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well, hektore---first off you somehow or another confused what i was talking about with something else, so when you bit that sentence you decided it was talking about something it wasn't. the point there was that ethical action--and thinking about ethical action--is an aesthetic matter, and always has been. the point isn't that complicated, and is not particularly about the question you decided it doesn't answer.
if you frame socialization as conditioning, you run into problems, yes? socialization is the production of a coherent ego, and to be coherent it has to be able to engage in certain baseline operations---for example your patterns of desire have to be delimited so as to fall within certain social limits---your modes of organizing information have to be adaptable within the constraints placed on you by your social situation. and so forth. so socialization is unavoidable--the question is not yes/no but what kind of socialization and what relation is possible/desirable with respect to socialization (including one's own)--and what types of argument can be fashioned that would make a political question of this.
your actions are constrained, whether you're aware of it or not. if you imagine yourself to be "free" and do not understand at least something of the constraints that shape you--including your ability to say that you're free--then you aren't, in fact, saying anything at all.
and nothing is changed by calling socialization "conditioning" except that it introduces some fantasy that it's possible to be outside it. it isn't. so you're in this game whether you like it or not. the variable really is the extent to which you think it important to know you're in it. there's no outside, and you're dreaming with your eyes open if you imagine there is.
so you could say that placing emphasis on embededness is simply placing emphasis on where it ought to be in any event, on social agents acting in particular social-historical environments, who possess various modes of processing information as well as modes of making statements about processing information.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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