ABSTRACT
Everyday life, experience, practice, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ are each attempts to mediate between structure and the individual, between objectivity and subjectivity, or, if you wish, between determinism and free will. While such mediations are as old as the oppositions themselves, they have a particular immediacy in our time, an immediacy which can be attributed, in dialectical logic, to a reaction against structuralism, politically and intellectually. (Ortner, 1984) The sense that we are presently at the end of something, as expressed in the terms ‘postindustrial’ and ‘postmodern’, is a sign of loss of confidence in the structures of the state, the political party, the labour union, and the established ways of doing and thinking. This same loss of confidence is also found in the laws, models, and theories of the social sciences, as expressed in the term ‘poststructuralism’. Critiques from the right wing of the political spectrum of all manifestations of state power except those which support capitalism and critiques from the left wing of the state’s support of capitalism, all speak of agency, either individual or collective, against structure. The bourgeois critique is essentially coherent. It is, simply stated, that any structure opposed to the orderly accumulation of capital is to be opposed. The left critique of structure is more theoretically problematic. How can one act within the system to oppose it without creating structures which simply negate the structures they oppose, that is, without creating mere antistructures? To escape the endless series of contradictions—anti-antistructures—one might pose anarchism as a political response or nihilism as an intellectual one. However, to the extent that we still consider ourselves to be social scientists, committed to problem solving, to abandon the project is not a very attractive prospect. Assuming one has not reached the highest state of antistructuralism, one’s critique of it must take another form, both intellectually and politically.
