residual individuality
Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 06 Apr 96 19:26:39 EST
I do agree with Gordon Wells that it is important to take into
account and find useful ways to account for just how individuals'
participation in activity is unique and individualized. I just
think the best way to do this is to _first_ characterize the
common or 'structural' features of participation, and then the
'residue' grounds the individual dimension. I also recognize that
this may seem demeaning to individuality, but I want to take
individuality, esp. in American culture, down a peg. The social
is not simply a sum of individuals, the individual is not
definable nor constituted except through the social (and
ecological), and individualistic reductionism is politically
dangerous in ways I'm sure you see perfectly as well as I do.
Perhaps more to the point, however, is the question of what we
take to be the individual unit of analysis. For me this is often
a unique and individual situation or micro-ecosocial system that
is far more than an organism, even if there is only one human
organism in its constitution. It think many of the answers to the
basic questions raised about individual differences in activity
need to be answered in terms of these larger-scale, or more
comprehensively contextualized 'individuals'. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU