Shutai and
Metabolic Sociology
What do I mean by 'shutai (主体)'?
The concept
Shutai is a Japanese term combining the kanji 主 (shu or nushi), which conveys ownership or primacy, and 体 (tai or karada), which refers to the body. While its meaning has evolved, it generally emphasizes the body’s sensorimotor functions and the perceptual field they create. Shutai is distinct from shukan (主観), which also includes the kanji 主 but pairs it with 観 (kan or miru), referring to the eye that gauges a visual object. In my research, I define shutai as a process of becoming by subjecting to and subjectifying the ecological laws of perception.
Shutai in Modern Japanese History
Shutai evolved both ontologically and epistemologically throughout modern Japanese history. As an ontology, shutai existed even before it was explicitly named. My research demonstrates this through early female Physical Education scholar-teachers who engaged in physical activities that subjected them to the ecological laws of perception. In their case, developing self-awareness through proprioception in turn enabled them to subjectify their physical movements using dance choreographies. The field of female Physical Education was pioneered by female scholar-teachers who reflexively learned from observing their own physical movements and then applied their learning to practice by rendering movements more self-consciously expressive, aesthetic, and social. Their pedagogies were therefore interventions for learners to develop a self-awareness over their movements and the feelings that accompanied them, and their dance curriculum a passage for the dancer to move into the presence of themselves and others.
Epistemologically, shutai developed along a different trajectory from its ontological practices and processes. One of its earliest public appearances as a concept was at the 1942 Overcoming Modernity symposium, where Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji introduced the term shutai-teki mu—with mu meaning absence, void, or nothingness. Nishitani used this term to describe an excess that is ‘neither a physical object nor “mind,” that is, the conscious self generally called “self”‘ (Calichmann 2008, 5). By 1946, however, the shutai-sei debate had reshaped its meaning, igniting discussions in literary and philosophical circles. This postwar debate also influenced how shutai was later used to interpret the 1960s student protests, which led to major university shutdowns.
Shutai is now an established concept in Japanese education discourse. It is a key term in the phrase ‘active, interactive, and deep learning’ (shutai-teki, taiwa-teki de fukai manabi), included in the K-12 Curriculum Standard issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). While scholars and educators interpret and apply shutai-sei education in various ways, I consider shutai as a historicizing praxis as well as a historical product that opens a path of becoming.
What do I mean by 'Metabolic Sociology'?
Metabolic sociology has three conceptual roots: 1) “Social metabolism” used by Marxist scholars and Environmental Sociologists; 2) “Active synthesis (dōteki chōwa)” coined by Japanese education scholar Ueda Kaoru; and 3) “Metabolism” as discussed by German philosopher Hans Jonas.
Metabolic sociology is different from ‘social metabolism,’ an idea that social evolution is interdependent with, and may be analogically associated to, biological evolution (Molina and Toledo 2014). Like social metabolism, metabolic sociology rests on the understanding that human life and social existence are constitutive of the natural ecosystem. However, metabolic sociology goes beyond the ‘scientific’ observation of social metabolism that studies the exchange of energy, materials, and information between human societies and the natural world by studying how humans both willingly and unwillingly subject themselves to the ecological laws of perception. Subjectification is a critical step in turning the ecological laws of perception into meaningful relationships and engagements with our surroundings.
Karl Marx critiqued capitalism for creating a ‘metabolic rift’—a disruption of humanity’s relationship with nature through exploitation, pollution, and ecological degradation. This rift, however, is not only a material consequence of capitalism’s exploitation of natural resources. It constitutes a much deeper, philosophical question that is universal to all human beings. According to French philosopher Renaud Barabaras, this is a sense of ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘being out-of-sync’ between life as a lived phenomenon (as disucssed by Jonas) and the phenomenological knowledge of life. Barbaras takes up the latter as his project by turning this lived sense of a metabolic rift, of ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘being out-of-sync’ into a question: ‘whether this “being off-kilter” or this kind of “balancing act” of thought over life results from the fact of thought or from the fact of life itself’ (2022, 4).
Half a century before Barbaras raised this question and just after Jonas published his Phenomenon of Life in 1966, a Japanese education scholar named Ueda Kaoru coined the concepts zure which may be translated as ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘out-of-sync,’ and dōteki chōwa or ‘active synthesis,’ to address the problematic that Barbaras presented, but from a pedagogical standpoint. Ueda also happens to be a grandson of the famous Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitaro. In Ueda’s concepts we see Nishida’s philosophy distilled and refined as a pedagogical technique to help learners become not just self-aware but actively and continuously so to transform selves and their worlds as a shutai.
Ueda’s answer to Barbaras’ question – is the rift a result of ‘being off-kilter’ in life despite thought or achieving a kind of ‘balancing act’ of thought over life – is not one or the other, but both. Learning happens by subjecting oneself to the sense of ‘being off-kilter’ or zure as much as subjectifying it in a ‘balancing act’ or what Ueda calls a dynamic synthesis or dōteki chōwa. Ueda argues that learning never happens according to an intricately laid out plan or by following a logical path of least resistance. As long as learning is done by humans in our own flesh and blood, we are bound to come out short of our hoped-for plans and deviate, even in our best interests, from what should be our logical next step.
Metabolic Sociology constitutes reflexive learning and becoming into its own framework, thus keeping its structure open to the potential for transformative change at multiple levels of reality. To do this, it is imperative to recognize our own ‘off-kiltered-ness’ as individuals and societies, so we may encounter others not as reified identities representing an imagined community but uniquely and historically off-kiltered as we are. Metabolic Sociology suggests that we turn our ‘being off-kilter’ as our unique learning experience-cum-environment so that it may facilitate collaboration and cooperation rather than trigger our anxiety by leaving us in fight-or-flight mode. Thus, Metabolic Sociology’s primary difference between modern sociological frameworks such as Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach is that the latter problematize, while the former cultivates agency and co-agency to realize transformative change and becoming.
Metabolic sociology is ‘metabolic’ because the discourses and practices that shape our ontological beliefs about the ecological laws that govern our perception change with the constitutive elements of our environment. They also emerge and disappear alongside the individuals and groups who embody and subjectify their zure in dynamic syntheses. We can recognize the metabolic nature of societies in human history, marked by a series of spontaneous social upheavals and collective actions. For example, Michel de Certeau (1970) analyzed the 1634 case of Ursuline nuns in Loudun, France, who were said to be ‘possessed’ by demons. Similarly, Oguma Eiji (2009) examined the discourse surrounding student protests in 1960s Japan but ultimately concluded that the essence of these movements remains elusive. Every society has accounts of entire generations or groups acting in what is often described as a ‘hysterical’ frenzy—whether spiritual, political, or both.
This view of the world where life, rather than humans, govern the ebb and flow of the universe is common among the beliefs of many Indigenous cultures. It is a perspective that is lost when we see life only for its material and economic value. One way to decolonize the Social Sciences from the latter perspective is to respect these Indigenous perspectives and practices as sustainable methods for subjecting human perception to the ecological laws that govern them. To dismissing their beliefs is to deny the role that humanity plays in building a sustainable planet. To judge them as non-scientific is to mistake human agency with discursive practices.
Metabolic sociology views ‘frenzied’ or off-kiltered individual and social behavior not as historical anomalies or as a social deviance, but as essential forces that restore humanity in societies that have marginalized and diminished fundamental human qualities. It examines how ecological laws of perception contextualize and its subsequent subjectifications mediate and reveal the onto-ecological changes that were forced into submission by modern technologies, ideologies, and apparatus. It recognizes that climate change is a wake up call to previously unthought-of forces that we no longer can nor should ignore. Shutai is a collective agenda to prevent the unthinkable trigger a fight-or-flight response by learning the art of subjecting to and subjectifying the ecological laws of perception.