Theories of Action and the Archaeology of Knowledge

Abstract

Repeated or patterned actions — that is, practices — are typically invested with meaning, but they need not be meaningful and they sometimes seem to have effects — as in the case of unintended or unexpected outcomes — which go beyond the ways in which they are understood by actors, onlookers or parties to an action.¹ This contention contradicts the premises of historical ‘interpretivism’, casting doubt on Sewell’s definition of ‘structures’ as ‘sets of mutually sustaining schémas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action’, where ‘resources … embody cultural schémas’.² Agency, in Sewell’s opinion, is ‘the capacity to transpose and extend schémas to new contexts’, rather than the ability — sometimes in defiance of expectations — to act.³ Historical transformation results from agents’ access to a multiplicity of intersecting structures and schémas, their transposition of schémas to new sets of circumstances, the unpredictability of the accumulation of resources as a consequence of the enactment of schémas and the polysemy — or multiplicity of meaning — of resources, in the American historian’s account, rather than from the unanticipated cooperation, competition and collision of individuals’ actions, frequently in institutions with ill-comprehended logics or dynamics and in conditions which are incompletely understood or are seen to be meaningless.⁴