Structure, Agency, and Affect

Abstract

The deconstruction of the simple structuralist and voluntarist perspectives in the previous chapter, coupled with the problematization of the dialectical perspectives of Giddens and Bhaskar, furnishes vital starting points, as well as certain theoretical resources, to address the problem of structure and agency. But it also discloses a number of conceptual blind spots and questions that call for further exploration. On the one hand, it is clear that the structuralist perspective emphasizes important constraints on human agency, whilst the agency-centred perspective stresses the autonomous or relatively autonomous role of (human) agents in constituting structures and producing differences of various sorts. But each perspective tends to privilege one element of the dichotomy they presuppose, thus reducing the other to the subordinated pole of a binary opposition.