>B. Ollman, I guess, would call the relationship (of society and the self) an
>internal one -- but I have not read his books carefully enough to be sure.
yes. haven't read his stuff since i was an undergrad tho. but that's the essential difference and derives from those older philosophical disputes. external relations = billiard ball model of society. there is a relationship. the question is, "what kind"
i think you make the mistake of presenting the issue in stark contrasts that are characteristic of the debates in phil. in sociology, for example (which was an attempt to negotiate the binary opp between freedom and determinism), we speak of individuation--the process whereby we have unique selves and they are unique precisely because of the complexity of society (so, you see how it's still social but with out being deterministically so?) but even in soc we have four diff. ways of viewing that relationship, even still. they can be mapped, via a critique of Nico Mouzelis and Laclau and Mouffe, like so:
"Since the inception of sociology, social theorists have often been involved in a seemingly intractable debate over the proper subject matter of the discipline. This concern to provide a social ontology--to map the topographical dimension of the object of sociological inquiry--can be found in the work of Marx (1845/1970), Durkheim (1895/1964), Weber (1915/1958), and Simmel (1908/1959). Their work can be understood as an attempt to specify the relationship between the individual and society. And, as each of these theorists argued, the ways in which the relationship between the individual and society is conceived in conceptually linked to particular modes of analysis. A social ontology, in other words, logically corresponds to a particular epistemology. Social theory must, therefore, delineate the properties that societies possess which then make them possible objects of scientific inquiry.
This attempt to account for the relationship between the individual and society is a perennial debate which is variously labeled the macro-micro or agency/structure debate. It is customary to classify this debate in terms of four positions. The first is an essentially individualist or voluntarist orientation, best represented by Weber, in which the social can only be observed by reference tot he ways in which it is manifested in and constituted by meaningful or intentional human action. Society--social institutions and social structures--does not exist except as the "actual or possible social actions of individual persons" (Weber, 102). The second is a collectivist orientation, articulated by Durkheim, in which society exists independently of conscious human activity; it is an emergent entity which is external to and coercive of individuals. Thus, for Durkheim (p. 2, my emphasis), "the system of signs which I use to express my thoughts, the system of currency I employ to pay my debts,...function independently of my use of them."
The various schools of social theory, as well as variants of Marxist social theory, have been classified as instances of one or the other of these two positions. However, two other positions have been offered as a corrective to the inadequacies of Weber's reductionist voluntarism and Durkheim's reified collectivism. A third position is attributed, in part, to Simmel but is most fully developed in the work of Berger and Luckman (1967). Here, the individual and society are continuously, dialectically constituted: individuals produce society which, in turn, produces individuals. Society is not to be understood as a "thing" that is completely external to the human activity that produces it. And yet, once society has been created, the individual does experience it "as an alien facticity...as a coercive instrumentality" p. 62). Society is an externalization or "objectivation" of individuals who, in turn, internalize society through conscious, intentional action. Their model accounts for both the subjective as conscious human action and the objective as the external, coercive power of society.
The fourth position is often ascribed to Marx, although, as noted, various brands of Marxist social theory have been categorized as closer to the voluntarist or reificationist positions (Mouzelis, p. 113). Here, as in Durkheim, society is encountered and appropriated by individuals as always already made. A Marxist approach does acknowledge, however, that society does not exist apart from the human activities which reproduce it. Nonetheless, this approach resists dissolution into a simplistic voluntarism: society is never entirely the product of conscious human action but neither is human consciousness and action completely determined by society. As Marx (p. 182) writes in The German Ideology:
"history...in it at each stage there is found a material result; a sum of productive forces, a historically created relations of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor...which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by each new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definitive development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances."
For Marx, individuals do not purely crate society; rather, they reproduce or modify it and the totality of such actions, in turn, sustain or change society.
For Nicos Mouzelis, the individual and society must be conceptualized as two radically different kinds of things. Society, on his account, provides the necessary conditions for intentional action while prescribing or circumscribing the form of such actions. Laclau and Mouffe's attempt to wed the voluntarist and dialectical models of the self-society continuum falls prey to the conventional criticism lodged against these positions. First, as with action-oriented social theories, the post-Marxist subject/agent exists "in an situational vacuum" (Mouzelis, p 110). And second, as with the social construction view, they collapse the distinction 'between subjects' practices and institutional structures" (ibid. p 113).
As Mouzelis notes, Laclau and Mouffe's position derives from the post-Wittgensteinian insight that the study of society is distinctive because the social is only realized in terms of human consciousness and reflexivity or, for post-structuralists, in terms of articulatory practices. On this view, social structure is a human production or discursive formation that involves both the material (non-linguistic) and the ideational (linguistic): speech, writing, ideas, physical activities and objects. Most importantly, this means that social structure cannot be adequately understood without reference to the ideas that people hold about their actions and the social or discursive formations within which they occur. To say all this, however, is not to deny that social structure exists nor is it to say that it is reducible to discursive practices and consciousness. It does mean that social structure, while not equated with discursive practices and consciousness, is nonetheless only present in and through them and hence it cannot be empirically discovered independently of them. <...>
Mouzelis wants to retain the semiotic insight into the irreducibly discursive aspect of social life, but without erasing the structuralist insight that social structure is real insofar as it both enables and constrains the forms and possibilities of discursive practices. And adequate model of the relation between the individual and society must provide the conceptual tools which not only operate at the levels of individual agency and social structure, but which also capture the transformative processes that mediate between these labels. As Mouzelis (p.111-2) insists,
"Insofar as Marxism views the economy as an articulation of modes of production, and insofar as the relations of production constitute the major feature of every mode, this key concept provides a bridge between systemic/institutional and an agency/action approach. In fact the relations of production concept leads quite 'naturally'...from the problems of analysis to problems of 'strategic conduct' and vice versa."
Because humans must produce their means of subsistence, labor provides the fundamental category of social analysis and this, for Mouzelis 9p 109), provides the crucial mediating concept which, when "applied to 'raw' theoretical material," yields "substantive theories."
In the transformative model of the relationship between individual and society, conscious human activity primarily consists of reproducing and transforming given objects which may be material and ideational. Human activity, on the Marxist view, is fundamentally social because it must always make use of social objects, practices, ideals, material and conceptual tools which are already in existence. In contrast to Laclau and Mouffe's position, subjects are not isolated, self-generative, and continually engaged in the production of agonistic political identities. Instead, subjects are embedded in an already exiting complex of institutions and practices which enable and constrain the possibility and form of their activities.
Mouzelis insists that the task of social theory must be to provide explanations which account for both individual and social structural phenomenon. And, he argues that the Marxist conception of re/productive labor provides the crucial analytical tool which mediates between these two levels of analysis. However, he fails to fully explicate how this understanding of human activity conceptually requires a separate, though related, level of structural analysis. The answer is implicit in Mouzelis's contention that Laclau and Mouffe fail to recognize that social structure is amenable to social analysis because it is not wholly contingent but is, rather, relatively enduring. Mouzelis's claims need to be strengthened by demonstrating that, although social structure is only relatively enduring, it nonetheless possesses emergent properties which make it distinct from and not reducible to the level of individual analysis.
Any attempt to understand and explain human activity must provide the conceptual tools with which to analyze the mechanisms--the social structure--which generate such activity. however, since social structure only exists in and through the human activities,then it must be understood as a fundamentally social creation. Social action, then, always involves two aspects: it involves both the re/production of social objects as well as the reproduction of social structure which enables and constrains those activities. Moreover, because social structure is itself a social construction, it is also subject to transformative social action and is, therefore, only relatively enduring. Finally, because social action is irreducibly interdependent, social structures are necessarily only relatively independent. Society, then, exists as the ensemble of relatively autonomous and enduring (though not space-time invariant) social institutions, processes, and practices.
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