Dyskursy Młodych Andragogów / Adult Education Discourses • 22/2021 CC BY 4.0 • ISSN 2084-2740 • e-ISSN 2719-9312 • doi.org/10.34768/dma.vi22.590 • s. 113-123 Peter Alheit* THE TRANSITIONAL POTENTIAL OF ‘BIOGRAPHICITY’ Abstract: ‘Biographicity’ is a concept that has been discussed in international adult education for more than 30 years. It has stimulated research concepts and has become a metaphor for the resilience potential of biographical learning processes in modernised modern societies. A basic theoretical foun- dation has so far been lacking. Tis article attempts to provide such a foundation. It frst introduces the quite sophisticated conception of ‘biography’ and emphasises the dialectical tension between structure and emergence (1), then turns to the challenge of describing ‘the social’ from the perspec- tive of the acting subject – the ‘biographicity of the social’, as it were (2), and ends with a refection on biographical learning (3) that overcomes its own limits (‘transitional learning’). Keywords: biography, biographicity, structure, emergence, unlived life, transitional learning. The inner dialectic of the construct ‘biography’ What we usually understand by ‘life’ is undoubtedly not the simple sequence of events in our biography, but a largely predetermined social orientation structure that must be meaningfully processed and adapted by the individual. Tis includes aspects of temporalisation and chronologisation: biographies run in diferent phases, and these phases essentially follow the chronological age. Tey establish a kind of orientation pattern that can be described as a ‘normal biography’. We usually speak of life course. Tis observation does not mean that all people actually live such standard biogra- phies. On the contrary, there are good reasons to assume that characteristic deviations can be observed for certain social groups and that even the standards themselves shif due to social change (Hagestad 1990). However, the orientation function of the normal life course remains decisive (see Kohli 1985; Fischer & Kohli 1987). Even with the ex- perience of drastic variation and de-standardisation, we have an idea of how our lives should work. We are dependent on a sequence grid with which we have to synchronise our actual life more or less successfully. However, such important biographical normality schemes are unable to anticipate all the options that appear in a specifc biography. Tere remains an abundance of alternative courses of action that we as individuals have to decide for ourselves: Is a professional career the central perspective of our lives or do we set other priorities? Do we prefer a patriarchal-hierarchical or a partnership-based family model? Should we * Peter Alheit – Georg-August-University of Goettingen, Institute of Education, Goettingen, Germany; e-mail: palheit@gwdg.de.