Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 21:31:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: Structure and agencey


I appreciate Tobin's response on relevant Bhaskar scholarship as well as
Allan's response.  Allan's objection to the obsession with the
structure/agency question is stated much more strongly than mine, but it
seems at first glance that his objections are similar.  We all operate
implicitly with with these concepts.  How much effort should we invest in
working out their logical relationship?  Many have done so from various
perspectives>  Recently I've been reading about Sartre, who did this stuff
too, even though he started out more from the standpoint of the abstract
individual.  I generally prefer to stick with the vague intuitive grasp of
this relationship and move on to other matters.  I don't object to others
taking a more rigorous approach, but sometimes it gets to be too much
nitpicking about too little.  I do think that the concept of habitus is a
rather clever one, and Bourdieu does at first glance seem to overcome some
of the unacceptable impersonal and abstract schematism of what I take
structuralism to be.  I'm not the one who is hung up on all this stuff, so
I'm not committing the rest of my life to refine the ontology of
structure/agency.

My recent remarks on culture throw a new ingredient into the broth.  Though
I'm sure Bourdieu leaves an opening for behavior that does not conform
strictly to the reproduction of the systemic status quo, he does focus on
behavior that shows the systemic ways in which our voluntary actions
reproduce the system.  All researchers do this because (1) it helps to
demystify the system and whittle down the illusions of free will (2) it's
easier to do this than to schematize what falls through the cracks of the
system.  The perspective of action over contemplation, or of the creative
person over the critic, introduces elements which are not always assimilable
into theoretical apparatuses constructed to prove the inescapability and
total hegemony of the system.  For cultural analysis, I'm not convinced that
all behavior is explainable in terms of social distinction, though obviously
most of it is.  (The question of collective cultural "resistance" is more
complicated, and I'm not going to tackle it now except to register my
skepticism over a lot of what "Cultural Studies" people do.)

This also reminds me of the few paragraphs I've been reading on
substantialism vs. relationalism.  I don't believe in a total relationalism
in which no entity exists or has meaning except in terms of its positioning
in a total system of relations plotted on the graph of a total system of
social vectors.  People are not phonemes.  The total disappearance of
substance into a continuous system of relations is pernicious.

At 11:49 AM 9/18/98 +0900, Allan Sutherland wrote:
>Is it not about time that we abandoned, or more accurately superseded the
>concepts of structure and
>agency with accurate explanations of social life, rather than continuously
>struggle with concepts
>that have little individuality,  integrity. As soon as one is tackled the
other >pops up like a
>forbidding ghost that will not go away, why because the attempted
explanation >is failing.
 

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