Theory

What is 主体 (shutai)?

Shutai is not a fixed subject. It is an ongoing practice of becoming — corporeal, relational, and historically situated — through which a person emerges as the midwife making unseen dimensions of reality visible and legible.

The term combines the kanji 主 (primacy, ownership) and 体 (body), and differs importantly from 主観 (shukan), the more cognitive sense of subjectivity tied to the eye's grasp of objects and the inner conversations it generates. Shutai is non-representational and pre-discursive: it is already happening in the turbulent space before experience crystallizes into understanding. It mediates historical conditions — disruptions, new twists, unintended consequences — before they find conceptual form.

The Japanese tradition of Pedagogical Anthropology (教育人間学), developed by prewar scholars steeped in the Kyoto School of philosophy, built its understanding of education around exactly this process. To be educated, in this tradition, is not to receive knowledge but to become capable of creative participation in historical life. Each person becomes shutai through practices of making and expressing — by engaging with the world, not withdrawing from it.

Engagement is not a straight nor even a straightforward process, but a traversal across four ontological levels that assume different modes of activity: entering the world (moving into presence), expressing oneself within it (presenting presence), recognizing what is absent or contradictory (presenting absence), and acting to transform those conditions (absenting absence). These are not biographical stages but stages of learning and becoming shutai that only occurs through a genuine encounter with reality.

A Sociology of Becoming

Metabolic Sociology is built on the physically active, everyday practices of becoming shutai. Its empirical domain is as wide as human practice itself — literary, artistic, technical, scientific, athletic — but its analytical orientation is specific: to explore and bring to light the ontological depths of the boundaries and thresholds that are ordinarily thought to divide and separate. Where conventional sociology maps the surface of social life — roles, norms, structures, networks — Metabolic Sociology descends into the generative turbulence below that surface, the place where becoming happens before it hardens into position, identity, or institution. It asks not what people do within social arrangements but how social arrangements are continuously made, unmade, and remade through the concrete, embodied, situated activities of persons becoming shutai.

This is not a sociology of individual subjects and their contexts. It is a sociology of structural couplings — the irreducible entanglements of persons, situations, and the historically accumulated conditions that shape what it is possible to do, perceive, and become. The boundaries it explores are not lines of separation but zones of generative friction: thresholds at which what has been invisible becomes perceptible, at which what has seemed inevitable becomes questionable, at which new or alternative possibilities become open to experimentation.

場面 (bamen): Two Modalities

Bamen operates in two co-present and mutually conditioning modes. As heuristic device, bamen helps us see what is normally unseen, structuring the encounter before its outcome is visible and holding the learner in a puzzling situation. As topological surface, bamen is the site on which that traversal inscribes itself — the single-sided Möbius surface whose non-orientability becomes legible only through completed traversal. These two modes are not sequential stages but the inside and outside of the same structure: the heuristic is bamen encountered from within the traversal; the topological surface is bamen as the visible expression of what that traversal has produced. Every bamen encounter is both simultaneously.

What Is the “Metabolism”?

Metabolism in Metabolic Sociology is not the precondition of social and ecological life but its continuous production through the movement of becoming shutai, enacted in bamen. The term is chosen deliberately against the dominant metaphors of sociological theory — system, structure, field, network — each of which tends to presuppose a pre-given architecture that agents then inhabit or reproduce. Metabolism, by contrast, names a process that makes its own conditions while consuming and transforming them. It has no equilibrium point, no steady state that would count as its completion; only the ongoing conversion of what is into what is becoming.

This is why shutai and bamen are not two elements within a metabolic system but the very activity of that metabolism. The dual modalities of bamen, as heuristic for the learner to descent into the ocean of existence and the legible surface that descent makes visible, is itself the flow of energy that keeps itself going — not a mechanism driving the process from outside but the autopoietic continuity of the process itself. What looks from the outside like an exchange across a boundary — between subject and world, language and ecology, structure and practice — is from the inside one unbroken surface, turned back on itself. The Möbius figure captures this exactly: traversal does not cross from one side to the other; it simply continues, until the traveler arrives at a place that looks the same but is different, because the traveler is.

Metabolic Sociology does not therefore have a shutai on one side and a society on the other, with metabolism as the exchange between them. Becoming shutai is the topological continuity of the social-ecological fabric — itself woven from bamen. Each concrete situation that discloses what was absent, that surfaces the ordinarily invisible, adds a thread to that weave. The cumulative effect — not as aggregate but as autopoietic unfolding — traces not only people's becoming shutai but also how boundaries and thresholds that once appeared only to divide are not merely crossed, but become materials (sozai) to build from — carving out niches of perception, relation, and action that did not exist before the traversal. Turning boundaries into possibilities is the metabolism of Metabolic Sociology.