Re: [xmca] Subject: Verb, Object

David, I accept that it is true that a group of hairdressers will include
people who have worked and lived in a whole range of areas, and each
individual, so to speak, imports their exogenous experience into the
hairdressing milieu. I disagreed with Steve only because his idea doesn't
solve my problem. As you say, it may be a perfectly good insight
nonetheless. My problem is that if "individual agency" derives from
diversity of experience, then this only reinforces the argument that it is
the "mode of production" and "laws of history" at work in interpersonal
activity, with individuals simply acting as carriers. My question: is there
any capacity of an individual to, for example, change the rules of the
hairdressing habitus, other than by importing ideas from the barber habitus
or whatever? Is there any capacity for real creativity, rather than
transmission? And if so, how?

Andy
At 04:13 PM 28/12/2007 -0800, you wrote:
> A propos, Andy. I read through Billet, and I also read Stetsenko AGAIN.
> I knew that your article was in some sense a rejoinder to them, maybe
> even a critique. But, to go back to Tony's point about the way we
> categorize a sign (and why not an activity?) being dependent on the
> PURPOSE of categorization, it's a little hard for me to see why Billet
> can't be right about hairdressing, and Hegel wrong about history ... In
> some cases we want to pay attention to the INDIVIDUAL subject and in some
> cases to the corporatist one.

  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
mobile 0409 358 651

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sat Dec 29 15:55 PST 2007