Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30 (Studies in Symbolic Interaction)

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Series Editor: Norman K. Denzin Recent Volumes: Volumes 1–29: Studies in Symbolic Inter...

Author: Norman Denzin

66 downloads 1444 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Series Editor: Norman K. Denzin Recent Volumes: Volumes 1–29:

Studies in Symbolic Interaction

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION VOLUME 30

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY

NORMAN K. DENZIN University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

JAI Press is an imprint of Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2008 Copyright r 2008 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84663-930-2 ISSN: 0163-2396 (Series)

Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS D. Mark Austin

Department of Sociology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Daniel Bryan

Peace and Justice Programs, Brethren Colleges Abroad, Quito, Ecuador

Ronald Burns

Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Patricia Ticineto Clough

The Graduate Center CUNY, Queens College, Flushing, NY, USA

Roberta L. Coles

Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Corey J. Colyer

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

David R. Dickens

Department of Sociology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Ju´lio Emı´lio Diniz-Pereira

School of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Patricia Gagne´

Department of Sociology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Elz_ bieta Ha!as

Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Regina Hewitt

Department of English, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA ix

x

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Christine K. Holland

Department of Communications, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

Barbara J. Jago

University of New Hampshire at Manchester, Manchester, NH, USA

John M. Johnson

Arizona State University, School of Justice and Critical Inquiry, Tempe, AZ, USA

Michael A. Katovich

Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Michal M. McCall

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Clark McPhail

Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Bernard N. Meltzer

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University, MI, USA

William J. Meltzer

Adult Services, Worthington Libraries, Worthington, OH, USA

Lawrence T. Nichols

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

James J. Nolan III

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

Celine-Marie Pascale

Department of Sociology, American University, Washington, DC, USA

Stephynie C. Perkins

Department of Communications, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

xi

List of Contributors

Robert Prus

Department of Sociology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., Canada

Joseph Schneider

Department for the Study of Culture and Society, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA

David A. Snow

Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA

Phillip Vannini

Royal Roads University, School of Communication and Culture, Victoria, BC, Canada

ELABORATING THE DISCURSIVE CONTEXTS OF FRAMING: DISCURSIVE FIELDS AND SPACES David A. Snow The ‘‘March of the Penguins’’ was released to theaters on June 24, 2005. Not only did this ﬁlm about the annual winter migration of the Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin quickly become the second highest grossing documentary of all time, but just as quickly it also became political fodder. As reported in the September 13, 2005 issue of the New York Times: At a conference for young Republicans, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made a ‘‘strong case for intelligent design.’’ (Miller, 2005, p. D2)

And the conservative ﬁlm critic and radio host Michael Medved is reported to have said that this is ‘‘the motion picture this summer that most passionately afﬁrms traditional norms like monogamy, sacriﬁce, and child rearing’’ (Miller, 2005, p. D2). Several months later, following the November 8, 2005, election defeat of all eight Dover, PA school board-members for the interjection of ‘‘intelligent design’’ as an alternative to the theory of evolution, the religious broadcaster and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson issued a ﬁrm warning to the town’s residents, saying: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your cityy . God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our ﬁnger is his eyes Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 3–28 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30001-5

3

4

DAVID A. SNOW forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. (Associated Press, 2005)

About the same time Robertson was issuing his latest apocalyptic warning, France, and particularly its Paris region, was in the throes of several weeks of civil unrest that began in response to the deaths of two teenagers in a poor community in a suburb of Paris on the evening of Thursday, October 27. The ‘‘riots,’’ as the disturbances were called across the European community and North America, appeared to beg for causal accounting and analysis judging from the media attention and commentary they received. For example, in a study of two paired-newspapers in six countries (Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States) over a 3-week period that I conducted with two colleagues (Snow, Vliegenthart, & Corrigall-Brown, 2007), we identiﬁed 418 articles on the ‘‘riots,’’1 with sometimes striking variation in the characterization of their causes, ranging from attributing them to unemployment, racism, and the failure of France’s minority incorporation polices to out-of-control youth and gangs, Muslims and radical Islamists, to the failure of France’s immigration programs. Each of the foregoing sense-making claims or charges is an instance of framing. In each case, an event pregnant with interpretive possibilities is framed in a way that provides one possible diagnostic or prognostic answer to the question of ‘‘What is going on?’’ or ‘‘What is being said?’’ or ‘‘What does that mean?’’ – questions that invite, according to Goffman (1974), among others, the application or construction of interpretive frames. Thus, a movie about penguins is claimed to make a strong case for creationism/intelligent design rather than evolution; a local election is said to be an affront to God rather than an example of democracy at work or a reasoned victory for rationalism; and several weeks of rioting in the city of light and its environs are said to be attributable to underclass material-based grievances rather than to the religious heritage and antiquated culture of the participants, or vice versa. To date, examination of these various diagnostic framings, especially from the vantage point of the framing perspective on social movements, would likely take one of three paths: descriptive identiﬁcation of one of the framings and elaboration of its functions; identiﬁcation of the factors that have affected the development or production of the frames in question; and examination of the effects or outcomes of those frames. A less likely path would involve systematic examination of frame variation across movements, groups, or time.2 And an even less likely research trek would entail an

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

5

examination of the discursive contexts in which those frames are embedded and out of which they have evolved. It is this least traveled path that I will traverse in this article. What I intend to do is to problematize and elaborate aspects of the discursive contexts impinging on framing in relation to social movements and politics more generally. In the case of the foregoing illustrations, for example, I would ﬁrst contend that they cannot be fully understood by inspecting them apart from the discursive contexts in which they are ensconced, and then examine those contexts and how speciﬁc features of them are related to the various frames that grow out of them and their respective life courses. There is, it is important to note, a primary exception to this neglect of discursive contexts, and it is associated with some recent work on what is called ‘‘the discursive opportunity structure (DOS).’’ But that concept, as I will argue, does not encompass the full complement of contexts in which framing is embedded. Thus, my intent is to address this lacuna by elaborating the concepts of discursive ﬁelds and space. And in doing so, I will also add to the conceptual architecture associated with the framing perspective on social movements. I will begin with a critical discussion of the idea of DOS, which provides a point of departure for my elaboration of discursive ﬁelds and spaces. As the discussion progresses, it will become clear that the conceptual elaboration is partly rooted, theoretically, in what I take to be a number of the orienting principles of symbolic interactionism, namely the principles of interactive determinism, emergence, and human agency (see Blumer, 1969; Snow, 2001). Additionally, I will illustrate and buttress my arguments and observations by reference to two studies in which I have been involved – one on the processes of frame articulation and elaboration within the context of a right-wing social movement organization (Snow & Clark-Miller, 2006), and the other entailing the previously mentioned assessment of frame variation in response to the French riots in the fall of 2005 (Snow, Vliegenthart, & Corrigall-Brown, 2007).

DELIMITING THE CONCEPTION OF DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES As the framing perspective has evolved, there has been growing recognition that framing processes cannot be adequately understood apart from the broader enveloping contexts in which those processes occur. One such

6

DAVID A. SNOW

context recently has been conceptualized as discursive opportunities or the DOS. To date the concept has been examined most closely and carefully in relation to the media, most notably in Koopmans research on how the strategies of the German radical right have evolved partly in response to various media reactions and constraints (Koopmans, 2004) and in Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht’s (2002) comparison of abortion discourse in the U.S. and Germany (between 1970 and 1994) via the media. Koopmans provides the most straightforward and researchable conception of discursive opportunities, deﬁning them in terms of three selection mechanisms that affect the probability of a proffered message or framing being picked-up and diffused. They include ‘‘visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc. – react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive)’’ (Koopmans, 2004, p. 367). The work of Koopmans (2004) and Ferree et al. (2002) constitutes an important contribution in identifying and empirically examining one set of contextual factors that affect the career of proffered framings. I accent one set because the focus of their work has been on the role of the media in shaping movement discourse and framing – on, that is, the media DOS in particular rather than on a DOS in general. My preference is that we think in terms of institutionally speciﬁc discursive opportunities, such as the media’s, rather than in terms of some general, over-arching DOS for two reasons: First, I fear that if we talk and write in terms of the DOS, its fate will parallel that of its parent concept, the political opportunity structure (POS). That is, DOS, like POS, will be invoked to explain everything and thus nothing.3 Additionally, it is not all that clear how to distinguish between general, overarching political and DOSs. Are they duplicative in some respects, thus making one or the other redundant? If, for example, a political regime becomes increasingly repressive banning public gatherings and speech, is the absence of oppositional protest and rhetoric explained in terms of the tightening of the POS or the DOS? It is also important to keep in mind that political or discursive opportunities do not determine the substance of discursive processes but delimit the spaces in which those processes occur. The overlapping concepts of submerged networks (Melucci, 1989), abeyance structures (Taylor, 1989), subcultures of accommodation (Johnston & Snow, 1998) and free spaces (Polletta, 1999), and the dramaturgical distinctions between front stage and back stage (Goffman, 1959), and public and hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990) remind us that oppositional discursive process, including framing, often proceed in the face of repressive structures, albeit cautiously and in private, hidden, or

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

7

submerged rather than public contexts. In light of these observations, I think we will be better served conceptually and analytically by conceptualizing DOSs in terms of speciﬁc institutions, as with the media, rather than too generally. A second reason for being cautious about thinking in terms of general DOSs is that the concept leaves little conceptual space for considering other discursive contextual factors and their implications for examining and understanding aspects of framing. In what follows I substantiate this concern conceptually and empirically by elaborating two such discursive contexts: discursive ﬁelds and discursive space.

DISCURSIVE FIELDS The concept of ‘‘discursive ﬁelds’’ has been invoked as one way to conceptualize at least one component of the context in which framing and discourse are embedded more generally (see, e.g., Spillman, 1995; Steinberg, 1999). Discursive ﬁelds, like the kindred concepts of organizational ﬁelds (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), multi-organizational ﬁelds (Klandermans, 1992; Rucht, 2004; Curtis & Zurcher, 1973), and identify ﬁelds (Hunt, Benford, & Snow, 1994), are constitutive of the genre of concepts in the social sciences that can be thought of as ‘‘embedding’’ concepts in that they reference broader enveloping contexts in which discussions, decisions, and actions take place. The ‘‘ﬁeld’’ concept has been bandied about for some time in the social sciences, wherein it is perhaps most closely identiﬁed with the psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951) and his ﬁeld theory, and has also ﬁgured prominently in the writings of Victor Turner (1974), and Pierre Bourdieu (1984).4 But it does not appear to have been until the relatively recent claimed ‘‘cultural turn’’ that the concept of discursive ﬁelds gained a footing within sociology, principally among sociologists working in the cultural area. To provide a sense of how discursive ﬁelds have been conceptualized and used in the cultural area, and to provide a footing for a reformulation of the concept, I refer brieﬂy to its treatment and usage in three different but interrelated works. The ﬁrst is Robert Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse (1989), which examines the ways in which the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the ascent of Marxist socialism were inﬂuenced by the contexts in which they arose, the ways in which they became institutionalized, and the ways in which their associated ‘‘ideologies were shaped by and yet succeeded in transcending their speciﬁc environments of

8

DAVID A. SNOW

origin’’ (1989, p. 5). For Wuthnow, discursive ﬁelds constitute not only ‘‘a space y within which discourse can be framed’’ (1989, p. 555), but also provide ‘‘the foundational categories in which thinking can take place’’ and ‘‘establishes the limits of discussion and deﬁnes the range of problems that can be addressed’’ (1989, p. 13). Also writing within the sociology of culture, and tussling with the structure/culture connection, Spillman (1995) proffers the discursive ﬁeld as the mediating link between the two – that is, ‘‘between structure and meaningful action’’ (p. 139). Like Wuthnow, whose conceptualization of discursive ﬁelds she invokes, Spillman regards discursive ﬁelds as the site or locale of ‘‘creative cultural work,’’ such as meaning making or framing. But Spillman also extends Wuthnow’s analysis by bootlegging social structure into her conceptualization by contending that ‘‘discursive ﬁelds express structured constellations of social relations’’ (p. 142) that are ‘‘presupposed in interaction’’ and thus limit or constrain meaning-making or cultural work (pp. 143–144). The last illustrative work is Mark Steinberg’s examination of repertoires of discourse among 19th century English cotton spinners. Steinberg draws on Spillman’s treatment by conceptualizing discursive ﬁelds as ‘‘dynamic terrain in which meaning contests occur’’ (1999, p. 748) and agreeing that ﬁelds both constrain and enable in the sense of limiting meaning construction as well as providing the tools for meaning work. But Steinberg appears to part company a bit with Wuthnow and Bourdieu, among others, in terms of the clarity of ﬁeld boundaries, arguing ‘‘that the boundaries of a discursive ﬁeld are never entirely ﬁxed or clear’’ (p. 749). Taken together, these three treatments suggest that discursive ﬁelds are the contexts in which meaning-making activities, such as framing, are embedded; that the ideational stuff that gets discussed and the rules or grammar for the discourse are contained within the ﬁeld; that the ﬁeld is also constituted by a set of patterned relations imported from the outside; and ﬁeld boundaries, while not fully transparent or ﬁxed, are skewed in the direction of ﬁxity and clarity. Although I agree with the proposition that framing can be best understood within the context of a discursive ﬁeld, I ﬁnd the above conception of discursive ﬁelds too restrictive insofar as it is maintained that they ‘‘establish the limits of discussion’’ and ‘‘the range of problems that can be addressed.’’ Or, as Spillman puts it, ‘‘They limit the range of potential meanings and values which might sensibly enter interaction’’ (1995, p. 144). I am not so sure that is empirically the case. If it were, then I would argue that the ideological bases for the movements with which Gandhi and Martin

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

9

Luther King are so prominently associated would have been framed quite differently, as both Gandhi and King drew from articulated strands of different ideologies and cultural perspectives – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity in the case of Gandhi, and Christianity, Gandhism, and the U.S. Constitution in King’s case. Both had something of the ﬂavor of what the historian George Mosse has called ‘‘scavenger ideology(ies)’’ (1985, p. 134). Consequently, I think we would be better served if we turned what appears to be taken as a constant within the cultural area into a variable feature of discursive ﬁelds. In other words, why not treat interpretive constraint as a matter of degree rather than as a given. To insist on the obverse suggests to me a kind of closed system approach to innovation, and a rather stilted view of agency. To be sure, some cultural sociologists relax this contention by suggesting that ‘‘some cultural autonomy exists in the particular meanings and values emerging in the interaction’’ (Spillman, p. 144) or that ‘‘the boundaries of a discursive ﬁeld are never entirely ﬁxed or clear’’ (Steinberg, p. 749). But I sense that such boundary- or constraint-relaxing statements are in part a reﬂection of what often appears to be an almost schizophrenic view within the sociology of culture of the tensions between the constraining power of culture and individual and collective agency. This tension is not so profound or immobilizing for symbolic interactionists, however, who have generally argued, following Blumer (1969), that while social actors take into account the structural and cultural constraints (e.g., roles, norms, values) that impinge on situations in which they ﬁnd themselves in the course of developing their respective lines of action, those constraints are not singly determinative of that action, including the generation and/or application of interpretive frames. And this is especially true in the contexts of contentious politics and social movements, wherein the relevance or legitimacy of extant cultural codes and framings are likely to be ambiguous, open to question, and/or contestable. Accordingly, I would argue for a more relaxed or elastic view of discursive ﬁelds and their boundaries, one that stretches on a continuum from emergent ﬁelds to highly structured ﬁelds. To get a handle on the way in which discursive ﬁelds are structured, I turn to the concept of organizational ﬁelds as developed within the sociological study of organizations. Spillman, as suggested earlier, contends that discursive ﬁelds ‘‘carry the power of structure into meaning-making’’ through the ‘‘patterns of structural relations’’ they ‘‘express’’ (1995, p. 144). I agree! However, I think the notion of ‘‘structural relations’’ that supposedly characterize a discursive ﬁeld is insufﬁciently developed, and

10

DAVID A. SNOW

that the concept of organizational ﬁelds provides a way to think more concretely about the constitution of discursive ﬁelds. The concept of organizational ﬁelds was originally propounded by DiMaggio and Powell to conceptualize the set of organizational actors that ‘‘constitute a recognized area of institutional life,’’ such as, in a given area of economic life, the ‘‘key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services and products’’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). Not only has the concept found wide application within the study of organizations and institutions, but it’s conceptualization has also been broadened to include any relatively organized ‘‘system of actors, actions, and relations y whose participants take one another into account as they carry out interrelated activities’’ (McAdam & Scott, 2005, p. 10), including social movement activity (see, especially, Armstrong, 2005; Davis, McAdam, Scott, & Zald, 2005; Morrill & Owen-Smith, 2002). The analytic utility of the concept is that it focuses attention on the array of relevant actors engaged in and contributing to a process or practice and, consistent with the interactionist principle of interactive determination, on the relationships among them and their patterns of interaction.5 Of course the degree of ﬁeld organization or the system of relations among the actors can vary on a continuum from unstable or unsettled to stable or settled. Unstable ﬁelds exist when the actors or participants and the system of relations among them are emergent or just evolving, or when the system of relations is dissolving due to a shift in attention to a more recent, noteworthy event, or to contestation among the actors. Stable or highly structured ﬁelds, on the other hand, exist when there is an ordered and legitimated system of relations among the various actors, such that there is an understanding of the decision-making process and the relative inﬂuence of the different actors in that process. Incorporating these observations into an expanded understanding of discursive ﬁelds suggests a conceptualization that includes not only relevant cultural materials that can be drawn on, in the sense of Swidler’s ‘‘tool kit’’ approach to culture (1986), but also the range of actors participating in the discussion and the system of relations among them, rather it be emergent and unstable or highly ordered and structured. This suggests, then, that discursive ﬁelds can vary on a continuum ranging from emergent and relatively unstructured and unstable at one end to highly structured and stable at the other end. Since discursive ﬁelds are constituted when two or more individual or collective actors discuss some relevant event or issue, and since there can be

11

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

considerable variation in the extent of agreement or disagreement regarding the focal event or issue, it is also clear that discursive ﬁelds can vary on a continuum ranging from consensus to heated contestation. Some scholars who have found the concept of discursive ﬁelds of analytic utility would argue otherwise, contending that they are ‘‘grounded in ongoing contention’’ (Steinberg, 1999, p. 749). But neither all debates nor meaning contests are grounded in contention, nor do they automatically or always become hotly contested and thus contentious. Here again I would argue that caution needs to be exercised so that we do not treat what is a variable feature of a process as an invariant property.

A Typology of Discursive Fields The cross-classiﬁcation of the emergent/structured and consensual/ contested continua yields a fourfold typology of discursive ﬁelds, which is schematically summarized in Fig. 1. Cell 1 contains recently emergent Emergent Field (1)

(2)

Tsunami Initial response to 9/11

Katrina French Riots

March of the Penguins Consensual Field

Contested Field London Terrorist Bombings

Religious Sectarianism Iraq War ID Movement Local Right-Wing SMO

(3)

(4) Structured Field

Fig. 1.

Discursive Fields.

12

DAVID A. SNOW

discursive ﬁelds in which there is considerable agreement or near consensus about framing the event either diagnostically or prognostically. The discursive ﬁeld that emerged in response to the December 26, 2004 earthquake-triggered Indian Ocean and southeast Asian tsunamis is illustrative. Not only was there immediate, near diagnostic consensus about the causes of the disaster – a 9.1–9.3 magnitude earthquake, but it prompted, as well, a huge worldwide effort to help victims of the tragedy, with billions of dollars being raised for disaster relief, symbolized in this country by the joint efforts of Presidents 41 (G. W. Bush) and 42 (W. J. Clinton). In time, of course, prognostic debates began to percolate as to the timeliness and sufﬁciency of the response, and the disaster response ﬁeld became more structured as well. But these observations bring into play temporal considerations, which contribute to the dynamic character of discursive ﬁelds, which I will discuss shortly. Cell 2 includes emergent ﬁelds in which there is heated contestation among the actors. Examples include the contested and unstable ﬁelds that emerged in response to the hurricane Katrina disaster and the Paris riots that began on October 27 and reportedly ended on November 17, 2005, when the police ‘‘declared a return to a normal situation throughout France, saying that the 98 vehicles torched the previous night corresponded to the usual average’’ (Wikipedia, 2005, p. 1). A picture of the contested character of the French riots’ discursive ﬁeld is indicated in Table 1, which shows the different diagnostic frames proffered by various actors and commentators within the ﬁeld. Across the top row, we see six different diagnostic frames, three of which cluster together as non-structural or category-based and three as structural. A more graphic sense of the difference between these two clusters of frames is provided by the following contrasting selections from the New York Times and the Washington Times. In the New York Times piece, the author, a French social scientist, argued that: ythe reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence. Rather we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to Los Angeles and beyondy . The rioters are generally 12–25 years old, and roughly half of those arrested are under 18y . They express simmering anger, fueled by unemployment and racism. The lesson, then, is that while these riots originate in areas largely populated by the immigrants of Islamic heritage, they have little to do with the wrath of a Muslim community.’’ (Roy, 2005, p. 27)

In stark contrast, an article in the Washington Times argues: There’s no scarcity of terminally sensitive apologists eager to make the usual excuses for the lawless. And it’s true that the housing projects ringing Paris, keeping the poor out of

Diagnostic Framing by Various Countries, Sources, and Time Periods (%). Diagnostic Framing Non-structural

Riff-raff (n ¼ 138)

Structural

Over-reaction Minority and/ Failure of by authorities or religious minority (n ¼ 185) groups (n ¼ 89) incorporation (n ¼ 208)

Total

Housing (n ¼ 59)

Economy and/or education (n ¼ 104)

Other (n ¼ 42)

Total (n ¼ 825)

Total

16.7

22.4

10.8

25.2

7.2

12.6

5.1

100.0

Country Netherlands Germany UK US Canada France

15.0 15.8 16.3 8.3 17.3 27.1

20.8 28.8 26.6 28.0 18.2 10.0

9.2 9.4 5.4 15.2 15.5 12.9

25.8 22.3 30.4 21.2 26.4 23.6

14.2 4.3 5.4 6.8 5.5 7.9

13.3 10.1 12.0 13.6 14.5 12.9

1.7 9.4 3.8 6.8 2.7 5.7

14.5 16.8 22.3 16.0 13.3 17.0

7.2 22.6

30.1 8.9

8.8 12.9

25.5 27.4

6.9 10.5

14.1 13.7

7.5 4.0

37.1 15.0

76.8

2.4 45.9

13.4 29.7

6.1 13.5

1.2 5.4

5.4

10.0 4.5

3.3

10.0

53.3

10.0

3.3

3.6

Source Media French government Sarkozy French opposition International actors

3.3

16.7

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

Table 1.

13

14

Table 1. (Continued ) Diagnostic Framing Non-structural Riff-raff (n ¼ 138)

Residents/ participants Other Week 1 2 3

Structural

Over-reaction Minority and/ Failure of by authorities or religious minority (n ¼ 185) groups (n ¼ 89) incorporation (n ¼ 208)

Total

Housing (n ¼ 59)

Economy and/or education (n ¼ 104)

Other (n ¼ 42)

Total (n ¼ 825)

13.6

38.8

3.9

18.4

6.8

15.5

2.9

12.5

7.0

15.5

12.0

35.9

8.5

15.5

5.6

17.2

20.9 16.5 13.9

37.3 22.0 11.1

3.3 8.7 22.8

17.6 27.8 24.4

7.2 7.7 5.6

7.2 13.0 16.1

6.5 4.3 6.1

18.5 59.6 21.8

DAVID A. SNOW

Source: Adapted from Snow et al. (2007)

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

15

sight, are islands of misery and woe. But it’s impractical to blame the French government for not assimilating the Muslim tide from Africa and Arabia when these Muslims by and large not only do not want assimilation, but resist it, insisting on bringing to France with them the eight-century culture that makes life such hell in their homelands. (Pruden, 2005, p. A04)

These two antithetical framings illustrate not only the poles of the various framings within the French riots discursive ﬁeld, but also the highly interactive, dialogic character of framing activity within the ﬁeld.6 That is to say that the various framings, including the juxtaposed ones just mentioned, are not independent but interdependent and recursive in the sense of being built up partly in response to each other, such that one framing may lead to a counterframing which in turn may generate a ‘‘lamination’’ (Goffman, 1974, pp. 82, 156–157) of the initial framing, ad inﬁnitum, until the event in question is superseded by another event, a particular framing becomes dominant over competing frames, or there is frame crystallization (convergence around a proffered framing). Equally contested, but somewhat more structured, was the discursive ﬁeld that emerged in response to the documentary, ‘‘The March of the Penguins.’’ It was emergent in the sense of being unanticipated because the contested interpretation of the documentary’s deep meaning caught people off-guard, but the ﬁeld was initially more structured than the Katrina or Paris riots ﬁelds because the contested framings were in accord with the ﬁelds that were already organized around the creationist and intelligent design movement and the anti-gay marriage countermovement. Cell 3 encompasses discursive ﬁelds in which there is considerable consensus among actors who are positioned or situated in relation to each other in a structured and relatively stable fashion. Here two illustrative cases are presented. The ﬁrst is the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings of London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour. Three bombs exploded within less than a minute of each other on three underground trains and in a bus about an hour later. All told, 56 were killed and around 700 injured. Since it was an unanticipated event, the discursive ﬁeld that emerged with it as an object of discussion is positioned almost in the middle of the continuum, but skewed slightly toward the structured end because the discussion was highly orchestrated and strongly consensual, suggesting rapid frame crystallization (convergence around or toward a proffered framing). The second illustration of a consensual, structured discursive ﬁeld is provided by the right-wing SMO that Jason Clark-Miller and I studied (along with Jennifer Murdock and Bill Bunis) in the mid-1990s. The SMO

16

DAVID A. SNOW

advertised itself as a ‘‘Constitutional Forum’’ for citizens wanting to educate themselves about the country’s constitution and how it is being ‘‘misinterpreted and abused.’’ The group met regularly on a weekend morning for at least two hours at a local cafeteria, with typically 30–40 dues-paying members, another 10–20 regulars, and roughly 10 guests in attendance. Members and other attendees generally arrived around 8:00 to purchase breakfast and socialize with each other before the meeting was called to order formally with a few pronouncements and a prayer, followed by an invited talk and open discussion that usually lasted for an hour. The group was highly structured in that it was organized hierarchically in a pyramid fashion, with the two leaders at the top and the rank and ﬁle participants and the speakers at the points of the base. We were interested in the processes through which frames were articulated and elaborated through the discourse, so we monitored the conversations ethnographically and taped or took notes on the speeches, questions, and comments that constituted the substance of each meeting, noting the topics discussed, what was said about them, the different frames that emerged, who said what and when, and how the discussions were conducted. Although there was often some debate, it was rarely conﬂictual as the ﬂow of the meetings and the frame articulation and elaboration of the different topics was orchestrated by the two leaders without any contentious opposition. Nonetheless, since there was occasional indication of discursive tension, I positioned this SMO as straddling, slightly the line between consensual and contentious discursive ﬁelds. Cell 4 is the last type or category of discursive ﬁelds schematized in Fig. 1. It includes discursive ﬁelds that are structured in varying degrees, but in which various issues, events, or practices are not merely debated but also hotly contested. Examples include the fractionated but structured discursive ﬁelds associated with the build-up to sectarian splits, whether resulting in large-scale ones such as the Protestant Reformation (Wuthnow, 1989) or smaller-scale ones such as the factionalism and defection that occurred within the Hare Krishna movement in the late 1980s (Rochford, 1989), with the Iraq war, and with the ongoing creationist/intelligent design and evolution debate. In each of these cases, and others like them, the discursive ﬁeld consists of the various actors on different sides of the issue, practice, or event in question and is thus fragmented into what social movement scholars have theorized as conﬂict and alliance systems (Klandermans, 1992; Rucht, 2004). But the system of relations among these fragmented or contentious actors is still structured inasmuch as it is organizationally or institutionally embedded, and patterned or relatively stable, as is typically the case with divergent political parties.

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

17

Thus far I have argued that discursive ﬁelds are not all of the same cloth or form but can vary along two dimensions that, when cross-classiﬁed, yield four types into which real-life discursive ﬁelds can be categorized. But actual discursive ﬁelds, like organizational ﬁelds, are not static or ﬁxed entities, but ‘‘dynamic terrain’’ (Steinberg, 1999, p. 748). However, not all ﬁelds are equally dynamic. So what other factors or variables, other than the consensual/contested and emergent/structured dimensions, affect the extent of dynamism or turbulence or stability of a discursive ﬁeld? In other words, what additional factors account for variation in discursive ﬁelds and associated framing processes?

Temporality and the Stream of Events I now focus attention on two interrelated factors implied but not articulated in the foregoing discussion: one is time, and the other is the stream of events. The importance of time is nicely illustrated by Elizabeth Armstrong’s (2005) study of how the ﬁeld of lesbian/gay organizations in San Francisco changed rather quickly in a short span of time. In the late 1960s the movement was dominated by organizations emphasizing societal transformation and anti-identity goals; by 1973, these goals had been replaced by the celebration of diversity and gay identity. ‘‘This turn toward identity building,’’ Armstrong writes, ‘‘was accompanied by rapid political consolidation,’’ with, ‘‘for the ﬁrst time,’’ gay organizations agreeing ‘‘upon a national gay rights agenda’’ (p. 161). This transformation, she argues, was due in large part to ﬁeld settlement or crystallization, involving a movement from inter-organizational conﬂict and fractionation to convergence and coalescence. To refer to organizational or discursive ﬁeld settlement or crystallization is, of course, to refer to a temporal process. ‘‘Time matters,’’ to borrow from the title of Andrew Abbot’s recent set of essays on theory and method (2001), and it matters greatly when examining the life course of discursive ﬁelds and associated framing processes.7 This is shown quite clearly in two data displays drawn from the previously mentioned study I conducted with Rens Vliegenthart and Catherine Corrigall-Brown on frame variation in response to the recent French riots. The ﬁrst display is the previously referenced Table 1. The last panel of the table is most relevant here, as it shows the descriptive results for our ﬁndings on diagnostic framing across a three-week time-period, from the inception of the riots on October 27th to, according to the police, their cessation on November 17th. Here we see a

18

DAVID A. SNOW

general decline in framing the problem in terms of social categories or groups, such as criminally oriented youth and over-reactive control agents, and a corresponding increase in framing the problem in terms of structural factors, such as the failure of minority incorporation and/or the economy and the public education system. Aside from the intriguing questions such ﬁndings raise about the causes and generality of this temporal shift in the problem locus of diagnostic framing over the 3 weeks, they also direct attention to the relationship between the event (or events) and the temporal ﬂuidity of the discursive ﬁeld for which the event has become a focal issue and perhaps its raison d’eˆtre. More concretely, if there are changes in the character of framing over the life course of an event, might not we expect changes in the life course of the relevant discursive ﬁeld as well? The second data display (Fig. 2) from our study provides an illustrative answer. Here we see a close linear relationship between the life course of French riots, as measured in terms of vehicles 1600

250 vehicles burnt

1400

arrests made 200

1000

150

800

framings

vehicles burnt/arrests made

total framings 1200

100

600 400

50 200

ov N

ov

18 -

N

ov N

16 -

ov N

14 -

ov

12 -

ov

N 10 -

N 8-

N 6-

29 -O

Fig. 2.

ov

0 ct 31 -O ct 2N ov 4N ov

0

Temporal Variation in Riot Intensity and Riot Commentary (Daily Total Framing); Adapted from Snow et al. (2007).

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

19

burned and arrests, and the total number of diagnostic and prognostic framings (correlation of 0.79 and 0.78) in the newspapers, with the decline in framings corresponding to the dissipation of the riots. If multiple framings associated with an event are taken as an indicator of the existence of a discursive ﬁeld that exists, in part or totally, to discuss and make sense of that event, then Fig. 2 also suggests the temporally ﬂuidity of discursive ﬁelds, especially emergent ones, as well as their event-dependence. These observations lead to the second additional factor I mentioned earlier as accounting for variation in the life course of the discursive ﬁelds and associated framing processes. Here I refer to what I call the stream of events. By that, I mean the ongoing ﬂow of events or happenings that are candidates for public and political attention, especially through the media. Events can be actual or real, as with the occurrence of the December 2004 tsunami, the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and the October/ November 2005 Paris riots; or they can be fabricated or contrived in a fashion akin to Daniel Boorstin’s ‘‘pseudo-events’’ (1961), such as the charge that Iraq had purchased material for nuclear bombs from an African nation. Whatever the substance of an event, there is little question but that a central aspect of the everyday world is the continuously ﬂowing stream of events. The ﬂow may not be constant, and there is considerable variability in the probability of any single event receiving media attention and public visibility because of the media’s various event-selection mechanisms (Gamson, 2004; Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988; Koopmans, 2004), but there is always an abundance of events that are available, especially with the advent of the Internet and the diffusion of its access, for discussion and debate. And it is around these events that discursive ﬁelds rise and fall, as sketched in Fig. 3, which diagrams how I conceive of a full-blown discursive ﬁeld. What accounts for variation in the public life-span of an event is not well understood. Clearly some events have a relatively short life-history, such as the French riots as shown in Fig. 2, although discussion of the event may continue in highly structured and focused discursive ﬁelds, as occurred in the aftermath of the 1960 urban riots in the U.S., as well as after earlier riots (Feagin & Hahn, 1973, pp. 199–262; Platt, 1971; Walker, 1969). For other events, attention wanes because of so-called ‘‘compassion fatigue’’ (Moeller, 1999) or sheer boredom. For still others, public interest in the event may be culturally patterned, such that it expands and contracts over the course of the year (Bunis, Yancik, & Snow, 1996). And still others may be crowded out by the glut of events ﬂowing upstream. Whichever of these explanations is operative, they all have implications for the life course of any event-related discursive ﬁeld and the associated framings, but the

20

DAVID A. SNOW

Public (Potential Constituents & Antagonists)

Ideology Ideology Counter Movement

Target, e.g., State, Government, Church

Social Movement d

Stream of Events

Ideology

Discursive Field

Fig. 3.

Sketch of Discursive Field with Stream of Events.

character of those implications are yet to be worked out and thus call for investigation.

DISCURSIVE SPACE Having extended and elaborated the concept of discursive ﬁelds and suggested some ways in which they can affect framing processes, I now turn to the ﬁnal concept I want to elaborate and relate to both discursive ﬁelds and framing. It is the concept of discursive space. By discursive space, I mean, very concretely, the total volume or amount of space available for talk, discussion, commentary, and/or reportage – whatever its form (e.g., a speech, a question, an answer, a comment on a speech, question, answer, or a comment) or context (e.g., an interactional encounter, ofﬁce meeting, broader social occasion, the media in general) – that is or can be bounded in time, and often in physical space as well. Thus, discursive space can be the total amount of column space in a newspaper, the length of an interactional

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

21

encounter involving two or more people, or the time span of a board meeting, a class, or a press conference; and it can be measured in terms of the total number of words, lines, or sentences (or some other metric) within the bounded space. Analytically, discursive space constitutes the base or denominator for calculating the proportion of space consumed or appropriated by some included discursive unit of analysis, such as the various categories of actors/ speakers that populate the space or discursive ﬁeld, the topics or events discussed, speech acts, and the resultant frames or other discursive products, such as narratives. To illustrate, let us return to Table 1 on diagnostic framing associated with the French riots, and let us assume that panel 2 captures the range of actors or voices included in the riot discursive ﬁeld and the range of their diagnostic comments. In doing so, the last column of the table could be read as indicating the amount of discursive space consumed by each set of actors. In this example, it is not surprising that the print media consume a disproportionate share of the space, since it was the source of our data. More interesting, however, is that the range of actors’ mirror what might be expected to constitute the French riot discursive ﬁeld. That is, the French government, opposition parties, international actors, and local residents and participants are all included. The one actor that stands out because he is an individual rather than a group or set, like the other actors, is Nicholas Sarkozy, the former French Minister of the Interior. We treated him as a separate source because of his polarizing position during the career of the riots. For example, more than any other actor, he was unambiguously clear about his view of the rioters, whom he called ‘‘scum’’ and ‘‘dregs,’’ and of what should be done, calling for ‘‘a war without mercy’’ against them, including immediate ‘‘deportation’’ of rioting immigrants (New York Times, November 10, 2005). This raises interesting questions about the character of frames that catapult some actors into the spotlight. My hypothesis is that it has to do with the clarity and unambiguousness of the framing. Whatever the case, our Paris riot data hint at the analytic utility of considering the concept of discursive space, as it provides the base for actually comparing actors in terms of their discursive position in the ﬁeld, and thus enables us to address the relative inﬂuence of different actors or voices via empirical documentation rather than argument by assertion. This can be seen even more clearly by returning to the previously mentioned study that Jason Clark-Miller and I conducted of frame articulation and elaboration in a right-wing group. We measured the discursive space for our analysis in terms of the total number of lines in our

22

DAVID A. SNOW

Table 2. Distribution of Frame Relevant Speech Acts and Discursive Space by Participants in Right-Wing Group. Participants

Leaders Members Speakers

Frame Speech Acts (N: 406)

Frame Discursive Space (N: 29,053 Lines)

Number

%

Number

%

194 137 75

48 34 18

12,785 9,629 6,639

44 33 23

Source: Adapted from Snow and Clark-Miller (2006).

discourse-relevant ﬁeld notes and tape recordings. That discursive space was deﬁned in terms of nearly 40,000 lines (38,062). In order to get an analytic handle on all of these lines, we clustered them into more manageable units called speech acts and examined, among other things, the distribution of frame relevant speech acts and discursive space consumed by the three sets of actors. As shown in Table 2, we see that all three sets of actors are co-participants, but not equally, as the leaders are clearly dominant in terms of both the proportion of speech acts and the discursive space consumed. Taken together, the above case materials suggest how incorporating the concept of discursive space into analyses of discursive ﬁelds and framing processes provides considerable analytic purchase by facilitating the empirical examination of the relationship between framing processes, the actors involved in those processes, and the relative inﬂuence of competing frames.

CONCLUSION In this paper, I have argued that discursive frames – such as those noted at the outset of the paper regarding the meaning of ‘‘The March of the Penguins,’’ the electoral defeat of the intelligent design advocates on the Dover, PA school board, and the 2005 French riots – can best be understood within the cultural and structural or organizational contexts in which they are embedded. I have elaborated three such contexts: discursive media opportunity structures, discursive ﬁelds, and discursive spaces, focusing on the latter two. Discursive ﬁelds evolve during the course of discussion and debate, sometimes but not always contested, about relevant events and issues, and

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

23

encompass cultural materials (e.g., beliefs, values, ideologies, myths) of potential relevance and various sets of actors (e.g., targeted authorities, social control agents, countermovements, media) whose interests are aligned, albeit differently, with the issues or events in question, and who thus have a stake in how those events and issues are framed. The discursive processes of frame articulation and elaboration draw selectively upon these cultural materials and are conducted in relation to the various sets of actors that constitute the discursive ﬁeld. Discursive space, on the other hand, refers to the volume or amount of space available for discourse within a temporally and/or locationally bounded context that, analytically, constitutes the base or denominator for calculating the proportion of space consumed or appropriated by some included discursive unit of analysis. Considered together, the concepts of discursive ﬁelds and spaces, as I have elaborated them, enable us to generate and examine empirically a host of questions that should extend and reﬁne our understanding of framing processes and the contexts in which they occur, and especially how those contexts constrain and facilitate framing in relation to social movements and politics and perhaps even more generally. Such questions include: To what extent and in what ways will framing processes vary by the relative stability of the discursive ﬁeld? Are framing processes more variable and wide-ranging in emergent and less structured and unstable ﬁelds? What is the relationship between framing processes and whether a ﬁeld is skewed organizationally in the direction of participatory democracy or bureaucratic hierarchy (see Polletta, 2002; Rothschild & Whitt, 1986)? Does the prospect or likelihood of frame crystallization (convergence around or toward an extant frame) vary by the form or type of organizational structure? What is the relationship between ﬁeld crystallization and frame crystallization? Is there a tendency toward frame crystallization or congruence as the actors within the discursive ﬁeld become more cohesive? Are some frames more dominant than others as measured in terms of the volume of discursive space consumed? Or are there other more telling indicators of dominance, such as the proponent’s or articulator’s ‘‘standing’’ (‘‘having a voice in the media’’ [Ferree et al., 2002, pp. 86–104])? To what extent is frame dominance affected by the form of ﬁeld structuration? Is frame dominance more likely in ﬁelds organized hierarchically?

24

DAVID A. SNOW

What is the relative discursive inﬂuence of different actors within the ﬁeld? Are some more dominant than others as measured in terms of the amount of discursive space consumed? And, if so, is such dominance partly a function of position or ‘‘standing’’ within the organization (Ferree et al., 2002)? In other words, are discursively dominant actors also likely to be organizationally dominant actors? Does the consumption of discursive space translate into greater inﬂuence within the ﬁeld, and within one’s group or SMO, in terms of the resonance or carrying power of ones’ framings? What is the relationship between discursive space consumed and leadership within a discursive ﬁeld and an SMO? Is the relationship, if any, more indirect and a function of certain characteristics, such as rhetorical ability and ‘‘social skill’’ (Fligstein, 2001)? These and other kindred questions one might ask underscore the potential theoretic, analytic, and empirical yield of the conceptualization of discursive ﬁelds and spaces I have elaborated herein, and invite more nuanced analyses of the relationship between framing and organization at a ﬁeld-level and particularly the relations between frame dominance, discursive dominance, and organizational dominance. In turn, these concepts add to the developing conceptual scaffolding associated with the framing perspective on social movements. Among the interconnected concepts and processes that have surfaced as the framing literature has expanded, there are at least ﬁve that can be thought of as cornerstone concepts and processes in that they provide a conceptual architecture that has stimulated much of the research exploring the relevance of framing to mobilization both empirically and theoretically. These key concepts or processes include: collective action frames, master frames, core-framing tasks, frame alignment processes, and frame resonance. The concepts of discursive ﬁelds and spaces extend this conceptual architecture. And, in doing so, this conceptual elaboration links the analysis of framing processes within the study of social movements more closely to both the sociological study of culture and organizations.

NOTES 1. We place the term riots in quotation marks because of our understanding that it is an inexact designation that may conjure images of the events that bear an untidy relationship to what exactly transpired. As well, it can be and has been construed as a politically convenient label that not only focuses attention on one segment of the participants, but may imply something demeaning about their character. These and

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

25

related concerns have been noted in examination of the ‘‘ghetto riots’’ of the 1960s in the United States. See, for example Feagin and Hahn (1973, fn 4, pp. vi–vii) and Silver (1969). We thus use the term riot advisedly, but we do so because it was by far and away the predominant descriptor of the disturbances that gripped France for the better part of three weeks. 2. For a summary and overview of the framing perspective on movements and much of the associated research, including work on these different research paths, see Benford and Snow (2000), Snow (2004), and Polletta and Ho (2006). 3. See, for example, Goodwin and Jasper’s (1999) critique of the political opportunity perspective on social movements in a special issue of Sociological Forum, as well as the responses. 4. See Martin’s elaboration of ﬁeld theory, which he conceives as ‘‘a more or less coherent approach in the social sciences whose essence is the explanation of regularities in individual action by recourse to position vis-a`-vis others’’ (Martin, 2003, p. 1). 5. The symbolic interactionist ‘‘principle of interactive determination stipulates that understanding of focal objects of analysis y cannot be fully achieved by attending only to qualities presumed to be intrinsic to them (but) requires consideration of the interactional contexts or webs of relationships in which they are ensnared and embedded. For all practical purposes, then, neither individual or society nor self or other are ontologically prior but exist only in relation to each other; thus one can fully understand them only through their interaction, whether actual, virtual, or imagined’’ (Snow, 2001, p. 369). 6. The use of the term ‘‘dialogic’’ in relation to the analysis of discourse can be traced back to at least the Russian literary scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (Todorov, 1984). For its application to an instance of collective action, see Steinberg (1999). It is interesting to note that, in some respects, Bakhtin’s dialogic principle bears a striking family resemblance to the symbolic interactionist principle of ‘‘interactive determination’’ (see Note 5). 7. The importance of time or temporality to understanding social processes and life has long been acknowledged within symbolic interactionism, in large part because of Mead’s lectures on the topic entitled The Philosophy of the Present (1932). For a summary discussion of Mead’s perspective on time, see Flaherty and Fine (2001), and for a more general discussion of the relevance of temporality to sociological inquiry, see Maines (1987).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The initial draft was written for presentation as the Peter M. Hall Lecture at the Midwest Sociological Society 2006 Annual Meeting. I thank Peter Hall for inviting me to give the 2006 lecture. I also acknowledge the assistance of a number of colleagues, including Jason Clark-Miller, Catherine CorrigallBrown, John McCarthy, Calvin Morrill, Francesca Polletta, Rens Vliegenthart, and Mayer Zald, who have worked with me on several relevant projects to which this paper is partially beholden or who have

26

DAVID A. SNOW

provided valuable insights as well as serving as constructively responsive sounding boards.

REFERENCES Abbott, A. (2001). Time matters: On theory and method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armstrong, E. A. (2005). From struggle to settlement: The crystallization of a ﬁeld of Lesbian/Gay Organizations in San Francisco, 1969–1973. In: G. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zelda (Eds), Social movements and organization theory (pp. 161–187). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Associated Press. (2005). Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster. November 11. Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Boorstin, D. J. (1961). The image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bunis, W. K., Yancik, A., & Snow, D. A. (1996). The cultural patterning of sympathy toward the homeless and other victims of misfortune. Social Problems, 43, 387–402. Curtis, R. L., & Zurcher, L. A. (1973). Stable resources of protest movements: The multiorganizational ﬁeld. Social Forces, 52, 53–61. Davis, G., McAdam, D., Scott, W. R., & Zald, M. N. (Eds). (2005). Social movements and organization theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The Iron Cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational ﬁelds. American Sociological Review, 48, 147–160. Feagin, J. R., & Hahn, H. (1973). Ghetto revolts: The politics of violence in American cities. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company. Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: Democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Flaherty, M. G., & Fine, G. A. (2001). Present, past, and future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s perspective on time. Time & Society, 10, 147–161. Fligstein, N. (2001). Social skill and the theory of ﬁelds. Sociological Theory, 19, 105–125. Gamson, W. A. (2004). Bystanders, public opinion, and the media. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & S. H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 242–261). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Anchor/Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books. Goodwin, J., & Jasper, J. M. (1999). Caught in a winding, snarling vine: The structural bias of political process theory. Sociological Forum, 14, 27–45.

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

27

Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. L. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 53–78. Hunt, S. A., Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (1994). Identity ﬁelds: Framing processes and the social construction of movement identities. In: E. Larana, H. Johnston & J. R. Gus ﬁeld (Eds), New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp. 185–208). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Johnston, H., & Snow, D. A. (1998). Subcultures and social movements: The emergence of the Estonian Nationalist Opposition. Sociological Perspectives, 41, 473–497. Klandermans, B. (1992). The social construction of protest and multiorganizational ﬁelds. In: A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 77–103). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Koopmans, R. (2004). Movements and media: Selection processes and evolutionary dynamics in the public sphere. Theory and Society, 33, 367–391. Lewin, K. (1951). In: D. Cartwright (Ed.), Field theory in social science. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Maines, D. R. (1987). The signiﬁcance of temporality for the development of sociological theory. The Sociological Quarterly, 28, 303–311. Martin, J. L. (2003). What is ﬁeld theory. American Journal of Sociology, 109, 1–49. McAdam, D., & Scott, W. R. (2005). Organizations and movements. In: G. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zald (Eds), Social movements and organization theory (pp. 4–40). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present: Social movements and individuals needs in contemporary society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Miller, J. (2005). March of the Conservatives: Penguin ﬁlm as political fodder. The New York Times, 13(September), D2. Moeller, S. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war, and death. London: Routledge. Morrill, C., & Owen-Smith, J. (2002). The emergence of environmental conﬂict resolution: Stories and the construction of collective action frames and organizational ﬁelds. In: A. J. Hoffamn & M. J. Ventresca (Eds), Organizations, policy, and the natural environment (pp. 90–118). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mosse, G. L. (1985). Nationalism and sexuality: Middle class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Platt, A. M. (1971). The politics of riot commissions. New York: Collier Books. Polletta, F. (1999). Free spaces in collective action. Theory and Society, 28, 1–38. Polletta, F. (2002). Freedom is an endless meeting: Democracy in American social movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polletta, F., & Ho, M. K. (2006). Frames and their consequences. In: R. E. Goodin & C. Tilly (Eds), The Oxford handbook of contextual political studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pruden, W. (2005). No more lessons from French tutors. Washington Times, November 8: Section A, 04. Rochford, E. B. (1989). Factionalism, group defection, and schism in the Hare Krishna movement. Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion, 28, 162–179. Rothschild, J., & Whitt, J. A. (1986). The cooperative workplace: Potentials and dilemmas of organizational democracy and participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

28

DAVID A. SNOW

Roy, O. (2005). Get French or die trying. New York Times, November 9: Section A, 27. Rucht, D. (2004). Movement allies, adversaries, and third parties. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 197–216). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silver, A. A. (1969). Ofﬁcial interpretation of racial riots. In: R. H. Connery (Ed.), Urban riots: Violence and social change (pp. 150–163). New York: Vintage Books. Snow, D. A. (2001). Extending and broadening Blumer’s conceptualization of symbolic interactionism. Symbolic Interaction, 24, 367–377. Snow, D. A. (2004). Framing processes, ideology, and discursive ﬁelds. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & S. H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 380–412). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Snow, D. A., & Clark-Miller, J. (2006). Frame articulation and elaboration in a Right-Wing Group: An empirical examination of framing processes. An unpublished manuscript. Snow, D. A., Vliegenthart, R., & Corrigall-Brown, C. (2007). Framing the French riots: A comparative study of frame variation. Social Forces, 86, 385–415. Spillman, L. (1995). Culture, social structures, and discursive ﬁelds. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 15, 129–154. Steinberg, M. W. (1999). The talk and back talk of collective action: A dialogic analysis of repertoires of discourse among nineteenth-century English cotton-spinners. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 736–780. Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286. Taylor, V. (1989). Social movement continuity: The women’s movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review, 54, 761–775. Todorov, T. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The dialogic principle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, ﬁelds, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walker, D. B. (1969). Intergovernmental response to riots. In: R. H. Connery (Ed.), Urban riots: Violence and social change (pp. 175–187). New York: Vintage Books. Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia. (2005). 2005 civil unrest in France. Available at http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Paris_suburb_riots, December, 5. Wuthnow, R. (1989). Communities of discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

INVITED COMMENT: FRAMING, ACTIONS AND FEEDBACK Clark McPhail As a longstanding fellow-traveler and occasional critic of symbolic interaction, I read Dave Snow’s paper with the following ﬁve basic Scientiﬁc Interest (S.I.) assumptions in mind: (1) there are no immaculate perceptions; (2) no object, actor, action, or situation has intrinsic stimulus properties; (3) therefore there are no inherent meanings for any object, actor, action, or situation; (4) the meaning of any object, actor, action, or situation is the response made to it; (5) therefore, there are as many meanings for any object, actor, action, or situation as there are responses made to it. In other words, meanings are constructed. Hence the different responses – the different meanings for or meanings of – the Fall 2005 Paris Riots and the current Spring 2006 Paris protests. I am also mindful of William I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas’s (1928) statement of what has come to be known as the Thomas theorem: ‘‘Whatever men [sic] deﬁne to be real is real in its consequences.’’ Given those assumptions and that theorem, I submit that one of the fundamental sociological questions must be: How do any two persons ever come to make similar responses to – to construct similar meanings for – an object, actor, action, or situation; and, how are those deﬁnitions – that are themselves both covert and overt actions – consequential for other actions they take toward that object, actor, action, or situation? Goffman’s (1974) Frame Analysis was a useful effort to unpack the Thomas Theorem and in doing so to address the implications of framing for

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 29–34 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30002-7

29

30

CLARK MCPHAIL

the organization of individuals’ experiences and the consequences of that organization for individual and collective action. The work of David Snow and his colleagues has been enormously useful for students of collective action and social movements seeking a more sociologically informed and sociologically sensitive model of the purposive actor than the rational calculus model sociologists and political scientists had borrowed from economics. No matter the nits that might be picked with, or problems identiﬁed in, Snow and his colleagues’ extensions of frame analysis, it is one of the more signiﬁcant contributions to collective action and social movement scholarship in the last half of the 20th century. What then can be said about the current effort – today’s paper presentation – to further unpack and apply frame analysis with regard to the discursive ﬁelds and spaces that inﬂuence the development of frames? If we look back over the period of time since the original 1986 piece on frame alignment, we see successive constructions of additional levels of expansion of the concept of frame analysis: the 1988 paper on ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization, and the introduction of core framing tasks: diagnostic; prognostic; and motivational framing. The 1992 chapter on master frames and cycles of protest elaborates on the diagnostic and prognostic features of framing. Diagnostic framing designates and deﬁnes the object, actor, action and/or situation; prognostic framing both prescribes additional actions to be taken and their possible or probable consequences; motivational framing answers the question ‘‘Why take this alternative action rather than another?’’ and thus opens up more degrees of freedom – more ways to answer the question why? – than is allowed by the singular minimax principle of rational calculus actors. All of these additional levels are insightful, useful, and promising. However, in 1997, Rob Benford wrote an insider critique of frame analysis in which he acknowledged that there had as yet not been the demonstration of a connection between ‘‘frames’’ and purposive individual action, let alone a connection between similar or related frames and purposive collective action. The same acknowledgment was implicit in Benford and Snow’s (2000) piece on framing processes and social movements in the Annual Review of Sociology. My hope was that today’s paper would report on the relationship between frames and actions. To his credit, Snow reports on both the framing actions of speakers, leaders, and rank-and-ﬁle members of one social movement organization over a period of time; and, on the framing acts in newspaper accounts – by editors, reporters, and the acts they attribute to riot participants and onlookers – regarding the Fall 2005 French riots. Today’s paper

Invited Comment: Framing, Actions and Feedback

31

is an interesting and informative effort that once again demonstrates Snow’s methodological scope and acumen. Will Rogers once said that all he knew was what he read in the newspapers. Indeed, many sociologists – myself included from time-to-time – have practiced what I call Will Rogers Sociology with content analyses of what is written about collective action in the newspapers. David is ambidextrous. He can do Will Rogers Sociology but he also observes and records what people do and for this he is to be applauded. He is a symbolic interactionist that counts in more ways than one! (An aside: Dave has no patience for the useless and divisive debate between quantitative and qualitative sociology; he argues for the far more productive distinction between good and bad sociology). How might it be possible to move the frame analysis project forward beyond merely adding one more level of conceptualizing about conceptualizations of framing? Frame Analysis should not become just another theoretical house constructed by stacking one level of conceptual cards upon another. It is essential to get action and feedback into the mix! We know more about the characteristics of framing acts and, from today’s presentation, about the discursive ﬁelds and spaces in which framing acts take place; we need to know more about the action consequences of framing acts, and the negotiated alignment of frames of two or more parties. There are useful threads in other recent work by Snow and colleagues. I refer to their (1998) piece on ‘‘Disrupting the Quotidian’’ in the collective action/social movement journal Mobilization. In their attempt to revisit the failure of relative deprivation as the cause of collective action, Snow and colleagues ask us to examine more carefully the taken-for-granted routine grounds of everyday activity – the quotidian – in the lives of people, and to look for occasions when it is disturbed or disrupted. The implication of that argument is that people will act or adjust their actions to return the quotidian to its original standing, or sometimes, to a different and higher standard. We would be well served by the reminder that Goffman – in Frame Analysis – says much the same thing about the ‘‘guided doings’’ of purposive actors (1974, p. 22). Actions must be adjusted to achieve the intended consequence and to maintain it in the face of random or deliberate disturbances. In Goffman’s words: A serial management of consequentiality is sustained, that is, continuous corrective control, becoming most apparent when action is unexpectedly blocked or deﬂected and special compensatory effort is required.

When we combine this with the notion of diagnostic framing – ‘‘What’s happening Now’’ – and one version of ‘‘What should be happening?’’ we can

32

CLARK MCPHAIL

see the possibility of the tension or disparity between the two as an occasion for, if not the cause of, adjusting actions to make ‘‘what should be’’ into ‘‘what is happening.’’ Moreover, we will then have moved from the conventional and traditional ‘‘linear analysis’’ of the relationship between framing action at time 1 and other actions at time 2 to a ‘‘recursive analysis’’ of consequences of action, feedback on the framing action itself. Frames have consequences for action, but actions also have consequences for frames. This is particularly true if we are considering the adjustments that must be made to ﬁt together the activities of two or more purposive actors. We not only have to adjust our actions to realize our goals but we also sometimes have to adjust our goals as well. This idea of a recursive negative feedback formulation dates back to the work of the Pragmatists – James (1890), Dewey (1896) and Mead (1899) – at the turn of the 20th century. Shibutani (1968) argues Mead’s (1938) theory of the act was a forerunner of the closed-loop, negative feedback model in Wiener’s (1948), Ashby’s (1952), Beer’s (1959) and Pask’s (1961) cybernetic theories and applications (Pickering, 2002) in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Miller, Galanter and Pribram’s (1960) TOTE model, Powers’ (1973) perception control theory and Goffman’s (1974) ‘‘guided doings’’ in the 1970s. It also underlies the model of agency in complexity theories’ assumptions of autonomous, heuristic, interdependent and adaptive actors in the 1990s (Lewin, 1992; Kauffman, 1993; Coveney & Highﬁeld, 1995; Decker, 2001; Macy & Willer, 2002). Shibutani says about Mead’s theory of the act: Each act is constructed as an organism makes a succession of adjustments to conditions (external and internal) that are undergoing constant change. Overt behavior is generally only the ﬁnal phase of an act; in most cases it is preceded by a number of preparatory adjustments, including various subjective experiences. (1968, p. 332) The key to all such self-correcting adjustments is feedback; all purposeful behavior requires negative feedback. The principle is relatively simple: the results of one’s own action are included in the new information by which subsequent behavior is modiﬁed. Thus, by responding to what he observes of his own activity, a person makes necessary corrections. (1968, p. 333)

If we bring action and feedback into frame analysis, we can bring frame alignment via signiﬁcant symbols back into our sociological efforts to understand social behavior and collective action; or, more ambitiously stated, we could bring symbolic interaction back into sociology. Thanks for the opportunity of reading and commenting on the paper. I hope my

Invited Comment: Framing, Actions and Feedback

33

comments will be helpful in continuing to move the frame analysis project forward.

REFERENCES Ashby, W. R. (1952). Design for a brain. New York: Wiley. Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and management. New York: Wiley. Benford, R. (1997). An insider’s critique of the social movement framing perspective. Sociological Inquiry, 67, 409–430. Benford, R., & Snow, D. (2000). Framing processes and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Coveney, P., & Highﬁeld, R. (1995). Frontiers of complexity: The search for order in a chaotic world. New York: Fawcett-Columbine. Decker, E. (2001). Self-organizing systems: A tutorial in complexity, Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. Dewey, J. (1896). The reﬂex-arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Kauffman, S. (1995). At home in the universe the search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewin, R. (1992). Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos. New York: Macmillan. Macy, M., & Willer, R. (2002). From factors to actors: Computational sociology and agentbased modeling. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 143–166. Mead, G. H. (1899). The working hypothesis in social reform. American Journal of Sociology, 5, 369–371. Mead, G. H. (1938). The philosophy of the act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, G., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pask, G. (1961). An approach to cybernetics (2nd ed.). London: Hutchinson. Pickering, A. (2002). Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask. Social Studies of Science, 32, 413–437. Powers, W. (1973). Behavior: The control of perception. Chicago: Aldine. Shibutani, T. (1968). A cybernetic theory of motivation. In: W. Buckley (Ed.), Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist (pp. 330–336). Chicago: Aldine. Snow, D., & Benford, R. (1992). Master frames and cycles of protest. In: A. Morris & C. Mueller (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 135–155). New Haven: Yale University Press. Snow, D., & Benford, R. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research, 1, 197–217. Snow, D., Cress, D., Downey, L., & Jones, A. (1998). Disrupting the quotidian: Reconceptualizing the relationship between breakdown and the emergence of collective action. Mobilization: An International Journal, 3, 1–22.

34

CLARK MCPHAIL

Snow, D., Rochford, B., Worder, S., & Benford, R. (1986). Frame alignment processes, micromobilization and movement participation. American Sociological Review, 51, 464–481. Thomas, W., & Thomas, D. (1928). The child in America. New York: Knopf. Weiner, N. (1948). Cybernetics. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

CELEBRATING WORK Patricia Ticineto Clough It is a pleasure to comment on the celebration of my work by three of my dearest friends and most respected colleagues. At ﬁrst I fretted over whether I had produced a ‘‘work,’’ especially one that could be celebrated. So the comments offered by Joseph Schneider, Michal McCall, and Norman Denzin at the World Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2005 and published in this issue were a gift to me. Schneider, Mc Call, and Denzin have drawn a line of thought through my writing, which has invited me to reﬂect on my career as a scholar and teacher in the discipline of Sociology. I want to express my gratitude to them and I will do so at the close of these remarks. It does not surprise me that I was worried at ﬁrst about my writings adding up to a work. I have long thought of myself as moving from one set of ideas to another, moving from one theoretical perspective to another, moving toward what seemed intriguing and relevant. And when I had to justify myself, I did so by arguing that I thought it is important to keep up with the newest theoretical formulations and to explore the way, in which they touched me and led me to understand the ever changing world, in which we live. That response might be expected. After all, I began my career in the early 1980s, when ‘‘theory’’ was ‘‘in,’’ when it was exciting and innovative. However, the innovative theory, which at that time was called critical theory, was being developed for the most part in the humanities at some distance from Sociology. So I learned not only to move from one theoretical perspective to another but to cross from one disciplinary ﬁeld of study to another. This inclination to move across disciplinary boundaries and theoretical perspectives was to become an ingrained practice as

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 37–44 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30003-9

37

38

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

I became engaged with feminist theory, which, after all, constituted itself initially as a transdisciplinary endeavor. My engagement in feminist theory not only gave me an understanding of doing transdisciplinary work but it catapulted me into the ‘‘deconstruction of the Subject,’’ part of the broader identity politics and politics of representation, heatedly debated by feminist theorists and others throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Initially I tried to translate the epistemological crisis of representation and identity provoked by the deconstruction of the Subject from the language of the humanities to that of the social sciences. It was this effort to translate that ﬁrst led me to think about the convergence of critical theory and the self-reﬂexive criticism of methodology in what would become known as ‘‘the critique of ethnographic writing.’’ If my writings have a line of thought it surely made its ﬁrst public appearance in The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Clough, 1992). If I would say now that End(s) produced a lineage of thinkers, I also would say that at the time End(s) was published, what I was trying to convey about the critique of ethnography failed to translate successfully into Sociology. But, at that time something else – something that might be called autoethnographic writing, did make its way into Sociology as an effect of the critique of ethnography. While I have a deep appreciation for the experimental autoethnographic writing that did develop in Sociology and surely my own autoethographic writings are quite important to me, nonetheless, the critique of ethnography that interested me from the start was one that could stay mindful of the deconstruction of the Subject especially as it was becoming linked to postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, Marxist cultural studies, and science studies. These critical theories were not only questioning the ethnographic tradition in relation to the epistemological foundation of Western modern thought. They also offered an understanding of writing that was broader than the one being deployed in experimental ethnographic writing, especially most autoethnographic writing. Writing was understood in terms that Jacques Derrida had offered when he proposed that ‘‘Writing’’ was as original as voice or speech. Of course, Derrida’s ‘‘Writing’’ is meant to play havoc with the very notion of originality, as the history of associations linked to writing point to its artiﬁciality or even its perverse appropriation of voice or speech, as if writing is always secondary to voice or speech. The important lesson offered by Derrida’s early work is about language and how it is linked in modern Western thought to voice or speech, what Derrida also referred to as breath or spirit. As speech, language invites a more humanistic orientation to the

Celebrating Work

39

subject than writing does. This is even so in the case of the most radical theories of language, such as Saussure’s semiotics and Lacan’s deployment of Saussurian linguistics in psychoanalysis. I especially mention these examples since it was Lacanian inﬂuenced semiotics, rather than Derridean grammatology or Foucaultian disciplinary genealogy, with which feminist theorists ﬁrst engaged as they made their impact felt on discussions of representation, identity, speech, and voice across the humanities. While these feminists questioned the politics of identity as well as experience as a ground of knowledge of reality, they nonetheless were concerned with experience and identity, reality and knowing. They meant to emphasize speech and voice, even while engaging these as nonintentional expressions of subjectivity shaped by unconscious desire. While End(s) drew more on these feminist theorists than Derrida or Foucault, the works of Foucault and Derrida were introduced in End(s) because I knew there was something these works offered that was different than feminist psychoanalytically inﬂected semiotics. But, it would not be until End(s) went to press, when I ﬁrst read Judith Butler’s assemblage of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault’s theories that I saw a way to move in order to take up writing in a way I had only begun to explore in End(s). Linking Derrida’s ‘‘Writing’’ to Lacan’s unconscious and Foucault’s disciplinary production of bodies, Butler’s work also suggested linking the body to technology and not just writing technologies of the subject (as I had used the term in End(s) to refer to ideological mechanisms productive of the subject) but also biotechnologies in relationship to what Foucault would call biopolitics and what more recently Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics, where power is ‘‘less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented by the ‘massacre’’’ (Mbembe, 2003). While Butler inspired my move to rethink bodies, technologies, and matter beyond psychoanalytically inﬂected semiotics, she did not herself make such a move. Her psychoanalytic semiotic approach to the body surely recognizes the material effects of a discursive construction of the body, that is, the performative realization of bodily matter. Yet, Butler has remained concerned with the human body and with its psychosexual morphology, shaped in subjugation to lack (Clough, 1994). I found myself moving away from her perspective and being drawn to what I would call in Autoaffection, ‘‘the future of thought.’’ (Clough, 2000) As I understood it then, the future seemed to be drawing us to it through a reconﬁguration of bodies, matter, and technology, in the context of ongoing transformation of the political,

40

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

the economic, and the cultural. At least it seemed that the future would be retrospectively described in terms of a new cofunctioning of politics, culture, and economy which, at the very end of the twentieth century, was being called, if not celebrated, as globalization. Leaving the feminist tradition that Butler’s queer theory so deeply informed in order to set off in another direction proved to be a rather difﬁcult project. Since 2000 and the publication of Autoaffection, I have been Director of Women Studies and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center CUNY and so I am never very far removed from feminist thinking about how and how not to theorize technology and bodies. I also feel called on to see clearly those worldly events that have occurred since the turn of the century so as to be sure to meet the challenges facing feminist theorizing in the differences of women lives, the different effects of the present reconﬁguration of bodies, technology, and matter on women and men in various sites around the world. It is however these differences and these changes, which move us into the counter/terrorist environment of this time and which have pushed me most to think boldly about biopolitics and the reconﬁguration of technology, matter, and bodies. I have been especially motivated to stretch my thinking about war, massacre, violence, and global capitalism to biotechnological transformation of life and the part played by capital invested technoscience in drawing life into political economic relationships of exchange. In Autoaffection, I already had begun to script my movement from the psychoanalytically inﬂected feminist semiotic approach of End(s) to a Derridean deconstruction of the Subject pointing to the inseparability of subjectivity from writing technologies and archiving machines. For me, Autoaffection was meant to mark the way deconstruction cut into the fabric of self-feeling, self-presence, or the autoaffection that allows the unconscious fantasy of the unity of subject identity, its self-same presence. I kept as the title of the book the very term I was to critique throughout the book because I wanted to mark how hard it is not to dwell in the fantasy of autoaffection. In Autoaffection, I settled on what ﬁnally I thought autoethnography to be. It is autoaffection and if not thoughtfully staged and unstaged, it will become oblivious to theorizing the social or what Brain Massumi describes as ‘‘the chaotic cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural dimensions.’’ Massumi goes on to suggest that if now the social is a chaotic cofunctioning, it is because each self-reproducing system – the political, the economic, the cultural are operating out of a generalized complexity, ‘‘the production of order out of chaos’’ (Massumi, 1998).

Celebrating Work

41

Masssumi links this chaotic cofunctioning to the subsumption of life itself into capital, such that affective bodily capacities have become directly manipulatable. Massumi therefore refers affect to a substrate of potential bodily responses, autonomic responses, which are in-excess of conscious states of perception. But while Massumi connects affect to autonomic bodily responses, he also draws the autonomic to the biophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze, drawing on it, as well as on Spinoza and Bergson, and recent theories of chaos, complexity, and dissipative structures. As such, affect is understood as preindividual bodily capacities. Affect is a virtual bodily potential, its actualization understood in terms of thresholds, bifurcation, and emergence, that is, in terms of complexity and dissipative structures. The capacity to affect and to be affected, to move and be moved, to act and to act upon, to become attentive or inattentive arises in and emerges out of a nonlinear complexity, a corporality that is indeterminate. Being drawn to rethink the social in the terms that Massumi suggests led me to go beyond Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari especially their thinking about affect. I was making a turn in my writing to engage bodily capacities and the technologies invested by technoscience and capital that have brought these capacities into market relations of exchange. There was a shift in emphasis in what was always there in my writing. I had always been engaged with the difference of writing and technology. That is, to say, I always understood writing to be techne deferred and techne to be physis deferred, such that the natural and the technical are indissociable. I always suspected, if not expected that the discourse about writing technologies of the subject would eventually veer off from a politics of representation, identities and subjectivity, veer off toward matter, bodies, and life itself. The turn to affect, however, would necessarily involve me with many graduate students and colleagues (including those who celebrate my work here). It would take a collectivity in order to ﬁnd ways to touch the complexity of the early twenty-ﬁrst century, to grabble with it and to recognize its in-excess-ability to the grasp of capital or technoscience, both of which were seemingly the conditions of possibility of the very complexity that exceeds them. This collective effort had one realization and, that is, a book of essays written by graduate students who studied with me, as together we addressed the economy of affect and biopolitics. The Affective Turn: Toward Theorizing the Social addresses capital’s putting to labor the very capacity of the human being, the human being’s very potential or vitality; more speciﬁcally it points to the technologies that reproduce preindividual life capacities outside the body, such as the mass

42

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

production of genetic material. In this sense, biotechnologies are assisting capitalism to shift its accumulation to the domain of life, while at the same time providing units for the measurement of expended energy and its costs in terms of informational logic (Clough, 2007). That is, to say, in its effort to reduce life to information, biotechnologies offer a quantitative unit through which qualitatively different aspects of life, if not the risk of living or having a valued life, can be made exchangeable. Here not only life, but death too, becomes value-producing, as various populations are differently marked for the exchange of risks to being a valued life or becoming a valueless life. All that has been thought as the condition of social reproduction has become a matter of the capitalist economy, has been subject to the capitalist market, just as now life capacities are coming to be. Not only is ‘‘bare life’’ or biological life being drawn into the political as Georgio Agamben has argued, borrowing from Foucault, but life itself is being drawn into economy as well. Thus, if a necropolitics is an intensiﬁcation of biopolitics, it is also something different, something that takes Foucault’s theorization of power into the twenty-ﬁrst century, into the environment of recent counter/terrorism and global capitalism. To rehearse Foucault’s argument, there is a difference between discipline and biopolitics. While forms of disciplining are directed at the individual subject, optimizing the powers of its body, its usefulness, along with socializing or interpellating the individual as a subject, by the late eighteenth century, biopolitics begins to overshadow discipline. The individual body is not so much the focus as is the species body and the regularities of the aggregate effects of individual bodies, which institutes a politics of population. If there is now a necropolitics, a beyond biopolitics, which Mbembe argues, returns to colonization (which Foucault did not do or not insistently enough) as well as moves forward to the present conditions of counter/terrorism, there is also the meshing of politics, of biopolitics, with an economy of affect, where bodily capacities have become unhinged from the human body and its particular dependencies on spaces or forms, or its reduction to corporeal manifestation in space or positions in the chronological continuum of time. The biotechnologies of an affect economy are allowing a more immediate reach to preindividual bodily capacities. So, the managing and the controlling of statistical risks across populations in relationship to life, the valuing of life differently in relationship to different populations, now extends globally, as capital invests technoscience in its effort to capture the productivity of preindividual bodily capacities.

Celebrating Work

43

Such a situation not only draws thought to violence, massacre, endless war, it also makes problematic the conﬁguration of state, economy, private, and public as it was conceived for modern society in the ﬁrst classics of Sociology. How politics, economy, and culture will now cofunction in the production of order differently around the world requires new empirical studies as well as new theoretical perspectives to assist such study. What the affective turn is doing is alerting Sociology to the necessity of rethinking the social and to take as a starting point an engagement with the various levels of life being mapped by biopolitics and mined by capital. It is a time for Sociology to rethink its relationship to science, to physics, and biology, their understanding of matter, and their deployment of information theory and complexity theory as these intersect with a global capitalism and a biopolitics of war and massacre. To me, the line of thought, which I have reﬂected on here and which my colleagues have drawn out in my writing, moves along with the history of ‘Writing,’ not only as a thought but as a materialization of technicity, which now touches down on bodily matter, and matter generally as it undoes any distinction of the natural and the technological. But the line of thought making itself through my writing might also be a materialization of the very affective capacities that arise in my being, arouse my being to move, to attend, to see, to feel, to act. The line of thought is as well autobiographic. The effort to engage the autobiographic, to explore it as the underside or inside of intellectuality has also been central to my writing. Writing autoethnographically has not only come back to me as an intensiﬁcation of intellectual life but it has also gone from me to students, enabling them to explore experimental thinking and the social. So ﬁnally, if I may I want to close with some thank you’s. I want especially to thank Joseph Schneider not only for organizing the celebration of my work but for taking up the most recent turn in my line of thought, as he addresses my engagement with affect. His take on this aspect of my writing has enabled me to see more clearly what I have done and what is yet to be done. Of course, Joseph is not new to the task of being a support to me and my writing. He has been there from the start. We have grown in support of each other as colleagues and have enjoyed the pleasures of learning and thinking together. In some very strong sense, he must be recognized for actually throwing me the line that I now see as the line of thought in my writing. Like Joseph, Michal McCall too has been a long time support and one of the most delightful readers of my writing. Along with Norman Denzin, she and I have been part of a small group, who for many years until very recently appeared together giving performances of what we call

44

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

autoethnographic writing. As we came to share a certain critique of autoethnographic writing, Michal and I moved together from Derrida to Deleuze, from Lacan to French feminism, from writing technologies to biotechnologies. All through this time, we have maintained our differences, remembering our different paths taken from the qualitative methods in Sociology, Symbolic Interactionism, and the like, which we learned in our graduate training. Our disciplinary memories have come to merge through autoethnography with our personal memories, giving us a very special understanding of being intellectuals. And ﬁnally I thank Norman Denzin who brilliantly mentored me when I was his graduate student and who since then has brilliantly mentored so many more in their pursuit of Sociology, cultural studies, and critical methodologies. He is the model that inspires me and informs my own efforts in mentoring graduate students as we learn together. Like no one else, Norman has made it possible for me and others to insist that students can do graduate work in a Ph.D. program without forsaking the complexities of their life’s stories. He has developed methods to make these stories enrich our understanding of the social. So Norman brings me back to think autoaffectionately, to think how autoaffection does not have to turn in on the self but rather can point to a life force, a life capacity that is shared collectively not only beyond the individual subject but at the preindividual level of life now threatened by the capture of the capital invested technoscience, but also released for political engagement, a project drawing us to the future.

REFERENCES Clough, P. T. (1992). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Second edition published by Peter Lang, Inc., New York in 1998. Clough, P.T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (Ed.) with Jean Halley. (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (1998). Requiem for our prospective dead (toward a participatory critique of capitalist power). In: E. Kaufman & K. J. Heller (Eds), Deleuze and guattari, new mappings in politics, philosophy, and culture (p. 47). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(Winter), 11–40. See my treatment of Butler’s work (1994). In: Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell.

SAVING SOCIOLOGY Michal M. McCall In her ﬁrst three books, Patricia Clough gave sociology a new subject, to replace the static, fully conscious, volitional, 19th century ‘‘self’’ who was not only the sole source of meaning but the author of society itself. In her newest work – The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duke University Press, forthcoming) – Patricia leads sociology beyond the subject to rethink ‘‘society’’ since, since as she says, ‘‘it is not from the position of the subject that sociality can now be grasped’’ (forthcoming, p. 32). In her ﬁrst book, The End(s) of Ethnography (Sage, 1992), she gave us the Lacanian subject who read and wrote to create a uniﬁed subject-identity. Her argument was that all writings/readings are expressions of unconscious desire. More speciﬁcally, narrative writing is an expression of the desire for a uniﬁed subject-identity or self. The desire, that is, to maintain a ‘‘symbiotic identiﬁcation with the m(other)’’ while at the same time ‘‘becoming selfidentiﬁed like the father ﬁgure’’ (p. xiii). Now, a uniﬁed subject-identity is never really possible because ‘‘the Oedipus complex is never completely or successfully resolved’’ (Clough, 1998, p. 4). But/so it can be/is fantasmatically constructed by constructing narratives, by authoring the self as the subject of a story (p. 18) – whether a narrative ﬁction like Hollywood ﬁlm, or a ‘‘factual’’ narrative like ethnography. In her second book, Feminist Thought (Blackwell, 1994); Clough traced the connection between the subject and realist narrative ﬁctions in feminist ﬁlm theory. Following Althusser, feminist ﬁlm theorists argued that ideology produces what counts as reality – ‘‘what can be seen, thought, or believed as the reality of experience’’ – and also ‘‘constructs a subject as the

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 45–53 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30004-0

45

46

MICHAL M. MCCALL

point of intelligibility.’’ For them, as for Althusser, ‘‘ideology is not a matter of consciousness but of the unconscious; that is, ideology is lived as reality through the workings of a subject’s unconscious desire’’ (1994, p. 75). Thus, they proposed ‘‘that in cultural productions, post-oedipal fantasies are elicited from and projected onto the reader or writer not only to interpellate them again and again as subjects of (ideology) but in doing so, to authorize only certain modes of reading reality. ‘‘[Kaja] Silverman described these fantasies as unconscious scenarios of ‘authorial desire’ which constitute both the political unconscious of the social formation of Western, modern capitalism and the fantasmatic of the modern subject’’ (1994, pp. 77–78). Feminist Thought revealed to readers who were following Clough’s thought what she had done in the ﬁrst End(s) of Ethnography: she had extended the argument about reading, writing, and subjectivity from the ﬁctional narratives of Hollywood cinema, where it originated, to the nonﬁction, ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ narratives of sociological ethnography. Silverman and other feminist ﬁlm critics whose understandings of narrative and unconscious desire informed Clough’s understanding, focused exclusively on realist, narrative Hollywood cinema. The originality of Clough’s argument was based in her recognition that narrative cinema is only one among many writing technologies or technical substrates of unconscious memory. She understood that narrative cinema, television melodrama, realist novels, computer simulation, and various forms of sociological ethnography were all writing technologies implicated in the production of subjectivities and social reality. In her ‘‘Preface’’ to the second edition of The End(s) of Ethnography, Clough said her idea of ‘‘writing technologies’’ was inﬂuenced by Derrida’s notion of ‘‘technical substrates: the writing pad, the moving camera, the computer’’ from which ‘‘memory or the unconscious’’ can never be separated (1998, p. xiv). Feminist ﬁlm theorists ‘‘drew on Lacan’s rereading of Freud, especially Lacan’s elaboration of Freud’s treatment of the ‘mirror stage’’’ to understand ‘‘the viewer’s unconscious identiﬁcation with ﬁlm images, which y promote the society’s ideology’’ (Clough, 2000, pp. 47–48). If they had also drawn on Derrida’s alternative rereading of Freud, as Clough did, they might have been led to the question Clough asked in her next book: Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology: ‘‘what is to be made of the unconscious if the cinema is no longer taken as its machine metaphor or as its only machine metaphor?’’ If they had followed Derrida following Freud from neurology to ‘‘the mystic writing-pad to ‘‘sophisticated archiving machines’’ (Derrida, 1996) of various sorts, as Clough did, they might have been led, as she was,

Saving Sociology

47

to imagine that it may be television that has drawn [feminists] to rethink the gaze and move it from a transcendental position of mastery somewhere near the camera behind the viewer’s back and locate it instead across from the viewer at the lit-up screen/image y [to] imagine that the emergence of television metaphors not only gives a new sense of the gaze, but gives the very idea that visuality can be changed with different technologies, and that therefore the unconscious is historically speciﬁc. (Clough, 2000, p. 58)

In Autoaffection, Clough began to theorize the nonnarrative writing technology of television. Unlike cinema, television, and the computer – the two teletechnologies characteristic and even constitutive of ‘‘the age of teletechnology’’ – are not narrative media. There is no beginning, middle, and end to TV and computer images; they are always ‘‘on.’’ [This is more obvious if you also consider ‘‘MCI or AT& T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail’’ (Derrida, ibid., p. 16)]. Instead, as Clough put it, TV and the computer are about the ‘‘ceaseless ﬂow’’ or circulation ‘‘of information and images’’ (2000, p. 92). Therefore, ‘‘the interface of computer technology and television’’ – these new writing technologies – shapes the unconscious differently – today – than cinema shaped the unconscious in modern, industrial capitalism, since, as Clough says: ‘‘neither narrative nor stories are necessarily or primarily the way in which the viewer and television are attached to each other’’ (ibid., p. 99). And this is what frees the unconscious from ‘‘conﬁnement in the oedipal narrative’’ (ibid., p. 140): television leaves behind what has been crucial to the cinematic apparatus: that is, the linking of images by means of relays through subject positions. The cinematic apparatus, after all, works by machining the cut-up components of subjectivity into the narrated movement of the image. Indeed, as feminist ﬁlm theorists have made clear, the important function of the oedipal narrative is to suture what has been cut up in order to give the machine vision back to the subject, as if it were a human vision, as if it were the viewer’s vision. In giving up this concern for relaying images through the subject, perhaps suspending any linkage between images altogether, television presents itself as a machine apparatus for the non-subjective movement of images; it presents itself as a machine apparatus for an unconscious without the oedipal narrative. (ibid., p. 59)

The subject of teletechnology is no longer split; rather it is mesmerized or traumatized by a loss it cannot acknowledge. Clough brought together her ideas about writing technologies and the historical speciﬁcity of the unconscious with Judith Butler’s feminist queer theory of ‘‘heterosexual melancholy’’ or trauma, because she realized it would help her ‘‘shift the unconscious to a post-cinematic or televisual regime’’ (Unpublished

48

MICHAL M. MCCALL

manuscript, p. 12). Butler had argued that along with the prohibition of the incestuous heterosexual object choice or even ‘‘prior to it, there is a prohibition of the incestuous homosexual object choice – the mother for the girl and the father for the boy.’’ And this loss ‘‘unlike the loss of the heterosexual incestuous object, is denied completely’’ and therefore ‘‘cannot be grieved’’ or ‘‘internalized and displaced onto others.’’ Rather, it is ‘‘ ‘melancholically incorporated’ and thereby kept alive in and as part of the one who cannot grieve’’ (Clough, 2000, p. 119). As she later wrote: In the psychoanalytic y account y trauma is about the incapacity of the subject to speak the past. Although there are efforts to work out trauma, more commonly trauma is acted out or compulsively repeated; the effort to overcome the repetition fails and fails to put an end to forgetting and the paralysis of voice. Trauma is understood as a symptomology substituting for something that was never experienced as such, a seemingly wasteful yet actually productive repetition. The ego’s defense being breached, a hyper-defensiveness results, a passivity even, an avoidance of pain in an involuntary or automatic shutting down of the perceptual apparatus, the conceptual apparatus, the cognitive apparatus, and even the motor apparatus.’’ (Unpublished manuscript, p. 12) [The] subject of y trauma lacks a well-deﬁned ego with a well-fashioned identity. Yet, rather than thinking of this ﬁgure of subjectivity simply or solely in terms of pathology, it seem[s] desirable to also think of it as a preﬁgure of a subjectivity drawn to the transformations of the cinematic and the becoming of the teletechnological. In this sense, trauma, it might be argued, raises the possibility of thinking the passing of the regime of cinematic representation and the becoming of a global regime of intensiﬁed ‘technomemory.’ In this sense, the trance-like, affective response in trauma [and TV watching, turn] repetition into the always already rerun, provoking nothing but anxiety about the speed at which moments ﬂee, are wasted, with no chance of recovering mastery, the speed at which traumatic events arise to demand our attention over and over again unto the exhaustion of desire. (ibid., p. 20)

The argument that the unconscious is historically speciﬁc – that it is shaped differently by the characteristic writing technologies in different ‘‘ages’’ – was brilliant in itself. So was the connection Clough made between the long-distance writing technologies characteristic of the late-20th and early-21st centuries and the traumatized, mesmerized subject of postmodernity. But in Autoaffection she also began to revise the social1 in the age of teletechnology. She warned, the teletechnological joins, if not displaces what sociologists of western modernity have referred to as the social structural. In the age of teletechnology, the social structural is being ‘‘smoothed out’’ or ‘‘ungrounded,’’ to use Gilles Deleuze’s terms, or ‘‘unbundled,’’ to use Saskia Sassen’s term. Even as the transnational or the global becomes visible, proposing themselves as far-ﬂung extensions of social structure, they are ungrounded by

Saving Sociology

49

that upon which they depend: the speed of the exchange of information, capital, bodies and abstract knowledge and the vulnerability to media event-ness. This transformation not only involves postmodern western or northern societies, where the arrangement of social spaces presumed in subject-centered, nation-centric discourses has been characteristic, at least until recently challenged by the teletechnological. It also involves societies in neocolonialism, where this arrangement of social spaces is not necessarily presumed, and, if imposed, not necessarily accepted, but where, nonetheless, the teletechnological speeds of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, as well as the vulnerability of exposure to media event-ness, are having their effect in the ‘glocalization’ of cultures and the production of technoculture and technonature. (2000, pp. 3–4)

In her newest work, Clough focuses on global changes in the social by joining Deleuze’s work on societies of control (1995) with what she calls the affective turn in cognitive psychology, literary studies, and neurology (Clough, forthcoming, p. 39). For scholars in these and other disciplines ‘‘affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, to connect’’; thus, the ‘‘turn to affect is a shift from the social construction or discursive construction of the body or bodily matter explored in the critical theory of the late 20th century’’ (ibid., p. 2). According to Deleuze, control societies are ‘‘taking over from disciplinary societies’’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 178) because of a ‘‘mutation in capitalism’’: the shift from industrial to global/electronic capitalism, which he calls ‘‘capitalism in its present form’’ (p. 180). The mutation [of capitalism] has been widely recognized and can be summarized as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the factory into the site of conﬁnement, with the capitalist owning the means of production and perhaps other similarly organized sites (workers’ homes, schools). As for markets, they were won either through specialization, through colonization, or through reducing the costs of production. But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil reﬁneries. It’s directed toward meta-production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells ﬁnished products: it buys ﬁnished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets y Markets are won by taking control rather than by establishing a discipline, by ﬁxing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products rather than by specializing production y Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is shortterm and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, inﬁnite, and discontinuous. (1995, pp. 180–181)

50

MICHAL M. MCCALL

Discipline was the form of power characteristic of industrial societies because industrial capitalism required ‘‘docile bodies.’’ As Foucault put it: The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the manifestation of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it y Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile bodies.’ Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). (1979, p. 138)

Foucault also talked about discipline in terms of subjection: This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (2004, p. 331)

The connections Clough made between Deleuze’s statement that global capitalism ‘‘seeks to sell services, and seeks to buy activities,’’ and the ‘‘affective turn’’ allowed her to see that whereas ‘‘disciplining engages a politics or representation’’ and is ‘‘part of a cinematic regime of representation,’’ the ‘‘target of control is not the production of subjects’’: rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, and potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identiﬁcation numbers, ratings proﬁles, and preference listings, that is to say, in bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data). Control is an extension of what Foucault referred to as biopolitics, where the individual body is not so much the focus as is the species body and the regularities of the aggregate effects of individual bodies which institutes a politics of population. Control is a biopolitics that works at the molecular level of bodies – and not necessarily, or only, human bodies. (Clough, forthcoming, pp. 25–26)

This, in turn, allowed her to deﬁne global capitalism as ‘‘an affective economy’’ and to write about ‘‘the meshing of biopolitics’’ with this affective economy: In the meshing of biopolitics with an affective economy, there is a marking of populations at various scales of living, some as valuable life and others as without value. Increasingly, it is in these terms that differences such as those of ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality and nation are materialized. Some bodies or bodily capacities are

Saving Sociology

51

derogated making their affectivity super-exploitable, or exhaustible unto death, while other bodies or body capacities collect the value produced through this derogation and exploitation. The bodies marked to become valuable call forth intensive investment in the realization of their affective capacities. The movement of value from some bodies, usually statistically determined, to other bodies, also so determined, can be found, for example, in the relationship of migrant bodies and the overly invested middle-class children in contemporary China. Or it can be seen in the relationship made between victimized, terrorized, and hated bodies brought forth for the discourse and practices of terrorism, counter-terrorism, surveillance and unending war. (Ibid., p. 35)

Another example of this meshing is the complex of problems peasants and subcontracted (‘‘sweatshop’’) workers suffer in countries of the South as a result of globalization (or economic imperialism): labor migration and exploitation, human rights abuses, depeasantization and the destabilization of rural communities, environmental degradation, food insecurity, increased poverty, disease, and death. As McMichael explained subcontracting: ‘‘With the opportunity for global coordination (and mobility) embedded in informational technologies, transnational corporations subdivide production sequences y and shift labor-intensive activities to offshore export platforms or processing zones. Parent ﬁrms tend to monopolize high technologies (e.g., production design blueprints), with component processes (assembling, etching, and testing computer chips), component goods (pharmaceutical stock, engines, and auto parts), and consumer goods (cameras, electronic games, TVs, and video recorders) moved offshore for production in cheaper sites, export processing zones, or sweatshop districts’’ (2004, p. 84). China, he says, ‘‘has become perhaps the prime location for low-wage production in the global economy’’ (ibid., p. 81). With 1.2 billion ‘‘educated but impressively cheap (25 cents an hour as compared with $1.50 in Mexico) and well-regimented’’ workers, China ‘‘now produces about half of the world’s shoes and a proliferating array of electronic items, toys, and garments for the global economy’’ (ibid., p. 82). For example, Shenzhen, near Hong Kong ‘‘has a booming economy and accounts for half of China’s GDP.’’ But ‘‘it is an economy powered by millions of migrant workers who are desperate enough to accept long hours, low pay and dangerous conditions because the alternatives back home are worse’’ (Ash, 7/20/02, p. 1). ‘‘More than 100 million rural Chinese have moved to cities like Shenzhen’’ (ibid.). And no wonder. ‘‘150 million people live in the Huai River Basin in central China. Many of them are poor farmers and ﬁshermen now threatened by water too toxic to touch, much less drink.’’ Their wells and ﬁelds are contaminated, their ﬁsh and shrimp are dead, and many of them

52

MICHAL M. MCCALL

are dying or have died of cancer. According to the New York Times: ‘‘Pollution is pervasive in China [of the 20 cities with the worst air in the world, 16 are Chinese, according to the World Bank]’’ but ‘‘leaders are now starting to clean up major cities, partly because urbanites with rising incomes are demanding better air and water. In Beijing and Shanghai, ofﬁcials are forcing out the dirtiest polluters to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. By contrast, the countryside, home to 2/3 of China’s population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local ofﬁcials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Reﬁneries and smelters forced out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign companies, to escape regulation at home’’ (Yardley, 9/12/04, p. 1). Of course this transfer of value from populations deﬁned as ‘‘human waste’’ (Clough, forthcoming, p. 35) to populations deﬁned as worthy of investment also happens globally, not just within countries. And the global ﬂow of ﬁnance capital is one important way the transfer is affected. As Wayne Ellwood wrote: the ‘‘deregulation of global ﬁnance capital [the end of ﬁxed currency-exchange rates after President Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1973; and the requirements debtor countries had to meet to qualify for World Bank/IMF ‘‘structural adjustment loans’’ in the 1980s, including ‘‘opening domestic markets to international trade and foreign investment, privatizing investment in public utilities and natural resources, ending most protective labor laws, and enacting powerful domestic and international safeguards for private property rights’’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 259)] coupled with the microelectronics revolution has sparked a surge in the ﬂow of capital. This uncontrolled speculation has eclipsed long-term productive investment and poses a huge threat to the stability of the global economy’’ (Ellwood, 2002, p. 72). Since global markets began to deregulate in the early 1980s, short-term speculation has become the single-largest component in the ﬂow of international investment. Managers of billion-dollar hedge funds, mutual funds and pension plans move money in and out of countries at lightning speed based on fractional differences in exchange rates. For every dollar that is needed to facilitate the trade in real goods, nine dollars is gambled in foreign exchange markets. (ibid., p. 73)

Again, according to McMichael: ‘‘In a world in which US $2 trillion circulates daily, the total value of foreign exchange transactions is double that of production, and 97.5% of foreign exchange transactions is speculative, it is not surprising that ﬁnancial crisis has become part of the landscape’’ (2004, p. 231). He refers to the collapsed economies of Mexico in 1994–1995; Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia in 1997; Brazil and Russia in 1998;

53

Saving Sociology

Argentina in 2000; and Venezuela in 2002, the results of which have been ‘‘increased poverty, violence, disease and death and increased dependence on European and US corporations to provide virtually all consumer products, employment and even public services’’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 267). Finally, Clough’s affective turn allowed her to see how we academics support ‘‘the great violence, disinterest, and arrogance of those [in] control’’ through our emphasis on professional ‘‘know-how.’’ She calls on us to confront ‘‘the social, changed and changing which exceeds all efforts to contain it, even ours to contain it conceptually.’’ If we ignore the changes that are ‘‘not already marked for our easy assimilation’’ (Clough, forthcoming, p. 39), we are complicit in their ghastly consequences. So, she is once again saving sociology or trying to do so.

NOTE 1. Thanks to Joseph Schneider for reminding me/us that the term ‘‘social’’ need not and should not be ‘‘taken to imply the involvement of humans alone’’ (2005, p. 37).

REFERENCES Ash, L. (7/20/02). Inside China’s Sweatshops. BBC World News. Clough, P. T. (1992). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Clough, P. T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Oxford, UK & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (1998). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (forthcoming). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (Unpublished manuscript). Deleuze, G. (1995). Postscript on control societies (pp. 177–182 in Negotiations). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ellwood, W. (2002). The no-nonsense guide to globalization. London, UK: Verso. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. Random House: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2004). In: J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power. New York: The New Press. Johnson, C. (2004). The sorrows of empire. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. McMichael, P. (2004). Development and social change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Schneider, J. (2005). Donna Haraway: Live theory. New York: Continuum. Yardley, J. (9/12/94). Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer. New York Times.

REWRITING THE SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE WORK OF PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH$ Joseph Schneider The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity. (Deleuze in Pearson, 1999, p. 12)

This essay and those collected with it emerge from a network of friendships stretching back 20 years and more that have been regularly reignited at meetings of Midwest and US professional sociology. Before that, Norman Denzin, Patricia Clough, and Michal McCall were, respectively, young professors and graduate students at the University of Illinois, and Michal and I, for at least for a semester before then, had been fellow students at the University of Iowa. Norman did his Ph.D. work at Iowa where he and I brieﬂy shared graduate student status. Patricia and I became acquainted through recurrent intersections of these and other colleagues and friends at various professional meetings.

$

Parts of this essay were presented on November 2004 National Communications Associations conference in Chicago and at ﬁrst annual conference on Qualitative Inquiry held at University of Illinois in Urbana, May 2005.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 55–77 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30005-2

55

56

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

Over the ensuing years, we three have paid attention to what Patricia has said and written and often have engaged her thought in ways productive to our own. We four are respected friends with no small emotional investment in what each imagines the others’ thoughts and feelings about her or him to be. Those personal intersections make our comments about Patricia’s work redolent with meanings that exceed the disciplined forms of scholarly social science performance and subjectivities: dear and trusted friends, respected colleagues, subjects and objects of desire – all of these and more. For me, the respect and affection linked to Patricia and her work are part of an ongoing challenge to think, as Foucault put it, differently and then to see where that could lead. In the more than two decades that I have known her, she has consistently written scholarship as though her life depended on it. In that, she inspires colleagues and students in the best traditions of the academy, intellectual inquiry, and cultural criticism. The project of our, with others, writing about Patricia’s work emerged in the wake of her ﬁrst and pathbreaking book and the essays that it collects, The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998 [1992]). A ﬁrst set of published commentary emerged from a panel done at the 1999 meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society (see Kassabian, 2001; McCall, 2001; Schneider, 2001; Neitz, 2001). The essays collected here variously take account of her subsequent work, which, in similar fashion, leads sociological readers and writers to places many have not been before. From our own early encounters with Patricia and her work, the three of us who write here, each saw that she saw things differently than we and others named ‘‘sociologists’’ usually did, and we saw that what and how she saw constituted a difference that aimed to help us move our thought, again after Foucault, elsewhere. I think it was clear to us even then that both what Patricia saw and the passion of her vision were rarely available in our own disciplinary canons of sociology. She always seemed to be reading ‘‘other stuff,’’ and bringing news that was both fascinating and troubling to our sociological ways. Somewhat alien, then, to these ways, Patricia was interdisciplinary before it was fashionable or even allowed, and at a time when defenders of the canon were as likely as not to call such work ‘‘confused,’’ ‘‘irrelevant,’’ or, worse (we perhaps then thought), ‘‘not sociology.’’ What Patricia writes and says often has brought me and my own projects up short. One such project has been sustained but the very particular interest in what sociologists have called the self and what interdisciplinary studies scholars in the humanities and human sciences are more likely to call the subject or subjectivity. The self or subject that I want in particular to

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

57

address here is the one who professes to know, the subject of knowledge and inquiry, including of course the kind of inquiry that all ‘‘we’’ students of the social-cultural do. Using a favorite term from Donna Haraway, Patricia’s writing on the subject of knowledge has been ‘‘tropic’’ for the work I have done and I am sure that others among us could say the same, offering their own stories of what it has meant to take her arguments seriously.

THE END OF ETHNOGRAPHY? YOU MEAN, WHAT I AM DOING? In 1985, I was moving along a more or less deﬁnable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garﬁnkel’s ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of inﬂuence, my writing then was focused especially on various ‘‘social constructionist’’ projects, ﬁrst with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called ‘‘grounded theory’’ and with Howard Becker about ‘‘doing sociology.’’ Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or ﬁeld work and ‘‘writing it up,’’ as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is deﬁned as ‘‘mainstream’’ (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.). Truth be told, I think many of us believed (and may still believe) that there is a kind of moral superiority to this qualitative/interpretive theory method as well. It was both more true and good because it took human beings and selves, as I thought of them then, more seriously: it listened to what those subjects said to their social science interlocutors; it believed them, in some sense; and it watched carefully what they did, all toward trying to ‘‘get it right,’’ so to speak, on their (and the world’s) terms. And the kind of social constructionist sociology of social problems and morality that I was writing required the familiar detachment of conventional social science method: unlike the Marxists and feminists and other ‘‘engaged’’ or ‘‘sympathetic’’ colleagues, we constructionists – at least, those of us in that ‘‘wing’’ of it – stood on the sidelines (we thought) with

58

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

our cherished warrant to abstract and then convey the claims making and responding activities – the ‘‘deﬁnitional activities’’ – that so-called ‘‘members’’ pursued relative to what the theory marked as ‘‘putative conditions.’’ The theoretical requirements of this position were quite clear to me and I was writing then in a way that insisted on them as a deﬁnition of what social constructionist argument was. But I had met Patricia and had begun to listen, with both fascination and dis-ease, to her arguments about qualitative, symbolic interactionist sociology and ethnography that she presented at meetings and had begun to publish. She then was working on chapters of a manuscript that became The End(s) of Ethnography, and Clifford and Marcus (1986), and Marcus and Fischer (1986) had just published their critical and reﬂexive analyses of how cultural anthropology produces true knowledge, especially through its signature practice of ethnography. Patricia drew their criticisms to qualitative sociology and ﬁeldwork, adding her own critical insights from psychoanalysis and feminist ﬁlm theory. Having been a political activist and from an Italian Catholic, working class family, what she already knew about Marx had been then recently elaborated at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar where she read new Marxist theorists inﬂuenced by continental and especially French poststructuralist scholars. In her ﬁrst book, Patricia said that conventional ethnographic and sociological writing produces a closed and gendered narrative that ensures both authoritative knowledge of a world external to the observer, on one hand, and the solidity of a masculinist ego, self, or subjectivity of the sociologist/observer him- or herself, on the other (no matter the sex/gender embodiment of the particular author). In discovering, representing, and documenting factual truths about the world – enacting the discourse of scientiﬁc realism – through a person-centered, narrative form, the social scientist secures his own self as strong and centered, a self that the writing technology of empiricism both successfully creates and effaces as, ﬁnally, not relevant to knowledge of the objects discovered ‘‘out there.’’ Her criticism insisted, by contrast, that the truth of the representations of the social, of peoples, of totalities, in these texts and the coherence, unity, and respect of their subject-authors are inextricably entwined. That is precisely what such writing technologies seek to deny. Clearly, this feminist, psychoanalytic poststructural criticism unsettles the dominant story of ethnography as a universally valid view of ‘‘how things really are’’ and makes it clear that it is not only so-called quantitative or ‘‘positivist’’ social science that relies on realist assumptions to ground knowledge practices but most qualitative work as well.

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

59

Reading studies of the nineteenth century novel as relevant to the realist narrative form typical of sociology and social science, Patricia insisted that this common form appeals to readers in that it offers them this same desirable subject position for their conscious and unconscious identiﬁcations: that of the narrator/observer in his heroic and always successful quest. This realist narrative form had deﬁned mass media at least since the nineteenth century and, she argued, is at the heart of twentieth century popular cinema and apparent also in much computer simulation (but less apparent in television). As she wrote those chapters in the mid- and late-1980s, she was herself in a psychoanalysis at the same time she was reading its foundational and revisionist texts. From all of this and from her life, she knew that the centered and rational self inscribed – perhaps, at the least – in the canonical texts of academic sociology and social science is a fantasy that, historically, has been especially difﬁcult for women, as well as others ‘‘on the outside,’’ successfully to sustain and perform.1 While she appreciated the pleasure such discursive practices bring, she drew attention to how they help enact structures of dominance in power/knowledge across an array of effaced if not erased differences, contributing to and variously shoring up human suffering and pain. What then (and perhaps still) seemed so striking to Patricia, was that her own discipline of sociology had so little to say about the operation of such an important set of linkages. Rather, as is true of most if not all conventional social science practice, sociological writing usually took these links as points of departure for its theory and methods rather than as topics for critical study. As I said, all of this gave me pause about my own practices of work, writing, and subjectivity. It became apparent that taking her arguments seriously, indeed, would mean the end of ethnography as usual for me.

TROUBLING THE EYE/I OF EXPERIENCE Beyond her critique of masculinist discursive authority in the subject of conventional ethnographic knowledge, another of Patricia’s contributions to sociology, to women’s studies, and to feminist scholarship is her critique of feminist standpoint epistemologies. Leading feminist scholars in the social sciences – political scientist Nancy Hartsock, in her Money, Sex, and Power (Hartsock, 1985) and sociologist Dorothy Smith, in The Everyday World as Problematic Smith (1987) in particular – drew on Marx’s hopeful proposition that workers could come to see capitalism ‘‘truly, for what it is’’

60

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

in ways that capitalists themselves were structurally unable to see. Hartsock, Smith, and other feminist scholars used Marx’s argument to found a parallel view of women in patriarchy. Women, because of their structural location, their position, in capitalist and modernist patriarchy, it was argued, could understand more fully and accurately how the larger political and economic systems in which they were subordinates were ‘‘put together,’’ to borrow a phrase from Smith. While history had been written by men – and one could add, white, ﬁrst world, colonial, and presumptively heterosexual men – yet offered as stories about all, women’s story (among other stories) – which these theories saw as more accurate – had been ignored. Such standpoint epistemologies offered grounding for the ﬁgure of ‘‘Woman’’ and of women’s voices, which were then to be offered up as an empirical corrective to supposed universal truths about society, culture, life – that is, ‘‘the world.’’ Indeed, as the word epistemology announces, these arguments sought to provide a foundation for more than merely an alternative view. The position was not simply one of ‘‘multiple perspectives’’ but rather offered in the familiar form of (the) ‘‘Truth,’’ just, in some sense, as had the white, colonial anthropologist’s ethnography that Patricia and feminist postcolonial critics had taken up for deconstruction. While that feminist postcolonial criticism, which was then emerging, would appreciate multiplicities in matters of truths, realities, and subjectivities – even or especially among women – these standpoint epistemologies were offered not as one of several but rather as the truth about (in this case) the sexist, patriarchal, and capitalist worlds taken as given in that work and, of course, also about ‘‘women’’ and their lives. Patricia and we might enjoy a sense of justice done by these feminist standpoint arguments, given the reign of conventional masculinist histories of all inclusive ‘‘truth.’’ But their foundational and closed quality could not launch a new and truly open way of thinking critically about the social that could survive in the already global world of postmodern capital into which they were offered, not to mention into the contentious whirl of ‘‘post-’’ discourses that were enlivening the academy as critiques of disciplined and disciplinary knowledge. What was so stunningly insightful for me about this argument, made, among other places, in her Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse (Clough, 1994) – not to mention brave – is the way it takes on a deconstruction of the relationship of experience and identity as the ground of true knowledge.2 It focuses on many of the same questions that her critique of ethnography does, but here Patricia writes criticism of feminist

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

61

argument from within feminist theory itself. It is the form of discursive authority in these works that she sees as all too familiar to their masculinist counterparts, which these and other feminists criticize and that she takes as her topic of criticism relevant to all knowledge projects beyond feminist theory. It is the position–experience–representation–truth connection that is under scrutiny here and that Patricia aims to deconstruct. Clearly, this critique of feminist standpoint epistemology from within feminism has been difﬁcult and even fraught for feminist writers, but the very credibility of feminist theory and criticism, and, indeed, of deconstructive criticism in all its versions rests on seeing all foundations for an untheorized truth as vulnerable (even if understandable) investments in fantasies of wholeness, presence, and solidity. This critique requires us, in effect, to take a deep breath and then seriously engage the claim that there are, ﬁnally, no guarantees for true knowledge except those we put there as a result of a collective moral/ethical choice (a ‘‘putting’’ that is then usually forgotten as having been done so that it can then be used as a foundation). With this deconstruction, the concerns of epistemology – namely, what are the grounds of truth and how are they justiﬁed? – give way to more immediate and moral/political questions, such as: Who gets to be part of the ‘‘we’’ of this process, how and when and where? Who is privileged and who is silenced? Who beneﬁts/suffers from it and in what various ways (cf. Star, 1991)?3 How are these provisional, partial, and always vulnerable points of truth arrived at, sustained, and reviewed?

TECHNOLOGY, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND AUTOAFFECTION In the introduction to her third book, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, Patricia (Clough, 2000) writes: With thought becoming indistinguishable from affect, the unconscious, and desire, cultural criticism not surprisingly not only has focused on rethinking bodies. It also has turned reﬂexively upon knowledge and science, calling into question their epistemological underpinnings in rationality and its discursive forms of legitimizing authority. (p. 14)

Accordingly, her book interrogates ‘‘feminist theory, Marxist cultural studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory’’ and ends with a consideration of ‘‘the cultural studies of science, especially the new sociology of science and the criticism of [the discursive authority of ] ethnographic

62

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

writingy’’ (p. 14). With this work and continuing in the most recent project, Patricia further develops her perceptive critique of cultural studies scholarship and cultural theory. The production and deployment of discursive authority in science has been one of Patricia’s abiding concerns. Her commentary on the relevance of the contributions of poststructuralism and a developing new appreciation of bodies and materiality to this critical analysis of science is, like all her work, rich and provocative. I want to mention here two themes from Autoaffection that bear rather directly on the subject of and in knowledge and on the implications of what Patricia has written for thinking differently about that subject and its linked knowledge. These are (1) the place of the human subject in relation to what Patricia calls, drawing on Derrida, ‘‘the technical substrate of unconscious memory’’; and (2) the returned ghost of full subject presence in the autoethnographic writing in sociology, cultural studies, and elsewhere, on the other. I use the main title of Patricia’s book in this section heading, above, because I think it reminds us of what is at stake in this affection for the authority that writing of all kinds, and perhaps especially today the writing of ostensibly true knowledge, brings.4 As she explains this key term from Derrida’s early work, autoaffection is ‘‘ ‘giving-oneself-a-presense or a pleasure,’ ‘hearing oneself speak’ in the closed circuit of mouth and ear, voicing and hearing.’’ This, she says, gives the natural grounds to the subject privileged in the western modern discourse of Man. It is autoaffection that allows the presumption of the unity of speech and precommunicated thought, giving the subject an inner presence, an inner voice, so that the subject, when it speaks, is presumed to speak its own voice, to speak its intention and to express its inner being. (Derrida, in Clough (2000, p. 17))

Sufﬁce it to say that this suggests a very strong psychic investment by the speaker in continuing to speak (and write, as well, although that is a somewhat different matter), where the position of the speaker certainly includes, at the least, you and me and our far-ﬂung academic colleagues. Allowing that in this ﬁgure Derrida marks the indissociable intersection of the bodily, the physical/affective, and the symbolic or cultural, we can see in a general way why poststructuralism has been such a disconcerting practice of analysis and criticism for many who might be marked as ‘‘us,’’ especially given the extent to which these elements have been storied as fundamentally distinct and dual. Patricia has contributed to rewriting such stories toward a portrayal of human subjectivity as dispersed, fragmented, and operatively linked in complex networks involving diverse other entities, including machines and

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

63

nonhuman life. Following from Derrida, when Patricia speaks of the importance of the ‘‘technical substrates of unconscious memory’’ she indexes an argument perhaps recognized most widely in early feminist ﬁlm theory. These arguments, deeply inﬂuenced by psychoanalytic criticism and Althusser’s discussion of relations between cultural texts and the formation of the unconscious, pointed to the ways that the technical apparatus of ﬁlm and ﬁlm production qua technology profoundly implicated the possible ways in which spectators could ‘‘see’’ and ‘‘become’’ themselves through these complex texts. This was not a simple determinism, but rather an argument for the implication of technology in the human and the possibilities for dynamic subjectivity that seemed to make it clear that the nature of this relationship – between technology and the human – was not merely, as some had thought, a diminution of the latter. Forefronting the ways that teletechnologies map the spaces or conditions of possibility for human being, Patricia (Clough, 2000) argued that from Derrida we can see the relations of ‘‘being and technicity y nature and technology, body and machine, the virtual and the real, and the living and the inert’’ not as oppositional but rather as ‘‘diffe´rantial’’; as always already ‘‘inextricably implicated, always already interlaced’’ (p. 11). Here, the human, while not erased, is certainly displaced from its fantasized sovereign position in knowledge and administration. In this, Patricia joins other cultural theorists such as Bruno Latour (1986, 1999) when he describes what he calls ‘‘centers of calculation’’ that mix ‘‘actants’’ including machines, microbes, and humans into a new sort of ‘‘community’’; and it is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s (1997, 2003, 2008) visions of ‘‘cyborgs’’ and ‘‘material-semiotic entities,’’ such as ‘‘the chip, the gene, the fetus, the bomb, the genome, the database’’ and, most recently, relationality between dogs and humans, in which diverse organic and inorganic, living and not, entities collectively constitute what can be thought as ‘‘agency.’’ In all of this work, the nature of the human and the personal and how they are to be marked are dramatically transformed and displaced according to a logic or calculus that is not centered inside ‘‘the individual’’ human being. While writers such as Latour and Haraway, unlike Patricia, do not draw explicitly on the idea of an unconscious or even a reworked discourse of psychoanalytic criticism, Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2004), in their writing of queer theory and on the materiality of bodies and teletechnology, certainly do. Patricia elaborates how their ideas help move thought beyond its focus on human and humanist subjectivity, especially as it has been framed by oedipal narrative particular to particular geopolitical times and sets of places and even beyond the consciousness of any

64

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

subject. In this there is an important but difﬁcult move that displaces the Western humanist subject and considers the emergence of what has been called the ‘‘postpersonal,’’ ‘‘posthuman,’’ and ‘‘affective.’’ As Derrida saw, love of the self; and the bodily hearing, feeling it become make this movement quite hard for many of us to appreciate and understand as anything other than a frightening dream, even as we are now living it, and, often, quite robustly so. It can take time to see that this work is not antihuman even as it is premised on and contributes to a stunning deconstruction of humanism. A second relevant argument from Patricia’s Autoaffection and one that she continues in her most recent work, discussed below, is her critique of autoethnography, the form of the practice that requires a self-reﬂexivity that is forbidden in canonical prescriptions, both in anthropology and sociology, for what ethnography is and how it should be done. It surely was not part of the form Patricia criticized in her ﬁrst book, where the observer–scientist– hero was the only source and bearer of the light but where he himself was never lighted as a character in the story’s drama. As Patricia notes, one legacy of the criticism of that untheorized, colonialist ethnographic practice has been the rise and popularity of multivocal texts in which those once only portrayed as simple objects have become complex, often quite politically savvy and, as we should expect, self-serving, speaking subjects. Thanks to this criticism, speaking for any others has become a considerably more fraught project than it used to be among human science scholars. Part of that legacy of criticism has been the development of experimental ways of writing true stories about others that aim to disturb and displace the authority at the center of knowledge – the one who sees and knows – and the opening that once seemingly solid center to a fragmented and ﬂuid subjectivity that itself also becomes the object of the writing. The so-called ‘‘autoethnography’’ has been one such popular form, and Patricia, arguably, has been its most productive, even loving critic. Such work would seem to invite a truly multiple, even dizzying, and potentially creative simultaneous movement of the ‘‘object’’ – even the notion of an outside – and the ‘‘subject’’ of knowledge and its ‘‘inside’’ that could allow if not encourage serious consideration of the stakes and ends of/in knowledge work of all sorts. But Patricia (Clough, 1997) has argued that central to perhaps the most popular form of autoethnography (but not exhaustive of it) is a ‘‘selfconscious self-reﬂection’’ on the part of the subject of knowledge that typically is ‘‘personal’’ in ways that resemble autobiography and television melodrama.5 In its reliance on these latter, this form of autoethnography paradoxically enacts a return of experience as the ground for authenticity

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

65

and, by extension, truth (with the case of that ‘‘t’’ usually left ambiguous). In the wake of the criticism of the social scientist and cultural critic speaking for others, autoethnographic writing has offered qualitative researchers a way seemingly to speak for one’s autoethnographic self and avoid the vulnerability involved in speaking for others. When we remember that symbolic interactionist and other phenomenological traditions in interpretive social science tend to privilege if not sympathize with such speech, theorized to come from an experiencing and centered self – a self very similar indeed to that of ‘‘Woman,’’ discussed above – we begin to see how certain forms of autoethnography do not in fact follow poststructuralist argument in its deconstruction of the humanist being. Rather, they easily can underwrite a return of that very being now speaking, unabashedly, for him- or herself as one who sees/experiences and represents/reports what that seeing/experiencing is and what it means. This is especially apparent when the author in question speaks both as a social critic/analyst and as a member of any category of persons who, it is believed, have not heretofore been heard or been ‘‘given voice.’’ If such writing does not embody an appreciation of the internal fragmentation of the speaking/writing subject, in history and time and body, such as that which psychoanalytic criticism in its reworked feminist versions offers, the fantasy of an authentic voice from/of experience can go untroubled. And in that it would seem we are back precisely at the place where the critique of standpoint theories began. Because of this, Patricia has been hesitant to encourage autoethnographic work as a productive way to trouble the construction of discursive authority in scholarly writing and criticism oriented toward the future. Of it she has said: ‘‘the subindividual ﬁnite forces realized with the deconstruction of the subject have little play [t]here; indeed, the subject of autoethnography often ends up full of its selfidentity’’ (Clough, 2000, p. 17).6 From this hesitance, she has considered what if any experimental versions of this genre might produce texts that are more open and mobile, not organized around the narrative scholar/subject/author ostensibly telling his or her story of (heroic) knowledge work done, but also not in the least denying how forces move through the writer – and are inﬂected by that writer – but not fully under her or his control. In the collection of essays by Patricia and her former graduate students discussed in the next section, one ﬁnds engagements with autoethnography that grapple with these problems of how to write a reﬂective and reﬂexive story in which both many and far-ﬂung subjects – often unknown – speak as ghosts in and through bodies that often are not their own and that are sometimes only so in pieces (see, e.g., Kim, 2007; Cho, 2007).

66

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

AFFECT, BODIES, AND OPEN COMPLEXITY: TOWARD REVISING CULTURAL THEORY AND CRITICISM FOR THE BECOMING NOW In Patricia’s most recent essays (2004, 2007, 2008), we see her address changes in the very conditions of possibility for the social itself as they emerge in the new millennium. Arguably her boldest and most wide-ranging writing to date, these inquiries contribute to an analysis of the social, cultural, and historical changes, worldwide, that in her view ‘‘pressure’’ writers of cultural theory and cultural criticism to reconsider both what they see and how they argue. In this, Patricia again sees more clearly and earlier than most both the signiﬁcant and entwined details of these global-local changes as well as some of the changes that critical thought about them must make to remain productively critical. As she has done throughout her career, Patricia here reaches across disciplinary boundaries to open and connect writings that resonate productively when drawn together but that often remain unknown within disciplinary practices that deem them irrelevant. In this she argues less that current cultural studies and cultural theory are no longer productive as they are insufﬁcient to engage increasingly prevalent and important aspects of global geopolitics, ﬂexible capital, labor subsumed by capital, and experiments in technoscience (Clough, 2007; and see Clough, 2004). She offers a friendly criticism of traditions from which she herself regularly has drawn – psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, symbolic interactionist sociology, and feminist poststructuralism – proposing that changes in the world involving information, affect, technology, bodies, movement, time, memory, capital, and value are the occasion to supplement currently conventional cultural analysis. To paraphrase her own account of the new direction in her work that these projects are, ‘‘I am there because capital and technoscience and telecommunications – all and more – already are there.’’ In an introduction to the essays collected from work by her former students in courses in Sociology and Women’s Studies, Patricia marks a ‘‘shift in y critical theory’’ from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life; from y [presuming] equilibrium-seeking closed systems to engaging the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions of metastability; from focusing on an economy of production and consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-individual bodily capacities or affects in the domain of biopolitical control. (Clough, 2007, p. 2)

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

67

Although this shift indexes and suggests a wide range of topics, here I want to note very brieﬂy, following Patricia, how these implicate understandings of the human subjects taken up in cultural theory and research and the subjectivities of the cultural critics themselves as well; in short, I want to point out how in this she continues the rewriting of the subjectivity that is this essay’s theme. Certainly, one of the most challenging aspects of these movements for cultural theorists and cultural studies scholars – and, certainly, for qualitative social scientists – is the decentering of signiﬁcation, representation, and meaning. This is not a matter of announcing yet again that there is a crisis in representation but rather a taking note of work that disattends representational practices and signiﬁcation, arguing that they are not at the center of the questions coming into view. That is, to study the social today does not necessarily mean giving prime place to a study of meaning, at least as it has been treated in most cultural theory, semiotics, and phenomenology. That is quite a claim. And to say that meaning and representation are not always at the center of the social is to say more. It is to say that the ﬁgure who/that operates these practices is, if not superceded in this then, certainly, disarticulated by diverse movements that at the least supplement those of the human and most certainly the humanist subjects caught up in these processes. This attention to the distributed and dynamic rather than only to the centered and static or ﬁxed – a focus that is also found in science studies and feminist science studies (see Latour, 1985, 1999; Pickering, 1995; Haraway, 1997, 2003; Barad, 2007) – insists that there are multiple, diverse, and everongoing sources of movement in the social-cultural, among which is the ﬁgure of the signifying and representing human(ist) subject. Another way of putting this, as brieﬂy noted earlier, is that the treasured humanist conception of agency is rewritten as distributed beyond and within the human and what Patricia calls ‘‘organic [as distinct from non-organic rather than inorganic] life.’’ Pearson (1999), commenting on the Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari notion of ‘‘machinic assemblage’’ – one that much aids understanding of these arguments – and what he calls ‘‘new work in the philosophy of mind,’’ writes: These developments call for a major reconﬁguration of ethology since behaviour can no longer be localized in individuals conceived as performed homunculi, but has to be treated epigenetically as a function of complex material systems which cut across individuals (assemblages) and which traverse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries (rhizomes). This requires the articulation of a distributed conception of agency. (pp. 170–171)

68

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

Such an approach to agency should not be read to suggest that interest turns away from the human even though it is no longer premised or centered on the humanist subject and its trauma. Patricia argues that the attempts to rethink the human as other than an essentialized subject or even the traumatized subject of psychoanalysis take us beyond Foucault’s disciplinary society and its normalizing/socializing/ideological enclosures, which operate through representation and interpellation, and are premised on a view of the human body as whole organism to be shaped and ‘‘trained to work’’ (Parisi and Terranova, in Clough, 2007, p. 17). She notes several sources of such thought – Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of ‘‘bodies without organs’’ and of bodies as ‘‘machinic assemblages’’; the earlier and enormously consequential rewriting of entropy in cybernetics by Claude Shannon and a subsequently developed view of the body as an information processing and computational system; the emergence and impact of molecular biology and genetic technologies, allowing views of the human and other bodies in terms of preindividual capacities not deﬁned primarily in terms of their contributions to the homeostasis of an imagined ‘‘larger’’ unity. Especially in seeing bodies as information processing systems, information is understood mathematically, as ‘‘an uncertain and probabilistic milieu by reducing it to sets of alternatives that determine more or less likely sets of possibilities on the basis of a given distribution of probabilities as determined by the relationship between channel and code’’ and where ‘‘the universe is [seen as] mobile and probabilistic regardless of the categories of understanding applied to things by human perception’’ (Terranova in Clough, 2007, p. 17). Here, Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle becomes less a description of a human(ist) subject’s knowledge (epistemology) but more a question of the undecidability of matter. Patricia draws our attention to the way the human body – as one body among others – in its virtually endless preindividual and molecular capacities has been disarticulated and pursued by increasingly ﬂexible capital entwined with various nationalisms, war machines, and self-reﬂexive systems that monitor risk in service of what Deleuze has called control societies. At the same time, bodies have been reviewed and opened up by wide-ranging technoscientiﬁc experimentation. Although the reign of organic metaphors and the moral weight of equilibrium, balance, and harmony characteristic of homeostasis as the telos of all conventionally ordered systems make it difﬁcult to appreciate, this attention to preindividual bodily capacities helps us see a complexity that is effaced in the wholism that characterizes Enlightenment thought. Pearson’s (1999)

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

69

characterization of machinic assemblage, on which Patricia draws, underlines the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept intends not to respect familiar boundaries, organic or otherwise: ‘‘A machinic assemblage connects and convolutes the disparate in terms of potential ﬁelds and virtual elements, and crosses techno-ontological thresholds without ﬁdelity to relations of genus or species’’ (p. 170). Following the origins of complexity theory from biology and physics to postcybernetic thought and insights gained from reading Deleuze, Patricia takes up questions that aim to rework the very notion of evolution or the theory of change inherited from Darwin. While the latter suggests we understand change as a linear movement from simple to complex forms, Patricia urges a consideration of what biologist Diane Margulis and Dorian Sagan have called ‘‘endosymbiosis’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 12). This argues that it is out of a chaotic and turbulent complexity – arguably consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘machinic assemblage’’ and at least some of what is named as ‘‘entropy’’ in cybernetics – that new and dynamic forms of order or pattern can emerge through an evolutionary capacity that does not simply reproduce what has been before. This rewriting of chaos and disorder as possible sources of creative emergence can be found in several lines of recent work outside the social sciences, including that of Donna Haraway (1997, 2003), drawing on Alfred North Whitehead; by Karen Barad (2007), writing from the work of Neils Bohr; of N. Katherine Hayles (1999) and Luciana Parisi and Terranova (2000) who have written on the history of cybernetics and postcybernetics; and by Keith Ansell Pearson (1999), Mark Hansen (2004a, 2004b), and Brian Massumi (1998, 2002), who comment variously on the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Patricia describes her own sense of surprise and interest at reading Pearson’s criticism of the theory of autopoiesis as set forth by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, which she has used in her earlier work. Pearson’s point, following Deleuze, is that the autopoietic system that Maturana and Varela describe, while dynamic and self-regulating/sustaining and while forefronting the coevolution of environment and system/ organism, stories a system that remains informationally and organizationally closed to its outside and thus reiterates and depends on the maintenance of that very inside/outside dualism. That is, while external circumstances are recognized to impact the system’s internal operation, this happens only insofar as the system selects those aspects of its outside that contribute to the maintenance of its past and established form and function, its ‘‘inside.’’ While we may say that it ‘‘interacts’’ in this exchange (but see Barad, 2007 on ‘‘intra-action’’), it does so only selectively and to serve its own

70

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

homeostasis, striving to deﬂect and nullify inputs that disserve the continuation of a smooth and reiterative operation. In short, its form, function, and operation do not evolve. Patricia draws on Pearson (1999) for a conception of system – including the organism, including the human organism – that is both informationally open and considerably more turbulent. This system maintains – sometimes only barely – orderliness in far from equilibrium conditions from which new dynamic forms of being, life, and thought might emerge (and which, by deﬁnition, do not conserve what has been and, as such, can be both exciting and frightening to the humans involved). Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis, says Pearson (1999), does not take into account ‘‘the extent to which all living systems and their boundaries are caught up in machinic assemblages that involve modes of transversal becoming’’ (p. 170). Central to Patricia’s thought about what she calls preindividual bodily capacities is her focus on affect and affectivity, which in some sense displaces her earlier attention to the more discursively situated psychoanalytic topic of desire. She writes, quoting Brian Massumi, that affect, which social scientists might misread as ‘‘emotion,’’ refers to: a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness. y [A]ffect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or [to] the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive – that is, aliveness or vitality. y Affect constitutes a non-linear complexity out of which the narration of conscious states such as emotion are subtracted but always with ‘‘a never-to-be conscious autonomic remainder.’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 2)

Affect is the complex ‘‘out of which’’ that the narrated objects emotion and desire are drawn by and through subjects who are themselves emergent in those narratives and in narrative time. Not ‘‘presocial’’ and not thought only in reference to human bodies – especially human bodies as organic wholes – this understanding of affect has emerged through the use of and careful attention to new technologies the operation of which enables its very conception and si(gh)ting. Here, the technical becomes inextricably part of the very ‘‘felt vitality’’ named. This attention to affect requires a shift away from theories of the social or discursive construction of bodies and matter. Affect is not ‘‘a conscious matter; it is not even unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense’’ and: [t]he affective turn throws thought back to the disavowals constitutive of western industrial capitalist societies, bringing forth ghosted bodies and the traumatized remains of erased histories. It also sends thought to the future – to the bodily matter and bio-technologies of technoscientiﬁc experimentation. (Clough, 2007, p. 3)

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

71

And this sense of affect requires that time, as opened up in Deleuze’s work, be understood to exceed the familiar subject-based, narrative conception found in that critical theory. Patricia points to Mark Hansen’s discussion of the work of video artist Bill Viola to help us consider the unfolding of such dynamic and becoming capacities through the technology of digital imaging of human faces. Viola’s dramatically slowed images allow us to see affect – which, without this technology, emerges much too fast for the naked eye to recognize – as existing prior to perception and emotion, the ‘‘out of which’’ these latter are made but that exists at a scale and in a materiality that has not been noticed by most cultural theory (see Hansen, 2004a). Although I cannot here pursue these fascinating ideas as Patricia does, it is clear that the ‘‘excess’’ of which she speaks, above, is outside of human perception and consciousness but very much of the human body and a dynamism. Following a long line of feminist critics of disembodied dreams of the virtual (see Hayles, 1999), Patricia takes very seriously the dynamic materiality – what Haraway might call the ‘‘ﬂeshiness’’ – of the matter at hand, although perhaps in a way that some of those colleagues might not at ﬁrst recognize as such. Long seemingly kept at arm’s length in much cultural analyses, matter and the material here are of central importance, although not as determinative and prior. In fact, the materiality that Patricia ﬁnds most exciting is one that emerges from Pheng Cheah’s (1996) friendly critique of Judith Butler’s vision of (bodies that) matter. That is, this is a materiality that reﬂects the insights of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism while reworking key elements of each (and see Massumi, 2002). The challenge in these discussions, among others, is how to take dynamic matter into account in critical and cultural theory – that is, of course, in discourse – in a way that does not reduce it to culture’s and language’s impoverished ‘‘other’’ needing to be ‘‘given meaning’’ by the human(ist) subject in order to become signiﬁcant. What does emerge, then, when meaning is made cannot be seen as ‘‘constructed’’ by a sovereign subject who is in control, but rather more as a joint ‘‘invention’’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 12), a coevolutionary emergence that did not exist before. This project, arguably, might hold some of the most exciting questions for those who do qualitative inquiry, but it does require a modesty about the contributions of human(ist) consciousness. These writers observe that ﬂuid, ﬂexible, and global capital long since has pursued the promise of affect and the capitalization of preindividual bodily capacities in service of its own vitality and, increasingly, for its own protection as entwined with technoscientiﬁc developments on which these changes rest. Patricia and her colleagues describe the emergence of an

72

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

‘‘affect economy’’ that turns not primarily on the disciplining and interpellation of laboring selves and subjects, but, rather, on the subsumption of myriad preindividual vitalities that have come to assume their own particular market value. This is a change that is seeable ‘‘not only in terms of biotechnology, biomedicalization, and genetics but also in terms of a technologically dispersed education/training in self-actualization and self-control at the pre-individual, individual, communal, national and transnational levels’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21). Drawing on the work of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and George Caffentzis to help extend her own vision shaped from Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine what she calls ‘‘the postcybernetic bodies of the early twenty-ﬁrst century’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21), Patricia calls our attention to a growing shift from economies that focus on the control of production and consumption to those organized in terms of the circulation and modulation of affect, where ‘‘it is not the surplus labor of workers around the world that is producing value but rather the calculation of the risks to [and quality of] their lives and to[/of ] life itself’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21). Recalling her own earlier critique of standpoint epistemologies, she notes that position-based epistemologies – for instance, thinking of ‘‘the worker’’ as subject – cannot provide an understanding of these movements: the conception of the social she draws on here cannot be thought in terms of the humanist subject (and see Hardt, 1995, pp. 40–41). With the real subsumption of labor by capital, she writes, quoting Negri, ‘‘labor ﬁnds its value in affect, if affect is deﬁned as ‘the power to act’’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 25), and it is in the modulation of affect as this potential that capital has itself invested (see Hardt, 1995, pp. 38–39). In such an economy, bodies and elements thereof are differentially valued with reference to these capacities, often described in terms of statistical population aggregates. Some are demeaned, exploited, even exhausted completely to death in war and massacre while others are the objects/subjects of enormous investment and elaboration (Clough, 2007, pp. 24–25) evident in a global biopolitics that can have mortal local effects. Anthropologist Ann Anagnost’s (2004) study of the ongoing transformation of China’s economy and the operation of capital accumulation in those shifts offers Patricia an example of just this sort of subsumption. Anagnost directs attention to the relationship of two sorts of Chinese bodies: that of the rising urban middle class one-child-only child, on one hand, and that of the uneducated and unskilled rural-to-urban migrant, on the other. What brings these two bodies into dynamic relationship is the notion of suzhi or ‘‘quality’’ of the lives involved. More speciﬁcally, the concern is to raise the quality of some lives while derogating or leaving behind the quality or

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

73

capacity of others. Anagnost points out that this concern, which has emerged discursively if not yet as ofﬁcial policy, arises just at the time when China has moved to what is called, increasingly, a ‘‘post-socialist’’ and ‘‘global’’ economy, which is to say one of increased privatization, capital accumulation, and an explosive interest in and desire for operation of ‘‘the market.’’ Increasingly, Anagnost argues, it has become important to sort Chinese lives into categories for investment in their future possibilities. In this, the middle class, urban, postsocialist child has become the object and subject of a great deal of what Negri, who both Patricia and Anagnost cite, would call ‘‘affective labor’’ in service of higher quality and more promising potential along diverse dimensions as well as toward enhanced well being and vitality. Here, the very notion of production is transformed from a focus on a product or task relative to that product to ‘‘the continuous modulation, variation and intensiﬁcation of social cooperation that occurs through interaction and linguistic performances which y far from giving rise to a ﬁnal product, exhaust themselves in the communicative interaction that their own ‘performance’ brings about’’ (Virtanen, 2004, p. 225). Patricia argues that the calculus that connects these two bodies is in terms of a conception of a biomediated body invested by capital around and in which an ‘‘informational logic’’ provides the basis for the determination of the energies and costs of this affective labor. In this body, diverse qualities of life as well as the value of life itself can be calibrated and compared in a common measure and ‘‘be made exchangeable.’’ While in all of this, Patricia and her colleagues see the subject and her actions/thoughts as less central, we cultural analysts and critics mostly still write uncritically from just such an autoaffected place of our own. Although we may have encountered and engaged, more or less productively, the inevitable trauma of the subject that psychoanalysis long since has announced, most of us have not yet begun either to examine the ﬂows of affectivity and their capture and modulation that she and others describe; and perhaps we have not even noticed the ways that our own bodies and subjectivities are rewritten by them, not to mention imagining our own bodily involvement in the trauma of war, violence, terror, and the calculation of worthy and not worthy life/lives itself/themselves. In this, as she has done before, Patricia invites us to follow thought toward the future, a future in which we must not only see the human ﬁgured differently – and, arguably, as ‘‘less’’ if read only from the fantasized position of a humanist subject – but as more internally multiple and diverse; as itself a machinic assemblage linked to other assemblages with diverse lines of energy that push and pull in many directions at the same time. Most of

74

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

the orthodoxies through and in which cultural theory and cultural studies emerged 25 or 30 years ago fail to appreciate the complexity of the material– semiotic entities, to borrow Haraway’s term, that here can be seen. One might even empathize with the cultural critic who is inclined to turn back to the more familiar forms of analysis. Thankfully, for her readers, Patricia never has found that sort of move to be one she can make or, if made, sustain (which is not to say that it sometimes has been appealing). For her, we might say that Voltaire’s ‘‘best of all possible worlds’’ – to which I allude, through Pearson and Deleuze in this essay’s epigraph – cannot be those that are safe and mostly known but rather must be and always have been those that still are unknown and at least somewhat out of control. And of course that is not all. They must have some sort of human promise, even if we cannot know quite what that means. While now difﬁcult to see in the affective turn to which she points, the question of how these shifts might be resources not only for capital and its interests, but also for effective ‘‘resistant projects’’ involving human bodies and linked heterogeneous subjects/actants and objects provides the condition for her work. That she cannot now quite see the forms and possible effects of such projects and that she knows there are no (and never have been any) ‘‘guarantees’’ as to their results become grounds not for despair but for hopeful engagement. From the daring and courage of her intelligence in these pursuits, and from the life she has given them, we, her readers and interlocutors, also have been moved elsewhere, which, indeed, is not a small thing.

NOTES 1. Much as it was impossible for any but select members of a certain class of white, Protestant gentlemen to be credible witnesses to the appearance and performance of nature in the experimental laboratory of Robert Boyle in seventeenth century London (see Haraway, 1997, pp. 23–39; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). 2. And see Scott (1991) on experience. 3. I am here reminded of this question as set forth by Susan Leigh Star (1991), who writes in feminist science studies, and whose work is discussed by Donna Haraway. Star’s version of the question is, simply, ‘‘Cui bono? ’’ 4. Here I draw very selectively from the rich and diverse array of questions bearing on teletechnology and the unconscious that Patricia addresses in her book. 5. The foremost proponent of autoethnography of this kind has been sociologist Carolyn Ellis. Beyond her Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness (1995), about which Clough (1997) writes, see her recent book, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (2004).

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

75

6. See my discussion of reﬂexivity in the work of Steven Woolgar as seen by Haraway (Schneider & Wang, 2000, pp. 241–251).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Patricia Clough, Michal McCall, and Norman Denzin for their encouragement and support in this work.

REFERENCES Anagnost, A. (2004). The corporeal politics of quality (suzhi). Public Culture, 16, 189–208. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘‘sex’’. New York: Routledge. Cheah, P. (1996). Mattering. Diacritics, 26, 108–139. Cho, G. (2007). Voices from the teum. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 151–169). Durham: Duke University Press. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (Eds). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clough, P. T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power, and academic discourse. New York: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (1997). Autotelecommunication and autoethnography: A reading of Carolyn Ellis’s Final Negotiations. Sociological Quarterly, 38(1), 95–110. Clough, P. T. (1998 [1992]). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. New York: Lang. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (2004). Future matters: Technoscience, global politics, and cultural criticism. Social Text, 80(22), 1–23. Clough, P. T. (2007). Introduction. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 1–33). Durham: Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory Culture and Society, 25(January), 1–22. Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. (1992 [1980]). Deviance and medicalization: From badness to sickness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, C. (1995). Final negotiations: A story of love, loss, and chronic illness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham: Duke University Press.

76

JOSEPH SCHNEIDER

Hansen, M. (2004a). The time of affect, or bearing witness to life. Critical Inquiry, 30, 584–626. Hansen, M. (2004b). New philosophy for a new media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium. FemaleManr_meets Oncomouset: Feminisn and technoscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. J. (2003). Companion species manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M. (1995). The withering of civil society. Social Text, 45, 27–44. Hartsock, N. (1985). Money, sex, and power. New York: Longman. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in science, cybernetics, and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kassabian, A. (2001). The ghosted writing of a haunted poststructuralism, or how I learned to read. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 542–544. Kim, H. (2007). The parched tongue. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 34–46). Durham: Duke University Press. Kitsuse, J. I., & Schneider, J. W. (Eds). (1984). Studies in the sociology of social problems. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Kitsuse, J. I., & Schneider, J. W. (1989). Introduction: Typiﬁcation and social problem construction. In: J. Best (Ed.), Images of Issues: Typifying contemporary social problems (pp. xi–xiv). Hawthorne: Aldine De Gruyter. Latour, B. (1986). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Massumi, B. (1998). Requium for our prospective dead (toward a participatory critique of capitalist power). In: E. Kaufman & K. J. Heller (Eds), Deleuze and Guattari: New mappings in politics, philosophy, and culture (pp. 40–64). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. McCall, M. M. (2001). Clough and Derrida at the scene of writing. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 544–549. Neitz, M. J. (2001). On rereading the ends of ethnography through displacements in the ﬁeld. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 553–557. Parisi, L., & Terranova, T. (2000). Heat-death, emergence, and control in genetic engineering and artiﬁcial life. CTheory, www.ctheory.com/article/a84.html.5 Pearson, K. A. (1999). Germinal life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge. Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, J., & Wang, L. H. (2000). Giving care, writing self: A ‘‘new’’ ethnography. New York: Lang. Schneider, J. W. (2001). The end of ethnography? Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 549–553. Schneider, J. W., & Conrad, P. (1983). Having epilepsy: The experience and control of illness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, J. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773–797.

Contributions from the Work of Patricia Ticineto Clough

77

Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technology, and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions. In: J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters: Power, technology, and the modern world (pp. 26–56). Oxford: Blackwell. Virtanen, A. (2004). General economy: The entrance of multitude into production. Ephemera, 4(3), 209–232, www.ephemeraweb.org

PRODUCING, CONSUMING, AND PROVIDING INSTRUCTION ON POETIC TEXTS IN THE CLASSICAL ROMAN ERA: THE PRAGMATIST CONTRIBUTIONS OF HORACE, LONGINUS, AND PLUTARCH$ Robert Prus ABSTRACT Although it is often assumed that the study of human group life as ‘‘something in the making’’ is a product of the more distinctive emphasis of 20th century American pragmatist scholarship, the roots of the analysis of the social construction of activity run much deeper. Whereas poetics (i.e., ﬁction) represents only one arena in which earlier scholars have more explicitly addressed the matters of human knowing and acting, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch, three authors from the classical Roman era (c. 200 BCE-500 CE) contribute notably to an understanding of the ways in which people accomplish activity. While Horace and Longinus focus primarily on the production of poetic texts, $

Paper presented at the Couch-Stone Symposium (Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction) held at the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, May 5–6, 2007.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 81–103 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30006-4

81

82

ROBERT PRUS

Plutarch addresses the matter of reading, comprehending, and utilizing ﬁctional materials within instructional contexts. The texts of Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch are generally valued for the insight that they cast on the Roman and Greek life-worlds in the classical Roman era, but they also assume considerable importance as detailed reference materials for developing a more informed, comparative (i.e., transhistorical) analysis of the study of human knowing and acting in contemporary contexts. Because of the particular subject matter they address, their extended levels of involvements in the communication process and their detailed analysis of people’s roles as authors, instructors, and readers, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch provide much valuable insight in the production and use of written texts. Moreover, given their associated attentiveness to the matters of authenticity and misrepresentation, persuasion and intrigue, and interpretation and inference, these statements should have considerable value to a wide range of scholars and educators.

INTRODUCTION There is a fact, however, which we must recall to the minds of the young not once merely, but over and over again, by pointing out to them that while poetry, inasmuch as it has an imitative basis, employs embellishment and glitter in dealing with the actions and characters that form its groundwork, yet it does not forsake the semblance of truth, since imitation depends on plausibility for its allurement. (Plutarch, Moralia, I: 25:7 [Babbit trans.])

The analysis of human group life as ‘‘an interactional, humanly constructed essence in the making’’ is often linked to American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot symbolic interaction.1 However, a number of classical Greek and Roman scholars not only established the foundations of a pragmatist approach to the study of human group life but also provided a number of instructive portrayals of group life as practical accomplishment. As part of a larger study of the contributions of classical scholarship to the social sciences,2 this paper considers the works of three poets of the Roman era who address matters of human knowing and acting in more explicit and sustained terms.3 While the texts introduced here represent only a portion of the fuller range of the classical poetical materials that have survived the ravages of time, they provide a considerable amount of material pertinent to the study, analysis, and representation of human lived experience.

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

83

Although well-known as classical authors, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch generally are not recognized as philosophers, educators, historians, or social scientists. As a result, their work has been much neglected by people in these latter areas of scholarship. Still, whereas the texts considered here have been developed with respect to the production and consumption of ﬁctional materials, these materials also (a) represent ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Roman and Greek life-worlds, (b) generate particular insight into the ways that people engage poetic endeavor, and (c) provide some comparatively astute analyses of humanly engaged activities more generally. As well, because these texts have been developed in notably detailed manners, they (d) constitute a valuable set of reference materials (data) for transsituational and transhistorical comparative analysis for scholars attentive to the study of human group life on a more generic or transcontextual level.

POETICS IN THE ROMAN ERA: FOUNDATIONS, EMPHASES, AND AUTHORS Before focusing on the three authors introduced here, it may be instructive to acknowledge the broader foundations and emphases of ﬁction in the Roman era.4 First, although much of the ﬁctional literature of this era was written in Latin, it is important to be mindful of the classical Greek literature (c. 700-300 BCE) that not only preceded but also informed subsequent Latin and Greek poetics in the Roman era. Indeed, whereas the material from the Roman era has been central to the development of Western European scholarship more generally, Roman (Latin Roman and Greek Roman) scholarship of all sorts is deeply indebted to those working in the classical-Greek era. Like other peoples of record, the early Romans, appear to have developed a wide range of casual ﬁctional representations. However, while Lucius Livius Andronicus (c. 284-204 BCE), Gnaeus Naevius (c. 260-200 BCE), Quintus Ennius (c. 240-170 BCE), and Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE) are frequently identiﬁed as among the ﬁrst to generate more sustained Roman poetical texts (Fantham [Kennedy, 1989, Vol. 1, 220–245]), these and other early Roman poets adopted Greek texts and models before they more systematically began to compose their own literature. Expressed in other terms, Latin epic or heroic ﬁctions, tragedies, and comedies were based on earlier Greek templates where these materials were

84

ROBERT PRUS

not more extensively copied from Greek sources. Notably, as well, a great many Greek literary terms and concepts were directly absorbed into Latin thought because the Romans lacked a vocabulary with which to articulate and convey these notions.5 Further, since Greek educators had been employed in Rome (instructing Romans on Greek scholarship) for some centuries prior to the Roman occupation of Greece, the integration of Greek thought into Latin scholarship was fairly extensive as well as enduring. Still, some important divisions persisted. Although some Greeks worked as instructors in what later would become West (Latin speaking) Rome and some Romans pursued educations in what would be known as East (Greek speaking) Rome, two rather separate, language-based realms of scholarly activities were evident in the classical Roman era and would persist for centuries beyond. Thus, despite their common classical-Greek base, the interconnections between Latin- and Greek-speaking scholarship are somewhat tenuous at best. Relatedly, following the Roman takeover of Greece in 146 BCE, it is essential to recognize the somewhat concurrent body of literature developed by Greek authors. As with the classical-Greek literature (c. 700-300 BCE), only some Greek and Latin texts from the Roman era have survived to the present day. Nevertheless, these texts also have a remarkable intellectual quality, the likes of which would only begin to become effectively approximated in Western Europe during the 12th–14th centuries.6 Further, because they had access to, and dialogued with, various classicalGreek texts, some of the materials that the later Greek and Roman authors generated provide present day scholars with an additional, comparative historical dimension that otherwise would be lost.7 Still, one encounters great unevenness in the ways in which these authors approached and represented matters of human knowing and acting in their poetic endeavors. Somewhat like contemporary symbolic interactionists, certain authors from the Roman era have been directly attentive to pragmatist considerations of language, multiple viewpoints, reﬂectivity, persuasive interchange, identities, relationships, emotionality, and activity of both individualized and collective sorts. Although this paper deals with only three authors whose works are relevant to pragmatist considerations of human knowing and acting in the classical-Roman era, it is hoped that this discussion may help readers appreciate a largely untapped set of resources pertinent to the study of human lived experience.8

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

85

ON HUMAN KNOWING AND ACTING Homer (Iliad and Odyssey, c. 700 BCE) and Hesiod (Theogony and Works and Days, c. 700 BCE) are generally acknowledged as the most consequential of the earliest poetic authors of record. Other especially prominent Greek poets include: the playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE), Sophocles (c. 495-405 BCE) and Euripides (c. 480-406 BCE) who are particularly renowned for their theatrically contrived tragedies; Aristophanes (c. 450-385 BCE) who is well-known for his theatrically developed parodies, and Menander (c. 344-292 BCE) who is appreciated for his ‘‘new’’ (softer) comedies. It is difﬁcult to tell exactly how attentive the authors of the Roman era were to particular instances of classical-Greek texts, but these materials generally were highly inspirational as well as conceptually enabling to those who followed.9 Among the Latin and Greek poets of the Roman era who address human knowing and acting in more sustained and analytic manners, the most pertinent are Horace (c. 65-8 BCE), Ovid (c. 43 BCE-18 CE), Dio Chrysostom (c. 40-120), Plutarch (c. 46-125), Longinus (c. 100 CE), and Lucian (c.120-200). However, the present paper will concentrate on some texts from Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch; statements that address the production and usage of poetic materials in more explicit, detailed, conceptual terms. However, and somewhat ironically given their notably parallel emphases on the nature, production and consumption of poetic materials, there is little evidence that the three authors whose works are considered here were especially attentive to Aristotle’s (394–322 BCE) Poetics or his related analysis of persuasive endeavor in Rhetoric.10 Likewise, although the three authors from the classical-Roman era make more extensive reference to Plato (427–347 BCE), it is not evident that they are fully mindful of the analysis of ﬁctional materials that Plato (see Republic, Laws) develops amidst his condemnation of poetic ventures as misrepresentative, if not more extensively corrupting, inﬂuences. Still some further qualiﬁcations are in order before we deal with Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch in more direct terms. First, instead of addressing the larger corpus of materials that these people have developed (most of which are more entirely poetically expressive in quality), particular attention will be given to those statements that deal with human knowing and acting in direct and sustained terms. As well, because these authors have focused on different sets of issues and have developed their texts amidst highly variable sets of poetic materials, their works will be presented in a ﬂow that diverges somewhat from a strict chronological ordering. Third, although these

86

ROBERT PRUS

authors discuss somewhat related conceptual notions, it is not apparent that they read one another’s works. Instead, the coherencies of their texts are more likely to reﬂect contacts with earlier Greek scholarship as well as the matter of authors experiencing and addressing somewhat parallel realms of human endeavor. Focusing more precisely on the production and consumption of ﬁctional representations, we begin with (1) considerations of generating poetic texts by Horace (c. 65-8 BCE) and Longinus (c. 100 CE). This is followed by (2) a discussion of how to teach and read poetic materials developed by Plutarch (c. 46-125 CE). Addressing the ways that people engage ﬁctional representations, as producers, instructors, and consumers, these authors take us into some broader considerations of educational and philosophic realms of endeavor as well as a variety of humanly enacted worlds and moral assessments of people’s activities and life-styles. Thus, while concentrating primarily on poetic endeavors, these authors provide us with an instructive set of materials pertaining to the sociology of knowing (especially representing, sharing, and comprehending information). With these qualiﬁcations in mind, we begin with two overtly instructional statements on how poetry should be pursued or accomplished as a craft. Whereas Horace writes in Latin and Longinus writes as a Greek, both authors (as participant–observers, analysts, and instructors) attend to poetics as social constructed essences. In addition to acknowledging the enabling quality of language as a communicative device for achieving intersubjectivity with the other as well as the importance of attending to human lived experience, Horace and Longinus are also highly mindful of the developmental, technological base of poetical endeavor.

HORACE Now listen to me, as I tell you. What it is that I – and with me the public – expect. You must note the ways in which each time of life behaves. And give a ﬁt grace to their varying natures and years. The child who is able already to form his words. And set ﬁrm steps on the ground is eager to play. With those of his own age; for the smallest cause. He ﬂies in a rage and as lightly recovers again. Changing from hour to hour. The beardless youth. Freed at last from his tutor, takes his delight. In horses and hounds and the grass of the sunny Campus.

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

87

As soft as wax, easily molded for evil, Brusque with his counselors, slow to make needful provision. Free with his money, spirited, full of desires. But swift to abandon things that he formerly liked. With altered pursuits, a man in the prime of life. Seeks riches and friends, becomes to have done already. What soon he will do all in his power to change. There are many misfortunes that circle a man when he’s oldy (Horace, The Art of Poetry [Dunsany and Oakley (Trans.), pp. 292–293])

Although Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BCE) is particularly wellknown for his odes and satires, our primary interest in his work revolves around ‘‘The Art of Poetry [or The Epistle to the Pisos].’’ Horace also wrote a number of satires, focusing on matters such as greed, vice, ambition, madness, fortune seeking, and the like, that offer some ethnographic insights and generic appreciations of human practices and relationships. However, both the ﬂeeting presentations and more thorough poetic encasements of these materials detract notably from their value as reference materials for the social sciences.11 Fortunately, although Horace’s The Art of Poetry (AOP) also is intended to entertain, this statement has a more distinctive analytical emphasis. Indeed, while Horace’s AOP is much less enabling and astute than Aristotle’s Poetics (of which Horace and other Latin poets seem unaware), Horace’s analysis of poetics not only has had a notable impact on the subsequent analysis of ﬁctional representation in Western European scholarship but still appears better known in many literary circles than is Aristotle’s Poetics (see Burns, 1990, pp. 28–29). While highlighting themes that are particularly relevant to a pragmatist analysis of ﬁctional representation in AOP, I will be relying on the translation of Lord Dunsany and Michael Oakley (1961). References refer to the page numbers in that volume. Still, since I have maintained the overall ﬂow of Horace’s statement, readers using other texts should be more readily able to locate particular sections of Horace’s statement in those texts. Sharing his insights on the broader ﬁeld of poetic endeavor with the Pisos (a father and his two sons, the latter of whom appear to be considering careers as authors of ﬁction), Horace (AOP, p. 287) introduces his text with an explicit recognition of the poetic license that artists and poets may assume in presenting wide ranges of (often discordant and insincere) images to others. Still, Horace cautions prospective authors to focus on subject matters that can be developed effectively within their own abilities and familiarities. Relatedly, they may strive for eloquence, clarity and charm while addressing things familiar to their audiences.

88

ROBERT PRUS

Although Horace (AOP, pp. 288–289) also encourages writers to introduce their readers to new names and terms of reference, he points out that it is the common or more generalized public practice rather than the poetic usage of particular words and phrases that establishes the popularity, decline, and possible resurgence of particular linguistic expressions. Noting that poetic artistry involves more than developing beautiful expressions, Horace (AOP, pp. 290–295) emphasizes the importance of authors relating to their audiences. Thus, Horace stresses the importance of writers (a) using words that match the emotions to be conveyed, (b) attending to the context of the events being featured, and (c) maintaining the coherency of any characters introduced. He also points to the practical value of authors (d) following tradition (and audience familiarities) in the materials they present and (e) introducing more novel features toward the end of their statements or in ways that more readily blend into notions that audiences already accept as viable. Writing many centuries before William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Horace (as indicated in the introductory passage; AOP, pp. 292–293) also explicitly encourages authors to attend carefully to people’s positions in the life-cycle and to the sorts of interests, activities, and limitations that characterize particular categories of people. Then, observing that people generally believe the things they see more than the things they hear, Horace (AOP, p. 293) emphasizes the importance of authors (as playwrights here) focusing on the more direct visual images they generate in staging presentations of their works. At the same time he indicates the importance of playwrights ﬁnding effective ways of verbally conveying images (e.g., through the use of actors’ reports on stage) of things (e.g., battles, ﬂoods) that cannot be presented on the stage. Horace (AOP, p. 294) also discusses the ways in which the chorus and musical accompaniment may be introduced to enhance the overall impact of their presentations. In an interim summary statement of sorts, Horace (AOP, p. 209) stresses the importance of authors attending to the matters of familiarity, coherence, and ﬂow so that they might enable audiences to more readily and completely engage the presentation. Then, following a consideration of the construction of verses, Horace (AOP, pp. 296–297) emphasizes the importance of (Roman) writers not just attending to but also more completely internalizing Greek authors as the models to be followed in developing one’s materials. Horace (AOP, p. 297) also encourages authors to actively search for ﬂaws in their own productions. He instructs those who intend to be competent authors to keep rewriting their texts until their materials are ﬂawless.

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

89

Then, referencing Socrates, Horace (AOP, p. 298) directs poets to strive to become familiar with the roles of a wide cross-section of people in the community. This way, Horace observes, authors will better know how to represent the parts of particular types of people and the ways that certain kinds of people relate to others. Indeed, Horace notes, carefully deﬁned characters may more effectively delight audiences and sustain their attention than the particular verses authors provide. If poets intend to give instruction through their works, Horace (AOP, p. 299) encourages them to be brief and to provide materials that are easily understood and remembered by their readers. When writing to please audiences, Horace instructs authors to stay close to everyday life so that credibility does not become an obstacle. Still, Horace contends, it is in mixing pleasure and sound advice that authors are more apt to achieve fame and ﬁnancial success. Later, in discussing technique, Horace (AOP, p. 302) takes issue with those who argue that the best poetry is either a natural gift or a purely technical matter. Thus, while arguing that explicit instruction and practice are essential to the development of an accomplished poet, Horace also insists on the importance of people’s existing abilities as the base on which instruction and technique may be most adequately developed. Horace (AOP, pp. 302–303) also explicitly cautions authors about the folly of attending to those who ﬂatter them. Instead, he encourages poets to seek out and keep company with those who will provide them with more sustained editorial feedback. Horace (AOP, pp. 303–304) ends his statement on the art of poetry with an insistence that poets (as creative essences) not only be allowed to live the life that they choose but also that they be allowed to pursue the time and manner of death that they prefer (unencumbered by the moralities and interventions of others). Albeit a comparatively short statement, Horace’s AOP is ﬁlled with insight for those interested in how people accomplish poetic endeavor and other creative writing projects. Since Horace writes as an insider (participant–observer) who is endeavoring to explain the very craft he addresses, these materials are particularly valuable. In the next text, Longinus’ On the Sublime (OTS), the author undertakes a somewhat related task. This statement also is intended to be instructional and, like Horace’s AOP, appears to be written by a highly accomplished author in the ﬁeld. Taken together, these two texts provide a particularly instructive base for approaching the study of the production of written materials more generally and poetic materials more speciﬁcally.

90

ROBERT PRUS

LONGINUS ON THE SUBLIME Although On the Sublime only appears to have been rediscovered by European scholars in the 16th century, this text represents a noteworthy, systematic, and sustained attempt to deﬁne literary eloquence on the part of a Greek author (c. 100 CE).12 While recognizing the entertaining, often playful, qualities of poetic materials, Longinus engages poetics in a rigorous, analytic-instructional manner. Indeed, On the Sublime is the most sustained analytical consideration of poetics on record from the classical-Roman era. After stating (OTS, I: 1) that the sublime consists of an eloquence and distinction of language that not only persuades audiences but also effectively transports audiences beyond themselves, Longinus (OTS, III: 2-VI: 5) identiﬁes a series of weaknesses that keep authors from attaining the sublime. These include: (a) more ambitious attempts to obtain grandeur, (b) attempts to please all audiences, (c) the extended, unwarranted use of emotionalism, (d) a failure to develop style, and (e) an excessive passion for novelty. Observing that it is difﬁcult to deﬁne excellence or the sublime, Longinus (OTS, VIII: 8) proceeds to identify ﬁve ways by which authors may pursue the sublime. These revolve around the matters of (a) fully developing one’s ideas, (b) invoking emotional sentiments appropriate to the text being developed, (c) striving for carefully controlled images through ﬁgures of thought and ﬁgures of speech, (d) pursuing nobility of phrase, and (e) attending to overall effects of dignity and elevation. Then, after observing that emotionality is not a requisite for sublimity (OTS, VIII: 2–4), Longinus illustrates these notions by invoking an assortment of Greek authors prior to focusing more directly on ampliﬁcation. Stating that ampliﬁcation (OTS, XI: 1–XIII: 1) is commonly achieved by the piling up of related phrases pertaining to particular topics, exaggerating the matters at hand, and stressing speciﬁc elements in sustained detail, Longinus differentiates ampliﬁcation from sublimity. Ampliﬁcation may emphasize quantity or matters of presence in various ways, but it does not guarantee grandeur. Likewise, elevation or sublimity sometimes may be achieved through direct or compact expressions. Longinus also notes that although ampliﬁcation emphasizes particular things, ampliﬁcation is not the same as providing proof for something [some text is lost]. Longinus (OTS, XIII: 2–XIV: 3) then proposes another route to sublimity. He suggests that those who zealously imitate the great authors (i.e., particular Greek historians, poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers) of

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

91

the past will ﬁnd much enabling inspiration. Then, seemingly ﬁnding inspiration in his own suggestions, Longinus in an exceptionally eloquent and instructive passage encourages contemporary authors to ask themselves not only what certain classical authors would say in particular situations but also how these classical authors would assess the particular productions of present day authors and their associates. By adopting the viewpoints of these classical scholars, it is anticipated that contemporary authors might develop text that is more ﬁtting for all times: We, too, then, when we at working at some passage that demands sublimity of thought and expression, should do well to form in our hearts the question, ‘‘How perchance would Homer have said this, how would Plato or Demosthenes have made it sublime or Thucydides in his history?’’ Emulation will bring those great characters before our eyes, and like guiding stars they will lead our thoughts to the ideal standards of perfection. Still more will this be so, if we give our minds the further hint, ‘‘How would Homer or Demosthenes, had either been present, have listened to this passage of mine? How would it have affected them?’’ Great indeed is the ordeal, if we propose such a jury and audience as this to listen to our own utterances and make believe that we are submitting our work to the scrutiny of such superhuman witnesses and judges. Even more stimulating would it be to add, ‘‘If I write this, how would all posterity receive it?’’ But if a man shrinks at the very thought of saying anything that exceeds the comprehension of his own time, then must all the conceptions of that man’s nature be like some blind, half-formed embryo, all too abortive for the life of posthumous fame. (Longinus, OTS, XIV: 1–3 [Fyfe, trans.])

In an immediately following passage, Longinus provides a succinct but compelling commentary on the centrality of images in poetic endeavor: Weight, grandeur, and energy in writing are very largely produced, dear pupil, by the use of ‘‘image.’’ (That at least is what some people call the actual mental pictures.) For the term Imagination is applied in general to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word has now come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience. That imagination means one thing in oratory and another in poetry you will yourself detect, and also that the object of poetry is to enthrall, of prose writing to present things vividly, though both indeed aim at this latter and at excited feeling. (Longinus, OTS, XV: 1–2 [Fyfe, trans.])

Clearly appreciating parallels between poetics and rhetoric, Longinus (OTS, XV: 8–12), notes that while poets often can exceed the limits of credibility in invoking the imagination, rhetoricians have the task of forging a highly believable version of reality in the instances in which they pursue judgments. It is through the use of the imagination in rhetoric that speakers may not only convince audiences of the viability of their claims but also more completely direct their minds and actions.

92

ROBERT PRUS

Focusing on the production of images in other people’s imaginations, Longinus (OTS, XVI) embarks on what will be an extended consideration of invoking ‘‘ﬁgures’’ (of thought, of speech) in pursuing the grandeur associated with sublimity.13 Noting that the apparent or deliberate use of ﬁgures tends to arouse suspicion on the part of audiences (as in concerns with deception, misrepresentation, and treachery through image manipulation), Longinus claims that ﬁgures are most effective when they are concealed by the speaker or author and the effects appear to emerge more naturally.14 In addition to building on the familiar or the taken for granted, Longinus notes the value of ‘‘ﬁgures of question and answer,’’ wherein the speakers or authors raise questions and, then, offer answers as if these were coming from other sources. Likewise, speakers may introduce ﬂashes of emotion, possibly amidst a series of seemingly disconnected phrases or instances of repetition and vivid presentation, often in rapid order, as subterfuge for projecting particular images that the author wishes to convey. Longinus also references ‘‘inversion,’’ wherein words or phrases are deliberately presented out of their usual order to create certain effects. Here, as well, the emphasis is on generating ﬁgures (and images) that appear natural or spontaneous rather than planned or contrived. Subsequently, Longinus (OTS, XXIII) suggests that authors consider the effects of accumulation (by invoking ‘‘ﬁgures of many cases’’), variation or differences, and building statements to climaxes as devices for making one’s images more compelling. Longinus (OTS, XXIV) also observes that the changing of terms of reference from singular to plural and vice-versa may generate stronger images in some cases. Longinus (OTS, XXV) further indicates that authors may achieve stronger images of things from the past by redeﬁning audience’s notions of time, as when events from the past are recast or transposed in ways that give them a heightened sense of immediacy. Somewhat relatedly Longinus (OTS, XVI) notes that authors may be more able to fully engage audiences in their presentations by addressing them more directly and singularly at certain points in the text (as in ‘‘This is important, don’t you think?’’). Longinus (OTS, XXVII) then considers authors’ abilities to assume the roles of the speciﬁc characters of whom they were speaking (wherein authors suddenly begin to personify the very characters that they had earlier been discussing as third parties).

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

93

Next, Longinus (OTS, XXVIII–XXIX) attends to ornamentation, wherein one dresses up one’s words and phrases (as in ‘‘Gilding the Lily’’). While acknowledging some gains to be made in this manner, Longinus also cautions readers about the risks of excessive ornamentation (lest it have the effect of ﬂattening, trivializing, or dulling the message). After noting that beautiful words (as in majestic terms) are to be used in contexts beﬁtting their applications [some text is lost here], Longinus (OTS, XXXI) observes that vulgar words also may be strategically employed to create certain, more compelling images. Longinus (OTS, XXXII) subsequently considers the use of metaphors, noting the particular potency of these comparative ﬁgures as image-shaping devices. He also acknowledges the advantages that can accrue to authors who invoke sustained sets of metaphors (themes) in dealing with commonplace descriptive matters. Still, like other ﬁgures that writers may use, Longinus cautions that an excessive use of metaphors tends to render texts ineffectual. Then, in a substantial shift of emphasis, Longinus (OTS, XXXIII) asks whether (in developing poetic materials or prose) it is more desirable for authors to pursue grandeur with some ﬂaws or to strive for impeccable precision while developing material of a more mediocre content. In developing his answer, Longinus notes that whereas an emphasis on precision often results in triviality, grand projects inevitably result in some failings. He also observes, somewhat ironically, that while the beautiful qualities of texts soon fade from memory, people often dwell on the imperfections they ﬁnd in others’ works. Still, noting that technical merits in themselves do not constitute greatness, Longinus argues that greater projects should be preferred for their nobility of enterprise. Later, Longinus (OTS, XXXVI) makes the argument that ﬂaws are to be considered in proportion to authors’ overall accomplishments in developing their texts. After this commentary on precision and grandeur [some missing text], Longinus (OTS, XXXVIII) addresses the use of hyperboles (wherein matters are particularistically stretched and reshaped) in generating images. Again, he emphasizes, ﬁgures have the greatest effect when they are introduced in manners that appear to have been more natural in their development. Longinus (OTS, XXXIX–XL) turns next to the arrangement of the contents of one’s texts. First, he encourages authors to be attentive to the ordering of their words and the harmony they generate therein. Then, Longinus stresses the overall conﬁguration of the passages that authors assemble in developing their text. Longinus observes that even less adequate authors can produce

94

ROBERT PRUS

superior products by attending to the overall composition of their works and the verbal carpentry entailed in generating the product they produce. As an extension of the overall effect, Longinus (OTS, XLI) next cautions authors to be mindful of the overall ﬂow or rhythm of their texts. While encouraging authors to avoid weak or disruptive ﬂows, as well as superﬁcial jingles, he also discourages authors from developing rhythms that are so pronounced that they detract audiences from the message being developed. Some last bits of instruction (OTS, XLII–XLIII) involve cautions about being overly brief, avoiding the use of trivial words to describe grand events, and becoming diverted from more central themes by attending to marginal matters. Longinus (OTS, XLIV) next laments the general decline of sublimity. While noting that many have claimed that democracy is the inspiration of noble minds, Longinus questions the integrity of this claim. Contending that the emphasis (in his democratic era) is on the love of money (and greed thereof ) rather than concerns with dignity or virtue, Longinus also notes that even philosophy, as it is presently practiced, offers no way out. Thus, rather than being inspired to achieve excellence, human minds are wasting away through insidious neglect. Following his brief commentary on the dangers of avarice, Longinus indicates that he will next address emotionality. He says that he has written on emotionality before [no available earlier text] and sees the topic as one that is closely connected with the pursuit of sublimity. [The rest of the text is lost .] As practitioners in the art of poetics, the Latin author Horace and the Greek author Longinus provide instructive ethnohistorical statements on the construction of ﬁctionalized materials and the quest for excellence in the materials that poets and other authors might prepare for their readers. Our third author, Plutarch, adds yet another dimension to the ways in which people might engage written text. Focusing more explicitly on the roles of those consuming these texts and even more speciﬁcally on those who might instruct others on how to read text, Plutarch acknowledges the intersubjective, reﬂective, purposive, instructed, and enacted aspects of written communications.

PLUTARCH Plutarch of Chaeronea biographer or historian presents pairs of famous texts, Plutarch discusses

(c46-125), a Greek author, is best known as a of sorts because of a series of texts wherein he Greek and Roman ﬁgures in Lives.15 In this set of matched sets of Greek and Roman ﬁgures whose

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

95

situations are similar in certain respects (as in founders of states, lawgivers, conquerors, and rhetoricians). Still, whereas Plutarch’s Lives attend to the circumstances, preparations, and activities of prominent historical characters, Plutarch seldom is identiﬁed as a bona ﬁde historian. Indeed, his work has a notably pronounced ﬁctional as well as an apparent moralistic quality. Thus, these statements are guided by considerations of people’s moral choices and are deﬁned by Plutarch’s evaluations of their activities rather than by more sustained (pluralist) scholarly analysis. Plutarch, himself, is quite attentive to these matters and says that he writes about lives and moralities rather than historical facts. Nonetheless, focusing on well-known individuals and presenting his cases in a more entertaining style, Plutarch’s Lives generated much attention following the rediscovery of his texts in Western Europe during the 16th century Renaissance. For our purposes, as students of the human condition, some materials from another collection of texts, Plutarch’s Moralia,16 are considerably more relevant. Although also presented in somewhat popularistic and moralistic terms at times, the topics in Moralia pertain more directly to the study of human knowing and acting. These include considerations of education and philosophy, and friendship, love, and interpersonal relationships, as well as emotionality, religion, morality, and character. Still, in keeping with the statements on poetics developed by Horace and Longinus, it is most appropriate in the present context to concentrate on Plutarch’s commentary on how young people should study poetry.17 Even though this text is often regarded as a minor, interim statement that simply deals with people’s education on route to the more serious study of philosophy, Plutarch’s How the Young Man Should Study Poetry is particularly important for appreciating (a) the ways that people consume or experience poetry as well as (b) the implications of ﬁctional materials and instructional emphases for the development of people’s characters.18 Plutarch does not conduct a sustained ethnographic study of how people read or come to know written text, but he still provides some very valuable materials on how both instructors and students might engage poetics in more direct and enabling terms. Relatedly, Plutarch suggests a number of worthwhile themes that contemporary scholars might pursue in greater ethnographic detail from the viewpoints of both instructors and students. Thus, whereas Plutarch’s statement is intendedly instructional, he generates considerable insight into the ways that people (as instructors and students) enter into the processes of interpreting, assessing, and learning from all manners of poetic text.

96

ROBERT PRUS

It is apparent that Plutarch shares many sympathies with Plato as a theologian and moral advocate. However, Plutarch does not assume the censorial postures toward poetics and poets that Plato’s spokespeople adopt in Republic and Laws. Hence, instead of censoring or outlawing poetic expression, Plutarch envisions poetics as a communicative medium. Nevertheless, poetic material is to be qualiﬁed through an instructional, interpretive process. For Plutarch, thus, poetics are to be selectively engaged by instructors in order to (a) help young people acquire character (as in virtue, bravery, and self-control), (b) develop wisdom and judgment, (c) achieve an understanding of the situations of poets as well as the particular people and other objects that poets represent, and (d) prepare people for the study of philosophy more generally. Plutarch begins his statement (How the Young Man Should Study Poetics [HSP]: 14) with an observation that while ﬁctional texts can generate pleasure on the part of young people, it is important to instruct young people on how to ﬁnd inspiration and utility from poetics. Noting that it is virtually impossible to prevent young people from accessing ﬁctional texts, Plutarch (HSP: 15) reasons that it is essential to ensure that these materials are engaged as appropriately as possible. Thus, rather, than keeping prospective philosophers from reading poetry, Plutarch (HSP: 15–16) envisions poetry as a resource to be used in ﬁnding value in the things that young people enjoy and to teach them to identify those materials that are not of value. Plutarch (HSP, 16) then explicitly states that poets tell lies. He notes that it is typically easier for authors to develop ﬁction rather than pursue the truth. Audiences, also, are likely to prefer ﬁction to more authentic representations. Indeed, Plutarch emphasizes, it is essential that readers be acutely mindful of the seductive powers of poets; not only with respect to deliberate deceptions but also the inadvertent fabrications that poets may develop in highly compelling manners. Plutarch (HSP, 17) follows this observation with illustrations of the ﬁctions that Homer and Sophocles knowingly presented about the gods. For reasons of this sort, Plutarch (HSP: 17–18) insists that newcomers be instructed on poetics as an imitative art and be encouraged to be explicitly attentive to the matter of assessing the plausibility of the imitations that poets generate. Plutarch also reminds readers that poets need not approve of or intend to promote the things they represent. In some cases, thus, Plutarch (HSP: 19) states that poets sometimes qualify their depictions of characters, actions, and events by directly interjecting critical commentary. Likewise, in a manner paralleling philosophers, Plutarch

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

97

(HSP: 20) notes that poets may intend that their text be used as a means for condemning or encouraging speciﬁc kinds of activities as well as a means of instructing people on particular matters. Still, an important task for instructors is to help readers distinguish authentic imitations from poetical attempts to astonish and excite readers. Where authors do not adequately clarify these matters, Plutarch (HSP: 21) says that it is advisable for instructors to draw explicit attention to these limitations. Another tactic (HSP: 22) for dealing with troublesome poetic text is for instructors to provide synonyms, explanations, or other clariﬁcations of particular words or passages. Then, addressing poetic representations of the gods, Plutarch (HSP: 23) illustrates the sorts of license (as in words, phrases, and diverse meanings) that poets assume in matters of theology. Plutarch (HSP: 24) then observes that readers need to be mindful of the ways poets use words in reference to other topics as well. Readers should attend to the ways in which poets use particular words for different purposes and consider other words that would better characterize the speciﬁc matters being depicted. Shifting frames somewhat, Plutarch (HSP: 25) then observes that the alluring feature of poetics is its attentiveness to authenticity. However, he stresses that it is the mixing of truth and falsehood that results in astonishment and enjoyment. Because of poets’ abilities to co-mingle authenticity and fabrication, Plutarch stresses the importance of readers developing a sense of skepticism about the materials they encounter. This skepticism (Plutarch, HSP: 26) not only is to encompass the poets as authors but is to be extended also to the characters those whose lives and activities are being depicted. Plutarch further encourages his readers (as is his own habit) to pointedly invoke moral judgments on the characters of whose activities they learn in these narrations. Plutarch (HSP: 27) deﬁnes a goal of instruction to induce young people to imitate and develop preferences for more virtuous characters and activities. Relatedly, Plutarch (HSP: 28) instructs readers to judge the virtuous and evil qualities of the characters that poets present and ask whether the acts and dispositions of the characters are consistent. Then, after indicating the desirability of those reading poetic materials to monitor their own behavior and to quest for moderation in their own characters, Plutarch (HSP: 29) notes the instructional value of attending to the ways in which different people (societies as well as individuals) deal with challenging situations (as in bravery in warfare). Next, having observed that individual readers may appreciate notably different aspects of any poetic endeavor (e.g., novel or unusual events vs.

98

ROBERT PRUS

elegant expression), Plutarch (HSP: 30–32) focuses on the particular use of poetry for generating character, as in managing one’s anger or being more attentive to the value of forethought. Approached in this manner, and attending to matters of civility and diplomacy as well as bravery in community contexts, Plutarch stresses the value of poetics for people learning valuable lessons of life. With appropriate guidance, thus, young people can gain instruction and wisdom even from materials of more unsavory sorts. Moving toward a conclusion, Plutarch (HSP: 35) again stresses the lessons of character that may be achieved through an instructionally enabled approach to poetics. In particular, Plutarch encourages an emphasis on moderation, accompanied by magnanimity of character. Hence, while condemning things that are evil, Plutarch stresses the importance of people dealing with life’s obstacles, challenges, and defeats with determined but controlled and congenial dispositions. Then, making a ﬂeeting reference to Plato’s notions of virtue, Plutarch (HSP: 36–37) concludes by stating that tutelage of this sort in poetics will prepare students for studies in philosophy.19

IN PERSPECTIVE Although their works have long been valued for their artistic and instructional qualities by scholars in literary circles, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch are almost unknown to educators, philosophers, and social scientists. However, when examined on their own, and especially in concert with one another, the texts discussed herein not only provide some very insightful materials on the ways in which people develop and engage ﬁctional texts but also have a much broader relevance for the study of human knowing and acting. By attending to the ways that people actively engage the symbolizing or meaning-making process as authors,20 instructors, and readers, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch introduce materials that have important implications for a pragmatist sociology of knowledge. Some may be tempted to dismiss these works as the quaint productions of the classical-Roman era. However, when situated within a broader historical context, amidst considerations of representing human knowing and acting in poetic terms – from Plato (Republic, Laws, Ion) and Aristotle (Poetics, Rhetoric) onward to John Dewey (1934, Art as Experience), Louise Rosenblatt (1978, The Reader, The Text, The Poem), and Becker (1982,

99

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

Art Worlds) – the relevance of these materials from Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch for education, philosophy, and the human sciences becomes even more compelling. That these texts were developed almost 2,000 years ago is even more valuable since they allow contemporary scholars to develop transhistorical and transcultural comparisons of a highly enabling sort. Moreover, because of the mixes of intentioned authenticity and playful fabrication as well as deliberate persuasive endeavor and inadvertent ambiguity that authors may invoke or otherwise generate in the production of written texts, along with the associated challenges of interpreting, comprehending, and utilizing these materials on the part of consumers and instructors, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch provide an invaluable set of reference points with which scholars of all ilks may reﬂect on their own productions and those of their more immediate associates as well as the materials developed within their respective academic ﬁelds.

NOTES 1. Brieﬂy expressed, symbolic interactionism (see Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969; Strauss, 1993; Prus, 1996, 1997, 1999 Prus & Grills, 2003); may be characterized by the following premises. Human group life is (1) intersubjective (is contingent on community-based, linguistic interchange); (2) knowingly problematic (with respect to ‘‘the known’’ and ‘‘the unknown’’); (3) object-oriented (wherein things constitute the contextual and operational essence of the humanly known environment); (4) multiperspectival (as in viewpoints, conceptual frameworks, or notions of reality); (5) reﬂective (minded, purposive, deliberative); (6) sensory/embodied and (knowingly) materialized (acknowledging human capacities for sensation and motion, as well as practical (enacted, embodied) physiological limitations and fragilities); (7) activitybased (as implied in the formulative (engaging) process of people doing things with respect to objects); (8) negotiable (whereby people may anticipate, inﬂuence, and resist others); (9) relational (denoting particular bonds or afﬁliations); and (10) processual (as in emergent, ongoing, or temporally developed). 2. While building extensively on the pragmatist components of the works of Plato (c. 420-348 BCE) and Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE), the larger project attends to a much wide range of classical Greek (c. 700-300 BCE) and Roman (c. 200 BCE-500 CE) scholarship. Thus, in addition to poetics, attention also has been directed toward pragmatist motifs in rhetoric, ethnohistory, religious studies, and philosophy. See Prus (2004) for a conceptual overview of the larger project. 3. In developing this statement, I have used the term ‘‘poetics’’ more generically to refer to a broad range of ﬁctionalized discourse (including rhymes, prose, theatrical productions, and the like) as well as the subcategory of materials that comment on poetic materials (as in criticism, analysis, and advice). 4. Although the Roman Empire existed in various conditions (sizes, continuities, and states of coherence and disarray), one might, somewhat generously, locate the

100

ROBERT PRUS

classical Roman era in the period c. 200 BCE-500CE. The division of Rome into West Rome (Latin) and East Rome (Greek) took place in 286 CE. 5. Thus, while Cicero (c. 106-43 BCE) openly laments the limitations of the Latin language when compared to the analytically rich Greek language and strives to promote a more distinctive Latin-based scholarship, it should be noted that welleducated Romans of Cicero’s day would be ﬂuent in spoken and written Greek as well as Latin. Although presently known almost exclusively as an orator or rhetorician, Cicero also is attentive to a considerable range of issues pertinent to a pragmatist analysis of human knowing and acting (see Prus, 2006). 6. Whereas the Latin literature would dominate the Roman Empire and become especially consequential in the development of Western European thought (and scholarship), the residues of classical-Greek scholarship (albeit notably constrained by various theological emphases) would provide the essential base for education in Eastern Europe as well as the southeastern Mediterranean arena. 7. It should not be assumed that the popular, 16th century Renaissance provided an adequate representation of classical-Greek scholarship. It did not. Indeed, some of the most consequential materials of a humanist, philosophic sort from the Greek, Roman, and (subsequent) Latin eras were largely ignored in the more expressive, poetical, artistic emphases of the 16th century Renaissance. Also see Durkheim (1904–1905). 8. Because this statement focuses on texts that deal with human knowing and acting in more explicit and extensive terms, little attention is given to some particularly wellknown Latin poets, such as Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus; c. 254-184 BCE), Terrence (Publius Terentius Afer; c. 185-159), and Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro; 70-19 BCE). Like the Greek poets that they imitate (e.g., Homer and Menander), these Roman authors present people as acting and interacting essences who engage the world in purposive, multiplistic, reﬂective, and linguistically enabled terms. Still, like the Greek poets they imitate, these Latin authors appear more intent on entertaining and/or moralizing with audiences than describing and analyzing human group life in more overt terms. 9. Readers are referred to Gilbert (1940), Dukore (1974), Kennedy (1989), and Sidnell (1991), amongst others, for a greater sense of the continuity of classicalGreek thought in Western poetics. 10. For a fuller appreciation of Aristotle’s relevance for pragmatist scholarship, see Prus (2003, 2004, 2007). 11. Of his many satires, Horace’s ‘‘An Apology for Satire’’ (Dunsany & Oakley, 1961, pp. 153–157) is among the most instructive from a pragmatist viewpoint. Horace considers the ways in which things are deﬁned and known, including poetic productions. Although he does not pursue this matter very fully, Horace asks whether satirists, whose texts more closely resemble everyday discourse, should be called ‘‘poets.’’ Relatedly, he asks whether comedy, which is also essentially prose, ought to be recognized as poetry. Still, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of ‘‘An Apology for Satire’’ is Horace’s (Dunsany & Oakley, 1961, pp. 156–157) explicit commentary of the role of his father as a moral guide. Indicating how his father anticipated, instructed, questioned, and advised him through an assortment of situations and behaviors, Horace credits his father with minimizing the misadventures and vices that Horace experienced in his formulative years. Even in this somewhat meandering poetic rendition, Horace’s

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

101

attentiveness to the persuasive (speech-related) role of the other for the knowing and acting of the target is unmistakable. Horace’s ‘‘Satire on Satire’’ also offers some valuable insights on the human condition. As Horace observes, since virtually everyone has failings or vices of one or other sorts, anyone could be selected as the target for satire or derision of some sort. 12. I am grateful to W. Hamilton Fyfe (1932) for his translation of Longinus, On the Sublime, as well as his introductory commentary on this text. Although authorship commonly is attributed to Longinus or Dionysius, the exact source as well as the broader dating (c. 100-300 CE) of this text is uncertain. For convenience, I will refer to the author as Longinus. 13. Readers familiar with Goffman’s (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life may appreciate the notably sophisticated analysis of impression management of poetic endeavor that Longinus provides. Also see Horace’s concerns with image work on the part of poets and Plutarch’s attempts to prepare students for the mixtures of fabrication and authenticity associated with poetical ventures. 14. This attempt to introduce more compelling images to an unexpecting audience may help account for some of the more intriguing, elusive, playful, and mystical effects of poetic and rhetorical endeavor. By contrast, much scientiﬁc explanation and pragmatist instruction (e.g., following the style of Aristotle) attempts to be clear, direct, and openly accessible. 15. Eighteen of Plutarch’s 22 sets of parallel lives have survived to the present time. See Perrin’s (1914) translation of Plutarch’s Lives (11 volumes in the Loeb series). 16. See the Loeb (15 volumes) translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. 17. I am indebted to Frank Cole Babbit’s (1927) translation of How the Young Man Should Study Poetry in Vol. I of Plutarch’s Moralia. 18. Those familiar with Emile Durkheim’s (1902–1903) Moral Education may appreciate some noteworthy parallels in Plutarch’s and Durkheim’s emphases on the development of character as a socially enabled process. Blumer’s (1933) study of the ways that young people experience movies (i.e., interpret, reconsider, and integrate aspects of ﬁlm ﬁction into their activities and senses of self) is also instructive in this respect. 19. Like his statement on studying poetry, Plutarch’s somewhat related text, ‘‘On Listening to Lectures’’ (LL) also considers the ways in which people may engage roles as students and instructors. Still, whereas HSP is more exclusively directed toward instructors, LL seems intended to be read by students as well as instructors. Amongst other things, Plutarch uses LL to alert readers to differing kinds of academic instruction; to encourage students to distinguish between sophistical instruction (as in shallow, ﬂuffy, but often popular instructors who deliver superﬁcial materials in more pleasing and ﬂattering styles) and more sincere, demanding instructors. Somewhat relatedly, Plutarch also indicates a number of ways that people engage student roles with respect to levels of dedication, styles of participation, and modes of self-expression. Attending to the mutuality that undergirds the student–instructor role, Plutarch (with some underlying frustration from personal experience as a lecturer) encourages students to be attentive and to strive to glean as much as they can by pleasantly, but actively, engaging the role of a learner. Responsibly assuming the role of listener, thus, is seen as an important step in the process of becoming a more genuine scholar.

102

ROBERT PRUS

20. Albeit focused on the development of historical accounts, Lucian of Samosata’s (120–200 CE) account of writing history (1959) offers some instructive parallels with the texts featured here (see Prus, 2008).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Beert Verstraete for his thoughtful discussions with me on these and related texts. I also would like to thank Norman Denzin for his thoughtful editorial assistance.

REFERENCES Aristophanes [c. 450-385 BCE]. (1938). The plays of Aristophanes (Introduction and Collected Works). In: Whitney Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr. (Eds), The complete Greek drama (Vol. II, pp. 421–1116). New York: Random House. Aristotle [c. 384-322 BCE]. (1984). The complete works of Aristotle. Jonathan Barnes (Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Becker, H. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blumer, H. (1933). Movies and conduct (Reprinted 1970. New York: ARNO). New York, NY: Macmillan. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. (Reprinted, 1986, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Burns, E. (1990). Character: Acting and being on the pre-modern stage. London: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin. Dukore, B. F. (1974). Dramatic theory and criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. New York, NY: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Durkheim, E. (1902–1903), (1961). Moral education. E. K. Wilson and H. Schnurer (Trans.). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1904–1905), (1977). The evolution of educational thought. P. Collins (Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gilbert, A. H. (1940). Literary criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press (1962). Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: AnchorDoubleday. Hesiod [c. 700 BCE]. (1988). Theogony and works and days. M. L. West (Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Homer [c. 700 BCE]. (1990). The Iliad. Robert Eagles (Trans.). with Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York: Penguin. Homer [c. 700 BCE]. (1991). The Odyssey. E. V. Rieu (Trans.). New York: Penguin. Horace [c. 65-8 BCE]. The Art of Poetry. pp. 287–304 in The Collected Works of Horace. L. Dusany and M. Oakley (Trans.). London: Dent. Kennedy, G. (1989). The Cambridge history of literary criticism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Longinus [c. 100 CE]. (1932). On the Sublime. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Poetic Texts in the Roman Era

103

Lucian [c.120-200]. (1959). How to Write History. K. Kilburn (Trans. in Vol. VI of) Lucian (VIII volumes). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1913). Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato [c. 427–347 BCE]. (1997). Plato: The collected works. J.M. Cooper (Ed.). Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Plutarch [c. 46-125]. (1914). Lives [11 volumes]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch [c. 46-125]. (1927). Moralia [15 volumes]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prus, R. (1996). Symbolic interaction and ethnographic research: Intersubjectivity and the study of human lived experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (1997). Subcultural mosaics and intersubjective realities: An ethnographic research agenda for pragmatizing the social sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (1999). Beyond the power mystique: Power as intersubjective accomplishment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (2003). Ancient precursors. In: T. R. Larry & J. H.-K. Nancy (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 19–38). New York, NY: Altamira Press. Prus, R. (2004). Symbolic interaction and classical Greek scholarship: Conceptual foundations, historical continuities, and transcontextual relevancies. The American Sociologist, 35(1), 5–33. Prus, R. (2006). In defense of knowing, in defense of doubting: Cicero engages totalizing skepticism, sensate materialism, and pragmatist realism in Academica. Qualitative Sociology Review, 2(3), 21–47. Prus, R. (2007). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: Laying the foundations for a pragmatist consideration of human knowing and acting. Qualitative Sociology Review, 3(2), 5–45. Prus, R. (2008). Writing history for eternity: Lucian’s (c.120–200) contributions to pragmatist scholarship and ethnographic analysis. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 37(1), 62–78. Prus, R., & Grills, S. (2003). The deviant mystique: Involvements, realities, and regulation. Westport, CN: Praeger. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Sidnell, M. J. (1991). Sources of dramatic theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, A. (1993). Continual permutations of action. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

IDENTITIES AND INVOLUTES: SOME REFLECTIONS ON NARRATIVE ETHICS Regina Hewitt ABSTRACT This paper proposes that narrative inquiry adopt the concept of the ‘‘involute’’ – a passage stored in memory from reading that is later enlisted as a problem-solving device – to further the goal of understanding the identity work performed through reading and writing. Three related examples are given – one from Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenthcentury essayist who coined the term and used an involute in fashioning himself as a scholar; one from Jane Addams, who used an involute from De Quincey to separate the role of the social worker from that of the literary critic; and one from the contemporary New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, who used an involute to create a socially engaged identity for literary researchers. Considering these examples, I argue that involutes offer insights into the connections between selves and others, words and acts, past and present that should advance interdisciplinary study and advocacy of morally responsible discourse.

[M]y main effort is to ﬁnd ways of talking about the ethical quality of the experience of narrative in itself. What kind of company are we keeping as we read or listen? (Booth, 1988, p. 10) Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 105–130 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30007-6

105

106

REGINA HEWITT

[T]he decision to treat stories as a moral discourse simply places narrative in the service of an objective that is different from the analysis of social factsy [They become] a means for being with others. (Bochner, 2001, pp. 140, 142)

INTRODUCTION The two epigraphs above call attention to the interest in ethics that saturates narrative inquiry throughout the ﬁelds – sociology, anthropology, communications research, literary, and cultural studies – in which it is now practiced and studied. As chapters on both ‘‘Writing’’ and ‘‘Narrative Inquiry’’ in the Handbook of Qualitative Research point out, people pursuing these practices are most often concerned ‘‘with the development of ethical selves,’’ with openness to others, and with replacing oppressive and exclusive plots with more respectful and inclusive storylines (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, pp. 959, 972; Chase, 2005, pp. 667–669). Presenting narrative inquiry as an evolving mode, however, Chase identiﬁes several areas that might beneﬁt from expansion or ampliﬁcation. An ethical thread runs through these areas, making them all, to some extent about the creation of responsible selves and the fulﬁllment of responsibilities to others. For example, narrative researchers need to learn more about non-Western concepts of self and other, about the nature of identities and relationships in virtual environments, and about how and why any particular story mobilizes any particular audience to work for social change (pp. 670–671). In addition to the large and collective goals for development that Chase identiﬁes, I suggest that narrative inquiry could also beneﬁt from more attention to how and why individuals selectively make what they read part of the identities by which they characterize themselves, plot episodes in their lives, and present themselves to others. To be sure, much work in narrative theory itself as well as in reader response criticism and autoethnography has already shed light on these processes. For instance, Bakhtin (1981, 1986) has revealed how the uniqueness of utterances makes reading a creative and ‘‘dialogic’’; Fish (1980) has located individual readers in ‘‘interpretive communities’’ that condition responses; Booth (1988) has conceptualized individual response as a comparative process of ‘‘coduction’’ and described reading itself in terms that evoke role-taking (points to which I return later). With concern for the power relations involved in telling and listening, Maines (1991, 1993) has analyzed how individual stories may be plotted along or against collective narratives;1 Richardson (1997) has indicted the ways in which culturally dominant stories tend to suppress other voices and

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

107

has encouraged the expression of collective stories that elude this control; along with Ellis (2004) and Bochner (2001), Richardson (1997, 2006) has emphasized the importance of empathy and identiﬁcation by which readers recognize another’s story as their own and may even develop the solidarity with others characteristic of the social movements.2 To this body of work, I would contribute the concept of the ‘‘involute’’ – a ‘‘personal link’’ between lived and textual experience that has recently been recovered from the work of the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey (Burwick, 2001b). Involutes can help us describe and explore the relationships that develop between selves and others – whether the others are textually or physically present – and thus can further our understanding of the identity work performed through reading and writing. I ﬁnd one opening for the term and concept of the involute in Richardson’s and Lockridge’s Travels with Ernest (2004). Throughout the chapter on Copenhagen, Richardson and Lockridge have been using recollections of their reading to work out the problems of professional and personal responsibility they confronted in that setting. At the end of the chapter, they talk directly about the signiﬁcance of remembered literature. Marveling at Ernest’s penchant for ‘‘spout[ing] y quotes,’’ Laurel asks ‘‘where those lines come fromy . [W]hat does it mean to you for literary quotes just to pop into your head? y Do you then see the world through those words? Or do those words describe the world to you?y Do the words enlarge the world? Settle it in a different place?’’ (pp. 124–125). Ernest begins answering hesitantly, ‘‘I don’t know y I’m not surey .’’ but then reﬂects that the quotes may position the world ‘‘in the same way a myth deepens and clariﬁes raw experience. The Myth of Sisyphus. Hamlet. The Little Mermaid. Myth and literature help order and direct your life, so you’re not just traveling fecklessly about. They’re like a map. We’re able to map ourselves onto literature and onto myth’’ (p. 125). In resolving the question with the map metaphor, Richardson and Lockridge generalize about their use of literary recollections and draw the chapter to a close. A new dimension of this inquiry might be opened up if a vocabulary for this kind of socio-literary engagement existed. Richardson’s and Lockridge’s dialog shows that we do not yet have terms for describing how particular quotations can function when particular readers evoke them in particular situations. The lack of terms reﬂects, perhaps, the low value assigned to such reading in traditional disciplines. The process is too individualistic for both sociology, which until recently valorized veriﬁable scientiﬁc results, and for literary studies which until recently valorized stable uniﬁed texts. Involutes supply some missing terms and thus serve the ethical goals of

108

REGINA HEWITT

interdisciplinary narrative inquiry, which seeks to understand reading and writing as socially situated behaviors. Involutes are, by deﬁnition, problem-solving devices, which show us how people use what they’ve read to interpret new experiences. They are part of the reorganization and reinterpretation processes that Richardson and Lockridge later described through a shelves-and-boxes metaphor: Laurel: y [W]hen you’re reading, time and space become one. You are connected to others historically – those in your space and not in your space, those alive and those who have never lived off the pagey . Ernest: The past can seem to stand still, unlike the present as we live it. Then, when we write about the past we set it back in motion, but in whatever order we may choose, connecting dots to reveal hidden similarities, camouﬂaged patterns of cause and effect – y. [and we] rearrange [the patterns] together on a shelf. Laurel: That process of putting things on a shelf offers to others a strategy for reshelving, if you will, the boxes and jars that have constituted their livesy. [S]eeing structure helps readers make connections to and in their own lives, too.’’ (2004, pp. 144–145)

The value of involutes lies in their helping us to see the structures that people are using to make sense of particular occurrences. They can contribute to interactionist studies – in the spirit of Perinbanayagam’s Presence of Self (2000) – that are interested in how imaginative encounters become part of the self and therefore part of that self’s future interactions. And because involutes are individualistic, varying from person to person and from situation to situation, they illuminate narrative’s ability to resist uniformity and universalizing (characteristics pointed out by Chase (2005, p. 667, and Kroeber, 1992, p. 9), yet they show that individuals are nevertheless ‘‘universal singulars’’ (to borrow a term from Denzin, 1997, p. 39) – i.e., individuals whose personal experiences reﬂect collective concerns. I will elaborate on involutes primarily through two related examples – one from De Quincey, who conceptualized them, and one from Jane Addams, who used an involute from De Quincey in a crucial passage in Twenty Years at Hull-House ([1910] 1990).3 In addition to illustrating the concept, the examples perform historical recovery and redemption. Since narrative is involved with reordering the past, reconsidering De Quincey’s and Addams’s stories recasts the relationship present-day scholars have to these signiﬁcant ﬁgures from the histories of literature and sociology. It reveals how De Quincey’s and Addams’s identities were conditioned by tensions between literature and science, escapism and activism, selﬁshness and altruism that remain part of the ‘‘legacy’’ still inﬂuencing attitudes toward cultural studies – attitudes that kept involutes from receiving much attention

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

109

during the past century.4 By recovering De Quincey’s conﬁdence in literature and redeeming Addams’s skepticism about it, present-day scholars can resist the binary oppositions of the past and embrace more ﬂexible identities, roles, and attitudes for the future. In conclusion, I look brieﬂy at the shaping of such a ﬂexible identity by Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of ‘‘new historical’’ literary studies, who used an involute from anthropologist Clifford Geertz to conceptualize himself as a socially engaged literary researcher. Greenblatt’s example has inspired a following comparable to a social movement within literary studies. The lack of terminology for combined social and literary experiences makes it difﬁcult to analyze what involutes do. Conventionally, we still speak of oppositions between the literary/ﬁctional/imaginative/imaginary and the real/actual/social that perpetuates a division many of us no longer accept. Following Denzin’s lead in considering all experience as textualized (1997, p. 33), I have in my analysis sometimes replaced the oppositional vocabulary with references to implicitly and explicitly textual experiences – with ‘‘implicit’’ standing for settings we approach as ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘explicit’’ standing for settings we approach through print.5 Similarly, following Richardson and Lockridge (2004, p. 179) and Booth (1988, pp. 10–13), I do not maintain the conventional distinction between ﬁctional characters and real persons. Like Booth, I wish the collapsing of the distinction to recognize the association of ‘‘character’’ with the strengths or virtues we perceive in others, whether we know those others in physical or printed worlds. Moreover, I ﬁnd it more respectful of living others to approach them as characters in print because doing so acknowledges that we have no unmediated access to others. As Denzin (2001, pp. x, 2) and Gusﬁeld (2003, p. 130) have argued, we are always responding to our interpretations of others.

DE QUINCEY’S INVOLUTE New scholarship on De Quincey is reevaluating his literary criticism, particularly with regard to the interplay of self and other in his works and in his life (McDonagh, 1994; Clej, 1995; Rzepka, 1995; Russett, 1997; Morrison, 1999; Roberts, 2000; Burwick, 2001b; Duffy, 2005; Frey, 2005; Jagoe, 2005). Crucial for an understanding of this interplay is the concept of the ‘‘involute.’’ According to Burwick, an involute consists of a ‘‘personal link’’ between a reader’s lived experience and some aspect of a text that is forged in the reader’s mind (2001b, p. 89). Involutes are produced by

110

REGINA HEWITT

‘‘vicarious impulse’’ – the tendency to refer characters, situations, and ideas in a text back to oneself, to take a text as cognitively and emotionally stimulating ‘‘in a way very similar to actual experience’’ (p. 89). Indeed, De Quincey does not really distinguish between textual and actual experiences, for he ﬁnds all experience to be composite. In his words, ‘‘far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes’’ (quoted in Burwick, 2001b, p. 89). De Quincey’s thinking reaches toward awareness of all experience as discursive or textualized that has become more widespread in postmodern times and that has had an impact on our understanding of the ‘‘real’’ effects of imaginary encounters in developing the self. Perinbanayagam argues that people who ‘‘enter into a dialogue with [a] text’’ are as susceptible to changes in themselves as people who enter into a dialog with physically co-present others. If a self is changed by encountering others through a text, it is that changed self who participates in any subsequent interactions and who necessarily brings the effect of that earlier imaginative encounter into subsequent ones. The effect of the imaginary encounter moves beyond the textual environment in which it arose (2000, p. 249). For De Quincey, such carry-over from textual encounters to subsequent experience occurs through involutes. Once ‘‘lodge[d] within the mind,’’ involutes ‘‘may perform an exegetical or hermeneutic function, rendering concrete the vague abstractions of a text (quoted in Burwick, 2001b, p. 90). Indeed we only recognize involutes in their subsequent applications, when they are used to solve problems in new situations, whether those situations are explicitly or implicitly textual. An example should make this concept clearer. Though many examples can be found in De Quincey’s Shakespeare criticism (Burwick, 2001b, pp. 88–111), the example I wish to consider occurs in De Quincey’s essay on The English Mail-Coach, the work that in turn furnished Jane Addams with an involute. Some background on De Quincey’s Mail-Coach may be helpful. Part memoir, part historical/political essay, part prose poem/fantasy, the piece was published in three installments in 1849 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a Tory periodical for which De Quincey often wrote. De Quincey subsequently revised it for publication in his collected writings. The essay selects events from his own past – some trips he took on the mail-coach during his student years, his opium habit – and from the national past – the introduction of the mail-coach in 1784, the social status of its passengers, its

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

111

service in circulating news from the Napoleonic Wars, especially news of Waterloo – and emplots them in a sequence that shows him swept up by forces beyond his control (the coach, politics, opium), yet coping with them as heroically as possible because of his intellectual and interpretive acumen. In the portion relevant to Addams, De Quincey tells how the mail-coach once got literally out of the control of its sleepy driver and how De Quincey coped with the situation. His success depends on his using a passage recollected from his reading to interpret and to guide his conduct in his present situation. In order to act, De Quincey has to assume the identity of a person capable of solving the problem he has encountered. The problem in this portion of the story is the appearance of another coach in the path of the runaway mail-coach. Since the lovers in the other coach are oblivious to the danger, De Quincey must either control the mail-coach or warn the lovers to get out of its way. In telling what happened, De Quincey foregrounds his own point of view, elaborating on and justifying his perceptions and reactions. Acknowledging that he was slow to realize what was happening and inept in his ﬁrst attempts to respond, he attributes his paralysis to his drug addiction: he admits to taking laudanum as the mail-coach was setting out ([1854] 1968, p. 306), and the cumulative effect of his addiction left his ‘‘frail, opium-shattered self ’’ capable of little exertion (p. 313). When he does recognize the danger, he tries ﬁrst to take the reins from the sleeping driver and to sound the guard’s horn, but he cannot grasp the one or reach the other (p. 313). After these failures, he realizes that his only recourse is shouting to the lovers, and he thinks of the Iliad because the volume necessary to convey the warning seems of an epic size beyond his powers, yet the thought of the poem helps him act. Here is how he tells that portion: Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the sole resource that remained. Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No: but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would sufﬁce as might carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig-horse. (314)6

De Quincey’s reference to the Iliad illustrates the functioning of an involute. The literary passage had been impressed on his mind from previous reading. When he subsequently found himself in perplexing circumstances, he was able to draw on it for interpretive purposes – to ﬁgure out what he could do to solve a problem. The involute helped him draw an analogy between the

112

REGINA HEWITT

remembered, explicitly textualized situation and his present implicitly textualized situation, and that analogy suggested to him a solution to his problem. De Quincey’s analogy between himself and Achilles is not simplistically imitative behavior but complexly responsive behavior that shares some of the characteristics of role taking. De Quincey does momentarily put himself in the place of the epic warrior whose shout can turn the Trojans’ horses, but he does not thereby retreat into fantasy, develop delusions of grandeur, or otherwise lose sight of his immediate difﬁculty. Rather, he becomes selfconsious about his capabilities and viable responses through the analogy with Achilles. He uses it to interpret his own situation, constructing the self who can overcome the frailty and sluggishness in his initial characterization and who can act to save those in danger. De Quincey acquires a heroic identity by plotting his story against the Iliad; he reaches self-consciousness through identifying with Achilles, and the effects of that development are as real as if he had reached self-consciousness through interacting with another living person. His example is consistent with Mead’s notions of role taking, which allow for identiﬁcation with mythic or generalized others in the process of the social development of the self (1934, pp. 152–160), with Perinbanayagam’s inclusion of imaginary encounters in the development of the self (2000, pp. 249–254), with Novitz’s generalizations about the narrative construction of personhood as including the imagination of the self as a ﬁctional character (1997, pp. 144, 154), and with Richardson and Lockridge’s evocations of myth and literature to structure personal experience (2004, pp. 124–125).

DE QUINCEY’S IDENTITY What makes De Quincey’s reading experience ethical is the responsiveness to others that it allows him to practice – ﬁrst in his response to the characters represented in the text and then in his application to himself and others as characters in his own life story. To elaborate on this process by which a reader such as De Quincey can become a responsive and responsible character, I turn to the ‘‘ethics of ﬁction’’ developed by Wayne Booth. According to Booth, narrative engagement involves both the reactions to others and the meeting of obligations to selves and others suggested by the term ‘‘response-able’’ (1988, p. 126, no. 3). Though inﬂuential in literary studies, Booth is underappreciated in sociologically based narrative inquiry,7 which is unfortunate since his later

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

113

work deals directly with the social relations fostered by textual engagements. Hesitancy to embrace Booth’s work is perhaps understandable since he positions himself in favor of referentiality (1988, p. 7) and therefore apparently against the insights into discourse that facilitated sociology’s narrative turn. Yet Booth’s treatment of the ‘‘worlds’’ within texts and the characters that populate them is pragmatic, not ontological. He recognizes that readers treat them as ‘‘real,’’ and he is interested in the processes and implications of our doing so. A member of the English Department at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1991, Booth wrote in the spirit and sometimes with the vocabulary of Mead and later interactionists, though he seldom directly connected his work with theirs: there is only one passing reference to Mead in The Company We Keep (1988, p. 238). That work nevertheless depends on a sense of the self as constructed by experiences of others: ‘‘the isolated individual self simply does not, cannot exist’’; ‘‘to break off from my ‘others’ is to break off parts of myself ’’ (pp. 238, 240). But since the self is a ‘‘unique’’ albeit unstable ‘‘collection of roles,’’ it is beneﬁcial to try out new ones. Booth comments: ‘‘While I have given up any notion of y [an] ‘authentic self,’ I have not lost anything in the giving up. If each of my roles engages the other roles fully and responsibly, y why should I be anxious about the process of adding or subtracting roles?’’ (p. 259). Booth’s own autobiography, titled My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony (published in 2006, the year after his death), shows how he orchestrated multiple roles throughout his life. His work on which, that treats the boundaries between ﬁction and non-ﬁction narratives as fuzzy, as distinctions we use when the practice of doing so serves a purpose (1988, pp. 16–17), addresses the ways in which reading narratives helps us try out different roles. Since there are no ‘‘unstoried sel[ves]’’ and since ‘‘ ‘real life’ is lived in images derived in part from stories,’’ it is important to learn ‘‘what [stories] do to us’’ and how we can self-consciously use their effects in moral ways (pp. 229, 228, 126, note 1). According to Booth, two of the things stories do are to involve us in the process of being with others – ‘‘keeping company,’’ as he puts it – and to develop our aspirations about the kind of person – i.e. ‘‘character’’ – we would like to be (1988, pp. 10, 166, 195, 252–254). Both of these effects are evident in De Quincey’s engagement with the Iliad. The process of being with others whether they are ﬁctional or living, involves some comparative assessment, between us and them.8 Because selves are ‘‘universal singulars’’ (Denzin, 2001, p. 39) who uniquely instantiate cumulative interactions and collective concerns, comparisons

114

REGINA HEWITT

between selves and others are not between isolated entities. The judging self necessarily draws on ideas, values, and attitudes that are prominent in his/ her culture and that are part of his/her cumulative experiences. To put this in terms from Richardson that I have cited above, personal and group experiences are always framed by a culturally dominant story, whether people embrace, reject, or compromise with it. Booth coined the term ‘‘coduction’’ to capture the blend of personal response and collective conditioning involved in any judgment.9 The judging self thinks with (co-) the others who have become part of him/herself through previous interactions and who are part of his/her current frame of reference (cf. Perinbanayagam, 2000, pp. 7, 24). Individual judgments thus are always accompanied by others’ inﬂuences. The concept of the involute allows us to identify some speciﬁc members of that inﬂuential company and thus learn more about the individual reader’s social situation. When we locate De Quincey among his nineteenth-century British peers, we ﬁnd a person eager to support a culturally dominant story of imperial expansion but worried about the effects of government power on ordinary people. Well-educated but lacking inherited wealth and status, and suffering from self-destructive habits including opium addiction, De Quincey embraced the role of a writer for Tory periodicals and, more generally, of a writer in support of English governance and hierarchy.10 De Quincey’s writing about the English mail-coach and his recollection of his reading of Homer are part of his efforts to identify himself as a valuable member of the British Empire. As Anne Frey (2005) has shown, De Quincey even associated himself with British ‘‘imperial systems,’’ including the Royal Mail, in his efforts to occupy a safe, secure place in his society. Frey’s study of the entire mail coach essay reveals how parts preceding and following the evocation of the Iliad (to which I will return shortly) betray his anxieties about the fate of individuals within the empire.11 The system seemed to require the sacriﬁce of the individual self as the empire demanded soldiers to defend it. Even the mail coach destroyed personal property, knocking over market stalls without pausing because ofﬁcials placed a greater value on keeping the delivery schedule. When De Quincey describes how the mailcoach brought news of military victories to people along its route, he casts himself as a spokesman for the ofﬁcial view that the collective national victory matters more than the personal losses that achieved it. On a smaller scale, he can give advice to those who do not recognize national priorities: he can warn those who are in the path of the mail-coach to get out of the way. By giving himself an ‘‘authorial position’’ on the mail-coach, De Quincey creates an identity that saves him from physical self-sacriﬁce and

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

115

manages his anxiety about the sacriﬁce of others by allowing him to issue limited warnings about the irresistible force of empire (Frey, 2005, pp. 44–58). Wanting to be sympathetic to the victims of empire but not able or willing to question the dominant narrative, De Quincey ends the English Mail-Coach with a vision of religious salvation compensating for all earthly losses (p. 57). De Quincey’s recollection of the involute from Homer is part of his creation of himself as a valuable and therefore protected spokesman. In Achilles, whose shout De Quincey emulates, De Quincey ﬁnds a role model for qualiﬁed participation in national combat. In the Iliad, Achilles temporarily refuses to participate in battle because of disagreements with Agamemnon’s leadership, but after his friend Patroclus is killed, he voluntarily sets aside his reservations and ﬁghts to avenge his friend’s death (Homer, translated by Butler, 1999). Achilles is the sort of character De Quincey wishes to be – effective in national service yet able to control his participation and motivated to act when he believes someone has been wronged. De Quincey’s image of himself as a small-scale Achilles is an example of what Booth calls ‘‘productive hypocrisy’’ or ‘‘hypocrisy upward’’: it’s pretending to be what one wishes to be but has not yet become or pretending to have skills that one has not yet acquired. Assuming the identity or role of someone who has the desired traits or skills is a step in the process of fulﬁlling one’s aspirations (1988, pp. 252–254). Through his use of the involute from the Iliad, De Quincey is trying out an identity that fulﬁlls his aspirations. More generally, drawing the involute from the Iliad reinforces the scholarly identity that De Quincey wished to have. Command of Greek literature was still the mark of an educated man in De Quincey’s England and a plausible basis for claims to a socially respectable position. De Quincey was excessively proud of his ability as a classics scholar and made his accomplishments in Greek central to all his autobiographical representations. When he presents himself in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he takes every opportunity to call attention to his excellence in Greek at school, his qualiﬁcations as a ‘‘corrector of Greek proofs,’’ and even his recourse to Greek when attempting to speak to a person whose language he did not know ([1821] 1998, pp. 6–7, 24, 56–57) In The English Mail-Coach, the ancient Greek text has become an artifact in the possession and service of empire. Since the Iliad is a ‘‘resource of scholarly English education,’’ instead of a French or German rival, threat, or impediment to English achievement, De Quincey is eager to possess and use it (Frey, 2005, pp. 56–57; cf. Jagoe, 2005).

116

REGINA HEWITT

From this analysis of De Quincey’s evocation of Homer, we can see the interplay of the personal and collective, past and present, imaginative and physical that involutes facilitate. Though formed by ‘‘vicarious impulse’’ (Burwick, 2001b, p. 89) and situationally speciﬁc, they are not arbitrary or solipsistic since they are connected to the culturally dominant story and the previous interactions that have shaped the reader’s self.12 In use, involutes are part of both reading and writing processes. They arise through reading, but they are realized by a narrative that tells their signiﬁcance to the self in a given situation.13 Insofar as they help people present themselves to others, involutes should also be considered among the processes in identity work that Snow and Anderson (1987) address.14 In their study of identity construction by a group of homeless people, Snow and Anderson consider ‘‘ﬁctive storytelling’’ (along with role embracement and role distancing) as one way in which people create and project the characters they want to be or appear to be. As I have shown in my study of De Quincey (and will show in sections below on Addams and Greenblatt), involutes are another way in which people assert their self-worth.15 The importance of creating a meaningful personal identity should not be underestimated. As Snow and Anderson discovered, the activity of making one’s existence meaningful is as important as seeking food or shelter (1987, p. 1365).

ADDAMS’S INVOLUTE As the passage from the Iliad served as an involute for De Quincey in his account of the mail-coach incident, so does the passage from De Quincey serve as an involute for Addams in her account of the founding of HullHouse. Her reading had lodged that passage in her mind, where it stayed until she dislodged it to interpret a puzzling situation and work out the perplexity. In Addams’s case, the problem is the social value of literature, the question of whether the habit of reading is ethically responsible or an irresponsible substitute for caring about living, co-present others. When Addams tells the story of her commitment to social work, she tells it as a conversion from literature to action, from words to deeds. In her account, the emergence of an ethical self depends on the rejection of the writer’s role and a literary identity. Addams accomplished that repudiation – in a maneuver that now appears poignantly ironic – through the use of the involute from De Quincey. Astonishingly to anyone who has De Quincey’s narrative in mind, Addams reverses the value he assigned to the Iliad, treating it as an obstacle rather than as a springboard to action.

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

117

The involute arises when Addams compares her travels in London, riding a bus through an impoverished neighborhood and wishing she could relieve the suffering around her, with De Quincey’s ride on the mail coach. Here is her retelling: [A]t the very moment of looking down the East London street [at the impoverished inhabitants] from the top of the omnibus, I had been sharply and painfully reminded of ‘‘The Vision of Sudden Death’’ which had confronted De Quincey one summer’s night as he was being driven through rural England on a high mail coach. Two absorbed lovers suddenly appear between the narrow, blossoming hedgerows in the direct path of the huge vehicle which is sure to crush them to their death. De Quincey tries to send them a warning shout, but ﬁnds himself unable to make a sound because his mind is hopelessly entangled in an endeavor to recall the exact lines from the ‘‘Iliad’’ which describe the great cry with which Achilles alarmed all Asia militant. Only after his memory responds is his will released from its momentary paralysis, and he rides through the fragrant night with the horror of the escaped calamity thick upon him, but he also bears with him the consciousness that he had given himself over so many years to classic learning – that when suddenly called upon for a quick decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only through literary suggestion. That is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in my ﬁrst view of the horror of East London I should have recalled De Quincey’s literary description of the literary suggestion which had once paralyzed him. ([1910] 1990, p. 43)

With De Quincey’s own version fresh in our minds, Addams’s alterations – especially her reversal of the value of the literary suggestion – leap startlingly off the page. In the process of inverting the value of literature, she omits reference to the failure of direct action (attempts to seize the reins and blow the horn) for which, in De Quincey, the literary suggestion compensates, and she omits reference to the laudanum that De Quincey blames for his initial paralysis. Addams’s alterations show how her reading of this text from the past has fused with her concerns in the present. Her negative judgment about literature is a ‘‘coduction’’ that does not come from De Quincey but from characters in her own culture whose literary preoccupations she found irresponsible. The ‘‘inaccuracy’’ of Addams’s recollection of De Quincey shows the dynamic nature of involutes more clearly than does De Quincey’s recollection of Homer. It indicates that the use of involutes, like role-taking itself, does not necessarily involve a compliant response to the perceived gestures of others. Addams’s reading of De Quincey might be understood as an ‘‘answering narrative,’’ a term Perinbanayagam uses in his analysis of imaginative encounters: ‘‘Not only do we read a narrative but constitute our

118

REGINA HEWITT

own version of it – shifting emphasis in some places, bringing the characters to our own measures, rendering their motivations intelligible according to our own worldviews’’ (2000, p. 251). Addams’s response to the narrative or gesture, then, is a complex answer, combining past and present, implicitly and explicitly textual concerns. To put this a different way, the ‘‘inaccuracy’’ of Addams’s reading might be understood in terms of the reshelving metaphor I quoted earlier from Richardson and Lockridge: Addams found in De Quincey a strategy for reorganizing her life, exchanging or modifying the literary identity that appealed to her in her youth with the social worker’s identity16 that she developed in her maturity. And rejecting the literary identity was crucial for the defense of social work that Addams’s wanted to make in Twenty Years at Hull-House. To understand why that should be so, we must consider the culturally dominant narrative that frames her autobiography.

ADDAMS’S IDENTITY Written episodically between 1905 and 1910 when it was published as a whole (Hurt, 1990, p. x), the goal of Twenty Years at Hull-House according to Addams’s preface was to justify the Settlement model of social work – to defend settlements from a ‘‘charge of superﬁciality’’ as well as to defend herself from biographies-in-progress ‘‘that made life in a Settlement all too smooth and charming’’ ([1910] 1990, p. 2). That the Settlement model needed defending from such charges stems partly from its emphasis on a personal commitment from social workers and on what would now be called ‘‘symbolic resources.’’17 This qualitative approach was incompatible with culturally dominant ideas about the superiority of science and the esthetic nature of literature. I will address these two ideas in turn after brieﬂy looking at the Settlement Movement. Beginning with Toynbee Hall in London, which Addams visited in 1888, and spreading throughout the world, the Settlement Movement represented a more personal response to the problem of poverty than the approach taken by the Charity Organization Society (COS) founded in 1869 to implement the ‘‘science of charity’’ (Goodlad, 2002, pp. 236–237). Whereas the COS sent ‘‘visitors’’ to the homes of poor people to assess their needs and order material aid, the Settlement Movement sent well-to-do members of society to live in poor neighborhoods as residents, not visitors. As both Shannon Jackson (2000) and Mina Carson (1990) point out in their studies of Settlement Houses, settlers cared as much about establishing supportive

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

119

social relations to help people cope with hardships as they did about relieving particular hardships when they could do so. At Hull-House, for example, public baths were opened for those who did not have the means to practice the ‘‘expensive virtue’’ of cleanliness, and a kindergarten was opened to provide an early version of day care for working mothers (Addams, [1910] 1990, pp. 182, 62–64, 100). But Hull-House also sponsored reading, drama, music, and art clubs that fulﬁlled less tangible needs. According to Jackson (2000), these intangible activities that fostered new social relationship among groups of immigrants and settlers constituted the real performance of social work at Hull-House. They helped people to try out new roles and take on new identities with which they might not otherwise have dared to experiment. While revisionist studies such as Jackson’s are able to recognize the value of intangible approaches to social change, more traditional studies such as Standish Meacham’s (1987) are leery of this cultural preoccupation, suspecting it of masking elitist control instead of destabilizing it. The conﬂict between the scientiﬁc, materialistic approach favored by the COS is just one example of the conﬂict between scientiﬁc and cultural or literary orientations that polarized the modern disciplines from the late nineteenth until the late twentieth centuries and impeded cooperative work and thinking. This persistent epistemic division has been much studied (to cite just a sampling of authors whose works are additionally relevant to my essay – Richardson (1997), Booth (1988), and Maines (1993) all remark on it), and its effects on Addams have also been well documented: Deegan details the process by which the rise of scientiﬁc sociology at the University of Chicago marginalized the personal practices at Hull-House, spinning them off into a separate and subordinate ﬁeld of social work (1988); Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998) indicate that Addams’s narrative approach is part of what sets her apart from the founders of traditional sociology; Ross (1998) argues that Addams’s thought is structured by literary rather than scientiﬁc paradigms. What has not been fully recognized – even in studies that note Addams’s ‘‘ambivalence’’ toward literature (Elshtain, 2002) and deﬁne her primarily as a writer (Joslin, 2004) – is the way in which Addams’s own sense of identity and the identity she created for other settlement and social workers is constrained by the culturally dominant story of the superiority of science. It is that uneasy relationship between science and literature that poses the problem Addams solves with the involute from De Quincey. To be taken seriously in early twentieth-century America, social workers could not keep company with writers. Literature and other cultural

120

REGINA HEWITT

resources had to be assigned at best a secondary place in social work, and that is the place in which Addams consistently puts them. Her explicit comments on literature always maintain the distinction between the real and the imaginary that allowed science to assert its access to a general knowledge not available to individual writers and readers. Though she knows that ‘‘the more literate person’’ can gain the courage to act by identifying with ﬁctional characters that ‘‘he [or she] scarcely distinguishes y from the likeminded people actually in the world’’ that s/he later meets ([1916] 2002, p. 43), she pulls back from exploring the value of the imaginative encounter. More typically, she claims, ‘‘while I may receive valuable suggestions from classic literature, when I really want to learn about life, I must depend on my neighbors’’ ([1916] 2002, p. 4). By accepting a division between implicitly and explicitly textual experiences, Addams separated the role of the social worker from the role of the writer, a separation that was crucial to professionalize the Settlement approach. That literature was becoming unavailable for social engagement in Addams’s time and place is further evidenced by the remarks on her education that she includes in her narrative. To a large extent, her identity work consists of efforts to distance herself from the literary and cultural pursuits she and her peers had been taught to value. She performs this distancing by denying the relevance of reading to lived experience. She reports that she and her classmates ‘‘read a great deal of Ruskin and Browning’’ but ‘‘never dreamed of connecting them with our philosophy’’ ([1910] 1990, p. 29). When she does describe their attempts to act on their reading, she turns the point into a humorous anecdote about an experiment, curtailed by a teacher, to see whether taking opium would enable them to reproduce De Quincey’s visions (pp. 28–29). This trivialization closes the door on more serious applications. By the time she embarked on the life-altering ride through London that started with more conventional travels to ﬁnish her cultural education, Addams saw literary and cultural pursuits as reprehensibly selﬁsh. In the chapter repudiating De Quincey, she further explained that she ‘‘suffer[ed] a moral revulsion against this feverish search after culture’’ in which she believed her contemporaries were engaged (p. 46) and that she longed ‘‘to live in a really living world’’ and could not ‘‘be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reﬂection of it’’ (p. 39). Since it can be argued that literature, culture, and esthetics are not interchangeable terms,18 Addams’s conﬂation of them reveals something signiﬁcant about her experience. It suggests that the rise of estheticism, which tends to combine and expropriate all literature and art, contributed as

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

121

much as the rise of science to Addams’s skepticism about the real effects of literature. The late nineteenth century was the heyday of estheticism – the movement led by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and others who advocated the classiﬁcation of literature as a ﬁne art and the separation of literary and artistic experience from practical or social applications. Though the movement can be understood as a complex reaction to a loss of religious and other traditional values and as a hedge against the ascendancy of science and the commodiﬁcation of literature and art, it can also be (and was) criticized as irresponsible escapism.19 Though more socially engaged views of literature certainly persisted,20 the prominence of esthetic assumptions diminished conﬁdence in the ethical application of literature. Factoring estheticism into Addams’s experiences, one can more easily understand why she could not openly identify with De Quincey, why she could not credit his classical learning (or hers, for she studied a good deal of Greek herself ) with projecting social action, and why she voiced such a sweeping judgment about literature. Despite the position she expressed, Addams did not in practice remove literature and art from social work. Indeed, the cultural dimension of social work at Hull-House is now seen as one of its greatest achievements (Jackson, 2000). Addams herself continued to read and write in ways that demonstrate the interplay between implicitly and explicitly textual experience. Famously, she drew on King Lear to interpret the Pullman strike ([1912] 2001), and her reﬂections in The Long Road of Woman’s Memory were inspired by the tragedy of Euripides, though, characteristically, she credits the women she knew with providing her with insights beyond those she took from Euripides ([1916] 2002, p. 4). The puzzling contradiction between Addams’s statements and practices – between the narrative of her life she wrote and the ‘‘counternarrative’’ she lived21 – becomes intelligible when we understand the pressures that made it selfdefeating for Addams to admit – even to herself – the connection between literature and social work, the complementarity of reading, writing, and acting. By studying Addams’s involute, we gain a way to solve a problem that the discrepancy between her statements and practices poses for her interdisciplinary successors. Without an explanation of the discrepancy, we must undervalue some part of her character, either treating her uses of literature as superﬁcial, as her words tell us, or treating her rejection of literature as disingenuous, as her actions tell us. With the insight we can gain from the involute, we can appreciate her ability to achieve a professional identity in

122

REGINA HEWITT

her situation and to model aspirations for qualitative social work beyond those she could personally express.

CONCLUSION On one hand, questions about whether reading and writing can be socially engaged, responsible activities belong to the disciplinary past. They are an historical problem, solved by such scholarship as I have cited in earlier sections on the textual nature of all experience and on the sympathetic understanding that opens up from textual engagement. On the other hand, the questions continue to be raised by scholars in more than one ﬁeld. Practitioners as well as critics of autoethnography still worry about its selfcentered approach (Chase, 2005, p. 666); sociologists who favor narrative inquiry still often distinguish their work from a literary criticism that purportedly analyzes or contemplates texts in isolation (Maines, 2001, p. 168; Perinbanayagam, 2000, p. 38). This version of literary studies is something of a ‘‘straw man’’ that has not existed since the heyday of the New Criticism many decades ago. More recently, deconstruction came under ﬁre for analyzing texts in isolation, but responsible deconstructive practices were always about challenging the authority of the Word on and off the page. Nevertheless, poststructuralist attention to textuality and the irresponsible grandstanding of some theorists did justify some of the accusations and caused many ﬁne literary scholars to repudiate theory in favor of referentiality. It was in that context that Booth made the endorsement of referentiality on which I remarked earlier. On the whole, scholars in literary studies have worked very hard to overcome the effects of trends like estheticism and New Criticism that abducted texts from social experience. The work of Booth that I have foregrounded in this essay provides one example of socially preoccupied literary analysis. A more widespread and deliberate campaign against literary isolationism was launched by Stephen Greenblatt whose call for a New Historicism stirred something of a movement toward socially engaged reading and writing. According to his own account of how his ideas took shape, Greenblatt used an involute (though he does not use that term) to create a socially engaged identity for literary researchers. In this concluding section, I look brieﬂy at Greenblatt’s involute and extend its implications to the ethics of interdisciplinary relationships. Greenblatt’s involute occurs in an essay titled ‘‘The Touch of the Real’’ in a special issue of Representations (1997) honoring Clifford Geertz.

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

123

The essay’s purpose is to explain how Geertz inﬂuenced Greenblatt’s thinking. The explanation takes the form of an involute – a passage from Geertz on ‘‘thick description’’ that lodged in Greenblatt’s mind and subsequently helped him solve the problem of the alleged separation between literature and lived experience. Here is the quoted passage: ‘‘Analysis,’’ writes Cliford Geertz y ‘‘is sorting out the structures of signiﬁcation – what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic – and determining their social ground and import’’ (p. 14)

And here are some of Greenblatt’s comments on how reading the passage affected him. (Since Greenblatt’s comments on his involute are much more extensive than De Quincey’s or Addams’s, I must necessarily quote selectively). Greenblatt observes: Geertz’s account of the project of social science rebounded with force upon literary critics like me in the mid-1970s: it made sense of something I was already doing, returning my own professional skills to me as more important, more vital and illuminating than I had myself graspedy . I was excited to ﬁnd a sophisticated, intellectually powerful, and wonderfully eloquent anthropologist who could make use of the tools in my disciplinary kit and in so doing renew in me a sense of their value (p. 14)

That Greenblatt’s sense of professional self-worth required validation by an anthropologist speaks volumes about the relative power of the social sciences in the disciplinary hierarchy, but what is more signiﬁcant for the interdisciplinary future is the way Greenblatt adapts Geertz’s point for his own purposes. More self-consciously than De Quincey or Addams, Greenblatt acknowledges that his use of the passage departs signiﬁcantly from its author’s agenda: He [Geertz] did not attempt, of course, to justify the academic analysis of literature, let alone to ﬁnd in it the radical politics for which I [Greenblatt] was longing, but he did something that seemed still more important. He argued that our interpretive strategies provided key means for understanding the complex symbolic systems and life patterns that anthropologists studied. The effect was like touching one wire to another: literary criticism made contact with reality. (p. 14)

Of further signiﬁcance to Greenblatt is Geertz’s notion that the ‘‘reality’’ at issue consists of ‘‘pieces of writing’’ (p. 14). Greenblatt felt authorized by Geertz to treat all texts – poems, stories, anecdotes, tracts, treatises, and trial transcripts, any ‘‘acted document’’ of culture (p. 19) – as equivalent and to investigate how they put us in touch with real human concerns: the ‘‘lived life’’ on which Geertz focused ‘‘was the thing that had been progressively

124

REGINA HEWITT

reﬁned out of the most sophisticated literary studies, or so it seemed to me at the time’’ (p. 20). Scholars who come to Greenblatt’s essay from sociology instead of from literary studies might be surprised by his emphasis on the discovery of ‘‘reality,’’ since ‘‘reality’’ is just what innovative sociologists have been displacing with textuality. Greenblatt’s essay should help us appreciate this variation in disciplinary experience: for scholars in literary studies, innovation consists of moving from textuality to ‘‘reality’’ (or referentiality). Greenblatt’s reﬂections on the involute from Geertz offer moving insights into the sense of self-worth he and others in his ﬁeld achieved by deﬁning the role of the literary scholar as an investigator of human experience through texts. In a move that personalizes interdisciplinary relations, Greenblatt wants to keep company with Geertz, and his doing so reminds us that narrative inquiry in various ﬁelds has a shared object – sympathetic understanding of the ways in which people create and sustain, change or fail to change, selves and societies through their acts and words. Despite valid criticism of its schematic preoccupation with power struggles (Kroeber, 1994, pp. 3–5), New Historicism has been important in energizing literary scholars to explore the social situation of texts more fully.22 Since interdisciplinary research seems well on the way toward acknowledging the social effects of literature, afﬁrming social roles for writers, and advancing socially engaged identities for scholars, one might ask if it is necessary to study past narratives such as Addams, which does not express our aspirations, or De Quincey’s, which links acceptable aspirations with an unacceptable imperialism. My answer is that studying such narratives takes an important step toward developing an ethics for interdisciplinarity. These narratives from the past help us to see the intellectual and emotional costs of imperial systems – whether they are political or disciplinary – and they help us see how individuals have coped with them. We should be willing to evaluate their decisions as unacceptable to us, when that is the case, but we should also be willing to acknowledge how these predecessors – some because of their very differences from us – help us to discover what characters we want to be and what virtues we want to practice in our work. To adapt a phrase from Booth that I quoted earlier, ‘‘to break off from [our] ‘others’ is to break off parts of [ourselves]’’ (1988, p. 240). That is what Addams did when she rejected De Quincey, and it is what we do when we ignore our connection with the past. Narrative inquiry – with the addition of involutes – can help us reinterpret our relation to the past. In the interdisciplinary present, we can write the counternarrative that Addams could enact but not express. In studying

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

125

involutes, we can answer Booth’s call for scholarship that ﬁgures out how to use stories in morally responsible ways, and we can more fully understand how reading and writing shape our identities.

NOTES 1. See also Maines and Bridger (1992) and Bridger and Maines (1998). 2. For these points from Richardson (1997), see especially pp. 32–33, and cf. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005, pp. 965–66). On storytelling and social movements, see Polletta (1998), Davis (2002), and Beverley (2005). Richardson (2006) proposes a method of ‘‘reading for another’’ that tries to look at a text through another’s eyes. The text becomes a means by which the present reader can recognize cultural pressures that affect both the other and the self, resulting in a deeper understanding of these persons in themselves, in relation to each other, and in relation to larger groups. 3. To my knowledge, the only other treatment of Addams and De Quincey that does not take her statements about her reading at face value frames my own study of literary interventionism (Hewitt, 2006). In that book, I read Addams’s use of De Quincey as an example of the delegitimation of the human utterance that Maines (1993) posits to explain sociology’s neglect of the narrative dimensions of Thomas and Znaniecki’s Polish Peasant in Europe and America. That analysis does not raise the topics of identity and ethics that I treat in this essay. 4. On the persistence in the present of past conventions and attitudes ‘‘either as legacy or as a set of practices that researchers continue [to] follow or argue against,’’ see Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 20). 5. By referring to print, I do not mean to exclude computer-generated forms of textuality. Though those are beyond the scope of this essay, they involve similar processes of interpretation: ‘‘text remains the means by which each [person] performs and negotiates the self’’ (Markham, 2005, p. 795). Online occurrences have been important in revising assumptions about the need for people to be co-present for interaction to occur; further, the ‘‘reality’’ of virtual experiences for many people has further destabilized the set of imaginative vs. actual oppositions with which I began this paragraph. Markham, 2005 provides a valuable overview of these matters. 6. I have quoted from the revised version that De Quincey prepared for his collected writings since that is most likely the version that would have been available to Addams: until recently, editorial convention favored taking an author’s latest revision as the ‘‘standard’’ form in which the text should appear. The now preferred (because of changing editorial conventions) original version has only one variation in the portion relevant to Addams. In the revision, De Quincey refers to ‘‘my frail, opium-shattered self ’’ ([1854] 1968, p. 313), whereas he originally wrote only ‘‘my single self ’’ ([1849] 1998, p. 221). 7. A search of Sociological Abstracts (2006) for references to ‘‘Booth, Wayne’’ during the past twenty years yields only ﬁve citations; in contrast, there are 74 citations to ‘‘Bakhtin, Mikhail’’ during the same period. For an appreciation of Booth in literary studies, see Langland (2006). 8. Cf. Kroeber (1992, p. 51) on comparative assessments in Bakhtin.

126

REGINA HEWITT

9. Coduction may have a counterpart in Denzin’s ‘‘epiphanies’’ insofar as epiphanies manifest connections between public and private (2001, pp. 34–39). 10. The purpose of De Quincey’s writing is often taken to be the purpose of forging his identity as a literary critic (Russett, 1997; Burwick, 2001b, pp. 34–42). De Quincey’s judgments often reveal a wish to identify with the ruling class. For instance, he disapproved of novels for middle class audiences because they undermined the prestige of poetry for more restricted readerships (Duffy, 2005); he elevated English culture over French and German, reproducing imperialistic attitudes in his assessments (Jagoe, 2005). 11. Frey (2005, pp. 56–57) mentions this incident but does not treat it as an involute. 12. Since traditional disciplines have often insisted that the texts, interpretations, and experiences they study must not be personally variable but in some way stable or generalizable and that the personally variable is uselessly eccentric, it is worth noting that innovative scholarship challenges this dismissal of the personal as arbitrary. Booth argues that complete arbitrariness would be possible only in an ‘‘artiﬁcial, experience-free world’’; in the world we have, arbitrariness is limited to the range of a person’s speciﬁc situations and experiences (1988, p. 199). Approaching the topic from a different ﬁeld, Denzin notes that relativism is not the absence of any standard (1997, p. 288, no. 4). 13. I am grateful to an anonymous reader of an earlier draft of this essay for suggesting that involutes, which I had treated as only a part of a reading process, are also part of a writing process. 14. Like Snow and Anderson, I place less emphasis than Stryker on role structures and more on ﬂexible processes (1987, pp. 1366–1368). 15. De Quincey might not be as far removed from Snow and Anderson’s group as he would ﬁrst appear to be. He was homeless for a time after he left England to escape his creditors and sought shelter at Holyrood Abbey, a sanctuary for debtors, in Edinburgh (Lindop, 1998, p. xxxiii). 16. Deegan implies that the term ‘‘social worker’’ is condescending because Addams and her colleagues identiﬁed themselves as sociologists when there was no separation between the two ﬁelds and when interventionism was still acceptable in sociology (1988, pp. 2–3, 309–328). Instead of avoiding the term, I prefer to put it to positive use. 17. On symbolic resources in social work, see Denzin (2002). 18. Again, I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this point. 19. For studies of late nineteenth-century estheticism, see Blanchard (1998), Dowling (1996), and Chai (1990). It should be noted that the escapist strain is more prominent in this later movement than in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century thinking about the esthetic. In a study of these earlier ideas, Burwick (2001a) argues that ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ began to be asserted as a strategy to escape political control and that its individualistic aspects reﬂect new evaluations of the self emergent at that time. 20. In essays on the emergence of the esthetic that follow up on his classic The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Abrams notes that alternative ways of looking at literature continued to be viable (1989, p. 160); that point might be compared to Denzin and Lincoln’s notion of ‘‘legacy’’ (cited above in footnote 4).

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

127

21. I borrow the term ‘‘counternarrative’’ from feminist research because of its suggestion of a suppressed way of thinking (see Chase, 2005, p. 655). 22. Some alternative socially engaged criticism, such as Kroeber’s and Bate’s (1991) ecological approaches, emerged partly to counter the political focus favored by New Historicists. Thus, even though much literary scholarship has moved beyond New Historicism, or moved New Historicism to a less schematic phase, the trend can be credited with productive inﬂuence. For works advancing New Historicism, see Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000), Cox and Reynolds (1993) and Veeser (1989).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the late Donna Darden and to Kathy Charmaz for encouraging early versions of this essay and to anonymous readers of subsequent versions for offering valuable advice. I also thank David Hanson, David Richter, and Meri-Jane Rochelson for presentations at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA) Conference in Salisbury, MD, March 16–18, 2006 that expanded and deepened my understanding of Wayne Booth.

REFERENCES Abrams, M. H. (1989). Doing things with texts: Essays in criticism and critical theory. Edited with a Foreword by M. Fischer. New York: W. W. Norton. Addams, J. ([1910] 1990). Twenty years at hull-house. (Ed. with an Intro. by J. Hurt), Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Addams, J. ([1912] 2001). A modern Lear. (Ed. with an Intro. by J. Hurt) The Jane Addams reader (pp. 163–176). New York: Basic Books. Addams, J. ([1916] 2002). The long road of woman’s memory. (Ed. with an Intro. by Charlene Haddock Siegfried) Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. (Ed. by Michael Holquist); In: Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (Ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist); In: Vern W. McGee (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bate, J. (1991). Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition. London: Routledge. Beverley, J. (2005). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 547–557). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Blanchard, M. W. (1998). Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bochner, A. P. (2001). Narrative’s virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 131–157.

128

REGINA HEWITT

Booth, W. C. (1988). The company we keep: An ethics of ﬁction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth, W. C. (2006). My many selves: The quest for a plausible harmony. Logan: Utah State University Press. Bridger, J. C., & Maines, D. R. (1998). Narrative structures and the Catholic Church closings in Detroit. Qualitative Sociology, 21, 319–340. Burwick, F. (2001a). Mimesis and its romantic reﬂections. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Burwick, F. (2001b). Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and power. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Carson, M. (1990). Settlement folk: Social thought and the American settlement movement, 1885–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chai, L. (1990). Aestheticism: The religion of art in post-romantic literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Chase, S. E. (2005). Narrative inquiry. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 651–679). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Clej, A. (1995). A genealogy of the modern self: Thomas De Quincey and the intoxication of writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cox, J. N., & Reynolds, L. J. (Eds). (1993). New historical literary study: Essays on reproducing texts, representing history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davis, J. E. (Ed.) (2002). Stories of change: Narrative and social movements. Albany: SUNY P. Deegan, M. J. (1988). Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick: Transaction P. Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N. K. (2001). Interpretive interactionism (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N. K. (2002). Social work in the seventh moment. Qualitative Social Work, 1, 25–38. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1–32). Thousand Oaks: Sage. De Quincey, T. ([1821 1849] 1998). In: G. Lindop (Ed.), Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Quincey, T. ([1854], 1968). The English mail-coach. In: D. Masson (Ed.), The collected writings of Thomas De Quincey (Vol. 13, pp. 270–330). New York: AMS Press. Dowling, L. (1996). The vulgarization of art: The victorians and aesthetic democracy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Duffy, C. (2005). ‘His Canaille of an Audience’: Thomas De Quincey and the revolution in reading. Studies in Romanticism, 44, 7–22. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Altamira. Elshtain, J. B. (2002). Jane Addams and the dream of American democracy. New York: Basic Books. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frey, A. (2005). De Quincey’s imperial systems. Studies in Romanticism, 44, 41–61. Gallagher, C., & Greenblatt, S. (2000). Practicing new historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Some Reﬂections on Narrative Ethics

129

Goodlad, L. M. E. (2002). Character and pastorship in two British ‘sociological’ traditions: Organized charity, fabian socialism, and the invention of new liberalism. In: A. Anderson & J. Valente (Eds), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Sie`cle (pp. 235–260). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, S. (1997). The touch of the real. Representations, 59, 14–29. Gusﬁeld, J. R. (2003). A journey with symbolic interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 28, 119–139. Hewitt, R. (2006). Symbolic interactions: Social problems and literary interventions in the works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Homer. (1999). The Iliad. Translated by S. Butler. Mineola: Dover. Hurt, J. (1990). Introduction. In: J. Hurt & J. Addams (Eds), Twenty years at hull-house (pp. ix–xix). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jackson, S. (2000). Lines of activity: Performance, historiography, hull-house domesticity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jagoe, E.-L. A. (2005). Degrading forms of pantomine: Englishness and shame in De Quincey. Studies in Romanticism, 44, 23–40. Joslin, K. (2004). Jane Addams, a writer’s life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kroeber, K. (1992). Retelling/rereading: The fate of storytelling in modern times. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kroeber, K. (1994). Ecological literary criticism: Romantic imagining and the biology of mind. New York: Columbia University Press. Langland, E. (2006). In memoriam: Wayne C. Booth. PMLA, 121, 555–556. Lengermann, P. M., & Niebrugge-Brantley, J. (1998). The women founders: Sociology and social theory 1830–1930. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Lindop, G. (1998). Chronology of Thomas De Quincey. In: G. Lindop (Ed.), Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings (pp. xxxii–xxxiv). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maines, D. R. (1991). The storied nature of health and diabetic self-help groups. Advances in Medical Sociology, 2, 185–202. Maines, D. R. (1993). Narrative’s moment and sociology’s phenomena: Toward a narrative sociology. Sociological Quarterly, 34, 17–38. Maines, D. R. (2001). The faultlines of consciousness: A view of interactionism in sociology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Maines, D. R., & Bridger, J. C. (1992). Narratives, community and land use decisions. Social Science Journal, 29, 363–380. Markham, A. N. (2005). The methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnography. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 793–820). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Meacham, S. (1987). Toynbee hall and social reform, 1880–1914. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Edited with an Introduction by C. W. Morris. Chicago : University of Chicago Press. McDonagh, J. (1994). De Quincey’s disciplines. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, R. (1999). De Quincey and the opium-eater’s other selves. Romanticism, 5.1, 87–103. Novitz, D. (1997). Art, narrative, and human nature. In: L. P. Hinchman & S. K. Hinchman (Eds), Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences (pp. 143–160). Albany: SUNY P. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (2000). The presence of self. Lanham: Rowman and Littleﬁeld.

130

REGINA HEWITT

Polletta, F. (1998). Contending stories: Narrative in social movements. Qualitative Sociology, 21, 419–446. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Richardson, L. (2006). Reading for another: A method for addressing some feminist research dilemmas. In: S. N. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis (pp. 459–467). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Richardson, L., & Lockridge, E. (2004). Travels with Ernest: Crossing the literary/sociological divide. Walnut Creek: Altamira. Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Roberts, D. S. (2000). Revisionary gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and high romantic argument. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ross, D. (1998). Gendered social knowledge: Domestic discourse, Jane Addams, and the possibilities of social science. In: H. Silverberg (Ed.), Gender and American social science: The formative years (pp. 235–264). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russett, M. (1997). De Quincey’s romanticism: Canonical minority and the forms of transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rzepka, C. J. (1995). Sacramental commodities: Gift, text, and the sublime in De Quincey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Snow, D. A., & Anderson, L. (1987). Identity work among the homeless: The verbal construction and avowal of personal identities. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 1336–1371. Sociological Abstracts. (2006). Cambridge Scientiﬁc Abstracts Illumina Database. 14 October 2006. ohttp://www-uk1.cas.com.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/ids70/quick_searchW Veeser, H. A. (Ed.) (1989). The new historicism. New York: Routledge.

SOCIAL SYMBOLISM: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS – A PRAGMATIST PERSPECTIVE Elz_bieta Ha"as ABSTRACT Social theory contains contributions related to the processes of semiosis. Between the subjective experience of intentional meanings and objectivized structure of meanings there is a sphere of meaningful interactions and collective actions. Arguments are presented that it is possible to integrate symbolic interactionist orientation and Durkheimian tradition in the study of social symbolism in the perspective of collective action approach and pragmatism. That allows going beyond the cognitive limitations inherited from phenomenological view on symbolism as manifested in the concepts of P. Berger and T. Luckmann about the social construction of reality. A model for a multidimensional analysis of social symbolism and its functions is proposed.

PROBLEMS OF SYMBOLIZATION There is no satisfactory theory of social symbolism.1 According to Raymond Boudon and Bourricaud (1982, p. 547) the main reasons are the diametrical differences in understanding symbolism. On the one hand, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 131–149 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30008-8

131

132

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

a symbol refers to what is imagined, straying from reality, and on the other hand, a symbol is linked to the cognitive code provided by culture.2 In the classical study of Ernst Cassirer, these two contrary tendencies are constitutive for the symbolization process. Ju¨rgen Habermas explores that conceptual legacy where the symbolic meanings extend between the meaningful images and pure cognitive meanings (Habermas, 2001, p. 18). This ambiguity is also resembled in the discussion whether symbolic is distinct from or identical to semiotics. Another problem is that in human sciences the study of symbolization content, or interpretation of meanings has overwhelmed the studies of symbolic forms and symbolization functions (Duncan, 1968, p. 7). In sociology, E´mile Durkheim’s thesis that social facts are actually symbolic still remains to be worked out in detail in terms of symbolic forms and functions; although, today we know much more about; for instance, mutual dependencies between power relations and symbolic actions in society (Cohen, 1976). Some decades ago, in his text Symbol, Reality and Society (1962),3 Alfred Schutz summarized brieﬂy the most important questions raised in studies of symbolization. One could refer to more contemporary authors, like Clifford Geertz or Mary Douglas, than those quoted by Schutz, but his accurate formulation of the pervading confusion over four fundamental questions is still valid. There is a continuous debate on: various deﬁnitions of ‘‘sign’’ and ‘‘symbol’’; different ways of understanding the process of symbolization; differing views on the relation between the signifying and the signiﬁed, or symbol and meaning; various concepts of intersubjectivity of signs and symbols. Schutz’s suggestion to study signs in relation to the reality of everyday life, which is characterized phenomenologically and in Weberian terms as motives of acting actors; and, to refer symbols to other realities transcending everyday life, is difﬁcult to uphold; although, it has proliferated in the social sciences till today. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann have done a lot in favor of that view. It can be methodologically useful in some cases of phenomenological analysis of creative experience; but, it is barely useful for a social scientist interested in a phenomenon of an individual transcended by society and not in his personal experience of transcendence. The former is immanently present in the experience of everyday group life. Schutz rightly

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

133

points out that individuals experience society, a group, or a community by means of symbols (Schutz, 1962, p. 292). Nonetheless the concepts of Schutz will not be discussed here in detail except for a very brief account of different theories of signiﬁcation and symbolic relations and for pointing out the inconsistency in his concept of signs and symbols originating in the idea of exclusion of symbols from a province governed by the pragmatic motive. However, it is worth pointing out that fortunately Schutz was not able to distance himself completely from the pragmatic perspective. He ascertained, naturally, that when one tries to single out the meaning common to different theories of signiﬁcation and symbolic relations, one comes down to an elementary statement that ‘‘the object, fact, or event, called sign or symbol refers to something other than itself’’ (Schutz, 1962, p. 294).4 He was inclined to believe that symbols have conventional character and the relation between a symbol and its meaning is arbitrary.5 Therefore, Schutz could not have but noticed that the concept of convention assumes the existence of a society and communication for which those conventions are established. It belongs to the pragmatic level, the level of communicative action. Alas, as a social phenomenologist, Schutz does not embark on the study of social creation of meanings in communication processes; but, he investigates the structures of commonsense knowledge. Contrary to Schutz, who – as I have shown – entangled himself into a contradiction narrowing the understanding of symbols to signiﬁcations transcending everyday experience; and, following the tradition of symbolic interactionism, the term symbol will be used here in a very broad sense. Ernst Cassirer (1944, pp. 32–35), Suzanne K. Langer (1942), and Raymond Firth (1973), among others, looked at it in a similar way. The symbol is a part of the human world of meanings as a vehicle for concepts of objects of actions that is why symbols have only a functional value. Unlike indications and signals (signs), symbols do not refer to things in some constant way; they are variable and equivocal, subject to interpretation.6 Contrary to Schutz, and according to symbolic interactionist orientation, symbolic relations are not to be considered as objects of knowledge; but, as a part of a system of action. Such, roughly characterized, was the approach of George H. Mead and Charles Morris. Among questions put forward sometime ago by Schutz in his pertinent study, Symbol, Reality and Society, there is one of a fundamental nature and it is particularly important for the sociologist: Does the symbol produce the society and the community, or is it produced by society? Schutz goes beyond this oversimpliﬁed alternative and drives at the possibility of complex,

134

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

mutual relations between society and a system of symbols, where symbols, being produced in society, inﬂuence its structure (Schutz, 1962, p. 292). Such an objective, relational, and systemic perspective, as opposed to the point of view of the individual actor who experiences meanings, when applied consistently to research on social symbolism leads to an unveiling of the complex structure of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a social symbolic system (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 237). Instead, the followers of Schutz – Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1973) – eliminating the distinction between culture and the structure of society (Heiskala, 2003, p. 278) or cultural system and socio-cultural interactions (Archer, 1996, p. 7) needlessly introduced into social theory, concentrated their attention only on one aspect of this process: social production of symbolic meanings of reality. This assumption is contained in the second part of the question – alternative posed above – whether the symbol is produced by society. The assumption of the ﬁrst clause of that question – whether the symbol produces the society, points to the social labor of symbols in the construction of society. This issue implicates the symbolic constitution of society which; certainly, has not been completely ignored in sociological theory; but, it requires a much more systematic elaboration. Risto Heiskala (2003, p. 279) suggests that Berger and Luckmann’s work lacks such a semiotic approach. It seems rather that their work – very important to the sociology of the twentieth century – was negatively inﬂuenced by the already signaled, particular and narrow understanding of symbolism introduced by Schutz, and later adopted in their conception of symbolic universum.7 Thus, consequently, a symbolic universum refers not only to the most fundamental reality of human action; but also to other realities transcending everyday experience and legitimizing the existing social practices.8 Berger and Luckmann, like Schutz, and following the premises of phenomenological philosophy, have been attracted by the cognitive dimension of symbolism and the way it infuses reality with the comprehensive meaning or sense.

SYMBOLIZATION AND INTERACTION Sociological theory (grosso modo it is possible to use singular form here) is full of inquiries and contributions related to the processes of semiosis – creating and functioning of meanings. Grouping them in only two orientations (Heiskala, 2003) – functionalism and phenomenology – neglects at least the third way marked by symbolic interactionist orientation based

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

135

on pragmatism as a philosophy of action and consciousness that takes the problem solving in social conduct as its starting point (Joas, 1993, pp. 18–24). In this perspective, meanings are products of social acts that are, as explicated by Robert S. Perinbanayagam, signifying acts. ‘‘Signifying is then the beginning of social acts, and meanings are the products of social acts, and when one signiﬁes, one is in essence anticipating a meaning to emerge’’ (Perinbanayagam, 1985, p. 10). Between the subjective experience of intentional, intersubjective meanings of phenomenologists and objectiﬁed structures of meanings of functionalists, there is a sphere of meaningful interactions and collective actions of various degree of organization. In this problematic context, one can see more sharply the relevance of the way of theorizing grounded in symbolic interactionism as developed by Anselm Strauss. He was reluctant to isolate this orientation as a distinct paradigm and regarded social symbolism not only as a bridge between different sociological orientations, but also as an interdisciplinary platform. He concludes his early book Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (1969) with two important points. They are based on the conviction that the interactionist perspective can be useful in many, variegated ﬁelds of research. First, it connects the symbolic perspective with research of social organization. Second, symbolic perspective could lead to the fusion of various theoretical approaches, creating new cognitive possibilities (Strauss, 1969, p. 178). As it takes place now, it is too early to announce the heuristic exhaustion of this orientation (Fine, 1993, pp. 61–87). Strauss’s work conﬁrms that George H. Mead’s idea9 of adopting social processes of collective action as a starting point for further research is methodologically promising for sociology (Strauss, 1991, p. 3, 4). In his last book, Continual Permutations of Action (1993), he declares himself in favor of collective action and symbolic perspective which turns out to attract research of social movements and, more broadly, of the ‘‘moving society’’ with the change as its main feature. However, much earlier, already in the last chapter of Mirrors and Masks, entitled Membership and History, we ﬁnd ideas delineating the symbolic interactionist perspective on collective action (Strauss, 1969, p. 148 ff ). Strauss’s concepts are not outstandingly innovative, but they accurately and precisely summarize research assumptions of symbolic interactionists and they deserve attentive reﬂection. The theses articulated by Strauss can be grouped into four categories: statements on group communication; statements on group origin and variability of meanings; statements on interrelation of individual and group actions in communication; and statements on social worlds created in communicative actions.

136

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

Theses related to communication and the foundation of the group clarify that communicative action is a collective process. Basically the life of a group is organized around communication. Communication ultimately consists not only in transmitting ideas between human minds; but also, it determines shared, collective meanings. More profoundly, groups exist only on the grounds of common symbolization of their members. Also theses concerning origins and variability of meanings place the process of their formation and change at a social or collective level. Primarily, terminology (shared meanings) originates in community actions and makes them possible. Next, symbols are pregnant with possibilities of convergence and divergence when in use. Further, interrelations of individual and group actions are anchored to communication. In particular, group members are able to participate in various coordinated actions because they share a common terminology. In sum, individual lines of convergence turn out to be a part of a broader, collective communicative action. Social worlds are created in communicative action. Shared perspectives in communicative action produce social worlds. Social worlds are embedded in a temporal matrix (history, heritage, collective memory and production of tradition). Continual Permutations of Action, Strauss’s opus magnum, abounds with further important elaborations that protects against deviating from the interactionist way of analyzing social symbolism methodically at the collective level. The action theory perspective is well suited to deal with social processes by using such terms as interacting and symbolizing instead of interaction and symbolization. The next crucial set of proposals is contained in theses concerning the key issue of social symbolism (Strauss, 1993, pp. 24–27, 151–155). 1. Symbols are generated through interacting. 2. Meanings explicit (interpretations) constitute only a part of symbolizing inherent within action. 3. The results of earlier symbolizing (symbols) are carried over to subsequent interaction. 4. Symbols are of a systemic character – they create networks of meanings. 5. New symbolization and following actions generate social change. All the above statements may be summarized in the theses about three interweaving qualities of symbols: 1. Symbols condition interaction. 2. Symbols are the fabric of interaction (as the symbolization process). 3. Symbols are products of interaction.

137

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions Symbol

pro

duc

t

on diti con

fabric Symbolization

Fig. 1.

Interaction

The Triad of Symbol Attributes.

This triad of symbol attributes and their interrelations can be presented graphically as shown in Fig. 1. Hans-Georg Soeffner was absolutely right when he said that Strauss expands the scope of questions from that of ‘‘What is a symbol?’’ to ‘‘Under what circumstances and with what intention something is turned into a symbol, and how is this socially constructed product conﬁrmed and sustained as a symbol?’’ (Soeffner, 1991, p. 362). Strauss conﬁrmed this interpretation (Strauss, 1993, p. 167) in almost the same wording ‘‘For a theory of action, three central and related questions about symbols are: (1) Under what conditions, and by whom, and with what purposes is some thing (act, event, object, person) made into a symbol – or used as a symbol? (2) How is this symbol conﬁrmed and maintained? (3) With what range of signiﬁcant consequences?’’ (Strauss, 1993, p. 151). It should be stressed once again that Strauss’s position is not completely unique; but, it precisely expresses the premises of symbolic interactionist orientation that far too often have been mistakenly regarded as a manifestation of methodological individualism and subjectivism (Alexander, 1985, p. 50). Hugh Dalziel Duncan, on his part, trying to ﬁnd out reasons of relatively undeveloped state of research on symbols functioning in society, has persuasively pointed out that the strongest barrier arose from the conﬂation of symbolism with subjective meanings, while actually a symbol ‘‘is used because it is public’’ (Duncan, 1968, p. 4). The intentionalistic semantics assumes as a subject matter only what a speaker means in a given situation (Habermas, 1992, p. 58). Interactionism, however, originating in pragmatism, contributed to the shift in the interpretive sociology from the

138

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

intentionalistic semantics, so inﬂuential in the theory of Max Weber10 as well as in the related social phenomenology of Schutz, to the use theory of meaning. The latter starts with the observed habitualization of interactions in which linguistic expressions; and, broadly speaking, symbolism serves practical functions in coordination of actions.11 That theory was initiated by George H. Mead in no lesser a degree than that which was put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The works of Ju¨rgen Habermas (Habermas, 1999, p. 174), among others, imply the synthesis of symbolic interactionism with the tradition of social practice research. That possibility springs from the adoption of symbolic collective action perspective and it requires the departure from intentional semantics to a pragmatic approach to communication processes.12 Some theorists; especially, those connected with the tradition of French sociological school, inspired both by Durkheim and Marx, speak of social imaginations – systems of representations consolidating symbolic norms and values that deﬁne social practices. Such an approach assumes an activity characterized by a close bond between signiﬁcations, or symbolic relations, and practice, where meaning and action cannot be separated. As the result, the question how symbolic systems articulate social conﬂicts (Ansart, 1977, pp. 21–22) may be addressed more accurately.

FROM COGNITIVE TO PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO SYMBOLISM In contrast to Habermas (1999, p. 486), the interactionists, whose point of view is shared here, do not separate communicative actions from the strategic ones.13 This is another differentiation based on methodological ‘‘intellectual ﬁction’’ that, similarly to Schutz’s concept of symbolic transcendence, separates the functioning of symbolism from the pragmatics of everyday life. The interactionists pay attention to pragmatic functions of symbolization in that sense, that these are ‘‘productive’’ for social processes. They cocreate those processes; and, therefore, a metaphor of social labor of symbols can be applied. Symbols by no means are autonomous (Ha"as, 2002, p. 357). They do not belong exclusively to what Karl R. Popper called a third world of objective content of thinking (Popper, 1992, pp. 148–149). Such a concept, as Habermas profoundly describes it, is cognitively narrowed (Habermas, 1999, p. 149). Symbols primarily are instruments, or tools of action (Firth, 1973, p. 77; Znaniecki, 1934, p. 181).14 As

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

139

expressed by Ansart: ‘‘All manipulation of comprehensive symbolic equipment is therefore decisive for the renewal, or transformation of social relations and that task of a new symbolic record (ree´criture) can by itself become a strategic and tactical place in the conﬂict between competing groups’’ (Ansart, 1977, p. 30). Although – as argued above – collective actions, social groups and social worlds are all included in the research program of symbolic interactionists’, however, one has to admit that their research of symbolization was of a microsociological character to a large degree. It covered basically construction, transformation, negotiation of identities and social biographies. The parallel concept of identity can however be worked out for collective agents, as Pierre Bourdieu’s work has clearly demonstrated (Ha"as, 2004). A model allowing a multidimensional analysis of forms and functions of social symbolism both for social collectivities and individuals would be desirable and it is attempted here. Before the model will be exposed, it is necessary to recall that the analysis of functions of symbolism remained under the inﬂuence of linguistic theories focusing on the cognitive function of language as the primary one.15 Anticipating the model of forms and functions of symbolism in social processes it is worthwhile to review brieﬂy the most important functions, as mentioned by many researchers, which were most often referred to the natural language – the basic symbolic system. As it is widely known, in 1934 Karl Bu¨hler distinguished three elementary functions: expressive, appellative, and representative related respectively to the sender, to the addressee of a message and to the reality to which the message refers. All three functions of communication operate on the level of mental processes. Another classic model of communication, elaborated by Roman Jakobson, was the joining of functions of the message with the elements of the communication act; and, despite its clarity and elegance, also assumed a mental concept of symbolization (Jakobson, 1989),16 i.e., a process taking place in the minds of participants. Although, social anthropologists, like Edward Sapir, paid more attention to the social usage of language and its functions in the context of communicating community, the categorizing, or modeling of relative cultural reality remained in the focus of their attention. The mental inclination is also visible in the search for linguistic categories structuring the experience of members of social groups. Raymond Firth’s research, however, was a breakthrough. By referring to S. F. Nadel’s work on the meaning of symbols for social relations (Nadel, 1951), Firth tried to extend the pragmatic approach, clearly visible in the

140

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

latter’s work. Going in this direction Nadel distinguished three functions of social symbolism: designating the group membership, types of social relations and expected behaviors; creating of social nomenclature; the dramatization of meanings (Nadel, 1951, p. 262). Firth deﬁned those functions much more extensively, distinguishing: expression, communication, knowledge, and control (Firth, 1973, p. 77 ff ). The biggest change and innovation has consisted in stressing the function of control related to the fundamental phenomenon of power in social relations. Instead, the ﬁrst three functions correspond to the original triad of language functions distinguished by linguists; but, Firth equipped them with the social content and presented them as functions of symbolism in collective practices. This anthropological approach to social symbolism, and not the linguistic one, led to the distinction of not only functions, but also modes of its manifestation, namely of discursive symbolism (with particular emphasis on the function of metaphor), symbolism of objects (symbolic vehicles), and behavioral symbolism (symbolic actions).17 Further research by social anthropologists has contributed to a stronger and broader pragmatic perspective in understanding the phenomena of social symbolism; because, such work ‘‘touches the fundamental dimensions of all symbolic equipment related to the whole of social life’’ (Ansart, 1977, p. 30). It was made possible on the grounds of research on rituals of social control, which regulate actions of members within the group, such as rituals of transition, rituals of intensiﬁcation, interaction rituals, or rituals of conﬂict (Ha"as, 1992, pp. 164–170). Obviously, no society is free from conﬂict, even a primitive one, where in an ideal-typical view, the homogeneity of a mythological vision of the world making everything clear (Ansart, 1977, p. 23), should guarantee harmonious social relations. The myth and ritual that actualize it not only give meaning to group experience, but also are simultaneously instruments for regulating social relations and sustaining, or reproducing stratiﬁcation. Georges Balandier (1974, p. 164), speaking of ‘‘anthropo-logy,’’ emphasized the duality of social relations system and the system of meanings.18 A particular dialectics of symbolism has to be put into relief here. In the light of functionalistic analyses done by anthropologists; especially, Edmund Leach, symbolism appears both as the instrument of integration and disintegration (Ansart, 1977, p. 30).

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

141

In the tradition of sociological thought, the achievements of E´mile Durkheim’s school are obviously very signiﬁcant for looking at symbolism from the perspective of collective actions. Contrary to the anthropological concepts described above, the researchers from the Durkheimian school focused not only on functions; but also to a greater degree on the identiﬁcation of symbolic forms. Albert Salomon (1955) showed that Durkheimian collective representations include three forms: symbolic collective representing, symbolic affecting, and symbolic recollecting (collective memory). It is once again worth remembering Strauss’s encouragement to consider these phenomena in terms of actions, i.e., as forms of creating representations, creating emotions and creating of collective memory, and not only in terms of their results. The fusion of symbolic interactionism with Durkheimian tradition renders the possible, and desirable; and, despite fears, is not extremely difﬁcult. The common bridge between them is symbolism, as shown by Robert M. Farr and Serge Moscovici (Farr and Moscovici, 1984, p. X) who developed the concept of social representations.19 Social representations – ways of understanding and communicating that create reality and common sense (Moscovici, 2004, p. 19) are the basis of human interactions.20

BASICS OF THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY The initial model for the social labor of symbols proposed here is framed by the symbolic interactionist perspective, characterized above on the example of Strauss’s concepts as the theory of collective communicative action. It is infused also with anthropological and Durkheimian inspirations. Its cornerstone is a dynamic system of collective action as communicative action, and not a nominalistic, linear model of communicative situation including an individual sender and receiver of a message. Analogically, the two types of social interactions distinguished by symbolic interactionists, i.e., interactions directed by an objective purpose, goal or interest, and interactions directed at constructing, sustaining, or changing the identity of participants, are proposed here in order to differentiate two types of collective actions. First are the collective actions that are oriented at an objective purpose that can be called institutional, and second are the collective actions that are oriented at the construction of collective identity.

142

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

Thus, conceived institutional actions (they do not have to be institutionalized in the sense of formal regulation) are intended to result in achieving particular values or aims, e.g., wage strike or gaining customers. The typology of these collective, institutional actions could follow, similarly to actions of individual agents, the differentiation of types of achieved values, as suggested for example by Florian Znaniecki (1952) (hedonistic, economic, esthetic, religious, cognitive, social) or as proposed by Bourdieu – different ﬁelds of practice. Instead, identity oriented collective actions aim at the deﬁnition of a collective subject – ‘‘we’’ as the value. They cover various collective practices that allow a symbolic objectivation of a group’s (collective agent) existence. The model attempted here excludes any discrepancy between microsocial and macrosocial phenomena. On the one hand, the objectivation of social reality in interaction processes (Luckmann, Berger), or the structuration (Giddens) and its subjectivation on the other constitute two poles of processual phenomena with symbolism as their fabric. Collective institutional actions and collective identity actions constitute the objective aspect of social phenomena. Individual actions and interactions oriented at tasks, and identity oriented individual actions and interactions produce a subjective side of social phenomena. They are closely connected to one another in the process of creating social structure and social biographies of individuals. Social theory, however, has not been and still is not free from dualistic differentiations, such as: individual–society, order–conﬂict, justiﬁcation– opposition or domination–transformation. Referring to Bourdieu’s analysis of constituting rituals which are responsible for the group formation and to Victor Turner’s analysis of transformation rituals, I suggest overcoming this dualism and examining three functions of symbolism: constitutive, conservative, and transformative, both in individual and collective dimension. These functions of symbolism manifest themselves both in taskoriented actions and actions oriented at identity. The functions of social symbolism as distinguished above (constitutive, conservative, and transformative) are realized by the means of the three forms of symbolism: symbolic representing, symbolic affecting, and symbolic recollecting, as well as three modes in which symbolism manifests itself: discursive symbolism, symbolic vehicles (objects), and symbolic actions. Symbolic constructing is a process constitutive both for – what has been named – the ‘‘individual’’ and the ‘‘society.’’ Thus, the functions, forms, and modes of symbolization discussed so far can be applied in the analysis of the individual as the agent and the interactant in symbolic interactions and

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

143

collective actions – the self. As expressed by Robert S. Perinbanayagam ‘‘y the structure of the self reﬂects, or perhaps one should say is constituted by, the structure of the symbolic systems with which it is implicated’’ (Perinbanayagam, 1985, p. 88). Pragmatism as articulated in the works of Charles S. Peirce, George H. Mead and others, including its cultural variant presented by Florian Znaniecki (Znaniecki, 1983 [1919]) has given origins to the study of the symbolic self or semiotic self.21 The attribution of meanings to interactants has been analyzed in the theory of symbolic interaction (Turner, 2001; Stryker, 1994; Hewitt, 2000; Gordon, 1994). Although linguistic communication cannot be overestimated, the forms of symbolization discussed above preclude the new danger of reductionism of the symbolic self to the dialogical self or even the trialogical self (Wiley, 2005, pp. 9, 13, 158–159) in the interplay of ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘you,’’ and ‘‘me.’’ Processes of symbolization in their constitutive, conservative, and transformative functions in the construction of the self take on not only discursive forms, but also symbolic vehicles or embodied symbols and symbolic movements or gestures. Symbolic representing, symbolic affecting, and symbolic recollecting are in use in communication and interaction of self with others and open the systematic analysis of meanings, emotions, and time in the construction of the self as already explored, among others by Norman K. Denzin (1984). The subjectivation and objectivation processes also take place on the very individual or self level because the use of signs ‘‘yby human agents to objectify their respective selves to others, as to themselvesy’’ (Perinbanayagam, 2000, p. 86) is in fact something different when it is for the others and when it is for themselves, or public and private. It also differentiates along with interaction processes aiming at some purposes or tasks in contrast to those interactions that are oriented to the interactants themselves. Roles and identities respectively are the classic and proper concepts to deal with these questions. From now on, the suggested concepts will only be referred to as the dimension of objectivation, i.e., institutional collective actions and collective actions oriented at identity to move forward in their elaboration. From among its numerous variations, sociologists have given the most attention to the discursive symbolism and its particular form as manifested by political ideology in modern societies.22 One can agree with Pierre Ansart’s statement, that nothing has conﬁrmed the hypothesis of the end of ideologies in the twentieth century which might result from multiple opposing symbolic representations related to social organization and political life (Ansart, 1977, pp. 7–8). In the twenty ﬁrst century, rather the

144

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

globalization of ideological conﬂicts comes to the fore as liberal democracy and market economy face antagonistic and fundamentalistic social worlds. The three main functions of symbolism mentioned above (constitution, conservation, and transformation) in institutional and identity-oriented collective actions can be examined more precisely by means of the more complex analysis of symbolic labor going on within each of them. Here the categories relating to symbolic forms, as described by Albert Salomon, can be helpful again. Symbolic collective representing, symbolic affecting, and symbolic recollecting also require further and more thorough investigation. Collective representing, for instance, have been divided into religious and secular, inclusive and exclusive (us/them), horizontal and vertical (the division of labor and social hierarchies), center/peripheries, and others. Collective symbolic affecting can be negative or positive. Symbolic recollecting could be generally divided into historic and mythical (of time, place, processes, objects, subjects, or agents).23 These distinguished functions are not inherent in symbolism itself but result from producing symbolism and its use in collective actions. Modes of this strategic use can be tentatively indicated here. And thus, the function of constitution of meanings of social reality in institutional actions is the result of strategies of legitimation24 and coordination of actions. The function of conserving the meanings of social reality in institutional actions is related to strategies of apology (justiﬁcation) and control. The function of transforming meanings of reality in institutional action is connected to strategies of delegitimation of purposes, and mobilization for new tasks. Respectively, the function of constitution in actions oriented at collective identity results from the strategies of creating the genealogy and the canon of speciﬁc meanings differentiating social collectivities. The function of conservation in actions oriented at collective identity is the result of strategies aimed at creating boundaries (distinctions) and their manifestations by means of symbolism. The function of transforming actions oriented at collective identity is connected with using the strategies of liminalization and conversion (Ha"as, 1992, p. 199ff). It should be reminded once again that there are three forms of symbolism in use (symbolic representing, symbolic affecting, and symbolic recollecting), as well as three modes of symbolism (discursive, embodied, and behavioral), and three functions of symbolism (constitutive, conservative, and transformative). The distinguished orders of collective institutional actions and collective actions oriented at identity are regarded as two aspects of collective actions. In the proposed basics for a model of functions of symbolism, its forms, modes, and strategies of use in collective actions,

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

145

various empirical analyses might be invoked to support this view. The purpose of this analysis however was limited to the formulation of a theoretical model that systematizes various contributions. In conclusion, the relevance of pragmatic analysis of functions of symbolization in collective actions should be emphasized. It leads to the ‘‘denaturalization,’’ so boldly claimed in Znaniecki’s cultural sociology (Ha"as, 2006), or in reﬂexive sociology of Bourdieu, and the expansion of the space of human liberty since nothing is determined beforehand in collective actions constructing institutions and identities given the mastery of symbols in labor.

NOTES 1. Umberto Eco’s radical opinion should be regarded as a rhetorical evasion: ‘‘Semiosis is a phenomenon typical of human beings (according to some, also of angels and animals), in which – says Peirce – a sign, its object (or meaning) and interpretant come into play. Semiotics is a theoretical reﬂection on semiosis. Therefore, a semiotiocian is someone who never knows what semiosis is, but he is willing to bet his life that it exists’’ (Eco, 1999, p. 65). 2. On this and other obstacles to the development of sociological studies of social symbolism see Ha"as (2002). 3. It was presented during a symposium in 1954 and ﬁrst published in Salomon (1955, pp. 287–356). 4. Symbol, however, is not a synonym of a sign and Schutz, in a way similar to U. Eco gives symbols a narrower meaning. Eco’s concept of the symbolic mode does not settle anything about the relation of symbol to reality in contrast to ontological views of Schutz. ‘‘Thus, a symbolic mode does not necessarily constitute a process of production, but always and invariably a process of text use, and can be applied to every text and every sign type through a pragmatic decision (‘‘I want to interpret symbolically’’) which on a semantic level produces a new function of signs, ascribing the designates having codiﬁed meaning new portions of meaning, the least deﬁnite and separated by an addressee. Characteristic of symbolic mode is a fact that if we decide not to activate it, the text will not be devoid of independent meaning on the literal and rhetorical level’’ (Eco, 1999, p. 204). 5. According to the tradition started by Aristotle and conﬁrmed by Charles S. Peirce’s deﬁnition. Eco, however, points out that ‘‘for Peirce no sign is exclusively a symbol, an icon, or an index but it contains – in various proportions – elements of all three (types)’’ (Eco, 1999, p. 152). 6. As Ivo Strecker pointed out in his theory of the social practice of symbolization Strecker (1988, p. 2), the ambiguity of symbolic representation assumes a univocal character of representation of signs. 7. In a way similar to understanding religion according to Durkheim (Berger & Luckmann, 1973, p. 113).

146

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

8. Berger and Luckmann claim that symbolic universe is the so-called fourth level of legitimation and distinguish three lower levels. They are: language categorizations, explanatory schemes related to speciﬁc actions, and commonsense knowledge. According to them ‘‘empirically, of course, these levels overlap’’ (1973, p. 112). The insistence on the concept of symbolism transcending practice is therefore inconsistent. 9. ‘‘[y] the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of behavior of the whole social group of which he/she is a member, since his/her individual acts are included in larger social acts [y]’’ (Mead, 1934, p. 6, 7). 10. It does not mean that in the concept of social action Weber formulated with the help of the subjective meaning, broader structures of meaning cannot be found. It is an actor and his relation to actions of others that gives sense to social action. Thus, the Weberian concept of social action can be read as a part of social practice based on codes of meanings (Ansart, 1977, p. 21). 11. An analysis of linguistics acts presented by John Austin and John Searle can serve as an example of pragmatic approach. They analyzed speech, acts and their functions in human communication: representatives, directives, commisives, expressives, declarations, verdictives, exercitives, behabitives, and expositives communicated by language users. However, they limited attention to linguistic symbolism and the perspective of individual users only and did not include the perspective of group practice. 12. It is a matter of broader sense of communication as a process of sign use (Zio´"kowski, 1998, p. 370). 13. Habermas has deﬁned communicative actions as such linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants aim at the realization of illocutionary goals. By strategic actions he understands such interactions in which at least one participant aims at perlocutionary effects (Habermas, 1999, pp. 486–487). 14. It is not a matter of coincidence that the approach presented here has a lot in common with Turner’s (1974) processual analysis of symbolism. Turner adopts deliberately Florian Znaniecki’s assumptions: neither social knowledge nor cognition, but the dynamic system of action is the starting point for research of symbolism in the context of temporal, socio-cultural processes. 15. The penetrating analysis of linguism was presented by Bourdieu (see Ha"as, 2004). 16. Besides the ‘‘triad’’ of basic functions – cognitive, emotive, and evocative – Jakobson distinguished also a poetic function (a reference to the message) and, following Alfred Tarski, a metalinguistic one (a reference to a code), as well as, following Bronis"aw Malinowski, a phatic function (sustaining the act of communication). 17. Cf. for example, important works of Pitirim Sorokin (1937) and Gilbert Durand (1986). 18. Similarly, Bourdieu in his sociology presents social differences and corresponding visions of the world: di/visions. 19. The term, introduced by Durkheim and translated as ‘‘collective imaginations,’’ is better rendered by ‘‘collective representations.’’ 20. Serge Moscovici speaks of social representations and not of collective representations in order to stress that these phenomena are objects of research and

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

147

not explanatory factors, as well as to emphasize their pragmatic formulation (1984, p. 16 ff). 21. In the wording of Robert S. Perinbanayagam, ‘‘The phenomenal self of any given human then is a symbolic self, an assembled opus of names and attitudes elicited by these names, and an activity of orderly categories and predictive relationships that he, along with his companions, must take account of, deal with, live with, and die with. Such a symbolic self is not ‘‘internalized’’ in any useful sense of that term but is used in conversation with self and between self and other and is manifest as words, utterances, images, and activities’’ (1985, p. 100). 22. Distinguishing the characteristic features of ideal type of ideology as an integrated and systematized pattern of beliefs allows also to distinguish quasi- and proto-ideological phenomena (Shils, 1982, p. 202–223). 23. It is worth noting here that these collective representations can be subordinated to main metaphors creating, sustaining, or changing the vision of social order, for example temporal metaphor of communism and Marxist ‘‘eschatology’’ of proletarian revolution, or spatial metaphor of European integration and globalization. 24. Legitimation in a broad sense of making meanings ‘‘objectively available and subjectively plausible’’ is for Berger and Luckmann a foundation of society as objective reality. In a model of symbolic construction of social reality presented here legitimation is understood as only one of many functions of symbolism.

REFERENCES Alexander, J. C. (1985). The ‘individualist dilemma’ in phenomenology and interactionism. In: S. N. Eisenstadt & H. J. Helle (Eds), Macro-sociological theory. Perspectives on sociological theory (Vol. I, pp. 25–57). London: Sage. Ansart, P. (1977). Ide´ologies, conﬂits et pouvoir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Archer, M. (1996). Culture and agency: The place of culture in social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balandier, G. (1974). Anthropo-logiques. Paris: PUF. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1973). The social construction of reality. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penquin Books. Boudon, R., & Bourricaud, F. (1982). Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, P. (1991). In: J. B. Thompson (Ed.), Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, A. (1976). Two-dimensional man. An essay on the anthropology of power and symbolism in complex society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cassirer, E. (1944). An essay on man. New Haven: Yale University Press. Denzin, N. K. (1984). On understanding emotion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Duncan, H. D. (1968). Symbols in society. New York: Oxford University Press. Durand, G. (1986). In: C. Rowin´ski (Trans.), Wyobraz´nia symboliczna. Warszawa: PWN. Eco, U. (1999). In: M. Woz´niak (Trans.), Czytanie s´wiata. Krako´w: Wydawnictwo Znak.

148

ELZ_ BIETA HAŁAS

Fine, G. A. (1993). The sad demise, mysterious disappearance, and glorious triumph of symbolic interactionism. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 61–87. Farr, R.M., & Moscovici, S. (Eds). (1984). Social representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firth, R. (1973). Symbols. Private and public. London: G. Allen and Unwin. Gordon, Ch. (1994). Self-systems: Five current social psychological approaches. In: G. M. Platt & C. Gordon (Eds), Self, collective behavior and society: Essays honoring the contributions of Ralph H. Turner (pp. 193–231). London: Jai Press. Habermas, J. (1992). Postmetaphysical thinking: Philosophical essays (pp. 57–87). Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1999). In: A. M. Kaniowski (Trans.), Teoria dzia!ania komunikacyjnego, Vol. I: Racjonalnos´c´ dzia!ania a racjonalnos´c´ spo!eczna. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Habermas, J. (2001). The liberating power of symbols. Philosophical essays. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ha"as, E. (1992). Konwersja. Perspektywa socjologiczna. Lublin: Norbertinum. Ha"as, E. (2002). Symbolism and social phenomena. Toward the integration of past and current theoretical approaches. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(3), 351–366. Ha"as, E. (2004). Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the politics of symbolization and symbolic interactionism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 27, 235–257. Ha"as, E. (2006). Classical cultural sociology. Florian Znaniecki’s impact in a new light. Journal of Classical Sociology, 6, 257–282. Heiskala, R. (2003). Society as semiosis. Neostructuralist theory of culture and society. Frakfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag. Hewitt, J. P. (2000). Self and society. A symbolic interactionist social psychology. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Jakobson, R. (1989). In: M. R. Mayenowa (Ed.), W poszukiwaniu istoty j˛ezyka. Wybo´r pism (Vol. 2). Warszawa: PIW. Joas, H. (1993). Pragmatism and social theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langer, S. K. (1942). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Penguin Books. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Moscovici, S. (2004). The phenomenon of social representations. In: R. M. Farr & S. Moscovici (Eds), Social representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nadel, S. F. (1951). Foundations of social anthropology. London: Cohen and West. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1985). Signifying acts. Structure and meaning in everyday life. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (2000). The presence of self. Lanham: Rowman and Little Field Publishers. Popper K. R. (1992). In: A. Chmielewski (Trans.), Wiedza obiektywna. Ewolucyjna teoria epistemologiczna. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Salomon, A. (1955, 1966). Symbols and images in the constitution of society. In: L. Bryson, L. Finkelstein, H. Hoagland & R. M. MacIver (Eds), Symbols and society (pp. 103–133). New York: Cooper Square Publishing, Inc. Schutz A. (1962). Collected Papers I. The problem of social reality. Edited and Introduced by M. Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Shils, E. (1982). The constitution of society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Social Symbolism: Forms and Functions

149

Soeffner, H.-G. (1991). ‘‘Trajectory’’ as intended fragment: The critique of empirical reason according to Anselm Strauss. In: D. R. Maines (Ed.), Social organization and social process. Essays in honor of Anselm Strauss (pp. 359–371). New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Sorokin, P. A. (1937). Social and cultural dynamics (Vols. 1–3). New York: American Book. Strauss, A. L. (1969). Mirrors and masks. The search for identity. San Francisco: The Sociology Press. Strauss, A. L. (1991). Creating sociological awareness. Collective images and symbolic representations. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Strauss, A. L. (1993). Continual permutations of action. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Strecker, I. (1988). The social practice of symbolization. An anthropological analysis. London: The Athlone Press. Stryker, S. (1994). Freedom and constraint in social and personal life: Toward resolving the paradox of self. In: G. M. Platt & C. Gordon (Eds), Self, collective behavior and society: Essays honoring the contributions of Ralph H. Turner (pp. 119–138). London: Jai Press. Turner, R. H. (2001). Role theory. In: J. H. Turner (Ed.), Handbook of sociological theory (pp. 233–254). New York: Kluwer Academics. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, ﬁelds and metaphors. Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wiley, N. (2005). The semiotic self. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zio´"kowski, M. (1998). J˛ezyk i komunikowanie. In: Encyklopedia socjologii (Vol. I, pp. 370–375). Warszawa: Oﬁcyna Naukowa. Znaniecki, F. (1934). The method of sociology. New York: Farrar & Rinehart Company, Inc. Znaniecki, F. (1952). Cultural sciences. Their origin and development. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Znaniecki, F. (1983, 1919). Cultural reality. Huston: Cap and Gown Press.

RESPONDING TO VERBAL AMBIGUITY: THE CASE OF PUNS Bernard N. Meltzer and William J. Meltzer ABSTRACT Using puns as an illustration, we examine how verbal ambiguity affects the process of discourse. Our major focus is on the responses people make to the occurrence of puns in face-to-face conversations. First, we question the notion that the groans that commonly and distinctively greet puns are responses to the perceived low or high quality of speciﬁc puns. Next, we describe the special problems of interpretation that accompany puns arising in encounters. Finally, we suggest a modiﬁcation of the views of Blumer and of Goffman as to the incidental or disruptive intrusion of jocularity into encounters. We conclude that verbal ambiguity – despite its popular identiﬁcation as enigmatic, ‘‘incorrect’’ language – does not signiﬁcantly alter the processes or results of everyday discourse.

When one uses the term ‘‘symbolic interaction’’ one ordinarily tends to think of successful intersubjectivity, shared meanings, between interactants. A little thought, however, brings to mind the occurrence of miscommunication and other problems of understanding in everyday discourse. Because symbols lack ﬁxed, intrinsic meaning, human communication is subject to problematic or faulty interpretation. These failures may stem from such contingencies, among others, as speech pathologies, differences in language

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 151–164 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30009-X

151

152

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

communities or linguistic competence, deliberate obfuscation, abstruseness, or verbal ambiguity. The last of these, as Burke (1964, p. 97) points out, abounds because it often makes for a dramatic vocabulary, an effective means of communication. The general editor of a series of volumes on interpersonal communication echoes this view in the statement that ‘‘equivocal communication can be effective communication’’ (Knapp, 1990, p. 7). This is so despite the fact that verbal ambiguity violates the widely held value of expressive clarity. Thus, human communication embraces the opposing tendencies of clarity and ambiguity; later discussion will demonstrate the great extent to which this tension obtains. A partial list of the multifarious sources of verbal ambiguity would include the following: irony, sarcasm, satire, double entendre, idioms, jokes (many), oxymorons, metaphors, euphemisms, and puns. William Empson’s classic Seven Types of Ambiguity (1956) treats at length the forms of dubious wording, each of which is characterized by simultaneous alternative signiﬁcations for the same linguistic unit. Given the transcendence by symbols of the here and now, they can refer to past or future events, hypothetical situations, nonexistent or imaginary objects, falsehoods, and, lacking ﬁxed meanings, polysemic verbalisms – hence, ambiguous expressions. The various ways in which people respond to verbal ambiguity form the concerns of this paper. We focus our attention upon the pun, which accomplishes ambiguity by using a homonym to suggest two or more different meanings, usually producing a humorous effect.1 One quite proliﬁc source of this form of wordplay is the myriad of words for each of which dictionaries list more than one deﬁnition. By playing upon fundamental elements of language – sounds and meanings – puns epitomize verbal ambiguity. Preminger and Brogan (1993) differentiate the following types of puns: lexical puns, which turn on a single ambiguous word; grammatical puns, which turn on an ambiguous morphology or syntax; and the puns based on words or phrases that simultaneously belong to disparate levels of diction, situation, or experience (p. 1005). All types have in common the unexpected association of distinct ideas (Crosbie, 1977, p. 267). Our selection of this source of verbal ambiguity reﬂects both its great prevalence and the voluminous scholarly literature. Linguists and anthropologists, according to Apte (1985; see also Sherzer, 2002), believe that punning is a universal phenomenon; Edmonson (1971, p. 88) asserts that ‘‘all peoples pun’’; and Hymes (1964) reports numerous cross-cultural studies of puns (e.g., Navaho, Mixteco, Winnebago, Annamese, Eﬁk, Vietnamese, etc.). Moreover, Crystal (1987, p. 63) points out that Shakespeare used puns extensively (over a thousand in his plays alone, according to Bather, cited in Crosbie,

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

153

1977, p. 2), and that an eighteenth-century French playwright wrote a neverproduced play with a pun in every line.2 And Garﬁeld (1987) informs us that the antiquity of punning is attested by its presence in Homer’s Odyssey and in the Old Testament, while punning has also been noted in ancient Hindu Vedas (Redfern, 1984, p. 35) and Pharaonic Egypt’s religious texts (Edmonson, 1971, p. 90). Our focus on puns will emphasize commonalities with other linguistic ambiguities particularly most humor, which is often an ingredient of puns. Occasionally, however, we shall pay attention to responses peculiar to puns, such as groans. In general, we hope to contribute to the understanding of some types of verbal expression that are rife in discursive, signifying acts. In doing so, we expect to discern similarities and differences between interpersonal interactions marked by, or relatively free of, verbal ambiguity. In analyzing responses to puns, we shall examine three apparently disparate aspects of the ways by which people manage their reactions to puns that are introduced into everyday conversations, namely: (1) possible meanings of the common, distinctive response to puns by groaning; (2) the problematic deciphering of puns; and (3) resolution of an issue raised by Flaherty (1990) as to whether puns, as a form of humor (Flaherty’s concern), may disrupt discourse or are incidental to it. The unity of this inquiry lies, then, in its treatment of ways in which departures from discursive clarity affect the conduct of respondents. Thus, we are raising the question of what difference, if any, puns – and verbal ambiguity generally – make in processes of interpersonal discourse. Of necessity, our treatment of punning will emphasize the entailed interaction process. As Gary Fine (1983) reminds us, Most humor [including puns] y implies a social relationship, a connection between self and other. Just as one cannot tickle oneself, so, too, one can hardly tell oneself a joke or play a prank on oneself. A jocular event typically requires a minimum of two persons to succeed—or, for that matter—to fail. (p. 159)

To conﬁne our analysis within manageable limits, we shall deal with puns in face-to-face conversation only. Also, we shall concern ourselves primarily with intentional puns.

THE MEANING OF THE GROAN RESPONSE Norrick (1993, p. 161) asserts ‘‘The recipient of a joke typically laughs at the crucial point, while the recipient of a pun often groans as a sign of

154

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

understanding’’ (emphasis added). Numerous treatments of audience reactions to puns mention groaning, a sound expressing pain or disapproval, often accompanied by squirms, rolling eyes, ﬂinches, headshaking, grimaces, winces, mumbled threats, or exclamations such as ‘‘That’s terrible!’’ or, on the other hand, ‘‘Oh, that’s a good one!’’ Scholars disagree, however, about the actual shared meaning of pun-induced groans. Thus, the groans elicited by puns are themselves polysemic and ambiguous. Some contend that it is those puns that are deﬁned as bad, pointless, or atrocious (e.g., use a key word that is not homonymous, or fail to connect signiﬁcantly two or more levels of signiﬁcation) that evoke the utterance. For example, both Davis (1993) and Marino (1988) refer to such puns as ‘‘groaners.’’ We have the impression that this commonsense view is widely prevalent in the general population. Other writers maintain that it is ‘‘good’’ puns (i.e., those in which the context gives both meanings signiﬁcance) that elicit the pained response. Thus, Koller (1988) refers to ‘‘feigned anguish’’ over some particularly adept punning; and Saﬁre (2001) writes of the ‘‘small groan to pretend the wordplay is outrageous while the one who gets the point acknowledges its presence’’ (p. 357, emphasis added). For these writers, then, groaning represents an appreciative response – in a sense, praising with faint damns. Thus, the groan, in these instances, is akin to the African-American slang use of ‘‘bad’’ as a reversal of the white standard, meaning good, the very best – as in ‘‘bad ass,’’ ‘‘bad boy,’’ and ‘‘bad doing’’ (see Major, 1994). The apparent lowly status of punning in general suggests a probable source of the routine feedback by groaning. Various students of punning (e.g., Alderson, 1996; Apte, 1985; Crystal, 1987; Davis, 1993; Preminger & Brogan, 1993; West, 2000) have reported on the disdain felt historically toward puns as the reputed ‘‘lowest form of wit.’’ Alderson (1996), for example, describes the concerted attacks of eighteenth-century American literati on punning as an inferior form of wit; Davis (1993) holds that puns were ostracized from serious literature during the Restoration in England; we learn from Shibles (2006) that the German word, der Kalauer, refers to both puns and stale jokes; and the subtitle of a relatively recent compilation of puns reads: ‘‘How to Lose Friends and Agonize People’’ (Gordon, 1980).3 Further, such historical literary and philosophical luminaries as Joseph Addison, John Dryden, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Friedrich Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Noah Webster decried this form of humor (see Crystal, 1987; Davis, 1993; Preminger & Brogan, 1993; West, 2000).4 The disparagement of punning may be expressed even by punsters themselves, who may follow an instance with an account such as ‘‘No pun intended,’’ or ‘‘If you’ll pardon the pun.’’

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

155

This pejorative reputation is held to derive from a variety of adverse allegations about puns, such as the following: that the pun is ‘‘impious as regards our linguistic categories established by custom’’ (Burke, 1964, p. 94); that ‘‘the punster often has to strain the conversation to make his point’’ (Morreall, 1983, p. 70); that the pun creates disorder, breaking ‘‘the conventions of orthodox speech or writing’’ (Redfern, 1984, p. 14); that it ‘‘presents a disruption of the one-to-one relationship between signiﬁer and signiﬁed’’ (Bates, 1999, p. 423); that [like humorous communication, in general] it ‘‘breaks various societal norms, among them that of politeness’’ (Kotthoff, 1996, p. 299); that ‘‘the pun is obviously anti-decorum’’ (Redfern, 1984, p. 18); that ‘‘puns disrupt the symbols used in much communication, rendering problematic the interpersonal and symbolic part of interaction’’ (Billig, 2001, p. 38); that ‘‘punsters often break other people’s tacit trust that conventions of relevance and seriousness will be followed’’ (Meltzer, 1980, p. 50); that ‘‘[p]unning makes forbidden connections, uniting what should rationally be kept separate’’ (Garﬁeld, 1987, p. 17, citing S. F. Gilbert); and that the pun ‘‘undermines the basis on which our assumptions about the communicative efﬁcacy of language rest’’ (Culler, 1988, p. 140). It is interesting to note, however, one critic’s reference to the pleasure that puns may offer in subverting the social order (Billig, 2001, p. 38). This same point is expressed in Flaherty’s (1984) earlier view that amusement can be stimulated by what he terms ‘‘reality play’’ – deﬁned as ‘‘a more or less innocuous and transient triﬂing with y normative expectations’’ (p. 80). The pleasure that punning may induce in both speaker and listener, as well as the potential dramatic impact of puns, may help to account for their frequent use. Most published considerations of the negative appraisals of pun-making, it turns out, are not linked with the presumed quality of speciﬁc puns. Rather, they reﬂect a generic evaluation of puns. Supporting this contention are pertinent comments by a few scholars. Norrick (1993), for example, asserts that utterances of displeasure are ‘‘standard’’ means of responding to puns (p. 99); Saﬁre (1996, p. 1) refers to ‘‘the usual groan’’; and Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1976) hold that groans or hisses are ‘‘formulaic’’ responses to puns (p. 106). Finally, we have Sherzer’s (1978) statement that: ‘‘Of course, the groan is not universal. Responses to puns and other forms of speech play are speciﬁc to particular languages, cultures, and societies’’ (p. 348n). The foregoing remarks conform to our conclusion that the groan response is a traditional, or customary, one, a conclusion that only a single one of the works we surveyed (Meltzer, 1980, p. 51) explicitly anticipates – in an

156

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

assertion that ‘‘audience responses y are mandated by tradition’’. As with so many other common understandings and expectations, this norm is tacit; groaning auditors need not indicate to themselves or others why they so respond. In any event, this normative character now seems almost selfevident to us, given the near-ubiquity of the response, regardless of audience evaluations, in our society. In view of its character as a shared expectation, the equivocal groan response can serve any of several functions: exhibiting the ‘‘proper’’ behavior in a punning situation; keeping one’s appraisal of the pun noncommittal; or concealing one’s failure to grasp the punster’s intended meaning.

THE PROBLEMATIC DECIPHERING OF PUNS Efforts of auditors to render puns intelligible are hampered by the incongruity of words and/or ideas that constitute their equivocality. As Burke (1964, pp. 94–95) points out, ‘‘perspective by incongruity,’’ or ‘‘planned incongruity,’’ provide the pun’s methodology, linking by tonal association words previously unlinked. In common with other forms of humor, the pun entails a surprising, that is, sudden and unexpected, juxtaposition of ideas. This juxtaposition, while often misleading and even sophistical, constitutes a somewhat culturally appropriate incongruity. Like other forms of linguistic humor (e.g., spoonerisms, malapropisms), puns, as we have seen, involve disorder in phonological and grammatical elements, distortions in the connection between form and meaning, reconstruction of familiar words and phrases, and similar ambiguity-heightening verbalisms (see Apte, 1985, p. 179). Harvey Sacks (1973) aptly describes this disconcerting character as follows: [A]t least one sense of how puns work involves the presence of a word, phrase, or other construction of more than one meaning, one meaning being used in understanding the construction in its conversational locus, while the other meaning(s) are also ﬁtted to the locus, although in different ways. Such a formulation suffers not only from its roughness, but also from its failure to specify the conversational locus involved. (p. 139)

Despite these aberrations from the conventions of orderly discourse, puns readily ﬁnd a home in innumerable encounters (as well as, of course, in advertisements and newspaper headings). This is probably the case because, counterintuitively, ambiguity tends to capture attention and enrich discourse, in part because it gives rise to problems of comprehension. As Evans and Evans (1957) assert, ‘‘y ambiguity serves to give extension to

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

157

meaning, to open up several avenues of thought for the mind to explore y’’ (p. 30). Expressing a view that is not commonly held by scholars of modern word usage, however, is Clark’s (1987, p. 24) admonition to avoid ambiguities at all costs. Decoding the pun requires, of course, taking the role of the punster and trying to convert ambiguous gestures into signiﬁcant symbols. The auditor must decide whether the homonym is intended as a pun and must infer its purpose before crafting a response. A certain amount of linguistic proﬁciency may be necessary, which can pose a problem for secondlanguage listeners and members of other language communities. These auditors may lack the skills needed to infer the speaker’s intent from acoustic and contextual cues, a problem they also face with idiomatic, ironic, and phatic (sociable) speech. Perinbanayagam (1985, 1991) summarizes ways of ‘‘disambiguating’’ problematic discourse that are also relevant to pun-decipherment. These ways include attending to ‘‘semantic content, tonal semiotics, and connections to previous articulations’’ (1985, p. 78), as well as to ‘‘the roles and selves of the articulator relevant to the situation, the placement of the [pun] in a temporal sequence (i.e., the context) and the situation’’ (1991, p. 72). It is evident that Perinbanayagam is describing accentuations of the interpretive process that characterizes everyday conversations. Both speaker and auditor have incentives where puns are involved. Each is likely, of course, to seek the establishment of shared meanings. In addition, each is likely to seek a favorable presentation of self through linguistic competence and cleverness, one by enunciating the pun and the other by recognizing and deciphering it.5 Conversely, puns that the auditor deems inadequate or grossly improper, or that the auditor is unable to comprehend, are likely to impair one and/or the other’s self-presentation. The ambiguity of puns is a more complicated matter than our discussion thus far has described. A number of scholars (e.g., Culler, 1988, pp. 3, 114; Preminger & Brogan, 1993, p. 40; Redfern, 1984, pp. 10–177) have taken note of the inherent ambiguity of language itself. Culler (1988, p. 141), for example, refers to ‘‘the myths of a monosemic language and a pre-existing structure of meaning y [the] belief in a language’s transparency, stability, and rationality’’ (emphasis added). Many of the previously indicated strictures aimed at puns derive from these myths. Illustrative of this inherence is the frequency, as Redfern (1984, p. 177) points out, with which ordinary conversation, broadcasting, and public speaking contain phrases such as ‘‘If you take my meaning,’’ ‘‘If I may rephrase that,’’ ‘‘So to speak,’’ ‘‘Or words to that effect.’’ Moreover, the creative, constructed characters of

158

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

human conduct, whether individual or joint behavior, can affect its clarity. Plummer (1991, Vol. 1) expresses the omnipresent social reality of change, or novelty, underlying much linguistic ambiguity: [M]eaning is never ﬁxed and immutable; rather, it is always shifting, emergent, and ultimately ambiguous. Although we may regularly create habitual, routine, and shared meanings, these are always open to reappraisal and further adjustment. (p. x)

And ﬁnally, the basic origins of ambiguity lie in the fact that all human languages must use ﬁnite vocabularies to indicate an inﬁnite number of possible referents. Thus, all languages must make manifold semantic use of the same phonemes (i.e., sounds), thereby enabling puns. To this intrinsic ambiguity of language, puns add another layer of ambiguous meaning. The resulting pun-augmented ambiguity requires special efforts to decipher. The higher the degree of perplexity experienced by the auditor, the more strenuous the special inferential efforts needed to comprehend the latent meanings (Preminger & Brogan, 1993). All puns, however, increase the complexity of messages to some degree. The punster and the pun recipient therefore must engage in closer complicity, or collaboration, than usual in order to achieve mutual understanding. McLeish (1993) summarizes Empson’s views on this point as follows: [A]mbiguity invites the listener y to help create the full meaning of a group of y words. Unless the person responding to the words adds his or her understanding of the nuances involved, what is being heard y remains inert y . (pp. 25–26)

Readers will note the correspondence of this perspective on ambiguity to that of symbolic interactionism on the construction of meanings in general, granting the listener creative partnership with the speaker, rather than passive recipience. The sole difference lies in the heightened effort often needed to convert ambiguity into shared meaning.

DO PUNS DISRUPT DISCOURSE? Turning now to the ﬁnal response to puns under consideration, we examine how they affect the course of discursive interaction. Some students of punning (e.g., Scott F. Gilbert, cited in Garﬁeld, 1987) aver that it promotes cohesion between encounter participants; in fact, ‘‘the more esoteric the pun, the greater the bond between people who understand it’’ (p. 177). Other students describe a variety of additional potential effects, as described below.

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

159

Frequently in face-to-face interaction the ambiguity of puns induces momentary derailment of the ﬂow of discourse. As Max Eastman (1937, p. 310) points out, such derailment is true for jocular expressions generally. However, is such derailment simply incidental to the discourse, or potentially disruptive of it? Flaherty (1990) addresses the matter of disruption by contrasting the approaches of Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman to the occurrence and consequences of humor for the ﬂow of interpersonal interaction. For Goffman, as Flaherty emphasizes, jocularity tends to breach deference and demeanor, the ceremonial order that regulates situations of discourse. Blumer, on the other hand, views surprising and incongruous digressions as integral features of symbolic interaction, which comprises a continuous process of anticipating, interpreting, and modifying one another’s responses. Thus, while Goffman stresses the relatively rigid normative structure of encounters, Blumer stresses their improvisational, processual, and emergent character. Consequently, Goffman sees the stream of discourse as fragile, or brittle, in the face of unexpected levity, which he deﬁnes as ‘‘misinvolvement’’ or other misconduct. Antithetically, Blumer sees such situations as highly resilient, resistant to disruption. Following Goffman’s lead in this matter is Sherzer (1978, p. 341), who holds that puns often ‘‘disrupt the cohesion ofydiscourse andybreak framey .’’ In line with Blumer’s more supple approach is that of Berger and Luckman (1966), who write: [I]t is comparatively difﬁcult to impose rigid patterns upon face-to-face interaction. Whatever patterns are introduced will be continuously modiﬁed through the exceedingly variegated and subtle interchange of subjective meanings that goes on. (p. 30)

Emerson (1973) introduces a plausible position that can be viewed as somewhat intermediate between Blumer’s and Goffman’s. In a study of the use of humor among physicians, nurses, and patients in a hospital, she describes the circumstances under which the resistance of serious discourse to being disrupted by humor is likely to be vitiated and overcome. According to Emerson (1973, p. 271), severe disagreement on interpreting the appropriateness of joking (or punning) in a situation tends to disrupt social situations. Thus, whether a pun will continue a conversation’s trajectory, redirect it, or terminate it may depend on whether the listener sees it as an outrageous breach of conventions or values she/he holds dear. Accordingly, puns deﬁned as intolerably digressive, frivolous, trivializing of the topic, impolite, hostile, or deliberately offensive (e.g., deemed overly obscene or derogatory) may induce a breakdown in the interaction.6 Our personal experiences and observations support this view. One of us recalls

160

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

witnessing an encounter between a graduate student and a professor, in which the professor asked, ‘‘What are you up to this term?’’ and the student replied, ‘‘Oh, about ﬁve feet six’’. The professor, glaring at the student, retorted, ‘‘I don’t know if I should continue this conversation’’. Following this reply, the student quickly engaged in repair by apologizing abjectly. Also, one of us terminated a conversation when an acquaintance voiced a heinous racist pun, despite the punster’s futile ‘‘I wasn’t being serious!’’ It seems reasonable to conclude that both Goffman’s and Blumer’s views may include valid components: Puns, like other forms of humor, violate linguistic and, sometimes, situational rules, thereby occasionally disrupting encounters (as Goffman maintains); but many potentially disruptive violations are readily forestalled by adaptive interpretations (in agreement with Blumer). The astute punster, of course, takes into account the kinds of situations, contexts, and audiences likely to induce deﬁnitions of impropriety.7 The likelihood, however, that a pun will be deﬁned as warranting disruption is mitigated by such indexical elements as a solidary relationship between speaker and addressee (Pexman & Zvaigzne, 2004) or superordinate status of the punster. Pun recipients tend to ‘‘cut some slack’’ for punsters in these instances. We speculate, further, that competitive punning (punning duels) – found in several cultures (see Edmonson, 1971, pp. 89–90, 167; Redfern, 1984, p. 35; Sherzer, 2002, pp. 67–69) – may occasion or reﬂect mitigation. Such playful contests are reminiscent of the African-American ritual insults of ‘‘dozens,’’ ‘‘signifying,’’ or ‘‘sounding’’ (see Labov, 1972), which can become seemingly rancorous without damaging relationships. One more comment merits mention about the impact of puns on interpersonal discourse: Sherzer (1978, p. 342) points out that speakers may use puns strategically for such purposes as to get the ﬂoor, to change the topic, or to relieve tension. To these, one could add deliberate efforts to shock or to impress auditors by one’s wordsmithing.

CONCLUSION This paper has been concerned with responses people make to verbal ambiguity in face-to-face interaction. Using puns as an illustrative case, we have considered three aspects of pun-related responses: the genesis of the ‘‘groan’’ reaction, problems in interpreting puns, and how ambiguity impinges upon the course of conversations. Of these aspects, the ﬁrst is the most distinctive and predictable response to ambiguity and the least problematic in origin and cognitive in character.

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

161

We examined various ideas about the sources of the emission of groans or other signs of displeasure following puns. Rejecting efforts to account for such emissions as consequences of only ﬂawed, or only adept, wordplay, we advanced the view that the lowly reputation of punning, per se, may be associated with the rise of a tradition of expressing disparagement. This tradition reﬂects a response by self-appointed guardians of rhetorical propriety to the ﬂouting by puns of conventional linguistic order. The decoding of puns tends to be problematic because of the incongruity referred to above. In addition, language itself is marked by essential incongruity and ambiguity. Hence, the ampliﬁcation of these characteristics by puns calls for extra efforts at decipherment; complicity between interactants becomes especially necessary. This diligent interpretive response is, inescapably, typical to some degree in all forms of verbal ambiguity, but it appears to be most marked in puns. Flaherty (1990) raises the question of whether Blumer or Goffman does greater justice to the management of humor-related ambiguity in interaction. Goffman’s ‘‘situational determinism’’ implies that infractions of rules of ‘‘ceremonial order’’ may disrupt social order and interaction. Emphasizing the ongoing processes of interpretation in interaction, by contrast, Blumer acknowledges the ﬂexibility and adaptability of interaction. Thus, these two preeminent scholars differ signiﬁcantly about the likelihood that ambiguity will give rise to disjunctive consequences for encounters. Emerson’s (1973) views, while more closely related to Blumer’s than to Goffman’s, add the element of negotiating agreement among interactants on the appropriateness of introducing ambiguous statements into serious discourse. Disagreement on this matter, it appears, may bring in its train a breakdown in the discourse; this is especially true when the auditor deﬁnes the pun as gratuitous and egregious. Emerson (1973) helps us recognize that humor (which includes puns) may undermine encounters through intrusion upon serious situations; at the same time, Emerson reminds us that such intrusions are subject to redeﬁning interpretations that sustain encounters. How does our treatment of responses to puns link up with the broader subject of responses to verbal ambiguity in general? With the exception of the topic of the traditional ‘‘groan response,’’ which applies only to puns, the ideas presented appear to apply generally. Thus, all of the verbal ambiguities listed in our introductory section – irony, sarcasm, satire, double entendre, idioms, jokes (many), oxymorons, metaphors, and euphemisms – while tending to enhance the dynamic, dramatic character of dialogue, can give rise to the deciphering problems we have discussed. Similarly, each of them can be productive of a breakdown in interaction

162

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

when subjected to strong disagreement as to its appropriateness in a given instance. In general, other than the more intensive process of interpretation to which it tends to give rise, ambiguity does not ordinarily necessitate qualitatively different conduct from that in everyday face-to-face interactions. This intensiﬁcation of the process, however, throws the process into sharp relief, thereby helping to enhance our understanding of everyday interpersonal discourse. By showing that ambiguity does not present insuperable obstacles to effective communication, we enlarge the scope of what can be fruitfully considered ‘‘normal,’’ daily face-to-face interaction.

NOTES 1. Culler (1988, p.32) reminds us that puns can occasionally be serious, too. 2. Also, according to the editor of a popular collection of puns (Moger, 1979, p. 79), James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake includes more than a thousand wordplays. 3. Bernard Dixon (cited in Garﬁeld, 1987, p. 176) exempliﬁes the disparagement, pointing out that the British medical publication World Medicine found that its relentlessly punning headlines, when it began publication in 1965, upset readers and advertisers, thereby adversely affecting its circulation. However, when the editors reduced their use of puns, the periodical attained commercial success. 4. Historically, however, a few illustrious punsters have defended their practice. Among them are Thomas Sheridan and Jonathan Swift. More recently, Jacques Derrida has both used puns profusely and discussed their value in exposition (see Culler, 1988, passim). Also, it bears noting that, according to Crosbie (1977, p. 1) and Preminger (1974, p. 681), puns were quite popular in the literature of seventeenth century Europe. 5. As we have observed, however, a relatively few punsters seem to gain positive self-presentations by devising what they consider incomprehensible plays upon words. For them, such unintelligibility and the associated discomﬁture of listeners are evidence of superior intellectual prowess vis-a`-vis bafﬂed audiences. 6. Obviously, such circumstances can be disruptive even in the absence of puns or other sources of ambiguity. The great popularity of pun-making (and other forms of augmented ambiguity), however, probably increases the eventualities of these circumstances. Nor should we overlook the propensity of unknown numbers of inveterate punsters to sacriﬁce propriety to their unrelenting ‘‘addiction’’. Schegloff (1987), incidentally, discusses nondisruptive misunderstandings in conversations due to (among other things) differing deﬁnitions by participants of utterances as ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘nonserious’’. 7. Another potential source of deﬁnitions of ﬂagrant impropriety is the listener’s deliberately false interpretation (for purposes of levity) of serious but ambiguous words or phrases as puns. The speaker may lack appreciation of such semantic distortion.

Responding to Verbal Ambiguity

163

REFERENCES Alderson, S. J. (1996). The Augustan attack on the pun. Eighteenth Century Life, 20, 1–19. Apte, M. L. (1985). Humor and laughter: An anthropological approach. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bates, C. (1999). The point of puns. Modern Philology, 96, 421–430. Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday & Company. Billig, M. (2001). Humour and embarrassment. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(5), 23–43. Burke, K. (1964). Perspective by incongruity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, J. O. E. (1987). Word perfect: A dictionary of current word usage. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Crosbie, J. (Ed.) (1977). Crosbie’s dictionary of puns. New York: Harmony Books. Crystal, D. (1987). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Culler, J. (Ed.) (1988). On puns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Davis, M. S. (1993). What’s so funny? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eastman, M. (1937). Enjoyment of laughter. New York: Simon & Schuster. Edmonson, M. S. (1971). Lore: An introduction to the science of folklore and literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Emerson, J. P. (1973). Negotiating the serious impact of humor. In: A. Birenbaum & E. Sagarin (Eds), People in places (pp. 269–280). New York: Praeger Publishers. Empson, W. (1956). Seven types of ambiguity (3rd ed.). London: Chatto and Windus. Evans, B., & Evans, C. (1957). A dictionary of contemporary American usage. New York: Galahad Books. Fine, G. A. (1983). Sociological approaches to the study of humor. In: P. F. McGhee & J. H. Goldstein (Eds), Handbook of humor research (Vol. 1, pp. 159–181). New York: Springer Verlag. Flaherty, M. G. (1984). A formal approach to the study of amusement in social interaction. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (Vol. 5, pp. 71–82). Greenwich: JAI Press. Flaherty, M. G. (1990). Two conceptions of the social situation: Some implications of humor. Sociological Quarterly, 31, 93–106. Garﬁeld, E. (1987). The crime of pun-ishment. Current Comments, 10, 174–178. Gordon, H. C. (1980). Pun-ishment: The art of punning or how to lose friends and agonize people. New York: Warner Books. Hymes, D. (Ed.) (1964). Language in culture and society: A reader in linguistics and anthropology. New York: Harper & Row. Knapp, M. L. (1990). Series editor’s introduction. In: J. B. Bavelas, et al. (Eds), Equivocal communication (pp. 7–8). Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Koller, M. R. (1988). Humor and society: Explorations in the sociology of humor. Houston: Cap and Gown Press. Kotthoff, H. (1996). Impoliteness and conversational joking: On relational politics. Folia Linguistica, 30, 299–324. Labov, W. (1972). Rules for ritual insults. In: D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 120–169). New York: The Free Press.

164

BERNARD N. MELTZER AND WILLIAM J. MELTZER

Major, C. (Ed.) (1994). Juba to jive: A dictionary of African American slang. New York: Penguin Books. Marino, M. (1988). Puns: the good, the bad, and the beautiful. Humor, 1, 39–48. McLeish, K. (Ed.) (1993). Key ideas in human thought. New York: Facts on File. Meltzer, W. (1980). Jest deserts: Audience reactions to puns. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology, 6, 49–52. Moger, A. (1979). The complete pun book. Secaucus: Castle. Morreall, J. (1983). Taking laughter seriously. Albany: State University of New York. Norrick, N. R. (1993). Conversational joking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1985). Signifying acts: Structure and meaning in everyday life. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1991). Discursive acts. New York: Aldine DeGruyter. Pexman, P. M., & Zvaigzne, M. (2004). Does irony go better with friends? Metaphor and Symbol, 19, 143–163. Plummer, K. (Ed.) (1991). Symbolic interactionism (Vol. I). Brookﬁeld: Edward Elgar Publishing Company. Preminger, A. (1974). Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Preminger, A., & Brogan, T. V. (Eds.) (1993). The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Redfern, W. (1984). Puns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sacks, H. (1973). On some puns: With some intimations. Report of the Twenty-Third Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies (pp. 135–144). Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC. Saﬁre, W. (1996). On language. The New York Times, September 22, 24–35. Saﬁre, W. (2001). Let a simile be your umbrella. New York: Crown Publisher. Sanches, M., & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1976). Children’s traditional speech play and child language. In: B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Ed.), Speech play (pp. 65–110). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Some sources of misunderstanding in talk-in-interaction. Linguistics, 25, 201–218. Sherzer, J. (1978). Oh! that’s a pun and I didn’t mean it. Semiotica, 22, 335–350. Sherzer, J. (2002). Speech play and verbal art. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shibles, W. (2006). ‘‘Humor Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Classiﬁcation and Analysis’’. Retrieved Jan. 19, 2006. (http://facstaff.uww.edu/shiblesw/humorbook/h7a%20begin. html). West, M. (2000). Transcendental wordplay: America’s romantic punsters and the search for the language of nature. Athens: Ohio University Press.

THE SPECTER OF WHITENESS$ Celine-Marie Pascale ABSTRACT This article draws from ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to examine commonsense knowledge about whiteness and white racial identities. In order to get at that which most broadly passes as matters of commonsense in the United States, the research design includes analysis of both interview and television data. I make two sets of concurrent arguments, one that regards the production of whiteness as a kind of normalcy against which race and racialization is made meaningful and another concerned with the analytical power derived by combining ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis. I illustrate local practices for interrupting hegemonic reproductions of whiteness and conclude with methodological considerations.

INTRODUCTION Those who have suffered at the boot heel of white racism have long established critiques of whiteness; in academia, Hortense Spillers, Cherrie Moraga, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldu´a, and Akasha Hull have been among the many scholars who kept white racism and white privilege in the forefront of social critique long before Critical White Studies emerged in the $

An earlier version of this article was peer-reviewed and published in the International Sociolinguistics Newsletter, Vol. 6.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 167–182 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30010-6

167

168

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

Social Sciences. Although efforts in this ﬁeld occasionally have served to recenter and reprivilege the lives and perspectives of white people, overall it has made extremely important insights into the production of racial privilege and oppression. At the start of the 21st century, abundant, crossdisciplinary literature provides rich analyses of the social, historical, legal, and economic processes through which white racial identities have been constructed and important critiques of the inseparability of whiteness from strategies of racial dominance. The epistemological ground of contemporary Critical White Studies (cf., Bonilla-Silva & Doane, 2003; Bush, 2004; Delgado & Stephanic, 1997; Foley, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993, 1997; Hooks, 1992; Ignatiev, 1995; Lipsitz, 1998; Perry, 2004; Rasmussen et al., 2001; Roediger, 2002; Ware, 1992; Wellman, 1993) is a social constructionist framework that engages both racial formation theory and critical race theory. Critical White Studies disrupts whiteness as an ‘‘unmarked’’ or assumed category; and, through this disruption, attempts to displace historical relations of power. In addition, scholars concerned with cinematic representations of white racial identities have critically examined stereotypes, mythologies, and assimilationist strategies of ﬁlm and television (cf., Denzin, 2002a; Holtzman, 2000; Vera & Gordon, 2003; Wilson, Gutierrez, & Chao, 2003). The analysis of this article is situated within emergent literature that deconstructs whiteness as a practice rather than a characteristic (cf., Aanerud, 2003; Chabram-Dernersesian, 1997; Fine, Weis, Powell, & Wong, 1997; Foster, 2003; Muraleedharan, 2003; Steyn, 2001). Hence the analytical concern does not regard the socially constructed meanings of ‘‘being white’’ but rather ‘‘whiteness’’ as something that is continually achieved and made meaningful through language and representation. In particular, I examine how commonsense knowledge (re)produces whiteness as a routine matter of daily life. In any given interaction or representation, some things must pass without remark – they must simply be understood. In this sense, commonsense knowledge is a saturation of cultural knowledge, which by virtue of its mundane obviousness, passes without notice or remark. To understand the production of commonsense knowledge, we do not need to know what is actually ‘‘true,’’ – what ‘‘really’’ is the case – we need only to know what is accountable as true (Handel, 1982). For example, although the movement of the sun across the sky is not factually true, it is accountable as true. It is not just that we have learned to see the sun move – very violent political, religious, and scientiﬁc struggles are submerged in what passes for commonsense in talk about sun rises and sunsets. The apparent clarity of commonsense is the effect of hegemonic discourses that conceal not only distortion and error, but also relations of power.

The Specter of Whiteness

169

Existing literature provides an understanding of how the unmarked nature of whiteness produces and maintains white racial dominance, yet we have little understanding of the more nuanced practices through which whiteness is produced as unmarked. In this article, I examine how commonsense knowledge leads to practices that make whiteness both invisible and culturally meaningful. I explore how whiteness, as a generally unmarked category, gains interpretative stability and consider the implications for counter-hegemonic productions of whiteness.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK While the data collection for this article is based on the logic and method of analytic induction that is typically used in qualitative research, the analysis draws strategically from the interpretative paradigms of both ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to produce a fuller understanding of local practices and cultural processes. Precisely because of the enormous contributions of ethnomethodology (cf., Garﬁnkel, 1967; Garﬁnkel & Sacks, 1970; Smith, 1999) and poststructural discourse analysis (cf., Butler, 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Foucault, 1970, 1972, 1977, 1978), it is possible to see the importance of studying both local practices and broader cultural discourses.1 At the same time, the limits of ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis also point to the impossibility of fully locating the productive force of language exclusively in either context. If individuals exert maximum agency through talk, we exert least in language. In immediate social situations, participants in talk determine the utterances, but more sustained and basic social connections determine these deeper layers of language (Volosinov, 1973). Commonsense knowledge is itself a cultural practice that becomes visible through routine assumptions in the daily local contexts. In order to examine what broadly passes as commonsense knowledge about whiteness, in both cultural discourses and local practices I draw strategically from ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis. I treat each as distinct yet complementary levels of analysis for several reasons. Fundamentally, each regards language as a constitutive force that produces social realities, rather than as a transparent vehicle for communication. Broadly speaking, both ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis decenter the subject – that is, they conceptualize subjects as constituted, rather than as preexisting, stable entities. And, both deny an empirical epistemology in which the meaning of a cultural text simply has to be read, in order to be

170

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

understood. Ethnomethodology exposes the practical reasoning subsumed in everyday practices, while poststructural discourse analysis reveals the cultural processes, through which this reasoning is invented and subsumed. Ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis both examine – at different levels – how socially meaningful and apparently objective social worlds are produced through language. And, consequently, to varying degrees, each interpretive framework examines commonsense knowledge. By drawing from ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis I am able to consider how local practices and the discourses that shape local practices, are analytically and politically linked.

DATA COLLECTION Within social sciences, the use of multiple forms of data is commonly understood as a form of comparison or triangulation intended to increase research validity. However, this study uses two interpretative frameworks that render any simple notion of ‘‘truth’’ problematic. My aim is not to establish validity for describing ‘‘how things objectively are,’’ but rather to use different data sets to demonstrate how commonsense knowledge comes to make things appear as they do. The peculiarity of common sense is that it imposes obviousness – which we cannot fail to recognize. And, it is this production of obviousness that I examine in interviews and television shows. Routine knowledge must be produced at every turn in order for it to be unremarkable – a matter of commonsense. A dependable analysis of commonsense must reveal how interpretative repertoires are deeply rooted to a particular culture and hence requires a diverse body of data capable of revealing relationships between individual and cultural practices. Including interviews and television shows in my research design allows me to examine the simultaneous production of taken-for-granted knowledge in multiple locations. In the process of forging common grounds for communication with others, the media that we actively engage, and the media engaged by others, shape our conversations and our thinking (Alasutari, 1995; Denzin, 2002b). For example, consider how phrases like ‘‘where’s the beef’’ or ‘‘show me the money’’ creep into the vocabularies of people who have never seen the commercial or ﬁlm that produced the expressions. However, the repetition of routine knowledge is far more complex than the repetition of catch phrases; the expressions of cultural assumptions take different context-dependent forms. The combination of television and interview data is a ‘‘piling’’ of evidence that produces multiple observations of a single subject (Ragin, Nagel, &

171

The Specter of Whiteness

White, 2003, p. 16) with the goal of generating the necessary breadth and depth to get at what most broadly passes as commonsense knowledge about whiteness. This study is built upon the principles of inductive analysis yet I interpret these ﬁndings through frameworks that enable me to develop empirically based social theory. The method is most deﬁnitely, sociological – even as it tests the boundaries of what counts as sociological by drawing from interpretative strategies that stand outside the usual frames of reference. Interviews I conducted purposive sampling in Northern and Central California of websites, places of employment, homeless shelters, and personal referrals to create a highly diverse group of interviewees. In selecting people to be interviewed, I focused on historically constituted categories of difference and included a cross-section of racial categories. Also included among those I interviewed are Jews and ethnic whites, lesbians, bisexuals, people who immigrated as children to the United States, and others who were among ﬁrst-generation in their families to be born in the United States. I sought a balance of men and women and, in the interests of gender diversity, included transgendered persons.2 In addition, I sought interviewees from a broad economic range including those who owned nothing more than what they carried with them to those with 500 million dollars in assets. Ages ranged from 23 to 71; some people were parents, and some were grandparents. In all, I conducted 23 in-depth interviews that generated 1,600 pages of transcript. While it was impossible to avoid some categorical overlap among my interviewees (for instance, there are ﬁve white men) no two interviewees share categorical similarities across axes of race, class, and gender. The selection of interviewees is intended to get at that which most broadly passes as matters of commonsense by ensuring diversity across social categories of difference. At the end of each interview, I invited the interviewee to select a pseudonym that was consistent with his or her gender and racial identity. I attribute all quotes to these pseudonyms. Television Shows My data collection of U.S. television shows began with intensive viewing of the fall 1999 season of U.S. primetime shows on ABC, NBC, and CBS. Given my analytical interest in commonsense knowledge, my methodological

172

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

strategies were guided by shows that were most widely available: most adult TV viewing occurs during the evening and the major networks are most widely available. If it seems that ‘‘everybody’’ in the United States has cable, consider that cable networks develop programming for relatively smaller and more speciﬁc audiences. The examples of channels featuring sports, children’s programming, and history come immediately to mind. Evidence of U.S. cable’s smaller audience size can be found in ratings; advertiser ratings for commercial network programs tend to be nearly three or four times larger than for cable (Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2006). In order to minimize the importance of genre-speciﬁc conventions, from the fall 1999 season, I selected three genres of programming with differences in style, content, and market audience: news magazines, situation comedies, and dramas. I then selected three shows from each genre.3 In all, I examined 180 hours of primetime television shows. Television has come to inhabit our daily lives, repeating over and again through various forms of syndication and through a variety of technologies. Consider that the 1999 opening season for Judging Amy, which I analyze in this article, was rerun on TNT in 2005, is available on DVD, and can be downloaded online. Further, TV series are now being converted to ﬁles that can be downloaded on iPods. In this sense, television shows come to inhabit our daily lives, remaining directly available to us long after the initial airing. The extension and intensiﬁcation of teletechnology has moved television well beyond the original broadcast model (Clough, 2000, p. 96). Analyzing television as a singular text obscures how television universalizes the circulation of discourses. Television provides, and draws upon, cultural resources for more than immediate audiences. And, in this sense television collapses distinctions between production and reproduction, between production and circulation, and between text and context (Clough, 2000). Further, the repetition of TV shows in various formats can be understood to reiterate the repetitions within the shows themselves. Television is less a singular text and more a technological movement and mediation of culture.

WHO, ME? WHITE PEOPLE AND RACIAL IDENTITY Although all of my interviewees talked about race as self-evident, people who identiﬁed themselves as white in my interview exit form all appeared to be uncomfortable when talking about race during the interview. For example,

The Specter of Whiteness

173

Ashley Worthington explained race to me, a white woman interviewer, this way: Umm I have um [long pause] well I don’t know. And I think that’s a particularly white way of asking what, er—responding to that cuz I don’t really know what, I mean I think maybe I do because it’s, it’s, it’s dealing a lot with a y with a y [short pause] with a cultural difference that I that I only have a very, very limited knowledge of, I think. I mean, I think as much as I TRY to be sensitive to things and uh and uh traditions and all these other things, I think I have a very limited knowledge of it. And um, even with my, my consciousness—er y er, my consciousness raised, I just I still think I have a very, very limited knowledge of what race is.4

The pauses, stammers, and sputters that are typically removed from interview transcripts to make them easier to read are central to conveying Ashley’s palpable discomfort. She begins by linking her ignorance about race to whiteness (I think that’s a particularly white way of asking what, er— responding) and seems to imply that only white people would not know about race. When Ashley says, ‘‘I TRY to be sensitive to things’’ and refers to being a person who has had her ‘‘consciousness raised’’ she makes herself recognizable as someone who, although ignorant, has made an effort (arguably a well-intentioned effort) to learn about race. Underlying Ashley’s talk about having a very limited knowledge of race, despite her best efforts, is an understanding of race as something that unknown others possess. Whiteness emerges in her talk as an unraced position from which things about race can be learned. Ignorance here seems to be without culpability. And in this sense, Ashley links together her ignorance about race, with her good intentions to learn about race, and makes herself potentially recognizable as culturally innocent; she appears not to be implicated in matters of race. I asked everyone I interviewed if she or he had a racial identity. Only white people responded with questions such as: ‘‘Who, me?’’ or ‘‘Me, personally?’’ Given that there were only two people present in each interview, each of us recognizably white, I had to consider these questions more rhetorical than substantive. They do not refer to a confusion regarding about whom I was asking, but rather to the fact that I was asking at all. While this might be understood as an expression of the self-evident nature of race, it was also congruent with general levels of disinterest and confusion that white people demonstrated regarding their racial identities. Whiteness – for white people – appeared to have no meaning as a race category. For instance, only people who identiﬁed themselves as white, talked about their race category as a matter of forms and boxes. Consider this exemplar from Lue Lani: Every form you ﬁll out now is asking you this question all the time. And when it asks you, it tells you—are you white, are you Mexican, are you this, are you that? And you

174

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

have to go down and it’s sort of like, I think we’re imprinting it upon ourselves that there IS, gee I’m over here in this one.

By talking about racial identity as something produced by a form, Lue Lani both constructs, and relies upon, a sense of race as unimportant or irrelevant to her daily life. If her characterization that we are ‘‘imprinting’’ race upon ourselves resists the reiﬁcation of race, her characterization ‘‘gee I’m over here in this one’’ also serves to minimize the importance of racialized identities. In this excerpt race is stripped both of historical signiﬁcance and also of current political, social, and economic importance. Since it might seem that only a white person could claim to take her racial identity from a form, it is also important to recall the importance of U.S. census categories in creating racialized identities. Racial categories such as quadroons and octoroons no longer circulate in public discourse, although they once were reiﬁed as social identities, in part, through the U.S. census. Indeed this history has been at the center of contemporary debates regarding the politics of the U.S. census. The politics and practices of race categorizations are always complex. When Betty Sakurai, who identiﬁed herself as Japanese-American, talked about her racial identity, whiteness posed a blank space. Betty characterized her mother as white and her father as Japanese. She talked at length about family rituals and customs that she enjoys that come from the Japanese side of her family but said: ‘‘from my mom’s side there wasn’t, we didn’t have a lot of cultural things at all.’’5 She concluded: I don’t know, its just I—I LOVE the fact that I am half ANYTHING, you know. I think whatever it was, I would totally embrace it and want to learn more and more about it and I—I just I love it.

Although Betty identiﬁes herself as biracial, she talked about ‘‘Japanese’’ as a racial category but not ‘‘white’’ (I LOVE the fact that I am half ANYTHING). Whiteness – her mother’s side of the family – is the blank space that allows Betty to be ‘‘half anything.’’ Whiteness emerges as the space against which racial categories gain meaning and visibility. In hegemonic U.S. culture, whiteness comes to stand as the ‘‘ordinary’’ way of being human and is juxtaposed by Betty against a special way of being. Since discourse constitutes subjugated subjectivities by marking ‘‘difference’’ from an unspoken hegemonic center, the visible processes that mark or name what they point to always constitute subjects as ‘‘others.’’ This interview excerpt demonstrates one way that local practice can produce the invisibility of whiteness while maintaining whiteness as a hegemonic ‘‘center’’ – from which all distances are measured by marked categories

The Specter of Whiteness

175

(cf., Frankenberg, 1997). In this sense, Betty’s celebration of being ‘‘half anything’’ also extends the disciplinary power of whiteness. In U.S. television, as in interviews, representational practices also produced whiteness as the daily context, on which ‘‘racial issues’’ may be overlaid. For example, in Judging Amy, Bruce Van Axel works as a court services ofﬁcer for Judge Amy Gray. He is a black man whose most signiﬁcant speaking parts, in the 1999 season, were attempts to educate Amy, a white woman, about race. In these conversations, Amy takes shelter in idealism while Bruce informs her with restrained anger about ‘‘reality.’’ For example: Amy: Maybe I am idealistic enough to hope that we will have a society where race isn’t the bottom line. Bruce: Until you have a child come home and tell you she was called a nigger you can’t understand how impossible that is [11/12/99].

Signiﬁcantly, the only racial slur to be used on the show in this season was expressed through the show’s only apparently black character.6 For Judge Amy Gray, as for the white people I interviewed, ignorance about race is made to stand as a claim to a kind of innocence, which in this case is related to idealism. Amy doesn’t have to see, and appears to be not implicated, in the disparity between what she and Bruce each experience as ordinary. In addition, this excerpt illustrates how people who are not recognizably white become carriers of that which is not ordinary or innocent – that which is raced. The disciplinary power of whiteness in television was exercised both through its invisibility and through its ability to impose a kind of compulsory visibility on those who are ‘‘not white.’’ In U.S. television shows, the concerns, interests, and needs of white people appeared as a kind of ‘‘normalcy’’ against which racialized lives became ‘‘different.’’ In TV drama (Family Law, Judging Amy, and The Practice) and situation comedies (Ladies Man and Frasier) whiteness functioned as an unmarked ‘‘condition of normalcy.’’ Whiteness was produced as a ‘‘normal’’ or ordinary way of being, both through the overwhelming presence of white people and through the way that whiteness consistently passed without remark. The apparent normalcy of whiteness on network TV also was produced by casting apparently white actors as characters with speaking roles while casting actors who appear to be ‘‘of color’’ in nonspeaking roles that were incidental to scenes – much like props that comprise a background for the storylines. Consider that in Frasier, two black characters appeared in the 1999 season: a TV news anchorwoman, who appeared on Frasier’s TV set, and a woman waiting tables in the cafe´ he

176

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

frequented. Only The Hughley’s – a comedy about a black family in a predominantly white neighborhood – produced whiteness as a marked category and I will explore this in a subsequent section. However, the other eight television shows, create a methodological problem: how to analyze the productive force of erasure? The commonsense erasure of whiteness left little or no ‘‘evidence’’ in the local context, no quotes of people calling themselves or others white, and no interactions in which whiteness appeared to be relevant. The local context, by itself, could not provide standard empirical access to the power of whiteness because whiteness functioned as both a routine and privileged subject position. For instance, across eight shows, whiteness was produced through the saturation of opportunities; the success of hard work; the adequacy of good intentions; the comfort of having police; and the conﬁdence that one’s best effort will be good enough. For example, in Judging Amy, the character of Vincent Gray is a ‘‘struggling’’ writer who wins the Pushcart Prize for ﬁction, and obtains a book contract from a large publisher. Although he suffers great existential angst, he meets with signiﬁcant professional success at every turn. Whiteness was a saturation of privilege that formed the background – not the focus – of TV shows. Apparently white people were never represented in ways that associated them with chronic poverty, discrimination, or daily drudgery. The only apparently white people who appeared to experience any degree of economic hardship were senior citizens seeking cheaper prescription medications in Canada in a 60 Minutes (10/17/99) news segment.7 Yet it is impossible to write these ﬁndings in a way that provides evidence for claims. How does one empirically demonstrate that which is not articulated? The power of whiteness – particularly for white people – works through virtue of its invisibility, through the ability of commonsense to erase the presence and meaning of white racial identities and to produce all other racial identities, as apparently inherently meaningful – even if the meanings of those racialized identities are unclear or contradictory. Whiteness gains interpretative stability because commonsense leads people to believe that whiteness is what one sees. In a white cultural imagination, commonsense knowledge renders whiteness apparently meaningless by masking or silencing the articulation of social, historical, and economic processes through which whiteness has been made meaningful. The invisible force of power becomes legible at the sites where discursive practices transform history into readable spaces. Whiteness understood in this way (re)produces biological essentialism and naturalizes a racialized hierarchy as it lays claim to its own innocence.

The Specter of Whiteness

177

By reifying ‘‘difference,’’ while simultaneously denying its importance, discursive practices promote pluralism that leaves race and racism intact. Indeed, the racism of white liberalism functions through practices that withhold ‘‘ordinariness’’ from people who are ‘‘not white’’ (Memmi, 2000). This denial of ordinariness is a cornerstone of liberal racism – I say liberal racism because it operates at a level of assumption, rather than at the level of belief or intention. By denying ordinariness to people of color, hegemonic commonsense knowledge produces a racialized vernacular moral order.

YES, YOU: A COUNTER-HEGEMONIC PRODUCTION OF WHITENESS Without question, my own presence as a white person shaped my data collection and analysis in ways that, at times, must have exceeded my awareness. That none of my interviewees engaged in what could be called counter-hegemonic productions of whiteness might be a result of my own presence as a visibly white person. Of the nine TV shows I studied, only The Hughley’s, a comedy about a black family living in a predominantly white neighborhood, treated whiteness as a marked category. In The Hughley’s, whiteness was marked with reference to historicized, racialized conﬂict. For instance, at Halloween [10/26/99] Darryl and his brother Milsap invite Dave (Darryl’s white neighbor) to go out with them. Dave thanks Darryl and Milsap for the invitation, and Darryl responds: ‘‘I had to invite you cause two black guys sneaking around the neighborhood ain’t gonna ﬂy unless there’s a white guy to vouch for them.’’ Here, as whiteness loses its ‘‘unmarked’’ status – its ‘‘naturalness’’ – it also loses its innocence. In black imagination, whiteness is often a representation – not of innocence – but of terror (Hooks, 1992). The cultural history that produced whiteness must, to some extent, be part of the enunciation that makes whiteness visible in order to avoid reinscribing white supremacy. To make whiteness politically visible is to reveal its coercive force (Roediger, 1994). Consider another episode in which Darryl’s grandmother, Hattie Mae, invited Dave and his family to join her extended family for Thanksgiving dinner [11/5/99]. When Dave and his family arrive, they are the only white characters on the set and their little boy announces: ‘‘Dad says we’re gonna be the only white folks for miles and miles.’’ The camera settles on the Hughley family standing motionless as they stare in shock and anger until Dave delivers the punch line: ‘‘I did NOT however, say that was a bad

178

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

thing!’’ A sound track of laughter accompanies the resuming action. The humor in this scene draws from the child’s ability to speak the truth that lays bare the framework of racism, which exceeds his understanding. Consider also how commonsense knowledge provides the central context for the humor of this scene. For instance, the audience needs no explanation of why Dave noted to his family that they were ‘‘gonna be the only white folks for miles and miles.’’ The Hughley family response of stony silence demonstrates their emotionally concordant reading this comment. The punch line delivers a laugh because it articulates what the audience believes to be true: Dave did not literally say that was a bad thing to be the only white family for miles around because he did not have to. The scene reveals an oftenconcealed cultural truth: white people’s fear of black people and black communities. The scene raises the ghost of racism and renders it impotent but not meaningless. The meanings of whiteness in The Hughley’s are produced in relationship to the meanings of blackness – both through a shared history that permeates their relationships and through characters’ abilities to parlay that history into a different present. In this sense, The Hughley’s resists dominant discursive practices that constitute white people as both innocent and without race. The Hughley’s did not represent people of color as being accountable for ‘‘explaining’’ race and racism to whites; nor did it reproduce a racial binary that implicates people of color as ‘‘the opposite’’ of white people – i.e., which is not innocent or ordinary. By making the meanings of whiteness visible as the presence of whiteness, The Hughley’s produced a counter-hegemonic discourse, through which a cultural transformation of race could become possible.

CONCLUSION The imposition of mundane obviousness renders routine considerations of whiteness as a racial category unnecessary, and arguably unthinkable, in a white cultural imagination. As a result whiteness appears to have no signiﬁcance even as it remains a dominant and dominating cultural presence. Whiteness, made to stand apart from the process racialization, secures the social, historical, political, and economic spaces through which white people assume cultural dominance without feelings of hate or bigotry. Hence hegemonic commonsense secures white racial dominance that can make claims of racism and bigotry appear to be not only unwarranted but also unfair.

179

The Specter of Whiteness

Using ethnomethodological and poststructural analytical tools to analyze commonsense knowledge about whiteness demonstrates how local practices enonciate relationships to the historical world through broader systems of language and discourse. The power of commonsense knowledge about whiteness is broadly cultural and discursive even as it is locally produced, transformed, and challenged through speciﬁc practices. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to attribute the vast power of language exclusively to discourse. It is in local contexts and local practices that discourses gain their materiality. And, it is in local contexts, in the ‘‘everydayness’’ of living that the possibility of agency and the potential for change exists. All classiﬁcation is generative in that it produces both meanings and order – hence; classiﬁcation must also be understood as a system of power, but not inherently so. While systems of classiﬁcation distinguish between this and that, say between a ball and an apple, social contexts provide the means for interpreting or ranking the importance of each category (Hall, 1997). The ball may be more important on a playground, the apple more important in the grocery bag. The relative importance of whiteness depends upon, not only its deployment in a particular context, but its repetition over time in multiple local contexts. The repetition of local contexts – in which objects are constituted repeatedly through a hierarchical ranking – leads to power relations that extend beyond any individual context. Hence to understand the importance of whiteness, it is important to recognize that the same patterns of commonsense knowledge repeated within and across interviews and television shows and to link these repetitions to a broader cultural context. Local contexts can never, in themselves, adequately account for relations of power; and, discursive contexts, can never, in themselves, adequately account for practices that sustain, reproduce, or resist those relations. This is why sociology needs analyses that can shift between the empirical and the theoretical, between the daily practices that constitute meaning and the conceptual practices that constitute knowledge. To dislocate studies of talk from theories of discourse is to serve hegemonic interests by dislocating analyses of power/knowledge from analyses of agency.

NOTES 1. Throughout, I use the term ‘‘discourse’’ to refer to ‘‘clusters of ideas, images and practices’’ that provide frameworks for understanding what knowledge is useful, relevant, and true in any given context (Hall, 1997).

180

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

2. Suzanne Kessler (2001) credits Virginia Prince with coining the term ‘‘transgender’’ in 1979 as a way to describe her decision ‘‘to become a woman without changing her genitals.’’ 3. From seven possible newsmagazines, I selected 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes II, and 20/20, because they make some effort to appear as ‘‘objective news’’ – focusing on consumer expose´s, in-depth coverage of current news stories, and human-interest/ personality pieces. From an array of 35 half-hour sitcoms, I chose shows that made some aspect of ‘‘difference’’ apparent within an otherwise homogeneous setting: The Hughleys, Frasier, and Ladies’ Man. From the seven legal dramas featured on network primetime, I selected three one-hour shows that included white women and people of color in central parts: Judging Amy, Family Law, and The Practice. 4. Throughout, I use ellipses to indicate pauses; ellipses inside of bracket indicate edited material. Capital letters indicate spoken emphasis. Parenthetical comments indicate material inserted into the excerpt for clariﬁcation. 5. Betty’s elaboration of what it means to be ‘‘half anything’’ through discussion of food and rituals demonstrates the logic of multiculturalism in which racial difference enrich white culture through food and arts. This conception of multiculturalism embraces ‘‘difference’’ stripped of history and power. 6. This style of turning expressions of hate back on those who historically have been victims of that hate is congruent with my other ﬁndings such as virulently homophobic remarks being made by the only gay character in TV episode. 7. This news segment concerned potential regulation of the pharmaceutical industry aimed at reducing the cost of prescription drugs to senior citizens.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Norman Denzin and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions for revision. I also thank Isabella Paoletti, Max Travers, and Mercedes Santos for their helpful feedback and critical comments on an earlier draft.

REFERENCES Aanerud, R. (2003). Fictions of Whitenes: Speaking the names of whiteness in U.S. literature. In: R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness (pp. 35–59). Durham: Duke University Press. Alasutari, P. (1995). Researching culture: Qualitative method and cultural studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Ltd. Bonilla-Silva, E., & Doane, A. (2003). White out: The continuing signiﬁcance of racism. New York: Routledge. Bush, M. (2004). Breaking the code of good intentions. Lanham: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc.

The Specter of Whiteness

181

Butler, J. (1997a). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997b). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1999). On speech, race, and melancholia. In: V. Bell (Ed.), Performativity and belonging (pp. 163–173). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Chabram-Dernersesian, A. (1997). On the social construction of whiteness within selected chicana/o discourses. In: R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness (pp. 107–164). Durham: Duke University Press. Clough, P. (2000). Autoaffection. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delgado, R., & Stefanic, J. (Eds). (1997). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University. Denzin, N. (2002a). Reading race. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N. (2002b). The cinematic society and the reﬂexive interview. In: J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds), Handbook of interview research: Context and method. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Fine, M., Weis, L., Powell, L., & Wong, L. M. (Eds). (1997). Off white: Readings on race, power and society. New York: Routledge. Foley, N. (1997). Becoming hispanic: Mexican Americans and the fautian pact with whiteness. In: R. Flores (Ed.), New directions in Mexican American studies (pp. 53–70). Austin: University of Texas Press. Foster, G. A. (2003). Performing whiteness: Postmodern re/constructions in the cinema. Albany: State University of New York. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York: Vintage Books. Frankenberg, R. (1993). The social construction of whiteness: White women, race matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Frankenberg, R. (1997). Displacing whiteness: Essays in social and cultural criticism. Durham: Duke University Press. Garﬁnkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Garﬁnkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structure and practical actions. In: J. McKinney & E. Tiraykian (Eds), Theoretical sociology: Perspectives and development (pp. 338–366). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Hall, S. (1997). The work of representation. In: S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 1–74). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Handel, W. (1982). Ethnomethodology: How people make sense. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, Inc. Holtzman, L. (2000). Media messages: What ﬁlm, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge. Kessler, S. (2001). Who put the ‘‘trans’’ in transgender? Gender theory and everyday life. International Journal of Transgenderism, 5(1). Available at: http://www.symposion.com/ ijt/gilbert/kessler.htm Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

182

CELINE-MARIE PASCALE

Memmi, A. (2000). Racism. S. Martinot (Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muraleedharan, T. (2003). Rereading Gandhi. In: R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness (pp. 60–85). Durham: Duke University Press. Museum of Broadcast Communications. (2006). Cable networks. Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved January 5, 2006, from http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/ C/htmlC/cablenetwork/cablenetwork.htm Perry, P. (2004). Shades of white: White kids and racial identities in high school. Durham: Duke University Press. Ragin, C., Nagel, J., & White, P. (2003). General guidance for developing qualitative research projects. In: C. Ragin, J. Nagel & P. White (Eds), Workshop on scientiﬁc foundations of qualitative research (pp. 9–16). Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. Rasmussen, B., Klinenberg, E., Nexica, I., & Wray, M. (2001). The making and unmaking of whiteness. Durham: Duke University Press. Roediger, D. (1994). Towards the abolition of whiteness: Essays on race, politics, and working class history. New York: Verso. Roediger, D. (2002). Colored white: Transcending the radical past. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, D. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory and investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Steyn, M. (2001). Whiteness just isn’t what it used to be: White identity in a changing South Africa. Albany: State University of New York. Vera, H., & Gordon, A. (2003). Screen saviors: Hollywood ﬁctions of whiteness. Boston: Rowman & Littleﬁeld. Volosinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik (Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ware, V. (1992). Beyond the pale: White women, racism, and history. New York: Verso. Wellman, D. (1993). Portraits of white racism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, C. C., II., Gutierrez, F., & Chao, L. (2003). Racism, sexism, and the media: The rise of class communication in multicultural America. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

DIMENSIONS OF THE POSTMODERN SELF David R. Dickens ABSTRACT In this essay I examine a variety of approaches to the contemporary postmodern self. I argue that this diverse literature may be analytically distinguished along two general lines. The ﬁrst concerns institutional or structural claims regarding what a self ‘‘is’’ or ‘‘is not.’’ The second focuses instead on what a self ‘‘does’’ or ‘‘does not do.’’ I conclude by recommending a more comprehensive approach that takes into account the salience of both of these analytical dimensions in the contemporary debates over the postmodern self.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE POSTMODERN SELF The problems and crises that plague contemporary self or identity formation were largely unknown in medieval Europe. Society was much more rigidly structured and inﬂexible than it is today. As a result, large institutional structures for the most part formed an individual’s concept of self. Society operated on the basis of lineage, gender, home, and social class – all of which were ﬁxed by birth. One major reason for the relative indifference to individual selfhood was the ﬁrm medieval faith in Christianity, which regarded life on earth as imitative or derivative of ultimate, other worldly realities. The Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 183–196 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30011-8

183

184

DAVID R. DICKENS

particulars of individual human experience were not very important, as the life of any one person was seen as merely a good or poor approximation of the archetypical patterns of heavenly or biblical events. What mattered most was the broad cosmic drama of faith and salvation (Baumeister, 1986). Evidence for this notion is demonstrated by the fact that biographies were rare in the Middle Ages, and autobiographies were virtually nonexistent. By the late Middle Ages, however, people increasingly learned to think in more individual terms and slowly solidiﬁed concepts of the single human life. Probably the most profound and powerful move toward individualistic thinking was the revision of popular Christian beliefs and practices. In particular, a new view of Christian eschatology emerged around the twelfth century that placed a greater emphasis on individual salvation and judgment. In earlier conceptions salvation was collective; it depended on your membership in the Christian community rather than on your actions as an individual. By the twelfth century, however, portrayals of the second coming began to stress the last judgment, in which souls were to be weighed and judged individually. Later medievals expected their souls to be based on what they did during their lives on earth. By the fourteenth century, popular belief had further enhanced the importance by advancing the date from until the end of time to while the individual was on his or her deathbed (Aries, 1981). The shift reframed the all-important issue of salvation in individualistic terms. The most traumatic of social changes at the end of the Middle Ages were the spread of religious dissent and the great increase in social mobility. With the onset of the Protestant Reformation there was an undermining of the consensus concerning the collective ideal of the model Christian life. Each individual would now have to decide whether to live by the traditional Catholic model or by the new Protestant models, or some combination. A single, unquestionable guide for how to live one’s life no longer existed (Baumeister, 1986). The other major development that brought the Middle Ages to a close, increased social mobility, was a more gradual process that took place over several centuries. This process involved basically two themes. First, social mobility transformed a relatively ﬁxed and stable basis for identity into a changeable and problematic one. Social position now became unstable and contingent on circumstances other than birth. Second, social mobility made public life more stressful, both by undermining traditional norms for formal social interaction and by making self-deﬁnition dependent on the uncertain course of commercial life, leading eventually to a retreat from public life toward privacy, home, and family (Sennett, 1977).

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

185

The early modern period (1500–1800) witnessed a dramatic rise in individualistic attitudes and values, preparing the way for the rise of modern conception of selfhood. New concepts of the hidden or inner self revealed the difﬁculty of knowing the true selves of others, constituting a major step toward understanding that self-knowledge was possible, though also problematic. An increased desire for privacy similarly symbolized both the emphasis on individuality, and the split between public and private life. Other indicators of the turn toward the modern self also originated at this time, including new attitudes toward death, a revision of marriage customs that left choice of spouse up to the potential mates themselves, new biographical literary practices, and new attitudes toward childhood. To these trends, the Puritans added an enhanced sense of self-consciousness and a greater awareness of individual self-deception. With the transition to the Romantic era (covering the ﬁnal decade of the eighteenth century and the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth), characteristics associated with the modern self (autonomous, rational, etc.) emerge fullblown. The eighteenth century’s rejection of Christian models for human potentiality led the Romantics into a passionate search for new, more secular models of fulﬁllment. It also fostered a rejection of the legitimacy of the traditional political and social order, introducing an emphasis on the pervasive conﬂict between the individual and society. In response, the Romantics experimented with new models of creativity, passion, and cultivation of the inner self. Also, as they became increasingly dissatisﬁed with the relationship of the individual to society, the Romantics expressed a deep concern with individual freedom, though they retained a faith in the ultimate attainment of an ideal society. Later, however, the Victorians (approximately 1830–1900) gradually came to accept the conﬂict of the individual with society as chronic, though they too retained a remote belief in the eventual perfectibility of society. As a result, some sought fulﬁllment away from society, as can be seen in the interest in transcendentalism. Similarly, anarchist movements of the time expressed the radical belief that government and private property were inherently evil. Even more widespread were the pragmatic efforts at progressive liberal reform as a way to address speciﬁc problems within existing society. All, however, shared a common view that any possible societal consensus concerning basic truths and ultimate values was lost. Henceforth, values would be personal, not objective and consensual (Baumeister, 1986). It is within this context that the ideas of the classical sociological tradition ﬁnd their fullest expression.

186

DAVID R. DICKENS

THE SELF AND THE CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION Whatever their position regarding the nature of the modern self, virtually all of the classical sociological theorists linked its fate in one way or another to the vast institutional transformations that deﬁned the transition from traditional to modern, industrial society. For Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Toennies, Simmel, Cooley, Mead, and others, changes in religion, politics, the economy, and the family impacted in most fundamental ways the nature of social interaction and individual selves. While Spencer and, in a more ambivalent fashion, Durkheim held a relatively positive view of these changes, such was not the case for most of the Germans. Perhaps most starkly representative here is Toennies, whose famous distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft contains an ominous evaluation of the prospects for modern selfhood. With the destruction of communal social bonds found in traditional society, Toennies warned of the alienating, atomizing effects on the lives of modern individuals. From a radically different political perspective, Marx railed against the alienating effects on the self induced by what he saw as the relentless commodiﬁcation of social relations in modern capitalist societies. Weber, on the other hand, foresaw threats to individual freedom and autonomous selves in the homogenizing tendencies of large modern bureaucracies. Thus, like Toennies and Marx, he too was troubled by the bleak prospects for autonomous selfhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In marked contrast to the decidedly pessimistic view of most of German classical social theory, early American sociology associated with the Chicago School took a more optimistic approach (with the notable exception of Louis Wirth’s theory of urbanism). This seems ironic at ﬁrst glance, given the signiﬁcant inﬂuence of German theory on early American sociological thought. However, when one recognizes that Simmel, rather than Marx, Weber, or Toennies, was the most inﬂuential German theorist in early American sociology, especially at Chicago, the irony disappears. While himself a critic of what he called the tragedy of modern culture, Simmel also foresaw the possibility of an autonomous modern self who fashioned together a workable identity out of the fragments of contemporary urban life. In the American context, Cooley’s concepts of primary and secondary groups exhibit some parallels with Toennies’ Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft distinction but he, more akin to Simmel, takes much of the sting out of

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

187

Toennies’ view in his notion of the looking glass self. Similarly, Mead, who extended and elaborated on Cooley’s ideas in his own theory of the social self emphasizing the ability of properly socialized individuals to ‘‘take the role of the other,’’ gave full voice to the more optimistic American view that modern societies had an almost natural predisposition toward producing autonomous, rational selves. At the same time, however, Mead cautioned that in the absence of stable institutions, prospects for the development of what he termed ‘‘mature selves’’ could be problematic. For the most part, though, Mead and other prominent American social thinkers of his time remained relatively optimistic that contemporary institutions, in the United States at least, were both stable and positive facilitators for the development of mature, free, and rational selves.

THE SELF IN POSTWAR AMERICA After World War II the United States became a major world power, having emerged relatively unscathed from the devastating effects of the war and possessing an enormously productive economy. Americans at virtually all levels of society were blessed with an unprecedented boost in their standard of living, implying to many new opportunities for previously unimaginable modes of self-expression. At this same time, however, social and cultural commentaries on the contemporary self in America took a markedly pessimistic turn. Foremost among these was the publication in 1950 of The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Ruel Denney, and Nathan Glazer. In this enormously inﬂuential work, Riesman and his colleagues introduced a new classiﬁcation of character types. For the bulk of human history circumstances had favored a ‘‘tradition-directed’’ social character in which individuals were largely a reﬂection of their age-group, clan, or cast. The way of life of tradition-directed individuals was sustained by a ‘‘tight web of values’’ in which legitimation rested upon established ways of doing things (Hewitt, 1989). The ‘‘inner-directed’’ character type appeared during the late Renaissance and early modern periods. The source of self is ‘‘inner’’ insofar as it is implanted in the individual early in life by elders and the motivation for action shifts from the simple reenactment of behaviors that have served well in the past to the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and make one’s mark in a world in which tradition has been splintered. The innerdirected self, typiﬁed by the nineteenth century entrepreneurs and pioneers who settled in the American West, had a ‘‘psychological gyroscope’’ that

188

DAVID R. DICKENS

enabled the individual to maintain a ‘‘delicate balance between the demands upon him of his life goal and the buffetings of his external environment’’ (Riesman et al., 1950). The society in which inner direction develops is a changing, growing one where strong emphasis is placed on production, savings, personal discipline, and commitment to long-term goals. As a society achieves its goals, however, emphasis shifts from production to consumption, from discipline and deferred gratiﬁcation to immediate enjoyment. And the organization of society itself shifts from small- to large-scale bureaucratic organizations. The result is the emergence of Riesman’s third character type, the ‘‘otherdirected’’ self. The other-directed person is equipped with a ‘‘psychological radar’’ rather than a moral gyroscope, for the essence of life for this character type is sensitivity to the needs and expectations of others. Being oriented to others, the other-directed self has an ‘‘insatiable psychological need for approval’’ (Hewitt, 1989). In 1958 a psychiatrist, Alan Wheelis, published The Quest for Identity, which addressed issues similar to those of Riesman and his colleagues, but which employed the language of professional psychiatry, promoting adoption of the term ‘‘identity.’’ According to Wheelis, the change in character was based on the ascendancy of the group over the individual: ‘‘Man is still the measure of all things, but it is no longer the inner man that measures; it is the other man. Speciﬁcally, it is the plurality of men, the group’’ (Wheelis, 1958). During the nineteenth century, Wheelis argues, values were relatively stable and were transmitted to individuals by parents, establishing in them a relatively permanent and autonomous sense of self. But, since then, values are not stable, for the world is changing too much and too fast (see Dickens & Fontana, 2002). As a result, the superego has declined and the role of the ego has expanded. In this new setting, the individual not only maintains an alert readiness to move with the current, but he also suffers a loss of the sense of self: not knowing what he stands for, he does not know who he is (Wheelis, 1958). This occasions a diffuse anxiety that is characterized not by classic symptom neurosis, but by ‘‘vague conditions of maladjustment and discontent’’ (Wheelis, 1958). This kind of individual has a diminished drive for achievement, a lessened sense of direction, and a weakened sense of purpose, with few commitments and nowhere to go (Hewitt, 1989). In the 1970s, Christopher Lasch extended Wheelis’ psychoanalytical description, using Freud’s theory of secondary narcissism to characterize the condition and fate of the contemporary self in the modern world of the bureaucratic state and the large corporation. According to Lasch, the sense

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

189

of historical time and continuity that once united the generations and made individuals interested in something outside of themselves has waned. Instead a new generational selﬁshness has arisen: ‘‘To live for the moment is the prevailing passion – to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations in the past and stretching into the future’’ (Lasch, 1979). At the root of the problem, for Lasch, are state and corporate bureaucracies that have stripped away cultural competence from ordinary people, making individuals dependent upon them and other contemporary bureaucracies such as the schools and the therapeutic industries. As a result, contemporary individuals not only lack any sort of commitment to a common life, but also the very inner resources that might compensate for this isolation. Lacking the inner direction to make the world according to their image of what it might be, late twentieth century persons are fundamentally lacking in skills and self-conﬁdence. The psychological result of this dependence on bureaucratic expertise is narcissism. The narcissist is preoccupied with self, not because she or he has a clear sense of self to be imposed on the world, but because of a deep rooted anxiety and insecurity that comes from not having much of a self (Hewitt, 1989).

THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN SELF The work of scholars such as Riesman, Wheelis, and Lasch constitute a critical transition to contemporary theories of the postmodern self. One of the ﬁrst attempts to formulate a conception of what is now referred to as the postmodern self in explicitly sociological terms is found in Zurcher’s (1977) concept of the mutable self. According to Zurcher, accelerations in the rate of cultural change demand a new self-orientation, one that removes the conventional goal of ‘‘stability of self (self as object)’’ and replaces it with the ‘‘change of self (self as process)’’ (Zurcher, 1977). This new, mutable self possesses openness to the widest possible experiences and is characterized by tolerance and extreme ﬂexibility. Zurcher, however, also registers a concern with the postmodern self in the manner of Riesman, Wheelis, and Lasch, ﬁnding that this mutability gives rise to a form of narcissism. Daily life becomes suffused with the relentless search for self-gratiﬁcation where others merely become means for the fulﬁllment of one’s hedonistic impulses. In The Saturated Self Gergen (1991) also emphasizes heightened mutability as a key feature of the postmodern or, as he calls it, the pastiche

190

DAVID R. DICKENS

self. Also, like Zurcher, he too sees the rapid pace of contemporary cultural change as the primary motivating factor, but he focuses his analysis more speciﬁcally on one aspect – technological change. For Gergen, advances in radio, telephone, transportation, television, satellite transmission, and computers have exposed contemporary individuals to an enormous barrage of social stimulation. As a result: ‘‘This massive increment of social stimulation – moving toward a state of saturation – sets the stage for radical changes in our daily lived experiences of self and others’’ (Gergen, 1991). All beliefs are thrown into question by the individual’s exposure to multiple points of view. The pastiche self is deﬁned by Gergen as a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation. The pastiche self, however, is only a transitional ﬁgure to a more fully developed, relational self. The postmodern, relational self is hardly a self at all in the traditional ego-centered sense. Rather, ‘‘ ‘I’ am just an I by virtue of playing a particular part in a relationship’’ (Gergen, 1991). Thus, for Gergen, with the onset of postmodernism begins the erasure of the category of self as conventionally conceived and, along with it, the need for a radical reconsideration of the self’s purported attributes (autonomy, rationality, etc.). In her provocative 1992 book, The End(s) of Ethnography, Patricia Clough advances another mass media technology-driven theory of the postmodern self in the context of her poststructuralist feminist psychoanalytical critique of ethnographic narrative. In place of the fully present self implied by conventional social science writing, which she argues is unconsciously constituted by Freudian Oedipal logic, she proposes a version of the postmodern self that recognizes, and preserves, its fragmented nature. Borrowing from Toni Morrison’s unconventional style of writing where narratives of racial and sexual repression are continually interrupted by jarring descriptions of the body (see Dickens, 1995), Clough describes a postmodern self that ‘‘insists on sexual difference and self-division in the construction of subject functions to support struggles of meaning y with no nostalgia whatsoever for possible integration into a norm’’ (Clough, 1992). In a similar vein, Denzin (1993) also focuses on what might be called the mass-mediated nature of the postmodern self in his analysis of the motion picture, Rain Man. In his reading of this contemporary ﬁlm, Denzin identiﬁes two versions of the postmodern self, one superﬁcial and one deep. The superﬁcial self corresponds to the mutable, impulsive, other-directed self described by Zurcher and Riesman, while, more profoundly, the deeper, ‘‘expressive self ’’ experiences emotions that ‘‘reﬂect a form of sensitivity

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

191

which opens the person to new experiences, and new emotion management strategies which produce authentically felt, deep moral experiences’’ (Denzin, 1993). This expressive version of the postmodern self sees through the surface facades and neon glitter of contemporary mass-mediated society, realizing the possibility for genuine, authentic experiences (also see Denzin, 2003). Another line of research on the contemporary self shifts the emphasis away from more traditional, institutional sources of the self (Taylor, 1989) to focus on the socially constructed nature of the racialized self. Going beyond the classic work of W. E. B. DuBois, for whom a series of physical traits (‘‘skin, hair, and bones’’) are taken to indicate a whole range of human qualities (intelligence, violent behavior, etc.), this work incorporates more radical theoretical insights from poststructuralist thought (see Denzin, 2001). In this view the racial subject is seen as ‘‘constituted by and within a system of representation’’ (Hall, 1996 cited in Denzin, 2001), not just of race but of class, gender, and sexuality as well. Some researchers here thus speak of a twice or even thrice hyphenated self where fundamental distinctions among racial/ethnic, class, and gendered aspects lose any single, privileged signiﬁcance (see Kovel, 2002). What emerges instead is a hybrid view of the self (Minh-ha, 1992), constituted at the intersections or borderlands (Anzaldua, 1987) of language, mass media representations, place, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. In Postmodern Existential Sociology (Kotarba & Johnson, 2002) existential sociologists Joe Kotarba, John Johnson, Andrea Fontana, and others revisit and revise their important earlier work on existential sociology, including the self (see Douglas & Johnson, 1977; Kotarba & Fontana, 1984). They identify two primary modiﬁcations to their earlier work. The ﬁrst concerns the increasing prominence of culture and media such as television and the Internet in shaping daily interaction. The second is the broad range of intellectual styles now available to sociological researchers, including more literary approaches that have always attracted existential sociologists. They continue, however, to argue in favor of an existential conception of the self that ‘‘refers to an individual’s unique experience of being within the context of contemporary social conditions y most notably marked by an incessant sense of becoming and an active participation in social change’’ (Kotarba & Fontana cited in Kotarba & Johnson, 2002, pp. 7–8). Existential sociologists thus continue to argue in favor of a strong sense of agency in the postmodern era. Giddens (1991) rejects the label ‘‘postmodernity’’ to describe contemporary social life in favor of ‘‘high modernity’’ or ‘‘late modernity.’’ He does so because he sees contemporary social trends as an intensiﬁcation of

192

DAVID R. DICKENS

modernity rather than a radical break from it, as the term postmodernity implies. In this context, Giddens argues that the self does indeed undergo massive changes, but these lead to what he calls the reﬂexive project of the self and ‘‘consist in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives’’ that take place ‘‘in the context of multiple choice as ﬁltered through abstract systems’’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 5). In Giddens’s view the increasingly diverse contexts in which selfconstruction occurs under late modernity promotes both fragmentation and integration of the self. Fragmentation may result form the disequilibrating effects of globalization and the radical diversity of mass-mediated experiences, but these same factors may also be used ‘‘in order to create a distinctive self-identity which positively incorporates elements from different settings into an integrated [self] narrative’’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 190). Other researchers (Wiley, 1994; Athens, 1994, 1995a, 1995b; Perinbanayagam, 2005) reject the notion of a peculiarly postmodern self altogether and focus on a more precise speciﬁcation of the mechanics of selfconstruction. Wiley argues that what he refers to as the semiotic self is trialogical in nature, synthesizing Mead’s ‘‘I–me’’ theory with Peirce’s ‘‘I–you’’ approach to achieve his ‘‘I–you–me’’ conception. As such, he claims that his approach provides an intermediary position between the over-centered Cartesian subject and the effaced or eliminated poststructuralist view. Athens identiﬁes what he sees as serious shortcomings in Mead’s twin views of the self as both a conversation between an ‘‘I’’ and a ‘‘me’’ and as an attitudinal taking process. His alternative approach is to conceive of the self as a soliloquy where an ‘‘us’’ or ‘‘phantom community,’’ consisting of others ‘‘who are not present, but whose impact upon us is no less than the people who are present during our social experiences’’ (1994, p. 525), plays a major role. In this way he argues that the ambiguity in Mead’s original conception of the self between conformity and individuality is resolved. Perinbanayagam, on the other hand, criticizes postmodern perspectives on the self as guilty of situational creationism, by which he means an excessive emphasis on the human subject’s ability to deﬁne the other solely on the basis of her/his own creative powers (Perinbanayagam, 2005, p. 341). Drawing on Wittgenstein’s as well as Mead’s concept of the ‘‘game,’’ he argues for a radically interactional notion of the self, where the other acts as an essential ingredient in the process of self-constitution. A somewhat different analysis arguing for the continuing salience of authenticity in the postmodern self may be found in an essay by Erickson (1995). She recognizes the decline of stable communities and the corresponding dissipation of absolute moral authority. Nonetheless,

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

193

Erickson maintains that the self is still a viable entity in contemporary life. While it makes no sense today (and it may have never made any sense) to speak of a unidimensional inner core self, one may conceptualize the postmodern self relationally as a biographically unique set of relationships an individual has with others. Authenticity, correspondingly, is deﬁned selfreferentially following Lionel Trilling’s famous distinction between sincerity and authenticity, not as ‘‘being ‘true to self ’ for all time, but, rather, as being true to self-in-context or true to self-in-relationship’’ (Erickson, 1995). Erickson’s contextual deﬁnition of self thus recognizes the radical contingency of contemporary postmodern life, but also argues for the continuing signiﬁcance of feelings of authenticity in personal conduct. Similarly, Gubrium and Holstein (1994, 1995, 2002) argue that postmodern pronouncements of the end of the self are premature. Already in the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche (1966) had denigrated the self as ‘‘a little changeling’’ but this became a prominent, even central, theme of postmodern thinkers inﬂuenced by French theorists such as Foucault (1977) and Lyotard (1984), for whom ‘‘the self today does not amount to much.’’ Instead, Gubrium and Holstein offer what they refer to as ‘‘an alternative version of a more actively formulated social self ’’ (2002). In their view the self is not so much an entity to be ﬁlled or saturated with meaning as it is ‘‘a social construction that we both assemble and live out as we take up or resist the varied demands of everyday life’’ (2002). Ironically, for Gubrium and Holstein, the inﬂuence of traditional sources of the self such as religion, the family, and the state have not declined so much as they have proliferated to include other organizations and institutions. The result is that the contemporary self is more socially elaborate and institutionally mediated than ever before but, according to Gubrium and Holstein, it is also a more active entity, albeit grounded in local interpretive practices and institutional settings. In similar fashion, the moral landscape of contemporary life in which the self must operate is determined locally as well.

DIMENSIONS OF THE POSTMODERN SELF Even the admittedly brief overview here of what has become an enormous literature concerning the postmodern self reveals a somewhat dizzying diversity: is the postmodern self unitary or fragmentary, rational or irrational, active or passive, autonomous and responsible or dependent and impulsive, thinking or feeling, authentic or inauthentic, sincere or phony?

194

DAVID R. DICKENS

I want to claim here that any attempt to provide a general answer concerning the complex nature of the contemporary, postmodern self might most fruitfully begin by specifying more clearly what I would like to call the basic analytical dimensions of the concept. The ﬁrst might be termed the structural or institutionally based dimension that forms the larger context within which self-formation takes place. Despite their otherwise divergent views, virtually all perspectives on the postmodern self agree to some extent that the dominant institutions of modern society have lost their ability to provide a set of stable normative patterns for determining individual selves. Instead, these theorists of the contemporary self emphasize its multiple, hybrid nature. Most also agree for the most part that contemporary mass media have achieved a correspondingly high degree of prominence, although their diverse, multifaceted nature seems to make contemporary mass media poor candidates for providing alternative models of generalized normative stability. The presence of increasingly diverse sources of the self thus leads many theorists to proclaim its demise in the postmodern era. The second analytical dimension of the postmodern self addressed by various commentators may be termed its functional or agentic aspect, of what a self ‘‘does’’ (or ‘‘does not do’’) rather than what it ‘‘is’’ (or ‘‘is not’’). Three particular issues ﬁgure especially prominently in discussions of this second dimension: autonomy, authenticity, and efﬁcacy. Autonomy refers to the ability, or lack thereof, of individuals to be masters of their own actions and, no less importantly, to be responsible for the consequences of their actions. Authenticity refers to the consistency of one’s actions with her/ his motivations or intentions. Finally, efﬁcacy refers more basically to the ability to link motivations and behavior in a way that intentions can be fulﬁlled. Thus, for example, contemporary debates over the ethics and politics of postmodernism implicitly derive their various perspectives from differing assumptions regarding the possibility of acting autonomously, authentically, and/or efﬁcaciously in contemporary social settings (see especially Holstein & Gubrium, 2002; Denzin, 2003). Of course, for interactionists such as Wiley, Athens, and Perinbanayagam, following Mead (1934), the self in one sense ‘‘is’’ what it ‘‘does’’ insofar as Mead deﬁnes the self in functional terms as a process, not a thing. It is important to note, however, that Mead also took into account the signiﬁcance of what I have called the institutional sources of the self: ‘‘without social institutions of some sort, without the organized social attitudes and activities by which social institutions are constituted, there could be no fully mature individual selves or personalities at all’’ (Mead, 1934, p. 262). Theorists like Wiley, Athens, and Perinbanayagam

Dimensions of the Postmodern Self

195

nonetheless continue to focus their work on reﬁning Mead’s analysis of the mechanics or inner workings of the self, largely ignoring the postmodern literature together. Much of the controversy and confusion surrounding the analyses and debates over the postmodern self today thus arises largely from the tendency among various theorists to focus their attention too narrowly on only one aspect of the concept to the neglect or exclusion of the others. The more interesting works on the other hand, provide, or attempt to provide, an analysis that addresses both changes in the structural or institutional dimension of the postmodern self and the ways in which these changes affect its ability to function in contemporary society. Represented here in the work of Denzin, Erickson, and especially Holstein and Gabrium, this sort of approach is more productively focused on tying together more clearly these various components of the postmodern self rather than promoting, or condemning, a single aspect as the deﬁning characteristic.

REFERENCES Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Aries, P. (1981). The hour of our death. New York: Knopf. Athens, L. (1994). The self as a soliloquy. Sociological Quarterly, 35, 521–532. Athens, L. (1995a). Dramatic self change. Sociological Quarterly, 36, 571–586. Athens, L. (1995b). Mead’s visions of the self: A pair of ﬂawed diamonds. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (Vol. 18, pp. 245–261). Greenwich: JAI Press. Baumeister, R. (1986). Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Clough, P. (1992). The end(s) of ethnography. Newbury Park: Sage. Denzin, N. (1993). Rain man in Las Vegas. Symbolic Interaction, 16, 65–78. Denzin, N. (2001). Symbolic interactionism, poststructuralism, and the racial subject. Symbolic Interaction, 24(2), 243–249. Denzin, N. (2003). Performance ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dickens, D. R. (1995). Whither ethnography?. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 207–216. Dickens, D. R., & Fontana, A. (2002). Time and postmodernism. Symbolic Interaction, 25, 389–396. Douglas, J., & Johnson, J. (1977). Existential sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, R. (1995). The importance of authenticity for self and society. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 121–144. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage Press. Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J. (1994). Grounding the postmodern self. Sociological Quarterly, 35, 685–704.

196

DAVID R. DICKENS

Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J. (1995). Individual agency, the ordinary, and postmodern life. Sociological Quarterly, 36, 555–570. Hewitt, J. (1989). Dilemmas of the American self. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (2002). The self we live by. New York: Oxford University Press. Kotarba, J., & Fontana, A. (1984). The existential self in society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kotarba, J., & Johnson, J. (Eds). (2002). Postmodern existential sociology. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Kovel, J. (2002). The enemy of nature. London: Zed Books. Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism. New York: Norton. Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Minh-ha, T. (1992). Framer framed. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil. W. Kaufmann (Trans.). New York: Random House. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (2005). The other in the game: Mead and Wittgenstein on interaction. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (Vol. 28). San Diego: Elsevier. Riesman, D., Denney, R., & Glazer, N. (1950). The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. New York: Random House. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wheelis, A. (1958). The quest for identity. New York: Norton. Wiley, N. (1994). The semiotic self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zurcher, L. (1977). The mutable self. Beverly Hills: Sage.

OTHERS IN THE MAKING OF SELVES Roberta L. Coles The Self has received renewed attention across disciplines in recent years. Scholars have analyzed, psychoanalyzed, discovered, named, and narrated a plethora of selves. There are dialogic selves (Bakhtin, 1981; Fand, 1999), playing selves (Melucci, 1996), redemptive selves (McAdams, 2006), emotionally managed selves (Hochschild, 1983), muscled selves (Sparkes, Batey, & Brown, 2005), mediated selves (Sawrey, 2005), saturated selves (Gergen, 1991), extended selves (Eakin, 2004), night and day selves (Fand, 1999), embodied selves (Sacks, 1985), ad inﬁnitum. (For a good overview of more Selves than you can shake a stick at, see Holstein and Gubrium, 2000). Even within a single individual a multiplicity of subjectivities can and, it is frequently advocated, should coexist. In fact, some might argue that complex society, comprising reﬂexive conversations about one’s acts and observations of those acts, exists within the individual. Hence, any sense of privacy we cling to can only be a ﬁgment of false consciousness; with multiple selves, we are never alone. Enjoying one’s own company is akin to standing in the middle of Grand Central Station. An apparent monologue is no less than a colloquium. Even the most private self-masturbatory act is a voyeuristic act, if not an orgy. In this rush to propagate and pander to Selves, the Other has been overlooked. As frequently occurs, those at the forefront of fame and fortune neglect to acknowledge those along the way who helped them become who they are today. Ironically so, because it is difﬁcult, if not impossible, for a Self

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 197–226 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30012-X

197

198

ROBERTA L. COLES

to exist without an Other.1 As sociologist Peter Berger asserts (1963, pp. 98– 99), ‘‘identity is socially bestowed, socially sustained, and socially transformed y taking the role of the other is decisive for the formation of the self.’’ One way or another, ‘‘the Other’’ plays a major role in how the Self is formulated, enlivened, and embodied in life and in academic discourse. This paper traverses the diverse roles assigned to the Other in various academic treatises on the Self. I do not offer a typology or exhaustive catalog of roles that the Other might play, but rather I show how the Other has been variously construed by unpacking the roles and responsibilities assigned to the Other in some inﬂuential texts of various disciplines and current research on the Self or Other over the past few decades. Neither do I attempt to promote a particular formulation of the Other as especially useful or empirically viable. I am more interested in exploring the power and agency of the Other, and in discussing how the various dimensions and functions of the Other are consequential for interesting, important narratives about the social self. I suggest questions to guide future explorations into the labyrinthine Other.

AN ASSORTMENT OF OTHERS Unfortunately, I am not the ﬁrst to attempt to map out the narrative terrain of Others. In 1985, R. S. Perinbanayagam presented various social theorists’ conceptions of the Other in his book Signifying Acts: Structure and Meaning in Everyday Life. Basically, they comprise three Others: the Generalized Other, the Meiotic Other (my language), and the Signiﬁcant Other. I will address three additional Others – the Unconscious Other, the Marginalized Other, and the Nonhuman Other – that I ﬁnd in a broader and more recent literature. Although I group them into six main Others, the borders of these types are somewhat arbitrary, porous, and nondiscrete, as interaction and intersection exist among them. Two characteristics that distinguish one Other from another are whether the Other exists within or outside the Self and whether the Other is an individual or aggregate entity. The Unconscious Other and the Generalized Other both are constructed from symbolic material outside the individual but ultimately take up residence within the Self. The Meiotic Self is the self-divided; there may be multiple divisions but each Meiotic Self is usually presented as singly constituted. The Signiﬁcant Other, an individual, and the Marginalized Other, often a status group or member of it, reside outside the Self but play supporting roles in relation to any particular Self, which may also be an individual or status group, such as

Others in the Making of Selves

199

men, Whites, and Americans. The Nonhuman Other may be individual, an aggregate of individuals, or the product of human behavior, all of which reside outside the Self. The Unconscious Other The Unconscious Other derives from psychoanalytic literature, particularly that of Jacques Lacan, who regrettably disguised his meaning of the ‘‘Other’’ in the verbal garments of at least ﬁve conceptual costumes, the Unconscious being the main or encompassing one (Lemaire, 1977; Socor, 1997). Even devoted disciples of Lacan appear uncertain of the Other’s identity. Catherine Clement (1983), a student of Lacan, argues that the Other is the embodiment of the Unconscious, the Phallic Law, the Father, and functions as the repository of language and culture; she argues that these are all found in the same ‘‘location’’ within the Self. On the other hand, psychoanalytical scholar Wendy Hollway (1993) posits that the Lacanian Other is the Mother. In much psychoanalytic thought, the development of the Self and its Unconscious is correlated with the inauguration of the psychic drives of Desire, Lack, and Absence. These motivating states are precipitated by the bodily, and later the emotional, separations from the Mother, which create a lifelong unsatisﬁed Desire for reunion. Indeed, one of Lacan’s multiple Others is the signiﬁer of the Mother, or more precisely, the signiﬁer of unlimited enjoyment of and union with the mother’s body, known as ‘‘jouissance’’ in Lacan’s theory. Lacan placed a slash or bar through his symbol for Mother–Other to indicate the prohibition of unlimited access to and enjoyment of the mother (Glowinski, Marks, & Murphy, 2001). In both Freud and Lacan, the source of prohibition is the father, and fear of his jealous wrath results in the infamous castration complex. Freud argues that without the castration complex one cannot fully experience sexual desire, as it is only the prohibition of the incestual object (mom) that forces one to seek enjoyment in a nonincestual object. It is this Lack of the primordial Mother that inaugurates Desire and drives the subject to search elsewhere for what it lacks (Glowinski et al., 2001). From then on, according to Lacan, all human desire is the desire of the Other (Lacan, 1977 [1959], p. 58); that is, the ﬁrst object of desire is to be recognized – needed, loved, admired, valued, acknowledged – by the Other (Bracher, 1995). While Freud ﬁrst posited the Unconscious as a repository of the images, sounds, and emotions available to and repressed by the child during the ﬁrst six months or so of its life, Lacan introduced language as a central factor in

200

ROBERTA L. COLES

the formation of the Unconscious (Peters, 1993). The child moves from an imaginary to a symbolic register with the acquisition of language through interaction with Others. The role of language in the formation of the Unconscious is not unrelated to the initiation of Desire through the castration complex just described. Lacan’s addition of language and symbolization presupposes that all systems of representation are based on Absence, echoing the primal loss of the mother (Siegel, 1999). Humans must use words, signiﬁers, to communicate. By deﬁnition, the signiﬁer is never the signiﬁed thing itself, so there results an incongruence, a dissatisfying lack or absence of the thing itself. Language, like the prohibitive castration complex, separates the subject from the full enjoyment of union with the primordial Other. Language, then, becomes a fence, a moat, between the Conscious and the Unconscious. It is this constant yearning for what is not there, this enduring sense of incompleteness and separation that, according to Socor (1997, p. 184), stimulates awareness of the Self. Desire, ‘‘the experiential afﬁrmation of absence,’’ gives birth to the I, and one may imagine y that the ﬁrst utterance of I is more closely characterized as ‘I desire’.’’ In this psychoanalytical shell-game, Lacan’s ‘‘I desire; therefore, I am’’ replaces the Cartesian ‘‘I think; therefore, I am.’’ The Unconscious becomes the repository for forbidden desires and signiﬁers, which become inaccessible to the volitional Self. In a sense then, the Self represents what is there and the Unconscious represents what is not there, what is absent, what is lacking. Socor (1997, p. 7) suggests that the Unconscious Other is the ‘‘absent made present;’’ ‘‘[T]he Other speaks this absence which (unconsciously) controls us y . The Other is the absent guest at the table of consciousness.’’ Therefore, one of Lacan’s famous dicta is that the ‘‘unconscious is the discourse of the Other.’’ The Generalized Other The Generalized Other is the sociological counterpart to psychology’s Unconscious Other. Analogous to Freud’s superego in his Holy Trinity of the id, ego, and superego, social psychologist G. H. Mead’s ([1934] 1964) concept of the Generalized Other is the repository of societal norms. According to Perinbanayagam (1985), the Generalized Other is the socialpsychological form of the abstraction that sociologists and anthropologists call ‘‘social structure.’’ Like Lacan’s Unconscious Other, the Generalized Other is formed through social interaction and therefore reﬂects historical and cultural malleability; it is not inherent within the individual. ‘‘The

Others in the Making of Selves

201

organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called ‘the generalized other.’ The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community’’ (1964, p. 218). Mead uses the concept of a game to illustrate. In a game, the individual must understand and enact the roles of all others involved in the game and comprehend the rules that condition the various roles (Mead, [1934] 1964). These roles-organized-by-rules coalesce into a symbolic unity, the Generalized Other, which mirrors the values and attitudes of a particular society and becomes internalized into what Mead refers to as the ‘‘Me’’ (as opposed to the ‘‘I’’) part of the Self. Thus, the Generalized Other embeds society within the individual Self, acting as a normative template, guide, and constraint on the Self. Unlike the singular Unconscious Other, an individual may have multiple Generalized Others because the individual can hold membership in multiple ‘‘societies,’’ such as an organization, a status group, family, tribe or nation, each having its own attitudes, values and expected behaviors. These Generalized Others may conﬂict with one another, and the Self must negotiate among them. The Signiﬁcant Other This is perhaps the simplest and most straightforward Other of those proffered here, and it is most frequently addressed in the literature on ‘‘relational Selves’’ or ‘‘dialogic Selves.’’ There can be as many Signiﬁcant Others as, but not more than, there are embodied individuals. The Signiﬁcant Other is, for lack of a better term, a ‘‘real’’ person, possibly a family member, partner, friend, therapist, or any number of people with whom a Self comes into contact. Various terminologies have been employed in the literature to distinguish the degrees of signiﬁcance that Signiﬁcant Others carry in relationship to a Self. Perinbanayagam (2000) designates ‘‘Interactional’’ and ‘‘Signiﬁcant’’ Others in particular instances of social interaction. The former is a person with whom one happens to be interacting, so technically this person may be an insigniﬁcant other. Perinbanayagam reserves the term Signiﬁcant Other for those who may or may not be physically present in the interaction, but who, nevertheless, play a signiﬁcant role in a Self’s life and can inﬂuence the Self from afar. In an analysis of autobiographies, literary scholar Paul Eakin’s (1990, p. 86) equivalent of Perinbanayagam’s Signiﬁcant Other is called the ‘‘proximate other.’’ Eakin says the ‘‘most common form of the relational life [is] the self’s story viewed through the lens of its relation with some key other

202

ROBERTA L. COLES

person, sometimes a sibling, friend, or lover, but most often a parent – we might call such an individual the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer.’’ It follows then that the Signiﬁcant Other is often approached as one Self in a dyadic relationship with another Self, where one Self is the focus and the other is, at least temporarily, playing a supportive role. Philosopher Martin Buber’s ([1923] 1958) formulation of I and Thou, a largely egalitarian and mutual relationship that he placed in opposition to the I– It relationship, which was one of subject–object, is illustrative of this. Buber thought the individual, as a fundamentally relational being, has an innate yearning for connection with others. Buber’s presumption that social interaction constitutes a necessary condition for the development of a whole person is, as you may recall, not unlike Lacan and Mead above. In all three, it is the developing child’s dyadic interplay with familial Signiﬁcant Others that precipitates the emergence of a soul (Buber), an Unconscious (Lacan), and (below) a Meiotic Self (Mead). And, it is the symbolic interaction with a community of Signiﬁcant Others, sometimes referred to as a ‘‘primary group’’ (Cooley, 1962), that gives rise to Mead’s Generalized Other. The Meiotic Self In Mead’s formulation of a very socially founded Self, the Self is composed of an ‘‘I,’’ the active, creative aspect of the Self that responds to the ‘‘Me,’’ the part of the Self that eventually internalizes the Generalized Other(s) and represents the self-image people form as they see themselves reﬂected in the actions and reactions of others toward them. The Self cannot come into being without this division, that is, without the objectiﬁcation of the Self, the attempt to view oneself from the standpoint of others. The Me and the I then carry on a spiraling dialog – the Me reﬂecting the Generalized Other and the I creatively responding – through which the individual’s choices and behaviors are conditioned but not determined. This concept of the splitting of the Self is an essential element of most psychoanalytical thought as well (Socor, 1997). Lacan, for instance, proposed a ‘‘mirror stage’’ of development, a prelinguistic phase in which the infant becomes capable of a self-reﬂective stance; it is the transition from experiencing one’s ‘‘self’’ as fragmented, partial, and segmented, to being able to view one’s self as an integral object (Wiener & Rosenwald, 1993). According to such thought, the meiotic process occurs, in a psychologically healthy individual, during early childhood without much effort on the part of the individual. I refer to this initial, mostly involuntary, division of the self into two essential parts as

Others in the Making of Selves

203

the basal Meiotic Self. However, a number of scholars acknowledge the Self’s ability to divide into multiple selves. One could legitimately argue that the voices of these Selves are merely the voices of the Generalized Others and Signiﬁcant Others pertinent to a particular Self, but in the literature they are treated as their own entities. I divide these potential divisions into three types: reﬂexivity, mind–body split, and a self-protective split. Many scholars of the Self refer to the ﬁrst type of split-self as a ‘‘condition of reﬂexivity,’’ or as Mead (1964) would say, the ability to take oneself as an object. Roger Bromley (2000) deﬁnes reﬂexivity as the ability to relate to oneself externally and to recover that continuously ‘‘othered’’ Self. Linde (1993) argues that without the property of reﬂexivity a Self is not a fully functioning social self. The Self should be able to, in a sense, stand as an observer of its own life and ask ‘‘How am I doing?’’ Assuming that people desire a good self, or one that is perceived as good by others, Linde (1993, p. 121) suggests that ‘‘reﬂexivity requires the narrator to separate him- or herself from the protagonist of his or her narrative in order to observe, reﬂect upon, and correct the self that is being created.’’ This is not unlike the self-therapy that most people do when they assume a self-observatory role to discuss (within themselves or aloud while driving in the car) the costs and beneﬁts of a potential decision or to rehash an experience to achieve a sensible account. Whereas a reﬂexive Self is a daily occurrence among healthy Selves, some splits feel more imposed upon the Self by life’s traumas or employed reluctantly by the Self as a mechanism to cope with trauma. Various life disruptions can lead to the experience of oneself as ‘‘the Other.’’ This can be a mind–body or spirit–ﬂesh division or one in which the Self essentially amputates a part of itself for protective purposes. For instance, upon the occurrence of a physical disruption, such as disability or ill health, people often experience the body as an ‘‘Other,’’ a stranger to one’s Self. As if dissenting, the body refuses to move in synchronization with one’s mental commands or with effortless ease. With such incongruity, the unity of body and Self can no longer be taken for granted. Or, occasionally the company of certain individuals or situations compels us to divide the Self as a protective strategy. Sennett and Cobb (1972), for instance, discuss how an alienated worker might ‘‘divide’’ him- or herself so that only part of his/her Self is subjected to humiliation; only one part is ‘‘othered.’’ ‘‘Dividing the self defends against the pain a person would otherwise feel, if he had to submit the whole of himself to a society which makes his position a vulnerable and anxiety-laden one’’ (1972, p. 208). Similarly, in the ﬁlm A Thousand Acres, based on Jane Smiley’s 1991 book of the same name, a story about incest, the eldest daughter recounts that each time her father

204

ROBERTA L. COLES

came to her in the night, she separated her Self from her body so that he was only raping a soulless shell. As medical anthropologist Gay Becker (1997) has noted, deep discomfort, even agony, can accompany such compulsory partition of the Self. Under worst-case scenarios, the potential for ‘‘multiple personality’’ or ‘‘dissociative identity disorder,’’ as depicted in the 1957 ﬁlm The Three Faces of Eve, is an inherent possibility as well. The Marginalized Other The Marginalized Other (my terminology) is the Other whose identiﬁcation and utilization is of most recent currency. Whereas the Generalized Other and Signiﬁcant Other were generally conceived as having similar structures and qualities as the Self (indeed because they bestow some of their own content to the Self), the Marginalized Other is largely about difference or ambiguity of one degree or another. Usually the difference has a negative connotation, but sometimes a romanticized one, such as in Elliot Gaines’ (2005) exploration of the notion of India as an ‘‘exotic other,’’ one that seems to exhibit exciting and fascinating, but still unusual, qualities. At one end of this difference continuum is the person or group that represents a standard deviation from the mean or that lacks sufﬁcient clout or legitimacy to warrant being named speciﬁcally, as in ‘‘Christians, Jews and others,’’ or ‘‘apples, bananas, and other fruit.’’ The named groups represent the center (or the Self), while the unnamed reside at the cultural, and often the societal, periphery. Sometimes the Marginalized Other reﬂects an ambiguous status, when it is unclear in which extant category it should reside. For instance, Maria Root (1999) speaks of bi- or multiracial persons as Others because they do not ﬁt into presumably discrete racial categories. At the other end of the continuum, the Marginalized Other is frequently constructed as the binary opposite of the center-Self. The Self seeks to distinguish itself from others; in doing so, it essentially constructs the Other with the remnants or undesirable elements of cultural material. In Berglund’s (1994) words, Marginalized Others are ‘‘those persons negatively constructed in the dominant symbolic order.’’ Hence, essentially the Other embodies the slough of the dominant center’s character. They become dummy variables, so to speak; that is, women are the ‘‘not-males,’’ people of color the ‘‘non-Whites,’’ and immigrants the ‘‘not-Americans.’’ Literary theorist Terry Eagleton (1983, p. 132) thus writes: Woman is the opposite, the ‘‘other’’ of man; she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chieﬂy negative value in relation to the male ﬁrst principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out his other or opposite, deﬁning himself in

Others in the Making of Selves

205

antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.

Ghassan Hage (2005) similarly discusses the Lebanese Maronites’ othering of the Druze religious minority. Hage’s description of the process of othering the Druze conjures up psychoanalytic imagery of the creation of the repressed Unconscious (the not-Conscious). [The Maronites] start thinking of wretched people, hewers of wood, etc. That is, they invoke and collapse the other into the very class images that they have banished from their deﬁnition of themselves and their white people. Likewise with skin colour: one systematically represses the whiteness of the other and the non-whiteness within the self to end up with a white self and a non-white other y . This also shows how, through this selective aestheticiszation, racialized thought manages to create a sense of absolute difference between self and other. (p. 202)

In this sense, individuals and groups are ‘‘othered,’’ (a verb connoting objectiﬁcation and powerless of Others). They are deﬁned in such a way that they are pushed to, or just beyond, the perimeters of cultural spaces, where they reside on the subordinate side of power dyads. If they are particularly unlucky, they may be doubly or trebly othered (Zaborowska, 1995); such as if they are, perhaps, women of color, or Muslim and disabled, or – heaven forbid – an aged, lesbian cult member. The subordinate and unclear status of these Others buttresses the dominant place of the Self and Center in a culture’s common sense (Nelson, 2001). The Nonhuman Other Nonhuman Others is a very recent idea, at least to the extent that it is garnering any utility, and it remains a largely undeveloped concept relative to the other Others. Most of the time the term ‘‘nonhuman others’’ refers to animals or, less frequently, inanimate objects. The social science literature on the social aspect of animals is growing rapidly, and quickly shifting to a literature of the Self. While some scholars are attempting to deﬁne animals as ‘‘subjective Others’’ (Irvine, 2004) or ‘‘nonverbal Others’’ (Sanders & Arluke, 1993), other scholars (Alger & Alger, 1997) are more interested in establishing a Self for animals. However, the possibility of nonhuman others has been attended to in the past as well. In Buber’s (1923[1958]) I–Thou relationship, two of the possible Thous are abstract symbolic systems, such as books and art, and nature. One could argue that the former is the product of humans and, therefore, does not count as a Nonhuman Other, but nature would embody animals, plants, and perhaps inanimate (though often formerly animate) objects, such as soil, rock, or water. According to Buber, nature and symbolic systems are

206

ROBERTA L. COLES

Thous in the sense that Selves are capable of receiving conﬁrmation through them. This gives rise to the possibility that inanimate nonnatural objects, such as toys, might be Others as well. As will be discussed below, the Wilson ball in the ﬁlm ‘‘The Castaway’’ (or the inﬂatable Bianca in the ﬁlm ‘‘Lars and the Real Girl’’) would fall into this category.

ISSUES OF POWER: TERRITORIAL BOUNDARIES, AGENCY, AND RESISTANCE The necessity of the Others’ existence for the development of a healthy Self bestows on Others an inherent, though frequently unrecognized and unrealized, power. Although virtually any reference to Self and Other privileges the Self over the Other, early conceptions of the Other found in G. H. Mead (1934 [1964]), Alfred Schutz (1970), and Charles Cooley (1962), for instance, painted Others that were largely benevolently agentic2; after all, these Others were often familial or friendly Signiﬁcant Others (primary groups) and distillations of group attitudes (Generalized Others) reﬂecting a neat Durkheimian consensus that acted as behavioral guides to emerging Selves. While such conceptions were not ignorant of conﬂicts between and within Selves and Others, many of these conceptions seemed to gloss over the internecine struggles that can occur in the formulation of Self and Other. Today those struggles have risen to the forefront with the focus on Marginalized Others. Positioning theory (Harre & Moghaddam, 2003) in psychology recognizes that the status of any particular Other may be situationally relative and is conferred by the Self through numerous strategies, such as address and naming (Perinbanayagam, 2000), the distribution of resources, and the creation of standards and rules. Ultimately, the ongoing creation of Selves and Others, and their continuous interplay, is inevitably about power and inﬂuence. It is a tussle over the content and quality of Selves and Others and over position – not only in regard to who is on top of a hierarchy or who gets to be the protagonist, but also over cultural territory, where lines are drawn in cultural sands and borders serve as both battlegrounds and locations for liaisons. Boundaries and Borders To preface the discussion about agency and power, one must discuss boundaries and borders, as they are inherent to one degree or another in the relationship of Self and Other. To do so, we must return to the psychoanalytic

Others in the Making of Selves

207

literature, in which the subject separates physically, psychologically, and eternally from the mother. In doing so, ego-boundaries are formed. While most psychoanalytic literature recognizes the necessary relational role of Others in the development of the Self, psychic health is assumed to be accompanied by some degree of separateness from others; in a healthy individual the boundaries between ‘‘Self’’ and ‘‘Other’’ should be carefully circumscribed. Boundaries are most often discussed in the context of Signiﬁcant Others. Women, for instance, are frequently said to exhibit ill-deﬁned, porous egoboundaries. Psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow (1978) explains that the female’s separation from the mother is characterized by greater ambivalence and confusion over ego-boundaries than is the parallel process for males. From this, it is often concluded that women tend to have more trouble maintaining healthy ego-boundaries; they become too easily embedded in others’ lives and identities. Their own needs get lost in the needs of others. Although speaking without reference to gender, sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) describes the ‘‘other-directed’’ false self, the altruist, as the person who is overly concerned with the needs of others. When overdeveloped, this false self oversteps its boundaries, bonding its true self to the group’s welfare [italics mine].3 Only occasionally, most often in the literature on Others’ resistance, is this ability to penetrate boundaries comprehended as a positive quality, when it is argued, for instance, that because of their porous boundaries women can incorporate Otherness more easily than can men. Despite the supposition that boundaries between Self and Others are essential to healthy personality development and perhaps to social relationships, some scholars recognize that the Desire of the Other simultaneously wars with these erected boundaries. Buber ([1923] 1958), Joas (1998), and others assert that the Self seeks fusion – sexually, spiritually – with Others and can only experience that fusion by transgressing the boundaries of the Self. According to Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci (1996), the apparent differences between Self and Other, which are constructed and delineated by discrete borders, entice us to cross over. Yet the Self fears the loss of identity that might accompany the penetration of borders. [E]ncountering another always entails putting into question something of ourselves and of our uniqueness and venturing into an unknown land only to discover what we lack: exposing oneself to otherness implies a challenge to one’s self-sufﬁciency and the recognition that the other is different precisely because s/he possesses what we do not havey (pp. 101–102)

208

ROBERTA L. COLES

The psychological lingo of boundaries often converts to ‘‘margins’’ and ‘‘peripheries’’ when discussing subordinate Marginalized Others or to ‘‘borders’’ when Marginalized Others are afforded (or assume) increased power and agency. Most of the time, residing on or beyond the border of mainstream society is a precarious, peripheral position. For instance, Lisa Park (2005) describes the border location of Asian Americans, who as a ‘‘model minority’’ ride the border between the White Americans at the Center and ‘‘bad minorities’’ in the outlying cultural territory. Park says, Asian Americans ﬁnd themselves standing on a ‘‘fault line,’’ vulnerable to the slightest quake or change in social boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Their social role as a mythical model minority requires that they continuously exhibit their patriotism or their deservingness of social citizenship through consumptive displays. Otherwise, they may fall into the ‘‘bad’’ immigrant category and experience even greater limitations on their social citizenship claims. (p. 12)

However, it has also been argued that such a border position provides, perhaps as a consolation prize (as with the meek who eventually inherit the earth), some double-edged characteristics that can be construed as forms of power for Marginalized Others. In this case, being ‘‘othered’’ supposedly imbues Marginalized Others with keen insight and cultural knowledge unavailable to the Center. Surviving in and successfully negotiating the Self’s or Center’s world requires Marginalized Others to make intelligencegathering forays across the border, thus rendering them more familiar with and skilled in negotiating both domains. The Center, on the other hand, can maintain its dominance even while lacking such knowledge, that is, while lacking understanding of the Other, the capability of seeing oneself as the Other, and the illumination that that capability would afford (Becker, 1997). Likewise, because of their contrast (difference) and their sashaying back and forth across cultural borders, Marginalized Others have the power to create ‘‘boundary moments,’’ which are, as deﬁned by Stephen Knadler (2002, p. xvii), ‘‘moments of disruption when people become conscious of their membership in aygroup because of their experience of rejection or counteridentiﬁcation by a member of another group.’’ Michael Holquist (1999, p. 101) argues that ‘‘the mind is structured so that the world is always perceived according to contrast.’’ Nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something else; there is no ﬁgure without a background. It is only in those moments of contrasting disruption that we see who we ‘‘really’’ are, that we see the nuances of our identity, as when one holds a ‘‘white’’ paint chip against a piece of white paper, only to discover the ‘‘white’’ paint chip is actually a pale shade of blue.

209

Others in the Making of Selves

On the other hand, because racial–ethnic minority groups and women must be well-versed in both worlds, it is occasionally argued that they themselves are divided, possessing a double consciousness, which can have negative or positive consequences for themselves or others. W. E. B. DuBois ([1903] 1979), in The Souls of Black Folk, argued that the African-American had no true self-consciousness. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder’’. (p. 3)

Brownley and Kimmich (1999) argue that women autobiographers are likewise doubly voiced, because they view themselves in two dramatically different ways – ﬁrst through the eyes of society as the stereotypical feminine object but then also in ways that conﬂict with the constraining stereotype. Being doubly conscioused or doubly voiced (read also: forked tongue) can lead to a double life, which may include an element of duplicity. Prime examples would be African Americans passing for Whites, literally, or as ‘‘oreos’’ and women deceiving men, particularly in the arena of orgasms (Forrester, 1997). Agentic Others The most agentic Other is the Signiﬁcant Other, which plays a strong and creative role in a Self’s initial and continuous identity formation. At minimum, the Self’s identity is a collaborative, relational effort with Signiﬁcant Others. Paul Eakin (1990, p. 63) suggests that we learn how to be a certain kind of person in conversation with others; that is, identity formation is socially and discursively transacted. Likewise, sociologist Erving Goffman ([1956] 1967, pp. 84–85) argued that a person’s constituent personal and social identities cannot be realized in isolation: Rather the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts y . While it may be true that the individual has a unique self all his own, evidence of that possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor.

In a person’s earliest developmental stage, the Signiﬁcant Other plays a pivotal role, both in the formation of the Self and in the formation of that Self’s Others. Without the verbal and nonverbal interaction between Signiﬁcant Others, particularly parents, and a child, the Generalized Other and the basal Meiotic Self would not form. As the circle of Signiﬁcant

210

ROBERTA L. COLES

Others expands in the life of a Self, the Generalized Other is formed and wends its way into the Me. Finally, the number and content of our multiple Selves are constrained and shaped by what ‘‘closely enmeshed others accord’’ (Goffman, 1971, p. 367). While the Signiﬁcant Other is usually viewed as using its agency benevolently, it clearly has the potential to exercise varying levels of control over the Self’s creation. As Jenkins (2000) points out, we know who we are because Others tell us. Narrative scholar Randall (1995, p. 44) says ‘‘Others story us’’. The stories Others tell about us, which Randall calls ‘‘outside-in stories,’’ help to create the social climate in which our lives are lived and to determine the range of options and opportunities by which our lives are bound. In fact, a Signiﬁcant Other can speak on behalf of the Self. This is most obvious in the case of children, who are still developing their own selves, their own voices, and have little control over their environment. As Steedman (quoted in Eakin, 1990) asserts, ‘‘children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative.’’ Glowinski et al. (2001) suggests that even the infant’s cry is interpreted by Signiﬁcant Others as speech, as when the parent responds to the infant’s cry with the explanation ‘‘Oh, she wants his diaper changed.’’ Cahill (1998) takes the parents’ identity-conferring role one step back, acknowledging that even prior to birth, parents, abetted by ultrasound technology and genetic tests, labor in the production of their offsprings’ identities. For instance, parents of an active fetus might jumpstart their child’s identity with statements such as ‘‘He’s already a strong kicker.’’ In return, family and friends may ﬁnd evidence of the parents’ announced identity in the infant’s later conduct and treat him or her accordingly. In some cases, Signiﬁcant Others may seize the opportunity to control an adult’s identity when s/he lacks the means to control his/her own identity. Cahill (1998) and Holstein and Gubrium (2000) proffer examples of the strong role Signiﬁcant Others play in the production of Selves for disabled people or persons with Alzheimer’s Disease. One might refer to the recent case of Terry Schiavo, a wife comatose for 13 years. Although her autopsy revealed her to be brain dead, Schiavo’s parents and brother had successfully created a vital public persona on her behalf. One might consider who Terry Schiavo would have been if a less interested party had been responsible for her care. In these latter cases, the person contributes little of his/her own labor to the creation of its Self. It is this ability of some Others that begs the question ‘‘Who is the Other here?’’ Is the Self just a vessel for the Other in these cases? In essence then, the relationship between the Self and Signiﬁcant Other can become a battleﬁeld over who gets to be Self and Other in each dyadic

Others in the Making of Selves

211

relational instance and over the content of the identity each Self will be allowed to have. It is this element of interpersonal struggle, which can be subtle or overt, that is often missing when scholars describe the process of narrating or making a Self. For instance, ‘‘Self A’’ may have a particular image of his or her Self, while Signiﬁcant Others B through E have different images of that person or at least Self A suspects that they do. Self A needs their feedback to try to assess which, if any, of those Selves are ‘‘really’’ hers, but directly asking for the feedback is risky and appears self-absorbed. Frequently, even if asked, Others withhold their feedback from Self A, though they may freely tell other bystanders what they think of Self A. Perhaps it is not their intent to keep Self A incomplete; maybe they intend only to protect themselves in some way, but the outcome is that their withholding makes Self A’s self-creation more uncertain. Illustrative of this process is Crooks, the black farmhand in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men ([1937] 1946). As the only African American farmhand, Crooks [described (p. 299) as a man who ‘‘had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego y .,’’] resides in a separate shack, isolated from the white farmhands. Lennie, the mentally retarded protagonist who has accidentally killed two people, suggests to Crooks that he come live with Lennie and his brother George when they ﬁnally buy the farm they have been saving for. Crooks thinks such a living arrangement might resolve the lack of certainty about his self-perceptions that accompanies his isolation. He states this in considerably less postmodern jargon: A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know if I was asleep. If some guy was with me, he could tell me I was asleep, an’ then it would be all right. (p. 292)

Occasionally, Others tell Self A what they think of him/her, and Self A may ﬁnd the revelation shocking, and then a battle ensues. Self A must convince them that they are wrong, must persuade them to let her out of that particular identity box. A similar power struggle can occur among the Meiotic Selves, particularly when the division of the basal Self into multiple Selves is imposed by external exigencies. As McAdams (1993, p. 115) asserts, the splitting of the self is occasionally a discordant one, as when one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is in another social setting. When there are multiple, particularly contradictory images, of a Self, one is left wondering which are the ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘faux’’ selves, much like

212

ROBERTA L. COLES

circus mirrors, where some reﬂect a taller self, a stockier self, or so on. One leaves the mirrored room wondering which image is the one closest to ‘‘reality.’’ Then the struggle is to suppress the undesirable Other(s) within the Self. Or as discussed earlier, when the body becomes the Self’s Other, the ﬂesh and spirit resort to ﬁsticuffs to determine which will have more agency. Convolutions of Victimhood and Agency Power is conventionally conceived as control that derives from physical or mental strength, aggressiveness, or a disproportionate share of resources. However, weakness and passivity can occasionally achieve the same ends. For instance, in the earlier discussion of mind–body splits where a weakened body is viewed as an Other by its Self, the body, in its weakened condition, ends up by default exercising quite a bit of control and constraint over the frustrated Self. And many a spouse will attest to the fact that a passive or lethargic Signiﬁcant Other can, with no use of force, redistribute the bulk of unwanted household labor to the Self. So an Other does not need to be in an authoritative position to achieve control of a Self; even victims can control through sympathy or guilt. In fact, Others are sometimes othered in partial or contradictory ways. While I am mostly discussing Othering as a cultural process, Others can be marginalized structurally as well. That is, often cultural othering frequently results in structural othering, by which I mean they have less access to society’s resources, as evidenced in lower rates of education, lower incomes, and less control over most institutions. When individuals or groups are only (by only I do not mean to imply that it is less damaging) culturally othered, they may be able to muster those structural resources and use them to resist their othering or to create a situation in which they become the Self/Center in relation to an Other. For instance, Jews have historically been victims to cultural othering, through negative stereotyping and genocide. However, compared to many other racial–ethnic groups, they have to a lesser degree exhibited structural othering. As an ethnic group, they have one of the highest median incomes and highest rates of education. These resources have better enabled them to survive their Othered status and utilize that status to create a relatively powerful political State. The agency attributed to various Others frequently exhibits such contrary qualities and ranges on a continuum from subtle and subversive to overt and imposing. The Unconscious Other is frequently portrayed as inaccessible and repressed. According to Lacan, the Unconscious is successfully ‘‘fenced off’’ by language, the Self’s defense against the Unconscious (Benstock, 1988

Others in the Making of Selves

213

or 1999). Buttressing this image, Gerald Peters (1993) portrays the Unconscious Other as a helpless pathetic character, likening it to ‘‘a silent and suspended self trapped behind all language, one that sheds tears never seen, one that cries to be let out but is never heard.’’ However, other portrayals depict the Unconscious as imparting discord and agitation as it reminds the Self of its lack of unity (Hunsaker, 1999). This Unconscious exercises its power in a frightening, surreptitious manner, by locating holes in the Self’s fortress-like symbolic structure and ferreting its way through. Clement (1983, p. 232) describes the Unconscious as a trickster who makes us say what we do not mean, manifested as [Freudian] slips of the tongue. ‘‘When you use the wrong word, when you say a word other than the one you meant to say, it’s not really you who is speaking. You are spoken y . You are just a conduit for that which has decided to escape from within at all costs.’’ Similarly, the Marginalized Other’s agency ﬂuctuates from a powerless victim to aggressive and furtive. As its name implies, the Marginalized Other is commonly portrayed as peripheral, subordinate, inferior, oppressed, and powerless. This victim-object is created by Centers who ‘‘othered’’ it, yet, many poststructuralists argue that the Other has agency when it participates in its own denigration (Punday, 2003). For instance, according to DeBeauvoir (1971): ‘‘When man makes of woman the Other, he may then expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies toward complicity. Thus woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks deﬁnite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other (p. xxxiii).’’ Although DeBeauvoir thought women differed from other oppressed groups because of their widespread internalization of negative myths about women, the same internalization of self-hatred has been attributed to racial and religious minority groups as well. However, in a number of aspects, Marginalized Others supposedly wield powers similar to the Unconscious. For instance, psychologist Wendy Hollway (1993) argues that men’s desire for the Other/Mother, which they fear because it induces vulnerability, gives women unrecognized power. Hollway argues that men hold ambiguous feelings toward vaginal sex. In the vagina, men feel engulfed in the love of the Other/Mother, but such inundation simultaneously reminds them of the power women exert over them. Benstock (1999) argues that Marginalized Others who occupy positions of internal exclusion within society – women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and others who exist at the margins of society – puncture the Self’s defense (as does the Unconscious), attempting to defeat its fencing off

214

ROBERTA L. COLES

network. The penetrating gaze of these Others threatens the Self, reminding the Self of its own internal split, which in turn explains the Self’s need to dismiss or repress the Others. Similarly, Anoop Nayak (2005) deﬁnes racialization as the application of imagined racial ‘‘essences’’ to others. The process of racialization, however, affects the identity not only of those who are subjected to its power but also those who racialize Others. According to Nayak, these Others return to trouble the Self in unconscious fantasies and unspoken desires. As an act of projection, racialization involves spinning a psychic web of fear, envy, and desire, which binds the bodies of racialized others in a silver thread of white anxiety. At the very least, because Marginalized Others rarely forget their position as an Other, to the extent that they continue to remind the Self/Center of that fact, they become a thorn in the ﬂesh of the Self/Center. Resistance The Unconscious Other’s propensity to dig its way through the defensive language network; the Signiﬁcant Other’s ability to create identity material for, or withhold it from, the Self; and the body’s occasional revolt against the Self’s control could be interpreted as forms of resistance to subordination, to a lifeless role. However, more salient of late has been the resistance of Marginalized Others, who traditionally have held a clearly more peripheral role. As mentioned earlier, Marginalized Others are, by deﬁnition, subordinate others. However, in recent years they have been accorded the possibility of agency sufﬁcient to resist their marginalization and/or to counter the dominant Center. Throughout history, Marginalized Others have resisted their subordination by telling jokes about or mimicking the dominant group (Wasson, 1994), grumbling to one another, or composing and singing satirical or political songs about their oppressors (Linde, 1993). But aside from momentarily lightening the burden of powerlessness, these tactics rarely transform the position of the Marginalized Other. More decisively, Marginalized Others resist and confront othering by developing a tolerance for contradictions (Bromley, 2000; Rosaldo, 1989) or by using the material from which they were constructed to mount a campaign to privilege the characteristics of the Others. For instance, Stone (2002) argues that the marginalized position is not simply one of deprivation, but additionally is an entryway to realms of knowledge and feeling that the dominant culture hides or denies. Stone quotes author Toni Morrison (2002) who wrote that her marginalized position as a black person

Others in the Making of Selves

215

and as a woman gave her ‘‘access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who were neither’’ (p. 71). According to narrative scholar Zaborowska (1995), this bicultural, in-between identity ‘‘may be the only kind capable of engaging in intercultural dialog and of remaking the host culture.’’ Although Lentin (2004) writes that Irish migrant women remain as ‘‘barbarian[s] beyond the pale of civilization, forever consigned to play the role of the ontological, political, economic and cultural other,’’ she also argues that their stories are not only the product of negation and damage but also of resistance and survival. Such a vantage point is increasingly being shared in written narratives and memoirs, such as through the Personal Narratives Group (1989) headquartered in Minnesota. PNG supports this strategy based on the belief that ‘‘nondominant social groups (women, racially or ethnically oppressed people, lower-class people, lesbians) are often particularly effective sources of counterhegemonic insight because they expose the dominant ideology as particularist rather than universal, and because they reveal the reality of a life that deﬁes or contradicts the rules.’’ Fand (1999) claims that Others have the power to change the very language and social structures that constituted them in the ﬁrst place, so that, for instance, women formed from patriarchal inﬂuences may nevertheless expose the contradictions embedded in patriarchal discourse and institutions and create a new dynamic between power ‘‘centers’’ and their ‘‘margins.’’ To illustrate, Marginalized Others are often created as opposites of Selves, for instance, men as rational, women as emotional. Literary scholar Helen Buss (2002) argues that in choosing to write an autobiography, women have traditionally had to enter the discourse of man. To garner cultural authority, they must portray an individualist selfhood attuned to personal achievement, when they really wish to tell a story characterized by absence, silence, vulnerability, immanence, interpenetration, one that is nonlogocentric, unpredictable, and childish. By Lacanian deﬁnition, many of these attributes are the very ones suppressed by the male child to enter the world of the adult, to leave the imaginary realm for the symbolic. Similarly, literary scholar Paul Eakin (1990) mentions that in the study of autobiographical writing, women’s and men’s autobiographical styles are distinguished by binary characteristics: women’s as collective, relational, and nonlinear and discontinuous, while men’s style is individualistic, autonomous, and linear. Ironically, these same dichotomies frequently are used to distinguish racial minority values and orientations from those of White Europeans. That is, racial–ethnic minorities are often said to be

216

ROBERTA L. COLES

oriented to the collective over the individual, to nonlinear over linear thinking, to interdependence over independence (Stone, 1988, for instance). However, in the past decade or so, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bahktin’s work on cultural and literary theory has risen to the forefront. His concepts of ‘‘dialogism’’ and ‘‘heteroglossia’’ are particularly utilized in discussions of Others, as Bahktin argues that the representation of multiple voices is essential to authenticity. Fand (1999) describes Bahktin’s concept of dialogism as privileging female characteristics over male. That is, Bahktin’s dialogism emphasizes relating and negotiating (rather than isolating and polarizing positions), responding to concrete particulars (rather than to abstract principles), and intuitive thinking (rather than linear thinking). Although such strategies continue to propagate problematic dualisms, by turning these dualisms on their head, Marginalized Others, in a backhanded way, argue that women and people of color are deeper and more layered than men and Whites, whose characteristics are by implication unilayered and egocentric. One ﬁnal way of resisting Otherhood is to transform an Other into a Self. This is currently happening in the literature on animal–human relationships. Generally, animals, if addressed at all, have been treated as groups, or perhaps as individual pets, subordinate and marginal to humans. At best they have been viewed, as mentioned above, as Nonhuman Others. Work by Alger and Alger (1997), Irvine (2004), and Sanders and Arluke (1993) has argued that animals are at least ‘‘subjective Others’’ and perhaps have Selves. To achieve this end, these scholars do away with the linguistic foundation of the Self that is found in Lacan and Mead and instead use a more emotive, senses-based Self,4 arguing that what is minimally needed for a Self are four facets (which they derive from psychologist William James’ (1890 [1950]) work): a sense of agency (self-willed or self-controlled action), a sense of coherence (that is, a sense of being a physical whole), a sense of affectivity (feelings), and a sense of self-history (memory).5 Current and Future Research Little empirical research incorporates the concepts of the Other. Partial explanation for this absence lies in the fact that the conceptions are often difﬁcult, if not impossible, to measure. For instance, being that the Unconscious Other is, as its name implies, unconscious, it is an Other that is merely speculative. The Self has no ability to access the Unconscious, let alone measure it. Like a god, its existence cannot be proven. Nevertheless, the belief that it might exist may exert measurable inﬂuence on social behavior.

Others in the Making of Selves

217

That is, an individual may avoid inebriation or a drug-induced high for fear that such a state may weaken the Self’s defenses and his or her repressed thoughts and emotions may embarrassingly leak out, bequeathing to other people more information about him/her than s/he has about her/himself. To what extent does belief in the Unconscious Other succeed in controlling or motivating behavior and what types of behaviors are more susceptible to this belief? These may be more fruitful questions for future research. One example of research that puts a twist on Lacan’s Unconscious Other is social psychologist Phillip Shon’s (2002) discussion of mass murder by young white youth, as in the 1999 Columbine murders. Shon adopts Bracher’s (1995) terminology, which deﬁnes Lacan’s Other as the Self’s ‘‘internalized ultimate authority.’’ Shon then suggests that these youth desire the Desire of the Other. However, in this case the Other has been externalized; the U.S. government and country become the Other, the ultimate authority, whom the youth hope desires them. In today’s multicultural society, these white youth think this authority now desires minorities, as evidenced in enforcement of preference laws, such as afﬁrmative action, hate crimes statues, gender equity, etc. It is the classic Cain and Abel story; the jealous youth kill the Other’s object of desire. Some sociological research has included the Generalized Other. Himsel and Goldberg (2003), for instance, studied marital satisfaction in regard to household division of labor. They found that satisfaction with the distribution of household labor varied according to which reference wives and husbands chose for comparison. Wives tended to compare their situation to their peers’, while husbands frequently compared chore distribution to their mothers’ situations. When husbands compared themselves to their wives, they often acknowledged that their wives assumed a greater share of family work. However, Himsel and Goldberg (2003) also found that a number of men, particularly those in dual-earner marriages, invoked for comparison not a real person but rather a Generalized Other, a putative typical dad, who performed less family work than they did. These husbands described an image of a Generalized Other whose meager contributions to family work enhanced their own relative involvement. Similarly, Gager’s (1998) study on father involvement – although it did not invoke the term ‘‘Generalized Other’’ – found that dads often generated an image of a ‘‘do-nothing dad’’ to whom they would favorably compare. Scott’s (2004) study on shyness uses both the Generalized Other and what I have called the Meiotic Self. Scott understands shyness as a dialog between the I and the Me of Mead’s social self (what I have termed the basal Meiotic Self). She distinguishes between embarrassment, which is a reaction of acute

218

ROBERTA L. COLES

self-consciousness about a faux pas that has already occurred, and shyness, which is anticipatory anxiety about imagined or expected blunders. According to Scott, shyness is caused by monitoring one’s own action compared to a generalized image of what she calls the ‘‘competent other,’’ an estimation of how socially skilled others are in a particular social situation. The Generalized Other was conceived by Mead as an organized community or social group that gives rise to a communal attitude about aspects of common social activity. This communal attitude must be taken up by the Self in order to fully develop. In doing so, the community exercises social control over the conduct of its individuals. Mead’s concept seems to assume that the Self takes up these social attitudes ‘‘correctly;’’ that is, there is little room for Mead’s Self to create a Generalized Other that is conducive to the Self’s desires. Yet the above described research suggests that individuals may tweak the Generalized Other to ﬁt their needs and that the individual may rely on faulty information to concoct a Generalized Other. In both cases, the Generalized Other is a dynamic Other that may change over the course of one’s lifetime, reﬂecting shifting social structures and cultural mores. This leads to potential research questions: Where did the fathers obtain the information that comprised their Generalized Other? From friends/peers who say they do less (but perhaps do more and do not want to admit it)? Do these fathers seek out other husbands who do less in order to make themselves look better? Hypothetically, if a Self perceives that the general attitude about extramarital affairs, let us say, is conservative but then hears a news report that extramarital affairs are increasing or ﬁnds that several friends are partaking in such affairs, does such information about what the Generalized Other is doing or thinking allow the Self to now consider doing what he/she might not have considered and how long would that time-lag be? How do persons choose among competing Generalized Others? Wiener and Rosenwald’s (1993) work on diaries incorporates the concept of multiple selves (which I sorted under Meiotic Self). The authors point out that diarists may keep several diaries reﬂecting different selves, multiple selves, which can then confront one another. Thus, the diary performs a ‘‘mirror’’ function, making Self into an Other or observing oneself as an object. By writing about oneself in the diary one creates a picture of the self as a whole. One may also become aware of the self as divided into subject and object, the experiencer and the observer of experience. Beyond the transitional object function of the diary, which serves to help the self differentiate from others, this mirror function of the diary helps to distinguish not only the ‘me’ from the ‘not-me’; it also embodies the division between ‘I, the subject’ and ‘me, the object’ of reﬂection. (p. 44)

Others in the Making of Selves

219

Similarly, Brendan Stone’s (2006) analysis of the diaries of two psychotic patients, shows that the diary functioned as the Other that aided the patient in rebuilding its shattered Self, to regain a voice that had been stolen, to reclaim an identity by dialoging with its Other. Such research could go further in asking what circumstances are more likely to produce, or what types of people are more likely to adopt, a strategy of multiple selves. Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) writing (mentioned above) suggests that situations of alienation (in their case, workplace situations) may either impose or cause a Self to adopt a strategy of selfothering, but one can easily imagine other alienating experiences (see, for example, Rayson’s [1999] work on Japanese-American women’s experience in wartime relocation centers, where she says their ‘‘split identity’’ was exacerbated), where one is situated in the midst of a new Generalized Other or in cases of rape or domestic abuse, where dividing, or separating from, the Self would be a logical coping mechanism. In regard to the Self as composed of mind and body, future research opportunities abound. Pregnancy and paralysis have always existed as situations that have the potential to alienate body from mind, but the aging of the babyboomers, increased organ transplants (most recently the face) and proliferating war injuries all provide a plethora of situations where the Self may feel othered by its body. Cases of amnesia provide instances where bodily dysfunctions or traumas obliterate a Self, require Signiﬁcant Others to put Humpty-Dumpty’s Self back together again, but also paradoxically potentially provide opportunities to construct new Selves. The Other that has garnered a fair amount of research is the Signiﬁcant Other. Some of that research has focused on how professionals can play the role of Signiﬁcant Other for various types of ‘‘clients.’’ For instance, M. E. Miller (1996) approaches the research interviewer as the Signiﬁcant Other; in this case, Miller himself was the Interviewer/Other. Miller visualized the interviewer as playing the ‘‘Thou’’ as in Buber’s I and Thou. He found that many of the respondents interviewed just wished to be heard out, to be listened to, and understood by an attentive other. However, he also concluded that the Self and Other in this relationship are mutually acting as Others for one another. The interviewer or therapist who intends to be the Other, acting as a sounding board for a Self, may ﬁnd, perhaps unwittingly, that s/he is gradually being changed by the other person. Similarly, Hurvitz’s (1979) work on family therapy argued that in order to be effective, therapists needed to become signiﬁcant others to their clients. Another set of research on Signiﬁcant Others focuses on daily dyadic relationships. Ogle and Damhorst (2003), for example, looked at mothers and

220

ROBERTA L. COLES

daughters as dyadic pairs and referred to each as the ‘‘dyadic other.’’ Speciﬁcally, the authors studied this relationship in reference to dieting behavior. They found that mothers and daughters described a process in which they used their perceptions about the dyadic other and their relationship with that other to guide their body- and diet-related interactions. Each attempted to exert control over their interactions. However, although both mothers and daughters acted as diet supporters to one another, only mothers served as conscious socializers and safety supervisors. A growing ‘‘unform’’ of autobiography combines both the Signiﬁcant Other and Self as Other (Meiotic Self). Autothanatography is essentially a memoir about dying, in which the Other, frequently familial, provides a map of a Self (Eakin, 1990). In this death narrative, the dying person incorporates his/her own perspective on his/her own bodily deterioration along with the narratives of Signiﬁcant Others about the dying person. According to Susanna Egan (2001), autothanatography reverses the usual pattern of autobiography; it covers a brief period of time and a single main experience, and involves other people than the dying self often in a dialogue of shared experience y . Second, autothanatography takes on the whole business of the body y . Facing death, the body forces reversal of the normal trajectories of autobiography. Miller [1994], again, has described the forward-looking story about the ‘‘becoming’’ of a life and describes autothanatography as an ‘‘UNbecoming.’’

Recent memoirs that exemplify autothanatography include Eric Michael’s (1997) Unbecoming, Christina Middlebrook’s (1996) Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying, and Nancy K. Miller’s (1996) Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a parent’s death. This form of memoir epitomizes the social creation of the Self, and although not research, it raises questions with potential for qualitative research. How much of one’s Self is so to speak ‘‘vaulted’’ in Signiﬁcant Others? And, as Signiﬁcant Others die, do they forever take with them, and hence render inaccessible, knowledge of another’s Self? One can imagine a young person whose mother dies and is no longer available to answer questions such as ‘‘Did I do such and such when I was young?’’ ‘‘Did I display a certain characteristic as a child?’’ ‘‘Tell me the story about y .’’ However, even as one reaches late life, with each passing of family members and friends, how might the remaining elder feel less a Self, less storied? How might that impact his/her own identity and will to live? Even without death, the unity or fullness of the Self may also suffer during geographical transitions, as when one moves to a new job or neighborhood, leaving behind people who knew them best and making friends who do not know one’s past nor care to ask. To what extent does the

221

Others in the Making of Selves

death or disappearance of the Signiﬁcant Others leave the Self incomplete or, on the other hand, offer opportunities to create new Selves? Finally, I have already discussed in the last part of the previous section research that is being conducted on Nonhuman Others. So far, that research is focused on animals, primarily pets and companion animals such as cats and dogs. It is conceivable that this will eventually expand to other animals, particularly those that have already been studied by biologists and naturalists. In short, I have tried to articulate and illustrate the roles and agency of the various Others that are usually subsidiary characters in the story of the Self. The literature on Selves easily allows individuals to keep rewriting their Selves with each new experience, each new disruption. But what about the Other? Its assumed subordination to, or at least secondary importance to, the Self produces and perpetuates a concept of Others that is somewhat stagnant. In fact, Others intersect, play multiple roles, and shift amoebically as they exist in a state of dynamic tension with the Self. A new generation of research and narrative focusing on the Other could enlighten and enliven the role of Others and Selves in the creation and maintenance of both social identities and interaction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Norm Denzin, James A. Holstein, Robert S. Perinbanayagam, and Phil Shon for their clarifying comments.

NOTES 1. I do not intend to imply here that Others and Selves are separate entities nor that Others have no Selves. Most Others do have Selves, though they often go unrecognized or undervalued. 2. One early noteworthy exception to the benevolent Other was Jose Ortega y Gasset’s (1956) notion of a malevolent Other whose goal was to submerge the Self within it. Ortega referred to this as ‘‘alteration.’’ He is discussed in Perinbanayagam (1985) as well. 3. One has to wonder whether the concept of discrete ego-boundaries and their necessity for psychic health would even arise in societies not based on private property. Holstein and Gubrium (2000, p. 11) relay the story of a Western researcher who lived with the Akaramas, a tribe in Peru. The Akaramas had no concept of the ‘‘individual;’’ group identity was paramount. Even upon death, a person’s absence seemed to go unnoticed. Eventually, the researcher left the ﬁeld because he felt his distinct ‘‘me’’ was being eradicated. However, the psychoanalytic and social theory that focuses on the Other arose in societies highly deﬁned by the concept of property and privileging male ways of relating, so I proceed on that premise.

222

ROBERTA L. COLES

4. One could still argue that Lacan’s creation of the Self could accommodate a less language-based construction of Self, as he argues that the psychological needs of Desire, Lack, and Absence underlie human interaction. Language enters later as a human symbolic register that is representative of these needs. 5. While I personally would be easily convinced that animals have a Self, I believe this search for the ‘‘minimal Self ’’ poses some problems. The arguments proffered are sometimes more about the humans involved in the human–animal interaction than they are about the animals. For instance, Irvine argues that humans seek relationships with animals and are concerned about animal well-being, that human– animal interaction increases in complexity over time, that animals act as ‘‘social facilitators,’’ and that people name animals. Although this is only part of Irvine’s evidence, she argues that these behaviors indicate that animals ‘‘give off ’’ (as in Goffman’s [1959] ‘‘impressions given off ’’) a sense of Self or subjectivity. That may be the case, but it is also possible that those same human-like behaviors may be projections of human subjectivity onto animals. Humans are known to name and talk to dolls, stuffed animals, and plants (Sometimes I even feel I’m talking to a wall!). Sometimes they paint faces on and name inanimate objects. Note the case of ‘‘Wilson’’ in the ﬁlm The Castaway, in which the main character, played by Tom Hanks, stranded for years on a deserted island, bestows a Self upon a volleyball, which becomes a needed companion, an Other, for Hanks. Wilson’s demise probably brought tears to many an eye or a lump to the throat, but I don’t think many would argue that Wilson had a Self or sense of subjectivity. In addition, the search for a minimal Self could foreseeably have us spelunking into the womb. At which point does a human (or animal) have the beginnings of a Self? Given that we now know that fetuses hear and feel in the womb and many (anal) parents now talk to, play music for, and practice math skills with their intrauterine baby, we may eventually hear arguments for a Prenatal Self. Is this somewhat akin to or will this intersect with the anti-abortion search for the earliest viable life?

REFERENCES Alger, J. M., & Alger, S. F. (1997). Beyond Mead: Symbolic interaction between humans and felines. Society and Animals: Journal of Human–Animal Studies, 5(1), 65–81. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. In: M. Holquist (Ed.). C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Trans.), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Becker, G. (1997). Disrupted lives: How people create meaning in a chaotic world. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benstock, S. (Ed.) (1988). The private self: Theory and practice of women’s autobiographical writings. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Benstock, S. (1999). The female self engendered: Autobiographical writing and theories of selfhood. In: M. W. Brownley & A. B. Kimmich (Eds), Women and autobiography (pp. 3–13). Wilmington, DE: SR Books. Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to sociology: A humanistic perspective. New York: Doubleday. Berglund, B. (1994). Postmodernism and the autobiographical subject: Reconstructing the ‘‘other’’. In: K. Ashley, L. Gilmore & G. Peters (Eds), Autobiography and postmodernism (pp. 130–166). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Others in the Making of Selves

223

Bracher, M. (1995). Doctor-assisted suicide: Psychoanalysis of mass anxiety. Psychoanalytic Review, 82(5), 655–668. Bromley, R. (2000). Narratives for a new belonging: Diasporic cultural ﬁctions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brownley, M. W., & Kimmich, A. B. (Eds). (1999). Women and autobiography. Wilmington, DE: SR Books. Buber, M. (1923 [1958]). I and thou. R. G. Smith (Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Buss, H. M. (2002). Repossessing the world: Reading memoirs by contemporary women. Canada: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Cahill, S. E. (1998). Toward a sociology of the person. Sociological Theory, 16(2), 131–148. Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clement, C. (1983). The lives and legends of Jacques Lacan. A. Goldhammer (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Cooley, C. H. (1962). Social organization. New York: Schocken Books. DeBeauvoir, S. (1971). Second sex. New York: Knopf. DuBois, W. E. B. [1903] (1979). The souls of black folk: Essays and sketches. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory: An introduction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Eakin, P. J. (1990). How our lives become stories: Making selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eakin, P. J. (2004). What are we reading when we read autobiography? Narrative, 12(2), 121–131. Egan, S. (2001). The life and times of autothanatography. An online discussion paper @ http:// www.english.ubc.ca/PROJECTS/PAIN/DEGAN.HTM Fand, R. J. (1999). The dialogic self: Reconstructing subjectivity in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Forrester, J. (1997). Truth games: Lies, money and psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gager, C. T. (1998). The role of valued outcomes, justiﬁcations, and comparison referents in perceptions of fairness among dual-earner couples. Journal of Family Issues, 19, 622–648. Gaines, E. (2005). Interpreting India: Identity and media from the ﬁeld: Exploring the communicative nature of the exotic other. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(4), 518–534. Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books. Glowinski, H., Marks, Z. M., & Murphy, S. (Eds). (2001). A compendium of Lacanian terms. New York: Free Association Books. Goffman, E. [1956] (1967). The nature of deference and demeanor. In: Interaction ritual (pp. 47–95). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. New York: Basic. Hage, G. (2005). White self-racialization as identity fetishism; capitalism and the experience of colonial whiteness. In: K. Murji & J. Solomos (Eds), Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (pp. 185–206). New York: Oxford University Press. Harre, R., & Moghaddam, F. (Eds). (2003). The self and others: Positioning individuals and groups in personal, political, and cultural contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger.

224

ROBERTA L. COLES

Himsel, A. J., & Goldberg, W. A. (2003). Social comparisons and satisfaction with the division of housework: Implications for men’s and women’s role strain. Journal of Family Issues, 24(7), 843–866. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Hollway, W. (1993). Heterosexual sex: Power and desire for the other. In: B. J. Fox (Ed.), Family patterns, gender relations (pp. 195–203). Toronto: Oxford University Press. Holquist, M. (1999). From dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. In: C. Emerson (Ed.), Critical essays on Mikhail Bakhtin (pp. 95–107). New York: G.K. Hall & Co. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2000). The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsaker, S. V. (1999). Autobiography and national identity in the Americas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Hurvitz, N. (1979). The signiﬁcant other in marital and family therapy. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 6, 122–143. Irvine, L. (2004). A model of animal selfhood: Expanding interactionist possibilities. Symbolic Interaction, 27(1), 3–21. James, W. (1890 [1950]). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover. Jenkins, R. (2000). Categorization: Identity, social process and epistemology. Current Sociology, 48(3), 7–25. Joas, H. (1998). The autonomy of the self: The Meadian heritage and its postmodern challenge. European Journal of Social Theory, 1(1), 7–18. Knadler, S. P. (2002). The fugitive race: Minority writers resisting Whiteness. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A selection. A. Sheridan, (Trans.). New York: Norton. Lemaire, A. (1977). Jacques Lacan. D. Macey (Trans.). London: Routledge. Lentin, R. (2004). Strangers and strollers: Feminist notes on researching migrant m/others. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27, 301–314. Linde, C. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. New York: Oxford University Press. McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Wm Morrow & Co. McAdams, D. P. (2006). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York: Oxford University Press. Mead, G. H. [1934]. Mind, self and society. C. Morris (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in A. Strauss (Ed.). (1964). G. H. Mead On social psychology: Selected Papers. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Melucci, A. (1996). The playing self: Person and meaning in the planetary society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michael, E. (1997). Unbecoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Middlebrook, C. (1996). Seeing the crab: A memoir of dying. New York: Basic Books. Miller, M. E. (1996). Ethics and understanding through interrelationship: I and Thou in dialogue. In: R. Josselson (Ed.), Ethics and process in the narrative study of lives (Vol. 4, pp. 129–147). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miller, N. K. (1994a). Representing others: Gender and the subjects of autobiography. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6.1, 1–27. Miller, N. K. (1996). Bequest and betrayal: Memoirs of a parent’s death. New York: Oxford University Press.

Others in the Making of Selves

225

Morrison, T. Quoted in Elena Stone. (2002). Rising from Deep Places: Women’s Lives and the ecology of voice and silence. New York: Peter Lang Nayak, A. (2005). White lives. In: K. Murji & J. Solomos (Eds), Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (pp. 141–162). New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ogle, J. P., & Damhorst, M. L. (2003). Mothers and daughters: Interpersonal approaches to body and dieting. Journal of Family Issues, 24(4), 448–487. Ortega y Gassett, J. (1956). The dehumanization of art and other essays. New York: Anchor. Park, L. S. H. (2005). Consuming citizenship: Children of Asian immigrant entrepreneurs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1985). Signifying acts: Structure and meaning in everyday life. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (2000). The presence of self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers. Personal Narratives Group (Eds). (1989). Interpreting women’s lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peters, G. (1993). The mutilating god: Authorship and authority in the narrative of conversion. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Punday, D. (2003). Narrative after deconstruction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Randall, W. L. (1995). The stories we are: An essay on self-creation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rayson, A. (1999). Beneath the mask: Autobiographies of Japanese-American women. In: M. W. Brownley & A. B. Kimmich (Eds), Women and autobiography (pp. 131–147). Wilmington, DE: SR Books. Root, M. P. P. (1999). Resolving ‘‘Other’’ status: Identity development of biracial individuals. In: S. Coontz (Ed.), American families: A multicultural reader (pp. 454–539). London: Routledge. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Sacks, O. (1985). The Man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Summit Books. Sanders, C. R., & Arluke, A. (1993). If lions could speak: Investigating the animal–human relationship and the perspectives of nonhuman others. Sociological Quarterly, 34(3), 377–390. Sawrey, J. (2005). Wouldn’t it be nice: Performing the mediated self. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(5), 789–807. Schutz, A. (1970). On phenomenology and social relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, S. (2004). The shell, the stranger and the competent Other: Towards a sociology of shyness. Sociology, 38(1), 121–137. Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. (1972). The hidden injuries of class. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Shon, P. C. H. (2002). The role of the other in mass murder. JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 7(1), 54–60. Siegel, K. (1999). Women’s autobiographies, culture, feminism. New York: Peter Lang. Smiley, J. (1991). A thousand acres. New York: Knopf. Socor, B. J. (1997). Conceiving the self: Presence and absence in psychoanalytic theory. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

226

ROBERTA L. COLES

Sparkes, A. C., Batey, J., & Brown, D. (2005). The muscled Self and its aftermath: A life history study of an elite, black, male bodybuilder. Auto/Biography, 13, 131–160. Steinbeck, J. [1937] (1946). Of mice and men. In: The Portable Steinbeck (pp. 227–323). Selected by Pascal Covici. New York: The Viking Press. Stone, B. (2006). Diaries, self-talk, and psychosis: Writing as a place to live. Auto/Biography, 14, 41–58. Stone, E. (1988). Black sheep and kissing cousins: How our family stories shape us. New York: Times Books. Stone, E. (2002). Rising from deep places: Women’s lives and the ecology of voice and silence. New York: Peter Lang. Wasson, K. (1994). Geography of conversion: Dialogical boundaries of self in Antin’s promised land. In: K. Ashley, L. Gilmore & G. Peters (Eds), Autobiography and postmodernism (pp. 167–187). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Wiener, W. J., & Rosenwald, G. C. (1993). A moment’s monument: The psychology of keeping a diary. In: R. Josselson & A. Lieblish (Eds), The narrative study of lives (Vol. 1, pp. 30–58). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zaborowska, M. J. (1995). How we found American: Reading gender through East European immigrant narratives. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

SYMBOLIC SPACES IN DIRTY WORK: ACADEMIC SERVICE AS AUTHENTIC RESISTANCE Phillip Vannini ABSTRACT Drawing from in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted at an American public research university with 46 professors I analyze the meanings that faculty in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities assign to the aspect of their work known as service and institutional governance. Regardless of disciplinary afﬁliation, almost all faculties perceive feelings of self-inauthenticity when they engage in service and governance and view this aspect of their work as meaningless, inconsequential, trite, and as a waste of time. Yet, interviews with two professors show that service and governance work leads them to feel true to themselves because they view it as of a meaningful symbolic space where a truly effectual cultural politics of resistance against alienating institutional forces can take place. I reﬂect on the latter two professors’ agency and power to redeﬁne symbolic occupational spaces within and outside their selves and occupation.

Research on the occupation of university professors regularly yields two ﬁndings: professors love their job and they love to complain about it (e.g., Blackburn & Lawrence, 1995; Bowen & Schuster, 1986; Clark, 1987).

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 227–252 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30013-1

227

228

PHILLIP VANNINI

Nevertheless, such research only tells a partial story. Whenever professors research their own work and occupational structure, they tend to view themselves as either researchers or teachers, but hardly as bureaucrats or administrators. Yet, service and governance are important components of professors’ work. Through their institutional governance faculty members contribute to the smooth running of universities and their departments. Faculty members are in charge of numerous administrative activities individually and collectively, in large part due to the highly abstract and specialized nature of academic work, which requires the expertize of insiders. Institutional governance tasks, for example, include the hiring, ﬁring, and promotion of faculty members; departmental policy-making, consulting with the administration on long- and short-term plans, organizing instruction, communicating with students, alumni, and administration through cabinets, senate committees, councils, and task forces; conducting commencement and other ceremonies, contributing to innumerable extra-curricular activities, organizing campus life and much more. Due to the very nature of professorial work, faculty members are also often asked to perform service for the public in different ways. These may include testifying in judicial courts in the role of specialists, addressing citizen groups, appearing on mass media, delivering health care; collaborating with administrative and legislative local, state, and federal units; providing artistic, cultural, and recreational activities and services; consulting with businesses or interest groups and organizations, working as anonymous reviewers for academic publications, volunteering the governance of professional associations, and meeting a vast number of social needs (Bowen & Schuster, 1986, pp. 14–24).1 Despite the importance of service and the amount of occupational time professors dedicate to it, much of our knowledge on professors’ attitudes toward it still comes only from anecdotal evidence, hearsay, or nothing but personal experience. This research study is an attempt to ﬁll that gap. In an attempt to contribute to the interactionist literature on the work and occupation of college professors, and in an attempt to shed light on everyday practices common in this writer’s work-life as well as in the work lives of my informants and many of my readers, in this paper I look at professors’ rapport with the ‘‘dirty work’’ (Hughes, 1958) of service by drawing from a larger ethnographic study of faculty at an American public research university. The particular institution under analysis here is the university I ﬁctitiously named Mountain State University (MTSU from here on) to protect the conﬁdentiality of those employed within it. My study of MTSU is based on observation, text analysis, and especially on 46 in-depth

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

229

ethnographic interviews I conducted with faculty members in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities. There is a second objective to this paper, however. As my analysis shows professors relate to service primarily in terms of their emotional experience of authenticity and inauthenticity. Most professors loathe doing the majority of service tasks (or to be precise, they loathe institutional governance, in most cases) because they feel untrue to their sense of self, and in particular to their most meaningful values, goals, and passions. A minority of professors, however, surprisingly feel most authentic during the performance of most service tasks. For this latter group of professors authenticity is derived in large part by resisting what they perceive to be the injustices of certain organizational practices at MTSU. In reﬂecting on the role of authenticity as an agent of structural and cultural resistance I attempt to contribute to the body of symbolic interactionist theory and research that is inﬂuenced by, and a source of inﬂuence of, cultural studies. The concept of authenticity lends itself well to romanticization. From the lens of authenticity, it is easy to view the world as colored in black or white. Yet authenticity comes in different degrees of intensity, it is often mixed with other emotions, and is at times extremely contradictory (Vannini, 2007a). Additionally, the experience of authenticity is often interconnected with that of sincerity, and it is therefore important to investigate where one ends and the other begins. The strength of a pragmatist and ethnographic perspective on authenticity is that it allows us to investigate the multiple meanings of this experience in concrete situations and from the perspectives of members of unique social worlds. A symbolic interactionist approach to authenticity, resistance, and cultural studies allows us to shed light on cultures as lived experiences of existential meaning-making and negotiating (Denzin, 1992). I begin this paper with a very brief overview of pertinent research literature on the academic profession and then I introduce the issue of self-authenticity and resistance. Subsequently, I introduce my method and data, and ﬁnally I reﬂect on authenticity as a social force.

SERVICE AND THE CULTURE OF THE PROFESSORIATE Everyday work in any given occupation is made of concrete and speciﬁc problems, goals, actions, and experiences that straddle the continuum between routine and emergency and between local and global contexts of action. These micro ‘‘going-concerns’’ (Hughes, 1958, 1970, 1971) are the

230

PHILLIP VANNINI

‘‘stuff’’ of which work is made, the stuff that awaits people at their desks, counters, cash-registers, ﬁelds, steering wheels, and street-corners every workday of the week. Academic work is not much different from other types of work. Just like other occupations faculty members have peers (other faculty members), superiors (department chairs, deans, provosts, university presidents, etc.), support staff (a department’s staff members, administrators), and even customers of some kind or another (audiences of their work, students, the public, etc.). The institution of academic work, some have argued, does not even differ too much from other seemingly conceptually distant institutions, such as the family (see Thorne & Hochschild, 1997). Much like family, academic work is also a very meaningful social world for faculty members: a going-concern and ‘‘ﬁeld of play’’ that spans and deﬁnes different areas of their biography and self (Richardson, 1997) and a goingconcern that demands speciﬁc face work, identity work, and contextdependent performances (Hermanowicz, 1998, 2003). A number of works that have shed light on professors’ attitudes, experiences, and behavior in terms of institutional differences have appeared in recent years. Among the largest and most comprehensive monographs are the works by Clark (1987), Bowen and Schuster (1986), and Blackburn and Lawrence (1995). All of these three research projects were based on large surveys of national samples of professors employed in different institutions. Drawing from their interviews with faculty members Bowen and Schuster (1986) noted that three negative themes emerged: professors were dispirited, fragmented, and devalued. Dispirited faculty members told interviewers that their morale was low for a number of reasons, including poor university leadership, pressure from external agencies, the low level of monetary compensation, deteriorating working conditions, and increasingly competing work demands. Dispirited faculty also lamented the worsening of collegiality and conﬂict with university administration. In terms of fragmentation Bowen and Schuster (1986) noted that the trend toward narrow research specialization had resulted in professors feeling isolated from their colleagues. Research pressures, in the form of publish-orperish expectations were especially strong for junior faculty, but even tenured faculty had to cope with newer organizational pressures. Both associate professors and full professors in fact were found to be having difﬁculty adapting to the rapid changes in organizational culture caused by the adoption of marketplace-type policies and practices (see Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Faculty who felt devalued also felt underpaid and underappreciated. But despite these problems, Bowen and Schuster (1986, p. 158) found that professors were still fully dedicated to their work: ‘‘no single ﬁnding stands

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

231

out so consistently across all thirty-eight campuses than the unwillingness of faculty to abandon their academic careers. They like their work, whatever its shortcomings.’’ Later research has also generally shown that professors are highly satisﬁed with their job and that work satisfaction is common across different types and prestige of institutions (Blackburn & Lawrence, 1995; Clark, 1987; National Center for Educational Statistics, 1990). In a recent survey, researchers for the National Opinion Research Center (2000) found that over 90% of faculty members were highly satisﬁed with their work and would choose the same career all over if they were to start again. Clark (1987) found that academics share common frustrations, such as low pay and having to deal with increasingly poorly prepared students, but in spite of these frustrations Clark’s respondents – thus conﬁrming the ﬁndings of Bowen and Schuster (1986) – manifested their attachment to the intrinsic rewards of the profession. Such intrinsic rewards (see Deci, 1976) include a strong belief in the value of education and the instrumentality of their job in furthering education, the pleasure of interacting with young people and actively shaping their minds, and most importantly, in Clark’s (1987, p. 222) words: ‘‘the rewards of doing academic work for its own sake, its own challenge and passion.’’ Beside the paradox of professors who love their work despite all their complaining, Clark (1987) found another paradox in academic culture: while on average the greatest majority of professors spend more time on teaching than on anything else, ‘‘teaching is not the activity most rewarded by the academic profession nor most valued by the system at large. [y] Professors themselves do the one [teaching] and acclaim the other [research]’’ (Clark, 1987, p. 99). Something similar could be said about service: despite all the time that professors – especially tenured ones – spend on service, they largely perceive this activity to be unimportant at best and a nuisance at worst. And yet, even more paradoxically, in relation to an occupational culture that devalues it professors who choose to dedicate themselves exclusively to service and governance – thus becoming chairs, deans, provosts, etc. – see meaningful increases in the their salary and in their institutional status. As Clark (1987) suggested, professors may be passionate about their work, but they direct much of their passion only to the values of teaching and research – to which graduate school directly socializes them (see Tierney & Rhoads, 1993). The socialization to academic work per se begins in graduate school, where students undergo a series of courses, seminars, workshops, roundtables, meetings, and advising sessions meant to prepare

232

PHILLIP VANNINI

them for the diverse demands of teaching and research, to the exclusion of service. Later on in their careers, as professors are asked to perform more and more service, they need to undergo a process of secondary socialization to adequately respond to the demands of different occupational agents. Because neither graduate school nor the institutions that employ them formally prepare professors to deal with cultures other than the latter, faculty are pretty much left to their own devices to ﬁgure out how to adjust to the culture and politics of service.

AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY The meanings that people give to work are important not only for their occupational cultures and work organizations, but also for their sense of self (Hughes, 1958; and see Shafﬁr & Pawluch, 2003). In studying the occupation of professors my focus in this and in related studies (Vannini, 2007a, 2007b) is on the experience of authenticity and inauthenticity of the self. Authenticity is the experience of being true to one’s self, whereas inauthenticity is the experience of being untrue to one’s self (Erickson, 1995; Hochschild, 1983; Turner, 1976; Turner & Schutte, 1981). Let it be clear that by discussing authenticity I am not referring to the metaphysical notion of being a true self, but rather to the pragmatic, phenomenological, and emotional experience of feeling true to one’s self. Rather than on metaphysics, here I draw upon pragmatism and on symbolic interactionism, especially on its existential tradition (see Denzin, 1984; Douglas, 1977; Douglas & Johnson, 1977; Kotarba & Fontana, 1984; Kotarba & Johnson, 2002; Manning, 1973; Tiryakian, 1962, 1968). We can easily conceptualize authenticity by thinking about how ‘‘humans will act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them’’ (Blumer, 1969, p. 2) and how consequently people will act toward their selves on the basis of the meanings that their selves have for them. Holstein and Gubrium (2000; Gubrium & Holstein, 2000) have followed this approach in their recent treatise on the authentic self. According to them, the self is a bricoleur of meanings, as individuals craft stories from locally available resources ‘‘all the while constrained, but not completely controlled, by the working conditions of the moment’’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 153). Earlier, Gecas (1986, 1991) – following Turner (1976; Turner & Schutte, 1981) and Hochschild (1983) – had similarly conceptualized authenticity as the emotional response to the self’s reﬂective assessment of the meaning of its own conduct and being. In other words, authenticity is a self-feeling (Denzin, 1984) in relation to self-meanings.

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

233

The self, of course, is made of various meanings; these are the meanings that individuals attribute to one’s being in the world, and to which one becomes more or less committed. The continuous construction of what is meaningful to the self includes the valuation of passions, goals, ideals, political and cultural values, and so forth. Acting in congruence with these self-meanings gives rise to the emotion called authenticity (Gecas, 1986, 1991, 2000). The opposite scenario, that of a self that betrays signiﬁcant meanings thus acts incongruently with one’s true self gives rise to inauthenticity. Authenticity is a complex emotional experience. Emotions are not simple, discrete units of experience. Because of their situatedness in complex emergent joint acts feelings of authenticity may be, and often are, mixed with other emotions. Hence, for example, seeking authenticity may yield unpleasant outcomes as it may cause distress, fatigues, disharmony and anger, or material loss. The emotional experience of authenticity, like most emotions, is therefore to be understood as a particularly complex and multifaceted experience involving hierarchies of conﬂicting perspectives (Vannini, 2007a). Take, for example, my act of writing this paper. At this very moment in my workday I need to accomplish three different tasks. I need to ﬁnish this paper, I am supposed to lend a hand in the revision of a couple of courses in our graduate curriculum, and I should mark what feels like an avalanche of student essays. As I choose to focus on writing this paper I feel a great sense of dedication to my commitment to research and thus a sense of self-accomplishment and congruence with my identity as a researcher. Yet, I also see myself as a dependable colleague and teacher. I do enjoy working with my colleagues and helping students reach their goals and thus doing my fair share of work allows me to feel at peace with related values. Thus, there is a certain feeling of inauthenticity lingering in my body as I type these words, a feeling that dilutes my otherwise authentic dedication to writing up my research (not to mention that this morning I feel rather guilty for dishing off my family responsibilities entirely to my wife). In sum, it should be obvious by now that experiencing ‘‘perfect’’ or ‘‘pure’’ authenticity is nothing but an ideal: we all experience authenticity and inauthenticity in different degrees of intensity. Furthermore, it must be said that in the majority of everyday life situations authenticity and inauthenticity fall under the cracks of routine, habit, and even a bit of ennui. While this may on the surface sound like a disconcertingly apathetic and jaded view of life, we ought to question whether living life’s ups and downs in an intense state of constantly overwhelming emotionality would be desirable at all. No one likes to live on a constant ‘‘roller coaster,’’ and everyone knows how unrealistic soap operas’ emotionally dramatic depiction of

234

PHILLIP VANNINI

life is. Authenticity and its emotional counterpart are seldom ‘‘peak’’ experiences; for the most we experience these emotions as mild ‘‘plateaus’’ (Vannini, 2007a) or hardly at all. Finally, there is an important difference between authenticity and sincerity. Whereas authenticity is the feeling of acting in congruence with our sense of true self, sincerity is about being truthful to others and to oneself (Trilling, 1972). One may feel perfectly authentic when lying to others – at least if one puts a low premium on sincerity or at least on being truthful to the particular person one is lying to, given a speciﬁc situation. One may also feel authentic when lying to oneself, since mechanisms like rationalization, compensation, projection, reaction formation, repression, selective interpersonal interaction, and selective imputation and valuation (Rosenberg, 1979) are common aspects of self-defense – common enough, that is, to be even necessary for healthy and normal self-development. The latter point raises an important question: in fact, is authenticity meaningful at all if it is based on self-denial and disillusion? The answer is yes; authenticity is still meaningful to the self – even when it is insincerity – because it is real in its consequences. I will further discuss this and issues related to authentic resistance in my conclusion. Resistance and Authenticity As Denzin (1992) has noted, the perspectives of cultural studies and symbolic interactionism share much in common, theoretically, substantively, and in terms of historical development, but to date, despite the fertile work of several cultural studies-oriented interactionists and interactionism-friendly cultural studies scholars, interactionist cultural studies of resistance within the context of work and occupations are absent. This paper attempts to ﬁll that void by focusing on resistance – a quintessentially classic concern of cultural studies – and the meanings of work, likewise a central issue in interactionist research. The concept of resistance, more than any single other, has shaped the history of cultural studies (e.g., see Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1976; Morley & Brunsdon, 1999; McRobbie, 2000; Willis, 1978). According to Saukko (2003) there are at least three types of resistance in cultural studies: critical contextualism, textualist optimism, and contingent resistances. For example, in the ethnographic work of Willis (1978) British working class boys’ practices of resistance at school highlight the subversive potential of their challenges to the academic and societal status quo. The ‘‘critical contextualism’’ (Saukko, 2003, pp. 39–43) typical of studies like Willis’s is marked by a view of resistance as both creative and futile; creative in that it

235

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

represents a counter-hegemonic force and futile in the sense that ultimately it fails to change the structural ‘‘realities’’ of the social contexts in which it occurs. In contrast, the ‘‘textualist optimism’’ (Saukko, 2003, pp. 47–50) more typical of studies like Fiske’s (e.g., 1989, 1994) is marked by an upbeat tone on the possibilities of resistance. Fiske’s (1989) study of how Madonna fans explore oppositional forms of sexuality exempliﬁes how resistance may be primarily and perhaps exclusively symbolic, and yet endowed with the potential of changing political and cultural structures. To date, the concept of resistance seems to have fallen out of grace with most scholars. Classical cultural studies scholars have been criticized for unduly romanticizing the lived experiences of their informants, and consequently for pushing forward their theoretical agenda and political fantasies at the expense of the phenomena object of analysis (Morris, 1990; Nightingale, 1992; Saukko, 2003; Stabile, 1995). Critical contextualist and textualist optimistic versions of resistance seem particularly guilty of this. In contrast, Saukko (2003, p. 40) argues, a contingent approach to ‘‘resistances’’ ‘‘analyzes a particular resistant activity from several perspectives and from the points of view of different spheres of life, evaluating what types of power this activity resists and what types of power it buttresses.’’ In other words, the contingent approach to resistances is more nuanced, heterogeneous, and reﬂexive of the complex and often contradictory meanings and outcomes of resistant practices. Furthermore, in paying closer attention to locally lived experiences of resistance, this conceptualization of authenticity relies more on the phenomenological underpinnings of this concept rather than on a realist deﬁnition of an outsider/scholar. A contingent approach to the multiple meanings of resistance is here coupled with a contingent approach to authenticity. Much like it has been the case for resistance; students of authenticity have employed selective vision and their ideological predispositions in searching for ‘‘true’’ authenticity. Multiple forms of experiencing authenticity are here juxtaposed with the contradictions of exercising resistances, thus drawing attention to the complex power of the self as a social force. In doing so, I attempt to acknowledge the relevance of authenticity as a symbolic practice and experience, as well as its effects on organizational structure and occupational cultures.

METHOD The main research question of this paper deals with professors’ experience of authenticity in the realm of work known as service and can be phrased as follows: How do faculty members experience (in)authenticity in relation to

236

PHILLIP VANNINI

service? Data come from observation, text analysis, and especially from indepth ethnographic interviews with 46 faculty members employed at MTSU during the academic year 2002–2003. To approach the professors I obtained lists of faculty members employed in three departments in each of the three academic ﬁelds: the social sciences (psychology, political science, and anthropology), natural sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology), and the humanities (English, music, and philosophy), and divided faculty members in groups according to their rank. I then selected randomly two names from each of the following three categories: assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. Whenever a department employed limited term, part-time, or adjunct faculty I also made a list of all such employees and drew randomly one name from the list. I contacted professors via email. All interviews were scheduled and completed during the academic year 2002–2003. All interviews took place in professors’ own ofﬁces or labs, and lasted in length between 1 and 1½ h. I taped and transcribed all interviews. I assured professors that my research was fully conﬁdential and in order to maintain such conﬁdentiality, in the following pages not only do I use pseudonyms to protect faculty members’ names, but I also use a pseudonym for the institution that employs them, MTSU. MTSU is a mid-size public university currently classiﬁed by the latest Carnegie classiﬁcation system as a Doctoral/Research University – Extensive. Nevertheless, at MTSU some departments are clearly more nationally competitive than others, whereas some departments do not even offer doctoral degrees. In general, MTSU is far less competitive than other schools in the same Carnegie category. Because my main interest is in professors’ description of their experiences of (in)authenticity I generally began my interpretation of transcribed interviews by searching for linguistic indicators of professors’ self-meanings. In the majority of cases this turned out to be a rather simple process because many informants explicitly made reference to what their ‘‘true self’’ was as they narrated stories of how they made the choice to become professors in their ﬁeld. Common indicators were such sentences or sentence fragments as: ‘‘this is who I am,’’ ‘‘I know myself and this is why Iy,’’ ‘‘yI wouldn’t be true to my self ify,’’ and so forth. I made a schematic summary of professors’ self-meanings by using thematic descriptors and I coded interview excerpts with each thematic category. Then, I checked to see whether these self-meanings were actually meaningful for each of my informants by referring to their answers to one of the questions included in my semi-structured interview protocol (‘‘Is feeling true to your self, or authentic, important to you in relation to your work?’’).

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

237

Subsequently, in order to ﬁnd the link between self-meanings and selffeelings I proceeded to evaluate professors’ answers to two questions present in my interview protocol that were derived from Turner and Shutte’s (1981) True-Self Test. Slightly modiﬁed in terminology from the original, I posed such question(s) as follows: I’m very interested in understanding what it means to you to be (in)authentic, or (un)true to your self, in the context of your work. Can you tell me some personal stories of times when you felt that you were being (in)authentic, (un)true to your self, in the context of work, and in particular in the context of performing service and institutional governance? What was it about your experience on each of those occasions that made you feel you were (un)true to your self?

Generally, answers to such question(s) encompassed a phenomenological description of feelings. And generally, professors told narratives from which a sense of self and others clearly transpired. In what follows, I use excerpts from the data to make my analysis as transparent as possible, and in order to show excerpts which as ‘‘exhibits [y] create windows within the text, bringing into view the social organization of my informants’ lives’’ (Smith, 1998, p. 312) for readers to examine. After bringing these data to the forefront of my analysis in order to describe the experience of authenticity I shift to the description and interpretation of two professors’ experiences that I deem to be particularly enlightening for our understanding of authenticity and the meanings of service.

SERVICE AND INAUTHENTICITY Most professors ﬁnd most service tasks to be a nuisance. Throughout my interviews MTSU professors explained that they have made a conscious choice to work in academia to be researchers and/or teachers and not to ‘‘push paper’’ and administer departments, colleges, or the university. Nevertheless, as a faculty member goes through the steps of the academic ladder, from assistant professor to full professor, he/she may expect to be asked to perform more and more administrative tasks. There are no differences in this phenomenon across departments; every tenured professor is expected to contribute to the organizational life of the department, college, and school, and more so as time goes by. ‘‘Dirty work,’’ it seems, must indeed be done. On the basis of my data I argue that there are roughly four groups of professors in relation to the performance of service. The ﬁrst group is made of professors who believe that all of service tasks are a waste of their time and

238

PHILLIP VANNINI

energy. These professors will often negotiate – more or less desperately – ways to do as little as possible. A second group sees most service as a necessary evil, and will do just enough to feel at peace with themselves and colleagues. A third group, a small minority, mostly because of their natural talent (certainly not because of their training), are perceived to be good at it. These faculty members are then in turn asked to do more service, simply ‘‘because somebody has to do it.’’ Indeed this is one trajectory that most professors follow in becoming department chairs or program directors at one point or another in their career: the story is always the same and is always told similarly: ‘‘somebody has to do it and I was afraid nobody would do a decent enough job. Besides, I kind of like it.’’ These professors are generally more sympathetic to their institution’s administrative needs. They may not invest all of their own sense of authenticity in doing service, but they certainly feel more at harmony with it than do professors in the two groups I mentioned above. Then, there is a fourth group, a very small minority in my sample who actually deeply enjoy most service and institutional governance tasks because in performing them they feel true to themselves. Let us then look in some detail at excerpts from my interviews with faculty members. For the clarity of my argument I focus on the ﬁrst three groups together because many of their characteristics overlap, and subsequently I focus on the fourth and radically different group. Service as a Nuisance Time is scarce in academic work, as in many occupations. Ylijoki and Mantyla (2003), Sorcinelli (1988, 1992), Thorsen (1996), and Whitt (1991) found time demands to be a notable source of stress for faculty. Van der Bogert (1991), who attempted to study how many hours per week professors worked, found that his question was often met with laughs, and I too received a lot of smiles in answer to this question. Because professors tend to invest much of their time on teaching and research (Blackburn & Lawrence, 1995; Bowen & Schuster, 1986; Clark, 1987) and because they feel truer to themselves as researchers and teachers (identifying reference), service-related tasks – which can be quite time-demanding, especially when professors lack the necessary training to perform them – are often perceived as a nuisance and a waste of precious time. In fact, one of the most common statements I heard throughout almost a year of interviews was: ‘‘If I could I would get rid of the service.’’ The reasons for this attitude, it turned out, are often the same: service may be necessary, but for the most part it is an inevitable byproduct of a meaningless, unimaginative bureaucracy that is disrespectful

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

239

of professors’ true vocation, passions, and needs, as this department chair explained: (PV): You said that there are certain aspects of your self in relation to your work that you feel untrue to; what are these aspects? (Professor, Chair, Humanities): For me, the administrative side is the one that I struggle with. I don’t feel that I’m very good at it, and I have to tell you that I was never trained to be an administrator. And that is one of the faults of MTSU within the departmentchair-structure. People get into it because they’re good in the ﬁeld, not because they know how to lead. Not that I feel that I’m not a good leader, but the things that I have done have not come about because of the fact that I have really learned how to be a good department head. I don’t know how to manage the ﬁnances as well as I should. [y] So it is research and it is teaching that is sacriﬁced. Something has to go: it isn’t possible to keep all those balls in the air. (PV): So, why did you choose to chair the department? (Professor, Chair, Humanities): You know, it really wasn’t my choice. The previous chair was getting really burned out. So he called me in here and said, I have to ask you something, we need a new chair to run this place and I really can’t think of anybody here that could run this place. I really did not want to. I had to sacriﬁce, in certain ways, in doing it. So, I said, well, for the good of the program I will. But it wasn’t without a great deal of soul searching, and a lot of sacriﬁces, but I’m close enough to the end of my career that it’s okay, if I were a younger professor with more need to improve myself and become an internationally known scholar I wouldn’t be able to do this.

Performing service leads these professors to feel untrue to their goals and passions because by doing service these professors contradict the most signiﬁcant meanings they have associated with their sense of true self. Whenever conduct is incongruent with values, goals, ideals (i.e., selfmeanings) an individual is bound to experience the self-feeling of inauthenticity. Feeling inauthentic is unpleasant and reduces faculty work satisfaction – though it may be accompanied by positive outcomes, like salary rises, a higher professional status, etc. As I also discussed elsewhere (Vannini, 2007a) the binary opposition between authenticity and inauthenticity needs to be uncoupled to make space for variations in degree and quality of emotional experience. For example, a common feeling which is different from ‘‘pure’’ inauthenticity is that frustrated authenticity. The following excerpts detail that sensation of frustration: (PV): So I gather that you feel inauthentic because you feel that chairing the department is not what you should be doing?

240

PHILLIP VANNINI

(Professor, Chair, Social Sciences): Yes. You see, my time in the ﬁeld has been abbreviated, and that’s unfortunate. Last year I only spent eight days on the ﬁeld, and two of those were spent driving. Being a chair can be frustrating. I think I excel at that, but I like to do research, and I like to teach, but there aren’t enough hours in the week. It’s very frustrating. One of the biggest problems with doing administration is that I don’t have time for my graduate students. Right now I have a few graduate students who are really struggling with their thesis, and I feel that they wouldn’t be struggling as much if I had more time for them. So I’m worried about that. I do stay awake a lot thinking of all the different things that I have to take care of. So when I spend time ruminating on all kinds of administrative decisions, then I stand back and I think: why am I doing this? It’s frustrating.

Other professors lamented a similar feeling of ‘‘missing out.’’ The emotion of frustrated authenticity is different from that of inauthenticity per se. Feeling frustrated means feeling unable to pursue authenticity as a goal, as these excerpts also illustrate: This week I’ve written one entire sentence. My ﬁrst regret is that my teaching load is reduced. My second regret is that I do not participate in undergraduate teaching (Professor, Social Sciences). What doesn’t make me feel authentic is the amount of time I spend working toward the organization of this conference. I’d rather spend more time working on my everyday teaching and research and whatnot (Assistant Professor, Humanities).

The feeling of frustrated authenticity clearly exempliﬁes how authenticity and inauthenticity are not black or white experiences. Organizing a conference, for example, was a source of great pride, recognition, and self-accomplishment for the above cited professor – and a source of authenticity as well, as he explained. MTSU professors were also upset because of their lack of preparation and training for the demands of service. As one professor in the natural sciences puts it ‘‘as scientists we are not trained to be bureaucrats.’’ But institutional expectations are such that as a professor’s familiarity with the workings of one’s institution increases over the years, so should their administrative responsibilities. Familiarity and seniority, however, are not necessarily synonymous with expertize with the technical mechanisms and functions of bureaucratic work. Therefore, even though a professor may be a good administrator, he/she may very well lack self-conﬁdence doing this kind of work: When you reach the full professor level people start asking you more things, like service. I try to avoid service jobs that don’t ﬁt me well. It’s awful to be doing what you don’t feel comfortable doing. But sometimes you can’t really say ‘‘no’’ (Professor, Humanities).

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

241

It was sort of implied that if I had done it, it would have been good for the future of the department. There was pressure outside of myself because I knew very well that there was no one else who could have done this. I really liked it here so if I wanted to stay I’d have to help the program survive (Professor, Social Sciences).

The latter professor, like many others, had gotten ‘‘trapped’’ in the web of organizational demands and expectations because in his mind no one else could have done a half decent job, and the problems someone could have caused with their incompetence might have jeopardized the future of the department. Such a situation is quite common at MTSU, and arguably at other universities: performing service is hardly ever a choice for professors as it is more likely to be a necessity and a course of action ‘‘by default.’’ Of course most professors, in most cases, can choose what kind of service tasks they wish to perform. For example, in my own case I know that even though I must perform some kind of service I can choose to dedicate my service time to the professional organization to which I belong. Doing so is more enjoyable and more authenticating (given that I identify is greatly invested as a member of that organization) than, say, organizing next year’s commencement. Yet, this is a highly structured ‘‘freedom’’ and at times choice is absent altogether. Ultimately then, practices of negotiation have to be undertaken. While much in academic culture is left open to negotiation, involved parties’ negotiative practices are also obviously limited by organizational structures. This also opens up an interesting analytical avenue: authenticity and inauthenticity are seemingly often riddled with contradictions. Feeling authentic may be a pleasant experience, but it can come at the cost of feeling guilty for dishing off responsibilities to friends and colleagues. And feeling inauthentic may not feel good, but the outcomes of inauthentic conduct may be instrumental for the survival of a program or even one’s own employment. The following excerpt shows very well the nature of this dilemma: Days, nights, holiday breaks. I never had a break. It always irritates me when people say college professors take summers off. I think it is exploitation and I have complained about this before with my chair. He did not disagree with me; he said that whenever I don’t feel like taking responsibilities I can say no. And I have started doing that. I’ve started saying no to people, but I have to do some things, with service especially I can say no but I have to be doing something because I’ll be evaluated on it (Associate Professor, Social Sciences).

The emotion of authenticity, indeed, is contingent on multiple outcomes of conduct structured by complex and often contradictory arrays of costs and opportunities for action, and thus varies along a multi-faceted continuum of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, all of which make authenticity as a black or white experience nothing but an ideal case. Authenticity as a concept and

242

PHILLIP VANNINI

as an experience therefore implodes into complex dialectics of negotiation within self and social worlds and between selves and social worlds. ‘‘Wasting’’ time by doing the dirty work of service, or at least most of it, also causes some professors to feel inauthentic because it impinges on other salient identities, like being parents or spouses. There were no gender differences in my sample in regard to this: every professor explained that they wished to have more time for their life outside of academia: It’s frustrating. I’m a family person. The little time I have I give it to my wife, my daughter, and my dog. I wish I had more. I wish I didn’t have this paperwork on my desk to prevent me from that (Professor, Social Sciences).

Finally, a professor may feel inauthentic and insincere in the context of performing service because at times the demands of such work lead them to violate their values and to have to lie to themselves. Authenticity is not synonymous with sincerity. One may be insincere but feel perfectly authentic, but whenever one feels that the lie is something in which they themselves (have to) believe, one may feel inauthentic: Sometimes I am being untrue to myself when I’m consciously bullshitting to others and to myself. It’s always a means toward an end; it’s what I do as a chair. Like, I know that when I have to ask something from the dean I know that I have to put it in such a way that it will beneﬁt to the dean, to the college, and the university at large (Professor, Chair, Humanities).

Having to lie to others and to oneself also constitutes an interesting proof of the complexity of authenticity. This professor, Harry – whose experiences I will examine in greater depth later – went on to explain that having to lie to others and to himself (e.g., by arguing in favor of hiring sessional lecturers in order to save the institution money) was quite painful given his humanistic and equalitarian ideals, but this feeling of inauthenticity was accompanied by an authentic experience: by hiring sessional lecturers he was in fact helping out freshly minted PHDs from his own department those who could not ﬁnd employment anywhere else. Again, this example speaks about the contradictions of the concept and experience of authenticity; contradictions that only a phenomenological and multi-perspectival perspective can detect. Service as Resistance As Saukko (2003) has explained, it is fundamental for a qualitative study inspired by the perspective of cultural studies to shed light on the diversity of data and the contingency of the experiences under analysis. Instead of discounting contradictions as unimportant deviations from the norm, it is

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

243

important to shed light on them. Failing to do so may push a theoretical agenda farther, but only at the expense of our responsibility to describe and understand the complexity of social life. For this reason I have decided to focus in some depth on the stories of Daniel and Harry. Daniel and Harry are unique in my sample in that they ﬁnd institutional governance to be highly meaningful for their sense of true self. Furthermore, they both believe that a motivated, inspired, and adversarial style of institutional governance constitutes a form of resistance to organizational unbalances of power and inequalities. Both Daniel and Harry are aware that what they do is a form of resistance and explicitly refer to it as such. Yet, they are also explicitly aware that their feelings of authenticity in practicing resistance are full of contradictions. Let us examine their stories in some detail. Daniel’s career story is quite different from others. Daniel realized as a young performer that his future in the world of classical music was inevitably limited. Musicians spend a great deal of time alone, practicing in a room, and then we go out and do some of the most public things you can do, like performing in front of an audience. And you bring to that experience not only the skill of playing an instrument or singing but all of the communicative skills that relate to emotions and emotionality, and excitement and disappointment. Generally I’d say about myself that the early stages of my training were not conducive to the physical apparatus of playing. I did not have a ﬁne instrument and my teachers were not particularly effective at taking whatever talents I had and bringing them to the highest level. And I was not individually talented enough to overcome any of those shortcomings. So while I had done performances even at high levels, there were always frustrations at that level. I was never happy with myself although I practiced so much. Somehow I never overcame my limitations. And so as I moved to higher levels of intensity performance what became clear to me was that my interest in academic administration were going to move me further along in satisfaction than was continuing to beat my head against the wall as a performer. As an administrator I began to have considerable success. At my former school we started with 250 music majors and when I left there were 450. And here I pretty much was the central person instrumental in getting the new building and in bringing enrollment up by 100% and lots of those kinds went on where there were satisfactions about administration that I had never really experienced as a performer. What that did for me was signiﬁcantly reduce the amount of time that I was teaching individual students but you see, I was helping all of them, and it also reduced the amount of time that I was practicingy. It was

244

PHILLIP VANNINI

hard to do in a way, but once I did it I was really glad (Daniel, Professor, Program Director, Humanities). For Daniel administration may have been a ‘‘default’’ solution, a ‘‘plan B,’’ as it were, but it was nevertheless a motivated choice that led him to drastically redeﬁne his sense of true self. There is of course a sharp difference between professors like Daniel who have enthusiastically embraced this new self-deﬁnition, and professors who end up chairing programs or departments simply ‘‘because somebody has to.’’ What constitutes ‘‘dirty work’’ and a source of inauthenticity for the latter is a passion and a source of authenticity for the former. An alternative interpretation is also possible. Authenticity, in Daniel’s case, could be an illusion, a plot implicated in order to defend the self from the painful realization that one is not as successful and competent as one once thought. While on the surface this argument seems to dismiss the validity of the very concept of authenticity, I argue that this is not the case. Certainly Daniel could be lying to himself. Or more precisely he could be unconsciously engaging in an act of self-defense, a rationalization (Rosenberg, 1979) as it were. Authenticity – as expressed through Daniel’s words could then be understood as nothing but a motive. Yet, if this motive feels true to Daniel, if it is sufﬁciently internalized to be true, it will be true in its emotional consequences, will be discussed later in detail. In my mind Daniel’s story is also interesting because despite his realization of his shortcomings as a musician, he continued to dedicate all of his passion to music not by teaching or performing, but by making the teaching of music at MTSU better. By investing more emotional energy in administration than in teaching or performance Daniel was still committed to music and to his own sense of self, but his instrumental strategies were now different. Daniel literally described directing a program much like he would have directed an orchestra: (PV): I hope you don’t mind me saying this, because it kind of points to a possible contradiction in what you have been saying, but it seems to me that the performing arts and institutional administration are very different activities. How can you feel true to yourself in both? (Daniel): They are different on the surface, but you can perform both of them in a similar style, and thus maintain that sense of commitment to your values and to your sense of who you really are. For example, when I was a department head, before directing this program, I never wanted to lead by control; I wanted to lead by consensus. I became very interested into administration and I had always been interested in helping people more than in my own projects. Working as a chair, and being a very otheroriented person, I had a very difﬁcult time getting many me-oriented professors to see

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

245

that their egoism went against the interest of the department as a whole. You know, with me, it’s less of what I’m interested in than a synthesis of what everybody is interested in. So my inclination was still to be expressive and to allow for my individual expression, you know, that essential core value for my self is there in everything that I do. It’s there when I play in an orchestra, it’s there when I do administrative work. (PV): So, you basically found a way to ‘‘play’’ with bureaucracy your own way, with your style, and your own way of making it meaningful for yourself? (Daniel): Yes! You know, if you’re simply dealing with a budget, if the budget is just there, it’s meaningless, you can’t advocate for it, you can’t even feel good when you get an addition to it. But if you shape it the way you want, to reﬂect your values, your goals, or whatever, then it makes you feel good about yourself.

Daniel’s experience of authenticity tells us that a professor may feel true to himself even in the context of service and governance, as long as his selfmeanings allow for him to feel coherent with his conduct. But it also shows us that something else is possible: the capacity to carve a personally meaningful symbolic space within the ‘‘dirty work’’ of service. Such capacity speaks volumes for theories that view that self as a reﬂexive and interpretive social force. Individual agency in this context has a powerful cultural and political emancipatory potential: through his service Daniel advocated and ameliorated the institutional place that music occupies in his university. That is ‘‘the maverick level’’ as Daniel put it: (Daniel): The university decided that they didn’t have enough money to ﬁnish the building and they decided to downsize the two departments that were there [Music and Theatre]. When I arrived the building completion project was not a priority. [y] But in time I convinced the dean and the administration that this school would not be the same without our program. They didn’t want to listen to me at ﬁrst and they wanted to go ahead with other priorities in the ﬁve-year plan, but I held my ground and went against a lot of people, always trying to negotiate with them. [y] (PV): It sounds like you took some risks in doing that; you must have stepped on a lot of people’s toes. After all, from my understanding the university doesn’t care too much about the humanitiesy (Daniel): Yep. I’m happy to work and promote good people and good ideas, and the maverick element in me comes at the point when I no longer allow someone to do whatever they want. So there has always been an element of moral ground in what I have done.

That moral element for Daniel comes in standing up for the humanities, which as a whole have struggled at MTSU – lagging behind many other ﬁelds in budget allocation. Because his authenticity entails moral goals it translates into forms of voluntary action with deep consequences for the

246

PHILLIP VANNINI

social organization of the university. Authenticity in this context then has a great potential: that of providing an individual with the ideology to resist institutional forces. Harry’s stories allow us to learn more about the institutional inequalities that structure work at MTSU. Harry, also a full professor and chair in the humanities, admitted feeling strongly about the way he values the humanities and their disciplinary ideals. Harry’s commitment to the humanities was typical of many other faculty members at MTSU. All the professors in music, philosophy, and English I interviewed at MTSU lamented their condition of ‘‘second-class citizens,’’ and accused the university, the system of higher education, and society as a whole to be oblivious to their needs. The humanities, they told me, cannot compete for funding with the natural sciences at MTSU, and as a result their survival is in danger. Harry, in particular, believes that as more and more students view universities as providers of a service that will eventually lead them to get a ‘‘job,’’ the liberal arts will continue to decline in institutional inﬂuence. Even though MTSU has recently launched initiatives to improve students’ composition skills, for Harry ‘‘funding literacy is only a token interest:’’ Since the Reagan era funding for the humanities is not existent. So we can’t compete with folks in the sciences. Part of being able to get million dollar grants is by providing a line of information that is of interest to the state. Funding literacy is only a token interest. And there is the conception that it is only an amateur ﬁeld. In other words, if you can read and write, you can teach reading and writing; anyone can. There is also the perception that most of the work of an English department is literary criticism, and that literary critics are parasites that exist on the talents of others. So funding for us is not an option. What keep us alive is the literacy needs of the university as a whole. The state won’t pay for rhetoricians. There’s no money there. But in ﬁguring out how to get an atom to explode as it’s going through a lot of dirt and getting 1200 feet underground, oh yeah, that’s the big one. I just head that one yesterday on the news. But look, in order for the state to survive, to continue to do what it does, it needs to maintain the consensus of the people. So it’s funny that they don’t recognize that the greatest weapon must be communication. And so the school is affected in two ways by this current political climate. One is in the budgets and funding being cut. And two is in the students who now come to the classroom and see themselves as consumers and make the demands that are typical of consumers, and education becomes compromised in the process.

Harry explained how he lives his life by a philosophy inspired by the writings of Gramsci, Marx, and other counter-hegemonic theorists and writers. His personal identity is that of a ﬁghter. Thus, working as a chair is a viable option

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

247

for him; by being a chair Harry explained he feels he can somehow affect the fortunes of his institution, rather than just complain about it: (PV): In light of what you said, it might seem to somebody that what you do is a contradiction. I mean, as you mentioned before, and as I have found out through my interviews, your department has its share of problems, lots of disgruntled sessional lecturers, for example, who complain about being exploited and alienatedy doesn’t that make you feel bad? (Daniel): It does, but by chairing I have the power to make things change. (PV): How much power do you feel you have in resisting these trends? (Daniel): Well, there’s the possibility that I could help people out, mainly graduate students or fresh PHDs as I told you before [see excerpt from Harry’s interview on page 17 of this manuscript]. The power is limited. I couldn’t for instance, reshape the department because there is faculty governance. I have the same power as any other faculty member, in the sense that I have the power to make my case and argue it, but the power to change is not there. Only the power to instigate a process whereby change might happen is there, however.

Having some power by performing an administrative role, even though at times it may feel like being in ‘‘collusion with the system,’’ allows Harry to exert resistance, which in turn makes him feel authentic. Again, we witness here another set of contradictions afﬁliated with the experience of authenticity. At times Harry admitted to feeling like a ‘‘sell-out,’’ but those moments are inevitable and necessary to the pursuit of other authenticating goals. For example, raising the enrollment of his undergraduate program may play into the university plans, but it is also a strategic political maneuver. Students, Harry believes, are the potential instigators of future socio-political and cultural change: In society’s past intellectuals have always been troublesome. How that has been handled historically is in two ways. One is by believing that intellectuals are not in the real world; they’re in ivory towers, even though we are given substandard pay and therefore we deal with problems of the real world very much based on our problems and our direct experience with it. The other way is that if we’re kept busy all the time—and this is from Gramsci—where is the energy to come together to have real political say? So we mainly do it through students, since what we publish is considered silly by the general public and is therefore insulated and limited to us.

Thus, through his work as a chair and through his various contributions to institutional governance Harry is able to advocate for the humanities and feel true to himself. Once again we see how the moral force of authenticity can have a powerful political relevance.

248

PHILLIP VANNINI

Despite the role that authenticity may play in motivating resistance, it would be a mistake to conclude that authenticity and resistance are the cure for all of the world’s troubles. Classical cultural studies scholars idealized the power of both authenticity and resistance, and it is important not to commit the same mistake again. Indeed, even for Daniel and Harry – despite their motivation and determination – at time it is simply impossible to resist institutional forces and foster positive change. In those cases authenticity and resistance have to subside to the realities of compromise and defeat. Harry, for example, mentioned that among the compromises he had to make with both himself and the institution of higher education is the hiring of limited term sessional lecturers: (Daniel): It’s a national trend. It’s much cheaper to hire folks that you don’t have to tenure. They’re underpaid and on-call. I think it is patently wrong. But it is the system. It is typical of this phase of capitalism in which we see more and more temp hiring and offshoring. We can’t ship our 101 classes out, though. It is plainly disrespectful when you put it in these terms: any student that comes through our school must take English but anybody can teach it. The system does not recognize that it requires professionals [tenured and tenure-track faculty]. And yet from our side, we do hire professionals because they are available, it is a weak market, and so it is the worst case of exploitation: people who are desperate for jobs and we give them bad ones.

Compromises are necessary, even if they lead to painful moments of inauthenticity. And resistance is not omnipotent, yet it holds the potential to carve deeply meaningful symbolic and structural spaces. Authenticity and resistance, therefore, are best seen not from an idealistic and romantic perspective, but from a pragmatic one centered on the role of negotiation in social interaction. Another way of understanding this important point is by juxtaposing authenticity and inauthenticity with, respectively, counterhegemonic and hegemonic interpretive practice (cf. Hall, 1980). In his famous encoding/decoding model Hall (1980) identiﬁed three main codes utilized by audiences to interpret meaning. Counter-hegemonic (or oppositional) readings deconstruct the ideologies present in cultural texts, hegemonic (or preferred) readings accept these ideologies at face value, and negotiated readings locally shape and modify the meanings of texts while partly accepting them – or having to accept them – and thus having to contend with contradictions. Over the late 1970s and 1980s, and also in lesser part up to date, cultural studies research has more or less associated authenticity (broadly deﬁned) with counter-hegemonic cultural practices and inauthenticity with hegemonic ones. While this is suggestive, it betrays more like a utopian hope for cultural and social renovation than it reﬂects everyday reality. As this study shows, experiences of self-authenticity falls

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

249

more often than not somewhere along the middle of a continuum, thus feeling more like negotiated practices than anything else.

CONCLUSION By interpreting service as a symbolic space where meaningful work and selfauthenticity are possible, professors like Daniel and Harry, can construct a critical space where institutional forces can be resisted through artful negotiation. Within such symbolic spaces of ‘‘dirty work’’ – as I intended this concept here – not only can faculty challenge institutional authority and pose the conditions for the (partial) renewal of their occupational culture and structure, but they can also validate their sense of true self. While I remain conﬁdent that authenticity and the self can work as powerful social forces, I also maintain that self-authenticity and resistance can only be both understood and enacted contingently – that is – as complex and potentially contradictory activities with multiple meanings and outcomes which may resist hegemonic power structures while buttressing them at the same time (cf. Saukko, 2003). The need for such understanding is especially clear when we take into consideration the somewhat disenchanting notion that what seems authentic resistance on the surface may be nothing but a self-illusion or a conformist act. Take Daniel and Harry, for example. Are they simply rationalizing their practices to defend themselves from the possible realization that they are falling short of their ideal self ? Or are they claiming to act authentically because of the premium placed on the ideals of autonomy, resistance to inequality, and authenticity within professorial occupational cultural culture? The answer to these questions, from a pragmatist perspective, is that whether self-defense or conformity matter or not it does not matter. Mechanisms of self-defense and subsequent ways of rationalizing less-thanideal conduct – through the constitution of vocabularies of motive – are common features of social interaction. They are inevitable, and their ideal counterpart (that of a world full of subjects who cannot be anything but sincere and authentic) is just that: a utopian ideal present only in the shallowest of philosophies. Hence, because of the very emergent constitution of vocabularies of motive, and because vocabularies of motive become shared within common social worlds (as in professors’ occupational culture), it becomes inevitable for social agents to conform to a local culture made in part by collective values, morals, ideals, goals, etc. Hence, Daniel and Harry’s practices of resistance are authentic to them only if we accept

250

PHILLIP VANNINI

the fact that the values which inform their sense of true self are not exclusively their own, but they are in fact common to many others and this does not make their actions any less genuine. From this it follows that authenticity and resistance, are based on contingent interaction, intrapersonal and interpersonal negotiation, and the necessity of compromise with ‘‘dirty work’’ – whether the ‘‘dirty work’’ is to perform an unpleasant job, or the kind of ‘‘dirty work’’ done to protect one’s self and identity – and not on idealistic and romantic notions of the politically autonomous subject or metaphysical concepts of true selfhood. The genuineness of experiences of authenticity, and the very validity of this concept are thus possible only from a contingent, phenomenological, and multi-perspectival point of view. Indeed, as this study has shown the meanings of authenticity and resistance are highly variable amongst different people, as well as across different circumstances for each individual and activity. Viewing the self and social life as reﬂexive, multi-faceted, and polysemic and viewing institutions as going-concerns ought to lead us away from thinking of concepts, practices, and experiences in terms of rigidity, determination, and ﬁxed order. An interactionist agenda for cultural studies, built on pragmatism and contingent validities can allow us to transcend the limitations of critical contextualism and textualist optimism (Saukko, 2003) and thus inch closer toward a more responsible understanding of concepts such as resistances and authenticities.

NOTE 1. Despite the difference between service and governance, and despite the fact that institutional governance duties are generally believed to occupy professors more than service, professors generally use ‘‘service’’ to refer to both. From here on I follow this convention.

REFERENCES Blackburn, R., & Lawrence, J. (1995). Faculty at work: Motivation, expectation, satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Bowen, H., & Schuster, J. (1986). American professors: A national resource imperiled. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, B. (1987). The academic life: Small worlds, different worlds. New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Deci, E. (1976). Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum Press. Denzin, N. (1984). On understanding emotion. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Symbolic Spaces in Dirty Work

251

Denzin, N. (1992). Symbolic interactionism and cultural studies: The politics of interpretation. New York: Blackwell. Douglas, J. (1977). Existential sociology. In: J. Douglas & J. Johnson (Eds), Existential sociology (pp. 3–73). New York: Cambridge. Douglas, J., & Johnson, J. (Eds). (1977). Existential sociology. New York: Cambridge. Erickson, R. (1995). The importance of authenticity for self and society. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 121–144. Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding popular culture. London: Unwin. Fiske, J. (1994). Media matters: Everyday culture and political change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gecas, V. (1986). The motivational signiﬁcance of self-concept for socialization theory. Advances in Group Processes, 3, 131–156. Gecas, V. (1991). The self-concept as a basis for a theory of motivation. In: J. Howard & P. Callero (Eds), The self-society dynamic: Cognition, emotion and action (pp. 171–188). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gecas, V. (2000). Value identities, self-motives, and social-movements. In: S. Stryker (Ed.), Self, identity, and social movements (pp. 93–109). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J. (2000). The self in a world of going concerns. Symbolic Interaction, 23, 95–115. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In: S. Hall, et al. (Eds), Culture, Media, and Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–1979 (pp. 123–148). London: CCCS University of Birmingham Press. Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (Eds). (1976). Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson. Hebdige, D. (1976). The meaning of mod. In: S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds), Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (pp. 87–98). London: Hutchinson. Hermanowicz, J. (1998). The stars are not enough: Scientists – their passions and professions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hermanowicz, J. (2003). Scientists and satisfaction. Social Studies of Science, 33, 45–73. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (2000). The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world. New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, E. (1958). Men and their work. New York: Free Press. Hughes, E. (1970). The humble and the proud: The comparative study of occupations. The Sociological Quarterly, 11, 147–156. Hughes, E. (1971). The sociological eye: Selected papers. New York: Aldine. Kotarba, J., & Fontana, A. (Eds). (1984). The existential self in society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kotarba, J., & Johnson, J. (Eds). (2002). Postmodern existential sociology. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Manning, P. (1973). Existential sociology. The Sociological Quarterly, 14, 200–225. McRobbie, A. (2000). Feminism and youth-culture (2nd ed.). London: McMillan. Morley, D., & Brunsdon, C. (1999). The ‘nationwide’ television studies. London: Routledge. Morris, M. (1990). Banality in cultural studies. In: P. Mellencamp (Ed.), Logics of television: Essays in cultural criticism (pp. 14–43). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. National Center for Educational Statistics. (1990). Faculty in higher education institutions (NSOPF-88). Washington: US Department of Education.

252

PHILLIP VANNINI

National Opinion Research Center. (2000). The American faculty poll. Chicago: National opinion research center. Nightingale, V. (1992). What’s ethnographic about ethnographic audience research? In: J. Frow & M. Morris (Eds), Australian cultural studies: A reader (pp. 149–161). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick: Rutgers. Rosenberg, M. (1979). Conceiving the self. New York: Basic Books. Saukko, P. (2003). Doing research in cultural studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Shafﬁr, W., & Pawluch, D. (2003). Occupations and professions. In: L. Reynolds & N. HermanKinney (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 893–913). Walnut Creek: Alta Mira. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Smith, G. (1998). The ideology of ‘fag’: The school experience of gay students. The Sociological Quarterly, 39, 309–355. Sorcinelli, M. D. (1988). Satisfactions and concerns of new university teachers. To Improve the Academy, 7, 121–133. Sorcinelli, M. D. (1992). New and junior faculty stress: Research and responses. In: M. D. Sorcinelli & A. E. Austin (Eds), New directions for teaching and learning (no. 50). San Franscisco: Jossey-Bass. Stabile, C. (1995). Resistance, recuperation, and reﬂexivity: The limits of a paradigm. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, 403–422. Thorne, B., & Hochschild, A. (1997). Feeling at home at work: Life in academic departments. Qualitative Sociology, 20, 517–520. Thorsen, E. J. (1996). Stress in academe: What bothers professors? Higher Education, 31, 471–489. Tiryakian, E. (1962). Sociologism and existentialism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Tiryakian, E. (1968). The existential self and the person. In: K. Gergen & C. Gordon (Eds), The self in social interaction. New York: Wiley. Tierney, W., & Rhoads, R. (1993). Faculty socialization as cultural process. Washington: George Washington University. Trilling, L. (1972). Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, R. (1976). The real self: From institution to impulse. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 989–1016. Turner, R., & Schutte, J. (1981). The true self method for studying the self-conception. Symbolic Interaction, 4, 1–20. van der Bogert, V. (1991). Starting out: Experiences of new faculty at a teaching university. To Improve the Academy, 10, 63–81. Vannini, P. (2007a). Dead poets’ society: teaching, publish-or-perish, and professors’ experience of authenticity. Symbolic Interaction, 29, 235–258. Vannini, P. (2007b). The changing meanings of authenticity: an interpretive biography of professors’ experiences. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 29, 63–90. Whitt, E. J. (1991). Hit the ground running: Experiences of new faculty in a school of education. The Review of Higher Education, 14, 177–197. Willis, P. (1978). Learning to labour: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. Westmead: Saxon House. Ylijoki, O. H., & Mantyla, H. (2003). Conﬂicting time perspectives in academic work. Time and Society, 12, 55–78.

USING MYTH TO BREAK OPPRESSION: AN INTERACTIVE INVESTIGATION OF ECUADOR’S MESTIZO CULTURAL IDENTITY Daniel Bryan ABSTRACT The question of cultural identity has taken new levels of importance in the Andean country of Ecuador. Ecuadorian scholars often treat identity as a historical construction, revealing the country’s Mestizo population as a culture of oppression. However, such statements only take into account the Western deﬁnition of history and fail to appreciate the indigenous concept of myth and the human need to constantly rewrite history in terms of today. Since Ecuador’s majority is profoundly Mestizo (people with both Spanish and indigenous ancestry), there exists a clash of thought structures, both Western and indigenous, which do not allow for collective transformation. This research utilizes interactive research methods, particularly Augusto Boal’s ‘‘Theatre of the Oppressed,’’ to penetrate the clash, intensifying it so that the ‘‘cultural oppression’’ becomes clear to those involved in the explorations, allowing them to uncover the ‘‘power of myth’’ now deeply buried in the collective unconscious.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 253–272 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30014-3

253

254

DANIEL BRYAN

In Ecuador, a country plagued by political instability, social inequality, and corruption the general population opens its mouth to scream only to realize that they no longer have any voice. Grafﬁti on the walls of its capital city, Quito, clearly express the frustration of its inhabitants. ‘‘The pains that remain are the freedoms we lack.’’ ‘‘So much liberty, so much freedomy so many beggars.’’ ‘‘Society pardons its criminals but not its dreamers.’’ ‘‘Heroes for a second, slaves for eternity.’’1 The air becomes ﬁlled with the desperate silence of oppression, as these same walls begin to close in, and as each day passes, the oppressive silence numbs the connection the common person has with his/her true self. While the great majority of Ecuadorians recognize their country is in crisis, they cannot envision themselves as part of the crisis; rather, they consider themselves only to be victims of the crisis. This study begins with an exploration of Ecuador’s identity crisis, recognizing it as profoundly ‘‘mestizo’’ in nature, stuck between negating traditional roots (separation anxiety) and confronting contemporary globalization (lack of authenticity). It continues by afﬁrming Freire’s ‘‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’’ and the need to break oppressive forces that inhibit the creation of authentic identity. I propose a three-step process (the Three-R’s). The next segment of the study uncovers myth as the most appropriate means for penetrating oppression, exploring cultural identity, and engaging authentic living. The fourth action of the study suggests Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) as the seminal practice for giving life to myth, thus enacting the construction of identity. Finally, the study shares examples of how Ecuadorian students and I implemented TO in the exploration of Ecuador’s myth and confronted the cultural identity crisis.

ECUADOR’S MESTIZO IDENTITY CRISIS The ﬁrst action of this study is to identify the crisis as one of collective identity, and more speciﬁcally, one of cultural identity. While not refuting the political, economic, and social crises, I do suggest, as numerous Ecuadorian scholars before me (Adoum, 2000; Carrion, 2002; Chaves, 1990), and as international scholars (Bharucha, 2000; Friedman, 1994; Schutte, 1993; Suarez Orozco, 2004) of various disciplines recommend on a more universal scale that cultural terms lie at the root of transforming a country’s collective crises. Scholars and analysts have described the crisis of cultural identity in numerous manners, one of which strikes out at postmodernism and the consumption of identities rendering Ecuadorian identity too individualistic (Traverso Yepez, 1998, p. 23). Going a step

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

255

further, the crisis is often related to the people’s adoption of Western values as a supreme ethical base for future development (Salgado, 2001, pp. 17–18). Several scholars (most notably Donoso Pareja, 2000; Espinosa Apolo, 2000) propose that Ecuadorians suffer from collective schizophrenia; they are unable to accept the conﬂicts within their true selves, thus creating false identities. Espinosa Apolo (p. 13) perhaps deﬁnes the crisis with most clarity, proposing the conﬂict as essentially Mestizo2 in nature. Ecuadorians have fallen into illegitimacy, lost between failing to accept their ‘‘cultural being,’’ and creating a false ‘‘cultural conscience.’’ Ecuadorian cultural identity thus exists as a result of negation and inauthentic construction, which ignores any sense of tradition and ‘‘cosmovision.’’ While cultural identity is a complex and subjective concept, I consider the most effective deﬁnition to be a combination of those of Friedman (1994, p. 30) and Espinosa Apolo (2000, p. 13), ‘‘A construction, elaborated discourse or communal expression of a combination of characteristics, which include race, occidental (or modern) ethnicity, traditional ethnicity and lifestyle, seeking to deﬁne ‘who we are’ according to both ‘being’ and ‘conscience’.’’ From this deﬁnition, and in relation to the aforementioned descriptions of the crisis, it is imperative to acknowledge the importance of cultural identity for a given group of people, in this case Ecuadorians. Most obviously, it provides a sense of knowing oneself in relation to others who share his/her culture. Additionally, it involves a process of confronting conﬂicts, recognizing them as part of self, and enabling one to transform them. Cultural identity entails a direct connection with tradition, customs, history, oral tradition, symbols, and artistic representations from the past generations. Finally, it attempts to break through classiﬁcations of identity based on social class and economic status. Cultural identity is also a fragile concept, because it does not seek preservation or expansion, as do national and social identities; rather, it seeks constant resurgence and depends on the engagement of a cycle that feeds-off acknowledgment of the cycle itself. In other words, cultural identity is a process and not a product of a process, or an ‘‘accessory category’’ (Amoroso, 1998, p. 10); however, in order for its power to be felt, the process must be acknowledged as both existing and important. Failure to engage in the process diminishes the concept of culture to a ‘‘characteristic’’ of a people, or even an ‘‘end,’’ when in essence, it is an ongoing experience. A lack of genuine cultural experience most often results in one of two phenomena: acculturation, a separation from the roots and traditions of authentic culture; and enculturation, the assimilation of a predominant culture as authentic. There is no consensus as to which of these phenomena most closely relates to Ecuador’s identity crisis; however, I argue that the general

256

DANIEL BRYAN

population, predominantly Mestizos, feels trapped between the two, suffering from separation anxiety and a lack of authenticity. Traverso Yepez (1998, p. 110) refers to the Mestizo condition as one ‘‘in a limbo space of existential instability,’’3 while Espinosa Apolo (2000, p. 94) makes similar reference to the ‘‘caught in the middle’’ syndrome when citing Frenchman Carlos Weiner’s popular saying, ‘‘[Mestizos] are principally comprised of parents who do not recognize their children and children who do not recognize their parents.’’4 The Mestizo complex, as I refer to it, is based on a complete denial of roots, both indigenous and Spanish. A metaphor may best illustrate the Mestizo complex as part of the identity crisis. If the United States is indeed a ‘‘melting pot,’’ Ecuador, as well as many other Latin American countries, is the ‘‘jar of oil & vinegar.’’ In the melting pot stews a soup composed of various ingredients (an ‘‘all sorts’’ of immigrants), mixing together over time for a ﬂavorful dish. In Ecuador, the indigenous and Spanish are thrown into a jar with several spices and set on the shelf. When needed, the jar is shaken to offer a momentary balanced ﬂavor; however, it always ﬁnds itself on the shelf again, with its contents separated across the middle. Hence, the cultural identity in Ecuador suffers from separation anxiety, meaning a separation of the Mestizo from his indigenous/Spanish roots, not to mention the indigenous and Spanish roots are separated from each other. On the other side of the crisis is globalization, the accelerated movement of people, goods, and ideas among countries and regions (Suarez Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). Particularly in Ecuador, the onset of American products, media, and values translates to a newly accepted capitalistic view of life, meaning that identity deﬁnes itself by the only constant of such a society, which is an accumulation of itself, ‘‘easily translated into ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ ’’ (Friedman, 1994, p. 67) by the vendors. The same phenomenon encourages Ecuadorian scientists, scholars, and creators to seek their fulﬁllment on the outside, causing an exodus of talent and creativity, which inhibits the country’s ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ promised by the leaders of globalization. Outside of academia, Ecuadorians tend to view globalization and development as one and the same thing, a system that ends up feeding the ailment it originally intended to cure (Ferguson, 1994). In order to understand how globalization relates to the identity crisis of an average Ecuadorian, I would like to share an advertisement of a prominent bank that appeared in many Quito newspapers over a several week period. In an effort to promote its small personal loans, the ad tells the story of a younger lady who owns a small electronic appliance store. She puts up part of her inventory as collateral in order to qualify for a loan, with

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

257

which she pays for plastic surgery to make her nose look just like that of her favorite movie star, Jennifer Lopez. The ad’s headline states, ‘‘You too can look like your favorite star,’’ providing, in essence, a call to assimilation. While the example marks the experience of one particular individual, I believe the marketing of it represents enculturation trends, in which masses of Ecuadorians measure ‘‘development’’ and ‘‘evolution’’ according to how well they assimilate Western images, values, and lifestyle. Obviously, according to our established deﬁnition, such enculturation results in an inauthentic experience of cultural identity. Directly related to separation anxiety and lack of authenticity is the phenomenon of cultural oppression, which acts as both their cause and effect. Oppressive forces, such as capitalist economics, social division based on ethnicity, and Western media portrayals of ‘‘successful living’’ cause one to separate from roots and/or forge ‘‘quick-ﬁx identities.’’ In other words, the social systems tied to acculturation and enculturation are not easily understood by the general public; they are controlled by invisible forces (often elitist), and those making the decisions of how to order the social structure, the people of the culture being not affected (Silva, 1992). The resulting pressure on individuals and communities is immense, leading to a self-constructed internal oppression in which the people live in constant denial of self. Oppressive forces have confused and clouded the very concept of identity to the point that identifying a sole cause of the principal conﬂicts is now impossible. ‘‘The cultural colonization is so day-to-day, so persistent that it has almost turned invisible, one almost cannot even feel it.’’5 (Boal, 1985b, p. 115) Solving problems without knowing the cause is also impossible; thus, the only current recourse available is a profound search for sources of the oppression, which has both caused and resulted from the negation of authentic cultural identity and assimilation of manufactured identities. It stands to reason that the ﬁrst step in understanding Ecuadorian identity and the causes of its mutilation would be to liberate oneself from the oppressive forces that hold back the journey of self-discovery.

BREAKING OPPRESSION THROUGH THE THREE-R’S (RECREATION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND REVOLUTION) Freire’s (1998) liberating theory of education will serve as the motivating philosophy in our search for collective self. If the ‘‘system,’’ meaning the force(s) that establishes and maintains order in society, is indeed oppressive,

258

DANIEL BRYAN

causing both acculturation and enculturation, then we seek a path toward understanding and transforming the system, as opposed to conventional development philosophies that seek ways to reform the system, adapting it to ﬁt particular needs. To transform is to revolutionize from within, to reform is to reshape from the outside. In order to employ the ‘‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’’ in our study of Ecuadorian cultural identity, one must understand Freire’s impression of violence, and afﬁrm that the common Ecuadorian suffers from systematic and symbolic pedagogical violence, both of which prevent the ability to engage in creative thinking and critical decision-making. Such pedagogical violence has redeﬁned education as something that one obtains, as opposed to a process of becoming. Confronting violence thus implies the afﬁrmation of education as a ‘‘process of becoming’’ or a practice. Proan˜o (1974, p. 46)6 describes the educational process as ‘‘the task to perfect man in all his being,’’ relating it to his spiritual journey. Proan˜o (p. 49)7 refers to the oppression as ‘‘accomplished conquests in relation to the mysteries of life;’’ yet, he claims that ‘‘the conquests are not deﬁnitive or complete,’’ and that the mission is unveiling the mysteries once again. In other words, and in direct relation with Ecuadorian identity, since Proan˜o directed his comments toward his countrymen, the oppression we must confront is the forced separation of man’s connection with those mysterious life forces that truly deﬁne who he is. Obviously, both Freire and Proan˜o sought some kind of revolution. They believed in the power of dialog to recreate meaning for the world and transform the reality of a given group of people. However, in relation to Mestizos, meaning a collective that culturally represents both oppressor and oppressed, invader and invaded, how does one proceed with a ‘‘transformative dialog?’’ I believe the answer comes from engaging in a process composed of three movements (the Three-R’s): recreation, reconstruction, and revolution.8 Recreation combats symbolic violence, referring to the necessity of recreating meanings for symbols commonly accepted as part of one’s society, culture, or community. This afﬁrmative act reﬂects the pedagogical force described as reproduction by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990). Recreation denotes the active afﬁrmation of already accepted symbolic meanings, or negation of accepted meanings, and creation of new ones. It is most simply explained when related to the classroom. A teacher asks a probing question, but instead of waiting for an accepted answer, he/she works with the students to understand the question and create an answer. If the answer is not equal to what is generally accepted, further exploration

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

259

is conducted in order to transform the meaning into something else, or to afﬁrm the answer uncovered previously by the students. Reconstruction combats systematic violence, referring to ‘‘making history’’ as ‘‘a way of producing identity, insofar as it produces a relation between what has supposedly occurred in the past and the present state of affairs’’ (Friedman, 1994, p. 118). As Friedman (p. 79) remarks on man’s self-conscious will to destroy the past in order to control his future, a society systematically destroys the past by claiming it as something dead, events whose life extinguishes after they occur. If identity is a process, or practice, and the past is an inherent part of our identity, then it must be reconstructed so that it can breathe again in the present. Revolution is then the engagement with the act of transformation, a permanent return to origins, and resurgence of cultural identity as the profound determining factor of ‘‘who we are.’’ The revolution develops from within itself, through a dialog with its own contradictory forces (Freire, 1998, p. 117), yet its potential grows out of the recreation of meanings and reconstruction of the parts that constitute its very existence. This dynamic view of revolution empowers people as it transforms ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ into present. The Ecuadorian indigenous peoples deﬁne such a momentous transformation as Pachacutik, or a renaissance of time and space that carries humanity toward truly knowing themselves. Now we can see that meaning is not objective, as identity is not objective; rather, they are both experience, a purely subjective phenomenon. Thus, another way of deﬁning the ‘‘Three-R’’ process is overcoming oppression through the experience of authentic living9. Acknowledging this process as important and/or necessary does not yet explain how one can actively engage in the process. The next action of this paper will be to identify myth as a means to connect with the process. Continuing to use the Andean country of Ecuador as an example, I intend to show that myth, infused to life through theater, serves as a tool for engaging the ‘‘Three-R’’ process, thus breaking oppression through the experience of authentic living.

MYTHOLOGY: A TOOL FOR BREAKING OPPRESSION Ecuador is trapped between a rich history and compelling mythology, prioritizing history as near science, and regulating myth as a legendary representation of history. However, is it not true that history is a subjective discipline and that we cannot attest to what is ‘‘real’’ and what is, I dare say,

260

DANIEL BRYAN

‘‘myth?’’ Nietzsche (1980, p. 18) reminds us that ‘‘history is justiﬁed in only one soil and one climate: in every other it grows into a noxious weed.’’ Friedman (1994) follows up, calling history a part of mythology: The construction of a history is the construction of a meaningful universe of events and narratives for an individual or collectively deﬁned subject. And since the motivation of this process of construction emanates from a subject inhabiting a speciﬁc social world, we may say that history is an imprinting of the present on to the past. In this sense, all history including modern historiography is mythology. (p. 118)

This study moves to expose history for its life-infusing potential. As Nietzsche (p. 7) says, ‘‘we require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and actiony Only so far as history serves life will we serve it.’’ However, he (p. 9) offers fair warning that man tends to ‘‘resist the great and ever greater weight of the pasty [which] oppresses him and bends him sideways.’’ History has no interest in generating life, only in preserving it, and in the act of preservation, ‘‘history has almost transformed men into downright abstractis and shadows; no one dares to show his person, but masks himself as an educated man, as a scholar, a poet, a politician’’ (p. 29). Myth, so often considered the opposite of history, is actually not on the same continuum at all. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world; Levi Strauss (1968, 1979) regards myth as concrete thinking, which like science seeks an order for that there seems to be no order. Myth is a constructivist manner of structuralism: a phenomenon is identiﬁed and we seek to attach it to our world concept, building up a structure of life based on the phenomena we observe. (Levi Strauss, 1979) Myth always builds up to the concrete image, while science, and history for that matter, breaks down to the parts. According to Levi Strauss (1968), the power of mythological thinking lies in its nature of being continuously dismantled and built-up again. While science exists to be accepted, myth exists to be resurrected; one world is linear and the other is circular. Borrowing a metaphor from Nietzsche, consider a tree growing out of the ground. From the historical perspective, the tree is studied as a single entity, the roots are its most ancient history and its outermost leaves are the newest additions to the present. From the mythological perspective, the tree cannot be divided into parts, nor should it be separated from the totality of life around it. The roots are living as much as the leaves, no matter which one came ﬁrst. The tree will die and can then be historically studied for its life span, cause of death and its contribution to the environment; however, in terms of the tree’s myth, instead of dying, the tree offers new contributions to the experience of life. Whether its seed begins a new tree, its trunk serves

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

261

as a home to some other being, or if it only becomes a symbol for human life, the tree continues to live in the present. Obviously, we can see links between this metaphor and religion, especially eastern traditions, the truth being that religion, as history, is part of mythical life. For some, understanding myth is best achieved through understanding image-based religions such as Hindu, which communicate divinity through the act of seeing (Dars´ an) or ‘‘image making’’ (Eck, 1998, p. 10). In order to best understand myth, I propose that one must see it in opposition to ideology, a logical/scientiﬁc construct often associated with history. Ideology functions as a weapon (usually of the elites) to control society (Traverso Yepez, 1998), while mythology is a tool used to create connections with the world and/or society. Ideology is a product of scientiﬁc thought, employing concepts, ideas, numbers, and words to communicate; mythology functions as concrete thought, employing symbols, images, rites, and traditions to communicate (Campbell, 1988). Most simply, ideology/ history is an explanation of the universe, claiming, ‘‘That is the answer,’’ while mythology is a connection to the universe, claiming, ‘‘That is part (of us).’’ In our effort to examine Ecuador’s cultural identity, it is necessary to move toward a practical use of myth, understanding it most simply as a metaphorical story, a recreation of history or a representative image of human potential that serves one or four basic functions (Campbell, 1988, p. 31): (1) mystical, or putting us in contact with the mystery of the universe, (2) cosmological, or aiding in the understanding of how the universe is interconnected, (3) sociological, or connecting us with the essence of interpersonal relationships, and (4) pedagogical, or teaching humans how to live according to given circumstances. The most concrete aspects of myth’s inﬂuence on cultural identity are the hero and the legend. They are both theatrical in nature and demand a brief analysis that will prepare us for later sections of this study. The hero is myth personiﬁed, one who ﬁghts against his/her own limitations in order to transform reality. Campbell (1968) identiﬁes three primary stages of the hero’s journey: (1) the call to adventure (or ‘‘Departure’’), when the hero realizes that something is wrong with the world; (2) the penetration of the other world (or ‘‘Initiation’’), when the hero crosses over into danger and confronts the conﬂicting forces, transforming them into something new; and (3) the crossing of the threshold back to the present world (or ‘‘Return’’), when the hero brings back the ‘‘lesson’’ so that all may transform with the hero. The hero can be imaginary or ‘‘real,’’ for his physical existence on

262

DANIEL BRYAN

earth is not important or relevant; the hero’s symbolic endeavors, and not his real-life acts, are what have the potential for transforming the present. Let us not confuse historical heroes with mythological heroes and understand that one person can be both at the same time. Jesus is a historical hero, recognized as a prophetic man who existed and changed society according to ideas, words, and real-life actions; he is a mythological hero for his representation of surpassing tremendous obstacles, symbolizing eternity, encouraging tradition, and living today through human creations of his image. A legend is a product of occidental knowledge applied to sacred myth, in which one or more of the elements (place, people, or events) are probably real (Ubidia, 1993, pp. 67–68). The Spanish conquest brought scientiﬁc thinking, which considered myth a form of entertainment and of little practical use. The result was to reduce myth to its parts (characters, place, story, etc.) without realizing that the very act of breaking it down simultaneously dismantles a complete thought structure, which in turn reduces cultural identity to a concept that can be broken into parts. For thousands of years, myth was the purpose of life, and in a manner of a few centuries, it became a story called ‘‘Legend.’’ Ecuadorian society, like that of Western civilization, has broken down society as far as it will go, categorizing every aspect of life. The individual is also broken down into his/her parts, but each effort in reductionism only succeeds in separating man from experience, that ‘‘beyond the self there is no universe of meaning into which one can be inserted.’’ (Friedman, 1994, p. 91) Broken down to an insigniﬁcant individual, man ﬁnds himself to be powerless when confronted by something as large as history. However, through a regeneration of myth, Ecuadorian society can once again focus on building itself up, in conjunction with history, instead of breaking itself down as a part of history. Myth connects origin, existence, and destiny into one authentic experience (Espinosa Apolo, 1999) and perhaps it can put the pieces of life’s broken puzzle back together again. Like Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy, the practice of myth calls for subjects to name their world and act upon the oppressive forces that hold one back from transforming reality. As stated, mythological reality is circular and exists for the sole purpose of returning to its origins; it must be destroyed and resurrected, like life itself. Ecuadorians, as other Latin American societies, base their informal education practices on cultural traditions and customs; thus, it is only natural that envisioning formal pedagogy as a mythological experience could serve as the ideal path for appropriating identity and breaking through oppressive social relationships.

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

263

Before continuing, let us clarify that the construction of identity through myth has nothing to do with the act of accumulating knowledge of myth, i.e., reading mythical stories, and building those into present Ecuadorian cultural identity. As already stated, identity cannot be accumulated; it can only be experienced. Myth suggests that we are not merely psychological/ sociological constructs of a chain of cause and effect events, but instead, that we are the events (and the people who lived those events). If we are the events, it is not necessary to know them, but rather, we must experience (and feel) them, including all those possible negative shadows of the past. If we can authentically experience our history, we can alter it into something we are, as opposed to something we have, and by becoming the history we gain the power to transform its oppressive nature; we become the powerful ‘‘when it is ruled and guided by a higher power and does not itself rule and guide’’ (Nietzsche, 1980, p. 14). The questions arise, ‘‘How can Ecuadorians access this power of myth?’’ Unfortunately for our ‘‘quick-ﬁx’’ society, there is no 10-step plan on how to engage myth and recreate cultural identity. Myth is hidden by elitist ideology, historical education accepted as ‘‘truth,’’ infectious hopelessness, and a general aversion to authentic cultural roots. Quite simply, mythical living requires practice: a healthy combination of observation, imagination, experimentation, and time. Obviously the practice of constructing collective identity cannot be done individually, and since we have already established that it cannot be accumulated, we also know that such practice must be creative in nature, meaning that a group of subjects must gather together in the practice of creating myth, which sounds like theater to me.

ENGAGING ‘‘AUTHENTIC LIVING’’ THROUGH THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED Engaging myth demands a certain kind of theater, one that Grotowski (2002) explores: What is possible? First, confrontation with myth rather than identiﬁcation. In other words, while retaining our private experiences, we can attempt to incarnate myth, putting on its ill-ﬁtting skin to perceive the relativity of our problems, their connection to the ‘‘roots,’’ and the relativity of the roots in the light of today’s experience. If the situation is brutal, if we strip ourselves and touch an extraordinary intimate layer, exposing it, the life-mask cracks and falls away. (p. 23)

Our theater must be a cultural journey into an unrecognized territory, similar to multicultural theater exploration (Una, 2002); it is not about ﬁxed

264

DANIEL BRYAN

notions of what is easily interpreted and performing a story in a manner that is comfortable and entertaining. It is moving away from artiﬁce and ‘‘building communities and ideas instead of monuments’’ (Davis, 2002). The most basic premises of theater, namely that of A performs B for C, must be reconsidered. Nietzsche (1980, p. 28) warns man of ‘‘[becoming] a spectator merely enjoying himself and strolling around and brought to a condition which can hardly be altered for a moment even by great wars and great revolutions.’’ Enacting myth evokes images of the Greek dithyrambic song, when actors and spectators were indivisible, singing out in celebration. Since that time, 2,500 years of theater has drawn profound lines between actor and spectator, until Boal (1985a) devised theory and methodology to eliminate the divide and create the ‘‘spect-actor.’’ Thus, the ﬁnal action of this study will be the application of TO theory and technique to the practice of creating myth and connecting with the experience of authentic living. Boal (2002, p. 207) plants two primary objectives for TO, which when related to myth, are nothing more than the practice of authentic living. They are ‘‘to enhance our ability to know or recognize a given situation, and to help us to rehearse actions which can lead to the breaking of the oppression shown in that situation. To know and to transform.’’ For our purposes, the ‘‘given situation’’ is the Ecuadorian’s confrontation with his/her history, or cultural being, and the ‘‘actions’’ are the development of a cultural conscience that provides balance for that cultural being, thus creating authentic cultural identity. Boal’s technique moves us through the mythological process of recreating meaning and reconstructing history, thus serving as the rehearsal for the third ‘‘R,’’ the Cultural Revolution. I argue that TO is essentially nothing more than a quintessential methodology for engaging in the practice of myth, especially when the themes being explored are pertinent to cultural identity. As TO seeks to transform actor and spectator, it serves humanity in the same way Levi Strauss (1968, p. 32) stresses the ritualistic nature of myth as, ‘‘[to] bring about a union (one might even say communion in this context) or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate groups, one ideally merging with the person of the ofﬁciant and the other with the collectivity of the faithful.’’ Myth is the structure for transforming two opposing forces into a whole entity, and TO is the method for achieving the transformation through action. TO and myth are inherently connected, engaged in a process of continuous recreation, and reconstruction. Like myth, ‘‘winning’’ or success in TO has nothing to do with resolving conﬂict; rather, it is identifying the conﬂict in order to transform it. Both myth and TO are sacred, penetrating

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

265

the human subconscious through imagery; both believe in a symbolic language that supercedes ideological communication, namely words (Langer, 1979). They are both symbolically signiﬁcant, seeking to understand a phenomenon and its relation with the totality, yet not trying to represent reality in the form of a concept. Both buildup life toward the universal in an attempt to unite humankind, as opposed to breaking life down to the particular, alienating us from meaning and experience. Finally, both myth and TO seek revolution as its end; in other words, the end is the resurgence of life and the permanent return to the process of authentic living. The end is a process, for ‘‘mythopractice in such terms is not the realization of myth in practice, but the practice of mythmaking’’ (Friedman, 1994, p. 141). If the practice of myth truly is powerful as mentioned earlier in this study, then we must alter our self-perception in order to experience it. We must reconnect with the roots of the theatrical experience, simultaneously serving as protagonist and audience, fused together as one through our experiential need for dialog. Thus, mythmaking becomes a creative process of theatrical dialog. Heeding the warnings of Boal (2005, p. 4), ‘‘that what we think is dialogue never really goes beyond parallel or overlapping monologues,’’ TO is the myth’s path toward cultural identity. Finally, after countless generations, Ecuadorians can return to the practice of myth; they will experience ﬁrst hand two of its roles: deﬁning cultural identity, combining Campbell’s ﬁrst three functions (see above), and acting as a pedagogical force. TO provides the method for becoming part of the myth, and willfully allowing it to become part of us. We enact mythical experiences, turning the audience into ‘‘spect-actor,’’ or in this case, ‘‘heroes of the story of life,’’ otherwise understood as ‘‘heroes of the rehearsal,’’ which is just one step away from being ‘‘heroes of the revolution.’’ In essence, TO carries myth from the page of a book, from an historical event, from the falsehood of truth to the rite of a culture; it is ceremony, the enacting of human potential and sacred ritual, not the habitual ritual of which Boal (1985a) negatively refers, but the empowering ritual that deﬁnes people ‘‘as a group instead of a mere collection of individuals’’ (Clarke et al., 2002, p. 47). Friedman (1994, p. 143) explains it quite simply, ‘‘This is the difference between the ritual mask that contains the power of the god and the theater mask that is a mere representation, a symbol or image of what it represents.’’ TO allows for the process of turning the symbol of the mask into a sacred object of power, making it more than a theatrical representation; it is transformed into a tool for mythical practice, recreating meaning in the here and now, while engaged in a reconstruction process that

266

DANIEL BRYAN

serves the rehearsal for revolution. We put on the mask not to identify with the hero, or make the audience identify with the protagonist; but to be the hero and live his/her adventure in the present time and space.

EXPLORING ECUADOR’S MYTH Working with the students of Universidad San Francisco de Quito and the Fundacio´n Teatro Bolivar of Quito, I was able to practice TO in the exploration of Ecuadorian myth. In this section, I brieﬂy describe the process we undertook and discoveries made by project participants. Obviously, discoveries are limited to the themes we chose and the subjectivity of the participants; we hope that our work serves further exploration in the area, thus leading to even more profound rehearsals for the Cultural Revolution. In search of mythical content for engaging in the ‘‘Three-R’’ process, one must inevitably look toward the past. Whether we study stories from indigenous tradition or historical events commonly accepted as truth, we ﬁnd the material in human memories, both published in the written form and stored in the minds of older generations. While accessing books and other written accounts represents the simplest process, and is often accepted as more reliable for the research involved, personal accounts should not be discarded for their obvious subjectivity; both forms of human memory contain value for our process. In both cases we can use TO as a transforming act that ‘‘mythiﬁes’’ experience. ‘‘Mythifying’’ the past liberates us from oppressive events and/or characteristics of our identity. I should note at this time an important discovery of our process, namely the difference between ‘‘mythifying’’ the past and glorifying it. For centuries, Ecuadorian historians (Velasco, 1981; Carrion, 2002; Martinez, 1997) have been accused of turning myth into truth, when in actuality they are glorifying events and historical characters in an effort to make the past sacred, a process that is incongruous with myth and TO. The past is only sacred in so much as it serves the present. Therefore, my students and I were able to read such poetic historical accounts; however, they often proved distracting in the creative process. The only way to ‘‘mythify’’ history and recreate cultural identity is through a theatrical process.10 Synthesizing Ecuadorian history in an effort to extract events and metaphors for engaging in the practice of myth is not an easy task. This small country’s history not only contains secrets for understanding its own identity, but also can arguably be considered a prime representation for the

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

267

‘‘conformation of American cultural identity.’’ (Martinez, 1997, p. 7) We identiﬁed ﬁve major historical periods for continued TO exploration: (1) the Spanish conquest/colonization, (2) formation of the American republic, (3) the onset of modernization and liberalism, (4) the domination of populist ideology, and (5) current practices of globalization. While pre-Colombian history and indigenous legend comprise an important part of Ecuadorian identity, the crisis is clearly Mestizo in nature, leading us to choose the Spanish conquest and colonization as the ‘‘taking off’’ point. The purely ‘‘native history’’ remains greatly important, in so much as it represents half of the roots of current cultural identity. There occurred thousands of years of tilling the soil before foreign agents fertilized the family tree, forever changing its appearance and growth process. What most interested us about the conquest – colonization was how such a small quantity of men could overpower a civilization, and of course we wanted to learn how that manifests itself in Ecuadorian identity. We engaged in two primary Image Theatre11 (Boal, 1985a, p. 135, 2002, p. 174) exercises: one exploring the story of indigenous belief that the ‘‘white man’’ may be the god Viracocha incarnate, and the other exploring the opposing dominant symbols of power, i.e., the invisible humans of Jesus Christ and the King of Spain as opposed to varied indigenous symbols that include the Sun, the Mountains, the Maize, the Inca, etc. The most profound group discovery suggests that Ecuadorian Mestizo identity was born of the most intense conﬂict possible: desires of violence versus desires of peace. While the indigenous culture waited for the mythical arrival of Viracocha who would transform their world order, Spanish conquistadors sought to increase their riches, symbolically through gold. The ‘‘Indigenous Mother’’ actively pursued peaceful transformation of a war-torn society12 and the ‘‘Spanish Father’’ abused such needs to fulﬁll his ego. I offer a synthesis of group commentaries that followed the exercise, ‘‘We are children of an abusive marriage, one that perhaps should never have occurred; however, it did occur and we were born. We must ‘psychoanalyze’ our relationship to our parents in order to truly understand ourselves. The only way to break internal oppression remaining from our ancestry is to confront them face to face.’’ Another discovery, slightly less profound in our eyes, relates to the detection of ‘‘what is real.’’ Our exercises demonstrated that reality is projected by power, yet the most powerful entities during this period of history were two invisible men: Jesus Christ and the King of Spain. Everything that has value in our lives comes from their graces, making us feel powerless, because we cannot relate to that which we cannot see. We are a people who struggle to understand how power lies in the invisible. We have lived

268

DANIEL BRYAN

years of passive acceptance, trying to create symbols that in some way make sense out of the power source’s physical absence. It is not too different than the power of money in a bank, or the power of information in the computer. The participants were able to recreate meaning of such powerful symbols like Viracocha, gold, indigenous mother, Spanish father, Jesus Christ, the king, maize, the Sun, the mountains, the Inca, etc. Through the images we created, history was transformed, if nothing else for the briefest of moments. Reconstruction of a past in terms of the present allowed us to understand not only who we are, but also dream about who we want to be. The rehearsal for the revolution had begun. In relation to the formation of the republic (later to be called ‘‘Ecuador’’), we engaged in three primary activities. First, we performed Image Theater exercises that explored the ‘‘before and after’’ images of the Revolution for Independence, including ‘‘characters’’ from the varied ethnic backgrounds, and how the formation of the new ‘‘free’’ state affects the cultural identity. Later, we performed an improvised exercise of forum theater that examined the naming of the country, ‘‘Ecuador.’’ Finally, we conducted Image Theater and other improvisational activities of the legendary battle hero, Abdo´n Calderon13. The major group discovery was a negation of the glory so often associated with the Revolution; instead, we realized the oppressive truth of the Republic. Our oppressors, who earlier received their orders from far away, now feel so much closer in vicinity. Why should I, a Mestizo, care about ‘rich white folk’ who are not happy that they must be subservient to other ‘rich white folk’? To live, I must be subservient to all. Now my powerlessness is even more apparent. I am angry to know that liberty from Spain is not liberating. I truly thought that I was free, but now I know that freedom is not passed down to me by Bolivar, Sucre or Caldero´n; freedom is earned by every person, community and generation. Such negative discoveries left us unhappy, causing us to seek out a hero who exempliﬁed authentic living; we arrived at Eugenio Espejo.14 Various Image Theater activities led us to conduct signiﬁcant research and the writing of a short play, Yo Soy Eugenio Espejo, for use in a pedagogical workshop with adolescents. The play tells the story of how one student, isolated from his mythological world, confronts his history, namely Eugenio Espejo, and ﬁnds a hero within himself. The play calls for audience participation at the end, forcing ‘‘spect-actors’’ to insert themselves into the story and confront various oppressive situations. Major discoveries of this work led to the title of the play. I am ethnically diverse, which does not inhibit my ability to revolutionize my world. My oppression presents itself as obstacles, which can be overcome through a dedication to my authenticity and a conviction to liberating myself.

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

269

Time constraints for the project limited our ability to signiﬁcantly explore the ﬁnal three periods; however, the exercises still provided valuable insight into the cultural identity crisis. In terms of the liberal revolution, another era mostly associated with positive results, we used Image Theater to explore the historical period’s increased ability of communication among geographical regions and its recognition of Mestizos as the middle class. Group discoveries revealed the time period as nothing more than a shift of power ideologies, meaning power stayed in the same hands, yet changed its appearance. ‘‘Our two great mythological symbols of this era, the train and Eloy Alfaro,15 do not move us toward authenticity. The most profound feelings come from losing our power connection to land, and replacing it with money and product. Could the train, so often associated with bringing the country together, be responsible for transporting oppression?’’ Our explorations of Populism resulted in discoveries closely related to those of Adoum (2000, p. 164), in which Velasco Ibarra ‘‘replaced a political philosophy with a philosophy of power.’’ Image Theater exercises revealed this era, which to a degree still continues today, for its importance of ‘‘selling’’ ideas and presenting images of heroism. We are in such need of heroes that we accept obviously false images as authentic. Populism is nothing more than inauthentic manufacturing of myth. Yet, look how easily it controls the masses. Could inauthentic myth be more powerful than authentic myth? If so, is there any hope for creating authentic experience? Such lack of hope in creating authentic experience may have inﬂuenced our explorations of Globalization, in which the group discovered the phenomenon as a drug-like experience uprooting us from the history we need to confront in order to ﬁnd any kind of legitimate experience. Several brief Image Theater activities revealed Globalization as capitalist temptation, demonstrating how we struggle for cultural identity in a hypnotic trance, walking like zombies toward the accumulation of authenticity. The oppression manifests itself in a repeated movement as if to say, ‘‘I am what I havey I am what I havey I am what I havey’’

CONCLUSIONS As is the case throughout Latin America, Ecuadorians play the victim of an identity crisis created by external inﬂuences: beginning with the Spanish conquest, continuing through the industrial revolution and set in fastforward through globalization. The result is a generation (or generations) disoriented from authentic cultural life, driven by anxiety, confused over

270

DANIEL BRYAN

rapidly changing roles, and transformed into strangers to themselves. The role of victim is not an attractive one; the shame associated with it makes looking into the mirror a difﬁcult task, even more so if one is asked to not only see the reﬂection, but also to correct the faults he/she observes. Suarez Orozco (2004, p. 183) shares the two pathways that one can construct when looking into ‘‘the social mirror’’. First, one may choose to ‘‘become resigned to the negative reﬂections, leading to hopelessness and selfdepreciation that may in turn result iny self-defeating behaviorsy depression and passivity.’’ The other pathway is that of resistance, which can also be divided into two classiﬁcations: one ‘‘infused with hope, a sense of justice, and faith in a better tomorrow’’ and the other ‘‘overcome by alienation leading to anomie, hopelessness and a nihilistic view of the future.’’ This study argues in favor of the pathway of ‘‘hopeful resistance,’’ using TO as a tool to teach authentic living through the engagement of myth. Standard educational methods and curricula will not serve this pathway, for it implies a complete transformation of self, from the inside out. Hope is not accumulated; it is constructed. Similarly, as Boal and Freire attest, liberation is not found; it is created. The Cultural Revolution will only begin once we have rehearsed authentic living.

NOTES 1. Grafﬁti observed by the author while living in Quito and/or extracted from the book, Quito: Una ciudad de grafﬁtis by Alex Ron (1998). (Translated by me.) 2. Mestizo refers to the race/culture of the descendants of Spanish and indigenous ancestors. 3. ‘‘El producto de esta unio´n, el Mestizo de entonces, tiende a ser, por ellos un ente desapreciado por los indios y rechazado por los blancos, viviendo en una especie de limbo de inestabilidad existencial que marca su vida, y su trayectoria histo´rica.’’ (Translated by me.) 4. Originally cited in: Toscano (1959). ‘‘se componen principalmente de padres que no reconocen a sus hijos y de hijos que no reconocen a sus padres’’ (p. 461). (Translated by me.) 5. ‘‘El colonialismo cultural es tan cotidiano, tan persistente que ya casi se torno invisible, ya casi no se siente.’’ (Translated by me.) 6. (1910–1988) A revolutionary Ecuadorian bishop and scholar, well known for his campaign for indigenous rights. ‘‘La construccio´n perfeccionado del mundo material es tarea llamada a perfeccionar al hombre mismo en todo su ser.’’ (Translated by me.) 7. ‘‘El hombre de conciencia crı´ tica sabe que las conquistas realizadas en relacio´n con el misterio del Dios, con el misterio del mundo, con el misterio del hombre comunitario, con el misterio del tiempo, no son deﬁnitivas ni acabadas: sabe que tiene la misio´n de ir desvelando todos esos misterios.’’ (Translated by me.)

Myth, Oppression, Ecuadorian Identity

271

8. I choose the word ‘‘movement’’ intentionally. It implies life, something natural, genuine development, something musical. 9. ‘‘Authentic living’’ is thus deﬁned as the engagement in life experiences that are creative and critical in nature. Like Freire’s ‘‘praxis,’’ authentic living demands both action and reﬂection in the process of connecting with life’s mysteries while overcoming symbolic and systematic violence. 10. See Elam, Jr. (2002). 11. Using the bodies of project participants, one other participant ‘‘sculpts,’’ without speaking, an image of his opinion. ‘‘Dealing with the images we should not try to ‘understand’ the meaning of each image, to apprehend its precise meaning, but to feel those images, to let our memories and imaginations wander: the meaning of an image is the image itself. Image is a language.’’ (AB 175) (Boal, 2002) There exist numerous variations of this exercise in which participants can modify the image, in attempts to let the image communicate more clearly. 12. The Spanish arrived at the very end of the Inca civil war. 13. This young soldier from Cuenca suffered four gunshot wounds at the deﬁning Battle of Pichincha, but he continued to ﬁght and carried the ﬂag of the revolutionary army, inspiring his brethren to victory over the Spanish. 14. Precursor of the Revolution for Independence, Espejo is son of an indigenous father and mulatto mother. He is doctor, lawyer, scholar, and revolutionary thinker. 15. General and President, leader of the Liberal Revolution in Ecuador, he is generally recognized for ending Conservative rule and uniting a divided country.

REFERENCES Adoum, J. E. (2000). Ecuador: Sen˜as particulares. Quito: Eskeletra. Amoroso, B. (1998). On globalization: Capitalism in the 21st century. New York: Palgrave. Bharucha, R. (2000). The politics of cultural practice. Hanover: Wesleyan. Boal, A. (1985a). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre communications group. Boal, A. (1985b). Te´cnicos latinoamericanos de teatro popular. Me´xico: Nueva Imagen. Boal, A. (2002). Games for actors and non-actors. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage. Campbell, J. (1968). The hero of a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. New York: Doubleday. Carrion, B. (2002). El cuento de la patria. Quito: MEC. Chaves, F. (1990). El hombre ecuatoriano y su cultura. Quito: Banco Central. Clarke, J., Hall, S., Jefferson, T., & Roberts, B. (2002). Subcultures, cultures and class. In: S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds), Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in postwar Britain (pp. 9–74). London: Routledge. Davis, T. (2002). Theatre beyond borders: Reconﬁguring the artist’s relationship to community in the twenty-ﬁrst century – moving beyond Bantustans. In: R. Una (Ed.), The color of theatre; race, culture, and contemporary performance (pp. 21–26). London: Continuum. Donoso Pareja, M. (2000). Ecuador: Identidad o esquizofrenia. Quito: Eskeltra. Eck, D. (1998). Darsan: Seeing the divine image in India. New York: Columbia. Elam, H., Jr. (2002). Towards a new territory in ‘multicultural’ theatre. In: R. Una (Ed.), The color of theatre; race, culture, and contemporary performance (pp. 91–114). London: Continuum.

272

DANIEL BRYAN

Espinosa Apolo, M. (1999). Duendes, aparecidos, moradas encantadas y otras maravillas: diccionario mitolo´gico popular de la comunidad mestiza ecuatoriana. Quito: Taller de Estudios Andinos. Espinosa Apolo, M. (2000). Los mestizos ecuatorianos. Quito: Tramasocial. Ferguson, J. (1994). The anti-politics machine: ‘‘Development,’’ depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Friedman, J. (1994). Cultural identity and global process. London: Sage. Grotowski, J. (2002). Towards a poor theatre. New York: Routledge. Langer, S. K. (1979). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Harvard. Levi Strauss, C. (1968). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago. Levi Strauss, C. (1979). Myth and meaning. New York: Schoken. Martinez, E. (1997). El Ecuador en la conformacio´n de la identidad cultural americana. Quito: SINAB. Nietzsche, F. (1980). On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life. Indianapolis: Hackett. Proan˜o, L. (1974). Concientizacio´n, evangelizacio´n, polı´tica. Salamanca: Ediciones Sı´ gueme. Ron, A. (1998). Quito: Una ciudad de grafﬁtis. Cuarta Edition, Quito: Editora Luz de America (First printed in 1994). Salgado, G. (2001). Los escenarios de la educacio´n ecuatoriana. In: E. Arellano (Ed.), Problemas criticas de la educacio´n ecuatoriana y alternativas (pp. 11–35). Quito: Abya Yala. Schutte, O. (1993). Cultural identity and social liberation in Latin American thought. Albany: SUNY. Silva, E. (1992). El mito de la ecuatorianidad. Quito: Abya Yala. Suarez Orozco, C. (2004). Formulating identity in a globalized world. In: M. M. Suarez Orozco & D. B. Qin-Hilliard (Eds), Globalization: Culture and education in the new millennium (pp. 173–202). Berkeley: University of California. Suarez Orozco, M. M., & Qin-Hilliard, D. B. (2004). Globalization: Culture and education in the new millennium. Berkeley: University of California. Toscano, H. (1959). El ecuador visto por los extranjeros. Puebla: Jose M. Cajica Jr., SA. Traverso Yepez, M. (1998). La identidad nacional en Ecuador: Un acercamiento psicosocial a la construccio´n nacional. Quito: Abya Yala. Ubidia, A. (1993). Cuento popular ecuatoriano. Quito: Libresa. Una, R. (2002). The color of theatre; race, culture, and contemporary performance. London: Continuum. Velasco, J. (1981). Historia del reino de Quito en la Ame´rica meridional. Quito: Ayacucho.

FROM COSBY’S LIPS AND THROUGH THE MEDIA’S FILTERS: A FRAMING ANALYSIS OF BILL COSBY’S REMARKS ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION AND THE JOURNALISTIC RESPONSE Stephynie C. Perkins and Christine K. Holland I just want to you be as mad as you ought to be (Dr. Bill Cosby, at Howard University’s 50th Anniversary Celebration of Brown v. Board of Education).

INTRODUCTION A few hours before the May 17, 2004 gala to commemorate the legal decision that ended ‘‘separate but equal’’ facilities for black and white U.S. citizens, comedian Bill Cosby heard a radio broadcast that was on his wavelength. As Cosby listened to ‘‘Ask the Chief’’ on May 17, 2004 Washington, DC Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey recounted the number of children who had been the victims of homicide (Schroeder, 2004). A few hours later, Cosby picked up on the discussion with a live audience at Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 273–294 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30015-5

273

274

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Constitution Hall to celebrate the historic verdict of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. During the event, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Howard University acknowledged Cosby for his multimillion dollar contributions to historically black colleges and universities. As Cosby spoke to the black-tie crowd who attended the 2004 celebration, he wove humor and social commentary into a speech that contrasted the promise of the 1954 Brown decision with persistent socio-economic and educational disparities in American society. However, it was Cosby’s statement, ‘‘lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal,’’ (Cosby, 2004) that generated, ‘‘an alternating current of criticism and support’’ (Tucker, 2004) as the story ﬁltered through the media. But what did Bill Cosby really say? Economist and author Dr. Julianne Malveaux (2004), who attended the Brown gala, described her response to Cosby’s speech: People squirmed because his words reﬂected the two Black Americas that hardly ever meet, of the long distance between a black-tie event and inner-city poverty. He referred to ‘‘these people’’ and ‘‘those people’’ at least a half dozen times in his comments, ‘‘these people,’’ not ‘‘my brothers and sisters.’’ In speaking of distance, he captured some of the ambivalence about race, progress, and outcomes in our community. (p. 122)

After The Washington Post recounted excerpts, the controversy spread to other media outlets. Howard University, which hosted the event at Constitution Hall, did not immediately release the transcript (Tucker, 2004). As a result, people who did not attend the event had to rely on the media to tell them what had happened; that ‘‘translation’’ is the focus of this study.

About the Method of Analysis This study used qualitative framing analysis to compare Cosby’s speech with 2 weeks of subsequent media coverage to determine whether the messages were different. In essence, Cosby’s message reached two audiences: the gala attendees and media audiences. This study compares the content of Cosby’s original speech with media accounts of the remarks. The purpose of this study is not to dissect the outcomes of Brown v. Board; other research continues to examine the decision’s economic and educational impact (Borman et al., 2004; Balkin, 2002; Samad, 2005). Neither is the focus a determination of whether Cosby’s comments were

275

From Cosby’s Lips

elitist, classist,1 or comprehensive (Forman, 2005; The Economist, 2005), as other authors have debated. This study seeks to examine qualitatively the ways in which the speech’s meaning was created or altered through news coverage. This is an important question, considering how few people heard the speech for themselves and the ongoing debate ignited by the media coverage. Framing analysis is particularly useful because it exposes manifest text as well as latent meaning. In this instance, it seems to have been the latent message or tone of the media’s reporting that created the controversy.

LITERATURE REVIEW In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted ‘‘separate but equal’’ facilities for black and white citizens that legalized segregation for the next 50 years. In practice, separate was anything but equal. Wright (2004) expressed the innate dichotomy: ‘Separate’ was highly effective in fostering the illusion that both blacks and whites had something to work with, and that neither was deﬁcient in what the other group had available to them. (p. 100)

Wright (2004) described the use of ‘‘equal’’ to describe segregated facilities as ‘‘ludicrous in the sweltering horror of 1896. The U.S. Supreme Court constructed language to legally isolate black people, to essentially abandon them to their own resourcesy’’ (p. 100). Wright (2004) said under the efforts of the leaders in black schools, young men and women were educated in a yculture of learning geared toward intellectual empowerment against an unfriendly worldy . It was education for liberation. What was unequal was the division of resourcesy . What was excellence was the legacy of schools under the control of the black communityy . As a disempowered people confronting an unfriendly world, the transition for blacks from segregation to desegregation got what the plaintiffs wanted but cost them what they had. (p. 105)

The Brown decision was intended to end the disparities in funding, resources and teaching expertize, and its implementation was met with a tide of hostility and violence intended to keep ‘‘the Negro in his place’’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 282). In 1950, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case, schools in 21 states were segregated. The NAACP recruited black families in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and South Carolina to attempt to enroll their children in white public schools. When their

276

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

attempts failed, the NAACP ﬁled class action lawsuits on their behalf (Carriuolo, 2004). As a result, Brown was actually a collection of ﬁve cases.2 The U.S. Supreme Court combined all of the complaints to raise the proﬁle of segregation as a national, rather than Southern, problem. Oliver L. Brown, whose name has become a shorthand reference for the case, was one of 20 plaintiffs from Topeka, KS. His daughter explained that he became involved because ‘‘he knew ﬁrsthand that segregated schools didn’t make sense for his child or anyone else’s’’ (Carriuolo, 2004, p. 22). When the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling on May 17, 1954, the Court decided in favor of the plaintiffs. In part, the unanimous decision said: Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local government. Compulsory school attendance laws and great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. We conclude that in the ﬁled of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. (Brown v. Board, 347 U.S. 483 (1954))

Roy Wilkins, who was then executive secretary of the NAACP, heralded the decision as the ‘‘Second Emancipation,’’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 419). On the 10-year anniversary of the decision, he said: It was the ﬁrst sweeping afﬁrmation by a branch of the Federal Government of the inherent illegality of compulsory segregation. Its impact has been extended far beyond the schoolhouse—to public accommodations, to recreation and health facilities, to transportation and housing, and to votingy . And it has provided a ﬁrm, constitutional basis for the continuing and accelerated struggle to rid the nation of the cancer of racism. (cited in Wilson, 1999, p. 332)

Despite the decision’s federal and international force, some states were slow to integrate; resistance was not limited to the South as de facto desegregation existed across the nation. Segregation persisted in classrooms, and black children lagged behind their white counterparts. The educational gap widened as the children progressed from the ﬁrst to the twelfth grades (Wilson, 1999). More than 50 years after the decision, some educators say that schools remain segregated. Resources continue to be denied to schools that serve African-American children, and the inferior facilities, funding, instruction, and texts continue to be a problem, particularly as white parents – and their tax dollars – ﬂee cities for the suburbs (Carriuolo, 2004; Balkin, 2002). It was in this light of the case’s history and continuing impact that Howard

From Cosby’s Lips

277

University prepared to commemorate the case 50 years after the decision, as a societal, educational, and cultural milepost. Cosby had the pedigree to be the evening’s keynote speaker. Although he is best known as an entertainer, William Cosby, Ed.D., earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. His dissertation explores using Fat Albert, a cartoon character he based on his childhood, as an educational tool. The Cosby Show, the long-running sitcom that earned him the nickname of America’s favorite dad (Watson, 2004) was considered the ideal depiction of the middle-class AfricanAmerican family (Watson, 2005). Cosby has a number of honorary degrees and is a highly regarded speaker frequently tapped to deliver college commencement addresses. Despite Cosby’s critics (Dyson, 2006; Mathis, 2006), others have referred to him as a ‘‘village elder’’ (Black, 2000, p. 16) whose words and observations are revered. He is also considered a credible speaker on the topic of education (The Economist, 2005) although he has been less outspoken about race (Dyson, 2006). It was Cosby’s ﬁnancial dedication to education that was being acknowledged at the Brown banquet.3

Night of the Controversy: Description of the Artifact An announcement posted on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund web site announced the upcoming event: On Monday, May 17, 2004, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), in cooperation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Inc. (NAACP) and Howard University, will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which ended ofﬁcially sanctioned segregation in public schools and ultimately dismantled the Jim Crow system of American apartheid, is considered one of the most important judicial decisions in American history. (NAACP, 2005)

The gala saluted lawyers and plaintiffs from the ﬁve consolidated cases. The event also included tributes to the nine Supreme Court justices who delivered the unanimous Brown decision and to the four living U.S. presidents. The husband-and-wife team of actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee hosted the event. Guests included some of the most inﬂuential artists and African-Americans in the nation. Cosby was one of the honorees. His acceptance speech is the heart of this framing analysis. This study focused on the audience as a key element in rhetoric.

278

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Bitzer’s (1968) theory of the rhetorical situation is important in understanding any speech. Bitzer (1968) deﬁned the rhetorical situation as: a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigency which can only be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the signiﬁcant modiﬁcation of the exigency. (Bitzer, 1968)

Public speaking does not exist in a vacuum. That which a person speaks in public is in response to a situation. The speaker decides to address a problem and proposes a plan to rectify it. The audience consists of the individuals able to modify the exigence, the obstacle, or problem in question. Exigency, audience, and constraints blend in a mutually interdependent system. It is important to note that the situation is not the same as context, as Kuypers (2002) noted: Contexts allow for the general interpretation of utterances; rhetorical situations provide moments for a ‘‘ﬁtting’’ utterance through which modiﬁcation of an exigence may be achieved. (p. 4)

If a speaker’s words are to effect change, they must be spoken by someone whom the audience deems credible, they must address a recognizable problem, and they must resonate with the audience in such a way that inspires them to action.

Speech Acts and the News Lippman (1922) discusses the nature of media’s relationship with the public in construction reality: For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too ﬂeeting for direct acquaintancey . And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it. (p. 11)

In the 21st century, the news is ubiquitous. At any hour, citizens have access to news and information, thanks to the advent of the Internet. Some have suggested that the Internet’s immediacy has not only supplemented traditional print and broadcast news but surpassed it as the source for up-to-the-minute information (The Economist, 1999; Freidman, 2001). The Internet appeals to audiences because of their ability to shape its content to their needs (Grossman, 2000). This suggests that the news is a negotiated, ﬂuid process that has the power to shape how audiences understand events and their context. Speeches are an important source of information; however, reporters do not and cannot report a speech verbatim because they have neither the time

279

From Cosby’s Lips

nor the space to reprint a speech word for word. Reporters relay the essential elements and pare the lesser details into straight or ‘‘hard news’’ stories. Typically, reporters use the inverted pyramid to order hard news. The copy opens with the most interesting or important elements and works toward the least signiﬁcant details. In this way, the story’s organization tells readers what is most important (Shoemaker, 1991). Mencher (2000) provided a textbook description of information reporters should include in their accounts of speeches: identiﬁcation of the speaker; primary point and supporting quotes; the context or circumstances surrounding the speech, listeners’ reactions, and odd or unexpected events. The reporter, then, has to ascertain the speech’s theme or themes, which reporters may have to ask the speaker to clarify if those ideas are unclear. Mencher (2000) explained that if reporters failed to do this, ‘‘those who attended the speech or heard it on radio or television would ﬁnd the story puzzling’’ (p. 375). Funny speeches, Mencher (2000) noted, are particularly difﬁcult to cover because the humor may not translate in the news story.

Framing Analysis This paper uses qualitative framing analysis to discover how Cosby’s remarks were shaped by the media coverage. Framing analysis is the best way to analyze the news stories in this instance because it considers the context of information, latent content, and news processes. Content analysis, on the other hand, only considers a text’s manifest content. Unlike framing, content analysis does not consider the ways in which news gatekeepers add meaning the news stories nor does it provide context; framing considers the factors that create meaning. Frame analysis is a ﬂexible theory that examines the ways in which verbal and printed texts create meaning. Framing analysis is analogous to a picture frame that exposes some elements of a picture while hiding the outer corners of the canvas. The frame’s dimensions, positive and negative spaces help the viewer attach meaning to a picture, just as framing analysis deﬁnes the ways in which a problem is conceptualized and deﬁned. Bateson (1973) originated the concept of framing, and Goffman (1974) advanced the idea as a ‘‘slogan to refer to the examination in these terms of the organization of experience.’’ Gitlin (1980) extended framing analysis to media, explaining ‘‘media frames, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organize the world both for journalists who report it, and in some important degree, for us who rely on their reports’’ (p. 7).

280

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Framing illustrates that perception and understanding can be shaped through a speech or through a news story. Framing involves the selection and the deletion of information, which promotes a particular deﬁnition, interpretation, or evaluation, or as Entman (1993) suggested, ‘‘frames diagnose, evaluate, and prescribe’’ (p. 52). Frames exist within the writer’s perception, the text he or she crafts, the audience and within culture (Entman, 1993). Framing analysis can be quantitative or qualitative. Qualitatively, framing has the ability to describe the why and how journalists or audiences think about events and the context in which they make those choices. Quantitative framing counts the headlines, subheads, leads, quotes, and graphics (Tankard, 2001) to provide statistical description. However, Reese (2001) said that the explicit, manifest content provides a fraction of a text’s meaning. This suggests that the symbolic elements of vocabulary, theme, syntax, and rhetoric, are equally important to examine to determine how text creates meaning. Pan and Kosicki (2001) and Callaghan and Schnell (2001) suggested that the ability to control how, or whether, ideas are discussed helps shape news and debate, meaning framing can limit or expand an audience’s understanding of an issue. The ability to identify is particularly important when examining news content that purports to deliver an unbiased account.

METHOD The present study examined four types of texts published between May 17 and May 30, 2004. The period was chosen to capture the immediate media coverage of Cosby’s remarks because the time element was so crucial to the audience’s perception of the news event. The researchers examined four texts: the speech Cosby delivered on May 17, Cosby’s public relations response, newspaper coverage of Cosby’s speech, and Cosby’s guest appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show, a nationally syndicated television program. Using four types of text provided multiple perspectives of the journalistic response. Including the televised program added a second perspective to Cosby’s initial remarks. The transcript of Cosby’s speech, provided by his public relations representatives, was downloaded from http://www.eightcitiesmap.com/ transcript_bc.htm in October 2004. The text notes that the transcript was created with audio-to-text software, which may have introduced typographical errors.

281

From Cosby’s Lips

The study examined newspaper articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Post was the ﬁrst paper to publish Cosby’s quotes. The Times, which has a circulation of 1 million, was chosen because it is a nationally respected newspaper of record. It is considered among the ‘‘media elite,’’ its coverage often sets the tone for other publications (Lichter, Rothman, & Richter, 1994). Thirteen articles were published during the speciﬁed time period. Two of the articles were published in the New York Times and 11 in the Washington Post. The analysis also includes a press release published by Cosby’s public relations representatives. The release provided further insight into Cosby’s response to the speech. The following section discusses the frames that emerged in several sites: Cosby’s address, Cosby’s interpretation of his remarks, and in news coverage. Two researchers, trained in framing analysis each, examined the articles’ headlines, cutlines, and photographs before examining the articles’ use of key phrases, labels, nicknames, quotes, and sources. These elements helped deﬁne the dimension and scope of the frames. As the articles and press releases were examined, a number of frames emerged slightly different, sometimes conﬂicting frames emerged in the text of Cosby’s speech and the media’s interpretation of it. Each frame offers a slightly different perspective. It can be argued, however, that the frames created in the media’s news coverage had the most impact, given their broad audience.

RESULTS Frames within Cosby’s Speech The audience members who heard Cosby’s words for themselves was a select group that attended the black-tie affair. The audience was further limited by Howard University’s decision to withhold audio or videotapes of the speech. Based on the transcripts, several frames emerged in Cosby’s address, including humor, debt, parenting, and ‘‘us vs. them.’’ The frames emerged from Cosby’s use of tone and language and the topics he discussed. The ﬁrst frame, humor, laced Cosby’s entire address. Cosby is a wellknown comedian whose style of delivery is often spoofed by other comics. On the night of the Brown gala, Cosby used his wit to entertain the audience in his after-dinner speech. Cosby began his address with a joke that bridged the occasion and his receipt of an award. Throughout the evening, Cosby

282

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

used witticisms, puns, mimicry, and anecdotes to make his point, as the following example illustrates. Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is the end of the evening, so to speak. I heard a prize ﬁght manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, ‘‘David, listen to me. It’s not what he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing’’ (laughter). y Ladies and gentlemen, these people sat, they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools. We have ﬁfty percent dropout. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband (clapping).

Debt Initially, the Brown decision was about access to education; however, it became a watershed event by helping to eliminate discrimination in transportation, housing, and many other areas of U.S. society. Similarly, the decision’s golden anniversary seemed to have opened the door for Cosby to make his comments. The evening provided the reason for examining the state of black America, and it was in this context that Cosby continually measured African-Americans’ progress. This frame characterized the sacriﬁce and responsibility associated with the Brown decision. Cosby characterized pre-Brown activists as living sacriﬁces, using phrases such as ‘‘these people sat, they opened the doors, they gave us the right.’’ He also characterized them as people who ‘‘marched and were hit in the face with rocks and punched to get an education.’’ Cosby contrasted their actions to current generations, many of whom he described as having discarded education, returning frequently to the phrases ‘‘50 percent drop out rate’’ in his speech. Cosby speciﬁcally spoke of the debt African-Americans in the year 2000 owed their ancestors. More speciﬁcally, the frame suggested that many African-Americans had not paid their debts to older generations because they had failed to live up to the promise of better education. In the following example, Cosby invoked the names of civil rights ﬁghters, such as Dr. Kenneth Clark, a sociologist whose 1947 study of dolls illustrated the impact of racism on children. I’m looking and I see a man named Kenneth Clark. y I have to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen yourselves.

283

From Cosby’s Lips

Clark’s work indicated that children saw themselves as inferior to white youngsters. His ﬁndings were cited in the Brown decision. Cosby’s implication was that the psyche of post-Brown generations was at stake, and that the generation owed it to themselves and to society to overcome the negative impact of racism. [Fifty] percent dropout rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by ﬁve, six different men. This frame described a generation that was in arrears, owing a large payment to society and to ancestors who had sacriﬁced their energy and their lives. The frame seemed to characterize African Americans, especially the poor, as ungrateful.

Parenting Parenting was a dominant frame of Cosby’s speech. He used the words ‘‘parent,’’ ‘‘parents,’’ and ‘‘parenting’’ 14 times, linking parenting to selfesteem, attire, language skills, sexual mores, literacy and education, and selfcontrol. Children who lacked oversight, Cosby said, were more likely to wind up in trouble and without a sense of the past or perspective. And something called parenting said if you get caught with (a slice of stolen pound cake), you’re going to embarrass your mother. Not you’re going to get your butt kicked. No. You’re going to embarrass your mother. You’re going to embarrass your family.

This frame, perhaps more than any other, seemed to point out a particular source of blame for problems within the African-American community. Without vigilant parents, Cosby seemed to say, communities unravel. The focus on parenting turned the blame inward on parents and their children rather than external forces, such as institutional racism or societal inequities; at the same time, this could also be empowering by suggesting that individuals have the ability, at the familial level, to change their fortunes.

Us vs. Them This frame contrasted Cosby’s upbringing to current practices, which seemed to distance Cosby from others in the African-American community. He used time to distinguish groups of people who think, believe, and behave as he does as ‘‘us.’’ He identiﬁed ‘‘them’’ as a separate group that has abrogated its responsibilities. In addition to time, Cosby used economic,

284

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

ideological, and racial differences as markers of distance. In the following excerpt, Cosby frames ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ as people separated by racial and ideological gulfs that could be bridged with activism. In some instances, as the following example illustrates, Cosby refers to people who are not like him as ‘‘it.’’ Brown versus Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner. It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. y Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.

The effect of Cosby’s words was distancing and dehumanizing the people about whom he was speaking. Whether this separation reﬂects elitism or classism is unclear; the overall impact, however, emphasizes a perceived gulf in thought, action, and empathy between Cosby and the people he referenced.

Audience Response In addition to reprinting Cosby’s words on the night of the gala, the transcription includes parenthetical expressions indicating the audience’s response. These notations served as frames because they provided a written account of the audience’s nonverbal responses. For example, there are several instances in which the word laughter was inserted in the text and surrounded by parentheses. Without a videotape or an audiotape, it would otherwise be impossible to determine whether the remarks were applauded or derided. The inserted remarks seem to directly contradict the media’s suggestion that the audience ‘‘sat stone-faced.’’ This technique frames the audience as supportive, not adversarial. The transcript also includes a sentence that appears to have been added after the speech. In that addendum, Cosby’s responds to his initial remarks about the names that some African-American parents bestow upon their children and the youngsters’ attire. Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack y and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.

285

From Cosby’s Lips

The next sentence of the text is in parentheses, indicating that it was added after the speech. The sentence seems to be a clariﬁcation. It creates a frame because it helped to explain Cosby’s remarks after the speech was criticized. When we give these kinds of names to our children, we give them the strength and inspiration in the meaning of those names. What’s the point of giving them strong names if there is not parenting and values backing it up.

Cosby Frames His Remarks In addition to the transcript, Cosby’s public relations representatives issued a press release, and Cosby contacted several journalists to clarify his statements. He spoke to Washington Post writer Hamil R. Harris, appeared on Tavis Smiley’s nationally syndicated television program, and talked to journalists at the New York Times. Cosby called Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for an hour-long ‘‘discussion’’ to further explain his position, and he talked for two hours to the Amsterdam News. In an excerpt from that conversation, Cosby said: ‘‘I’m tired, and I’m mad as hell,’’ said Cosby who has been making the rounds recently with reporters, defending his tough talk that has drawn criticism recently from some prominent Black leaders. ‘‘I really don’t care if people don’t like what I’m saying,’’ said Cosby, speaking from Philadelphia, where he was born and raised. ‘‘We have to march on our own neighborhoods. That is our space.’’

Cosby’s remarks, which were meant to clarify, also seemed to abate his sharp commentary.

Overview of Frames in Media Coverage Most of the media frames were generated by the Washington Post, which covered the story in the gossip columns, news, opinion pieces, and style. Both of the articles in the Times were published in the news section, and they seemed to repeat the Post’s comments. The early frames in the newspaper coverage of the Cosby speech discussed the Brown decision in terms such as a legacy, describing it as a ‘‘glittering cloud,’’ ‘‘titans of civil rights,’’ civil rights ‘‘war horses,’’ ‘‘pioneers’’ and legends, their recollections as ‘‘mighty remembrances.’’ The coverage also

286

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

described Brown v. Board as ‘‘sheer magic’’ and the opportunities it provided to further education and helping African-Americans reach the ‘‘upper echelons of Wall Street.’’ One description also called the decision a blow to ‘‘American apartheid.’’ Early coverage focused on the gala itself and offered no speciﬁcs about Cosby’s speech. Gradually, however, the coverage changed, as reporters noted. The ﬁrst frame in the news coverage is the media’s coverage of itself. The other frames that emerged included a characterization of Cosby, his comments, and reaction to his speech.

Frames in Newspaper Coverage: Meta reaction/Reﬂexive This reﬂexive frame revealed the way in which journalists covered the story. Reporters exposed their thoughts and the processes that drove news coverage. Washington Post writer Hamil R. Harris, for example, noted that the coverage was uneven. The controversy took a few days to brew in public opinion because the diffusion of information was slow, as he noted. Cosby’s speech, delivered late on May 17, received scant press attention at ﬁrst. y As word of his comments spread, so did the reaction-on talk radio, in churches and high schools and among law enforcement ofﬁcials and black leaders. (Washington Post, May 26, 2004, Hamil R. Harris.)

The Washington Post provided context for what happened the night of the speech. In the following excerpt, Washington Post gossip columnist Richard Leiby explained to his readers: ‘‘We published brief excerpts on his cultural critique’’ (Washington Post, May 23, 2004, D3). On May 24, Post writer Jabari Asim said The Washington Post reported that Cosby unleashed a diatribe against ‘‘the lower economic people’’ who, in his estimation, ‘‘are not holding up their end of their deal’’.

This illustrates that the Post recounted portions of what happened. The excerpts did not contain the full context of quotes, as the following examples of omissions show: Hamil Harris reports that Cosby also turned his wrath to ‘‘the incarcerated,’’ saying: These people are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing CocaCola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake. And then we run out and are outraged, [saying] ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand (Washington Post, May 19, 2004)?

From Cosby’s Lips

287

The excerpt that Harris quoted did not include the next line from the speech, and this changes the meaning of Cosby’s words: I wanted a piece of pound cake just as much as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if [you] get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother. Not you’re going to get your butt kicked. No. You’re going to embarrass your mother. You’re going to embarrass your family. (Text of Cosby’s speech.)

As a result, the comments were inﬂammatory. And in another example, the Post’s Harris tells readers about reaction to the speech: ‘‘Mfume did part company with Cosby when he said that people from ‘lower socioeconomic groups have not kept their end of the deal when it came to realizing the promise of Brown.’ y‘It’s not just the lower socio-economic groups, it’s the new black millionaires, the new wealthy as well,’ Mfume said. We all need to take more responsibility, not just poor people.’’ (Washington Post, May 26, 2004, Hamil R. Harris)

Harris’ account does not include the portion of the speech in which Cosby says: Basketball players, multi-millionaires can’t write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires, can’t read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown v. Board of Education, where are we today? It’s there. They paved the way. What did we do with it? The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing.

By omitting this part of the speech, the news coverage seems to unfairly focus attention on lower-economic African-Americans. In this instance the frame is created by the omission of information. Cosby the Man This frame within the media coverage focused on Cosby as a person and the seeming contradictions between his words and his actions. The juxtaposition seemed to suggest that Cosby’s actions were hypocritical. Coverage reﬂected mixed opinion. Sample adjectives included ‘‘comedian,’’ and ‘‘philanthropist,’’ phrases included ‘‘genial father,’’ ‘‘whose own beloved son, Ennis, was slain by a racist Ukrainian immigrant – still suffers’’ and ‘‘Jell-O spokesman,’’ ‘‘angry preacher.’’ More familiar references simply called Cosby ‘‘The Cos.’’ Negative characterization included ‘‘elitist,’’ ‘‘out-of-touch,’’ and ‘‘unrepentant.’’ Other columnists suggested that Cosby’s statements had ‘‘betrayed the African-American community.’’

288

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Ridicule This frame in the media’s coverage discussed Cosby’s use of humor; however, it reﬂected the darker connotations of ridicule. For example, one headline said, ‘‘Cosby’s saying the darndest things.’’ A thumbnail photograph of Cosby before the speech showed a smiling Cosby, but the caption said, ‘‘Ready to let off steam.’’ The frame was also deﬁned by phrases such as ‘‘turned his wrath,’’ and Cosby’s ‘‘candor on full display.’’ Other writers said that Cosby’s comments ‘‘mocked’’ lower income AfricanAmericans. Other comments questioned Cosby’s timing, which is so critical in comedy, and suggested that Cosby should not have made his remarks at such a ‘‘glittering’’ gala. Washington Post columnist Donna Britt said Cosby’s speech ‘‘despite cruelly oversimplifying things,’’ had a point. Britt repeated the quotes often used in the media’s coverage to underscore her point. Her use of the nickname ‘‘The Cos,’’ also had the effect of delegitimizing Cosby’s words. The comic was apparently less hilarious earlier this month when, at a Brown v. Board of Education celebration in Washington, he castigated ‘‘lower-economic people’’ – meaning poor blacks – for ‘‘buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ y Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads.’’y Then Cos lambasted ‘‘the incarcerated’’ who aren’t ‘‘political criminals.’’ y In fact, Cosby, despite cruelly oversimplifying things – had a point. So did NAACP Legal Defense Fund head Theodore Shaw, who reminded the audience that the black community’s problems aren’t all self-inﬂicted. Cosby’s rant reﬂected a frustration felt by many hardworking, accomplished black folks about some of their less successful brothers and sisters. (Washington Post, May 30, 2004)

Conﬂicted Responses This frame in the media’s coverage described the audience’s response to Cosby’s speech as lukewarm. NAACP representatives were described as ‘‘stone faced,’’ ‘‘none of whom seemed to be amused in the slightest,’’ as they ‘‘sat with their jaws tight’’ after Cosby’s remarks. The frame is reﬂected in the following quote from Joe Madison, a talk show host moderator on WOL-AM in Lanham, Maryland: ‘‘Cosby went overboard when he absolved white America and the government of any responsibility for the ills of the poor black community,’’ Madison said. ‘‘He made it seem

289

From Cosby’s Lips

like the problems affecting black people in the community are pathological. You can’t paint the poor black community with a broad brush.’’ (Washington Post, May 26, 2004, Hamil R. Harris)

Theodore M. Shaw, the head of the Legal Defense and Education Fund, is one of the people whom Leiby (Washington Post, May 19, 2004) described as coming to the podium ‘‘stone faced’’ after Cosby’s remarks. In an opinion piece he wrote for the Post, Shaw provided his perspective in his own words: Bill Cosby is a beloved icon. So it gave me no pleasure to follow him to the state at Constitution Hall on May 17, the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, after listening to his remarks. y I knew even before I reached the stage, that Cosby’s comments would be hijacked by those who pretend that racism is no longer an issue and who view poor black people with disdain. So departing from my own prepared remarks, I embraced the notion of personal responsibility, at the same time calling attention to problems faced by African Americans that are not self-inﬂicted. (Washington Post, May 27, 2004)

Shaw’s use of the word ‘‘hijacked’’ suggests the possibility that others would take Cosby’s words and use them for their own purposes without considering or revealing their full context. Cosby’s meaning would be lost in translation. He acknowledged Cosby’s emphasis on parenting, but he also emphasized the need to acknowledge the continuing impact of systemic racism on African-American communities. As a result, this frame in the media’s coverage suggested that the audience was unsure about how to respond to Cosby’s words. The frame seemed to suggest that Cosby’s words put the audience in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide whether to stone him or applaud him.

DISCUSSION If the rhetorical analysis of Cosby’s speech is considered from the traditional Aristotelian standards, it is clear, some who heard the speech did not agree with his logical arguments, nor did they agree with his ethical decisions to use speciﬁc forms of support to illustrate his ideas. However, the public outcry following Bill Cosby’s remarks at the gala commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education at Howard University May 17, 2004 marks the speech as a success. He deﬁnitely aroused his audience’s emotions. From Bitzer’s perspective, the complex between the speaker, the audience, and the constraints surrounding the rhetorical situation (when Bill Cosby

290

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

address the audience at Constitution Hall that Monday in May 2004), had its ‘‘exigence’’ when Cosby heard Washington D. C. Police Chief, Charles H. Ramsey making a plea for more parental involvement during a radio broadcast earlier in the day (Reel, 2004). I was already on that wavelength, but what clicked was that there was another voice of authority—and that is the chief of police—who was saying, ‘‘our job is to arrest people, and your children should not be out at a certain hour, ’’ Cosby said to Ramsey on a radio broadcast September 2, 2004, as they discussed the controversy that arose from Cosby’s comments in May.

Cosby’s speech gained its signiﬁcance in light of the weight of the occasion, where it occurred, and the audience. This was a gala celebration of the watershed Supreme Court decision that changed the face of the American educational system. The media’s coverage seems to have missed the substance of the speech, focusing instead on the provocative sound bites. Without explaining the context of Cosby’s words, the quotes took on a life of their own; however, this emphasis on the quote is consistent with the textbook coverage of a speech. The sound bites did not convey the full context of Cosby’s words. For example, there were notable omissions concerning Cosby’s charge to millionaires and celebrities who, despite their wealth and education, had failed in their responsibilities to themselves and to the children who look to them as role models. The media’s sound bites and quotes were taken from the ﬁrst few minutes of the speech; the comments about athletes came in the closing. Whether reporters were present at the gala or if they stayed for the entire speech is unclear; what is clear is that by repeating the same quotes, coverage of Cosby’s speech was limited. The frames in Cosby’s speech were noticeably different from the media coverage. Whereas Cosby’s address contained humor, the tone came across much darker as sarcasm or separatist in the media’s coverage. Further, there was as much emphasis on Cosby’s persona as there was on the substance of the speech. This seems to suggest that the source, in some cases, carries more weight in the media’s coverage as the source’s words. Cosby is not alone in his lament about the overall conditions within the African-American community. Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of Oliver L. Brown, is now an educator also sees a decline in interest in education. Her warnings are just as stern, but despite her family’s legacy, her words have not attracted as much attention: African-Americans have traditionally placed a high value on education. During slavery education was a down payment on freedom; after the Civil War, education was a down

291

From Cosby’s Lips

payment on opportunityy. However, popular culture does not reward academic achievement. Pop culture ﬂaunts the success of athletes and entertainers but neglects to send the messages to youngsters that success in these areas is not attainable for the average person. Access to success is still coveted by African-Americans but not necessarily through education. (Carriuolo, 2004, p. 26)

Cosby frequently speaks on convocations and graduations, and on many of those occasions, he has urged audiences to take responsibility for their actions. It was in the context of the celebration (black-tie gala, esteemed audience, landmark case) that Cosby’s words drew heated criticism. Cosby, however, also seemed to recognize his contribution to the controversy because he took the extra step of clarifying his statements to members of the media. His statements attempted to provide context missing from the initial speech. It is unclear whether Cosby would have gone so far without the controversy, and it is unclear whether the media would have highlighted his statements in the context of another event. In this instance, it seems that the exigence in Cosby’s speech, combined with the media coverage and public’s response generated a difﬁcult painful discussion about the ongoing disparities that continue to keep American communities economically, racially, and ﬁscally segregated. In this instance, framing analysis shows the media’s ability to shape how people, who did not attend the speech, learned about Cosby’s address. The context and depth were shaped by the media’s media processes, some of which prevented reporters from providing the full context of Cosby’s charge. These limitations seem to have been multiplied as the story was repeated in the media. Framing analysis also illuminates Cosby’s attempts to use public relations to control the message after it had been reported. Nevertheless, Cosby’s public appearances and press releases did not receive the same intense media coverage as his initial speech, once again pointing out the media’s ability to frame messages.

FUTURE STUDY Later studies might compare meaning from the initial coverage of Cosby’s speech to subsequent messages to determine if the frames in the media coverage changed, especially in light of Cosby’s community forums, which he initiated in 2006. This study did not attempt to isolate other factors in coverage, such as celebrity or racism. Other studies might also examine the more speciﬁc implications of race by comparing coverage in mainstream newspapers to coverage in African-American newspapers, particularly since

292

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Cosby suggested there were differences in black and mainstream papers (Kendall, 2004).4 Additional studies might also examine the combined impact of Cosby’s celebrity and race on news coverage.

NOTES 1. The Black Scholar devoted an issue to discussing various aspects of the Cosby debate. 2. The other four cases included Briggs v. Elliot, a South Carolina case; Boling v. Sharpe from the District of Columbia; Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County; and Gebhart v. Belton from Delaware. 3. Cosby and his wife, Camille, have given millions to institutions of higher learning. Their $20 million gift to Atlanta’s Spelman College in 1989 was the largest single donation ever given to a historically black college or university. (Johnson, 1989). The Cosbys’ philanthropy is ongoing. In 2006, Cosby gave $3 million to the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The donation was the single largest in that school’s history (Gordon, 2006). 4. Cosby told NPR commentator Tavis Smiley, ‘‘It was the white man who got the word from somebody who was there, who called the white man, who put it in the white paper, which is called the Washington Post.’’

REFERENCES Balkin, J. M. (2002). Would African Americans have been better off without Brown v. Board of Education? The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Spring, (35), 102–105. Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an ecology of mind. London: Paladin. Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, January(1), 1–14. Black, R. (2000). Where did we go wrong? Bill Cosby and the anxiety of communal responsibility. The Black Scholar, 34(4), 16–20. Borman, K. M., Eitle, T. M., Michael, D., Eitle, D. J., Lee, R., Johnson, L., Cobb-Roberts, D., Dorn, S., & Shircliffe, B. (2004). Accountability in a post desegregation era: The continuing signiﬁcance of racial segregation in Florida’s schools. American Educational Research Journal, 41(3), 605–631. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Callaghan, K., & Schnell, F. (2001). Assessing the democratic debate: How the news media frame elite police discourse. Political Communication, 18, 183–212. Carriuolo, N. E. (2004). 50 years after Brown v. the Board of Education: An interview with Cheryl Brown Henderson. Journal of Developmental Education, 27(3), 20–27. Cosby, W. (2004). Dr. Bill Cosby speaks. Retrieved September 30, 2004, from http:// www.eightcitiesmap.com/transcript_bc.htm Dyson, M. E. (2006, July 21). The injustice Bill Cosby won’t see. The Washington Post, A 17.

From Cosby’s Lips

293

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clariﬁcation of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. Forman, J. (2005). Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture: From Martin Luther King to Bill Cosby: Race and class in the twenty-ﬁrst century. Villanova Law Review, 50, 213. Freidman, M. (2001). Internet now leads as source of breaking news. Computing Canada, 27(22), 15. Gitlin, T. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, E. (2006, June 16) Cosby makes $3 million gift to Morehouse. News and Notes with Ed Gordon. National Public Radio. Grossman, L. (2000). The land of 1,000 voices. Time Magazine, 156(12), 51. Johnson, R. E. (1989, May 1). Bill and Camille Cosby: First family of philanthropy; $20 million gift to Spelman is largest ever in history of Black institutions. Kendall, N. (Executive Producer). (2004, May 26) Tavis Smiley Show [television broadcast]. transcript. Retrieved June 16, 2004, from http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley /archive20040526.html Kuypers, J. A. (2002). Press bias and politics: How the media frame controversial issues. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lichter, S. R., Rothman, S., & Richter, L. S. (1994). The media elite. In: R. Davis (Ed.), Politics and the media (pp. 83–102). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lippman, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York, NY: The Free Press. Malveaux, J. (2004). How long? Cosby, Brown and racial progress. Black Issues in Higher Education, 21(9), 122. Mathis, D. (2006, June 30). Bill Cosby vs. Cliff Huxtable. News and Notes with Ed Gordon. National Public Radio. Mencher, M. (2000). News Reporting and Writing. McGraw Hill: New York. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc. (2005). Recent events. Retrieved March 7, 2005, from http://www.naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article¼287 Pan, Z., & Kosicki, G. M. (2001). Framing as a strategic action in public deliverance. In: S. D. Reese, O. H. Gandy, Jr. & A. E. Grant (Eds), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 35–65). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Reel, M. (2004, September 3). Radio call-in guest Cosby has ally in Ramsey: D.C. police chief agrees ‘One hundred percent’ with entertainer’s critiques of some blacks. The Washington Post, B06. Reese, S. D. (2001). Prologue – Framing public life: A bridging model for media research. In: S. D. Reese, O. H. Gandy, Jr. & A. E. Grant (Eds), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Samad, A. A. (2005). 50 years after Brown: the state of black equality in America. Los Angeles, CA: Kabili Press, Inc. Schroeder, A. (2004, August 5) Names and faces. The Washington Post. Shoemaker, P. (1991). Gatekeeping. Communication Concept Series, Vol. 3. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Special Article: Newspapers and the Internet: Caught in the web (July 17, 1999). The Economist, 352(8128), 17–19.

294

STEPHYNIE C. PERKINS AND CHRISTINE K. HOLLAND

Tankard, J. W. (2001). The empirical approach to the study of media framing. In: S. D. Reese, O. H. Gandy, Jr. & A. E. Grant (Eds), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. The Cosby Show, Lexington (2004, July 10) The Economist (U. S. edn.). Retrieved February 7, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd¼ true&risb¼21_T3886151202&format¼GNBFI&sort¼BOOLEAN&start DocNo¼1&results UrlKey¼29_T3886151206&cisb¼22_T3886151205&treeMax¼true&treeWidth¼0&csi¼7955 &docNo¼2 Tucker, C. (May 26, 2004). Bill Cosby’s speech: His words sting because the truth hurts. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved May 30, 2004, from http://www.ajc.com/today/content/ epaper/editions/today/opininion_044b14e5d4b631110072.html Watson, J. (2004). Cosby uproar. Amsterdam News. Retreived September 17, 2004, from www.amsterdamnews.org/News/article/article.asp?NewsID¼43930&ID¼4 Watson, M. A. (2005). With a nod to Cosby, the black family channel steps up to the plate. Television Quarterly, 35(3/4), 4–7. Wilson, S. (1999). In search of democracy: The NAACP writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (19207–1977). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wright, R. L. (2004). The language. Exploring the hidden meanings in Plessy and Brown. In: The editors of black issues in higher education with J. Anderson and D. N. Byrne (Eds), The unﬁnished agenda of Brown v. Board of Education. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

RECONSTRUCTING RELATIONSHIPS IN THE CLASSROOM: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC TALE OF LEARNING Barbara J. Jago ABSTRACT This autoethnography considers the role of human relationships in the educational process. Approaching learning as a transformational process rooted in human experience and interaction, I explore the central role of emotion in learning relationships. Through an analysis of a learnable moment experienced in a relational communication course on language, I theorize new ways of ‘‘doing’’ learning relationships.

I’m trying to learn how to live, to have the speaking-to extend beyond the moment’s word, to act so as to change the unjust circumstances that keep us from being able to speak to each other; I’m trying to get a little closer to the longed-for but unrealized world, where we each are able to live, but not trying to make someone less than us, not by someone else’s blood or pain: yes, that’s what I’m trying to do with my living now. Pratt (1984), ‘‘Identity: Skin Blood Heart,’’ p. 13.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 295–323 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30016-7

295

296

BARBARA J. JAGO

SENIOR YEAR: 1980–1981 I move through my ﬁnal year at Smith College with an incurable case of senioritis. My ﬁrst ‘‘real’’ boyfriend, Andy, lives in Chicago. When we aren’t traversing the country on weekend visits, we talk on the phone, lost in some hormonal fantasy. I share an apartment with ﬁve Smith women, and we spend our days smoking, drinking, eating, watching television, and just hanging out. School lingers in the background of daily life. So in the late fall of 1980, when my major advisor, Professor H, informs me I need a course called the ‘‘History of Anthropological Theory’’ to graduate, his words hang in the air between us like a mushroom cloud. I offer no response so he repeats himself. ‘‘The course isn’t being offered this spring and you can’t graduate without it,’’ he says. Two words seep into my brain: ‘‘Can’t graduate.’’ Immediately, panic constricts my breathing and my eyes ﬂy wide open in sheer terror. ‘‘What?’’ I rub my sweaty palms up and down my blue jeancovered thighs. ‘‘So what do I do? I have to graduate,’’ I plead. ‘‘Well,’’ he says, painfully articulating the words, ‘‘I suppose we could do a tutorial to fulﬁll the requirement.’’ He doesn’t even try to smile. ‘‘Ok,’’ I mutter. As expected, the tutorial is horrendous. Every week I read some wretched book I can’t begin to fathom, and then panic in anticipation of my threehour meeting with Professor H. Gregory Bateson, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ruth Benedict – the ideas these anthropological icons discuss seem so far removed from my life. I sit for endless hours in Professor H’s cavernous, musty ofﬁce, silently listening to him recite the overwhelmingly dull history of anthropological theory, frozen in this inept student self, feeling dumber with each passing week. I have no insightful comments to offer, no answers to his probing questions. My papers are horribly written. I have nightmares about failing. This is not what a tutorial is supposed to be. There is no easy rapport, no give and take of ideas, and no mentoring relationship. There is just this ceaseless feeling of failure. Finally, with graduation only 4 weeks away, thinking I have almost made it, I hear the dreadful words: ‘‘What are you going to write your ﬁnal paper about?’’ We never discussed a ﬁnal paper. More tongue-tied than usual, I struggle to form words: ‘‘Final paper?’’ I squeak. Professor H glares at me, shakes his head, and repeats himself with emphasis: ‘‘Yes, your ﬁnal paper.’’

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

297

If he didn’t see me as the dumbest person on the planet before, he certainly does now. My future ﬂashes in a cranial slide show: senior week, graduation, moving to Chicago to live with Andy. There is no ﬁnal paper in sight. Then in a moment of sheer anger or desperation or just plain old fear, my brain begins to twist, to plan, to plot. Eyebrows raised and eyes shifting from side to side, I lean toward Professor H, just slightly. ‘‘If I don’t write this paper,’’ I say as gently as possible, trying to summon whatever feminine wiles I possess, ‘‘will I still pass the course?’’ This time he doesn’t hide his disgust. ‘‘Yes,’’ he whines, ‘‘you will pass.’’ ‘‘Ok. Then I don’t want to write a ﬁnal paper. Thank you.’’ These are the last words we exchange. Not until I begin my doctoral work in communication do I realize how much I would have loved those readings if only I could have gotten past that morass of emotion making it impossible for Professor H and me to be fully present to one another. I suspect both of us were angry about having to suffer this trial by anthropological theory every week because the damn course wasn’t being offered, but neither of us said a word. I suspect both of us were afraid I wasn’t smart enough to be successful, but neither of us said a word. I suspect both of us were frustrated because I was not the ideal academic prote´ge´, but neither of us said a word. Professor H and I never talked about what went on between us during those weekly three-hour torture sessions. We never really engaged one another beyond the surface considerations of anthropological theory. We never really developed a deep and satisfying learning relationship. We were too busy following the canonical story of learning with its archaic rules about relationships and emotion.

FEBRUARY 2005 My life has been spent in pursuit of learning. After graduating at the top of my boarding school class, I earned a B.A. in anthropology from Smith College, two Master’s degrees: one in cinema studies from New York University (NYU) and another in secondary social science education from the University of South Florida (USF), and a Ph.D. in communication from USF. During my doctoral program, I began teaching relational communication to undergraduates, both in conventional classrooms and in a learning community. In 1998, doctorate in hand, I was hired as an assistant

298

BARBARA J. JAGO

professor by the University of New Hampshire at Manchester and have been teaching relational communication here ever since. So I am I guess you can say, a ‘‘professional learner.’’ In my daily life, both as a relational communication teacher and researcher, learning is central to my endeavors. I consider myself to be a lifelong learner and hope to foster that quality in my students. I use the term ‘‘professional’’ because both my training and my experience in education make me if not quite an expert, then certainly knowledgeable and practiced in the art of learning, most notably learning about relational communication. I use the term ‘‘learner’’ because although I have spent many hours in the classroom cast, by traditional academic culture, in the seemly separate roles of student and teacher, my experience across these roles falls more inclusively under the heading of learner. In addition, my ongoing autoethnographic research about identity and emotion is rooted in an insatiable desire to learn more about human communication. Theorizing myself as a learner, I am on more equal footing with my students. This is especially true in the relational communication classroom where the subject matter makes us all experts about our own personal stories. Contrary to the canonical story of learning, with its teacher-abovestudent hierarchy, I have come to believe that I have as much to learn from my students as they have to learn from me, and from one another. Following Paulo Freire, I believe: the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire, 1970, p. 80)

After all, we seek the same end: improving our lives and the world in which we live. In this way, learning becomes what McNamee and Gergen (1999, p. 13) would call the ‘‘coordinated actions’’ of participants in a process of ‘‘conjoint relations.’’ In this autoethnography, I utilize emotional introspection (Ellis, 1991) to craft and share stories of my lived emotional experience as a professional learner. In addition, I layer (Ronai, 1995) these personal accounts of my learning experiences with analytical discussions of pedagogical theory and practice. In particular, I focus on the ways in which the social construction of emotion (Gergen, 1999) in educational settings has informed – and sometimes deformed – my learning and the learning of others, and offer some suggestions for how we might more productively reconstruct emotion in our pedagogical relational practices. In sum, I hope to reconstruct the canonical story of learning in higher education.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

299

From a social constructionist perspective, I understand emotion ‘‘not as a feature of our biological make-up, a constitutional urge that drives our actions, but as a component of cultural life’’ (Gergen, 1999, p. 109). Emotions are culturally constituted social performances or ways of being with others, reﬂected in and constructed through historically grounded ‘‘vocabularies of action’’ (ibid., p. 109) that offer evaluations of particular aspects of social interaction. In this way, emotions function as guidelines for cultural life. Following Hochschild (1983), I want to expose the ‘‘feeling rules’’ that typically accompany us when we enter educational interactions, and the implications those rules have for teaching and learning. My goal is to illuminate the ways in which our culturally constructed emotional responses reﬂect a particular ‘‘culture of learning,’’ a canonical story of learning grounded in beliefs, attitudes, and values about what learning relationships should be and by extension should not be (Bruner, 1996). My inquiry is guided by three key questions: What is the canonical story of learning and learning relationships that dominates higher education? What are the emotion rules attendants to this canonical story? How we might revise the canonical story of learning to enhance the quality of our educational experiences? Though I focus on learning about relational communication in higher education, I include experiences that range across disciplinary contexts and grade levels. As you witness my story (Boler, 1999), I hope you will be encouraged to critically examine your own emotional experiences with learning, your own learning relationships, and in doing so help me to create a more holistic conversation about how to successfully reform the ways we do learning together.

OCTOBER 2004 I teach and conduct research in relational communication. As an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, relational communication deﬁes simple categorization. In my work, I draw on theoretical and methodological resources from a vast array of disciplines – most notably psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, history, English, and art– in an effort to understand and improve upon the ways in which we communicate with one another in our intimate relationships, family relationships, workplace interactions, community relationships, and global exchanges. At the center of my efforts is the belief that communication is our most signiﬁcant human endeavor. As I tell my students: ‘‘The way we talk about the world matters.’’

300

BARBARA J. JAGO

Why is relational communication such a vital area of concern in the study of human experience? The answer to that question is as simple as it is complex. Human beings are by nature storytellers (Fisher, 1986). We create, maintain, repair, and transform our personal and social realities (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) through the stories that we co-construct with others across a broad range of social, economic, political, and cultural contexts (Bruner, 1990; Coles, 1989). From this perspective, relational communication plays a seminal role in the production and transformation of our personal identities, our close relationships, our social institutions, and our global community. Central to this way of thinking about communication is the concept of change. As a teacher and researcher in relational communication, I believe my ‘‘primary challenge’’ is to help others learn how to successfully participate in the diverse ‘‘range of conversations’’ we experience on a daily basis in our complex and dynamic world, to be open to true engagement and connection with others (Gergen, 1995, p. 34). In narrative terms, this means understanding that through these conversations we author the stories we inhabit (Crites, 1986), and thus through these conversations we have the capacity to reframe or reinterpret the meaning of our experiences, rewriting old stories in new and more satisfying ways (Parry, 1991). In sum, this action-oriented approach to learning necessarily begins and ends with human interaction, and takes as its goal the equitable and just transformation of our relationships, our stories, our lives (Bruner, 1996; Freire, 1970; Gergen, 1995; Hooks, 1994; Mezirow, 2000).

FALL 1975 I am a 13-year-old high school sophomore, one of twelve students in my Algebra I course nervously anticipating a mid-term exam. Arriving in the classroom as I have done countless times before, I sit at my desk in the back of the room, next to the windows overlooking the crumbling tennis courts and towering pine trees. Coach begins to hand out exams. ‘‘Coach,’’ as her name suggests, is a short, stocky woman with a booming voice, commanding presence, and tough demeanor. You don’t mess with Coach. As Dean of Women at The Grier School, my small, all-girls boarding school nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania, Coach is the embodiment of discipline, both academic and social. She is also the best math teacher I have ever had. I love being in her class, feeling safe in the logical, unemotional world of equations and proofs, and she rewards my efforts with perfect grades.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

301

But today’s exam is different. Like always, I know the material inside and out, but for some mysterious reason, as soon as the exam appears on my desk, I choke with panic. I read the instructions: ‘‘Solve the following equations for X’’ but the problems blur on the page. My pencil begins to waver, slipping through my sweaty ﬁngers. My arms begin to shake and then my whole body freezes. I sit like a statue for a moment, hoping the sensations will pass, and then expand my chest with a deep cleansing breath. I glance at the clock above the blackboard. Five minutes have already passed. I am already running out of time. Tick. Tick. Tick. I look at the questions on the page again. They take a familiar form, and I know I know how to answer them. But for some reason, my mind is completely blank; vacant, that is, except for the growing panic. I take more deep breaths. My stomach churns toward my throat. You are such an idiot! The voice in my head screams. With the force of sheer terror, my hand shoots into the air. Coach comes over and leans on my desk. ‘‘I can’t do this!’’ I whisper to her. ‘‘My mind is completely blank. Completely blank!’’ I look up at her, the blue of my eyes consumed by dilated pupils, pleading for help. ‘‘I know the answers, buty.’’ My words drown in the bile rising from my stomach. I am convinced Coach will tell me to keep trying. I hold my breath. Instead, Coach responds with an uncharacteristic sweetness. ‘‘Don’t worry, Barbie,’’ she says. ‘‘I know you know this material. Go back to your room and try to relax. You can take the exam another time. Ok?’’ Racing back to my room, through the maze of long hallways and winding stairs, I worry I am losing my mind. I don’t understand I am having my ﬁrst panic attack, a ﬂat out assault of fear on my defenseless brain. A week later, back to my calm and conﬁdent self, I ace the exam. Coach and I never talk about my ﬁrst learning panic attack. And it is years before I realize how life in boarding school afforded me options for emotional expression and understanding that might not have been available to me in a public school in a teacher–student relationship.

SUMMER 1993 In my late twenties, I decide to become a teacher, to spend my life in the realm of intellectual inquiry, learning and helping others to enhance their knowledge of the world.

302

BARBARA J. JAGO

At ﬁrst, I try teaching at the secondary level. I enroll in the University of South Florida’s secondary social science education program, and simultaneously begin substitute teaching for the Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa. I spend most of my 2 years as a substitute, teaching at Madison Junior High School, an inner city school ﬁlled primarily with lower income and ethnically diverse students and burnt-out teachers. I love the kids. They speak their minds and keep me on my toes. But the day-to-dayness of substituting proves quite stressful so I abandon the classroom for a graduate assistantship in the county’s Testing and Evaluation ofﬁce. Again, I am disappointed. The bureaucracy is overwhelming, the work tedious, and as a result of extended periods of sitting at a desk, I suffer severe back pain. Ultimately, my contract is not renewed. Working at the secondary level teaches me many things about public schools. I learn the story of classroom overcrowding, outdated and biased textbooks, detailed curriculum standards that hinder teachers’ abilities to actually help students learn how to think for themselves. But most important, I learn that my intellect will not be satisﬁed with teaching at the secondary level; I need the challenges offered by higher education. So after completing my M.A. in education, I decide to pursue my Ph.D. in communication so that I can teach at the college level. I think I am headed for a career of the mind. I couldn’t be more wrong. Throughout my M.A. coursework in education, no one ever mentions the central role emotion plays in learning. No one. There is some attention given to how to reduce faculty burn-out and a lot of time spent considering styles of discipline for troubled students. We discuss negative emotion – such as anger and even rage – as something to be evicted from the classroom and positive emotion – such as exhilaration and fervor – as something to be channeled into calmer, more intellectually facilitative emotions like excitement and curiosity, but we never really talk about the ways in which learning is by nature an emotional pursuit, for students and teachers. No one suggests that intellect is intimately tied to emotion (let alone to physicality and spirituality), that we have to make space for all kinds of aspects of the self and of relationship in the classroom if we are to successfully promote learning. No one suggests that there are certain unspoken feeling rules for classroom interaction, a canonical story of learning that might actually be critiqued and transformed to enhance learning relationships. And no one dares to suggest that these feeling rules might somehow be tied to ethnicity, class, gender, age, or any number of other social standpoints. In short, there is little discussion of the whole learner in the relational system we call learning.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

303

DECEMBER 2004 Learning cannot be systematized and replicated like a mathematical formula. While we have a tendency to try to reduce learning to ‘‘information processing,’’ where ‘‘ﬁnite, coded, unambiguous information about the world is inscribed, sorted, stored, collated, retrieved, and generally managed by a computational device’’ (Bruner, 1996, p. 1), the ambiguous and emergent nature of knowledge deﬁes such formal and systematic categorization. Instead, learning is more usefully viewed as a ‘‘cultural process’’ of interpretation, an ongoing collaborative effort to make sense of the everchanging physical and social realities created and inhabited by human beings. In other words, paraphrasing communication theorist Sheila McNamee (2003), I suggest we theorize learning as a relational practice, a ‘‘conversation’’ among teachers and students. What does it mean to say that learning is conversation? To begin, we must ﬁrst consider that learning is the result of our pedagogical efforts to obtain this entity called knowledge. Knowledge is, from a social constructionist perspective, a body of information, a collection of concepts and theories, of stories (Bochner, 1994), which experts agree are meaningful in helping to describe, explain, and even control (some aspect of) the world. These concepts and theories develop and change over time as the experts conduct and share research in an effort to reﬁne their ideas. In other words, knowledge and more speciﬁcally the meanings that constitute knowledge, are the product of social interchange and consensus, of discourse emerging as McNamee (2003, p. 2) says ‘‘in the joint activities of persons in relationship.’’ We might even go so far as to suggest that knowledge itself is a conversation that keeps growing and changing as new ideas are introduced and critiqued, and experts come and go. So, from a constructionist perspective, knowledge becomes something radically different from the canonical notion of knowledge as an essential, stable, and unchanging entity given to students by teachers. So if knowledge is the result of ongoing conversation, shouldn’t we conceptualize learning in the same way? In other words, if knowledge is a collection of discursively constructed meanings, what better way to explore that conversation than by fully participating in it? In this way, knowing is conversing, so learning should be too – both for experts and students. In fact, I might even suggest that knowledge and learning is the same thing. I make this point about learning as conversation because I believe utilizing the metaphor of conversation requires us to acknowledge the central role of emotion talk in learning. Historically, emotion talk has been

304

BARBARA J. JAGO

notably absent from the canonical narrative of learning. Sure, we encourage our students to get excited about learning and we tell them to ask questions when they are confused, but we tend to construct these emotions in very unemotional ways. We want to see students exhibit intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm, and we want to know when they are confused; but we seem to want to move quickly past the realm of feelings – as well as bodies and spirits – on our way to what is considered to be the real space of learning: the mind.1 There is little room for discussion of relentless zeal, deep-seated hostility or anger, and even sexual passion in our classrooms (Hooks, 1994). Throughout our educational careers, we learn to check these so-called debilitative emotions at the classroom door. But it is this emotion talk, I believe, that lies at the core of learning relationships and we must be willing to embrace emotion talk in all of its manifestations if we are to truly transform our selves and others through learning. As researchers who study learning and teachers who utilize that pedagogical scholarship in (and out of) the classroom, we are woefully inept at recognizing and harnessing the power emotion talk has in the learning process (Ingleton, 1999; Schutz & DeCuir, 2002). And as a result, we limit our capacity for the kind of holistic engagement that would enhance our learning relationships, and by extension our social worlds.

JANUARY 2004 Thirty years ago, looking at that Algebra I exam through my 13-year-old eyes, I was paralyzed with fear and angry with myself for being so afraid. And it wouldn’t be the last time. Through high school, college, and graduate school, my personal experience reﬂected the intimate relationship between uneasiness, anxiety, fear, anger, and learning; but I worked hard to keep those disquieting and debilitating emotions at a safe distance from my academic pursuits, and out of my personal learning story. I believed they came from my perfectionist self, from feelings of helplessness and inadequacy in the face of new learning challenges I desperately needed to master. I was afraid my teachers would not like or respect me, that other students would be smarter than me, that someone would ﬁnally ﬁgure out I was an imposter, an idiot hiding behind this well-crafted facade of intelligence and creativity. And I knew I was not alone in these feelings (Salzberger, Williams, & Osborne, 1983). But even equipped with this self-knowledge and some useful strategies for silencing that frightened voice in my head; uneasiness, anxiety, fear, and

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

305

anger followed me all the way through my Ph.D. program and into my life as an assistant professor of Communication Arts seeking tenure. Basically, I internalized the traditional emotion rules attendant to the canonical story of learning and used both surface and deep acting (Hochschild, 1983) to hide my feelings from other students, my teachers, my colleagues, and my self. Then in the spring semester of 2002, while teaching a course in language at UNH-Manchester, I had an experience that completely changed my thinking about the relationship between emotion and learning; an experience that showed me how uneasiness, anxiety, fear, and even anger could actually strengthen our capacity for growth and transformation; an experience that proved to me emotion and intellect (and physicality and spirituality) are intimately bound together in our relationships, our life stories (Andersen & Guerrero, 1998; Goleman, 1995), and thus in learning. This experience prompted me to challenge the canonical story of learning, to reconstruct the feeling rules for learning that now guide my relationships with my students and my self.

APRIL 2002 My stomach knots in anticipation of the annual class visit made by my chair, Gary Goldstein. The Ativan I ingested an hour ago helps to calm my anxiety, but my stomach continues to tighten, my breathing to labor, my heart to pound. I take another slug of Diet Coke, mistakenly believing more caffeine will not erase the calming affects of my medication. Pacing the classroom ﬂoor, I review my class notes, pausing momentarily to look out the open window (with its clearly posted ‘‘Do Not Open’’ sign ﬂapping in the wind) at the beautiful spring day and the water of the Merrimack River rushing to the sea. Students trickle in and I hand them quizzes. A few minutes later Gary walks through the door and ﬁnds a seat at the back of the room. Gary is the Chair of the Natural and Social Sciences Division at UNHManchester where I am in my third full-time year as an assistant professor of Communication Arts. The two college divisions (the other is the Humanities Division) were created, to mimic the departments our commuter campus is too small to have, in large part to create a system for conducting teaching evaluations. This is the third time Gary has visited one of my classes. A psychologist in his 50’s, he maintains the demeanor of the hippie we are all convinced he

306

BARBARA J. JAGO

used to be. Gary is a genuine and caring man, the most non-intimidating person I know. In the past, he has raved about my teaching, especially about my ability to get students involved in discussions. In fact, even Gary gets involved in our conversations during his class visits and I anticipate no exception today. So I really shouldn’t be so nervous. But this is my ﬁrst semester back from a year’s medical leave for major depression and I am eager to reestablish my teaching reputation. I feel strong, but still vulnerable. My performance anxiety is much higher than usual. But I’m not supposed to talk about that. After the students ﬁnish their quizzes, I introduce Gary to the class. ‘‘For those of you who do not know him, this is Dr. Gary Goldstein from the psychology program. He is my boss, and today he is here to evaluate my teaching. So be nice to him!’’ I stand behind a podium poached from a classroom down the hall. This is the only time I have used a podium all semester, hell, probably all year. ‘‘Today we are continuing our discussion of Emily Martin’s book The Woman in the Body (1987),’’ I say, loosening my white-knuckle grip on the podium only long enough to ﬂip through my notes. I deliver a brief interactive lecture summarizing Martin’s critique of the social construction of women’s reproductive health by mainstream medical culture. I look out at the 24 students in my class, the majority of whom are female, in their early twenties, and eager to discuss new ideas. When I ask a question, there is no shortage of hands waving in the air. But over the course of the semester a small clique has formed on the left side of the room. I am having difﬁculty reading their sporadic contributions to class discussions, their subterranean talk, and their silences. I keep trying to engage them, making eye contact, smiling, and asking them pointed questions, but my efforts continue to fall short. I worry they aren’t learning; I worry their behavior will negatively affect my evaluation; I worry they don’t like me. The right side of the room feels open to the ideas we have discussed, engaged, friendly. ‘‘Martin argues,’’ I explain, ‘‘that women lack an image of body wholeness. She claims this arises, at least in part, from the medicalization of the body, the construction of the body and its processes in medical discourse. What metaphor does Martin argue is generally used by the medical community to characterize childbirth?’’ Hands wave in the air and I call on the ever-eager Carol to answer. ‘‘Production,’’ she says.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

307

‘‘Yes. Good. And how does that metaphor apply to the participants in the birthing process?’’ I continue to look at Carol. She’s right with me. ‘‘The doctor is the manager who directs the birth process, the baby is the product, and the woman is merely the worker carrying out the manager’s orders.’’ I smile. ‘‘Right again! So she is secondary to both the doctor and the baby; she’s not really in control; the doctor is perceived as doing all the work.’’ As the momentum of the discussion builds, I step out from behind the podium. ‘‘And what are the implications of that metaphor? How does it affect birthing women?’’ Brows furrow across the room. I pause. Wait, I tell myself. Wait some more. But no one raises a hand. ‘‘Ok.’’ I continue. ‘‘Martin says the production metaphor that dominates medical discourse about women’s reproductive lives creates a situation where women feel fragmented, alienated from their own bodies and in the case of c-sections, from their own children.’’ I pause to let the class process what I have just said. ‘‘Any questions?’’ The room is silent. ‘‘So we’re all on the same page?’’ I pause again. Heads nod. ‘‘Good. Let’s put our understanding of Martin’s ideas to a test. We are going to become Emily Martin by watching a clip from a PBS video entitled Intimate Universe: The Human Body (Dale, 1999) and critically exploring the language – both spoken and visual – the narrator uses to describe conception, gestation, and birth.’’ For a half an hour we watch the video and I pause periodically to ask questions to stimulate discussion. Almost everyone in the room offers an insightful observation, and almost everyone is appalled by the description of the woman’s body being ‘‘at war’’ with the ‘‘foreign’’ implanting embryo. Toward the end of the video, during the childbirth sequence, one of the male students from the left-side-of-the-room group, Peter, walks out without comment. All eyes follow him to the door. His departure doesn’t surprise me; Peter’s physical absence merely mimics the mental absence he has displayed throughout the semester. I haven’t been able to reach him. I wonder how Gary will interpret Peter’s departure. I check Gary’s response, relieved that he appears happily engaged in the conversation. Soon it is apparent that he can’t keep quiet any longer. His hand rises. My heart races a bit faster. ‘‘Gary?’’ I say. Oh God, what is he going to say? I force a smile. Every eye in the room rests on Gary.

308

BARBARA J. JAGO

‘‘I want to be clear about something here,’’ he says in his distinct NY accent. ‘‘Martin is not completely discounting the value of medical science is she?’’ Eyes shift, focusing on me. Students are eager for my response to this senior faculty member, my boss. Rarely (and sadly) are they privy to this kind of intellectual exchange between professors. I am so thankful to have an answer; I can’t hold back my smile. ‘‘Of course not! But she is saying we really should consider that how we talk about these medical procedures and patients’ bodies matters because words are not just words, they also inform our actions.’’ I pause for effect, ready to repeat the course mantra. ‘‘How we talk about the world matters.’’ Gary nods. Whew! After the video clip ends and the discussion winds down, we ﬁnd ourselves at break time. ‘‘Great analysis!’’ I tell my students. ‘‘When we return, we will be discussing the birth stories you got from your interviews. See you back here in ten minutes.’’ As students leave the classroom, I expel enough air to ﬂoat a hot air balloon. I am almost surprised that Gary doesn’t get swept away when he comes over to compliment me. ‘‘Great class, as always,’’ he says. ‘‘I hope you didn’t mind my participating.’’ I laugh. ‘‘I have come to expect it, Gary. And you asked an important question. Thank you.’’ He smiles. ‘‘I wish I could stay for more, but I can’t. I’ll have a written evaluation for you soon. Thanks,’’ he says on his way out the door. I take a deep cleansing breath. You did it, I tell myself, and maybe even did a good job. During the break, I return the podium to its home classroom. The students return ﬁfteen minutes later. As the second half of the class begins, I sit on the table at the front of the room, my typical pose for class discussions. I am relieved, thankful, and emotionally spent. ‘‘Thank you all for being so smart,’’ I tell my students. ‘‘Gary was very impressed with you. You did a great job!’’ Suddenly a hand shoots up from the right side of the room, second row. I make eye contact with Mary and nod my head. Mary’s words ﬂy at me with ferocity that seems to come out of the blue. ‘‘Why are we always man-bashing? And why are we ripping on medicine?’’ For a moment, I am not sure what Mary just said. I just stare at her, stunned by both her extreme anger and her accusations. I see other heads

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

309

nod. After what feels like forever, the meaning of Mary’s words ﬁnally sinks in. I try to respond without appearing defensive. But I can’t help but take her criticism personally. My emotions take over. Panic sets in. My brain fogs. I am caught off-guard. You see, I work extremely hard framing gender discussions so as not to ‘‘man-bash.’’ That’s all I can think about. I’ve done my best not to manbash and I’m getting called for it anyway! ‘‘I’m sorry you think we are man-bashing,’’ I reply. ‘‘That is not my intention, nor is it Martin’s. Let me try to explain what we are doing.’’ I hesitate as tears begin to invade my eyes. I blink them away. I need to remain calm, to show no weakness or fear, to follow the rules. Another student, Sarah, comes to my rescue, attempting to explain that our critique of medical practices is warranted. ‘‘I know this women who was given a c-section without her consent. She....’’ Mary cuts Sarah off before she can ﬁnish her sentence. ‘‘That doesn’t matter,’’ she says, her voice still venomous. I see Sarah shrink into herself. But before I can respond to Mary’s comments or her disrespectful interruption and dismissal of Sarah, another student chimes in: ‘‘And why aren’t we studying more about gender and the media?’’ I try to regain my composure, to breathe. ‘‘We are studying the media to a degree, today’s video, for example, but this isn’t a media course. This is a course about relational communication.’’ The tears are getting bigger, coming faster, refusing to be squelched. I wipe them away with a quick brush of my hand, hoping no one will notice. I watch my credibility ﬂy toward the open window. Another hand shoots up, a hand attached to one of my best students, Anne. ‘‘Why are we emphasizing gender so much? If I take Gender in the fall, will we be covering the same material?’’ ‘‘No. I.... The gender course...’’ I can’t ﬁnish my sentence. I feel a student rebellion forming, a rebellion that I take to be a reﬂection of my dismal failure as a teacher. All eyes are on me and I am seconds away from bursting into tears. ‘‘I’m sorry, but I can’t talk about this anymore today. We will revisit these issues next week. I am sorry, but I have to go.’’ I grab my papers and books, and ﬂee. My credibility is moving in the opposite direction, right out the open window. There is still a half hour of class time left, but I can’t go on. Eyes to the ground, tears pouring down my cheeks, I race downstairs. Safe in my ofﬁce, I let the tears come. Someone knocks on the door but I can’t answer. I worry that I broke out of my role as an even-tempered professor. I worry that I damaged my credibility. I worry that my

310

BARBARA J. JAGO

emotional response is out of line with the situation. I worry that I have failed my self and my students by letting our emotions get out of control. How did this happen? What did I do or not do to upset and alienate these students? What do I do now? I think of ways to stop their anger, not of ways to embrace it and build on it. By the time class is formally over at 4 p.m., I am composed enough to come out of hiding. I have never been more thankful for the small physical plant of our college; the safety of my car is just outside the back door. I spend the next few days simultaneously berating myself for losing my cool in front of my students and thinking about ways to turn the situation around to our mutual beneﬁt. Apologetic emails arrive from students, including Mary, worried about my emotional response.

APRIL 2002 Early in the next week, I am sitting in Gary’s ofﬁce, seeking his counsel. ‘‘Here’s what I suspect happened,’’ I explain. ‘‘I think your presence as an evaluator of my teaching, especially one who asked a question which the students might have interpreted as being critical of the perspective under consideration, prompted the students to offer their own evaluations. And I had been so nervous and then so relieved, I couldn’t handle the barrage of critical comments. I made the mistake of taking their criticisms personally. I was hurt so I cried and ran away, like a little kid. And now I have to go back in there in 2 days and facilitate a conversation about what occurred. What should I do?’’ ‘‘Well,’’ Gary pauses to choose his words carefully, ‘‘I have to ask. Do you think your reaction had anything to do with your depression?’’ I react without thought. ‘‘No. I think this would’ve happened anyway, even with my depression. My depression is not really an issue anymore.’’ As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know they might be a lie. The major depression that had sent me away on medical leave for a year is much improved, but still lingers in these ﬁrst few months back at school. I have no way of knowing the role it might have played in this situation. So I give Gary the safe answer, the answer I need to believe is true. The real answer – if there is one – we’ll never know. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ Gary assures me. ‘‘It’s not that bad. What are you thinking of doing?’’ I explain my plan.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

311

‘‘Sounds good to me,’’ he says. ‘‘You’re turning what could have been a bad experience into a teachable moment.’’ A learnable moment, I think to myself, for all of us.

APRIL 2002 When I walk into class 2 days later, armored in my most professional skirtand-jacket-wear, I appear fully composed but feel unsteady, embarrassed, and just plain scared. Was my emotional display last week too much for students to handle? After all, professors aren’t supposed to cry, let alone run out of the room. Did I irreparably destroy my relationship with some of my students? Is my credibility gone for good? I come armed with my plan. My plan is simple: I ask students to list two things they like about the course and two things they would like to change about the course, including recommendations for how to create positive change, and exit the room for a half hour to let them talk openly to one another in small groups. Then I return to facilitate a class discussion. This plan, I think, will open up a dialog about what we are studying and how we are studying it. I am open to suggestions and to change, I tell myself. I can handle any emotion that comes my way, even the anger I felt last week. I try to think about the anger as a good sign, a sign that I am getting to the students, challenging their beliefs, engaging them. I promise myself to be open to a more holistic level of engagement with my students. I am ready. The wall clock reads 1:00. ‘‘Good afternoon,’’ I say, glancing from face to face, trying to make eye contact with everyone in the room. My lips vibrate a smile. My voice quivers. I clear my throat. ‘‘I am sorry for breaking down and running out on you last week,’’ I tell them, inhaling a deep breath. ‘‘I found myself so overwhelmed by emotion, I couldn’t speak. I apologize for leaving.’’ The students are shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Some smile. Most faces contort with confusion. There is no script for this particular classroom moment. I continue in my best professor tone, even paced, authoritative, and above all rational. ‘‘Today, I want to spend the ﬁrst part of the class working through some of the concerns you expressed last week. Is that okay with all of you?’’ Heads nod. ‘‘Okay, then here’s the plan.’’

312

BARBARA J. JAGO

JUNE 2005 The subject of relational communication requires me to invite personal experience into the classroom, both my own experience and the experience of my students. It’s the nature, so to speak, of the beast. Certainly, the centrality of personal experience to learning about relational communication is obvious. What isn’t obvious is that the connection between personal experience and learning runs even deeper than my particular subject matter might suggest. To positively transform human interaction in any realm of inquiry (be it sociological, anthropological, political, economic, biological, etc.), we must challenge learners to develop new ways of thinking about themselves and others, new ways of narrating the world that allow positive transformation to occur, whatever the particular subject matter might be. On a fundamental level and across academic disciplines of inquiry, the methodological centrality of personal experience to learning is supported by research on brain neurology. Neurologists who study the process of learning suggest that what we call knowledge is actually a collection of neural pathways formed as a result of personal experience (Ackerman, 2004; LeDoux, 1996; Zull, 2002). In other words, as we move through the world and engage with others, our brains create networks of neurons that encode or hardwire experience for easy reference when we confront similar situations in the future. However, if past experience doesn’t serve present realities, the brain then builds new pathways on the foundation of the old ones. As Ackerman (2004, p. 85) notes, ‘‘whenever we learn something, the brain mints new [neural] connections or enlivens old ones.’’ Interestingly, this neural knowledge exists in our brains in narrative or story form. So if we conceptualize learning as a way to successfully cope with new experiences, to ‘‘make new and different things possible’’ (Bochner, 1994, p. 29), then we must begin with existing neural pathways of knowledge with our own personal experiences, our own stories. Experience is also central to more philosophical considerations of learning. As I invite experience into the classroom, I am inspired by a variety of educators who theorize learning as a transformative act, an interactive process that engages the whole learner in ‘‘sustainable dialogue’’ (McNamee & Gergen, 1999) to create positive change in social relations. In Experience and Education (1938), John Dewey used the concept of experience to lay the foundation for the transformational approach to educational pedagogy so prevalent today. Dewey argued for a more progressive approach to education, an experiential model where students do

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

313

not passively receive pre-existing knowledge through lectures and textbooks created by ‘‘elders,’’ and useful for life in the future. Instead, students become active and engaged learners who experience, create, and use knowledge through interactive participation in learning experiences with others in the present. Through these learning experiences, Dewey argued, students acquire the capacity for freedom of expression and individuality, as well as the ability to directly respond to the dynamic challenges of their immediate (and future) circumstances. For Dewey, learning is a lived, relational experience rooted in and responsive to the everyday lives of learners, and designed to develop the unique capacities of each learner. As Dewey (1938, p. 7) said, ‘‘there is an intimate and necessary relationship between the processes of actual experience and education.’’ Like Dewey, Paulo Freire rooted his transformative Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) in experience. In addition, Freire called upon educators to use collaboration and dialog to help students become ‘‘revolutionaries’’ who utilize simultaneous action and reﬂection – what he called ‘‘praxis’’ – to transform oppressive social relationships. In other words, Freire theorized learning as a political act. ‘‘The object of dialogical-libertarian action,’’ Freire (ibid., p. 174) wrote ‘‘is not to ‘dislodge’ the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to ‘bind’ them to another reality. On the contrary,’’ he continued, ‘‘the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality.’’ More recent pedagogical theorists continue to support an experiential approach to education and emphasize the equitable and socially just transformation of social relationships as the critical goal of learning. Drawing on the political pedagogy of Paulo Freire, feminist theorist Bell Hooks (1994) describes ideal feminist educational practice as ‘‘holistic,’’ ‘‘empowering,’’ ‘‘transgressive,’’ and ‘‘transformative,’’ engaging learners in the promotion of their own well-being and the well-being of others. This creation of well-being occurs, Hooks (ibid., p. 15) maintains, through the development and application of ‘‘knowledge about how to live in the world.’’ Hooks envisions the classroom as a place of ‘‘possibility.’’ ‘‘In that ﬁeld of possibility,’’ Hooks (ibid., p. 207) writes, ‘‘we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.’’ Like Hooks, eminent educational theorist Jack Mezirow (2000) describes experiential transformation as central to pedagogical practice. Mezirow (ibid., p. 16) asks learners to explore their ‘‘frames of reference’’ for making

314

BARBARA J. JAGO

meaning of experience, ‘‘the structure of assumptions and expectations through which we ﬁlter sense impressions.’’ He divides these world-views into two parts: (1) a ‘‘habit of mind’’ – a set of assumptions that serve as ﬁlters for attributing meaning to experience; and (2) resulting ‘‘points of view’’ that suggest particular forms of action. Mezirow concludes: Central to the goal of adult education in democratic societies is the process of helping learners become more aware of the context of their problematic understandings and beliefs, more critically reﬂective on their assumptions and those of others, more fully and freely engaged in discourse, and more effective in taking action on their reﬂective judgments. (ibid., 31)

Similarly, English professor Jane Tompkins, reﬂecting on her life-long teaching career in higher education, describes the role of experience and transformation in education in very pragmatic and human terms. A holistic approach to education would recognize that a person must learn how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun, as well as how to add and subtract, multiply and divide. It would not leave out of the account people who are begotten, born, and die. It would address the need for purpose and for connectedness to one another and ourselves; it would not leave us alone to wander the world armed with plenty of knowledge but lacking the skills to handle things that are coming up in our lives. (Tompkins, 1996, p. ixie)

All of these theorists, as well as a variety of others (including Mary Field Belenky, Stephen D. Brookﬁeld, Eliot Eisner, Maxine Greene, Robert Kegan, and Parker Palmer) use experience as the foundation for their ideas about best practices in transformational education. They emphasize three interconnected human capacities vital to the pedagogical pursuit of positive and equitable transformation: (1) the development of self-awareness – or reﬂexivity; (2) the growth of our understanding of others – or empathy; and (3) the ability to act in conjunction with others to create positive change – or conjoint action. Through the development of these capacities, a pedagogy of transformation helps learners to enlarge their ‘‘capacity to cope with complicated contingencies of lived interpersonal experience’’ (Bochner, 1994, p. 7). Of course, the self is central to any pedagogical theorizing about transformation. As a social constructionist, I see the ‘‘self’’ as a relational construct, intimately tied to the ‘‘other’’ through communication (Gergen, 1995). One can only understand the ‘‘self’’ in relation to the ‘‘other’’; and one can only understand the ‘‘other’’ in relation to the ‘‘self.’’ As a result, the pursuit of self-awareness and the development of empathy go hand-in hand, and manifest themselves through collaborative action. Additionally,

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

315

both the self and other are tied to the intellect and emotion, and to physicality and spirituality. Historically, the canonical story of learning has embraced only the intellect, leaving little or no room for the heart, the body, the spirit, or for the central role of relationship in learning. But the depth and breadth of learning I am speaking of here requires not just intellectual but also emotional, and even physical and spiritual engagement, whatever the academic discipline might be. Unfortunately, for many teachers and students this is a frightening prospect (Nikitina, 2003). As Mezirow (2000, pp. 6–7) says: ‘‘Transformative learning, especially when it involves subjective reframing, is often an intensely threatening emotional experience in which we have to become aware ofythe assumptions undergirding our ideas and those supporting our emotional responses to the need to change.’’ A frightening prospect indeed, but one, I would argue, well worth pursuing if we hope to create a more equitable and just world. So when I step into a relational communication classroom, I can’t ignore the depth and breadth of the roles played by emotion rules in our learning relationships. I can’t help but see the traditional feeling rules of the canonical story of learning as limiting and potentially damaging to those relationships. But it wasn’t until I read Megan Boler’s Feeling Power (1999) that I really understood how fully I need to embrace the wide range of positive and negative emotions emerging in classroom interactions, to reframe the canonical narrative of learning and the construction of relationships and emotion within that narrative. Like the pedagogical theorists mentioned above, Boler (ibid., xviii) conceptualizes education as an experiential process of ‘‘critical inquiry and transformation, both of the self and the culture’’ where we ‘‘envision future horizons of possibilities and who we want to become. She continues: Education aims in part to help us understand our values and priorities, how we have come to believe what we do, and how we can deﬁne ethical ways of living with others. Emotions function in part as moral and ethical evaluations; they give us information about what we care about and why. (ibid., xviii)

From this perspective, emotions become guides in the learning process, signaling both the comfortable safety of treasured beliefs as well as the fear, anger, and distress that come with questioning and challenging them. When we engage in this ‘‘pedagogy of discomfort,’’ Boler (ibid., p. 176) says, we invite ‘‘defensive anger, fear of change, and fears of losing our personal and cultural identities’’ into our learning relationships, and should welcome those emotions, not try to shut them down. If we can do this, if we embrace

316

BARBARA J. JAGO

discomfort, we can open ourselves up, students and teachers alike, to the possibility of seeing the world from a multiplicity of perspectives; we can open ourselves up to more ethical and productive kinds of learning relationships; and we can learn to ‘‘inhabit a morally ambiguous self’’ ready to embrace a wealth of others (ibid., p. 182). In this way, Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort helps us to see the ways in which the canonical story of learning – with its attendant feeling rules – reinscribes existing relations of power leaving little, if any, space for equitable and just social transformation.

OCTOBER 2003 As I think back on the conversation the plan created for my language class, I am struck by two thoughts: I did the right thing and I did the wrong thing. The right thing was to acknowledge what happened and try to address it in a non-threatening way. I offered students the opportunity to air their grievances and I offered myself an opportunity to respond in a calmer, thoughtful manner. I tried to expand the limits of our relationships and create a more holistic level of engagement. Of course, none of my students dared bring up ‘‘man-bashing.’’ I suspect they were silenced by my reaction from the week before – because the canonical narrative of learning makes no room for this kind of emotional display by a teacher or student, because they didn’t want to possibly risk their grades by bringing up the issue again, because they know me and care about my emotional well-being, and because their very belief systems and thus selves were at stake. I was afraid too. I wasn’t sure I could handle their criticism; I couldn’t trust myself not to cry all over again. And I didn’t know if I was ready to risk the comfort of the canonical story of learning, with its attendant teacher–student hierarchy, I had worked so hard to construct and sustain since my return from the medical leave. Students told me how much they liked the course, my teaching methods, and our discussions, reestablishing, I believe, the more traditional hierarchy we had challenged the week before. We addressed some of their concerns, speaking about the ways in which the language course differs from the gender course, why gender was an appropriate topic to discuss in a course about language, and how much of the current research on language was sparked by feminist inquiry. We spoke about restructuring quizzes with more open-ended short answer questions, taking more frequent breaks and other marginally important topics.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

317

But we didn’t talk about man-bashing. Which leads to what I did wrong? I let us play it safe. I steered the conversation away from the anger and extreme frustration that surfaced the week before. I didn’t push students or myself to share our negative feelings again, to go to the place where their anger toward and rejection of feminism resides – and where my anger at their anger about feminism lives, manifesting itself as tears of frustration because when they attack feminism, they are attacking feminists – like me. I stopped us from changing the feeling rules of the canonical story of learning and more fully engaging one another. We didn’t go back to that uncomfortable emotional space because I didn’t let us. I was too damn scared – and I think my students didn’t feel comfortable enough to lead the way, again. Perhaps the greatest fears a teacher faces are fear of criticism, fear of hostility, and fear of losing control – all of which can be summed up by an overarching fear of a more equitable and substantive relationship with students. I suspect students share the same fears. I hope I will react differently if a similar situation ever arises again. But I don’t know. Fear, uneasiness, and anger might kick in my ﬂight response again, my brain responding automatically, bypassing all cognitive processing. I might not even have a choice. I might not have a choice, that is, unless I learn how to let emotion create learning instead of shutting it down, unless I reconstruct the feeling rules for learning, making space for all kinds of emotions in the classroom, including fear, uneasiness, and anger, unless I embrace ‘‘a pedagogy of discomfort’’ (Boler, 1999), a new narrative of learning that will invite both my students and myself into deeper and more challenging learning relationships. If I had let discomfort and anger stay that day, I wouldn’t have needed the plan. If I had reacted more calmly to the accusation of man-bashing, to the highly charged emotional place feminism occupies in the classroom, to the emotional lives of my students and myself, we might have learned something more – about language, about feminism, but more importantly about our selves, about others, about our relationships, about our lives. And if I had let discomfort and anger stay that day I would have learned something I didn’t learn until I read the last page of Mary’s ﬁnal exam. Mary, you’ll recall, had raised the man-bashing issue in the ﬁrst place. BarbaraI just wanted to thank you for this class. I know at points I didn’t see where this was going and was frustrated. I am so grateful for having been able to see this class through. The ideas of power, transformation and the miracle question have meant so much to me. I didn’t realize, at least consciously realize, I had this ability to change my situation and

318

BARBARA J. JAGO

life. I didn’t think I could be anything but the personality, live the reality I’ve always led (which has included an unhealthy romantic relationship). So thank you. Thank you for helping me to learn this. I usually learn the info I need, take my ﬁnal and move on, soon forgetting what I had learned. What you’ve taught me I will carry with me the rest of my life. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you teaching. Thank you.

When I read those four words – ‘‘an unhealthy romantic relationship’’ – I ﬁnally understood why Mary had gotten so angry. She was in an abusive relationship, a fact that she later conﬁrmed in conversation with me. So all the talk about feminism, about patriarchy, about sexual inequality had hit home for Mary, right in the part of her self she didn’t want to see, or to show others. And she needed to hit back. I wish I hadn’t gotten in her way; I wish I had made room for her feelings in the classroom that day. Who knows where that conversation might have taken her, taken us? We’ll never know. The ﬁrst sign of the success of the pedagogy of discomfort is, quite simply, the ability to recognize what it is that one doesn’t want to know, and how one developed emotional investments to protect oneself from this knowing. This process may require facing the ‘‘tragic loss’’ inherent to educational inquiry; facing demons and a precarious sense of self. But in doing so one gains a new sense of interconnection with others. Ideally, a pedagogy of discomfort represents an engaged and mutual exchange, a historicized exploration of emotional investments. Through education we invite one another to risk ‘‘living at the edge of our skin,’’ where we ﬁnd the greatest hope of revisioning ourselves. (Boler, 1999, p. 200)

FIRST DAY OF CLASS: SPRING 2005 Thirty students ﬁll the seven neatly arranged rows of desks, populating the back rows ﬁrst, and slowly moving forward, toward me, not quite sure if I am friend or foe. I pace in front of the chalkboard, while reviewing my class notes and making visual assessments of the students. They seem to get younger with each semester, a reﬂection of my increasing age as well as the decreasing age of the average student attending UNH-Manchester. The room is alive with history. The red brick walls were raised in 1880, to house the machine shop for the textile mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, and in 1999 became a full-time home to the university. So much has changed in 120 years; what was once a space for the physical labor of textile production is now a space for intellectual inquiry and development, pursuits that seem so vastly different. Still, one thread weaves

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

319

throughout the history of this building – the thread of hard work and pursuit of the American Dream. More students arrive. A young man sits in the front row. The heat kicks on, sending rumbling waves of noise downward from the wide plank wooden ceilings 12 ft above. I wonder how many of these students would rather be snowboarding. I write the course number and my name on the pristine ﬁrst-day-of-thesemester chalkboard. Dressed in my breezy professional-wear, ﬂowing ﬂoral skirt, lilac blouse, pantyhose, and black heels, I continue pacing until 1 o’clock arrives. ‘‘Hi!’’ I say, smiling as I lean on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. ‘‘This is CMN 457, Introduction to Interpersonal Communication, and my name is Barbara Jago.’’ My voice echoes around the room, words ﬂuttering out of my mouth in steady, well-rehearsed ﬂight. Thankfully, the students don’t seem to notice my nervousness, a feeling of insecurity, panic, and even outright fear that hits me each time I step foot in the classroom, especially on ﬁrst days. With my hands clutching the desk edge, I shift my weight from one hip to the other, from one hand to the other. I smile, scanning the room to make eye contact with as many students as possible. Are they nervous too? Insecure? Excited ? Air escapes my body in an audible sigh hanging in the lofty space above us. ‘‘You are going to love this class!’’ I state with conﬁdence, a comment that is part hopeful self-fulﬁlling prophecy and part historical fact. Each time I say this, I believe it a bit more. I have been teaching this introductory interpersonal communication course for about 7 years, in graduate school at the University of South Florida and now at UNHManchester, for a total of 13 times. Students respond positively to the course in part because the material is compelling but also, I have come to allow myself to believe, because of the way I teach. ‘‘I won’t spend much time lecturing at you. I hate to lecture, and I hate to be lectured at. Instead, we spend most of our time together in conversation. I think we all learn better when we begin with our own experience, using it as a foundation for discussing theories and concepts. And I think that is especially true for a course that explores relational communication. So please remember this is your class, and I am counting on each one of you to make it great! Ok?’’ A few heads nod. ‘‘Ok?’’ I repeat, slightly louder. About ten students respond with a quiet ‘‘Yes.’’ Now I am almost screaming ‘‘OK?’’

320

BARBARA J. JAGO

‘‘YES!’’ Almost everyone in the room is shouting, and laughing a bit uneasily. We have just broken our ﬁrst rule about traditional classroom etiquette – no yelling. Gottcha! ‘‘You can expect that by the end of the semester, you will know more about yourself and have learned how to more successfully cross that great divide between yourself and others. In many ways, this course is about the development of awareness of self and empathy for others, which, I think you will come to understand, are interrelated communicative phenomena grounded in morality and ethical interaction.’’ I continue my monologue. ‘‘Contrary to what you might think, I am not an expert on relational communication.’’ Scanning faces, I see traces of confusion in furrowed brows and squinting eyes. Professors aren’t supposed to admit to vulnerability, to any shade of ignorance, and my admission thwarts student expectations, especially the expectations of the majority who are ﬁrst generation college students. Another rule is broken. Students ﬁnd themselves in increasingly unfamiliar territory. ‘‘I might have read a lot, and done some research and writing,’’ I continue, ‘‘but I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about relationships. No one does.’’ I pause for effect. ‘‘Like me, each of you has also done a lot of research on relationships; each of you has been actively engaged in the process of interpersonal communication theory-building your entire life. You have done this every day as you negotiate your own relationships with family, friends, co-workers, and lovers.’’ I eek out a nervous smile and scan the room again, acknowledging the boundary I have just crossed between the intellectual world of academia and the embodied world of sexuality. I have to be careful entering this emotional sensitive, highly personal territory. Younger students tend to squirm at the mention of sex and I don’t want to alienate anyone who might not have a great deal of experience in the romance department. But I refuse to keep quiet about a central issue in our study of relationships, even if it makes some students uncomfortable. There goes another rule. ‘‘This semester we will use what you have already learned from your own experience to join the ongoing scholarly conversation about relational communication. I think you will be surprised by what you already know, and I hope, enlightened by what others have to say, including the people seated in the desks around you.’’

321

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

I pause again for emphasis. ‘‘I must warn you, though. This class deals with so many issues that are highly personal and emotionally sensitive. We consider all kinds of close relationships, including family relationships, friendships, and sexual relationships, and we talk about the challenges posed to those relationships by poverty, addiction, eating disorders, and domestic violence, to name just a few. So you have to come to class prepared intellectually and emotionally to go to some difﬁcult places; you have to come to class willing to take good care of your own minds and hearts as well as the minds and hearts of those seated around you, including me. Ok?’’ A few students nod. ‘‘I don’t expect you to believe what I believe about relationships. But I do expect you to get to know your own beliefs, to be able to explain why you believe as you do, and to be open to witnessing the experiences and perspectives of others, even if their beliefs seem completely foreign. Ok?’’ More heads nod. ‘‘Most important, I expect you to come to class with an open heart, to come to class fully present and willing to embrace the possibility of positive transformation, in your self, in your relationships, and in the world, even when every ﬁber of your being seems to be resisting. And I hope we will be able to talk with one another about how we are feeling as we move through this process. Feel free to speak out in class, in my ofﬁce, through email—just so long as you let me know how you are responding to the work we are doing, even if you think your response won’t make me happy. Trust me, I want to know—even if you are feeling angry and pissed off at me. I want to know. You probably won’t hurt my feelings—and if you do, I will let you know. Trust me.’’ More students are nodding now, even laughing. ‘‘Think of this as an alternative classroom reality, where the normal rules about learning and learning relationships don’t apply.’’ I smile, while making eye contact with every person in the room. ‘‘Having said that, let me remind you: You really are going to love this class.’’

NOTE 1. And we ignore the ways in which the ‘‘mind’’ is itself a social construction (Mead, 1934).

322

BARBARA J. JAGO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Linda Detman, John Cerullo, Sheila McNamee, Art Bochner, Carolyn Ellis, and Norm Denzin for their support as I developed this project. This story is dedicated to my wonderful students at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester and to all the teachers who helped me along the way.

REFERENCES Ackerman, D. (2004). An alchemy of mind: The marvel and mystery of the brain. New York: Scribner. Andersen, P. A., & Guerrero, L. (1998). Principles of communication and emotion in social interaction. In: P. A. Andersen & L. Guerrero (Eds), Handbook of communication and emotion: Research, theory, applications, and contexts (pp. 49–96). San Diego, CA: Academic Press Limited. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Bochner, A. (1994). Perspectives on inquiry II: Theories and stories. In: M. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 21–40). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifﬂin. Crites, S. (1986). Storytime: Recollecting the past and projecting the future. In: T. Sarbin (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct (pp. 152–173). New York, NY: Praeger. Dale, R. (1999). Intimate universe: The human body. Beverly Hills, CA: CBS/Fox Video. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi. Ellis, C. (1991). Sociological introspection and emotional experience. Symbolic Interaction, 14, 23–50. Fisher, W. (1986). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51, 1–22. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gergen, K. (1995). Social construction and the educational process. In: L. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds), Constructivism in education (pp. 17–39). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gergen, K. (1999). An invitation to social construction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Autoethnographic Tale of Learning

323

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Ingleton, C. (1999). Emotion in learning: A neglected dynamic. Melbourne, Australia: HERDSA Annual International Conference. LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. New York, NY: Touchstone. Martin, E. (1987). The woman in the body. Boston, MA: Beacon. McNamee, S. (2 Feb., 2003). Teaching as conversation. http://www.california.com/Brathbone/ mcnamee.html McNamee, S., & Gergen, K. (1999). Relational responsibility: Resources for sustainable dialogue. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Nikitina, S. (2003). Stories that stayed ‘‘under the skin’’. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 251–265. Parry, A. (1991). A universe of stories. Family Process, 30, 37–54. Pratt, M. B. (1984). Identity: Skin blood heart. In: E. Bulkin (Ed.), Yours in struggle (pp. 11–63). New York, NY: Long Haul Press. Ronai, C. R. (1995). Multiple reﬂections of child sex abuse. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23, 395–425. Salzberger, I., Williams, G., & Osborne, E. (1983). The emotional experience of learning and teaching. London: Karnac Books. Schutz, P., & DeCuir, J. (2002). Inquiry on emotions in education. Educational Psychologist, 37(2), 125–134. Tompkins, J. (1996). A life in school: What the teacher learned. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Zull, J. (2002). The art of changing the brain: Enriching teaching by exploring the biology of learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

MY SHORT AND HAPPY LIFE AS A DECORATED WAR HERO$ John M. Johnson There is no true glory in war. (Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 5, 1944)

Growing old is perhaps preferable to the alternative in certain respects. But it does have its downside. My enlarged prostate leads me to program my palm pilot with the location of public lavatories. My three hypertension medications interact to produce the unanticipated side effects of remembering all of the untoward foolishness of my past. Even more worrisome, my penis is shrinking more rapidly than my libido and my Levitra produces a Hobson’s choice between sex and sleep. The psychological sufferings are even worse! As I begin to close out a middling academic career at a second-rate university, the shortcomings and mediocrities are impossible to ignore. I have to explain to myself why the less talented seem to achieve more, and why pervasive greed and hubris goes unpunished, if not actually rewarded. Humility seems to have disappeared as a public or private virtue, perhaps to reappear when the next real estate or bond market bubble bursts. Then there is the small matter of my three marital failures, from which I have learned that it is seen by others as bad taste to put all the blame on these three hapless women. $

Presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Philadelphia, August, 2005. My title bowdlerizes Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story, ‘‘The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’’ and thus implies a radically different view of existential freedom, aungst, and ennui.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 325–334 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30017-9

325

326

JOHN M. JOHNSON

With all this existential angst interwoven with my senior moments, is it a wonder that I should feel ecstatic, venerated, and thrilled to learn that our political leaders and mass-mediated culture have deﬁned me as, well, not only a ‘‘war hero,’’ but a decorated war hero! This comes as very good news, and just when I needed some to bolster my low self-esteem. As our warmongering Republicrats seduce our youngsters to take up arms and kill people in all manner of far-off and far-ﬂung places, from Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Grenada, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Columbia, Yemen, and Iraq, it follows that mass media, cinema, and political culture would try to deﬁne all sorts of low-level ﬂunkies as ‘‘war heroes.’’ Cultural lies that link war with anything of actual or potential value play an important role in the continuation of killing more people. My newfound status as Decorated War Hero comes as a surprise, as I have not spent the last 40 years thinking of myself in these terms. I have quite a few good and bad memories from those years as a US Navy ofﬁcer (1964–1967), including two Westpac (West Paciﬁc) deployments to the Vietnam War, one relatively uneventful and one relatively more eventful. I can recall those wonderful mama-sans from Kaoh Shung to Hong Kong to Sasebo, those drunken cavortings with bennie boys in Olongapo (Subic Bay), jacking-off in my stateroom to the recent Playmate of the Month, taking whites and reds to get up for or come down from our ﬁring missions, losing and winning hundreds of dollars playing gin or acey ducey, sharing feelings with my friends about the incompetent assholes who were posing as our leaders, becoming a shellback, and of course the inﬁnite inanities of military bureaucracy. To ﬁnd some aspect of our own or any other military action in the last several millennia ‘‘heroic’’ is surely the darkest possibility of reason. The Presidential election of 2004 even included a contentious ‘‘medals ﬂap,’’ concerning the validity and nature of John Kerry’s Vietnam-era war medals and decorations, when I found myself thinking that no person who favored one candidate or the other could actually tell the Vietnam-era truth about war medals, or ‘‘gedunk medals’’ as we called them at the time. The animus for this paper stems from this political debate and my recent angst is over the gloriﬁcation of war and violence in American culture.

‘‘GIVING THE GOUGE’’: BECOMING A SPEAR CARRIER FOR THE EMPIRE If military cooks can consistently fuck-up the preparation of refried beans, why would one expect these nincompoops (I have learned to call this

My Short and Happy Life as a Decorated War Hero

327

institutional rationality) to produce efﬁcient killers in 4–6 months of basic training? The answer to this is obvious: they don’t. Before an individual comes into the military, they have been inculcated with celebratory military triumphalism for decades; these teachings come from parents, family members, peers, teachers, professors, history book lies, cinematic lies, mass media lies, religious lies, and a wide range of other cultural lies (see Goode, 1978). These cultural lies tell of the alleged or presumed challenges of outside forces, and of how these unprovoked aggressions are met with the heroic efforts of our own peace loving people. These cultural lies neglect to specify the complete social, economic, and political context, and the extent to which the aggressive acts were a response to other actions which preceded them. For America speciﬁcally, they neglect the Christian genocide of the indigenous peoples, and our own long-standing and consistent imperial actions from the Bay of Manila onward. The cultural lies purport to justify blood sacriﬁce of the young for the short-term hubris and conceits of the political, economic, and religious leaders. By the time an individual gets to military basic training, then, much work has been accomplished by the cultural liars and their lies. Our tender youth merely have to learn ‘‘the military way of doing things,’’ military discipline and protocol, and technical matters. While the popular Hollywood ﬁlm An Ofﬁcer and Gentleman does capture some of the spirit and e´lan of my own ofﬁcer training (including the apparently universal attempts by the ofﬁcer candidates to fuck the local townies), the ﬁlm greatly exaggerates the physical aspects of the training over the academic aspects. Most of the time one spends in ofﬁcer training is in the classroom, not on the obstacle course. Classroom behavior is more boring and less visually dramatic, of course, which might explain this false emphasis in the ﬁlm. In the classrooms, much of the instruction is technical (how steam boilers and weapons systems operate, how ballast tanks are ﬁlled on ships, and so on), even though many of the ofﬁcer candidates lack the appropriate technical background to process this kind of information. How do young college graduates with no technical background pass highly technical examinations on power plant engineering? The answer is ‘‘giving the gouge.’’ This phrase is common argot for ofﬁcer candidates. ‘‘Giving the gouge’’ means that the instructor for a class gives a review for the examinations, and during this review the answers to the questions are directly or indirectly given. For students, instructors are evaluated on their capabilities of giving the gouge in such a manner as to produce passing exam results, just as in contemporary university education the student teaching evaluations tend to be linked to the inﬂation of grades, now known as massive, pervasive, uncontrolled, and irremediable in the US.

328

JOHN M. JOHNSON

Military education is corrupt, and this produces corrupt, inefﬁcient, and unwise military organization and leadership. Education in the larger culture is also corrupt, however. This produces pervasive corruption that crosses institutional boundaries. Which came ﬁrst, corrupt education or corrupt institutions throughout the culture? No one seems interested in this question. Nor am I. I am only interested in claiming my culturally honoriﬁc status as a decorated war hero.

LEARNING THE MALE CODE Being a Navy ofﬁcer means that one can fuck around all over the globe. This is common knowledge for all career Navy ofﬁcers. But it is never said in public, and a certain measure of discretion is required in order to create and recreate this ancient male code. While contemporary university experience may be considered an opening gambit in this gender education (Greek letter fraternity membership is even better!), US Navy neophytes cannot be fully trusted to learn all that is needed. So, when a ship deploys for a lengthy (9 or 10 month) deployment to the west Paciﬁc, the ofﬁcer and enlisted elders (the chief petty ofﬁcers) step forward to give additional, explicit instructions, namely, that what goes on in Hong Kong stays in Hong Kong. Furthermore, when writing letters (this was before email), the commandment is that one should not write about others’ actions or indiscretions. The sages recognize that it is often tempting to beat the breastplate of one’s self-righteousness at the expense of some other person, express that old zerosum morality play, but this tends to produce unanticipated dilemmas they say. On the Taussig, our own Captain Queeg (Commander Dale Steele Perry) sermonized in the ofﬁcers’ ward room, ‘‘Loose lips sink ships,’’ apparently feeling secure that no other person there was old enough to know that he had plagiarized this from a World War II poster. When the Las Vegas advertising asserts ‘‘What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas,’’ does this mean that Las Vegas stole this from the Navy, or did the Navy steal it from Las Vegas? This feels like one of those chickenand-egg kinds of questions. At a recent meeting at my church, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix, our Board President Ellie Anderla said that the Women’s Spirituality Group had adopted the slogan: what happens in the women’s spirituality group stays in the women’s spirituality group. So my own view asserts that the Navy and Las Vegas stole it from the Unitarian Universalists. At any rate, the slogan afﬁrms bounded or contextual deﬁnitions of truth and good, and stigmatizes those who

My Short and Happy Life as a Decorated War Hero

329

transgress the boundaries; hardly what Plato, St. Thomas Acquinas, or Alasdair MacIntyre had in mind. Furthermore, Ellie Anderla’s comment suggests that gendered deceit and dishonesty may not be the sole province of men. Too bad.

GUNDECKING Gundecking is a common term in the seagoing navy. The term originated about 200 years ago. Originally gundecking referred to a 13-step exercise that began with the simulation of ﬁring of a cannon, followed by actions to prepare the cannon for the next ﬁring; ‘‘gundecking’’ was the faking or simulation of the ﬁring. Today, gundecking refers to the faking, falsifying, fudging, doctoring, or altering of ofﬁcial reports or documents; from the most ordinary and trivial (the daily PMS reports of the Planned Maintenance System for shipboard equipment) to the relatively more important and consequential (such as the Battle Damage Assessment Reports during a wartime engagement). Two of my early publications explained and documented various levels of gundecking (Johnson, 1972; Johnson, 1980a, 1980b, in Altheide & Johnson, 1980), done in San Diego by interviewing people I still knew who were still on the USS Taussig. The fudging or falsiﬁcation of ofﬁcial reports was a routine matter. It was done for ‘‘good organizational reasons,’’ not those of individual gain or laziness. Here is an example of gundecking, one that involved the collaboration of several dozen individuals, including the commanding ofﬁcer. The USS Taussig (DD 746) had a hull-mounted sonar and a variable depth sonar (VDS), the latter being housed on the fantail, and when needed lowered into the water below the gradient temperature depth (commonly about 160–180 feet). Regulations required the VDS be used at least once a month, to test its operational status. On one occasion, when returning from the west Paciﬁc and steaming in company with other ships of the squadron, the squadron commander sent a message to the ships to break formation in order to conduct this test. The Taussig’s VDS was not operational because many of the critical parts had been cannibalized to keep the hull-mounted system operational during the deployment (when it is more difﬁcult to order and receive spare parts in a timely manner). Such cannibalization by the sonar technicians was not a ‘‘deviant’’ practice, but instead an example of ‘‘good work,’’ and evidence of showing ingenuity when faced with unpredictable breakdowns. The true situation was communicated to the commanding ofﬁcer, but he elected to fake the entire (very costly) exercise in order to keep

330

JOHN M. JOHNSON

up appearances with the other ships of the squadron. The VDS test results themselves were faked, or ‘‘gundecked,’’ by making slight adjustments from prior reports. The ability to know when and how to gundeck ofﬁcial reports were a sign of organizational competence. When conducting ﬁring missions during the Vietnam War, ofﬁcial reports were routinely gundecked. These reports were called ‘‘Battle Efﬁciency Reports,’’ and how these reports were gundecked can be found elsewhere (Johnson, 1980b, in Altheide & Johnson, 1980). Documented in this earlier report is the recognition that organizational actors from groups of Vietnamese peasants to army intelligence to shore-based spotters to air and naval gunﬁre support ‘‘scratch each other’s back’’ by providing information, data, intelligence, and spotting reports which make themselves and others ‘‘look good,’’ in an organizational sense. Many years after the Vietnam War I had the pleasure of serving on the faculty at Arizona State University with Frank J. Sackton, who had been General Douglas MacArthur’s adjutant during the Japanese occupation following World War II. He retired from his Army career in 1977 as a four-star General. General Sackton had served the National Security Council during the Vietnam War. During a conversation with General Sackton, I once asked him if the higher-level war planners and policy makers knew about gundecking, and the falsiﬁcations of ofﬁcial information and data at lower-levels. He responded by saying, of course they knew of these practices, since all of them had served the military for many decades, and at the higher policy levels they assumed that such information was fashioned to make its creators ‘‘look good.’’ For them, he said, the important issues involved getting data and information from other (nonmilitary) sources, and to try and cross-check or independently verify all sources of information. (At 95, General Sackton still teaches full time for the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.) When I ﬁrst wrote about gundecking in the 1970s, I was inclined to think these kinds of informational pathologies were more characteristic of military organizations, or perhaps even the historically speciﬁc pathology of the Vietnam War run by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his GM technocratic bean counters. But now I have over 40 more years of additional organizational experience, and what I have seen at universities, nonproﬁts, and churches incline me to judge the military pathologies as among the least extreme. The larger truth about gundecking seems pretty clear; organizationally produced information does not report on facts or events, which are independent of the organizational culture and processes which produces them. Those who fail to observe this universal truth will ultimately be victimized by it.

My Short and Happy Life as a Decorated War Hero

331

CUMSHAWING Cumshawing is another everyday word and occurrence in the seagoing navy. It means the theft of organizational equipment or material for organizational (not private) purposes. About 2 years after leaving Navy in 1967, I went back and interviewed many sailors and ofﬁcers about their cumshawing experiences, in San Diego, and in writing my paper on cumshawing I learned that the word had entered the language in the eleventh century, from Chinese origins. This fact alone attests its longstanding practice and persistence. Here is a good example of cumshawing. When USS Taussig went to the dry dock in Long Beach for repairs, the hull-mounted sonar was repaired, overhauled, and updated. As the ship readied for its return to sea, a team of shore-based electronics technicians (yardbirds) came aboard to test the sonar system. To insure the tests were accurate, and not a function of previously used tubes, a set of 120 new tubes were used for the tests. These tubes cost $3,000 apiece, or a total of $360,000. Once used in the tests, however, the tubes could not be used again by the technicians for future tests. The tubes had no value on the open market, so the ‘‘yardbirds’’ proposed a ‘‘deal’’ for us; in exchange for 40 pounds of coffee and ﬁve new foul weather jackets (an organizational cost of less than $100), they would give us the 36 test tubes. This would allow us to use our quarterly budgetary allotment in other ways, including the legendary ‘‘Spend it or lose it’’ spending sprees as the end of the ﬁscal quarter or year approached. One’s organizational competence was assessed on the basis of successfully completing such deals. The USS Taussig was a World War II destroyer. Some pieces of equipment were old, and were no longer carried in the spare parts system. For example, the ship had a World War II vintage bathythermograph (BT), located at the port quarter, near the fantail. The BT was a device lowered into the ocean at depths up to 300 or 400 feet, for the purposes of detecting the temperature gradients of the ocean (a critical bit of information for ASW, or anti-submarine warfare, because enemy submarines can avoid detection by sonar by remaining below these gradients). When we once needed a critical spare part, which was no longer readily available in the supply system, we conducted a clandestine ‘‘midnight raid’’ on the ships in the mothball ﬂeet in San Diego, for the purposes of stealing the needed parts. Our ‘‘raiding party’’ departed at about 02:00, traveled by water using the captain’s boat, and blackened their faces to avoid detection. The commanding ofﬁcer and executive ofﬁcer stood on deck to supervise

332

JOHN M. JOHNSON

the departure, and then the return of the successfully purloined BT equipment. Real-world practices such as gundecking and cumshawing are not to be found in the lofty, halcyon world of university instruction. The formal courses in organizational theory or organizational culture merely reproduce and sustain the ghostly abstractions of academic chimera. But gundecking and cumshawing are the on-job-training of these college graduates who then go on to reproduce their efﬁciencies and pathologies in the larger corporate cultures. It would be interesting to know if the many Kenneth Lays (Enron) and Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom) of the corrupt corporate world got their start in our military or other ofﬁcial institutions.

GEDUNK MEDALS AND WARTIME HEROISM Career military personnel seen the world over sport rows upon rows of arcane medals, ribbons, badges, medallions, and specialized insignia. Colonels, generals, admirals, and other ‘‘ﬂag rank’’ careerists show-off the ‘‘scrambled eggs’’ on their hats, and the special markings of their epaulets. There is a complicated ‘‘metric’’ in all these hierarchal rankings, and senior ofﬁcers know the six-digit rank number of their colleagues in equivalent ranks, in order to know who is suppose to salute ﬁrst. Military outsiders often wonder how it is possible to earn or achieve so many medals, medallions, and ribbons, especially for those from countries where there has been no known military action in decades. The Russian generals and colonels, with literally scores of ribbons covering their tunics, must take ﬁrst place in cartoonish absurdity, followed closely by small African and Central American national buffoons. The general rule seems to be this: the less actual combat a country has engaged in, the greater numbers of awards for combat heroism. The larger rule is even obvious to those who have never taken a sociology class: military medals (and the ribbons worn to represent them on daily uniforms) are the Boy Scout merit badges given by the careerists to each other, to sustain the pretense that they are doing something worthwhile. Medals, ribbons, medallions, and epaulets are hardly trivial. In Hannah Arendt’s famous study of Nazi exterminator Adolf Eichmann, she ascribes considerable import to Eichmann’s fascination with the Schutzstaffen (SS) insignia, in formulating her ideas about ‘‘the banality of evil.’’ Outsiders think there surely must be some spectacular motive involved to kill 300,000 Jews, and then are stunned and bewildered to learn that one was drawn to such actions by the stylized uniforms and insignia (Arendt, 1964).

My Short and Happy Life as a Decorated War Hero

333

War medals are, for the most part, a joke. When I was a Navy ofﬁcer, this was common knowledge. We joked and ridiculed these medals and ribbons. We called them ‘‘gedunk medals,’’ and in the photographs I retain of the Taussig ofﬁcers, only the career types were wearing the ribbons on their daily uniforms. Gedunk is a traditional navy term, and it refers to the ship’s store that sells candies, cigarettes, toiletries, and ‘‘incidentals,’’ and/or the actual candies and incidentals themselves. Using the term in reference to war medals represents an obvious attempt to trivialize and ridicule the medals. Personally I have no doubt that there were instances of monumental battleﬁeld bravery in Vietnam, but the true presumption and burden of proof must be elsewhere. This is the comment of Vietnam war veteran and author Heinemann (2004, p. 16): The plain fact is that in Vietnam medals were handed out like popcorn, right down to the Good Conduct Medal and the Riﬂe Sharpshooter Badge, particularly among careerminded ofﬁcers and NCO’s. Ticket-punching lifers, we called them with all the derision that the phrase implies; they seemed more interested in tending their precious careers than anything else. I know ofﬁcers who were given the Bronze Star for simply being in country (the ultimate in merit badges). An Air Force pilot told me that his commanding ofﬁcer suggested that he write himself up for a Distinguished Flying Cross on no particular account, and that he, the commander, would sign it. To his credit, my friend did not do so. By the same token, a writer friend of mine keeps his Bronze Star to prove to his children and grandchildren that despite what they may hear about Vietnam, he acted the way an adult is supposed to act, with compassion and grit, and that if he is not especially proud of his service in Vietnam, he is not ashamed of it either.

Deﬁning military actions as heroic is important for cultures based on murder and killing. It serves to hide what is really going on, and plays an important role for future leaders, spear carriers, and citizens. The future political, economic, and religious leaders use these ideas to justify more murder and killing, always rationalized to be in ‘‘the national interest’’ or ‘‘public good,’’ of course. For the future generations of spear carriers, now more likely to be drawn from interactive and video game players who are completely propagandized by the images and roles of heroes in the games, these ideas are used to ignore and hide from their own complicity in the killings and murder. And for the citizens hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of ofﬁcial lies and propaganda, they use these ideas to elect more Republicrats, for more killing and murder, always justiﬁed by some pragmatic exigency or situational contingency, of course. In Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story ‘‘The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’’ the central character is a weak and passive cuckold, a psychological prisoner of his forceful and controlling wife. He is ﬁnally

334

JOHN M. JOHNSON

able to break free of this condition, in one brief moment as he is being attacked by a charging rhinoceros, and a moment before he is shot and killed from behind by his wife. Hemingway leaves it ambiguous whether she was aiming at Francis or the rhinoceros, but makes it clearer that one brief moment of true existential freedom is better than none at all. My view of existential freedom is decidedly different than that proposed by Hemingway, as my freedom has been pervaded by decades of suffering for my own responsibility for the endemic violence of American culture and its institutional leaders.

REFERENCES Altheide, D. L., & Johnson, J. M. (1980). Bureaucratic propaganda. Boston: Allyn & Bacon Co. Arendt, H. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Vintage Press. Goode, W. J. (1978). The celebration of heroes: Prestige as a control system. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heinemann, L. (2004). When actions speak louder than medals. New York Times Op-Ed, Friday, August 27, 2004: A 16. Johnson, J. M. (1972). The practical uses of rules. In: R. A. Scott & J. D. Douglas (Eds), Theoretical perspectives on deviance (pp. 215–248). New York: Basic Books. Johnson, J. M. (1980a). Military preparedness as propaganda. In: D. L. Altheide & J. M. Johnson (Eds), Bureaucratic propaganda (pp. 179–204). Boston: Allyn & Bacon Co. Johnson, J. M. (1980b). Battle efﬁciency reports as propaganda. In: D. L. Altheide & J. M. Johnson (Eds), Bureaucratic propaganda (pp. 205–228). Boston: Allyn & Bacon Co.

THE HOME RUN: A DRAMATURGICAL MOMENT IN TIME Michael A. Katovich and Ronald Burns ABSTRACT This paper describes the home run as a dramatic offensive accomplishment in baseball linked to the ﬁve dramaturgical dimensions (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) deﬁned by Burke. Such an accomplishment also pertains to two types of social pasts – categorical and crystallized – that can serve as correlates to the ﬁve dramaturgical dimensions. Owing to its dramaturgical and temporal signiﬁcance, the home run symbolizes a celebrated sign of prowess that contributes to a home run hitter’s or slugger’s rariﬁed status. Further, as a dramaturgical moment, the home run calls forth speciﬁed responses (especially on the part of announcers) that contribute to its distinctive meaning in the game.

Early twentieth century Major League Baseball (played by salaried professionals in large metropolitan areas – and heretofore referred to as baseball) became known as America’s pastime, beﬁtting Jacques Barzun’s statement, ‘‘He who would know the heart and mind of America better learn baseball’’ (Voigt, 1976, p. 3). Accordingly, baseball historians have viewed the game as expressing values (however mythical) attributable to

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 337–359 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30018-0

337

338

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

America’s looking glass self – individualism, democratic participation, the melting pot, ingenuity, and teamwork. Even though it may not be exactly the game that Barzun romanticized, it is still the game that Mead (1934, pp. 154–155) employed as an example when describing a generalized other. Mead’s example involved a play in baseball that allowed all ﬁelders to activate their roles, take the roles of other ﬁelders, and adapt to the anticipated acts of their ﬁelding teammates. While baseball may no longer be the most popular game in America, it still retains practical and artistic human constructions of acts that appeals to students of culture and social action. Some in social and psychological sciences have linked baseball to dramatic themes associated with failure and superstition (Gmelch, 1992), fear of errors (Aronson, [1994] 2004), and dark humor (Katovich, 1993). On the more interactionist side of things, McCall and Simmons (1966) paid explicit attention to G. H. Mead in their analysis of the stolen base as a social object. While the notion of a stolen base uses combinations of metaphorical and literal description, it does draw attention to one particular means of approaching an end. Baseball refers to a set of separate social objects – a pitched ball that one attempts to hit and four distinct posts that the person hitting also attempts to reach. Each post (or base) represents progression from ﬁrst base to home plate that also represents the beginning and ending of a run scored, or the game’s key offensive accomplishment. At the risk of sounding like Dr. Watson, often berated by Sherlock Holmes for ‘‘having a great grasp of the obvious,’’ a baseball team simply cannot win unless they score at least one run. What may be less obvious, and perhaps more interesting to Holmes, is the sheer variance in regard to accomplishing the act of scoring. Multiple means of producing a standard objective lends intrigue to any game. Whereas the common objective (scoring a run) exists as an unwavering aim, the variance in, and multiple realities of, means to an end, contributes to an interactionist appreciation of emergent as well as to obdurate realities. Amid thousands of variations regarding how players produce a run, two narratives stand out. One, similar to a value added methodology described in the social sciences (see Loﬂand, 1970), pertains to systematic teamwork and the coproduction of necessary conditions leading to a sufﬁcient result (the run). In this value added team narrative, one player (a batter) reaches base, is ‘‘moved over’’ to successive bases by subsequent batters, and eventually scores when one of these subsequent batters ‘‘bats the player in.’’ The batter scoring is credited with a run scored (R) and the batter who bats the scorer in is credited with a ‘‘run batted in’’ (RBI).

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

339

A second dramaturgical narrative, and the main focus of this paper, truncates the value added process of scoring a run via the drama of the home run. This narrative resembles James’ (1890, p. 240) description of ‘‘thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.’’ As a substantial hit, the home run compresses necessary and sufﬁcient conditions – in itself, it produces a run and contrasts starkly with more value added ways of producing a run. As the least methodical (in terms of systematic progression) and most dramatic way of producing a run, the home run also invites roars from the crowd and explosions from scoreboards. In the following we provide elaboration about the home run as a dramaturgic event. We ﬁrst discuss the dramaturgic nature of the home run as a temporal and spatial aberration – or as a hit that stops play and freezes players in place. Second, we discuss the home run in the context of a dramaturgical narrative, noting that the production of a home run occurs within a dramatic contest. In our discussion, we elaborate on the theatrical and temporal components of the home run, keying on two distinct types of social pasts that involve theatrical and memorable home runs. Third, and by way of a conclusion, we extend temporal and dramaturgic themes to representative responses to home runs in the form of announcers’ ‘‘home run calls.’’ As a caveat we note that baseball fans and players often take knowledge of the game for granted. However, some readers may neither know the game nor care to know much about it. From their perspective, rudimentary acts and processes associated with scoring runs require explicit speciﬁcation. However, as Bateson (1972) noted in another context, all points of view leak – there is no such thing as a seamless description (and thus, an ‘‘exact science’’). Attempts to explain how any system or game works to the uninitiated can provide more confusion than clarity. Further, in regard to Schutz and Luckmann (1973) efforts to explain particular worlds are also confounded by problems of translation – speciﬁcally, problems associated with making implicit common stocks of knowledge and attendant jargon explicit. In this vein, we ask for the reader’s patience with our descriptions of the home run. Hopefully, our discussion will allow for a clear enough connection between baseball, interactionism, and dramaturgy.

THE DRAMATURGICAL NARRATIVE OF THE HOME RUN Every major sport has at least one accomplishment that can serve as a metaphor for broader outcomes within and outside of the game. In football,

340

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

the touchdown pass, especially one from a long distance that wins a game, congers up something miraculous, and an answer to a ‘‘Hail Mary.’’ The slam dunk in basketball has become analogous to a taken for granted answer – a ‘‘no brainer.’’ However, the home run appears to possess the most expansive metaphorical power – applicable to ‘‘wowing’’ audiences, ‘‘killing’’ in comedy nightclubs, and ‘‘landing’’ lucrative contracts. The home run goes by a greater variety of names (e.g., ‘‘blast,’’ ‘‘dinger,’’ ‘‘tater,’’ ‘‘long gone’’) than any other offensive hit, making it appear, at least, as a key demonstration of competence on the playing ﬁeld (cf. Fine, 1983, pp. 137–144). Fans seem to provide a roaring chorus in response to the home run as aforementioned scoreboards ‘‘explode,’’ sending ﬁreworks into the sky. Writers and poets have also portrayed the romance of its ﬁnality, creating dramatic images such as ‘‘the miracle at Coogan’s bluff’’ and ‘‘the homer in the gloaming.’’ Arguably, no other accomplishment in sport invites the imaginative and correlative leaps that the home run inspires (Plimpton, 2001). The home run’s popular and provocative status allows the baseball fans and commentators to wax poetic and heroic over its sudden impact. For instance, in response to Ernest L. Thayer’s famous poem, ‘‘Casey at the Bat,’’ which expressed the profound disappointment felt by fans after putting their hopes on a slugger who struck out, Grantland Rice wrote ‘‘Casey’s Revenge.’’ Rice’s poem described a home run so massive that ‘‘no one ever found the ball that mighty Casey hit.’’ However, the impact of the home run has engendered some criticism in regard to threatening the ‘‘purity’’ of the game. Recent attention to performance enhancing drugs in the form of steroids has linked the home run to dubious technologies. Further, and as mentioned above, the mere ubiquity of the home run truncates the more systematic strategy of scoring runs according to a sequential base-to-base methodology that represents the value of teamwork over mere individual accomplishment. In his classic depiction of human behavior and its conjunctive analysis, Burke (1945) provided a dramaturgical pentad that served as keys to understanding situated behavior. His speciﬁc keys referred to the act (occurrence), scene (place of occurrence), agent (performer), agency (method of competent performance), and purpose (motivation). As Edgley (2003, p. 142) notes, each of the keys possess distinct meanings but all form an interdependent whole – or narrative of behavior. Speciﬁcally, the home run as an act or occurrence takes place is a speciﬁed scene (a batter’s box) and involves a contest between two agents, a pitcher (throwing the ball toward the batter’s box) and a batter (who intends to hit the ball with his

341

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

bat). The batter indicates particular agency through his ability to ‘‘swing the bat’’ in a split second, and at a ball traveling between 80 and 100 miles per hour. The batter’s purpose, to achieve personal success that will ostensibly contribute to the success of the team, creates the competitive drama in which one person’s success is inextricably linked to another’s failure.

The Act The home run is one of four distinct ‘‘base hits’’ in the game, along with singles, doubles, and triples. Each occurs when batters hit pitched balls in fair territory that cannot be turned into putouts by ﬁelders. Each of the hits also represents where (at what base) the batter stops running after the hit – a single indicates stopping at ﬁrst base; a double indicates stopping at second base; and a triple indicates stopping at third base. A home run occurs when the batter either hits a fair ball outside of the ﬁeld’s dimensions (over the outﬁeld wall and, often, into the fans’ seats) or hits a ball within the ﬁeld’s dimensions to which the ﬁelders cannot adjust fast enough, enabling the batter to reach all bases without stopping. The home run can further be demarcated as either an interior or exterior act (cf. Collingwood, 1956, pp. 213–215). The exterior quality of an act pertains to its historically factual signiﬁcance, or what Mead (1929, pp. 236– 237) termed implicitly objective – it must have occurred owing to agreement about what constitutes reality in the here and now. In baseball, a 1-0 score represents an agreed to reality in which one team ‘‘must have’’ scored a run and the other team ‘‘must have’’ failed to score. The interior quality of an act provides more subjective meaning based on thought, introspective awareness, and emotion. Beyond any score, the home run can represent prowess, heroism, and particular fulﬁllment that an objective statistical summary cannot convey. External qualities of an act tend to rely on understandings of what social objects have occurred, how long it occurred, and the consequences of its occurrence (cf. Blumer, 1969, pp. 3–8). Internal qualities presume symbolic signiﬁcance associated with occurrences – allowing participants and observers to interject descriptions and draw conclusions that may or may not meet intersubjective criteria. While external consensus regarding the importance of some home runs exists in regard to particular outcomes and records, emotional responses (positive or negative) to any home run are often based on many arcane and subjective factors (cf. Billings, 2000, pp. 416–417).

342

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

Generally speaking, the drama and suddenness associated with the external quality of the home run alters the rhythm and pacing of the baseball game. Literally, the home run is the only hit in baseball that produces a run and at least one RBI simultaneously. Singles, doubles, triples, and walks can produce RBIs but only with others on base; neither can, in and of themselves, produce runs. Further, the home run is the only hit that creates an institutionalized pause in the game – or a standard stoppage in play accompanied by a ceremony. The game comes to a temporary halt as the batter rounds the bases – ‘‘touches them all’’ – and meets one or others on his team at home plate to receive often stylized congratulations. As a peculiar offensive measure, its run production engenders unique attention that other offensive events lack. Accordingly, as the home run becomes more prominent, the rhythm and pacing of baseball begins to emphasize the immediacy of offense and the melodrama of sudden achievement rather than the poetry of systematic accomplishment. The pause following the home run does more than simply suspend action. It also interrupts the ﬂuid merging of roles representing a generalized other. As mentioned earlier, Mead’s example of a generalized other involved a play in baseball that allowed all ﬁelders to activate their roles and take the roles of other ﬁelders simultaneously. By creating an institutionalized pause, the home run replaces interactional processes with ceremony, allowing an institutional pronouncement for the validity of the outside event. As the batter rounds the bases the defensive players on the ﬁeld have no pragmatic purpose, other than to watch passively.

The Scene Writers and observers often frame the detail in terms of a contest, especially pitting the pitcher against the batter. When it is any batter’s turn to bat (or ‘‘be up’’) he approaches the plate with his bat and stands in a batter’s box, deﬁned by two rectangular shaped boundaries to the right and left of home plate. All batters, whether batting from the right or left of the plate, must keep their feet in the demarcated rectangular space. The pitcher, who opposes all batters, begins all plays from the mound (a slightly elevated hill in the middle of the inﬁeld). The batter awaits the pitcher’s throw as he stands in a batter’s box, slightly more than 60 ft from the mound. The catcher, who also opposes the batter, lowers himself in a squatting position directly behind home plate as he awaits the pitcher’s throw. A batter remains at bat and in the batter’s box until he either fails to

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

343

reach one of the posts or bases (including, but not restricted to, striking out or batting into an out) or succeeds via a range of means, including one of the four aforementioned hits. The batter’s box represents a place analogous to what Goffman (1967) termed, ‘‘where the action is.’’ As Goffman put it, the action-centered place brings to bear elements of skill, fate, chance, consequence, probability, and demeanor. In turn, the batter’s box represents the place where pitched balls (physical perceptual things) become transformed into social objects (balls, strikes, hits, and outs). However, with the home run the scene shifts from contact in the batter’s box to the areas where the home run ball eventually lands. Typically, the home run ball reaches areas where the fans congregate, either the ‘‘bleachers’’ or the ‘‘grandstands’’ beyond the outﬁeld walls. The ball becomes a ‘‘souvenir,’’ that has potential value. Often, the value depends on whom (or what agent) hit the home run and the agency associated with such a hit.

The Agent and Agency In keeping with an individualistic focus, the act of producing a home run is connected immediately to the producer, or the batter. Further, each agent, or the batter responsible for the home run, becomes deﬁned as a type of home run hitter – ranging from ‘‘ﬂuke’’ to ‘‘slugger.’’ The typology of agents producing home runs correlates with attention to statistical detail (Katovich, 2001; Tygiel, 2000). The ‘‘slugger’’ or ‘‘home run king’’ achieves distinction through consistent statistical probability of hitting a home run. While such probability is arbitrary, the batters who can produce at least one home run for every 15 times at bat achieves the distinction of premier home run hitter. As Schmitt and Leonard (1986, pp. 1089–1091) pointed out, observers keep records that not only provide quantiﬁable standards, but also stimulate attention to seemingly immortal achievements as well. Focusing on the agent and agency, or skill and prowess, lends qualitative and subjective signiﬁcance to the home run. Beyond the externality of the occurrence, observers can ﬁnd dramatic and even mythological signiﬁcance in some home runs. Some home run hitters have become mythological agents to the extent that they became catalysts that provided praxis for change (Couch, 1984). The most celebrated catalyst was Babe Ruth, whose prodigious talent as a home run hitter made him an object of hero worship (Klapp, 1963). His impressive physical presence (6 ft 2in. and well over 220 pounds) made

344

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

him considerably taller and heavier than most of the players of his time (Ritter, 1966, p. 53). His physicality, combined with his appetite for publicity as well as the frequency and timing of his home runs ‘‘made him a national sensation’’ (Creamer, 1974). As an agent and skilled practitioner demonstrating agency, Ruth’s prominence and abilities made him appear as a unique and superior individual (Lloyd, 1976, p. 989). In general, agents as home run hitters establish categorical identities as ‘‘sluggers.’’ The identities enable home run hitters to take advantage of publicizing their agency, recognizing that the more publicity they receive, the more economic opportunities await them (Carvalho, 2004). As we note later, these agents also possess uncanny timing to hit important home runs at the ‘‘right times,’’ making them recognizable and newsworthy objects of attention. Home run hitting agents such as Ruth tend to adopt a charismatic style that enhances their status as agents who demonstrate ﬂairs for agency. Home run hitters become known by and through their swings, their ability to exceed normal home run distance (known as ‘‘tape measure home runs’’), and a home run ‘‘pose.’’ The pose occurs immediately after a slugger hits the ball and prior to the ball landing in the stands. Often aware of an audience, and willing to create evocative displays, home run hitters provide opportunities for writers and fans to recall his and their own emotions. Characteristically charismatic, home run hitters trust that the media (especially television) will put them in an evocative light (cf. Wasielewski, 1985, pp. 212–214; Couch, 1989, pp. 271–272).

Purpose We noted that the run in baseball represents a key social object that separates success from failure. In scoring a run, a team puts itself in the possible position of winning the game. As with any achievement in sports, the run has ‘‘no physical structure, but is simply a social object, a symbolic structure generated by a cooperative social act’’ (McCall and Simmons, 1966, p. 52). In baseball runs are social objects that, in Mead’s terms, resolve problematic situations (Mead, 1938, pp. 6–8). Speciﬁcally, the run represents the consummation of a future shared by players at bat – or an object in the perceivable distance (see Couch, 1970, pp. 459–460). Such a distal object is yet to materialize, but assumed to be possible – and part of what (McPhail, 1991, p. 198) identiﬁed as the temporary suspension of ‘‘whatever was problematic.’’ In effect the run

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

345

signiﬁes the consummation of an object that makes subsequent objectives (e.g., winning the game) possible. Very few players come to bat with the sole purpose of hitting a home run during that turn at bat. Most simply want to make good contact with the ball and in turn, make some useful offensive contribution. At times, however, some players come to bat with the explicit intention of hitting a home run. Such motivation tends to be based on several situational characteristics, such as the current score of the game, the inning in which the game is played, the number of players on base, the pitcher on the mound (and the pitcher’s repertoire of pitches), and the batter’s past success with regard to hitting home runs. In evaluating the batter’s purpose, observers should consider the game as proceeding according to situational realities that players on each side deﬁne as signiﬁcant. In effect, the game possesses narrative dynamics that become relevant from situation to situation (see Maines, 2001). For instance, when and if a batter succeeds at the batter’s box and reaches the base, the game moves from preventing the batter and getting on the base to preventing the (now) base runner from advancing. Further complexities occur when the base runner does advance from base to base or occupies a new base after the next batter succeeds in reaching base. As new objectives emerge, new dynamics become activated. The sheer possibility of multiple objectives and motives allows for a situated vocabulary (Mills, 1940), linked to an interactional process that players activate as they pursue objectives. This process is connected to one of interactionism’s core concepts, Mead’s (1932, pp. 15–16) notion of emergence. While those who interpret the game can assume particular motivations (or attitudes) and adjustments (to get on base, to score a run, to hit a home run), the game also becomes deﬁned by the events taking place, many of which cannot be predicted with precise accuracy. For instance, a batter at one point in time stands at bat with the purpose of merely ‘‘moving a runner over’’ and making some contact with the pitched ball. However, and even immediately subsequent to the batter’s original purpose, the batter perceives the necessity of making good enough contact to hit a home run rather than merely move a runner over. Each event taking place in the game provides the conditions for new presents that in turn, invite new interpretations of the past and new expectations in regard to the immediate and long-term future. Adjustments and emergent objectives also call forth various identities that players assume during the course of the game. Each player assumes a functional identity, or a commitment to adjust his behavior and engage in particular responses to external events and others’ acts (Scheff, 1968; Miller,

346

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

Hintz, & Couch, 1975). A batter’s purpose in the batter’s box is to adjust according to any speciﬁc functional identity that seems valid at the moment. In turn, some batters acquire categorical identities associated with speciﬁc types of hitting (e.g., a home run hitter). Such identities also become lodged in temporal contexts associated with a collective memory of the particular batter’s prowess and future expectations that the batter will iterate such prowess in the batter’s box.

TEMPORAL DRAMATURGY OF THE HOME RUN From a symbolic interactionist perspective, the home run resembles a signiﬁcant symbol (Mead, 1934) in that it calls out common and dramatic responses among fans, players, and professional observers (e.g., sportswriters and broadcasters). While many plays in the game have such potential signiﬁcance, no others elicit the patterned responses and expectations to respond as does the home run. The home run brings fans to their feet as they coconstruct a shared gaze toward the ball’s arc into the bleachers or grandstands. The players on the home run batter’s team greet the batter with stylized and routine congratulatory responses. As discussed later, broadcasters create specialized ‘‘calls’’ for home runs – or standard descriptions and celebratory responses – that do not exist for any other type of hit. Finally, in some parks and cities, home town fans in the bleachers or grandstands often expect the fan who has ended up possessing the home run ball hit by a batter on the opposing team to return the ball to the ﬁeld by ‘‘throwing it back.’’ The home run also creates specialized time. Many fans not only recollect the home run as a key event in the game, but also feel conﬁdent that others who saw the game will recollect the hit as well. As such a potentially memorable event, the home run becomes located in retrievable social pasts as deﬁned by Mead (1929) and Schutz (1967). Mead and Schutz offered dynamic theories of social pasts that represented a synergetic combination of memory (of prior occurrences), imagination (of hypothetical possibilities), and recontextualization (ﬁtting prior occurrences into ongoing plans of action). On this basis, we suggest two types of social pasts that are relevant to recalling the home run as a symbolic event. First, a crystallized past pertains to the speciﬁc timing of an act that interested observers treat as a discrete moment in time. Second, a categorically preeminent past pertains to the duration of an accomplishment that interested observers regard as monumental in its entirety.

347

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

Crystallized Past Particular events make enough of an impact to be forever retrievable, as if every micro detail associated with such events become permanent memories. In the context of a game involving distinct and discrete methods of keeping score, permanent memories also become linked to speciﬁc outcomes. The ‘‘home run that won the game,’’ for instance, becomes memorable as an achievement at a particular time (and scene) that causes a particular ﬁnish. Retrieving a crystallized past as a permanent memory involves four dynamics listed below. First, timing of the event becomes the temporal emphasis of a crystallized past. Batters hit many home runs during the course of a season, but only a few occur at speciﬁc times associated with outcomes. Second, and implicitly connected to timing, the nature of the game, as deﬁned by scorekeeping, contributes to the derived meaning of the event. Such meaning connects to the key reason for engagement in a game – winning. Home runs that cause a particular outcome achieve a specialized memory status, becoming identiﬁed as, e.g., ‘‘game winners,’’ ‘‘walk-off home runs,’’ and ‘‘curtain closers.’’ Third, the social characteristic of a crystallized past becomes revealed as a turning point (Strauss, 1959). While players, fans, and observers do sometimes anticipate a home run, especially in regard to a batter’s categorical identity, most home runs are only anticipated in vague ways, as gamblers might anticipate hitting a jackpot. The thought that a particular batter might hit a home run occurs to several people, but not as a ﬁxed idea. In this way, most home runs, especially the dramatic ones, are not ﬁrmly anticipated. The element of surprise, especially in the context of the outcome of a game, changes the way people remember the game and the event. Fourth, the transformational quality of a crystallized past is keyed on the pristine act itself. The memory of a home run as a crystallized event not only remains as permanent, but also remains permanently uncluttered. Its memory as a remarkable achievement is forever kept regardless of other memorable acts preceding or succeeding it. Teams can win games in varieties of ways, but winning a game because of a home run solidiﬁes the memory of accomplishment. The home run as ‘‘a winner’’ has an economy of expression that other potential methods lack. The act also represents the most monumental of offensive accomplishments, associated with strength, virility, and prowess. Reminiscent of Halbwachs’ (1992) insight that collective memories of events link action with speciﬁc consequences (or ‘‘moral outcomes’’) home runs that evoke crystallized pasts also become linked to signiﬁcant historical

348

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

outcomes. Baseball’s World Series, for instance, represents the annual moral outcome in which a championship team prevails. In this context, two home runs have decided World Series play – one by Bill Mazeroski in 1960 and the other by Joe Carter in 1993. Both home runs ended their games and served as turning points. Neither could be predicted with certainty and both changed the way people remembered each of the World Series contests – the home runs have framed subsequent recollections of the contests. Each of the turning points could represent the possibility of a pristine accomplishment – spectators can remember the speciﬁc home runs as crystallized moments in time that will endure across generations of fans. Mazeroski and Carter share the similarity of ending World Series contests, but each of their home runs remain unique outside events with equally distinct inside perspectives related to the events. Some World Series home runs become famous for deciding dramatic games and games in dramatic ways, rather than the series itself. Two in particular, Carlton Fisk’s ‘‘body English shot’’ and Kirk Gibson’s pinch hit home run have become oft recounted charismatic events in MLB history. Fisk’s home run won game six of the 1975 World Series, but did not lead to a World Championship. Even so, its occurrence in the bottom of the 12th inning during a memorable game made history. The term ‘‘body English shot’’ seemed to provide a symbolic capsule for its memorable quality, and came about after Fisk hit the ball. The outﬁeld cameraman captured Fisk guiding the ball with his arms as he hopped toward ﬁrst. Gibson’s home run evoked images of the wounded hero who provides an explicit purpose. Plagued by a leg injury that kept him out of the entire game, Gibson came to bat as a pinch hitter (replacing a teammate scheduled to bat) in the bottom of the ninth inning with his team down by a run. In a great deal of pain, Gibson hit his home run with a teammate on base, resulting in a dramatic ‘‘come from behind’’ victory. The camera followed Gibson as he hobbled around the bases, pumping his arm as if he were reloading a riﬂe. While the World Series is the most obvious event in which crystallized pasts emerge, Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers remains the most memorable home run linked to a crystallized past. For a number of reasons, early televised footage of Thomson’s home run accompanied by a voice over supplied by a local radio announcer (screaming into the microphone, ‘‘the Giants win the pennant!’’ four consecutive times) has become baseball’s cultural canon, combining dramatic victory, crushing defeat, and individualistic themes of fulﬁllment and despair (cf. Bruner, 1990, pp. 58–60). Baseball fans have reseen the attendant televised footage of Thomson rounding the bases

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

349

(or skipping on air) amid a dramatic change in action rates (Goffman, 1963) and celebrated such footage as a primary example of how exciting any game can be. While we assume that the memory of Thomson’s home run would endure without televised images, the iteration of the visual ceremony of rounding the bases served as one of the ﬁrst outstanding TV moments in the history of baseball (Plimpton, 2001). Over the years, writers and commentators have made countless allusions to Thomson’s home run (and Gibson’s as well) as a Deus ex machina, representing a dramatic outcome from victory and deciding not only the outcome of a game, but also of the league championship between two inner city rivals. Writers supplied melodramatic nomenclature (‘‘the shot heard ‘round the world’;’’ ‘‘the miracle at Coogan’s Bluff’’) as well as literary frames (Dom DeLillo used it as a starting point for his novel Underworld). Of interest, the limitations of early televised technology contributed to the crystallization of the ceremony. As TV broadcasting had yet to develop the multiple and omniscient camera aesthetics associated with contemporary viewing, fans watched the game from the perspective of a single camera located in a stable position – giving viewers a behind-the-plate view of the pitcher’s mound, the batter’s box, and the grassy part of the inﬁeld. When the batter hit the ball to an inﬁelder, the camera would adjust to capture the play. However, balls hit to the outﬁeld would be out of camera range. Instead of following the trajectory of the ball or keying on an outﬁelder tracking the ball, the camera would follow the course of the batter turned base runner, leaving the outﬁeld action to the viewer’s imagination. Thus, Thomson’s dance around the bases as the inﬁeld teemed with radical changes in action became the primary visual memory of the event. The timing of the home run coupled with visual permanence, not only served as a reminder of the ethos of the game (‘‘it ain’t over ‘till it’s over’’ as Yogi Berra put it), but also invited a ‘‘paradigm shift’’ in regard to how games would and could be broadcasted. The drama associated with game winning home runs and the capacity to televise them provided compelling selling points in the post integration, post World War II, and post depression eras.

Categorically Preeminent Past Crystallized pasts refer to retrievable memories of an act – or a particular home run – in the context of a game. Such pasts also highlight a player’s functional identity in the process of producing the home run. The act (or occurrence of the home run) takes precedence over the reputation of the

350

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

agent (i.e., whether or not the agent is a home run hitter, per se). Conversely, the agent and techniques of agency become the memorable objects in reference to a categorically preeminent past. Again, using the categories of temporal emphasis, derived meaning, social characteristic, and transformational quality, four speciﬁc measures help to deﬁne the categorically preeminent past. First, in contrast to timing, the temporal emphasis of the crystallized past, the categorically preeminent past focuses on the duration of a batter’s (as agent) accomplishments. The categorically preeminent past is more concerned with across time accomplishments that lead to a paradigmatic achievement. By paradigmatic achievement, we mean that the duration of a sequence of events will inspire particular and enduring designations of the accomplishment such as ‘‘home run king’’ (a status assigned to the current all-time leader in home runs). Second, while across time achievement involves many home runs, some of which decided particular outcomes associated with the game, the overall agency is not necessarily recalled as determining any outcome of any particular game. Rather, the meaning is derived from the character of the person who engages in play rather than determines the outcome of any particular game. The categorically preeminent past of play differs from the crystallized past of game in the same way that Huizinga (1950) distinguished sport (play) from contest (game). Huizinga noted that ‘‘the good sport’’ continues to keep playing despite negative or threatening circumstances. Play implies heart, which further implies ‘‘being up for’’ challenges. Third, the actual achievement of the contestant in the game alters memories of an event and creates more of a status passage (Glaser & Strauss, 1964) rather than a turning point. The status passage implies a journey in which the end point (e.g., breaking a record) is anticipated and even planned to the day (e.g., a consecutive home run streak). The status passage as journey calls forth particular designations regarding heroism. The home run hitter as hero is credited with a specialized purpose – to not only make contributions to the team effort, but also to establish himself as a great home run hitter. However, while motivation to hit home runs does lend credence to the person’s legitimacy as an athlete, it does not necessarily elevate the person into the status of enduring hero (or denigrate the person to the status of enduring goat). Heroism is reserved for one who demonstrates character in the contest itself; who does not merely play to hit home runs but ‘‘raises the bar’’ so as to provide future standards for accomplishments.

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

351

Fourth, the accomplishment associated with a categorically preeminent past implies a noble precursor – a precedent who becomes a successor simultaneously. At times, the precedent maintains its luster. The aforementioned Babe Ruth became known as ‘‘the sultan of swat’’ after ﬁrst, setting a season record for most home runs (60), and then establishing an all time career home run record (714). In 1961, Roger Maris broke Ruth’s seasonal record when he hit 61 home runs. In 1974, Henry Aaron’s 715th home run ﬁnally surpassed Ruth’s record. Each pursuit of Ruth’s records engendered a possessive protection of Ruth’s memory that included explicit racist tones (in the case of Aaron). Nevertheless, people in baseball did not suddenly refer to Ruth as ‘‘the former sultan of swat.’’ In turn, precedents can also imply ignobility such as the current controversy surrounding performance enhancing substances and their alleged effects on increased home runs. Barry Bonds, the current season record holder with 73 home runs, for instance, has been called on to defend his prowess in the face of accusations that he has taken steroids. Pursuit of home run records provides a particular temporal narrative (see Maines, 2001, pp. 168–169) for categorically predominant pasts that symbolizes a collective standpoint toward the richness of baseball’s past, especially as deﬁned in terms of a quest, a journey, and melodrama. The pursuit also reveals the possibility of a different future and especially one in which the present record holder will relegate a former record holder. Such a possibility may be problematic, especially if the present record holder symbolizes the contextual richness of a social system’s past, as did Babe Ruth (cf. Gongaware, 2003, p 508). Ruth’s single season record of 60 home runs represented more than sheer frequency. It was the record held by the charismatic home run king credited with restoring interest in a game that had experienced waning support and enthusiasm. The person breaking the record needed to demonstrate the capacity for frequency and the allure of a hero being worshipped. At times, however, the particular narrative has a somber quality, bordering on a social stigma. Roger Maris received more than a fair share of criticism when he broke Ruth’s season record. Henry Aaron also confronted a great deal of antagonism in pursuit of Ruth’s all time home run record. Up against an honored past of Ruth’s accomplishments with the added burden of confronting the issue of race, Aaron faced several obdurate and prejudicial obstacles. Some wished to maintain the integrity of Ruth as a ‘‘home run king,’’ even though Aaron would have the record. Aaron’s pursuit challenged a key dimension of the categorically preeminent past – the duration of a collective memory of pursuit of a record held by

352

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

‘‘the immortal’’ in baseball. Each home run that Aaron hit did not simply bring him closer to a record, but to ‘‘the record’’ that had come to symbolize the glory and romance of baseball’s immortal post self. Ruth’s record of 714 home runs served as perhaps the most noble of all precursors, so much so that even the most casual fan could recognize the signiﬁcance of the number. Surviving players and sportswriters from Ruth’s era willingly obliged reporter inquiries to talk about ‘‘the Babe’’ as Aaron approached the record. Almost to the point of absurdity, many relied on an oral tradition that cast Ruth as a Paul Bunyan-like ﬁgure. Buzzi Bavasi, General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers recalled ‘‘when Ruth whipped the bat you could see the hickory bend.’’ Ruth’s teammate, Waite Hoyt said that Ruth was ‘‘one of a kindyif you had never heard of him and passed him on Broadway, you’d turn around and look.’’ Leo Durocher, another former teammate, said that Ruth ‘‘hit balls so high that the inﬁelders would lose sight of them.’’ Another one of Ruth’s contemporaries maintained that after a night of drinking Ruth would ‘‘show up at the clubhouse, guzzle a glass of bicarbonate of soda, and burp so powerfully that all the loose water in the showers would fall down.’’ (Stanton, 2004, pp. 19–20). As Huizinga noted in regard to the serious player, Aaron treated his play and the game as an ongoing test of character and will. As part of the ﬁrst wave of African-American players after Jackie Robinson’s entrance into the game, Aaron impressed reporters and fans with his no-nonsense dedication to all facets of the game. Unlike Willie Mays, who often joked with the press and presented himself as a ‘‘good sport’’ who could laugh at off-color jokes, Aaron maintained a polite but always studied persona who would never merely ‘‘kid around’’ (Halberstam, 1994). Aaron’s master status as a black man contributed heavily to the dismay that people felt over ‘‘losing’’ Ruth as the statistical home run king. Aaron’s approach to his 715th home run was dotted with painful reminders of his African-American identity. As Aaron kept hitting home runs and as it became apparent that he would indeed break Ruth’s record, he received hate mail, death threats, and criticism from legitimate media outlets. Fans heckled him unmercifully – the hecklers often keyed on invidious comparisons to Ruth and the color of Aaron’s skin. From Aaron’s point of view, the stigma associated with race proved to be the most frustrating and unjust obstacle. Aaron had to acknowledge that many people resented him simply for being a black player who would break Ruth’s record (Aaron, 1991).

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

353

Issues of race have reemerged since the 1990s when the baseball world experienced a sudden peak in home run production. In 1998, Mark McGuire, a very popular white ballplayer, and Sammy Sosa, a popular black player from the Dominican Republic, surpassed Roger Maris’ single season record. The pursuit drew national attention with fans and commentators celebrating a contest between the two. McGuire ended up winning the contest by becoming the ﬁrst player to hit 70 home runs. Some hinted that the press favored McGuire as a ‘‘golden boy’’ in contrast to Sosa’s decidedly ethnic stature. While each of the pasts represents differing emphasis on act (crystallized) and agent/agency (categorically preeminent), some home runs reveal intersections between the pasts. Two in particular can conclude this section on home runs and social pasts. The ﬁrst applies to Ruth, who established a reputation as a home run hitter with impeccable timing. Ruth’s most memorable and dramatic home run occurred when (allegedly) he ‘‘called his shot’’ during the 1932 World Series against the Chicago Cubs. The event has become part of baseball’s mythical past (see Mead, 1929; Maines, Sugrue, & Katovich, 1983). While all agree that Ruth did hit the home run on a ‘‘one ball, two strike count’’ various narratives, often contrasting with each other, exist as to the sequences associated with the hit. Lloyd (1976, p. 986) combed through several narratives and contends that prior to hitting the home run, Ruth ‘‘pointed out toward the ﬁeld and hit the next pitch out of the park.’’ Not willing to simply round the bases (knowing that rounding in itself annoyed ﬁelders), Ruth also laughed and gesticulated, ‘‘ﬂapping his arms’’ as if to indicate that the ball had wings (Carvalho, 2004). Despite contrasting stories, ‘‘the called shot’’ has endured as an indication of Ruth’s charismatic appeal as a home run hitter. Second, the ﬁnal home run hit by Ted Williams, one of baseball’s premier hitters, serves as a memorable way of closing one’s career. Williams’ home run, which occurred during his last at bat in his career, became his 521st, which at the time put him third on baseball’s all-time home run list. As the hit in his ﬁnal major league at bat, it endures as one of the great ‘‘last hurrahs’’ in the game. The novelist John Updike (1960) provided a poetic and ﬁrst hand account of the home run as ‘‘the tip of a towering, motionless, construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky.’’ After Williams rounded the bases (‘‘like a feather’’) he decided to forego a ‘‘curtain call’’ (acknowledge the fans cheers). Sensing the inside heroism of the moment, Updike concluded, ‘‘Gods don’t answer letters’’ (1960, p. 18).

354

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

THE MEANING OF HOME RUNS AND DRAMATURGICAL RESPONSES: THE HOME RUN CALL G. H. Mead’s famous dictum that ‘‘the meaning is the response’’ has allowed interactionists and dramaturgists to discuss social objects in ﬂuid and processual terms. However, as Blumer (1969, pp. 2–3) also noted, responses that become patterned over time lend stability to the meaning of objects – casting such objects in enduring social contexts. In regard to the home run, the announcer’s home run call has become one of the more patterned and noticeable types of response. Just as the home run invited institutionalized pauses in the game, it also engendered a break in the continuity of an announcer’s story. The event of the home run prompted a particular response on the part of the announcer that recognized suspension of the game in order to complete the ceremonial rounding of bases. Such a response eventually became ‘‘a call’’ on the part of the announcer – or dramatic voice-over descriptions of the home run that constitute signature phrases. The announcer’s call has become a familiar and normalized assertion of the home run as a signiﬁcant and distinguishable event. Radio and television announcers have employed distinct dramaturgical devices that Goffman (1959, pp. 30–70) discussed in regard to impression management. First, the iterative signature line mystiﬁed the event, conveying proper emotion and cadence that signiﬁed awe. Through the call, the act of a home run, its scene, the agent, one’s agency, and a batter’s purpose have meanings quite distinct from any other hit. Through the announcer’s voice and iterations, the home run signaled a ritualized form of discourse that listeners easily remembered and anticipated. Over time, fans expect to hear announcers to provide benediction of the hit with their signature call – making both the home run and the call something awesome to recollect. Early into broadcasting baseball on the radio, announcers’ mystiﬁcation of the home run had materialistic opportunities. As a built in pause coupled with celebrative reverence, radio stations and marketers concluded that the home run created proﬁtable time. When making the call, announcers could also employ a ‘‘time out’’ to endorse products. In particular, beer, tobacco, and nicotine products were prominent masculinized staples. Cigarettes, bottles of beer, and cigars dominated the audiovisual landscape of baseball – with frequent advertisements on the radio and many ads on billboards at the park (Howell, 1991). Ball players found that they could receive endorsement money for lending their names and faces to beer, cigarette, and cigar advertisements. Announcers endorsed several products as they wound up

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

355

their home run calls, calling the home runs ‘‘White Owl (cigar) wallops,’’ ‘‘Old Goldies (cigarette),’’ ‘‘Ballantine (beer) blasts,’’ and sometimes exclaiming ‘‘This Bud’s for you,’’ after the call. The iterative call also relied on the announcer’s ability to maintain expressive control. As the home run became more frequent, announcers treated it as something unusual that nevertheless could be quickly normalized. By providing oral description of events, announcers create vivid recollections associated with particular sounds. The announcer’s expressive control provided listeners with a stable reference point by which to appreciate the hit as notable. However, somewhat different from Emerson’s (1972) observation that immediate normalization produces the appearance of ‘‘nothing unusual happening,’’ the announcer’s ability to provide a call and maintain control created the simultaneous feel of an unusual event that could be described in ways that appeared sensible. The credibility of the announcer’s maintenance of expressive control further allowed for dramatic realization, or an emergent call that captures the signiﬁcance of the home run’s crystallized or categorically preeminent past. Perhaps the most famous radio call in the history of the game, Russ Hodges’ aforementioned euphoric description of Bobby Thomson’s pennant winning home run, created an auditory sanctum that remains as memorable as the blast itself. His spontaneous call would become part of baseball lore (and replayed on numerous retrospectives). Branca throws. There’s a long drive, I think it’s gonna’ beyThe Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left ﬁeld stands! The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy!

As home runs became more frequent and with the advent of television broadcasting, the home run became an audiovisual spectacle. The towering blasts, the tape measured home runs, and the home run poses became celebrated as reiterations on television broadcasts (Halberstam, 1994). The spectacle also enhanced the importance of the announcer’s call. On television, the call complemented the visual trajectory of the ball through colorful, emotional, and masculinized glee. Once the call becomes a going concern, fans anticipated its reproduction, recounted its articulation, and even applied its elocution to other situations. As televised games became more prominent, announcer’s calls became part of this legend. Indeed, many announcers admitted into the hall of fame became known for their home run calls.

356

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

We mentioned that the home run as broadcast changed the narrative of games – and even the narratives of announcers who called games. Televised broadcasts, in particular, not only enhanced the home run via announcers’ calls and visual aesthetics, but also invited innovations that would add to the dramaturgical gestalt of the blast. As television and baseball strengthened its bond, home run hitters enjoyed more pronounced celebrations of the event. Currently, the home run hitter rounds the bases as scoreboards explode (simulating ﬁreworks), music plays (e.g., the theme to The Natural), and jumbotrons (electronic wide screens) portray the ceremony. Announcers who call home run blasts do not have signature phrases for stolen bases or sacriﬁce hits. Scoreboards do not explode when batter and base runner succeed on a hit and run play. Theme music does not accompany a single, double, or triple. In effect, the home run becomes the outside narrative on which sportscasters and sportswriters, as well as fans, draw when recounting the past. As the key event of the game, the home run serves as an iterative object of a collective memory (see Schwartz, 1991). It is recalled as a moment lodged within immediate reach of conscious memories (Denzin, 1969). Fans, baseball historians, and reporters can ﬁll in the same assumptions about the importance of home runs and feel conﬁdent that others will know precisely what to ﬁll in. In this vein, home runs are proximate reminders of the drama of games and in ‘‘restorable reach’’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). Sports highlight shows, such as ESPN’s Baseball Tonight provide ongoing TV images of home runs, making them more available to fans and observers than other means of scoring runs. Typical of such shows, the home runs become infused with whimsical summaries, or meta-calls, often evoking references to lines from ﬁlms. While such meta calls can be whimsical or referential, they also serve as keys to emphasize home runs as primary highlights of the game (see Goffman, 1974). Television recaps of games revolving around home runs emphasize melodramatic and dramaturgic climaxes, with multi-visual images and passionate audio responses of players, fans, and commentators from the dugouts, stands, and announcing booths. The home run as an audiovisual iteration contributes to its enduring memory and perhaps takes on more importance than the home runs that have no corresponding grammar. As a dramaturgical event that becomes a vital part of baseball’s enduring and variegated past, the home run stands out as a signiﬁcant symbol, calling out collective and stylized responses on the part of players, fans, and commentators. Unlike any other offensive contribution in the game, or even in all of professional sports, the home run combines competent performance

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

357

with lore, fable, and myth. The act itself, often described as ‘‘booming’’ and ‘‘towering’’ allows for dramaturgical waxing – equating it with many larger than life accomplishments. The scene literally transforms with a home run, placing a highly pragmatic and competitive relationship between pitcher and batter into the context of ceremony. The home run gives rise to heroic agents whose skill or agency provides powerful negotiation tools – in the form of bigger contracts. Finally, the purpose of the home run, amid all of its dramaturgical glory, achieves the reason for participating in the contest itself – to score a run.

REFERENCES Aaron, H. (With Lonnie Wheeler). (1991). I had a hammer: The Hank Aaron story. New York: Harper-Collins. Aronson, E. ([1994] 2004). On baseball and failure. In: Elliot Aronson (Ed.), Readings about the social animal (pp. 10–13). New York: Worth Publishers. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Chandler Publishing Co. Billings, A. C. (2000). In search of women athletes: ESPN’s list of the top 100 athletes of the century. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24(4), 415–421. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, K. (1945). A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carvalho, J. (2004). Bad times but still swinging: World Series coverage before and during the depression. NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 13(1), 81–93. Collingwood, R. G. (1956). The idea of history. London: Oxford University Press. Couch, C. J. (1970). Dimensions of association in collective behavior episodes. Sociometry, 33, 457–471. Couch, C. J. (1984). Constructing civilization. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. J. (1989). From hell to utopia and back to hell: Charismatic relationships. Symbolic Interaction, 12, 265–279. Creamer, R. (1974). Babe: The legend comes to life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Denzin, N. K. (1969). Symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology. American Sociological Review, 34, 447–474. Edgley, C. (2003). The dramaturgical genre. In: L. T. Reynolds & N. J. Herman-Kinney (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 141–172). Walut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Emerson, J. (1972). Nothing unusual is happening. In: T. Shibutani (Ed.), Human nature and collective behavior (pp. 208–222). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Fine, G. A. (1983). Shared fantasy – role-playing games as social worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1964). Awareness contexts and social interaction. American Sociological Review, 29, 669–679. Gmelch, G. (1992). Superstition and ritual in American baseball. Elysian Fields Quarterly, 11, 25–36. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

358

MICHAEL A. KATOVICH AND RONALD BURNS

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon Books. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row. Gongaware, T. B. (2003). Collective memory and collective identities: Maintaining unity in native American educational social movements. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32(5), 483–520. Halberstam, D. (1994). October 1964. New York: Villard Books. Halbwachs, M. (1992). In: L. Coser (Ed.), On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howell, J. (1991). A revolution in motion: Advertising and the politics of nostalgia. Sociology of Sport Journal, 8, 238–257. Huizinga, J. (1950). Homo Ludens: A Study of the play element in culture. Boston: Beacon Press. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Dover. Katovich, M. A. (1993). Humor in baseball: Functions and dysfunctions. Journal of American Culture, 15, 7–15. Katovich, M. A. (2001). Drugs and numbers in the reporting of American sports. Culture, Sport, Society, 4(2), 121–139. Klapp, O. (1963). Heroes, villains, and fools. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lloyd, F. R. (1976). The home run king. Journal of Popular Culture, 9(4), 983–995. Loﬂand, J. (1970). Interactionist imagery and analytic interruptus. In: T. Shibutani (Ed.), Human nature and collective behavior (pp. 35–45). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Maines, D. R. (2001). The faultline of consciousness: A view of interactionism in sociology. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Maines, D., Sugrue, N., & Katovich, M. A. (1983). The social import of G.H. Mead’s theory of the past. American Sociological Review, 48, 151–173. McCall, G., & Simmons, J. L. (1966). Identities and interaction. New York: The Free Press. McPhail, C. (1991). The myth of the madding crowd. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Mead, G. H. (1929). The nature of the past. In: J. Coss (Ed.), Essays in honor of John Dewey (pp. 235–242). New York: Henry Holt. Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1938). The philosophy of the act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. E., Hintz, R. A., & Couch, C. J. (1975). The elements and structure of openings. The Sociological Quarterly, 16, 479–499. Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated action and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review, 5, 904–913. Plimpton, G. (2001). A chronology of the home run. In: G. Plimpton (Ed.), Home run (pp. 1–6). New York: Harvest Original. Ritter, L. S. (1966). The glory of their times: The story of the early days of baseball told by the men who played it. New York: Macmillan. Scheff, T. (1968). Negotiating reality: Notes on power in assessment of responsibility. Social Problems, 16, 3–17. Schmitt, R. L., & Leonard, W. M., II. (1986). Immortalizing the self through sport. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 1088–1111.

Dramaturgical Moment in Time

359

Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1973). The structures of the life world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schwartz, B. (1991). Iconography and collective memory: Lincoln’s image in the American mind. Sociological Quarterly, 32, 301–318. Stanton, T. (2004). Henry Aaron and the home run that changed America. New York: William Morrow. Strauss, A. (1959). Mirrors and masks. New York: Free Press. Tygiel, J. (2000). Past time: Baseball as history. New York: Oxford University Press. Updike, J. (1960). Hub fans bid the kid adieu. The New Yorker, Oct. 22. Voigt, D. Q. (1976). America through baseball. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Wasielewski, P. (1985). The emotional basis of charisma. Symbolic Interaction, 8, 207–222.

SCOREKEEPING VERSUS STORYTELLING: REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF ‘‘HATE CRIME’’ Lawrence T. Nichols, James J. Nolan III and Corey J. Colyer ABSTRACT The paper addresses the issue of contrasting constructions of social problems. Using ‘‘hate crime’’ as an example, we focus on portraits of the problem in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports and in the New York Times. The analysis illumines how fundamental contrasts in representations of hate arise from differences in the underlying, and institutionalized, sense-making practices of scorekeeping and storytelling. We conclude by discussing the larger implications of the ﬁndings for further development of the theoretical model of ‘‘dialogical constructionism.’’

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 361–379 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30019-2

361

362

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

INTRODUCTION Interpretive sociologists, such as those working within the ‘‘constructionist’’ perspective articulated by Spector and Kitsuse (2000 [1977]) and further developed by numerous other scholars (e.g., Pfohl, 1977; Best, 1989, 1993; Nichols, 1989, 1999; Denzin, 1991; Holstein & Miller, 1993; Ibarra & Kitsuse, 1993; Loseke, 1992, 1999; Lowney, 1999; Maines, 2001; Altheide, 2002; Holstein, 2003), have frequently grappled with the issue of contrasting images of emergent social problems. As Best (1990) has argued, if the ultimate goal of social scientiﬁc work is knowledge of contemporary society, then it matters a great deal whether there are 50,000 children missing each year, as some advocacy groups claimed, or only a few hundred, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) believed. But this observation leaves open the question of how to develop a sociological understanding of the conﬂicting claims and widely divergent estimates that appear so frequently in social-problem debates. As will be seen in more detail below, the sociological literature has explored the issue of differences largely in terms of the presumably opposed interests and attitudes of claims-makers who participate in individual socialproblem debates. Thus, in some treatments, emphasis is placed on the rational, political interests of feminist, or African-American civil rights, or homosexual-rights groups, and how these interests presumably shape claimsmaking rhetoric. Other analyses focus on irrational factors, especially shared fears or recurrent ‘‘cultural worries’’ (Loseke, 1999, p. 62) and a ‘‘culture of fear’’ (Furedi, 2002), that produce ‘‘moral panics’’ and exaggerated claims about problems. In still other treatments, there is consideration of how rational, economic interests shape claims, such as those presented by media organizations for whom news is ‘‘purposeful behavior’’ (Molotch & Lester, 1974), often within an ‘‘entertainment framework’’ (Altheide 1998, 2003). In this paper, we offer an alternative approach to the analysis of competing constructions of social problems. Using data from recent discourse about the emergent issue of ‘‘hate crime,’’ we examine the role of contrasting representational practices in generating different images of the problem. In particular, we look at scorekeeping in ofﬁcial federal databases, versus storytelling in mass print media. We also note the existence of intermediate forms that blend together these two representational practices, such as the primarily narrative, secondarily statistical combination favored by advocacy groups such as the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. We argue that the characteristics of these representational practices themselves exert an important inﬂuence on

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

363

deﬁnitions of social problems such as hate crime. We also note that the scorekeeping, storytelling, and blended practices are institutionalized sensemaking practices that can be regarded as competing voices in the ongoing dialog (Nichols, 2003) about hate crime and other contemporary issues. Since the professional literature has often focused on claims-making in mass media, it will be convenient to begin with an examination of this issue.

Constructions in Mass Media Within the ﬁeld of the sociology of social problems, there is a large and growing literature on constructions of issues in mass media (e.g., Altheide & Snow, 1979; Fishman, 1980; Garofalo, 1981; Barak, 1994; Chermak, 1994; Potter, 1998), including traditional print media, radio and television (Altheide, 1976), and newer media, especially the Internet. A recurrent theme in many researches is the extent to which media ‘‘distort’’ or ‘‘misrepresent’’ actual problems in the social world. Such distortions may occur, it is argued, either as the result of excessive emphasis or else through neglect and silence. Thus, there have been numerous studies critiquing the exaggerated coverage through which claims-makers in media organizations artiﬁcially produce ‘‘crime waves,’’ including alleged epidemics of violence against elderly persons (Fishman, 1978) or outbreaks of money laundering by major banks (Nichols, 1997). In the same way, sociologists of social problems have analyzed distortion by omission, as when media organizations fail to provide in-depth coverage of corporate crime, or choose not to characterize corporate illegality as ‘‘violent’’ (Wright, Cullen, & Blankenship, 2002). Explanations of allegedly distorted coverage differ. Some scholars suggest that misrepresentations by media, especially when these involve exaggeration, may be understood in terms of social psychological factors, especially ‘‘moral panics.’’ A case can be made, for instance, that media organizations promoted a moral panic about serial murder (Jenkins, 1994) by claiming that in any given year there were several dozen serial killers at large, who were taking the lives of thousands of innocent victims. In the same way, media arguably played a central role in the ‘‘satanism scare’’ of the 1980s (Richardson, Best, & Bromley, 1991). More recently, David Altheide (2002, p. 3) has argued that ‘‘fear has become a dominant public perspective,’’ and that ‘‘constructing the discourse of fear is a major accomplishment of the mass media’’ (2002, p. 184). Thus, from a social psychological point of view, distorted claims in mass media may ultimately reﬂect a fundamentally irrational aspect of social life.

364

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Sociologists also analyze media misrepresentations from a conﬂict perspective, in terms of hierarchy and domination. A key consideration, here, is how patterns of ownership of media organizations, along with dependence on government agencies, result in the protection of elite interests and the reproduction of inequality. An inﬂuential study by Ericson, Baranek, and Chan (1991, p. 349), for instance, found that, ‘‘Government ofﬁcials were a dominant source in all news outlets, but especially in newspapers.’’ Other studies have pointed to the effects of class and race on the reporting of social problems. For example, it has been asserted that the media panic over the crack cocaine epidemic occurred only when the use of cocaine became prevalent among lower-class and minority persons (Reinarman & Levine, 1995). Researches of this type generally ﬂow from, or are at least consistent with, a power elites model of society in which mass media are seen as occupying a second tier of the hierarchy (Simon, 2002). Bagdikian (2000, 2004), for example, has indicted contemporary ‘‘media monopolies,’’ while McChesney has called attention to ‘‘rich media, poor democracy’’ (2000) and our ‘‘unfree press’’ (2004). Conﬂict sociologists have also examined the role of ideology (e.g., Cavender, 1981; Humphries, 1981; Gorelick, 1989; Jewkes, 2004) in generating distorted coverage of social issues. Thus, in an inﬂuential study of ‘‘manufacturing consent,’’ Herman and Chomsky (2002) presented a ‘‘propaganda model’’ of the operation of mass media. Applying this approach to recent reality crime programs, Cavender (1998, p. 92) ﬁnds that such programs ‘‘create illusions that are dangerous, not only because they confuse television and reality, but because they are a powerful tool for a repressive ideology.’’ In the same vein, Surette (2006, p. 39) contends that, ‘‘The crime and justice content found in the media leads to a ‘Predator Criminal Icon’ y. We ultimately base our policies not on our typical criminals but on our most atypical ones.’’ An intermediate approach to claims-making in mass media is rooted in the view of society as a network of interest groups involved in exchange relationships. From this perspective, media organizations are neither entirely autonomous nor entirely coopted by an elite superstructure. As they pursue their own mission and self-interest (Gans, 1979), as reﬂected in audience shares and ﬁnancial proﬁt, media organizations absorb and rework claims from many sources (Best, 1990). For instance, both Hallin (1985) and Schudson (1989), drawing on the theoretical writings of Jurgen Habermas, have advocated a model of mass media as ‘‘formally disconnected’’ from other ruling agencies. Within this approach, exaggerated claims about social problems, in melodramatic formats such as televised talk shows, may simply be savvy business practices (Lowney, 1999).

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

365

Constructions in Ofﬁcial Statistics Sociologists doing interpretive work on social problems have thus far invested relatively little effort in the study of statistical artifacts and practices. One instructive exemplar, however, is the analysis by Philip Jenkins of the production of ofﬁcial data on ‘‘serial murder,’’ by local law enforcement agencies, by the FBI, and by the U.S. Congress. Jenkins pays particular attention to the process by which an ofﬁcial ﬁgure of several hundred killings per year emerged from Congressional hearings. As he notes, police agencies routinely enumerate serious crimes in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) document that is submitted monthly to the FBI. In the case of killings, there is a further recording procedure, known as the Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR). These supplemental reports may contain information about the identities of victims and offenders, along with data on the age, sex, and race of those involved. Jenkins believes that the ofﬁcial ﬁgures of the SHRs were misinterpreted in a manner that generated a second ofﬁcial estimate (by Congress) that was grossly exaggerated. As he explains: The critical part of the data was found in the SHRs, in the number of homicides that could not be classiﬁed under one of the supplied headings. Between 1976 and 1985, for example, about 17 percent of all homicide circumstances are listed as unknown. In the same period, 29 percent of murders indicate an unknown relationship between offender and victim. During 1983, the law enforcement experts studying serial murder presumed that most of these unknown and even stranger categories were the work of serial killers like Bundy or Gacy, and this was the source of the four or ﬁve thousand victims idea. (Jenkins 1994, pp. 60–61)

Jenkins further suggests that the construction of inﬂated ofﬁcial estimates becomes clearer when other routine organizational procedures are considered. When a murder is detected, the police ﬁle the requisite paperwork, with the deadline being within ﬁve days of the end of the month in which the incident occurred. At this early stage, the police might well know neither the offender nor the circumstances, and thus enter an unknown response in the appropriate categories. Weeks or months later, the situation might well change, and the correct procedure would be for the police department to submit a new report to amend the ﬁrst. Here, though, there is enormous room for cutting corners. y A conscientious ofﬁcer in a professionally oriented department with an efﬁcient recording system probably would notify the reporting center that the murder was no longer unsolved or lacking known circumstance . y Other ofﬁcers in other departments might well feel that they have more important things to do than to submit a revised version of a form they have already completed. (Jenkins, 1994, pp. 61–62)

366

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Thus, the quality and accuracy of scorekeeping will vary across local police departments, and the consequent gaps and ambiguities may facilitate exaggerated ofﬁcial claims by such groups as Congressional investigating committees (Best, 2005). When sociologists of any persuasion critique alleged misrepresentations in mass media, they require some standard of comparison that presumably offers a more accurate portrait of truth. Ofﬁcial data systems such as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, or the Center for Disease Control Mortality Reporting System, along with reports commissioned by the government and its administrative agencies function in this capacity. Whereas media accounts may be inﬂuenced by distortion and the narrative arc of anecdotes, ofﬁcial records are produced through predictable methodologies. These resources are created with attention to reliability and validity concerns. Theoretically, they are immune from the changing winds of circumstance. For example, Joel Best (1999) relies on ofﬁcial statistics to challenge the conventional belief violent crime is a random phenomenon. Using data published by the FBI he demonstrates that that crime victimization is tightly clustered around social, behavioral, and demographic correlates. While he is careful to show that even these ﬁgures are culturally accomplished, their mode of production holds more weight. In the same way, researchers have cited ofﬁcial data indicating that behaviors such as drive-by gang shootings (Sanders, 1994) or recreational drug-use (Reinarman & Levine, 1995) were stabilizing, or even declining, at the very time when intensive media coverage gave the impression of rapidly spreading epidemics. This style of critique is likely to endure within the literature of interpretive sociology, even if sociologists remain ambivalent about the validity of ofﬁcial tabulations.

SCOREKEEPING AND STORYTELLING ABOUT HATE CRIME Representational Practices The two portraits of hate crime examined here arise from contrasting modes of gathering and presenting information about social problems, which may be referred to as ‘‘scorekeeping’’ and ‘‘storytelling.’’ Considered in idealtypical terms, scorekeeping is relatively impersonal, or depersonalized. What began as interpersonal encounters (e.g., racial epithets followed by violence) is reduced to units within tables of aggregate numbers. Each numeric item is

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

367

treated as formally equal to every other item in the database. Individual human actors are not identiﬁed, and the details of their everyday lives, as well as the ‘‘irrelevant’’ features of the interactions warranting the data entries, become invisible and inaudible. For this reason, the tabular representations are also highly condensed and relatively ‘‘colorless.’’ These artifacts require scorekeepers, who are often individually anonymous, and who may be relatively low-status workers within complex organizations (e.g., data entry clerical staff and data management technicians), such as local police departments and the FBI. These practitioners translate original events into a language of ‘‘quantiﬁable variables’’ (e.g., race, gender, age) by means of coding practices that are invisible to later readers of the ﬁnalized data, and utilize a grammar of statistical transformations (e.g., tabulations by type of offense, by year, by region, etc.). Their implicit selfpresentation is that of persons possessing a numerical competency or expertize, sometimes exercised within a framework of professional ethics (e.g., certiﬁed public accountants) or an ofﬁcial mandate (e.g., Federal Centers for Disease Control), and sometimes exercised within informal parameters (e.g., ‘‘self-appointed experts’’ who ‘‘keep tabs’’ on a selected problem). Organizational interests, such as demonstrating a decline in local crime-rates or a need for greater resources to combat a spreading drug epidemic, may also inﬂuence results in ways that are hidden from later audiences. The artifacts of scorekeeping have perhaps an implicit ‘‘voice,’’ which might be understood as a staccato monotone, devoid of inﬂection. As a consequence of depersonalization, moreover, there is an absence of dialog in numeric databases. These texts appear rather as proclamations or pronouncements, that is, as monologues. As such, they are not concerned with plot, characterization, descriptions of motives, or dramatic conventions. There may be a chronological aspect, analogous to that in narratives, which often arises from ‘‘updating’’ practices (e.g., cumulating totals by calendar year, by decade, etc.), as well as ‘‘projections’’ of future occurrences. The units of data, being formally equivalent, are generally not individually ‘‘memorable.’’ Incidents are detached from their original contexts (e.g., longstanding local racial tensions). Morals, if any, are often implicit (e.g., it is presumably good if the frequency of bias crime declines). By contrast, storytelling is highly personalized, although the inclusion of personal details from originating events is very selective. Human actors, such as the victim of a bias crime, the alleged perpetrator, witnesses, and bystanders, are often explicitly identiﬁed by name and may be further identiﬁed via photographs or on-the-scene videos. Details of the everyday lives of these participants often appear in stories, even when such matters

368

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

(e.g., the occupation of a bystander) are not closely linked with the social problem under discussion. Such features lend ‘‘color’’ to stories, and may enhance their emotional appeal. These artifacts require narrators, whose presence is often highlighted via such practices as a newspaper reporter’s byline, or an ‘‘action news’’ television reporter’s sign-off (e.g., ‘‘this is Geraldo Rivera, at the Los Angeles County Courthouse’’). Narrators translate originating events into a language of sequential experiences, with an identiﬁable beginning, middle, and ending. Their self-presentation is frequently that of competent observers who grasp the meaning of unfolding events, and who compose truthful tales by means of accepted professional practices (e.g., use of two independent sources). It is not uncommon for these practitioners, as well as the organizations that employ them (e.g., television networks), to include conspicuous self-presentation claims about their alleged special skills as narrators (e.g., the abilities of Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, or Oprah Winfrey to elicit the true feelings of those affected by social problems). The artifacts of storytelling are typically imbued with a range of diverse voices, which are engaged in both internal and external dialogs. There may be, for instance, diametrically opposed claims from participants in reported events (as when a family’s accusation of ‘‘brutality’’ is rebutted by the assertion of a local police chief that ‘‘the suspect reached for a weapon’’). Indeed, the professional ethos of ‘‘balanced reporting’’ requires that narrators in the news media solicit multiple perspectives as a matter of routine. An external dialogue, meanwhile, may take place between reporters and their audiences, through such devices as letters to the editor, phone calls to news organizations, and e-mail entries to the websites of reporters (e.g., on ‘‘The O’Reilly Factor’’). Indeed, commercial news organizations may strongly encourage such dialogue as a means of attracting viewers and increasing their earnings from advertising, while individual reporters may pursue the dialogue as a career-building strategy. Successful narratives also make other fundamental demands on audiences. Just as, in Mead’s (1934) famous example, competent baseball players must be mentally able to ‘‘take the roles’’ of all other players simultaneously, so also competent readers and listeners must be able to assume the roles of all participants in stories. Indeed, reporters take this for granted when they include such details as statements from the families of victims of hate crime, and they may manipulate the presumed role-taking ability of audiences in order to attain emotional effects (e.g., sympathy, shock, or relief). In the same way, narrative practitioners can and do assume that their audiences will recognize particular genres, such as drama or ‘‘horror stories’’ (Johnson, 1995)

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

369

that may feature stereotypical ﬁgures of good and evil (e.g., the courageous whistleblower battling the greedy corporation or the military bureaucracy). This also suggests that narratives about social problems are inherently moralistic, even when reporters conceal their own value commitments, or ‘‘balance’’ the opposed ethics of participants. Narratives also exhibit both an internal (within stories) and external (across stories) chronological dimension. Internally, there is a reported sequence of events (e.g., the police received a call and came to the scene of an attack on a gay bar). Externally, there is a chain of narration, organized as an initial report and a series of ‘‘follow-up stories.’’ Moreover, in contrast to the somewhat mechanical practices surrounding scorekeeping noted above (e.g., annual updates), individual narratives and series of narratives often feature very open-ended, qualitative and highly contextualized deﬁnitions of time. Examples might include ‘‘the weeks before the murder of Matthew Shepard,’’ ‘‘the decades following the Stonewall riot,’’ or ‘‘the post-9/11 world.’’ These various features imbue many narratives with a ‘‘memorable’’ quality, which enhances their value as mnemonic devices that make comprehensible the myriad details of perceived social problems. In the same way that scorekeeping may condense the issue of bias crime into a parsimonious table, storytelling can epitomize the same issue in the form of ‘‘landmark narratives’’ (Nichols, 1997) such as the James Byrd murder. Both practices, in other words, facilitate and channel collective memory. But narration includes an important ‘‘vicarious’’ dimension that allows audiences to relate to alleged problems as ‘‘something that I myself might experience.’’ Audiences, in other words, can insert themselves into narrative imagery in a way that is arguably not possible with regard to the rectilinear rows, columns, and cells of scorekeeping tables. These ideal-typical similarities and differences between the representational practices of scorekeeping and storytelling are summarized in Table 1. In presenting this dichotomy, we do not intend to argue for the superiority of one modality over the other, especially as privileging one mode of representation runs the risk of ontological and epistemological ‘‘gerrymandering’’ (Woolgar & Pawluch, 1985). Indeed, both have characteristic strengths and weaknesses. If, for instance, scorekeeping is less personal than storytelling, this limitation is at least somewhat offset by its more systematic quality that facilitates hypothesis testing and generalization. A database on bias crime may also help answer questions about what types of individuals and groups (e.g., African-Americans, Islamic believers) are most likely to be the target of hate crime at any particular

370

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Table 1. Contrasting Representational Practices. Scorekeeping Depersonalized (actors not identiﬁed) Voice of depersonalized monologue Paradigm of ‘‘hard science’’ Equal emphasis on units of data Data deﬁned as numeric ‘‘variables’’ More determined by formulas Organized around incidents Little or no vicarious involvement Less variety of genre Usually not sequential Not oriented toward plot Not oriented toward characterization Not oriented toward motivation Not based on dramatic conventions Not oriented toward entertainment Less preachy (implicit morals) Less ‘‘memorable’’ (external information storage) Less contextualized Updated via statistical recording (including projections of future incidence) Scorekeepers are often anonymous

Storytelling Personalized (actors identiﬁed) Voices of interpersonal dialogue Paradigm of ‘‘truthful tales’’ Unequal emphasis on units of data Data not deﬁned as ‘‘variables’’ Less determined by formulas Organized around experiences Much vicarious involvement (audiences take roles in stories) More variety of genre Inherently sequential Oriented toward plot Oriented toward characterization Oriented toward motivation Based on dramatic conventions Often oriented toward entertainment More preachy (explicit morals) More ‘‘memorable (internal/external information storage)’’ More contextualized Updated via ‘‘follow-up stories’’

Narrators are often conspicuous

time – questions that are beyond the competence of narratives about bias attacks. Therefore, a holistic or integrative approach to understanding emergent social problems might well employ both representational practices. We would also like to recognize, brieﬂy, a range of intermediate practices that blend together features of scorekeeping and storytelling. It is possible to imagine a logical continuum from relatively ‘‘pure’’ tabulation (as in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports) to relatively ‘‘pure’’ narration (as in many newspaper articles), in which there are two important intermediate categories: (1) a primarily scorekeeping, secondarily storytelling variety; and (2) a primarily narrative, secondarily tabulation variant. An example of the ﬁrst intermediate type might occur when a federal agency such as the Center for Disease Control publishes reports on such problems as childhood obesity that include selected case reports of individual experiences. Illustrations of the second intermediate variety seem to be more plentiful, especially among a range of activist groups that engage in policy debates.

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

371

One such organization would be the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, which recently issued a report on ‘‘Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Violence’’ (2004). Within this text, scorekeeping and storytelling practices appear, literally, next to one another on the same page. Here is an illustration: ‘‘In June 1994, a month that contained both Stonewall 25 and Gay Games events/celebrations in New York City, there were 91 anti-LGBT and HIV-affected incidents – an all-time high for any month at that time’’ (2004, p. 15, emphasis added). In the ‘‘Selected Case’’ narrative, printed on the margin of the same page, there is a suggested format for reporting the alleged 91 cases: ‘‘A 19 year-old man was bludgeoned to death while standing on a corner in Queens’’ (2004, p. 15). The following page presents additional data in the same format: ‘‘There was a 33% increase in anti-LGBT incidents when January to June 2004 is compared to the same period in 2003. That increase underscores the extraordinary jump in such violence in the latter half of 2003, and the fact that the jump continued into 2004’’ (p. 16). Juxtaposed with this scorekeeping passage was the following narrative: ‘‘Kevin’’ was raped and abducted from Columbus, Ohio and found several states away. ‘‘Kevin’’ reported the incident to the police and received medical attention. He recently saw one of his perpetrators in his local community. He called BRAVO’s helpline for suicide counseling. BRAVO provided safety planning, referrals to a mental health trauma advocate and public advocacy. Arrests have not been made. (NCAVP, 2004, p. 16, emphasis added)

The relatively greater emphasis on narrative, in such mixed-practice accounts, is understandable in terms of the advocacy mission of groups such as NCAVP, which requires identiﬁcation with victims and empathy with their experiences. As regards the individuals and groups involved in scorekeeping and storytelling, we do not wish to argue that there is rigid specialization or a predetermined division of labor. Indeed, it is quite possible for scorekeepers to become storytellers, and vice versa, or for both to engage simultaneously in both practices. Nevertheless, it does appear that there are often rather pronounced tendencies, among both individuals and organizations, to favor one practice more than the other. Such inclinations may result from formal mandates (e.g., legislative requirements), market factors (e.g., customers may request statistics), or personal preferences. The FBI, for instance, seems more strongly inclined toward scorekeeping, while the reverse is true for the New York Times. It may be useful to think in terms of four broad categories of individuals and groups that regularly engage in both scorekeeping and

372

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Table 2.

Representational Practices and Presenter Roles.

Presenter Ofﬁcial (government)

Public (nonproﬁt)

Professional (commercial)

Private (citizens)

Scorekeeping FBI (Uniform Crime Reports) EPA (Air and Water Quality) Bureau of Labor Statistics Better Business Bureau Union of Concerned Scientists Church Researchers Social Service Agencies Academic Natural Scientists Insurance Industry Researchers Labor Union Researchers

Love Canal Community Activists Whistleblowers (Silkwood)

Storytelling Warren Commission Knapp Commission Congressional Committees Alcoholics Anonymous Public Citizen (R. Nader) NCAVP Academic Ethnographers New York Times TV Talk Shows Professional Songwriters Stand-Up Comics Bloggers Informal Peer Groups Authors of Letters to Editors

storytelling: ofﬁcial (governmental), public (nonproﬁt sector), professional (commercial), and private. Eight basic possibilities, combining these presenter types and the two representational practices, are illustrated in Table 2. It is also important to note that individuals may be located in one of the eight conceptual cells (e.g., scorekeeper at the FBI) during their working hours, but then move to the cell of ‘‘private narrator’’ in their off-hours. Indeed, according to the model of ‘‘dialogical constructionism’’ (Nichols, 2003), virtually all competent members of society engage in discourse about moral issues, and thus function as social-problem claims-makers. From this perspective, the cell of private narrators would be the most inclusive and the most heavily populated. Therefore, perhaps the best way of thinking about the distinctions is in terms of roles, even more than types of individuals or groups. Having thus set forth the characteristic features of scorekeeping, storytelling and intermediate representational practices, we now proceed to a more detailed illustration via recent claims about the problem of ‘‘hate crime.’’

Portraits of Hate Crime Data for this study come from two different types of sources, one a government database and one a prominent national newspaper, over a

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

373

3-year period, from 1997 to 1999. The governmental source is the FBI, which established a national hate crime data collection program in 1990, following passage of the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act. Hate crime data are provided to the FBI by state and local law-enforcement agencies. In order to qualify as ‘‘hate crimes,’’ behaviors must be ‘‘criminal offenses committed against a person or property which are motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic/ national origin, or sexual orientation.’’ Most law-enforcement agencies in the United States participate in the FBI’s hate-crime program. Putting it another way, approximately 85% of the U.S. population is served by police departments that report hate crimes to the national program. Hate crimes are reported to the FBI in two formats: (1) a quarterly incident-based form (submitted as an adjunct to the Uniform Crime Report program); and (2) the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Most police agencies submit hate crime data using the quarterly Uniform Crime Report, which contains little or no information about the characteristics of the victim and the offender. NIBRS, by contrast, collects information about the victim, the offense, the offender, the arrestees, damaged property, and more. The print media source for this study is the New York Times. We selected it for a number of reasons: it is a newspaper of record, and covers not only national events but also news in the densely populated and diverse metropolitan areas of New York City, northern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut. In order to identify relevant stories, we used Lexis Nexus and searched for the terms ‘‘hate crime’’ or ‘‘bias crime’’ in the headline or lead paragraph of stories from 1997 through 1999. The stories selected were either the original reports of a hate crime (N ¼ 52), or else follow-up stories on the same crimes (N ¼ 151). These stories were then coded according to deﬁnitions employed by the FBI for hate crime reporting, including offense type, bias type, and offender race (see FBI, 1988, 1997). The following excerpt, or a news story coded as the crime of ‘‘Intimidation,’’ illustrates the type of stories examined in this analysis. The Bridgewater-Raritan High School student, whose name was withheld by the authorities, was charged with making terroristic threats and harassment under the state’s bias law, said Wayne Forrest, the Summerset County Prosecutor. The law forbids intimidating individuals or groups because of race, color, religion or ethnic origin. y The police said a dozen students at the school received messages on September 23. y Some messages warned, ‘‘Beware of an uprising of white power.’’ ‘‘They were all of that tenor, attacking the Afro-American community and the Jewish community,’’ Mr. Foster said. (New York Times, Oct. 2, 1999, Section 1, p. 50)

374

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Statistical Portrait Data from the NIBRS indicate that 2,976 hate crimes were reported between 1997 and 1999. Assault was the most frequently reported (35%) type of crime, followed by vandalism (27%), and intimidation (23%), both classiﬁed as nonviolent offenses. Bias crimes that tend to attract media attention, arson (0.8%) and murder (0.05%), accounted for o1% each of the reported hate crimes. Other types of crime comprised the remaining 13% of reported incidents. In terms of context and circumstances, the data show that hate crimes are predominantly interpersonal, targeting people rather than property and involve single offenders rather than groups. The data further portray anti-Black (35%) as the most common bias type, followed by anti-White (19%), anti-gay/lesbian/bisexual (13%), and anti-Jewish (6%). The remaining 26% of hate crimes were a combination of other bias types, including other types of racial bias (e.g., Asian and Native American), ethnic bias, and bias against individuals with mental and physical disabilities. The NIBRS database gathers information on the offender as well as the offense. We note that missing information in a majority of cases make these data difﬁcult to interpret. Yet, they do allow us to draw a provisional scorecard of the hate-crime offender. According to the NIBRS, the majority of bias crime incidents involve a single offender, rather than assailants operating in groups. When race could be determined, White was the most frequently identiﬁed (44%), followed by Black (14%). In the remaining 40% of incidents, the race of offenders was not known. Physical force was noted in nearly a fourth (21%) of incidents, while ﬁrearms (3%) and clubs/bats (3%) were reported in less than one case in twenty. Injury data are available in slightly less than half of reported hate crime incidents. For nearly one in ﬁve cases (16%), ‘‘no injury’’ was entered. In an almost equal number of cases (17%), the database indicates a ‘‘minor’’ injury. ‘‘Serious’’ injuries were reported in less than one case in twenty (3%), and deaths in less than one case in a hundred (0.07%).

Narrative Portrait A different image of ‘‘the hate crime problem’’ emerges from 203 stories on bias crime from the New York Times for 1997 through 1999. Thus, with

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

375

regard to type of crime, the newspaper accounts featured murder and arson in nearly one third (29%) of initial stories, and in over half (54%) of followup stories. The same two offenses, as noted above, appeared in just over 1% of reports on the NIBRS scorecard. As regards type of bias, the newspaper accounts featured anti-Black bias in over half of the follow-up stories (52%), as opposed to the 35% found in NIBRS statistics. By contrast, anti-White bias (which was scored at 19% by NIBRS) did not appear in Times initial accounts and in only 3% of the follow-up stories. With regard to type of victim, the newspaper reports again differed from those of the federal government. Perhaps surprisingly, the percentage of personal victims was only 63% in initial stories, as compared with more than 80% in NIBRS. Reports in the Times on number of offenders varied greatly from FBI statistics. In initial news stories, one in four incidents (25%) involved a single offender, as contrasted with more than eight in ten in NIBRS. The higher concentration of stories with multiple offenders may reﬂect the perceived greater newsworthiness of such attacks. On the question of race of offender, the Times coverage was also different from the ofﬁcial numbers. In NIBRS, nearly half of offenders (44%) were identiﬁed as White, whereas, in the Times only 36% of the ofﬁcial stories had a White offender. The initial newspaper accounts also contrasted with the FBI database by treating more than 60% as ‘‘race unknown.’’ In reporting bias crimes, the Times also presented a picture of weapons used that differs from the ofﬁcial statistical version. Initial news stories featured ﬁrearms in about one quarter of incidents (24%), and follow-up stories (27%). This magniﬁes the portrait of NIBRS (where ﬁrearms were noted in only 3% of incidents) by a factor of eight. An even greater contrast appears with regard to the variable ‘‘injury’’. Death, which is noted in less than 1% of NIBRS cases, is magniﬁed by a factor of more than 15 in Times initial stories (15%). The chasm is even greater in follow-up reports, where the death of a hate-crime victim is reported in more than half (54%) of cases. These contrasting portraits of hate crime are summarized in Table 3. By combining scores for the seven variables discussed above, the contrasting portraits in the NIBRS and The New York Times may be summarized as follows. According to the NIBRS, the most typical bias crime is an assault, motivated by anti-Black bias, against a person, committed by a single offender, usually White, employing physical force

376

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Table 3. Accounts of Hate Crimes in NIBRS and in The New York Times (1997–1999).

Type of crime

Type of bias

Type of victim Number of offenders Race of offenders Weapon used

Injury

NIBRS (n ¼ 2,976)

NY Times (Initial) (n ¼ 52)

NY Times (Follow up) (n ¼ 151)

Murder (0.05%) Assault (35%) Arson (0.8%) Intimidation (23%) Vandalism (27%) Anti-Black (35%) Anti-White (19%) Anti-Jewish (6%) Anti-GLBT (13%) Person (82%) Nonperson (16%) Single (82%) Multiple (18%) White (44%) Black (14%) Firearm (3%) Club/bat (3%) Physical force (21%) Bomb (20%) Death (0.07%) Serious (3%) Minor (17%) None (16%)

Murder (14%) Assault (17%) Arson (15%) Intimidation (17%) Vandalism (29%) Anti-Black (38%) Anti-White (0%) Anti-Jewish (18%) Anti-GLBT (10%) Person (63%) Nonperson (37%) Single (25%) Multiple (40%) White (36%) Black (0%) Firearm (24%) Club/bat (20%) Physical force (16%)

Murder (46%) Assault (19%) Arson (8%) Intimidation (10%) Vandalism (17%) Anti-Black (52%) Anti-White (3%) Anti-Jewish (9%) Anti-GLBT (21%) Person (68%) Nonperson (22%) Single (36%) Multiple (54%) White (52%) Black (4%) Firearm (27%) Club/bat (16%) Physical force (35%)

Death (15%) Serious (22%) Minor (5%) None (44%)

Death (54%) Serious (18%) Minor (0%) None (19%)

that leads either to no injury or to a minor injury. According to the initial stories of hate crimes reported in the Times, the most common bias crime is a vandalism motivated by anti-Black bias, committed by multiple offenders whose race is unknown, employing ﬁrearms and that result in no injury to the victim. The typical hate crime from follow-up Times stories are murders committed because of an anti-Black bias, committed by multiple offenders, usually White, using physical force (i.e., hands, ﬁsts, or feet), and resulting in the death of the victim. It is interesting to note that even within the same news source, different portraits of hate crimes emerge, depending on whether one is looking at initial stories or follow-up reports. The Times was much more likely to write follow-up stories for murder, anti-GLBT bias, and attacks with multiple offenders using physical force that resulted in death.

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

377

CONCLUSION The paper has examined the issue of distorted coverage of social problems by comparing portraits of hate crime in a major newspaper and in the most authoritative ofﬁcial database. While recognizing that a series of factors – including moral panics, group interests, and hierarchies of privilege – may produce differences in claims-making, we have called attention to the inﬂuence of the contrasting representational practices of scorekeeping and story telling. A holistic approach incorporating all of these factors may prove valuable to the sociology of social problems, and a focus on representational practices may yield greater insights into the importance of narrative in the construction of public issues. The discussion also has important implications for the further development of a theoretical model of ‘‘dialogical constructionism’’ (Nichols, 2003) that seeks to capture the interplay of claims-making voices in the deﬁnition of shared troubles. In particular, it is noteworthy that both scorekeeping and story telling are institutionalized practices (Altheide, 2003) that play important roles in interpreting a broad range of public issues. In a sense, their contrasting perspectives may be regarded as a form of triangulation, perhaps conceptually similar to what Denzin (1988) has termed ‘‘methodological triangulation.’’ Thus, the ‘‘generalized social problems dialogue’’ (Nichols, 2003) includes not only an array of complementary and competing voices of claims-maker groups, but also a logically analogous array of complementary and competing interpretive practices that claims-makers (including federal agencies and mass circulation newspapers) frequently employ.

REFERENCES Altheide, D. L. (1976). Creating reality: How TV news distorts events. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Altheide, D. L. (1998). The news media, the problem frame, and the production of fear. Sociological Quarterly, 38, 646–668. Altheide, D. L. (2002). Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Altheide, D. L. (2003). The mass media as a social institution. In: T. Larry & N. J. Herman Reynolds (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interaction (pp. 657–684). Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Altheide, D. L., & Snow, R. P. (1979). Media logic. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bagdikian, B. (2000). The media monopoly (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bagdikian, B. (2004). The new media monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

378

LAWRENCE T. NICHOLS ET AL.

Barak, G. (1994). Media, society, and criminology. In: G. Barak (Ed.), Media, process, and the social construction of crime (pp. 3–45). New York, NY: Garland Publishing. Best, J. (Ed.) (1989). Images of issues. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Best, J. (1990). Threatened children. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Best, J. (1993). But seriously, folks: The limitations of the strict constructionist interpretation of social problems. In: J. A. Holstein & G. Miller (Eds), Reconsidering social constructionism (pp. 129–147). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Best, J. (1999). Random violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Best, J. (2005). Damned lies and statistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cavender, G. (1981). Scared straight: Ideology and the media. Journal of Criminal Justice, 34, 430–441. Cavender, G. (1998). In the ‘Shadow of Shadows’: Television reality crime programming. In: M. Fishman & G. Cavender (Eds), Entertaining crime: Television reality programs (pp. 79–94). Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Chermak, S. (1994). Crime in the news media: A reﬁned understanding of how crimes become news. In: G. Barak (Ed.), Media, process, and the social construction of crime (pp. 69–94). New York: Garland Publishing. Denzin, N. K. (1991). Hollywood shot by shot: Alcoholism in America. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine Transaction. Denzin, N. K. (1988). The research act. New York, NY: Prentice Hall. Ericson, R., Baranek, P., & Chan, J. (1991). Representing order: Crime, law and justice in the news media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (1988). National incident-based reporting, Volume 1. Data Collection Guidelines. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (1997). Hate crime data collection guidelines. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Fishman, M. (1978). Crime waves as ideology. Social Problems, 25, 531–543. Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Furedi, F. (2002). Culture of fear. New York, NY: Continuum. Gans, H. (1979). Deciding what’s news. New York, NY: Pantheon. Garofalo, J. (1981). Crime and the mass media: A selective review of research. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 18, 319–350. Gorelick, S. (1989). Join our war: The construction of ideology in a newspaper crime-ﬁghting campaign. Crime and Delinquency, 35, 421–436. Hallin, D. C. (1985). The American news media: A critical theory perspective. In: J. Forester (Eds.), Critical theory and public life (pp. 121–146). Cambridge, MA. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of mass media. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Holstein, J. A. (Ed.) (2003). Challenges and choices: Constructionist perspectives on social problems. New York, NY: Aldine Transaction. Holstein, J. A., & Miller, G. (Eds). (1993). Reconsidering social constructionism. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Humphries, D. (1981). Serious crime, news coverage and ideology: A content analysis of crime coverage in a metropolitan paper. Crime and Delinquency, 27, 191–205. Ibarra, P., & Kitsuse, J. I. (1993). Vernacular constituents of moral discourse. In: J. A. Holstein & G. Miller (Eds), Reconsidering social constructionism. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Jenkins, P. (1994). Using murder. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Representational Practices in the Construction of ‘‘Hate Crime’’

379

Jewkes, Y. (2004). Media and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Johnson, J. (1995). Horror stories and the construction of child abuse. In: J. B. Hawthorne (Ed.), Images of Issues (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Loseke, D. (1992). The battered woman and shelters: The social construction of wife abuse. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Loseke, D. (1999). Thinking about social problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Lowney, K. (1999). Baring our souls. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Maines, D. (2001). The faultline of consciousness: A view of interactionism in sociology. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. McChesney, R. W. (2000). Rich media, poor democracy. New York: New Press. McChesney, R. W. (2004). Our unfree press. New Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Molotch, H., & Lester, M. (1974). News as purposive behavior. American Sociological Review, 39, 101–112. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. (2004). Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Violence. Washington, DC: NCAVP. New York Times. (Oct. 2, 1999). Student accused of sending hate e-mails. Section 1, p. 50. Nichols, L. T. (1989). Discovering Hutton: Expression gaming and congressional deﬁnitions of deviance. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (Vol. 11, pp. 1–29). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Nichols, L. T. (1997). Social problems as landmark narratives: Bank of Boston, mass media and ‘money laundering’. Social Problems, 44(3), 324–341. Nichols, L. T. (1999). White-collar cinema: Changing representations of upper-world deviance in popular ﬁlms. In: J. A. Holstein & G. Miller (Eds), Perspectives on Social Problems (Vol. 11, pp. 61–84). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Nichols, L. T. (2003). Voices of social problems: A dialogical constructionist model. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (Vol. 26, pp. 93–123). New York, NY: Elsevier Science. Pfohl, S. (1977). The ‘discovery’ of child abuse. Social Problems, 24(3), 310–332. Potter, G. W. (1998). Constructing crime: Perspectives on making news and social problems. Chicago: Waveland Press. Reinarman, C., & Levine, D. (1995). The crack attack. In: J. Best (Ed.), Images of issues (2nd ed.). Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Richardson, J. T., Best, J., & Bromley, D. (1991). The Satanism scare. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Sanders, W. B. (1994). Gangbangs and drive-bys: Grounded culture and juvenile gang violence. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture and Society, 11, 263–282. Simon, D. (2002). Elite deviance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Spector, M. & Kitsuse, J. (2000 [1977]). Constructing social problems. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Surette, R. (2006). Media, crime, and criminal justice: Images, realities and policies. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Woolgar, S., & Pawluch, D. (1985). Ontological gerrymandering. Social Problems, 32, 214–227. Wright, J. P., Cullen, F. T., & Blankenship, M. B. (2002). Chained factory ﬁre exits. In: M. D. Ermann & R. J. Lundman (Eds), Corporate and governmental deviance (pp. 290–304). New York: Oxford University Press.

THE USE OF CRITICAL LIFE HISTORY INQUIRY AS A METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING THE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION OF ACTIVIST EDUCATORS Ju´lio Emı´ lio Diniz-Pereira ABSTRACT Narrative inquiry and life history are privileged methods for studying people’s lives, experiences, and identity construction. In this article, I argue that critical life history inquiry is especially suitable for studies of those, who have actively involved in progressive social and cultural movements and have developed an identity as activist educators.

INTRODUCTION There has been a recent growth of interest in various forms of narrative inquiry – life histories, life stories, oral histories, biographies, and autobiographies – in social science in general (Riessman, 1993; Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995b; DeVault, 1997; Ellis, 1997; Ellis & Bochner, 2000) and particularly, in the academic ﬁeld of education (Casey, 1993; Apple, 1996; Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 381–410 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30020-9

381

382

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

Goodson & Sikes, 2001). These are also the major sort of research methods used in the study of teacher knowledge (Butt, Raymond, McCue, & Yamagishi, 1992; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) and teachers’ lives (Goodson, 1992, 1995b). In this article, I argue that these methodologies, and more speciﬁcally a methodology which I call critical life history inquiry, open an avenue of possibilities for the discussion of activist educators’ identity construction, mainly for those activist educators who have been actively involved in progressive social and cultural movements.

LIFE HISTORY INQUIRY: CRITICAL APPROACHES Different categories of narrative inquiry have been used in social science and the educational ﬁeld with the purpose of constructing critical knowledge with socially and culturally oppressed people, joining them in order to attempt to promote social change. I call these different categories of narrative inquiry, whose purpose is to promote social justice, critical life history inquiry. In the educational literature, there are several outstanding examples of what I call critical life history inquiry. For instance, Weiler (1988) focuses her research on the experiences and life histories of feminist women teachers and administrators; Middleton (1992, 1993) uses autobiography in order to analyze how her own experiences of education – as a student and as a teacher – have inﬂuenced her praxis as a ‘‘sociologist of women’s education’’; Casey (1993) analyzes a set of life histories narrated by women teachers and progressive activists; Foster (1997), through a life history approach, strives ‘‘to understand both the objective and subjective experiences of black teachers’’; and Crocco, Munro, and Weiler (1999), through a set of life histories of ‘‘women educator activists’’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the U.S., seeks ‘‘to challenge historical interpretations that have cast women as passive in the face of educational change’’ (p. 3). Thus, these are some examples of research where different categories of narrative inquiry were used in a critical way and for implementing social changes. Furthermore, testimonio (Beverley, 2000; James, 2000; Tierney, 2000) could be considered as a special form of critical life history inquiry. Beverley (2000) deﬁnes testimonio as a ‘‘narracio´n de urgencia’’ – an ‘‘emergency narrative’’ – ‘‘involving a problem of repression, poverty, marginality, exploitation, or simply survival that is implicated in the action of narration itself’’ (p. 556). According to Tierney (2000), the testimonio has

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

383

the following important characteristics: ‘‘(a) the purpose is social change, (b) the truth is created through the telling of an individual’s events that have otherwise been occluded or ignored, and (c) the author is he or she who testiﬁes, and not a researcher’’ (p. 541). The development of the ﬁeld of testimonio studies has largely taken place in Latin America where it was already booming in the 1980s (James, 2000; Tierney, 2000). The vantage points of these studies have been from those who have been silenced, excluded, and marginalized by their societies. They problematize fundamental issues of voice and agency, memory and silence, and the nature of subaltern cultural production (Beverley, 2000; James, 2000; Tierney, 2000). In sum, as Beverley (2000) puts it, ‘‘What testimonio obliges us to confront is not only the subaltern as a (self-) represented victim, but also as the agent – in that very act of representation – of a transformative project that aspires to become hegemonic in its own right’’ (p. 561). The research that I developed through which I was interested in studying the identity construction of activist educators could be considered another example of a critical life history inquiry. I discussed this topic through an analysis of life stories (testimonios) of women activist educators who have participated in a progressive social and cultural movement in Brazil – the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement), the MST. These testimonios, which I collected through semistructured interviews, sought to uncover the main elements that have been responsible for the development of their identities as activist educators. However, because my research maintained some features of a traditional narrative inquiry, such as the lack of a deeper involvement of the storytellers in the analysis of the research data, I would not call it a testimonio. Although I do not see my research as a testimonio, I strongly identify its purposes with those of the testimonio. This academic investigation was also explicitly committed to the attempt to promote social justice. As mentioned above, the participants of this research were women activist educators who have participated in the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Members of this movement have been silenced, excluded, and marginalized by the Brazilian society. Thus, while this research as a whole was not a testimonio, I consider the participants’ stories, which I collected for this research, testimonios. In the next sections of this article, I brieﬂy present what the specialized literature discusses concerning the strengths, paradoxes, tensions, and dilemmas associated with the use of life history as a methodology for studying people’s lives and identity constructions.

384

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

STRENGTHS Goodson and Sikes (2001) state that there have been claims in the specialized literature that life history methodology, along with certain other qualitative methods, has the potential to be a socially empowering and emancipatory experience for participants through enabling them ‘‘to tell their story, to give their version, to name their silent lives’’ (p. 99). The feminist movement has been one of the main social agents in developing the claim that the life history can be an empowering and emancipatory methodology. The greatest strength of life history, according to Munro (1998), is that ‘‘it allows the subject to speak for himself or herself’’ (p. 9). She cites Barbara Myerhoff in order to argue that, ‘‘by providing opportunities that allow people to become ‘visible and to enhance reﬂexive consciousness’ the life history process can address feminist concerns that research be empowering and transformative’’ (p. 9). Weiler (1988) also believes in the importance given to lived experience and the signiﬁcance of everyday life, mainly for women. She argues that ‘‘an emphasis on the everyday experiences of women and the need for the researcher to locate herself in terms of her own subjectivity is fundamental to a feminist methodology’’ (p. 63). The Personal Narratives Group (1989) argues that life histories are well-suited for illuminating several aspects of gender relations such as the construction of ‘‘the gendered self-identity.’’ According to Goodson and Sikes (2001), one of the strategies of empowerment in using life history is through what the authors call ‘‘enhanced self-worth.’’ They cite Clandinin and Connelly who support the idea that ‘‘Feeling positive about oneself and knowing that you are valued is, perhaps, one of the most empowering states of being, regardless of any concrete changes which may ensue’’ (p. 101). However, Goodson and Sikes argue that, ‘‘for this value to be realized, it is important that informants should not feel that they have been badly used and that their story is being used simply to meet the researcher’s needs’’ (p. 101). It has to do with the risks of doing what Patti Lather has called ‘‘rape research,’’ that is, ‘‘research where the researcher takes what they want and then departs without any concern for or further contact with their informant’’ (quoted in Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 93). This is a serious ethical issue that must be discussed along with other ethical concerns about using narrative inquiry and life history in research. Sharing stories is another strategy of empowerment in life history. Goodson and Sikes cite Ken Plummer who claims that ‘‘reading the life

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

385

stories and histories of others who have similar characteristics, backgrounds, experiences and perceptions, can be empowering and emancipatory because it can show an individual that they are not alone’’ (p. 101). However, the authors warn, ‘‘there is always the possibility that people will not be able to recognize or identify with the life histories that are presented. Where this happens, the experience could be diminishing and undermining, rather than empowering’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 102). Another possibility of empowering through using the life history methodology is by the way of participation in nonhierarchical research. It has been claimed that life history research is in essence a collaborative methodology. Consequently, participants can be seen to be empowered as co-researchers. ‘‘The sorts of interview-conversation used by life historians, together with the level of collaboration (in planning, data collection and analysis) that they can achieve with the approach can appear to offer the opportunity to engage in non-hierarchical, non-exploitative research’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 102). However, Goodson and Sikes also state that collaborative research is not necessarily nonhierarchical. There are contradictions in this attempt to abolish status and power differentials between researcher and informant. Hence, different authors have highlighted the potential of life history to be empowering and transformative as one of the most important strengths of this methodology. However, some authors (Goodson, 1995b; Goodson & Sikes, 2001) remain quite skeptical about claims concerning the emancipatory nature of life history research. As Goodson (1995b) states, ‘‘there is nothing inherently liberatory about life history research’’ (my emphasis). Goodson and Sikes (2001) point out that ‘‘there has been a tendency to be celebratory rather than critical’’ about these issues. These claims for empowerment and emancipation through life history can be, as the authors put it, ‘‘at best, naı¨ ve and, at worst, grandiose and ethically dubious’’ (p. 103). Despite these controversial aspects of its emancipatory and empowering potential, Goodson and Sikes (2001) state that ‘‘one of the strengths of life history is its accessibility in terms of it being relatively jargon-free and easy and interesting to read compared with other types of research writing’’ (p. 100). In education, one of the principal values of life history is the importance of teachers’ own understanding of their experiences (Goodson, 1992; Casey, 1993; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). In Goodson’s opinion, one of the merits of studies of teachers’ lives is that they ‘‘re-assert the importance of the teacher: of knowing the teacher, of listening to the teacher, and of speaking

386

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

with the teacher’’ (1992, p. 234). Above all, he says, these studies ‘‘re-assert the importance of the teacher’s voice,’’ which is particularly valuable in building ‘‘a knowledgeable counter-culture’’ to face simplistic political and ‘‘managerial’’ views of schooling. Critical life history inquiry does not claim itself to be inherently emancipatory and empowering. Actually, the progressive social and cultural movements in which most participants of this type of research have been actively involved are transformative, empowering, and emancipatory. These progressive movements, and of course the people who have participated in them, have agency to transform society and education. Thus, one of the strengths of the critical life history inquiry is to help make these movements, their struggles, and mainly their characters’ lives more visible, highlighting the capacity of human beings to respond to all kinds of oppression, while sustaining the hope of building a truly just, nondiscriminatory society. The critiques about the transformative and emancipatory characteristics of life history remind us that, in order to achieve higher quality work, narrative inquirers and life historians must pay attention to the paradoxes, tensions, and dilemmas in the development of their studies. This issue will be addressed in the next section.

PARADOXES, TENSIONS, AND DILEMMAS First of all, it is essential to point out that the focus on teachers’ voices and stories has coincided with a period of conservative restructuring of schooling (Denzin, 1991, 1992; Goodson, 1995a). This restructuring began during the Thatcher and Reagan regimes, in England and in the U.S. respectively, and it is still taking place nowadays in different countries living under neoliberal administrations all over the world. It might seem paradoxical that conservative educational reforms focus on teachers’ practices and teachers’ voices. However, Goodson (1995a) shows that this is not the case since both conservative reforms and the emphasis on teachers’ stories ‘‘may play the same role of narrowing the teacher’s area of professional competence and judgment, of social and political outreach’’ (p. 63). In this sense, he states, conservative educational reforms stressing practice and teachers’ voices may ‘‘create a valuable covering noise, an apparently quite emancipatory noise, while that very practice is narrowed and technicized’’ (p. 56). Consequently, teachers are effectively disenfranchised in the ‘‘discourse of schooling.’’ Thus, Goodson (1995a) states, ‘‘To promote stories and narratives, without any analysis of structures and

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

387

systems, shows how the best of institutions can unwittingly complement the moves to uncouple the teacher from the wider picture’’ (p. 63). Although some leftist scholars have applied this methodology, Goodson (1992) drives our attention to the fact that ‘‘a large body of less overtly political scholars besides some of a conservative orientation’’ has also adopted it. According to Apple (1996), there are beneﬁts and problems in narrative studies. He criticizes the visible poststructural emphasis of these studies. He contends that there is a tendency in this poststructural/postmodern emphasis to reduce everything into ‘‘a discourse’’ or ‘‘a text.’’ There are also some tensions and dilemmas concerning the use of narrative inquiry and life history. One of these dilemmas has to do with the very relationship between agency and structure, that is, between individual lives and social settings. According to Goodson and Sikes (2001), ‘‘Life historians have to acknowledge the complexity of the relationship between the individual and society, especially with regard to the ways in which people tell their stories and locate their lives’’ (p. 107). Thus, they should be aware of ‘‘the way in which history supplies both contexts in which to locate the story and frameworks for interpreting it’’ (p. 107). Methodologically speaking, as it is with other types of qualitative research, there are also tensions around ‘‘relational distance’’ in narrative inquiry and life history. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) stress the tensions of how ‘‘to experience the experience as a narrative inquirer.’’ They state, ‘‘Some worry that if inquirers do not become fully involved in the experience studied, they can never truly understand the lives explored. Others feel that by becoming fully involved, objectivity will be lost’’ (p. 81). These tensions and dilemmas are quite important in this ﬁeld of study and indeed, all narrative inquirers and live historians should pay attention to them. However, Clandinin and Connelly remind us that ‘‘How we deal with the tensions is of more importance than merely naming them’’ (p. 82). Moreover, Goodson (1992) argues that much of the criticism concerning this type of research ‘‘would not stand if we move to a more broadly contextualizing life history or collaborative intercontextual approach’’ (p. 9). In his opinion, teachers’ stories of action should be reconnected with ‘‘theories of context’’ in order to move us to a better understanding of their social and political construction. Differentiating life history from other forms of narrative inquiry is, indeed, an important step in this direction. Moreover, this article also claims to distinguish critical life history inquiry, which is explicitly committed to oppressed people’s claims for social justice, from traditional and apolitical life history approaches.

388

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

Other dilemmas and tensions in narrative inquiry and life history are related to the researcher’s condition as an insider or an outsider. This topic will be brieﬂy discussed in the next section.

INSIDER/OUTSIDER Some authors in the specialized literature stress the issue of ‘‘insiderness’’ and ‘‘outsiderness’’ in narrative inquiry and life history. For instance, Rasbridge (1996), an American male researcher doing life history inquiry with Cambodian refugee women, discusses the issue of the utilization of ‘‘outsiderness’’ in obtaining the more reliable information. As a ‘‘double outsider,’’ he believes that ‘‘The life history, sympathetically conducted, affords just such an opportunity for women to build conﬁdence by sharing their experiences [y]. Women themselves become the authorities of their life experiences, and the researcher becomes the facilitator’’ (p. 210). Challenging feminist approaches, he argues for ‘‘humanist approaches’’ in life history endeavor where, quoting Johnson-Odom, ‘‘We must view women’s oppression in the context of all oppression’’ (p. 211). Olmedo (1999), studying ‘‘reminiscences’’ of elderly Latinas in the U.S., seems to disagree with Rasbridge that we might be able to gather ‘‘the more reliable information’’ being an outsider. She states that because of her ‘‘ethnic identiﬁcation’’ and her ﬂuency in Spanish, being an ‘‘ethnic insider’’ facilitated her ‘‘acceptance’’ among the participants of her research. However, she also states: My membership in the ethnic community alone was insufﬁcient to elicit trust, which is a culturally deﬁned and negotiated relationship. In fact, it took several sessions of story sharing before the women became more personal in discussing intimate issues of family relationships. (p. 358)

Thus, she discusses several dilemmas in her role as an ‘‘ethnic insider’’ in researching life stories. She says, ‘‘It is not uncommon for members of minority groups to be suspicious of researchers, and asking people to publicly share aspects of their biographies can pose serious challenges’’ (p. 360). As mentioned above, the dilemma of trying to maintain a balance between engagement and distance is another issue that can create conﬂicts for researchers to collect life stories. While admitting the importance of ‘‘certain level of rapport and intimacy,’’ Olmedo states that the level and nature of her engagement at times created a problem in her research. She had to put limits on her engagement. ‘‘In some ways, being an ethnic insider complicated my desire for certain control of my roles,’’ she says (p. 359).

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

389

However, the author highlights that ‘‘the sociolinguistic rules of language propriety as well as the cultural rules of intergenerational relationships created distances’’ in her relationship with the participants. In her words: Being an ethnic insider did not obliterate the social meaning of the other roles. Communicative competence in that setting called for respect for these sociolinguistic conventions and the cultural rules of interpretational relations. This is an issue that can easily be overlooked when one enters research as an outsider to the ethnic community being studied, an issue that even an ethnic insider may ignore. (p. 360)

For Olmedo, to draw upon Barbara Myerhoff’s work, in the sharing of one’s story, there is a process of negotiation of ‘‘shared understandings’’ between the ‘‘ethnic insider’’ and the storyteller. Nelson (1996), who also uses oral narratives in her research, steers our attention to the complexities of claiming ‘‘insider status’’ in anthropological research. For instance, her condition as a Black, female researcher doing research among African American women did not automatically mean that she was ‘‘a trustworthy member of the community.’’ She says: while the sharing of racial, gender, and class membership with informants is my unquestionable qualiﬁcation for insider status in its broadest sense, each interaction in the ﬁeld with a new informant revealed the variousness in their individual views of me asy someone who shared their perceptions of reality and had an intimate understanding of their life experiences. (p. 184)

Thus, Nelson challenges the idea of the existence of an absolute ‘‘insider status’’ in anthropology, and more speciﬁcally, narrative studies. She prefers to use the term ‘‘gradations of endogeny,’’ suggesting that ‘‘native status is not ﬁxed constant with the same intensity from informant to informant and from place to place’’ (p. 185). In her opinion, there are ‘‘degrees of acceptance’’ in the relationship between the researcher and the participants. The recognition of ‘‘relative endogeny’’ or ‘‘gradations of endogeny’’ is a crucial element for ‘‘the all-important consideration on the inﬂuence of native status on quality of access and immediate rapport, and on the data we gather’’ (p. 185). However, she also stresses that sharing ‘‘group membership with one’s informants does not protect the anthropologist from errors of interpretation’’ (p. 189). Although I have done the ﬁeldwork for my research in Brazil, interviewing Portuguese-speaking people, which certainly provides me some ‘‘relative endogeny,’’ I see myself as a multiple outsider in this academic investigation – a white, middle-class man who embodies an urban culture interviewing working class women of color who embody a rural culture.1 Moreover, being from a speciﬁc region in Brazil, the Southeast region, my ‘‘gradations of

390

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

endogeny’’ decreased substantially when I went to different Brazilian states in order to interview women activist educators who live in different regions in that country. However, the political and ideological identities that I share with these women activist educators helped me transcend some of our differences. I will discuss this issue and provide more detailed information about my research further in this article. Another tension in life history studies is the problem of speaking for others. As will be highlighted in the next section, critical life history inquiry advocates for speaking with others rather than speaking for them.

SPEAKING WITH OTHERS RATHER THAN SPEAKING FOR THEM ‘‘Is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike us or who are less privileged than us?’’ ‘‘Will it enable the empowerment of oppressed peoples?’’ ‘‘If I don’t speak for those less privileged than myself, am I abandoning my political responsibility to speak out against oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of my privilege?’’ These are some of the questions that Alcoff (1995) raises in the current context of what has been called the ‘‘crisis of representation.’’ According to her, feminists and anthropologists have addressed the problem of speaking for others. In anthropology, for instance, there is a discussion ‘‘about whether it is possible to speak for others either adequately or justiﬁably.’’ The author cites, for example, Gayatri Spivak’s essay – Can the Subaltern Speak? – which ‘‘rejects a total retreat from ‘speaking for others’ [and] prefers a ‘speaking to’ in which the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity of the oppressed, but still allows for the possibility that the oppressed will produce a ‘countersentence’ that can then suggest a new historical narrative’’ (p. 110). Alcoff continues her emphasis on the problem of speaking for others, stating that: Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated speakers: such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those oppressed groups. (p. 99)

In her view, the acknowledgment, that there is a problem in speaking for others comes from the prevalent acceptance of two claims. First, according to Alcoff (1995), ‘‘a speaker’s location is epistemically salient,’’ that is, ‘‘a

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

391

speaker’s location (which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically signiﬁcant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve either to authorize or de-authorize her speech’’ (p. 98). Second, Alcoff also states, ‘‘not only is location epistemically salient but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous’’ (p. 98). As she points out, ‘‘In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for’’ (p. 99). At the same time, argues Alcoff, ‘‘no easy solution to the problem of speaking for others can be found by simply restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a member’’ (p. 100). She turns our attention to the fact that the attempt to avoid the problematic of ‘‘speaking for’’ could lead researchers to an individualist realm, which ‘‘is based on an illusion, well supported in the individualist ideology of the West.’’ As she states: the claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of the self in classical liberal theory – that I am unconnected to others in my authentic self or that I can achieve an autonomy from others given certain conditions. But there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which my words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to demarcate decisively a boundary between my location and all others. Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce their dominancey The declaration that I ‘‘speak only for myself’’ has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects. (p. 108)

Alcoff acknowledges that there are ‘‘numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others that have been politically efﬁcacious in advancing the needs of those spoken for’’ (p. 107). Thus, she concludes that ‘‘an absolute prohibition of speaking for would undermine political effectiveness.’’ Accordingly, if we do not adopt a prohibitionist position, ‘‘how we can justify a position that would repudiate some speakers while accepting others’’ (p. 100). As a consequence, in Alcoff’s opinion, ‘‘we should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialog and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others’’ (p. 110). Beverley (2000) also cites Gayatri Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? and argues that ‘‘If the subaltern could speak – that is, speak in a way that really matters to us, which we would feel compelled to listen to, then it would not be subaltern’’ (p. 559). In the author’s opinion, what Spivak is trying to show is: that behind the gesture of the ethnographer or solidarity activist committed to the cause of the subaltern in allowing or enabling the subaltern to speak is the trace of the construction of an other who is available to speak to us (with whom we can speak or

392

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

with whom we would feel comfortable speaking), neutralizing thus the force of the reality of difference and antagonism to which our own relatively privileged position in the global system give rise. (p. 559)

One of the Spivak’s concerns, again in Beverley’s view, is about ‘‘the way in which hegemonic literacy or scientiﬁc representation effaces the effective presence and agency of the subaltern’’ (p. 560). This concern lies in ‘‘the suspicion that intellectuals and writing practices are themselves complicit in maintaining relations of domination and subalternity’’ (p. 562). According to Beverley (2000), what takes place in testimonio, however, is ‘‘the confrontation through the text of one person (the reader and/or immediate interlocutor) with another (the direct narrator or narrators) at the level of possible solidarity. In this sense, testimonio also embodies a new possibility of political agency’’ (p. 563). Thus, ‘‘what testimonio seeks to elicit is coalition.’’ The point of testimonio is, in the ﬁrst place, to intervene in the world, especially ‘‘in a place where the subaltern is not,’’ such as the university. In a critical life history inquiry, we should speak with the participants of our academic investigations rather than to speak for them. In my research, I have not attempted to speak for the women activist educators from the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Rather, I have tried to add my voice to their voices in order to amplify their claims for social justice. The issue of amplifying oppressed people’s voices through critical life history inquiries will be addressed in the next section.

GIVING VOICE TO THE OPPRESSED VS. AMPLIFYING OPPRESSED PEOPLE’S VOICES Originally, one of the main purposes of life history studies was to ‘‘name silent lives’’ (McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993) and provide voice for those who have been socially and culturally silenced.2 In education, for instance, life history has been used for ‘‘giving voice’’ to women teachers (Munro, 1998; Weiler, 1988; Casey, 1993), black teachers (Foster, 1997), ‘‘First Nations educators’’ (Orr, 2001), and lesbian teachers (Sparkes, 1994). However, all of these authors were already able to realize the complexities regarding the issue of ‘‘giving voice’’ to the oppressed. Munro (1998), for instance, states that life history ‘‘provides a method that seeks to ‘recover’ the voices of women who have traditionally been marginalized’’ (p. 6). She cites Jane Marcus who referred to ‘‘this process of recovering women’s voice as ‘invisible mending’’’ (p. 6). However, in Munro’s research, she realized that her original intention of ‘‘giving voice’’ to women teachers

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

393

could, actually, reproduce ‘‘the very unequal power relations’’ that she, as a feminist, sought to disrupt. She states that ‘‘the very agency of the individual seems undermined by talk of ‘giving voice’ [y] it actually underscores my perceptions of those I was researching as disempowered and conﬂicted with my understanding of them as meaning makers’’ (p. 12). Riessman (1993) states, that the researchers are not able ‘‘to give voice.’’ She prefers to conceive of narrative inquiry ‘‘as a chorus of voices, with an embedded contrapuntal duet.’’ In her words: There are strains because most researchers are privileged and white and many women we want to include are not. Some voices will have to be restrained to hear voices from below to create a particular harmony, but a different interpreter might well allow other voices to dominate. Representing women’s experience is limited further because language is often inadequate, and the world as perceived by subjects may be conﬁned and organized by structures of oppression not apparent to participants themselves. Just as gender is not enough in feminist research, giving voice to experience is not either, even as we commit to women’s standpoints. (p. 16)

Goodson and Sikes (2001) state that life historians should acknowledge the complexity and problematical aspects of claims to emancipate and empower ‘‘silenced lives’’ through ‘‘giving voice.’’ They argue: If life history is undertaken in order to ‘‘give voice’’ to people who would not otherwise be heard, and if it is the life historian who is in the position of providing the channel to enable those voices to be heard, then there is an inevitable inequality. (p. 102)

James (2000) also criticizes the ﬁgure of the ‘‘redemptive ethnographer’’ giving voice to the oppressed other. He states, ‘‘Certainly, oral history’s fundamental claim to distinguish itself by giving a voice to the voiceless, to those who do not enter the dominant narrative of history, shares this redemptive urge’’ (p. 138). Tierney (2000) has stated that the challenge is to seek some sense of voice and agency that enables action. For Tierney, ‘‘the task of life history and personal narrative is not merely to develop a catalog of silenced lives, as if the creation of a catalog is sufﬁcient, but rather, we undertake such research ‘to challenge the oppressive structures that create the conditions for silencing’’’ (p. 55). Beverley (2000) also discusses ‘‘the presence of voice’’ in the testimonio. He says: Testimonio gives voice to a previously anonymous and voiceless popular-democratic subject, but in such a way that the intellectual or professional is interpellated, in his or

394

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

her function as interlocutor/reader of the testimonial account, as being in alliance with (an to some extent dependent on) this subject, without at the same time losing his or her identity as an intellectual. (p. 562)

He states that testimonio is a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian narrative form, because it does not require or establish a hierarchy of narrative authority. Moreover, the testimonial discourse has also a ‘‘metonymic character,’’ that is, ‘‘each individual testimonio evokes an absent polyphony of other voices, other possible lives and experiences’’ (p. 557). Beverley also stresses that it is important to understand that the testimonial narrator ‘‘functions as an organic intellectual (in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of this term) of the subaltern, who speaks to the hegemony by means of a metonymy of self in the name and in the place of the subaltern’’ (p. 557). In the author’s view, what testimonio asks of its readers is ‘‘solidarity – that is, the capacity to identify their own identities, expectations, and values with those of another’’ (p. 558). In turn, as Paulo Freire (2000) argues, solidarity requires ‘‘true communication’’ because it is only through ‘‘true communication’’ that human life can hold meaning.3 According to Clandinin and Connelly (2000), there is a rich, developing literature on voice. Part of this literature, they state, criticizes researchers for co-opting and using participant voices for research ends. In order to avoid the co-optation of voice, the authors suggest the term participant signature, ‘‘a term that recognizes the inﬂuence of participants on the signature of the text, a term that recognizes that the signature may be negotiated among researcher and participants’’ (p. 148). Thus, ownership matters. The question of who owns stories is closely linked to concerns of ethics and negotiated relationships in the ﬁeld. Invasion of privacy, practicing therapy without a license, and abuse of information are among other ethical concerns for narrative inquiry. These are crucial issues that must be seriously discussed in this type of methodology.

THE DATA COLLECTION PROCESS As mentioned above, in my research, I analyzed life stories (testimonios) of women activist educators who have participated in the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Similar to Casey’s (1993) research, my academic investigation has been oriented toward ‘‘progressive ends.’’ I strongly agree with this author that theory, methodology, and politics are completely interwoven. It is impossible to separate them. Goodson and Sikes (2001) do not believe that there is only one, ‘‘proper’’ way of doing life history inquiry. However, they state that ‘‘A one-to-one

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

395

interview-conversation between informant and researcher is perhaps the most commonly used strategy for collecting life history data’’ (p. 27). The authors defend the idea that not everyone can or should do life history. In their opinion, Life history is an approach best suited to people who are able to listen attentively and beyond what is actually being said, and who can ask pertinent questions in a nonthreatening manner. It demands the willingness to share one’s own experiences, if this seems appropriate, and, of supreme importance, it requires the researcher to be the sort of person that people want to talk to. (p. 20)

It is difﬁcult to say whether or not I am the sort of person that women from the Landless Workers Movement want to talk to, however, my assessment is that the participants were very willing to cooperate with my research. Even though I see myself as a multiple outsider in this investigation – a white, middle class man who embodies an urban culture interviewing working class women of color who embody a rural culture – our political and ideological links helped transcend some of these differences. As Nelson (1996) stated, ‘‘the researcher’s identity unavoidably contributes to the kind and quality of the information we gather’’ (p. 184). I believe that the political and ideological identities, which I shared with the participants, helped me gather quality data for my research. In order to collect data for my research, I spent a few months in Brazil in 2002. In total, I interviewed 11 women activist educators who have been members of the movement for at least three years. Some scholars such as Cole and Knowles (2001) and Goodson and Sikes (2001) seem to agree that research samples for life history inquiry should be quite small. Goodson and Sikes, for instance, argue that ‘‘large samples are unnecessary and even inappropriate because objective, etic and nomothetic generalization is not the ultimate aim’’ (p. 22). Cole and Knowles encourage involvement with fewer rather than more participants for an intensive exploration, rather than for more superﬁcial engagement. However, it is impossible to deﬁne the most appropriate number of interviewees in life history research. If we look at other examples of critical life history inquiry already mentioned in this article, we are be able to realize that any project has a different number of participants. For instance, in Weiler’s (1988) research, 11 feminist women participated in her study – seven schoolteachers and four administrators; Casey (1993) recorded the narratives of 33 progressive political women activists; and Foster (1997) conducted 20 life history interviews with black teachers. Generally, the number of interviews depends on the aims of the research, on the topic, and

396

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

on time and resource restrictions, that is, ‘‘on what is actually possible’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Cole & Knowles, 2001). Moreover, the discovery of ‘‘the saturation process’’ (Bertaux, 1981 cited by Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Cole & Knowles, 2001), a process in which every new life story is conﬁrming what the preceding ones have shown, is also usually used to deﬁne life history research samples. In my research, I was already beginning to discover ‘‘the saturation process’’ when I realized that the very last activist educator that I interviewed held a different proﬁle from the other interviewees. She was the only case of someone who practically grew up in the Landless Workers Movement and, as a consequence, had a different life story (testimonio) to tell. The other interviewees became members of the movement when they already were adults. Unfortunately, due to time and funding constraints, I was not able to pursue other activist educators who had grown up in the movement. Interviewing 11 activist educators only once was what was actually possible for my research. Goodson and Sikes (2001) also state that life history rarely involves a random sample of informants. Moreover, on issues associated with participant selection, invitation, and involvement in life history, Cole and Knowles (2001) state that there is a range of perspectives. In their words, As life history researchers guided by principles of relationality, mutuality, empathy, care, sensitivity, respect, and authenticity, how we invite participation, whom we invite, and how many, will naturally reﬂect these principles. Similarly, if we accept the subjective and intersubjective nature of human experience and meaning-making, the dynamic, multidimensional, and contextual nature of knowledge, and the related unpredictability of the human condition, then concerns about ‘‘sample size’’ and representativeness, purity of ‘‘truths’’ told, and generalizability of research ﬁndings to populations of people become nonissues. (p. 65)

Issues of reliability and generalizability will be more deeply discussed in the section about validity in life history inquiry at the end of this article. Several scholars (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Ebbeson, 2001) seem to agree about the advantages of other sources of data complementing life history inquiry. Field notes, reﬂexive journals kept both by the researcher and by the participants, letters between the researchers and the participants, observations, supplementary documentation, and also photographs and other personal-family-social artifacts have been suggested as good sources for gathering contextual information. In addition to the interviews, I also collected documents of various kinds – books, booklets, magazines articles, journal articles, dissertations – about

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

397

education in general and, more speciﬁcally, about its teacher education programs that have been published by people working with or in the Landless Workers Movement since the late 1980s. I also took ﬁeld notes throughout my ﬁeldwork.

THE INTERVIEW PROCESS In my research, the interviewees were selected through different types of sampling. Once recruited, they were invited to participate in the research. I called them individually and scheduled meetings of at least 3 h in places that were convenient for them. From these initial contacts with the MST women activist educators we embarked on what Goodson and Sikes (2001) call ‘‘the research bargain’’ – ‘‘the understanding between the researcher and the informant about what the nature of their relationship is and what each can expect from their mutual participation’’ (p. 26). Many scholars (Measor & Sikes, 1992; Casey, 1993; Nelson, 1996; Rasbridge, 1996; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Goodson & Sikes, 2001) state that the quality of the relationship between the researcher and the participants, which is intrinsically hierarchical and always being negotiated, is crucial in life history inquiry. These scholars stress the importance of ‘‘trust’’ and ‘‘solidarity’’ in this type of research relationship. In addition to trust and solidarity, indeed two quite important elements in this methodology, it is essential to consider the researcher’s and the participants’ level of political and ideological commitment in critical life history inquiry. This kind of commitment produces a bond of comradeship, which in turn, helps transcend the differences between the researcher’s and the participants’ individual identities. I suggested that the researcherparticipant relationship should be one of partnership.4 The participants responded positively to my suggestion for the deﬁnition of this research relationship. One of the interviewees said: I love this word [‘‘cumplicidade’’]. Whenever we accept to participate in an interview we already trust the researcher. This is a kind of trustful relationship. I have been very comfortable talking to youy

Some narrative inquirers and life historians (Rasbridge, 1996; Olmedo, 1999; Ellis & Bochner, 2000) state that in order to build trust in the relationship with the interviewees they spent several sessions of many hours with the participants. As mentioned above, because of time and resource constraints, each of the MST’s women activist educators in my research was

398

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

interviewed only once. The average duration of each interview was two and a half hours. However, these 2½ h were not the only time that I spent with the participants of my research. I got together with them in different situations both before and after our interviews. Examples would include attending meetings, participating in a demonstration,5 having lunch or dinner, visiting settlements, and visiting schools among other things. Thus, besides sharing similar political and ideological identities, I believe that these other moments also contributed to the construction of a relationship based upon trust with the participants in my research. In Cole and Knowles’ (2001) opinion, ‘‘the length of each conversation is a delicate thing.’’ The authors tend to favor long conversations. But this, of course, depends on other circumstances, such as the availability of each participant. Another aspect to be considered in life history interviews is a location ‘‘where there will not be interruptions or distractions, and that are emotionally and physically comfortable’’ (p. 75). Still, on the issue of improving the quality of collected data, Measor and Sikes (1992) argue that ‘‘reciprocity’’ is an excellent data gathering ‘‘tactic.’’ There is no doubt that sharing personal information and experiences with some of the interviewees brought me closer to them. Goodson and Sikes (2001) draw our attention to the fact that it is ‘‘potentially ethically dubious’’ or ‘‘ethically questionable’’ when ‘‘researchers deliberately manipulate relationships with informantsy by employing techniques of ‘‘reciprocity,’’ with a view to obtaining better quality data’’ (p. 93). I completely agree with them. However, it is important to highlight that I did not share personal information and experiences with interviewees in my research as a methodological strategy for gathering better quality data. The moments that I shared personal information with the interviewees took place spontaneously, as part of a very natural conversation. Nelson (1996) reminds us that, in any interview process, a ‘‘minimal rapport’’ has to be established during the ﬁrst minutes of the encounter and maintained throughout in order to guarantee a comfortable and meaningful life narrative process. As Nelson says, ‘‘The ease of access and the quality of rapport are constantly negotiated as the researcher and the informant construct their identities’’ (p. 194). Casey (1993) and Goodson and Sikes (2001) stress that the life history interviews should be informal and relatively unstructured. Actually, different authors have considered the life history interviews ‘‘conversation-type encounters’’ and have used different terms to refer to this data collection process, such as ‘‘interactive conversation’’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), ‘‘guided conversation’’ (Cole & Knowles, 2001), or ‘‘grounded

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

399

conversation’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001). From the following dialog, it is possible to see that the interviews with the participants of my research took place in a very informal atmosphere. (Interviewee) I don’t know if this is according to what you wanty For me it is really easy to get stuck in one question. It is hard for me to follow a sequencey (Interviewer) Don’t worryy For the success of this interview I believe that it is really good to keep this informal atmosphere. I want you to keep taking this as a conversation rather than a formal interview. Again, don’t worry about that...

At the same time, through the interviewee’s statement – ‘‘I don’t know if this is according to what you wanty’’ – we can notice her preoccupation about the relevance of her story. According to Goodson and Sikes (2001), in life history, when interviewees make this kind of comment, ‘‘what they are doing is seeking conﬁrmation that they are telling the ‘right’ version of their story, the version that they believe the researcher wants to hear’’ (p. 46). It brings up questions about validity in life history inquiry. I will discuss this speciﬁc issue in the last section of this article. Although, at the time of the interviews, I held an interview script with questions that I wanted the participants to answer, I did not mechanically follow this script during the conversations. After establishing a ‘‘minimal rapport,’’ I shared general information about the research subject, goals, and methodology with them. Since the interviewees had already had experience in doing research (action-research) in the MST teacher education programs, this initial conversation ﬂowed quite easily. I spoke with educators who already knew about the challenges, needs, and dilemmas of qualitative research. I realized that they felt an empathy with me as well. I anticipated the questions that I wanted them to answer in order to provide them an overview about the interview. I checked if they understood all the questions and started from the ﬁrst question in the interview script. After asking this ﬁrst question, I temporarily abandoned the interview script. I was listening very carefully to their stories and sometimes taking brief notes of some issues that I wanted them to clarify or to talk about more. At the end of the interviews, I suggested that they take a look at the questions in my interview script again and check if they had answered all of them. If they wanted, they could complete their answers or even highlight some of the information that they had already provided. Cole and Knowles (2001) state that developing questions to frame a series of conversations is more difﬁcult than it ﬁrst appears. They suggest fewer questions rather than more and broad questions rather than narrow as starting points. I had only ﬁve questions in my interview script. However,

400

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

while encompassing the same topics, the questions that I really asked my interviewees were a bit different from the ﬁve original ones. I used a more simple language. I strongly agree with Tierney (1998) who says, ‘‘Everyone in the ﬁeld needs to reformulate questions once we have learned a bit about a group or an individual’’ (p. 54). I used a tape recorder in order to collect interview data. Some authors (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Goodson & Sikes, 2001) state that the use of tape recorders is preferred by most life historians rather than relying solely on note taking and memory. However, Goodson and Sikes (2001) state that ‘‘using a tape recorder introduces an element of artiﬁciality into the situation.’’ They say, ‘‘Researchers also need to consider the extent to which using a tape recorder inﬂuences the nature and content of what informants say’’ (p. 32). Usually, the interviewees in my research were quite comfortable in the presence of the tape recorder. Again, they had had experiences in their teacher education programs doing qualitative research, including collecting data through interviews. The device that I used was a small tape recorder to which I attached a microphone for better quality sound. At the beginning of each interview, I turned this tape recorder on, put the microphone on the table (or on the ﬂoor) and said ‘‘Now, let’s forget about this stuff over here and let’s start our conversationy.’’ My intention was to mitigate the presence of a potentially intimidating device. After collecting data for my research in Brazil, I came back to the U.S. in September of 2002 and started transcribing, ‘‘translating,’’ and analyzing the audiotapes. I will provide more details about these three important stages of the research in the next section.

TRANSCRIBING, ‘‘TRANSLATING’’ AND ANALYZING THE LIFE STORIES I transcribed all the audiotapes, 13 in total, listening to each of them twice – ﬁrst, listening to the tapes and transcribing them simultaneously and, then, listening to them again in order to proofread the ﬁrst draft of the transcriptions. I strongly agree with Goodson and Sikes (2001) who maintain that, ‘‘There is no doubt that doing your own transcribing enables you to become familiar with the data’’ (p. 33). Though this was difﬁcult and time-consuming work, I enjoyed hearing the interviewees’ life stories (testimonios) again. At this time, I was able to pay attention to details in the conversations that I had not realized during the interviews. I wish I had

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

401

had more time during my ﬁeldwork in order to transcribe one interview before recording the next one. Because all the interviews in my research were recorded in Portuguese, I transcribed all of them in Portuguese. Despite the fact that I consider my research as an ‘‘analysis of narratives’’ rather than a ‘‘narrative analysis,’’ I transcribed this Portuguese version of the transcriptions word-for-word, trying to reproduce all the features of speech – pauses, laughs, and so forth. It came to over 240 single spaced, typed pages.6 After transcribing all the interviews, I mailed each transcription to the respective interviewee and asked them to verify whether or not the transcriptions were trustworthy. I received positive responses from these interviewees about the correctness of the transcriptions. The next step was to write an English version of the transcriptions. In doing so, and similarly to what James (2000) did with Don˜a Marı´ a’s story, I edited the transcriptions, shortening, condensing, and reconﬁguring the order of parts of the interviewees’ life stories (testimonios). This version came to over 90, one-and-a-half-spaced, typed pages. I used this English version of the interviews to analyze these women activist educators’ life stories (testimonios), double-checking the original version if necessary. Because there are ethical issues concerning conﬁdentiality and anonymity in narrative inquiry and life history research (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), I have not used the interviewees’ real names in this work. Instead, I have adopted pseudonyms to protect their personal identities. Transcribing is considered one of the ‘‘levels of representation’’ in narrative inquiry (Riessman, 1993). Perhaps, because most of the narrative inquirers and life historians do their research in their own countries, transcribing the interviews and writing the ﬁnal report in their own languages, authors barely mention ‘‘translation’’ as another layer of representation in this type of academic investigation. Moreover, because I am not a professional translator, I asked a friend of mine, who is an American and is able to understand Portuguese very well, to help me proofread the English version of the interviews’ transcriptions. In so doing, he suggested changes in the ﬁrst draft of my translation in order for the text to become clearer for an English reader. Like ‘‘translation,’’ ‘‘proofreading’’ is not usually mentioned as a level of representation either in narrative inquiry or life history. Life historians, who do their research with people who speak a different language from that in which the ﬁnal report is written, perhaps, omit this information because they are afraid of saying that they have to count on someone else in order to proofread their translations.

402

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

Thus, if transcribing is already ‘‘incomplete, partial, and selective’’ or ‘‘an interpretative practice,’’ because, as Riessman (1993) says, ‘‘There is no one, true representation of spoken language’’ (p. 13), translating and proofreading add further layers of representation in this process. Analyzing the transcript (or the proofread translation, in the case of my research) is another level of representation in narrative inquiry (Riessman, 1993). As Riessman notes: There are decisions about form, ordering, style of presentation, and how the fragments of lives that have been given in interviews will be housedy In the end, the analyst creates a metastory about what happened by telling what the interview narratives signify, editing and reshaping what was told, and turning it into a hybrid story, a ‘‘false document.’’ Values, politics, and theoretical commitments enter once again. (pp. 13–14)

As mentioned above, issues of validity in narrative inquiry and life history are quite crucial and will be discussed in the next section of this article. Goodson and Sikes (2001) state that analysis in life history ‘‘usually involves ﬁtting the evidence and information into a framework of some kind. This framework may take the form of classiﬁcations, categories, models, typologies or concepts’’ (p. 34). In critical life history inquiry we should not try to ﬁt the life stories (testimonios) into ‘‘inductive categories’’ or a theoretical framework. Rather, we should try to construct ‘‘deductive categories’’ – categories which come from the life stories (testimonios) themselves. Even though I went to do my ﬁeldwork with some prior categories in mind – actually, everyone does – most of the categories in my research came from the similarities that I was able to realize among the women activist educators’ life stories (testimonios). Thus, an important issue in this type of academic investigation is how to present research ﬁndings, that is, ‘‘turning a life story into a life history and in crafting a representation of informants’ experiences and perceptions’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 37). One of the key questions is how much direct quotation to use. According to Goodson and Sikes: Any synthesis or rewording by the researcher is a step away from the originaly Then there is the issue of how far the informants’ words are left to speak for themselves and how much commentary and analysis there should be. Whatever decisions are made, the researcher needs to be able to justify what they have done. Thus, in some circumstances, it may be possible to leave a verbatim transcript to stand entirely alone (or with a minimum of comment) and in others, not to include any reported speech. (p. 37)

Among the examples of critical life history inquiry already cited in this paper, Foster (1997), after brieﬂy introducing each of the black teachers who participated in her research, opted for presenting their life histories

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

403

without making any comment. She edited the teachers’ stories and divided them in three groups according to their teaching experience: ‘‘the elders,’’ ‘‘the veterans,’’ and ‘‘the novices.’’ Casey (1993), after analyzing interviews of progressive political women activists, also divided them in three groups: ‘‘Catholic women religious teachers,’’ ‘‘secular Jewish women teachers,’’ and ‘‘black women teachers.’’ She preferred to insert quotations from the interviewees throughout her analysis. In my research, I decided to share my interviewees’ life stories (testimonios) as they were told to me and then, to present an analysis of the research data, intercalating my analysis with quotations from the interviewees. Different scholars (Pamphilon, 1999; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; James, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Goodson & Sikes, 2001) advocate the necessity of establishing a dialog between ‘‘macro’’ and ‘‘micro’’ levels in analyzing life stories. They stress the active role of the researcher in interpreting life stories. Consequently, narrative inquirers and life historians are urged to provide personal background information, which according to Goodson and Sikes (2001), ‘‘will enhance the rigor of their work by making potential biases explicit’’ (p. 35). They also state that, ‘‘In life history work, where informants’ lives are revealed, perhaps it is only ‘fair’ that researchers’ lives are too’’ (p. 35). Besides recognizing the active role of the researcher in interpreting life stories, some authors (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001; Ebbeson, 2001) also discuss the advantages of the participants’ active involvement in data analysis and interpretation. In their opinion, this process should also be ‘‘interactive’’ and ‘‘collaborative.’’ However, because participants are usually not physically present, Cole and Knowles draw our attention to the difference in the participants’ involvement at this point in the inquiry. If direct involvement of participants in the analysis and interpretation of data is not affordable, Goodson and Sikes (2001), citing authors such as Peter Woods, Yvonna Lincoln, and Egon Guba remind us about the importance of ‘‘respondent validation’’ or ‘‘insiders conﬁrming the correctness of analysis.’’ Although in my research I would love to have some feedback from the participants about my data analysis and interpretation, it would imply translating the ﬁnal report – or at least the chapters about the participants’ life histories – from English to Portuguese again and then asking them to evaluate ‘‘the correctness of the analysis.’’ This would demand a lot of time and work from the participants as well as me. I prefer to take responsibility and acknowledge my active role as the researcher and rely on other validity strategies.

404

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

VALIDITY On the issue of validity in narrative inquiry and life history, the authors cited in this section seem to agree, that in order to evaluate the quality of this type of research it is imperative to go beyond traditional, positivistic, and standardized notions of validity, reliability, and generalizability. Two main issues have been addressed in the specialized literature on validity in narrative inquiry and life history: ‘‘criteria for judging quality’’ and ‘‘the truthfulness’’ of narrative accounts. On the ﬁrst issue, Hatch and Wisniewski (1995a) state ‘‘criteria for making judgments about the quality of scholarship used with other research approaches do not ﬁt narrative and life history’’ (p. 120). They argue that this type of research ‘‘should be judged by different criteria than traditional notions of validity and reliability’’ (p. 128). In their words: ywhile the qualitative paradigms have increased their respectability, narrative and life history approaches remain suspect even within the qualitative ﬁeld because their ‘‘data are subject to incompleteness, personal bias and selective recall’’y When personal stories are the prime sources of data, and often the products of inquiry, those (qualitative researchers among them) bound to thinking of ‘‘science’’ as paradigmatic knowledge will be reluctant to accept life history and narrative inquiry as legitimate. (p. 126)

Thus, through presenting ‘‘a list of criteria for quality narrative and life history work’’ (see Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995a, p. 129), the authors argue that ‘‘there are other ways of thinking about issues of ‘truth,’ ‘epistemological warrant,’ and ‘criteria for adequacy’ that go beyond the standardized notions of reliability, validity, and generalizability’’ (p. 128). From my analysis of the specialized literature, I ﬁnd two conﬂicting positions on this issue. On one hand, there are authors (DeVault, 1997; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Grumet, 1991) who argue that ‘‘there is no standard by which to measure any narrative.’’ Generalizability, in the usual sense, is not a concern either. On the other hand, even agreeing that ‘‘validity is a difﬁculty for narrative inquiry,’’ there are those (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995; Carr, 1997; Beverley, 2000; Cole & Knowles, 2001) who criticize ‘‘an epistemological relativism’’ in some of the current discussion about ‘‘truth’’ in narrative inquiry and life history and argue for the need to develop a ‘‘ﬂuid set of criteria’’ for evaluating this type of qualitative research. The challenge is to develop ‘‘a criterion that dialectically conjoins notion of objective truth (conventionally a positivist science value) and subjective interpretation (both part of qualitative inquiry and an aesthetic value)’’ (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995, p. 26).

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

405

Linking narrative inquiry to both social science and art, BlumenfeldJones (1995) presents ‘‘ﬁdelity’’ as a criterion for practicing and evaluating narrative inquiry. ‘‘Fidelity’’ is contrasted with ‘‘truth’’ and constructed, in part, as moral in character. ‘‘Fidelity’’ is also ‘‘characterized as a ‘‘betweenness,’’ constructed as both intersubjective (obligations between teller and receiver) and as a resonance between the story told and the social and cultural context of a story’’ (p. 25). Cole and Knowles (2001) address issues of rigor – ‘‘standards or criteria used to make judgments about the quality of a research piece’’ – in life history research. The authors lay out a set of eight elements and associated features (Intentionality; Researcher presence; Methodological commitment; Holistic quality; Communicability; Esthetic form; Knowledge claims; Contributions) that, according to them, ‘‘can serve as standards or criteria by which life history research – which places central the notions of self, relationship, and artfulness – can be judged’’ (see Cole & Knowles, 2001, pp. 125–127). Another issue, which the specialized literature addresses, concerns the accuracy or truthfulness of the stories. According to the Personal Narratives Group (1989), ‘‘When talking about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become confused, and get things wrong. Yet they are revealing truths. These truths don’t reveal the past ‘as it actually was,’ aspiring to a standard of objectivity. They give us instead the truths of our experiences’’ (p. 261). Munro (1998) says that the purpose of feminist narrative inquiry ‘‘seeks to validate women’s voices and experiences as truth.’’ She quotes Sherian and Salaff who state that ‘‘contradictory statements and actions are not necessarily false fronts that should be eliminated. On the contrary, sensitive recordings of inconsistencies in what people say or do may show how perceptions of objective reality actually reﬂect different levels of more complex realities’’ (pp. 130–131). Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992) discuss their understandings of what they call ‘‘satisfactory stories,’’ that is, ‘‘stories that can advance living action.’’ For these authors, ‘‘a good story presents a coherent plot’’ (pp. 8–9). Following Cohler, they state that ‘‘coherence is imposed by the work of story makers.’’ They suggest that ‘‘coherence derives from the tacit assumptions of plausibility that shape the way each story maker weaves the fragmentary episodes of experience into a history’’ (p. 5). Thus, according to the authors, ‘‘A good story must not only be horizontally coherent – episodes hanging together to warrant generalizations – but also vertically – episodes warranted by acts, feelings, and so on. In short, better

406

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

stories must be coherent in several planes; they must become compact’’ (p. 285; original emphasis). James (2000) cites Philippe Lejeune who, in autobiography, uses the expression ‘‘the referential pact’’ – ‘‘the commitment on the part of the teller to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ about her life’’ (p. 136). For James, ‘‘The referential pact associated with the oral history text is likely to be, as with autobiography, premised on notions of ﬁdelity to meaning rather than to criteria of strict accuracy associated with information’’ (p. 136). Thus, life-story researches ‘‘emphasizes the truth of the telling versus telling the truth’’ (p. 137). I strongly agree with Paulo Freire who says that ‘‘While we engage in the scientiﬁc research of reality [y] we must not assume a neutral attitude. We can’t confuse our preoccupation with the truth (characteristic of any serious scientiﬁc effort) with so-called scientiﬁc neutrality, which in fact does not exist’’ (Freire, 1985, p. 112). Freire argues that the researcher must be critical, involved, and rigorous toward truth. However, he also states, the critical and careful researcher wants to discover the truth of reality, not the submission of reality to his/her own truth. As Freire says, ‘‘We cannot respond to the myth of the neutrality of science and the impartiality of the scientist with the mystiﬁcation of truth, but rather with a respect for that truth. In effect, at the moment when one is seduced by this falsiﬁcation of reality, one ceases to be critical’’ (Freire, 1985, p. 158). It is important to highlight that the struggle for ‘‘the truth’’ is an epistemological, political and ideological one. Critical life history inquiry should be judged not only according to its intellectual rigor but also according to its capacity to generate solidarity, empathy, and ‘‘some level of activism’’ (Finley & Finley, 1999) that helps to promote new political alliances among progressive social and cultural movements and among progressive individuals.

CONCLUSIONS In this article, I discussed a variety of issues regarding narrative inquiry and life history, I provided more detailed information about my research, including how I collected and analyzed the life stories (testimonios) of women activist educators who have participated in a progressive, critical, and radical social movement in Brazil: the Landless Workers Movement. Narrative inquiry and life history are privileged methodologies for the study of people’s lives, experiences, and identity construction. Life histories,

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

407

which might be described as analyzes of narratives (stories or life stories) rather than as narrative analyzes, distinguishes itself from other forms of narrative inquiry thanks to its emphasis on the socio-historical, cultural, and political contexts. It focuses on the dialectical relationship between agency and structure. I argue for the necessity of making a distinction between the type of research that takes place in both narrative inquiry and life history, and what I call critical life history inquiry. The most important distinctive characteristic of critical life history inquiry is its explicitly political commitment to social justice. Consequently, the life stories (testimonios) used in this speciﬁc type of research come from socially and culturally oppressed people, mainly from those who have struggled for implementing social change and liberation through their active participation in progressive social and cultural movements. The critical life historian’s purpose is not only to give voice to economically, socially, and culturally oppressed people, helping their voices to be heard in spaces from which they are generally excluded, but also to add the researcher’s voice to theirs in order to amplify their claims for social justice. Consequently, the researcher’s role is to speak with ‘‘the other’’ rather than to speak for them. There are many methodological and ethical issues that life historians must pay attention to. Although ethical issues are important in any academic investigation and any human relationship, they are extremely important in narrative inquiry and life history due to the potential, this type of research has for harming already socially vulnerable people. Finally, traditional, positivistic, and standardized notions of validity should not be used to assess narrative inquiry and life history. Because the struggle for ‘‘the truth’’ is a political one, critical life history inquiry should be judged for its intellectual rigor and for its capacity to generate solidarity, to inspire some level of activism, and to help promote new progressive political alliances.

NOTES 1. I interviewed six women of color (black and mestizas) and ﬁve white women in my research. Only two interviewees claimed they embody an urban culture rather than a rural culture. 2. For a historical background of life history studies in social sciences and education see Goodson (1981) and Goodson and Sikes (2001). 3. Dialog is a keyword in Freire’s work. He emphasizes the importance of ‘‘a relationship of authentic dialogue.’’ As Freire (1985) says, ‘‘True dialogue unites

408

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

subjects together in the cognition of a knowable object, which mediates between them’’ (p. 49). 4. In Portuguese I used the word ‘‘cumplicidade’’ in order to deﬁne the relationship that I wanted to construct with the participants. In English the word ‘‘complicity’’ – ‘‘partnership in an infraction,’’ according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary – has a negative connotation. Thus, I decided to use rather the word ‘‘partnership.’’ 5. This demonstration took place in Caruaru, in the state of Pernambuco, in front of a Federal bank branch, on the very ﬁrst day that I arrived in this town. The settled peasants, members of the Landless Workers Movement, were demanding more funding for agriculture. 6. Hatch and Wisniewski (1995), following Polkinghorne, state that there are two types of narrative inquiry: analysis of narratives and narrative analysis. As they put it, ‘‘The former uses narratives (stories) as data and produces taxonomies and categories much like those found in other qualitative studies. Narrative analysis gathers descriptions of events and happenings and generates a narrative as a research product’’ (pp. 125–126). The authors conclude by stating ‘‘it seems to us that narratives generated via narrative analysis procedures would look more like ‘life stories’ than the ‘life histories’’’ (p. 126). Given these distinctions, it is clear to me that my research is an analysis of narratives rather than a narrative analysis. Similarly, the methodology used in this academic investigation is a life history rather than a life story. (See also Goodson, 1992; Goodson & Sikes, 2001, for differences between terms such as life history and life story.)

REFERENCES Alcoff, L. M. (1995). The problem of speaking for others. In: J. Roof & R. Wiegman (Eds), Who can speak? Authority and critical identity (pp. 97–119). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Apple, M. W. (1996). Power, meaning and identity: Critical sociology of education in the United States. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17(2), 125–144. Beverley, J. (2000). Testemonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative inquiry (pp. 555–565). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Blumenfeld-Jones, D. (1995). Fidelity as a criterion for practicing and evaluating narrative inquiry. In: J. A. Hatch & R. Wisniewski (Eds), Life history and narrative (pp. 25–35). London: Falmer. Butt, R., Raymond, D., McCue, G., & Yamagishi, L. (1992). Collaborative autobiography and the teachers’ voice. In: I. Goodson (Ed.), Studying teachers’ lives (pp. 51–98). New York: Teachers College Press. Carr, D. (1997). Narrative and the real world. In: L. P. Hinchman & S. K. Hinchman (Eds), Memory, identity, community (pp. 1–25). Albany: State University of New York Press. Casey, K. (1993). I answer with my life: Life histories of women teachers working for social change. New York: Routledge. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Studying the Identity Construction of Activist Educators

409

Cole, A. L., & Knowles, J. G. (Eds). (2001). Lives in context: The art of life history research. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (Eds). (1999). Shaping a professional identity: Stories of educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Crocco, M. S., Munro, P., & Weiler, K. (1999). Pedagogies of resistance: Women educator activists, 1880–1960. New York: Teachers College Press. Denzin, N. K. (April, 1991). Deconstructing the biographical method. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. Denzin, N. K. (1992). Interpretative biography. (2nd ed.). Newbury Park: Sage. DeVault, M. (1997). Personal writing in social research: Issues of production and interpretation. In: R. Hertz (Ed.), Reﬂexivity and voice (pp. 216–228). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ebbeson, L. (2001). Reﬂections on ‘‘our stories’’: Women in cardiac rehabilitation. In: A. L. Cole & G. J. Knowles (Eds), Lives in context: The art of life history research (pp. 184–191). Lanhan: Altamira Press. Ellis, C. (1997). Evocative autoethnography: Writing emotionally about our lives. In: W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Representation and the text: Re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 115–139). Albany: State University of New York Press. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reﬂexivity: Researcher as subject. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative inquiry (pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Finley, S., & Finley, M. (1999). Sp’ange: A research story. Qualitative Inquiry, 5(3), 313–337. Foster, M. (1997). Black teachers on teaching. New York: The New Press. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power and liberation. Westport, London: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (20th-anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum. Goodson, I. (1981). Life history and the study of schooling. Interchange, 11(4), 62–76. Goodson, I. (Ed.) (1992). Studying teachers’ lives. New York: Teachers College Press. Goodson, I. (1995a). Studying the teacher’s life and work. In: J. Smyth (Ed.), Critical discourses on teacher development (pp. 55–64). London: Cassel. Goodson, I. (1995b). The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political. In: J. Amos Hatch & R. Wisniewski (Eds), Life history and narrative (pp. 89–98). London: The Falmer Press. Goodson, I., & Sikes, P. (2001). Life history research in educational settings: Learning from lives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Grumet, M. (1991). The politics of personal knowledge. In: C. Witherell & N. Noddings (Eds), Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education (pp. 67–77). New York: Teachers College Press. Hatch, J. A., & Wisniewski, R. (1995a). Life history and narrative: Questions, issues, and exemplary works. In: J. Amos Hatch & R. Wisniewski (Eds), Life history and narrative (pp. 113–135). London: The Falmer Press. Hatch, J. A., & Wisniewski, R. (Eds). (1995b). Life history and narrative. London: The Falmer Press. James, D. (2000). Don˜a Marı´a’s story: Life history, memory, and political identity. Durham: Duke University Press. McLaughlin, D., & Tierney, W. (Eds). (1993). Naming silent lives: Personal narratives and process of educational change. New York: Routledge. Measor, L., & Sikes, P. (1992). Visiting lives: Ethics and methodology in life history. In: I. Goodson (Ed.), Studying teachers’ lives (pp. 209–233). New York: Teachers College Press.

410

JU´LIO EMI´LIO DINIZ-PEREIRA

Middleton, S. (1992). Developing a radical pedagogy: Autobiography of a New Zealand socialist of women’s education. In: I. Goodson (Ed.), Studying teachers’ lives (pp. 18–50). New York: Teachers College Press. Munro, P. (1998). Subject to ﬁction: Women teachers’ life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham: Open University Press. Nelson, L. W. (1996). ‘‘Hands in the chit’lins’’: Notes on native anthropological research among African American women. In: G. Etter-Lewis & M. Foster (Eds), Unrelated kin: Race and gender in women’s personal narratives (pp. 183–199). New York: Routledge. Olmedo, I. (1999). Redeﬁning culture through the memorias of elderly Latinas. Qualitative Inquiry, 5(3), 353–376. Orr, J. (2001). Researching ﬁrst nations: Educators through presence, collaboration, and advocacy. In: A. L. Cole & G. J. Knowles (Eds), Lives in context: The art of life history research (pp. 192–201). Lanhan: Altamira Press. Pamphilon, B. (1999). The zoom model: A dynamic framework for the analysis of life histories. Qualitative Inquiry, 5(3), 393–410. Personal Narratives Group (Eds.) (1989). Interpreting women’s lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rasbridge, L. (1996). An anthropological approach to Cambodian refugee women: Reciprocity in oral histories. In: G. Etter-Lewis & M. Foster (Eds), Unrelated kin: Race and gender in women’s personal narratives (pp. 201–213). New York: Routledge. Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. Newburry Park: Sage. Rosenwald, G. C., & Ochberg, R. L. (Eds). (1992). Storied lives: The cultural politics of selfunderstanding. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sparkes, A. C. (1994). Self, silence, and invisibility as a beginning teacher: A life history of lesbian experience. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(1), 1–24. Tierney, W. G. (1998). Life history’s history: Subjects foretold. Qualitative Inquiry, 4(1), 40–70. Tierney, W. G. (2000). Undaunted courage: Life history and the postmodern challenge. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 537–553). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Weiler, K. (1988). Women teaching for change: Gender, class, and power. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

COMMUNITY IN A MOBILE SUBCULTURE: THE WORLD OF THE TOURING MOTORCYCLIST D. Mark Austin and Patricia Gagne´ ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a 9-year period, from 1998 through 2006, we examine the foundations of community among a nongeographic, mobile, identity-based community of touring motorcyclists. Although traditionally oriented geographic communities continue to exist, the literature shows a growing trend toward non-geographic, identitybased communities, whose cohesiveness is based on collective identity, in-group/out-group boundaries, shared values, and symbols. Our focus on a mobile identity-based community contributes to this literature by examining a collectivity that is not only non-geographically situated, but is also based on a strong value placed on travel. Within the touring BMW motorcycling community, we found a strong collective identity that was founded on the shared values of adventure touring; long-distance, all weather endurance riding; proﬁcient, and highly skilled riding; and safety. Our ﬁndings contribute to the literature on identity-based communities by demonstrating the salience of ritualized interaction that rewards those who conform to (or excel at) group values and reinforces the sense of collective identity that exists among this dispersed, mobile community. Additionally, our research demonstrates that a recreational subculture

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 411–437 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30021-0

411

412

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

can provide some of the traditional beneﬁts of community without many of the demands present in the more comprehensive forms of community. Those who ride are both alone and held tight in the fold of the elect. They draw together for protective warmth and take strange relish in needing to do so at all. (Pierson, 1997, pp. 9–10)

INTRODUCTION Sociological interest in the salience and dynamics of community goes back as far as the discipline itself. Durkheim’s (1893/1984) theory on the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, based on the division of labor in industrial society, is similar to the work of To¨nnies (1887/1957), which examined the shift from communities based on sentimental and traditional bonds to those organized on rational ties. These theories are useful in understanding the changed nature of communities as we moved to a postindustrial society, in which increased geographic mobility and technological advances in communication are important facets of social life. A dualistic typology and lack of recognition of community sentiment in modern society has been criticized (Lyon, 1987; Kasarda & Janowitz, 1974; Hunter, 1975), but a need for research on the changing basis of community remains. Researchers have noted prominent transformations in the foundations of community. Despite research that indicates local social ties and attachments are still important (Mesch & Manor, 1998; St. John, Austin, & Baba, 1986; Guest & Lee, 1983), the decreasing sentimental importance of geographically based local areas for many people has been recognized (Lyon, 1987) as has the increasing impact that urban sprawl has had on declining civic engagement in general (Putnam, 2000). With these changes there is an increasing recognition of the importance of non-geographic sources of attachment to social groups and a recognition that social interactions can be utilized to foster a stronger sense of community where gesellschaft relationships are prevalent (Lowe, 2000). Social scientists have recognized an increase in identity-based communities that are often geographically dispersed (D’Emilio, 1983; Phelan, 1989; Taylor & Whittier, 1992). Moreover, research on consumer culture has revealed a growing trend of community formation based on brand loyalty and/or consumption of a particular product (Maffesoli, 1996; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). Despite this growing social scientiﬁc literature, little research has focused on mobile, geographically dispersed communities where relational ties are

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

413

based on involvement in a particular type of recreation and loyalty to a speciﬁc brand of product necessary to the activity. Researchers interested in consumer culture have identiﬁed important shifts in the foundations of community. We seek to expand upon this literature ﬁrst by examining the ways in which members of a mobile, geographically dispersed, identitybased group attain a sense of collective identity and maintain a sense of community. Second, our research examines these issues among a community that is organized on the basis of ownership and allegiance to a speciﬁc consumer product and the associated lifestyle. The participants in our research are similar to other motorcyclists in terms of their brand loyalty (see Joans, 2001 and Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). Unlike the more visible community of riders who use their motorcycles primarily for commuting, cruising around town, or taking shorter rides in the country, our research focuses on a population of riders who are involved in long-distance touring, which we conceptualize as a form of ‘‘serious leisure’’ (Stebbins, 2001). Speciﬁcally, the community we studied was made up of touring motorcyclists who rode BMW motorcycles. They commonly traveled 500 miles or more in a single day, often riding alone to attend rallies or other group activities, or simply to take a trip. Such lengthy rides, even when taken in the company of others, place this form of recreation among the more solitary forms that exist. Like other objects associated with leisure (Chambers, 1983), motorcycles are symbolic of certain ideals, attitudes, values, and modes of behavior (Austin, Gagne´, & Orend, forthcoming). For most American motorcyclists, riding is more than a means of transportation. Motorcycles hold strong symbolic value that is often shared by non-riders. Riders and non-riders alike tend to associate the machines with ‘‘physical toughness, masculinity, virility, excitement, danger, and freedom’’ (Chambers, 1983, p. 309). The motorcycle that individuals choose represents the type and style of riding they participate in and a form of personal identity that can translate into participation in one particular motorcycling community or another. For example, certain motorcycles are designed for street riding, while others are manufactured for riding off-road and some, known as ‘‘dual sport’’ bikes, are appropriate for both types of riding. ‘‘Sport bikes,’’ are designed for high-speed street riding but are not usually chosen for long-distance riding. ‘‘Touring bikes’’ are designed for long-distance riding or touring while ‘‘Cruisers’’ are designed for shorter distances and may be better suited than touring motorcycles for riding around urban areas, although many motorcyclists tour on cruisers and vice versa. Research on German motorcyclists found that riders of different styles of motorcycles view their

414

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

in-group to be the more prototypical biker as compared to the out-group (Waldez, Mummendey, Wenzel, & Boetcher, 2004). Much of the social scientiﬁc research on motorcycling has examined riders in biker gangs (e.g., Watson, 1982; Posnansky, 1988; Hopper & Moore, 1990; Wolf, 1991; Quinn, 2001, 2003). Although research on touring motorcyclists is scant, a small body of literature on recreational motorcycling has emerged in recent years. Such research includes Maxwell’s (1998) study of community and motorcycling, work on women motorcycle operators (Auster, 2001; Glamser, 2003), Joans’ (2001) examination of female Harley-Davidson riders, and a theoretical examination of the commodiﬁcation of the biker image in American culture (Austin et al., forthcoming). Despite this research, social scientists have devoted comparatively little effort to understanding how riders create and maintain a sense of collective identity and community. Given postindustrial transformations in the sociological foundations of community, our research, as an examination of a mobile, geographically dispersed community, is theoretically important in an increasingly transient society.

CONCEPTUAL MODELS OF COMMUNITY Along with the historical changes already noted, new conceptual models that have evolved in the academic literature emphasize the nature of modern community sentiment. The terms, ‘‘community of limited liability’’ (Janowitz, 1951; Kasarda & Janowitz, 1974) and ‘‘liberated community:’’ (Wellman, 1988; Mesch & Manor, 1998) refer to models of community sentiment as they relate to feelings, expectations, rules of social organization, and social ties. Both models allow for the importance associated with a modern geographic based community. The term ‘‘community of limited liability’’ (Janowitz, 1951; Kasarda & Janowitz, 1974) emphasizes that while sentimental and family ties within the area may be important, ‘‘residents’ involvement in their local neighborhood is voluntary and limited by the degree to which it meets their needs’’ (Mesch & Manor, 1998, p. 504). A resident may view the neighborhood as a status symbol or asset to be used as needed and traded in as new opportunities and needs arise. Similarly, the ‘‘liberated community’’ (Wellman, 1988; Mesch & Manor, 1998) model acknowledges mobility in modern society, suggesting that many contemporary social relationships in the United States are non-geographically based and that many members of post-industrial urban communities have little, if any, attachment to place (Mesch & Manor, 1998). These models of community stress the need for non-geographically based sources of community such as those discussed in the present research.

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

415

These conceptual models do not imply that local relationships are without any importance in modern urban societies, but rather that they are only a portion of overall social networks (Wellman, 1996). Still, Carroll (1984) argues that traditional sociological views of community (e.g., Wirth, 1938), which focused on geographic communities and a shared living experience, have overlooked the other forms of community that are increasingly important in a mobile industrial society. Examples of research on non-geographic communities include studies of occupational groups (Carroll, 1984), recreational vehicle users (Counts & Counts, 1996), participants in garage sales (Herrmann, 1996), gay men (D’Emilio, 1983), and lesbians (Phelan, 1989; Taylor & Whittier, 1992). The foundations of such non-geographic communities are shared meanings, values, symbols, history, purpose, identity, interests, and group boundaries (Carroll, 1984; Counts & Counts, 1996; Furr, 1997; Phelan, 1989; D’Emilio, 1983; Taylor & Whittier, 1992). These projects have demonstrated that social science research on communities need not limit itself to those in which the members live in the same geographic location, but can focus on common interests, activities, and bonding experiences. These latter models of community are central to our examination of touring motorcyclists. As pointed out by Herrmann (1996), in citing Carroll (1995), there are 92 deﬁnitions of community, and sociologists are yet to settle on one deﬁnitive use of the term. With this in mind, there appear to be some general consistencies that exist in the use of the term community, especially as it relates to feelings of belonging and sharing a similar life situation, circumstance, and/or interest. Furr (1997) draws a distinction between ‘‘locality communities’’ and ‘‘non-place communities.’’ Non-place communities are held together by ‘‘a common sense of identity, history, purpose, and interest’’ (Furr, 1997, p. 186). In citing previous studies, Brint (2001, p. 6) points out that ‘‘communities of choice’’ are able to ‘‘provide a focus of interest and support unavailable to many people of communities deﬁned purely by physical propinquity.’’ Herrmann demonstrates this approach in her examination of garage sale activities that ‘‘create social and emotional links between people’’ and ‘‘a really kind of nostalgic ideal’’ (1996, p. 706). Although geographic communities may also be chosen, non-geographic communities require additional effort beyond choosing a residence for individuals to ﬁnd and join. Kelly (1996) asserts that changes accompanying the Industrial Revolution included more reliance on specialization for recreation and less basis in the local community of residence. Nongeographic communities, ‘‘communities of choice,’’ provide opportunities for people to pursue interests that may not be shared by proximate others (Brint, 2001, p. 6). Those who belong to groups based on a shared interest

416

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

are not always required to conform in other ways. Brint further asserts that in general, activity-based groups have a higher respect for individuality than do other communities, such those based on beliefs. Activity-based communities appear to allow participants to enjoy some of the advantages of group membership and community without many of the higher levels of commitment and expectations associated with those based on more deeply held values or those that encompass larger aspects of participants’ lives. One form of activity-based group, or community of choice, is that which exists among participants in ‘‘serious leisure,’’ which Stebbins (2001, p. 54) describes as profound and based on ‘‘substantial skill, knowledge or experience,’’ or some combination of the three. ‘‘Casual leisure,’’ on the other hand, is a much more short-term experience with little or no special skills or training needed to enjoy the activity (Stebbins, 2001, p. 53). In his examination of a gathering of sports car enthusiasts, Goodall (2004, p. 732) distinguishes a ‘‘true enthusiast’’ regardless of the particular activity as: ‘‘separated from others who merely participate in it by a quality of character that thrives on sharing the uniqueness of its culture.’’ The commitment level of the serious leisure participant, then, can be expected to be more intense and encompassing. The distinction between ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘casual’’ leisure is useful in explaining boundary distinctions between in-group and out-group members. As individuals become increasingly involved in, or ‘‘serious’’ about, a leisure activity they become part of a well-developed social world that includes ‘‘groups, events, networks, organizations, and social relationships’’ (Stebbins, 2001, p. 54). A related distinction that is useful in understanding the intense sense of uniqueness and community found in some groups is Lyng’s (1990) concept of ‘‘edgework,’’ which he conceptualizes as risk taking as a form of ‘‘boundary distinction – the exploration of edges as it were’’ (Lyng, 2005a, p. 5). Edgework can involve a variety of activities including ‘‘work place edgework’’ (such as a jet pilot, rescue team member, ﬂoor stock trader, etc.) and sporting activities (such as downhill skiers, motorcyclists, base jumpers, etc.) (Milovanovic, 2005, pp. 57–58). Lyng (2005a, p. 4) suggests that the nature of these activities creates a bond that supersedes traditional gender, racial, age, intellectual and socioeconomic divisions. Research on sport, recreation, and leisure strongly suggests that these forms of activity, particularly when engaged in seriously, have the potential to build conﬁdence, create a sense of personal empowerment and development, hone leadership skills, increase physical ﬁtness, and create lifelong attachments to others in the sporting and/or recreational community (Gagne´ & Austin, 2002; Blinde, Taub, & Han, 1993, 1994; Chung & Elias, 1996;

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

417

Downing, 2000; Kelly, 1987; Young & White, 1995). Further, sport participants often experience a meaningful sense of community with others who share their interests and experience a type of escape from their daily lives (Segrave, 2000). This sense of escape from a rationalized (Weber, 1921/1968), McDonaldized world (Ritzer, 2004) can be an important motivation for edgeworkers (Ferrell, 2005; Lyng, 2005b). Kelly (1996, p. 68) argues that in addition to the need for shelter, food, and the survival needs of protection and nurture, humans have the additional need of freedom and community. The importance of freedom and community may appear to be at odds with each other. Pursuit of freedom can draw individuals away from collective community ties with the associated obligations and expectations that bond individuals to group norms. On the other hand, community can provide a sense of security and belonging. Recreational communities may help to balance these needs as they only involve a portion of the segmented social lives of members. This project examines a recreational group that allows participants to simultaneously pursue these two human needs. In this project, we analyze how motorcycle related activities allow riders to develop and reinforce a sense of community by fostering a collective identity, extended social ties, and a sense of common purpose and also allow for a certain degree of individual freedom. Segrave (2000, p. 61) maintains that sport can be a ‘‘symbolic refuge y from the quotidian drudgery’’ of daily life. In the case of touring motorcyclists, this refuge is also geographic as riders choose to leave the physical geography of their daily routines and in many cases interact primarily with other motorcyclists during their period of escape.

METHODS This project utilized three established research techniques including participant observation, survey research, and in-depth interviews. Participant observation, associated with a naturalistic perspective, is used to observe informants in their natural social world (Fielding & Fielding, 1986, p. 55). We became ‘‘opportunistic complete membership researchers,’’ relating to those we studied as ‘‘status equals, dedicated to sharing a common set of experiences, feelings, and goals’’ in a social group in which we were already members (Adler & Adler, 1987, p. 67). This accepted method has been used to examine social settings including an Alaskan ﬁshing boat (Bourassa & Ashforth, 1998), the world of truck drivers (Ouellet, 1994), a poker cardroom (Hayano, 1982), and the lives of Appalachian women (Gagne´, 1992). Although we were both involved in motorcycling for a number of years,

418

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

the more active involvement in the motorcycling community and systematic observation, including collection of ﬁeldnotes, has encompassed the last 9 years or so. For data collection the authors, either individually or together, attended over 75 BMW motorcycle rallies in various locations scattered throughout the United States and Canada. The rallies ranged in attendance from about 50 to over 9,000. In addition, we attended a variety of other motorcycle related events, such as motorcycle races, charity rides, and club meetings. We kept ﬁeldnotes as we toured by motorcycle and interacted with riders and non-riders throughout the United States and Canada. Our deep level of involvement in the community of touring motorcyclists provided an opportunity to examine a wide range of activities associated with motorcycling. During the research it became clear that our identity as motorcyclists enhanced the rapport and trust we were able to establish with the groups we studied. Although we were intentional and methodologically sound in our research, our identity within the community was that of BMW motorcycle riders. There was no noticeable change in the behavior of our fellow riders upon learning of the research project other than their interest in the project and willing participation by many. Our identity and personal interest as BMW riders limited our access to other motorcycling subcultures. While we were able to observe some of the other subcultures, we were never full participants and were rarely fully accepted in those social worlds. A second research technique involved a survey that was completed by a number of motorcyclists in 2001. The distribution method consisted of personally distributing the questionnaire to some riders while leaving other questionnaires to be picked up voluntarily by riders at motorcycle related events. Additionally, a key informant distributed the questionnaire to women riders in a local club. Our survey instrument contained a number of questions with a ﬁxed response format, which ascertained demographic and categorical information and 10 open-ended questions that allowed respondents to express their feelings and their attitudes in their own words. The open-ended questions dealt with issues such as why respondents ride and the social, physical, intellectual aspects of riding that participants like and dislike. Potential respondents were provided with a stamped envelope to return the questionnaire. A total of 95 questionnaires were returned. 48 returned questionnaires were from men and 45 were from women, reﬂecting our oversampling of women. For this project, we only used the questionnaires completed by riders of BMW motorcycles, which were the vast majority due to our participation in this subculture. The third research technique was the use of in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted beginning in 2002. A postcard was afﬁxed to the questionnaires, and respondents were asked to return the postcard if

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

419

they were interested in participating in an interview. 25 interviews were conducted (17 women and 8 men). For this project, we only utilized the interviews with BMW riders (4 women and all 8 of the interviews with men). The use of these types of interviews is a standard research technique designed to provide a better understanding of the experiences of research participants (Arksey & Knight, 1999). The three above-mentioned research techniques provided much of our data, which we supplemented with secondary sources by reading popular motorcycle magazines and websites, participating in e-mail based groups, and interacting with personal acquaintances who are part of the motorcycling community.

SOLIDARITY AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AMONG RIDERS Our data suggest that among all motorcycle riders, there is a sense of solidarity and collective identity that generally exists, despite the brand or style of motorcycle or the type of riding the owner chooses. One respondent summed up the sentiment best, saying, I think all riders regardless of the style of riding or the make of the bike, feel a connection to each other. It is an unspoken understanding that we all share a passion. People who don’t ride have no concept of that connection.

A 44-year-old woman rider with 25 years of riding experience explained the ties in this manner, No matter who they are or what else they like, I have something in common with other motorcyclists. There is a spark of light in their eyes, and they are alive in a spiritual sense. That is the bond.

The sense of solidarity and collective identity among motorcyclists forms a community boundary between riders and non-riders. Although subgroup boundaries exist among motorcyclists on a number of issues (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995; Pierson, 1997) including brand and style of motorcycle and type of riding, many members of the larger motorcycling community seem to have found that they have more in common with other riders than with the general non-riding population. One rider with 31 years of riding experience explained, We are a relatively small group compared to the general public as a whole. We share a love of machinery, a passion for riding, and share in the risks of the sport as well as a somewhat negative public perception.

420

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

Another rider, who began riding when he was 54, explained that he felt a bond and a sense of community with other riders, saying, ‘‘We’ve all chosen to do something beyond the norms of society, perhaps living life a little fuller.’’ Solidarity and collective identity among motorcyclists was expressed in a number of ways. For example, one very common practice is for motorcyclists to wave to each other as they pass riding in opposite directions. Additionally, riders are expected to take a moment to greet each other when stopped. Such greetings commonly turn into lengthy conversations. Moreover, whether on their motorcycles or traveling in another vehicle, motorcyclists share a norm of mutual aid that includes checking to see if a rider stopped at the side of the road needs assistance and offering help when requested. Such aid might include use of a cell phone, an offer of tools, helping a rider work on his or her motorcycle, putting the bike on one’s trailer or truck and taking it to a shop or another location where it can be worked on, and inviting the rider to spend the night at one’s home or giving one’s telephone number to aid givers and telling them they always have a place to stay when in the aid recipient’s area. Among the riders we met in our ﬁeld observations, stories of giving and receiving such help was common. Similar sentiments were commonly expressed in our interviews and surveys. For example, one respondent with 37 years of experience stated, ‘‘I never pass a biker at the side of the road without stopping to help.’’ Each of us experienced the kindness of strangers when our motorcycles broke down or when we stopped to assist other riders. The bond between those who might otherwise regard each other as strangers was captured by a male rider with 26 years of experience as he explained that ‘‘Motorcycles offer a common point of interest, an easy way to start a meaningful conversation with a complete stranger.’’ Motorcycling, for many of the participants in this subculture, provided entre´ to larger social circles than they may not have otherwise experienced, and most believed riding had increased their exposure to a wider diversity of individuals. A 44-year-old female rider, commenting on the social aspects of motorcycling, stated, The best social part is sharing the adventure and experiences with someone else. Motorcycling adventure tales entertain lots of people, but most interesting is the broad variety of people I meet, people I would not know without the bond of motorcycles.

Many touring motorcyclists, perhaps because of their level of devotion to their pursuit, focused their extended social world on those they had met as a result of motorcycling. One woman rider stated, ‘‘Nearly everyone who we [she and her husband] socialize with regularly is connected to the motorcycling community one way or another.’’

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

421

BRAND-SPECIFIC COMMUNITY The BMW riders we studied shared a common bond based, in part, on the historical development of the machines they rode. This brand of motorcycles was ﬁrst manufactured in 1923 and some of the basic design can be traced to current models. Many BMW riders have owned a variety of this brand of motorcycle and have developed a sense of shared situation and history with other riders of the brand. For many riders, the motorcycle and related events represent a form of fetishism as participants involve themselves in fetishising an object and the qualities and capacities of the object (Dant, 1996, p. 511). Activities, emotions, and symbolism that accompany the object, in this case motorcycles, evolve into much more than mere consumption and the obvious function of the material object. Ritualistic activities help to celebrate a particular object or product, which may be produced by a particular producer (Dant, 1996, p. 511). BMW rallies themselves can be viewed as serving important ritualistic functions for the participants (Austin, 2008) that strengthens the bonds of the community. It was interesting to observe that the reverence and esteem afforded BMW motorcycles by their riders did not always extend to the company. Some riders expressed negative comments regarding the company, even while they remained devoted to the product. Among some riders, there seems to be a preference for older motorcycles and their technology over the more complicated higher technology of the newer bikes. It is clear that among this group, the mode of transportation was of central importance to their identity and recreational activity. BMW riders, like motorcyclists in general, have a strong sense of identity based largely on the brand of motorcycle that an individual rides. The sense of comradery or common identity that exists among motorcyclists is intensiﬁed by brand loyalty among riders and can also serve as a divisive issue among riders (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995; Pierson, 1997). Among the riders we studied, one mentioned that ‘‘Meeting other riders, especially BMW riders’’ was the most positive social aspect of motorcycling for him, exemplifying the in-group and out-group differences that riders sometimes express based on brand of motorcycle. A male rider summed up the sentiment when he said, ‘‘Always a strong positive aspect of riding experience has been the bond between similar types of riders.’’ Other riders found these divisions undesirable and one even referred to ‘‘moto-bigotry’’ as a negative aspect of motorcycling and preferred motorcyclists and non-motorcyclists as the desired social divisions in a world in which ‘‘your ride or you don’t, what you ride is immaterial.’’

422

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

One rider informed us that the most disliked social aspect of motorcycles is ‘‘The rivalry amongst brand owners.’’ In discussing the brand and style of riding divisions, one 49 year old rider with 5 years of riding experience stated, ‘‘I believe there are a number of identiﬁable sub-groups in motorcycling: Harley true believers; Gold Wing people; hardcore sport bike riders; squids; sport-touring people; BMW people. Many riders identify strongly with their subgroup more than with the sport as a whole. It’s very tribal.’’ One writer, commenting on this ‘‘subculture of bikes’’ stated that it ‘‘may help one to understand how a single religion such as Christianity could have given rise to so many strange sects’’ (Pierson, 1997, p. 30). As previously mentioned, it is common for motorcyclists to wave to one another and to talk among themselves at gas stations, restaurants, and other stops. Conversations may be short or long, or they may merely acknowledge each other with a friendly nod, but it is generally unusual for riders to ignore one another in a manner common among other motorists. Despite these general tendencies, Schouten and McAlexander (1995) found that within another motorcyclists’ subculture, the HarleyDavidson subculture, a wave may not be returned by a rider who feels that his status is higher than the other rider’s status within the riding community. Motorcyclists exhibit in-group and out-group distinctions (Tajfel, 1982) with shifting boundaries. To a large extent the most distinctive boundaries create a strong division between motorcyclists and those that drive automobiles or ‘‘cages’’ as they are sometimes referred to by riders. However, these boundaries are curiously drawn between riders of different brands and types of motorcycles. Even within these brand-speciﬁc boundaries, hierarchies may also develop.

MASTER STATUS WITHIN A BRAND-SPECIFIC COMMUNITY Just as solidarity is stronger with a low division of labor (Durkheim, 1893/ 1984), we found that cohesiveness and collective identity became stronger when groups of motorcyclists all rode the same style and/or brand of motorcycle. Within the BMW motorcycling subculture, we found that identity as a BMW rider had a tendency to become the master status in the conﬁnes of the group. The emphasis on riding BMW motorcycles intensiﬁed the sense of community and transcended social boundaries based on social class, gender, and race that traditionally serve as divisions among members of the larger society. Within the community, the type of motorcycle someone rode, his or her riding abilities, status as a long-distance rider, and knowledge about motorcycles were greater determinants of social status than social class,

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

423

occupation, education, or income. One woman rider with 19 years of experience explained how status that was salient in the world outside of motorcycling was irrelevant within the riding community. She said, yseeing them once or twice a year and never realizing what they do as an occupation. You know, sometimes it’s brought up, sometimes it’s not, and knowing that it really doesn’t make a difference, you know, what your, your occupation is.

Discussions of occupation, when they did occur, tended to focus on the impact that work schedules had on the ability and time available for riding and travel. Further, our ﬁeldnotes suggest that those with higher status occupations (inasmuch as we knew what they were) and less riding experience or lesser developed skills typically had lower prestige in the community than those with occupations of lower socioeconomic status, more riding experience, and better skills. Within the community, individual riders became known as the guy who had ridden to the Arctic Circle, Ecuador, or some other remote location; the woman who had ‘‘ridden the four corners’’ of the United States; or the person who had crippling arthritis but continued riding with a cane, or who had started riding again after having a leg amputated, or was riding again after a serious crash. While most participants in this subculture were white males, it was not uncommon for a group of riders to have one or two women or racial minority members as part of a small group riding, eating, or socializing together. We believe the lower numbers of female or riders of color in attendance at club meetings or on group rides is representative of their smaller numbers among riders. For example, although women are the fastest-growing demographic group among all motorcyclists, they continue to represent less than one-ﬁfth of all owners of motorcycles (Ellis, 2006). Although clubs oriented toward women riders or motorcyclists of a particular race or ethnic group do exist, our experiences suggest that they tend to be made up of riders of different brands of motorcycles, with being a ‘‘woman rider’’ or an ‘‘African-American rider’’ becoming the master status. As individuals join groups based on brand or style of motorcycle, the tendency is then for them to become known as a brand- or style-speciﬁc rider, rather than a ‘‘Black woman BMW rider’’ or a ‘‘Latino sport bike rider.’’ As we became more involved in the BMW community, we were privy to occasional patronizing comments about women riders. For example, when the second author told a male member of the community that she checked the air pressure in her tires about once a week, he replied, ‘‘Not bad for a woman.’’ As she became better known in the community, that particular individual and the group of male riders he associated with became increasingly interested in her travels. As her competence as a rider

424

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

improved, she gained greater respect from men and other women in the community. Similarly, one woman we interviewed talked about having to demonstrate her superior skills to the men with whom she rode. When riding with a group of men through twisty mountain roads, she sometimes grew bored with the pace of travel and took the lead. As she demonstrated her competence as a rider, it was her opinion that she gained their respect. We found that the respect that women riders held among BMW riders was due, in part, to the emphasis they place in their presentation of self on being riders, rather than ‘‘women riders.’’ Furthermore, some of the most honored high-mileage or adventure riders in the BMW community were women. For example, one winner of the BMW Motorcycle Owner’s women riders of America mileage competition was a woman who rode over 73,000 during the 6 month contest. Her record was recently beaten by a great-grandmother in her seventies who has also competed in the Iron Butt Rally, in which motorcyclists ride approximately 11,000 miles in 11 days. One result of the respect women had earned within the community was their election to club leadership positions at the local and national levels. Similarly, although their numbers in the BMW community were minuscule, we found that people of color were accepted simply as ‘‘riders.’’ This was best exempliﬁed by one particular event at a rally in a southern state. A higher socioeconomic status African-American rider made a noticeable effort to introduce the ﬁrst author to a white friend of his. The friend was of lower status and was wearing a bandana with a confederate ﬂag emblem on it. The friend’s status and the emblem, which some might ﬁnd offensive, was of no apparent consequence to the man making the introduction, suggesting that their mutual interest in motorcycling was a stronger consideration than traditional racial or political divisions. Such ﬁndings support the ‘‘contact hypothesis (Amir, 1969) developed by social psychologists, which suggests that contact among members of different social groups reduces prejudices. Our research further suggests that having a unifying collective identity – in this case the brand-speciﬁc ‘‘BMW rider’’ identity – helped to mitigate prejudices and stereotypes among members, who tended to overlook race, gender, and social class out of respect for the shared values and collective identity of the group. One rider commented, ‘‘Most other [non-BMW riding] bikers are not like me, but this ‘forced socialization’I consider a valuable growth experience.’’ Another mentioned that he had ‘‘met some strange and interesting people because of my bike.’’ The common focus on riding and motorcycles in general, and on a brandspeciﬁc product and a culturally deﬁned ideal style of riding dictated that traditional status distinctions became less important. Just as those in the

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

425

community tended to downplay statuses based on class, gender, or race, individual members of the community were expected to present themselves as riders and to seek prestige in the community in accordance with the cultural values of riding safety, high mileage, all weather riding, endurance, and adventure riding. For many of the riders we observed, motorcycle rallies were the site where shared values could be celebrated through ritualized interaction. Although the community included numerous opportunities for members to interact, communicate, and ride with one another; our ﬁndings suggest that the primary foundation of collective identity among this mobile, non-geographic group was the numerous rallies held each year throughout the United States.

MOTORCYCLE TOURING AND RALLIES AS COMMUNITY The formal organization of the BMW community is, to a large extent, accomplished through the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America (BMW MOA). It was organized in 1972 by a few riders. Since then, membership of that organization has grown to over 38,000. Another organization, the BMW Riders Association (BMW RA), is smaller, but provides an organizational structure for riders. Neither of these two organizations is afﬁliated with the BMW Corporation, giving them a degree of autonomy not enjoyed by all brand-speciﬁc motorcycle organizations. In addition to these two organizations, a number of smaller groups and methods of communication held the community together. Over 150 clubs existed in the United States. Local clubs provided opportunities for individuals within a smaller geographic region to get together to talk about common interests, go on rides, hold swap meets, and sometimes organize charitable events. In addition, the BMW MOA and BMW RA each sponsored annual rallies and websites, as well as published a monthly magazine with articles on motorcycle safety, maintenance, and adventure travel. Opportunities to meet and ride together, to read about others’ travels, and later, to interact with others online provided the interaction necessary for collective identity and a sense of community to develop and sustained. Our research suggests that among BMW touring motorcyclists, motorcycle rallies were the most salient organizational locus of collective identity and community formation and maintenance. Attending a weekend rally might require participants to ride hundreds of miles on a Friday, with a similar return trip on Sunday. In this way, rallies facilitated the expression of key values of high mileage and all weather touring while providing a destination in which individuals could gather for face-to-face interaction.

426

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

Similar to Goodall’s (2004, p. 732) research on gatherings among Ferrari sports car enthusiasts, BMW motorcycle rallies serve as ‘‘ritual celebrations,’’ – a time and location where individuals could get together and enjoy the company of other riders who shared their values about riding and many aspects of life. Such values were symbolically expressed by a culture-speciﬁc style of motorcycle attire that most commonly included high-quality, padded, textile riding suits or jackets, and pants (which offer more protection from the weather than leather attire), riding boots that have additional armor to protect the ankles and shins, full face helmets, and highquality padded gloves. These values were expressed in conversations and had the effect of further establishing boundaries between the BMW community and those considered less serious about riding. Generally many of the conversations that took place at the motorcycle rallies we attended helped to reinforce the more general collective identity as motorcyclist and the more speciﬁc identity as BMW rider. Conversations tended to focus on issues such as motorcycle maintenance, adventure travel, camping, and other aspects related to motorcycle touring. As a result of those they met at rallies, participants developed a friendship network that extended throughout the country. Such groups of friends and acquaintances might only see one another at rallies as each returned to their respective homes, which tended to be dispersed over a very large geographic area. One rider reported, ‘‘I love meeting people, either on the road while traveling or at events such as rallies,’’ while another wrote that she liked to ‘‘See friends from all over the United States a few times a year at a planned event-rally.’’ Although they were geographically dispersed all over the United States, members of the geographically mobile community relied on rallies to provide an organizational foundation of community. Because of the strong sense of cohesion and solidarity that existed within the community, rally participants exhibited a high degree of trust toward other attendees. Despite the anonymity afforded by groups that commonly were in hundreds, and sometimes in thousands, riders felt comfortable leaving expensive items such as helmets, camping equipment, and riding suits unguarded and motorcycles with keys in the ignition. This common trust contributed to a sense of community as riders felt safe from both violent and property crimes while participating in rallies. A long-term BMW rider stated, You go to [BMW] rallies, take your helmet and gear off and leave it on the bike, and it doesn’t go anywhereyI mean would you leave your gear and stuff on your bike here [referring to the restaurant at which the interview was conducted]? Probably not. But at a rally you do because of that sense of community. You’re just everyone’s friend. I mean, even if you don’t know each other, you’re friends and you’re not going to take something from a friend.

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

427

While attending rallies it was common for new friendships to develop as impromptu groups formed to ride to local restaurants or go on scenic rides. Commonly lone attendees were invited to ride with a group of complete strangers, and riding groups formed with portions of the group being previously acquainted with each other, but without any singular person being acquainted with everyone on the ride. For example, at a rally, the ﬁrst author had planned to ride to a restaurant with a group of acquaintances. One of the group members made a special effort to invite a woman who had ridden a long-distance alone to attend the rally and thus did not know other attendees. Like most people, touring riders prefer to associate with people with whom they can identify and avoid those who are likely to reject them (Corey, 1996, p. 16). Attending and participating in rallies was a method to help insure that, at least at the destination, a rider would be with a community of accepting and supportive members. As one rider explained, ‘‘It’s like a family away from home. Hugs and handshakes are always welcome.’’ As in most groups, some members of the BMW community were more outgoing than others, with many valuing the individualism inherent in riding. Some of the people we met at rallies expressed a preference to travel alone, but once at the rally, their interests turned to visiting and spending time with others. Our observations and interviews suggest that rallies allow riders to enjoy the beneﬁts of community without sacriﬁcing the individualism they desire and the freedom that riding can bring. Of the larger population of BMW riders, only a small proportion attend rallies, resulting in an extended community of friends and reference groups that include large geographic sections of the country. Rallies allow individuals to become acquainted with others who share this statistically rare interest and set of values and to develop a sense of community with them. Although most riders have access to local clubs of BMW riders, the fact that rallies appear to be at the heart of this identity-based mobile community is related to the strong value riders place on riding long distances and being serious about riding and safety. Getting to a rally that might be on the other side of the continent is a way of expressing key values and then sharing the adventure with others upon arrival.

SERIOUS AND LONG-DISTANCE RIDING AS BOUNDARY MARKERS Many of the participants in our study drew a distinction between their interest in long-distance or touring–riding and those motorcycle riders they frequently regard as ‘‘posers’’ or, less frequently, as ‘‘wannabes.’’ In general,

428

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

posers were stereotyped as motorcycle owners who were more interested in their appearance and stylized presentation as a ‘‘biker’’ than they were in riding long distances. Speciﬁcally, a trend among riders of certain styles and brands of motorcycles is to dress up in leather jackets or vests to ride short distances, often to bars or other gatherings where the greatest concern is to be seen, or ‘‘pose,’’ with the bike. When they do travel long distances, the BMW riders we talked with said ‘‘posers’’ tended to haul their bikes in a pick up truck or trailer, restricting rides to short distances in the immediate locale. The boundary distinction BMW riders drew between their own community and those they considered to be posers represents a distinction between the ‘‘serious leisure’’ (Stebbins, 2001) or the ‘‘edgework’’ (Lyng, 2005a) in which BMW riders saw themselves engaging, and the more casual, less demanding style of leisure engaged in by those who limit their riding to shorter day rides in good weather on paved roads where restaurants, motels, gas stations, and other amenities are plentiful. The value placed on serious leisure was an important boundary marker within the BMW community. One 49-year old rider said he felt a bond ‘‘with those who ride frequently,’’ perhaps because of ‘‘a sense of common involvement in a sport which is somewhat risky and also poorly understood by most people.’’ Drawing the boundary distinctions more clearly, another man described the social aspect of riding he liked the most, saying, ‘‘I like most of the people that I’ve met who ride, not the posers. They [serious riders] are interesting, individualistic, and opinionated as hell.’’ Traveling across the state or country provided opportunities to engage in serious leisure and, when the destination was a rally, to meet with others of similar values upon arrival. One rider summed up these group sentiments when she wrote, ‘‘Simple travel is a thrill. Anticipation of a trip makes me almost giddy. People who ride enjoy other riders, non-riders just don’t get it and that’s OK.’’ Among the BMW riders we studied, there was a strong value and prestige attached to adventurous travel, such as riding long distances, riding in other countries, and traveling to remote locations. For example, one rally participant said he had visited approximately 40 states and that he did not count the ones in which he had ridden brieﬂy. Another rider spoke of taking a post-retirement trip to visit all 48 capitals of the lower continental states. At national rallies, annual awards were given to riders who had ridden the most miles during an approximately 6 month long contest. Additional awards were given at 100,000 mile increments for mileage accumulated on BMW motorcycles, with a few riders having achieved the one million mile mark. As an example of emphasis on the long-distance riding at one locally

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

429

sponsored rally, an attendee informed the ﬁrst author that she had left for the rally after work on Friday and had ridden all night. She planned to leave Sunday morning for the 900 mile return trip. Long-distance riding was seen as a status symbol and a boundary marker between serious touring riders and those many community members considered to be wannabes. One rider, who reported riding 30,000 miles and participating in 60 motorcycle-related activities in the past year, informed us that ‘‘Fellowship of my long distance peers’’ was the social aspect of motorcycling that he liked the most. Statistics tend to support the claim that BMW riders are serious about long-distance riding. In 2000, for example, 1.7% of new motorcycle registrations in the United States were BMWs (Motorcycle Industry Council, 2001), yet riders of these motorcycles represented nearly 45% of participants in one semiannual Iron Butt Motorcycle Rally, in which participants average approximately 1,000 miles per day for 11 consecutive days (Ayres, 1997, pp. 225–227). Associated with this value, the community tended to frown upon riders who ‘‘trailered’’ their motorcycle. This is a term to describe hauling a motorcycle to an event in a truck or trailer, rather than riding it. BMW motorcyclists understood an owner’s desire to haul restored antique motorcycles or those who trailered their bikes out of a snow-bound region. Exceptions were also made for the older riders, those with disabilities, or those making family accommodations, such as traveling with children. At one rally, a rider reported to the ﬁrst author that he passed a vehicle hauling a BMW motorcycle and as he passed the driver he shook his ﬁnger in a ‘‘shame on you’’ manner. The driver immediately pointed to the woman accompanying him as to say ‘‘It is her fault, not mine.’’ Another rider was forced to trailer his bike to Bike Week in Florida (an annual gathering of motorcyclists which is attended by a few hundred thousand participants) due to medical issues, after riding to the event for over 25 years. He mentioned the negative looks he received as other BMW riders passed him on their bikes. At one rally, a young man arrived towing an older classic BMW behind his car. Upon arriving, he almost immediately began a type of apology for towing the bike. Other riders assured him that it was acceptable due to the age and pristine condition of his motorcycle. The stigma attached to trailering motorcycles was an important boundary marker between motorcyclists and poseurs, who were commonly stereotyped as being more concerned with the appearance of their bikes and more likely to trailer them to an event than to ride. Hierarchical social structure may develop within recreational subcultures (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). In this group high-mileage riding and adventuresome travel are among the

430

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

hierarchical status markers that lead to classic in-group and out-group distinctions (Tajfel, 1982) that strengthen the bonds of community. Motorcycles that were in a ‘‘ratty’’ condition due to high-mileage and adventuresome travel, and those who rode them, were afforded special esteem. At rallies, awards were given to riders that had ridden the farthest distance to the rally and, at the larger international rallies, special exhibit areas were set aside for high-mileage motorcycles to be displayed. An additional distinction among BMW riders served to increase status and demarcate the boundaries between serious motorcyclists and posers. Many BMW riders placed a high-value on economy travel to remote locations, as long-term budget travelers tend to do (Riley, 1988). At rallies and on the internet, conversations often focused on economy lodging, camping, adventurous travel, maintaining one’s own motorcycle, and techniques that allowed riders to travel relatively inexpensively. Further, varying levels of knowledge related to the activities of the group and varying skill levels were also status markers within the group (see Brint, 2001). Conversations about travel or group activities, and discussions about motorcycles and maintenance, provided opportunities for riders to demonstrate their cultural capital and enhance their social prestige within the group (see Collins, 2004; Best, 2006). The more one could demonstrate experience and expertise, with a focus on high-mileage and adventure travel, the more serious she or he was likely to be taken, with higher status and prestige the result. Within recreational subcultures, dedicated participants have processes and markers that identify members (Wheaton, 2000), reinforce group identity, and delineate in-group members from those outside the group. Within the BMW community, the high-value placed on safety was demonstrated with the highly protective riding gear described above. The speciﬁc style of clothing, with an emphasis on textile rather than leather gear, additionally served as a symbolic marker between adventure touring riders and those who were members of other communities. Moreover, BMW riders tended to wear full protective gear even in the hottest weather, prompting derogatory comments from riders of other brands. As riders and researchers, we collected most of our ﬁeld data during the hottest months of the year. We grew to detest the ubiquitous, ‘‘Isn’t that hot?’’ comments we heard from other motorcyclists who rode in t-shirts, jeans, and open face or no helmets. The clothing made us potentially identiﬁable as BMW riders, even when we were not in the immediate presence of our motorcycles or among other BMW riders. On one trip, for example, an older man approached the second author and asked her if BMW supplied riding gear with their motorcycles. When she replied no, he asked if the motorcycles had airconditioning. Again she replied no and asked why he thought they might.

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

431

He responded that he could always tell a BMW rider by the clothing they wore and that he wondered how we could stand the heat. She explained that she would rather endure the discomfort of the heat than the injuries that could result if she opted to be cooler and had an accident. This concern for safety was expressed by one BMW rider who said that he shared a sense of camaraderie or bond ‘‘especially with those riders who emphasize safety in their riding.’’ While the people we interviewed and observed shared a sense of solidarity with other serious riders, the strongest bonds within the BMW touring community tended to be among those whose allegiance was brand-speciﬁc.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Our research strongly suggests that the foundations of community among this non-geographic, mobile, identity-based group included a focus on a brandspeciﬁc object, strong values attached to how the object should be used, and ritualized interaction that reinforced these values, resulting in a strong sense of social solidarity, collective identity, and community. Although hierarchies developed within the BMW community we studied, our research suggested that social status was based on shared values, rather than the traditional markers associated with the dominant culture, such as social class, gender, or race. This work is not to suggest that motorcyclists are a community devoid of any conﬂict or division, but for the most part among BMW riders there are social aspects of community that tend to override traditional divisions. To some extent this occurs among the motorcycling community at large, but appears to be even stronger among subcultures of the larger motorcycling culture. This is probably best stated by Maxwell (1998, p. 284), an anthropologist, in his work on the motorcycling community: I am not suggesting that there is an overpowering common bond that enables motorcyclists to transcend completely the constraints on thinking and behavior that membership in American culture entails. Indeed, differences are acknowledged as noted above. What is important, however, is the way in which motorcyclists deal with differences.

Utilizing the deﬁnitions of non-geographic community (e.g., Carroll, 1984; Furr, 1997), which focus on issues such as shared identity, sense of common purpose, and extended social ties, we can see how various activities related to motorcycling can help to develop and maintain a sense of community among participants in an individualistic recreational pursuit. We also understand how community can develop in subcultures that live and work in geographically dispersed areas and interact with one another in varying locations.

432

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

The mechanical expertise of many experienced riders adds to the sense of history and comradery as repair and maintenance issues are a major source of discussion. Emergent norms can develop among travelers that share a interest and mode of travel (Riley, 1988) and these norms can serve to reinforce a sense of community and distinguish in-group from out-group members as common identities are reinforced. Touring BMW motorcyclists while belonging to this smaller group, belong to a larger motorcycling subculture that transcends the smaller groups. Motorcyclists tend to self-select into brand-based subcultures, but also identify with the larger motorcycling community. These brand divisions seem to be a source of irritation to some riders, while it strengthens the sources of identity and community for others. Individualism is an apparent theme in historic and contemporary American society. Observers have commented on this seemingly contradictory interest in community, which implies collective identity, and the continuous emphasis on individuality (Brint, 2001). In American culture, there has been an ongoing battle between individualism and community (Putnam, 2000). Various institutions and forms of social participation can serve to mediate these seemingly contradictory inﬂuences of individualism and the search for community. Motorcyclists appear to exemplify this dichotomy as they simultaneously speak not only of the freedom and independence of motorcycling, but also spend a good deal of time, effort, and ﬁnancial resources to gather and participate in activities with other motorcyclists. Participation in this activity may allow riders to meet the socially prescribed goals or needs of both individualism and community. One rider stated that the social aspect of motorcycling he likes the best is ‘‘The uniqueness of the people I meet through motorcycling,’’ but continued to state he likes ‘‘the fact that it is a ‘group’ thing and an ‘individual’ thing at the same time.’’ For this subculture, motorcycling appears to have tapped into both of these sentiments. Social bonds in this group appear to be very strong, but based on an activity that can appear from outside the subculture as a solitary activity. In a discussion of urban life and the limitations of ﬁxed communities in urban life, Loﬂand (1973, p. 137) discusses the manner in which groups of individuals that know each other can create private space in the public areas by ‘‘traveling in packs.’’ While motorcyclists described in this research may or may not travel in packs, they do congregate in packs. Urbanites can create a mobile ‘‘home territory’’ because of the fact that they know each other well and share an identiﬁcation with each other, which ensures ‘‘mutual protection and self-conﬁrmation’’ (Loﬂand, 1973, p. 138).

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

433

The analogies between this process and the use of rallies and other motorcycle-based events is strong as riders congregate to create a ‘‘home territory’’ that exists for a very short period of time but is recreated in various geographic locations with predictable routines and familiarity. Our ﬁndings should not be generalized to all motorcyclists, but are focused on riders of BMW motorcycles. As suggested by a membership survey of members of the BMW motorcycle owner’s of America (Membership Survey, Final Report, BMW MOA, 2001), BMW riders tend to be wealthier and ride more miles per year than the average motorcyclist in the United States. In 1998, an average American rider was a 38-year old male with at least some college education. This average rider was also married and had an annual income of a little over $44,000 (Motorcycle Industry Council, 2001). The average number of miles ridden by American highway riders was around 2,400 miles in 1992 (Motorcycle Industry Council, 1993). The survey of BMW riders revealed that only 12.4% reported a household income of less than $40,000 with over 60% indicating that they ride more than 5,000 or more miles per year. Almost 70% of the BMW riders reported over 20 years of motorcycle riding experience. These differences suggest that the riders represented in this project are atypical when compared with the average American motorcyclist. Issues of community have been a prominent theme in classical and contemporary social theory and empirically based research. The ‘‘rootlessness’’ of American society, as some observers have labeled the mobility and lack of community, has been identiﬁed as a potential source of declines in companionship, shallow personal relationships, psychological insecurity, lack of interest in local community problems, and other personal and social problems (Packard, 1972). The research presented here makes it clear that non-geographic sources of community can be important and are available to members of a mobile society. However, there are a number of issues that remain to be resolved including questions of comparability and substitution. It is not clear from the research presented here, if participants in the BMW motorcycle community pursue a sense of community and belonging as a result of the absence of these issues in their local community, or if participation in groups such as this one are merely an extension by those that already have a high-level of participation. That is, is the motorcycling community a response to lack of community or merely a reﬂection of a developed sense of community among individuals that are already participants in many social activities and this is just an extension of that level of participation? Or, somewhat conversely, is this community comprised of individuals that ﬁnd more all-encompassing forms of community too

434

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

restrictive and thus seek more segmented social lives? Future research is called for that examines whether or not the sense of community established in groups such as this extends into other aspects of the lives of participants and the impact that it might have. Past research suggests that women touring motorcyclists experience an increased level of self-conﬁdence as a result of their motorcycling experiences and this spills over into other aspects of their lives (Gagne´ & Austin, 2002). The research presented here does not provide evidence that the sense of community provided by motorcycling has a positive or negative impact on the community experiences of participants beyond the motorcycling community. Future research that examines the long-term and extended impact of non-geographic forms of community is warranted. Additionally, the impact of modern communication technology (particularly the internet) on the construction and maintenance of geographically dispersed communities such as this is not fully understood. In a mobile post-industrial society, in which consumption helps us to deﬁne ourselves and our relationships, this particular mobile community may provide insight into a model of community that will be increasingly prevalent and important in the future in other consumer based subcultures.

REFERENCES Adler, P. A., & Adler, P. (1987). Membership roles in ﬁeld research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Amir, Y. (1969). Contact hypothesis in ethnic relations. Psychological Bulletin, 71, 319–342. Arksey, H., & Knight, P. (1999). Interviewing for social scientists. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Auster, C. J. (2001). Transcending potential antecedent leisure constraints: The case of women motorcycle operators. Journal of Leisure Research, 33, 272–299. Austin, D. M. (2008). Motorcycle rallies as ritual and boundary distinction. Unpublished Manuscript. Austin, D. M, Gagne´, P., & Orend, A. (forthcoming). Commodiﬁcation and popular imagery of the biker in American culture. The Journal of Popular Culture. Ayres, R. (1997). Against the wind: A rider’s account of the incredible Iron Butt Rally. Center Conway, NH: Whitehorse Press. Best, A. L. (2006). Fast cars, cool rides. New York, NY: New York University Press. Blinde, E. M., Taub, D. E., & Han, L. (1993). Sport participation and women’s personal empowerment: Experiences of the college athlete. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 17, 47–60. Blinde, E. M., Taub, D. E., & Han, L. (1994). Sport as a site for women’s group and societal empowerment: Perspectives from the college athlete. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11, 51–59. BMW Motorcycle Owners of America. (August, 2001). Membership survey. Prepared by UNICOM-ARC: St. Louis. Bourassa, L., & Ashforth, B. E. (1998). You are about to party deﬁant style: Socialization and identity onboard an Alaskan ﬁshing boat. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 27, 171–196.

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

435

Brint, S. (2001). Gemeinschaft revisited: A critique and reconstruction of the community concept. Sociological Theory, 19, 1–23. Carroll, M. S. (1984). Community and the northwestern logger. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Carroll, M. S. (1995). Community and the northwest logger. Boulder, CO: Westview. Chambers, D. A. (1983). Symbolic equipment and the objects of leisure images. Leisure Studies, 2, 301–315. Chung, H., & Elias, M. J. (1996). Patterns of adolescent involvement in problem behaviors: Relationship to self-efﬁcacy, social competence, and life events. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 771–784. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corey, R. J. (1996). A drama-based model of travel destination choice. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 5, 1–15. Counts, D. A., & Counts, D. R. (1996). Over the next hill: An ethnography of RVing seniors in North America. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Dant, T. (1996). Fetishism and the social value of objects. The Sociological Review, 44, 495–516. D’Emilio, J. (1983). Sexual politics, sexual communities: The making of a homosexual minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Downing, J. D. (2000). Hoop dreams and life schemes: Women, sport, and social mobility. Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. Durkheim, E. (1893/1984). De la division du travail social (The division of labor in society, with an Introduction by L. A. Coser, translated by W. D. Halls). New York: Free Press. Ellis, S. (Aug. 2, 2006). Motorcycles shift gear for the ladies. The Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com; accessed December 8, 2006). Ferrell, J. (2005). The only possible adventure: Edgework and anarchy. In: S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 75–88). New York, NY: Routledge. Fielding, N. G., & Fielding, J. L. (1986). Linking data. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Furr, L. A. (1997). Exploring human behavior and the social environment. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Gagne´, P. (1992). Appalachian women: Violence and social control. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 20, 367–415. Gagne´, P., & Austin, D. M. (2002). Doing gender and negotiating equity: Women motorcyclists in a male-dominated subculture. Paper presented to the 2002 Annual Meetings of the Paciﬁc Sociological Association in Vancouver, British Columbia. Glamser, F. (2003). Women motorcyclists: Childhood foundations and adult pathways. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology, 31, 183–193. Goodall, H. L., Jr. (2004). Deep play in a poker rally: A Sunday among the Ferraristi of Long Island. Qualitative Inquiry, 5, 731–766. Guest, A. M., & Lee, B. A. (1983). The social organization of local areas. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 19, 217–240. Hayano, D. M. (1982). Poker faces. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Herrmann, G. M. (1996). Women’s exchange in the US garage sale: Giving gifts and creating community. Gender & Society, 10, 703–728. Hopper, C. B., & Moore, J. (1990). Women in motorcycle gangs. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18, 363–387. Hunter, A. (1975). The loss of community. American Sociological Review, 40, 537–552.

436

D. MARK AUSTIN AND PATRICIA GAGNE´

Janowitz, M. (1951 [1967]). The community press in an urban society. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Joans, B. (2001). Bike lust: Harleys, women, and American society. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kasarda, J. D., & Janowitz, M. (1974). Community attachment in mass society. American Sociological Review, 39, 328–339. Kelly, J. (1987). Freedom to be: A new sociology of leisure. New York, NY: Macmillan. Kelly, J. (1996). Leisure (3rd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Loﬂand, L. H. (1973). A world of strangers: Order and action in urban public space. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Lowe, S. (2000). Creating community. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 29, 357–387. Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A social psychological analysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95, 851–886. Lyng, S. (2005a). Edgework and the risk-taking experience. In: S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 3–14). New York, NY: Routledge. Lyng, S. (2005b). Sociology at the edge: Social theory and voluntary risk taking. In: S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 17–49). New York, NY: Routledge. Lyon, L. (1987). The community in urban society. Chicago: Dorsey Press. Maffesoli, M. (1996). The time of the tribes: The decline of individualism in mass society. D. Smith (Trans.). London: Sage. Maxwell, A. H. (1998). Motorcyclists and community in post-industrial urban America. Urban Anthropology, 27, 263–299. Mesch, G. S., & Manor, O. (1998). Social ties, environmental perception, and local attachment. Environment and Behavior, 30, 504–520. Milovanovic, D. (2005). Edgework: A subjective and structural model of negotiating boundaries. In: S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 51–72). New York, NY: Routledge. Motorcycle Industry Council. (1993). Motorcycle statistical annual. Irvine, CA: Motorcycle Industry Council. Motorcycle Industry Council. (2001). Motorcycle statistical annual. Irvine, CA: Motorcycle Industry Council. Ouellet, L. J. (1994). Pedal to the metal: The work lives of truckers. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University. Packard, V. (1972). A nation of strangers. New York, NY: David McKay, Inc. Phelan, S. (1989). Identity politics: Lesbian-feminism and the limits of community. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pierson, M. H. (1997). The perfect vehicle: What it is about motorcycles. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Posnansky, G. R. (1988). Communication and the counterculture: An ethnographic analysis of communication use in the motorcycle gang. Ph.D. dissertation, The Florida State University. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Riley, P. J. (1988). Road culture of international long-term budget travelers. Annals of Tourism Research, 15, 313–328. Quinn, J. F. (2001). Angels, bandidos, outlaws, and pagans: The evolution of organized crime among the big four 1% motorcycle clubs. Deviant Behavior, 22, 379–399.

World of the Touring Motorcyclist

437

Quinn, J. F. (2003). The nature of criminality in within one-percent motorcycle clubs. Deviant Behavior, 24, 205–281. Ritzer, G. (2004). The McDonaldization of society (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Schouten, J. W., & McAlexander, J. H. (1995). Subcultures of consumption: An ethnography of the new bikers. Journal of Consumer Research, 22, 43–62. Segrave, J. O. (2000). Sport as escape. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 24, 61–78. St. John, C., Austin, D. M., & Baba, Y. (1986). The question of community attachment revisited. Sociological Spectrum, 6, 411–431. Stebbins, R. A. (2001). Serious leisure. Society, 38, 53–57. Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33, 1–39. Taylor, V., & Whittier, N. (1992). Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobilization. In: A. D. Morris & C. McClurg Mueller (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 104–129). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. To¨nnies, F. (1887/1957). In: C. Loomis (Trans.), Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft. [Community & society.] Eastt Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Waldez, S., Mummendey, A., Wenzel, A., & Boetcher, F. (2004). Of bikers, teachers, and Germans: Groups’ diverging views about their prototypicality. British Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 385–400. Watson, J. M. (1982). Righteousness on two wheels: Bikers as a secular sect. Sociological Spectrum, 2, 333–349. Weber, M. (1968, original 1921). Economy and society. New York: Bedminster. Wellman, B. (1996). Are personal communities local? A dumptarian reconsideration. Social Networks, 18, 347–354. Wellman, B. (1988). The community question re-evaluated. In: M. P. Smith (Ed.), Power, community and the city (pp. 81–107). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Wheaton, B. (2000). Just do it’: Consumption, commitment, and identity in the windsurﬁng subculture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 17, 254–274. Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1–24. Wolf, D. R. (1991). The rebels: A brotherhood of outlaw bikers. Toronto: University of Toronto. Young, K., & White, P. (1995). Sport, physical danger, and injury: The experiences of elite women athletes. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 19, 45–61.