Redefining the Situation: The Writings of Peter McHugh 9780773558175

Citation preview

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

REDEFINING THE SITUATION THE WRITINGS OF PETER McHUGH

Edited with an introduction by

Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-5692-8 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5693-5 (paper) 978-0-7735-5817-5 (ePDF ) 978-0-7735-5818-2 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Redefining the situation : the writings of Peter McHugh / edited with an introduction by Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel. Other titles: Writings of Peter McHugh Names: Bonner, Kieran, 1951- editor. | Raffel, Stanley, editor. | Container of (work): McHugh, Peter, 1929-2010. Essays. Selections. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190049030 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190049073 | ISBN 9780773556935 (paper) | ISBN 9780773556928 (cloth) | ISBN 9780773558175 (ePDF ) | ISBN 9780773558182 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: McHugh, Peter, 1929-2010. | LCSH: Sociology. Classification: LCC HM585 .R43 2019 | DDC 301—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design Inc. in 10.5/14 Caslon.

CONTENTS

Introduction Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel

vii

Acknowledgments xxxvii 1

Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization

2

Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor 18

3

On the Nature of Rule Following

4

On the Failure of Positivism

5

A Common Sense Conception of Deviance

6

Confrontation 100

7

A Letter of Resignation 116

8

On a Letter of Resignation 123 Stanley Raffel

9

Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance

37

52 71

10

Insomnia and the (T)error of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism 151

11

Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action 180

12

Notes on Circulation

213

3

139

vi

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

13

Intimacy

220

14

Furthermores on the Aesthetic 238

15

Delicacy, Desire, and Dream in the Work of Peter McHugh: Towards a Sociology of Jouissance Alan Blum 243

16

The Invention of Analysis: “If This Is Sociology, I Want to Be in It” Kieran Bonner 258 The Works of Peter McHugh Index

289

287

INTRODUCTION Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel

The contingent and deeply ambiguous uncertainty of all social conduct have been explicit in the ideas of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, not to mention Heraclitus, then ethnomethodology, then Analysis, up to and including postmodernism itself … This heterogeneity [of language], composed of both power and powerlessness, gives us our place as a space in which the play of interpretation is not only possible but necessary; possible as a consequence of the profound ambiguity of the limit; necessary if language is to be a human practice, if we are to enjoy our situation as an affirmation rather than suffer it as a sentence. McHugh 1996, 21–31

This book is a reader centred on the work of the late Peter McHugh, who died in 2010. McHugh is an internationally known sociologist within the influential field of antipositivist social theory. He is probably most familiar due to his collaboration with Alan Blum and the tradition of inquiry in social theory, Analysis, they initiated. This tradition of inquiry is exemplified in the many articles and books they jointly authored or coedited (see “ The Works of Peter McHugh”) – a tradition that has been taken up by their students, including the editors of this volume. The uniqueness of this publication is that it provides the only selection of McHugh’s sole-authored writings. Some of these have previously been published but appeared in hard-to-find journals. The editors have also accessed several previously unpublished essays that provide a much fuller and in numerous ways surprising view of McHugh’s place within the contemporary social and cultural theory scene. The aim of this collection is to provide a comprehensive view of McHugh’s position within the sociological tradition, not only with his own articles

viii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

but with three new essays on his work by colleagues who are established scholars in their own right; they are also uniquely qualified to discuss the tradition of inquiry McHugh helped cofound. We especially note that our collection includes an original essay by McHugh’s long-time collaborator Alan Blum. These essays and articles offer an opportunity to reflect on the discipline of sociology by reengaging the development of the field over the last fifty or so years. They aim to actively contribute to the wider project of reinventing social theory that is going on at the moment, work involved in moving beyond the frozen big data/postmodernism debate, and in theory and research addressing our global times and convergences between Anglo-American and Continental thought, as exemplified, for example, in the recent Routledge publication, The Reflexive Initiative (Raffel and Sandywell 2016). This introduction places McHugh’s work not only in the modern and postmodern sociological tradition but also in contemporary social theory broadly, including the hermeneutics of Gadamer and his followers, the critical theory of Habermas, the renewed focus on Hannah Arendt’s political theory, and Derrida’s deconstruction. Thus, we will show McHugh’s work (especially the later essays) not only addressing issues relevant to sociologists in general but appealing to all who are broadly interested in the expanding field of interdisciplinary social theory, whether that be rhetoric and literature, legal theory, political theory, or contemporary philosophy more generally. We will argue that, in contrast to the received wisdom that locates McHugh’s work as an offspin of ethnomethodology or as marginal to the so-called sociological mainstream, it was actually McHugh who never lost sight of the requirements for a valid social theory adequate to the challenge of formulating the foundations of social life and interaction. We propose to look at how he engaged with the foundational figures in sociology (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Parsons, and especially Garfinkel) and, increasingly, with the tradition of French cultural theory (Derrida, Blanchot, Levinas, Lyotard). And we argue that the essays collected here show McHugh’s influence in coestablishing a unique perspective within social theory (Analysis) and also show him to be a key theorist in his own right. While the papers in this volume are arranged chronologically, we begin with a quotation that could be said, in retrospect, to identify the problem his corpus of writing always sought to clarify. This quotation could be said to be

IntroductIon

ix

prescient in its formulation of the “heterogeneity of language” in our era of twenty-four hour news, political polarization, information bubbles, discourse wars, and so on. All social conduct and the language used to describe social conduct, McHugh acknowledges, is deeply and irreparably ambiguous (a recognition that, as he points out, goes as far back as Heraclitus), is brought to the fore by the great twentieth-century philosophers (Wittgenstein and Heidegger), and is incorporated into contemporary fields of social inquiry as varied as ethnomethodology, Analysis, and poststructuralism. The ambiguity of language has currently led to battles about the meaning of pronouns, binary categories, and arguments about the tension between “free speech and inclusive language.” If McHugh was making a theoretical point in 1996, this same ambiguity has, amongst other things, become an occasion for so-called “culture wars” in everyday life today. Theoretically speaking – and as ethnomethodology shows – members have methods for resolving such ambiguity for all practical (contingent) purposes  – the method of “the ‘uninteresting’ essential reflexivity of accounts” (Garfinkel 1967, 7); McHugh, however, raises the radically reflexive question as to the implication this has for inquiry into social conduct. Inquiry, like all social conduct, is not exempt from this universal. It, too, in all instances, is a contingent accomplishment, whether it takes the form of “grand matters, grandly put or [a detailed description of ] the prosaic details of everyday life” (McHugh 1968, 11). In what way is this human condition of thought and action a sentence to be suffered, and in what way is it an opportunity to be enjoyed? What does it mean to recognize this universal as a condition of conduct and inquiry? What does it mean to inquire into the foundations of social life, given this recognition? The work of McHugh gives us the opportunity to document one way this recognition developed and the challenge such recognition offered for his commitment to exemplifying the full awareness of reflexive sociology. At the same time, the essays and articles that follow demonstrate both the development of McHugh’s thought and its reflection in (and on) developments over the same period in the discipline of sociology. The first paper, “Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization” (1966), would fit within any standard list of mainstream sociological concerns in that it deals with a case of socialization (in this case, in relation to recidivism and the failure of many rehabilitation programs). Prisoners need to be resocialized if they are not to be, as they too often are, recidivists. As McHugh (1966) shows, however, such efforts typically fail because to

x

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

resocialize prisoners requires an adequate theory of the logically prior issue of the conditions of social order that made them what they are in the first place. Resocialization, to be successful, would have to mean “radical change,” “the substitution of one set of value orientations for another” (356). As he says, “moral suasion and monopoly of force in the context of different values do not result in radical change” (356–7). In a way that will not be surprising for researchers on cults and radicalization, he states, “social disintegration can be one phase of radically changed behaviour” (356). He argues for the necessity of a stage of social disintegration if radical change, whether in the individual or in society, is to occur. Yet even in what appears to be a recognisable mainstream sociological argument and concern, resocialization, one can hear resonances of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological experiments and their focus on sustaining bewilderment, not only through the demonstration of the “documentary method of interpretation” on which McHugh was a research assistant but especially the confusion produced by the mock medical school interviews (Garfinkel 1967, 58). McHugh’s conclusion is that, vis-à-vis the interest in rehabilitation, there is a group for which the normal practices of ongoing socialization will inevitably fail. For example, “the values of the therapist and prisoner are so divergent that for one to adopt those of the other would require contradiction of the original set (a resocialization situation) rather than mere elaboration upon it (a plain socialization set)” (1966, 357). Furthermore, they will fail for a reason that will continue to occupy McHugh – the conditions of social order. Here we note that the nuances, the depth involved in theorizing the foundation of the social order, one of McHugh’s abiding concerns, can be glimpsed even in this first article. To use his later language, ambiguity is at the core of the distinction between socialization and resocialization. The second paper, “Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor” (1969), deals with another standard sociological topic: social stratification. But here, too, McHugh locates a group for which standard sociological solutions do not apply. Just as prisoners cannot be resocialized in the way some sociologists and social reformers would lead us to expect with their platitudinous call for “more education” to solve social problems, professional actors display a very unexpected relation to the requirements of a stratification system based on class. For this research, McHugh (1969) followed what looks like the standard participant observation methodology, interviewing “fifty professional [stage] actors, observing their rehearsals” and participating “with them out of hours” (540).

IntroductIon

xi

Incidentally, there is an added reflexive component to this paper, as McHugh was raised in an acting family, being the son of the well-known Hollywood actor, Frank McHugh; before he entered academia, he actually did some acting in his own right. As we will see from the Bonner paper, McHugh attributes, in some ambiguous way, his experience in acting as preparing him for the kind of theoretic trajectory his scholarly career took. As the “Structured Uncertainty” paper demonstrates, professional actors suffer from socioeconomic uncertainty: his research showed they averaged “about four jobs per year, and they lose 5 for each job they obtain. Thus their competence is reviewed about twenty-five times a year” (1969, 541); they are moreover unsuccessful in job seeking about 80 per cent of the time. His research concludes: “the socioeconomic and technical conditions of acting increase the uncertainty of a member’s position in society and decrease the calculability of his effectiveness at work. The actor moves unpredictably from job to job. Vertical mobility may be great, it may not, there being no way to tell – the only sure thing is rapid descent” (548). Now, while these are conditions that would lead sociologists to predict anomie or demoralization, that, as McHugh shows, is not the experience of these professional actors. Rather, and here he cites Weber (1947, 393–6), these actors are collected by a collegial social organization that effectively neutralizes the uncertainty. As if a lead in to what Garfinkel demonstrated as a feature of the concerted activities of everyday life, McHugh (1969) concludes “there are circumstances where uncertainty does not lead to anomie, where a detailed set of rules and positions are not necessary to order, where broad-gauged behaviour and unconcern with reputation are not signs of demoralization” (555). The social organization of professional stage actors may be atypical, yet this case study demonstrates the limitations of the Parsonian theory of society; we have here a case, atypical though it is, where both at a fundamental and ordinary level, solidarity rather than normative orientation is foundational. Or, more accurately – but in a way admittedly not yet fully developed in McHugh’s work – solidarity and normativity are foundationally intertwined. While these professional stage actors do, like other groups in Western society, need to achieve in terms of economic and social mobility, in stark contrast to other groups, they do not measure themselves in terms of their level of achievement. We get something counterintuitive according to standard social stratification theory, an egalitarianism that does not depend on equality of outcome and a solidarity that does not depend on sustained relations to the means of production.

xii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Both these earlier papers, then, show McHugh engaging with, on the face of it, fairly standard sociological topics but also reaching rather surprising conclusions that constitute something of a challenge to the conventional sociological understandings of the time; in particular, he points to the problem of social order as needing to be retheorized more fundamentally. In both cases, the ambiguity that would later be recognized as the limit of language and conduct is here recognized in the one case as the failure to adequately theorize what radical resocialization means and, in the other, to account for what should have been an anomic or alienated reaction to unstable economic and social conditions. This leads us to the third paper in our volume. Though he undeniably had and still has his critics, Talcott Parsons was the most influential sociological theorist of the twentieth century. Whether mostly affirmed (as he was in the 1950s and early 1960s) or disputed (as he was from the late 1960s on), much of twentieth century sociology could reasonably be said to be situated in relation to a position vis-à-vis Parsons. In his influential book Defining the Situation (1968) – excerpted in chapter 3 of the present collection – McHugh acknowledges Parsons’s contribution, both by accepting that sociology’s core problem is the one he dealt with via a specific case in the first paper, social order, and also that the existence of normative rules is key to the problem’s solution. However, more immediate influences are those who, unlike Parsons, emphasize the need to see the “intersubjective” side of rule following, notably Alfred Schutz (1962) and Harold Garfinkel (1967). As McHugh (1968) states, “macrosocial ideas and analyses are … insufficient because both society and interaction are preconditions of each other, and to have social order at a societal level there must be some (not necessarily identical) order at the interactional level” (9). His focus on the way members define the situation serves as a “behavioural and methodological device to account for the relation between grand matters grandly put [Parsons] and the prosaic details of everyday life [Schutz, Garfinkel], upon which any cosmos logically depends” (11). Consistent with his objection to merely accepting normative rules as solving the social order problem, he asks, “in what sense do rules ‘determine’ definition … How is it that the rule of monogamy is followed, since it might not be?” (13). For much of sociology, norms or normative rules (of, e.g., monogamy) are the basic building blocks of society: but how do they work? To say, as many in the Marxist political economy tradition might, that they work

IntroductIon

xiii

through “false consciousness,” is “to replace one criterion (common sense) with another (institutions according to sociology). All well and good,” says McHugh (1968), “except that it is unreasonable to ascribe subjectivity to one and objectivity to another, since both are objective in their own terms” (10). McHugh, on the other hand, formulates social rules by working through role-taking according to Mead, asking “how do they take the role of the other and so ‘ascertain what they are doing?’” (12); motivated action according to Parsons, who “provides us with units in which rules might be followed, but we are without a description of the ways rules are followed” (16); common sense understanding according to Schutz, who “advanced the empirical idea of norms one step by talking about them as they are formulated by the actor” (16) and by so doing highlighted that norms are “assumptions that actors make” in actual interaction – but who still leaves unexplained “just how do assumptions get invoked during an interaction” (17); and the ethnomethodology of Garfinkel, who shows how the sanctioned properties of discourse or constitutive rules “are necessary in the sense that a stable order requires their presence” (17). Even here, though, McHugh notes that defining the situation uses both constitutive rules and preferential rules. Unlike Garfinkel, he seeks to describe both processes. In this, he explores the actual process of rule adherence in the manner of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) and some of his followers. Normative rule following emerges as a highly problematic phenomenon, the nature of which remains to be described. “As an element of social order, defining the situation is a bedrock ‘form of life.’ Therefore it is necessary to describe it rather than explain it by showing how it exhibits features external to itself ” (McHugh 1968, 18). McHugh’s ambitious aim is to show the way defining the situation “is, in this sense, a form of life, a rendering of an event that needs no further grounds” (19). In an important move, also further developed in later work, members’ normativity is linked to becoming self-conscious or reflexive. We can note that, to the extent to which he can establish such a relationship, self-consciousness would become a topic about which sociologists (as well as of course psychologists) can have something to say. McHugh’s increasing interest in what an actor must know or oriented action is balanced by a decreasing interest in socialization, as conventionally formulated. In a development over previous work, it is now seen that, as an explanation for how norms are followed, including the possibility that they are not followed, the concept of socialization glosses the process that must be addressed.

xiv

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

There was another book published around the same time as McHugh’s Defining the Situation that acknowledged in much more dramatic fashion that sociology, after Parsons, needed a change of direction. Alvin Gouldner (1970) announced that sociology was in a “crisis.” Independently, Gouldner arrived at a similar conclusion with McHugh, that resolving the crisis would require attention to reflexivity. However, while Gouldner adheres to a hopelessly concrete version of reflexivity, his solution shows us how the concept McHugh was grappling with was a prominent interest in the 1970s. As we delve further into McHugh’s contribution, we wonder whether those in our times who do not take the reflexivity issue seriously – those who think all is resolved with “big data,” for example, or those such as Jeffery Alexander who think one can theorize while ignoring how the theorist is a producer, thereby continuing the reflexivity problematic – are in any way closer to resolving the crisis to which Gouldner prophetically pointed. As we will see, the reflexivity developed by McHugh (along with his collaborator Alan Blum) provides the basis for the way theorists can take responsibility for the form of what is said as well as its content. Though McHugh explicitly rejects the theory–method distinction – and especially so in the excerpt from Defining the Situation included here – it still is fair to say that the next paper, “On the Failure of Positivism” (1970b), demonstrates how theory is method by addressing the dominant paradigm of the sciences and social sciences. While the nature and viability of positivism (its theoretical justification as it were) is most often discussed within the province of philosophy, we would note that McHugh, as we would now expect, brings a strong sociological perspective to it. His specific sociological move is to ask whether positivism, as it is formulated in various theories as a method for establishing truth, is a viable form of social action. What he finds is that the process of establishing truth in the sciences and social sciences is primarily a social enterprise. When he examines correspondence theories or coherence theories, the two prevailing conventional theories of truth production, he finds that they are not only self-contradictory as formulations but, more importantly, they fail to account for the behavioural ways truth is established in practice (McHugh 1970b, 328). “Correspondence posits a single, despotic reality so unmalleable that it does not permit us to talk of the truth of differences in communication and action by persons in the same location in the system” (329). On the other hand, “coherence posits so many realities that one cannot talk of the truth of the same communication and action by persons in different locations” (329).

IntroductIon

xv

In ways that would point to the future development of the perspective that came to be called Analysis, McHugh shows that social inquiry and truth finding as a social action is “beyond objectivism and relativism” (332), neither the alienation of pure objectivism nor arbitrary and accidental as in relativism. The conclusion to his analysis of the failure of positivism is that, “nothing – no object, event, or circumstance – determines its own status as truth, either to the scientist or to science. No sign automatically attaches a referent, no fact speaks for itself, no proposition for its value” (332) – and so, “that a finding is ‘true’ comes to be so only after applying to it the analytic formulation of a method by which that finding could be understood to have been produced” (332). In this vein McHugh (1970b) wrote, “Truth is conceivable only as a socially organised upshot of contingent courses of linguistic, conceptual, and social courses of behaviour” (329). It turns out that this statement forms the major, indeed the only, evidence for Jürgen Habermas’s (1984) conclusion that Blum and McHugh are “self-confessed relativists” (130). This conclusion is wrongheaded on two grounds. Firstly, while there certainly is a concession driving McHugh’s statement that there can be no truth-statement that is independent of the procedures for establishing it, it is also saying that establishing a truth is a matter for a community. As Blum and McHugh were to develop, reflexivity could provide a basis of access to standards by which community, in turn, could be assessed and evaluated (Bonner 2001). Communally determined criteria are not nearly as loose as the radical relativism that Habermas perceives in this quotation. Relatedly, Habermas did not follow subsequent developments in Blum and McHugh’s work. In that light, readers should consider whether the alternative to absolute truth put forward in McHugh’s “Insomnia” paper (1996) or the idea of truth as an unshakeable conviction (see Blum and McHugh 1984, 128–34) can safely be dismissed as relativism. Though independent of each other, Analysis, like Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Arendt’s political theory, seeks to establish a truth that is “beyond objectivism and relativism” (as Bernstein [1983] would say). In particular and as Blum and McHugh would demonstrate in Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (1984, 89–100), Habermas misses the opportunity that a radical reflexivity offers for truth assessment – an opportunity, as we will show, already available in this very essay. If positivism has failed, sociology has lost its preferred method, a method that we must admit even McHugh himself has used previously, especially in the paper on actors with its reliance on interviews, representative sampling,

xvi

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

and his respondents’ own opinions as basically descriptive – though in light of his later work, the organization of the respondents’ opinions around an argument that is the author’s points, in retrospect, to an ironic recursive element of the paper. Members’ accounts, now, are not descriptive in a correspondence or coherence sense but rather themselves rest on methods for producing what they conclude. In the final section of this paper, then, McHugh argues there is no such thing as either theory or method alone, “for theory is not distinctive and procedures are without content … Neither can be adequately conceived except as an integral practice of the other: theory is method and method is theory” (1970b 334). This brings McHugh, in turn, to a formulation of the difference between the member and the sociologist, which, in a way, points to both the beginning of the difference between ethnomethodology and Analysis, and also toward the development of the latter. What makes sociological talk distinct from members’ talk is that a sociologist is or should be self-conscious or reflexive about the canons used to establish a truth. “Sociology is not a program for saying ‘In society X children are considered a virtue’ – the member can do that, and the tourist too. It is instead a program for describing the theoretic-procedural rules by which it can be said … the rules by which it can be said commonsensically and the rules by which it can be said sociologically” (McHugh 1970b, 335). If concretely there are sociologists who say “in society X …,” this is analytically indistinguishable from members’ talk. In order to distinguish the voice of the sociologist from merely being the members’ mouthpiece, sociologists must be able to account for the method that produced whatever truth they establish; that is, sociology must be reflexive. Thus, and in contrast to Habermas’s claim, McHugh’s paper offers preliminary thoughts on what, in the wake of positivism’s failure, an alternative version of truth seeking might look like. McHugh recognizes that there must be some alternative criterion if one is to justify a distinction between the sociologist and those he or she studies. The tentative suggestion is to work toward an articulation of what form a nonpositivist version of truth’s relation to knowing might take. If by knowing we mean oriented action or self-consciousness, arguably McHugh has already begun this work. Just like the papers on stratification and socialization, the next paper, “A Common-Sense Conception of Deviance” (1970a), deals with a standard sociological topic. But the glaring difference between this paper and the earlier ones is that now McHugh explicitly avoids the conventional methods of analysing the topic. At the time of writing, there were two dominant

IntroductIon

xvii

procedures for explaining social deviance: the causal approach associated with Robert Merton (1968) and the reaction or labelling approach associated with Howard Becker (1963). Instead of either of these, McHugh focuses on the phenomenon itself – deviance in its own right; that is, he carefully develops a description of the requirements of the phenomenon of deviance, requirements the explanatory foci lack but also must presume. By so doing, we suggest, he begins to exemplify what, in practice, a nonpositivist method for sociology might involve. We see that what it does involve is the sociologist, qua theorist, starting from what he or she takes as an ordinary member’s view of, in this instance, deviance, but not stopping there, instead going on to depict (formulate) the criteria that underlie (produce) it. That is, McHugh here goes on to do what he says sociologists need to do to distinguish sociological talk from members’ talk, by articulating and formulating the conditions for members’ talk. In this case, McHugh arrives at two criteria that, he argues, can generate the members’ view, namely that we get deviance only if the act in question might have been otherwise and if the actor doing it is formulated as knowing what he is doing. “For the observing member, in other words, a deviant act must occur in a situation where he [or she] can conceive that there were alternatives to that act; and it must be committed by an actor who knows what the alternatives were” (McHugh 1970a, 61). Though McHugh does not say so, the implication is that neither Merton nor Becker are only studying the surface features of deviance since if the deviance has a cause it could not be otherwise and so it would fail to meet a constitutive element of the phenomenon: if it is all in the label, the doer may not accept that he knows he is deviating, which overlooks the other constitutive feature. That is, these theories of deviance fail to describe the processes members engage in when deciding on deviance. The sociologist must “do more than merely cite causes and terms, for these are only implicitly descriptive of what members do – of the courses of social treatment by which the causes and terms are enacted and take observable shape” (McHugh 1970a, 64). We see this paper as proposing a kind of sociology that is significantly different. However, we should, as well, note that it also displays progress in McHugh’s substantive thinking, especially in how the process of following norms is understood. Here, this process is depicted as knowing what one is doing in the absence of conditions of failure. As the telling example of various stages of the treatment of a child in preparation for a school interview makes clear, these two criteria provide what McHugh was looking for in

xviii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

previous work: a sociological version of what it is to self-consciously describe the ground of members’ actions as they go about the ordinary activity of, in this case, charging one with deviating from a norm (conventionality) and recognizing whether the charge sticks. “When the conventional contingency is realized the equivalent of a charge has been made. The charge sticks or not, depending on whether the actor is also treated as a theoretic or practical actor [theory is method, method is theory] … Conventionality and theoreticity are the processes by which deviance is recognized, responsibility ascribed, and labels designated” (McHugh 1970a, 78). Labelling theory, while seemingly plausible, glosses this process. As if to point to his joint work with Blum, McHugh concludes, “it is the rules to which we look in our creation of moral assessments, enforcements, exemptions, and so on, and in the theoretic case it is from these rules we look to see if alter also looked … The state of the world and the state of the actor are part and parcel of moral rules … Moral rules not only permit but create and require the possibility of argument, denial and disconfirmation” (85). The next paper in our collection, “Confrontation,” (written in 1972 but unpublished) takes us from McHugh’s reflections on the academic discipline of sociology to his experience in the academy itself. A special feature of “Confrontation” is that it was the product of a specific experience.1 Both McHugh and Blum were teaching at Columbia University in April 1968, a period of a major student uprising featuring a sustained building occupation that managed to shut down normal university functions. Unlike most of their colleagues, even those supposedly on the left (those depicted in the paper as “liberals”), McHugh and Blum were strong supporters of the students, as best demonstrated by the fact that, like the students who occupied the buildings, they were arrested in the police action that ended the strike. On the one hand, this paper amounts to a sympathetic treatment of the students’ strategy and tactics, which did consist in the use of confrontation. But this aspect of the paper should not distract us from seeing that it is also clearly a case of McHugh again utilizing the method he was developing in the previous paper. He is, we can say, formulating confrontation in various ways but especially by contrasting it with the old left idea that what is needed to produce consciousness is instruction. Also noteworthy in this paper is the critique of liberalism on the unusual ground that it has a flawed version of speech. Liberalism is resisted because it treats speech as natural, as neutral. It fails to make language problematic.

IntroductIon

xix

This paper can read as a period piece, written in the aftermath of, and strongly influenced by, events of the late 1960s, events that both Blum and McHugh had observed and participated in. The argument it makes was transformed by later developments in their collective and individual works. However, we note that the core innovation credited to the New Left – that is, that the way to bring the other’s recognition about is not by the liberal method of dialogue but by the radical method of confrontation – is hardly a passé idea. Allowing for differing modes of expression, this selfsame notion is present in currently influential radical thinkers, notably, Žižek (1999), Rancière (2010), and Badiou (2005). Though Blum and McHugh would go on to develop a rigorous dialectic as an alternative to humanistic liberal dialogue, there is a clear affinity between what the New Left was advocating and the experience of facing the other as introduced and developed in McHugh’s paper on affirmative action (2005) written many years later. Both the need to denaturalize language and the recognition, as referenced in the previous paper on deviance, that the “state of the world and the state of the actor are part and parcel of moral rules” provide an almost seamless lead-in to the next period in McHugh’s working life, lasting some twenty years, his collaboration with his friend and colleague Alan Blum; it forms the main subject of Kieran Bonner’s paper in this volume, based on his interviews with McHugh in 2007. However, we do not here include any of his writing from that period as all his published work during that time was collaboratively written and this book is devoted exclusively to his solo writing. See the bibliography at the end of this volume for the full list of their published collaborative work. We take up the story with McHugh’s next solo piece, “A Letter of Resignation” (1992). Here, he is first defending and then analysing his drastic and dramatic decision to resign his university post. As Bonner notes in his piece, McHugh’s complaint in his resignation that “first questions” are being ignored in his academic setting reflects his early education in philosophy. But, it also treats as a resource the previously noted commitment to reflexivity as essential to moral thought and action. Notwithstanding the letter’s philosophical grounding, in terms of our emphasis on McHugh’s relation to sociology, we see that even the admittedly descriptive letter is still steeped in sociological concerns. Thus, in explaining the university’s current state, he cites both structural conditions and cultural factors. He also bemoans the impact of bureaucratic processes in the modern university, especially the concern with the rise of the administrative ethos that has only

xx

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

grown since the time of his resignation. The letter is particularly poignant in describing the alliance of administrativism and parochial student interest (instrumentalism) in terms of its effect on the teacher–student relationship. Yet, in that regard – and despite the rise of structural conditions and cultural factors that seem overpowering to an individual university teacher – the letter reminds that one always has an existential choice, the choice in this case to resign from his job in protest. To this extent he is practically reflexive with regard to the analytic grounds of conventionality and theoreticity, the foundational elements of moral action. In a paper on role, Raffel (1999) describes how a particular teacher who goes above and beyond the expectations (the rules) of the role of teaching, can be understood to act from the distinction between rules and principles, as developed by Blum and McHugh in their 1984 work. If the rule/principle distinction can be said to go some way to account for an actor (i.e., teacher) who is committed to the activity of teaching as shown by going beyond expectations, conversely, it can be here applied to an act of resignation because the particular role expectations he describes hinder the activity of teaching. When McHugh was asked by the editors of Dianoia for permission to publish his letter, he agreed only if he could provide an addendum as his way of drawing attention to the difference between a description (even if sociological) of the situation and an Analysis of it; though self-conscious reflection (moral thought) and principled action need each other, each has its own demands. In this addendum, McHugh poses five questions that, if taken up, offer the possibility of what he now explicitly describes as an Analysis. This is a reference to the distinctive method of doing sociology, which, as we have shown, was available in nascent form in his papers written before his full collaboration with Blum began; it reached fruition in the course of their collaboration. In this Analysis section, clearly McHugh is not using conventional sociological methods to arrive at his suggestions for further work, but still, it would be an extreme case of misunderstanding to conclude that he has turned into something other than a social and sociological theorist. Thus, and just as an example, he is clearly thinking of resignation as he thought of deviance and of positivism, namely as a norm-oriented (or, in Blum and McHugh’s terms, rule-guided) form of social action. Also of sociological relevance is his critical take on reason. Theorizing reason in this way – e.g., “reason can become entirely technical and administrative, thus losing its place by supplanting its purpose” (McHugh 1992, 111) – should not seem

IntroductIon

xxi

at all strange to those familiar with the critical social theory developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1986). Besides the paper on confrontation, with “A Letter of Resignation” we now have a second opportunity to examine McHugh’s take on the university scene. One difference is that, unlike the central concept of the earlier paper, confrontation, there is no way the central concept of this one, consumerism, is not pervasive. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that nowadays the pervasive influence of the consumerist ethos on university life has become dominant. Thus, we see the strong affinity between what McHugh was talking about in the 1990s and the central thesis of Stefan Collini’s recent and well-reviewed Speaking of Universities (2017). A further issue is what McHugh makes of the two phenomena that he detects as potentially present in the university: he treats the potential for confrontation with enthusiasm (“revolution is in the air”) whereas he seems to be in despair at the strength of consumerism. In the addendum where he shows how a theorist could be Analytic rather than descriptive with regard to the conditions so described, McHugh tempers his despair. The rise of consumerism is now just one comic example of the university’s attempts to survive while still orienting to the desire to know: consumerism pretends it can live with a watered-down version of knowing as achieving some goal and that pretence is comic to the knower. We can speculate that, if he had applied his theorist’s eye to the conclusions of the confrontation paper, they would have been tempered by a realization that a university cannot survive merely by finding a home for confrontation; dialectical or purposeful reasoning (i.e., non technical reasoning) needs to have a place in the university. The next paper, by Stanley Raffel, takes up McHugh’s suggestion to think analytically about the action or, as is turns out, the two forms of action that resignation can take. Raffel uses the descriptive material in McHugh’s letter to suggest how Analysis can help us understand what is involved in a good and necessary resignation. It articulates the taken for granted understandings involved in the long stage of McHugh’s type one resignation (submission) before arriving at the decision to act on the second type of resignation (evacuation). It uncovers the type of moral reasoning involved in putting up with bad conditions (swallowing) and the type of moral reasoning that leaving (throwing up) requires. Indirectly, the paper provides ways of analytically thinking of complaining, protests, strikes, collective action – even confrontation more generally, in the modern university setting;

xxii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

it can be read as a way of showing how Analysis takes a text, in this case about bad university conditions, and proceeds to tease out the actions and thinking embedded in the text, in turn as a way of showing what it looks like to articulate and act on McHugh’s first questions – “what are we” and “how should we live” – in very particular circumstances. The next paper – “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance” (1993) – is noteworthy for providing a very clear demonstration of what McHugh first alluded to in the addendum to his letter. It provides a fully worked out example of what it is to think analytically about a topic. So doing, we gather from this paper, would involve identifying the usage, the grammar, and finally, the form of life2 for, in this case, fragmentation. This was a paper written for a conference on “Fragmentation and the Desire for Order/Unity” in Alberta, Canada. It appeared to be so direct a response to the Call for Papers, to which it frequently makes reference, that the Dianoia editors decided to reprint the Conference Announcement as part of the paper. By thinking analytically, in the tradition of Analysis, it is determined that, in terms of its grammar, fragmentation is connected to the basic activity of being able to make things. In turn, making and its possible consequence, fragmentation, are seen to have, as their underlying form of life, an attempt to overcome human finitude. Fragmentation, he says, brings a particular anxiety or dread that is different than the grief that attaches to death. The vexing character of fragmentation … is … because it raises a doubt about our power not present in death-decay … In the face of mortality, fragmentation generates an extra doubt, doubt not just about the durability of the manuscript or Yugoslavia, but of the endurance of our own power to make, powers which had been our own to exercise and without which the opportunity to create definite things, the world would vanish … The special loss in fragmentation, as distinct from death and decay, is that it is not inevitable. (McHugh 1993, 45–6) As McHugh reflexively notes, the opportunity to make that humans take up (or not) is not itself made; rather, the opportunity points to the limit of making. This limit “is a fate … a requirement, which does not come and go” (47) in the way that what we make can come and go. Fragmentation is a moment in “the continuity of making” but a moment that makes visible

IntroductIon

xxiii

what is necessary for making, thinking, and violence – or “deliberation and transformation.” Fragmentation, he goes on say, lives “in the excess of unregulated making” (49). In a way that goes beyond the analysis of Heidegger (1978a, 1978b) and George Grant (1969), or even Arendt (1958), who is approvingly cited, McHugh points to a core aspect of our contemporary era – the marriage of technology and science; fragmentation in this era raises “the dread” of making as “pure transformation, violence unshaped by communal ends or deliberations, which in the idiom of today we could say have been cleansed from the relation” (49). This thinking about what a limit is, its properties and how they can affect our relation to it – an issue he examines at length – is, as he acknowledges, influenced by Maurice Blanchot (1993). Here, McHugh reflects the increased interest in continental theory that has been a defining characteristic of advanced sociology ever since the late 1980s. But whereas it was usual for theorists to be influenced by what we might call more easily assimilated continentals such as Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Ulrich Beck (1992), and Bruno Latour (1993), it is striking that it is the enigmatic figure of Blanchot who has excited McHugh. Blanchot, of course, is no sociologist, but even as McHugh makes use of him in his 1993 paper, he does not lose sight of sociological issues – now in the form of the social significance of fragmentation – nor, for that matter, how fragmentation as a social phenomenon seems relevant and urgent in our technological era where making “is left to itself … reified as pure making for its own sake” (48). In addition to the fact that he connects the concept of fragmentation to the noxious societal phenomenon of ethnic cleansing happening in Yugoslavia at the time (and so adds an original dimension to genocide research), there is the concluding idea that the great mistake that results in fragmentation occurs whenever making ceases to be regulated by communal considerations. The “hard truth” McHugh points to, is that in an era of “undeliberated transformative power,” communal ends can become “cleansed from the relation” (49) to making. We will see that the interest in social order now becomes an increasing interest on his part in the notion of community. Perhaps one of the major well-known challenges to the conventional sociology of this period was offered by Jean François Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition (1984). Though first published in translation some years ago, its ramifications are still being felt even today. Lyotard created controversy by dismissing Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, and Jürgen

xxiv

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Habermas, three figures with a place in the sociological pantheon, as all outmoded purveyors of “grand narratives” (1984, 11–12, 66, 88n37). McHugh’s response to Lyotard and to other work that shares major aspects of Lyotard’s viewpoint – notably Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction (1978) – forms the subject of his next paper, “Insomnia and the T(error) of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism” (1996). As McHugh notes, and as underlined in our opening quotation, postmodernism has in common with the theorizing of Blum and McHugh a recognition of the inevitable ambiguity in the relation between any and every sign and what it signifies. But, as we have seen, thinking analytically requires proceeding from surface ambiguity to identifying an underlying form of life for whatever phenomenon one is seeking to study. As a phenomenon’s form of life would seem to amount to its ground or foundation, McHugh differs from postmodernism by resisting its conclusion that the ambiguity of sign–signifier relations means that we can exist, never mind happily exist, without foundation. If postmodernism recommends erasure of foundation, “any erasure theorist must, to be such a theorist, formulate erasure. And this latter is not a contingency the way facts and relations are contingent. For one thing it is said to be a universal. For another, it is unavoidable if one is to be an erasure theorist, to erase, a requirement which is constitutive of postmodernism” (McHugh 1996, 21). That is, the reflexivity of postmodernism could end up being deeply contradictory because in its denial of all foundation, it denies what it requires to make its very own claims. But McHugh’s Analysis goes further. Though he shows the potential for postmodernism to be radically unreflexive, this does not mean it cannot be a practice. In the language of his paper on the failure of positivism (1970b), though it is not self-reflective about its procedures for establishing truth, this does not make its practice impossible. McHugh therefore pushes his Analysis of postmodernism further by analysing its practice. If theory is method and method is theory, he shows what an impoverished form of social life awaits the self-proclaimed foundationless actor – namely, a life without the necessary commitment that gives one a place in some community. Drawing on a surprising source, Dante’s Inferno, McHugh (1996) formulates postmodern practice – and in particular, the practice that in denying foundation denies its own foundation – as a form of futility. He likens this futility to insomnia: “the emptiness of insomnia is … content emptied of collective significance and thus also of a community’s

IntroductIon

xxv

own power to generate individual commitment and to limit the sign’s perfect freedom” (36). Community, then, features even more strongly in this paper than it did in the previous one. At the same time, the paper also suggests that if what is meant by loss of foundation, as it does seem to mean in certain passages in Jacques Derrida’s work, is that there is a limit (in Blanchot’s sense) to the kind of knowledge that we, as interpreting beings, can attain, then a postmodern perspective can indeed, as postmodernists like to think, offer a kind of liberation. Free from even the aspiration to perfect knowledge, we can enjoy the opportunities offered by what Derrida (1978) calls, without quite grasping how it offers a kind of foundation, “active interpretation” (292). McHugh (1996) offers several examples, both mundane and “important,” of what such active interpretation could look like in practice: “we can take pleasure in the particular artifice involved in tossing pasta, peacemaking, invention, expression of talent, spontaneity, and so on, which can be indelibly satisfying as occasions in the taming of uncertainty … the limit is. But we can live creatively in its image if as we interpret we embody its freedom [contingency] and necessity [contingent foundation]” (34). In this sense, we see that McHugh takes up and affirms the opportunity a limit offers, as he described with regard to another limit in the previous paper. Taking stock here on what has been accomplished so far, we have received a powerful demonstration of the self-contradictory nature of postmodernism. While we would argue that this critique has been developed in a way that is distinctive to McHugh, he is, of course, not the only one to see this incoherence at the heart of postmodernism. However, what most certainly is distinctive to McHugh (and yet is perhaps insufficiently flagged in the postmodernism paper itself ) is what he now concedes – namely, that a reformulated postmodernism can offer a route out of the failures of positivism (see especially section 5). Freed from even the aspiration to absolute knowledge, we can indeed experience a kind of liberation – that of providing active interpretations. Unlike Derrida, McHugh offers detailed examples of what active interpretations look like. But is such liberation a necessary result of postmodern thinking? No, we might say here instead that, among other things, McHugh is actively interpreting postmodernism. The result is that we see not only the flaws of postmodernism – its exaggerated claims or even its downright ignorance of its own logic – but also, with the “active interpretation” of Analysis, a very significant contribution to what

xxvi

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

can come after positivism. In other words, there is a way past the either/ or choice of the big data of science and the relativism of (spurious) claims to a foundationless reflexivity. Finally, there is at least one noteworthy methodological innovation in this paper, a first use of a technique that McHugh will continue to utilize and also further refine in subsequent work. In thinking analytically about postmodernism, he makes use of an extended metaphor; i.e., one way he lets postmodernism appear is by suggesting that it has something in common with insomnia. Affirmative action, the subject of the next paper, “Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action” (2005), is a difficult idea to defend because it does not seem fair; admittedly, the policy discriminates between one group in favour of another. McHugh shows that by thinking analytically about what affirmative action is meant to serve – justice – it is possible to defend it. Affirmative action can be just when justice can be seen not as neutral fairness but as “the socially organized theory and practice of society that arises out of shared being” (McHugh 2005, 140) defined as “a place both for being in common and being oneself ” (138). That is, shared being is not for self and against the other or for the other but at the expense of self (both ways of thinking about the supposed unfairness of affirmative action) but rather a place where being in community and being oneself are in a self-influencing dialogue. Clearly this is a concept of justice that is informed by thinking as a sociologist would and should, about the needs of a society. “Equality and equity together in the life-world amount to justice (or injustice), which is the socially organized moral theory and practice of society that arises out of shared being” (140). Indeed justice more or less is the practice of thinking about the needs of a society. In arriving at this concept, McHugh again shows the influence of difficult continental thinkers who he, like some others, was reading at this time. In particular, we see the influence of Emmanuel Levinas (1969) in the paper’s argument that seeing the face is needed to stimulate us to engage with what would be moral. We also see the influence of Jean-Luc Nancy (1993) for the idea, essential for analytic justice, that we share being and so that persons cannot be conceived of as ontological “I”s, as a purely liberal democracy imagines so-called “individuals.” This paper, too, displays continuities with previous work. In particular, we see McHugh developing the notion already present in inchoate form in the last two papers that it is only in relation to community analytically

IntroductIon

xxvii

speaking that the needs and desires (and now, the moral obligations) of being a person can be fully understood. A second continuity is that he is again using the method of comparison or extended metaphor – this time in suggesting that we will go awry in working out what justice could be for African American people in the contemporary United States if we imagine that slavery is like a plane crash or if we see justice is achieved by the formal proceduralism of mechanical triage. Here, picking up on the idea of principle developed in his collaboration with Blum (1984), and continuing with the earlier statement that theory is method and method is theory, McHugh (2005) states, “what affirms principle or any substance, whether it be freedom, pursuing happiness, nativism, or whatever, is action; affirming action is necessary for principle to make an appearance in the life-world as one element of the common place” (152). That is, part of the common place that is the United States is its history, in this case the history of slavery. The equality that is constitutive of the founding of the United States and the equity that seeks to address contingent flaws in that foundation are brought together in affirmative action, as a way of affirming the original principle in action. With its talk of infinitude, the ontological significance of birth and death, and not least its avowed concern with nothing less than the meaning of life, the next paper, “Notes on Circulation” (written in 2007 but not published), does at first seem distant from sociological concerns, even if it continues wrestling with the deep foundations of social order and makes use of the work of Simmel in the process. It may help to orient the (perhaps disoriented) reader to note that the issues McHugh engages with here are not all that removed from the issues discussed by another philosophically sophisticated social theorist, Hannah Arendt (the subject of recent publications in sociology) addressing the way her work intersects with and challenges contemporary sociological theory. In Arendt’s well-known and greatly respected book, The Human Condition (1958), she too dwells on the meaning of birth and death and even, like McHugh, imagines life as “cyclical movement” – at least in relation to a central dimension of the human condition, biological life (1958, 96). Also like McHugh in this and other papers (and like sociologists in general), she focuses on social action as a key type of this movement. The issues engaged in McHugh’s “Circulation” paper, therefore, are not exactly foreign to previous (and distinguished) social theory. But it is also important to note how McHugh and Arendt differ. Where she sees the

xxviii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

world of stories as established in history as providing some kind of permanent and reliable home for human judgments – and so, at least in the case of some social actions, exempting human behaviour from cyclical movement – McHugh, in thinking analytically about what circulation actually is (and in particular, its indiscriminate nature), offers no such exemption for any act or any actor. He asks, “is circulation synonymous with sense, virtually in thrall to sense in that what does not make sense cannot circulate?” And he answers no, eventually concluding that it is quite possible that even “gibberish” will circulate. From the perspective of the living actor, circulation points to a limit that makes powerlessness visible. While some of us might argue that Arendt’s concept of the world provides a way of relating to action via stories and so also provides a way of distinguishing between what is worth enduring and social detritus, resisting the laissez faire feature of circulation, McHugh highlights the powerlessness of the living actor’s relation to the eventual meaning of what will endure. In this sense, his conceptions of action and circulation speak as much to this era of mediated neoliberal globalization as it does to human possibility (Arendt’s focus). His conclusion here is also consistent with the point expressed in previous papers and with which we began this introduction, that there is an inevitable ambiguity inherent in sign–signifier relations. It takes up the problem of the limit raised in both the “Fragmentation” (1993) and “Postmodernism” (1996) papers but now as the powerlessness of what circulates to have a definite meaning or even any (meaningful) meaning. If the “Shared Being” (2005) paper takes up the issue of the just relation of persons to those in the community who have suffered a past injustice, the “Circulation” paper takes up the issue of the limit to which even justice is subject, in that there is no guarantee that what turns out to be possible because it comes to exist will be just or even make sense. How anything comes to circulate in life will be a matter of fate, not justice. In his almost stoically Irish American fashion, here in the guise of circulation, he formulates the limit as fate, including, we might add, the fate of his own work. We note here that it is reflexively ironic that this book project participates in this very problematic McHugh analyzes and, by so doing, attempts to intervene in the circulation of what “McHugh” might mean, perhaps pointing to a more Arendtian possibility. This project ironically recognizes that here, too, our very act of writing and publishing is an example of what is (now) circulating in the world even as we recognize that this project is not exempt from the circulation which carries “transition and thus carries

IntroductIon

xxix

both sense and nonsense as they are in transit (hence the survival of cultural ‘junk’ along with treasure, for example).”3 On the methodological level, note that this paper too adopts, as one of its resources, the method of comparison, though less in the extendedmetaphor format. One way McHugh manages to depict circulation’s paradoxical combination of wealth of material and utter indiscriminateness of that material is to suggest it is rather like a person who manages to be both “gross and fecund,” which may be one of the hard truths of the limit to which all actors are subject. Intimacy, the topic of the next paper (written in 2009 but unpublished), is surely one that, unlike the previous paper, does fit within the normal province of sociology. At the same time, however, conventional sociology finds it difficult to analyse it or sometimes even acknowledge its existence. As McHugh explains, the difficulty arises because intimacy requires an unusual form of discourse, one that is foreign to the positivistic, representative discourse to which sociology is still wedded. This differing order of discourse is shown to be similar (note again the method of metaphor) to how effective art communicates, namely by revealing more than it can say in so many words. Like a good painting, intimates do not need to be explicit. Instead they reveal by intimating. The oriented action that is intimacy “possesses an innermost interiority and a face to face sociality, which together constitute the basic elements of intimacy.” In several ways, this paper is the other side of his previous “Circulation” paper. If circulation is laissez faire, intimacy is its inverse: “innermost is labyrinthine and invisible, mixing the residues of however many hours of experience, however many transformations of those hours and in what order, however many directions and redirections of desire and the various fates of its particulars, however many endowments, and in what proportion of good or ill, of nature, chance, and occult esoterica.” As these elements crystallize in the context of an intimate relation, “it will include all this × 2 or more (intimates) … generating a formidably transformed architecture of being, intelligible to members yet beyond all powers of totalizing description.” It is in intimacy that the heterogeneity of language, its fundamental ambiguity, finds its richest expression. This rich ambiguity, says McHugh, is informative, even while being, at least via the technique of representation, indescribable. This, we suggest, is a “mature” paper in that it does not so much wrestle with the relation between the ambiguity of language and identity as try to work out what the indescribable allows for. In

xxx

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

the “Postmodernism” paper, McHugh responds to the hypothetical question “who cares who is speaking” with a “Me, Me I say, and that’s enough” (1996, 39). In the “Intimacy” paper, McHugh imagines “a close companion gently asking, ‘Who are you … who, truly, are you?’” – a question that invites coming to terms with one’s identity “after all is said and done.” It is as though McHugh poses the challenge of whether one can truly be intimate with and for oneself and other. Though this is the last complete paper that McHugh ever wrote, there are clear signs that his thought was still developing in ways that would be hard or even impossible to predict from previous work. In particular, we would single out the continuing use of Levinas but now to argue that he could actually offer an alternative to the master concept in the discipline of sociology, the concept of society, which McHugh names as “the general atmosphere.” Commitment to care for self and other, a commitment developed as principled action in the “Shared Being” paper, “is in itself an affirmative thesis to the desiccated sociality endemic to the general atmosphere” reducing “the airless omnipotence of that atmosphere.” If principled action ground in justice resists the laissez faire character of circulation, the advocacy of principled action that appeared in previous papers, especially “Shared Being,” and also in his collaborative work with Blum (1984), in this paper, there is a new recognition that without the addition of intimacy, the principled life is inadequate. Such a life would be too limited because, though it would manage to be undeniably moral, it would be “bland.” Here, McHugh separates principle from Eros (a unity glossed in “Shared Being”) in order to develop the relation of Eros to intimacy. Speaking the language of intimation, intimacy is suggestively formulated as “an aura, an aura of images, sonorities, places, moments of inhabited silence, all of them melding into an affirming, ineffable and fertile sensation that exceeds their original composition.” And while as a social relation it gestures like a work of art, unlike a work of art, intimacy is “never completed … It is not plastic, but flesh.” Hence, “whatever their particularities, intimates expose the meaning and direction of their being: A vigorous, enduring, and self-defining desire to know an other and to be known by an other. A desire so simple, yet so difficult.” Besides these surprising developments, there are also, as we would expect, continuities. For example, the use of the concept of shared being here develops from how that concept first appeared in the paper on affirmative action. Arguably, also, the whole idea of looking for a nonpositivistic form

IntroductIon

xxxi

of discourse returns to concerns first flagged all the way back in the paper that reported the failure of positivism as theory and method. The last paper, “Furthermores on the Aesthetic” (written in 2009 but unpublished), picks up where McHugh’s intimacy paper leaves off. “Our look at intimacy and art as manifestations of aesthetic reasoning offers an unusual opportunity to think about the aesthetic … in relation to other kinds of discourse.” Here, McHugh again shows that his fundamental intellectual interest is deeply sociological but he now seeks to develop the discourse in distinction from the discourse of modern rationality, arguably a discourse that the discipline of sociology is still in the grip of. Intimacy’s “resistance to interpretation … more likely reflects the incapacities of modern rationality rather than intimacy itself, which is both intelligible and learnable and thus aesthetically and socially rational.” As if harkening back to his first two papers on the limitations of understanding social action according to “normative expectations,” McHugh proposes that “the intimacy of conduct and the aesthetic constitute a fresh challenge to the hegemony of the modern model.” Whether as sociologists or as ordinary members of society, we are faced with a stream of our own and others’ behaviour. In the language of his earlier paper, it is this that enters circulation. But the way all these acts will remain in circulation depends on the ongoing and always provisional work of deciding on their meaning, even if the meaning we sometimes arrive at is that, as the “Circulation” paper concluded, an act is senseless. If the “broadly accepted idea that powerful institutionalized norms of social life necessarily pervade the organization of daily life” without denying a role for expectations, the main argument of the paper is that expectations are not the adequate resource they are taken to be. Harkening back to the language of his paper on positivism and true to his earliest discoveries, he says, “no sign speaks for itself … no rule, no sentence, no act is self-explicating.” Drawing on his own analysis of aesthetic reasoning in the “Intimacy” paper and also Derrida’s concepts of identity and difference (1978), McHugh argues that it is aesthetic tools such as comparison, analogy, and metaphor that provide the prototype for how we are best able to make sense (that is, work out the meaning) of whatever enters circulation. In his example, we need to consider what a shout of “stop” is like and unlike (its identity and difference) to decide whether it signifies robbery or some more mundane and presumably more expected event. “Interpreters make do under the imperfect guidance of rules or procedures that are themselves

xxxii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

also imperfect, yet work most of the time because they are worked out nevertheless” As he goes on to formulate it: “the principle in aesthetics is thus to recognize ambiguity and then exploit it [through metaphor and simile] to produce some tellable acts(s).” The power of aesthetic discourse, he concludes is that it understands the pervasive nonaesthetic discourse and itself, while the hegemonic modern model “cannot offer an account of the aesthetic in their own terms and hence lack knowledge of their own self-created vulnerability.” McHugh’s corpus of writing here ends in a place that shows the journey he first set out on in his very early and more conventional research (a journey first announced in the ambiguity between socialization and resocialization) culminates in an affirmation, in the strongest possible sense, of the aesthetic and intimate opportunity offered by “the contingent and deeply ambiguous uncertainty of all social conduct” (1996, 21). If, like the professional stage actors, “intimates must live in a pervasively nonaesthetic world” and “if they do and they understand that world,” McHugh’s work shows how both conduct (everyday action) and interpretation (sociological action) is not condemned to be completely of this world. While we began our discussion of the last three papers with an articulation of their sociological relevance, despite appearances to the contrary, we can end by noting that there has been a strong tendency within much more conventional social theorising in the current era to address such concerns. Affect theory, as represented by Nigel Thrift (2008) has cogently made the argument that sociology has neglected the whole realm of affect. The last three papers by McHugh clearly show that he, too, is a theorist who wishes to bring affect into sociology and social life, though now with the benefit of the theory and method of Analysis. Indeed, as we shall see in the following chapter, such an aspiration, while made explicit in the final papers, was, Alan Blum argues, an overriding characteristic of everything he wrote. As brief as his last set of notes is, we could particularly note the last paragraph that McHugh wrote, at least for public consumption. Here we have something that cannot have been more up to date at the time of his death: an acknowledgement – however hesitant – that the internet generation, so often and routinely maligned according to its attachment to Facebook and YouTube and social media generally, could be displaying the aesthetic interest for which this paper has been providing the possibility. The next chapter in our collection is by McHugh’s collaborator and close friend, Alan Blum. Blum formulates McHugh’s collected works as instancing the problem of “deciphering and traversing a path.” It is as

IntroductIon

xxxiii

if McHugh offers work that can be treated as designing “a curriculum for himself as his means of imagining what a strong relationship to the representation of worldly affairs should be for an educated person.” Blum offers an Analysis of the various papers addressed in this introduction by both describing and formulating the rich unfinished character of any corpus of writing. Drawing significantly on Lacan, Blum offers what we might call an Analysis of the development of McHugh’s exemplification of Analysis and its ironic relation to enjoyment. Blum formulates McHugh’s reflective relation to life as “an exemplary challenge and model for anyone devoted to reflecting upon the conventions and nuances of social action and the human condition,” having “consequences for any sociology that would aspire to a reflective relationship to social life.” Blum shows, moreover, both how this reflective relation was a consistent, omnipresent feature of McHugh’s work, whatever the specific topic of individual papers, but also how his way of producing such a relation changed over time. At the same time, Blum also suggests a separation between early and late work, i.e., between the early concern with contingency or “what could be otherwise” and the later recognition of the inevitable remainders left by any and every signifier (as demonstrated, for instance, in the “Circulation” paper). Blum shows that in the face of the inevitable unfinished character of any and all writing, McHugh’s work can be formulated as living up to the standard the reflective writer must set for oneself: “for example, if the topic is a reflective engagement with a topic, its topic is (really and truly) reflection and is applicable in principle to its own writing, since writing and representation form another topic.” In this way, as Blum sees it, McHugh’s work shows McHugh’s particularity, “his own model of inquiry,” albeit a model that can inspire others, by making conversation about the challenge of establishing a voice “the objective of the theorizing.” The final paper in this volume is Kieran Bonner’s analysis of a series of interviews he did with McHugh. Bonner’s overriding interest is in uncovering, through the interview process, at least part of the story of how the method and theory of Analysis came to be invented. His uncovering itself demonstrates the method of Analysis as it engages the interview material as if it were a response to the question of why a unique perspective needed to be created given the plurality of perspectives that already exist. His paper seeks to highlight and, to an extent, reconcile two equally undeniable conclusions that he derives from the interview material: while many contingencies occurred in the course of the work’s development, McHugh

xxxiv

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

and his colleagues are nevertheless firm in the conviction that what has been invented is not just desirable but a necessity. The contingency embodied in the biography (what could be otherwise) of any thinker shows the unfinished partiality of all work that at the same time exemplifies a strong relation to what is necessary and desirable. As Bonner analyzes Analysis, it is the need to resolve the tension between contingency and necessity, a tension that is also a paradox in and of life itself, that led to the invention of Analysis. An additional feature of Bonner’s paper, through its use of interview material, is that it offers readers the chance to hear McHugh’s actual voice, thereby affording at least a glimpse of someone who, “as a person and inquirer,” Blum says, “just might be one of a kind.”

NoteS 1 It should be noted that, by the time this paper was written, McHugh’s collaboration with Blum was in full swing. The paper, while written by McHugh, should be seen as having its birth in and reflecting their ongoing conversation. 2 Here, see also McHugh et al. 1974. 3 In “How the Dead Circulate in Life” (2011), McHugh makes the irony even more explicit when he highlights the extreme vulnerability that the dead are subject to: the living have the power to revise the meaning of what will circulate while the dead, of course, have lost this power – be they Plato, Elvis, or Che to use McHugh’s striking examples. Of course this makes his contrast with Arendt even more stark in that she believes, due to the human storytelling capacity, the meaning of acts is likely to be clarified after the relevant actors are dead. While McHugh was of the view that “How the Dead Circulate in Life” was a separate entity from his “Notes on Circulation,” the editors have decided not to include it in this volume due to overlapping content with the latter.

ReFeReNCeS Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1986. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Metapolitics. New York: Verso.

IntroductIon

xxxv

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. The Risk Society. London: Sage. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders. New York: The Free Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh. 1984. Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Bonner, Kieran. 2001. “Reflexivity and Interpretive Sociology: The Case of Analysis and the Problem of Nihilism.” Human Studies 24 (4): 267–92. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge. Collini, Stefan. 2017. Speaking of Universities. New York: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Grant, George. 1969. Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 1. Boston: Beacon Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1978a. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 143–87. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. – 1978b. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 283–317. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McHugh, Peter. 1966. “Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization.” Social Forces 44 (3): 355–63. – 1968. Defining the Situation. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. – 1969. “Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor.” In Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness, edited by Stanley Plog and Robert Edgerton, 539–55. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

xxxvi

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

– 1970a. “A Common-Sense Conception of Deviance.” In Deviance & Respectability: The Social Construction of Moral Meanings, edited by Jack D. Douglas, 61–88. New York: Basic Books, Inc. – 1970b. “On the Failure of Positivism.” In Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Everyday Knowledge, edited by Jack D. Douglas, 324–40. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. – 1992. “A Letter of Resignation.” Dianoia 2 (2): 106–11. – 1993. “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance.” Dianoia 3 (1): 41–51. – 1996. “Insomnia and the T(error) of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism.” Human Studies 19 (1): 17–42. – 2005. “Shared Being, Old Promises and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies 28 (2): 129–56. – 2011. “How the Dead Circulate in Life.” In Spectacular Death, edited by Tristanne Connolly, 261–9. Bristol: Intellect Press. McHugh, Peter, and Stanley Raffel, Daniel Foss, and Alan Blum. 1974. On the Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge. Merton, Robert. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1949. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe: The Free Press. – 1951. The Social System. London: Routledge. Raffel, Stanley. 1999. “Revisiting Role Theory: Roles and the Problem of the Self.” Sociological Research Online 4 (2). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/ socresonline/4/2/raffel.html. Raffel, Stanley, and Barry Sandywell. 2016. The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected Papers. The Hague: Martin Nijhoff. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Walsh, Philip. 2015. Arendt contra Sociology. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Weber, Max. 1947. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Glencoe: The Free Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is very poignant that I write these acknowledgments after Stanley passed away in June 2018. When the revised formatted manuscript had been submitted and the publication was going ahead, he managed to sign the book contracts just before he died. Elaine Samuel, his wife, confirmed to both of us by email that the contracts were in the mail from Edinburgh to Waterloo; he replied, “you both won’t believe how wonderful to me to see this stage going through.” That was my last communication with Stanley, and he died two weeks later. It is sad that he did not live to see the final print copy of this book, but as can be gleaned he was very happy with its publication. Those who knew Stanley already know how important it was to him to make McHugh’s single-authored work widely available. He took the reins of this project back in 2015 and invited me to be a co-editor. We worked together on it from that time, mostly through communication across the Atlantic but also in person at the annual Analysis conferences in Syros, Greece, and during visits to Canada. In fact, this project occasioned his only visit to my home in Kitchener so he could go through Peter’s papers and books. Though he was obviously deflated by the news he had cancer in February 2018, he was still heartened by the fact that the reviews of the manuscript were very positive, and we were both feeling confident that Peter’s work would appear as a publication by McGill-Queen’s. Though ill and in pain, he continued to work on the revisions to the introduction we had offered to undertake. We have not been able to find any notes Stanley left for the acknowledgments, but I do know he would want to thank the very significant help that his wife, Elaine Samuel, gave to him – especially the delicate task of turning PDF files into MS Word documents. In a similar vein, I would

xxxviii

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

like to thank my wife, Margaret O’Shea Bonner, for her help and support throughout this enterprise from the very beginning. Whether from our early days in Toronto when I was exploring the work of Blum and McHugh, all the way to Syros, or in the car on the way to Boston, the world of Analysis is also the world of our conversation. There are others we should thank: Peter’s children, Joshua and Caitlin McHugh, for their ongoing support of seeing their father’s work in print, including estate permission. In particular, I want to thank Ryan Devitt for his great work in formatting this manuscript and for his help with proofing and the index. Without the application of his thorough, comprehensive, and thoughtful contribution, I would still be working on the manuscript rather than at the acknowledgment stage. My colleague Susan Brophy kindly offered helpful suggestions on the book’s description that I was happy to incorporate. We also want to thank the responses of the anonymous reviewers and especially the work of MQUP, who have been very helpful on every front, whether with the cover design or through the publication process. Jonathan Crago, in particular and especially, has been a very supportive guide. St Jerome’s University should be acknowledged for the funding and sabbatical provided so I could set aside my teaching and administration to concentrate on this. I would like to thank all my graduate students, Stephen, Sara, Mike, Benjamin, Karolina, Celia, Amelia, Jeremy, and Chamathka, who variously share in the commitment to Analysis. I know Stanley would like to mention his students and friends in Edinburgh, Eric Laurier, Allyson Noble, and Gregor Schnuer, who sustained his spirit back there. Versions of my paper were delivered at the 3rd Annual Analysis conference in Syros and I thank my friends and colleagues David Lynes, Andriani Papadopolou, Elke Grenzer, Syeed Hydralli, Steve Bailey, and my old Trinity friend and long-standing Analyst, Paddy Colfer, for their comments and ongoing commitment to the conversation. They show that the community of Analysts, despite many differences that a real community gives birth to, is much wider than those named above, a community that reaches across time and geography to include many other colleagues, friends, and ghosts from the past. Of course, it goes without saying that none of this would have happened if Peter had not met Alan Blum back in their Columbia University days in New York in the late 1960s. Though academics, they were both men of the world, Peter the son of a Hollywood actor and an actor himself, and Alan, as he has often said, the son of a stage mother. Along

Acknowledgments

xxxix

with intellectual interests in phenomenology and ethnomethodology, they shared a love of life, which became the basis for an enjoyable collaboration to develop a theory and methodology that threw light on foundational concerns as these appeared in everyday life. That collaboration, which this book celebrates, led to the invention of the work that also became a community. Alan’s ongoing friendship, talent, and commitment show in his contribution here. His indefatigable commitment to productive theorizing is the example that continues to develop in an enlivening way, the work he and Peter invented. It was this very work that brought Stanley and me together in the first place, and so, the circle closes. It is only fitting that this work should now be dedicated to Stanley Raffel.

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Dedicated to Stanley Raffel: Analyst, collaborator, friend

1

SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION AS A REQUISITE OF RESOCIALIZATION

One needn’t go very far to discover that attempts to rehabilitate deviants fail to change the person at least as often as they succeed. Cressey, Bloch and Geis, Korn and McCorkle, and Clausen, among others, estimate that recidivism among criminals, drug addicts, and the mentally ill varies from 50 percent up to nearly 100 percent.1 Bloch and Geis state that “An analysis of imprisoned men and the recognition that approximately 65 percent – almost two-thirds – return to prison indicate the futility of many of our present procedures.”2 Regardless of the amount of activity meant to foster it, changed behaviour remains an unmet aim of rehabilitation. There are several reasons for this state of affairs, and I shall mention two here. First, in regard to the administrative procedures of rehabilitating organizations, they operate in an environment marked by goals that are either contradictory in themselves or antithetical to the concrete practices that could produce changed behaviour. This situation of deterrence and punishment versus rehabilitation has been commented upon any number of times and is not surprising to those familiar with penal and psychiatric organizations. The second reason is of a different order and much less often cited: the nature of social theorizing, perhaps especially sociological theorizing, has tended to emphasize stable social structures, with attendant concentration on orderly interaction attuned to the overall norms and values of the larger society. However apt this perspective may be in depicting the whole panorama of social life, deviance and the like have been discussed primarily as curious contrasts, over and against our Originally published as Peter McHugh, “Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization,” Social Forces 44, no. 3 (March 1966). Revision of paper delivered to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society, Montreal, Canada, 1964.

4

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

abiding interest in order. Consequently, we tend to use the ideas we have developed to explain order in our attempts to account for rehabilitation, on the assumption that bringing men back to a legitimate social life is the same kind of activity as the routine constraints on men who are already part of the legitimate social order. To give a single example, note how we transplant into rehabilitation our ideas of socialization and learning, ideas that originally explained how neophytes become conforming members of their cultures and in so doing perpetrate society that had existed before their arrival. Yet if rehabilitation requires unlearning, a phenomenon which is not ubiquitous in the socialization of children, typical theories of socialization will not suffice. They will not suffice because they do not cover the very important elements of unlearning and radically changed behaviour, which are part and parcel of the process of rehabilitation. To put it another way, the toilers in deviant rehabilitation can tell us why it does not occur. But, unfortunately, we cannot in the telling learn much about how it could occur, perhaps because our views of a stable social order do not help us to understand the radical changes in behaviour which characterize rehabilitation. For a theory of radical change and rehabilitation, as opposed to the administrative practices, which must be orderly to put rehabilitation into effect, some ideas stressing disorder and disintegration may be fruitful. It will be the burden of this paper to delineate some ideas about disintegration as the social condition, which precedes rehabilitation. In so doing, we shall investigate the difference between ordinary socialization and resocialization; the differential effects on resocialization of social organization and disintegration; and the actual empirical operations for inducing rehabilitation in concrete organizations. Sources will be of several kinds. Research in criminology and penology will be utilized to depict the failure of current practices, followed by a review of alienation and anomie and their possibilities as conditions of disintegration and rehabilitation. Running throughout will be references to industrialization, which, surprisingly, is an actual case of existent radical change in natural systems. It is a case strikingly similar to changes which are now only hopes in rehabilitating organizations. First, however, I shall list basic premises and conclusions – some very obvious – in order to clarify what follows: 1 2

Rehabilitation requires radical rather than ordinary changes in behaviour. Radical change requires changes in values.

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

5

3

Socially organized relationships tend to reinforce old values, or to only gradually diminish their efficacy in guiding behaviour. 4 Disintegrated social relationships tend to eradicate rather than simply diminish the efficacy of values in guiding behaviour. 5 Therefore, social disintegration can be one phase of radically changed behaviour. 6 Social disintegration occurs when group activity is random and interpersonal sanctions are either ineffective or nonexistent. 7 In a situation of resource monopoly, disintegration can be operationalized as follows: a Activity can be made random by scheduling each activity according to a table of random numbers. b Interpersonal sanctions can be made ineffective by a continuous turnover of individual interactants (random group composition). These conditions will be treated as necessary but insufficient requisites of radical individual change. They would be required as one stage of rehabilitation, but would not automatically lead to changes because they would have to be followed by the well-known, typical forms of social learning.

The Meaning of Radical Change and Socialization We probably should begin by indicating what is meant by radical change. Simply put, radical change will be treated as the substitution of one set of value orientations for another. Here we make the usual distinction between specific norms of low generality and overarching values of high generality.3 The values of a group are shared by all its members and therefore give them a common identity over and above their particular roles and against the coexistence of other groups. Norms, on the other hand, are specifications of value for different positions within the group, varying according to the statuses to which they apply. Radical change according to this view is a change in the values which bind a whole collectivity to certain kinds of behaviour, and must remain distinct from ordinary change exemplified by shifts in role norms – shifts which are simply different modes of interaction, not indicators of any change in the characteristic goals of the whole group as a solidary unit. The difference is one between transformation of (radical change) and transformation in (ordinary change).4 Similarly, radical change occurs rapidly: for individuals, a change in values within a single lifetime,

6

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

for societies a change in one or two generations. The term radical implies revolutionary rather than evolutionary change when time is the basis of measurement. The other major concept to be used in this analysis is socialization. Obviously, the process of value change must be completed through some kind of social learning. However, since we are trying to describe radical change in the same person rather than continuity between generations, we are directed toward a particular kind of learning quite different from the ordinary kind: resocialization. Resocialization is unlike plain socialization because in resocialization the person adopts values which are contradictory to the old ones binding the collectivity. As resocialization requires us to handle the notion of contradiction, it is different from plain socialization, which entails “merely” the successive expansion of learned norms and values upon a congruent base. To this degree, resocialization involves distinctive processes of interaction and social organization, i.e., de-socialization. It is suggested that, since radical change requires a change in values, plain socialization will be ineffective because it cannot handle the contradiction which must occur under that condition. I shall now offer evidence for this assertion.

Plain Socialization Cannot Produce Radical Change When conflict exists between groups, social control must be exerted either through complete monopoly of resources (cultural, social, biological and physical) or through appeals to legitimate authority.5 (The latter requires no monopoly and no coercion, since legitimacy makes the agency of control congruent with the values of the controlled group.) Thus, where values conflict the agencies of control must either monopolize the perquisites of behaviour or convert the deviant group to a new set of legitimizing norms. For example, psychiatric treatment cannot be successful to the degree it requires the cooperation of the prisoner, because the authority of the therapist is illegitimate from the point of view of the deviant, and therefore fails to elicit his cooperation. Evidence for this is the exclusively middle-class clientele of psychoanalytic therapy as well as the failure of such treatment in prisons – the successfully treated middle-class group imbues the therapist with legitimacy to begin with, prisoners do not.6 Due to differences in the reference group values of prisoners and therapists, cost exceeds reward to the extent that prisoners choose any alternative to treatment. The values of therapist and prisoner are so divergent that for

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

7

one to adopt those of the other would require contradiction of the original set (a resocializing situation) rather than mere elaboration upon it (a plain socializing situation). Similar conditions exist in colonial administrations. Although there is a practical monopoly of armed force in these societies, there is neither total monopoly of resources nor legitimacy, resulting in “Messianism which is inimical to economic growth.”7 Messianism maintains the traditional features of the system in much the same way that inmate subcultures maintain their values. The following is taken from a work describing the inability of central governments in some emerging societies to induce participation in industrial activities: Those in the subsistence sector have not had their commitments to institutions eroded very greatly. Consequently a frontal attack on any one of these institutions is likely to be perceived as an attack on all of them. Moreover, because the sentiments in support of the institution remain intact, such a procedure is likely to evoke a strong response, one that is strong enough in most cases probably to cause the central government to give up the programme. The institution in question, having been successfully defended, is thus apt to emerge from the contest not weaker than it was before but stronger.8 One could accurately substitute inmate subcultures here and leave the description of process as is. Without legitimacy or monopoly, plain socialization is nothing more than moral suasion, because the social organization of the target group supports, may even require, the efficacy of old values. The attributes of ordinary socialization, in which cumulative behavioural additions develop upon a congruent base, cannot be applied to situations in which radical changes in behaviour are either expected or required. Since we are talking of value, something which pervades the activity of the group in many spheres, the contradiction between new and old cannot be eliminated by lower-level status separation or priority, because the value is operant in all statuses. Instead, for radical change to occur, resocialization must occur. Rather than adding the new to the old – plain socialization – the old must first be eliminated – desocialization. The question remains how desocialization operates as the first step in the process of resocialization.

8

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Desocialization On the face of it, the most promising examples of desocialization are depicted in the literature devoted to anomie, alienation, disruption, disorganization, and the like, as well as in several discussions of rapid industrialization, because they depict behaviour which is quite different from, and often antithetical to, the behaviour occurring when the system was integrated. Some studies of Africa indicate that the mobility, urbanism, and corporate organization of work in a transitional society increase the scale of interaction and communication in a way that disrupts the extended family and paves the way for free-floating individualism. The works of Schein, Biderman and others concerning American prisoners in Chinese camps suggest that certain disruptions of prisoner relationships will foster collaboration or withdrawal, behaviour which requires an important change in the soldier’s reference group. A laboratory study which violates expectations between subject and experimenter produces innovation, powerlessness and meaninglessness in subjects whose attitude scale scores in no way forecast these behaviours before violation. Dornbusch discovers that a military academy must destroy the symbolic accoutrements of earlier systems of interaction before its own rather different norms can be effective in guiding cadet behaviour. Hagen depicts a point at which industrialization includes “withdrawal of status respect,” meaning the old relationships disappear into limbo before what he calls “creative innovation,” e.g., the introduction of new behaviour, can appear.9 On the other hand, the penological works devoted to deviant rehabilitation are unanimous in suggesting that criminal behaviour is not so much rehabilitated as reinforced; that these efforts are more likely to disrupt the staff than change inmates; and that there is something about custodial organizations which inhibits rehabilitation. Clemmer talks of “prisonization” which is actually a continuing socialization to the values of the inmate subculture – plain socialization in our terms. Sykes describes the sustaining congruence between prison roles and criminal norms. Cressey reports that the requirements of custody and rehabilitation are exclusive to the extent that staff must enlist the cooperation of inmates and thereby become “corrupted,” e.g., act to reinforce the prisoner relationships which are supposed to be changing.10 These studies indicate that the twenty-four-hour control of force in prisons fails to induce radical change in prisoner behaviour, while in a developing society such changes do occur. Perhaps the difference is due to the absence of desocialization in the prison case, an absence which obviates

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

9

resocialization, and perhaps the absence of desocialization is attributable to the absence of social disintegration. It may be that the new values which would mobilize conforming behaviour are not effectively socialized because the organized relationships in the inmate social system serve as the vehicles for expression of old values. To the degree that continuing relationships reinforce the old values, the old values can be discontinued only by discontinuing the relationships. In other language, the interactional skills or norms specified by new values may in fact be absorbed, but the commitment which must precede the valued use of these skills is in no way redirected. In the industrializing situation, on the other hand, the disruption of previous relationships makes possible the development of a new (industrial) commitment, upon which base the learning of skills may proceed. One observes that the depletion of previous relations through withdrawal of status respect never occurs in prison.11 The import of this examination is that social disintegration disrupts the on-going relationships which are the vehicles of values at the level of interaction. If one assumes that values influence interaction, there is no inherent reason to deny the influence of interaction upon values. Anomie, as a terminal or chaotic state, could be so only if values were disrupted in that state. The suggestion here is that disintegration of interaction can eradicate values and thereby desocialize those who undergo the disintegration. The next question involves just what happens in this process of disintegration. How can alienation from the antecedent social order be programmed? What operations will produce it?

Operant Disintegration Disintegration consists of two parts: (1) normatively meaningless events, a dislocation of the cohort’s sequence of activity; and (2) subverted interpersonal relationships, the social isolation of individuals. The first discoordinates the activities of the group; the second makes its sanctions ineffective.12 We shall take up normatively meaningless events first.

1 NoRMatIveLy MeaNINgLeSS eveNtS Normatively meaningless events refers primarily to disruption of the routine activity of the cohort rather than to the interaction of its members. Obvious examples are sleeping, eating, work and recreation. Operant meaninglessness would involve the following steps in scheduling activities:

10

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

a b c d

List all such activity Assign a number to each activity Organize these activities by consulting a table of random numbers Randomize the completion of each activity

Such a procedure would deconstitute social organization by making it unpredictable to the member in the following ways: •

•

•

The person’s assumption that he can affect events is destroyed. That the actor must be able to perceive and actualize his own efficacy in affecting his environment has been suggested as a necessary concomitant of continued normatively governed behaviour, i.e., the concomitant of behaviour which is not anomic.13 To the degree this assumption is both necessary and absent, disintegration must occur. Randomized routines are external social conditions which correspond to and induce the social psychological state of powerlessness in that the actor’s participation does not result in order or in any other conceived state of affairs. The coordination or consistency of events through chronological time disappears. In Schutz’s language, the actor’s assumption of “et cetera” – that future events are expected to be comparable to past events – serves to connect discrete occurrences, and so makes it possible for behaviour to proceed through recognition of the similarity between events.14 Insofar as events are not temporally coordinated, they become incomparable and therefore perceptually meaningless as phenomenal foci of norms. Time perspective becomes indeterminate. Since sequential events are one measure of time, a random sequence should disorganize this perspective. Cohen, Farber, and the Cosers, among others, suggest that an indeterminate end to a deprived situation makes its effects all the more drastic.15 Thus, besides the uncoordinated temporal sequence of events, one can expect the very uncertainty of randomness as a time measure to increment the disintegration.

It is suggested that these characteristics – one referring to the actor’s direct relation to events, the others to his perception of the relations between events themselves – are descriptive of Leites’ and others’ characteristics of depersonalization: things become “questionable instead of valid,” “value judgments cease to be self-evident,” “alternative courses of action lead to an identical result,” and the actor becomes “tabula rasa as to previous

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

11

conceptions of the meaningful life.”16 In the language of this paper, the person and his behaviour come to be valueless, uninfluenced by previous goals or standards, because they are not encapsulated in an environment which meets his standards of minimal clarity.

2 SUBveRteD INteRPeRSoNaL ReLatIoNSHIPS The ruination of a system of interpersonal relations would have to (1) inhibit the continuation of pre-existing relationships and (2) prevent shared adaptation by members of the old system to new conditions. If the former did not occur, the system would continue unaffected. If the latter did not occur, the old system would continue as the old system but with new characteristics, i.e., the change would be dialectical rather than radical. Compressing the views of functionalists, and oversimplifying their works as well, we can assert that a system of viable social interaction requires reciprocal exchange between persons; complementary roles; and a unit structure which maintains values, adapts to external conditions, reaches some unit goals, and solidifies the positions of sub-units toward one another.17 Much sociological writing expends a good deal of energy depicting these features, but when it comes to assessing the attributes of a failing interaction system, ideas are sparse – (a reflection of theorizing restricted to order mentioned above). Failure is usually attributed to the absence or reversal of one or another of the characteristics of order already in the accounting scheme but not to any special condition which is independent of them.18 The problem with such self-contained, logically closed arrays is that they do not specify the operations through which extreme change and/or failure are generated once the system is in motion, either at the system level or at some lower level. So-called “conflict” theories are seldom more helpful, since they usually begin with the assumption of some “incompatible differences of objective,” when for our purposes these are just the differences which must be produced to induce failure.19 And, of course, social conflict is not social disintegration, because a system can maintain a social order forever in the face of both internal and external conflict (prisons and some colonial societies are good examples of this). We are thus left with literature that describes organization and disintegration but which does not link the two by depicting an explicit relation between them which could be used to induce disintegration. Assuming an on-going system will tend to adapt to externally imposed conditions and thereby obviate radical change as opposed to ordinary

12

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

change – most penology can be read in this light – the generating mechanism of interpersonal behaviour must reveal the way to disintegration. It remains to discover those mechanisms and to construct conditions which will prevent their realization. What, we must ask, are the prior conditions which allow interaction to proceed and the system to continue? How can these conditions be transformed, disintegrated, dis-equilibrated? And how can this occur in situations where conflict is an important systemmaintenance device, as is the case with inmate subcultures in prisons? Let me suggest that one of the binding features of any interaction system is constancy between partners (individual propinquity) and that lack of constancy prevents the erection of integrated interpersonal relationships. Let me further suggest that absence of individual propinquity can exist in conjoint activity, so that disintegration is a problem that remains sociological and is the obverse of purely physical isolation. A combination of absence of propinquity and conjoint activity resides in a continuous turnover in group composition: individuals randomly thrown into contact with other individuals, even in the playing of roles and while engaged in concerted activity, making them all strangers face-to-face. Under these circumstances, they should be unable to conceive of themselves as members of one group or another, or as capable of maintaining interaction with a particular set of others. Because the assignment of individuals to the loci of interaction can be controlled, a total institution need not rely upon cooperation from those holding deviant values. And constancy or lack of it is a parameter of action which is conceptually independent of the theories of social organization summarized above. A basis for asserting that random assignment of individuals is a generating mechanism for subverted interpersonal relationships can be found in the works of Blau, Homans, and Jones and Thibaut.20 These studies indicate that the beginnings of interaction and group activity depend upon conjoint behaviour between particular others – individuals qua individuals – if any sustained relations are to develop. In fact, the idea of increased scale in number and kind of interacting partners during industrialization is the societal counterpart of changing group composition. Interaction with multitudes of qualitatively dissimilar others induces secondary relationships between members of the system, tending first to disintegrate and then to reorient their actions and values. These studies indicate that the early stage of an interaction must include a relationship between persons instead of roles, or persons in roles, because

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

13

roles are only skeletal guidelines to behaviour and must be fleshed out through the “informal” and “personal” attributes of those who play them if interaction is to continue. Blau suggests that interaction is particularly vulnerable to failure here, because its attraction for each member is accompanied by fear of rejection.21 In sociological terms, the actor is faced with normative ambiguity in his expectations, since he cannot know whether his acts will be deemed appropriate by the strange other, and he therefore is unsure about the response the other will emit. Further, when more than two actors are involved, competition for attraction develops which deflects solidary coalitions. We can suggest that this is a stage of pre-group individualism in which the orientation of one person to another is not completed by a substantive agreement that expectations are reciprocal or complementary. Neither consensus nor dissensus exists as a group property, and in fact the aggregate of persons does not comprise a group at all. Continuous turnover should – if the above correctly distinguishes between person and group as the difference between initial and succeeding stages of interaction – keep the interaction always concerned with the potential failure of impression management and never a fait accompli. In his defensive reactions while competing for attraction, therefore, the individual would remain socially isolated in the presence of others similarly situated, and a following stage of group cohesion would not emerge. Since reciprocity, or exchange, does not develop, disintegration must occur to the extent that reciprocity is a necessary characteristic of order.22 There is a final consequence related to random completion of activity and interpersonal subversion. Much small group work has conceived member satisfaction as a product of instrumental accomplishment of the task. Other works depict the way dissatisfaction develops and blame is assigned when tasks are not completed.23 Blame is, interestingly, often ascribed to persons rather than situations, because situations are too abstract to be punished as a symbolic affirmation of norms. From this, we can suggest that as activities are continually begun but never finished, dissatisfaction will be personified and thereby amplify interpersonal subversion. All members of the cohort would, in effect, occupy failure roles, and these roles would be unpredictable enough in location and intensity that a stratification toward leadership would be unlikely, reinforcing the disintegrating effects of random routines and subverted interpersonal relationships.

14

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Summary Radical change, the complete transformation of behaviour, must stem from comparable transformations of value if this latter concept has any utility for social science. The failure of deviant rehabilitation on the one hand, and the Messianism of colonial societies on the other, informs us that moral suasion and monopoly of force in the context of different values do not result in radical change. To the degree these circumstances represent the conditions of ordinary socialization, one must look elsewhere for an explanation of radical change. Studies of anomie and studies of the proliferation of societal scale suggest that the polar changes in behaviour which mark them are uninfluenced by old values, and we may infer that anomie or disintegration serves to erase that influence and desocialize those facing such conditions. The operant meaning of desocialization and disintegration, a meaning which can be used as a specification of radical change as well as a program for the inducement of such change, involves randomization of activity and subversion of interpersonal relationships, assuming that activity and interaction are the behavioural vehicles of values. As operations, they produce suspicious encounters between strangers and meaningless links between events, phenomena which, we suggest, vitiate the efficacy of the values of the group, the system, or the society. It should be stressed that disintegration is not proposed as a sure resocializer but rather only as a precedent for resocialization. It is meant only to provide a way of conceiving the fission of values which makes new fusions possible, not inevitable. And it is probably unnecessary to cite the proximity of these ideas to what has been called brainwashing and all the ethical problems these matters entail.

NoteS 1 Edwin H. Sutherland and Donald R. Cressey, Criminology, 6th ed. (New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1960), 591; Herbert A. Bloch and Gilbert Geis, Man, Crime and Society (New York: Random House, 1962), 575; Richard R. Korn and Lloyd W. McCorkle, Criminology and Penology (New York: Henry Holt Co., 1959); John A. Clausen, “Mental Disorders,” in Contemporary Social Problems, eds. Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.), 209. 2 Bloch and Geis, Man, Crime and Society, 575. 3 Clyde Kluckhohn et al., “Values and Value Orientations in the Theory of Action” in Toward a General Theory of Action, eds. Talcott Parsons and

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12

15

Edward A. Shils (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 388–483; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 114ff. Richard Christie and Robert K. Merton indicate that values can be tested, diminishing the old argument that whatever one makes of values conceptually, they cannot be fruitful empirically. “Procedure for the Sociological Study of the Value Climate of Medical Schools.” Journal of Medical Education 33, 10 (October 1958): 125–53. Talcott Parsons, Edward A. Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse Pitts, eds., Theories of Society, Vol. 2 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 1214. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and ed., Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78ff. Hans H. Strupp, “Psychotherapy,” Annual Review of Psychology 13 (1962): 445–78; David Abrahamson, “Evaluation of the Treatment of Criminals,” in Failures in Psychiatric Treatment, ed. Paul H. Hoch (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1948), 58–77. Everett E. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1962), 411. Terence K. Hopkins, “On Economic Planning in Tropical Africa,” Co-existence 1 (May 1964): 87. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1955); George A. Theodorson, “Acceptance of Industrialization and its Consequences for the Social Patterns of Non-Western Societies,” American Sociological Review 18 (October 1953): 477–84; Edgar H. Schein, “Interpersonal Communication, Group Solidarity, and Social Influence,” Sociometry 23 ( June 1960): 148–61 (the ideas in this paper are clearly similar to Schein’s, exemplified by his topic heading in the cited paper: “Creating Influenceability through Social Alienation”); Peter McHugh, “Order and Disorder in Social Time and Space,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962; Sanford M. Dornbusch, “The Military Academy as an Assimilating Institution.” Social Forces 34 ( July 1956): 316–21; Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change, 186–200. Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (Boston: Christopher Press, 1940); Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Donald R. Cressey, “Contradictory Directives in Correctional Group Therapy Programs,” Federal Probation 18 ( June 1954): 20–6. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change, 186. Dislocation of sequence alone would not work, since this lack could become “socially shared” in a cohesive group of inmates, thereby increasing their solidarity. Schein, Thibaut and Kelley, Sykes and others note this as one

16

13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

of the “problems” in rehabilitation of various kinds. Purely situational adversity probably binds the membership more closely, something Goffman refers to when he writes of an institutional underlife. Subverted interpersonal relations should prevent such an adaptation, however, because it would obviate the development of solidarity. See Schein, “Interpersonal Communication, Group Solidarity, and Social Influence,” 23: 148–61; Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison; John W. Thibaut and Harold H. Kelley, The Social Psychology of Groups (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), 169–87; Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Doubleday & Co.), 207–25. Alfred Schutz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Understandings of Human Action,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14 (September 1953); Thibaut and Kelley, The Social Psychology of Groups, 180ff. Lewis A. Coser and Rose Laub Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” in Modern Sociology, eds. Alvin E. Gouldner and Helen P. Gouldner (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 638–47. E.A. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1953), 128; Maurice L. Farber, “Suffering and Time Perspective of the Prisoner,” Authority and Frustration: Studies in Topological and Vector Psychology (Ames: University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare 20, 1944), 153–227; Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 638–47. Nathan Leites, “Trends in Affectlessness,” in Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, eds. Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 620–2. Works often consulted for their lists of necessary functions are Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951), 26–36; and Marion J. Levy, The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 149–97. Homans suggests that less frequent interaction between members tends to disintegrate the system, but Schein depicts situations where frequency remains about the same but disintegration appears. George C. Homans, The Human Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950), 361; and Schein, “Interpersonal Communication, Group Solidarity, and Social Influence,” 23: 148–61. Rolf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 135. Peter Blau, “A Theory of Social Integration,” American Journal of Sociology 65 (May 1960), 545–56; Edward E. Jones and John W. Thibaut, “Interaction Goals as Bases of Inference in Interpersonal Perception,” in Person Perception and Interpersonal Behavior, eds. Renato Tagiuri and Luigi Petrullo

socIAl dIsIntegrAtIon As A requIsIte of resocIAlIzAtIon

17

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958): 151–78; George Homans, “Social Behavior as Exchange,” American Journal of Sociology 63 (May 1958), 597–606. 21 Blau, “A Theory of Social Integration,” 549. 22 Alvin W. Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement,” American Sociological Review 25 (April 1960), 161–78. 23 Fritz Heider, “Social Perception and Phenomenal Causality,” Psychological Review (1944): 358–74; Gustav Ichheisiser, “Misunderstandings in Human Relations: A Study in False Social Perception,” American Journal of Sociology 55 (September 1945), Part 2.

2

STRUCTURED UNCERTAINTY AND ITS RESOLUTION: THE CASE OF THE PROFESSIONAL ACTOR

An actor being interviewed at home by a newspaperman: Yes, we have orgies here all the time. Pot, LSD, everything. Then the next day the maids clean up, and we have to throw out all the people who couldn’t make it to the street the night before. The same actor after the newspaperman has left: Have you ever given an interview and seen how it turns out? They put in what they want, or the better ones leave out what they want. Look, reporters have an idea what actors are like, so why argue? Just feed the machine. Say whatever will get you through it, and don’t worry about paying the check, because you will have to pick it up. His statement to the journalist was a misrepresentation, in the sense that it was “objectively” false, but it was not a lie because actors think this kind of behaviour appropriate when dealing with the public. At a black tie dinner: Husband: Shit on you. Wife: Fuck you. Husband: “Too”? Originally published as Peter McHugh, “Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor,” in Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness, eds. Stanley Plog and Robert Edgerton (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

19

Wife: My husband’s finally admitted he doesn’t know the difference between shitting and fucking. A vulgar exchange, but it is more informative to disclose that no one, including husband and wife, thought anything was wrong – not in choice of language or the relations it depicts. Finally, in a gathering of actors killing time before a rehearsal: He won’t be very helpful to us, playing those tiny parts. Not only that, he’s sick. I don’t know why he doesn’t do something about it, pull himself up, make the most of what he has. This proposition, acceptable perhaps to those in bureaucratic and professional settings, caused the group of actors to disband. Something was wrong. If we can learn about the conditions in which professional stage actors must live, we may unravel why these conversations occurred as they did – why a man would say he sponsors orgies when he doesn’t, why no one at the dinner expressed surprise or disgust, why actors would be startled to hear someone suggest self-improvement. These conditions will be described in some detail in order to show how very uncertain they are, so uncertain that there is no a priori reason to expect actors to form a group at all. But we shall discover that actors nevertheless do form a group, a rather rare one for an industrial society. It is this special group that shapes the behaviour of actors, behaviour that from any other perspective would seem bizarre, irresponsible, anomic. Following this, it will be argued that the uncertainty of conditions and special group form are compatible with one another, and so actors’ behaviour is signally appropriate to their situation.

Procedure Data were gathered by in-depth interviews with fifty male actors, observation of their rehearsals, and participation with them out of hours (rehearsals and out of hours activities included females). Actors were selected to participate in the interviews only if they had earned at least half their income from the stage in the previous two years, thus insuring their dependency on the stage for a livelihood. Females were not interviewed because they are not expected to be the primary source of income and familial status

20

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

in our society. Consequently, those interviewed do not represent the total membership of Actors Equity Association, the stage union, but they are not meant to, because many on the union roll work elsewhere and so do not meet the basic criterion of uncertainty. Access was gained through the investigator’s friends in the theatre, an important detail in light of the findings. These friendships had developed over many years and were of immeasurable help in providing entry to rehearsals and out-of-hours interaction. It is a mark of their cooperation that several actors themselves suggested that the study be done and a mark of their veracity that the straight interview materials were not contradicted by the direct observations. Interviews were partially structured. The same questions were asked of each subject, but for most questions there were no fixed alternatives to limit responses. Leads that developed in particular interviews were followed up. Participation out of hours took place over the course of several years and included interactions such as parties, meals, and conversations. Raw responses have been coded and tabulated on the assumption that so-called qualitative data can be counted. Verbatim materials are presented when necessary for illustration. I should stress again here that the aim of this paper is to describe uncertainty and its consequences for social organization, and behaviour, rather than to capture acting as a whole. A great deal about the history of the craft, and peripheral aspects of the general life of actors, has therefore been omitted. I shall begin with a description of the uncertain socioeconomic and technical conditions of professional stage acting and then go on to describe the social organization of the craft; a third section will suggest that the kind of social organization existing in those conditions is not entirely fortuitous.

Uncertain Occupational Conditions Of Actors To begin with, the socioeconomic position of actors fluctuates very greatly, in both the long and short run, and so it is difficult for them to anticipate their place in society. Second, the technical procedures available to actors at work are vague in principle and ambiguous in application and make it equally difficult for them to predict their effectiveness on the job. We shall take up socioeconomic and technical uncertainty in turn.

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

21

Socioeconomic Uncertainty Here we shall portray the amount and kind of social mobility actors undergo, the proportion of time they spend without work, and the social precariousness of celebrity. Actors average about four jobs per year, and they lose five for each job they obtain. Thus, their competence is reviewed about twenty-five times a year. These are very meaningful encounters, for they require face-to-face participation by the applicant: He must “read” for parts in the presence of writers, directors, and producers. In many cases he is asked to return several times. The milieu in which these readings occur directly confronts an actor with his own small chance of success. They take place in a theatre or an office suite at an appointed time, but when the actor arrives he discovers that there are ten or twenty or thirty others there too, all with similar appearance, style, age, and so forth. It does not take a lightning calculator to compute the probabilities in these cases. When one adds the fact that an actor’s agent, supposedly on his side, may have sent a couple of others in an attempt to get his 10 percent (actors call these types “flesh peddlers”), readings indeed become a whimsical affair. The actor is forever presenting himself for a job, exposing himself to evaluation by others, and this usually occurs when he is out of work. The result is failure four times out of five. Although an actor has several jobs in the course of a year, he is not always working. Only 12 percent work fifty weeks of the year; fully two-thirds are employed less than thirty weeks. These periods can hardly be called leisure or vacation, however, since the unpredictable longevity of a show makes it impossible to plan them in advance, and naturally the actor is not paid when he is not working. As a result, actors are always in the market for work. When they have a job, the tendency for shows to be short-lived pressures them to be on the lookout for the next time; when they are without work, the start and term of their next employment are similarly tenuous. Insofar as society makes regular work an important value, this condition poses the actor with important problems of self-regard, not to mention the matter of sheer economic survival. These uncertain structural factors, created by the economics of the theatre, are reflected in the actor’s own view of his career prospects. When asked how much money they might possibly make at their career peak, actors speculate a median of $92,000 per year. Yet when asked how much they will probably make, in order to bring the pie back down from the

TABLE 1

SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS OF ACTORS

Average number of jobs lost, past year

20.3

Number working less than fifty weeks

44

Number working less than thirty weeks

33

MOBILITY

Perceived upward mobility Possible upward mobility, as median income Probable upward mobility, as income

$92,000 Don’t know

Perceived downward mobility Likelihood of remaining at possible peak “Very likely”

0

“Somewhat likely”’

1

“Somewhat unlikely”

7

“Very unlikely”

42

Total

50

Likelihood of remaining at probable peak “Very likely” “Somewhat likely”

0 4

“Somewhat unlikely”

28

“Very unlikely”

18

Total

50

Actual mobility per cent increase in income After 5–10 years

220 %

After 10–20 years

24

After 20+ years

21

OCCUPATIONAL INCOME

$ 0–999

8

1,000–4,999

31

5,000–9,999

2

10,000–19,999

3

20,000–49,999

3

50,000–

2

Total

50

Number recognized as member of occupation out of hours

24

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

23

sky, actors find it so difficult to give an answer that two out of three say that they do not know. The import here is that a “career” has no practical meaning, for it is without a prospective contour. Actors cannot specify what a career looks like, cannot describe a typical future for a member of their occupation, and so cannot anticipate one for themselves. They can guess an upper range of achievement, exemplified by their ability to speculate about possible income. They cannot, however, go on from there to formulate their own particular chances by first consulting what they understand to be the typical career ladder, by assessing their own capacities, and then putting the two together by relating the typical pattern to their self assessment. They cannot respond to what is probable, as opposed to what is merely possible, because the channels of upward mobility are one dimension of an unpredictable future. According to one actor: “Hell. I could make a million dollars. I could make a thousand dollars. I could make ten thousand dollars. Take any number you want and put it down. But this I know …” He went to his desk and exhibited his tax return. His total income for the previous year was $736.45, which leads us to consider actors’ feelings about downward mobility. They expect to be downwardly mobile. Actors think it “very unlikely” that they will remain at their possible peak and “somewhat unlikely” that they will remain at the probable peak (whatever it may be, since they cannot predict it). Their responses to potential upward and downward mobility suggest that actors do not know what to expect in the way of a career peak, except to say that they will not stay up there. “We’ll have to do a benefit for him” is heard over and over again with reference to the man who puts nothing away in the face of likely downward mobility. Now what of actual mobility? Regardless of what they say, what happens to actors in fact? According to table 1, income rises for twenty years, then decreases, with much the greatest increase coming between the fifth and tenth years in the business. Theodore Caplow (1964, 75) points out that earnings always drop at the end of a career, but these data indicate that the decrease for actors begins after only twenty years, not ordinarily the end of a career. We can combine Caplow’s statement with these findings by suggesting that actors peak out much earlier than those in other occupations. One clear reason for this is the smaller number of parts available to those in middle age. Note, too, that these actors, who were selected for their dependency on the stage, are concentrated in the $1,000–$4,999 category. Unfortunately,

24

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

table 1 cannot show whether those in the lower ranges have always been there, but actors will say that there is a good deal of fluctuation in the inhabitants of a category from one season to the next. And actors who have been relatively successful at some earlier point say that they maintained their peak for a very short time and then experienced a swift slip downward (the term “roller coaster” turned up regularly in these interviews). Income is cyclic rather than linear, requiring continuous adjustment and readjustment in living style. A chart of a single actor’s career, for example, would be as likely to show its high point immediately before or after its low point as anywhere else, reinforcing his conception of the future as unpredictable. As a final aspect of socioeconomic uncertainty, it is important to know about actors’ celebrity. Celebrity expresses how the public thinks of actors and what the actor must contend with when he is thrown together with persons not in his business. Almost half the actors state that they have been recognized as actors outside of working hours. Most of the actors so identified were known as a generic occupational type, that is, actor, but three were identified as specific persons, which is sui generis an aspect of fame or notoriety (this distinction being contingent on whether the occupation has high or low prestige). Whatever the identification, a stare will follow, and in stores this is often accompanied by the removal of valuable objects from reach. But actors do not think of themselves as so childlike that they will break things or so poor that they will steal them, with the result that handling the discrepancy between self and social treatment becomes a regular facet of such encounters. Most of them do this by adopting an air of perfect executive propriety, detached sensuousness, or sagacity, depending on their age and appearance vis-à-vis the other party. Needless to say, they have had the training to be good at this, but they still must do it. The personally identified actor has even greater problems in this regard, because the public thinks of him as being just like the parts he plays – in Goffman’s terms, they confuse doing with being (Goffman 1961, 100). In one instance, a comedian found it impossible to give directions to household help, because they thought him a funny dope. Another actor, accosted at a restaurant, was punched several times on the shoulder, knocking his spoon out of the soup, all the while being smiled at and called by his first name. Of course, the public thinks he will be gratified by this sort of thing, but every actor denies it. In fact, most of the celebrated ones refuse to go out in public if they can help it, since they expect that their private space will be violated if they do. Even the least obnoxious sort of confrontation, like

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

25

being asked for an autograph, is usually accompanied by some undercutting statement to the effect that it is for a daughter or a niece, someone who is young and impressionable enough to be fooled by counterfeit. From the point of view of the actor, people around him lose their poise without knowing it; since they do not know it, they expect him to cooperate in an affront to himself.

Technical Conditions Other uncertain aspects of the actor’s environment are the technical exigencies within which he must perform. There are two of these, the first having to do with his own rules for working up a performance, the second with his relation to the audience as he presents that performance. Below is an illustration of these vagaries: Q. Suppose you follow all the rules you have learned, in acting classes or from reading, in some scene. What happens usually? A. (Laugh). What rules? Classes help to loosen you up, and the reading helps to loosen you up in theory so yoU can loosen up in classes, but they don’t tell you how to actually do a scene. What happens usually is the scene flops. Go and get another suggestion, it is impossible to rely on “The” or “a” method. (A reference to the Actor’s Studio in the first instance, and to the bromide that every actor has a method in the second.) Q. How do you know someone has offered a good suggestion? A. Well, you can’t always know. Sometimes a suggestion is made that just clicks, and everyone knows it’s a good one. Q. What do you mean, “just clicks”? A. It sounds right. Everyone can agree that it’s right, and then you try it out and it turns out to be right. The audience likes it. Q. Can you tell beforehand that it will be right, in any sure way? A. No, you have to try it out to be sure, but there is a feeling beforehand. Of course, sometimes there’s no feeling beforehand, yet it turns out right. I don’t know; it’s just a matter of experience and trying things out.

26

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

This interview, and the tabulation of responses in table 2, suggest that the actor is faced with vague and indeterminate technical standards before he steps on a stage and that this burden is amplified by absence of audience feedback once the actual performance begins. We shall discuss these in turn.

INDeteRMINate StaNDaRDS oF teCHNICaL CoMPeteNCe When asked about what they do at work in order to create a performance, actors (1) find it difficult to specify what they should do beforehand to bring off a successful result (“No, you have to try it out …”); (2) say they are likely to fail even when they act in terms of (some unspecified) success rules (“What happens usually is the scene flops … It is impossible to rely on ‘the’ or ‘a’ method”); (3) discover success and failure through general approval–disapproval rather than by calculated observation (“Everyone can agree that it’s right … The audience likes it”). Actors’ technical rules are clearly not rationalized in the bureaucratic sense, with the result that they may vary in application even when the tactical demands of the situation remain the same. There is not a set of means that permits an actor to plan a performance so as to produce a certain effect. Similarly, the difference between success and failure is hard to determine even after the fact – after the task has been performed and must be regarded as a finished product. He can only gain the closure permitted by ad hoc and generalized approval, which does not help to locate specific and thus remediable sources of error. oNe-Way CoMMUNICatIoN BetWeeN aCtoR aND aUDIeNCe One reason for the finding above involves the one-sided relation between actor and audience: the audience “sees” the actor but cannot be seen in return. With the exception of a comic line, there is no reciprocal interaction between the two, yet the audience engages in a concomitant and continuous review of the actor’s effectiveness. The activities of many other occupations are reviewed while they occur (diagnostician, beautician, salesman, for example), but in these cases the audience is also visible, so the worker may discover at any point how efficiently he is communicating his work to his audience. Actors and other performers are disadvantaged in being judged simultaneously with the assembly of their performance, while at the same time they are not permitted much feedback. Responsive adjustments while the “interaction” is taking place are therefore difficult because the client is invisible and his reactions are silently imposed. In this respect, professional

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

27

TABLE 2 TECHNICAL CONDITIONS OF ACTORS INDETERMINATE STANDARDS

ACTORS (N = 50)

“Can you say beforehand what you should do on the job, in order to bring about the results you want?” Always

4

Some of the time

20

Seldom

22

Never

5

Total

50

“When you do follow some plan to bring about the results you want, how often does it work?” Every time

1

Most of the time

22

Less than half the time

25

Never

2

Total

50

“Is there any way of checking up on work already done that tells you if you’ve been successful?” Yes, cites abstract rules Yes, cites change in performance of play Yes, cites approval-disapproval No

a 22% (11)

10% ( 5) 84% (42) 10% ( 5)

a Total percentages greater than 100 because respondent can mention more than one alternative.

stage actors have less access to the hidden back-stage, where they may privately adjust their act to situational and audience demands, than does Goffman’s metaphorical actor of everyday life (Goffman 1959, 106–41). In summary, the socioeconomic and technical conditions of acting increase the uncertainty of a member’s position in society and decrease the calculability of his effectiveness at work. The actor moves unpredictably from job to job. Vertical mobility may be great, it may not, there being no way to tell – the only sure thing is a rapid descent. The time he spends out of work poses problems of worth in terms of the value of regular employment, because joblessness cannot be planned in advance and is not considered a routine reward for services rendered. And his treatment by the public is out

28

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

of harmony with his own sense of self. On the technical side, indeterminate standards make it difficult to predict the consequences of alternative ways of doing things. Work turns into a series of trials where even error is not clear, and certainly not the obvious effect of a specific act, while the asymmetry of communication and judgment leaves actors without cues at the critical moment of performance. These conditions raise a serious question: Are actors anomic, a mere conglomerate that survives only because the public demands entertainment, or do actors form a group, with shared norms and interaction? Structured uncertainty could be resolved by the sentiments and forms of interaction between actors or it could so permeate their activities that the label “actor” designates a mere aggregate of persons. We must ask whether socially organized behaviour accompanies these conditions or if instead we observe a formless collection of bodies. We can begin to answer this question by using actors’ occupational identification as a measure of groupness. Should we discover some identification, we may reasonably describe acting as a subculture, one that maintains some viable level of cohesion, and go on to investigate what kind of group it is. Table 3 suggests that actors identify with their occupation. First, they say that the job of another person is the most important determinant of their treatment of him, that is, their social preceptions incorporate occupational differences. Second, they say they would become an actor if given another chance to choose – a rather positive view of their occupation. Finally, these feelings are reinforced by their interaction patterns, which are restricted primarily to others in their occupation. Thus, to the degree that occupational identification implicates a subculture, actors are more like a group than an aggregate. Our next step will be to delineate the kind of group it is, what it establishes as appropriate behaviour, and how that behaviour helps to resolve uncertainty.

Group Practices and Sentiments I shall turn now from the socioeconomic and technical conditions of acting, over which the membership can have little control of a direct sort, to the internal norms for technical and interpersonal activity that actors as a group construct and enforce. Table 4 summarizes these data, and illustrative responses are included in the discussion.

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon TABLE 3

29

ACTORS’ IDENTIFICATION WITH THEIR OCCUPATION

RECOGNIZED DIFFERENCES BETWEEN OCCUPATIONS

“Which of these are important to you in deciding how to act with other people?” a

The money they make

22%

Their education

12%

The job they have

70%

Their personality

36%

The kind of family they have

10%

None

6%

OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE

“If you had it to do over again, would you become an actor?” Yes

27

Probably

11

Probably not

9

No

3

INTERACTION

Proportion of friends who are actors

72%

Proportion of casual interaction with actors (cup of coffee, chat for a minute, and so on)

54%

a Total percentages greater than 100 because respondents can mention more than one alternative.

Technical Practices Actors are all equals on the job, too. I have gotten good advice from bad actors, and bad advice from good actors, so I always listen and take it seriously no matter who makes the suggestion. Sooner or later one will work. Something happens, and the performance goes better. Actors solicit suggestions from every quarter on the job. They do not assess the worth of a suggestion by distinguishing the size of part or public reputation of the player who initiates it (“No matter who makes the suggestion”). Moreover, since an actor has no explicit set of rules that tell him beforehand that a suggestion will work, he looks to others in the cast for agreement that it is a good one (“Everyone can agree its right”). If an actor gains this consensus, he tries that out (“You have to try it out to be sure”). If he

30 TABLE 4

REDEFINING THE SITUATION GROUP PRACTICES AND SENTIMENTS

TECHNICAL PRACTICES

Source of suggestions (“Where do you go to get a suggestion?”)

Status-linked (depends on size of part, past success of initiator)

All actors

12

38

Validity of suggestions

Status-linked

All actors

(“Where do you go to decide if a suggestion is a good one?”)

9

41

(“When can you be sure that a suggestion was a good one?”)

Before the fact

After the fact

5

45

Competitive

Cooperative

8

42

Individually controllable

Situationally determined

6

44

Relevant to actors’ relations with one another

Irrelevant to actors’ relations with one another

13

37

INTERPERSONAL SENTIMENTS

Looking for work Dislike

Public acclaim

thinks the audience is not properly affected, he returns to his colleagues for another suggestion and tries that out (“Go and get another suggestion”). This is an ad hoc trial and error procedure that utilizes cast consensus as the yardstick for choosing between alternatives. But the point here is that validation by group consensus tends to diffuse the error of a particular actor by absorbing it into the group as a whole – he cannot in this circumstance be held responsible or blamed when a mistake is made and cannot be regarded as a hero when a success occurs. Diffusion differs greatly, from the explicit, hierarchically organized rules and roles that predominate in bureaucracies and professions, where members can locate the specific source of error in any instance and then hold that source accountable. The efficacy of an actor’s suggestion can be discovered only retrospectively, owing to the joint effects of indeterminate standards and asymmetrical review, and so, in retrospect, the identity of its initiator tends to get lost in time. But more than that,

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

31

a consensus technique magnifies the effect by losing him in space as well, since validation by consensus intervenes between the suggestion and the trial. The whole group takes responsibility for the consequences.

Sentiments of Interaction Actors also exhibit a normative structure for other problematic activities that are job-related but not in direct relation with actual performance: job seeking, dealing with like and dislike, and responding to public acclaim. 1

2

3

They cooperate rather than compete with one another when looking for work: I always tell someone a job is coming up, even if I’m up for it myself. Why not? It never makes any difference, you either get the job or not. It doesn’t depend on who the rival is so much as what the director wants, and when I lose out one time I get the part the next time. I think most of us feel this way. No, I wouldn’t call the competition “cutthroat.” Actors treat dislike as unchangeable and situationally determined, not to be controlled by the individuals involved: Sure, there are people I don’t like. But nothing can be done, it’s just “personality conflict.” In the service we used to get transferred when that happened, but in the theater you just go ahead and pay no attention since nothing can be done about it. It’s the fault of the person doing the disliking as much as the person disliked … I like most everyone, and when I don’t it’s personality conflict and nothing can be done. Actors refuse to accept public acclaim or prestige as a determinant of their relations with one another on and off the job: Some actors get high-falutin’ when they make it big, or even when they land in a hit, but there aren’t many. Face it, work and friendship are two entirely different things, and we all know there are good actors who don’t make it, so public recognition is unimportant so far as actors themselves are concerned. Oh, we’re all happy when somebody does well, but it doesn’t have any effect on the kidding, say, that actors do to one another. Besides, today’s flash is tomorrow’s poop, and everyone is aware of that.

32

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Actors are confronted with differentiation, as in public acclaim and personal animus, but to them it is an epiphenomenon, the immutable product of situational happenstance. They need not evaluate an act as if the individual is to be blamed or praised, with the result that a particular behaviour does not become invidiously attached to the person who originates it. These sentiments, based on normative dissociation of act from actor, make it possible to enforce horizontal rather than vertical relationships. Interaction can be egalitarian, a style which deflects the emergence of stratification as an important dimension of behaviour. Thus, technical rules stress the development of consensus, while interpersonal sentiments are egalitarian. These are characteristics of collegial social organization, as opposed to the bureaucratic and professional kinds. It is a type that has received little attention since Max Weber (1947), who discussed it as a form of organization that limits monocratic or bureaucratic authority: “Legitimate acts require the participation of all members” (395), “Acts of authority must be carried out only after previous consultation and vote” (393), and “there is concern with uniformity of opinions and attitudes” (396). We might add that among actors, insofar as they furnish a collegial contrast to bureaucracy, there is little emphasis on step-by-step formulae that delimit a recognizable series of points for the assembly of the end product. This absence of formula and assembly points means that there is a comparable diminution of hierarchically organized statuses, for there are too few rules to induce an internal division of labour – there are not enough distinctions to tell the members what the statuses are or could be. Nor is there the individual autonomy and responsibility in actors’ collegiality which is so characteristic of the professions: suggestion and trial is a procedure requiring validation by colleague agreement before a particular proposal can be considered legitimate. Among actors, authority resides in the whole group, whereas in other endeavours it is vested in roles within the group. As a result, interaction on and off the job does not exhibit the finite stratified perspective typical of other occupations. If there is little emphasis on making distinctions, there is correspondingly little grist for stratification.

Collegiality And Uncertainty Having described the occupational conditions and group organization of acting as, respectively, uncertain and collegial, it remains now to put them together. Is there a relation between the two, a compatibility between the form of the group and the conditions in which it exists?

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

33

First, the parametric uncertainty of potential and actual mobility is mitigated by refusing to act in terms of public acclaim. The individual actor, facing an unpredictable socioeconomic future, is provided with continuing support by the group however his public status may fluctuate. If instead there were a parallel stratification system among actors that required comparable changes in treatment and self every time a change in public status occurred, uncertainty would impair continuous interpersonal behaviour. In the latter scheme of things, the occupation actor would probably designate no more than random collisions of disparate men. The need to act on the unpredictable would obviate the development and persistence of norms that could be regularly applied and mutually expected, circumstances that are necessary to sustained concert among persons. Among other things, the dissonance of celebrity engenders this disdain for the public ranking system, with the result that actors are not likely to act on, or even care about, outside criteria of success anyway. Since the public and private definitions of acting and actors are exactly opposite, a man can easily misrepresent himself to the public without any apparent purpose except to do it. In fact, our actor’s remarks to the newspaperman were fully responsible ones, if by that we mean responsibility to one’s own. As the public and its journalist surrogate are the violators of one’s private self, not to mention fickle arbiters of employment and performance, it becomes a duty, not a choice, to portray one’s life for the public as at odds with one’s life for the group. Being forced to participate in two worlds, our actor accomplished this by contradicting them and kept them separated in so doing. The actor’s view of animosity is equally compatible with uncertainty. As an ascriptive quality, one beyond the capacity to change, an actor need not conclude that some act by those involved could rectify the conflict, and so he need not define and deal with exceptions to egalitarianism. An actor does not have to think anyone is at fault. To the extent this characteristic is shared, it inhibits the growth of an esteem system, a system which would demand a routine search for invidious comparisons and lead him back to stratification and the contingencies of uncertainty. Thus, when one actor talks about bootstrap betterment the rest become uncomfortable, because it implies that the individual does not merely have a place in the world but is morally required to do something on his own to improve it. After a first glance, it is not so surprising that actors adopt a cooperative rather than adversary system in looking for work. Some actors, for example, will go for a reading, discover what the production staff wants, and then telephone an acquaintance who seems to fit the bill more precisely. Such

34

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

collaboration may decrease the chance of a single actor for a single job, yet the over-all effect, besides an increase in collegiality, is to enlarge the amount of information that any one actor can possess. This may, on balance, outweigh the increased competition, since all will know where the opportunities are, and where they are not, with the result that the actor is probably rejected less often and accepted more often. Thus, besides supporting the collegial system, cooperation tends to overcome the secrecy that would make things even vaguer than they are. It has already been suggested that consensus at work diffuses failure and success into the group as a whole. Given the uncertainty of conditions between audience and performer and the large amounts of error that ensue, consensus is a way of concealing fallibility, but it also supports the general egalitarianism exhibited in actors’ sentiments of interaction. No one may claim sole responsibility for what he has done nor must he accept sole responsibility for what he has not done, with the result that a particular triumph belongs to all. Actors probably could not survive as a group if they had to recriminate, there being so much error and so little technique for locating it that they would not have time for anything else. Consensus is a fitting motif for going right ahead when goals are coming no closer to realization. Thus, collegial social organization is an ensemble format for egalitarianism and consensus, with little emphasis on hierarchies of rules and distinctions of authority. In this type of organization there is just one kind of member, not many kinds – once admitted, one member is the same as everyone else, and will continue to be, since there is no important way of evaluating him. One is a member and that ends it. Collegiality is a gyroscopic device that washes out the effects of environing uncertainty, because actors can respond to nominal criteria of membership that are met simply by being a professional stage actor, rather than to complicated and unpredictable shifts in socioeconomic status or technical fortune. The point of reference for membership – whether or not one possesses the specific quality “actor” – is totally encompassing, open-armed, so one need not find his place by addressing multiple foci that change in unknown ways and can be discovered only after the fact. A success here, a failure there; acclaim now, ignominy then – none of these call for adjustment by actors, because one is a colleague regardless, entitled to all the claims and perquisites of any other member. When one actor is asked for his autograph, he is careful to pass the request around to the others, especially if they have suffered reverses.

structured uncertAInty And Its resolutIon

35

The idea of a collegial subculture suggests the appropriateness of certain other actions we have not directly considered: de-individuation, expansive behaviour, and passion, all antithetical to the bureaucratic version of social life. Whatever he may do, a collegial member continues to be supported by his group. Error is, as we have said, diffused rather than specified; egalitarianism emphasizes what is held in common rather than what is special about the individual; single focus membership excludes any behaviour other than occupational identification as irrelevant criteria of unity. Consequently, acts that would be deviant in some other kind of group – the dinner conversation that we began with – can be perfectly acceptable among actors. The individual participant is permitted a wider band of normatively acceptable behaviour because a particular act does not call its initiator or recipient into question as a bona fide member. Thus, no one at the party thought anything was wrong because (1) sexual behaviour between man and wife is irrelevant to their group identity, and so (2) a public statement of such behaviour, whether true or untrue, is possible without changing their standing in the group. Nothing was imminent in that conversation because it was not grave. It was not grave because the language employed, and the action it depicted, occurred in a context of collegiality.

Implication The stress in social science on explicit rules of calculation, performance, and evaluation may have led us to assert that these are necessary conditions of social order, that their absence will lead to anomie. Similarly, we may have concluded that the individual behaviours that are associated with those conditions are the only appropriate ones and that their absence is evidence of psychological debility, obtuseness, and lack of control. But the existence of such rules, and the individual behaviours they prescribe, may be no more than numerically predominant empirical phenomena in the professional and bureaucratic organizations we usually study. If the actor’s case is a valid one (and here I am not referring to any but professional stage actors), there are circumstances where uncertainty does not lead to anomie, where a detailed set of rules and positions are not necessary to order, where broad-gauged behaviour and unconcern with reputation are not signs of demoralization. Calculation, differential authority, and stratification are minor subcultural imperatives and not reflected in the behaviour of actors; if they were, sooner or later there would

36

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

be no group left to enforce them. A structure of invidious distinctions, the creation of a paradigm of individual accountability, would in the uncertain world of the actor require pervasive, instantaneous, but unpredictable shifts in action, role, and self-image. Acting is a vague and amorphous business but the kind of solidarity it exhibits enables the craft to persist as a group endeavour. Collegiality resolves uncertainty by ignoring its effects.

ReFeReNCeS Caplow, T. 1964. The Sociology of Work. New York: McGraw-Hill. Goffman, E. 1959. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, Ny: Doubleday Anchor Books. – 1961. Encounters. Indianopolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Weber, M. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by T. Parsons and A. Henderson. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

3

ON THE NATURE OF RULE FOLLOWING

Posing the problem of social order has become a tradition in the study of social life. It asks how we can account for our observation that human behaviour is usually organized and concerted rather than random, and the answer varies from theorist to theorist. Thomas Hobbes, one of the first to pose this question explicitly, suggests that people realize the likelihood of war, each against all, if they do not forego the vagaries of pure individualism, and so they rationally turn to the state for protection against that realization.1 Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons share with Hobbes the importance of his question, but they object to his answer. They believe that society inculcates a set of rules and behaviours enforced less by individual will and political sovereignty than by the independent preexistence of society itself. Durkheim and Parsons transform the state into society.2 These macrocosmic views of social order differ substantially from the view that emphasizes the dynamics of social interaction on a smaller scale. George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Alfred Schutz, and W.I. Thomas, among others, answer the problem of order with a discussion of such processes as role-taking and definition of the situation.3 Thomas’s famous aphorism, “If men define situations as real, they are real in the consequences,” led workers in this tradition to investigate how persons develop common perspectives and communicate these perspectives to one another. They observe order and want to know why, just as Hobbes, Durkheim, and Parsons do. But they build their answers from the ground up rather than from the top down. They imply, by their use of the phrase “definition of the situation” that there is no one-to-one correspondence between an objectively real world and Originally published as chapter 2 in Peter McHugh, Defining the Situation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

38

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

people’s perspectives of that world, that instead something intervenes when events and persons come together, an intervention that makes possible the variety of interpretations which Schutz calls “multiple realities.”4 According to this view, the same events or objects can have different meanings for different people, and the degree of difference will produce comparable differences in behaviour. Long a sticky issue in philosophy, the epistemology of variable meaning need not directly concern us here, because we are not interested in how man can logically justify what he does so much as we are interested in how he goes about doing what he does.5 We need only look around us to see people acting in concert; they apparently come to adopt compatible definitions of their situations, the principle of variable meaning notwithstanding, By the same token, however, we also see people acting differently in similar situations. Why? Society, it is said, provides a baseline of interpretation for its members. But it remains to be seen just what mechanisms are operating to determine those interpretations at the point where they are actually being constructed. These “higher” levels of analysis are incomplete because they ignore the interpenetration of society and interaction. They do not in themselves describe how the mundane activities of ordinary members can be conceived as maintaining or changing what happens at the very general levels of society, although these mundane activities are the vehicles of society. To suggest that society is “exterior” to interaction is only to say that society is not a carbon copy of mind,6 but it is not to say that society is not experienced by members or that society does not depend for its continued existence upon a membership that interacts. If society were so exterior that it could not be experienced, the discipline of sociology would be impossible. Suicide, as disjuncture between member and society, would never be taken as an appropriate topic. Nor would alienation, which is a specific description of members’ experiences. Macrosocial ideas and analyses are in this respect insufficient because both society and interaction are preconditions of one another, and to have social order at a societal level there must be some (not necessarily identical) order at the interactional level. Because our statements about society and order ultimately rest upon the activities of members, we must make problematic the relationship between macroscopic properties such as “culture” and the experiential properties by which they can be said to operate. To fully describe an institution as a locus of group rules, for example, requires some description of how the institution looks to those engaging in the action, because they will act

on the nAture of rule followIng

39

according to how it looks to them, and in so doing the institution will be maintained or changed.7 An example of this is the idea of “false consciousness.” One way, an experiential way, of describing behaviour and norms is by discerning to which groups in society one aspires and to which he believes he belongs. Upon discovering these, we are sometimes led to assert that our aspirations can be “wrong” or inappropriate, that is, false. But false by what standards? To say false is not to deny the experience of identity but to characterize it. It is false not in the sense that it does not exist but because it is out of accord with some imposed standard that utilizes society and institutions as the important criteria of truth. It is certainly not false in the way a breach of some chess rule would be false or in the way calling someone by the wrong name would be wrong. Nevertheless, it becomes a short step to denote society as objective and experience as subjective. Like Hegel and Adam Smith, Marx ascribed meanings to the process of social interactions. Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” and Hegel’s “ruse of the idea,” appear in Marx’s system as an objective logic of dynamic institutions that work themselves out behind the backs of the actor’s. In so far as men know not what they do, they realize the blind forces of society. Although these forces are the work of men, they simply remain, in Veblen’s term, “opaque.” Thus Marx measures the subjective notions of the actors of the system against the objective meaning as revealed by scientific study. And in the comparison and typical incongruity between what men think they do and the objective social functions of their acts, Marx locates the ideological nature of the subject’s “false consciousness.”8 Now the issue here is not whether man’s purposes inevitably come to pass. Of course they don’t. It is rather what we are to take as the purport of “men know not what they do.” At the moment of doing, they must “know” what they are doing if by that we mean they are defining what they are doing, unless we deny that men can be said to be conscious (aware, responsive), an assertion that neither Hegel nor Marx nor a conditioning table would make.9 But how do they know? By using some rule or criterion in some situation. And how can they be wrong? By applying some other rule or criterion. To say “false consciousness” is to replace one criterion

40

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

(common sense) with another (institutions according to sociology). All well and good, except that it is unreasonable to ascribe subjectivity to one and objectivity to another, since both are objective in their own terms – it is the relation between the two criteria that is disjunctive. This is not to say that the standards of the actor are always right. Indeed they may never be right according to some criterion. It is only to say that the standards of the actor, his way of making definitions, are the bases of action, and that actions are the analytic bases of institutions. An institution must in some way be experienced to continue or change, and thus an institution can be said to exist at the level of interaction. Further, interaction must occur before the institution can be said to exist at all, even for its own sake, and in its own macroscopic terms. Being conceptually interdependent on the one hand and directly observable only in social action on the other, we must understand action before we can methodologically be said to have observed institutions, and an understanding of action will also provide an understanding of the institutions embedded there. The existence of each level is a condition for the existence of the other, and so, if we know about one, we will also know about the other. Thus, the relation between definition and institution poses no ineluctable paradox. Accordingly, we can ask how members can be said to be conscious, if by that we mean defining their situations. We need to describe how members define their situations, how objects are meaningful, and how that meaning shifts over the course of one’s association with those objects. Generally, then, what sociologists say about grand matters of great scale depends for its cogency on behaviour at the level of social interaction. This is one of many reasons for suggesting that the definition of the situation should be examined. At the level of social interaction people are experiencing the grand matters in a way that makes those matters contingent upon the quality of that experience, there being a relation between the grand matters and the experience grandly described. The idea of the definition of the situation can help us to depict what experiencing is like and can thus serve both in its own stead and as a behavioural and methodological device to account for the relation between great matters grandly put and the prosaic details of everyday life, upon which any cosmos logically depends. Granted the pre-existence of society as an abstraction. But how does this abstraction enter into the daily lives of individuals whose definitions are continually being made and remade? What are the components of the definition of the situation itself?

on the nAture of rule followIng

41

It would seem that those who are supposed to be dealing more regularly with the definition of the situation are symbolic interactionists, but they usually presuppose these components. We shall discuss this perspective more thoroughly later. It will suffice for now to note that in symbolic interaction a definition occurs by having taken the role of the other or by adopting a group standpoint. In so doing, one learns what is expected of him; that is, he constructs his definition of the situation: Fundamentally, group action takes the form of a fitting together of individual lines of action. Each individual aligns his action to the actions of others by ascertaining what they are doing or what they intend to do – that is, by getting the meaning of their acts. For Mead, this is done by the individual “taking the role” of others – either the role of a specific person or the role of a group (Mead’s “generalized other”). In taking such roles the individual seeks to ascertain the intention or direction of the acts of others. He forms and aligns his own action on the basis of such interpretation of the acts of others. This is the fundamental way in which group action takes place in human society.10 But how do they take the role of the other and so “ascertain what they are doing”? What are the devices of social interpretation that make this possible and allow interaction to proceed?11 This is not to ask, as several have, for a classification of roles to be taken on (reference groups, standpoints, and the like) but to ask how any role is taken on, regardless of the group of reference or standpoint chosen? Without an answer to this question, the idea of the definition of the situation will not help us to understand how interaction takes place, except as a plausible assertion, bolstered by belief rather than evidence. On the basis of this very brief summary of two traditional ideas in sociology, I want to suggest more directly how those ideas generate certain issues with regard to the definition of the situation. I shall do this by immediately asserting that rules (norms, values) are a means by which society and definition can be said to coexist, because rules inhabit both the collective conscience and the member’s definition. Rules are socially organized in the most encompassing sense of the term. (I am not going to justify this assertion except by appeal to the authority of the literature.) Next, I shall draw on analytic philosophy to delineate these issues and then review several relevant works that are expressions of them. I have

42

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

chosen analytic philosophy and particular sociological studies that I feel offer the most cogent descriptions of the problematic relation between rules and activity and, therefore, the most adequate current starting points for connecting the definition of the situation and the problem of order. I might add that by issue I mean in need of description. These issues evolve around the ideas of rules, rule-governed behaviour, and the observation and description of these ideas.12

1 In What Sense Do Rules “Determine” Definition? Does a rule, because it can be said to exist on a societal level, automatically engender conformity at the level of interaction? “Obeying a rule” may be a practice, but is it inevitable? If not, “following a rule” becomes problematic and needs to be investigated. How can it be said that a rule is followed, obeyed? How is it that the rule of monogamy is followed, since it might not be? By this I do not mean that we should explain the following of a rule by reference to something else, say socialization. I mean we should describe the activity of following a rule in the way it is followed as it is being followed. A rule, for example, can be misinterpreted in the course of being followed – a member can be incompetent with regard to a rule. Perhaps the rule of monogamy is conceived to be an entirely legalistic one, without exclusive rights of sexual access. Or rules can be disobeyed, in the sense that some who know and are capable of applying them may not do so. Access rights may be ignored. Thus, what sorts of observations can we generate in order to describe the problematic relation between general rules and the action of defining the situation?

2 Are Rules Complete? If we start out to describe the definition of the situation, and if we use the idea of rules in so doing, will we accomplish such a description? Or would some matters of definition be omitted, because the concrete activity of defining extends beyond the contents which develop from rules? Perhaps defining situations is a stratum of life with its own logic, a logic that requires something other than a description in terms of rules. Rules, for example, may or may not be complete. Now even to ask whether or not rules are complete is to imply that some things we want to depict may not be covered

on the nAture of rule followIng

43

and not covered in the sense that rules are irrelevant rather than missing. To begin by limiting the definition of the situation to the occasions when rules are complete could limit a description of defining the situation so narrowly as to obviate our purpose.

3 Are Rules an Exact Calculus? Are ambiguities, troubles, vagueness, and misinterpretation as they are because those involved “don’t know their real definition, or because there is no real ‘definition’ to them”?13 In a way, this is to ask if societal rules can be “verified” by interactants as existing in their interactions. What makes a proof convincing? Does a proof make a proof? Do we decide by calculating or do we accept by having been convinced? Is a definition a mere choice, like choosing between a penny and a dollar, or is it a conviction? When we ask, “Is it love?” do we test it by consulting some definition as if it were a proof, or are we convinced by various tenuous evidences that could never be redeemed by an explicitly calculable and determinant rule?

4 What Is the Observable Logic of the Definition of the Situation? Does it have its own motif, or is it a repetition of socialization, internalization, and institutionalization? Is it “bedrock,” in the sense that it cannot be fully described by anything else, say by the coming together of personalities, norms, and social structure? How does it look for its own sake, before being explained away from outside? This is to ask not for explanation, but for description. “Why did the Puritans persecute bachelors?” is not the same query as “How did the Puritans persecute bachelors?” The first may receive an answer in terms of slavish pursuit of Biblical injunctions, of the motives of a set of women, of views about maintaining the numbers of true believers, or of the survival of a useless practice. Whichever answer is given, it will not be an answer to the second question. It will not tell us whether Puritans taxed bachelors heavily, placed them in stocks, or disenfranchised them. And this distinction between the reasons for an action or

44

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

the occurrence of an event, on the one hand, and the means in which it was done or the way it took place, on the other hand, is what in the present connection we refer to by the words “explanation” and “description” respectively.14 What I shall do now is take several kinds of work that are closely related to the problem of order, rules, and the definition of the situation, and briefly assess them in terms of these issues. In Talcott Parsons’ work, the social order consists in part in the translation of cultural values into social norms, which become the rules by which behaviour is governed at the level of interaction. The logical starting point for analysis of the role of normative elements in human action is the fact of experience that men not only respond to stimuli, but in some sense try to conform their action to patterns which are, by the actor and by members of the same collectivity, deemed desirable. The statement that this is a fact, like all statements of fact, involves a conceptual scheme. The most fundamental component of that scheme is what is here called the means–end scheme … There is no such thing as action except as effort to conform with norms.15 Norms become concrete means and ends of action and a source of identity between member and system. The social order resides in this identity. Norms are a source of identity because they diminish the potential distinction between self and collectivity, since they engender a coinciding interest for the self and for the collectivity. Through this identity persons are committed to the social system – they can be called members – and thus their behaviours cohere. Norms establish the ground rules, and a social system is stable when these norms are effective in governing interaction. The question here is, what are the actual ways in which members go about their ends and means? What does an action look like with regard to the concrete observables that would describe for us the activity proposed as rule-governed? Because it is at least possible that a rule may not be obeyed, government needs to be pictured for us. How are norms invoked during

on the nAture of rule followIng

45

interaction, what does obeying a rule look like concretely? Does it come out universalism just like that, ensconced in abstraction? In what sense can norms be said to “appear”? The action scheme is metaphorical, because we are without a reproducible description of the actual activity which is supposed to be “explained” by the notion that norms are followed by men. If a rule can be followed or not, then the way it is followed or not becomes our descriptive task. We cannot, of course, say we have explained anything that has not been described. All we know by having consulted the action scheme is what we have already posed as issues: Rules can be followed or not, they may or may not be complete, they may or may not be exact, definition may or may not have its own logic. Parsons suggests that rules can be followed, and provides us with units in which rules might be followed, but we are without a description of the ways rules are followed. Alfred Schutz advanced the empirical idea of norms one step by talking about them as they are formulated by the actor. A philosopher, Schutz is typically treated as though he were only a theorist, but his version of the attitude of everyday life also moves toward making norms observable. Rather than treating norms as the abstractions of the investigator, he extends them to those being observed (although they remain quite abstract). He takes them out of the sociologist and puts them into action, as something that can be watched rather than presupposed. Now, being something which actors themselves will recognize, we might be able to observe norms among rather than just impose them on the actors. In so doing, he moves them from the sociologist’s stratum of meaning to the actor’s. The world … is from the outset experienced in the pre-scientific thinking of everyday life in the mode of typicality … and depends upon my practical or theoretical “problem at hand.” Thus, typification depends upon my problem at hand for the definition and solution of which the type has been formed. Typified patterns of the Others’ behavior become in turn motives of my own actions, and this leads to the phenomenon of selftypification well known to social scientists under various names.16 But problems remain. If rules and typification of the problem at hand are not followed in some cases, we are left without much to say about the ways in which they are not followed (if we are permitted to say that things

46

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

will “break down,” this is an effect rather than a description of not following, and we are still without a description of what breaking down looks like). Further, the rules are still too abstract. They have been put above the heads of actors but not in their mouths, Schutz has reconstructed the idea of rules so as to make them potentially observable, but the actual ways in which rules are invoked remain obscure. Little is said about how these rules are practiced. Describing rules as assumptions that actors make is to move a step toward description of definition, because it is now possible that an actor will use them in ways that can be observed. But just how do assumptions get invoked during an interaction? Schutz has left us with a limited program for describing behaviour. Garfinkel moves forward a notch by distinguishing rules that are necessary for order (constitutive rules). Constitutive rules are necessary in the sense that a stable order requires their presence. He indicates empirically that these rules are important by violating them and then observing the disorganization that results. Garfinkel capitalizes on constituent properties of rules, and in this is directly involved with the social order, because he relates a property of social order to a property of rules. With regard to the constitutive order of events, “It is our perennial task to locate and define the features of their situations that persons, while unaware of, are nevertheless responsive to as required features.”17 The fact that persons are “unaware” has an important empirical consequence because they will not appear in just any orderly circumstance and thus cannot be observed there. But because persons are “responsive” we can still have a program for observing these rules. Our task is to learn what it takes to produce for members of a group that has stable features perceived environments that are “specifically senseless.” … Events which are perceived by group members as being atypical, causally indeterminate, without a relevant history or future, means character, or moral necessity.18 That is, we can locate and define required features by breaching them. In such a program, however, two aspects of the definition of the situation are omitted: First, we are without a description of the operation of unrequired features (preferential rules); second, we are without the possibility of a description of orderly interaction, because the program requires that “we

on the nAture of rule followIng

47

produce perceived environments which are specifically senseless,” that is, disorderly environments. Garfinkel does not depict for us the whole round of rule-governed activity, because he has chosen to concentrate on constitutive rules to the exclusion of those “alternatives that are treated as within the player’s discretion to comply with.”19 Now, if rules are invoked as situations are defined, and if rules are both constitutive and preferential, we must incorporate preferential rules to describe the definition of the situation. We need the contingent as well as necessary rules by which something comes to he meaningful. Having long hair may not be a constitutive property of “woman,” but it can be a part of being a woman in the sense that it makes a difference to those around her. We want to locate and define the symptoms of membership and not just the essential criteria of membership – meanings which actors treat as matters of interest even though they do not stand as bona fides. We want to do this because, as an element of social order, defining the situation is a bedrock “form of life.”20 Therefore it is necessary to describe it rather than explain it by showing how it exhibits features external to itself. It is in this sense that the exclusion of preferential rules makes any such statement about defining the situation a metaphorical one. Being bedrock, it must be fully described but cannot be without utilizing the preferential as well as constitutive property of rules. And being bedrock, orderly definition must be described as well, because we are no longer using definition to delineate anything except itself. I am asking here whether the definition of the situation can be described, not by going outside of itself – not by calling it determined by constitutive rules, or socialization, or social structure – but according to its own motif. What sort of logic does it represent, not how is it caused? What are its internal relations, not what effect does it have? A man who writes aphorisms may say a thing, and, on another occasion, the very opposite of it without being guilty of a contradiction. Each aphorism, as it stands, is quite complete in itself. Two different aphorisms are not parts of one and the same communication. Suppose you go to a museum where several paintings are hung on the wall. Would you complain that they are not correlated and do not fit into one and the same perspective? Well now, each painting has a pictorial space of its own. What

48

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

is represented in two paintings, though the paintings may be adjacent, is not in the same pictorial space. It is the first aim of Art, it has been said, to set a frame around Nature. Sometimes the frame is large, sometimes small, but it is always there. An aphorism is Literature and done with ink instead of colors. Of two aphorisms each is in a frame of its own. Hence no clash … No: seeming contradictions are not always absurd.21 An aphorism or painting is a puzzle only when it is presumed that it must be causing, or caused by, or related to something external to itself. Only then can it be contradictory, and we could not arrive at such a conclusion until after describing it for its own sake, without referring to some external criterion of logic. By the same token, the definition of the situation deserves to be so described. Perhaps actors are “unaware,” but why not describe this unawareness? What does it mean, by way of description, to say that actors are unaware? This is not so metaphysical as it seems if by bedrock we mean some content which helps solve the problem of a discipline – in sociology if it connects with the problem of social order. It is then not to be explained by some other notion but rather only to be described because it is an element of social order and requires no further justification. It is in this sense a form of life, a rendering of an event that needs no further grounds. To explain a form of life in terms of something else is to revise the question it was intended to answer, with the result that the description is not the same answer either. One is playing a different game. What I now suggest we do – and this is a programme for the future – is to reverse the whole situation by saying: “The formal motifs which we have been considering all combine to impress a certain stamp on a stratum: they give us the means to characterize each stratum ‘from within.’ that is, with no reference to the subject.” If we carefully study the texture of the concepts which occur in a given stratum, the logic of its propositions, the meaning of truth, the web of verification, the sense in which a description may be complete or incomplete – if we consider all that, we may thereby characterize its subject-matter.22

on the nAture of rule followIng

49

Summary This brief description of the history and issues in the problem of order suggests the basic question guiding the research reported here. We want to know how men define things as real. To the degree that the way men define things makes a difference, and to the degree that some kind of definition must take place if there is to be social action, then a description of definition is a description of one of the elements of social order. We shall go about this by describing how a definition comes to be so given the existence of perspectives already determined by society, culture, and reference group. It is a study of the devices by which meaning is assigned or not, rules are invoked or not, actors are made aware or not, from which flows the substance and content of any particular interaction. Because all theories presuppose these devices, I suggest that making them explicit and observable will generally improve sociological knowledge.

NoteS 1 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1928), 6. 2 Emile Durkheim, On the Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933). Parsons’s earliest complete statement of this position appears in The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), 77–82. 3 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934); John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1926); Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vols. I and II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); W.I. Thomas, Social Behavior and Personality, ed. Edmond H. Volkhart (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951). “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” originally appeared in W.I. Thomas, The Child in America (New York: Knopf, 1928), 584. 4 Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” reprinted in Collected Papers I. The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 207–59. It is the general tautological case that an event which is not part of a “system” must be assimilated by it to some degree before it can be a cause of action in that system, that is, to be part of a system requires being part of that system. The special point here, however, is that some single event, as described by its location in physical space and chronological time, need not be a single event as described by social actors. The question for us

50

5 6

7

8 9

10 11

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

thus becomes how are we to conceptualize the way some single event can become a multiple of itself. Philosophers’ growing interest in the analysis of ordinary language, by which they mean analysis of the language as it is used by ordinary people, represents their acceptance of this aspect of meaning. By mind I mean only that members refer to things and can articulate a future, not that there is a ghost in the machine, free will, or individual determination of society. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949); Peter Strawson, Individuals (New York: Doubleday, 1963); J.L. Austin, “Other Minds,” in Logic and Language, ed. Anthony Flew (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 342–80. This is not a reference to intended and unintended consequences but to the general institutional effects of varieties of interaction in varieties of conditions by varieties of members, whatever their intentions. See the discussion to follow of “false consciousness.” H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford, 1959), 58. In one sense, Marx adopted the viewpoint expressed here in statements like “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process” (italics supplied). It is probably not a distortion to equate the phrase “actual life process” with experience. Then Marx adds that consciousness is “emancipated” into a deranged superstructure as a result of the division of labor. But it is still consciousness based on the actual life process (the division of labor), the difference being in the division of labour and not consciousness. The two correspond empirically – it is their justification that brings in the notions of subjectivity and objectivity. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. with an introduction by R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 14. Herbert Blumer, “Society as Symbolic Interaction,” in Human Behavior and Social Processes, ed. Arnold M. Rose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 184. As a matter of fact, Robert K. Merton suggests that any serious functional analysis (which are often in the macrocosmic tradition) must include a description of “the meanings (or cognitive and affective significance) of the activity of pattern for members of the group” if the analysis is to make sense. See his Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. and enl. (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 56. For another statement of this position, see Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Communication and the Social Order (New Jersey: Bedminster, 1962), xv–xxx, 109–14, and 431–8. It should be noted that Duncan, with very broad purpose, takes art and artistic symbolism as the

on the nAture of rule followIng

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

51

consummate measure of social order. This work differs from Duncan’s at least because it does not use the dramatic or artistic metaphors and from Merton’s because it avoids the concept role as an “explanation” of definition. I am especially indebted here to Wittgenstein, of course, and to Cavell and Waismann. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York; Macmillan, 1953); Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed. George Pitcher (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1966); Friedrich Waismann, “Verifiability” and “Language Strata,” in Logic and Language, First and Second Series, ed. Antony Flew (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1965). I have used the analytic philosophers here because they pose the problems in their strongest form, and thus any solution would be the strongest solution. But I make no claim to solution, only to addressing the problems. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 25. Robert Brown, Explanation in Social Science (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. 1963), 20. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 76. Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” Collected Papers vol. I, 60. Harold Garfinkel, “Conception of and Experiments with ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions,” in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. O.J. Harvey (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1963), 192. Ibid., 189. It should be said here that Garfinkel has recently moved away from this position. See his Studies in Ethnomethodology (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Ibid., 192. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 226. Waismann, “Language Strata,” 238. Ibid., 246.

4

ON THE FAILURE OF POSITIVISM

I shall attempt in this chapter to describe how seeking truth might actually be done. Emphasis will be on the behaviour of seeking truth, on the institutional and essentially public character of truth, in contrast to the usual psychological and semantic descriptions that depict private disembodiments of that behaviour. Positivism, ostensibly a behaviourist epistemology and the most influential program for the conduct of science, nevertheless has been permitted to develop without much attention to whether or not it is capable of being followed in behaviour, whether or not it can be done. I hope to indicate that, limited as it is to perceptions by the individual observer, the world of positivism is a romantic one, for it leads us to expect that truth can be found in the private senses of some man. But this is a demonstrably inadequate picture of the social institution where the actual ascriptions of scientific truth take place. Our inquiry will thus assess the sheer asocial logic of conventional epistemology against the active possibility of its realization in the ongoing practices of a social institution. By such ideas as social institution, ongoing practices, and behavioural achievement I mean to make reference to a canon of rules that members use and the observing analyst formulates in describing some social activity, and that transforms what would otherwise be private individual performance into public social understanding. When Originally published as Peter McHugh, “On the Failure of Positivism,” in Understanding Everyday Life, ed. Jack Douglas (London: Routledge, 1971). This paper was an early contribution to a series of informal seminars and investigations conducted with colleagues in the New York area. For more recent work, see a paper coauthored with Alan F. Blum, “The Social Ascription of Motive,” American Sociological Review (February 1973).

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

53

as sociologists we describe, theorize, and so forth, we do not do so simply by citing the concrete practice itself – this holds no interest whatever. We are instead engaged in the analytic observation or conception of a concrete practice according to some rule or grammar, and it is this latter that permits us to distinguish between, say, the description of a mathematical notation and schizophrenic babble. The notation and the babble could be concretely identical; an ordinary member will understand the two depending upon what canon of rules he applies, and a sociologist describes the two by having formulated these canons. To be recognizable as a behavioural production, in other words, truth or a method or whatever requires that some grammar by which this canon and not that one can formulate for us the concrete activities for which that very formulation itself provides. Another way of saying this is to analytically describe an activity we must formulate whatever a member must know to do the activity. What we shall be engaged with here, then, are the various formulations of scientific procedure insofar as they can be understood to be self-descriptive or methodic in themselves. Truth of whatever kind, whether metaphysical, interactional, or scientific, thus cannot be sociologically conceived except as just this kind of behavioural production. It has no status apart from the ways it can be achieved by being intelligible according to some rule-guided way of looking, so the possibilities for ways of looking will be our concern. We shall not, therefore, be engaged in “just philosophy,” if by that is meant the analysis of ideals irrespective of their self-descriptive adequacy as members could use them in socially organized courses of human action. Our interest is in their adequacy as canonical formulations of the rule-guided practices we call the institution of science. Such an aim will require a brief analysis of the several epistemologies of positivism with regard to their formulability as actual behavioural practices and possibilities. Whatever their content as ideals, we shall ask whether correspondence and positivist theories of truth could ever describe institutionalized scientific and thus social canons of action. It will be suggested that they cannot, largely because of their exclusive reliance upon physical objects and the private sense data of observers. That is, positivism is concrete and cannot formulate for us how we could observe positivism to have been done. We shall investigate whether these conventional precepts of scientific work are behavioural possibilities or not – whether or not, however sleek their verbal manifestations, they are glosses of actual scientific practice insofar as they cannot be seen in ostensibly scientific activities. To the degree that

54

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

such ideals are impossible to conceive or formulate in that way, they will confabulate the construction of theories, the development of methods, and the making of observations, matters which are the very identity of a discipline. It is best to know about them. We shall thus take up four matters, not necessarily in order: (1) the adequacy of positivist ideals as formulations of truth-seeking practices; (2) the failure of positivist ideals as formulations of truth-seeking practices; (3) an examination of institutionalized public truth as an alternative formulation; and (4) how public truth reorganizes certain traditional premises of procedure.

Positivist Formulations The two fundamental epistemologies of truth have traditionally been called the correspondence theory and the coherence theory. Generally, a correspondence theory asserts that a proposition is true if there is an object corresponding to the proposition, and it is this position that embraces positivism. A coherence theory asserts that a proposition is true if it is consistent with experience. The history of philosophy has been fraught with arguments about these theories, arguments that are reflected in the conduct of sociology. They are probably familiar to us, but are easily available in any case, so we shall be brief and direct in examination of them.1 There is no need now to labour over lexical definitions of truth. Because the adequacy of various formulations is the central issue, to begin with a definition would presuppose the subject. More deeply, lexical definitions shut off our understanding of practices because they do not tell us how they could be used or done as behavioural accomplishments, something we have already concerned ourselves with briefly and shall return to throughout the chapter. A single sentence, for example, is used in behaviour in various ways, sometimes this way, sometimes that way –“The president of the United States is a Republican” can be a threat, a factual assertion, an irony, and so on – and to stipulate one kind of true usage or another at this juncture would restrict us to some lexicon that could have no more than a coincidental connection to behaviour. We can say that truth has been asserted to have something to do with fact, both pure and applied (Northrop 1959); with events, both seen and unseen (Russell 1927, 1929); with ideas, both testable and untestable

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

55

(Woozley 1949); and with language, both verbal and nonverbal ( J. L. Austin 1964). And we can indicate the history of what correspondence and coherence “are about” by enlarging on the phenomena with which they deal: experience and thought, life and mind, practice and theory, objects and language – all united by concepts, which are a means for describing these things. Whether concepts are asserted to be more experience than thought, more life than mind, more practice than theory, more objects than language, has traditionally been thought to mark one’s commitment to the way truth is to be achieved. Positivist theories assert that a proposition is true if there is an object corresponding to the proposition. There must always be a relation between a belief and an object, according to this view, between a sentence and a world of objects, between a proposition and the objects to which it makes reference, or, by extension, between a statement about a statement and the latter’s world of objects. In this scheme we have a language that makes assertions about independent objects and that can be truly or falsely connected to those objects. Truth requires a special kind of connection. Schools within positivism have developed out of differences in the kind of relationship that is thought to be required.

1 Truth Is a Copy One version that can be quickly rejected is that correspondence is a “copy” relation, a mental reflection of reality.2 In this instance truth exists when a statement reflects, as a picture, some substance in the real world. When asked how words can contain meaning, the proponent of this view would state that the names of things resemble pictures of things, that statements are pictures of objects or states of affairs. The question here is just how a statement can be a picture, since metaphor is inadequate as a description of the behaviour required by an epistemology, and our first interest is in behaviour. Does a word, concept, or sentence have the same relation to objects that a picture has to what it depicts? What objects in the world correspond to conditionals like “if ” and “perhaps”? What is “if ” a picture of? What is the difference between “that is deviant” and “that is not deviant,” that is, what element in the world corresponds to “not?” A picture relies entirely upon material objects, but the phenomena incorporated in sentences are not always material. What

56

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

materially corresponds to “someone” in the sentence “Someone loves Mary?” What sort of photograph could picture this for us? Pictures show things; sentences state things. Showing is representing and arranging; stating is referring and describing. The great advantage of words and concepts is that they needn’t simulate the spatial properties of the objects they describe – they are not part of the furniture of the world – and in this respect the copy theory fails.

2 Truth Is an Image Another theory is the one that suggests that words can become concepts because they are associated with mental images (Hume 1927; Locke 1894). According to Locke, images are unilaterally created by the impingement of physical objects upon the mind. But Vygotsky (1962, chapters 5, 7) and Bruner et al. (1956, 35–41, 268–75) have shown that we can conceptualize before we have images in many cases and that we can therefore sort images according to some expectation rather than the other way around. Further, our language often incorporates nonmaterial abstractions like “function” and “virtue,” abstractions that cannot be dealt with by imagists. And it is these concepts that form the very heart of social order. Because imagists make such concepts impossible, so do they make social order impossible. Sociology would not be permitted to even entertain the truthful possibility of statements like “The family in society X functions to socialize the child,” or “In society X large numbers of children are considered a virtue,” or “In society X economy and family are institutionally segregated.” More, since a family or an economy is not a thing-in-the-world but a set of rule-guided activities, the very existence of families and economies themselves would be impossible, not to mention their relations – we would have to say that they cannot truthfully be said to exist and that their relations cannot exist either. Similarly, the institution of science – the canon of ideas and procedures – could have nothing to do with truth. To treat concepts as if they are only as good as objects in the world is to eliminate innumerable kinds of perfectly acceptable truth statements, and in this the image theory would reduce us to something like the practice of eidetics – imagine a visible display that could literally and completely reproduce the sociological concepts of function, society, rule.

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

57

3 Truth Is a Reflex A more recent formulation is the one that asserts that general words and statements are the names of properties that exist in particular objects and situations in the world (Woozley 1949; J.L. Austin, in Nagel and Brandt, 1965, 161–76). It asserts that there is a single property that appears at different instances, say the yellow pencil and egg yolk and coward. Everything that is not a particular, that can appear in more than one place at one time, is a universal. The pencil and yolk are examples of the single universal “yellowness.” This theory, depending on the form it takes, cannot account for two matters. First, words as properties of particular objects makes it impossible to use relational or comparative statements. How does it account for “This pencil is yellower than that egg yolk” or “This group is more cohesive than that group?” Being “yellower” or “more cohesive” is not the name of a universal property, because other objects cannot have them, for they are relations between two particular objects. Yet yellower and more cohesive are certainly concepts and contain propositions of fact as people use them in both ordinary life and in science. The second of the reflex formulations is that a statement refers to (a) general types of situations, ones that conventionally may occur, and (b) to actual history, in which these types of situations do or do not occur. Truth here resides in the correlation between these two aspects of a statement, given that the situation is a “standard” one. Well, at least we are here finally brought to language, which is an “Absolutely and purely conventional” human matter ( J.L. Austin 1964, 171). That is, the words we use need not be connected to the world in any necessary way. They are man’s arbitrary appointments and no longer require a pictorial or intrinsic connection to objects. But they are saddled with a flawed connection, however sophisticated, by having to “correlate” with actual history under standard conditions. The notion of standard conditions does, of course, implicate the possible existence of nonstandard conditions, and so a decision will have to be made in each case as to whether conditions are standard or not. How? What are the criteria for this decision? Some other set of arbitrary linguistic appointments? If so, and it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, we are forced to conclude that these conventions too would be subject to the

58

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

test of standard conditions: we would have to construct standard conditions for deciding on the standardness of conditions, which is circular. If instead we are to look to the world so that it might itself inform us, we are back to objects as determinants and nothing new has been offered us. Either way, a solution disappears.

4 Truth Is a Test The pragmatists tried to discover what distinguishes true ideas from those that are false and from those that are neither true nor false.3 They concluded that true ideas are those we can verify, false ideas those we cannot; that all true ideas are useful and all useful ideas are true; and that an idea is true so long as it is profitable to our lives. But can we verify all our true ideas? Can we verify dreams, for example? Not if no one believes our description. Can we settle a claim over who made the last move in a chess game? Not if it went unrecorded. We cannot verify all true ideas. Epistemological truth consists in analytic verifiability rather than verifiedness. James seems to have confused a question like “What does the truth of a belief consist of?” for one like “How can we test the claim of a belief to be true?” With regard to utility, perhaps all true ideas are useful, but false ones can also be useful. The man who closes his windows at night because he thinks the air will make him sick may also close out malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The fear is erroneous, but it is useful to him. Utility does not distinguish between true ideas and false ideas. Turning to profitability, it is difficult to distinguish from usefulness. How can something be unprofitable and useful, profitable and useless? Yet even if we ignore this question we can ask if an idea loses its truth when profitability ceases. Such an assumption implies that all statements can be true at one time and false at another. Can all propositions be true today and false tomorrow? It seems that a particular one cannot. “On 30 August 1969, the American Sociological Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco, California” will never be false in the future if it is true on 30 August 1969. A particular statement does not lose truth, and in the latter sense pragmatism’s emphasis on profitability is inadequate. In summary, the nature of truth as correspondence is still unreported. The positivist theories we have addressed so far, which assume that correspondence is unidirectional, that material objects determine the accuracy

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

59

of correspondence, are fallible by their own logic. Common to all these theories is a referential dictum: language and conception must comply with independent objects. The truth practices of men, comprised by their use of an institutional canon in language, are in positivism limited to conforming to a determinant world of objects and only those objects. Language is given no purchase of its own. This is a behavioural impossibility, however, since it is a circular and contradictory directive that presupposes knowledge of the object in the first place; that is, we must know before conceiving it the object of reference which is to be the test of that conception. We are expected to find out if the exchange is an economic one by consulting the exchange, while at the same time we are to suspend any conception of it as economic. This formulation entails that the character of an object or state of affairs is self-evident and sending out its own particular self-identifying signals, our task being to devise some mechanism for getting on its beam. Here is the proverbial paradigm of sociological method: ask and you will hear, look and you will see. Differences and similarities between wars in the Pelopennesus and wars in Vietnam, between male and female roles, between industrial society and developing society, could be “discovered” only by lining up so that these unconceived objects could imprint themselves upon us in the way coins are minted. In sociology the minting procedure is supposed to be accomplished by sampling: be sure that all units (objects) have a chance to be asked the question, and then they will tell you what they are. We are expected to select objects (to know about them) and then to wait until they tell us what they are (not to know about them). How we could justify a claim to proper alignment remains unstated, and that we should distinguish objects while suspending knowledge of them is a behavioural contradiction. Positivism is a plan that can be only tautological, stipulative, contradictory, and elliptical. We want to consult the world, naturally, but to be ordered to consult the world by looking at it is to provide no description of the way it might be done. Of course we look, but how? The object-determined standard requires of shared or common truth that each observer be located in precisely the same position – physically, psychologically, socially – vis-à-vis the object. Otherwise, observers would have a different line on the object and, therefore, would be receiving different signals. But this isn’t the way science, not to mention the everyday social order, works. Many observers, in various positions in the world, talk of truth and falsehood in shared and concerted ways. We have before us the phenomenon

60

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

that some things are said to be true, and are enforced to be true, across whole groups whose members occupy grossly different positions. This is only to say that the world is socially organized. Imagine the pristine positivist: A, well, concretin, as it were, a concretin who is only encumbered by language and canon, not oriented by them, whose task is to absorb and record as a litmus some world of objects that has a life of its own. Besides its self-contradictoriness, then, positivism disregards social organization by making it impossible to think of any kind of socially organized conduct as truth-producing conduct. We shall turn next to coherence theories of truth, which have been construed as alternatives to correspondence theories but have the same flaws.

CoHeReNCe tHeoRIeS Generally, coherence theories are attempts to offset two elements in positivist theories: (1) that truth and meaning exist in a relationship between statements and objects and (2) that the object determines the relationship. Now the world comes to be produced in the mind rather than reflected in the mind. (Impure coherence adds as a condition of truth that a proposition must also be consistent with “experience,” but this begs the question because experience is either a product of the material world, in which case coherence is really correspondence, or a total mental construction, which would be tautological.) According to Bradley (1914) and Blanshard (in Nagel and Brandt 1965), coherence concepts differ from correspondence concepts in that they are words and thoughts, not images or pictures. “Yellow” and “cohesion” are a result of the mind’s comparing yellow or cohesion until a certain concept arises that exists in that mind. The cohesion is not out in the world but rather is a result of one’s thinking about it. It is the concepts themselves that are universal, not any cohesion in the world. The logical objection here is the view’s contradiction of itself. If cohesion is a result of minds comparing cohesion until a certain concept arises, what is it that has been compared? An independent source of conceptualization is proposed (comparison with something) while at the same time concepts are supposed to be entirely mental. A program of coherence would require behaviour in violation of its premise. As with positivism, the behavioural problem with coherence is its difficulty in accounting for social order, for if concepts are entirely personal

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

61

how do we explain the phenomenon of concept shareability? And if we admit shareability we contradict the notion of the concept as purely mental, because sharing entails communication and the existence of others with whom the concept “corresponds.” This is the argument that often sullies the purity of the coherence advocate. It makes him admit that truth is no longer dependent solely upon internal mental consistency but on consistency with experience as well. He hopes by doing this to maintain his original point, because it enables him to say that shareability results from the similarity in experience of those who share – that those with similar experiences will have similar concepts, and so coherence can still be an epistemology of truth. This adaptation has two faults, however, depending on what the advocate means by “similar.” First, if by similar he means “grossly similar,” say of the kind between members of a whole society, he obscures so much of importance that he is merely asking us to search for new terms to solve the same old problem. We need to distinguish differences within a society – roles and institutions, for example – that are importantly dissimilar. The second fault is the obverse of the first, if he wants similar to mean the specific biography and location of particular individuals, we must invoke the empirical phenomenon of those with different biographies and in different locations who nevertheless agree that they are seeing the same things, whose concepts cohere. Coherence fails to describe how we could do in behaviour the kinds of things it demands we do. Thus, neither correspondence nor coherence is useful to us, on either formulative, analytic, or concrete behavioural grounds. They are selfcontradictory as formulations and fail to account for behavioural usage besides. Starting from radically opposite premises, they each result in a singular kind of failure: there can be no “truth” (a) to differences in behaviour by persons in the same location or (b) to the same behaviour by those in different locations. In each case the institutionalization of a canon of truth procedures is ignored, life being instead the impoverished result of its two competing sources, material objects versus individual mind. Correspondence posits a single, despotic reality so unmalleable that it does not permit us to talk of the truth of differences in communication and action by persons in the same location in the system, because, being in the same location, unilateral determination from the single location in the world to conceptualization would obviate that as a possibility. Coherence reverses the behavioural inadequacy of correspondence. It posits so many

62

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

realities that one cannot talk of the truth of the same communication and action by persons in different locations. Both of these theories design a world consisting solely of physical objects and private minds, and where they differ is in which side they place their trust: if correspondence suffers from misplaced concreteness, coherence is afflicted by misplaced fancy.

aNaLytIC tRUtH Neither of these views of truth can do for us what they claim, and the fact that so many men have laboured fruitlessly for so many years recommends that we abandon the search. That truth might reside in some thing, universally and eternally there for the discovery, is to formulate an insoluble problem. We must accept that there are no adequate grounds for establishing criteria of truth except the grounds that are employed to grant or concede it – truth is conceivable only as a socially organized upshot of contingent courses of linguistic, conceptual, and social-courses of behaviour. The truth of a statement is not independent of the conditions of its utterance, and so to study truth is to study the ways truth can be methodically conferred. It is an ascription, and little could be done for the study of truth by describing Galileo’s incline or Weber’s attitudes or the values of puritanism and the motives of scientists, for this would be to presuppose that Galileo and Weber and so on are acceptable. To study truth we needn’t study the per se theories of Galileo and Weber, for this would be to study the object as if it could somehow tell us what criteria had been applied to it. Rather, we need study the ascription (or not) of truth to those theories insofar as those ascriptions are warranted by socially organized criteria. Actually, this principle applies to any phenomenon of social order. In the field of deviance, for example, it is wholly inadequate to say that deviance resides in the pristine act – deviance, as with truth, is socially defined and treated. Nothing becomes a violation, nor a truth, until it is so treated. The phenomenon of truth is one phenomenon of social order, its “criteria” therefore no more or less than the way it is socially done. As a matter of fact, A.J. Ayer, a positivist, comes finally to this. Instead of asking what is really real, he asks what is real as opposed to illusory. Let us adapt an example he uses (Ayer, n.d.): Suppose that someone claims to have discovered a lost Titian, and hires a set of experts in order to find out if the painting is a Titian. There is a definite procedure for finding out if it was

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

63

painted by Titian, for the experts examine the grain, give the radiation test for age, consult the records to see if the painting exists someplace else, and so on. In the end, different experts may disagree, but they know the evidence which tends to support or refute their opinions. Suppose that these men maintain the position that the picture exists solely in the observer’s mind, others of them that it is objectively real. What possible experience could any of them have which would be relevant to this argument one way or the other? In the ordinary sense of the term “real,” in which it is opposed to the term “illusory,” they must all agree that the picture is “real” without doubt. The two sides have satisfied themselves that the picture is real in this sense because they have obtained a set of correlated sense-impressions that lead them to discover that the picture is real, in the sense that real is opposed to illusory? It seems clear that there is none. If there is no other method for solving whether the picture is really real or really mental, we might as well assume that the question cannot be answered, and so proceed on whatever evidence is at hand and all the evidence that is potentially available to us, which leads us to conclude that the picture is real. Ayer believes that he rescues correspondence but only because he stops too soon. For, while the individuals involved may receive sense impressions and make sense observations, the validation of these observations – that is, support for the assertion that the observations are not illusory – comes from agreement among the whole group of those concerned with the painting. In fact, Ayer suggests that each expert may very well disagree, that is, have different sense impressions or make different inferences from them; he resolves such variation by asserting that the two sides can satisfy themselves only by acting collectively. It comes to be a “satisfaction” by acting in concert, and to act in concert is to vitiate any differences in the sense observations of individuals: Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn a language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives. (Quine 1960, 13)

64

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Validation by agreement is produced not by the chaotic personal diversity of individual sense data but by a methodic group process. Sense observation in its strict meaning can never itself be a collective property, whereas validation can never be an individual property. Thus, what we call “sensing” is more nearly like the individual observer and “knowing” (truth) more nearly like the concession of validation by agreement. And don’t these distinctions depict the individual scientist in the first case, and the institution of science in the second? The difference between sensing and knowing is the one between private psychological perception (or misperception) and collective public truth. Sensing something is partly a matter of using objects in experience. Alas, if this were an important characteristic of truth, positivism and correspondence might suffice. But knowing something is a collective act, requiring some public enabling rule, which can generate validation from others who are engaged in the endeavour. The scientist as individual is a senser, but science as enterprise is knowing. Consequently the collective activity called science cannot use the scripture of sense impressions, for two different people cannot have the same ones. Instead, it needs perforce an institutional epistemology in the sense that a finding, as discovered or invented by an individual perceiver, does not become a truth (or error) until the collective of science agrees that it is, until the collectively enforced procedural canon produces admission to the collective body of knowledge. It is a version of psychological reductionism to equate science – and therefore truth – with the activity of one observer. This is what makes truth a behavioural accomplishment in the social sense of the phrase and furnishes another good reason for abandoning positivism. A second parallel reason, one that can be distinguished from the first for explication’s sake, is that the expressions of “facts,” “truths,” and the like are linguistic. Whether one accepts that language is the instrumental vehicle of a conception of truth, or that language and conception are synonymous, sentences are the things we use in making claims to truth. As the ultimate ground of a sense-datum theory, private individual perception requires that an entirely private language be capable of expressing perception and hence truth. But this is ridiculous, since one consequence of a private language would be that no one could know what is being talked about, not that it is merely difficult to know or that another strange though learnable language is being spoken but that it would be impossible to know the claim under any condition. Now could there be a language of truth in which no one could know what is being said?

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

65

If people could not be brought to use a word in any regular way, if one who had been taught as we have should go on to give the name (red) to what we should call the complementary colour, if another used it as we do on Monday but in a different way on Tuesday, and if others did not even show these degrees of regularity then … there would be no distinction between mistakenly or correctly. Unless the words had a regular use, I should not know it was red, and I should not know what colour it was, because there would be nothing to know. (Rhees, in Pitcher, 1966, 269–70) Imagine what sociology would be like if terms like social organization, socialization, and ecology were private, if they were used in no regular and public way. It certainly couldn’t be a discipline or methodic or even sensible. It takes on its sense, and thus the possibility of truth, by ascending from sense data to language, from privacy to the public social order. In so doing, the conditions, emergence, and admission of truth become forms of public language. Consequently, truth resides in the rule-guided institutional procedures for conceding it. So what are we to make of the conclusion that something comes to be called true, not because it corresponds to reality but because it has been formulated in terms of some institutional canon? If something cannot be a valid truth in the same way it can be privately perceived, how are we to describe the activity called science, which deals in valid truths? We can begin by citing a fundamental consequence of the failure of positivism: nothing – no object, event, or circumstance – determines its own status as truth, either to the scientist or to science. No sign automatically attaches a referent, no fact speaks for itself, no proposition for its value. A nude proposition is without any immanent status, because its truth value cannot be assessed by observing its relation to a datum. We have just done away with this view. Rather, just as an event comes to be intelligible to the scientist only after applying to it some rule of grammar4 – a proposition comes to be knowledge only after conceiving it in terms of some rule of the canon that depicts the linguistic procedure by which the proposition is given life as a course of institutional action. That a finding is “true” (or false or ambiguous) comes to be so only after applying to it the analytic formulation of a method by which that finding could be understood to have been produced. Having discovered that collectively developed and enforced grammars of agreement and method are a determining and not

66

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

merely tangential characteristic of science, we can summarize by saying that an event is transformed into the truth only by the application of a canon of procedure, a canon that truth-seekers use and analysts must formulate as providing the possibility of agreement. By grammar I mean the way in which a statement can be understood to have been made. Thus, any claim to truth is successful if the claimant can analytically describe his method for us. Method is of course the “how” rather than the “what,” the use rather than the substance, in conventional terminology. In detail this requires that whatever the substantive object of attention, we are expected in assessing truth to consider the way attention was given, namely that attention can be described rather than presupposed. This is the particular sort of method that makes science distinctive and another reason for abandoning the object-limited theories of positivism, for they can deal with only what is known not how it is known. Thus, again, objects have nothing at all to do with truth. Truth is completely and deeply a procedural affair, and that is the way claims to truth are conceded. What can be done, for example, with the Tumin-Davis and Moore argument except to look at how each part of it – each idea, test, or observation – could be the product of some rule-guided procedure? A debutante finding depends not upon itself but upon its institutional construal. This has important consequences for our suppositions about reality, objectivity, and the relation between theory and method. With regard to reality, and if we equate it with truth, we must admit that there are as many realities as there are describable procedures. Because there are in principle many rules of construal, so can there be many realities, all with equivalent status as truths. It might be objected here that this is a return to the worst feature of coherence, namely, that any idea at all is now permitted to be called true, because individuals could adopt and abandon distinct and incompatible rules of procedure at will, whereas by science we mean something that holds across individuals. This is a just objection so far as it goes – people could take any procedure at all as adequate, and each of them could take some different procedure. But they do not. They do some things together, that is, institutions are an ineluctable form of collective life. And the fruits of what they do separately can be collectively enjoyed, in the sense that what one did others would have done, because the same rules are made institutionally available as resources in behaviour. That is, we needn’t abandon the idea of objectivity so long as we recognize that objectivity is made possible

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

67

by having met a generally accepted rule of procedure within the collectivity (Kaufmann 1958, 237), not that something could hold independently of the procedures we use together in order to decide that it holds. This is just another way of describing validation by public method. To be known to have met a rule of procedure is to have described one’s method by formulating its public institutional character. It is to transform the mere individual sense datum “performance” into methodic “competence” by making publicly available an analytic description of one’s method. This description is at once the formulation of a method and the transformation of its surface content. Subjectivity, if we want to stay with these terms, now comes to be the experience of the issue at hand to the individual, and note the proximity of this to sense data as a possession of the individual scientist. By default, we are forced to include that canonical validation by description is more objective than the sense perceptions of the scientist. Abject relativism is here personified by the ubiquitous notion of sense data, because sense data are incapable of objectification by public formulation. A further implication concerns the idea of successive approximations. If they can be said to occur at all, successive approximations are to the formulability of method rather than to the properties of objects. And since methodic formulation is understood in terms of the institutional canon, it is not eternal. Kuhn (1962), for example, is on to this when he argues that anomalies, or discoveries, can be so only because the canon we have been following prepares us not to see the stuff of anomaly (see also Polanyi 1952). Finally, we should address the conventional separation of theory from method, a cleavage that parallels the fruitless physical–mental dualism of correspondence–coherence and that has misled us into the belief that truth is substantive, when instead truth is an institutional grammar. If there is no tenable epistemology for a single world of real objects, theory is right off transformed from an acquiescent handmaiden of correspondence into the sovereign of reality by agreement. Yet sociology can be distinct from other endeavours not by having theories – they are equally common among men on the street – but by having special procedures for invoking these theories, and we want to maintain the possibility of this distinction. We have theories, which are substantive descriptions of realities and are incorporated into the body of truth, and procedures, which are empty of substance yet essential to the distinctive character of the enterprise and which are the means for incorporation of theory. There is thus nothing to either theory or method alone, for theory is not distinctive and procedures are without

68

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

content. The consequence of this is not merely that they are unable to stand apart – they cannot even be conceived as separate practices. Neither can be adequately conceived except as an integral part of the practice of the other: theory is method; method is theory. Thus, any distinction between sociology and the man on the street can be grounded only if the sociologist’s theories–procedures are themselves taken as topics of inquiry. This is what it means to publicly formulate one’s method. The man on the street gets there however he may, without any attention to theories–procedures except as they help to get him there. His theories– procedures have no problematic status insofar as he is not constrained to describe them. Sociology could be distinctive only by treating itself as the phenomenon for investigation. Sociology is not a program for saying that “In society X children are considered a virtue” – the member can do that and the tourist too. It is instead a program for describing the theoretic– procedural rule(s) by which it can be said that “In society X children are considered a virtue,” the rules by which it can be said commonsensically and the rules by which it can be said sociologically. Members can give many reasons for having children, and I suppose sociologists might parrot these reasons. This wouldn’t be news, however, unless the member’s reason were news, and even then the sociologist remains the member’s mouthpiece. The news comes only when it can be shown that the member’s reason can be studied, with emphasis on studied – that is, when a reason can be given to study the reason for children, or suicide, or whatever – a reason that provides a way of giving attention to these phenomena. A (distinctive) discipline can be achieved only by having created the (distinctive) possibility of itself. This is, for example, represented by the self-correcting rule in science, which produces a pervasive preoccupation with the structural possibilities for its own corpus and character. Another topic is the rule of doubt. How the principle of doubt can be publicly formulated is the kind of procedural behaviour that needs sociological description. These are the grounds for rejection of the positivist picture of behaviour, since it cannot account for institutional rules, yet it is according to these rules that we proceed to truth. In sum, the failure of positivism necessarily turns us to what people do collectively. In what they do, it is the publicly available method that constitutes the truth. Truth is not constituted by particular faces, attached to proper names, observing concrete objects. It is necessary to remove the province of truth from the physical object world to the social world.

on the fAIlure of posItIvIsm

69

No canon, no collective, no institution can go outside itself to a world of independent objects for criteria of knowledge, since there is no other way except by its own rules to describe what’s being done with regard to knowledge. Sociology, then, is responsible not just for its substantive discoveries but for having created the very possibility of them, because it has created itself. Sociological truth, as with any other kind, exists only because sociology has generated its own ways of conceding truth. It is not an aggregation of private people sensing individual objects but a public, rule-guided, and institutionalized canon of social procedure.

NoteS 1 For a summary of these philosophical positions, see Nagel and Brandt (1965, especially 121–77). See also J.L. Austin, in Caton (1963); Tarski (1944); and Wittgenstein (1953). 2 Langer (1948). This was also Wittgenstein’s (1961) early position. He later took up a very different position, of course. 3 James (1949) and Peirce (1960). Pragmatism is not positivism. But it does rest on certain versions of correspondence, and so I include it here should it be thought to provide an alternative to positivism. 4 By grammar I do not mean technical forms of usage but rather the rule(s) of transformation from private to public, the way we analytically “see” social competence in concrete individual performance. See, for example, Chomsky (1968). His distinction between competence and performance is comparable to ours between analytic and concrete.

ReFeReNCeS Austin, J.L. 1964. Sense and Sensibilia. New York: Oxford University Press. Ayer, A.J. n.d. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover. Bradley, F.H. 1914. Essays on Truth and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon. Bruner, Jerome S., Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and George A. Austin. 1956. A Study in Thinking. New York: Wiley. Caton, Charles E. 1963. Philosophy and Ordinary Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chomsky, N. 1968. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Hume, D. 1927. Selections. Edited by C. W. Hendel, Jr. New York: Scribners. James, W. 1949. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green. Kaufmann, A. 1958. The Conduct of Inquiry. San Francisco: Chandler.

70

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langer, S. 1948. Philosophy in a New Key. New York: New American Library. Locke, J. 1894. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by A.C. Fraeser. Oxford: Clarendon. Nagel, E., and R. B. Brandt, eds. 1965. Meaning and Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Northrop, F.S.C. 1959. The Logic of Sciences and Humanities. New York: Meridian. Pierce, C. 1960. Collected Papers, V. Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss Cambridge: Belknap. Polanyi, M. 1952. “The Stability of Scientific Beliefs.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3, 11 (November 1952): 217–32. Quine, W.V. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Ma: MIt Press. Russell, B. 1927. Philosophy. New York: Norton. – 1929. On Knowledge of the External World. New York: Norton. Tarski, A. 1944. “The Semantic Theory of Truth and the Foundation of Semantics.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March): 341–75. Vygotsby, L.S. 1962. Thought and Language. Cambridge, Ma: MIt Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan. – 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by Pears and McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Woozley, A.D. 1949. Theory of Knowledge. New York: Hutchinson.

5

A COMMON SENSE CONCEPTION OF DEVIANCE

My question here will be: Deviance is an expression of what social process? I will try to show that the sociological import of deviance is its expression of two kinds of common sense actions: first, a deviant act is an act that members deem “might not have been” or “might have been otherwise”; second, it is an act the agent of which is deemed to “know what he’s doing.” For the observing member, in other words, a deviant act must occur in a situation where he can conceive that there were alternatives to that act, and it must be committed by an actor who knows what the alternatives were. By invoking these two common sense rules, a member comes to depict the circumstance or situation in which the act takes place and the agent or person or group committing the act, respectively. This is the process, much elaborated below, by which deviance is conferred upon an act. This is to say that members, judgers, assessors, and labellers have a notion of the ways in which social structure can generate and limit behaviour and beyond that a notion of the actor as an agent of his own behaviour. It makes a difference to them whether an act had to occur or not, whether it was structurally possible to do otherwise; and whether an actor knows what he’s doing or not, whether the actor can be said to have intended to do what he did. It is on these two common sense considerations that societal designations of deviance, as well as exemption from such responsibility, depend in any social state of affairs. Some shootings, for example, are thought to be made necessary by their settings, as in self-defence. Here the judging member calls up a version of social structure (in this case the absence of alternative courses of action) in exempting the shooting act. Originally published as Peter McHugh, “A Common Sense Conception of Deviance,” in Deviance and Respectability, ed. Jack Douglas (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

72

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

It does not embody the same social transgression as a shooting that didn’t have to occur, say, the deliberate murder of a political rival. Other shootings, though occurring in circumstances with structural alternatives, are thought to be committed by actors who didn’t know what they were doing, as in wanton mass shootings. In the latter instance, the common sense focus is not on the aspect of setting but directly on the mind of the actor, which for the member depicts that actor’s intent. These two criteria of responsibility – “It might have been otherwise” and “He knows what he’s doing” – are criteria for the conventionality and theoreticity of acts.1 They are the fundamental common sense rules for deciding what is deviant and what is not and for distinguishing between various kinds of deviance. Whether our interest is in killing, boredom, psychosis, bureaucratic indifference, organized crime, lying, alienation, totalitarianism, stupidity, or delinquency, we first assess the possibility that a particular such act needn’t have occurred at all, whether it is conventional and then if the actor knew what he was doing, whether it is theoretic. And the social units can be of any size or conceptual status, such as persons, groups, bureaucracies, political ideologies, physicians and their patients, spouses and their spouses, and so on. A deviant act thus is not located by identifying its “effect” (though it may have effects) in the sense that an effect alters something in the world which exists independently of the act under question: for example, the waste and expense that follow upon crime. Criminality may cost a fortune. That may be one of its effects. But criminality as deviance does not depend on costing a fortune; it could occur and be so designated whether it cost much or little. Members do not treat deviance pragmatically, according to what are thought to be its consequences. In this regard deviance is typically a moral matter. The social processes of deviance, in which members call one another into question, inhabit the items which are thought to produce an act, whatever its effects. Deviance is an upshot of its own production. This is to say, for example, that deviance could occur even if it never had any effects at all. A sole figure on some island, engaged in some perfectly harmless practice, could be called deviant if that practice ever came to public attention. We may share the sentiments of those who decry this punishment of a deed because it “isn’t hurting anything,” but we are doing so at the sacrifice of the sociological import of punishment, which ensues from the items that are defined as producing the act, rather than from the changes in the world which may follow it. We can call another into question, even

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

73

punish, without ever attending to the pragmatic consequences of the act upon which we call ourselves into question. Let me give an example of the difference between effects and upshots.2 In almost all circumstances serious pool players are quiet when another player takes his shot. They believe a sudden noise will startle the shooter and interfere with his shot. Treat the startle as an effect of the noise in that the noise alters something in the world (the shot). Assume also that any and every serious pool player subscribes to this as an effect of the noise. Then observe two sets of serious pool players, in each of which one player shouts and hence will be said to have startled the shooter. Now it so happens that when one set is composed of professional stage actors, there is no observable difference in their behaviour after a shout as compared with their behaviour after no shout. Their game proceeds in the same way in each instance. The next shooter chalks his cue as he lines up his shot; the eyes of the players remain on the table; there is desultory talk by those not in the game. Among the other set of serious players, however, there is a distinct difference in their behaviour following the shout; they are immediately silent, their eyes moving from the table to the shouter, then to one another; and sometimes they shake their heads and address a comment to the shouter. Among professional stage actors, the shout is accompanied by about the same behaviour that can be observed after other shots; among others, behaviour is distinctive. Yet the startle is held by each group to be an effect of the shout. If social deviance depended on the startle as effect – in our terms, on the effect independently of its producing act – the shouting player would be deviant in both sets of players. If deviance were conferred according to the premised effect, both groups would respond as the nonactors do because both groups hold that the shout produces the startle effect. But there is no special response by professional stage actors. A reaction occurs only when the players are not professional stage actors. If we agree that some differential response must occur in deviance, we can see that in the former case the stipulated effect has nothing to do with deviance. From this we can suggest that it is not the effect in either case, not being the effect in one. Something other than pragmatism is operating here. In both sets of pool players the startle effect is believed to follow the shot, but in only one set is there a startle reaction, a reaction that is therefore only associated with deviance, rather than essential to it. The idea of deviance as effect does not describe the activity and for good reason: the startle as effect does not describe the

74

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

conventionality and/or theoreticity of the shout. This distinction between the social identification and effects of deviance introduces the conceptual and empirical thrust of what is to follow. On the assumption that the reader will be better able to fashion his own usable understanding if he is appraised of this thrust, I will discuss it very briefly here. I have chosen to locate deviance in its common sense items of production, not in some formalist classification of its causes and effects (such as biographical factors, group conflict, stratification), in order to meet the sociological principle of describable social treatment. This principle stresses that it is the activity of members as they deal with one another that maintains or changes society by creating, filling, and emptying all the categories, organizations, and units of society, and so to describe society one must describe these dealings. True, the term “stratification” can be a description, once it is descriptively specified. But, (1) it will remain a description of stratification, not deviance; (2) it will not be a sociological description, even of stratification, until it is specified in a very particular way, namely, by depicting the actual, ongoing social treatments of members such that those common sense treatments can be said to comprise the classification we call stratification. What the principle of social treatment requires, then, is a description of deviance according to its own logic as members do deviance, not according to some other logic of factors external to itself (the cause–effect logic of stratification).3 We do no more with the idea of deviance than note it as an undescribed symptom or point of reference for this or that if we talk all around it with terms like stratification or socialization or the social position of the labeller, and even upon abandoning these embellishments, it is necessary to describe it by its own logic, that is, as it is composed of the common sense methods that enable us to say, “It occurs, it exists, it is a social phenomenon.” We must, in other words, do more than merely cite causes and terms, for these are only implicitly descriptive of what members do – of the courses of social treatment by which the causes and terms are enacted and take observable shape.4 It may be that deviant labels emanate from subcultures, or that delinquent histories include certain class affiliations, but to say so is not to depict what is done as deviance or delinquency. We know nothing of deviant behaviour – of the acts identified by such a designation – by having described its formal causes. Neither causes nor terms describe the procedures members use in organizing themselves as social

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

75

actors. They are extrinsic to doing deviant treatment, among all other forms of treatment, and thus cannot serve an analysis of the assessment procedure called deviance. To say that being born into the lower class is biographically selective for the kind of delinquency that comes to the attention of authority is in no way to describe what authority does when it attends. It is only to accept a patina of our own everyday presuppositions about delinquency. How authority treats the matter, and delinquency can be said to be, as a socially generated and recognized phenomenon that can be distinguished from the biographical factors said to be its cause, remains unstated. It takes for granted that there is an authority called doing delinquent treatment; that is, it does not describe delinquency-coming-to-attention-of-authority as a course of common sense action. Being born into the lower class may be related to delinquency, but the two ideas have only been juxtaposed against each other until so-called treatment has been described. The same inadequacy is apparent in deviance as effects. To say that an effect of deviance is the existence of prisons, ostracism, or a punch in the mouth is not to depict the doings which warrant turning members into the kinds of offenders who “need” such treatment or the doings by which such offenders continually reappear in summary tables. It is not even to depict an offender. To note and count the inhabitants of these tables as deviant is to accede to common sense judgments already made, not to describe those judgments while being made, and of which the inhabitants are mere traces. Surely they must be traces of something, unless a djinn whisks them from one place to another without even a first glance by some membership. But of what? Without its common sense items of production, with only its causes and effects, we will not have identified, observed, or described deviance and thus will be left holding a conglomerate of causes and effects of nothing. I will expand on the idea of doing deviant treatment throughout by attempting to show that deviant acts are both conventional and theoretic. That is, they are acts which members deem might have been otherwise and during which the actor can be said to have known what he was doing. In order to point up these essential elements of deviance, I will first treat deviant acts as if they are always punishable. In part II the assumption will be modified to include other forms of deviance. Part III includes a discussion of the relevance of the ideas presented here for other sociological issues. In part IV, certain critically important general properties of social rules are distinguished from other kinds of rules.

76

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

I Conventionality To the member, a deviant act is first of all conventional. By conventional I do not mean the ordinary, customary, or commonplace. I do not mean to generalize about the prevalence of deviance. Whether or not deviance is regular and commonplace, conventional behaviour is behaviour which a member deems might not have been, or might have been otherwise. It is essential to the member, in other words, that a deviant act not be inevitable. If he sees deviance, so does he see alternative ways of performing in the circumstance under question. The forms of deviance which are punishable (lying, professional crime, indifference, bribery, spying, bigotry, and so forth) and not the forms which a member calls coerced, accidental, or miraculous (homicide, poverty in underdeveloped countries, brain damage, some versions of psychosis, being hit by a meteor, and so on).5 In its conventional aspect, deviance is not merely not following a rule but whether the rule can be conceived to have been followable and followable in the situation in which it was not followed. It is probably their nonconventional similarity that sometimes induces us to draw parallels between, say, saints and psychotics. They share the common sense notion that they had to do what they did in the situation where they did it. The sociological importance of deviance does not cover nonconventional instances like being maimed in a war or falling accidentally out of a building, although we may be uncomfortable in being around these affairs. A conventionally deviant act occurs in the context of other possibilities, as is attested in the suicidal case by the tenacious and organized devotion to sorting out the self-destructive from the accidental. Take, for example, a horribly burned face. What do we do with it, about it, as concerning its conventionality? That its owner is stigmatized is surely correct, yet this says little about assigning responsibility for the face. We may expect its owner to manage the interactional scene for us, and in this sense he is held responsible for something, but we needn’t hold him responsible for having created the scene, in the sense that the owner of the face will be held to have authored his face.6 He may have been burned in an accident or burned by someone else or lightning may have struck. In any of these cases – accident, coercion, or miracle – we assign responsibility to a situation, that is, to something that “couldn’t be helped” and therefore to the nonconventionality of the face, by locating the items of behaviour

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

77

which are said to have produced the face. That the burn “might have been otherwise” is in these circumstances not a possibility for which we hold the owner responsible. His face, in fact, is not causally “his.” Instead, he gets treated as a victim, which shifts the locus of inquiry to some other set of conditions and some other author of the face. If it is discovered that his face was burned in a fire at home when he was a child, perhaps his parents’ activities will be taken up for their conventionality: Were they out of the house at the time, and did they have to be out of the house? Were they at a movie, a funeral, a hospital? If they were in the house, did they rush out without attempting to save him, or did they make the effort and fail, in which case they too would be absolved because “it couldn’t have been otherwise.” It is important to note here that the existence of the conventionality– nonconventionality question makes it impossible to think of deviance merely as the ready assignment of designations or labels, if by that we mean that a term is matched to an act the way the names on a roll are matched to the people in a room. Rather, deviance requires a charge before it can be said to have occurred at all. Something has happened, certainly (or a supposed something – this is not crucial), but the first ensuing question is to find out what happened, and the procedure is to assess its conventionality or not. There being at least two outcomes, the procedure is not univocal. This is to say that at some prior point deviance is a charge not just a designation. A charge is a call to judgment of responsibility (“what happened?”) not the consequence of its exercise (“this happened”). To say someone is a fool, for example, is to implicate some other behaviour which in that situation might not have been foolish and presupposes that the foolish act has been weighed against this possibility. To say that a fool rushes in is to suggest that he didn’t have to, and to suggest he didn’t have to is to indicate some alternative was possible. The reputable poor, though soon parted from their money, are not called foolish because there are thought to be no alternatives. The poor’s loss is deemed inevitable; the fool’s not. This sort of procedure is totally dissimilar from saying that a piece of wood is ash or that a face is horribly burned. (Of course, it is true that members sometimes act as if they are only designating a property not making a charge. But these designations either presuppose a charge already made or presuppose that a charge could be made and might be termed labelling ideology. The analytic process of deviance remains one of conventionality and charge, because it would be incumbent on the member to argue for conventionality if a counterassertion

78

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

were made. A fool would lose his reputation if it were discovered that he had been pushed in.) To say that a face is horribly burned is only to indicate the potentiality of deviance, for such a statement is not necessarily accompanied by a description of its items of production. It is an essential analytic feature of deviance that the designation, name, label ascription, or what have you be some kind of account that imputes a “choice” among alternatives not a situationally determined product. The face is burned, which itself recommends nothing one way or the other about deviance. The face may have been burned in a war, that is, accidentally, in which case it is not conventional and not deviant. Or it may have been burned on the owner’s decision that he was “too beautiful,” which a member would probably say was a choice that might have been otherwise and thus levels a charge. Our next immediate concern will be to expand on the workings of a charge as a feature of conventionality. A charge depends for its existence on being defeasible; that is, it must he capable of rejection as a characteristic of an observed act. In other words, it must not be self-evidently correct that the charge is applicable and deviance occurring, for a charge always bears the possibility that it will be refuted. Being without a nose, if that can be said to be self-evident, is not comparable in this regard to being without morals, which is always a defeasible charge. The logic of conventionality is that it should be vulnerable to rejection, undoing, refutation. In actual practice it may not be refuted, but in actual practice this is always a possibility when deviance is at issue. This raises the question in any particular case that a judgment may be accompanied by disagreement; for example, a group can be deviant to some and not others. It is here that moral contests reside. One import of the defeasibility of a charge is that a member doesn’t “elect” to define an act as deviant but rather “accepts” such a definition in the sense that any designation of deviance must be conceived as the outcome of an argument. (The argument needn’t be verbal, of course, nor between two parties. It need only be the consideration of a contention, insofar as the applicability of a label has to be managed into existence.) Deviance is a sifted outcome that must be backed. Take, for example, the classic syllogistic form: “Blux is an actor; all actors are childish; Blux is childish.” The universal premise “All actors are childish” disguises its own characteristic qua premise: namely, that it requires some reason, warrant, or justification which does not appear by inspection in that premise.7 “Who says?” we might ask, but we would be more precise to ask “How says?” Is the

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

79

content of this statement recommended by theological definition, empirical finding, taxonomic inclusion, or what? (This is true also with regard to classic syllogisms, such as “Socrates is a man/All men are mortal/Socrates is mortal.” The more self-evident appearance of these is a consequence of their being hackneyed.8) That is, a syllogism requires backing, for there is nothing in the universal that can be said to necessitate agreement by a reading of the statement. It is always possible that even a syllogism will be argued. The existence of this possibility is a feature of syllogistic logic. It obviates a self-evident logic. What a syllogism would require to be self-evident is the following: (1) a beforehand knowledge of the grammar of its terms; (2) a language structure which conforms to that of reality; (3) a perfectly known reality; and (4) immediate knowledge of reality by all users of the language.9 In other words, for a syllogism to be self-evident would require that everything be known and nothing learned. Furthermore, a beforehand knowledge of terms means that it cannot be self-evident, for such knowledge would comprise a mediating factor between the syllogistic sentence on the page, or utterance in the air, and some reader or hearer. Thus, something else must be “established” before the syllogism. Suppose that we were discussing actors and someone uttered the syllogism above. Some such stated or unstated question as “According to what criteria?” will arise or be presupposed, even if it is only directed to oneself. It would bring answers like “I have read about actors,” “I have observed actors,” “According to psychoanalytic versions of the world,” “That’s what actors say,” “Can’t you tell?” and so forth. Or the question might be more directly definitional, as in “All actors? You mean to include the people in community theaters who do it part-time as therapy?” Or it might accept everything but the conclusion: “Well, yes, Blux is an actor, and actors are childish, but Blux is an exception. He is very mature.” A charge is used, it is a behavioural and linguistic process, and it must be weighed, justified, made good. That is, it must give evidence, facts, reasons. To make it good is to appeal to something outside the statement on the page or the utterance in the air – some empirical, taxonomic, or statutory rule by which argument is made or presupposed and the statement given life as a course of action. One can most easily see this, perhaps, in history. Until the sixteenth century, theological propositions were guaranteed and may even have seemed to have been self-evident, but they were, of course, backed up by faith. Suddenly, they needed authority and witness, as warrants against a burgeoning scepticism of their immediate self-evidence. Foucault similarly

80

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

depicts the variety of backing which can be observed to have generated changes in the treatment of madness. Aside from these formal inadequacies of the syllogism, we can add that the common sense notions which are the subject matter of sociology are substantial, and so the purely formal feature is inadequate as a description of common sense in any case. Common sense descriptions are certainly not a calculus, even if the form “All As are Bs” is a calculus, and any notion that they are inadequately formulates deviant processes. Common sense notions are literally equivocal; they do not even qualify as formal, although they are sometimes treated as if they do.10 A common sense canon may be enforced as morally or normatively required, but it does not meet the canons of geometric analyticity because the following of a rule, alas, does not insure that the performance will be accomplished. And this is a consequence, not of the weakness of men, but of the character of the rules themselves, as we shall discover in a moment. A flagellant theory will not do. Some have called common sense rules “maps,” “blueprints,” and “calculi,” but these terms should always be enclosed in quotation marks. One cannot get from one social place to another by following common sense rules in the same way one gets from one number to another by following arithmetic rules. It is an interesting and important characteristic of certain kinds of rules that merely by following them one succeeds, but this characteristic is absent in social rules. By following the rules for multiplying numbers, one has multiplied numbers; by following maps, one follows maps; but by following virtue rules, one may or may not have been virtuous. The simplest kinds of these social rules, say the instructions for eating a salad, are not enough to insure success in the activity guided by the rules. A leafy lettuce salad can be intractable. This is because, by contrast with maps and arithmetic, common sense rules can be followed only in the absence of their conditions of failure. Take the bromide “It is better to give than to receive.”11 Now, the rule of which this is a statement incorporates a whole set of conditions which would prevent the activity of giving: the lack of a recipient, nothing to give, no occasion for giving. To succeed to virtuousness here, and thus follow the rule, there must be not just good intentions but a recipient and a willing one at that; some object to give; and so forth. If these are not present and available, one has not violated the rule, because their unavailability is incorporated by and envisioned in the rule. A common sense rule depicts a course of action (giving, under conditions of failure that do not obtain) and should never be confused with the statements (“It is better to give than

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

81

to receive”) that are only elliptical references to the rule as a contingent course of action. Imagine how odd it would be, for example, if everyone took the statement as the rule, which would make it impossible to practice giving, everybody refusing to receive. A statement of a rule may be positive, but it presupposes certain rule-stipulated conditions which will necessarily make a common sense act fail, and it is only in the absence of these conditions that an act can succeed. Without a recipient, an object, an occasion, following the rule of giving is not possible. A common sense rule is a peculiar, abstracted transformation of courses of action into structural conditions of failure – conditions which describe and depend on the state of the world as the action occurs. The statement thus is abstracted and cannot fully represent the rule, and the rule, by addressing itself to the limitations of social structure, depicts itself in negatives. It cannot therefore be self-evident or automatically invoked because the activity it guides does not always succeed and because the conditions of failure must be consulted when it does not.12 These conditions are incorporated by conventionality. We always ask, “What happened?” – “What was the state of the world vis-à-vis rule-stipulated conditions of failure?” before “What shall we do about it?” I suppose this is what makes common sense so awesome to the member and elusive to the sociologist. A common sense rule guides the issue of deviance by depicting certain features of the world which, if they obtained, would preclude the activity. For some, American prisons pretty well obviate the possibility of following the heterosexual rule. The rule itself depicts various contingencies (a one-sexed population without conjugal visiting) which require going away from certain acts themselves, say, homosexuality, in any instance of assessment or appraisal of those acts. When such failure contingencies are decided to exist, the rule cannot have been broken, even though behaviour is out of accord. The prison, according to those holding the view, is a social structure necessitating the failure of heterosexuality. In fact, the heterosexual rule, conceived as a set of stipulations upon sexual activity, would be said to have been validated, rather than violated because its conditions of failure existed and the act was not guided by it. Thus, in the prison case, efforts have been made simply to provide the structural alternative to homosexuality in the form of conjugal visiting, not to “rehabilitate” the “sick and deviant” prisoner. It is the condition of the world here which neutralizes the failure and exempts the homosexual act. The deviance, if any, is to be found in some prior item of production.

82

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

But these matters are not limited to the dramatic; to eat certain salads gracefully is impossible without using a knife as well as a fork. An absent knife is a failure condition that can be “seen” in salad eating over and over. Common sense rules take the form of “only if,” the “only” being a reference to sets of failure conditions which are built into the rule.13 Deviance, thus, can exist only when these conditions of failure do not obtain and yet the act fails. Otherwise, the rule has been followed in the sense that it has a grip on the activity. Here is grist for deviance. Deviance is failure when conditions of failure are absent. A deviant act is a conventional act, whence it is deemed that the conditions of failure (accident, coercion, miracle) are not present, and thus the act under question was not inevitable. If homosexuality persisted after the introduction of visiting rights, it would probably be called deviance. Because the conditions of failure are not present, the act under question is (was) contingent, unnecessary, needless. Not giving can only be deviant if the conditions of failure do not obtain: if no recipient does not obtain, if no available gift does not obtain, and so forth. One stumbles not always out of weakness but out of the state of things – a state that may or may not coincide with conditions of failure. And until the state of things is deemed to accord with the absence of the conditions of failure as demarcated by the rule, the activity at issue has no moral aspect. This is the equivocal nature of moral rules: they display an emphasis on conditions of failure (an emphasis that necessitates checking on the world), the absence of which becomes the conditions of success. A common sense success is not a success solely by being a success. It is not like arithmetic. Rather, it is a success because it takes place in a world empty of the conditions of failure, in a world that provides the freedom to do it by not obviating the structural alternatives for doing it. What will be a success is thus represented in the rule largely by the prospects for failure. Failure itself is not deviance. Deviance is to fail in the absence of conditions of failure. The very same act would not be deviant if conditions of failure were present. In summary to this point: to assess an act as conventionally unnecessary, and to back this assessment with a reason, is to charge deviance. To charge deviance is to move closer to holding alter responsible for the identified act because it is to say that the rule-given conditions of failure (accident, coercion, miracle) do not obtain – that the actor was “free,” his act not fixed by social structure. The potential label, designation, or name is worked out by charging this responsibility and is no more than a tag,

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

83

a terminological epiphenomenon of the charge. Furthermore, and by way of distinguishing the pragmatic from the deviant feature of an act, although an effect can be assigned to an act (his suicide upset his children), an effect need not be assigned and is therefore inessential to deviance. The actor could be charged even if there were no effects. It is responsibility for the items in its production, not its effects, that must be identified in deviance. Deviance is identified through its common sense structural “causes”; that is, its conventionality–nonconventionality. To be poisoned by a Borgia is distinctively separable from being poisoned by an oyster, although one could be made equally sick, even dead, by both kinds. The first we take to fall under the conventional rubric “It might have been otherwise,” the second under the nonconventional rubric “It couldn’t have been otherwise.” It is this application of the criteria for conventionality that makes the two incomparable with regard to deviance. The Borgia poisoning, in which we would discursively rule out conditions of failure, would continue on from the charge to an assessment of responsibility. Conventionality and nonconventionality are two common sense versions of “cause” – they depict for members the indeterminate and determinate consequences of social structure – and as such they delimit reactions to behaviours which are out of accord. They thus generate the possibility of social deviance. There is nothing deviant about an act until it has been called a conventional act.

Theoreticity Let us now move on to the second aspect of members’ assessment of deviance, which is captured by the phrase “He knows what he’s doing.” This phrase is suggestive of, and I think helps to resolve, a central and difficult problem in sociology: namely, the problem of the actor as agent of his own behaviour. Although it has been called a psychological or at least a social-psychological problem, I shall try to show among other things that this needn’t be so if we convert it into a problem about members’ treatment of the actor as if here were an agent – a procedure which directly connects with social deviance. To clarify the following general discussion, I will begin with an example. Note that the same behaviour in children and adults can be very differently treated. A physiological description by a child, for instance, may lead to no observable reaction by those around him, whereas the same description by an adult usually does. It is often said by parents that the child is exempted

84

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

because he is still learning, which may be true, but glosses over our interests. It would bring greater concision to ask the parent what there is about the common sense state of “learning” that permits of exemption in the child’s case. And sooner or later I think we would find that a parent conceives a child not to know what he is doing, in that the child is held to have no theoretic or formulated knowledge as opposed to mere knowledge by familiarity or practical knowledge. Members generally make a distinction between knowing what they are doing (theoretic action), in the sense that the actor can be said to formulate what he is doing in terms of some rule or criterion, and not knowing what they are doing (practical action),14 in the sense that the actor is unable to so formulate what he is doing. Russell’s distinction between savoir and wissen, on the one hand and connaître and kennen, on the other,15 corresponds to the difference between theoretic and practical action, respectively. And I think Simmel had it in mind but primitively and with certain indigestible consequences, when he separated sociability from sociation.16 The former, insofar as Simmel can be read with our interests in mind, is for the member to envision the form of the activity as it exhibits rules, while the latter is only to participate in the content of the activity. In attending to form, we specifically organize the matter as a procedure as such, while sociation is a sealed preoccupation with the thing itself. Shwayder nicely sums it up by saying that we distinguish between acting in terms of the idea “That’s the rule,” and not so acting.17 It is the difference between behaviour which is regular and behaviour which is rule-guided.18 According to Bennet, who is discussing generalizations and for which we may substitute action, the move from regular (practical) to rule-guided (theoretic) is comparable to the move from “generalizations which manifest” a rule to “generalizations about” a rule and is “analogous to that of the move from descriptions which are rules to descriptions which refer to rules.”19 Perhaps the distinction is similar to the one between rule-governed, in the way a generalization or law would govern, and rule-oriented, in the way an evaluation or assessment would be oriented. It is to “assess as well as express.”20 At any rate, it is the contention here that actors themselves make these sorts of distinctions about the activities of one another. Those undergoing psychoanalysis, for example, are directly involved in transforming “acting out” (practical action) into “insights” (theoretic action). In this procedure the analysand is to review his acts in such a way that he displays “That’s the rule” behaviour about acting out. In so doing he transforms the practical

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

85

action of regular acting-out behaviour, which only manifests or expresses some clinical rule, into rule-oriented behaviour, which is an assessment in terms of the clinical rule. Socializing situations, including formal education, are probably the ones where this distinction is a most direct and palpable common sense concern. So also does it characterize the difference we impute between amateurs and professionals in all fields, as in art: the true poet is not one who only happens upon his work but who has mastered the rule-guided “discipline” of his craft, even when he chooses to innovate upon it. This is to say that members assess whether behaviour only happens to conform to (or violate) a rule or whether the actor was behaving in terms of the rule. Is the actor conforming to, or violating, the rule as rule, or does he merely happen to conform or not? In other words, can he be thought to have a rule-oriented reason for what he does? In New York City, the parents of preschool children rush them from interview to interview in hopes of getting them into private school in the belief that public schools won’t do the job. The parents are consistently on tenterhooks about their child’s behaviour at these interviews, even when things went well at the last one. They treat the last one as only coincidentally that, nothing on which to envision the next. This is because, although they may think of the child as a conscientious practical actor in his interview behaviour and thus not culpable on these grounds, they do not conceive the child to be a theoretic actor, to be rule-guided, in that he does not attend to an interview as it expresses formidable social properties of which this single interview is an instance. He is thought to have no conception or mastery of the interactional formulations by which the practices of interviews proceed, though he may have a sense of what he’s doing while doing it. He is responsive, but not instructible. That is, he is thought not to deal with rules qua rules, of which an interview is one case. Consequently, parents spend the time before an interview trying to put the child in a good humour, in an attempt to create a scene in which the practical actions of the child will happen to conform to the rule-guided version of correct interview behaviour. Argument is avoided, breakfast is gratifying, the child is kept busy on uncranky fun, and so on. And when the interview turns out badly, the parents act as if nothing much can be done about it, the child not having known what he was doing when he did it. The issue of deviance and conformity doesn’t really come up. With older children, however, a disappointing session is often followed by remonstration

86

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

because the child is thought now to be a theoretic actor and thus to have chosen to do badly. In the first case, deviance and conformity are just not relevant, because it is the parental version of their child that he is only a practical actor. In the second, however, deviance and conformity are at issue, because the child is a theoretic actor. He is now held to be an agent of his own behaviour because he “knows what he’s doing.” Only here does deviance arise. I am not suggesting that an actor with knowledge by acquaintance or familiarity – with only practical knowledge – does not know what he’s doing in that he is unaware of his milieu and activity: that he is a robot or dope. A practical actor, as with children, can attend to his circumstance in the sense that he could record his experience, write it in a letter, tell it, draw a picture of it, or the like. He can even do these in a way that satisfies him and in a way that could be made intelligible to others, viz., clinical interpretations of schizoid writings. A parrot is surely not unaware when he squeaks, “Polly wants a cracker” nor is Piaget’s child when he syncretically interprets mechanical cause and effect. Yet suppose the parrot croaks his line immediately following someone’s remark that “a Floridian is looking for a wife.” Even those who dislike awful puns might laugh. But they laugh only because it seems like a bad pun; that is, it only happens to be guided by pun rules and thus meets none of the criteria, though it appears to meet all. Any exercise of wit is foreclosed here; it has nothing to do with the quality of wit at all, because the parrot does not formulate the rules by which puns are made. A lout is not forever and always prevented from doing something clever. But he does not link the act to its context; he only acts in a context. We are made to suffer the boring redundancy of a child’s joke because, although he can practically engage with the comic, he does not apply the theoretic criterion of repetition. To be a theoretic actor, thus, is “not merely to satisfy criteria, but to apply them.”21 Similarly, a conformist is not one who happens to satisfy a rule but one who applies it, and a deviant is not one who happens to violate the rule but one who defies it. Those who only happen to be one place or another in the conforming–deviant scheme of things are exempted from judgment. They are not even in the scheme. That children are syncretic and egocentric serves not to remove the onus of deviance but to preclude even the possibility of it, because although children may know the particular objects with which they are dealing (marbles, a mother, some peers), they are thought not to know them as usably rule-guided objects, by which they

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

87

are organized into general courses of action. Thus, although things and acts can be identified by the nontheoretic actor, rules cannot. He does not act in consideration of a rule. This is not a strange idea to members, as can be observed in their everyday adoption of it. One common sense use of this distinction is playing dumb. An actor who explicitly attends to the difference between knowledge by familiarity and theoretic knowledge – that is, an actor who formulates the distinction – can anesthetize his deviance by acting as if his knowledge were only by familiarity: he can act dumb. He can act as if he doesn’t know he committed an offence, and he may get away with it as a result, especially if he is a recruit, neophyte, or newcomer. He gives an impression of practical action by having theoretically organized the distinction. It is a device made available by a theoretic treatment of the materials of deviance themselves, a very sophisticated course of action. Certain features of the guard–inmate “collaboration” in prisons and hospitals can be seen as an exercise of the distinction in order to neutralize it. The offender plays dumb in not recognizing the rule, while the offended plays dumb in not recognizing the offence or in not recognizing that the offender is playing dumb – by playing dumb about playing dumb, as it were. Of such also is made the plea of temporary insanity,22 which is a statutory provision for the distinction between theoretic and practical action. This distinction, if correct, is very revealing of the idea of intentions, motives, and purposes.23 An actor can be said to have intended to do what he did by being ascribed theoretic status with regard to what he did. If he is held to have behaved in consideration of a rule and if his behaviour can also be said to have been conventional (not accidental, coerced, or miraculous), then so can he be said (according to common sense) to have intended, wanted, or meant to do what he did. That is, he can be treated as an agent of his own behaviour, his act as a motivated act. He will be treated as if he is alive to the world around him and hence the conforming–deviant issue will arise. Here is the paradigmatic deviant. Someone who “knows what he’s doing” in this special sense will be held accountable for his acts and responsible for his behaviour. He will be considered to have acted from the status of full-fledged membership, which is to take on social responsibility and to give over rights to review. Intentions, as acts which are deemed to be theoretic, are a central feature in deciding on the character of an act – so central, in fact, that an intention to deviance can be deviant, and punishment ensue, in the face of behaviour which conforms. This is

88

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

the theoretic reciprocal of behaviour which only happens to conform or deviate. An imputed intent makes the behaviour unimportant. Imagine the suburban wife’s reaction upon discovering that her husband’s fidelity is only a consequence of being unable to find an object for his promiscuous intent. An argument like “But I never did anything” would hardly assuage her, though it might amplify her suspicion that he is another kind of incompetent as well. Intent is explicit in criminal cases and can literally make the difference between life and death. In summary, deviance in this other aspect of common sense response is committed by one who can be said to be a theoretic actor. A theoretic actor is socially treated as if he acts in consideration of a rule. To be so treated is to have intended to do what was done (if the act is also deemed conventional), which is to assign responsibility for the act. It is this social responsibility which engenders the execrable character of deviance. Deviance is thus the expression of a process in which behaviour is assessed as conventional (or not) and then theoretic (or not). With regard to conventionality, to be deviant the behaviour requires that it be deemed unnecessary – not accidental, coerced, or miraculous. When the conventional contingency is realized, the equivalent of a charge has been made. The charge then sticks or not, depending on whether the actor is also treated as a theoretic or practical actor. If the former, he will be said to have known what he was doing by having acted in consideration of a rule; that is, he will be held responsible because he intends to do what he does. If the latter, he will be exempted because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Conventionality and theoreticity are the processes by which deviance is recognized, responsibility ascribed, and labels designated. Deviance is an upshot of these processes because they produce the designations of deviance which follow them.

II I now want to modify the periphery of what I have been saying so as not to be peremptory about what is deviant and what is not. Although it has been my central purpose to locate the overarching parameters of deviant judgments, not to discuss particular substantive forms of deviance, it is time to redeem certain forms which may have been excluded while pointing up the ideas of conventionality and theoreticity. Deviance has been discussed here as if it were always both conventional and theoretic and hence punishable.

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

89

An act that “might not have been,” performed by an actor who “knows what he’s doing,” would usually engender punishment for the offence. These are the kinds of acts, neither inevitable nor unconsidered, for which actors are held directly responsible. Lies, fraud, indifference, professional crime, and disingenuousness are examples from our kind of society that readily come to mind. Yet many other behaviours which we have come to call deviant do not combine in this positive way for both conventionality and theoreticity and are thus more rehabilitative than punishable: mental illness, delinquency, ignorance (as contrasted to stupidity), and so on. There is no overriding reason not to continue to call these deviance, but by applying the two notions of conventionality and theoreticity I think we can see what they share with all deviance, as well as what in particular separates them from the more punishable forms. I think they meet one or the other of the conventional–theoretic criteria, but not both. Suppose, for example, that someone tells a falsehood, tells something that members believe to be untrue. Imagine our response here, which will be to address the conventionality and theoreticity of the falsehood. Is the falsehood accidental, coerced, or miraculous; that is, is it inevitable and so not conventional? What if “No, no, you’re beautiful” had been said to an ugly, crying woman? Being a palliative, we may very well suggest that, socially speaking, the statement could not have been otherwise under the circumstances. We think of some palliatives as being forced by the situation. Even though the speaker knows what he’s doing – knows others would take his statement to be false, intends to make a false statement – he is doing something that is made impossible to avoid and thus falls under the common sense rubric of nonconventional and hence exempted behaviour. Now imagine that the falsehood is treated as a “tall tale.” What are we doing here? A tall tale implies that it might have been otherwise, for the teller is conceived not to have had to launch it. He chooses to do so, so to speak. Yet it is also treated as an “exercise of the imagination” in that the teller is thought to get carried away and doesn’t have it in mind that he is doing anything in particular. We often excuse him on the grounds that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he’s not acting in consideration of rules of truth, that he is without any theoretic intent at all (if we got the impression that it only seems to be a tall tale and the teller has something else in mind like changing the subject, we are, of course, no longer dealing with a tall tale). He is thus not held responsible for telling an untruth because his behaviour, while conventional, is treated as not theoretical.

90

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Suppose next that what the speaker is saying sounds like a paranoid delusion, spattered with persecution and aggrandizement. It seems to me that in secular societies there is some empirical division about the conventionality of this. In some places, notably backward ones, such acts are thought to be neither accidental nor coerced nor miraculous, to be not inevitable and thus conventional. In other places, we do believe psychosis to be a result of biographical accident or the coercions of circumstance. Where such an act is defined as conventional, the common sense observer moves on to theoreticity and whether the actor can be seen to have acted in consideration of a rule. And again there may be a division, although the attribution of theoreticity is not very prevalent in the world today. Some would say no, he is “insane” and that means he cannot be a theoretic actor, which is a more clinical version than yes, he can so be seen, he knows what he is doing. The latter would be assignment of full responsibility, since the act is both conventional and theoretic, but the former would not, since it is only conventional. If the act24 is thought to be nonconventional in the first place, on the other hand, the actor would be exempted from responsibility right off, and his ensuing treatment would be to rehabilitate without punishing. Continuing with conventional and theoretic mix, think of the falsehood that smacks of mendacity. It is our notion that a lie is something that might have been otherwise and that the actor knows what he is doing. He knows what he is doing in that he is felt to maximize advantageously a discrepancy in information and that he does this out of a choice that is unencumbered by circumstance. When this occurs, his act is both conventional and theoretic. He can be said to have done it without duress and by intent. The consequence for him will be severe in terms of the treatment he will receive. One final example. Imagine a man who goes from the tenth floor of a building to the first, without the aid of stairs, elevator, or parachute. The first issue will be to decide what happened, and this will involve asking about “causes” with an eye to their conventionality: Was the act inevitable? Did he trip by an open window? Was he pushed? If it is decided that he tripped, another accidental death. If he was pushed, homicide. In either of these cases it is not the act of going from the tenth to the first floor that is deviant. Rather, the deviance, if any, resides in some prior act of which this is only an extension. It is to be discovered in the items which produced going from the tenth floor to the first.

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

91

But suppose these possibilities are abandoned. Suppose the subject is young and athletic, very unlikely to trip, and that no one was in the room when he did it. We have rejected the possibility that the act was not conventional and in doing so accept that the act was conventional. We establish the working premise that it must in some way have been a choice, since it was not inevitable in the circumstantial sense. (Note, by the way, that the procedure is one of abandoning or rejecting certain classifications and not merely accepting some. This is the heart of the equivocality of moral rules already discussed. We proceed by following rules of rejection until no other interpretation is possible or likely except the one that is left, which transforms the affair into a positive assignment of responsibility.) So we move on to the theoretic–practical status of the actor: Did he know what he was doing, insofar as he can be said to have acted in terms of the rule about jumping off high places? Could he have observed his act as if he were a third party? If so, the act will be classified as suicidal, for to be a theoretic actor is to intend what happens. If not, if though he could be said to have been “aware,” “responsive,” “conscious,” he could not also be said to have been rule-guided, we will probably adopt our favourite residual category of psychosis, that being the only one left after an exhaustive rejection of all others. Thus, out of the various configurations of conventionality and theoreticity we come to various forms of deviance. An act can be one or the other or both or neither. I suggest that all deviance is generated by some such configuration. The actual configuration in any case remains to be observed.

III There are several relevant methodological and conceptual issues in sociology that conventionality and theoreticity may clarify. At least I hope they will not be further obscured. First, this idea of deviance makes it unnecessary to look at the act itself. Since deviance is no more nor less than the way an act is received, empirical observations can be made by observing its reception. It is unnecessary to establish any empirical criteria of deviance except community criteria. We do not have to look at the act itself, or recreate one after it vanishes. This is intuitively important with regard to the physically inaccessible, such as suicide, although the difficulty holds even for acts which are not so terminal. Under this principle, the suicide is its treatment via conventionality and

92

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

theoreticity, and nothing else. It is the sociologist’s special advantage not to have to observe the act or person that members deal with, only the way members do their dealing. It is not necessary to conceive the essential sociological nature of deviance as a transaction between some actual concrete labelled actor and some actual concrete labelling actor. Analytically, the transaction is entirely between labelling actors, even when it so happens empirically that a labeller is labelling his own act. The sociological “actor” is the labeller, whatever the referent act, whoever the concrete person. We need observe no more than conventionality and theoreticity. Second, we are clarifying the very vague notions of ought, morality, and value. The traditional idea of ought, as something which should be done, barely scrapes the surface of deviant behaviour, because it seldom tells us how we actually behave with regard to the acted performances that oughts and values only give us the license to do. Children ought to do many things, but they are often excused after not doing them. Adults are, too. Conventionality and theoreticity are the modes and behavioural uses of morality, of its enforcement and exemption, given the very general and undescriptive character of moral precepts. They are ways of moral practice, and it may even be appropriate to say that they, as in the suicide case, are the morality. Furthermore, if we proceed, as was suggested, by rejecting certain interpretations before going on to the next, the moral status of any case is arrived at by rejecting the existence in the world of rule-stipulated conditions of failure. To be immoral, then, is to reject exemption and not just to accept immorality. To add figures may be to add figures, but to be immoral is to be not moral. This is a consequence of the active logic of conventionality and theoreticity, which is a ruling-out procedure of conditions of failure and practical action, respectively. Third, conventionality and theoreticity depict the processes by which acts fall inside and outside “the norms.” To say that profanity is deviance in one group because it is outside the norms, but not in another because it is inside the norms, is clumsy if not tautological and can only be applied willy-nilly. How but by fiat would we know we had a case that something outside the norms was not deviant; that is, how does the inside–outside conception provide a principled empirical opportunity to observe an exception? To counter that we look at the “situation”’ to see whether a norm is invoked or not is little better, for it is only to recognize that a norm may not be invoked. It is not a method for observing how this happens and thus gives no lever for description. To say one will be excused,

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

93

another not, depending on whether the situation involves friends, enemies, mothers, spouses, and so on, is only the barest kind of ad hoc illumination. What is there about these memberships such that inclusion and exclusion could happen? That is, what formulation of behaviour, independent of its particular, boundaried content, makes it possible of characterization in the first place? We need first to know the analytic properties of deviance, not the concrete substantive imputations which are their consequence. To put it even more aggressively: conventionality and theoreticity are general processes which occur in all groups and all relationships. They are the linchpins of deviance because they generate the conceptual possibility of particular normative imputations, with the result that we needn’t document one substantive description by another. To say that falling inside and outside the norms is determined by the meaning of the act to the member is equally uninstructive. It is so bland an idea – of course it is the meaning – as to be nondescript. So the meaning of a shout varies between sets of pool players. We have already said this by depicting their behaviour. We need to talk of meaning not as offence against a (substantive) norm but the rule by which offence comes to be recognized and generated as an offence; that is, we are right back to conventionality and theoreticity. These are the criteria of meaning in a deviant matter because they generate the content of the matter as deviant. Fourth, it is according to the workings of conventionality and theoreticity that the grades and boundaries of membership are proffered and withdrawn. A full member is a person, group, or collectivity whose acts do not come to be questioned under the rubrics of conventionality and theoreticity. A partial member is one whose act is deemed either conventional or theoretic but not both. A nonmember is one whose act is both conventional and theoretic. One who never comes under these auspices never engages in behaviour that is questioned. One who falls only under one is, presumably, excused in part. Though he may be placed in limbo for a while, he is probably treated as retrievable without having to annul his act, so long as it can be shown that he will not repeat it. One who falls under both, on the other hand, will be excluded until and if his act can be annulled, which is to say that it can be treated as if it never happened. This sort of rereading is a process which makes it impossible to think of social definitions as frozen in time and place. Rather, a single act can be punished at one point and then fully redefined as exempt at another.25 It could, for example, be called conventional and theoretic, then nonconventional and practical.

94

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Fifth, conventionality and theoreticity are relevant to preferential rules, not constitutive ones, and hence deviance occurs with regard to preferential rather than constitutive behaviour.26 Deviant behaviour does not violate the rules that sociologists describe as necessary for the maintenance of social action. It is instead the kind of trouble that may change or disrupt things without destroying them. Since the judgmental aspect routinely incorporates the possibility that acts may or may not be conventional and theoretic, it cannot be said that the presence or absence of one or another is necessary to the continued survival of the action. Lying, psychosis, and the like are continuous matters for which members are prepared and with which they cope in an organized way. One feature of this organization is the operation of conventionality and theoreticity. Sixth, it would seem that conventionality is the common sense version of situation, theoreticity the common sense version of actor. “Was it inevitable?” is to ask about the causal status of the circumstance in which an act takes place, and “Does he know what he’s doing?” is to ask about the causal status of the actor (person or group) who does it. They are common sense versions of social structure and character, respectively, when the causal status of an event becomes an issue. They conjoin situation and actor so as to produce the social account on which members make inferences, review themselves, assign blame, and so on, when an act needs to be evaluated for deviance. Seventh, conventionality and theoreticity can be used to study social change and to compare social units, by applying them to particular items of behaviour. At one time, for example, decisions about deviance were mostly the province of laypersons as members of the same collectivity. Now, however, many of these deliberations rest with experts in bureaucratically rationalized organizations, often with rather different results than before. But I would argue that the conventional–nonconventional and theoretic– practical questions continue to guide such decisions and that any differences in result are a consequence of which side of the alternative is accepted as an adequate account. That madness was earlier thought to be a theoretic choice, whereas it is now thought to be only a practical action, probably describes the change in treatment we accord to that state. The questionable behaviour, then, may be located in a different cell by the expert, but his deliberations remain in the same matrix. The general analytic status of conventionality and theoreticity makes it possible to go beyond a mere substantive juxtaposition of changes in treatment and toward the links

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

95

between such changes because they formulate for us how the treatment of deviance is possible in the first place. They are thus utilized by, and can describe, behaviour in and between societies, organizations, persons, towns, economies, or whatever social units and processes one chooses to investigate.

IV I have tried to depict deviance not as the substantive reception of particular acts but as the common sense rules which generate the reception of any act. There are two of these rules, “Might it have been otherwise?” and “Does he know what he’s doing?” That they are common sense rules rests on the claim that members recognize and use them. These rules are constituted by ruling-out procedures; ruling out (or not) certain circumstances by checking on the world, a procedure which can eliminate those circumstances as causes and so locate an actor of potential responsibility; and ruling out certain features of the actor, a procedure which brings the social realization (or not) of that responsibility. Underlying these matters is the analytic idea that deviance must be conceived in terms of the character of rules and their treatment by members, not concrete acts and their treatment or concrete persons and their treatment. It is the rules to which we look in our creation of moral assessments, enforcements, exemptions, and so on, and in the theoretic case it is from the rules we look to see if alter also looked. But it would be more than an oversimplification – it would be an error – to depict this procedure of rule-looking as one of matching behaviour to rules, as though the process were identical to matching towns and maps or kitchens and blueprints,27 since matching does not incorporate defeasibility. Now, to say that these latter kinds of rules are not defeasible kinds is not to say that they always lead to actual successes: a rule of multiplication may not be followed as a result of all sorts of mistakes, forgetting, and intervention. This would be to confuse the very thing we are trying to clarify; namely, it is not the act (multiplying) we scrutinize but the kind of rule by which the act can be a course of action (being guided by rules for multiplying). A man may fail to multiply because he is distracted, because he forgets, because paper and pencil are unavailable, or because he is shot through the heart, but these factors are not built into the rules for multiplying the way they are built into the rules for deviance. They have nothing to do with rules for multiplying, the state of things not being formulated or made relevant

96

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

by those rules. Yet the state of the world and the state of the actor are part and parcel of moral rules. They are encumbrances which make it impossible to say an act failed or succeeded merely by looking at the act, as arithmetic rules provide. A moral observer cannot grade his subjects by looking at the doing of a behaviour the way arithmetic teachers grade theirs by looking at the doing of a multiplication.28 And again, it is not because observers are weak or uninformed, nor because the moral rules are merely more complex, but because moral rules are incomparably and qualitatively distinctive. We never talk about the “erosion” of arithmetic, for example, but this is easy with morality because deviance is always a conventional–theoretic charge. Moral rules not only permit but create and require the possibility of argument, denial, and disconfirmation.

NoteS Note: The following have been important sources in formulating this chapter: D.S. Shwayder, The Stratification of Behaviour (New York: Humanities Press, 1963); H.L.A. Hart, “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights,” in Logic and Language, First and Second Series, ed. Antony Flew (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 151–74; Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); Jonathan Bennet, Rationality (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). I wish also to thank Alan F. Blum, Aaron V. Cicourel, Walter Goldfrank, and Jack Douglas for their helpful suggestions. 1 “Conventionality” and “theoreticity” are technical terms which will be clarified below. 2 See Shwayder, The Stratification of Behaviour, 311–20, for a discussion of upshots. 3 These “explanations” do not explain anything. In fact, they do nothing except turn back upon themselves. Lacking description, what is thought to be explained is only an elliptical reference point for allusions to the explanatory factor. 4 This is to say that references to structural causes are no substitute for description. For more complete statements of this argument, see this writer’s Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 7–20; Aaron V. Cicourel, The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (New York: Wiley, 1968), 1–18. 5 “It makes a great and real difference when the cause of deviant behavior is seen to lie in deliberate choice rather than in accident, inheritance, infection, or witchcraft.” Eliot Freidson, “Deviance as Social Disability,”

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

6

7 8

9 10

11 12 13

97

in Sociology and Rehabilitation, ed. Marvin B. Sussman (Washington: American Sociological Association, undated). This is not to discount Goffman. My purpose is to depict processes by which deviance comes to be recognized in the first place; his is to depict what happens afterward. See his Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963). This distinction also needs to be made for some of the cases described by Freidson, “Deviance as Social Disability.” I might add here that with the exception of professional stage actors, the examples used throughout are not empirically known to concretely represent the points they serve. Perhaps the owner of a burned face would be held responsible. The claim is that if he were, the circumstance of his face would be treated as a conventional one. See Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, 94–145. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 300. This is to say that, far from being a deduction, the ascription, gains weight only by having been repeated; “An argument is hackneyed, when practice with it or its kin has long since prepared us to use it unhesitatingly and without qualms. [It is] immediately obvious for the same reason that a Latin sentence is immediately obvious when we are quite used to both its vocabulary and to its syntax.” Chaim Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 112–13. Social processes are thus the behavioural siblings of the dialectic logic of rhetoric and argumentation, not of Cartesian deduction–demonstration. It is perhaps this understanding that underlies recent greater interest in linguistics, the dramatic metaphor for social interaction, and even the collaboration of Marxists and Rousseauans in politics as theatre. This example adapted from Shwayder, The Stratification of Human Behaviour, 271–3. This is the process which generates moral relativism. A member excuses an act when conditions of failure are present or by acceding to others’ accounts as to what will be considered conditions of failure. It is a mistake to hope that we could list failure conditions and then match them against an act. This is to beg the issue by denying what has already been suggested: whether we are dealing with an overarching rule or one of its subrules, the process remains the same. It is still a charge and must be worked through, not matched, because it is an argument not a deduction, and there are failure conditions for failure conditions. Aside from this logic, such a list would be a practical impossibility anyway, there being innumerable sub- and subsubconditions.

98

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

14 It may be confusing to use the term “practical action” as a contrast to theoretic action because practical action has been used to cover all common sense activity (viz., Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967]). But I have chosen to do so in order to indicate that the opposite of theoretic action is not no action at all, or some form of subhuman action, and to suggest that we do have these two kinds of action in connection with the idea of rules, as will be addressed below. 15 Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (New York: Norton, 1940). 16 George Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, trans., ed., with introduction by Kurt H, Wolff (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 40–57. Simmel errs in limiting pure sociability to certain kinds of activity, such as play and art. If sociability is theoretic action, it can be everywhere. And sociability is probably never pure in the concrete because it always operates jointly with sociation. 17 Shwayder, The Stratification of Human Behaviour, 238ff. 18 Bennet, Rationality, 8–21. See also John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review ( January 1955), 3–32. 19 Bennet, Rationality, 21. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ryle, The Concept of the Mind, 28. 22 See “Common Sense Conceptions of Insanity,” an unpublished paper by Alan F. Blum. 23 Intentions, motives, and purposes are technically different phenomena, but I will treat them as similar here. 24 The reader should be reminded that I am not talking here or elsewhere about the socially untenanted act per se but about its treatment. “The act” is always empty until it is given treatment, in our case according to conventionality and theoreticity. I have left implicit the qualifications “treatment of the act,” “reception of the act,” and so on for ease in reading, but the reader should assume such a qualification in every case. 25 See the author’s Defining the Situation, for an empirical examination of rereading. 26 Harold Garfinkel’s earlier work was primarily concerned with constitutive features. See his “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions,” in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. O.J. Harvey (New York: Ronald, 1963). For a general review of constitutive rules, see Shwayder, The Stratification of Human Behaviour, 267–71.

A common sense conceptIon of devIAnce

99

27 It is a different matter entirely to ask directions or to learn to read maps because what is being done here is asking or learning and only incidentally mapping. See Wittgenstein on understanding, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953). 28 This is not to say that grading a multiplication is so simple or obvious as to be self-evident, which I have tried to show is never the case in any kind of activity. It is only to emphasize the distinctions we have been discussing between these kinds of rules, which involve different kinds of non-selfevident checking procedures.

6

CONFRONTATION

As a signal for those who have not participated in confrontation, and as a reminder to those who have, we begin with LeRoi Jones’s now common phrase: “Up against the wall, mother-fucker.” This line was to appear over and over again, in one event after another, and described for those involved the contour of their participation in confrontation. The question is, what does it represent? What is the organizing rationality of confrontation, which has so often been described as irrational, disorderly, hedonistic? It may be, after all, that confrontation is only irrational according to the prevailing standard, as would inevitably be the case with the radically new, but quite sensible in terms of another version of the world. We shall explore the rationality of confrontation and will try to do so by examining the actions and language of confrontation itself. What, in other words, is its intelligibility? What do we have to know to know we are participants in a confrontation? From whatever sources it may arise and wherever it may lead in consequence – important questions, perhaps, but not ours – we want to examine, simply, what it is, independently of the social and psychological status of those who would do it and those who would not. Beginning with Marx and his version of social action, we shall follow by moving to a comparison of new left and old left, and then to resonances in our contemporary culture. The materials of the lecture are restricted to events in the United States, primarily the confrontations in universities there. For Marx, the question “How does a social class arise?” is equivalent to the question “what are the grounds of organized political action?” Peter McHugh, “Confrontation” (unpublished paper, 1972).

confrontAtIon

101

In this sense any and every radical theory of political action constitutes a description of the conditions under which a population is transformed or mobilized into a socially organized collective. If classes are a kind of social collective then all theories of political action within the radical tradition are simultaneously descriptions of social collectives. Think of defining “social class.” Ollman (1971), say, is undoubtedly correct in noting how Marx’s shifting use of the idea resists distillation in a general formula, but this is because Marx refused to define social class in terms of a list of attributes which would be necessary and sufficient for its correct application. To give a list of common properties would have been to deny Marx’s intention that the concept depicts a course of action. A class, in other words, is not characterized by its common properties because it is not in a list of properties that the analytic status of class resides. Marx recognized that common values, interests, relations to property and the like do not define class sufficiently. Instead, class requires concerted theoretic understanding on the part of a collection of actors of their class interests. It is not that there are classes on one hand and action on the other, but rather class is acting in terms of class interests. They are not two independent notions – class is a course of action, concerted action in terms of economic interests. Marx then supplies us with the notion that the existence of a social class is warranted when one finds in some set of behaviours evidence for the assertion that a collection of actors is acting under the auspices of economic relevances. The crucial question in any particular case becomes how to decide that a collection of persons is so acting: What observable features of an organization of social actions are used to decide upon the presence of the phenomenon “social class?” In other words, what does it mean to say of a collection of actors that they are acting under the auspices of economic relevances? For one thing, Marx shares with people as diverse as Weber, Lewin, Cassirer, and Wittgenstein that more is required than simply a listing of common existential properties, e.g., the fact that its members possess common interests, fate, culture, values, property, status. To say it shares common properties is to do no more than perform some categorization, where the relevance to action of the categorization remains problematic or contingent. Members of some collection might be categorizable and “know it,” but their acquisition of unit status for the sociologist requires some sort of behavioural demonstration of how their knowledge is employed by them as a rule in

102

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

action. Unless such a demonstration is provided, classifying into common properties can always be seen merely as an artefact of sociological or some other observational procedure whose relevance to action remains unsettled. For example, the peasantry might be categorized in such ways and yet they did not act in terms of class interests. Instead, one locates a set of actions which recommend that the collective (1) conceives itself as a collective actor, (2) finds its collective status theoretically within a sociohistorical context, and (3) develops various organizational forms for articulating these concerted understandings. These three conditions must be discerned in the welter of activities before social class can be adequately applied in this tradition. Though obvious, certain critics have missed this point. To ask if such-and-such a class is “class conscious” is to violate Marxist methodology, because if such-and-such a class is not class conscious then its members are not a class. For Marx class consciousness is a parameter and not an empirical “effect” of class. This is why Lipset’s “findings” that the working classes are authoritarian (Lipset 1963), fascist, and so forth do not constitute a convincing rebuttal of Marx. Marx would say that such evidence merely testifies to the fact that such workers do not constitute a class in this sense. Lipset rebuts Marx by misusing the idea. Thus, in summary, if Marx defined social class as a course of action, and if the character of such action resides in some instance of concerted and self-conscious practical political theorizing and organizing, then for analytic purposes we can read Marx as speaking of organized political action whenever he speaks about social class. Social class is only and exclusively a description of a collective which is politically mobilized, i.e., one that is theorizing self-consciously and acting instrumentally under the auspices of such theoretic relevance. Any question which addresses the issue of whether some aggregate constitutes a class is asking whether the collective is politically mobilized. (Parenthetically, a most fundamental feature of this criterion is that it does not depict the psyche and hence cannot be equated with attitudes, dispositions, and the like.) The important implication of this reading for us is that any radical program which posits conditions for politically mobilizing collectives can be read as a theory of how a social class is created. It amounts to saying that radical politics is another way of speaking about the production and maintenance of collectives, of social organizations. It also amounts to saying that any and every program of radical politics is a theory of social organization.

confrontAtIon

103

To understand how the new left has altered radical politics, we must recognize that Marx’s conditions for the production of social classes have been transferred en toto to the description of status groups (blacks, students, etc.). The economic roots of the collective, in other words, have been reformulated to include its socially organized character. To accommodate to this usage, we want to say that all radical programs are theories of social organization and not strictly theories of social class. This is not to take a position on whether status ultimately reflects class, only to note that new left programs address their mobilization to populations which are not located through an orthodox class model. Sociologically, the notion of status represents an attempt to describe more finely the environment of objects which actors respect as the constraints and conditions of their performances.

Radical Programs as Theories of Social Organization So, the adequacy of any radical political program can be assessed in the same terms commonly employed to decide the adequacy of any description of the formation of a collective. Programs of radicalization can and will here be read as sociological descriptions of the process whereby an aggregation of people becomes transformed into a collective actor. This is to say that theories of social organization constitute a collection of transformation rules. Any and every program for radical political action is essentially a collection of rules for transforming and mobilizing populations. These rules serve, in effect, as instructions for producing the very events they depict. Differences between various political radicalization programs are then located in the different rules proposed for transforming some describable population into a socially organized environment of concerted social actions. Each radical theory specifies some hypothetical initial population of actors as the politically relevant population. Such a population is created by a theoretic decision to categorize some aggregate of persons as “potential members” usually by virtue of some set of properties which the theorist locates as their common possession. In Marx, relationship to property or means of production did this work; in modern black power programs, colour functions this way. From the perspective of the actor, each categorization furnishes a set of relevances or grounds of conduct which control the population’s actions in the sense that the categorization specifies features of their environments which actors must take into account in formulating

104

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

their actions. In this way, the categorization of an initial population serves simultaneously to specify grounds of conduct or relevances or motives or normative orders. Each radicalization program is constrained by this election in two senses; it is these motives and only these motives through which the population acquires its unit character for the radical theorist or observers; it is these motives and only these motives which have to be addressed in any strategy for mobilizing that potential population. Second, each radical program furnishes some rules for identifying the environmental features of actors which must be operated upon or transformed in order to mobilize actors’ motives so as to produce the recommended or desirable state-ofaffairs. Thus, Marx not only described actors acting under the auspices of economic relevances (mere economic determinism) but he furnished a description of the socially organized conditions – alienation from labour, for example – the alteration of which succeeds in transforming economically motivated transactions into common and concerted economic interests. Finally, and most important, each radical program must supply some interpretive rule for conceiving of and describing the transformation which is accomplished when these environmental features are operated upon. For example, Marx’s notion that a certain stage of technological development (e.g., the factory system, machine production) is necessary for the working class to develop a concerted sense of their common economic interests implies a theory of conduct which specifies the ways in which communication accelerates collective reevaluations and serves to intensify organizational programing in this population. This is to say that the radical program must furnish some theory of mobilization which joins the initial population to its environment. Some principle describes the ways in which the relevant environmental features are to be dealt with in order to transform the initial population of category elements into a politically mobilized organization of collectivity members. In terms of the perspective employed so far, the alleged similarities and differences between the phenomena labelled “old left” and “new left” are descriptions of different perspectives about the most effective ways and methods for mobilizing populations. Controversies between these political factions can be read as disputes about the adequacy of competing theories of population mobilization and about the most effective methods for achieving such results. While the term “new left” does catch phenomena such as black power, SDS,1 situationists, gauchistes, and the like, it is more than a simple

confrontAtIon

105

rubric; as a course of action “new left” refers not to particular persons and groups but rather, as we have tried to indicate, to a collection of theories and methods for mobilizing populations. If we conceive of the new left in this analytic sense, we will immediately recognize that it goes beyond what is conventionally called political activity: it includes also a variety of achievements in concerted understanding, reflectiveness, and action of which politics is just one type. As a corpus of theories and methods for mobilizing populations, the new left incorporates certain political sects, literature, theatre, forms of psychotherapy, and self-exploration (the variety of forms available for doing such mobilization). To appreciate these features of the new left we must first understand the achievements which population mobilization is designed to produce. In the Marxist tradition, the mobilization of a population referred to the process whereby men were freed, were released from the artificial constraints imposed upon their natures by an alien social organization. Operating from the premise that men are unfree in the sense of their being manipulated by stimuli and impulses which they themselves cannot control, Marxist theory offered a description of the conditions under which such unfreedom is perpetuated and recommended a systematic program for the achievement of collective freedom. In this tradition, freedom, rationality, and knowledge tended to be used as analytic equivalents: these equivalents served to articulate Marx’s conception of the “essence” of man, a freedom which is available to man by definition simply by virtue of his being human. Man was seen to constantly reaffirm his unfreedom through and by his daily actions and in so doing was seen to deny his essence, his freedom. Since in Marx’s terminology the parameters of revolution were free men acting as a concert of free and rational men, his theory of revolution is another way of speaking of the organizational conditions under which freedom is produced. Using this comprehensive conception of freedom we can understand how the achievement of political mobilization is not narrowly political but a transformation of men’s conceptions of themselves and of the socially organized environments which they inhabit. In this tradition, the achievement of freedom (knowledge, rationality) means the production of a concerted self-consciousness or particular form of collective knowledge. The unfreedom of men is not merely a function of their wicked and corrupt real institutions but is preeminently implicated in the methods they use for categorizing themselves and their worlds. It is in their language. Men are unfree in a multiplicity of senses: they fail

106

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

to comprehend the ways in which their concrete existences deny their humanity; they are unable to allocate their energies productively; they fail to contemplate the merely factual character of their aspirations and environments, which conceals the many other possibilities available; they fail to locate their interests, as members of humanity, in the concerted actions of their fellows. In such failures of recognition men are unfree and ignorant and lack self-knowledge. This is why at the heart of every radical program lies a theory for transforming men’s conceptions of self and world. This is why radicalization programs are praxiological in the sense that they describe methods for the accomplishment of freedom. This is also why freedom is a parameter of population mobilization, i.e., freely acting men is true by definition of a mobilized population. In this sense, mobilizing a population would be to mobilize the capacity to organize concerted conceptions of their collective unfreedom and to act upon such knowledge in a methodical and systematic manner. The instrumental goal is to create a social organization (society) wherein the possibility of such a recognition exists.

Old Left, New Left The new left differs from the old left not in these diffuse aims and goals but in the precise assortment of methods advocated for the achievement of collective recognition and for organizing their population(s) in the service of such a recognition. One problem that it raised immediately, then, concerns the most effective available procedures for “forcing” a collection of actors to conceive of themselves as a collective with common interests, for forcing them to realize that they must think in such ways if they intend to survive, for forcing them to comprehend their unfreedom, and to grasp it as a socially organized and motivated denial of their basic humanity. Black power groups differ from more traditional, liberal-based civil rights organizations in that they are prepared to discard older strategies for mobilizing populations in favour of an alternative collection of methods. Similarly, the differences which separate SDS from conventionally orthodox Marxist “parties” or the differences between new and old theatre, art, and therapy can best be grasped as differences in theories and methods for mobilizing relevant populations. The various orthodoxies which in each area of endeavour (politics, art, literature) are labelled “old” tend to the view that mobilization can and

confrontAtIon

107

should be accomplished pedagogically, within the established forms of linguistic categorization. The supposition is that men can be taught or told that they are unfree and they can be instructed into the organized possibilities available for realizing their freedom. The new left denies this: men cannot be taught that they are unfree, they must come to see it. What is needed is not instruction but confrontation, which denaturalizes the conventional categories of language by stripping them of their usual context. It is in this sense that the talking cure of psychoanalysis, the orthodoxy of conventional Marxism, the theatre of Brecht, and even the routines of the university, are all of the same piece: they advocate didactic mobilization and a style of rhetorical engagement. By not making language itself problematic, they are enfeebled in their use of its conventional categories, which are associated with conventional conflict and action and can only perpetuate unfreedom. The various newer factions not only deny the efficacy of these programs but they rebut the tacit segregation of language from action, by, in confrontation, displaying in diverse ways the manner in which talk becomes unhinged from its organized contexts. They expose the problem of how language can be used as a substitute for practical political actions and how, unless we think deeply about language, we perpetuate the sources of unfreedom which reside in our ways of categorizing ourselves. No matter what their differences, the confronting forms of politics, theatre, and art make the problematic nature of language their foremost and essential concern. They accomplish this by experimenting with different usages, by displaying the contingent relationship between language and action (as in the critique of liberalism), by isolating language from action in order to expose both the impotence of talk as well as its destructive pervasiveness. The new left then accredits as a first premise the notion that the denial and achievement of freedom is implicated so fundamentally in the categorizing and conceptualizing procedures of members – in their language – that it is these very procedures and the talk which is based upon them which must be made to surface by dislocating and exposing them. This is the unitary fundamental of those who are otherwise as disparate as Artaud, black power, Lenny Bruce, Pinter, the Living Theatre, and Students for a Democratic Society. Note, for example, how in the comedy of Lenny Bruce and in various SDS and black power rhetoric, the language of the street is used to confront people in such a way as to make any reaction, including no reaction, a definition of essential character. aS a form of violence, this

108

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

language is organized around the insult, against which it is impossible to be neutral. A parameter of confrontation is the production of circumstances in which one rethinks his presuppositions. The disjunction between talk and action, and the source of this disjunction in the categorization of language, is another description of the unfreedom of men. The production of freedom involves a critique of this relation and a program of reintegration. The new left is an instance of politics and art being choked by the liberal sensibility, its major enemy. The heart of intellectual liberalism is its science, its formal logic, and its polarization of observer and subject in the service of the disinterested application of “theory.” The heart of social liberalism is its civility; the heart of political liberalism is its conception of moderation, dialogue, or negotiated understandings, reason, and the application of pragmatic intelligence to action. Language frames the culture of liberalism in so far as it provides the ground and identity of liberal acts. It is thus not merely words which become targets of the new left but rather the presuppositions and assumptions – its very form of life – which make the words possible. In speaking of a liberal language, we have in mind a pattern of linguistic use: the culturally accredited implications of talk which both speaker and hearer assume in common and assume that the other assumes. Talk, not to mention language, is a commitment in the sense that “speaking correctly” means recognizing the consequences of talk as a set of understandings and actions. For example, in asking if someone performed an act voluntarily, one is implying that something is fishy or untoward in the situation. “Did you do that on purpose?” is always asked in criminal courts, which excel in the fishy. To the extent that this implication is treated by members as a parameter of the talk (as necessary for its correct use) we can say that all talk raises the problem of the cultural competence of members (that one recognizes in the question that something is fishy). Furthermore, talk acquires its “sensible” character only by virtue of the fact that collectivity members can locate grounds for the intelligible grasp of utterances. By asserting that the new left attacks the liberal language then, we intend the following: they attack (through various methods) the unstated and routine forms of understanding which make the mere use of any language possible (i.e., the common culture of the language community). Much of the new left strategy is based upon the assumption that societal members have come to segregate their talk from the culture which makes it

confrontAtIon

109

sensible and in so doing to dissociate their moral purposes from their talk. In this sense, the new left tactic is to force language users to confront the implications of their talk by forcing them to recognize that they are morally engaged participants in its production rather than, as liberal rationality would have it, mere theoretic spectators and analysts of its “accuracy.” The language of the liberal culture is here no longer conceived as an impersonal medium which expresses or asserts “facts” about some “real” world. Instead, the use of the language is itself the topic. Its forms and uses are not treated as filters for “thoughts” but as the actualization of thought itself. In this sense, the form or medium – the way men talk – becomes not an objective technical resource for describing the world but constitutes a moral commitment to the world in its own right – as one possibility among many. From this perspective, the substantive assertions of the liberal culture or language are treated at every point as only contingently related to the behaviour which they entail. Treating language as a moral commitment then serves to review the responsibility of members on any and every occasion of their talk. The new left regards the lessons of history in this way: that men have avoided action and evaded responsibility through the particular ways they have used language. Thus, the new left attacks the logic and language of liberalism in several senses: it shows the logic to be a form of domination which to be effective requires the tacit consent and cooperation of a community of speakers and hearers; it attacks the language by isolating its various features, by comprehending its political uses, by showing the ways in which users are deflected from experiencing the events which the language depicts; by creating forms of communication on which the presence of this language is controlled or suspended or totally eliminated or made irrelevant. The new left attacks the liberal conception of language for its lack of commitment and proposes in its stead a language whose use knowingly constitutes a commitment. It refuses to allow societal members to escape responsibility for what they say by creating a structural context where what is said is what is meant: men are forced to confront the moral consequences of their language; they are forced to recognize the character-defining feature of their talk and action. While such recognitions are indeed explicit in Marx, as evidenced by his comments on the social organization of bourgeois scholarship, there is a crucial point of contrast. The new left does not merely attend to the class interests of cultural producers; it goes behind them to the bedrock forms of

110

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

life which make the mere expression of such interests possible. The very rules of the game which allow members to talk together, to argue, to convince, are treated as organisational perversions, are challenged, repudiated, recreated. The very language which conventional radicalism employs to communicate is treated as one variant of the liberal, naturalistic conception of language. Clichés of orthodox Marxism are treated with the same disdain as the clichés of political liberalism (though with perhaps a residue of sympathy). Despite its radicalism, orthodox Marxism assumes the very common culture that the new left treats as problematic. Moreover, orthodox old left radicalism treats the execution of a successful revolutionary action as the result of a type of explicit “rule following” action. This means that the old left treats the available corpus of theories and methods for producing revolutionary change as constraints in the following sense: effective political action is possible only when actors demonstrate through their behaviour their respect for the corpus of revolutionary political ideology as maxims of conduct. The typical theory of conduct subsumed by old left radicalism tacitly stipulates that the actor is responsive to a collection of political directives to which he attends as maxims, which guide his formulation of actions. The typical old left actor is one who acts under the auspices of such ideas. This is the notion of “ideology” which American sociologists like Bell (1961) and Shils (1955) have in mind when they write of the end of ideology. They can only speak this way because they subscribe to a nineteenth-century version of ideology. New left programs accept the death of this so-called ideology in the sense that the theory of conduct and type of actor do not describe conditions of successful political actions. They do not work because, when activists treat such a collection of “ideas” as maxims of conduct, these ideological formulae do not adequately take into account contingencies of time, place, situation, and population (Debray 1968). This is to say that the revolutionary program becomes reified, with an accompanying loss of reflexivity (of examining basic categories) by the revolutionary actor. The program of one time and place is elevated to the status of a revolutionary paradigm – a contradiction in terms – for all time, the existence of which narrows the practical field of vision that had been the impetus for the program in the first place. In other words, in an essentially practical endeavour practice is made subservient to talk. Once again, actual circumstance is victimized by our ways for representing it.

confrontAtIon

111

Thus, the new left conceives of successful political actions as those that are created under the press of actual circumstances, as methods whose sensible and efficacious character become available only after an action has been undertaken and experienced. This is Mao’s point. The new left regards as doctrinaire any calculus of revolutionary action which requires for its successful execution a collection of prearranged and abstract norms of conduct which actors obediently learn and apply as concrete circumstances materialize. Another distinction pertains to the populations to which the old and new left direct their radicalization programs. The old left was confronted by the spectacle of polarized economic classes and by the obvious “factual” disparity between the lives of men and the achievements to which they were entitled. Alternatively, the new left recognizes as a fact of life the presence of a liberal culture and society: a society that has “progressed” technologically and socially. Such a society is difficult to arouse because its members are content with the “objective” signs of improvement in which they participate, they congratulate themselves on their representative institutions, their free speech and elections, their civil rights legislation, their increased civility. The society with which the new left is confronted is a society which accepts mere factual progress as real progress, which equates verbal and civic humanitarianism with freedom. The strategic problem as the situationist new left sees it is not to mobilize the working classes by educating them, but to reawaken the liberal middle classes by reminding them. The large middle classes of industrial nations who are verbally committed to humanitarian ideals must be forced to enact these ideals. The new left tactic of confrontation is based upon the assumption that such a population must be provoked and disturbed and that it cannot be allowed to rest. This is achieved in confrontation by interrupting our conventional methods of categorizing which in turn is achieved by interrupting their organizational base. Confrontation randomizes what had been taken for granted and thus calls into question our formulations of the world by, in effect, denying us the world as we know it. In confrontation, social role as an arm of organization is impossible, and we are thrown back on our character. Our decisions, thus, cannot be taken in the name of anything or anyone but ourselves, because routine organizational accounts are no longer available, the organizational base having disappeared. In this regard, the aims of confrontation are anything but irresponsible, insofar as they force us to take up the issue of responsibility – responsibility for our own

112

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

actions. “Up against the wall” means that whatever we do we shall reveal our character, and in this the new left hopes we will examine our mode of interpreting our society. It offers us the opportunity to be creative about our understandings. In general, then, confronters see the old left and liberalism as equivalents in the following respect: although they may vary in substance, they make the same unexamined presuppositions about language, and so their conflict between them takes the form of interminable and useless argument over content. For the new left, a radical program requires an attack on our method of thinking, not on the content of thinking – content is only a surface manifestation of the deep structures of language which produce it. Words are made to take a back seat to language, as it were. The idea of linguistic attack is appropriate also to certain contemporary developments in the arts. The poor liberal cannot escape into the theatre, for example, as he is liable to find himself the target of organized provocation there as well. As in politics per se, the focus of attack is not our formal and codified substantive values, not our religious and other institutions but rather our socially organized ways of seeing and categorizing self and world which are bedrock and fundamental. Pinter, say, does not address “issues” like Brecht but instead calls into question the basic cultural competence of the spectator, his ability to understand language, to know what the world means, to believe what he sees. The difference between Pinter and Brecht is, again, a difference in their radicalization programs. Similarly, the Theatre of Cruelty, the Living Theatre, and the like constitute organized assaults upon the methods of members. These attacks are designed to make audiences question their own competence by withholding the kind of formal structures which make spectatorship available, and thus to force audiences to supply their own structures, thereby transforming them from spectators into participants, from impersonality to commitment. Pushing audiences beyond the limits of understanding in this way is an effort to make them accredit the fact that their culture fails to provide them with resources for evaluating the experiences in which they are engaged. It is to demand recognition of the obsolescence of presupposed standards about the facticity of distance between events observed and the categories through which those events are made possible in the first place. We are, accordingly, engaged in producing events, not just watching them unfold. Needless to say, making participants of spectators – while literally true of the theatre – is a metaphor for all the new left programs described so far.

confrontAtIon

113

It is instructive to examine the ways in which the new left theatre and art strike at the very heart of liberal language by making the audience and its common culture the “topic” of the presentation. First and foremost is the notion of art as a human experience; in looking beyond this cliché we may note that it describes art as a human action in the deep sense of the term. For example, we visit a theatre to witness the performance of a play and find ourselves involved in an event that does not yield to an assessment in terms of conventional criteria. We cannot seem to locate a plot, characterization, unities, even a clear and unequivocal set of “meanings.” No matter whether we are bored or puzzled, angered or aroused we cannot locate the grounds for our response in any set of standards which we have learned. We want to say that the event is not an instance of art, while simultaneously our engagement announces to us that the event (whatever its character) “works” in some sense. We are forced to recognize the following dilemma: if art is a human endeavour, one’s participation in the endeavour should control one’s evaluation rather than some unexamined presupposition of what constitutes art – which may be extrinsic to the experience itself. We are confronting a crisis of definition: to deny the experience as art is to deny our humanity while to accept the experience as art is to challenge a conception of art which is part and parcel of our way of looking at the world. The ghost of Wittgenstein lurks here. Perhaps there is no general definition of art in the sense of a calculus or formula which enumerates the common properties of all events described as art. Perhaps the only resemblances such events share is their capacity to mobilize an audience. In this case, each event must be judged anew – not by asking whether this play fulfills certain criteria which must be present before we can correctly apply the label “good” – but by asking whether the play works, succeeds in engaging or involving us. To even pose this question is to begin to describe ourselves for we can only describe what we do on the particular occasion of an event. To do art is to do art. To talk about art is to talk. To criticize art is to criticize. Each is a form of action, each a commitment. To do one is to elect, as a commitment, not to do the other. As we commit ourselves to action, we commit ourselves to that action, for one thing, and in no respect can we conceive our position as one of disengaged spectatorship. Consequently, what the event is is what is done (is what we do). The idea of spectatorship, conversely, detaches what the event is from its auspices in the commitment,

114

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

as if the event could live independently of the categorizations by which it takes life as a course of social action. In a sense, these are methods which remove the possibility of a “general theory.” If ever, we seek to reconstruct the general theory afterwards. We are involved in Weekend 2 or The Homecoming,3 it holds our attention, it puzzles us. It is only retrospectively that we seek to reconstruct reasons or theoretic justifications for our response, usually when we are called upon to describe or evaluate or criticize the play. As we have already tried to indicate, however, these are different commitments, for the only thing we know is the fact of our involvement and the only description available concerns the methods we employ to create and sustain the involvement. This is how the devices of boredom and alienation in Antonioni, Warhol, and Godard, and the enthusiasms of the Living Theatre, are of the same piece: the spectator is induced to treat his spectatorship, his distance, as problematic; the corpus of assumptions about life and the theatre which the spectator brings into play (his common culture) becomes an object (the object) of concern for him, because his scrutiny of this culture is necessary if he is to survive the experience. To say “art is life” is not to assert – as in naturalism – that art mirrors life (its scenes of horror, degradation, injustice, cruelty) but that the very possibility of art requires life for its production – requires, that is, ordinary and routine ways of categorizing and comprehending the world. In a way, the phrase “politics as theatre” is misleadingly conservative, what with the implication that it is no more than a metaphor, and which works only from the direction of politics toward theatre. Those who would use the phrase really mean politics is theatre and theatre is politics, that the two are synonymous. They are synonymous in that each is a participation and so each is a commitment, and it is this commitment itself which is reflexively brought to social consciousness by being made the topic of confronting politico–theatrical performances. These performances require the spectator to contemplate ordinary taken-for-granted methods and to act upon them. When we say, then, that the liberal use of language is under attack in the new theatre we have in mind these routine and ordinary methods of seeing and conceptualizing the world which are indispensable to conventional art, to conventional politics, and to conventional everyday life. Thus, if the new left understands anything it is language. The rationality of the new left is the rationality of language. Confrontation denaturalizes speech by exposing the linguistically reflexive ground of speech, by exposing

confrontAtIon

115

how speech is action and action a commitment. Confrontation reveals what we say as a production of how we say it. In this respect confrontation is not a revolution in content, it is a revolution in style.

eDItoRS’ NoteS 1 Students for a Democratic Society. 2 A film directed by Jean Luc Godard. 3 A play written by Harold Pinter.

ReFeReNCeS Bell, Daniel. 1961. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press. Debray, Regis. 1968. Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. London: Pelican Books. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1963. Political Man. London: Mercury Books. Ollman, Bertell. 1971. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. London: Cambridge University Press. Shils, Edward. 1955. “The End of Ideology.” Encounter (November): 52–8.

7

A LETTER OF RESIGNATION

Today, how can we not speak of the university? … [I]t is impossible now more than ever, to dissociate the work we do, within one discipline or several, from a reflection on the political and institutional conditions of that work. Such a reflection is unavoidable. It is no longer an external complement to teaching; it must make its way through the very objects we work with, shaping them as it goes, along with our norms, procedures, and aims. We cannot not speak of such things. Jacques Derrida

In 1989, Peter McHugh, a social analyst, author, and professor of sociology, offered his resignation to his employer, York University in Ontario. In his letter of resignation, he reflected on “the political and institutional conditions” of the work of teaching. For Peter McHugh, consumerism is the problem and condition which has begun to shape the “norms, procedures, and aims” of university teaching. His letter of resignation shows that, in speaking of the university, “we cannot not speak” of consumerism. We invited the author, and he agreed, to let his letter of resignation be published, though he cautioned that he “wrote it to make and emphasize the descriptive point of consumerism for administration and faculty, and so it is not an analysis.” The author wanted to add some ideas “on how to begin thinking analytically about the letter’s contents – four or five ways to work up a genuine theoretic problem.” He suggested, and we agreed, that “they’d best be placed as an addendum so as to give readers the benefit of having first looked at the letter.” Bearing in mind the “limited original purpose,” and the original letter’s local audience, we still thought that the problem of consumerism is not limited to York University. We suspect that what is described below could also

A letter of resIgnAtIon

117

be found in many other universities in North America. The description is not neutral; it displays the passion and disappointment of one subject to the very conditions he seeks to describe. That is, it is a passionately human response rather than a detached impersonal description. Yet precisely because it is human is it also identifiably real. We acknowledge that not everyone shares this teacher’s particular situation nor, if everyone did, would the contemporary university be described in the same manner. Yet his eloquent description makes a topic of how consumer culture “makes its way through the very objects we [in the university] work with, shaping them [colleagues? students? administrators?] as it goes, along with our norms, procedures and aims.” As Derrida says, “We cannot not speak of such things.” We invite you as readers to take the publication of this letter as an opportunity to respond to the author’s description in a way which similarly reflects on your own particular situation. (Though your description and/or analysis will, of necessity, display its own orientation.) What does being a university teacher mean to us? In what ways does our particular situation hinder or help in the realization of our vocation? What are the principled choices available to us as we respond to “the political and institutional conditions” of our work? We hope that you treat this letter of resignation as a spur to your reflection on these questions. Kieran Bonner and Paul Harlan September 15, 1989 Professor Pat Armstrong, Chair, Department of Sociology S430 Ross York University As you suggested in our conversation, I am setting out in writing the reasons for my decision to leave York University effective July 1, 1990. I don’t think I have to detail the miserly habits of our government, a condition we have faced for some fifteen years now. Certainly they have been destructive. But our responses have been just as damaging. Over this long period of financial stringency, York appears to have sought – above all – to maintain and increase its enrolment. And it has done so in a self-contradictory, even immoral way – by emphasizing the vocational rewards of university to students and the industrial benefits of university training to business. As a result, York has devolved into a market for

118

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

students and employers, and we teachers have become functionaries in the commerce of their satisfactions: with students, by enhancing occupational prospects; with employers, by providing a pool of skills. Intellectual concerns are now debased. This consumer culture is one in which first questions are no longer asked and thus students come to university with the (mis-)understanding that those questions are a waste of time and should not be asked. Fundamental scholarly inquiry, such as “What are we and how should we live?,” is preempted in consumerism by an image of life as endless and unreflective movement and accommodation – from place to place and thing to thing – and of education as a merely technical means for achieving these. I seldom find an undergraduate student now who takes up arts for arts’ sake: students enter courses instrumentally, to gain access to some ultimate job or profession many steps removed from what should be the immediate excitement of academic work. And they are fixated upon their blinkered pursuit. For example, I often ask advanced undergraduate students to write about instrumentally useless affairs such as games, ritual, fine art, and the like. In preconsumption days they worked out formulations of these and often recognized through the exercise that it is possible to enjoy some intellectual or social commitment for itself, whatever else it might bring. Nowadays students can hardly name such activities and when they do, complain that nothing is more useless than the examination of uselessness. Consumerism is evident also in the number of good and poor students today. Until four or five years ago, undergraduate classes always included a few very good students who understood the work and did it well. There were also many average students who grasped the basic point, and if their scholarship did not always match their feel for the subject, they were interested nevertheless and tried to work things through. Finally, there were a very few poor students, and they seemed more indifferent than incapable. This was a constant distribution no matter where I was teaching, including York. The difference between universities was only that the average students were better in the better schools. Currently at York, however, the best student has all but disappeared, the average student is dull, and the poor student abounds. Substantively, few of any type see value in developing scholarly interests through their own projects. I am convinced this is because they see this university as a place to give them what they immediately want rather than a place to help

A letter of resIgnAtIon

119

them develop what they will eventually need. They do not have intellectual aspirations nor do they recognize the inherent value of intellectual work. To them the university is a filling station. The same view of students as consumers is manifest in exorbitant foreign-student fees. This has been disastrous at the graduate level; many students who sought to come here to study with me have been unable to afford to do so. Also, given the few dollars these fees bring overall, their existence gives the impression of a chauvinist institution and, for the foreign student, of stigmatized origins. More importantly, these fees deny the idea of the good university as one which nourishes conversation among differences, as if foreign persons do not contribute anything of their own to York and its culture and are considered valuable only as a source of money. If course work, then, has turned from a common quest undertaken for its own sake into a confrontation between consumers (students who demand their occupational aspirations be serviced) and possible suppliers (teachers who may or may not comply), it has been my experience that university administrators and department officials are far from idle observers in all this. They listen very sympathetically to students who complain that certain teachers are reluctant suppliers, i.e., that they are intellectually demanding and insist on examining first questions. Student–consumers discover very quickly that authority at York shares their purpose, indeed has been promoting it for years. Students never really hear from the university that a good education should equip them to be able to resist society, to ask questions which are significant and thus also disquieting rather than ingratiating. The consumer model has been destructive too in the way it has insinuated bureaucratic process at York. Recently, after discussion with me, an Arts Faculty committee determined that one of my students guilty of plagiarism should be suspended, plagiarism being the worst possible intellectual offence. Later, a “higher” committee arbitrarily rescinded that decision, citing the need for uniformity of decisions. The hackneyed “If I do it for you, I’ll have to do it for everyone” excuse was invoked from the other angle: “If I didn’t do it for (to) them, I can’t do it for (to) you.” Poor thinking aside (equity, or equality of concern, does not entail equality of outcome), this action well represents consumerism’s bureaucratic tendency to usurp basically local decisions and to elevate procedure over substance, i.e., its tendency to become hierarchical and

120

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

empty. That the intellectual concern regarding plagiarism should give way to bureaucratic uniformity is typical of practices specializing in “products,” cost-benefit analysis, people-processing and the paradigm of multiple choice – of the selling of satisfaction and, especially, of the selling of the appearance of it to clients. For some time now, our department has been complicit in these affairs. We have chosen to go along, fussing about enrolment but preferring to overlook the issue of enrolment’s relation to good pedagogy because that question can be inimical to comfortable consumerism. In a way, the department’s own decline is analogous to that of the students’. Even though we have the same members as years ago – or perhaps because we do – we have become sluggish as a collective, duller and less interesting. Partly this is because bureaucratic centralization has left us with less to do and because what is left is not very stimulating. But the department did not resist this miasma, either directly, through real efforts to discuss and negotiate, or indirectly, by the self-arousal that would have come from thinking collectively about such significant matters as commitment, the “good” student, or intellectual coherence, and so on. Until the last year, the department met instead primarily to hear the chair explain, usually in the admonitive, some new decree from the administration. Meetings were exciting only as to whether we would be able to achieve quorum. On the rare occasions when we had the chance to decide on something, recommendations were voted down out of sullen resentment. Loss of intellectual autonomy to consumerism has worked to demoralize our department and in the past not infrequently produced a reactive, secretive, and self-serving leadership. And what about the larger issue of research at York? Suffice it to say that resources are paltry here in relation to other places with which Canada and York like to compare themselves. Further, funding agencies’ instrumental focus on a quick payoff, in combination with York’s stress on projects that bring in large overhead, is yet another replay of the consumer-survival interests that I have been trying to demonstrate. The decision to leave has not been an easy one. I will miss the intellectual stimulation and commitment of some of my graduate students. And an active new graduate director, as well as your own selection as chair, offer hope that revitalization of the department has begun. But in the end I am left with the wrenching spectre of a particular university

A letter of resIgnAtIon

121

project which encapsulates York’s amnesia for its own beginning and purpose: a new building, to be placed at the very heart of campus, which will include offices for both faculty and business, together in perverse embrace. That an organization would actually volunteer to surrender its fundamental identity, and memorialize it in a building, must provoke hard questions about the gravity of its decay. It is all a matter of very great regret. Sincerely, Peter McHugh, Professor June 15, 1992

Addendum To think analytically about the university conduct described in my letter, one could begin by addressing the following: 1

The comic tension in university organization between the need to survive and the desire to know (comic because they can never be perfectly integrated and must forever remain distinct, yet we always try to overcome and ignore these essential limits). Imagine, for example, that university consumerism means we treat surviving as knowing and, equally, knowing as surviving. Does our laughter rise out of the fact that, in living exactly that way, we find it impossible to believe and yet go right ahead and act as if we do? In any case, how might this problem be worked out not as an instance of sheer ignorance but as the self-brought and self-understood mistakes of pretending about the ways we exemplify collective needs and desires? 2 How reason, as the method of university, can by its very nature subvert the value of knowledge. Unrestrained by the moderating spirit of self-examination, for example, reason can become entirely technical and administrative, thus losing its place by supplanting its purpose. 3 If reason’s form is argument and if ours is the epoch of argument (“to speak is to fight”), do/can the parties to argument annihilate, as wolf to lamb? What would this look like in university? 4 What is the nature of resignation and in what kind of world is it necessary, unnecessary, good, bad, and so forth? As usage, resignation

122

5

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

can be (1) submission, (2) evacuation, and yet for both there is the implication (knowledge) that things ought to be better – both demonstrate real capacity for imagination. As usage depicting relations within the collective, what is it to swallow that implication and what to throw it up? Etc., etc. Needless to say there are many possibilities, all of which could, in their doing, themselves become the objects of these very questions.

8

ON A LETTER OF RESIGNATION Stanley Raffel

I The act of resignation is quite unusual but one specific resignation, that of Peter McHugh from York University in Toronto, is even more unusual than most because, as we have just seen, his actual resignation letter, when published, was supplemented by suggestions as to how to “think analytically” (McHugh 1992, 110) about the very thing, resigning, that he has just done. Among other things, he suggests that we should ask: What is the nature of resignation and in what kind of world is it necessary, unnecessary, good, bad, and so forth? As usage, resignation can be (1) submission, (2) evacuation, and yet for both there is the implication (knowledge) that things ought to be better – both demonstrate real capacity for imagination. As usage depicting relations within the collective, what is it to swallow that implication, and what to throw it up? (McHugh 1992, 111) Resignation – of either sort – is here formulated as an act done within a collective – a community – that can be either necessary or unnecessary, good or bad. The questions asked about it, e.g. about swallowing, about throwing up, are designed to help us consider these issues of communal necessity and morality. McHugh does not say how he thinks his own resignation will stand up to this scrutiny and that is the task I have set myself here. He begins the actual resignation letter by depicting a problem of fifteen years duration: “I don’t think I have to detail the miserly habits of our government, a condition we have faced for some fifteen years now”

124

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

(McHugh 1992, 107). Here we have a presentation of the first thing that “ought to be better.” The government is not giving his university sufficient funding. But he says that this condition has been “faced for some fifteen years now.” Clearly his response to his knowledge of this problem has been to “swallow” it. That is, this has been something he has been submitting to, something he has been resigned to rather than resigning over. Why might the first type of resignation be the necessary or good response to this first thing, at least taken on its own? There are actually at least two separate issues here. Firstly, if he knows that this ought to be better, why does he submit to it as distinct from attempting to change it? Why is it necessary to be resigned to this rather than actively resist the government? The obvious answer is that, as he is not in the government or in a position to exert much influence on it, he would seem to have little scope for more active resistance. We might note that he was right that it would do little good to resist, as this condition is very recalcitrant, persisting to this day. But why is it not then necessary to resign over this? Why did he not evacuate immediately rather than swallow this knowledge for some fifteen years? But type two resignation would have been grossly premature because if, as the original McHugh suggestion implies, a necessary or good type two resignation is like vomiting up one’s knowledge of all the things that should be better, then someone who leaves as soon as only one condition has deteriorated has not really swallowed much and so could not be said to really have much to vomit. Even more to the point, had he left at this moment, he would not as yet had to swallow anything done by those whose action he would both have more reason to care about and more control over, the actions of members of his own community. By staying he witnessed and, as we shall see, has had to swallow a second thing and it is indeed something that is of more direct relevance to his collective because it is their response to the miserly government: But our responses have been just as damaging. Over this long period of financial stringency York appears to have sought – above all – to maintain and increase its enrolment. And it has done so in a self-contradictory and even immoral way – by emphasizing the vocational rewards of university to students and the industrial benefits of university training to business. (McHugh 1992, 107)

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

125

As with the funding issue, there is the clear sense that this too ought to be better. He calls this policy “self-contradictory,” even immoral. Again though it appears that he has been more resigned to this than actively trying to resist it, say by demanding a meeting with university administrators and urging them to change their recruitment policies. The reason why such attempts at personal resistance would not be necessary or good has to do with the fact that, even though we are now dealing with actions of the collective to which he does belong, any complaint of his at this stage is only marginally more likely to be listened to than had he journeyed to Ottawa in an attempt to have a word with the prime minister. No doubt the York authorities would already know that serious academics would hardly be delighted with this new way, new at least in the 1990s, they are selling the university. Submission – swallowing – his knowledge of the less than ideal quality of this policy does begin to seem necessary because it is so unlikely that any protests on his part would be listened to, would have any effect.1 But then now should he resign, i.e. refuse to personally just swallow this knowledge of damaging admission policies? The key problem which surfaces here and which makes evacuation still premature is the fact that thus far, although McHugh is saying that the policy is damaging, that seems more an assumption than actual knowledge on his part. What seems required (necessary, good) is some sort of evidence that the policy is not just a clever new way to attract more students. He needs to just swallow his sense that the university is pursuing the wrong path because he cannot yet throw at it any actual examples of the damaging effects of the new policy. And it does appear from his letter that, by being resigned to rather than resigning over the policy, he was able to accumulate (through what in the aftermath of the policy he was starting to have to swallow) evidence of just how damaging the policy was. It was the case that the basic effect of the policy was a drastic change in the quality of students, the arrival of a new generation of students with whom “intellectual concerns are now debased. This consumer culture is one in which first questions are no longer asked and thus students come to university with the (mis-)understanding that those questions are a waste of time and should not be asked” (McHugh 1992, 107–8). Here we have a third thing that ought to be better. Surely we would prefer not to live in a world where students are arriving at a place with a dismissive attitude toward what is, arguably, the main point of them being there in the first place. In having to experience this – in enduring this – McHugh really

126

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

does begin to have evidence that the university’s policy is damaging. Indeed few would doubt that what he presciently dubs the consumerist mentality is persisting. But even in the face of this, what he basically does is just continue to do what we have so far seen him doing, be resigned in the first sense. Since he now does have tangible evidence of damage, one question is, why he is still submitting? But what possible form could a more active response take? The two most plausible options short of resigning would be to either complain to the admissions department or directly confront the students themselves. The trouble with the first possibility is that, as initial student attitudes, distressing as they are, are not exactly a surprise given how the university has been presenting itself to them, merely alerting the admissions office to this result is hardly likely to constitute much of an eye-opener. And the trouble with directly attacking the students for their dismissive attitude is that it flies in the face of the fact that the university has actually been encouraging them to have that attitude toward it. We now see that being resigned to – swallowing – the fact that such disappointing students are going to be arriving does seem just like realism on McHugh’s part but in that this is yet another thing that he must swallow, we need to reraise the question of the necessity or good of him not now leaving. Someone who would leave a place when the very people he is there to provide an activity for are making it clear that they consider that activity a waste of time could surely be said to be executing a more valid departure than someone who goes just because a place is no longer being funded properly or even someone who goes because he considers that the place has been misrepresenting itself to new recruits. The better motivation for leaving is that it is now becoming clear that both the external conditions and the place’s response to them are actually forcing McHugh to suffer, endure, swallow, the humiliation of having what he has been hired to do dismissed by those he has been hired to do it with (students) as a waste to time. So is it necessary or good to leave a place, to leave one’s collective, when one is having to endure much personal humiliation as a consequence of being there? The problem with such a solution, at least as it applies to this material, is that it overlooks the possibility that one might have some power, some ability to effect how one is being treated. While we have been satisfied that there is little McHugh could have done to affect either government funding or university recruitment policy, it is not so clear that he can have no effect on student attitudes. After all, he is supposed to be a teacher. Note, for example, that McHugh refers to the arriving students’ attitudes as a misunderstanding. Surely it is a teacher’s job not just to ask first questions

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

127

but also to correct misunderstandings. We begin to see that had McHugh evacuated when he first realized students believed people like him were just wasting their time, he could have legitimately been accused of merely having no stomach for his job. It cannot be good for a teacher to leave because students arrive at his classes in a state of misunderstanding even though it remains true that this is a lot to swallow when the misunderstanding concerns something so basic to the very worth of one’s enterprise. Thus surely there are many teachers who to this day are resisting the attitude of arrivals McHugh is identifying. The next event reported in the letter does take the form of what we can call McHugh attempting to do his job: I often ask advanced undergraduate students to write about instrumentally useless affairs such as games, ritual, fine art, and the like. In preconsumption days they worked out formulations of these and often recognized through the exercise that it is possible to enjoy some intellectual or social commitment for itself, whatever else it might bring. Nowadays students can hardly name such activities and when they do, complain that nothing is more useless than the examination of uselessness. (McHugh 1992, 108) He gives no indication of when he first conceived of this exercise. However, even though he says it was a success in “preconsumption days,” we can guess that it is likely that he only thought of it when the disparagement of fundamental questioning was beginning to show itself in the students he was having to teach. It hardly makes sense to demonstrate, as this exercise does, that just the fact that an intellectual commitment is for itself (instrumentally useless) is not to say it is a waste of time, the form of the demonstration being to show just how many instrumentally useless activities there are that we do not consider time wasting, unless one is facing an audience who are inclined to think of academics as time wasting. Note also that he says he was attempting this activity with advanced undergraduates. It can be gathered that, while McHugh had become resigned, because he had no choice, to students arriving with an anti-intellectual attitude he could not just resign himself to the knowledge that they were also departing with this attitude. So now we have to admit that we are not just dealing with someone who does not have the stomach for the job. Instead we have someone who is actively trying to do what is required of him but finds himself unable to

128

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

do it. That is, his task – his efforts – do seem futile if even the work he urges that would enable students to recognize that intellectual activity is not a waste of time is refused on the grounds that it is just a waste of time. The awareness that one’s best efforts to do one’s job merely gets the complaint from those one is trying to do it for that one should stop wasting their time, does seem a painful sort of knowledge to have to swallow.2 But the evidence is that even this is not considered by McHugh sufficient grounds for leaving. There is a passage in the letter that roughly dates the time that elapsed between when he first became convinced not just that the students believed fundamental questioning to be worthless but also when he knew that his best efforts to persuade them otherwise were not working and the time when he actually left. It amounts to the not inconsiderable “four or five years” (McHugh 1992, 108). We can say then that he was actually resigned to his own inability to improve the situation for quite a while. We know why he was not able to avoid type one resignation with regard to this. This reflected a realization of his lack of success in his attempts to correct the misunderstandings but was it really necessary or good for him, given this realization, to still delay type two resignation for some four or five years? What is he waiting for? The next event reported in his letter can help with this question: It has been my experience that university administrators and departmental officials are far from idle observers in all this. They listen very sympathetically to students who complain that certain teachers … are intellectually demanding and insist on examining first questions. … Students never really hear from the university that a good education should equip them to … ask questions which are significant and thus also disquieting rather than ingratiating. (McHugh 1992, 109) We know from the previous story that McHugh himself is certainly one of those who have been attempting to encourage students to pursue first questions and we also know that in recent years the main consequence of his attempts has been student complaints. The suggestion here is that this could have been a consequence that he would have continued to swallow, even though he could not help but think it less than ideal, if only the university authorities had been willing to indicate to the students that their complaints were not necessarily legitimate.

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

129

Here then we have another event within the collective – unsupportive and even actively hostile authority – that he knows ought to be better, that in other words he would be having to swallow as long as he stays. But given that it is unlikely that a more supportive administration would have, at least over the short run, eliminated student complaints, how can he be implying, as he is, that this would have made his task manageable? Going back to the previous story, although we did suggest that he found himself becoming unable to successfully teach, a more precise version of this experience is that he was finding it impossible to do the task on his own. What he is suggesting might have helped, because it would have at least cast some doubt on the students’ own version of events had someone in a position to do so explained that the students may well be too quick to assume that their time is being wasted because they misunderstand the nature of a good education. That is, while it does seem true that McHugh could no longer manage to teach the current generation he faced on his own, there is still the possibility that he could do so if others were able and willing to help him with formulations of what he is doing because, in fact, the students’ problem with him may be that, not realizing that they need to be disquieted, they assume that when they are, their time is being wasted. A further point which would have the effect of giving McHugh even more to swallow now is the fact that the others who he wants help from here are hardly just random others. In calling on the university authorities to offer this form of aid, he is only expecting them to do their job. We should add that, to this day, any university administrators faced with the sort of complaints McHugh identifies and sympathetic to his formulation of the source of them should be prepared to offer the sort of help he found lacking. We can say that he does now have quite a lot to throw up, considerably more than if he left fifteen years before. He has now swallowed (and so is in a position to throw up) the fact of a miserly government, the fact of the university’s immoral response, the tangible effect on student attitudes of that response, the failure of his own best efforts to improve those attitudes, and the reluctance of the administration to offer him any support in this endeavour, even when he clearly needs it. But the subsequent passages in the letter indicate that he still does not think it necessary or good to resign: For some time now, our department has been complicit in these affairs. We have chosen to go along, fussing about enrolment but preferring to overlook the issue of enrolment’s relation to

130

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

good pedagogy … Even though we have the same members as years ago – or perhaps because we do – we have become sluggish as a collective, duller, and less interesting. Partly this is because bureaucratic centralization has left us with less to do and because what is left is not very stimulating. But the department did not resist this miasma, either directly, through real efforts to discuss and negotiate, or indirectly, by the self-arousal that would have come from thinking collectively about such significant matters as commitment, the “good” student, or intellectual coherence and so on. Until the last year, the department met instead primarily to hear the chair explain, usually in the admonitive, some new decree from the administration. Meetings were exciting only as to whether we would be able to achieve quorum. On the rare occasions when we had the chance to decide on something, recommendations were voted down out of sullen resentment. Loss of intellectual autonomy to consumerism has worked to demoralize our department and in the past not infrequently produced a reactive, secretive, and self-serving leadership. (McHugh 1992, 109–10) We are presented with still another thing that he knows could have been better, the actions of his own closest colleagues in the university, his department. This additional thing that he has been swallowing, like his disappointment with the actions of those in authority, concerns something that he would have needed help – support – from others to do. In this instance it is not immediate help in conveying a lesson to students. The additional thing he could not do on his own but probably could have done if his close colleagues were more proactive, is some form of active resistance to the whole state of affairs his letter is describing. No matter how bad one’s place is becoming there remains the issue of whether the others who are most obviously in the same situation as oneself are going to fight it. The point here would be that, though he alone cannot exactly negotiate with the higher authorities in an effort to moderate consumerist policies or generate collective self-arousal at departmental meetings, these are things his department as a whole potentially both could have and ought to have done. What he is implying is that had his department made a fight of it, it could still have been necessary – good – for him to remain even as he would be swallowing all the other problems he has been experiencing.

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

131

While there is nothing to suggest that the inadequate response of his department was not a major factor in making the ultimate decision to leave seem necessary or good to him, careful attention to his text does force us to conclude that there is a significant difference in his description of the workings of this factor and all the other factors. Whereas he detects no evidence that government funding, students, or the attitudes and behaviour of those in authority are likely to change, he does not exactly adopt the same stance concerning processes in his own department. He only objects to the nature of departmental meetings until the last year. The implication is that it is not just that these ought to be better but that there are at least some small signs that these are becoming better. This sense that at least his own immediate department’s actions may be changing, is confirmed when he writes, “an active new graduate director, as well as your own3 selection as chair, offer hope that revitalization of the department has begun” (McHugh 1992, 110). Though we do have to admit that there is nothing very tangible here, we still have to ask if it is so necessary or good to leave just when at least one thing may be starting to improve. But the first point to be remembered is that, even if, as still seems highly contingent, his immediate department was beginning to rouse itself for a fight, that would not eliminate the fact that, at least until the resistance bears some fruit, this still leaves him having to swallow all the other mentioned problems. Still, without further explanation, it does seem odd to be leaving when at least something might be getting better. The final point made in the letter can help us here. He writes that, because of the recent signs of hope and also because he will be losing one long-standing good he has not mentioned (“the intellectual stimulation and commitment of some of my graduate students”), “the decision to leave has not been an easy one” (McHugh 1992, 110). But what seems to have finally made leaving seem necessary or good is that, during the same period that, in his immediate environment there are at least small signs of revitalization, something else has also been happening in the place as a whole: But in the end I am left with the wrenching spectre of a particular university project which encapsulates York’s amnesia for its own beginning and purpose: a new building, to be placed at the very heart of campus, which will include offices for both faculty and business, together in perverse embrace. That an organization would actually volunteer to surrender its

132

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

fundamental identity and memorialize it in a building, must provoke hard questions about the gravity of its decay. (McHugh 1992, 111) We were asking after the good of leaving when at least one thing might actually be getting better. Here we have yet another thing that he would know is not getting better. But there is a significant difference between his relationship to this thing and his relation to all the other things we have discussed. He has swallowed all the other things, but here we have something he would only have to swallow if he stayed. As he states, this building was, at the time of his leaving, a future project so that we can say one consequence, one advantage, of going is that at least he will not have to swallow the knowledge that he is part of a university that has such a building. What he seems to be saying, in making this the final cause of his resignation is that, even though the future at York does offer the slight prospect of having one less thing to swallow, it also offers the spectre of having one more thing to swallow. Furthermore, this additional thing is something that he really cannot see any necessity or good in him swallowing. This raises the question of what distinguishes this item from all the others. Though this development can hardly be said to be inconsistent with other actions he has reported, particularly other actions by the administration, what seems to distinguish it is, firstly, how voluntary it is. Even the consumerist recruitment policies could be said, at least to an extent, to be forced on the university, as today, by a miserly government, but here we have something that it is much harder to see not as something the university has freely chosen to do. Second, as he notes, a building in effect “memorializes” a policy. Unlike a recruitment policy, which could always change, it is difficult to have any hope that the general tenor of a place is going to change once what it is becoming is now being expressed, as it were, in stone. The import of this final factor is that it makes it the case that, even though one thing may be improving, that is not enough. He would still be having to stomach too much if he stayed because he would be stomaching the fact that overall the place seems to be getting even worse, with the problems he sees showing every likelihood of becoming permanent. But does he not weaken his case (and make his leaving seem less necessary) by the fact that, by leaving when he does, he does not at least try to swallow – submit to – even this latest development? After all, he could presumably not be certain at the moment he resigns that the building would not prove

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

133

to be an insignificant one-off or, for that matter, even whether the project would definitely be completed. There may never be a perfect time to leave but to address the question of whether this specific leaving is at the right time, we need to be careful not to forget the type of leaving it is. It is a type two resignation and, in line with McHugh’s own formulation of this, we have suggested that this amounts to throwing up all sorts of knowledge of how many examples of bad things one has had to swallow as a consequence of remaining part of a place. As we saw, it would have been wrong to leave before there was very much to throw up. What we are asking now is whether he should also have been willing to swallow the existence of this new building. But if vomiting really is an apt metaphor for type two resignation, we can perhaps gain a sense of when it is really necessary to resign by considering when it may be necessary to vomit. At least sometimes, the phenomenon of vomiting is not just a matter of swallowing so much that is noxious that one is unable to keep it down. It is true that, when we vomit, indigestible things we have swallowed are thrown up, but it can also be that seeing or even thinking of another thing that one does not go so far as to actually swallow, provides the trigger that makes one unable to keep all these other things in. McHugh’s action of resignation does seem to take this form. He has been clearly struggling for years over what he has been forced to swallow but there is also one final thing that he just cannot swallow and which also makes him finally throw up all the other things.

II In this section the discussion moves from one specific case to a consideration of the necessity and goodness of resignation per se as a move in a community. To begin this work, we need some sense of what a community is. Since resigning from York, McHugh, as we know from this volume, continued writing and there is a more recent paper included here in which he deals more explicitly with the issue of community. That paper will prove a crucial resource for us. In it he writes: An imperial I is simplistic because the acting individual, the person, exists within and moves among all of us and I and common place, creating for themselves and others membranous passages that are variously an interior and an exterior, at times

134

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

friendly, at times not, but in any case the boundaries of I and us and common place are porous, more transparent than opaque, omnirelevant parts of the person, a person who is I and us and common place all at once. (McHugh 2005, 21 and reprinted in this volume) In analysing actions in a community, then, we are analysing the relations among three parts: the “place,” the “us” (which is to say, all those who belong to the place), and each “I” (which is to say, any one who is part of the place’s “us”). In our case, our focus has been on the actions of one person, McHugh. While it is true that, as this passage warns, it would be a serious mistake to treat his actions, including his resignation, as something he does just as an “I” because it is simultaneously something he does both as one of his “us” (a member of the university community) and as part of a “place” (York University), it is also true, as is the case almost always with resignation (at least type two ones) he was alone in doing it. Though certainly others were, when it happened, sympathetic to his action, he was the only one of his “us” and in that “place” to actually resign. Therefore we can think of his act as one which serves to highlight the “I” (the separate, the distinct, the apart)4 part of him, even though this is certainly not to say that the act has no repercussions for the other parts of him: his “us” and his “place.” The fact that resignations are, as here, usually done by only one of the “I’s in an “us” means that contemplating the act provides an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities for action available to any one of a community’s members, in particular when, as in the McHugh example, this one does not feel “friendly” toward either the actions of the majority of the rest of his “us” or the “place” to which he belongs. Returning to points already established in section I, the basis of this “I’s” unfriendliness to both the place and most others in it is his sense that both they and it ought to be acting better. He thinks he can actually see how it and they could be better, e.g. by having a different admissions policy, by fighting the administration’s decisions. Firstly working on type one resignation, the good or necessity of swallowing such knowledge, in such a situation requires, as we saw, rejecting two seemingly more attractive alternatives: trying to change things by, say communicating one’s critique or leaving. But leaving without swallowing much would just amount to lack of commitment both to one’s place and the other people there, and we suggested that attempting to change the place or the people by direct

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

135

communication is unlikely to be effective. This is because it is probable, due to the fact that their behaviour is unintelligible without reasons, that a place and its members would already realize that they are departing from what is ideal but see various reasons for doing so and no compulsion to do otherwise.5 Type one resignation here seems a necessary or good solution for an “I” because it is both a way of not abandoning one’s commitment to a place and the people in it, while also at least not abandoning one’s own standards, e.g. one’s knowledge of what a place such as a university really ought to be. In swallowing things, as distinct from embracing them enthusiastically, one at least is continuing to be aware that things are hardly ideal. But also, by being willing to swallow things, one can hardly be said to be uncommitted to the place or one’s fellow members. One is still doing all that is required to be a part of it. But if this is all resignation ever is, it does become a problematic solution, certainly for the resigned one and even for the others there and the place as a whole. Assuming one really does know that and even how a place and its members ought to be better, it does seem feeble to have no way of making others and the place listen to one. And, from the point of view of the place and all the people in it, if it and they really ought to be better than they are, it does seem good, necessary that they be made to face this. Here we have McHugh and potentially others experiencing the same need to face seen in the “Confrontation” paper and also to be seen in the paper on affirmative action. If all there is is type one resignation, we get both the unsatisfactory probability of someone endlessly accumulating ever increasing knowledge of how bad their place is becoming but still just swallowing more and more of this knowledge, and the probability of a place and all of its members just becoming worse and worse without any prospect of possible constraints on what they are doing and becoming. But there is something else besides type one resignation that even one “I” who is seeing all the problems but also seeing that nobody else really seems as keen to want to do anything about them, can do. The necessity, the good of type two resignation is that it provides a possible option for any one in this situation. It is not necessary or good just to continue to swallow endless knowledge of how bad things are becoming in one’s place because there is a limit to how much that is bad anyone needs to or is even able to swallow. The existence of such a limit is visible in the possibility, the necessity, even the goodness of some one vomiting, throwing all of it (in our case all the accumulated knowledge of all the things that ought to be better), up.

136

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Can we be explicit, then, about the good, the necessity, of type two resignation for all the parts of a community? For an “I” it means that no matter how committed one is to a place and the others in it, there is no actual necessity for one to just endlessly swallow one’s knowledge of how bad it is becoming. It is not necessary for a person to just swallow everything because there are points and times when one really could not and should not keep it all in. There are times when one needs to vomit. It is also good for the place that there be this possibility of type two resignation because it can provide at least some sort of limit on how much it is allowed to deteriorate. It is not as if there are no limits to the extent to which a place can depart from its ideals even if, for whatever reason, there is no widespread resistance to what is happening. There is the limit provided by the fact that any one in the place could be driven to resign. Regarding relations with others, a good or necessary resignation, which we now know amounts to a resignation in which at least someone has so much awareness of problems – of things that ought to be better – that they just cannot swallow it all any more, instead they must throw it up, is good for the others who do not resign because, for one thing, it is not exactly abandonment. If the resignation is really necessary, they ought to be able to accept that the resigning one is only going not because he or she wants to but because he or she cannot really take it any more. Also, it may mean that they will have less to swallow in the future because even one resignation may have the potential to be sufficiently disquieting as to produce at least some moderation of the policies of the place. This possibility exists because of another aspect of the occasional need for and goodness of this act both from the point of view of the person doing it and the place in which it is done. We have said that a large part of the necessity of type one resignation has to do with the fact that it does seem that no matter how much one person may realize that a place is going wrong, they are going to have a hard time getting anyone else to pay attention to them. Type two resignation, in so far as (per McHugh and as we have tried to demonstrate) it is like someone really finding it necessary to throw up because of how much they have had to swallow, constitutes an expression of how intolerably bad a place has become that it is hard to ignore. Even though only one person may be vomiting at the moment, it is hard for persons in the immediate vicinity to simply ignore this fact. The same analysis that has helped us to specify a good or necessary resignation can also help us to see bad or less necessary forms of resignation. Firstly, dealing with type one resignation, this type would not be

on A letter of resIgnAtIon

137

necessary unless it really is the case that there is no scope for more active forms of resistance. If, say, one is simply underestimating one’s colleagues’ willingness to put up a fight or even the administration’s willingness to listen, then mere resignation seems too passive a stance. Alternatively, if what one finds it hard to swallow really ought not to be better at all, say if an instrumental university really is the way forward, then there seems no necessity of anyone being resigned to rather than embracing such a development enthusiastically. Turning now to type two resignation, as suggested more than once, a key fact that would make this seem not so good would be if one does not have all that much to throw up. If one is evacuating without having swallowed much that is bad, a resignation could just reflect personal weakness, lack of commitment to one’s collective or both, rather than serious problems that really ought not to be ignored by and in one’s community. One could detect such communal relevance in a type two resignation by whether substantial numbers of others in the community would be able to recognize as problems what one of them is throwing up. They should be able to recognize it, if it is really relevant, because if it is composed of aspects of life in the place, then of course they should be having to swallow it too. But if others do recognize the problems, while it does provide some confirmation that the problems exist, it raises the question of why it is not necessary, good that all the others resign as well. One answer is that it can hardly be beneficial to a place if not just one but most of its members are leaving it. In fact, though, even more than one departure may not be all that necessary or good. One factor here would simply be that, even among those who share a sense that something is deeply wrong, there is no reason not to allow for the possibility that there could be varying degrees of ability and willingness to keep swallowing it, at least for a time. Another point is that, of course, even among those who share a place, there would be differences in how much the various “I”s have actually been made to swallow. An example is that just by dint of length of service in a place, some will have had to swallow much more than others. Finally, there is another point which has already been suggested above but deserves reiteration. Since even one resignation could potentially have the effect of compelling a place and its members to pay more attention to what they are doing and where they are going, there is the possibility that one resignation would cause significant improvements to be made and so enable all those who remain to have less to swallow and so make it less necessary or good for them to resign as well.

138

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

NoteS 1 The deep reason why they would be unlikely to listen to him has to do with the parameters of oriented action. Unless we assume that the university’s policies are just an accident, they must have reasons for what they are doing and so would not be likely to be shifted just because someone else can offer an opinion that the policy may be detrimental. 2 Without denying the basic thrust of McHugh’s complaint here, i.e. that it is not really possible to live happily with students who persist in an instrumental attitude to knowledge, it is possible to claim that other teaching tactics could have lead to a more receptive attitude on the part of contemporary students. For this argument, see Watts 2001. 3 Pat Armstrong, to whom McHugh was addressing the original resignation letter. 4 This way of thinking about the I is further developed in McHugh 2005. See especially 17–18. 5 Here we touch again on the point raised in endnote one. That in so far as behaviour is oriented, there will be reasons for it, and in so far as there are reasons, it becomes difficult to see how even real knowledge of problems will be listened to. See McHugh 1992, 111 for a way to formulate such a stance, namely not as ignorance but as trying one’s best to ignore. Below we suggest why, if this is the problem, type two resignation may help to solve it.

ReFeReNCeS McHugh, Peter. 1992. “A Resignation.” Dianoia 2, no. 2: 106–12. – 2005. “Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies 28, no. 2: 129–56. Watts, P. 2001. “An Analysis of Teaching from ‘A Letter of Resignation.’” Master’s thesis, Edinburgh University.

9

MAKING, FRAGMENTATION, AND THE END OF ENDURANCE

CoNFeReNCe aNNoUNCeMeNt Fragmentation and the Desire for Order/Unity This conference intends to explore varied instances of fragmentation, their inter-connectedness, and the desire for order against which they are highlighted. How should we understand and live reflectively, at what may be the close of the modern era? What new possibilities of community and understanding emerge?

Politics and Globalization The experience of fragmentation is perhaps most obvious as a global political phenomenon of the late 20th century, as territorial states splinter along national-ethnic lines. Commentators have puzzled at the emergence of a “new tribalism” alongside, paradoxically, the globalization of economic production and cultural consumption.

Identity and Community Community, identity, and the question of “Who are we?” both as collectives and individuals are increasingly being debated in late modern (postmodern) times. The essentialist/nonessentialist Originally published as Peter McHugh, “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance,” Dianoia 3, no. 1 (Spring 1993).

140

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

debate within feminism, multiculturalism, the issues of race, class and gender, and so on, all push us beyond the universal claims of liberal politics of individual equality.

Worlds of Meaning and Discourse The confident universal categories and aspiration to objectivity that represent much of the enlightenment legacy are now under intense scrutiny in many sites, but especially in the university. The language of discourse and perspective jostles with that of Reason and Truth. Traditional canons in many disciplines – and, indeed, the disciplines themselves – are challenged for the ways in which they organize knowledge and for the questions they (do not) pose.

I Although there are diverse usages of fragmentation, some of which are said to contribute to social life rather than impede it, I will examine the particular kind accompanied by loss and apprehension suggested in the conference call for papers. The language of the conference call suggests that the problem of fragmentation is driven by the question of the endurability of what we make. It is a problem charged with a particular anxiety: that what we make may not simply decay or die but break up so arbitrarily as to resist any understanding at all, throwing doubt on our powers to make and on our knowledge of those powers. We will address this issue and its basis in certain notions of the whole, its parts, and their connection to what would be the void of total fragmentation. If, for example, the fact of fragmentation nevertheless belongs theoretically to a desire for unity, it remains part of the order rather than its antithesis, part of desire rather than the void – it could be an awful fact, certainly, but not fragmentary in its most violent sense, the sense that it is the void because it portrays the end of the end of endurance.

II Given the several ideas of fragmentation – which are nearly always glossed by their users – we will begin by looking at them briefly, working from the outside in as a way of developing some fundamental notion of making and fragmentation that is responsive to the interests of the conference.

mAkIng, frAgmentAtIon, And the end of endurAnce

141

Consider a few current usages: 1

2

For the Romantics just about everything is a fragment, because to them the whole could never be held together by a system itself, only by the way that system is presented through its instances and in the acts of individuals. All is “experience” – that gloss – and ideas can be known only in and through the moment of their appearance. Hence life is essentially unformulable except aesthetically, i.e., except by being reproduced in some other verbal, visual, or auditory moment. Schlegel, for example, writes 838 separate sentence-paragraphs meant to stand as self-presenting, self-sufficient appearances.1 Any responses to them, moreover, in Romanticism would be laid out just to sit beside the original as another fragment, equally real but juxtaposed rather than integral. This is what passes for Romantic conversation. The truth of ideas and action is in their appearance – for the library, say, its card file; for the person, her look; for the nation, its map. The fragment is not thought to be a loss at all but an engrossing production in which the whole, if there is one, is to be found through its actualization in discrete islands of conduct. So we do have a certain multiplicity in Romanticism, but it is not destructive, and losses serve only to show that suffering can be heroic because there will always be rescue in another appearance, including death. Among some postmoderns, Benjamin’s paper on translation2 is cited approvingly for its discussion of the kinship of languages, in which any one language is said to be but a fragment of the family of all languages. Of course there would have to be some kinship among particular languages if translation is possible, in the sense that the first writing can more or less be reassembled from the translated one, and so by fragment Benjamin must mean part, because we can move between languages without damaging them and in a way that sustains their sense for native speakers. That particular tongues are kin within the family of language and that translations between tongues show a family resemblance, are characteristic of plural unity rather than the scattering fragmentation we seek to examine here. A few, additionally, even use fragmentation to depict all interpretation of any kind, including disseminating, reading, conversing, and so on, and which makes fragmentation just another name for social relations.3 In any case, confabulating a part and fragment would divert us from addressing whether the latter is irreparable granulation.

142

3

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Finally, there is what might be called the usage of contrived fragmentation prevalent in the arts and social sciences, which consists usually in reordering the spatio–temporal course of events as a means to disturb conventional sociocultural life.4 But such reorderings do not generate the everyday dread we examine here because they are – and have to be – seen to be the productions they are, rather than destructive of those productions. In that respect, insofar as they are thought “creative” – another convenient gloss – they promote rather than undermine the power to make and control. This is authorized fragmentation, making something to break, rather than making something which can break. Surrealism has institutionalized this vision of fragmentation as a standard formula for appearance, and much literary work follows that vein today.

III Recall the Conference announcement, which mentions “instances of fragmentation and the order against which they are highlighted … splintering … puzzled commentators,” and so on, words that exude a certain anxiety, a certain presentiment of mortality if not catastrophe which is not characteristic of the usages above. We need now to examine the nature of this presentiment as a first step in formulating our notion of fragmentation. Note that this beginning – this paper, this one we are doing right here and now, particularly with these early questions – can itself be seen as a first effort to grapple with multiplicity. Indeed all theorizing begins with dispersion (fragments?) – with heterogeneous notes, memories, speculations – as its own prehistory; so do we, with the who-knows-what-it-is phrase swarm so helpfully provided by the conference announcement. And it is worth mentioning that while one always begins that way, on this occasion fragments are also our topic, so we will end with them too, though not, presumably, without taming them a little analytically.

IV All usage for fragmentation depends on the notion of a production – of a bringing-to-be in the world – as that which fragments and fragments as either noun or verb. For Romantics, the center of life is concretized as the actual productions through which ideas, community, and the whole are

mAkIng, frAgmentAtIon, And the end of endurAnce

143

presented, which so flattens and expands the distance between actions as to give these productions the multiplicitous feel of lonely singularities dotted in space. And the tenuous structure of dependency between parts, so long a staple in social science, stands as a theoretically terminal social possibility – as a falling away of the parts – which is then refuted (or not) by behaviour which can be seen to be socially produced and organized (or not). And finally contrived fragmentation is an explicit recognition not just of composition but of the process of assembling and disassembling one. All in all, then, what can be fragmented and what does fragmenting, are compositions, made things, like governments, vases, families in the narrow interactive sense, the actual writing in academic papers, paintings but not the painter, bureaucracies but not bureaucracy, schools but not education, discourse but not conversation? Many elements are not made: value, necessity, desire, hunger, primary drives, secondary drives, laughter but not the joke, the dialectic, life, decay, death, anxiety, the possibility of fragmentation, wisdom, the yearning for justice, and so on, including, of course, the very need to make. These latter may wax and wane, but they do not fragment. So we need to ask what making is such that it generates the possibility of fragmentation.5 Our anxiety over fragmentation extends beyond the fact of, say, Yugoslavia or our compassion for Yugoslavians. While we certainly do respond to the deaths of Yugoslavians and to the decay of Yugoslavia collectively, our anxiety seems not to be limited to those particular and observable historical facts even as it emanates out of them. And by the same token, neither do we mourn the Yugoslav dead as we would those we know – compassion is more abstract than mourning – nor are we ourselves intimidated in the same way they are by their failure of government to make its people safe. Yet Yugoslavia probably sends a twinge through all of us, a twinge generated by what we understand to be fragmentation. In this we appear to be dealing with something other than conventional death and decay, which happens all the time and is without effect beyond its own shadow, with something other than whatever it is that makes us grieve for specific persons and regret the decay of things we have made that are close to us. The vexing character of fragmentation exists on another dimension. It is portentous, baleful, because it raises a doubt about our power not present in death-decay: does what we have the power to do not have the power to endure? Fear, not grief, attaches to this question. In death and decay, then, we are better integrated, better able to accept, sooner or later, the particular local fact on each of its occasions. Whereas in

144

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

fragmentation, our anxiety floats, and our regret is not able to close the loss.6 And while the order between death and necessity can be consoling – we mourn rather than hesitate – we seem never prepared for fragmentation, which threatens not just particular fabrications but our very power and interest in making. It gives a hint of catastrophe, of the mortality of sheer granulation that smells like death in life, as though it is a different sort of mortality. But what sort? Mortality is one part of the limit of making, indeed of all living beings as well. In fact, perishing begins immediately upon birth in the analytic sense. But this would be a facile truth, even specious, if left without qualification. For persons continue to make in the face of that truism and can do so not mechanically, as though condemned, but in such a way as to disclose in making their own influence upon the world, their own commitment that making is not just a matter of the particular production but also expresses more broadly certain powers to influence those parts of the life-world already offered within the limit.7 The immortal opportunity to make offered by the limit,8 then, is actually taken up by makers (this is within our power), who consequently bring into the world what otherwise would not have been but who nevertheless are able to understand the hard truth that the offer is not one which includes immortality. Here we begin to appreciate the anxiety that accompanies fragmentation. In the face of mortality, fragmentation generates an extra doubt, doubt not just about the durability of the manuscript or Yugoslavia but of the endurance of our own powers to make, powers which had been our own to exercise and without which the opportunity to create definite things in the world would vanish. This is the fearsome puzzle that follows splintering. The special loss in fragmentation, as distinct from death and decay, is that it is not inevitable. Fragmentation is not laid down as a condition the way dying is, so we can be surprised by it, puzzled by it, and so on, as the announcement describes. The conference call, for example, could hardly have included death and decay as threats to the desire for unity. Nor do they “jostle Reason and Truth” In fact, reason and truth continue to live quite comfortably with them, however troubled by fragmentation. Thus, in the world, within the range of practical choice, making contrives to bring into the world what can either be or not be. In this limited respect making is understood to depend entirely on the spirit of fabrication and the technology of realization, but the fragment demonstrates we are

mAkIng, frAgmentAtIon, And the end of endurAnce

145

nevertheless still subject not just to finitude but to its uncertainty. Even in the finite world we control, we suffer finitude. There is something about making, about production, that invites, includes, incites, the enigma that is fragmentation. Having gotten some sense of the usage of fragmentation, we need next to work out the form of life to which it belongs and what sort of necessities, social forms and limits, it exemplifies.

V What do we understand about any production? Besides its meaning, use, or composition, we understand making, the name and idea for a certain kind of being that does not really illuminate (or conceal) the particulars of any single production (except to theorists) but rather stands as a limit upon that production and upon us. It is a limit that prescribes the possibilities and impossibilities of making – of the assembling, composing, functioning, and appearing of making’s productions (and of their not-assembling, not-composing, etc.). It is what making necessarily is, and it necessarily is not. This limit, like all limits, is absent in one sense: It is not present as a manifest part of the production, the phenomenon, the object, the way meaning and composition are present, and yet it is present in another sense, in that the made production begins to recede into the limit – to become, not absent itself, but absorbed within that which is neither present nor absent but … what? … suspended in the production, suspended in all making, as the finitude of making’s own possibility and impossibility together. The limit, simply, just is, it is what must be, and what cannot be, in making. It is beyond our evaluation and beyond our instrumentalities.9 And so we can understand the greatness of making as this limit: that making’s productions can embody both possibility and impossibility together and can bring the division of presence and absence into presence in the form of production. This is its greatness and the greatness of its vulnerability: that it is impossible to bring possibility and impossibility together, and impossible to bring presence and absence together. Or is all this an illusion? What could be the illusion here? Is it an illusion that we can bring possibility and impossibility, presence and absence, together? Or is it an illusion that it is impossible to bring them together? Or does it matter? In fact, is this very question of illusion always the illusory part when evaluating a limit, which is beyond evaluation?

146

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

The limit does not come and go, as productions do. It does not die. It does not decay. It does not fragment. It is not contemporaneous with specific acts of making, in fact it cannot be said to even have an “interest” in making if by that one means it appears in productions (this is the sense in which it is absent from the production). Rather, the limit is the vast continuity of making, including dead productions, decayed productions, fragmented productions, productions that are successful, productions that are unsuccessful, imagined productions, unimagined productions, unimaginable productions. The limit, then, is the whole of making. It is impersonal. We know the limit but not as friend nor as enemy, certainly not as witness, but as what? What is the figure of making? And what is this figure such that we may better understand the nature of fragmentation? (Note the making we ourselves embark upon here, note how it is impossible to reduce the limit to an image or figure, and how it is nevertheless quite possible for us to go ahead and do it.) Is the limit friendly? No, the limit does not care, even about itself. Is the limit enemy-ly? No, the limit does not care, even about us. Is the limit indifferent? No, the limit makes making. Is the limit rational? No, it puts contraries together. Is the limit human? No, or it would be some of these other things. Is the limit a fate? Yes, the limit is a fate and a fate that is not friendly, not enemy-ly, not indifferent, not rational, and not human.10 It is a requirement, which does not come and go, that what we make must come and go, a requirement of what must be, what cannot be, what powers are ours, and what powers are not.11 This is a requirement of finitude. But it is not a punishment laid down, but rather, a life offered, because it gives the possibility and motive to do things, to do definite things in the world that are the productions which exemplify making as a matter of achievement rather than behest.

VI The surprise, violence, gratuitous loss, and dread in fragmentation certainly get the attention of makers (us), as we begin to doubt the endurance of our power to make. It is an endurance that had seemed assured because it bears not on actual productions but on the broad opportunity to make, which we had expected would endure beyond the decay of particular things. If we examine all this closely, however, I think we will understand it as part of the system of making in relation to the whole community and not

mAkIng, frAgmentAtIon, And the end of endurAnce

147

a catastrophic visitation from without. In that case, fragmentation is “only” an extreme instance of the continuity of making. As it brings a primeval moment of maker silence, stilled production, and readiness to listen, fragmentation is the volcanic juncture of extreme violence and real thinking. These latter seem to be adversaries but are actually a climactic instance of what they were originally, a collaboration of the two dimensions of making which is necessary to all production, the collaboration between deliberation and transformation. Deliberation and transformation are essential to all making and they coexist as the shapers of making. Making is action which changes things in the course of doing. Changing things – making them different, influencing our affairs in that way, is primarily a matter of deliberating about the best means for change, then working to produce that change by transforming the materials (things, people) with which making begins. This is the process of deliberation and transformation. They are making’s power but also its weakness: deliberation in particular is required both to weigh the means for particular productions as part of making and to consider the value of those productions – for the whole, as the mediating part of community. It displays the structure of duplicity, while it is meant also to hold the rein upon transformation. The vulnerability here is the tension between promoting making and restraining it on the occasion when making may work against the collective (e.g., as reflected in varieties of nuclear argument). As a fundamental part of making, and thus of calculating means, deliberation is already committed to making – and in any case calculation is a perverse place to consider collective value, which is not really a matter of calculation at all.12 Thus, the collective ends and regulation of making reside both in making itself and outside, in other domains of community. So it is always possible that the domain which is making will be out of harmony with the others as a result of the imperfection of deliberation, which is a result of its structural place both inside and outside, both as promotion and as restraint. In such a circumstance making may be left to itself, to its own self-governance, reified as pure making for its own sake. Given the infinite capacity to make, productions could multiply and multiply and multiply, beyond making’s original communal end, in a paroxysm of hypertransformation.13 Here, in the excess of unregulated making, is the abode of fragmentation.14 In each and every granule of the fragment, the power of transformation is inescapable as a savage explosion of unmoderated – which

148

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

is to say undeliberated–transformative power. Fragmentation, then, is pure transformation, violence unshaped by communal ends or deliberations, which in the idiom of today we could say have been cleansed from the relation. Again, Yugoslavia: it has been from the beginning a pastiche of inimical disparities, a state made not from deliberation upon the requirements of nationhood but to buffer flagrant Balkan quarrelling among neighbours. Making then, and more particularly deliberation, are always living not under but beside the volcano. Deliberation must guide transformation (this is part of making’s limit). It thus must remain distinct from transformation lest, through our infinite capacity to transform, making is taken over and becomes sheer transformation for its own sake – becomes thoughtless and ceaseless, multiplying toward the violence of gratuitous loss and the dread déjà vu that what is about to happen to us has already happened.15 All in all, making’s productivity will endure so long as there is a proportionate relation between deliberation and transformation. And fragmentation creates an opportunity, however painful, to reestablish such a relation. In this it is affirmative as well as destructive because it reveals the whole limit of making: a limit that is not simply a forced requirement but one that we need for the pleasure and equanimity of doing definite things in a mortal world.

VII The next step in any analysis of making would examine how it participates in the whole round of collective life, how to think of the world(s) in which making has a place.16 What sort of collective is it that supports and needs making? What sort would not? What is endurance, in detail, as both conduct and value? What other parts of that world are close, remote, indifferent, hostile? And how does all this come together as a possibility and accomplishment, including, of course, the possibility and accomplishment that we have worked out as fragmentation?

NoteS 1 Friederick Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). He cheats a little by classifying his fragments, though.

mAkIng, frAgmentAtIon, And the end of endurAnce

149

2 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 69–82. 3 Maurice Blanchot, in discussing Nietzsche, mentions how in some of his work he speaks “according to a very different language: no longer of the whole but of the fragment, or plurality, of separation.” I seek to distinguish fragmentation from plurality, however. See Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 152. 4 See, e.g., Brian Wallis, ed. Art After Modernism (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 179, 181–3, 206–7. 5 Hannah Arendt does not dwell on fragmentation, but her depictions of making (she calls it work) remain among the most interesting. See her The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 136–74. 6 Postmodernism often treats death as the most difficult part of our finitude (e.g., Bataille). One wonders, though, after examining fragmentation, whether that opinion is not more narcissistic than thoughtful. 7 There are two kinds of power that influence making, in other words, the (immortal) power of the limit, which is not made but laid down, and our own (mortal) power to make, given by the limit. 8 See section IV below for a discussion of limit. 9 Another way of saying this is that the limit of making is not itself made. Jean-Luc Nancy makes a similar point about community, viz. The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31; as does Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill, 1988). 10 Some good teachers seem to behave like this. Also, it is tempting to call fragmentation an aporia, but that would be stretching the point. 11 A limit in this sense does not include extrinsic conditions but rather constitutes the subject, drawing a line between what it is necessarily and accessory variables embedded in its context. Such conditions as the politics of the state, motives of persons, demographics of population, and so on, may well influence the particulars of making in any instance but are not requisite, as the fact of their variability demonstrates. 12 “No physician deliberates whether he should cure, no orator whether he should be convincing, no statesman whether he should establish law and order, nor does any expert deliberate about the end of his profession.” Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 61. Aristotle reserves deliberation to means for the “practical arts” (making), but that would leave making entirely separated from community. 13 This is one way to think about certain medical technologies, particularly in the United States, which are used to keep people alive whether or not they want to live.

150

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

14 Except, of course, the fragmentation of accident. 15 Multiplicity should not be thought to mean only reproduction of many individual productions. It includes also transient flux in which the larger social parts and their relations are ceaselessly transfigured, such that at any one period every other time, and every other place, becomes apostasy. 16 Note our own double relation to making in so doing: we make an analysis of making, such that the subject we examine is for us also a simultaneous resource for examination (among other resources such as our desire to examine, our skills, etc.). This is to say we have two interests: in the world and in our analysis of the world. And yet that is only one interest, because our analysis of the world is certainly part of it as well – making an analysis is not exempt from the limit of making. This two-as-one is not a mere technical ambiguity but a profound one with enormous consequence for all practice without exception. There is not space to discuss this further here, but see a work with my collaborator and colleague Alan Blum: Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984).

10

INSOMNIA AND THE (T)ERROR OF LOST FOUNDATION IN POSTMODERNISM

1 Insomnia is a wakefulness without intentionality … Its indeterminatedness … does not condense its own emptiness into a content. It is uncontained – infinity. (Levinas 1989, 170)1 Though we should be sleeping, we are awake, and yet it is not the kind of wakefulness that comes from noise or a bad dream nor from daytime’s occasional intrusion with a particularly pressing immediate problem. Insomnia – that specific form of sleeplessness – is instead indeterminate, without intention, and empty, a bed of vacant tossing and turning. This is odd. For one thing, here at the very beginning we find ourselves characterizing insomnia largely by what it is not: it is not-sleep, a notinterruption, a not-intention, a not-determinate, etc. But what is this? Even to call it empty is to place some zero at the center of the idea. If sleep, after all, is some kind of respite or recess, then why should the absence of stimulation by intention and determinatedness – why should emptiness – not be exactly the soporific we need for sleep? How can we be kept awake by nothing? Originally published as Peter McHugh, “Insomnia and the T(error) of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism,” Human Studies 19, no. 1 (1996). Revision of paper delivered to the Society for Phenomenology and Human Science, Seattle, Wa, 31 September 1994. My thanks to those discussing the paper following its presentation and to Alan Blum for helping me to realize it would be better understood with the addition of what is now section 5. That part also draws on conversations with Blum over the years.

152

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Possibly we can, if sleep is not a recess – if it is more than a technical period of physical and psychic restoration. Though distinctive, with its own characteristics, sleep may be alive to life much the way waking is, so that it includes a more vital part of the sleeper, whether it is also a restorative or not. What Bergson first qualified by citing its “disinterestedness” – which is to say its interest in a certain seclusion – surely has to be something other than the slumber of anesthesia. We can think of the kind of sleep we are working to locate as one which is active, as in daytime – one that does have an interest – but is not subject to the same intrusions of the day, not the kind of intrusions of the sun that come to us directly from others such as work and family, that come before our own first mediation. The space of this sleep is more solitary than the day, befitting the dark, and yet also greater than stupefaction: a space that is waiting to be filled by the “I.”2 One is what one is in sleeping, sovereign in that very sense of being with oneself, even if we are not always at one with ourself. Sleep is being together and at one with one’s contradictions and similitude but never being contradicted in that already heterogeneous being. Hence, for example, the dreams we all know and know as our own in each and every distortion of content. Sleep, here, is the solitude of being in one’s own place. But this is not a vacuous place, because our place is filled, filled with the I, filled and yet without an other except through that I. Indeed, the one whose dream it is is led by it, drawn on and then back by the dream’s enigmatic paths and ambiguous figures. Sleep is where the I defines the world without regard to counterclaims, the totalization of the world by the I in sleep’s solitude. In sleep, then, the I collects the self at its discretion, in its own time and way, on the sole occasion when such an action is possible. If sleep is a respite, it is a respite from interruption; if it is a restoration, what is restored is the autonomy of self-governance. (Lacan 1981, 79). So it is not that the world is absent at night, and sleep ignorant. Rather, sleep affirms one’s place in the world, and yet also one’s independence from it, through the distinctive signature of the uninterrupted I. Thus, the restlessness of insomnia, and its interminability, contravene not the numbness of sleep but its sovereignty, its sovereignty as the welcoming space of the I, the place where the I actively makes its peace and nourishes its subject. The insomniac’s nights are empty, not productive, because they do not express, in the night’s own way, the perfect world of the omnipotent sleeper. More, they fail to do this at the very period in which an I can be

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

153

expressed, beyond busy trespass by the competitive practical interventions of the waking hours we call daytime. The emptiness of insomnia with which we began is thus devoid of the self-defining work of the night. It is not that night has become day. Rather, it has become not-night. This is its emptiness, its interminability. Insomnia is insubstantial, an insufficiency of content, because the I and its signature are made invisible. We need now to think about a daytime that could belong with insomnia. Any life is connected between day and night – those that are not would surely call for explanation, would call for that kind of connection – and so we need to collect some sense of a waking existence consonant with the I-less night of the empty sleeper. We need an empty daytime. Though different than the night, it will not, presumably, be as different as the vernacular night and day.

2 The following characterization of everyday conduct is from a selfdescribed postmodernist: Marking … Tracing … Erring … Drifting … (A)drift … Ad(rift) … Rifting. A/d/rift toward anonymity … common mark of spiritual life. If to be a self is to possess and to be possessed by a proper name, then to lose the self is to become anonymous, and to become anonymous is to lose the self. Tracing inscribes a certain anonymity. The trace is the “erasure of the present and thus of the subject, of that which is proper to the subject and of his proper name.” (Taylor 1984, 140)3 We shall look closely at this statement, not in order to explicate or correct but as postmodern self-description, because as a self-report it is an orthodox instance of postmodern conduct in the way it speaks about itself.4 Thinking ahead, we should keep in mind whether it could equally have been written about insomnia.

2.1 Ellipsis To begin simply and concretely, and to anticipate later issues on indeterminateness and the nature of speech, it is noticeable that the statement

154

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

punctuates itself with ellipses, surrounding the writing with interactions that allow it to die away like talk, it is inarticulate in that respect – faux poetry, poetry’s rhythm without its tropes – halting, dependent on its regular silence to offer to us whatever we ourselves might think up to offer back to them. What lies at the root of this inarticulation? Is it humility, self-effacement? Or must humble writing bespeak itself more fully, lest it be so mild we never hear it at all? Is it indifference? Or does indifference not really speak to us in the first place, being always either silent or unresponsive? Is it searching? Or does searching, even as it drifts, nevertheless resist drift for pathway? Is it conversation? Or does conversation know that we could never exhaust its possibility, that the writing could never make it complete, and so ellipsis is only redundant in this respect? Perhaps it is glossing, compiling words as glances upon some languishing subject that thereby remains opaque for us. It glosses itself as a way of leaving us to our own solutions beyond the mutual needs of intertextuality, casting a shine on the subject in which we see our single reflection, the work we alone must do to deepen whatever it is that the writer commends. Ellipsis amplifies the reader side of the good reciprocal relation of writer and reader. It effects a transfer of intertextual responsibility to us, as though the writer appears merely to punctuate a reader’s authorization of the reader’s own responses. But this is not laziness; it raises a question about postmodernism’s commitment to content, which we will think about more thoroughly later.

2.2 Drifting Possibly the glossing is an expression of drifting or aimlessness, also said to be postmodern: To saunter is to wander or travel about aimlessly and unprofitably. The wanderer moves to and fro … with neither fixed course nor certain end. (Taylor 1984, 150) What is aimlessness, conceived as part of the postmodern project? If it is not a fixed course, isn’t it at least a course, i.e., a design named by the writer as one to expect rather than be surprised by as we come to understand postmodernism? What is the difference between a course that is fixed and one that is not? Is the latter random? Can a course be neither fixed nor random, i.e., flexible? What would that be, as a formulation? Really, for a

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

155

course to be a course at all, do we not discover this precisely by seeing that it is limited in some way, not random, and in some sense directed in what it accepts as itself and what it rejects as extraneous. If a design is “no fixed course” we also discover this to be limited in some way, fixed in that sense for example to be limited in that it excludes fixing even if, as now, we do not quite know what that means. Lack of nerve, too, is noticeable in the passage when we consider the gloss “neither fixed course nor certain end.” If all everyday conduct with fixed course or certain end were measured against behaviour without, fixed and certain would be scarce indeed. The contingent and deeply ambiguous uncertainty of all social conduct have been explicit in the ideas of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, not to mention Heraclitus, then ethnomethodology, then Analysis, and many others, up to and including postmodernism itself.5 The condition of uncertainty in language does not distinguish aimlessness from much at all in this specific respect of uncertainty (which is not to say that uncertainty must be accompanied by aimlessness as Taylor intends it). That an exemplar of aimlessness would claim such a distinction only demonstrates, well, his own aimlessness in misunderstanding the nature of his own charge. But errors like this are not unusual, as we will see further on, because they follow from the promotion of errancy in postmodernism. Within the space of the trace is inscribed a cross that marks the site of the disappearance of the self. (Taylor 1984, 51) The trace is a way of conceiving the basic structure of signs and thus of one aspect of the nature of social action within a world of language. Erasure (“The trace is the erasure of the present and thus of the subject,” [ibid. 4]) refers to the specifically contingent historical understanding in any relation, large or small; a contingency not just in the particular details of that relation but which includes the very basis of understanding per se and so of history itself. It embraces all socially constituted relations: knowledge, errancy, supposition, science, art, memory, fact, writing, reading, and so on, including, of course, tracing and erasing themselves as ideas and as conduct. This is necessary if one is to do Derridian postmodernism.6 Erasure, then, is a theorist’s formulation of the way the (now) fact, event, history, etc. are understood. And erasure of the (now) fact-event-history, which is now also a just-now fact-event-history, is a way of writing and understanding not just the fact-event-history but erasure’s necessity,

156

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

although it is not put this way by postmoderns because they resist all requirement as “totalizing.” But any erasure theorist must, to be such a theorist, formulate erasure. And this latter is not a contingency the way facts and relations are contingent. For one thing, it is said to be universal. For another, it is unavoidable, if one is to be an erasure theorist, to erase, a requirement which is constitutive of postmodernism. For example, to drift away from erasure is not possible except as one who is no longer an eraser. Most importantly, this is a fixed course, a course which imposes necessity on the world and on the postmodern theorist, making Taylor’s claim a self-contradiction. The only contingency is whether one is (was, will be) an erasure theorist. In other words, this theorist cannot be aimless and must follow this fixed course. Is this a grand narrative? I don’t know. But it is a narrative of the compelling amplitude of necessity. The trace erases. What happens here? Is it the end, as Taylor hints in his quote of Derrida, in that the subject and the subject’s possessions are no longer present? Elsewhere he comments, again quoting Derrida, that “The trace marks the end of authentic selfhood by making ‘enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “presence” …’”7 The end of authentic selfhood. Does this mean, too, that there never has been an authentic self, presuming the trace has always been with us, doing its work on human discourse? Or has the self been inauthentic only since Heidegger, only since having been theorized, only since having been invented as a theorist’s account? If there is nothing left for us but inauthenticity, life does begin to sound like drift and anonymity. But in taking up erasure Taylor elides the other half of the idea of the trace: “Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as the other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear [italics supplied]” (Derrida 1976, 70). In other words, as the common sense notion of tracing would imply, something is left of then now, and as now becomes then this residue continues even as its specific composition may change. So the erasure for Derrida is not annihilation, as Taylor suggests8 (although Derrida does claim elsewhere, contradictorily, that the self disappears). In fact, retention is what makes the difference between then and now (according to Derrida), the very difference that is said to generate meaning in the first place. Thus Derrida, having been contradicted by Taylor, now contradicts Taylor. But our point here is not to correct an intellectual omission as an

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

157

academic exercise. Rather, we see through the gloss to the problematic it fails to illuminate, the problematic which is this kind of work itself: the postmodern conception of social conduct. It is not simply that Taylor’s aimlessness begins in certain undetermined linguistic ambiguities between fixed and loose, authentic–inauthentic or in various elisions that simplify his task. Rather we need to think about this as itself an oriented instance of postmodern conduct. This will require a closer examination of errancy, particularly in its connection to error.

2.3 Errancy To err: 1 a To turn aside from the proper path: STRAY. b To go about aimlessly. WANDER. ROAM. 2 To deviate from a standard (as of wisdom, morality, accuracy). To be or do wrong, to make a mistake.9 (Webster’s 1961) Errancy includes wandering, deviating, wronging, and mistaking, which have more generally come to be called transgression. And so it also includes therefore the idea of a standard, some principle that includes what wronging is as well as what may be wronged, deviated from, accepted, affirmed, mis-taken. Without a standard the conduct would be entirely self-presenting, incapable of offering the difference which according to postmodernism generates meaning. And as a simultaneous dimension of that standard, transgression is proposed to be errancy’s practice. As a program of everyday conduct, errancy seems to be a method of wary detachment from social intimacy. Erasure is said to deny authentic selfhood in identity, for example, as if the shifting relations among signifieds and signifiers are too much for any self to integrate, although in the postmodern program the actor must still be able to read signs cognitively in order to determine what constitutes regular pathways and thereby what would constitute straying from them. The isolation sought in aimlessness does increase self-direction by reducing the influence of other, if in the absence of an authentic self we are still permitted to speak of self-direction. But this remains a passive project because it is parasitical on paths that already exist, since it is these latter which determine what actual straying would be. And given that one must stray above all, substantial commitments and relations are to be inhibited except those that are accidental. Other persons,

158

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

collectives, ideas, and interests need to be recognized for the pathways they are, and then passed up as too settled, complacent, orthodox, constraining. In this life the intent is to be remote and ready to go (away). So we have a complete sweep in that wandering is to do away with social collectives, of all things: with any capacity to influence or be influenced by others, and with any theoretic possibility of an historically grounded self except through the accident of an aimless history. In this it is consistent between its conception of life and the actual empirical conduct such a conception would require. But it does not do away with narrative if by that we mean it does away with a standard that certain things be done and certain things not be done. It is not a liberation from narrative but from a particular one – shall we say from the one which commends collective social intimacy. It is not that wandering is not committed, for it is committed to wandering. In being committed to wandering, which includes wandering among all the substantial possibilities of life, we can say that it is committed to rejection of content for the method of errancy. In this way, wandering is a producer of detachment. Presumably, one wanders too from remnants of self, if anything is left of it after the trace, leaving the actor with something like personality: a collection of individual traits and proclivities. In a perverse way, the unitary self, which was to have been vanquished, is instead simplified and now reappears as one discrete individual stripped of other influences except those of errancy. Thus, the isolated symmetry of the selfless postmodern actor, moving in a detached and motile world, promotes a new kind of privacy: not, as in the past, an interior struggling to speak itself, or struggling not to, but a vacuum inaccessible to other, a vacuum in which attachments are accidental, communal relations flat when not oppressive, and pervasive disattachment forms between persons, groups, communities.10 Surprisingly, postmodern privacy objectifies alterity by depriving it of its normative force, leaving it merely as a remote condition with neither appeal nor repugnance. The idea is to remain alone, satisfying needs perhaps but unable to enjoy them except in private or, when finally participating in some communal affirmation, doing so only as another straying, this time from the postmodern project. This raises still another question: how would such straying be identified in the postmodern “community,” such as it is? Aimlessness is commended as liberation, liberation from socially sustained value, which will better fit the selfless personality. Here again

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

159

we confront the contradiction of the postmodernist as one who is both aimless and committed. Thus: 1 2

3

Erring is possible only on the existence of a standard because: a It is only a standard that can be violated. A meaningless act violates nothing. It is not even an act, really. It is only a standard of what constitutes roaming, wandering, aimlessness that wild differentiate them from anything else and permit particular concrete conduct to be so identified. To stray here is to conform to a standard for straying. (1) and (2) hold also for the conduct of writing. To commend errancy is accomplished by collecting discourse according to some rule, connection, value, interest, or orientation by which speech becomes social as behaviour favourable to conduct which is errant. Taylor’s earlier elision of Derrida conforms, for example, to errancy’s standard to be mistaken.

This is to say that postmodernism’s recommendation to wander, as seen through Taylor, is parasitical upon the very thing it resists, the idea of a standard, because what it recommends is to orient to a standard of aimlessness, a standard which collects, however ambiguously, discrete instances of behaviour as errant or fails to do so or does so only as various contingencies appear to be the case. This is Taylor’s commitment, his principle, from which he (his book) could not turn away or stray and be the book it is.11 Several mixed questions now arise: 1

2

Given errancy requires a standard, is this a foundation? If one strays from errancy, for example, is there anything left of one’s errant self except in memory and history? Parenthetically, is errancy confirmed by straying from errancy? a Similarly, given it is necessary to erase to be an erasure theorist, is it not true that erasure is a foundation? If errancy can be foundational, how could errancy, or erasing, not offer an authentic self as an agent of such conduct? That is, how could we account for the errant act except by seeing it as oriented, as agency? a If errancy is not foundational, isn’t all errancy therefore accidental, not worth commending as action, in that there are no grounds except the errant event itself – that is, an originary presence – by which to claim, justify, or deny the identity of that conduct?

160

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

3

If foundation is not possible, and agency a figment, what are Taylor, Derrida, Lyotard, and company doing, and how are we to understand their recommendations? 4 All in all, what is foundation, and what could be foundational? In deconstruction, it most often means originary presence, sometimes only persistent commitment.12 But can one say that the postmodern project is not a grand narrative and that its practitioners are, like the rest of us, without selves and agency? In any case, and whatever one calls it, we have found so far that to be a postmodern theorist one must erase, and, simultaneously, to be a postmodern actor one must stray, must be aimless. That is, we have established something like a ground of demonstration in postmodernism, at once theoretic and quotidian, that can fairly be called both a requirement and a contradiction. Now we need to work out the kind of thinking that could create such a world, and let me anticipate that we will find it as a reification of the sign–signified relation, in which all conduct is said to imitate the behaviour of signs.

3 The unending play of surfaces discloses the ineradicable duplicity of knowledge, shiftiness of truth, and undecidability of value … freely floating signs cannot be tied down to any single meaning … [so] everything is radically relative. (Taylor 1984, 16) The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence. (Derrida 1973, 85) First we hear from Taylor that something is “ineradicable,” and then, no, “everything is radically relative.” Second we hear from Derrida that the trace, his term for the way same and other are fully interdependent, nevertheless erases selfhood, which is the interpersonal locus of same and other, the locus of interdependence. Through and through, writers’ usage contradicts writers’ usage. Is this roaming, straying, erring? Mis-taken? Lost selfhood? Passive resignation from the difficult but interesting opportunities generated by the problem of undecidability?

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

161

Perhaps it is the postmodern conception of the sign and of self that generates these apparent errancies. Like modernism, postmodernism persistently follows and works out the inevitable variability in relation between sign and meaning, which is now a commonplace in the humanities and social sciences. But modernism seemed to struggle to tame this variability, as in architecture’s effort to purify form against mixture, whereas postmodernism celebrates it. Thus, the modernist conception of value as uncertain has been replaced by the view that it is essentially undecidable, moving us from an interest in working out the value of, say, purity, to disdain for such work and elevating the fact of sign–signified multiplicity to a principle, to heterology. This is the principle that underlies the demise of self, of grand narrative, of the valorization of political consensus, and so on. But the self is only the first domino: “The death of the Alpha and the Omega, the disappearance of the self … fray[s] the fabric of history … the story seems pointless … From the perspective of the end of history, the “final” plot seems to be “that there is no plot” (Taylor 1984, 73). All “disappears” into variability in imitation of the sign, following the roaming, wandering, and straying among all variety of relationships among alters, just as the sign does. Postmodernism conflates variability of the sign – that its meaning cannot be controlled if by that is meant that theoretically a sign may always change its relation to the signified – with self. If the sign is contingent, then so is self; if the sign is not self-identifying, then neither is self; if the meaning of the sign disappears, so does self. Thus, if the sign strays, so must the self, and errancy becomes a method for living. In this determining respect the sign is made originary for postmodern theory – the method of the sign appears as the method of all within language – another contradiction for those whose theorizing disclaims the originary. And it is noticeable that while they dislodge what they claim to be one conceptual tyrant, the self, they only replace it with another, this time the sign, and all this is made possible by stripping conduct of genuine collective influence, i.e., of the social. Again, the question: should such an elemental, even totalizing heterological privileging of the sign, be thought foundational for postmodernism? Having suffered the death of self, history, and God, the postmodern actor is left in a social vacuum, without guidance or support – that is, without possibility of a conversational or dialectic relation – by any organic collective. This has significant consequence beyond the losses themselves, because it is

162

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

these communal relations which are the source and focus of social value and individual commitment but which are now placed out of reach. We are left with a denuded actor who is circumscribed by cognition, a sort of linguistic processing machine, one who can recognize all that is given in language but must always remain detached. Loss is the elemental condition of life. The actor labours always not out of conviction but in imitation of its condition, as one who cognizes but does not commit, as one always moving away. This is its aimlessness.

4 Becoming has no goal and underneath all becoming there is no grand unity. (Nietzsche 1968, 13) This is a remark which has been put to many uses, among them to demonstrate that development is random and good, development is random and bad, development is foreordained and good, development is foreordained and bad. In postmodernism, Nietzsche’s comment plays out this way: “Through unexpected twists and unanticipated turns, erring and aberrance show the death of God, disappearance of self, and end of history to be the realization of mazing grace [italics in original]” (Taylor 1984, 168).13 Here, although it may not strictly be a goal (just what did Nietzsche mean by goal anyway?), aimlessness is said to be realized in the unsure wanderer’s recognition that stable icons are dead and there is no plot, etc.; he “is not sure where he comes from, where he is, or where he is going … He is forever sans terre” (Taylor 1984, 156). In this example becoming does come to something of a realization, whether or not it is a goal, and it is something united as well: first, it comes to the recognition that even icons are unstable and then in achieving mazing grace, which is meant to refer back to an embrace of the play brought on by the labyrinthine maze of life’s endemic plotlessness and distinctionlessness. In other words, as we come to aimlessness, errancy nevertheless winds up conceding an arrival and a sort of negative unity, contravening its Nietzschean paternity. It concedes also the play in language depicted by Derrida (though without the affirmative joy he recommends): “[There could be] … the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

163

truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center” (Derrida 1978, 292). It is significant that Derrida cites “the affirmation … offered to active interpretation.” This characterization opens the theoretic door, as it were, to all social participants and not, as it might otherwise seem in postmodern literature, only to we chosen few who profess theory. Now interpretation is extended to a socially inclusive hermeneutics, to a communally salient set of questions that could in principle be asked by any speaker, whether professor of theory or plain theorist: (1) What interpretation is, what active interpretation is, and what affirmation is; (2) How actual speech conduct might embody each of these hermeneutics, both separately and together; (3) Whether commended and actual postmodern conduct, such as that which is the topic of this paper, satisfies (1) and (2). But Derrida does not do this, nor do his exegetes.14 In this paper we address (3), and we are beginning to understand that the postmodern actor may not be equipped by postmodern theory to embody any conception of joyous affirmation or active interpretation. In this respect postmodernism does not seem to teach because it does not adequately formulate itself, does not narrate any method for its own accomplishment, as with Derrida here, and because the conduct it commends could not produce what it claims to be able to achieve, such as joyous affirmation and Taylor’s notion of grace, as we will see further on. Derrida calls for joyous affirmation and the faultlessness of innocence, a surprising resonance of Rousseau and a commendation Nietzsche and some contemporaries might reject as being a goal. It is almost as though we still retain a trace of the state of nature, of the epoch before society, before language, before knowledge of the prohibition.15 Perhaps becoming, for postmoderns, is to abandon the abstractions of truths and standards for “the nearest reality, that which is around us and inside of us, [which] little by little starts to display colour and beauty and enigma and a wealth of meaning – things which earlier men never dreamed of ” (Nietzsche 1982, 34). Wandering, now reconceived as “individual development,” could qualify in the sense that this standard of proximity, nearness, the close at hand rejects exoteric universals, as well as significant communal influence upon the immediacy of the signifiers. Of course this is a standard, a limit, in that certain things are included and others excluded. One would have to be very careful about making

164

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

comparisons, for example, lest the colours cancel each other out. But note here that the history of the wanderer, and of sign–signified relations, would not be cumulative; each moment would constitute its own epoch, the next its own, and on and on. In this way, a past and a future become sheer chronological aspects of one’s life, which is to say not normatively relevant except as aimless accretions. It is an aesthetic standard, generating episodic novelty of experience in the here and now, as though one’s identity is always a contemporaneous fabrication. Error doesn’t count for long, nor truth. And when they arise they are seen for the wealth of their colour and their curiosity as enigma. Thus does the faultless innocent circulate as a means of generating exposure to experiences “without goal or underlying unity.” It is one thing to exemplify the intrinsically loose nature of language, which we all do without exception, including Derrida, whether we speak from postmodernism, classicism, the enlightenment, or whatever. It is another to claim that this de facto universality of the gap alone is an affirmation simply by having been noticed or exhibited as our condition. Something is missing here, something is missing in Derrida and postmodernism generally in the ways they (fail to) theorize this vital dimension of language, which for them we might even risk saying is fundamental. Of course signs, a condition of all speech, are not at fault; nor, as conditions, can they be truth; nor, being utterly variable in their use, could they be originary. These very features of the sign are not only what permits but demands what Derrida glosses as “active interpretation,” a conclusion with which one may wish to be sympathetic but which does need to be examined. Yet it is not examined. That gloss is about as far as Derrida – and Nietzsche too – are able to go in their work: to affirm the gap between what we say and what we mean, between our actual speech and the conversation it seeks to imitate, between the nature of desire and its spoken realization, between sign and signified. Play for Derrida is a way of stipulating the betweenesses in our actions, but he does not work out any theoretic description of this space as a collection of possible relations. His many analyses offer stimulating demonstrations, but the theoretic relationships that make joyous affirmation possible, and the kind of world this would be, are unformulated, and so we are left with the apparency that it is only possible in the absence of a standard. But this is not possible (since there is always a standard, including the standard of no standard).

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

165

So it is up to us now to initiate some formulation of what active interpretation and joyous affirmation could be, not for Derrida but for ourselves. This is to say we shall place these notions under erasure, to be worked out and developed here in order to suggest some conception of greater vitality than errancy as an interest of postmodernism.

5 Beginning with our situation, we stipulate now the profound and irreducible ambiguity (erasibility) of all sign–signified relationships, such that language, whatever greatness it may give, does not offer any natural transparency in the connection between sign and signified. Discourse is not self-explicating, and conversation is not self-sustaining.16 Profound ambiguity is a limit, which is to say it is laid down as a given in and as language, laid down as such beyond our capacity to change, transcend, or put aside.17 Any and all parts of language – writing, talking, thinking; laughing, grunting, profaning; babble, silence; reason, the ineffable, theorizing, the divided line; affirming, enjoying; ambiguity itself – all parts are limited by the limit, and so profound ambiguity forms part of our being, always and everywhere. This is a limit which is, but does not exist and cares not if we resist. It does not alter, and cannot be altered. It does nothing, subtracts nothing, adds nothing. It is not active, not organic, not anything except what is: profound ambiguity. And yet the limit, though final, does not determine all particulars. The very finality of profound ambiguity opens the door to multiplicity, most significantly to the possibility of interpretation to begin with, and then to multiplicity of interpretation. As with all limits, we learn from it what necessity is, what possibility is – here of interpretation – what impossibility is, and how possibilities may or need to be realized if only we have the imagination to imagine them. And it is a limit that can be known, one which is not so remote that it could never be understood. So we are kept by the limit from certain things as beyond possibility – perfect knowledge, for example. But we are offered others as within our power, among them interpretation. The limit’s boundary establishes in the whole both the impossible and the possible, which together form an enormous and irreducible heterogeneity in what we are. The limit’s negation – of perfection, completeness, certainty – simultaneously offers the freedom

166

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

inherent in ambiguity, heterogeneity, and the indeterminate, which is the possibility of interpretation. This is what is offered by profound ambiguity. But it is only offered, not given and not forced, which means it is left to us to affirm the offer by taking it up. This is how we live on the border, on the line between determination and freedom as that between our heritage of incorrigible incompleteness and the opportunity for interpretation. Whether ambiguity will be painful or enjoyable depends not on the limit itself but on our willingness to accept its powers: the powers it does not give and the power it offers, this latter being the (limited) power of interpretation. We do suffer incompleteness as one dimension of our mortality, but by the very same token we may enjoy interpretation, the affirmative counterpart of incompleteness, because it gives us the active work of doing it, of developing the arts and wants of interpretation as well as the understandings it generates. Because our capacity for joyous affirmation resides in active interpretation as an expression of our own powers, this is a difference we can make for ourselves in making interpretations. We can actively engage the very part of the limit inaugurated as our powerlessness: profound ambiguity, imperfection, incompleteness, mortality. We can do so as the part which is interpretation, that part of the limit which is the same to ambiguity and yet also other to our powerlessness. This heterogeneity, composed of both power and powerlessness, gives us our place as a space in which the play of interpretation is not only possible but necessary: possible as a consequence of the profound ambiguity of the limit, necessary if language is to be part of human practise, if we are to enjoy our situation as an affirmation rather than suffer it as a sentence. Once again we live within a moderating mixture, here between possibility and necessity, as what can be and what needs to be. But this need is not arbitrary and external, in the way we think of the coercive necessities of biology. Rather, it is one in which we are free to understand it as that which will inspire affirmation, not resignation, because it gives us interesting and independent work to do and thus to be decisive rather than aimless in doing that work, decisive in the way we have taken up the offer and affirmed that it is good for us to have done so. And so this limit is a mixture in which the difference between parts does not subtract from but rather enhances the place and consequentiality of interpretation. It is enhanced by the play of this mixture, a play between the freedom of possibility and the weight, the import, the potency bestowed upon that freedom by necessity, a play which amplifies the power of interpretation and thus the flourishing of discourse and conversation.

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

167

And so the heterogeneity of language concerts a mixture in which the particular pleasures of specific interpretive invention commingle with, now, what we might name the enjoyment embodied in the vitalizing work of the whole of interpretation. Why not affirm this as within our power, and why not do so joyously, as an affirmation that our powers are necessary? We are approaching something like a poetics of enjoyment, where the work of interpretation will coalesce with enjoyment as itself a work, itself in the work, itself the active working of interpretation. Now the work of interpretation becomes also an embodiment, an embodiment that demonstrates the joyous affirmation of interpretation, of both its freedom and its weight as a moderation of what could otherwise have been a passive polarization of freedom and necessity. And is it not this latter that produces Taylor’s aimless actor? Any interpretation is a making: something is done that changes what had been, conceived either as a moment in the stimulating current of profound ambiguity or as that content which came before, or could have come before, or could have come after and now does (not); of that which comes against, or could have come against, or could have come for, and now does (not). Think of this making as beginning in a multis of grammars, a multis of grammatic applications, and some ambient necessity to interpret. This is the scene of the play of interpretation, the setting for the work and for enjoyment, the latter only a possibility for the same reasons we already know about whether the need for interpretation will be taken up: for the reason that it might not be taken up, might not become the work, might not therefore fertilize what had been only the possibility for enjoyment. Play18 is expressed in the artifice that confronts this indeterminate setting and transforms it from within by working out some speakable formulation that folds back on this working out as interpretation. If artifice originates in the limit of profound ambiguity, artifice brings that very origin to life as the initiative of making which that origin offers. Artifice, then: (1) is free because the original demand of profound ambiguity is not specific as to interpretations made; (2) and not free because interpretation, though true to itself, is neither its own origin nor its own validation. This is to say that all substantive interpretation, like politics, is local, and, being local, also subject to erasure; that particular interpretations, always possible, are never eternal; that enjoyment of the work, always possible, is never inevitable. It is by now a commonplace that postmodernists seek the break in the regular order of things ( Jameson 1991). This is no mere descriptive interest but one that values new space, the chance for novelty, rearrangement,

168

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

experiment, and so on. Although the need for interpretation is constant, it can become an explicit issue of conduct if life gives off an appearance of crisis, when we can be moved to call up and revisit the very process of making which is interpretation. In a break we can imagine that we are remaking interpretation – once again joining the play of its parts, and the pleasures of engaging this artifice, as if for another first time. A break is a space when interpretation and interpreter may come together as self-expression or talent or invention or revolution (and also, alas, the reverse of these). Here the working out of interpretation is thought there to be seen, to be put together under the auspices of the situation and its particular artificers, which is always a pleasure, a pain, or both.19 What can be pleasurable is the artifice and effort, the work, the attention, the action of making an interpretation. This is possible whatever else may happen, including the success or failure of some interpretation’s results. One end of making may be the result it brings. But another is the play of making itself, which can be a source of pleasure in its own right, because it engages the particular, the local, the self, as palpable rudiments – as the streets, so to speak – of interpretation. Although a break is just another variation on the demand for interpretation, it does greet the particular with a distinctively explicit opportunity for invention in the work of making.20 Perhaps it is these local expressions of artifice that Nietzsche meant by the colours of life. Sometimes, for example, we find pleasure in making interpretations because they are an expression of talent, such as tossing the pasta or playing the violin; or because they seem spontaneous, as with a joke, a sudden kiss; or because they are so complicated, say in settling the peace. These can be inventive, pleasant, surprising – engrossing in the sense that their doing gives satisfaction. They can even be important in their consequences for us. And they do affirm interpretation, in that they are made within the context of artifice and effort, are erasible, discursively repetitive, heterogeneous, etc. etc. But is that all there is to interpretation? Do we want to leave joyous affirmation to such particular exhibitions of the work of making interpretation? The winning of a peace prize certainly affirms peace, and the skills of the winner, but it does not say anything (yet) about joyous affirmation of the demand for interpretation, profound ambiguity, or the play of language. Worldwide perhaps in its political implications, it remains at this juncture a theoretically local process because, though a real accomplishment and a

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

169

feat that may receive acclamation for its consequences, it does not as that feat of peace express joyous affirmation of its making as an achievement of language. At least, that is not why it is given a peace prize. This is to say that achievement of peace does not itself warrant characterization as the kind of joyous affirmation we are trying to formulate. On the other hand … it may be that tossing the pasta, so publicly overshadowed by peace, will evince our sense of joyous affirmation because what can be joyously affirmed as interpretation is interpretation itself, which is not equivalent to widespread acknowledgment nor even good results. Tossing the pasta can demonstrate not just artful tossing, effective tossing, famous tossing, but also love of the notion of interpreting, love of interpretation embodied in the tossing, a notion which may be instantiated but is not circumscribed or exhausted by tossing. The tossing could demonstrate love of the artifice and the idea of making interpretation, of craft and our affirmation of the offer to interpret, of the freedom and necessity in which all this originates. While we can love the doing so also can we love doing – dare we risk saying this? – we can love doing the representation that is the doing, and that is what I am attempting to formulate as joyous affirmation. In exactly the same way, the peacemaker could love not just the prize for peace but also the embodiment of freedom and need distinctive to the work of interpretation. Though s/he would win no prize for that (except in hermeneutics), it would be an action that embodies not just the artifice of making the peace but also joyous affirmation of the need for interpretation offered by profound ambiguity. All in all, then, joyous affirmation-love of interpretation has two parts or rather one whole from which one part may be separated: (1) Love of the whole body of interpretation, of ambiguity-artifice-demonstrationfreedom-need-pleasure-enjoyment; (2) love of the particular part which is the pleasure of artifice. We can take pleasure in the particular artifice involved in tossing, peacemaking, invention, expression of talent, spontaneity, and so on, which can be indelibly satisfying as occasions in the taming of uncertainty, and why not?21 But this is not the same as the joyous conjunction of that work with profound ambiguity, the eternal condition in which artifice itself was born, the image of which we bear now: of an origin that prefigures the use of artifice, of an offer of interpretation which needs to be affirmed, of a need which we do affirm as a matter of fact and

170

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

commitment. We are not original. The limit is. But we can live creatively in its image if as we interpret we embody its freedom and necessity. If this is the look of interpretation, is it also a center, a foundation? Perhaps, if by that we mean it is not an origin but an opportunity, offered by the limit, to center ourselves more affirmatively, and more enjoyably, than in the errant life proposed by Taylor. In any case we need now to turn back to errancy where, after this refraction, it becomes a story of decisive resistance to joyous affirmation.

6 Early on in the Inferno. Dante describes the Futile, who ran, for perpetuity but without progress, after a whirling standard in the Vestibule of Hell: The dismal company of wretched spirits … Whose lives know neither praise nor infamy; Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him were faithful, but to self alone were true; Heaven cast them forth – their presence there would dim the light; deep Hell rejects so base a herd, Lest sin should boast itself because of them. This dreary huddle has no hope of death, Yet its blind life trails on so low and crass That every other fate it envieth. (Dante 1949, 86) Futility inhabits a vestibule rather than either Hell or Heaven, having been rejected by each because the futile were not only not faithful but not rebellious either. Even sin does not want them, for while their lives did not deserve praise they also deserve no blame. Instead, the fate of the futile is nothing, to be suffered in the limbo of the vestibule. Their fate is to live in the debilitated nowhere in between, between life and afterlife, in an eternity that will not offer even death, that offers no definite place or particular content. Having circulated aimlessly to and fro in life, having made no record and inscribed no reputation, having embraced nothing in particular, they are without substance now, just crying out and envying the definite fates of

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

171

others. Compared to Hell itself, theirs is a region without content, a region whose vacant distinction is its absence of anything to do or be or name. Is errancy the postmodern version of futility? Futility’s emptiness, as we see, is not the void nor rejection of everything nor love of evil but rather the always provisional touch then separate, touch then separate of the wanderer. Its emptiness is its aimless commendation that we see this lover, this work, this family, this community, this self, this moment, this sleeper, this soul, as foreign. It is to treat everything intimate not with love, nor irony, but as anthropologically strange. Thus, in limbo, the world’s inhabitants and occasions are entirely factoid. Alterity is there, always there, but it is not a relation of nourishment because it must be momentary, and detached even then, serving only as a place or person from which to depart. The issue with aimlessness is not that all is the same, that there are no differences. Difference is necessary as that to and from which one must stray, a stranger upon whom to glance and pass by. To be aimless, one must stray from an alter to an alter, and then again, and again. This is a corollary of the claim that self disappears, much like insomnia dissolves the sovereignty of the I in the night. Now only alterity is left, or rather half of alterity, the half that is difference, because the half that is the same no longer has its common partner in some self of its other. Alter no longer has a same to itself in the same of other because other is without that same. To stray from this lover, for example – to treat this lover as foreign – is to “erase” the part of this lover that is the same to me and reduce this lover to any other to me. Between postmodern alters there can only be alterity and any basis of community is eradicated. Straying thus proposes that movement must always remain on the surface and never go to root. Deeply, errancy is shallow. So straying is not free to move anywhere after all: it must avoid the profound possibilities in any relation. Nevertheless, this levelled surface does have profound consequences. It forms the world as a place where all difference is equal, and if all difference is equal no difference is significant. It is the significance of difference, of course, that is the basis of community, in which we not only recognize identity (the difference of a difference) but also our commitment (the worth of a difference).22 This objectification of difference atomizes relations by liberating content from influence by the social. Objects, including persons-as-objects, do not

172

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

develop into community because they are unable to embrace (or reject) the collective. They can only recognize it. Selves and alters as objects – cognizers, identifiers – are futile because the normative force of identity, its social worth, is lost in perverse liberation by social default, and so the meaning of signs, individual opinion, and interpersonal instrumentalism are freed from any collective or communal influence. They remain unsocialized. This is truly a lost foundation – the social is a foundation because only in community can discrete and specific meaning become history, only in community can individual opinion be true (or false), and only in community can value humanize what would otherwise be sheer instrumentalism. And this loss is a result of the overwhelming conflation of signs with social community. Indeed, the greatest social difference is that between sign and community, and it is only from the two together that we can theorize social action as a dynamic relation between identity and value. Here we come upon a monotony of the daytime comparable to that of insomnia, in which everything in the world is virtually if not literally identical because all differences are remote and impersonal. Difference exists, but it does not excite or call. Perversely, the colours of life, the particular shapes and sounds of the world which were to be renourished by doing away with formulaic narratives grand and small, are muted still because they come to be invisible in the remoteness of postmodern alterity. And so, in the end, the colours of errancy are grey, which is no colour at all. What has come to be called “free play of signifiers” takes on a genuinely double new sense here, in that signifier comes to collapse into one both signs and sign-ers, to collapse the users of words into the what of words. In social life, the limit of the sign – its essential and profound ambiguity – in no way obviates its collective use as reasonably certain or uncertain by those engaged in everyday conduct. But in errancy people, and the talk of people, are finally individuated, left free of collective necessity in its commendation to aimlessness. The emptiness of insomnia is revived here as content emptied of collective significance and thus also of a community’s own power to generate individual commitment and to limit the sign’s perfect freedom. A world that reduces community to sign, and thus produces a world “without fault, without truth, and without origin” is a world conceived in the absence of the users of signs and the collective traditions and commitments that only the social can endow. It is a world offered by a theory which privileges the sign. Indeed, this actor is not really a user of signs at all but a follower of them, a follower not just of content but also of their promiscuous theoretic

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

173

attachments to signifiers, without which attachments those same signs would be voids without end.

7 As all and everything are to be treated as foreign, we come in sight again of Dante’s Futile, who must live just that way for eternity because their aimlessness offered nothing in particular, offered nothing definite enough to make them eligible for some distinct place, whether Heaven or Hell. A capstone phrase in postmodernism is “the death of the author” and now we are in a position to examine this gloss. Foucault, remember, ends his “What Is an Author?” with the remark “What difference does it make who is speaking, so long as we know the conditions of the discourse?” (Foucault 1984, 101–20). And it is true that a course of action, such as discourse, can be independently theorized. In fact Dante does this for futility through the usage of the whirling ensign, we do this for errancy, and so on. There are different modes of speech – for example science-speech, art-speech, quotidian-speech – which may need to be addressed at times for their distinctiveness, without regard to the usual influences and modifications of the whole. But speech-in-the-world, whatever its mode, must be practiced and practiced by speakers who actually live within the incompleteness of speech in two vital senses of that idea: (1) The many varieties of practically possible actions and understandings that are relevant at any one moment and (2) the non-self-explicating, profoundly ambiguous meaning and significance of any single social action. Everyday speech does not say itself exactly, directly, or explicitly. It can only intimate. It is always contingent how any practical speech will connect with such relevances as problematic collective interests, problematic individual interests, problematic particular relations among speakers, problematic collective histories, problematic collective knowledge, problematic relations between collective knowledge and a particular speaker’s knowledge, problematic interlocutors of any speech, problematic resources of intelligence, duplicity, and stupidity; possible real consequences, imaginary consequences; and the nature of false presuppositions, ambiguous presuppositions, adequate presuppositions. The life-speaker serves all modes of speech as an interlocutor of these continuous problematic reverberations which are always being worked out among cospeakers in their course and as the context for the utterances they actually read and hear and act upon.

174

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

And this is not a matter of reducing ambiguity by accumulating more information or calculating more extensively what is already at hand. Nor is life itself reducible to abstract conditions of discourse, as Foucault would have it. Rather, a who that is speaking is the one who works through the always ambiguous flux of sign–signified relations, across the whole spectrum of meaning, limitation, morality, and so on in any one encounter. So: a who not only has a life in life but now in theorizing too, as a one (collective, person) that labours as the specific and visible embodiment – the what-embodier – of the conditions of discourse and their various realizations in conduct, and thus a one who can be said not only to produce and make whatever any actual discourse turns out to be but to demonstrate the need for whatness that turns up in any and all whatever.23 Only through life-speakers speaking and through the implicit histories and traditions this speech embodies (such as the need for interpretation), will “the conditions of discourse” be realized. Of course life-speakers speaking conditions can be a condition, too, but then Foucault’s question becomes empty. In the life-speaker the practical and the philosophical commingle as considerations taken together in theorizing social conduct. Again, given the irreparable gap between sign and signified, it is the who that actually do this relation in the world, work which embodies in all discourse the possibility given by language, whether this is joyous affirmation or only muddling through. Or both, which is not impossible to imagine. Life-speakers embody language, and language includes the whole beyond the use of signs, and thus life-speaking includes the whole beyond the sign. Indeed the gap, however affirmed or suffered, is an opportunity rather than a curse because it distinguishes human conduct from the life of plants. In these respects, everyone cares who is speaking because any who participates in authorizing as a matter of agency the work that generates, transforms, rejects, etc., the speeches that constitute discourse, and the valuable–valueless contingency that makes some discourse significant and other discourse not. The who are not anonymous by virtue of their responsibility for practise in the world and by virtue of language’s need for embodiment, including embodiment of interpretation. Finally, given the necessarily variable nature of signs, the particularity of this demonstrative work cannot be laid down in advance and could not be accomplished by a mechanistic dummy. Thus, what is laid down – the gap, profound ambiguity, absence of originary presence, sign–signified contingency – leaves to us the

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

175

very work that cannot be laid down. If we are free, this is where it begins – in the active interpretation generated by the limit of imperfect speech. The futility of postmodern aimlessness resides in its prescriptions of estrangement and depersonalization and its picture of language as a set of overwhelming conditions: loss of self and independence from commitment. It is an ignorance that conceives value always as constraint and the gap as victimization. And yet it exempts itself from these same principles. Consequently, futility can offer no possibility of a one that is particular (I do not say unique), just the many that are the same in their anonymity: “Who cares who is speaking?” Who cares, ask the Futile, because alter cannot be heard and cannot be seen. Who could care in such a world, in which the only visible is the me that is acted upon, a me without remnant of its sovereign I, a me that can only be a victim: Me, Me I say, and that’s enough. As anonymity supplants embodiment and intimacy recedes into indifference, we do now begin to drift because we lose touch with content.24 We float, free as a signifier: abandoning, and being abandoned by, place after place; compensating for the loss by always being vigilant; calculating identities here and there in the homeless ozone of impersonality. Embodiment, commitment, have been replaced by abstract motion that continues without resistance, but which could never moderate or even socialize the worst uncertainties of tomorrow.

8 That is our freedom in postmodernism, a vast and palpable emptiness. It is not the emptiness of nothing because it is filled. It is filled first with the worm of our losses: of self, truth, history and second, with dread: not the anxiety of death, for we have already lost ourself and the rest, but dread – dread of living through each night and day in thrall to our insomnias: 1 The horrible silence of talk that could never become conversation. 2 The horrible invisibility of appearances that could never suggest authenticity.

176

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

3 The horrible tableau of ceaseless motion in which nothing can mature. 4 The horrible monotony of a world in which everything is recognizable but nothing is significant. 5 The horrible repression of a world in which expenditures of Desire are made impossible. 6 And where all this will be eternal because there is no longer enough passion for revolt, or even suicide. Certainly it is true that joyous affirmation will risk horrors of its own. But they could not be these, because profound ambiguity has inspired enjoyment of interpretation rather than, as with errancy, the (t)error of absolute freedom of the sign.

NoteS 1 See also Levinas (1987, 48). 2 In his note on the subject, Blanchot calls sleep the “Sovereignty of the I” (1982, 264–8). 3 At the end of the paragraph Taylor is quoting Derrida (1978, 229). 4 I want to emphasize the idea of everyday conduct, by which I mean to include the whole social world of doing work and living life, including doing philosophical work and living philosophically. Thus, for example, Taylor’s writing is examined not just for its prescriptions but also as a popular account of certain everyday practices today. 5 For example, Heidegger (1982); Wittgenstein (1958); Garfinkel (1967); Blum and McHugh (1984). This is by no means an exhaustive list. 6 Trace and erasure, terms given by Derrida, derive from Heidegger’s famous crossout, “A thoughtful glance ahead into the realm of ‘Being’ can only write itself as Being,” represented by Derrida as “The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy, ‘What is …?’” Cf. Heidegger (1958), Derrida (1976). 7 Taylor is quoting Derrida (1976, 70). 8 Call this elision an error, as Taylor himself might. But it would not count as particularly negative because he commends erring for the postmodern actor, as we will see below. 9 Again, this is used not to correct or define but as a repository of usage with which to begin. 10 Sloterdijk (1987, 127) characterizes our time as “the incapacity to have the right rage at the right time, the incapacity to express, the incapacity to explode the climate of care, the incapacity to celebrate, the incapacity to let go.”

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

177

11 This notion of principle is fully developed in Blum and McHugh (1984). 12 See Gasche (1986) for the variety of incommensurables that have been called foundations (his name for them is grounds). 13 Mazing grace is the recognition cited by Taylor and referred to above that “From the perspective of the end of history, the ‘final’ plot seems to be ‘that there is no plot,”’ which he borrows from Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? 14 But see Staten (1984). 15 But it is after knowledge of the prohibition and so, once again, a standard. We are not thinking about an issue that arrays standard against pure freedom. 16 Folding this principle back on our saying of it, whether or not that principle is “true” here and now, we need to accept that whatever I am referencing by it is true to the extent we can stipulate with some confidence that this beginning, while both a risk and erasable, does not traduce either conversational good faith in general or the implicit interest in joyous affirmation which we seek to make explicit by this working through. 17 For a more complete discussion of limit see McHugh (1993, reprinted in this volume) and Blanchot’s (1993) discussion of the neuter. 18 In the literature play is both noun and verb, to reference the loose relations between parts of language as well as actions which express those relations. We exclude play as a trait of persons not because there are none but in order to emphasize that our interest is in the structure of language. 19 There can be pleasure in working out the painful situation and vice versa, e.g., Barthes’s lovers (1978). Note also that we are not depicting the results of interpretation here but the making of them. 20 A pleasure not always for the better, since it can eventuate in new forms of repression, junk, emptiness, etc. 21 The pleasures of particularity can be reversed, of course. War, a lapful of pasta, only reaffirm the uncertainty of the particular. What would not have disappeared in these failures, however, would have been the play of artifice, whatever the circumstantial dissatisfaction. But embodiment, as distinct from satisfaction, does not await success of interpretation, and success does not determine the joyous affirmation of embodiment. 22 Derrida makes use of difference as differance. But he means to depict in how differance is the way we locate meaning, in the relation of sign– signified or what I am calling here identity; it is not, therefore, an account of the communal significance of those differences in identity as meaning. 23 In fact, this very problem was an impetus to phenomenology from the beginning. It should be noted here that the idea of a who as speaker is not limited to persons. Collectives, too, may speak as interested participants

178

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

in community, e.g, governments, cultures, social classes, musics, traditions. And it would be especially misguided to neuter these, as if they can neither influence nor be influenced by history, because that would mean everything must be refabricated in every moment at every space. 24 Usually accomplished in postmodern theory as nothing but another sign anyway. Viz., Baudrillard (1981).

ReFeReNCeS Barthes, R. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Baudrillard, J. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St Louis: Telospress. Blanchot, M. 1982. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. – 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blum, A. and P. McHugh. 1984. Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Dante. 1949. The Divine Comedy, vol. I, Hell. Translated by D.L. Sayers. London: Penguin. Derrida, J. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. – 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. – 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1984. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader. Edited by P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Prentice Hall. Gasché, R. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. 1958. The Question of Being. New York: Twayne. – 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Lacan, J. 1981. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by J.A. Miller. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Levinas, E. 1987. Time and the Other. Translated by R.A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne. – 1989. The Levinas Reader. Edited by S. Hand. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma: Blackwell. McHugh, P. 1993. “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance.” Dianoia 3 (1): 41–51.

InsomnIA And the (t)error of lost foundAtIon

Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Random House. – 1982. Daybreak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sloterdijk, P. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Staten, H. 1987. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Taylor, M.C. 1984. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Webster’s 3rd New International Dictionary. 1961. Springfield: Merriam. Wittgenstein, L. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. London: Macmillan.

179

11

SHARED BEING, OLD PROMISES, AND THE JUST NECESSITY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The epiphany of the face is ethical. Emmanuel Levinas

I Two stories: Story A: The plane crashes. Some faces cling to life. Rescuers triage who will be treated first. They act accordingly. Story B: The plane crashes. Some faces cling to life. Rescuers triage who will be treated first. Their enemy is on the list. They act accordingly. Two stories staked to caustic uncertainty, awful possibilities lying side by side with better ones, in a scene suffused by pressure – pressure not only to act but to act in time, as finitude and the unforeseen erupt in a moment of mortal risk. And yet the difference between Story A and Story B suggests there is more to it than the relentlessness of the event itself, vastly more, in the way that scene will be understood and lived, or not, by the faces who cling to life and by their rescuers. Indeed the rescuers, sometimes supernumeraries in tales of accident, will for us become much more significant once we work out what it is in these stories that we need to think about. Triage combats the mortality of the face in both stories. But Story B introduces a separate pressure, as it interrupts what in Story A had been a relatively seamless relation between the calculus of triage and the individual Originally published as Peter McHugh, “Shared Being, Old Promises and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action,” Human Studies 28, no. 2 (2005).

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

181

need for care. It is an interruption in which we introduce not just the mortal face but its intimacy, in particular its intimation of morality to the one for whom the face is present. (Morality pervades Story A, too, in the way it creates responsible grounds of triage and for triage itself as a morality of impartiality. But that is distinct from the analytic issue here, which is to formulate an initiating relation by some other, here a crash victim, to one who approaches, here a rescuer.) In Story B mortality intrudes the moral into the action as an explicit contingency, and “acting accordingly,” whatever it may produce as conduct, here expands to include infinitely more than what had seemed to be the simple triage of plain mortal faces in Story A. The facing position, opposition par excellence, can only be a moral summons. This movement proceeds from the other. The idea of infinity, the infinitely more contained in the less, is concretely produced in the form of a relation with the face. (Levinas 1969, 196) What do we have now at the crash? What is the more? What is the less? And how can the one be contained in the other, how can the more be contained in the less? Story A narrates the need for decision as basically technical (that kind of morality), a matter of inspecting the body of each face, its look and sounds and silences, and then determining which among them and in what order they should be treated. It depicts a formulaic sorting operation, in which treatment decisions are glossed, and accepted as such, in terms of the medical status of each face in relation to the availability of rescuers, equipment, and time. The story’s inherent concrete question, its contingency, is a matter of the technical adequacy of rescue, of controlling for calculation and errors in application when the means to comply with that aim are imperfect. Because it is as efficient as accident permits, it is thought to be fair – propitious for those treated and for those not, well, how should we describe them, suffering as they do the bad luck not only of the crash itself but of short resources as well? (This pairing of luck and efficiency seems to run throughout the thinking about accident as a descriptive nexus.) At first all crash faces were considered unlucky. Then, as rescue begins and for fairness–efficiency’s sake, which in triage are conceived to be synonymous, some are not chosen for treatment and so they lose yet again, including perhaps the chance for life.

182

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Crash fairness depicts the moral nature of (1) the accidental condition as some shared but undeserved collective disadvantage accompanied by (2) distinct individual degrees of that disadvantage, and (3) certain transparent actions that are socially understood to demonstrate impartiality. In this way accident and fairness make every clinging face begin as equal, uniform, insofar as each presents the same miserable spectacle of ill luck and desperation. Any distinction between them awaits a protocol of triage, a protocol that is to be without secrets and to govern all rescue without exception. Thus faces, while treated equally with regard to the application and results of the protocol, are nevertheless also differentiated by it, which is to say that simultaneous equality and difference in treatment are understood to be fair, a situation to which we will return. In this way, the unintelligible opacity of accident, its resistance to comprehension, begins to be socialized. Story B, alternatively, is quite different. Conditions of the Story A kind no longer suffice as an account of the decision because, for the first time, the practical meaning of responsibility has been raised as an explicit moral issue by the appearance of a morally ambiguous condition – “Their enemy is on the list.” From the instant s/he materializes in front of us, faces us, the cliché of “the mortal enemy” explodes to life as it arrests, if only for a second, the routine order of triage. Rescuers are left, oddly, “free” – free within the empty moment of aporia that attends all such arrests; free, however anxious, to cease all compliance; free in this case of the demands of triage and the comforts of applied probability, of the habits of our thinking about enemies and enemyness, of our self-assuring expectation that dexterity and care will be our only preoccupations. This is a primal freedom, for it suspends the orbit that joins one to another and to the world in all their commonality, leaving one to the formless and wholly liberating instant of an unrooted moment of experience. And because it is a primal freedom, a freedom indeed beyond value, a clearing, its content is a certain nothingness.1 Here, in this vacated moment, lies the risk inherent in all perfect liberation: one is now free to do anything, anything at all. Or nothing. One is free to either treat or let lie there, as if a faceless thing.2 And yet the face is still there, present to the clearing. The presentation of the face, expression, does not disclose an inner world previously closed, adding thus a new region to comprehend or to take over. On the contrary, it calls to me above

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

183

and beyond the given that speech already puts in common among us. (Levinas 1969, 212) The rescue of Story B has been interrupted by facets of the face: on the one side by its mortal individuality, by the conspicuously heterogeneous particularity of this face, this enemy, this history, this subjectitude, this dying, this place; and on the other by the intimation of an infinite whole, “above and beyond” our history and what is given here and now, an above and beyond that includes, comes to life in, and yet is also revealed by that very facet of particularity. A practice, here technique, has been intruded upon by the call of that particular face to the infinity of the moral, a summons that emanates from and is contained in every particular face. (A summons that may be rejected, of course. Its power lies not in its force but in its presentation of itself.)

II So here we are, with ourselves and our commonness, and our enemyness, and all our other practical etceteras, yet also we are drawn to an otherness which is not a face though introduced by one, not an opposition par excellence but an otherness that is above and beyond opposition. It is above and beyond precisely because, though faceless and not mortal, it nevertheless encompasses faces and mortality. The face of the enemy does not simply disclose more about itself or ourselves, as if a window or a mirror. What it discloses is the infinitely more than speech of self-disclosure and enemyness that have already been put in common as the history before us. The face reconfigures the initial practical opposition of one to any other – in this case an other part whose opposition is the being of a literal enemy – by infusing it with a greater and friendlier “opposition par excellence,” an opposition in the figure of excellence, the moral that is “more” than the literal face and yet also embraces it, includes the literal, and in truth depends on the literal. The face imbues the concrete here and now with the moral as part of one and the same. Crash faces, always mortal in any case, rouse our memory of that very fact in our anticipation that we may already be in the presence of imminent passage. This is to say that the face of the passenger discloses to the aporetic rescuer not some specific decision, nor some particular vision, but rather the necessity of decisiveness itself as a need of one’s own, of one’s own agency

184

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

in giving or withholding treatment. And so it is this further understanding that interrupts the pure liberation of freedom which now, at the very instant of its inauguration, comes already to be dissolved irretrievably in the simultaneous appearance of moral necessity. Whether it is heeded or not, whether or not it inspires treatment, moral opportunity has become an explicit part of the story. It is the moral, then, that offers the freedom, the risk, of real decisiveness, while at the same time it depends for this very possibility on its disclosure by the “less,” by the mortal, by the decisive singular mortality of the face, even or especially the face of the enemy. Are we overwhelmed? No. The mortal, which itself is not free and will always suffer its own debt to time, is nevertheless saved from the desolation of this condition because it contains the moral, and although it is particular and transient, that face is not alone, being instead a mortal part of the whole constituted by mortality and morality and their inseparable relation. And so mortality’s great weight is not that it is inevitable or desperate or heroic but that it is necessary – necessary to bring the moral to life and into practice. Although all life dies, mortality itself cannot be understood as a simple terminus because it brings the moral into appearance, because it is morality’s face, because it intimates the truth of the desirable. Story B is no longer a story of coping, of following the fair order of things, as if that order is simple and immutable in all conditions. We no longer think abstractly, of the abstract things that had served so well in Story A: of technique and mediation and coping and risk. Instead, we now think of what is good in particular: what is important to do now, to do now with this face, and thus, inevitably, to collect ourselves with our own history as one demonstration of its value. Unlike the disposable present in which it appears, and unlike its commonplace history, the face is indispensable. The very fact that the face is mortal, sometimes thought to be a defining weakness, forms instead its greatest power, the power of simultaneous mortality and irreplaceability in its particulars, refuting what would otherwise seem to make victims of mortal beings, in which the face and inevitability are thought to be unequivocally and unalterably at odds, forever opposed, and the face entirely insubstantial because, although it comes, so must it go. But victimage ignores the face as the mortal and necessary part of infinity, the part that contains that part of being that is greater than the prosaic yet present in it, that needs the face to be present to the world in the here and now.

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

185

Thus, in its morality the face has become particular, and therefore utterly uncommon, however it may be duplicated in everyday coins of the realm. All the circumstantial figurations of an other, numerable and innumerable, are transfigured as infinitely more than their sum, because they constitute the moral initiative in social conduct. In this way the heterogeneous and particular mortal other face manifests itself as the originating moral object of community and deters what otherwise could be an easy indifference or obliteration by the one who approaches, whether rescuer, enemy, or stranger. In this the face surpasses itself because, though still vulnerable as ever, it is yet also greater than it was because it is no longer at the mercy of chance, of its sheer facticity, for it finds itself in the element of moral necessity as its own element, a morality “above and beyond” that fact. It is a morality that says, “Do not act simply to reproduce the fact of mortality. Do not imitate that fact by repeating its indifference to particularity and incomprehension of the desirable. Instead, heed the face as its own and for the call its presence demonstrates.” The face survives chance, not by escaping but in its gift of moral intimation to any other of the necessity of the desirable, even though in the end each face will always live out its own finitude.

III Here are two more triage stories: Story A. Slavery ends. All faces, slave and free, seek places at work and in education. Personnel and admissions directors consider (triage?) who is likely to succeed. Those most likely are then selected regardless of facial differences. Story B. Slavery ends. All faces, slave and free, seek places at work and in education. Personnel and admissions directors consider who is likely to succeed. Those most likely from each group are selected and given places until they comprise about the same proportion as their numbers in society. Triage is now put in service once again but for life, not life and death: for equality, the pursuit of happiness, redistributed power. In both stories emancipation’s promise is to be executed by inspecting black and white faces for promise of another kind, the qualities they foretoken as persons who will participate in freedom.

186

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Although crash triage is devoted to keeping faces alive – it is simpler, or anyway one-dimensional – there are nevertheless certain resonances between the crash and slave kinds of story. In Crash Story B, some uncertainty was introduced for rescuers as they discover their enemy is on the list: will they treat the enemy, and if so will they be able to do so with the self-control they could for any other face? Will efficiency fray, or guilt distract, as a consequence of even thinking such things? Crash history exposes the issue of how to act responsibly upon the intrusion of some significant “force of circumstance,” that is, a circumstance which is not only unexpected and lacking context but inscribed there, coexisting within the very moment of the need to be decisive.3 It is a story in which the question of moral responsibility is inescapable even for the numb. Uncertainty again announces itself in Slavery Story A. The triage is purely mechanical, just as it had been in Crash A, where that was the way it was supposed to be. But is the end of slavery all that similar to Crash Story A, in which routinization is sought after as both effective and fair? The crash, obviously, is an accident, and in that respect a medical emergency. And while an accident may have its causes they are not immediately relevant to treatment, as they are in the self-created problems of slavers.4 Fair in Crash A, is rescue triage also fair in Slavery A? Is a plane crash an adequate analogue to slavery? To further interpret these very specific stories we need some image of the end of slavery as it bears on the moral relationships among black and white faces, relations which we can anticipate are more complicated than those in Crash B.

IV One image of slavery’s end is a vast pen, centuries old, at the moment its gates are opened for generations of captives to flee as they choose. And where might they flee, to what destination? Where but to derivatives of the same in the land of their keepers, to the land of omnipresent white faces who built the pen. Though outside, and presumably glad of it, these generations can hardly begin new lives because they exist circumscribed with the abiding residues of history: they are prefixed persons, former-slaves, ex-slaves, nonwhites. On moving out and into the open, black faces must live at the practical margin, as both ex-slave and prefree, in the making of their applications. Their indenture has been transformed, perhaps,

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

187

but not eradicated as they live on the sociocultural margin that follows, including a future of choices and results that will be entirely contingent on the developmental dynamic between their faces and the ones who had owned them yesterday in the pen. The end of slavery, then, begins not as an achievement but as a promise, the word of the collective to act in such a way as to share with black faces the equality of freedom.5 It is a promise to release desire among all faces for the first time. A promise to embrace whatever desire may inspire – the pursuit of happiness, for example – as a collective creation by the newly reconstituted “We” that arises for all the many diverse faces of this expanded whole, faces that are now equal by principle.6 Being a condition of pursuit but not its achievement, all faces arrive at some such initial circumstance as portrayed in Slavery Stories A and B, where the emancipated opportunity to pursue happiness now materializes in changed conduct that is socially organized in terms of their original promise. The constituted We becomes a community in formation – becomes, as all communities do, both divisible and indivisible in its parts and putatively indivisible as a whole, however primitive and volatile that process may be. In Slavery A all faces, black and white, are treated identically, as had those crash faces clinging to life. Triage is mechanical, excluding any consideration except the one measure of likelihood of success, and thus do we now have former slaves treated according to a standard of strict equality (in the story).7 The standard is an absolute one, a formal equality of no exceptions and no excuses whatever the circumstance – the same standard that generates in Crash A the unexceptionable equality of faces before triage. In Crash A the standard is enforced for all faces, and seems fair. Yet there is a question here: Will Slavery A’s results embody equal pursuit of happiness for black faces, if by equal pursuit we mean the offer of an equal opportunity? Black history and preparation have been institutionally inferior to that of white faces. To pursue happiness, to really pursue happiness, to be free to pursue happiness with no more than the normally distributed unfavourables – would, could that opportunity begin here? Well, it has begun concretely, one might say, if by that is meant the gate has been flung open with some unshackling in the form of an actual test, as well as the sheer possibility of a step beyond the gate. And it has begun with one standard for all faces. But to propose that it will generally achieve parity, its proponents would have to assume that a black face would, on the day of release from the pen, be proportionately as likely to succeed as a white face; and obversely, that a white face, having already lived a life

188

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

outside the pen, will be proportionately as unlikely to succeed as a black face. True, all faces are in the same pool, a pool that could perhaps be said to be blind to colour, yet for that very reason also amnesiac to history: As a practical matter black faces had seldom been taught to swim in this pool. The standard in Slavery A depicts only formal justice. Formal justice “is a second-order component … consisting in the … right to have all of one’s substantive rights respected or enforced. Enforcing rights given is to be distinguished from the substance of rights, which can vary greatly, as demonstrated by slavery” (Vlastos 1962, 55). In formal justice rights are enforced, but their substance is not addressed. It is a pro forma plan, routinely applied without measure of its service to the ends for which it was adopted. The calculus that seemed right in Crash A suffers here, because calculation governed by formal equality – one that does not avail itself of history and is limited to the mechanics of protocol with regard to what is desirable. It ignores the conditions which created the need for slave triage in the first place. In Slavery B, alternatively, triage is oriented to another conception of emancipation. Here equality is exemplified not just by being offered the same test for likelihood but also by consideration of whether all faces are comparably prepared by history; if not, some adjustment is made among the qualified for degrees of difference which that history has created. It is significant here that triage is given another dimension, the dimension of equity, an idea glossed in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Reasonable conformity to a standard.” In equity, the absolute of formal equality – enforcement regardless of history and other communal need or special circumstances – is qualified by a stipulation that enforcement be “reasonable” in the context within which the standard is to be applied. It is a qualification that introduces the possibility of different inflections in the ways equality may be embodied. The absolute requirement, swim or sink, can give way to mediation by reason, in this case the reasonability of – what? – of the moderation of a lifeline, of some adjustment to practices fairly thought more likely to realize the promise of equality borne by emancipation. In Slavery B the sharing which accompanies emancipation (a topic to which we return below) begins in a freeing of all faces, white as well as black. A white face, for example, must no longer think of the black face as some universal alterity, which probably had already become a dissonant principle for what were mixed faces in lives that had long included such communal practices as coming together in certain work situations, prosaic conversation, and planning – conduct that would not have been possible in

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

189

the total alterity of, say, a human and a machine or a human and a lemur. Coincident with these developments comes an elevation in the authority of the black face, of course, raising issues of acceptance, rejection, and so on at every level of action, belief, and commitment. The uncertain varieties of satisfaction and distress among all faces in this inauguration of authentic collective life are limited only by our imagination in the stories and records of the time. Thus, in Slavery B we observe another kind of embodiment, a different reasoning: (1) formal or absolute equality in applying the measure of likelihood would subvert the equal pursuit of happiness because it would deny an adequate share to black faces in both the means of its pursuit (education and work as instrumentalities) and of its fruits (education and work as good in themselves);8 (2) such a subversion would be a direct result of slavery, the condition rejected by emancipation; (3) to hold black faces responsible would contradict the shared being that had generated the promise and its acts of liberation, before which black faces had not been free to be themselves. The promise, equality, emancipation, freedom – all presuppose that collective life is a share. Just what is a share of this kind? Sharing equality is not simply a matter of sharing of objects, say hardships and rewards.9 It is not a distributive standard. In fact many collectives which do share also believe it appropriate that hardship and reward may be unevenly distributed. To share freedom, emancipation, the kind of sharing that we will name shared beings is more elemental than that (even though it can of course affect distribution).10 It is to recognize that human experience of the world is of an intersubjective space, an arc of encompassing language and history within which is formed a sense of tradition, of place, and of one’s self in that place. In that respect shared being is substantial, really an experience of itself, of being within life’s substance as a particular living composition of the possible and impossible. In that experience its space and language become objectified, objectified as unalterable form and structure and all possibility and limit. It is a materialization of the real. Shared being in our case is for white faces to extend that notion of a person to black faces, faces with the capacity to understand themselves, their evaluations, and their choices in some “reasonable” accord with the trajectory of the real.11 In the life-world the name for shared being, wherever it is apprehended, glimpsed, intuited, felt as it touches some population, is equality. As that space expands, so does equality as a place for other to become it- or her- or himself. Here it expands place for black faces, collectively and individually,

190

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

to affirm (or not) the pursuit of happiness as the course of their own coming-to-be of themselves, comparable but in an affirmative way to the free moment in Crash B when rescuers confront their enemy. It is affirmative now because these black faces are free to be self-predicating, to appropriate (rescue?) themselves for themselves. Thus, as the place and embodiment of equality, sharing is a fecund relation of otherness that belongs to every one (collective, person) and no one and in which each is extended the nourishment of a particular place while also being, inevitably, part of that which is in common. What is common is the shared being of all faces, including those who desire a life which surpasses slavery’s unyielding struggle to survive, understood now as a desire by the whole that such desire in any face will be welcome. All this together founds the shibboleth “basic human dignity,”12 a phrase we so often gloss in telling our stories about the necessity of equality and the reasons for equity but which also exhibit the uncertainty of negation – loss of freedom, wrongful death, indifference to equity – that have threatened the peace and safety that inhere in being that is shared. Shared being, then, is peace, a place for being both in common and oneself. Being in common and being oneself become ineluctable possibilities, but they are also contingent: will they be realized? Indeed, achieving the promise has been, to say the least, difficult. Many would use stronger terms: mortifying, abysmal, heartless, a liar’s word. To illuminate all this one can only say, with respect and humility, that we need to think about equity and justice.13

V The following is a well-known story from the civil rights 60s: When Martin Luther King sought to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Alabama Governor George Wallace tried to stop him. The case quickly made its way to the US District Court, where it confronted Judge Johnson with a dilemma. The courts had upheld the rights of speech and assembly, but the states had the right to regulate the use of their highways for the safety and convenience of the public. As Judge Johnson acknowledged, a mass march along a public highway reached to the outer limits of what is constitutionally allowed? Nevertheless, he ordered the state to permit the

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

191

march, on grounds of the justice of its cause: The extent of the right to assemble, demonstrate and march peaceably along the highways … should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against. In this case the wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly. (Sandel 1996, 90) Judge Johnson’s dilemma is to decide on the commensurability of a specific history on one side and state authority on the other, which means he must decide between the particular enormities of real accretions of historical fact and the enormity of suspending government’s acknowledged authority. In his terms, he must “commensurate … the enormity of the wrongs” and “the outer limits of constitutionality.” He decides in favour of history. We read his decision to say that the “dilemma” was only soluble through the notion of equity, an equity in which formal enforcement of the standard (the legal precedent of state regulation) and purely formal justice itself as depicted above, may be informed by some context, here the history of the promise (of equality) and of what has followed (inequality). These latter – law, history, context, the particulars – are now commensurable. They are made so by the nature of equity, which supplies the kind of latitude that can sustain the reasonability of Judge Johnson’s decision to decide for one enormity and against another. Having failed in its promise, the authority represented in this instance by the state must give way to action by faces for whom it failed and who seek to demonstrate that failure. In this way, equity has offered not just a decision but a place for commensuration of what had begun as incommensurables: the necessity that in some instances specifics of law itself, sometimes contradictory and sometimes not, need to be interpreted in terms of history and circumstance.14 That is, equity generates adequate grounds for such actual decisions as this and for others in which a standard is thought to need moderation: here, that decisions in law may be contextualized, may follow life rather than the arbitrary or speculative or conventional or, even, canon. Note the theoretic burden that reasonability carries here, as in the oeD . It cannot be addressed now, except to note the fact that “reasonable conformity” or some equivalent is always socially presupposed as part of language, whether in the varieties of social analysis or just by observing everyday understandings of things, and is represented by such phrases as open texture, instability of the sign, sanctioned vagueness, and so on. What,

192

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

for example, could be more vague than the oeD depiction yet carry more authority than the oeD ? To expect that commensuration could be right or possible only among things that begin as commensurable is to oversimplify language and the ways it works, the ways we understand, use, and know it from within. We know that language contradicts itself, for example, all the while transforming these selfsame contradictions as reasonable, adequate, or whatever is needed in dealing with matters at hand, namely the entertaining versatility in usages offered by any dictionary. Reasonability is in these respects a linguistic fact of life in social accounts, an utterly familiar and supple side of language that moves dialectically throughout social intercourse. So we have the principle of equality, the promise, and equity, which we saw in Slavery B and Judge Johnson’s decision as the multitudinous ways that principle is organized and measured in the particulars of everyday life, the promise as it is collectively organized, ignored, criticized, concealed, interpreted, promoted, confronted, and so on, and which are exemplified in Judge Johnson’s weighing of the state’s authority to regulate the highways and marchers’ right to assemble. Equity presents the particular’s relation to the common – this particular condition of wrongs and those seeking to demonstrate them as broken promises on one hand as against standard limits of law on the other. On closer examination we note also that it is through equity’s reasonability that respect for law is sustained even in the face of its suspension when the principle of equality is at issue, a respect expressed in such speech as “enormous wrongs,” “the right to demonstrate” against those wrongs, and so on. Equity thus supports both the moral principle itself and that it be expressed as law, while disclosing also the recognition that principle and law are interpreted through language into conditions at hand. Equality and equity together in the life-world amount to justice (or injustice), which is the socially organized moral theory and practice of society that arises out of shared being. Shared being is presented, brought to appearance, demonstrated, in the justness of the acts, relations, and institutions which are always in play as soon as we speak or otherwise collectively encounter one another. Because the very idea of justice is initiated by shared being (indeed, justice is the sole virtue that requires sharing), it must organize the relations of simultaneous oneness and manyness that comprise any social body. Manyness does generate a pluralism, say black faces and white faces, yet that manyness is never always divided, never nothing but manyness, and

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

193

oneness, whether that of person or collective, is never always indivisible, nothing but oneness, as if the same is all there is, as if the identity forged by parts could never be divided. Any face, any community, is always a composition. It is justice where the rhythms of these differences meet and coalesce, corrode, petrify, unify, and where the many and the one are most significantly embodied in the particular kind of sharing that is real, real in the here and now of some place, in a life that distinguishes this place from that, and that from the infinity of all possibilities. Justice forms the conduct that delivers sharing or fails to do so, indeed justice is that conduct, for good or ill. And because it is a virtue of the whole, it is the only virtue that can create a collective state of being that is at one with itself. All in all, being an encompassing virtue, justice present or justice absent expresses the mortal–moral relations of faces in any place, any community, just as do Crashes A and B, and Slavery A and B, in the everyday local worlds we have been examining. In this its responsibility has been to organize collective pathways for every face to step free from slavery, however well or poorly it has met this charge. It is, in our drama of retrospect, the early locus of affirmative action, a first surface of shared being and the paradigm that develops into a panoply of institutional remedies for past or present discrimination against minorities and women. Our examination of justice as the organization of shared being offers an opportunity to think about the triage stories as different expressions of equality, equity, the moral and mortal, the one and the many, and so on, an opportunity to think about the nature of community and its relation to justice and value. Slavery A, which incorporates a protocol derivative of Crash A, raises a question about whether the moral knots of history can be untangled by flat technical interventions, in this case by a mechanical calculus that is universally applied. The great advantage of Crash A triage – a combination of deliberate haste and fairness – is due precisely to the fact that a plane crash is an accidental and immediate threat to life, in which rescuers know little and can respond to little except the conditions directly before them: injury and resources. All else is unknown and without bearing on the matters at hand. Crash A is in this respect an encapsulated episode, insulated from all knowledge except the presence of the moment and its bearing on what is already known about rescue. Its triage seems morally appropriate because its protocols respond to the needs of each face in such a way that failure to succeed can be understood to be a consequence of the limits imposed by contemporaneous circumstance, by encapsulation. In these

194

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

respects all rescue choices but one are technical. That exception is a moral one, the imperative that technical protocols be consistently applied for all faces. Crashes are unusual in that they are endogenous emergencies – self-contained and virtually without a history at the time except the crash. It is this that accounts for the shock of Crash B, where history does intrude upon crash endogamy, bringing with it an unwelcome complication of the one moral decision rescuers can routinely make. The question for us is whether a morality for the singular and detached condition of encapsulation can be transposed to the prosaic, occasionally dramatic, pervasively normalized social affairs of everyday life. Consider Slavery A, which reproduces Crash A triage but under different circumstances: Crash A pressures of time have been replaced by those of reconciliation, possible death by social reformation, and encapsulation by historical perspective. The two present a perspicuous and bizarre polarity, one that can only be understood by going through them. Slavery A is not entirely peremptory in the most brutal sense. It is concerned, as is all triage, with measure, with discriminating between probabilities, examining potential, the likelihood a face will in the future succeed in doing whatever it is s/he seeks to do. Although much more complicated, it is reminiscent in those details of Crash A, where victims were separated according to the tractability of their injuries: assessing and comparing the probability of recovery, seeking a clean account of any outcome under the auspices of some such query as “Can it (the saved life, the successful ex-slave) be done in this case?” More deeply, in both stories each face is left to serve as its own exhibit and whatever that reveals in its candidacy for selection. Educators and employers become behavioural siblings of rescuers, there to observe, as if onlookers, the qualities given off by each face. So it is accurate to say that in each story a certain attention is given to the evaluation of each face. It is a neutral attention, developed to establish that whatever is said of a face is said, as it were, by the face itself, by the candidate. The mandate of Stories A responders is to conduct themselves in such a way as to be able to assign to candidates themselves the responsibility for any results they (the responders) will record. But the conditions of Slavery A do not include the same narrowly focused knowledge as in Crash A. Slavery A is not the product of accident, it is not encapsulated, its details in history not abridged. Nor are officials literally saving lives. Indeed they are redirecting them. And they know all

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

195

this, could know. They could also know, or imagine, what is organizationally implicit in Slavery B: as a collective, black faces are not yet adequately prepared for – what should we call it? – a race race. In retrospect the solution proposed in Slavery A would not serve the ends of black pursuit of happiness or authentic shared being. Although for a moment it brings all faces together, its method – mechanical triage – subverts those ends by treating slavery as though an accident, virtually without a history. It thus ignores any responsibility to distinguish between the reasons for collective differences in results between black and white faces, even though it was white faces who created those disparities by constructing the pen. Furthermore, the plan does not reflect the fact that officials know the history, and although they know the turn toward shared being, they apply it only superficially: instead, framed by a commitment to technical calculus, the triage is unable to escape its own foundation as a system that requires formal equality and only formal equality. The absence in Slavery A of equity, of social context, only amplifies the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of unbalanced results. In its way, this design is perfectly impartial in averting the particularity of the face, just as Crash A triage does. But crash morality is not analogous to the specific conditions of slave freedom, either in their actual circumstances or their connection to the interests of shared being, because the plan conflates equality with equity, eliding the latter and thus legitimizing artificially generated rates of success and failure. Without equity, the purpose of equality of being – that it be shared – will whither and the pursuit of happiness remain out of reach for black faces. Even assuming official good intentions, in other words, the impartial, as in formal equality, can be inequitable, recalling for example the mundane “If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to make one for everybody,” which is to refuse to address the singularity of any instance at hand, much less its equitability.15 It is colour blind where colour is both at issue and determining in that to know the colour of the face in 1865 is to know the intrinsic disadvantage created by the triage it is. In the parts of life with histories, the morality of formal equality is simplistic because conduct can never be understood by taking it as a self-explicating reproduction, one that need only be observed to be known for what it is. Thus what was clean and fair in Crash A becomes clean and unjust when equity is ignored in situated history. The pen’s morality of constraint has been exchanged for a morality of indifference.

196

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

In Slavery B some adjustment is made for the difference in conditions between black and white faces. In order to fully examine it, and to draw out certain principles now concealed within all our stories, we need to think more extensively about sharing and how profoundly it is inscribed in the social.

VI The “us” is anterior to the “I,” not as a first subject, but as the sharing or partition that permits one to inscribe ‘I.’ (Nancy 1993, 72) Although anterior to I, the us is nevertheless not a first subject. Once again, this time in sameness (us), we find expression of the one and the many (us partitioning Is), here in a way that reveals both their distinctiveness and their complementarity. The plural precedes the singular, yet its precedence is not one of power. Rather, it is a consequence of the fact that in being a part the I, as with any part, needs that of which it is a part, in this case the us, to establish – “permit” – it to be itself in its nature. All is (us), the common place in which I exists and is partitioned as distinct. Without a commonplace (common place) there could be nothing that is one part (of the whole) yet also apart (from the whole) – an I – and it is in this sense that the common place is anterior. The I, being the neediest of all things, is then also the most equal, the I within the common place that permits I’s singularity, and without which I could not exist. I without a common place is otherwise entirely indistinguishable, faceless, beyond sharing, implying nothing, containing nothing, void. In other words, and drawing upon discussions above: • • • • • • •

Every one is the same, and every one is not the same. The same precedes the not same because the common place makes partition possible. This does not mean that same is first, but rather that it emits partition of the not same (I). The plural us is singular, the singular I plural. The singular us is also plural, the plural I also singular. These are independent of clock time. These characteristics constitute the kinetic transparency, proportion and inseparability of moving social parts within themselves and through the rhythms of the whole.

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

197

All this is dense and may seem irretrievably convoluted but should clear up as we proceed. The intent is to identify some parts of what is occasionally compressed as the one and the many and to offer a depiction of social actors in the middle of things in the world, actively participating among the simultaneously like and unlike, singular and plural, us and I. Indeed, the moral epiphany that follows from the face is just such a disclosure as it emerges in the other’s (common) mortality and (uncommon) particularity, a particularity that establishes the irreplaceable oneness, the I-ness, which together with its mortality shapes the other’s moral call. Other’s face changes in these ways for the one who approaches while, simultaneously, it does not change at all in its universality nor in its habitation of the common place. In the life-world of the whole these elements fluctuate in complex varieties of speed and place and identity as “We the people” collects singular I’s, all of whom deserve to pursue happiness as part of the us, as part of the same.16 We the people marks not the absence but the irrelevance of differences within the whole, marks a singularity of being in the happiness offered by what is good in itself – above all, perhaps, a collective dignity in life for all faces, dignity deserved equally by every face as part of the same, as the us that is anterior to and collects the plural aspects of the I. This is decisive. Dignity is not given to I by itself, nor does collective happiness amount to the sum of I happiness: “Justice is fulfilled in doing one’s best to contribute to the happiness and excellence of everyone in the polis and to that alone” (Vlastos 1995, 84). In the common place happiness is not equivalent to individual satisfaction. The aim is to provide the conditions of happiness not for one class but for the city as a whole. Whether or not this entails the concept of a city as an entity over and above the individuals who comprise it, at least it entails the idea of a man being prepared to subordinate his own interest to those of others. (Cross and Woozley 1964, 90) Published in 1964, the above is cryptically representative of Platonic political philosophy at the time (including its pronominal obsolescence) as it engages the issue of relations between a collective and its members. But what it proposes will be misleading if the claim that an individual should be prepared to subordinate one’s interest is interpreted to mean that the individual and city are born into polarity. Rather, each is part of the other and furnishes the other with an instance of plurality that can be hospitable

198

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

to opposition, indeed opposition that is probably inevitable and may even improve rather than endanger the common place. As we found in our discussion of the one and the many, the interest of I and us, self and others, self and community, may be complementary rather than antithetical – or, on the antithetical occasion, exemplifying that aspect of the one and the many. Any one, whether individual or community, is both plural and singular, and the one I has within its plural varieties its city, as does the city itself with its citizens. Furthermore, any many, a city, is a one unto itself, a singular us, in the particularity of its nature and history, while simultaneously it serves a multiplicity of citizen interests and other political forms of local life. Citizens and city are one us and can even have a single overriding interest that is shared by all Is, an external threat for example or dignity for all as above. (Then again, it may be riven to the point of disappearance). At risk of restating the obvious, the sources of sharing are social, as we have seen, even though the United States subscribes to an individual model of self-determination and liberty favouring “The ontological individual, prior to society” (Skrentney 1996, 27). John David Skrentney continues on to paraphrase Robert N. Bellah et al. (1985) to the effect that American “universalism [is] bound up in the idea of utilitarian individualism … not equality” (Skrentney 1996, 27). For them, America is I-ness and the I’s first subject is its utilities. Given what we have worked out so far – sharing of freedom and a being that is in the middle of life’s influences (the common place, us, I, justice) – it would be impossible and undesirable to create a place in the image of the ontological individual. But it is an ontology that is widespread and directly bears on the idea of sharing and the promise and so worth thinking about in greater detail as a means for theorizing affirmative action and the possibilities of its realization in collective conduct. To begin with, supremacy of individualism does not seem promising even as an ideal, because the “us” would be absent by implication if the I is prior. This could produce the city of pigs, a metaphor that depicts unrestrained individuals seeking their own happiness above all and willing to use force and fraud. And as we contemplate the other side of such a life, we should remember that any requirement that one receive justice is only possible if the commonplace us is anterior to the I because justice is ultimately a communal enterprise.17 This is to say that a justice derived from ontological I would (1) fail and (2) require self-contradiction, and we will see below that (2) seems to be the case.

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

199

Furthermore, an imperial I is simplistic because the acting individual, the person, exists within and moves among and between all of us and I and common place, creating for itself and others membranous passages that are variously an interior and an exterior, at times friendly, at times not, but in any case the boundaries of I and us and common place are porous, more transparent than opaque, and omnirelevant parts of the person, a person who is I and us and common place all at once. Although life is likely more complicated here, it is also more likely to be – dare we say it? – happy than in a world where each of its elements casts itself as sovereign and the other its possession, and yet inevitably an other to other whose designs are similarly utilitarian. Another flaw in the individualist model is the kind of community it will produce at its best: happy individuals with no interest in excellence. The actor is so privatized that the sociality of virtue – its commonality, collective contribution to Is, and communal good – is made irrelevant to self-interest. Even milder versions, those that promote individual autonomy for example, cannot account for cooperation as necessary, only as one choice among others. Moreover, its response to marginal kinds of behaviour – whether in politics, personal habits, the generically foreign or disreputable – is the tepid “live and let live” variety that shunts them into anonymous privacy, the community attic, where the issue can be hidden rather than publicly engaged. Autonomy as a principle of I-conduct does not become entangled in divisive argument of the kind that includes sociocultural risk for its participants. In these respects it is not moderate, as it first may seem, but rather careful, vaguely impartial, and prudently remote, however significant the issue.

VII Today’s justice has developed in the spirit of the ontological individual, embodied by the I-ness of proceduralism where “Certain individual rights are so important that they outweigh considerations of the general welfare or the will of the majority … [in favor of ] … a framework of rights, neutral among ends, within which persons can pursue their own conceptions of the good” (Sandel 1996, 290). The community’s role, detached from value, is thus made secondary and restricted to offering general procedures – frameworks – for expressions by Is of their individual choices.18 It is essential to recognize that neutrality is itself a position, a value – it is not neutral about neutrality – and as with all positions it includes some things and excludes others. In that respect neutrality is not inclusive. It

200

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

can omit whatever lies outside its own frame and so it omits what is not procedure. Among the not-procedures is substance, content, that although good in itself may nevertheless displace or be ambiguous regarding the fact and image of neutrality. From its position of voiceless transparency, proceduralist justice may seek to suppress that good in order to maintain an expressionless face in formulating what constitutes fair and effective public conduct. It must be noted also that in such a society it would be possible to abandon the promise – should we say neuter it? – if through neutral procedures individuals in their wisdom decide to do so. Indeed this may have been what happened after 1865, a silent default on the promise by Is and an impassive judiciary. In recent history, however, its precepts do seem to have surfaced in contemporary arguments centering around affirmative action and such usages as set-asides, preferences, quotas, merit, and diversity, among others. Affirmative action is meant to remedy two substantial (in both senses of the term) circumstances: the remaining effects of our history of slavery and contemporary racism or other forms of public exclusion. It exemplifies the problematic connection between the need for sharing and a neutral state because sharing is substantive, the communal/common place basis in social action from which us and I are partitioned. Yet contemporary neutral-but-individualist justice is expected to remain passive as it awaits the accumulated choices of Is, who are only one part of the original pairing of us and I. In this respect individual choice trumps communal need, claims to neutrality not to the contrary. The ontological I and proceduralism inhere in each other by default because the us has been absented from the common place. It is occasionally true that a counterbalance is valuable in social institutions, but the question here is whether in this instance it is obstructive, even polarizingly so given its intellectual restrictions, in responding to what is a communal promise that can only be fulfilled communally, through participation of both I and us. For the dispassionate procedural society, a sum of I-approvals is its touchstone and so also the limit for pursuing fairness and happiness. All else is officially beyond its compass, even to the point of deferring commitments that have been with us for well over a century. Consequently, we often find ourselves with a justice that not infrequently violates its own foundation by deciding upon, even creating, substantive results, as in Slavery B, while also acting as a procedural society along the triage lines of Slavery A when

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

201

rejecting affirmative action. (Recruitment that reaches out to all faces but must, then be triaged strictly in terms of finite ranking, has been found acceptable because it is proceduralist. But is this the kind of action that will fulfill the promise?) Thus we have a derived, often contradictory justice that is expected to be systematically passive but is also improvisatory if pressure to untangle something is insurmountable, when it usually leans nevertheless in favour of Is.19 There are numerous examples of leaners, but a significant early case that continues to influence affirmative action issues is Regents of the University of California v Bakke [438 U.S. 265 (1978)]. Bakke, a white face, was denied admission to medical school because some slots had been kept open for black faces as a remedial measure and to increase the number of black faces practicing medicine, of which there were few. But the Supreme Court rejected the university plan, citing among other reasons that “Remediating the effects of ‘societal discrimination’ [is] an amorphous concept” that may be “ageless in its reach into the past,” and “It is the individual who is entitled to protection against classifications.” (Regents … v Bakke at 1279) And not remediating, of course, consigns the unremediated to an ageless future of discrimination’s effects; to depict societal discrimination as “amorphous” – formless, unclassifiable – exhibits innumeracy in ignoring identities among the many and a leaning toward the ontological I, given the clear historical and statistical documentation of discrimination; further, such a leaning is made plain by the claim that it is the I that deserves protection. It is unquestionable that Is do deserve protection, not because they are unclassifiable but because they are also an us with a common history, because they are plural while being singular in their composition, and so in that respect no such choice as the court’s is needed. But that it made such a choice is determined by the blindness to the one in many of the ontological I. And yet the decision then went on to suggest that “diversity” would be an acceptable general criterion, apparently because it would include faces of all colours and could be accomplished on a “point” (race one factor among many) rather than “grid” (read quota) basis. Acceptance of a diversity criterion is not fully consistent with the ontology of I, which Justice Louis Powell made explicit in his opinion and which persists deeply as its subtext. Nevertheless diversity, apparently, is not amorphous, not historical nor statistical, and might pass muster as long as it can be made not to seem a set-aside and conceals its contradiction of the ontological I.20

202

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

A recent 5–4 Supreme Court decision, Grutter v Bollinger (539 US. 306), may seem at first to expand the acceptability of affirmative action in university admissions. But a second look at Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion for the court in this case reveals that its basic reasoning emulates Justice Powell in Bakke, often to the letter by quoting him, e.g., “All race conscious programs … must have a logical end point” (i.e., a sunset) and be “narrowly tailored.” The opinion thus preserves the legal status quo, and any victory for affirmative action resides only in the fact that Powell’s ground for Bakke were not overthrown. In any case all this generates confusion in the courts, schools, workplace, and other institutions, because the original good of fairness has been broken structurally into two parts when it comes to the administration of justice: (1) On one limb strict impartiality, which risks the flaw of neutrality’s substantial impotency (e.g., not responding to discrimination because it would be amorphous and ageless); (2) On another, accepting community actions that promote certain values as good in themselves – diversity here – which risk the right of Is to choose. And we find both in Bakke, a single case. Given the long term of this structural contradiction, it was quite possible that the system would gradually lean one way or the other, and it did. It came to identify itself with the impartiality of judicial liberalism and the part of the whole that is I. Continuing argument about affirmative action and other substantive matters such as the death penalty demonstrates that issues of value remain in other iterations of the tension between bureaucratic and substantive solutions, a tension that is endemic because their difference in kind is what constitutes the system as its foundation.21 Though they bring wide ranging results, proceduralism and substance are not complementary, and so they ensure delay, dilution, horse-trading, standoff, and so on, all a political result of their origin in a deeply contradictory ideology – self versus collective interest as to what is necessary and desirable in relations between faces and the means of justice.22 Justice is a communal virtue, and we are discovering as a result that virtue includes administration! It includes administration in the loose but very complicated sense of persons collecting their various parts, treating one another in certain ways including its own contradiction and administration in the not so loose but more complicated sense of community, large or small, as a culture, a division of labour, a history within which those persons live as the us and Is of the common place they turn out to be.

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

203

VIII If I am triaged and I survive, I will surely be happy, but the us of all faces, including mine, can only be happy if my survival was just, i.e., a consequence of good triage. But what of my happiness if I discover the triage was botched, that in the confusion I was assigned the wrong number? What if that became generally known? What if the person who deserved the number didn’t make it? All this is administrative. Does it deserve the comment “Justice was not done”? What does the beneficiary of the error think, the rescuers, those left behind? It was an administrative mistake and in its result was not a just triage. Was Slavery A an administrative mistake? Alternatively is it more like a Crash B in which protocol is not followed – here, the absence of a fair protocol? Good triage is not merely whatever Is approve but one that sustains the general welfare of all faces, the us that form the victims and rescuers of this and other crashes, indeed of all flyers and including the very repute of the place we live. If in fair triage I do not make the list I am likely inconsolable. I suffer that fact and ask myself all those questions that are without answer. Though struggling, a just I would not be unhappy if by that is meant I am dissatisfied because it was unfair, that my fate had been determined by an inauthentic standard or a violation of a fair one. Proceduralism worked here, but it worked not to preserve my right to choose but to preserve the common place of justice, because triage is one instance of shared suffering, a fundamental dimension of shared being, and so it is not the proceduralism of utilitarian individualism. If some cannot be saved, our regret – and it is profound – is for perishing Is, profound because triage encompasses a double loss: Is no longer able to embody themselves or (the) us, themselves here being the particular singularity of that face, a face at this moment all too mortal yet also moral, possibly even pacifying, in the way the need for triage was met by the us, by the (plural) multiplicity of a (singular) common membership. In all this, however, it is not Is who have been responsible for the protocol itself, whether followed or not. Nor are happiness and unhappiness created by Is but by a collective invention, triage, in which risk, suffering, life and death are shared among faces and ministered by a team of rescuers. Well, you might say, repeating the problem, sometimes we cannot do what is good in and of itself for all faces, it is impossible to cancel out

204

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

slavery because it is history, so the prescription fails. But this is to commit the individualist fallacy that interrupts rescuers in Crash B, as well as the formal equality fallacy of Slavery A. We may not be able to do the same for each and every face, as in accident triage, but in that circumstance we do the best we can to set out the idea of triage and then to achieve it, which is to say crash triage is thought fair and fairness is good in itself.23 The criterion of sharing does not, because it could not, include identical treatment of all faces. Nor should it in some circumstances, as we will discover below. What it does include is just consideration of all faces, as in fair accident triage. It is significant that one criterion for the justness in Crash A, treatment first for those most likely to survive and then for those least likely, is founded on the idea that shared being encompasses each of collective life’s occasions, including those that make us suffer. Slavery A, however, exhibits no readiness to accept that white faces ought to share in suffering the practical exigencies that attend sudden freedom – too few places in schools and employment, say, and too little preparation of black faces – even though they have been, directly or indirectly, responsible for them. All faces are made formally equal in Stories A, as though equity is not a requirement of emancipation. Slavery A is a debased imitation of Crash A, debased because it takes place in entirely different circumstances: slavery was no accident. Slavery A already includes a differentiated history and depicts contemporaneous circumstances that offer some opportunity for equity. Yet none is provided. Slavery A exchanges a morality of oppression for a morality of indifference. Treated as allegory, which it is, Slavery A raises certain questions: Is it fair to say that although today there are no slaves, slavery is not over if some black faces live in circumstances that are consequences of those depicted by Slavery A? Is it fair to say that even if slavery is over, failure to live up to the original promise of freedom – shared being, including shared suffering when necessary for the general good – calls for succeeding generations to fulfill the promise? Today certain elements do exemplify in part the promise and emancipation: There are no pens, for example (just ghettos and prisons whose inhabitants are often virtually all black); no known lynchings; certain visible increments of the inclusive impulse in public accommodations, wider and

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

205

more incisive public discourse, increasing income and occupational mobility among black faces. And yet contingencies persist, contingencies emanating from the colour of the face, uncertain opportunities for the pursuit of happiness, and pervasive questions of an authentic connection between the moral and mortal such as discrepancies in the death penalty. Activities in the common place express other concerns in contemporary guises of various depth: affirmative action, human rights, civil rights (are these the same?), false and valid class consciousness and how to distinguish them; who is arrested and who goes to prison, red-lining, schools, gerrymandering, genealogy, the public and/or/versus the private, the adequacy of political representation, and so on. Furthermore, equity in such matters as pay, housing, and schools exists only in pockets, and though it develops in some cases it also regresses in the many contradictions among courts, banks, politics, and other institutions. Thus slavery, if we include its effects, is not over and “We the People,” the Constitution’s deceptively inclusive beginning,24 can seldom be spoken without taint of hypocrisy, then or now. It has been 137 years since the pen but black and white faces, though more accessible to one another in civic culture, are not reconciled. In the common place too many black faces are marginal – marginal in employment, marginal in their morbidity, marginal in the tone of their social relations with white faces, in their greater risk of humiliation, and so on and on through life to the end, which itself is too often premature. What is to be done? To determine that, we can begin by thinking of the present in terms of the mixtures of common place, us, and I. They are dynamic, rearranging themselves in their content, proportions, and relationships to form different eras, particular places. It is now a bromide that a modern society is one in which the past is, well, passé. The contemporary is understood to have succeeded it in some broken/refractory line, its common place to be the present moment between what came before and what will be the future, indeed a future that will be us-created and thus singular in the sense that history and tradition are not thought to be a natural part of that life. In these conditions difference can only become a copresent multiplicity of pluralities, pluralities coexisting within that plural as individuated Is. The “diversity” – plurality – of students in the contemporary affirmative action university is one good example here, a common place where many faces cohabit in an inevitable demonstration of particular biographies among the relics that have survived the contemporary break. In this society the

206

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

us consists in its multiplicity, in this sameness of differences, its plurality also its singularity, its singularity that of being plural. It is conceived as a modern place, a self-creating place, where the modern will absorb the relic and then recreate itself by either reinterpreting subjects or giving way to some successor.25 Recent court gains in student recruiting for diversity, should they continue, suggest a kind of mild triage success for black faces (depending upon what counts in the end as diversity). But all in all, this appears to be an ahistorical era insensitive to both slavery and the promise because they inhabit an impossible separation of distance, a Powellian distance which clears the way for many Is and the individuated collectives that imitate them, as the common place. In this common place, black faces are not thought to be embodiments of slavery or the promise. Beginning with the Supreme Court, contemporary resistance to the “ageless reach into the past” leaves slavery as the furniture of another world and the promise a desiccated incentive of doubtful power.

IX We are now in a position to better understand the idea of a deep promise as a moral requirement that affirms shared being, affirmation that is especially significant in periods that seem deaf to the call, to its necessity. Deep promises are the collective’s traditions as they depict a future in history for a community of faces. Unlike promises transacted among persons, deep promises constitute a sociocultural identity, whether in retrospect or prospect, and are necessary for the collective to be itself: to be exemplary, in its everyday practices, of some particular nature in content that is its own.26 In our case the promise promises not merely to open the pen but to become inclusive, to include all our singularities and pluralities as parts of the whole, where we will affirm equality and equity in our practices. It is left to justice to organize their relation in this life-world of division and unity as they nest within accidents, slaveries, rescues, liberations, promises, techniques, etcetera, not least in the “system” of justice itself, including all its guises and deconstructions. To pursue happiness, to actually pursue it, may be inspired by proclamation and declaration but begins in what follows as the conduct of everyday life. It begins with the opening of the pen, the first juncture where behaviour meets principle, where justice lives as the place to interrogate the

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

207

connections between value and real forms of conduct in relation to equality, equity and happiness.27 It is obvious that a former slavery which slips into discrimination is unjust in terms of the promise. This is to say that what affirms principle or any substance, whether it be freedom, pursuing happiness, nativism, or whatever, is action; affirming action is necessary for principle to make an appearance in the life-world as one element of the common place. An affirmative action is conduct that performs a collective promise in that it reaffirms in some act whatever it is that the promise promises. It may not always be able to actualize the promise (voting by black faces was not permitted everywhere until about one hundred years after passage of the Eleventh Amendment), may not bring its substance into existence, but betokens its good faith by generating conduct that demonstrates its principle. In that sense it comports with its promise – it is explicit good faith – even as the promise remains yet to be fulfilled. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education (347 US 483), for example, can be understood to reject separate but equal because that practice fails to perform the promise, and to have fairly well succeeded in making it happen, but whether “With all deliberate speed” remains a question. And yet the reasoning in Brown, in its history and reception, appears to have affirmed or performed that promise even where segregation remained the case and deliberate speed was not to be found. Thus, affirmative action is not dreaming a promise, speculating on it, or simply hoping that history will somehow achieve it. Affirmative action fails exactly to the degree it does not bear fruit in real practices that demonstrate commitment to the promise, practices that live the promise even as the promise has not yet materialized. In this what we have come to call affirmative action is true of all principle, whatever its content. Today, ignoring or forgetting black faces as embodiments of slavery and the promise are disaffirmations in that they do not participate in the agency offered and needed to breathe life into principle. This is not a matter of means and ends, either. The end, equity in university admissions, for example, includes the actions affirming its necessity. This is true for any principle. As a practical matter, and whatever the pros and cons or popularity of specific policies now collectible under the rubric affirmative action, an authentic commitment to shared being requires its expression in explicit affirming action – policy action, legal action, interpersonal action, action in the common place – which is consonant with that commitment and thus implies shared being.

208

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Action – conduct, expression, doing – is required of commitment, which would otherwise be hollow if not self-contradictory.28 As deep promises materialize in communities, so does the bond of the general will. This bond includes but extends beyond the kind that exist within families, between friends, and between localities and nationstates. This bond is the particular substance of shared being as a particular quality of place, a quality whose resemblance can be found in and to collect particular kinds of families, particular kinds of friendship, particular kinds of neighbourhoods, particular kinds of politics, particular kinds of justice, particular kinds of collective and individual self-expression. It is a bond not reducible to I-autarchies or us-majoritarians. There are many common places. Good ones, however they may differ otherwise, discover and act on the ethical epiphany of the face, in the substance that forms and is affirmed by their conduct.

NoteS 1 We run into an inevitable limit of discursive writing here, in which it is made to seem (falsely) that we are attending to one distinct phase of some periodized chronology of crash, face, recognition, abyss, etc. But the aporia of freedom is not a “property” of the scene. Rather, it inhabits the scene as a sudden and normless suspension of thinking as usual in which an abyss clears out space for some significant apprehension previously unrecognized. Epiphany exhibits certain features of aporia, and for all we know that may have been his intent when Levinas (1969) declared the nature of the face. In any case aporia is not a puzzle or problem in the standard sense because it is not subject to or resolved by calculation. It is a stoppage of thinking as usual. 2 That we are now moral does not of course guarantee affirmatively moral action. Moral action can be immoral. 3 In rescue, speed is important. But in other conditions force of circumstance can be drawn out, as for example in the school desegregation phrase “All deliberate speed.” 4 I have glossed the grounds for this distinction for clarity’s sake here. That issue will be taken up as we discuss fairness below. 5 What follows is an analysis of possibilities that could attend the end of slavery, with the understanding that many have not been realized. Evidence that the promise has not been realized is pervasive in the voluminous descriptive literature that depicts black social, economic, and cultural

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

6 7

8

9

10 11 12

209

struggle in both history and the present, and will not be rehearsed here because our aim is to formulate a theory of affirmative action. An incisive examination of these issues and data can be found in Andrew Hacker’s new edition of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (2003). Other such references include George M. Frederickson (1977); Orlando Patterson (1996); Thernstrom (1996); and Thernstrom (1997). Also see Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West (1996) for something a little different. In my opinion, with the exception of the Thernstroms, their materials support the view (not shared by them, necessarily) that we remain in a period that can justifiably be called the end of slavery. Whether or not one chooses that view does not diminish the need to address its conditions, theorized for what they are if we are to adequately formulate what needs to be done now to realize the promise. Does it need to be said that equal in principle is hardly the equality promised? See the discussion of justice that follows. Obviously, these stories did not happen, then or now. They are meant to sharpen life conditions in order to make certain analytic points about the nature of equality and its relation to the needs of life, as I will attempt to demonstrate below. I will also address a different notion of equality, one amplified by the idea of equity. Ordinarily the distinct incompatibility of value as good in itself and as utility is defended at all costs. In this situation, however, we find ourselves in extremis, within a conflation of the two for those faces who confronted self-development as simultaneously a means and an end. Although these can become an object of pursuit, the way in which this valuation occurs is almost always instrumental, whereas happiness is conceived to reside in what is good in itself, and pursued for its own sake, which is the way I use it here. Compare Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (1992, 1214b, 10–25) and Nichomachian Ethics (1999, 1097a, 15–21). “Being” has come to have several different meanings: (1) as that which is given in all human possibility and limit, (2) as entity, and (3) as I develop it here. See Heidegger (1982, 342–4). By “reasonable” I mean in a way that could be worked out as intelligible and appropriate by those concerned (most likely the community). See below for an explication of this. Avishai Margalit (1996) illuminates this idea, as well as Michael Sandel (1996, 90). They offer a counterweight to the emphasis on individual rights that has come to dominate the (usually liberal, philosophically speaking) work on what is required for human justice.

210

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

13 There are many groups who do not fully participate in American shared being and its promises. I have limited the narrative to the story of African American exclusion in order to gain substantive focus in the development of the argument. Once developed, presumably, a theory of affirmative action would lead to a variety of sociopolitical possibilities for these groups. 14 Judge Johnson’s decision was not law until he made it. And even then it was not statute because it did not replace the state’s authority. Yet it had to be followed. 15 I have not considered bad faith at all in this paper in order to examine the principles taken up most directly. That it could exist, did exist, and does exist is likely true but would not illuminate the principles themselves. 16 We and us can have different senses (we initiates, us receives), but I ignore that here. 17 Among the classic virtues, in fact, it is the only generically communal one. 18 The most widely influential writing taking this position, and it is considerable, is John Rawls (1971). Kieran Bonner (1997, 176–200) offers an incisive examination of the valorization of choice in community. Unlike Rawls, Stanley Raffel (1992, 86–117) attempts a nonneutral conception of justice. Maurice Blanchot (1993, 303) describes neutrality as “One who does not enter into what he says.” 19 The notion of “insurmountable pressure” is of course a gloss and deserves attention in its own right. I am thinking of the political and emergency kinds here. 20 There have been speculations about the origin of this contradiction. One has it that Justice Powell worked it out as a compromise that would keep affirmative action alive. 21 We should point out that affirmative action can be unpopular even among black faces, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In Grutter (at 123–4), he says the university “Cannot have it both ways” but must choose between either diversity or excellence. In another case (515 US, at 241), he calls affirmative action “noxious” and an instance of “governmentsponsored discrimination.” (Note also that some who remain committed to shared being nevertheless resist certain forms of affirmative action because they are thought un- or counterproductive, although this does not appear to be the reasoning of Justice Thomas.) 22 Justice includes more than the judiciary, of course, among them collective traditions that affect development of law, legislatures, and patterns of everyday practice such as social stratification, social mobility, immigration, the tone of interpersonal contacts, and so on. 23 The import of “Do the best we can” may be easily overlooked unless we think of it as seeking excellence and following virtue – arete as the Greeks would have it.

the just necessIty of AffIrmAtIve ActIon

211

24 Deceptive in two ways: black faces were not thought to be persons at the time, and when they were they were not treated as “We.” 25 Postmodernism has been depicted as successor to modernism but also its branch. I am satisfied that they do exhibit similarities and differences, whichever designation is given. 26 I am simply going to assert here that any useful idea of affirmative action cannot depend on some advance stipulation of definition, conceptualization, or policy. In the words of Wittgenstein (1958, 3) “That … concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea … of the way language functions. It is the idea of a language more primitive than ours.” 27 There are several competing ideas of happiness, such as communitarianism, liberalism, and others that we cannot examine, our topic being equality and equity and the conditions and actions of their affirmation. Their criteria loosely correspond to our distinction between us and I. See Charles Taylor (1995, 181–204). 28 This expression can be problematic and a source of argument with regard to effectiveness, its adequacy as a representation of shared being, and so forth, but to surrender to these difficulties is also to surrender the commitment. Finally, it should be noted here that the usage “affirmative action” has been treated throughout as itself action that exemplifies and thus implies shared being, even among those who might find the concrete words unfamiliar.

ReFeReNCeS Aristotle. 1992. Eudemian Ethics, 2nd ed. Translated by M. Woods. Oxford: Clarendon Press. – 1999. Nichomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. Translated by T. Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Bellah, R., et al. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper and Row. Blanchot, M. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bonner, K. 1997. Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the Urban– Rural Debate. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Cross, R., and A. Woozley. 1964. Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Inquiry. London: Macmillan. Frederickson, G. 1977. The Comparative Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gates, H.X., and C. West. 1996. The Future of the Race. New York: Knopf. Hacker, A. 2003. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York: Scribners.

212

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Heidegger, M. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by A. Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Margalit, A. 1996. The Decent Society. Boston: Harvard University Press. Nancy, J-L. 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Translated by B. McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Patterson, O. 1996. The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in Americas “Racial” Crisis. New York: BasicCivitas Books. Raffel, S. 1992. Habermas, Lyotard and the Concept of Justice. London: Macmillan. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Boston: Harvard University Press. Sandel, M. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent. Boston: Belknap Press. Skrentney, J.D. 1996. The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Supreme Court of the United States. 1954. Brown v Board of Education, 347 US 483. – 1978. Regents of the University of California v Bakke, 438 US 265. – 2003. Grutter v Bollinger, et al., 539 US 306. Taylor, C. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Boston: Harvard University Press. Thernstrom, S., and A. Thernstrom. 1997. America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible. New York: Simon and Schuster. Vlastos, G. 1962. “Justice and Equality.” In Social Justice, edited by R. Brandt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. – 1995. Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. London: Macmillan.

12

NOTES ON CIRCULATION

Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other. Simmel 1997, 171

We connect, and we separate, in expression of a right granted by our humanity, always presupposing the other in whatever particular way. We can imagine that presupposing one another in this transit back and forth among connection and separation forms a primitive circle, as a one “follows” an other and the other precedes the follower, while simultaneously the other also follows the one, and so on in transits of separation and collection that repeat and repeat, a one being one while simultaneously being also an other to another one, each both following and being followed, connecting and disconnecting, separating and coming together in their twoness and their oneness, their oneness being that each is constituted within the infinitude of human circularity. This infinity, moreover, is not simply a sum of onenesses but rather a round of transitive compositions that are both specifically identifiable in themselves as well as a collective realization of humanity’s grant, the capacity to presuppose. Coming together/separating is not merely the gathering and dissolution of singularities but, as Simmel suggests with “presupposing,” a continuing anticipation of transitivity, an oriented coming together into a collective oneness of onenesses as well as an oriented separating into distinct onenesses, then coming together again and separating again, and then Peter McHugh, “Notes on Circulation” (unpublished paper, 2007).

214

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

again, within that circle of back and forth, but always within the ambit of circulation. These alterities, being always in some relation of transitivity, of simultaneous mobility within the form of that encirclement, cannot be construed as independent of each other, however distinct, individuated, particular, or extraordinary they may be. One instance of circulation’s persistence is the transitory experience of having been “thrown” into the world, a world that had come before, and of awakening to that fact and to its facticity as pregiven, for the very first time (Heidegger 1962, 219ff ). Thrownness provokes a recognition of the unvoluntary yet motile discovery of having entered a place that is already under way, a first transition, as it were, where first is a measure not of time but of primacy, of the given, as a condition of existence. Thrownness thus initiates recognition of social fact, an expression of the one encompassing circle of separating and coming together, understood to collect the twoness of oneself and alterity in a relation the substance of which is being in the middle of things. Circulation enacts this fact and possibility, all the while narrating itself to the vernacular as “the meaning of life,” that is, as the story of human movement, development, change, and, of course, its decomposition. Indeed, thrownness is equivalent to social birth insofar as it is the origin of the understanding that coming together and separating are an inevitable form of the life-world. Death, too, often thought to be birth’s successor as the final or ultimate or metamorphic transition, nevertheless “lives a human life” (Alexandre Kojeve, cited in Strauss 2000, 91) in these very respects: in the per se of its incarnate and universal alterity, an alterity that always arrives but never departs; in the now segregated and utter singularity of its host; in its place in memory, desire and suffering; and as one transition among the horizon of all transitions around and within which the meaning of life is construed. (I use death here in its limited sense, to exclude dying, which is altogether distinct because in dying desire has not been extinguished.) Because the dead can no longer presuppose the other, death is for them a kind of “ontological graduation” (Strauss 2000, 98) from circulation and transition. The dead do not go, just as death never departs them, and so coming and presupposition of the other will cease, in harmony with the decoupling fissure in the circle of coming and going and the vanished other of presupposition. In this, death represents both the circulation and stasis that are simultaneously joined as one narrative occasion, life and dying having come (circulated) to an end (stasis) in which each cannot be

notes on cIrculAtIon

215

understood without the other, and furthermore presupposed by the other, thus demonstrating anew that stasis is part of circulation. In this respect death itself, as distinct from dying, becomes a mere formality, a mere formality that follows upon dying, because it is a terminal transition in which presupposition, and indeed participation in the language that is life, are impossible except for those who remain to witness it. Death marks a final transition as one between experience and void. It is also a “mere formality” in its universality as the part that, although it brings stasis, always returns (circulates). It is eternal, a form, in its collection of the transitory with the intransitory. Thus, however dramatized, we need to recognize that birth and death are not so special, yet also not so insignificant, in that they exemplify again the indestructability of both the mundane as well as particular being-with and being-absent that is circulation, the simultaneity of death’s being everywhere in its visits to singular lives. In these particular embodiments – in their distinct and oriented ways of assembly, dispersion, expiry – they constitute and reconstitute the real life substance of all thrownness and all death. They are in themselves the authentic moments of existence, even in finitude, that are always mortally manifest within the ceaseless perpetuity of circulation. (It should be noted that although a life comes to an end in death, death continues to circulate so long as life continues. This is another sense in which death is part of life.)

Stasis It is tempting to think of stasis as the antithesis of circulation, a period when “Nothing happens most of the time,” as Gould describes certain periods in paleontology (Gould 1988, 16–23). But reproduction, generation, descendancy, do continue as a kind of movement in place even during the eons when, according to Gould, nothing happens because his fossils do not change. But circulation’s existence is not limited to change, whether it be change in significance or direction, large or small. Rather, it is constituted in phenomena of which it could be said, as in Heraclitus, that “These having changed around are those; those having changed around are these” (Heraclitus Fragment, 88.) That is, circulation brings together and separates whatever is not complete in itself, whatever contradicts self-sufficiency – whatever, in its coming and going, needs some alter to become itself (Nancy 1988,

216

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

137). Human generations, for example, whether fossil or current, include (these) children who in turn become (those) parents as they beget (these) children, whence the cycle continues on through another generation, and so on, each a transition, each an instance of circulation and, equally, each generation incomplete in itself – a parent inconceivable without child, any child’s being understood in the context of having been parented. Moreover, while repeated identical transition may seem frozen, it remains, no less than repetition itself, another transition. (And, as postmodernists amply demonstrate by performing them, such repetitions can be made interesting.) The only stasis, really, is circulation itself, the outer part of which never moves and is without need, being complete in itself: a conduit without a history or a future or desire. It conveys. It does not advocate. In any continuous image of time, it would be that which never changes and never reproduces. It simply is. Similarly, one version of eternal return is thought ominous if not terrifying because it premises return as perpetuity of sameness, a kind of live-in stasis within mini-infinities of continuous repetitive circles that, though serial, do not add, subtract, multiply, or divide, as if petrified descendants of Gould’s fossils. And yet, if such repetition is terrifying, it has changed direction by virtue of that fact: difference here between individual and fossil, both being real and circulating while also suspended within the stasis of some burden. Hence the form of circulation endures. One might also say, with Plato, that “Time is [merely] a moving image of eternity” (Plato Timaeus, 37d). In our terms, though nothing happens, time does, on and through the fossil and the clerk.

Circulation’s Form As we begin to think of everyday life more concretely – of vehicles on the street, stock exchanges, greetings, blood, money, transit systems, labour, marriage, immigration, assault, and so on and on – we begin to think of such actual trafficking as an infinity of possibilities that has come now to be an infinity some of whose possibilities have come to be realized in transit; that is, some possibilities actually appear as conduct. In this they have become finite representations of the two elements of circulation: (1) the familiar idea of circulation as movement among realizations or embodiments, and (2) circulation between the very notion of possibility itself and of existencein-the-world, a coming together in the kind of oneness with which we began.

notes on cIrculAtIon

217

Thus, circulation is not simply movement among embodiments, as if duplicating the ready-made, but between the heterogeneity of possibility and its realization in embodiments. This is to say that circulation is not only the everyday trafficking of realization alone but the form in which that fact and the not-embodiment of possibility coexist and which constitute one corpus: a continuous relation between the possible and the real, where the possible is as real as the real. Circulation is itself, in our context, born within a relationship of alterities, the alterity between the everyday and the infinite. Furthermore, to live in the world one needs to understand this form, however primitively or unarticulated, as that into which one has been thrown as itself an act of transition. In this respect, the capacity for imagination – here, to “know” that what does not exist may or may not come to pass in existence – and to know that some of these passages are not, will not, cannot be known in advance, even though they can be recognized for what they are if and when they appear in conduct. As we come to this point we participate in all the rich, uncertain, and (theoretically) unlimited beads of transition, where we discover that its nature in any particular case does not originate within its own inherent interiority as if by magic but rather from the dialectic coexistence (circulation) of possibility, infinity, and the process of realization. Transit is unintelligible except as descendant of circulation’s genesis in the infinity of possibility and the world of finite realizations, alterities whose coming together and separating will excite life to movement, to passage, to change, and will do so both as existents of the social (living in the world) and the sociality of the nonexistent (the real potential of possibility). This is circulation’s form, the very being of social movement, transition, and stasis, within which are embodied all the many social transitions compressed by Simmel’s brief comment and which may be a right but also a need.

Ambiguity, Confusion Imagine coming upon letters of the alphabet strewn without pattern in a field. On finding them we may be surprised because they do not belong by their nature in the scene the way trees and grasses do nor does their (dis)arrangement confirm some presupposed other, as might a billboard blown down by winds. But could there be circulation here? Could [letter/?] become [letter/sign], a sensible sign as well as an empty letter? Suppose we discover some person with an interest in bemusement observing from

218

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

behind a tree, in which case the original [letter/?] itself could become socialized here as the subject and the whole scene therefore entirely selfreferential as in [letter/?>bemusement] and a transition from enigma to some created or causal relation, exemplifying a standard sociolinguistic parse. “Bemusement” could thus make sense and an adequate analysis support it as a reportable tale of transition. But does that matter? What would be settled with regard to the nature of circulation? Is circulation synonymous with sense, virtually in thrall to sense in that what does not make sense cannot circulate? If what does not make sense is “nothing,” why would it be banished in this case but not Gould’s if it generates a question that expresses transit? Imagine some group of “sense theorists” (we all know them) and when taking up the problem being asked whether they have ever observed senselessness or transited some senseless encounter. Their certain laughter would only reenforce the possibility that such a query is itself not senseless but simply dim-witted. (Why bother to ask?) Moreover, anything authentically senseless … well, what could be authentically senseless? Possibly gibberish, but then its sense would be that, would be what it is – a close relative of the stasis family, perhaps, but not senseless at all because it gives off an understanding of gibberish and thus expresses a coming–separating encounter. Gibberish travels because circulation is independent of the affirmative notions of sense and the negative notions of nonsense characteristic of collective exchange. Circulation carries transition and thus carries both sense and nonsense as they are in transit (hence the survival of cultural “junk” along with treasure, for example). In this its compass is fixed, singular, self-evidently uncritical, because it does not advocate anything with regard to what it already includes. Being part of the whole, it conveys any and all of the whole’s transitions, that is, any and all exemplifications of its own dialectic of possibility–realization. This is a limit that is selective but also indiscriminate, including as it does every little thing and every big thing that comes and goes, and so – metaphorically speaking – where circulation is concerned all its inhabitants might as well be metonymy. In circulation’s habitat, a “vertical” or interruptive substitution will not be found. Nor could it develop retrospectively, in its inexhaustible instances. Rather, interruption lies in (real) possibility that comes to pass in embodiment, where it will have initiated not just its own realization but a place within the coming together and separating of circulation’s alterities, “thrown” in its own way

notes on cIrculAtIon

219

as it moves from the infinite or possible to the finitude of the existent and presupposition and transitivity. Were circulation a person, it would be thought both gross and fecund – without taste, fear, or parsimony, its nature a vast fount of moving worlds without category, a circus of possibility and action. But it is not a person, not a “figure”; it is their carrier and thus, in itself, unmythical.

ReFeReNCeS Gould, S.J. 1988. “The Case for the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone.” Natural History 97 ( January): 16–24. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Nancy, J-L. 1988. The Experience of Freedom. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Simmel, G. 1997. “Spatial and Urban Culture.” In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Theory, Culture and Society, edited by D. Frisby and M. Featherstone, 137–86. London: Sage. Strauss, J. 2000. “After Death.” Diacritics 30 (3): 90–103.

13

INTIMACY

History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept. G.W.F. Hegel A mysterious intimacy … grips our entire being as if there were no distance at all and every encounter … were an encounter with ourselves. Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hegel is writing of history as Vast Philosophical Scale, but we know that his Spirit is a lived concept. Gadamer is writing of art, but we know that our being lives as another picture within its mysteries. Our writing is an attempt to depict and exemplify how this could be.

Preliminaries Intimacy is a term, an action, a relation whose usage and subjects are both familiar and promiscuous, namely love, friendship, sex, marriage, depth, close association, searching, and even the skin and what it wears. It will be the argument here that although intimacy is said to inhabit these and other grammars, in life’s practice it is not unusual that on some such occasions, happy marriages and old friendships included, intimacy is not to be found. And if it can be absent among any and all the various occasions of “close Peter McHugh, “Intimacy” (unpublished paper, 2009).

IntImAcy

221

association,” it follows that none could be said to require intimacy insofar as its absence does not cause the relation to dissolve or be called into question. Similarly, that relation itself could not account for intimacy’s presence. Rather, intimacy leads a life of its own, as one immediately encounters in a dictionary: Intimate. (1) v, late Latin past part of intemare, to make known. Intimate. (2) adj, Latin superlative of intimus, inward, innermost. Intimacy. The state of being intimate. We have intimacy as (1) a virtual announcement, (2) a virtual concealment, and (3) a gloss. Although these are of course different parts of speaking, they may nevertheless cohabit, suggesting that the intimate state of being is both inward and the sort of outward action that is made known, however indirectly, by intimation. And what, then, are noun-intimates, the selves who are intimates? What do they do, feel, know? What kind of human boundary is it that divides, then lives within, both the inside and outside of a close social relation? And just what is the innermost of such a relation? Is the innermost, already a mediation, accompanied by yet another, this time to deliver its public appearance? Or does it never show itself? To possess a nature of its own means that intimacy constitutes a distinct order of discourse. The dictionary glossing just noted, for example, is not accidental but a revealing epiphenomenon of intimacy deserving examination for what it suggests about intimacy itself and not just another demonstration of the vagaries of ostensive definition. For all we know, intimacy may at root, on its own and by its very nature, resist representation, in effect occasioning the ellipses by which a dictionary can only become one more manifestation of its subject. Furthermore, intimacy as a social actor, as an oriented course of action, may exist within and “know” both the announced or public part of a relation as well as its unannounced innermost interior, participating in this process in a plurality of dimensions that may or may not be integral or contradictory or only juxtaposed, yet through which intimacy can be sustained because its ways simply are not constituted, and cannot be understood, in terms of the logic of a calculus. To this point we have been wrestling with the lexical as a means to approach intimacy. Why not treat these difficulties, the very resistance we encounter, not as an accident or insufficiency but a result of the very nature

222

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

of intimacy – a portent or sign that suggests we relax preoccupation with the lexical in favour of the spaciousness of language, where we will no longer find ourselves among the quandaries of the “dictionary position,” as it were, and where calculation’s brittle restraints could no longer obstruct our understanding of intimacy’s fluent interior dance. To do so would put us in good company, the 93rd Fragment of Heraclitus, to wit: The oracle does not say and it does not hide. It gives a sign. “... Does not say and does not hide …” Apparently the oracle does not announce but does not conceal either. And yet it does act. It gives a sign, an emanation that does not discourage anticipation of something not yet known, something now anonymous, which may nevertheless be accessible, intelligible, salient – something present after all, that would otherwise have remained hidden. Can we imagine that all this suggests a prospective intimate order, an innermost that is enigmatic though not secret, in a world of substance and language? It may not say – it is a reticent innermost to be sure and easily overlooked among the many regimes of appearance in the world. But can it be intimated through its signs and thus also confirm a place among the not-in-so-many-words poems, paintings, pantomimes, and the like of the life-world? While intimacy does not narrate itself in the way that, say, the institutions of marriage and friendship narrate, does it radiate? Could it be apprehended in the images and sonorities of its own intimation, even as it never directly shows itself? To begin thinking about these questions it is necessary that we first briefly address the standard form of representation in order to help in apprehending what intimacy may be.

Standard Representation In addressing reality, to follow the standard form of representation is to name the essence of an object and then to reflect it. This is a simplification, but no matter how complicated they become, standard cause–effect relations will express strains of that Platonic correspondence of copy to original as the criterion in offering evidence. For intimacy, however, think of a phenomenon that cannot be true or false: that is without an essence that must be shared by all its instances (it does not have “properties,” conduct “proper to” it in all cases) and that contains no rules by which intimacy can be taught, even though it is reasonable to imagine that it could be learned through its examples. Needless to say, actual intimates understand it by whatever

IntImAcy

223

name. Another way to put this is that intimacy is not mechanistic, and so a mechanistic corroborative test would fail to be isomorphic; that is, the test assumptions would not coincide with those we are developing for intimacy.1 The purpose of these comments is not criticism except to suggest that phenomena which resist representation will offer their own mysteries, but not those of denotation, because they are not the kind of puzzles that metric solutions could do away with.

Innermost We begin with an actor conceived to possess an innermost interior and a face-to-face sociality which together constitute the basic elements of intimacy. The innermost is an order more opaque than other common sense layers of embodiment because, as we have begun to note, it is not itself public, as are a face, biography, or even the apparent personality and psychological traits we think of as belonging to the human interior. The innermost is labyrinthine and invisible, mixing the residues of however many hours of experience, however many transformations of those hours and in what order, however many directions and redirections of desire and the various fates of its particulars, however many endowments, and in whatever proportion for good or ill, of nature, chance, and occult esoterica. Furthermore, these elements are continuously on the move among countless interstices and transitions amongst people and circumstance, changing in shape, import, and colouration, always within the sensibility of its own aura, an aura that intimates the irresistible draw of some resonant center. Finally, and most significant, given that intimacy is a relation, it will include all this × 2 or more (intimates) + the inevitable textural transformations that occur as the parts of these histories converge and separate, generating a formidably transformed architecture of being, intelligible to members yet beyond all general powers of totalizing description. We can, however, seek an informative analogue to the innermost by working up a hypothetical example. Imagine a close companion gently asking, “Who are you … who, truly, are you?” Few today would understand the question to be asking, “What are you thinking about?” because, though thinking is an interior activity, it would be too narrow a response to a more encompassing question. One who believed herself inhabited by soul, whatever we mean by it, might respond in the following way: “I understand

224

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

your question, yet hesitate. Not only because I’m inarticulate with such questions, which I am and guess we all are, but because my soul has already asked it of me, and I of my soul. On each occasion, it seems, while I try to respond, my answers are not declarative and they don’t include lists. Usually I search my desires and their origins … my fear … my certainty … my blindness … my joy. I speculate on my nature and on my future, weigh how I am guilty and how not, how I care for these things. And then, most especially, whether they compose a whole … one I could like.” These touch the innermost, which is not so much secret as indescribable, and thus remains for an other and oneself together to glean from within the exposures of their relation, and probably only “after all is said and done,” that is, with all the many inferences and ambiguities that congeal somehow from our actions as they appear in the world.2

Sociality Beyond its public mystery and the veil cast by its indifference to word’s dominion, intimacy lays down in advance a spacious canvas of social alterities – the alterity of one’s self, of an other, and an implicit image of the one-another. In the work of Levinas, alterities are often identified with the face, because for him the face of another awakens moral responsibility in those before whom the face appears and thus becomes a necessary part of the moral order and without which no human society could survive. This is an unusual conception, because it specifies a particular course of conduct, the face-to-face, rather than the conventional presupposition that “society,” some general atmosphere, magically provides this elemental community necessity as the interface, as it were, of morality. But what could such a general atmosphere be, except a random weather of collisions between learner and learned, a fog of someplace and noplace, more and less, this and that, and other variations on bombardment by vicissitude. It is a learner made entirely subject to an environment, any environment, because this learner’s theoretic endowment is passivity – an actor created to do no more than receive and absorb, taking on the social as if a second skin and to become, in the end, a servo-being. The general atmosphere is of course an “experience,” it is experienced, and yet its subjects are species subjects, without particularities and no more than instances of the species in the erotic sense, because they remain

IntImAcy

225

unengaged and without initiative, virtually faceless, in moderating the general atmosphere to include the singular, the particular, the decisive I, an other of significance. Imagine the excesses of such an actor, one who would be without even independent opinions and all because s/he is designed to be a virtual dummy. The individuation of the face-to-face is significant because we are now able to displace the passive face of the general atmosphere with actors able to respond to one another, each of whom is both needy and needed – needy because humanly vulnerable and needed for the same reason: to moderate the pervasive stringencies of the human condition, made possible by an individuated capacity of mind and body no longer identical to impressions stamped out by the general atmosphere. In this seedling of social growth is found notice of the other, the origin of care and the safe reciprocities of interpersonal solicitude, of caring for the other as an obligatory matter of moral as well as practical value. As with all institutions, however, the idea of care creates its own limitations in terms of its assumptions and values, which are embedded in the practices of caring relations and should be examined before adopting them as a template for all social life, particularly given our interest in intimacy. What in these practices could be suitable preparation for intimacy, for envisioning an intimate actor? Iterations of care are widely exemplified today in health and parenting. A moment’s reflection reveals in both cases that the central relation is a univocal one, unequal in both power and influence. Physicians know, for example, they will be poor caregivers for acquaintances and loved ones because they will lack the detachment necessary for good medical decisions, and friends may not demonstrate the appropriate degree of willingness in following instructions, divulging secrets, etcetera. In parenting the contents of intimacy, as we will see, would either bewilder the child or treat children’s capacities as those of a little adult, thereby foreclosing the possibility of child-oriented care. In terms of intimacy, the single most elementary feature of care is its inequality and, in medicine, impersonality and abstraction as well. In the childcare case too much would be “on the table,” as it were, and in medicine too little.3 The prerogatives of the more powerful, the very conduct appropriate to their tasks, will inhibit the kinds of extensive interpersonal disclosure that mark relations of intimacy, however decently or lovingly they might be discharged, and creates a two-tiered society as well.

226

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Care, in which intimacy is pretty much unthinkable, is thus not enough. Our actor still lives in the general atmosphere except for the important addition of ambulances and sandboxes, and more significantly of an incipient collective in its recognition of the existence of an other. Faces probably express more comfort, though the same loneliness in a world that continues to be impersonal. Anthropologically, a collective in which most remain almost as oppressed as in the general atmosphere, caring could slowly extinguish itself in corrosive waning desire and insufficient energy. And yet the actor’s own recognition of a moral connection to others, hence also of oneself as a morally oriented alter to others, generates an actor who takes account of others’ situation (here the need for care) that cannot be underestimated. It creates the possibility of a principled actor – one for whom others are thought to deserve our attention and care if needed. This is a genuine transformation, because a principle extends beyond its specific circumstance by demonstrating also the principle of principle, of fidelity to a truth or standard as a continuous part of life and through a variety of conditions. Commitment to care is one thing, and a good one, and to follow a moral standard of any kind is in itself an affirmative antithesis to the desiccated sociality endemic in the general atmosphere. Principle can do still more, however, and if accepted in real practices as itself principled, becomes a ground-up organizing focus that will greatly reduce the airless omnipotence of that atmosphere. With caring we have endowed the forlorn passive actor of the general atmosphere with a primitive innermost and sociality  – with enough humanity to realize a life less barren than its history, one no longer entirely governed by lack, in what could be called a protosocial system of living together that removes the risk of barbarian nihilism. And yet s/he remains underdeveloped, with an innermost unexcited by doing good with care alone and a sociality that has discovered collective principle but not the opportunity to savour its results in authentic participation. In essence, a bitter life has turned bland. To say this is to say our actor is still without passion. It is difficult to imagine that a life spent doing insipid care and insipid sociality would inspire the capacities of spirit (or even curiosity) that would sustain one beyond the prosaic. We need some conception of an erotic actor, one who seeks, gives, resists – an actor who may be needy but is not bloodless.

IntImAcy

227

“Here I Am!”: The Erotic I “Here I am!”4 is an erotic I whose language speaks not the passive “I exist,” but “I live!”: a language that infuses the flat fact of existence with inspiration by desire – for the power to be, to seek, to know fundamentally.5 It is also an aesthetic materialization of what had been the passive actor with whom the erotic I had begun in the general atmosphere, together now, and who compose both a blending of opposites as well as its contradiction in acts of mixture that exemplify the manifold realizations of same and other: a one that is simultaneously two, a two simultaneously one, and altogether a two-in-one.6 It is probably our most affirmative legacy from the Eros myth. Having faced sheer need for the labour of survival, this same and other presage in one image the positive desire to persevere beyond indigence and toward self-government, toward some place for the insemination of passion and whatever it is the erotic I lacks, and knows s/he lacks, as Eros invents for us the dream of blending two beings and passionate life. (And also, not least, the precarious but necessary perturbations of desire that follow: hubris, madness demonic and madness divine, violence, remorse. The erotic I can be indifferent to moderation and the circumscriptions of reason.) The erotic I is one who is particular, living in a space, a latitude as yet uncrowded, in which it would be imaginable to pursue participation in one’s own development, for one thing, and to envision the making and unmaking of decisive commitments among the exciting tangle of others, otherness, and thinking. What could become sharing, and intimacy too, would no longer be squeezed within restrictive limits of exigency tethered to care but expand to include the erotic impulse in its own part of the life of the social. Out of all this, all its balance, decisions, opportunities, accumulations, and freed imagination, will grow the singularity of inimitability, of personhood – a person. Given their tedious self-sacrifice, émigrés from caring who had wondered what about me, don’t I also need to care for myself? (perhaps their first expression of desire) could find pleasure here, where interest in self would no longer need to hide. And so the historic tale, as distinct from the contemporary one, ends here, having marked out and illuminated the elemental conditions of life if intimacy is to develop: orienting to an other in a socially responsible way, and orienting to oneself erotically (as we have depicted it here).7 When affirmative and together, as now and in Phaedrus, they are exemplary and “Come from God,” the “far nobler” gifts of collective creation than, in

228

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Plato’s terms, the “sober sense of augury” (prognostication by the merely clever)8 because what is best for us finally becomes accessible. And such evocations do, of course, need to be heeded. We began with a thicket of uncertainties that collect themselves around flux and mystery: the apparent conceptual confusion/public reticence of intimacy, the inviting yet problematic and even contradictory impulses of erotic desire, and the distinctly opaque dispositions of passivity and intuitive guidance. But caring brings attention to the extant realities of an other and the possibility of cooperation; the erotic I introduces passion and desire in both their necessity and risks, all of which moderate our uncertainty if we work out the realization that conduct in any kind of relation will manifest the very quality of being that constitutes it and of which it is a part, however elusively. Given what we know now, then, to continue to live within remnants of the general atmosphere would be a default of our own making. We learn also that an Eros without direction is flawed and contradictory (Diotima omits justice as one of Eros’s “natural qualities,” for example), and intimacy does not present its reason from a causal point of view. Yet these very distinct and complicated elements, once understood in the adhesive contexts of sociality and mixture, can nevertheless be consonant with intimacy if only because in life the erotic range and possibilities of the two are complementary. Simply put, Eros is the most human of gods, desirous and fallible, and intimacy is neither science nor skill but one of the arts of desire, an art that can successfully create a one of two and yet, simultaneously, also sustain the original two in one, each of which coexists as and within the fundament of the intimate relation. They are, finally, fully human, which for us means they demonstrate a capacity for the intimate.

The Intimate Actor One can imagine an intimacy beginning among multitudes of contact, a few of which may develop (or not) through intensifications of interest, commitment, and then to what finally comes to be realized as another beginning, an opportunity, this time for intimacy.9 Provoked by the relation’s particular manifestations in conduct, its immanence embodied in specific actions that prolong interest, an inarticulate sense of Heraclitan personhood is aroused that anticipates the unfolding of some shared and fertile canvas, as though awaiting the flash of some “telling incident” that would dissolve any possibility of just passing through yet another relation. Should

IntImAcy

229

the relation continue, it would probably expand to include intimations of attachment itself as part of that canvas, part of its content and in this initiate a premonitory difference from other varieties of close association. And then swiftly, as if a play because it happens directly in front of us,10 the incipient intimacy can become both expansive and self-circumscribing as it matures and finds expression in the developing artifice of its own language – in conversation, images of a future, emotion, not least in all the everyday jokes and tricks and irritations – whose threads and texture reveal the relation’s temporal and conceptual order to be an intimacy. That order is a relation between innermosts: innermosts that are shared and irreducible and well beyond the likeness of equals, propinquities in disposition and common interests that tend to be thought friendly.11 Rather, it is an instance of shared being: An intersubjective space of encompassing language and interpersonal history, forming a collectively particular sense of place, of self, and of other, and which is experienced by intimates as actions that embody the relation’s own originary substantive limits as to the possible and impossible.12 Shared being is thus not a distributive phenomenon like exchange and rewards but a particular kind of life, a specific kind of life, that materializes among persons committed to sharing it.13 Intimacy is a form of shared being, a very unusual one in the intensity of its breadth and depth – more pervasive, more encompassing, a more idiosyncratic personal transformation than we usually expect to occur in marriage, friendship, and other instances of shared being such as minority integration. We need now to think carefully about the idea of interiority as a way of developing our interest in intimacy. An interiority, whether this be called the inner soul of consciousness or the inner essence or concept – that is what has always served as the guiding principle of philosophy. It is characteristic of philosophical writing that the relations with an exterior are always mediated and dissolved by an interior, and this process always takes place within some given interiority.14 For us the inner and outer do not split off into separate empires, with an interior seated within the person, away from all else, and an outside reminiscent of the general atmosphere. Rather, they are our language for certain kinds of action, the actions of intimacy among many others, and, as it turns out, very vague when referring to personhood.

230

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

If we follow Deleuze and think of, say, infinity – which presumably begins as an exterior – it comes inside with us because we are mediating its nature from our own inside–outside, that is, from within our (shared) language. Deleuze’s point is not very interesting except to remind us that whatever we understand to be the “innermost,” to be its reality, is both within (our deliberations) and without (in the world, publicly noticeable, capable of being understood). Some actual or exemplary intimacy may be invisible but not its sense, a sense made available by its imaginability within language, here within our language of the inside and our language of the outside. And when we examine intimacy we are engaged with the particular kind of interior that is innermost, an inward nakedness of personhood that supplies real bodies of substance to the broad yet vacant metaphors of two-in-one, same-in-other, etcetera. Two influences in the creation of intimate opportunity are the immediacy and expression of that nakedness. It is in the nature of nakedness, when it appears, to be immediate because it can go no further than to manifest itself, and that is nakedness, nakedness in its ultimacy, whatever the interest or subject may be. It is a demonstration that everything (relevant) is revealed. Whether sensory or intellectual, intimate nakedness is without guile and includes everyday usage on the order of now I know, nothing more to think about, I see it clearly, this is everything. Immediacy conveys to the other that the naked moment can be taken for what it is, that is, whatever is exposed is what it is for whom it appears. It both generates and reflects an invaluable credibility of detail for the relation’s development.15 Any whiff of “impression management,” “false nakedness” (whatever that could be), or other instrumentalism is also taken for what it is – immediacy is never occasional or one-sided. As implied above, the natural inaccessibility of the contents of nakedness can be elusive even to those well into the relation. Expression is the substance of the immediate moment that makes it also a telling one, a gesture that naturally fills it and is often spontaneous, e.g., a one-to-one wink in the middle of chaos. They can be memorable and they can be common or both, say weeping over the dead child. Cartoons, both the comic and painting kind, emphasize the idea in their own ways.16 One experiences them directly – the fascinating look on a face we regret was never photographed – and occasionally with pain, as in an absence that is coda to an intimacy. Expression and immediacy are first moments in how we come to understand acts of conduct, especially at the beginning of an intimacy.

IntImAcy

231

All in all and simply put, as process, nakedness, the immediacy of nakedness and its recognition in expression, of some substance, that then appears and appears as having been made. (Setting it down this way would be entirely misleading unless it is remembered that all is going on simultaneously in assembly and revision.) As nakedness is given and taken in so does its appearance begin to take shape, and give shape, of a being-here and a being-there, a presence that inheres in any social aesthetic if it is to be publicly intelligible. It is a montage, forming a whole beyond the particulars and greater than the bodies and talk of persons involved, a montage of what would otherwise be incalculable and ahistorical piles of experience, a montage of being, a sensory composition of exposed, revised, and developing appearances and never equal to the sum of its parts. And though it would be expected to gain its own nature from these experiences, it is not an explicit architecture but an aura, an aura of images, memories, sonorities, places, moments of inhabited silence, all of them melding into an affirming, ineffable, and fertile sensation that exceeds their original composition. Its being is all these things and none of them, because the being of an intimacy, as distinct from the intimacy itself, is not an existent.17 All this is to say that, occasionally surviving the many natural risks of circumstance we have already noted, intimacy’s mode of being is the action of self-disclosure, and furthermore that the materials or content of these actions are also self-presenting in intimacy as the disclosures they are. Disclosure is thus conveyed in such a way as to simultaneously disclose, besides its content, that it is being presented as such, as both disclosure and bestowal.18 Exposure, because it reveals, collects, and exhibits these materials – it is the relation’s content and archive – thereby generates and regenerates its reason as well as the interests and commitment of any particular personhood. It is intimacy’s figure, its talisman, and so it is also how the being of an intimacy brings itself, brings itself within the place of intimacy, needing no external access.19 As both act and figure, exposure envelops all the parts of intimacy as one and is thus, climactically, also the very site and habitat of its being. The being of intimacy, like perhaps none other, already pervades its occasions as a consequence of this one singularity, a singularity without compare, of its being’s embodiments in nakedness, immediacy, expression, and self-presenting disclosure.

232

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

The immediacy of self-presentation, the content of which so depends on expression and its near relatives the senses, are versatile signifiers in aesthetic action.20 They are substitutable, as in a murmur or a pat, and can be employed virtually all at once, an interest unmistakably portrayed by the small dinner party. Imagine such a party among intimates and familiars: entertaining stories touching on memory, redolent kitchen, noisy argument, a moment’s encompassing gaze, wishing the scene could be painted.21 Well, it could be painted, and suppose it were. How might we think of the relation between the painting and the party itself? The painting is a record of sorts, but the wish probably would include more, a wish to “capture” the intimacy of the party, its immediacy and expression – likely impossible unless one were willing to accept the condition that the painting might replicate but never duplicate the dinner or it would not be a painting, it would be dinner, more accurately an imitation of dinner. Yet something like the greater wish, reasonable in itself, could be accomplished so long as it would accept the measure of painting, in many ways not an aesthetic aspect, notably its craft and the calculative knowledge to produce colour (whether the “right” one is another matter) and texture so important to painting, the geometries of space, and so on, all parts of the craft. Then, assembled from the craft, from the artist’s subjects, and from what can only be called the inspiration of persona, appears the painting’s style, an instance of the collaboration between aesthetics and technique, that cannot be segregated in determining the impact of the painting. The Eros thought to be erotic wild man, with no inclination for measure, could never have been a painter. In art’s language measure is included because imagination needs discipline, the care and working out of the per se of its collection of images, to civilize the work by organizing and painting its subject, which otherwise would result in an accident worthy of the general atmosphere. Intimacy is a recursively though not a reflexively made thing, a particular kind of poiesis, a making – not a sudden invention, not an act of genius but unlikely, unconditional, unbounded, probably unconventional, unhurried, never completed. It is an unusually pointed but more detailed and specific mimesis of the same-in-other in that it is a relation of disclosing and presenting, of substance and manifestation, as one complementary action in what we might call the being of self-generated exposure. (And it reveals the real of same–other metaphors by exposing them as intimacy, in doing so also foregoing – or thwarting – any claims to the transcendental.) Every

IntImAcy

233

intimate moment becomes an amalgam of every other, and thus each is also its own library. Even as it begins, intimacy portrays a figure in the present of a future which already feels like history. As these knowledges unfold and accumulate, what had been two personhoods, or three, four – friends, spouses, lovers, whatever – can only be understood in terms of their being, that is, as a singularity that demonstrates itself in its action, whatever that may include – a spirit, tone, density, content – unfolding and unfolding as they live the trajectories of the intimacies they have created. Furthermore, intimacy would be persistent in arousing itself, whether by humour, torment, freewheeling, argument, sex, or other alchemies, in expressions of the energy generated by its originary desire.22 (This is not to imply that a single intimacy would always behave in the same way nor that a single intimate would.) Whatever their particularities, intimates expose the singular meaning and direction of their being: A vigorous, enduring, and self-defining desire to know an other and to be known by an other. A desire so simple, yet so difficult. Deeply, intimacy conveys images of its being, as do certain paintings, that may expose in any instance the figure of its substantive nature, a figure that extends beyond the particulars of immediate content. In this respect compare Picasso’s Guernica, a major work and an icon, with Munch’s The Scream, now also iconic but thought minor. An icon may transform the particulars of the original by universalizing them, and after the Munch gained exceptional public currency its figure changed from individuated person to epochal “anxiety.” Most significant for us, however, is the signal change this produced in the painting’s reputation as art. In aesthetics, art resides in the space, or process, between object (signifier) and understanding (signified), a process that includes immediacy and expression, in which the viewer experiences serial qualitative changes in the contents of the relation, coming finally to a signified, to the point of an aesthetic understanding. But The Scream, by dint of its status as cliché, has become a victim of “automatic processing”: the elimination of the aesthetic journey from signifier to signified, which is to say the viewer has been denied the entire aesthetic experience, in that the signified has virtually been collapsed into the signifier.23 Guernica is iconic for both its craft and its figure of civil war. Its particulars have not been superseded, likely the result of a craft that creates the two as inseparable. In great art, it is probably craft that creates its own inexhaustibility of sense – the idea that one never experiences it in the same

234

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

way – and thus protects the object and its relationships from the cruelties of cliché. Intimacy, while certainly not a craft, may nevertheless exude that same image of inseparability, even though it could not be denotatively true. But there is another aspect of art, automated processing, which could be shared by the aesthetic of intimacy, a relation that requires at least as much contemplation. Wouldn’t it be just as possible for the space between signifier and signified to disappear, as in art, or simply recede? To disappear would be catastrophic, lethal by blowing it out of existence, recession turn it shallow or dull, leaving a ruin in any case. If intimacy is vulnerable, routinization may be a reason because the relation has become mechanical as its aesthetic processes have eroded. These are phenomena made possible precisely because art’s aesthetic independence from the explicit frees it from the descriptive representational specifics of its subject and thus to exceed or negate the empirically given, eliding once again denotative language-in-use. What had been descriptively unnarratable, if not unintelligible, is thus released, not from language but from the impenetrable shadow cast by standard conventions of description. One cannot love what one knows if what is known is the denotative, but one can love intimacy because in its self disclosures and exposures what is known inheres in the particular. In this it is identical to art except for their subjects and in what seems to be the fact that the particulars of those subjects are juxtaposed. Intimacy is less free (hence its reserve?), given that art is able to impose its unity. Art’s practical accomplishment is greatly enhanced by the availability of techne, in particular the risk/prudence of selecting/making materials that do/do not belong together and the skills to bring them into the work. For intimacy, however, technical decisions remain so, and its unity will finally rest on conduct’s exposure of itself, always a contingency as immediacy and expression disclose themselves. This is to say that intimacy is such that it must speak for itself, rather than have techne participate in its doing. In the end, intimacy’s subject is itself and its self-presentation a speaking for itself, for the particular substance of an intimacy as well as its methods of self-disclosure. In these ways it does not possess the pliability of art. Of course not. It is not plastic but flesh. Nevertheless, art and intimacy share a kinship in their aesthetic similarities. Speaking of art, Lacan wrote, “Works engender more than they reflect,”24 certainly also a trait of intimacy, which begins between strangers and whose “meaning” we have just depicted. The potential of the intimate

IntImAcy

235

relation is a “work” in that it is made and, like art, under relatively free auspices (only itself and chance), and more a genesis than a result. Different auspices, but ones that encourage making and in which the who of an intimacy can both create and take on its substantive whatness, a consequence not as deeply available in the everyday relations of influence, satisfaction, association, etcetera. Intimacy’s potential is its originary power.25 Art may be free in ways that intimacy is not. But art cannot exhibit indifference to or love of its own origins in achievement, as may intimacy. Nor is art per se inherently self-critical. Criticism comes from critics-byoccupation, and while self-satirizing is manifold, it is art first and hence secondary as critique. Again, intimacy is an inheritance from Eros of the desire to know and the desire for mixture. It lives in the moments when we are able to act for ourselves, speak to ourselves, and know ourselves – know ourselves as those of whom we speak and with whom we act.

NoteS 1 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2 Conversation about the soul would likely be sporadic at best. See the idea of expression on page 230 in this volume for the reasoning. Also, for example, Hannah Arendt: “The life of our soul in its very intensity is much more adequately expressed in a glance, a sound, a gesture, than in speech.” Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1971), 31. 3 Further on, intimacy will be seen to be adult conduct in the one case and more wide-ranging in medicine. 4 A biblical expression. See I Samuel, 3:4. 5 In this paper desire is the elemental force or energy that ignites the affirmative relation between wish and its objects, and includes such admixtures as getting up in the morning and the passions. 6 Technically, the way to think about this formulation is to imagine each of its referents (one and two) to exist simultaneously as both (a one and a two) and neither (a one nor a two). Some authentic intimates convey this idea in life in the turns of multiplicity, surprise, and apparent contradiction that run through the tissues of their union. 7 There are many, probably too many, characterizations of Eros. We add to the confusion by using him as both myth figure and form of conduct.

236

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

8 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1973), 244. Note the implicit inference here that the erotic is more serious than unremitting sobriety. “Come from God” can be read to mean originary or fundamental source. 9 Narrowly romantic interest does not count here. 10 Whether observer or participant. 11 An intimate relation is distinct from each innermost taken separately because it is an intersubjective mixture, not a matter of simple addition. 12 Adapted from P. McHugh, “Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action,” Human Studies 28 (2005): 137. Reprinted in this volume. The version here is related but emphasizes the interpersonal rather than communal side of shared being. In neither instance does the idea depend on distributive notions. 13 Nor is “life style.” 14 Gilles Deleuze, “Normal Thought,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1997), 144–5. What Deleuze depicts includes the innermost but is conceived considerably more broadly, as will become apparent. 15 Good playwriting demonstrates immediacy in all its painstaking refinement. The writer is continuously exercised by the need that audience understanding be exactly as intended. If the speech is meant to appear plainspoken, it is so written; if to appear devious, it is plainly written to only seem so. 16 Both are calculated, obviously, yet we collaborate in treating them as spontaneous. In this one respect, putting aside a self-contradiction, they are imperfect examples. 17 “Being” is exceptionally complicated and diverse in its meanings. We use it here as necessary to our understanding as follows: Intimacy is a flexible set of practices and ideas that exist in intimate relations. But no collection of practices–ideas can be fully understood without recognizing as well their distilled essence or nature, which is not synonymous with or derivable by observing them. In life the two aspects are always necessary to one another. The phrase “human nature,” for example, is a reference to the being of humanity that is irreducible to exact specification. 18 Not as gift, nor standard reciprocity, but recognition of the relation in the particular language of intimacy. 19 Being itself cannot be self-consciously created. 20 Not to be confused with the presentation of self works by Erving Goffman and others. 21 Or photographed, for those who think it can be art, but the photo probably would not make the point as clearly if only because it could seem like a record.

IntImAcy

237

22 What about boredom? Can desire to know the other be extinguished by nothing else to take in and exhaustion with what is already there? Or is genuine intimacy, as distinct from, say, “love,” impervious because its complications fend off or enervate the mechanical? This would require also thinking about exterior conditions and how its environment would/could sustain/sap its endurance. Chance, for example, might have either kind of influence, depending upon whether it is the brutal or benign kind. 23 Menke, The Sovereignty of Art (Cambridge, Ma: The MIt Press, 1998). Or so the story goes. By this measure, the same painting could be art today but décor tomorrow. 24 Cited in Gerard Wajcman, “Desublimation,” lacanian ink 29 (2007): 97. 25 Ibid. Wajcman seeks to restore “the dignity of the thing” (art itself ) and its reputation for originary power (a claim made here for intimacy on page 235 in this volume) by questioning Freud’s widely influential notion that art is always a result of sublimation. But why be compelled to look elsewhere and ask, demeaningly, where its center comes from, as if the thing itself is an empty suit or a beast or (bad) dream?

14

FURTHERMORES ON THE AESTHETIC

Our look at intimacy and art as manifestations of aesthetic reasoning offers an unusual opportunity to think about the aesthetic – until now a subtext of “Intimacy,” the previous paper in this volume, yet interesting in its own right – in relation to other kinds of discourse. As we have seen, the kind of intimacy that goes beyond good marriage and long friendship can best be understood in its own aesthetic terms, because modern reason, including social science and much of philosophy, are generally limited to an unyieldingly cognitive standard and thereby ignore aesthetic action as well as conduct that exhibits aesthetic influence. As we discovered, however, the aesthetic is unusually enlightening in seeking to understand intimacy and raises a point about the standard presumption of intimacy’s “resistance to interpretation”: that any such resistance more likely reflects the incapacities of modern rationality rather than intimacy itself, which is both intelligible and learnable and thus aesthetically and socially rational. In being akin to the aesthetic, intimacy separates itself from discourses that reflect prevailing orthodoxies, among them the broadly accepted idea that powerful institutionalized norms of social action necessarily pervade the organization of daily life, which in turn generates an elemental assumption of impersonal expectation theory: participation in any social relation is one of mutually plausible expectation along with the expectation of mutually plausible repair on occasions of misunderstanding, as if to rely entirely on preordained mutual expectations as some cause-in-advance of doing the work of life in just that way. Further, expectations are considered to be collectively scripted in the institutional sense and emanate from the top down.1 Peter McHugh, “Furthermores on the Aesthetic” (unpublished paper, 2009).

furthermores on the AesthetIc

239

In an aesthetic relation, on the other hand, these and other nonaesthetic normative accounts are no longer determinative in that the aesthetic itself, exemplified by intimacy’s autonomous connective balance of exposure between particular subject and object, a one and an other, displaces the dominance of reasoning by normative expectation. It is in these respects that intimacy of conduct and the aesthetic as a touchstone of collective life constitute a fresh challenge to the hegemony of the modern model. Intimates must live in a pervasively nonaesthetic world, so they do, and they understand that world. But nonaesthetic discourses can only understand aesthetic discourse from aesthetic experience, of course, and thus it can be said that its practices and theorizing, and often also its practitioners, may have no knowledge of the intimate aesthetic opportunity as a consequence of the absence, for them, of any exposure to the aesthetic as a distinct discourse. Just how distinct is exemplified by the idealized forms of their signifiers, and indeed of their very conception of what signifiers can and cannot do.2 In cognitive discourses signifiers are to be achieved by contextualization of their “materials” (facts, acts, intentions, conditions), materials that are an assemblage of speech acts and notions (including ones that are visual, bodily, etc.) which are considered a single etymology – one self-enclosed, self-referencing collection – that prescribes a mechanical or constitutive rule for passage from signifier to signified. But strictly mechanical passage is always a literal impossibility given the inherent ambiguity of social action and language, whether it be cognitive, aesthetic, or other, and so a signifier always requires an intermediate interpretation before it can be realized in some signified.3 (In art, we noted that skipping the intermediate is best understood not as an absence but as “cliché.”) However obvious a command to stop, for example, it still needs its attachment to roadway or snatched purse to be iterable as the sign it is. No sign speaks for itself, however habitual its linguistic passage may be. No rule, no sentence, no act is self-explicating. This process, the one actually required for iterability, furnishes yet another instance of mechanical processing’s failure to understand its own limitations. Accomplishing signification is not achieved by following a presumptive mechanical rule because it is not possible, something that presumption and cognition fail to foresee: the assembled contexts intended to bring about the mechanical result are themselves inexact and boundless. A single one-track entity cannot lock in a signified because it too is limited

240

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

by the same vagueness and equivocity, leaving its interpreters to simply … what? … to make do, to make do in the imperfect world of guidance by the multivocal procedures of the more-or-less that is the common sense reasoning Garfinkel introduced as ethnomethodology.4 Interpreters make do under the imperfect guidance of rules or procedures that are themselves imperfect, yet work most of the time because they are worked out nevertheless. When they do not, they are provisionally reinterpreted, and then again, as necessary. Fortunately, all is not for nought with the cognitive. That the social is not perfectly clear does not entail that it is perfectly opaque. The work to present a best case, to write a rule most clearly, to simplify, to edit, to fudge a little (“It is perfectly clear”), to think about the action in terms of the StoP, the effort to follow the instructions while assembling the model, are tacit concessions to the fact that a principle of single track rule is inadequate and not a requirement anyway – otherwise a simple presentation would be enough. As Derrida suggests, we gain purchase on the iterability of signs, their “reasonable” but imperfect consistency, in the interpretive work that addresses their identity and their difference. Imagine hearing the shout of “Stop!” while observing a running figure with purse. Each subject, each act, expresses an identity and also a difference – the shout, not a murmur or runner, and the runner, not a pacer or a shout –which together signify robbery. (But provisionally, in the absence of contradiction). It is in the simultaneous work on the possible difference or not of the possible identities of each that is iterated or completed in generating robbery as the signified, work which cannot be stipulated in advance or according to rule. In these respects life does imitate art in the ways signifiers travel to signifieds. Equally, cognitive rationality moves that much closer to aesthetic rationality. Given the nature of social adequacy as making do, now essential, it must be recognized that ensuing acts of ad hoc interpretation will also be sources of error, uncertainty, failure, and additional ambiguities, all of which become the tombstones of the original notion of ironclad passage. Signifiers in aesthetics are achieved immanently, “creatively,”5 a process in which meaning is not available through reenactment of linguistic rules but by collecting parts of diverse contexts – think of them as elements – in a single place as sound, picture, sentence, act, and so on, separately or together, that become the signified in the particular content of their relations for an

furthermores on the AesthetIc

241

interpreter, a particularity unfixed and variable and thus also variable as a signified. The principle in aesthetics is thus to recognize ambiguity and then exploit it to produce some tellable act(s), i.e., the signified, a content collected by its elements and which may vary among interpreters. In a way, and in contrast to nonaesthetic discourses, the inexorability of ambiguity is transformed here into need, and a sustaining one, for the genesis of metaphor and simile and deception and surprise and artfulness and plain meaning, on and on. And sustaining too, though unrecognizedly, in both producing and then rescuing the nonaesthetic’s failure ever to be perfectly clear, that is to say, the aesthetic becomes the “solution” to the nonaesthetic’s self-created ignorance of social language’s inherent ambiguity. Most conclusive, all this makes the aesthetic indispensable to the functioning of our language in all its discourses because without it these discourses would remain in permanent crisis. Indeed, the aesthetic can destabilize nonaesthetic discourse as a consequence of these very factors – a sense that aesthetic discourse is not “normal,” not normalized in advance because it does not follow the discursive constitutive order of the nonaesthetic, but rather interrupts that condition of life as usual. Aren’t these weaknesses of the denotative inevitable rather than accidental, given they grow from the exclusions and inclusions characteristic of its own nonaesthetic discourses? Aren’t they, in effect, a blindness? And don’t they demonstrate the aesthetic’s power in that it understands the other(s) as well as itself, while nonaesthetic discourses remain incomplete – they cannot offer an account of the aesthetic in their own terms and hence lack knowledge of their own self-created vulnerability? More, could they therefore be said not to understand themselves either, e.g., their self-deception about the constitutive in many instances? Mundane case example: The internet “revolution,” so-called because many now spend their time in the hedonistic bliss of Facebook, YouTube and the like rather than with newspapers or friends on the block. However silly and worse, they demonstrate a strictly aesthetic interest in whatever shows up and reveals itself or presents such an opportunity to the user. Is this of a piece with the authentic (in conservative-speak) freedoms that other discourses recognize as aesthetic but, given their limits, have yet to understand?

242

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

NoteS 1 Sociologists depict this kind of relation as one of social control, i.e., the way a social entity keeps its membership together. Dispersive structures may also qualify if seen from the perspective of the entity’s interests and may be liberating if that is the character of the entity. Given the narrowness and exclusion of the cognitive, asked the question “How much diversity is enough, how much too much?,” the response would probably be “Not much” to both. 2 By idealized I mean their ideal practices as formulated in writing. We will discover that these can (in fact must) vary greatly from actual practices. 3 See Jacques Derrida, for example: “Iterability [of signs] supposes that the self same be repeatable and identifiable … [and] … implies both identity and difference,” that is, requires interpretive work that puts the two together on each occasion. “Limited Inc abc …” Glyph (1977): 190. 4 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 5 “Creative” is a useless, empty word except in quotes, which only designate that fact. I insert it to suggest that whatever is intended in its use is likely close to the aesthetic.

15

DELICACY, DESIRE, AND DREAM IN THE WORK OF PETER McHUGH: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF JOUISSANCE Alan Blum Introduction I will talk about my dear friend and collaborator Peter McHugh, who as a person and inquirer just might be one of a kind, but whose approach to theorizing and to the relation of such work to life can be an exemplary challenge and model for anyone devoted to reflecting upon the conventions and nuances of social action and the human condition.

The Context Of course, lauding the contributions of friend or family is often treated with a wary eye, perhaps deserving what Peter and I often called, with some mirth, a high discount rate. Yet, I propose that in some important respects McHugh’s work in sociology, typically unappreciated, found opaque, and perhaps unfamiliar to some, must rank as a significant contribution to modern social theory. What I will claim is that Peter McHugh, beginning within the critical context of the analysis of the social order reflected in symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, and its roots in phenomenology and hermeneutics, developed over the course of his life an unprecedented approach for studying the affective infrastructure of social life. McHugh began his work within the context of sociological studies that tended to limit affect to the spillover of conforming and deviant relations to norms. Yet, Goffman’s identification of the innovative strategies operating in such a context furnished an exemplary model of social affect in his representations of self presentation and its varied and intricate shapes in social interaction (1967). Goffman’s nuanced studies made transparent the force of affect in an intellectual environment dominated by empiricism and

244

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

structural–functional analyses of motivated compliance to a normative order that could elicit besides responses ranging from conformity to deviance, critical responses from those such as Alvin Gouldner through others as Habermas and Foucault that tended to concentrate upon the emotions in relation to power, protest, resentment, alienation, and usages amenable to their attempts to unmask ideologies and to affirm more reflexive modes of thinking. Despite these commendable efforts, to paraphrase Wittgenstein (1951), the object (emotion, affect, whatever) dropped out as irrelevant, externalized, treated reductively, or in supposed revivals today as affect studies (that imagine a corporeal drive as their be-all and end-all), or versions of the sociology of the emotions (e.g., the so-called Imposter Syndrome) that accept social construction and its labour as their raison d’etre.

Towards a Sociology of Jouissance What I propose is that it was within such a context and its ruling discourse that Peter McHugh began the work of developing a path of inquiry into the sociology of jouissance, implicitly playing off this conception that Lacan had revived from his readings of Freud. For the exposition in this paper we might understand jouissance as resembling what is prosaically called the “emotions” or “affect” but only with the reservation that jouissance is a more comprehensive notion that is specifically attuned to the movement of spirit in life that Hegel discussed and to the dialectical resonances of interiority and its reflexive relationship to ambiguity and the unknown that marks its power in contrast to these other usages, evoking the notion of passion and its depth and resonance and implications that could range from ecstasy to boredom, from charisma to disaffection. Thus McHugh, unfamiliar in detail with Lacan at the time, proceeded to formulate jouissance in his way as both topic and resource through usages such as desire and spirit that were meant to capture the movement of inwardness expressed and concealed in all conduct. As topic, jouissance makes reference to the ethical and aesthetic resonances of social conduct with implications for notions such as community, culture, tradition, and law. In any study or research the subject has to be seen as fundamentally orienting to this element in conduct and to its irresolute character in any specific case. As resource, jouissance makes reference to the rhythm and

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

245

drive of writing itself, in ways that must include all representation and its necessary engagement with the irresolute traces that it leaves as its remains. Of course, this relation between jouissance as both topic and resource requires a method that can administer these two parts, topic and resource, with the elegance and eloquence needed to invest such an art of inquiry with eros. In this way he shows the inescapable influence of passion and its otherness in life as a force both necessary, desirable and fundamentally ambiguous, the Grey Zone we inhabit for engaging what the novelist Marianne Fritz calls The Weight of Things (Fritz [1978] 2015).

Theorizing As Self Formation We must understand Peter’s writing as his way of solving problems where the problem is not some conventional statement of a social issue but the convention itself and its uses of the habituated vernacular of the society to gloss as settled and explanatory the unformed formulae that identify any such issue. This means that the problem of doing reflective analysis certainly includes social issues because they are part of the wider net of any and all topics. Reflection upon a topic is a problem insofar as it materializes in practice as the work of deciphering and traversing a path. Peter conceives of this passage as marking the development of a thinker based on expectations that he, Peter, sets for himself and for anyone else as an ideal for inquiry. So it is as if he creates a trajectory of challenges for himself (as a guide for any would-be theorist) that needs to be handled over the course of a life. It is as if he designs a curriculum for himself as his means of imagining what a strong relationship to the representation of worldly affairs should be for an educated person. Peter started by working from the conventions that he inherited first in the academic discipline of sociology and then in philosophy, leading him to begin with ruling clichés in circulation in such disciplines. Thus, each topic for him was like a course in school, a way for motivating himself to address a specific condition that had to be faced by the theorist as ideal speaker, as one intending to do the work of composing a study. First, one has to engage the problem of defining the situation, then plunge into and organize the usage to listen for its overtones, associations, and distinctions, then orient to the diverse reactions and replies imagined of

246

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

others who co-inhabit the same intellectual space and who are exercised by the same usage, and finally, construct a work that can incorporate and suffer with enjoyment the necessarily unfinished character of the account that is made. These are the demands Peter McHugh formulates as parameters of the composition of an analysis. Note that the unfinished character of the product, what we call its remainder, is due to its not being driven by the model of an algorithmic objective but is heuristic through and through and is meant to expose the connotative surfeit exceeding such an ideal. Thus, the trajectory both mimics and exposes the notion of algorithm by appearing to adopt its ideal of a stepwise accomplishment of an outcome only to make transparent how such a product always leaves a connotative surplus that exceeds the delusion of grandeur correlative with its hallucination of finality. In this way he can anger both extremes of positivism, its empiricists and its most radical critics alike, by evoking images of the narcissism that they typically think they have outgrown.

School for Theorizing These stages are figures meant to link imperatives that theorizing in the strongest sense must handle. As I implied, the first stage is reflected in the rudimentary work on Defining the Situation, the second stage by semiotic influences in papers on correspondence and coherence in relationships that are purported to comprise the signifying chain, the third stage is expressed in different resonances of community that are discussed in the paper on “Shared Being,” and the fourth stage comes to view in the tension inherent in the notions of production and fabrication that are dramatized in the paper on “Making.” These stages in the composition of such work play off the need to begin with an unformed topic, moving through a process of collecting its orthodoxa or opinions in representations, for the purpose of retrieving the unstated collective problem that seems to him to inspire the surface speeches and rules (that appear present and absent or intangible in the vernacular, present enough for him to imagine them and absent to conclusive determination down to the last detail). The end of inquiry in this way must situate the inquirer/composer as one fated to make a fragile work that needs be oriented to as both revisable and enjoyable.

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

247

Stages as Milestones Each stage is a problem-solving situation that must be traversed and that creates possible disputes over further ways of proceeding. For Peter, problems were of needing to care for one’s relationship to their time, space, and the requirement of sizing up the situation, and of one’s perspective in relation to others’ in beginning to explore the convention taken up; how to raise the question of orienting to the convention as a thought process; how to motivate oneself to take up collecting and segregating signifiers with respect to associations such as correspondence, coherence and the like and of thinking about grounds of inference; then, how to induce oneself as inquirer to accept the legitimacy and value of dialogue, despite its porous and contentious character, and to the need for reconciling its open-endedness in composing the account while suffering the fragility of all fabrication and so of all made things including such accounts as this. Finally, Peter honoured as a virtue a capacity to accept the end of living with irresolution and of affirming it with a degree of zest since any such “product” cannot be finalized and has to be treated with levity and lightness. Such an inconclusive end is not a lack or deficiency as if a conclusion has failed to materialize but a parameter of inquiry, akin to what Lacan has called a sign of the hole in Being. As an overview of this “final solution” of Peter’s work, we see how his final stage brings to a climax Lacan’s notion of jouissance in identifying it as joyous affirmation, reworking and criticizing Derrida’s translation of that usage from Nietzsche. McHugh advanced his formulation by demonstrating that interpretation is challenging and enjoyable because it is not animated by an objective of finality, in contrast, needing and desiring to revel in its play and provocative character.

Ending as Rebeginning So the stages of the trajectory move in time from beginning to end (that never ends and is a rebeginning) and moves through space from egocentricity through interaction between different opinions that inevitably elicit adversarial exchanges that need to be overcome by a restitching of solidarity. As a prosaic summary, the path can be seen to move from the image of a self-absorbed subject who treats oneself as the centre or even as if the whole, to the mature speaker whose experience of being humbled successively by

248

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

the normative order and then by the Real invites revitalization through a touch of the comedic grasp of conditions and limits. This relationship between writing about a topic and the problem it solves for the theorist is not like the case of inquirers who make their own context and background a topic as in Jews studying the Holocaust, Poles studying Polish street fairs, Lithuanians studying Lithuanian neighbourhoods, the physically disabled studying the physically disabled, or Afro-Americans studying race. Though these might be commendable attempts to integrate work and life, and an early paper of McHugh’s was a study of actors based upon his family’s relationship to show business and his father’s acting profession, his agenda was different. He believed that one should move beyond such identifications in order to develop a reflective voice that could better enrich and empower these very relationships. Thus, the empirical value of such expertise and its proximity to the experience always needs to be refashioned reflectively through a model of theorizing such as he was proposing, that could only produce a stronger voice for a critical relationship to the topics. For him, the traditional critique of the disregard of verstehen and the actor’s point of view launched against positivism was never anything but an opener for further analysis and not an analysis in its own right, necessarily open to further questioning. In this way Peter’s work, even at the earliest moments, moved against both empiricism and its doctrinaire critics in its search for a third path, glimpsed as a beginning in ethnomethodology but seemingly insufficient in relation to the spirit and rigor he demanded for a stronger inquiry (Plato 1945, 1957). The sequence of problems he wanted to address was formulated as a graph of desire not simply for identifying the maturation of anybody but as conditions that a subject devoted to a reflective relation to maturation (aka theorizing) must handle in completing their work in the best sense. This means that Peter McHugh was guided by an idealization of finished work as work of high quality, noting both what it should look like and paths towards its composition and completion. We can again note the connection between the successive studies of McHugh on significant topics and his intention of treating the topics he takes up as problems that one must engage in moving through a life that is grounded. In this sense, the topics illustrated for him the most important problems a reflective subject must face in living a life from social interaction, through community, to the penultimate challenges offered by topics of justice and law, intimacy and art, and mortality, tradition, and inheritance.

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

249

Returning to Jouissance As I noted, a sociology of jouissance was circulating in sociology, implicitly in the vernacular of the emotions and yet as a pervasive undertow, as the unstated ground of what sociology calls motivated compliance or the attachment to the normative order, identified in Max Weber’s conception of social action as “action oriented to an order and governed thereby in its course” (Weber 1947, 87–126) or in examples of breaking through the order in usages such as charisma, protest, and rebellion. As I am using it here, jouissance was reduced and simplified to stand for the emotions that support the motive to connect to “norms” whether compliantly or not or to disconnect through disaffection. Because every such attachment needed to be an investment of affect that “overspilled,” it always left a remainder both ambiguous and capable of assuming many shapes as negative or positive, for example, as what Simmel (2011) called fear and resignation, and other effects such as guilt, shame, love, hate, and the like. Because this relationship to the normative order could only assume the form of what Armand Zaloszyc calls a sacrifice (1991), it was ambiguous and not self-evident, always capable of inviting further questioning of the meaning of what is said and done. In this context, when sociologists sought to track the meaning of a jouissance of administration, one path of inquiry lay in identifying an affective force even in the gesture(s) of conformity that repressed the work of its own commitment to the normative. In response, ethnomethodological studies revealed how the most innocuous enunciation was problematic in its dependence upon an emotional attachment to a ritual of enunciation itself. Further, Goffman showed how a jouissance of administration had to include ways and means of organizing selves for success and failure in the shape of subversive modes of self enhancement that formed a landscape for an interpretive analysis of the jouissance of everyday life but only when the everyday was identified as what McHugh was to call “the general atmosphere” as the territory of the Real. The general atmosphere is of course an “experience,” it is experienced, and yet its subjects are species subjects, without particularities and no more than the species in the erotic sense, because they remain unengaged and without initiative, virtually faceless, in moderating the general atmosphere to include the

250

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

singular, the particular, the decisive I, an other of significance. (“Intimacy,” 224–5 in this volume) Though the “general atmosphere” is typically identified as reality, McHugh recognized that a strong relationship to the world invited a reformulation of the Real in ways that could make possible a path for breaking through the fog of the general atmosphere. What we begin to appreciate in his work is that the breakthrough requires administering jouissance in a way that can overcome its individualistic tone both within and without: in this respect just as interaction is not simply an encounter between two ones that engage one another but needs to be conceived as a one–two in which the parts each participate as themselves and the other, both together and apart as Ranciere says (2009), so inwardness is not an exchange between two independent parts of the mind but a doubling within in which the subject’s intelligibility and/or intractability is part of the relationship to and for the subject and not an external condition. As a resource such a relation to jouissance and its ambiguity had to sustain and mark McHugh’s writing, and as topic this inquiry into social conduct at the same time had to reveal the aura of doubleness intrinsic to all social forms. McHugh’s series of studies accomplished this objective in specific ways and with important consequences for any sociology that would aspire to a reflective relationship to social life. First, he showed how any conception of the social based upon the normative, the generalized other, the distribution of the sensible, or even as a language game, always remained at its core fundamentally ambiguous, forcing upon usages such as culture or community respect for the notion of shared being inherent in the best versions of social life. McHugh used shared being as crucial in his paper that dramatized how any strong relationship to social life requires its subject to embrace the need for incorporating the twoness of the one that makes each I social and that makes each We responsible to its diverse Is, in this way strengthening both plurality and unity as parts of a reflexive doubling relationship to self and other. The doubleness enacted through the notion of shared being not only expresses the ethical implications of any social bond but also conveys the need to conceive of community not abstractly but as a practice of affirming the principle for which a social formation purports to stand. In this way he required any notion of a relationship to face the test of affirming its principle in action as its sine qua non.

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

251

McHugh then demanded of such doubleness that it be affirmed in the practice of exposition. In this way he joined the distinction between the topic of a representation (say gender, social class, disability) and its resource (manner, means, method) in the writing as an expression of doubleness in the same spirit; the topic and the resource have to be related and differentiated. This is only to say that the reflective relationship he sought to recover for and in the topic being studied and in his formulation of the subject of this trajectory, the so-called ideal speaker such as the one he constructed to stand for justice in the paper on shared being, had to be seen as exemplifying a relationship inclusive enough to apply to his own writing of the paper and its attempt to display a just relation to the usage and opinions being explored. Over the course of his life’s work, Peter discovered that the principle affirmed in the analysis of a topic needs to be enacted in writing about the topic, not mechanically but by specifying it in relation to the exposition and its particular conditions and challenges. Again, writing about justice needs to exhibit a just relation in its writing by carefully monitoring the diversity of the opinions it engages as its manner of being principled in an affirmative way in practice. For example if the topic is a reflective engagement with a topic, its topic is (really and truly) reflection and is applicable in principle to its own writing since writing and representation form another topic. As the members of a group or community, all topics are equal in this sense, together, and are different in their ways, apart. The doubleness of topics like the doubleness of people has to be embodied in action that affirms the principle (shared being) in practice.

The Work of the Subject in Peter’s Studies So, Peter’s actor has to handle and bear the doubleness inherent in his relationship to jouissance in whatever topic being studied. To make the story short, his paper on insomnia shows this dramatically in his invention of an actor forced to operate or “make do” in Certeau’s sense (1984), between the impossible and incoherent poles of essentialism and what he views as postmodern wandering and errancy. Such an actor has first to recognize the pervasive and inescapable mimesis that must be discerned in all conduct as an affective or spiritual inheritance rather than as tangible and doctrinaire, and then has to struggle to free oneself from the grip of determinism that tempts acceptance of the status of victim. As an ideal speaker, Peter’s subject must engage this doubleness by embracing ambiguity and the essential and

252

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

revisable character of all such work in the spirit of joyous affirmation. This struggle mirrors the engagement with doubleness that is inherent in any topic or study and that invests all analysis with a dialectical spirit. Peter emphasizes the anxiety of doubleness in writing and representation most dramatically in the paper on making in which he views the promise of finality that typically motivates productivity as fated to bring the subject face-to-face with an unsettling recognition of the frailty, vulnerability, and open-ended result of fabrication, disclosing how what is made is always something that can and will be unmade. What Peter called the general atmosphere is ruled by the denotative conception of language and representation that remains blind to the “exclusions and inclusions characteristic of its own nonaesthetic discourses” where the strictly mechanical passage “from signifier to signified … is always a literal impossibility given the inherent ambiguity of social action and language … and so a signifier always requires an intermediate interpretation before it can be realized in some signified” (“Furthermores on the Aesthetic,” 239 in this volume). This is Peter’s version of Lacan’s refrain that the signifier is a subject for another signifier that testifies continuously in his work to Heraclitus’s counsel that no one can hide from the logos (Lacan 1992).

Early and Late McHugh I focus on the development and apparent change in Peter’s work over time because all significant work such as his goes through a process of growth and diversification, what Kierkegaard called recollection and repetition, where the beginning is not immobilized as in fundamentalism or conversely left behind as obsolete but innovatively reimagined as part of the growth of the inquirer and their change over life in meeting challenges offered at different times. Just as the works of Plato, Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, and such “greats” are routinely classified as early or later, sometimes for getting the record straight and on other occasions as opportunities to locate contradiction and inconsistencies in their work, we can treat changes over time in a thinker’s work as a way of engaging the ways in which they differentiate their beginning through their capacity to maintain and diversify their voice in response to the contingencies created by the problems raised in every successive generation. I have already noted how Peter’s conception of space as interaction between somewhat external selves as independent actors mediated by

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

253

problematic and ambiguous expectations and interpretations, evolved towards his position that space deeply tapped the vein of ambiguity within the person, overflowing as the doubleness of jouissance both interior and encompassing others, that could never be treated mechanically but ought be endured and enjoyed. Similarly, I noted how Peter’s notion of time had to move from a social vision of the temporality of all courses of action to a deepening awareness of memory, heritage, and tradition and of the incalculable absence of a reply to (t)his present as anything but material for comedy (to the fact, as Lacan says, that Other doesn’t answer).

Two Major Vectors of Change: Ambiguity, Circulation We can note through two usages the major change over time in Peter McHugh’s work, changes that marked his deepening of sociological roots in an evolving approach to social theory as a fundamental and interdisciplinary theoretical rather than disciplinary contribution. In recasting his early conception of ambiguity as not simply linked to the recognition of a convention as what could be otherwise, he detached ambiguity from its identification with this awareness of relativism over time towards a vision of the signifier as a word whose meaning is masked in its very enunciation not because it could be otherwise but because it is always more than it can show. The aporia here is not one of relativism (that the signifier has many senses) but one that discloses how the doubleness of any word between its face and concealed backside reveals the way the signifier must invariably mask its meaning. The impact of such a notion of ambiguity changes the positioning of theorist who orients not to the plural senses of the signifier but to the ways in which such an orientation must lead to the continuous attempt to track its collective problem and the experience of joyous affirmation in the face of this provocative end that can only invite further work. Such joyous affirmation in the face of both work and life that must remain unfinished leads Peter McHugh in his paper on “How the Dead Circulate in Life” (2011) to reformulate circulation as less an interaction or process of dissemination of influences and ideas, as a desire for more than life (cf narcissism and death). That the dead circulate in life expresses the promise and power of heritage, tradition, and memory, the capacity of community to affirm in action shared being. Peter’s work here allows us to appreciate the fate of the social actor in time, between past and future, in the present

254

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

life, determined to imagine what has and will die with a lightness of being. This is how his reformulation of joyous affirmation begins to identify such desire in the absence of phallic consummation and sets the stage for his comedic engagement with ending.

Travesty The pedagogical spirit of McHugh’s trajectory and the exemplary status of its theorizing that it must idealize along with the imperatives that mark its curriculum, lend to his theorizing an inevitable judgmental aura that can both offend and fascinate bystanders. Peter proposes a model of strong speech in terms of which he finds all alternatives lacking and that can lead to the question “why your ideal speaker?” In my discussion I have sought to show how his orientation to his own absolutism that each and every model of thought must presuppose in its own way given the inescapable mimetic character of inquiry, must recognize it as both necessary and hallucinatory, what Kenneth Burke calls “equipment for living” (1957) both indispensible and verifiable but only in ways that must remain “conversational” and irresolute. What then justifies his claim in relation to his own model of inquiry? Here Peter draws upon the algorithm subsumed in a theory by asking us to imagine bringing what it proposes to a definitive outcome and to examine its resources, if any, to engage the overflow of jouissance (the connotative excess) that it must exclude and/or towards which it remains silent. Peter grounds his analysis by trying to imagine and sketch the kind of social world inhabited by such a collection of social actors implicitly in contrast to the ideal speaker he envisions as his model. This tension between what Simmel calls the desire for life (aka the general atmosphere) and for more than life (the ideal speaker) is meant to become the conversational focus. In other works I have described this method as travesty when a subject is constructed to inhabit the world implied in the theory as a taken-forgranted environment. For example, we try to imagine what it would be like to actually live in the world ruled by contractual interaction between independent actors governed by denotative conceptions of representation (see Blum, The Lived Experience of the Dying Body, 182). Note in another example from Foster Wallace, how overcoming a denotative conception of playful requires a playfulness on the part of the inquirer.

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

255

Lenore has a quality that attracts men. It is not a normal quality or a quality that can be articulated … he said about trying to articulate it. “Vulnerability” is of course a bad word. “Playfulness” will not do … both denote, and so fail. Lenore has the quality of a sort of game about her. There. Since that makes very little sense it may be right. Lenore soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules. How about that. The rules of the game are Lenore and to play is to be played. Find out the rules of my game, she laughs, with or at … (Foster Wallace 1987, 73) McHugh felt that the need to open up any distinction to such play is to expose the aesthetic relationship of actor to environment as a relationship of jouissance that in turn requires an inquirer whose own playfulness, bordering on the aesthetic, reveals jouissance and the desire it discloses, to serve as the imperative bond that connects inquirer and material in a quirky loving embrace.

Conclusion In each of McHugh’s studies his ideal speaker has to struggle to establish a voice in trying to overcome such a “general atmosphere,” making conversation about this the objective of the theorizing. Judgment materializes as some artful way of administering this conversation and monitoring its movement towards an end that remains inconclusive but intelligible. This struggle in our current environment has been popularized through the polarity of the tension between the analogical and digital emphases on language and distinguishing that simply replays McHugh’s conception of such an opposition as the surface of a discursive concern to reformulate as a problem solving situation the denotative sacrifice of meaning in the service of an ideal of efficient discourse as an exchange between what Wittgenstein parodies as talking lions who use words jointly without really understanding their implications. This reformulation designs resistance in the form of an ideal speaker whose necessary act of negation must affirm in a positive spirit its commitment to an aesthetic (analogical) desire to sacrifice the security of a final solution for the joyous affirmation of an unfinished conversation and its playfulness.

256

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

In this paper and this book as a whole, we have tried to show how the intellectual legacy of a person such as Peter McHugh could not be preserved in a record without losing a sense of everything essential and resonant about his work and life unless such a record was a beginning for us to recover the meaning and investment of spirit that it seems to mask and yet must exhibit, concealed–unconcealed as the Heideggerian cliché goes. Peter McHugh was a living lovely handful who enriched the lives he encountered, of those who were not comatose but willing to hear and heed his explorations!

ReFeReNCeS Arendt, Hannah. 1956. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press – 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Burke, Kenneth. 1957. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Certeau. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foster Wallace, David. 1987. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin Books. Fritz, Marianne. (1978) 2015. The Weight of Things. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. Reprint. St Louis: Dorothy, A Publishing Project. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. (1895) 1957. Studies on Hysteria. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, Ny: Doubleday. – 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City: Anchor Books. Heidegger, Martin. (1935) 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Garden City, Ny: Doubleday/Anchor. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton. McHugh, Peter. 1968. Defining the Situation. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. – 1996. “Insomnia and the T(error) of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism.” Human Studies vol. 19, no. 1: 17–42. – 2005. “Shared Being, Old Promises and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies vol. 28, no 2: 129–56. – 2009. “Furthermores on the Aesthetic.” Unpublished paper. – 2011. “How the Dead Circulate (in Life).” In Spectacular Death, edited by Tristanne Connolly. Bristol: Intellect Press.

towArds A socIology of jouIssAnce

257

Plato. 1945. The Republic of Plato. Translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 1957. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato. Translated by Francis Macdonald Cornford. New York: Liberal Arts Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry vol. 36, no. 1: 1–19. Simmel, Georg. 2011. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1947. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Glencoe: The Free Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: The MacMillan Company. Zaloszyc, Armond. 1991. “Sacrifice and our Destiny.” lacanian inc vol. 4 (Fall): 49–57.

16

THE INVENTION OF ANALYSIS: “IF THIS IS SOCIOLOGY, I WANT TO BE IN IT” Kieran Bonner

I The Object That Is Analysis

1

To analyse is … to address the possibility of any finding, puzzle, sense resolution, answer, interest, location, phenomenon, etcetera, etcetera. Analysis is not concerned with anything said but with the grounds of what is said – the foundations that make what is said possible, sensible, conceivable. For any speech, including speech about speech, our interest is reflexive. (McHugh et al., On the Beginning of Social Inquiry, 2) Theorizing is ironic toward the treatment of conversation as a means of access that opens us to the ultimate truth, because conversation is enjoyable in-itself as the work through which the interest in the development of the in-itself is embodied both as the worker’s way of working out what the notion is and as his way of making explicit what he is. (Self Reflection In the Arts and Sciences, 147–8.) It’s not just talking. I mean, it’s how you take – let’s see. How –. So, A says B, C says D, and A, who said B, needs to understand how D could come out of C, having heard B. So it’s – that’s the kind of thing. (Peter McHugh in an interview on the nature of dialectical collaboration)

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

259

In the first quotation, McHugh et al. describe the kind of inquiry the title of the book, On the Beginning of Social Inquiry, announces. To do Analysis, they say, “is to ask after grounds of what is said, what makes it possible.” As they go on to describe, “collaboration, is our method for being able to produce an analysis which is reflexive, which addresses its own possibilities, and yet is at the same time speakable, do-able, distinct from chatter, a denial of nihilism” (4). Collaboration, or as the introduction later calls it, “the dialectical engagement” (1994, 14) between the inquirers and the tradition in which they are embedded was McHugh et al.’s solution to the problem of being productively reflexive about being reflexive. Their solution was to be dialectical in the way Plato describes thinking as a conversation within the soul of self. In the sense of the quotation above, in the conversation between speakers A and C, A is interested in why speaker C said D in response to hearing speech B. A seeks to recover what C heard in A’s speech (B) through an analysis of speech D. With their 1974 book, Analysis now becomes object in the world (e.g., 1974, 1984, 2016). As an object, like all made objects, it did not always exist.2 Analysis, a particular way of looking at the world, is an example of a contrivance that McHugh and his friend and collaborator, Alan Blum, brought into existence. The object that is Analysis is not just a newly made object it is also a new perspective on the examination of social life, a new mode for the production of inquiry (Bonner 2016). It is both a new object in the world and a new way of relating to the very world that Analysis is now part of. This paper seeks to address the invention of Analysis, bringing it from possibility to actuality, from some ambiguous need and desire to what Arendt would call a “fact” in the world, in the way a particular birth is a fact. This perspective was developed and formulated during the 1960s and early 1970s at Columbia University in New York by Blum and McHugh in collaboration with several students, most notably, Dan Foss, Stanley Raffel, and Stephen Karatheodoris. I did my graduate work at York University in Toronto between 1977 and 1986. There I took courses in this perspective taught variously by Blum, McHugh, Raffel, and Karatheodoris, sometimes together, most times separately. I had only a vague sense of the beginnings of the work, of how the work was shaped, the kind of sense a stranger to a new culture picks up through casual and sometimes sustained references (Schutz 1944).

260

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

In 2006, I applied for a small grant at St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo to fund a research project that would interview the founders of this mode of inquiry, Blum and McHugh. Stephen Karatheodoris, sadly, had passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1990. Peter McHugh had resigned from York University and was living in New York at the time. As it fortuitously would happen, I was doing some presentations in Ireland and Scotland in 2007 so I was able to include Raffel in the interview process. As with all interview research funded by universities, this project went through the ethics approval at the University of Waterloo. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. I interviewed Raffel at the University of Edinburgh, McHugh at his home in New York City, and Blum at the Culture of Cities Centre in Toronto, all in that order. McHugh, at the time, was in remission for cancer treatment and he passed away on 5 January 2010.3 I have published work that applies Analysis (e.g., 1997, 1998), and I have published work on the nature of this perspective. (e.g., 2001, 2016) This particular paper is my attempt to examine the invention of Analysis through a collaborative engagement with the interview material made available by transcriptions of my five interviews with McHugh in New York. The focus of the paper is on what made it necessary to invent or develop a new form of inquiry. While there are historical and sociocultural forces that of necessity shape the beginning of Analysis (Blum 2016), I am pursuing a more analytical question: given at any one time or era there are a plethora of ways to do social inquiry, why invent another one? What, to one of its developers, made this form of inquiry seem necessary? In this sense, I am pursuing a Columbo sort of question: we know what was done (Analysis was created) and we know who did it (Blum and McHugh). What we don’t know is why they did what they did and how, in a broad biographical sense, they went about doing it. In ŽiŽek’s terms, the biographical details will provide the manifest content but my analysis seeks to recover the latent content, in this case the problem or absence that called for a new perspective, the relation of the Imaginary to the Symbolic Order: “The true source of interest in the detective’s work is the process of deciphering itself, not its results” (ŽiŽek 2006, 27). Again, as stated, I interviewed each separately and so have the point of view of each with regard to this beginning. In this paper, I focus on the McHugh material. In subsequent papers, I will take up the Blum and Raffel interviews.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

261

An unexplicated resource for my paper will be the concerns of Kieran Bonner who proposed to interview Alan, Peter, and Stanley to get a sense of the historical or factually contingent beginnings of Analysis.4 I was curious about the way particular intellectual sources, not only Garfinkel but also Wittgenstein and Heidegger, shaped the development of this work. I was also curious about the way they found inspiration from Plato’s Socrates which was unique for a perspective within the discipline of sociology. My own friendship with the Greeks and especially Plato’s Socrates has become part of who I am. Yet, this influence was an outcome of being introduced to Analysis by my undergraduate professor (Brian Torode) at Trinity College, Dublin. After completing undergraduate university we (my wife Margaret and I) went to San Francisco and Alaska to work in construction to pay off some debts I owed my father; in the process I made extra money so I applied to York University, Toronto with the intention (as I told Margaret!) of staying for two years to do my Master’s before going back to Ireland. This is the accident of biography intertwined with the essential character of working out a vocation. Of necessity, I will be setting aside my own historical beginnings, as I work through the historical beginnings of Analysis, though of course it is a contingency that pervades this presentation. The invention of Analysis was driven by a need and a desire, and this invention decisively shaped who I was to become. The Catholic tradition describes the process of being shaped in one’s vocation as formation. The distinctions between what Heidegger calls the contingency of birth (being thrown in the world), what sociologists call socialization, university education as it is organized in North America, and a formation which reshapes one’s socialization are all involved, in a blurred way, in the invention of Analysis. In analyzing Peter McHugh’s biographical reflections, I hope to articulate the absence that called forth this invention and so shed some light on these distinctions.

II Peter Describing Peter at the Beginning of the Journey to Analysis? PM: Oh, well that’s a – (laughs). Let’s see; well, I guess I should start –. After I got out of the service, I knew – I knew a fellow who was {01} starting up a small liberal arts school modelled on Black Mountain College, which – I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Black Mountain here. Well, it’s famous, although it was

262

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

short-lived as a liberal arts, including art, school. And they had Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley, there were poets, and Einstein was on the board of directors, and so on and so forth. So then this man, Dana – William Dana – who was at Black Mountain, started a college in California. And I’d gotten out of the service and I was hanging around, and I had theatrical connections, so I did some theatrical work. But then he had met me, and so on and so forth, and he wanted – he thought I’d be good, because I was, kind of, interested in different things including theatre [and] I’d read some kind of {02} pseudo- or semiphilosophy and so on. So they – he gave me a scholarship to go out there, plus the G.I. Bill – I made it – so I went out there, and –. KB: Out where, again? PM: Out to Palos Verdes College, in California, which was in – near Rolling Hills – in L.A., south of L.A. And it was really good. And one instructor I had, in particular, a man named Robert Brown, who never became really famous, but he was a philosopher, and he was educated at the LSe. And he taught a philosophy course there, and it included a tutorial. So there’d be one day of lecture, and then there’d be one tutorial – one student with him – in his – at his place. {03} And there – I mean, so I – that was my introduction to philosophy. And I didn’t know what the hell was going on – I had no idea, at first, what was going on. The idea of asking a “first question” just was very difficult to handle for a common sense actor like me, you know what I mean? I’d just been around, and I hadn’t been particularly – you know, I wasn’t – I mean, I was a good student, and I got good grades if I liked the course, and I didn’t get good grades if I didn’t like it – that kind of stuff. So –. But then gradually I came to understand what it was. And at the same time, I was taking part in the Sean O’Casey play there, “Juno and the Paycock,” even though I was very young – I played, like, you know, the Paycock, and so forth – and I saw kind of certain relations {04} between the course I was taking in philosophy, and the tutorial, and this acting that I was doing. So, out of that, I learned that … that was my first exposure to the idea of asking first questions.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

263

From the above selection, we can see that McHugh’s encounter with academia was in some sense accidental. He had “gotten out of the service” and was “hanging around.” He had “theatrical connections” so he was doing “some theatrical work.” His friend mentioned that he would “be good” for this small newly established liberal arts college in Palos Verdes. Through a particular teacher there, Robert Brown, he was introduced to philosophy. This encounter with philosophy was disorienting, and it was such because “the idea of asking a ‘first question’ just was very difficult to handle for a common sense actor like me.” The disorientation and challenge was because common sense made asking first questions “difficult to handle.” Somehow Brown’s course in philosophy together with the experience of playing the Paycock in Sean O’Casey’s play “Juno and the Paycock” he began to understand “the idea of asking first questions.” Note that what McHugh struggled with was not answers to first questions but “the idea of asking first questions.” It is the very posing of first questions that was the challenge. Though McHugh did not mention it in this 2006 set of interviews, it was the inhospitability of students to the asking of what he calls “first questions” that became one reason for his resignation back in 1989. In his “Letter of Resignation,” he described his experience of teaching Analysis in relation to this issue of first questions. Intellectual concerns are now debased. The consumer culture is one in which first questions are no longer asked and thus students come to university with the (mis)understanding that those questions are a waste of time and should not be asked. Fundamental scholarly inquiry, such as “What are we and how should we live?,” is preempted in consumerism by an image of life as endless and unreflective movement and accommodation – from place to place and thing to thing – and of education as a merely technical means for achieving these. I seldom find an undergraduate student now who takes up arts for arts’ sake: students enter courses instrumentally, to gain access to some ultimate job or profession many steps removed from what should be the immediate excitement of academic work. (1992, 107–8, reprinted in this volume) First questions are fundamental questions and McHugh came to understand the importance of first questions when he got some distance from

264

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

his common sense perspective – taking a philosophy course but also his experience of theatre acting. First questions require a reflexive distance on instrumental concerns, especially concerns to do with job training. What is notable about McHugh’s 1992 description is that he formulates vocational self-interest as an “ultimate” or eventual concern for undergraduate students but “first questions” as a feature of “the immediate excitement of academic work.” In ways that remain to be developed, understanding what is involved in asking first questions is part of what is exciting about academic work, an excitement he first discovered during his own undergraduate experience. What is involved in teaching the asking of first questions? McHugh himself was at first disoriented by the experience, so student disorientation cannot be the issue with the York students. In the “Letter of Resignation,” McHugh goes on to describe his attempt at teaching the asking of first questions: For example, I often ask advanced undergraduate students to write about instrumentally useless affairs such as games, ritual, fine art, and the like. In preconsumption days they worked out formulations of these and often recognized through the exercise that it is possible to enjoy some intellectual or social commitment for itself, whatever else it might bring. Nowadays students can hardly name such activities, and when they do, complain that nothing is more useless than the examination of uselessness. (118 in this volume) Here we can begin to glean an inspiration for his part in the invention of Analysis. Understanding the significance of the importance of asking first questions points to understanding that part of social life, whatever its particular content, where one can “enjoy some intellectual or social commitment for itself.” Enjoyment or what Blum (2003, 2016), following Lacan, would later call jouissance needs to be a recognizable experience if one is to appreciate the asking of first questions (see Blum’s paper in this volume). We can see this in the second quotation at the beginning of this paper, where theorizing as conversation is experienced as enjoyable in itself. Analysis, again in ways that remain to be developed, is invented to make a place for the importance of the experience of enjoying something for its own sake (games, ritual, fine art) and, reflexively speaking, enjoying the intellectual exploration of enjoying something for its own sake. In some way, the experience of this enjoyment, and the intellectual exploration of

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

265

this experience, leads to an appreciation of “fundamental scholarly inquiry” in terms of “What are we and how should we live?” Unlike a philosophy course, where first questions are abstractly posed and responded to, what McHugh engages is an everyday practice that is engaged for its own sake. McHugh’s reflection on the background that prepared him to collaborate on the development of Analysis generates a speech that focuses on his exposure to first questions in a philosophy course and his experience playing the lead role in a Sean O’Casey play. The characters in O’Casey’s play speak with a poetic lilt and show a love of talking. In particular, the character of the “the Paycock” or Captain Boyle, that McHugh was playing at that time, is a fun-loving if irresponsible storyteller who experiences pains in his legs every time the prospect of working to ease his family’s poverty is in the offing; these pains “magically” disappear when it is time to head to the pub. The play is a classic O’Casey comic tragedy. Also ironically, during one scene when Captain Boyle (the Paycock) and his “butty” ( Joxer) are talking after several drinks, Boyle waxes lyrically about his time as a sailor and he says, “I ofen looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question – what is the stars, what is the stars?” Joxer replies, “Ah, that’s the question, that’s the question.” Then Boyle says, “An’ then, I’d have another look, an I’d ass meself – what is the moon?” to which Joxer replies, “Ah that’s the question – what is the moon, what is the moon?” (Act 1 toward the end). Here O’Casey, through his inebriated characters, parodies the idea of first questions, as they appear to be addressed in the discipline of philosophy. First questions can be treated as abstract and otherworldly, or they can be answered through various religious and spiritual commitments. In ways that have yet to be developed, neither in retrospect seemed to be options for McHugh’s interest in first questions. Both of these practices (abstract philosophy, religious commitment) place the emphasis on answers to first questions, in Gadamer’s terms, privileging the answer over the question (1975). We now recognize how his theatre experience could be related to his understanding of the asking of first questions. Theatre, “like games, ritual fine art, and the like” is an art form that is enjoyed for its own sake, “whatever else it might bring.” Of course, for this enjoyment to be possible requires an ability to be open to experiences outside of the instrumental paradigm, a focus on ends and not merely means. A fixation on the instrumental paradigm, the quest for deliverable measurable outcomes, will, of necessity, blinker actors from understanding the importance of asking first questions, making it seem that “nothing is more useless than the examination of uselessness.”

266

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

III The Accidentally Fateful Encounter with Garfinkel PM: Well, then Palos Verdes College didn’t make it. They foreclosed on it, basically. The co – there were certain interests – the Skakels. Ethel Skakel was John Kennedy’s – Bobby Kennedy’s wife. The Skakels had big – I don’t know, they were big into something. And they owned the property, and they decided to do something else with the property, and so on and so forth. So then at the time, I had met my wife, Pat, and she was at UCLa. So she said, “Well, you know, I have a friend whose father is, like, in the admissions, so let’s go over there, you can go to UCLa.” So, I thought, okay – (laughs) drifting, right? basically – but I was interested in Pat, you know … So then I went to UCLa, and I was taking a curriculum in the humanities and social sciences. And I was also working as a gardener, and I had to take a course at 8 o’clock in the morning. And it was like [a] dart boards; like, you know what I mean, like the same thing. So I looked around, and I saw this thing in the catalogue, and it said, “Sociopathic Behaviour,” and the teacher was somebody that I’d never heard of, didn’t know the – Harold Garfinkel. So, I said, “Well, of all the things that – why don’t I try that.” “Sociopath” – I looked it up in the dictionary, “– well, yeah, the might be interesting.” So, I took Sociopathic Behaviour, and I was just – you know what happened? I got it. I just got it. And only to find out later that he was on the verge of being fired for being unintelligible. KB: Oh, really? PM: And – yeah, yeah, you know what I mean? But, I mean, I just got it. And he was a funny guy, too. I mean, I –. Somehow, whatever it was in that brief history – or whatever – you know, in my whole life, but also, what I’d done at Palos Verdes – I just got it. And I loved it. And he thought I was – you know, he’d say, well, “this is the best exam” – or, you know, whatever, when you hand me back the paper. So I thought – KB: You were in a graduate school – or undergraduate or – PM: Undergrad – oh, undergraduate. So – and there were graduate students in the course. I didn’t know that, either. I mean, they were there, sitting-in or were taking the course, and stuff

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

267

like that. But I found that out later when I –. So I –. Anyway, a comic part of it is – and, in a way, I rue this fact, but it is comic – I thought, “Well, if this is sociology, I want to be in it” – only to find out that it wasn’t sociology as conceived by sociologists. But anyway. I stayed with Garfinkel and took a couple of courses, and –. He was – you know, he is still interesting. And Aaron Cicourel came out after he got his degree at Cornell and so on and so forth – he was there. We can see from this stretch of talk a series of elements emerge. We recognize many contingent and accidental episodes that led to his fateful encounter with Garfinkel. There is the collapse of the college, an unanticipated accident from the perspective of the biography that interrupted his education. There is his meeting with his wife, Pat, and her encouragement to come to UCLa and apply through her connections. There is the fact that he was working as a gardener and so, because of that job, having to take an 8 am class. There is, as he calls it, “the dart board” effect, looking around to see what would fit with his work schedule and landing on this class called “Sociopathic Behaviour,” that appeared to be interesting. Then there is what almost seems to be a “master signifier” in his formulation of that experience: “I got it, I just got it,” a phrase he uses again later. McHugh points to the meaning of that phrase when he says he “found out later that he was on the verge of being fired for being unintelligible.” “I just got it” acknowledges the notorious difficulty of Garfinkel’s thoughts, ideas, and writing and the almost surprise that his experience as a student here, unlike his struggle with first questions, came relatively quickly. And, it seemed like a revelation. As he reflects on it, “whatever it was in that brief history … in my whole life but also what I’d done at Palos Verdes – I just got it.” In other words and in ways that seem mysterious, his experience up to then seemed to be an ideal preparation to understand the way Garfinkel’s method was getting at the foundations of social life. Garfinkel affirmed McHugh’s self-understanding in his comments on his work. Another significant element is McHugh’s comment that Garfinkel “was a funny guy, too.” As if foreshadowing both his collaboration with Blum and the development of the relation between theorizing, comedy, and enjoyment (1984), he points to the way that seeking to understand the foundations of social life, with all of the contingencies involved in that journey, can be enjoyable, an experience that is foreclosed when students are blinkered by job concerns.

268

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Here we have a series of contingencies that lead to a life-transforming experience, an experience that changes the direction of his life. These contingencies include the accident of becoming a sociologist, which he sees as comic – McHugh chose a profession based on a (mis)understanding that Garfinkel’s work, ethnomethodology, exemplified the discipline. Even then, his retrospective recognition of the misunderstanding is not treated as fatal flaw leading to a tragic result: “Anyway, a comic part of it is – and in a way I rue this fact, but it is comic – I thought if this is sociology, I want to be in it.” Here McHugh is referring to the suffering of having to work in a profession that, with notable exceptions, formulates the everyday member as a “servo-being,” pointing to the limitation of the concept of socialization as conceived by sociologists. “What could such a general atmosphere be, except a random weather of collisions between learner and learned … It is a learner made entirely subject to an environment, any environment, because this learner’s theoretic endowment is passivity – an actor created to do no more than receive and absorb, taking on the social as if a second skin and to become, in the end, a servo-being” (“Furthermores on the Aesthetic,” 224 in this volume). In retrospect, McHugh recognizes that the fateful encounter with Garfinkel was theoretically and experientially transforming. Garfinkel’s (1967) work famously showed the fallacy of the “judgemental dope” that sociological theories of society rested on. In contrast, ethnomethodology shows that social order rests on the taken for granted but oriented work of everyday members, the seen but unnoticed work that the discipline of sociology also took for granted. McHugh recognizes the comedy of choosing to pursue a profession that was unable to take seriously the oriented work of the everyday members that were the object of its study, formulating such members as “servo-beings,” actors who are “designed to be a virtual dummy” (225 in this volume) Perhaps it also shows McHugh’s entrancement with the Symbolic order and the discourse of the university, where philosophy appears to have a monopoly on the asking of first questions. McHugh’s comic rueing of his choice of discipline does not just refer to conventional sociology’s theoretical inadequacy, he also indicates that his own biographic “drifting” was transformed by this encounter. That is, this encounter provided for a way he could be oriented about what he wanted to do, that is, self-consciously grasp what Garfinkel showed was taken for granted by everyday members.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

269

IV Academic Career versus Academic Calling PM: Well, then, I – so I went on, after I got my B.A., I went on in sociology. But – this is an interesting insight on Garfinkel – so when I – and I didn’t understand the implication at the time – so I said – and I hadn’t really wanted to become a professor or anything [] – so, but I –. So, when I was a senior and trying to decide what to do, I asked him, you know, what kind of – what should, you know – what do you think I should do? And, retrospectively, this was the first, kind of, real discovery about the dark side of Harold Garfinkel. He said, “Well, you ought to go to one of the top schools.” I said, “Well, what are they?” And he said, “Well, you know, you go to Harvard, go to Michigan – go to Michigan, or Berkeley – go to Berkeley.” I said, “Well, I’m kind of interested in what you’re doing.” He said, “Well, yeah, but, you know –,” and so on and so forth. Well, yeah, I did, I stayed in there. And there were a few other – it was basically Harold, though, and – there was a good professor, Ralph Turner – he was kind of a straight social psychologist – he was good. But the – I don’t think the department was very good. And it was run by would-be scientists – the scientism was rampant. I mean, that was the fifties – early fifties – and they didn’t know what they were talking about. McHugh here refers to the problem of conventional sociology in relation to its aspiration to be a science and so unreflexive about the grounds of its own practices with regard to understanding social life (“didn’t know what they were talking about”) and the radical difference ethnomethodology offered. Yet, despite the promise of ethnomethodology that Garfinkel offered, he too seemed focused on ultimate job concerns. Where McHugh was interested in developing himself with regard to the possibilities that ethnomethodology created for the study of social life (rescuing the common sense member from being formulated as a judgmental dope), Garfinkel was advising him in terms of career possibilities. Pursuing this approach to understanding social life was an “in itself ” for McHugh and to develop his understanding meant apprenticing to the inventor of the work; Garfinkel, on the other hand, at least from McHugh’s perspective, was advising McHugh about

270

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

graduate work that would be good for his career. While McHugh “hadn’t really wanted to become a professor or anything,” Garfinkel provided advice that seemed geared toward success in that very prospect. This was also the beginning of McHugh’s sense, even if it was as yet unarticulated, of the limitations of a founder’s relation to his own work, despite its transformative effect on McHugh. PM: [Garfinkel] was a Parsons student, and, so, he always – you remember, he dedicated it to Parsons, I think – his “Studies” – so he always – you know, his one limitation – and it’s too bad because it was a limitation which hindered his work – was that he wanted to be accepted by scientists. In relation to the need for a new perspective that makes the exploration of “first questions” necessary and desirable, we are beginning to see that for McHugh, Garfinkel moved the possibility of the new perspective closer but did not realize this for him. As McHugh et al. (1974, 22) stated, “we must first record the great influence of the writings of Garfinkel, though this influence has not worked itself out in our thinking in the ways it has in his students.” An important difference between the perspectives of ethnomethodology and Analysis was the latter’s interest in questioning the limitation science placed on understanding the foundations of social life, foundations that for McHugh involved taking the risk of engaging “first questions.” Recall Weber’s famous piece in “Science as a Vocation” where he approvingly quotes Tolstoy: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do, and how shall we live?’” (Weber, 142–3.) To those who sought an answer to such questions, Weber said, One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’ – that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in favour of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity, which sets in if one lacks the courage to clarify one’s own ultimate standpoint and rather facilitates this duty by feeble relative judgments. In my eyes, such religious return stands higher than the academic prophecy, which does not clearly realize that in the lecture-rooms of the university no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

271

The problem McHugh struggled with is the preservation of intellectual integrity with the pursuit of first questions, and it was this that provided for the need for a new perspective; this perspective sought to come to terms with the truth of our contingent beginnings that science showed pervaded the modern world. If our beginnings are contingent, what makes the asking of first questions necessary. If all that the sociology can say is that most of us become competent adults of whatever society we are socialized into, then first questions and access to ultimate truth are relative to, as Berger (1963) says, which side of the Pyrenees one is born. We are now closer to the problem for which Analysis was invented; in an age dominated by the scientific method, an age that equates knowledge with what science establishes, the integration of intellectual integrity with the pursuit of first questions is a challenge. Within science, as Weber acknowledged, it is impossible. Does this have to mean the pursuit of first questions in an intellectually rigorous way is impossible?

V The Journey to Columbia University, New York McHugh continued to work with Garfinkel in order to develop a method that may help his (unconscious) search but left after his Ma (1959). PM: So I stayed there, and then, I got my Ma there, and then I was kind of tired of the place, and then Garfinkel – I had come to know Garfinkel, and the {12} problems that he had – how he wouldn’t tell you anything. So, I thought – and then Cicourel had gone to Northwestern, which was in Chicago. And so I transferred from UCLa after I got my Ma, there, to Northwestern University, where Aaron Cicourel was teaching. At Northwestern University, McHugh completed his PhD, working on the material that he did as a graduate student with Garfinkel on the “Documentary Method of Interpretation.” This was eventually to become his first book, Defining the Situation. After Northwestern, he landed a job in the University of Delaware. As a sociologist, he discovered that not only was the discipline of sociology scientistic in the social scientific sense of the term, but it was further marginalized at Delaware because of Dupont’s funding of the natural sciences. In reflecting on his experience there, he related an anecdote about how he and his sociology students were kicked out of the assigned seminar room in mid class by a chemistry

272

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

professor who needed the room immediately. For McHugh, this anecdote was telling for the way it illustrated the marginalization of all nonscientific academic work. Carl Weinberg, in his memorial reflection on his friend Peter McHugh, describes the situation they shared as friends and academic colleagues in Delaware.5 Both recognized they needed to get out of Delaware if they were not to “wither on the vine” (Weinberg 2010). Weinberg asked McHugh to help him on a grant application. McHugh took over and wrote the application to help his colleague out. The application received $65,000, a very large grant in 1964. In turn, this grant led to his “escape” from Delaware and his being hired at Columbia University. As he said, “he couldn’t believe it.”6 PM: See now, who knows if I had[n’t] – if the guy down there hadn’t said, “Come on, come on, help me out, get me a grant, here,” maybe that – this never would have happened, you know what I mean? I don’t know, I don’t know, you know what I mean? Here is a good example of McHugh reflecting on a biographical contingency – in this case good fortune – that led to his going to Columbia University, “a good school” in Garfinkel’s terms. He wonders in retrospect whether Analysis would have been invented in the way it was without the good fortune of gaining a large grant that made his Columbia appointment possible. Implied in this is that without the move to Columbia University and therefore his fated meeting with his future collaborator and friend, Alan Blum, Analysis may not have happened. The invention of this new perspective is intrinsically tied to his meeting with Alan Blum. What is intriguing in this slice of conversation is his awareness of the contingency involved in the development of this new perspective: “maybe this never would have happened.” And with regard to this matter, he confesses his ignorance “I don’t know, I don’t know, you know what I mean?” In what way is it reasonable to say that the essential is dependent on the contingent; in what way does this not seem to point to the absurdity of life, that one’s discovery of the importance of what is first or foundational about life (desire, biography, society, ethics) rests on a happenstance that could have been otherwise. To say that the discovery of the theory/method into the investigation of what is first, what is essential, could have been otherwise, might not “have happened” suggests a negation of the very essentiality being claimed. Is, ultimately speaking, all of life an accident as Camus’

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

273

Meursault claims? If it is, all claims for what is essential and necessary are partial, existentially particular, socially located and so not universally essential. Note that this becomes an issue when one wants to think through one’s claims, when one is critically reflexive about one’s choices. Of course, if one is narrowly blinkered by instrumental self-interest, then this vexing issue will be dismissed as abstract, irrelevant, inconsequential, trifling, and so on.7

VI The Blum and McHugh Collaboration That Led to the Invention of Analysis McHugh had been at Columbia and working out his own relation to the heritage of ethnomethodology for two years before Blum arrived. PM: I was – you know, I wished I were making better progress at, kind of, finding out not what it was, anymore, but what could I do with it; what could I do with it. I knew what it was … It wasn’t that I was looking for the object, but for my place in it. Knowing ethnomethodology was not enough for McHugh; he wanted to know what to do with it, for his “place in it.” McHugh is searching for his own place in a work that had already changed his life (one that moved him into the career of university professor) a work that now spoke to him more than the teacher who created the work. There was still something missing in the breakthrough ethnomethodology made possible, a missing that is named as “one’s place” in the work. In the terminology of the “Self Reflection” quotation above, the dialectic that is theorizing is “the work through which the interest in the development of the in-itself is embodied both as the worker’s way of working out what the notion is and as his way of making explicit what he is” (1984, 148). McHugh was still in the process of finding a way to make explicit “what he is.” Recall that so far, we have what we might call Weber’s problem: how to address first questions in a way that does not require the sacrifice of the commitment to intellectual rigor for the reflexively aware theorist. Ethnomethodology, by itself, had not resolved this problem though, for Peter it was a decisive move. It was decisive in that it showed how members have methods for resolving the contingency of everyday life. The essential reflexivity of accounts showed the way members accomplished social order

274

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

through and despite the possibility of contingency but they do so through affirming the sanctioned properties of discourse. As stated: members “make do under the imperfect guidance of rules or procedures that are themselves imperfect, yet work most of the time because they are worked out nevertheless. When they do not, they are provisionally reinterpreted, and then again, as necessary” (McHugh, 240 in this volume). Everyday members theoretic work is “a make do.” They have the theoretic resources to work out their relation to the contingency of everyday life by “assembling an appearance of order.” With ethnomethodology, McHugh has a landscape to work in but not a direction, a problem or sense of unsettled or unsatisfactoriness but no real sense of what would resolve it. Alan Blum was hired at Columbia around 1965. He had already been exposed to Garfinkel’s work through Eliot Mischler at Harvard while on a postdoctoral fellowship. When Blum was hired he looked up McHugh. KB: So, when Alan looked you up, at what – and Alan was doing – was interested in ethnomethodology …? PM: Very, very, very interested because of Mischler, and here I [am] – you know, here’s this guy that actually was the student there; so I think he treated it like, kind of a – you know, a lucky break, ’cause Alan is – was a curious person, and he liked the work, and we – then we hit it off. We just hit it off. And he understood – he understood that we needed to be doing something else than what we been trained to do, you know what I mean? The fateful encounter between Blum and McHugh is described as another “lucky break” not unlike the break of the research grant he got that enabled him to escape Delaware. In this case, Blum understood the intellectual dilemma that McHugh described of needing “to be doing something else than what we been trained to do.” He does not elaborate on this need to do “something else” but we know that it relates to the place of the theorist in theorizing, and so it is a reflexive issue. Both realized that what they had inherited from sociology was not enough. Ethnomethodology had made a breakthrough, but something else was needed however unclear that was. And McHugh adds another element to their encounter, repeating it for emphasis: “we hit it off. We just hit it off.” The compatibility, the rapport they experienced when they first met each other meant their shared need

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

275

to do something else was not a lack to be lamented but an opportunity to enjoy working out the “something else.” KB: And then how did you find working that collaboration together and writing together and, you know, I mean, to actually lead to a publication – PM: Well, I mean, it was pretty easy – I mean, I thought it was pretty – “easy” is not the right word. But it went smoothly, even though there were bumpy spots that we shared collectively. In other words: you know, you write a paper – there are, you know, places in the paper that [aren’t easy] in certain ways and you have to change it – this and that and the other. But I thought it was pretty easy – he’s very easy to work with, Alan, and he’s –. He’s always been very good at, kind of, pushing you one step further by inventing something for you from what you’ve already said. [I mean], he [was] good – with me, he was very good about that. So in that sense – I don’t know, it just kind of went. Plus, we were friendly –. I mean, we had a lot of laughs –. It was hard to get laughs at Columbia – well, by that I mean, Columbia was no laughing matter. [] Columbia was a hard place. Here we see a work and life integration that is a resource for the invention of Analysis. If ethnomethodology provided a kind of inheritance, some resources to work with, the friendly relation that embraces laughter provides resources for a working collaboration. The collaborative writing experience did not eliminate the normally difficult experiences of writing, of finding “some bumpy spots” or “places in the paper” that need to be changed. But on the whole, his writing collaboration with Blum “was pretty easy.” Interestingly McHugh says Blum was easy to work with not because he was tolerant or affirming but because he would push his collaborator “one step further by inventing something for you from what you’ve already said.” This is collaboration where the collaborator makes more work for you, pushes you to analyze further on the basis of what one has already said (Bonner 2016). On top of that “we were friendly, we had a lot of laughs.” That addition does not seem incidental though it is added as a “plus.” Columbia University is described by McHugh as a hard place, as “no laughing matter” so the achievement of sharing laughter is noted to be all the more remarkable. So we have two young sociologists who liked

276

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

working with each other and who had a desire (and ambition) to transform the dominant intellectual trends of the time. The development of Analysis was not just the outcome of accidental encounters but by the desire and ambition of two who “understood that we needed to be doing something else.” Their collaboration made a home for an inventiveness that pushes the examination of an object further that in turn made the invention of the perspective of Analysis itself an accomplishment. KB: How did the perspective of Analysis coming into being? PM: You know, I just can’t – I can’t recall. I think it was more invented than introduced, if you can put it that way. And I don’t think our work [initially] was all that different. The “Motives” paper – I mean, I leave it to you, you’ve got the [background] – but, you know, it wasn’t all that different from ethnomethodology. I have elsewhere (2001, 2016) described the way the “Motive” paper launched their collaboration in terms of its similarity and its difference (which I think McHugh underestimates) from ethnomethodology. Yet, that difference did not satisfy their sense or need to do something else than reproduce their inheritance. He and Blum were both collaborating, they knew they needed to do something different, to negate their inheritance in some way, and that their enjoyable relationship made a home for invention. This turns out to be the process of making sociology into a discipline where “if this is sociology, I want to be in it.” The invention of Analysis is the invention of a perspective in sociology that makes a place for them which analytically means making a place for the possibility of access to the ultimate truth.

VII Plato and Completing the Outline of Analysis KB: Now, so, then, Columbia – at this stage – ’68, ’69 – you guys – both of you guys were working together – [so] the collaboration was fairly well established, because you ended up going to different places, right? PM: Oh – yeah, no, I went to Hunter and he went to NyU. And I taught at Yale, too. Let’s see, what happened then? Well, then the work took another turn. You know why? Stephen. Stephen was at NyU. Alan was at NyU. Stephen took a course from Alan, or something, and introduced Alan to the Greeks.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

277

KB: To the Greeks? So that’s where – PM: So that, really, was the compelling last – not last, but the compelling move to kind of complete the immediate outline of what it was we were doing. If it is said that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology emerged from Husserl’s phenomenology, as mediated by A. Schutz, it is also said that Analysis emerged from Heidegger’s transformation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. When I was first introduced to the work of Blum and McHugh in Trinity College Dublin, I was taught that their sociological perspective was an application of Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology. At that time and as preparation for studying the work of Blum and McHugh, the class read Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” The On the Beginning book affirms this interpretation when it notes: “in our respective attitudes toward ordinary language and the everyday world, we have about as much in common with ethnomethodology as Heidegger shares with Austin” (23), an influence noted by Sharrock and Anderson in their book The Ethnomethodologists (1986, 110). The influence of Heidegger is noted in many of the anniversary reflections on oBSI in The Reflexive Initiative (e.g., see index). However, the story is much more complicated than that the perspective of Analysis developed as a sociological translation of Heidegger’s philosophical intervention. I first encountered this complication when I went to York to study with Blum and McHugh in 1977. I expected an intellectual environment where Heidegger would be a major focus and was surprised to find, instead, a radical reading of Plato and his Socrates more prominent. McHugh notes that the engagement with the Greeks (i.e., Plato), an engagement initiated by Blum’s student Karatheodoris, became “the compelling move to kind of complete the immediate outline of what it was we were doing.” Analysis developed as a perspective not in any mechanical application of new intellectual breakthroughs made in other fields but rather in the search by two friends who also shared a lot of laughs. As Blum says, “we continued to plough on, finding jewels here and there, coming to understand ultimate meaning [first questions] not as a metaphysical fantasy or an objective for philosophy but as the intimation of a problem-solving situation in which fundamental ambiguity comes to view in myriad mundane events of everyday life, as a recurrent perplexity both vivid and forceful” (2016, 270). Garfinkel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein were the places where the jewels were found, but a decisive move was the discovery that a radical and contemporary (phenomenological) reading of Plato would provide.

278

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

KB: So what did you find in Plato that helped address what you were working – PM: Just, kind of – knowledge: you know, the idea of knowledge? I mean –. See, basically, you’ve got to have an actor – an endowed actor – that’s an ideal speaker. We got “ideal” speaker from Chomsky. An ideal speaker is one who may not know everything, but thinks so, meaning – I mean, I put that crassly, but you know – who does know. And knows that he’s participating in the world, in ways that other – might be otherwise. Now, you get that from Wittgenstein, I’d say. Whereas, in ethno, there was never any of that about “might be otherwise.” Ever. And so “might be otherwise” – for me, anyway – and I think, for everyone, but maybe not in that term – was, like, crucial. So that opens up all the descriptive work to an actor who could choose, and might as well be conceived to have chosen, even out of ignorance, you know. Ignorance itself then becomes a kind of a choice, in a certain sense, you know, and so on and so forth. So that created an actor who could ground his or her own orientation in something other than the world itself – of common sense. So it gives you a chance to have an actor who can kind of imagine something else. So it gives you an actor with imagination, let’s put it that way. “It might – could be otherwise.” Here McHugh outlines some of the jewels that he and Blum found as they sought to find a way to have access to “ultimate meaning” or first questions as an everyday situation of problem solving. He mentions Chomsky’s Ideal Speaker, Wittgenstein’s “might be otherwise,” and Plato, the latter providing for the possibilities of human knowledge. (Chomsky is cited favourably in 1974 but, as the Analysis perspective developed, cited critically in 1984.) Blum and McHugh’s notion of Ideal Speaker was developed in ways they describe in the 1984 quotation at the beginning of this paper. The Ideal Speaker is formulated as the actor who seeks to access the “ultimate truth” despite the fundamental gap or limit, which ironically means the “ultimate truth” is fundamentally inaccessible. In this sense, human knowledge means the Socratic “I know I don’t know” which, in terms of Plato’s Divided Line, means dialectically engaging the examination of the first principles that sustain the inquiry into ultimate meaning. They “read Plato” not “as biographer of Socrates” nor “as a reporter of innumerable engagements

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

279

between Socrates and his interlocutors” but rather “as making reference to the theoretical life, to the soul of the ideal theorist” (1974, 14). In this sense the social inquirer develops an Ideal Speaker for the object being understood (the notion), as a way to speak about a whole that cannot be directly accessed. The Platonic tragicomedy about the enterprise (to speak about what cannot be directly spoken about) found a home in a collaboration between two sociologists who shared “a lot of laughs.” McHugh is explicit about the fundamental limit of human knowledge in his “Fragmentation” paper. “The limit is a fate … It is a requirement which does not come and go … This is a requirement of finitude. But it is not a punishment laid down but, rather, a life offered” (146 in this volume). Again in his “Postmodernism” paper, “profound ambiguity is a limit … beyond our capacity to change, transcend, or put aside … We are kept by the limit from certain things as beyond possibility – perfect knowledge, for example” (165). The ambiguity and contingency of life can never be resolved in any final way, yet this is not a punishment but an offer; the invention of Analysis shows how McHugh and Blum took up that offer.

VIII What Is Analysis? Conversation and the Marriage of Contingency and Necessity KB: How did you and Alan initially work at developing this other kind of sociology? PM: Conversation. KB: Conversation? PM: Through and through. Through and through. I mean, we talked a lot. Columbia, it was great to be there. We all lived in the same neighbourhood – by “all,” I mean the two of us. (laughs) There was the West End [a bar in the Upper West Side], that was the place – the place, the [] place … So–. And then the students were interested. But it was mainly Alan and I, at – just conversation. Analysis was invented by two inquirers who knew that something else was needed than what they had inherited, who understood that life, even mundane life, was not severed from a relation to “ultimate meaning” but who needed a method to provide an access to what could not be directly accessed, an access that does not give up on the mundane events of everyday

280

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

life, that is, without giving up on the spirit of the discipline of sociology (even if it means giving up on how it was conventionally practiced). They invented a perspective where McHugh could say, “If this is sociology, I want to be in it.” Though they found jewels in many contemporary theorists and were particularly influenced by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, McHugh and Blum developed the work through conversation. In terms of the second quotation beginning this paper, “conversation is enjoyable in itself as the work through which the development of … [Analysis] is embodied” (147–8). This was their way “of working out what [Analysis] is” and their “way of making explicit what” they are. McHugh described the process of collaboration that was Analysis as embodied in On the Beginning. After insisting that the method was not formal (and so not a method in the narrow sense of the term), he described it thus: PM: It’s not just talking. I mean, it’s how you take – let’s see. How –. So, A says B, C says D, and A, who said B, needs to understand how D could come out of C, having heard B. So its – that’s the kind of thing. Here we see how McHugh and Blum found a method of conversation that, when they read Plato, became a dynamic, lively, but also everyday application of the method of dialectic. Conversation for Analysis is “not just talking.” Speaker A has to recover how Speaker C could say D after hearing A say speech B. A, as a social inquirer, is reflexively part of the conversation she seeks to analyze. What is more there is a gap between the B speech and the D speech. It is not that it follows logically or automatically. Rather A orients to speech D and tries to understand what speaker C heard in speech B that leads her to say D. A is oriented to recovering the necessity embedded in speech D. The social inquirer, in order to do Analysis, must be both a speaker and a listener, who shows listening by recovering how speech D could come out of speaker C, after having heard speech B. With this method we have a formulation of the relation between contingency and necessity and a resolution to the unavoidable contingency with which any life must come to terms. While the collaboration described in On the Beginning shows speakers A and C to be mutually oriented to recovering the hearing embedded in each others speech, the perspective of Analysis shows that this is a relation between speech and language and not an interaction between two speakers. What moves this relation

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

281

is the “need to understand” what relation to “What are we” and “How should we live” is embedded (as latent content, as it were) in speeches B and D. While A in McHugh’s formulation is the oriented actor, the actor oriented to recovering the grounds of speech, C is oriented insofar as A recovers the grounds that made the connection between B and D necessary. While C could be any particular actor who says D in response to B, A seeks to recover the orientation that would make the response of speech D necessary, rather than happenstance. Thus there is happenstance and necessity, contingency and essentiality wrapped up in this formulation of the collaborative nonmethod. Analysis does not so much eliminate the unavoidable contingency of everyday life as wrestle with it to recover the ground or essentiality the contingency necessarily rests on. Such essentiality, of necessity, reveals a response to first questions. For example, in their examination of science’s commitment to avoiding bias, McHugh et al. conclude (75) that their analysis seeks to draw attention of others away “from a [narrow] concern with facts and details to which the talk [of science] is oriented – the question of practical decisions and constraints – to a concern with the commitments underlying all speech and with their rational and moral status. We have tried to make the commitment underlying biased speech show itself intelligibly as a concern to protect this very question (the question of commitment) from being explored. In this sense we have asked whether such a life is worth living, whether such a world is worth our commitment, and we have brought an alternative world to view.”8 That is, Analysis shows that all forms of methodical inquiry, insofar as they necessarily rest on epistemological assumptions and reveal an ontology, have implicit answers to first questions. Avoiding first questions now looks like “bad faith.” Speeches B and D are features of the essential reflexivity of accounts. A happens to say B and C happens to say D in response to B. What C heard in speech B is a resource to respond with speech D. This is how speech happens in everyday life. Ethnomethodology shows how order is assembled through the work of members A and C as they manage the relation between topic and resource. For Analysis, as Blum and McHugh say in their most developed statement of their collaboration (1984), “the interchangeability of topic and resource means only that being human is to ask after the foundation of the human. To ask after the human is to exemplify the human, since the human is part of the whole. Inquiry is the way in which the human exists as such a part by asking after the relationship of part to whole” (141).

282

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

A, in seeking to recover the grounds of how speech D responds to speech B, seeks to recover a necessity in their speaking together. Trying to recover how speech D emerged from hearing speech B, recognizes that the relationship of speaking is part of a whole and that the whole influences speeches B and D. While speeches B and D are the outcome of an interaction between A and C, both participate in the whole. Analysis develops the part that asks after the relationship of part to whole. Analysis as a mode of inquiry, like all particular modes of inquiry, shows that all engagement with first questions is, of necessity a marriage of contingency and necessity. Biographies of thinkers and philosophers trade on this marriage as both a resource and a topic. Because of the rise of Nazism and the Third Reich, Arendt, an influential theorist for the development of the Analysis perspective, ended up in the US, in turn providing seminal formulations of totalitarianism, revolution, and the American Republic. It is hard to imagine Arendt’s work outside of these experiences. Yet, all of these are contingent historical facts. Analysis is the theory/method invented to work through this very modern problem, as a way of acknowledging that working out answers to first questions (“ultimate truth”) as they seek to untangle the relation of contingency and necessity, of necessity reproduces that marriage. McHugh’s biographical life is a contingent fact. This is true too of Blum, the coinventor of Analysis as it is true of all of us. Each of our births could have been otherwise. However, our entry into the world is the entry of a speaker and actor, a new beginner in Arendt’s terms. That speech grounded in our contingent entry into the world, of necessity, is also contingent. Analysis was invented to rescue such speech from sheer contingency, though such rescue is, in the end, also ambiguous. “That the ultimate truth needs discourse and is absolute points to a source of irony in my recognition that I am needed by the ultimate truth as much as it is needed by me … Irony enjoys its limit, it enjoys the unfolding of the in-itself, because it enjoys being needed and used by the ultimate truth” (Blum and McHugh 1984, 148).

NoteS I thank Margaret for the suggestion of this title and for the connection between McHugh’s and O’Casey’s first questions – and, should I add, for making my own relation to “first questions” enjoyable for us. 1 I thank my coeditor, Stanley Raffel, who read an earlier draft of this paper and made important suggestions that were incorporated into the paper.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

283

2 Also as a made object, it is vulnerable to fragmentation. Its existence does not ensure its durability. As McHugh states in his paper “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance” (1993, reprinted in this volume), “the immortal opportunity to make” (whether buildings, cities, works of art, fiction, nonfiction, or, in this case, a new form of inquiry) which humans can take up includes “the hard truth that the offer is not one which includes immortality … The special loss in fragmentation, as distinct from death and decay, is that it is not inevitable … Thus, in the world, within the range of practical choice, making contrives to bring into the world what can either be or not be” (1993, 45–6). 3 I should add that all three were somewhat reluctant to do this and agreed to it because of my friendship with them, my commitment to the perspective, and not because they saw the project was itself apparently worthy. If history shows the accidental nature of life, then a perspective that is interested in foundations, in the possibility of access to “ultimate truth,” in being rather than becoming, would of necessity be reserved toward the accident of becoming. 4 As a sociologist, I am interested in interaction, as an analyst I am interested in the question of significance and the grounds of such significance, and as an Irish person I am interested in the way the above interests are embodied and displayed in history, narrative, and drama. All three interests are embedded in this analysis. 5 “The Delaware campus was profoundly conservative. The financial support came primarily from the DuPont Corporation since it had politically maneuvered to guarantee that there would be no state taxes. The president of the university was a former DuPont executive who was a consultant to the Nixon war machine on matters of chemical warfare” (Weinberg 2010, 294). 6 1964–68 Co-Principal Investigator. Contexts of Teacher Alienation Project #5-1340-2-12-1. Office of Education, US Department of Health, Education and Welfare ($65,000). 7 On the other hand, if one is interested in rigorous engagements with first questions, would the conclusion that the grounds of the essential are accidental risk leading to despair? 8 “This very discursive move (questioning the conventions which support modern inquiry) may seem to put Analysis outside of sociology (insofar as the latter understands itself as a science), yet it has a continuity with the questions Weber (1946) first raised in ‘Science as a Vocation,’ questions that pervade much of Weber’s work, especially his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958). That is, what can sociology offer to the Tolstoyian questions, ‘What should we do?’ and ‘How should we live?’

284

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

Weber recognizes that the role of science is limited to clarifying the goals and purposes one has already but is not able to otherwise substantively contribute to the issue of the good. And this, according to Weber, is the fate the scientist must bear. Yet, can clarity be conceived as an ultimate purpose and how can this be provided for?” (Bonner 2001, 275–6).

ReFeReNCeS Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1961. Between Past & Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press. – 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. – 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. – 2003. Responsibility and Judgment. Edited with Introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Beckett, S. 1969. “Samuel Beckett Talks about Beckett.” Interview with John Gruen. Vogue (December): 210. Blum, A. 1978. Socrates: The Original and its Images. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. – 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. – 2016. The Lived Experience of Death. London: Routledge. Blum, A., and P. McHugh. 1971. “The Social Ascription of Motives.” American Sociological Review 36: 98–109. – 1979. Friends, Enemies, and Strangers: Theorizing in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. – 1984. Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Bonner, K. 1997. A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science and the Urban– Rural Debate. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 1998. Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition. London: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press. – 2001. “Reflexivity and Interpretive Sociology: The Case of Analysis and the Problem of Nihilism.” Human Studies 24: 267–92. – 2010. “Peter McHugh and Analysis: The One and the Many, the Universal and the Particular, the Whole and the Part.” Human Studies 33: 253–69. – 2014. “Principles, Dialectic, and the Common World of Friendship: Socrates and Crito in Conversation.” History of the Human Sciences 27, 2: 157–79.

the InventIon of AnAlysIs

285

Brown, M. 1988. “A Radical Re-collection of Sociology: Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences.” In Self-Reflection in the Human Sciences, edited by M. Van Manen, 24–40. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions. Dallmayr, F. 1988. “Praxis and Reflection.” In Self-Reflection in the Human Sciences, edited by M. Van Manen, 1–15. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions. Gadamer, H.G. 1975. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward. – 1986. The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated with Introduction by P.C. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, J. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McHugh, P. 1992. “A Letter of Resignation.” Dianoia 22: 106–11. – 1996. “Insomnia and the (T)error of Lost Foundationalism in Postmodernism.” Human Studies 19: 17–42. – 2005. “Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies 28: 129–56. McHugh, P., S. Raffel, D. Foss, and A. Blum. 1974. On the Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. O’Casey, Sean. 1924. Juno and the Paycock. Dublin: Abbey Theatre. Plato. (1941) 1945. The Republic. Translated by F.M. Cornford. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1944. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” American Journal of Sociology 49, 6: 499–507.  Weber, Max. 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

THE WORKS OF PETER MCHUGH

1962 1966

1968 – 1969

– 1970

1971 1972

(with Norton Long and Scott Greer). Suburban Social and Political Structure. Evanston: Centre for Metropolitan Studies. “Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization.” Social Forces 44, no. 3 (March). Reprinted in Social Problems in a Changing World, edited by W. Gerson. New York: Crowell, 1969. Reprinted in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, edited by Gregory Prentice Stone and Harvey A. Farberman. New York: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970. Defining the Situation. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Contexts of Teacher Alienation. Report #5-340-12-1. Washington, DC: Office of Education, US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. “Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor.” In Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness, edited by Stanley Plog and Robert Edgerton. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. “Toward Research on Guidance: Elements of Social Interaction.” In Social Foundations of Guidance, edited by C. Weinberg. New York: Free Press. “A Common Sense Conception of Deviance.” In Deviance and Respectability, edited by Jack Douglas. New York: Basic Books. Reprinted in Recent Sociology No. 2, edited by H. Dreitzel. New York: Macmillan, 1970. “On the Failure of Positivism.” In Understanding Everyday Life, edited by Jack Douglas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. “Confrontation.” Unpublished paper.

288

1973 – 1974 1976 1978 1979 1980 – 1983 – 1984 1990 1992 1993 1996 2005 2007 2009 – 2011

REDEFINING THE SITUATION

“La Rebuffade.” Communications 20. (with Alan Blum). “The Social Ascription of Motive.” American Sociological Review (February). Reprinted in Warner Modular Publications. Andover, Ma: Warner. (with Stanley Raffel, Daniel Foss, and Alan Blum). On The Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge. The Rehabilitation of Culture in Contemporary Theories of Social Structure. Ottawa: Council for Cultural Studies. (with Alan Blum). “The Risk of Theorizing and the Problem of the Good of Place.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 3, no. 3. (with Alan Blum), eds. Friends, Enemies, and Strangers. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Moral Development in Children. Toronto: Report to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. (with Alan Blum). “Irony, the Absolute and the Notion.” Maieutics (Spring). (with Alan Blum). “Upbringing, Mathematics, and the Sign Over the Door of Plato’s Academy: On the Beginning of SelfFormation.” Phenomenology and Pedagogy 1, no. 3. (with Alan Blum). “Introduction: Some Reflections on the York Project.” Phenomenology and Pedagogy 1, no. 3. (with Alan Blum). Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. “Art as Language: Preliminaries.” Sight 2, no. 1. “A Letter of Resignation.” Dianoia 2, no. 2 (Spring). “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance.” Dianoia 3, no. 1 (Spring). “Insomnia and the T(error) of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism.” Human Studies 19, no. 1. “Shared Being, Old Promises and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies 28, no. 2. “Notes on Circulation.” Unpublished paper. “Intimacy.” Unpublished paper. “Furthermores on the Aesthetic.” Unpublished paper. “How the Dead Circulate (in Life).” In Spectacular Death, edited by Tristanne Connolly. Bristol: Intellect Press.

INDEX

action: and class, 100–2; conventions, 243; and institutions, 40; moral, 208n2; motivated, xiii; practical versus theoretic, 84–7, 88, 91, 98n14; principled, xx, xxvii, xxx, 206–8, 250–1; radical political, 101–4, 106, 110. See also aesthetic; Marx, Karl; normative rules; Weber, Max Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, xx–xxi aesthetic: action, 238; and community, 239; and jouissance, 255; and language, 240–1; reasoning, 238–9; as social theory, xxxi–xxxii. See also intimacy affect theory, xxxi; critique of, 244 affirmative action, 200–2, 205, 207, 209n5, 210n13, 211; criticism of, 210n21; defence of, xxvi. See also shared being Alexander, Geoffrey, xiv Analysis: development of, vii–viii, xv–xvi, xx, xxxiii–xxxiv, 258–84; and ethnomethodology, xvi, 243, 248, 249, 270, 273–8, 281; first questions, xxii, 262–5, 270–1, 281–2; of fragmentation, xxii– xxiii, 139–50; of intimacy, 220–37; method, xxii, xxxiii, 245–7, 280–2; of postmodernism, xxiv–xxv, 139–50;

and reflexivity, xv, 258–9, 264–5, 274, 281; of resignation, 121–2, 123–37; and science, 270–1 aporia, 182, 208n1, 253 Arendt, Hannah, xxiii, 235n2, 282; contemporary sociological theory, xxvii; on work, 149 Aristotle, 149n12 Ayer, A.J., 62–3 Badiou, Alain, xix Beck, Ulrich, xxiii Becker, Howard, xvii Benjamin, Walter: translation, 141 big data: versus reflexivity, xiv, xxvi. See also postmodernism Blanchot, Maurice, xxiii, xxv; community, 149n9; fragmentation, 149n3; neutrality, 177n17, 210n18; subject, 176n2 Blum, Alan, xviii, 52, 98n22, 254, 264 Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh, xv, xxx, 150n16, 151, 260; collaboration, vii–viii, xix, xx, xxx–xxxiii, xxivn1, 267, 273–82; postmodernism, xxiv; principled action, xx, xxx, 177n11; rule/principle distinction, xx. See also Analysis Bonner, Kieran, xi, xix, xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxiii, 210n18, 259, 261

290

INDEX

Bourdieu, Pierre, xxiii Brecht, Bertolt, 107, 112 Burke, Kenneth: “equipment for living,” 254 Chomsky, Noam: Ideal Speaker, 278–9 circulation, xxxi; and death, 214–15; form, 216–17; of nonsense, 217–19; and stasis, 215–16, 218; thrownness, 214. See also limit Collini, Stefan, xxi collegiality, xi, 32–6 community, xv, xxiii, xxiv–xxv, xxvi–xxvii, 133–4, 171–2, 187, 188–9; and fragmentation, 139–40; and ontological “I,” 196–202; and resignation, 134–7. See also aesthetic; Blanchot, Maurice; Nancy, JeanLuc confrontation: intelligibility of, 100. See also language; New Left consumerism: and bureaucracy, 119–20; and first questions, 118–19; of universities, 116–21 Dante, xxiv, 170, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, 230, 236n14 Derrida, Jacques: deconstruction, viii, xxiv; difference/differance, 177n22; erasure, xxv, 155–6, 160, 165, 176n6; identity and difference, xxxi, 240, 242n3; play of language, 162–3; the university, 116–17 desocialization, 7–9 deviance: members’ definition of, 71–4, 76–8, 83, 87–91, 93, 95; as moral matter, 72, 78, 82, 92, 96, 97n12; punishment, 72–3, 75, 76, 88–90, 93; and rehabilitation, 3–5, 8, 14, 89–90; sociological description of, 3–4, 71, 74–5, 76, 91–5; and values, 3, 4–7,

9, 12, 14. See also normative rules; social order Durkheim, Emile, 37 ethnomethodology, x, xiii, 155, 240, 243, 248, 268–9, 273–4, 277. See also Analysis; sociology equity, 190–2, 204–5; and equality, 195, 206–7, 209n7, 211n27. See also affirmative action finitude. See limit first questions. See Analysis Foucault, Michel, 79–80, 244; death of the author, 173–5 fragmentation, xxii–xxiii; anxiety, xxii, 140, 142–4; death, 143–4, 149; endurance, 140; globalization, 139; and making, xxii–xxiii, 140, 143–8, 150n16, 252; order, 139, 140, 144; and the university, 140; usage, 141–3. See also Analysis; Blanchot, Maurice; community; limit Gadamer, Hans-Georg: art, 220; first questions, 265; hermeneutics, xiii, xv Garfinkel, Harold, x, xi, xii, 51n18, 98n14, 240; constitutive rules, 46–7, 98n26; and McHugh, Peter, 266– 70, 271. See also ethnomethodology Goffman, Erving, 16n12, 24, 27, 236; affect, 243–4, 249; deviance, 97n6 Gouldner, Alvin, 244; crisis of sociology, xiv Grant, George, xxiii Habermas, Jürgen, xxiii–xxiv; on Blum and McHugh, xv Hegel, G.W.F., 220, 244 Heidegger, Martin, vii, ix, xxiii, 155,

INDEX

156, 280; being, 156, 176n6, 209n10; phenomenology, 277; thrownness, 214, 261 Heraclitus, vii, ix, 155, 215, 222, 228, 252 Hobbes, Thomas, 37 insomnia, 171; as emptiness, 151–3, 172. See also Levinas, Emmanuel intimacy, xxix–xxx; aesthetic, 221, 231– 5, 238; and care, 225–6, 228; and the erotic, 227–8, 235, 236n8; and face, 181, 224; insipid, 224–6; interiority, 223–4, 229–30; nakedness, 230–1; representation, 221–3; usage, 220–1. See also shared being jouissance, 247; and affect, 243–4, 249; doubleness, 250–1, 253; as enjoyment, xxxiii, 264; sociology of, 243, 249–50; topic and resource, 244–5. See also aesthetic; joyous affirmation; Lacan, Jacques joyous affirmation, 164–70, 176, 177n16, 251–5; interpretation and, 162–3, 165–70; as jouissance, 247; and the limit, 165–6; in postmodern theory, 162–5 justice: communal versus individual, 197–202; formal, 188, 191; limits of, xxviii; promise of, 206–7; and shared being, xxvi, xxx, 189–90, 192–3; and triage, xxvii, 203–4. See also affirmative action; equity Kuhn, Thomas, 67 Lacan, Jacques, xxxiii, 234, 252, 253; jouissance, 244, 247, 264; selfgovernance, 152 language: aesthetic versus denotative, 239–41; ambiguity, ix, xii, xxix, 153–4, 164, 165, 173–5, 239–40;

291

and confrontation, 107–8; and liberalism, xviii–xix, 108–10, 112, 114; limit, 165, 172, 175, 208; and the New Left, 107–9, 114–15; ordinary, 50n5; and truth, 54–7, 64–5 Latour, Bruno, xxiii Levinas, Emmanuel, xxvi, xxx, 176n1; insomnia, 151; face, 180–3, 208n1, 224 liberalism: critique of, xviii, 108. See also language; New Left limit, xxv, 145–6, 149, 177n17; ambiguity, vii, 165–7, 279; and circulation, xxviii–xxix; fragmentation, xxii– iii; and making, 144–6, 148, 149, 150; and the moral, 184–5; and resignation, 135–6. See also joyous affirmation; language Lyotard, Jean François: grand narratives, xxiii making, 246–7; and fragmentation, xxii–xxiii, 140, 143–8, 150n16, 252; and human finitude, 144–6, 148, 149, 150 Marx, Karl, x, xxiii; essence of man, 105–6; false consciousness, 39, 50n9; relations of production, 103; social action, 100–2, 104–6 McHugh, Peter: and academia, xviii, xix–xxii, 116–22, 123–37; acting career, xi, 262, 265; biography, 261–2, 266–7, 269, 271–2, 273, 274–7, 278; and Blum, Alan (see Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh); early and late work, 252–4; as social theorist, vii– viii, xx, 243–56. See also Analysis; Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh; Garfinkel, Harold; reflexivity Mead, George Herbert, 37; role taking, xiii Merton, Robert, xvii, 15n3, 50n11

292

INDEX

Nancy, Jean-Luc, xxvi, 215–16; community, 149n9, 196 New Left, xix; art and theatre of, 112–14; and confrontation, 107, 111; and liberalism, 108–111; and old left, 100, 104, 106, 110–12. See also language; liberalism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 149, 164, 168, 247; becoming, 162–3 norms. See normative rules normative rules: and action, 44–5; common sense, 80–1; and deviance, 8, 76, 81–2, 95–6, 243; radical change, 5–6; social order and, xii– xiii, xvi, xvii–xviii, 3, 10, 13, 33, 35, 39–49; and truth-production, 52–3; values, 5–6, 9. See also Garfinkel, Harold; Parsons, Talcott; Schutz, Alfred Parsons, Talcott: criticism of, xi, xii, xxiii; influence, xii, 270; normative rules, 44–5; social order, 37 phenomenology, 177n23, 279, 243, 277. See also Heidegger, Martin Plato, 216, 222, 227–8, 248, 261; dialectic, 259; influence on Analysis, 276–81 populations: mobilizing, 101–6, 107, 111 positivism: criticism of, xiv, xxv, 52, 59–60, 64–6, 68, 246, 248; coherence theory, 60–1; correspondence theory, 53, 54–5, 58–9, 64. See also postmodernism; social order postmodernism: criticism of, xxv–xxvi, 157–65, 175–6; death of the author, 173; debate with big data, viii; erasure, 155–6; foundation in, xxiv, 159–60, 161, 170, 172, 177n12; and modernism, 211n25; and positivism, xxv; self-description, 153–6; sign

and signified, 160–1, 164, 165. See also Analysis; Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh; Derrida, Jacques; joyous affirmation; Taylor, Charles psychoanalytic therapy, 6 radical change, 4–7, 8, 14; versus dialectical change, 11. See also normative rules; socialization Raffel, Stanley, xx, xxi–xxii, 210n18, 259, 260 Raffel, Stanley, and Barry Sandywell, viii Rancière, Jacques, xix, 250 reflexivity, xiv, xvi, 245, 258–9, 273; doubleness of, 251–2; and principled action, xix–xx, 250–1; in works of Peter McHugh, xxxiii, 243, 245, 247–8, 251, 254. See also Analysis rehabilitation. See deviance resignation: necessary, 135–6; as swallowing, 123–37; as throwing up, 123–4, 127, 128, 129, 133–7; unnecessary, 136–7. See also Analysis; community; limit roles, xiii, xx, 12–13, 37 Romanticism, 141, 142–3 Schlegel, Friedrich, 141, 148 Schutz, Alfred, xii, 10, 37–8, 259, 260; commonsense understanding, xiii; normative rules, 45–6 shared being, 253; in affirmative action, 193, 198, 206–8, 211n28; American, 210n13; doubleness of, 250–1; and intimacy, 229; and justice, xxvi, xxx, 189–90, 192–3; as promise of freedom, 204; and triage, 195, 203 Simmel, Georg, xxvii, 84, 98n16, 213, 249, 254

INDEX

slavery, xxvii, 185–90, 192–6, 200, 203– 6, 207, 208n5. See also affirmative action; justice; triage sleep, 151; and the “I,” 152, 176n2. See also insomnia social action. See action social order, x, xxvii, 56, 60; analytic truth, 62–3; coherence theory, 60–1; deviance, 3–4, 9; members’ definitions, 39–49; positivism, xvii, 56, 59; social disintegration, 4, 9, 11, 13; theory of, 3–4, 37–8, 243. See also normative rules socialization, 4; as moral suasion, 7, 14; and radical change, 6–7, 8 sociology, 38, 48–9; and affect theory, xxxi; and analytic philosophy, 41–2; and continental theory, xxiii; conventional, x, xii, xv, xxix, 40–1, 269, 271; crisis of, xiv; and ethnomethodology, 266–8; of jouissance, 243, 249–50; reflexive, xiii, xvi–xvii; theory and method in, 67–9, 74, 83, 91; and truthproduction, 54, 56, 59, 65, 67–9 Surrealism, 142 syllogism: critique of, 78–9 symbolic interactionism, 41, 243 Taylor, Charles, 211n27; postmodernism, 153–7, 159–63 theorizing. See Analysis Thomas, William Isaac, 37 Thrift, Nigel: affect, xxxi triage: and morality, 180–2, 193–4; and slavery, 185–7, 194–5, 200–1, 206. See also affirmative action; justice; shared being

293

truth-production: analytic, 62; as behaviour, 52–5, 59, 60–1, 62, 64, 68; coherence theory of, xiv, 60–2; correspondence theory of, xiv, 54–8, 61–2, 63, 64; rules of, 52–3, 56, 64–9; in science, 52–3, 64–7. See also normative rules; positivism; sociology uncertainty, 19–20; of social conduct, vii, ix, 155; and social organization, 28–35; socioeconomic, 21–5, 27; technical, 25–7, 28 Weber, Max, xi; intellectual integrity, 270; social action, 249; social organization, 32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, vii, ix, 51n12, 69, 99n27, 113, 155, 244, 261, 278, 280; language, 211n26, 255; rule following, xiii Žižek, Slavoj, xix, 260