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

[Gregory Allan Thompson <gathomps@uchicago.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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