Re: [xmca] agency redefined

Hi Michael,

Latour seems to want to avoid the agency/structure dialectic (or perhaps
offer his account of it) by viewing agency as in part an activity of
structuring. Structures for him are always contingent achievements,
assembled and maintained. Much sociology, in my reading as in his, is in
contrast stuck in a *dichotomy* of agency versus structure (and consequently
micro/macro).

You say that passivity is how the world pushes back at us. But surely the
world frequently does more than push back. When I catch the flu the world
takes a shot at putting an end to me, by means of an agency that has no
consciousness at all.

Martin

On 3/16/08 2:13 PM, "Wolff-Michael Roth" <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

> 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 15:34 PDT 2008