Re: [xmca] Agency/Structure, Individual/Society, Subject/Object

[ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]

Greg:

This is quite in line with my recent post regarding Marx's fetishism of 
commodity's production.  If the commodity qualitatively changes due to the 
production does it not make sense that an individual qualitatively changes 
due to that production as well?  The ideology of the individual does not 
need to throw out sociological/cultural impacts upon the individual but 
through goal directed activity in irreversible time does it not make sense 
that a person's agency is more then a replay of that sociological/cultural 
impact?

Here is an example from the philosophy's colored history that I hope 
illustrates my point:

Wittgenstein's Poker  - - 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/may/12/artsandhumanities.highereducation





From:   Gregory Allan Thompson <gathomps@uchicago.edu>
To:     xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Date:   09/27/2010 11:00 PM
Subject:        [xmca] Agency/Structure, Individual/Society, 
Subject/Object
Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu



Possibly following Andy's thinking on Structure and Agency and his radius 
of subjectivity, I want to propose that the structure vs. agency problem 
turns on the Subject/Object distinction that Hegel theorized away long 
ago. Furthermore, when seen in this light, the Structure/Agency problem 
turns into something quite different, in particular, the structure agency 
tension might better be construed as a tension of timescales (following 
Jay Lemke’s work on timescales). 

Simply put, in the course of human interaction (typically "conversation"), 
the habits, motivations, and intentions of the socially constituted 
historical subject (now an “individual” as we like to call them) 
potentially stand in tension with the subject that is emergently being 
defined in the throes of the here and now of human social interaction. The 
historically mediated social subject (cf. Holland, Lave et. al's "history 
in person") is confronted by the presently mediated social subject (cf. 
Goffman's "face") and the possibility for tensions arise (much as, in 
laboring, the laborer is confronted (dominated) by the history of his 
labor in the form of capital - esp. as the congealed form of capital known 
as "the machine").

Thus the tension of agency vs. structure is really a tension between the 
(socially mediated) ontogentic subject and the (socially mediated) 
micro-genetic subject.

(okay, that was a little too quick and dirty, but I think there is 
something there).

The thoroughly social nature of the subject is precisely what Hegel and 
Marx (and Vygotsky and Mead, and in a different tradition, Durkheim) were 
arguing for. The individual attains her individuality THROUGH “the 
social.” Reconciling the opposition of subject and object, of individual 
and society, of structure and agency seems to be exactly what Marx is 
doing in his theorizing of capitalism. 

In light of this, one can’t help but wonder why the structure/agency 
problem has been such a persistent issue even among Marxist sociologists. 
I can only assume that this is the result of a persistent ideology of 
subjectivity as individualism that takes the individual as prior to the 
social – logically or ontologically - ontogenetically (see Piaget) and 
phylogenetically (see Smith, Rousseau, or any of Marx’s infamous 
“Robinson-ades”). 

Here is an ideology with legs! Three hundred years and running…
Anyone see any signs of tiring?
-greg




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