It seems possible that neither causality nor dualism are the central issue.
In any interactional model one must suppose that agency is for the most part
a retrospective account of trajectory, itself a recursive interplay between
the developing organism (with it's own increasingly individuated
requirements) and the (also developing) ecosocial systems which nourish,
constrain, and inform it. Is there ever a point where we can say the
individual has complete control or a point where we can say it has none? I
think not but, depending upon the question one is pursuing, it might make
sense to model it as such (even if the assumption is rather unrealistic) or
similarly to develop models in which the individual need be given no special
status at all; e.g., from certain biological perspectives at least, the
individual is "simply" another self-organizing ecological system composed of
trillions of similarly self-organizing systems (cells) and googols of
interconnections (many of which intersect larger scale networks). The same
could also be said about social systems I suspect but which is "inside"
which, the individual or society, may be a distinction not worth making.
I recall that one of my first questions concerning the sociocultural
reframing of agency was, "doesn't the causal explanation of an act also
require an explanation of how the actor(s) came to be present in the setting
wherein that act made sense? Can we really bypass teleonomy?" Ignoring for
the moment the fact that our very language frame induces us to acknowledge
individuals (even as we may seek to re-parse them) it seems essential to
describe the mechanism(s) by which an activity setting comes to be in the
first place, how that comes to have meaning. By the same token, even as we
may acknowledge that activities can precede the presence of any particular
individual, so also can individuals precede activities; i.e., there
certainly was a time when most of the activities we currently value were
constituted differently or did not even exist. Perhaps part of the problem
is in the way the social is usually conceived, as something "larger" than
the individual. Maybe, as with the concept of ecosystem, society is not
always usefully thought of in scalar terms. In that respect, as well as
others, embodiment might be a better term than internalization (it would
certainly be more biologically realistic I think).
Just a thought,
Rolfe Windward
GSE&IS
ibalwin who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu