Hi Mike,
I'd like to answer your questions in more detail, but I'm up to my eyes in
it at the moment, so please excuse me while I interleave.
At 08:24 AM 25/11/2001 -0800, Mike wrote:
>Mid- April is an impossible times for Americans interested in education
>including work-based education to move around a lot.
Same here in Australia. I certainly can't go, as much as I might like to.
In response to your comments:
>Your message raises an issue that has been increasingly bothering me and
>I wonder if you and others in the group could help me out. I am reading
>the work of Holland and Lave in a couple of books, one by Holland on culture
>and agency, the other by Holland and Lave called "history in person." This
>comes on the heels of reading other modern writings in anthroplogy in which
>various claims are made about something referred to as "human subjectivities"
>(as in your posting).
>
>What has me perplexed is what range of meanings writers are attributing to
>this term. Sometimes it appears to be roughly equivilant to "from the
>subject's
>point of view" and the warrants have to do with social analysis of
>positioning.
>At other times it seems like a form of psychologizing based on a variety of
>methods, but the methodology linking these methods to theories of various
>kind (in the Holland and Lave case, Bakthtin is often and important invoked)
>makes me wonder if I am dealing with psychologists, sociologistists, etc.
>
>I think I am probably not entirely alone in my uncertainties about what
>"subjectivity" refers to in a lot of recent post modern writing. What is
>your understanding?
I, for one, share your confusion to some degree. The term has taken on all
sorts of meanings, some quite tyrannous (IMO) because they often mistake
the relational for the relativistic (esp, e.g., in moral or cultural or
aesthetic domains). My understandings of "subject" and "subjectivity" have
fairly old (Aristotle) roots: the subject is the active, or agentive,
element in any relational event (of course, where people are concerned,
every subject can also be an object). I understand "subjectivities" as
roughly synonymous with the "role structures" historically constituted
within various contexts. This is a far more complex concept for me than
"subject", but is none the less connected with it through and through
because specific and various social positionings (socialised roles,
subjectivities) allow for, or are given, different degrees of agency or
activity in their given context (a cat may look at a king, but it cannot
make legislation). There are also many levels of abstraction that pertain
to the concept of subjectivities. The most abstract categories (e.g.
"children", "women", "men", "heterosexuals", etc) seem to me to be fairly
unhelpful for analysis by themselves. However, once seen in specific social
relations, we can start some analyses about the various possibilities for
agency that various categories of people, at practically any level of
abstraction, are "given" or "allowed" (the rights of children in the family
court process; the possibility for the President of the USA to be overtly
gay; etc).
There are issues of technologies; of having (xyz things and/or attributes);
of possibilities for acting effectively to change things at x,y, or z
levels of society; and so on, tied up in the concept for me. Certainly the
meaning of "subjective" that translates to "depends on one's point of view"
is hopeless and unuseful to me, if only because it raises the question "and
what does one's point of view depend on?".
At any rate, I do not consider myself to be a "post-" person, since I think
we remain stuck in very primitive patterns of association and have not
"transcended" anything very much at all, socially speaking, so I am
probably not the best one to ask about this. I hope this helps anyway.
Once again, apologies for my haste.
Best regards,
Phil
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Opinions expressed in this email are my own unless otherwise stated.
If you have received this in error, please ignore it.
Phil Graham
Lecturer (Communication)
UQ Business School
www.uq.edu.au/~uqpgraha
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