Called the psychic network. That Dionne Warwick, she's something else.
>Charles: I can't claim credit for this
>focus on this THIS, of course, this
>changingness. Engels hipped me to
>it, actually, and then Karl Marx said
>the thing is (this this) to change the
>world.
Well me to, but it is also part of my disipline which has a history. Yes, of course. Karl is one of the Founding Daddies and we pray at the alter in honor of Him, ritually, religious like. Well, some; many don't.
But anyway, I read marxist social science and I realized a couple of years ago that much of it lacked an adequate theory of social change because it inadequately conceives of the relationship between the individual and society.
On a vulgar social constructionist view, this relation is conceived of as merely dialectical: society creates people who in turn create society. And so on. Society, social sturcture, social institutions (like property, rights) aren't seen as capable of standing on their own apart from the human actions and beliefs that create them. What would happen, say, if we all started running about taking people's property any ole time we felt like it, ey? Well it wouldn't happen quite so easily now would it.
Anyway, even though society is understood as something that people 'create' it is also true that we encounter society as Other, as something outside of us, alien to us and, indeed, coercive of us. As Durkheim said: "the system of currency with which I pay my debts, the instrument of credit I utilize in my commercial relations...function independently of my use of them" This would be history, tradition, in other words. When history and tradition weigh too heavily upon us, then we come to believe that the way things are is the only way they can be and/or the way they should be. Reification! As in what my students say all the time after reading Savage Inequalities about disparities in school fudning: "Well I know that it sucks the way it is, but local funding of schools seems the only option. Anything else would be like communism and lawd know we don't want that! And man oh man, socialism is dead can't you see? If you can't, you must be like trapped in the hippie sixties or sumpin. Pass the bong dude."
Yet, even while this approach recognizes the import of society/history andthe possibility that we encounter society/history as alienated from us, it all to often suggests that society (language, the polity, culture, etc) are all merely emboidments of human consciousness, subjectivity and if we cannot see this then we have reified society. The problem then is a failure to theorize historical change, some relationship between the individual (conceived in terms of idealism, voluntarism) and society (conceived of as mecahnistically determining human life).
The more adequate Marxist understanding of historical materialism--and sheesh didn't I type this already on LBO in response to Doyle?--allows for a *transformational* model of the relationship between individual and society. It is still accurate to say that society wouldn't exist w/o human activities and practices that uphold society. It is also quite proper to acknowledge that people couldn't do what they do and say what they say w/o society--that is, without conception of what they are saying and doing that is handed down to them through culture, history, etc. In other words, we are born into a world in which there is language, money, credit cards and all the practices associated w/ them.
People don't *create* society. They are born into it and so what they do is re/produce society: they statically produce (sustain) society and they may, at times, dynamically reproduce (or transform) society. On this model, there is a concept of change or history, if you will.
The problem with vulgar marxist models of economic determinism is that they don't take seriously enough the fact that it is only through the activities and ideas of people that society is enacted and re-enacted every day. I'm still one of those "It's the economy stupid" in the last instance folks, but I want to explore this problem: what people make of and do with the world they find around them and why. Yeah, yeah, yeah it's the economy stupid, but I think it's much more complex than that of course and I think it important to delineate and specify how it works in more detail.
Snit