ABSTRACT
It is a truism that individuals contribute to social life through their actions. However, sociology has defined the relationship between action and society in many ways, and some approaches have involved writing the sociological equation without including the actual person's contribution, relegating the individual actor to the environment of the social proper. In communicative constructivism, subjectivity and the self as a thinking, feeling, and acting being, is explicitly implicated while keeping assumptions about its nature and composition sparse. It favors a “thin” subject. From the point of view of subjectivation research, this sociological perspective requires a complementary subject-theoretical perspective to reveal the trans-situational institutionalizations of communicative action, which materialize in subjectivated individuals. We call this the mattering, or heavy, subject, responding to a contemporary debate in the social sciences regarding whether the subject should be theorized in a parsimonious manner (a thin subject) or a rich manner (a thick subject). Through the lens of theories of embodiment and the life course, the subject can be defined as both thin and heavy, considering both the capacity of the communicative situation to accommodate all kinds of entities that may figure as subjects, as well as the massive transsituative knowledge concentrated in the subject.
