On the constitution of ‘self’ and ‘mind’: The dialectic of the system and the person

This article introduces a perspective in which questions at a psychological grain of analysis are integrated with a broad societal frame of interpretation, drawing on interdisciplinary feminist writings that provide alternative ways to theorize the social. It is argued that understanding the constitution of subjectivity, ‘self’ and thought requires a societal-level model of the social with both discursive and material constituents as well as local discursive processes that are deployed within, and configured through, that broader system. It is further argued that the ontological notion of a ‘person’ (in a specific, non-modern sense of ‘person’ and in a specific sense of ‘ontological’) is a conceptually necessary part of the theoretical language, as the anchor for processes of social constitution and as the substrate of agency, where agency is theorized as a multilevel process. One central claim developed in this article is that it is through the dialectic among these societal-level, local, and personal constituents that subjectivity, ‘self’ and thought are constituted, a ‘self’ that is assumed to be situated, hybrid, complex, tension-filled and unstable, yet substantial. © 2004, Sage Publications. All rights reserved