ABSTRACT
Just as vulgar Marxism produced its own one sided accounts that reduced human experience to the economy, the study of discourse, language, and representation has increasingly come to be seen as an end in itself, in the process reducing human experience to the realm of culture”. The key epistemological issue for the social sciences appears to be how to hold together the dimensions of economic structure in given contexts, historical processes initiated by human agents to confront those iniquitous situations, and the subjectivity that drives subaltern actors to action. The entire Thomsonian exercise in the foregoing texts might be seen as an effort to establish the intimately articulated, dialectical relation between the theoretical triad of structured social existence/being, human agency as becoming in historical process and, what makes this possible, conscious social experience and its symbolical products. An important issue that emerged during one’s study was how was one to think of the subject of ‘collective conceptions’.
