Re: [xmca] agency redefined

Hi Martin, Heidi:
talking about agency without also talking about structure makes no
sense, because structure enables and is revealed in agency, which
mobilizes structures, but can do only because it is structured
itself. In sociology, you get the agency|structure dialectic, where
structure captures another dialectic, that of material resources|
schema. Somewhere I make the argument that this is not sufficient and
that we need to think in terms of a triple dialectic each of
processual character:

agency|passivity||resources|schema

When you closely analyze, then you will see that it no longer makes
any sense to speak about inside outside dichotomy, but
simultaneously, it forces you to think differently about Latour's
agency, which is something different, but which is captured in the
passivity moment in my model. Passivity captures how the world pushes
back at us, affects us, when we act toward it. Think about touching,
you may intend to learn about something through touching it, but at
the same time you have to open yourself up to be touched b y the
world, which leaves impressions in/on your body, that actually lead
to sensation, the first important moment in ANL's theory of
consciousness.

Latour does not talk about consciousness, which cannot be thought
independent of the world, to which it stands in an irreducible and
constitutive relationship. That is why his agency is different from
CHAT agency, or sociological agency. :-)

Cheers,

Michael

On 16-Mar-08, at 10:38 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

Heidi,

The excerpts from Activity, Consciousness, Personality are very
interesting.
I must confess, though, that I get confused when Leontiev writes in
these
terms: of the "subjective image" as a "reflection of reality." To
western
ears/eyes it is very easy to assimilate this to the model of
knowledge/perception as a matter of mental representations. Bakhurst
has a
good discussion of the notion of 'reflection' in Vygotsky, Leontiev,
Lenin
et al., but I don't have it to hand. What are the connotations of the
term
in Russian?

By the way, Latour agrees with you that humans have a capacity for
consciousness that objects do not. But he still argues that objects
(microbes, polypeptides, transportation systems) have much more of a
variety
of forms of agency than we usually give them credit for.

Martin

On 3/15/08 1:01 AM, "varnam soupend" <heidizulfai@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Luiz , Bruce , Martin ,
> For the past several nights , I 've not been able to use the
> Internet ; I
> had , therefore , to put my message in word format and now have to
> send it as
> an attachment . My apologies for the inconvenience !
> Heidi
> heidizulfai@yahoo.com
>
>
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Received on Sun Mar 16 12:19 PDT 2008