Selves, Societies, and Emotions

Understanding the Pathways of Experience

Thomas S. Henricks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317252238
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Building on contributions from sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and neuroscience, Henricks develops a more general account of how people discover and reproduce the "meanings" of their involvements with others. Among its many themes are treatments of selves as "projections of personhood," of the ways in which self-expression has changed historically and is now experienced in our electronically mediated era, of emotions as "framing judgments," and of ritual, play, communitas, and work as four distinctive "pathways of experience."

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Social scientists have long been fascinated by what is sometimes called the “miracle of social order”—the fact that human interaction is so orderly and predictable even when the people involved are motivated by diverse, contradictory, and thoroughly partisan interests. With some measure of success, most of us make our intentions plain to others, move briskly through the traffic of human affairs, and find stable vantage points from which to observe the most ill defined of situations. We draw conclusions about the character of those situations, the meanings of the objects we find there, and the intentions of the other people we confront. We pursue lines of behavior with confidence and moral justification. We experience emotions that are recognized—by ourselves and others—to be consistent with what is happening to us. Such feats are accomplished in not only familiar settings before those who know us well but also new, confusing situations in front of complete strangers. How is any of this possible?

Curious also is the degree to which we maintain relatively clear visions of ourselves as we move through our daily activities. That is, we are able to maintain feelings of personal coherence and self-direction at the same time that we embrace obligating relationships with other people, who usually have their own opinions of our character and commitments. As sociologist Georg Simmel (1971, 143–49) argued in a famous essay on “the stranger,” most of us are reconciled to the fact that our social relationships never feature complete acceptance or immersion. In one sense we are a part of all that happens around us and indeed can only realize our possibilities as persons through the recognition and support that others provide. That set of public recognitions—defining who we are as participants and as persons—is commonly described as our identity. However, we also exist in our own private estimations, understandings that are never entirely equivalent to the ways that others see us. In that second sense we have—or perhaps are—selves. We maintain our own visions of the world, and those perspectives ultimately keep us apart from the settings we inhabit. That tension—between the positions that others would grant us and those that we would give ourselves—is one of the most fundamental matters in the social sciences. That people find and accept their placements in the social world as much as they do is one portion of the “miracle” referred to above. That so many are forced to accept those placements on the terrible terms that are offered them is not only one of the tragedies of the human condition but also the challenge for a compassionate social science.

This book addresses the general issue of how people make sense of their involvements in the world and then behave toward others on the basis of those comprehensions. I will argue that there are different ways of making sense and different resources that are used in that process. My special interest is the tension that has been described above: between the locations that the world offers us and those that we envision for ourselves.

In addition to describing the different ways in which people are placed in the world, I will offer my own models of how those social standings are achieved. Some placements will be shown to be impositions of subjective imagination and desire (what I call “ascending meaning”); others are accommodations to the terms of otherness (what I call “descending meaning”). Most are the curious combinations that lie between these extremes. Most generally, my intention in this book is to show how comprehensible forms organize the movements of people through the world and how people’s experiences of those forms are organized in ways that are equally coherent. In that context, this is a book about selves, societies, and emotions.

The question of how people find their places in the world has always been a fundamental theme of social science and, before that, of philosophy, religion, and literature. It persists as a guiding issue for those disciplines and defies resolution because of the vastness of its implications and the inherent complexity of the human condition. Arguably, that question becomes even more pertinent in our contemporary era, especially in those societies that are marked by what is sometimes called “advanced,” “high,” “late,” or even “post” modernity. To cite the view of one prominent observer, sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991), modern relationships have become increasingly “dis-embedded” and abstract. If once-upon-a-time people managed their lives within the terms of relatively small, stable communities where face-to-face encounters were the dominant settings for meaning making now we have “relationships” with people we may meet once and never again, with those we have never encountered face to face, with faceless abstract organizations, and with the façades of personhood that ever-expanding media forms present to us. Increasingly, we communicate with people through phone calls, e-mails, text messages, webcams, and “tweets.” We participate in online video games with players from across the world; we “vote” electronically for the reality show contestant of our choice; we invest money in a stock market and watch our standing rise and fall with the enthusiasms of the millions.

With even less response from the objects of our attention, we understand ourselves to be supporters of professional sports teams, members of celebrity fan clubs, contributors to interest groups, and advocates of political candidates. We feel ourselves to have relationships with the objects of our affection. We trust one television anchor and not another; we follow our favorite actors, musicians, and sports stars—or rather the versions of them that are presented to us—with ardor. By degrees our social connections have been lifted out of their local contexts. In all these ways our current habitation seems to be what Giddens (1991, 16) calls a “runaway world,” where social and cultural formations are proliferating and then moving away from one another. By such processes, or so some argue, contemporary people are losing both their sense of being firmly placed in the world and the feelings of assurance that attend those placements.

As important as these qualities of fragmentation and change may be, this book explores the counter-thesis that most of us have not lost our footing entirely. We continue to have selves and identities, although the character of these formations—and the circumstances in which they are made—is now altered. Despite our differences, we behave in patterns that are, for the most part, recognizable to others, and we communicate in ways that make our intentions plain. We understand the world—and share those understandings—through publicly acknowledged formats. Amidst societies marked by increasingly large and mobile populations, social diversity, the proliferation of specialized cultural forms, and new organizations committed to reinventing themselves at every turn, there is still some measure of orderliness and a perception that “meaningfulness” still resides in the world. At least that is the emphasis that is taken in this book. To be sure, disorder, change, and even meaninglessness are fundamental aspects of existence. So are force and fraud. These matters will be considered in due course. However, my abiding concern is to discover how people achieve feelings of coherence and stability amidst the confusions of contemporary life.

FOLLOWING GOFFMAN

In the academic world, books begin where others end. This particular writing takes as its point of departure the contributions of sociologist Erving Goffman regarding the nature of human experience. Like many other writers who I will discuss in this book, Goffman was committed to understanding how people find their way in social settings. More precisely, he wished to describe what he called the “interaction order,” the continual forming and re-forming of relationships between people as they encounter one another in face-to-face meetings (1983). Much of Goffman’s writing focuses on the conditions or “organizing principles” that make possible these daily encounters. Part of that project means describing the social positions that people hold in these settings and the patterned relationships that exist between people in their capacities as position holders and as persons. In that sense Goffman wished to understand how all of us establish coherent identities before others. However, he also wanted to know how we inhabit those settings subjectively—that is, how we think, feel, and act in our capacities as selves. For such reasons, his work is a valuable point of entry for anyone wishing to integrate the objective and subjective aspects of experience.

That issue of how people inhabit circumstances of many types is central to the discussion of human experience that follows. On the face of it, such a topic is so wide-ranging as to make impossible any attempt to comprehend its various dimensions or even to say anything that has not been said a hundred times before. Better perhaps to read the “classics” of many disciplines and ponder the sayings of those now-distant authors. For that reason, the current book develops a much more limited theme that was given prominence in Goffman’s book, Frame Analysis (1974). In that writing, which is commonly considered to be his masterwork, Goffman argues that social and cultural patterns that are, for the most part, not of our own making “frame” our experiences of the world—and of ourselves. These frames are essentially typologies of interpersonal encounters. When we “make sense” of the world, we fit its happenings to well-established models that society offers to us. In that way, particular occurrences are comprehended as instances of general types. We process our own, seemingly personal experiences of those events in much the same fashion.

The current book is presented as an extension of Goffman’s general approach. In what follows, I argue that the idea of framing can be applied not only to social encounters but also to qualities of persons and to the placement of those persons in social situations (issues that are also central to Goffman’s writing). In other words, I describe some additional things Goffman might have analyzed further with his framing perspective had he not died in the midst of his productive career at sixty. However, I also argue that there are other kinds of “frames” and “framing” besides the cognitive or conceptual constructs that are the centerpieces of Goffman’s classic book. In that spirit, I try to show the pertinence of physical as well as symbolic patterns to the ways people operate.

Most generally, then, this book, like Goffman’s, focuses on how experience is organized. As mentioned above, I place special emphasis on the typology of experience known as the emotions, which are shown to be both the results of a series of “framing judgments” as well as a set of labels or narratives that help people make their way through situations. My general position is that human consciousness is located at the intersection of many different kinds of patterns, some physical in character, others symbolic. Effectively, these patterns are frames that permit and channel the varieties of experience. As Goffman (1961b) emphasized, social life can be seen as a series of “encounters” that these contingent frames organize. And our privately managed behaviors can be understood as a succession of movements from one intersection of patterns to the next. Most of the book that follows is a spelling out of ways in which people make sense of those encounters. Ultimately, I develop the theme that experience is a progress through space and time that follows coherent sequences or “pathways”—models for being that connect current events with happenings in the past and future.

ARGUMENTS TO COME

One of my favorite professors in graduate school insisted that writers should never present the structure of their arguments too explicitly. Reading something manufactured with that earnest, plodding spirit is rather like seeing a person’s body with the bones poking through the flesh. Writing, even of the academic sort, is not an office memorandum but rather an invitation to reflection. Readers should be encouraged, cajoled, and seduced—they should not be instructed.

That gentleman, no longer with us, was influenced deeply by the tradition of the humanities in which beautiful writing was the ideal. Truth, if such a term can be used in our suspicious contemporary era, was a conclusion people reached through their encounters with well-fashioned cultural expression. To be sure, that general point of view—that our subjective experiences of the world are founded on our encounters with symbolic form—is one prominent theme of the pages that follow. However, against that professor’s directives, I set forth in the following pages an overview of the chapters to come. Like most social scientists, I believe that readers—at least of this sort of book—wish to know what it is the author is trying to accomplish and, on that basis, determine if the argument succeeds or fails. That disposition is especially pertinent for a project like the current one, which tries to expose at least some parts of the skeleton that lie beneath the flesh of human affairs. To accomplish that end, it seems appropriate to be both earnest (if such a term means being open and honest about the arguments being made) and plodding (if that means addressing the most familiar matters of life with the most ordinary examples in the least suspenseful ways).

Following this introduction, then, chapter 2, “Framing Experience,” details the general approach that I will take in the remainder of the book. The initial portion of that chapter is devoted to an overview of the ideas that Goffman presents in Frame Analysis. The remainder of the chapter develops my own vision of how experience is organized. That model, what I call the “ascending-descending meaning perspective,” is essentially an arrangement of five principal “fields of relationship” in which people locate themselves. It also describes two opposite processes they follow to appraise and develop their standings in those contexts. A special theme of the chapter is the different ways in which the concept of “meaning” can be understood and the implication of these different meaning systems for action and experience.

Chapter 3, “Selves as Projections of Personhood,” considers the ways in which framing activities are applied to persons. The chapter begins with an analysis of the concept of the self as presented by the psychologist William James and explores the specifically social influences on self-development as described by sociologists George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and their modern descendants. Later portions of the chapter shift from descriptions of the cognitive self to descriptions of self-feeling. Seeking to integrate the above views, I develop a general treatment of selves as “projections” of personhood, processes of envisioning the roles that one will play in social settings. By such projections, people are carried into and through events.

Chapter 4 is titled “New Settings for Self Expression.” Its general argument is that persons—and their behaviors—are judged also in terms of the settings in which those matters occur. That is, we use understandings of place and time to help us decide what—and who—is going on. The particular focus of the chapter is the new possibilities for self-expression that arise within the “virtual realities” that new media forms create. To put that issue into historical context, I discuss first the changing manifestations of selfhood in premodern, modern, and postmodern societies. The second part of the chapter describes three ways in which persons participate in contemporary media forms—as audiences of electronic selves, as producers of those visions, and as actors who communicate with one another in and around those settings.

Chapter 5, “Emotions as Forms of Self-Awareness,” explores the viewpoint that emotions are patterns of awareness produced by the interaction between people’s self-understandings and their interpretations of various kinds of circumstances. Focusing initially on the contributions of contemporary psychologists, I review some of the different ways that emotions and emotionality have been understood in that discipline. Using my ascending-descending meaning perspective, I try to integrate what is sometimes described as the dual nature of the emotions—that is, their status as both physical and symbolic realities. The central claim of the chapter is that emotions are the results of a series of “framing judgments,” subjective appraisals of the character of situations. In that context, I provide a model that displays this process and indicates how some well-known emotions are related to one another. Those specific emotions are said to be “frames” in their own right.

Chapter 6, “Emotions and Social Order,” focuses on how people experience their own placement in social relationships and express that sense of placement through emotions. To support my thesis, I discuss how emotions are both consequences of and contributing elements to our interactions with other people. The chapter begins with some comments on the different meanings of the term “social.” The remainder is devoted to describing how these different understandings of the social are addressed in some well-known sociological theories of emotions. Once again, I try to integrate these different theories.

Chapter 7 is called “Dissatisfaction, Disorder, and Desire.” People may seek comfortable placements in the world, but they also want to experience movement, excitement, and change. In that light, the chapter begins with a discussion of why disorder is a prominent—and indeed inevitable—feature of personal, social, and cultural relationships. Later portions provide a general theory of satisfaction and dissatisfaction—and more particularly, of pleasure and displeasure—and apply this theory to experiences of stability and movement. The chapter concludes with some comments on how social processes both discourage and encourage the anticipatory feelings called “desire.”

The eighth and final chapter is called “Behavioral Pathways.” In that chapter I try to show how basic human behaviors are framed. I argue that these behavioral frameworks operate as specialized pathways for experience. The chapter begins with a view of emotions as “currencies” or “tokens of exchange” that people use to gain and express social standings before one another. I describe four of those standings—privilege, engagement, subordination, and marginality. The chapter’s key theme is the identification of some key interaction trajectories, or “pathways,” that lead people to these standings. Four of these pathways—work, play, ritual, and communitas—are given special attention. My argument is that people entering these formats not only have some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Framing Experience
• 3. Selves as Projections of Personhood
• 4. New Settings for Self-Expression
• 5. Emotions as Forms of Self-Awareness
• 6. Emotions and Social Order
• 7. Dissatisfaction, Disorder, and Desire
• 8. Behavioral Pathways
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index