Being Human: The Problem of Agency. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus)

Margaret S. Archer, Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 323 pp. This book is the last in Archer's trilogy dealing with culture, structure and agency. In the previous two books, Culture and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Archer makes the argument that structure and culture can be shown to have distinctive properties and powers. In this book the same case is made for agency. In this work, Archer is concerned with establishing the sui generis properties and powers of agents. The key to being human is found in the realisation of as an emergent relational (p.123) that is pre-linguistic and tied to activity in the world. Archer begins her account with a critique of what she regards as the dissolution of humanity in recent social theory. She takes to task both rational choice theories that leave us with and social constructionist theories that produce Being. is a rational but soulless opportunist and Being is a malleable grammatical fiction (p.4). Neither of these theoretical positions take account of the continuous sense of that all humans have that emerges from activity in the world. Archer's dense critique of rational choice theory and social constructionism, especially the latter's reliance on linguistic theory, is elegant and compelling. Archer demonstrates clearly how the lobotomy (p.85) of Modernity's Man and the disembodied of Society's deny the creative self. Archer uses Merleau-Ponty's point that the sensed bodily envelope is critical to the development of a sense of distinguishable from others (p.131). This sense of is constituted in activity in relation to natural needs. Archer maintains that looking for an entity or substance called self is futile, the is an emergent property whose realization comes about through the necessary relations between embodied practice and the non-discursive (p.123). Archer contends that the body and its sensory capacity confronting the natural world is central to development and the practical consciousness that precedes language and language acquisition is not the result of some intellectual mastery of linguistic principles or syntax but it is a tool or instrument acquired as a result of activity (p.135). The centrality of practice is tied to the fact that it is only through practice that potential can be realised and personal identity formed. Archer continues her argument with an examination of the emotional inner life of all beings that grounds all development. It is emotion that fuels the constant internal conversation we have with ourselves, for example the inner dialogue that asks Isn't he ever going to stop talking? (p.193). What Archer calls first order emotions are related to the natural, and discursive orders of reality and represent reactions to and commentaries upon the three different types of concerns in those orders. In the natural order the concern is for the physical well-being of the body in its environment and the emotional reaction is visceral. In the order the concern is for subject/object relations and the concern is for competent performance or achievement. And in the third, the discursive order, the concern is also for subject/object relations but the concern is for self-worth in the light of normative strictures. The dilemna for any individual is, of course, that these three orders ar e not, in practice, distinct and there are no guarantees that they are compatible. …

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