And yes: it doesn’t at all answer the question of why some one or some group begins to challenge some particular aspect of their everyday life, with reference to some specific ideal – this sort of question, in Marx at least, I take to belong to the sort of “messy retail business” that is very difficult to theorise generically. What the theory can do is to try to establish the plausible availability of certain kinds of challenges – and perhaps also cast some light on some of the things that might get in the way of certain kinds of challenges. But only on a very abstract logical level.

But the sort of vision of social context that allows this sort of “slippage”, I think, necessarily opens the sorts of issues you raise above: that social actors are in a sense only loosely coupled, certainly to any specific theorisable perspective on the social context. The same conceptualisations that would allow social actors, say, in my account, to slide back and forth amongst practically-constituted dispositions associations with the reproduction of capital, would equally allow them to slide back and forth amongst dispositions practically constituted in other dimensions of their experience – and their experience needn’t be limited to what is happening in the immediate present, but can be extended in various ways to incorporate the proxy experiences of other times. And individual idiosyncracy also enters in, as you’ve discussed above.

The issue with being able to say something about possibilities at an abstract logical level is that it may provide some purchase on dispositions that can plausibly be expected to be widespread – and therefore perhaps increase the possibility of articulating an ideal in a way that might resonate, or anticipate a problem that might confront a particular articulation. It also becomes possible to think of ways to expand opportunities for the practical experience of certain dispositions – or to contract opportunities for others – and so open possibilities to make certain kinds of transformation more likely.

But I’m very tired :-) Apologies if this isn’t that coherent – too long without sleep :-) Hope the marking isn’t too much of a slog…

The notion of “bootstrapping” that you use above, though, is something that I also think is promising. I haven’t used the term, but I take this sort of concept to be tacit in the notion of making history, but not in conditions of our choosing: already in this formulation, right or wrong, there is a rejection of the reduction of social actors to scene – social actors have at least the possibility to make history. But by improvising with what we have at hand, bricoleurish, likely without full cognisance of what the hell we’re about to do. Some of my favourite moments in Capital address the issue of unintended consequences – Marx will draw attention to some small thing – for example, legislation requiring working children to attend school for part of the day – and then talk about what this accidentally demonstrated about who can learn, and how teaching can be done, and how people need not be tracked into exclusive identities of “workers” or “students”, etc. The text unspools large amounts of this stuff – accidents – things no one intended to happen – lessons practically demonstrated, which no one set out to learn. Marx then runs around behind, pointing out the accidents, highlighting them, trying to make sure we don’t miss the implications – trying to deepen the groove in which these accidents currently shallowly run.

This works well with what I have in mind by bootstrapping. The results of a practice can lead to modifications of both agents and scenes that were not anticipated by either. In this respect, the act is not strictly a product of the scene, nor of the agent engaging in the act (I can transform myself through my acts in ways I did not anticipate or expect… As a philosopher I become other than I was in my philosophical praxis). Burke comes up with some nice examples of this in the case of Medieval philosophy that resonate well with Lacan’s claims about the role served by “master-signifiers”. On the one hand, he speaks of how certain Medieval thinkers argued that “God chose the good because it is Good”. On the other hand, he argues that certain Medieval theologians argued that God’s creation must be rational because God is rational. These two claims were interconnected. The intention certainly was not to pave the way for secularism (secular investigations weren’t even conceived), yet these theological shift had the long-term effect of promoting secularism because the implication that follows from this thesis is that you can explain the world and talk about values without having to make reference to supernatural explanation. Consequently, as the details of this thesis were developed the need to refer to the divine increasingly diminished. This functions like a Lacanian master-signifier, where situating the field of language in terms of a particular key signifier can suddenly make that field appear in a very different light, producing profound reorientations of thought.

Another problem I see with scenic philosophies is that they don’t attend enough to questions of “circumference”. By “circumference” I have in mind the scope of influence conditioning a phenomena. For instance, the circumference of a pot of water on a stove is very small or local, pertaining largely to altitude, pressure, and air temperature, and the heat of the burner. While we can say, like Whitehead, that every monad prehends the totality of the universe, the real scope of these prehensions is rather narrow in the case of the stove burner. Social theorists often talk of human beings in terms similar to stover burners, treating social circumference as the immediate social setting. However, human beings, in their relation to language, are unique in that the scope of their circumference is quite variable. I can live my life with Lucretius, Socrates, or Jesus within the scope of the circumference of my action. Our lives can be lead in light of events that occurred well before our lifetime in parts of the world geometrically remote from us (living in terms of the 60s or the Russian Revolution), etc. In short, it is very difficult to clearly delineate context for social systems. There is thus a margin of freedom enjoyed by these systems that differs, perhaps, in kind from other types of systems.

In addition to this, my worries about Agency have also gotten me thinking more about Lacan’s understanding of the subject. For Lacan, Subject is not a substance characterized by transparency and immediacy, but is rather a void that persists in all identifications. To say that the subject is a void is to say that all the signifiers that might characterize you as a subject always end up failing by virtue of the fact that the signifier cannot signify itself (it always requires another signifier and that signifier yet other signifiers ad infinitum). What this entails is that at some level our relationship to our subjectivizations or interpellations is always precarious (”what is it that makes me this?” “am I really this?” “what do x really do?”). For subject there is always a lack of fit with the world and personal identity. It is this crack or fissure characterizing Subject that would then function as the condition for the possibility of something like critical consciousness. This does not, of course, answer the question of why someone begins to challenge available identities and personal identity at a particular point in time; though it does at least establish why, logically, such a challenge is a perpetually available possibility.

Anyway, enough for now. I’m off to mark.

In terms of your question above about “abstraction”: I do agree that act, scene, etc., need to be thought in tandem, but that’s not specifically what I was trying to thematise above. I was interested more in keeping open the possibility – at least at the level of a sort of working agnosticism – that the relationships between these things might not always be the same – not simply in the sense of shifting over historical time, but in the sense of being best thematised in different ways with reference to different aspects of some particular time.

The interest for me, personally, in trying to maintain this sort of agnosticism, is that I see capitalism as bifurcated in a particular way, such that certain social institutions – the sorts of concrete institutions that we think of as “intuitively social”, tend to fight over politically, etc. – are, in the context of the theory I’ve been trying to work out here, institutions that are denaturalised to some degree by the context itself. I use an argument along these lines to talk about why we suddenly start finding it so intuitive to think about “the social” or to think about “historical determination” or similar concepts. Another dimension of social practice, in terms of the theory I have been exploring here, involves a long-term historical patterns enacted in and through the transformations of these more “overtly social” institutions. This pattern is both more difficult to see (because, synchronically, it exists nowhere else but in existing institutions), more persistent than other consequences of social practice, and “really” abstract – a form of abstraction enacted in practice, rather than a conceptual abstraction narrowly conceived.

Where the context is so multilayered, thinking agency becomes, for me at least, quite complex – and not necessarily amenable to any one theoretical approach. This is without even getting into the whole issue that I don’t understand the theory of capitalism at which I’m gesturing above, as a sort of overarching theory to which all other things can be reduced. I’ve argued in other places that the “mechanisms” Marx uses, for example, to make the case that certain dispositions arise as moments of everyday practices associated with the reproduction of capital, in principle can’t be restricted just to the practices associated with the reproduction of capital – his own theory, in other words, opens up to and invites tandem forms of theorisation.

The notion of “bootstrapping” that you use above, though, is something that I also think is promising. I haven’t used the term, but I take this sort of concept to be tacit in the notion of making history, but not in conditions of our choosing: already in this formulation, right or wrong, there is a rejection of the reduction of social actors to scene – social actors have at least the possibility to make history. But by improvising with what we have at hand, bricoleurish, likely without full cognisance of what the hell we’re about to do. Some of my favourite moments in Capital address the issue of unintended consequences – Marx will draw attention to some small thing – for example, legislation requiring working children to attend school for part of the day – and then talk about what this accidentally demonstrated about who can learn, and how teaching can be done, and how people need not be tracked into exclusive identities of “workers” or “students”, etc. The text unspools large amounts of this stuff – accidents – things no one intended to happen – lessons practically demonstrated, which no one set out to learn. Marx then runs around behind, pointing out the accidents, highlighting them, trying to make sure we don’t miss the implications – trying to deepen the groove in which these accidents currently shallowly run.

I don’t know if it’s what you’re reaching for with the notion of “bootstrapping”, but I think the term isn’t a bad one for this phenomenon – a sort of blind groping forward, and then glancing back periodically to try to make sense of what we’ve done, so that it then becomes possible perhaps to make something deliberately, that previously simply befell us…

This can be found in Badiou and Zizek as well. In the case of Badiou, for instance, the declaration of a truth and the procedures that follow that declaration are precipitated by an event (an element of scene, albeit a special one). The question I’m groping towards, then, is not one of opposing an abstract agent or act to scene, but rather determining how something like agents and acts might be able to emerge within a scene without those agents and acts being overdetermined by the elements of scene. It’s really not a question I can very precisely or clearly formulate at present.

One possibility I do find promising, however, is that of a sort of “bootstrapping”. That is, suppose that an act is largely precipitated by the scene. Everything depends on the temporality of the act. If we conceive acts as temporally instantaneous, we will be likely to reduce acts to motion or scenic determinations. We get more resources if we conceive acts as temporally elongated, unfolding over time. That is, it’s possible to think of something new being created in the course of an act unfolding as immanent developments of the act itself, not the situation. For example, in the writing of a novel the initial move to write might be purely motivated by scenic determinations (one’s socio-economic status and how it individuates you, reigning styles, reigning modes of writing, etc). However, as you write the novel you begin to discover problems specific to the novelistic and stylistic space itself that don’t arise strictly from the situation in which the novel is being written. This is a sort of creation ex nihilo that introduces something into situations that weren’t there before. These in turn become scenic elements of their own (in that the written work becomes an object among objects in the world). I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to get at here.