When
Erving Goffman arrived at University of Chicago in the late 1940s, he was an
ardent Freudian. A few years later he devised a new way to study mental
illness: he got himself into the schizophrenic ward of a mental hospital,
incognito, for two years. Instead of the retrospective method of
psychoanalysis, probing for the meaning of symptoms deep in past childhood,
Goffman directly observed what mental illness is in the present, as disturbed
social interaction.
Goffman
is an emblem of the take-off of micro-sociology. No one creates an intellectual
movement by oneself. In the background were not only the Freudians, seeking
unconscious meanings in everyday life; also what Blumer named Symbolic
Interactionism, emphasizing the social construction of the self and everything
else. At Berkeley in 1964, after a
student sit-in for civil rights shut down the university, Blumer commented to
us in class: a social institution exists only as long as it is enacted; when we
collectively stop enacting it, it stops existing.
Another
movement was springing up, the ethnomethodologists, insisting that sociology
does not even exist, but only the study of folk methods for making sense of
what is taken for reality. This was the phenomenology of everyday life, in the
sense of Husserl and Schutz, but Garfinkel and his followers changed it from
philosophical introspection into micro-situational observation. Especially
important was the invention of conversation analysis by tape-recording real-life
conversation. This shifted the emphasis from the cognitive and rather
individualistic focus of phenomenology onto the details of social interaction;
and transcribing the tape-recordings made it possible for other researchers to
examine the empirical findings and to point out new patterns in them. When
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson in 1974 laid out the turn-taking rule as the
fundamental process of talk, it became possible to reinterpret it later as the
socially ideal form: no gap, no overlap between speakers is talk in maximally
attuned rhythm, and it exemplifies high solidarity in that little temporary
group. Violating the no gap rule gives embarrassing pauses, micro-indications
of what Goffman called alienation from interaction. Violating the no-overlap
rule is people trying to talk over each other; this is the most characteristic
form of incipient conflict and struggle for dominance, as became clearer in
micro-studies of violence. By reinterpreting the data I assimilated the
empirical findings of conversation analysis to a Durkheim-Goffman synthesis
eventually called interaction ritual chains. I can’t say my ethnomethodological
acquaintances were happy with this Gestalt shift; but theoretical
reinterpretation of good evidence is how research fields build new knowledge.
Feedback
between innovation in research methods and theoretical concepts has driven the
advance of micro-sociology. New research techniques spin off from each other.
By the 1990s came portable video recorders, followed by even more ubiquitous
mobile phone cameras and CCTV. Knowing what to look for theoretically makes
photos key evidence, because we can read photos in tandem with new
understanding of the emotions in facial expressions, body postures and rhythms
(research by Paul Ekman and others). We are seeing what causes what in the
micro-dynamics of situations, both conflict and domination, alienation and
solidarity. The deepening spiral between research technology and theory also
improves traditional methods of observation and interviewing; it sharpens our
ethnographic eye as to what to look for and what kinds of detail to probe for
in our questions. Today’s ethnographer can say, I am a camera, echoing Christopher Isherwood describing Berlin in
the 1930s.
Goffman
exemplifies how traditional methods of participant observation yielded
theoretical results that assimilate other strands. In the 1950s Goffman
deserted Freud for Durkheim, reinvigorating the social anthropology that he
learned from his British Commonwealth teachers. Like Lloyd Warner and Mary
Douglas, he brought ritual home from the colonies and applied it to our own
natives, ourselves. Durkheim’s theory of religious and political rituals takes
us beyond the cognitive emphasis of both symbolic interaction and
phenomenology; it gives us a mechanism that generates solidarity, morality and
cognition simultaneously by pumping up symbols with shared emotion. Although
the macro-sociological version of Durkheimian theory was functionalist
equilibrium, Durkheim down-sized to the interacting group becomes dynamic. It
makes a great addition to the study of historical and even revolutionary
changes when religions, regimes, and manners are delegitimated and replaced by
more engrossing ones. The ingredients that produce successful rituals are
variable; when assembly, mutual focus, shared emotion and rhythmic
synchronization are absent or disrupted, sacred objects are desacralized,
cultural beliefs fade, and moralities become outdated. Far from being a
idealization of perpetual solidarity, neo-Durkheimian micro-sociology is a tool
for dissecting social change and conflict. When Lloyd Warner shifted from
Australian clans to American cities, he found more than one tribe: social
classes, stacked up like a totem pole. What Marx and Engels called the means of
mental production and Gramsci called hegemony is determined by the
micro-sociology of interaction rituals; but we don’t have to wait for macro
crises in the system to bring changes, since the ingredients for stability and
change are here at the micro level.
Followers
of Goffman, Blumer and Garfinkel have proliferated in the last 40 years,
producing many strands of micro-sociological research. I will single out a few
areas of recent discovery. As a link between mid-20th century and today, consider
some theoretical developments in the sociology of emotions.
There
is the pioneering work by Theodore Kemper; by Tom Scheff on the shame-rage
cycle; and by Norbert Wiley, whose 1994 book The Semiotic Self is probably the greatest contribution to symbolic
interactionist theory since Mead. Here I will concentrate on a particular
pathway.
Arlie
Hochschild’s ethnography of flight
attendants uncovered emotion work, Goffmanian efforts to control the emotional
frontstage of the situation, as part of the job. This led to a large body of
research on workers’ emotional presentations. Perhaps Jack Katz’s title, How
Emotions Work, is a riff on “emotion work”, while he shifts to radically situational methods, visual and
auditory recordings, and a more embodied theorization. Katz dissects the major
emotions by examining in micro-detail interactional situations where they
happen. Laughter, the happy solidarity emotion par excellence, he finds in the
fun house of mirrors. But seeing the distorting image of one’s body in the
mirror is not enough to produce laughter; instead the child runs to bring
father or mother; they all focus together on the image, and then they laugh.
The emotion is spontaneous and bodily self-entraining in the physical rhythms
of laughter, but it is body-to-body entrainment channeled by a sharpened mutual
focus of attention. The physiological process is social physiology, and it
works from the outside in. Katz starts from phenomenology but what he finds is
deeply social and embodied.
And
emotions are moments in a sequence through time. Road rage comes from disrupted
rhythms and frustration over the lack of communication channels with the other
driver, other than using the car itself to make embodied gestures like cutting
the other car off. Time-dynamics are also crucial for the various kinds of
crying that Katz records, such as resistance by a small child to her pre-school
teacher, producing a rising-and-falling whine along with each exercise she is
being forced to do, while retreating into the fortress of resonance inside her
own whining body. Whining is truly a weapon of the weak, and in a
child-centered age, sometimes a local source of power. This is a long way from
Freud, but deepening what he was trying to do.
Another
important theorization of emotions comes from Jonathan Turner, by
reconceptualizing evidence of human evolution. Humans diverged from other
primates, not at first by larger brains but by increased neural wiring between
emotional and cognitive centers. Humans thus have a much more differentiated
range of emotions they can express and recognize in others, in face, voice, and
gesture. This enables more flexible kinds of solidarity and social
coordination; it enables religious and other rituals, marking both group
membership and moral obligation, and boundaries to outsiders; and it enables
ways of manufacturing new memberships. The Durkheimian mechanism was there at
the origins of human society. The entwining of emotion, cognition and their
embodied communication are what made possible speech and memory codified into
symbols, which is to say culture as well as personal habitus. What one thinks
comes from the symbols and gestures that spring most spontaneously to one’s
consciousness, because those have been marked by strong emotions, positive or
negative, deriving from the most successful interaction rituals, or from the
searing memories of dramatically broken rituals.
In
recent years neuro-physiological research has caught up with the Durkheimian
point, recognizing that strong memories are emotionally marked; the rational
emotionless calculator assumed by many non-sociologists as the epitome of human
behavior does not fit everyday cognition. It is nice to have some legitimacy
conferred by the so-called hard sciences. But micro-sociology still leads the
way, since mirror neurons do not work automatically across all situations; the
human brain is programmed from the outside in, by the success or failure of
social interactions to generate emotions focused on shared experiences in the
chains of everyday life.
Interaction
ritual theory has been applied in the sociology of religion, not surprisingly
since this is where Durkheim originated it. But there are many different kinds
of religions in today’s religious marketplace. Scott Draper, using survey
methods but asking the right questions about religious practice, shows how
churches generate different amounts and kinds of spiritual experience by
different mixes of ingredients.
Sociology of prayer examines the micro-details of what is said, done, and
experienced. Michal Pagis’s research on group meditation shows that even in a
retreat where persons are not supposed to talk or even communicate by gestures,
nevertheless they orient bodily to each other and follow the lead of more
experienced meditators in falling into a harmonious rhythm. That this rhythm is
shared comes out by the contrast to meditating at home alone; individuals find
it much more difficult to maintain concentration, and feel a need to return to
the silent meditation group to keep up their spiritual experience.
I will
add a parallel that is perhaps surprising. Those who know Loic Wacquant would
not expect to find silent harmony. Nevertheless, Wacquant’s study of a boxing
gym finds a similar pattern: there is little that boxers do in the gym that
they could not do at home alone, except sparring; but in the gym they perform
exercises like skipping, hitting the bags, strengthening stomach muscles, all
in 3-minute segments to the ring of the bell that governs rounds in the ring.
When everyone in the gym is in the same rhythm, they are animated by a
collective feeling; they become boxers dedicated to their craft, not so much
through minds but as an embodied project. Although Wacquant does not
conceptualize this in Durkheimian terms, nevertheless his research contributes
via the theoretical reframing of good data.
Now
some applications of micro-sociological methods and theory to mainstream
sociological topics: especially our concern with stratification, inequality,
power, conflict and resistance.
I
began to study violence when I realized that conflict theory in the Weberian
sense had very little action in it, but was comparative statics. Micro-methods
brought new discoveries. Originally our data were police statistics,
bureaucratic artifacts remote from the scene of action. Closer data came from
interviewers armed with symbolic interactionism, talking to prisoners or doing
gang ethnographies. A different slant emerges when we look directly at violent
confrontations. The first inkling came in World War II, when S.L.A. Marshall
interviewed combat soldiers immediately after battle, and found only a small
proportion actually fired their weapons at the enemy. Later the Army
psychologist Dave Grossman found evidence they are held back not by fear of
being hurt (since persons in some situations ignore very high danger, including
medics, and officers who are not using weapons); they are inhibited by a
deep-seated fear of killing someone. This sounds paradoxical but I have
connected it with several wide-spread patterns.
A
large proportion of violent confrontations of all kinds-- street fights, riots,
etc.-- quickly abort; and most persons in those situations act like Marshall’s soldiers-- they let
a small minority of the group do all the violence. Now that we have photos and
videos of violent situations, we see that at the moment of action the
expression on the faces of the most violent participants is fear. Our folk belief is that anger is the
emotion of violence, but anger appears mostly before any violence happens, and
in controlled situations where individuals bluster at a distant enemy. I have
called this confrontational tension/fear;
it is the confrontation itself that generates the tension, more than fear of
what will happen to oneself. Confrontational tension is debilitating;
phenomenologically we know (mainly from police debriefings after shootings)
that it produces perceptual distortions; physiologically it generates racing
heart beat, an adrenaline rush which at high levels results in loss of bodily
control.
This
explains another, as yet little recognized pattern: when violence actually
happens, it is usually incompetent. Most of the times people fire a gun at
a human target, they miss; their
shots go wide, they hit the wrong person, sometimes a bystander, sometimes
friendly fire on their own side. This is a product of the situation, the
confrontation. We know this
because the accuracy of soldiers and police on firing ranges is much higher than
when firing at a human target. We can pin this down further; inhibition in live
firing declines with greater distance; artillery troops are more reliable than
infantry with small arms, so are fighter and bomber crews and navy crews; it is
not the statistical chances of being killed or injured by the enemy that makes
close-range fighters incompetent. At the other end of the spectrum, very close
face-to-face confrontation makes firing even more inaccurate; shootings at a
distance of less than 2 meters are extremely inaccurate. Is this paradoxical? It is facing the other person at a
normal distance for social interaction that is so difficult. Seeing the other
person’s face, and being seen by him or
her seeing your seeing, is what creates the most tension. Snipers with
telescopic lenses can be extremely accurate, even when they see their target’s
face; what they do not see is the target looking back; there is no mutual
attention, no intersubjectivity. Mafia hit men strike unexpectedly and
preferably from behind, relying on deception and normal appearances so that
there is no face confrontation. This is also why executioners used to wear
hoods; and why persons wearing face masks commit more violence than those with
bare faces.
NOTE THE POLICY
IMPLICATION: The fashion in recent years
among elite police units to wear balaclava-style face masks during their raids
should be eliminated. It operates as a status marker for such units, and in
some countries as a deliberate effort to intimidate people; but in democracies
like the United States it ought to be recognized by police authorities that
wearing masks increases the likelihood of out-of-control violence by these
forces.
Confrontational
tension/fear is a corollary to interaction ritual theory. Mutual focus of
attention-- awareness of each other’s awareness-- is an ingredient of high
mutual entrainment; normally, with a shared emotion building up, the result is
collective effervescence and solidarity.
But conflict is action at cross purposes. Face-to-face confrontation
simultaneously invokes our hard-wired propensities to get into a shared rhythm,
and contradicts it because one is trying to impose dominance on the other. No
wonder face confrontations are so tense. It is not being afraid of being hurt
that generates the most tension; nor is it exactly right to say it is fear of
hurting the other; it is above all tension specific to tightly focused mutual
action at cross purposes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have called in confrontational
tension/fear, except that the facial
and bodily expressions look like fear.
Face-to-face
confrontation is what pumps adrenaline and cortisol, and creates the tension we
see on faces and bodies. As heart
beat rises over 140 beats per minute or BPM, fine motor coordination declines,
such as aiming a gun; over 170 beats per minute experience becomes a blur; over
200 BPM paralysis can set in. Face confrontations, especially when combined
with other sources of tension and arousal such as running, car chases, an angry
argument or an emergency call, result in several patterns that we see in
violent situations.
NOTE ON POLICY
IMPLICATION: Training of police officers
should emphasize explicit awareness of the consequences of very high heartbeat
and other bodily signs of extreme tension. The officer who shot an adolescent
carrying a toy gun on a playground
(Nov. 2014 in Cleveland) had raced to the scene and fired within 2
seconds after jumping from his car, within the acute confrontational distance
of less than 3 meters. Better trained officers would be aware of their own body
signs and the danger zone for perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to
fire until they had a clear view of the situation. Geoffrey Alpert has shown
that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of force have a more
deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both sides. More
attention to such micro-details should train more officers up to this high
level of competence.
If
both sides get into the zone of high tension and physiological arousal, the
fight will abort; if they do fight (given further situational conditions I will
come to shortly), the fight will be incompetent. The same pattern is true for
other weapons besides guns, such as knives, swords and clubs, and for fist
fights. Since these weapons need very close confrontation, their competence in
doing damage is generally low, contrary to what one might think from
sword-fighting movies, including those with samurai or magical super-heroes.
How
does violence sometimes succeed in doing damage? The key is asymmetrical confrontation tension. One side will win if they can get
their victim in the zone of high arousal and high incompetence, while keeping
their own arousal down to a zone of greater bodily control. Violence is not so
much physical as emotional struggle; whoever achieves emotional domination, can
then impose physical domination. That is why most real fights look very nasty;
one sides beats up on an opponent at the time they are incapable of resisting.
At the extreme, this happens in the big victories of military combat, where the
troops on one side become paralyzed in the zone of 200 heartbeats per minute,
massacred by victors in the 140 heartbeat range. This kind of asymmetry is
especially dangerous, when the dominant side is also in the middle ranges of
arousal; at 160 BPM or so, they are acting with only semi-conscious bodily
control. Adrenaline is the flight-or-fight hormone; when the opponent signals
weakness, shows fear, paralysis, or turns their back, this can turn into what I
have called a forward panic, and the French officer Ardant du Picq called
“flight to the front.” Here the attackers rush forward towards an unresisting
enemy, firing uncontrollably. It has the pattern of hot rush, piling on, and
overkill. Most outrageous incidents of police violence against unarmed or
unresisting targets are forward panics, now publicized in our era of bullet
counts and ubiquitous videos.
Can we
predict which pattern will happen? The barrier of confrontational tension can
be circumvented if one or more conditions are present:
One is
attacking the weak. Successful attackers seek out a weak enemy; sometimes this
is someone physically weaker, but situational weakness is far more
important. Armed robbers seek
isolated victims and avoid even
unarmed groups, and try for surprise, catching their victim off guard, in order
to seize the interactional momentum. Attacking weakness also comes from imbalance of numbers; in photos of
riots, almost all the violence happens when clusters of 5 or 6 persons attack
an isolated opponent, who is usually knocked to the ground and has their face
turned from the attackers. This is more of a social than a physical advantage,
because when two or three are attacked, they often succeed in fighting off a
much bigger group of attackers; that is, the little group generates enough
mutual support so that they are not emotionally dominated.
Another
condition, then, is social support from a highly coordinated group of violent
actors; an army squad, a SWAT team, a historical phalanx of warriors in close
formation: these are drilled to act together, and as long as they focus on
their own rhythm, confrontational tension with the enemy is a lesser part of
their experience.
Another
pathway is where the fight is surrounded by an audience; people who gather to
watch, especially in festive crowds looking for entertainment; historical
photos of crowds watching duels; and of course the commercial/ sporting version
of staged fights. This configuration produces the longest and most competent
fights; confrontational tension is lowered because the fighters are concerned
for their performance in the eyes of the crowd, while focusing on their
opponent has an element of tacit coordination since they are a situational
elite jointly performing for the audience. Even the loser in a heroic staged
fight gets social support. We could test this by comparing emotional
micro-behavior in a boxing match or a baseball game without any spectators.
Finally,
there are a set of techniques for carrying out violence without face
confrontation. Striking at a distance: the modern military pathway. Becoming
immersed in technical details of one’s weapons rather than on the human
confrontation. And a currently popular technique: the clandestine attack such
as a suicide bombing, which eliminates confrontational tension because it
avoids showing any confrontation until the very moment the bomb is exploded.
Traditional assassinations, and the modern mafia version, also rely on the
cool-headedness that comes from pretending there is no confrontation, hiding in
Goffmanian normal appearances until the moment to strike.
All
this sounds rather grisly, but nevertheless confrontational theory of violence
has an optimistic side. First, there is good news: most threatening
confrontations do not result in violence. (This is shown also in Robert
Emerson’s new book on quarrels among roommates and neighbours.) We missed this
because, until recently, most evidence about violence came from sampling on the
dependent variable. There is a deep interactional reason why face-to-face
violence is hard, not easy. Most
of the time both sides stay symmetrical. Both get angry and bluster in the same
way. These confrontations abort, since they can’t get around the barrier of
confrontational tension. Empirically, on our micro-evidence, this zero pathway
is the most common. Either the quarrel ends in mutual gestures of contempt; or
the fight quickly ends when opponents discover their mutual incompetence.
Curtis Jackson-Jacobs’ video analysis shows fist-fighters moving away from each
other after missing with a few out-of-rhythm punches. If no emotional
domination happens, they soon sense it.
Micro-sociology
of violence is much more optimistic than conventional macro-theories of class
or racial inequality, or cultures such as masculine hegemony and honor. These
long-term factors are hard to change. But immediate situational conditions are
always the bottleneck through which macro-conditions must pass if conflict is
to turn into violence. Micro-interactional theory points out situational conditions to avoid. And it offers micro-practices
for each of us to deal with threatening situations in your own life. Keep any
confrontation emotionally symmetrical; make confrontational tension work for
you by maintaining face contact; avoid micro-escalations; let the situation
calm down out of boredom, which is what happens when an interaction becomes
locked into repetition. In the violent sociology of emotions, boredom is your
friend.
A
long-standing criticism of ethnomethodology and other micro-sociology has been
that it tells us nothing except tedious details that are really determined at
the macro level. The sociology of violence shows this is not true; there is
crucial causality at the micro level. And we are extending this to other areas.
Anne Nassauer,
assembling videos and other evidence from many angles on demonstrations, finds
the turning points at which a demo goes violent or stays peaceful. And she
shows that these are situational turning points, irrespective of ideologies,
avowed intent of demonstrators or policing methods. Stefan Klusemann, using
video evidence, shows that ethnic massacres are triggered off in situations of
emotional domination and emotional passivity; that is, local conditions, apart
from whatever orders are given by remote authorities. Another pioneering turning-point study is David Sorge’s
analysis of the phone recording of a school shooter exchanging shots with the
police, who nevertheless is calmed down by an office clerk; she starts out
terrified but eventually shifts into an us-together mood that ends in a
peaceful surrender. Meredith Rossner shows that restorative justice conferences
succeed or fail according to the processes of interaction rituals; and that
emotionally successful RJ conferences result in conversion experiences that
last for several years, at least. Counter-intuitively, she finds that RJ
conferences are especially likely be successful when they concerns not minor
offenses but serious violence; the
intensity of the ritual depends on the intensity of emotions it evokes.
Erika
Summers-Effler shows the diversity of emotional practices that sustain social
movements whose goals are so difficult that they are permanently failing.
Cathartic laughter tinged with mysticism emotionally reboots Catholic Workers
among the self-destructively poor; harnessing righteous anger keeps an
anti-death-penalty group going although its leader gets most of the energy.
Interaction Ritual works very widely as a mechanism, but it can use different
emotional ingredients; the landscape of emotion-marked group idiocultures (to
borrow Gary Alan Fine’s term) remains to be mapped.
High
authorities are hard to study with micro methods, since organizational high
rank is shielded behind very strong Goffmanian frontstages. David Gibson,
however, analyzing audio tapes of Kennedy’s crisis group in the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962, penetrated the micro-reality of power in a situation in which
all the rationally expectable scenarios led toward nuclear war. Neither JFK nor
anyone else emerges as a charismatic or even a decisive leader. The group
eventually muddled their way through sending signals that postponed a decision
to use force, by tacitly ignoring scenarios that were too troubling to deal
with. This fits the pattern that conversation analysts call the preference for
agreement over disagreement, at whatever cost to rationality and consistency.
Stefan Fuchs, in his micro-sociologically informed theory book Against Essentialism, says that
organizational authority looks most rational and decisive when communicating to
outsiders; the closer one gets to the inside, the more activities look ad hoc.
Authority is a performance for the distance; up close, it dissolves into
particularistic idiosyncrasies; perhaps a better way to put this is that it
becomes the micro-details of situational interaction.
We
have a long way to go to generalize these leads into a picture of how high
authority really operates. Does it operate the same way in business
corporations? The management literature tells us how executives have
implemented well thought-out programs; but our information comes chiefly from
retrospective interviews that collapse time and omit the situational process
itself. Lauren Rivera cracks the veneer of elite Wall Street firms and finds
that hiring decisions are made by a sense of emotional resonance between
interviewer and interviewee, the solidarity of successful interaction rituals.
Our best evidence of the micro details of this process comes from another
arena, where Dan McFarland and colleagues analyze recorded data on speed
dating, and find that conversational micro-rhythms determine who felt they
“clicked” with whom.
Finally,
I will mention my most recent book, Napoleon
Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy. Among others, it
analyzes how a famous organization-builder like Steve Jobs used an style that generated a tremendous
amount of emotional energy focused on cutting edge innovation. Jobs’ interactional style was to evoke
extreme emotions, including very negative ones, but unlike authoritarian
leaders who bark out critiques and orders and then slam the door behind them,
Jobs stayed to argue at great length until the group emotion became transformed
into a shared trajectory of action. His insults and obscenities were only the
opening move that revved up group emotion; successful IRs transmute the
initiating emotions-- whatever they are-- into solidarity, and Jobs kept the
group focused throughout the argument until this happened. And it increased
everyone's emotional energy; by the end, if it meant staying up 48 hours to fix
it, let's get to it.
(Note: The 2015 film Steve Jobs inaccurately portrays how he dealt with his high-tech
team, assimilating him to the management cliché of motivating workers by
threatening to fire them.)
Such
interactional techniques are rare, since they require constantly recycling
emotional energy between leader and group; whereas most hierarchic authorities
become cut off from those doing the work. Interaction ritual processes suggest
a way to make network analysis more dynamic rather than comparative statics;
for instance we observe Jobs’ techniques for recruiting the most desirable
people and thereby building a productive network. More generally, we see how entrepreneurs flourish by playing
in ambiguous or dangerous networks, interacting with potential rivals and
enemies who can steal key information and key opportunities, or band together
temporarily to exploit them jointly. Dangerous networks expand by a timely
application of emotional domination, in contrast to inner circles of allies
(like Jobs' high-tech work group) which are built by cascades of EE.
I will
end this scattered survey with some
research that falls into the rubric of Weberian status groups, i.e.
social rankings by lifestyle.
David Grazian has produced a sequence of books, Blue Chicago and On the Make,
that deal with night life. This could be considered a follow-up to Goffman’s
analysis of what constitutes “fun in games” as well as “where the action is.”
For Grazian, night-life is a performance of one’s “nocturnal self,”
characterized by role-distance from one’s mundane day-time identity. By a
combination of his own interviewing behind the scenes and collective
ethnographies of students describing their evening on the town, from pre-party
preparation to post-party story-telling, Grazian shows how the boys and the
girls, acting as separate teams, play at sexual flirtation which for the most
part is vastly over-hyped in its real results. It is the buzz of collective
effervescence that some of these teams generate that is the real attraction of
night life. And this may be an appropriate place to wind up. Freud, perhaps the
original micro-sociologist, theorized that sexual drive is the underlying mover
behind the scenes. Grazian, looking at how those scenes are enacted, finds
libido as socially constructed performance. As is almost everything else.
In
conclusion. Will interaction
ritual, or for that matter micro-sociology as we know it, become outdated in
the high-tech future? This isn’t
futuristic any more, since we have been living in the era of widely dispersed
information technology for at least 30 years, and we are used to its pace and
direction of change. A key point for interaction ritual is that bodily
co-presence is one of its
ingredients. Is face contact needed? Rich Ling analyzed the everyday use
of mobile phones and found that the same persons who spoke by phone a lot also
met personally a lot. Cell phones do not substitute for bodily co-presence, but
facilitate it. Among the most frequent back-and-forth, reciprocated connections
are people coordinating where they are.
Ling concluded that solidarity rituals were possible over the phone, but
that they were weaker than face-to-face rituals; one was a teaser for the other.
There
is a theoretical reason why full-body co-presence makes for more successful
IRs. Full-body presence is multi-channel; it is much easier to catch the
other’s emotions, gestures, body posture and rhythm than from voice alone, or
even voice-plus-image of the sort that Skype provides. Bodily co-presence is an important
ingredient not in itself, but because it enhances mutual focus-- meta-awareness
that the other is focused on what you are focused on; or for that matter, that
you are not so fully focused; alienation from interaction is also easier to
detect face to face. Full channel bodily co-presence also enhances the other
main ingredients of an IR, building a shared emotional mood to a high intensity
via a continuous feedback loop; for instance that is why people laugh more when
there are more people present. We
could test this by measuring the intensity of laughter among remote users
reading on-screen emoticons or expressions like LOL, compared to laughter
during physical presence. And bodily co-presence helps build rhythmic
coordination; not to say there are no rhythms in exchanging text messages etc,
but those rhythms are almost certainly not as fine-tuned as those found in
voice recordings of persons who are clicking with each other.
Also there
is touching another person, something that can only be done when bodily
present. Such expressions of affectionate or sexual contact are generally
reserved for a few relationships (although there are formal versions like
handshakes, air-kisses and forearm bumps enacting more limited bits of
solidarity). Conceivably future electronic devices might wire up each other’s
genitals, but what happens would likely depend on the micro-sociological theory
of sex (chapter 6 in Interaction Ritual
Chains): the strongest sexual attraction is not pleasure in one’s genitals per se, but getting the other person’s
body to respond in mutually entraining erotic rhythms: getting turned on by
getting the other person turned on. If you don’t believe me, try theorizing the
attractions of performing oral sex. This is an historically increasing
practice, and one of the things that drives the solidarity of homosexual
movements. Gay movements are built around effervescent scenes, not around
social media.
Voice
conversations require co-presence in time if not in space, whereas this
limitation does not hold for other electronic media, allowing them to reach far
larger networks. It still appears that the greatest amount of back-and-forth
messages happen among a relatively small proportion of social media “friends”
who also meet physically. Big media-only networks numbering in the hundreds or
more-- other than for celebrities who use them essentially as broadcast media--
are built either by assembling old schoolmate networks, or among professionals
in a specialty. Yet the one type of professional network I have studied,
philosophers and other intellectuals, has the pattern that those who have the
most network connections to eminent persons, themselves are more likely to
become eminent; and these connections involve a crucial period of face contact.
In other words, having a far-flung network does not do very much good for one’s
intellectual career unless you meet these people personally. Meeting to do what? To carry out intense intellectual IRs,
getting the emotional emphasis that comes from being at the forefront of
research and argument. In the absence of systematic research it is dangerous to
extrapolate from one type of arena to another; but my impression is that
although top financiers and business executives have very large social
networks-- they had these already in the era before the social media-- their
crucial deal-making happens by face meetings. Emotional domination and
persuasion happen most subtly and effectively in full-body presence. It seems
likely that persons who rely exclusively on distant electronic networks are
stratifying themselves into a lower tier beneath the elite.
Of
course the media of communication change; but the stratified patterns of
intellectual networks have remained across a very long history of media
inventions, including writing, book publishing, printing, letters delivered by
postal service, newspapers and journals, and the first electronic media, the
telegraph and telephone. In recent years I get communications from distant
scholars by email; but those in areas of strong mutual interest soon travel to
discuss things personally; and these personal contacts are what accelerate the
process of creative research.
It
would be foolish to postulate that electronic or other media technologies will
never be invented that mimic the key aspects of bodily IRs: that is to say, that can enhance sense
of mutual attention, strengthen shared emotions, and get people electronically
entrained in interpersonal rhythms. Given the existence of micro-sociological
understanding, it is more than likely that media technologists will try to
mimic real-life IRs. Crude advances in social Artificial Intelligence are
already pointing the way, as are efforts at virtual reality. It may become
possible to electronically stimulate the emotional and rhythmic parts of the
brain; the result might well be a high-tech version of heroin addiction. But I
doubt that the real social interactional world will go away; people who become
electronic junkies will be dominated by people who use a wide spectrum of
successful IRs, and at the core of those networks will be real people who meet
bodily.
I am
not a fan of science fiction, which always struck me as mostly recycling
mythologies of the pre-modern past. In this talk I have been tracing the
history of micro-sociology over the past half-century or so, and we can see the
direction things are going. Micro-sociology grew up with a sequence of
inventions that might be called information technologies: tape recorders,
videos, photos of facial expressions of emotions, long-distance photography,
computer-stored messages, and now portable monitors of physiological body signs
being used in sports training and the military. Better to call these
micro-interactional technologies, or micro-interactional recording
technologies, because they give us new kinds of data we can pore over in detail
and thereby discover new patterns.
Thus,
two projections for the immediate future of micro-sociology, let us say the
next two decades, by which time I will probably be dead. First, micro-sociology
is going to get even better data, and the key things we will learn will be
about mechanisms of mutual awareness, the causes and consequences of a variety
of shared emotions, and the patterns of rhythmic entrainment that together
determine levels of solidarity and emotional energy. What Durkheim and Goffman
formulated are among the most important discoveries of sociology; they will be
modified but they will not go away.
Second,
micro-sociological technologies are going to spin off new combinations and
advances from themselves, in the usual cascade of technological
innovation. But technologies
develop in tandem with theories, and the theory that knows the most about how
humans do interaction is micro-sociology.
We are going to be part of that technological cascade, whether we like
it or not.
As we
said in the 1960s, it’s been quite a trip. And it's not over yet.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Civil War Two, Part 1
by Randall Collins
Giveaway ends May 24, 2018.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
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