Re: structural theory

Angel M.Y. Lin (mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Thu, 28 Dec 1995 20:21:53 -0500 (EST)

Thanks very much Jay for your helpful note.

Here's another brief note from me... :-) well, if I have tended to look
at things from individual viewpoints/intentions, it's my own fault, not
that of ethnomethodology... actually my supervisor always corrects me on
this tendency of mine... ethnomethodologists, unlike symbolic
interactionists, do not focus on individual intentions, but on the public
accountability of practices and utterances... you see, I've not been an
entirely perfect student... but at least I may have the redeeming merit
of being willing to learn :-)
Best wishes,
Angel

On Thu, 28 Dec 1995, Jay Lemke wrote:

> A brief note. I did not mean to say, as Angel interpreted me,
> that according to Bourdieu we are all either dominators or
> dominated. What I said, and what I believe B argues, is that
> the 'field of power' structures the other fields. This is
> a much more subtle and complex notion, and in fact is closer
> to Angel's view that people find themselves positioned in
> relations of domination rather than consciously seeking to
> harm one another. People really need to read Bourdieu
> carefully to understand his position. It is not formulated
> in terms of individual intentionality at all, and the precise
> relation of the field of power to other fields, and what a
> 'field' means are complex and technical. I do sense I think
> that Angel's background in ethnomethodology, while it helps
> in seeing the weaknesses of purely macro-structural social
> theories, may include a bias toward reformulating structural
> theses in terms of individual events and actor's viewpoints.
> I do not believe it is generally possible to do so without
> great loss; micro-social theories cannot replace macro-social
> ones, though it is possible to find some synthesis between
> them, either along the lines of various models described
> in _Textual Politics_ (chaps 2 and 6), or perhaps with
> Latour's network theories (which I personally think need
> to be incorporated into the sort of ecosocial models with
> intermediate semiotic formations outlined in TP, but are
> not quite sufficient in themselves, at least as developed
> by BL so far). JAY.
>
>
> JAY LEMKE.
> City University of New York.
> BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
> INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>
>