ABSTRACT
One of the few propositions upon which social theorists agree is the truism ‘no people; no society’. Accord stretches a bit further because no-one seriously maintains that ‘society is like people’. Society remains different in kind from its component members, even if it is conceptualised as being no more than the aggregate effect of people’s doings (and conceptions) or the pattern produced by them. The crucial difference is that no aggregate or pattern truly possesses self-
awareness,1 whereas every single (normal) member of society is a self-conscious being. Thus, however differently the social may be conceptualised in various schools of thought (from an objective and emergent stratum of reality to an objectified social constructwith the ontological status of ‘facticity’), the social remains different from its component members in this crucial respect. It lacks self-consciousness. Therefore, it follows that a central problem for social theorists must be to provide an answer to the question ‘What difference does the self-awareness of its members make to the nature of the social?’ Historically, the answers given have varied from ‘all the difference’, as the
response common to idealists, to ‘no difference at all’, as the reply of hard-line materialists. Today, the variety of answers has increased but the question remains because it cannot be evaded. For example, social constructionists cannot dodge the issue by regarding any societal feature as a product of ‘objectification’ by its members because each and every individual can mentally deliberate about what is currently objectified in relation to himself or herself (they can ask ‘Should I take this for granted?’). Conversely, no objectified ‘entity’ can be reflexive about itself in relation to individuals (it can never, as it were, ask ‘Could this construct be presented more convincingly?’). The ineluctability of this issue led Hollis and Smith (1994) to maintain that ‘argument about [the] “objective and subjective”, : : : is as fundamental as argument about [the] “collective and individual”’. Not only are these two issues of equal importance but also they are closely intertwined. The ‘problem of structure and agency’ has a great deal in common with the
‘problem of objectivity and subjectivity’. Both raise the same question about the relationship between their component terms, which entails questioning their respective causal powers. Once we have started talking about causal powers it is
impossible to avoid talking about the ontological status of those things to which causal powers are attributed or from which they are withheld. However, a popular response to these two (recalcitrant) problems is the sugges-
tion that we should transcend both of them by the simple manoeuvre of considering them to be the two faces of a single coin.2 Transcending the divide rests upon conceptualising ‘structures’ and ‘agents’ as ontologically inseparable because each enters into the other’s constitution and therefore they should be examined as one mutually constitutive amalgam.3 In a single leap-frog move, all the previous difficulties can be left behind. This manoeuvre has direct implications for the question of ‘objectivity and subjectivity’. If ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ are conceptualised as being inseparable, because they are maintained to be mutually constitutive, then this blurring of subject and object necessarily and seriously challenges the possibility of reflexivity itself. If the two are an amalgam, it is difficult to see how a person or a group is able to reflect critically or creatively upon their social conditions or context.
