I am currently working on an essay considering various aspects of the "agent-structure problem," and I would like to share portions of my work as I generate them. The agent-structure problem concerns several foundational topics to all social theorizing, and hence intertwined with all thinking about human being in the world: What is the nature of human agency? What causal powers do social structures hold, and how do these powers influence agents? Is there a middle point between social theories that tend to efface the possiblity of the subject exercising agency (post-modernism, post-structuralism and social constructionism) and theories that fully "free" the agent-subject from any geo-historical and socio-cultural contextualization (neo-liberalism, methodological individualism and volunteerism)?
I have been grappling with the agent-structure problem since I was a graduate student in cultural anthropology, and I have been influenced by several thinkers on this subject: Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Salins, Roy Bhaskar, and Margaret Archer. At this stage in my figurin', I find the work of Bhaskar and Archer, who both work under the "scientific/ critical realist" umbrella, as providing the most persuasive account, and I will be drawing heavily from this philosophy of social science.
The agent-structure problem is essentially a problem of social ontology, and consequently, imbricated in the political. As I work through the problematics of the nature of and relationship between agents and structures, I hope to begin a dialectical conversation over human being, ontology and the political especially in relation to the work of Lacan and Zizek.
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