Heidegger

Too bad Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. If he hadn't, his thought on Practice as the basic axiom of humanness, in contrast to the knowing and desiring subject, would permeate social theory today. But for now it has to be filtered through Foucault, Bourdieu, and others; these are smart guys too, but they don't go the distance like Heidegger in really getting away from a transcendent subject. (This transcendent subject is the "homunculus" that was attacked by Peirce, who posited a continuous process of semiosis instead.) I should confess that I haven't read Heidegger, only Dreyfus' "Being in the World".

I am thinking about the unified mass of the world that is always present and happening as a ground of Being that we always seek both to rejoin and escape. Our self-interpretation lifts us out, and we seek to quiet the anxiety that derives from the fact Being has no essence except that it self-interprets, and otherwise the meaning it ascribes to its reality is up for grabs - - always.

With narrative, we arc out of that un-thematized world and find our way back to it, like the idea of dis-equilibriums being resolved as narrative key (Todorov), creating a thematized self as we navigate whatever contest is presented in the narrative, un-thematizing the self when we reach equilibrium and Labov's coda.

With problems that must be solved by making ourselves individual (e.g. training and consumption in the industrial world), we invent a separation from it, and internalize the transcendent self we must have in order to compete in an individualistic society.

By making babies and building houses and joining school boards, we *physically* rejoin the unthematized pre-ontological world, as our lives become part of the stuff and exchange process of the world, rather than Being trying to understand itself as that which understands itself (which masquerades as a fundamental Kantian self). Curbs the anxiety, at least for a little while. Interesting: the unity of the pre-ontological world is no less true than the fracture of the ontological Being.

I am also thinking that explicit survey methods are doomed to failure if we consider the idea of the background processes that make the world intelligible as being the key to understanding another Being. By asking that Being about itself, you only get the foreground processes, the places for the Being where things don't function transparently. To get the background, you have to be there to watch, and see the ways that coherency is implicitly created (inspired by Fairclough).

Anyway that is my first post. A little heavy on the culture, a little light on the population, but these things take time.