On Subjects, Opponents and Counterparts

Abstract

If the articulation of common problems is to form the basis for political attachments, it clearly becomes of special importance what kinds of social grouping are evoked in discussion of such problems, and the relationships indicated between them. Problems bring people together and push them apart, and both dynamics need to be accommodated in a political conceptualisation of the collective bond. This question of collective positioning forms the focus of this chapter. Our interest is in the various social categories which arise in each domain, the patterns of sympathy and opposition they are tied to, and the perceived spatial scope of these conflicts. These are discursive patterns in the same sense as described in Chapter 3 and, in theoretical terms, Chapter 2: routinised ways of speaking which, though always susceptible to renunciation by individual speakers, nevertheless recur widely across the discussions, and whose adoption is generally taken for granted rather than marked by hesitation or reflexivity.