Domination and Subjugation in Everyday Life

Lonnie Athens

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412857154
• eBook ISBN: 9781351521826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reputable scholars have long charged that symbolic interactionism, which is based on the principle of "sociality, " discounts the importance that subordination plays in human groups. Emphasizing dominance and power, Athens explains how subordination operates in human group life from a new interactionist's perspective, aptly dubbed by him, "radical interactionism."Expanding on the work of sociologist Robert E. Park, Athens explains the nature and operation of super-ordination and subordination, which he believes affects all social interaction between human beings and groups. He then develops a generic framework and a common terminology to help explain all forms of social conflicts. Athens argues that a radical interactionism disentangles the nature of domination, power and force, as well as the relationship among them, in a manner consistent with the basic premises of the Chicago school of pragmatism.This book offers a provocative and intelligent outline of the development and evolution of radical interactionism, a perspective interactionists can add to their toolbox with profit.

1

The Idea of a “Radical Interactionism”

Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity may be as
scarce as low rents in New York or San Francisco.

—Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American
Culture in the Age of Academe (1989, p. ix)

The Intellectual Context of the Problem

Reputable scholars have long charged that the main progenitors of symbolic interactionism discounted the importance that subordination plays in human group life.¹ Today, there are a growing number of interactionists who concur with their non-interactionist critics that both Blumer and Mead slighted the importance of subordination in everyday human affairs.² Thus, I believe that most scholars, both interactionist and non-interactionist alike, would now agree that at least Blumer and Mead discounted human subordination’s importance in their work,³ although there remain some die-hard interactionists who would dispute this conclusion.⁴ What distinguishes my efforts over the last decade from that of almost all my predecessors is, however, the fact that I have moved beyond mere criticism of Blumer and Mead toward the actual construction of an alternative form of interactionism that is not based on ideas or assumptions imported from contradictory approaches.⁵

More specifically, my goal here is to try to develop the bare foundation for an alternative form of interactionism that not only places the utmost importance on dominance and power, but also can be traced directly back to the original work of Robert Park⁶ and is deeply rooted squarely in the Chicago school of pragmatism, a label that William James and Charles Pierce attached during the early part of the twentieth century to the five members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago: Edward Scribner Ames, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Addison Moore, and James Tufts.⁷ Among the members of this school of thought, the two who most influenced Park were undoubtedly its leader, Dewey, and his highly esteemed colleague and protégé, Mead.⁸ Incidentally, Park not only personally knew both men but also maintained long-term relationships with them.

In a highly cited review of symbolic interactionism titled “The Sad Demise, Mysterious Disappearance and Glorious Triumph of Symbolic Interactionism,” Gary Fine, a Harvard PhD and the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University—but more importantly, for our present concerns, a leading exemplar and spokesperson of “anarchistic interactionism,” a concept that blossomed in the 1990s—loudly applauds the fact that symbolic interactionism has not only survived the many premature epitaphs written in anticipation of its intellectual passing, but in the process of saving itself from dying out, it has also become a more richer and diversified, and, thereby, much more vibrant approach.⁹ To avoid any suspicion that I may be placing words in Fine’s mouth, let me quote at some length his posing of the question of symbolic interactionism’s present intellectual health and his subsequent answer:

Question: “Symbolic interactionism in the 1990’s has a diversity that may vitiate its center. This splintering, of course, has benefits, in that diversity produces intellectual ferment. Yet such broadness raises the question of what, if anything, post-Blumerian symbolic interactionists share. Does a dominant model of symbolic interactionism exist?”¹⁰

Answer: “If the goal of symbolic interaction is to maintain itself as a distinctive oppositional movement, then it has failed, with more outsiders addressing the central issues and more insiders stepping outside the boundaries. . . . Yet, if the ultimate goal is to develop the pragmatic approach to social life—a view of the power of symbol creation and interaction—then symbolic interaction has triumphed gloriously.”¹¹

Since Fine never defines what he means by a “pragmatic approach,” much less the particular version or school of pragmatic thought to which he is referring, it is impossible to assess the truth or falsity of his contention. A positive side effect of Fine’s leaving the term “pragmatism” undefined here is that it provides a stern warning for anyone using this term in the future to explain exactly how they are defining “pragmatism” as well as the source of their definition of the term. Unfortunately, just as there are significant similarities in the thought of the American pragmatists, such as Dewey, James, Mead, and Peirce, there are also significant differences in the schools of pragmatic thought associated with them.¹² In fact, Peirce switched the name of his philosophy from “pragmatism” to “pragmaticism” for the specific purpose of differentiating his version of pragmatic thought from that of “pragmatism.”¹³ In The Chicago Pragmatists, Darnell Rucker provides the following eloquent explanation of it:

Only at the new University of Chicago at the turn of the century did there grow up a school of American philosophy. The pragmatism that John Dewey and his colleagues and their students collaborated on there had its roots in James and Peirce, but what emerged from their efforts was distinctively their own and reflected more truly the soil from which it sprang than either James’ or Peirce’s thought.¹⁴

My usage of the term “pragmatism” will closely coincide with the meaning that the Chicago school of pragmatism gave it. According to this school, pragmatism was based first and foremost on its unique notion of “action,” which, according to its members, is simultaneously biological, psychological, and social in nature. In their view, human action is definitely susceptible to scientific study. If this is going to be done, however, then it must be treated as a natural product of an unfolding, contingent process that cannot be reduced to a mechanical system of causation, because its agents, who are imbued with thought and emotions, direct their activities toward objects that are situated in a larger operating environment that necessarily includes other agents.¹⁵ According to Rucker, from this school of pragmatism’s standpoint, human action displays the following three key ingredients:

• (1) “Activity is something going on, and agents or persons and objects or the world are alike results of the process.”
• (2) “Agents are essentially social beings: consciousness is the product of processes in which a number of agents interact.”
• (3) “Ends are relative to the conditions of the actions at a given time: a genuine evolutionary process is one in which real novelty enters, invalidating preconceived, fixed goals of action.”¹⁶

For what it is worth, my hunch is that it is not possible to trace all the sociological approaches that Fine includes under “interactionism” directly back to any of the different schools or versions of pragmatism. For example, I would argue that “social coordination theory,” which Fine claims is “perhaps the most compelling and ambitious on-going research program within interactionism, specifying the generic principles of collective action is that of Carl Couch and his students,” is, at best, only superficially connected to the Chicago school of pragmatism.¹⁷ According to this philosophical school of thought, the organic component of social action must always be included as an integral part of any explanation of it, which social coordination theorists blatantly ignore.¹⁸ Apparently, unbeknown to them, the basic components of collective action—which takes two different fundamental forms, cooperative and conflictive, rather than just one, cooperative, as they mistakenly believe—were more precisely identified almost fifty years before them by Mead and Park.¹⁹ Thus, unlike Fine, I do not believe that the indisputable fact of the increasing theoretical and methodological diversity found among present-day interactionists is an occasion to celebrate the progress made toward the further development of a pragmatic approach, but only a much more eclectic and, thereby, incoherent one, in which a new and worse form of the wheel is all too often invented. Thus, I view this diversity as an occasion for despair, because he overlooks the problem of how you can possibly develop a more viable pragmatic approach that is not based on what he calls a “dominant model or center” of interactionism. The diversity of the theoretical approaches that Fine unabashedly praises represents to me as sure a sign as any that interactionism has lost its original moorings in at least the classical school of Chicago pragmatism and, in turn, its intellectual way.

Moreover, over the last three decades, interactionism has become such a mishmash of divergent, often contradictory approaches that it has become impossible to develop a cumulative body of knowledge by utilizing it. When you stuff all these diverse approaches under the same intellectual banner, the significant differences among them are overlooked until it merely becomes a convenient label for a meaningless conglomeration of philosophical assumptions and theoretical and methodological orientations that are as different as they are similar to each other. If people are referring to an approach by the same name but basing it on different fundamental philosophical assumptions and using significantly different concepts, or what Blumer fondly referred to as “root images,”²⁰ then it obviously creates a serious obstacle to generating a cumulative body of knowledge. Without the generation of a genuine cumulative body of knowledge, the refinement of a theoretical framework based on empirical research becomes virtually impossible.²¹

Of course, a period of intellectual anarchism may be expected before the old center or dominant model vanishes from the scene and a new one emerges to replace it. But the period of anarchism in interactionism that Fine sings the praises of has continued for so long, at least over a quarter of a century, that it now threatens the extinction of interactionism as a distinctive approach to be reckoned with in sociology, which Herbert Blumer²² tirelessly devoted his career to creating and defending.²³ Thus, in my opinion an urgent need has emerged today for a new center and dominant model of interactionism that can be, in fact, traced back directly to the classical school of Chicago pragmatism. More specifically, I think that interactionists must replace the earlier, more conventional, and ultimately conservative center and dominant interactionist model based on the work of Blumer and Mead with a much more radical center and dominant interactionist model based on the work of Robert E. Park. Unlike Mead and Blumer, who make sociality the basic principle on which interactionism rests, Park makes dominance the fundamental principle on which it should rest, thereby elevating power to the utmost importance. In this chapter, I will only try to explain the main reason that we did not see a new radical form of interactionism emerge on the sociological scene until the first decade of the twenty-first century.²⁴

Park’s Fall from Grace in Sociology

Unfortunately, Park’s work died prematurely on the vine not long after the last vestiges of the original Chicago school of sociology vanished from the scene by the early 1950s. Andrew Abbott observes, “Textbooks of the 1950’s make minimal mention of even Park, much less of the Chicago School,” later adding that “the 1960’s saw numerous attacks on Park’s theories.”²⁵ Thus, unsurprisingly, Robert Park, the undisputed leader of the Chicago school of sociology during its halcyon years of 1918 to 1934, is today the “forgotten man,” not only in the general field of sociology, but also, more importantly for our present concerns, in symbolic interactionism. In fact, Blumer, who was a former graduate student and later a junior colleague ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 The Idea of a “Radical Interactionism”
• 2 Radical and Symbolic Interactionism: Demarcating Their Borders
• 3 Mead’s Conception of the Social Act: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique
• 4 Park’s Notion of Collective Behavior: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique
• 5 Mead’s Analysis of Social Conflict: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique
• 6 Park’s Analysis of Human Conflict: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique
• 7 Human Subjugation from a Radical Interactionist’s Perspective
• 8 Dominative Orders and Their Change
• 9 Dominative Encounters: From Tiffs to Wars
• 10 Progression through the Dominative Encounter Process: The Calculus of Escalation
• 11 Conclusion: Twenty-One Principles of Radical Interactionism
• References
• Index