Abstract
I shall now undertake a discussion of collective subjectivity’s hermeneutic dimension and of what will be called its material constitution. Conceived overall, the whole comprising the hermeneutic dimension and the material constitution, plus the space-time dimension to be introduced below, furnishes what could be declared the ‘formal’ causality of social systems, that is the conditions whereby they are (re)produced and changed. The multidimensionality of social systems, recently underscored by Alexander1 – who handles it with reference to the ‘conditional’ and the ‘normative’ aspects of individual action as well as within a renewed version of Parsons’ AGIL scheme – will be thereby assessed, albeit in a different key.
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References
J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 244; ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’, in K. Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader, p. 310. See also Sérgio P. Rouanet, A razão cativa (Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985).
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This is the case also with the discussion proposed by G. Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964) pp. 29ff. H. Garfinkel (’ Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities’, in Studies in Ethnomethodology, pp. 40–1) has shown that time is an essential element of conversations. We can go further and suggest that conversation – qua interaction – is time in its social unfolding.
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See, for Habermas, Chapter 3; M. Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’ (1976), in Power and Knowledge (ed. by Colin Gordon) (Brighton: Harvester, 1980) p. 83.
See Renato Ortiz, Cultura Brasileira e Identidade Nacional (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985) p. 58. For the production and consumption of music as a process that involves collective subjectivities (although the author has in mind in fact the outcome of the process in its totality), see H. Becker, ‘Art as Collective Action’, American Sociological Review, vol. 39, 1974.
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© 1995 José Maurício Domingues
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Dọmingues, J.M. (1995). Collective Subjectivity and Multidimensionality. In: Sociological Theory and Collective Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376342_9
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