[DM] I think most of the sociology profession would be with Arlo on this. Certainly Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer and Tony Giddens.
[Arlo] The notion of "structuration", or some form of this dialectic, is also found in the thoughts of Bourdieu and Bakhtin. Bourdieu, as the article Ron posted said, viewed the dialectic in terms of an individual agent always situated within a "habitus" who moves towards the attainment of "symbolic capital". "In Bourdieu's work, habitus can be defined as a system of durable and transposable[3] "dispositions” (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures (such as class, family, and education) and external conditions (field)s they encounter. They are therefore neither wholly voluntary nor wholly involuntary." Bahktin, in following a Vygotskian path, was more concerned with the internalization of this. Rather than be concerned with an "agent" in a "field", Bakhtin looked at how the "field" became internalized within the "agent". The agent's voice, then, is never a solo but always a duet (or a 'polyet'). But in all these cases, and I include Pirsig since his MOQ demonstrates straight out that "intellectual patterns derive from the social world" not from individual autonomous agents apart from social activity, the interplay is always that the "self" is both social and autonomous at the same time, it comes from both the assimilation of the collective consciousness and the unique experiences of the organism. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
