----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
You sound like a strict Darwinist arguing with Gould about species or clade selection! Why the glorification of the individual organism? If we don't need to do that in evolutionary theory, we sure as hell don't need to do it in social theory.
Miles
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No glorification at all. I just think there are a lot of neglected issues regarding the terms individual and agent when the terms unity [or, more importantly whether there is a lack of unity] and organization have gone missing. I'm a fan of the one/many problem[s] when it comes to the politics of naming/describing/explaining social kinds and the attendant attribution of agency. Hell, what isn't an agent??????? Like Lynn Margulis I'm happy to think of biological individuals at all space-time scales as ecosystems with varying degrees of unity; it's the politics of observership and agency attribution that seems to be at issue whenever Ted rants about internal relations, no? :-)
Internal relations need as much to be explained if they are to do any explanatory work in turn. We should be as wary of an all embracing and suffocating holism as we like to think we are when declaiming social atomism [metaphor alert!]. Who/what is an individual? Inquiring talkers/writers want to know.
Ian, [part] member of the Dis[United] States