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Symbolic Interaction and cultural studies

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................vii1 Introduction..................................................................................................Michal M. McCall and Howard S. Becker2 Social Interaction, Culture, and Historical Studies John R. Hall.............................................163 The Good News about Life History Michal M. McCall and Judith Wittner.........................................464 Studying Religion in the Eighties Mary Jo Neitz..............................................................905 Why Philosophers Should Become Sociologists (and Vice Versa) Kathryn Pyne Addelson...........................1196 Art Worlds: Developing the Interactionist Approach to Social Organization Samuel Gilmore.....................1487 Symbolic Interactionism in Social Studies of Science Adele E. Clarke and Elihu M. Gerson.....................1798 Fit for Postmodern Selfhood Barry Glassner...................................................................2159 People Are Talking: Conversation Analysis and Symbolic Interaction Deirdre Boden.............................244Contributors....................................................................................................275Index...........................................................................................................277

Chapter One

Michal M. McCall and Howard S. Becker

The papers in this volume were originally prepared for the 1988 Stone Symposium, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; they are presented here in the order in which they were given at that meeting. The authors had the following assignment, more or less in these words: tell about work being done in your substantive area of cultural studies; say what the tradition of symbolic interaction thought and research has to tell other people who do such work; say what the other people who work in your area have to tell those of us who are symbolic interactionists; and illustrate your points and arguments with examples from your own work (all the authors had in fact recently done empirical studies of the topics they were to discuss). The assignment assumed that symbolic interactionists have not taken full advantage of work done in related fields that would be useful to their own projects, and that other people in cultural studies would be glad to know, and find useful, some of what symbolic interactionists take for granted as working ideas and procedures.

Most of the authors are sociologists, and many of them-Clarke, Gerson, Gilmore, Glassner, McCall, Neitz, and Wittner-have worked within the symbolic interactionist tradition. Others of the authors have been more loosely identified with that tradition. Boden, a well-known conversational analyst, makes her affinity with symbolic interaction explicit here. Although familiar with symbolic interaction theory, Hall has worked primarily in the area of cultural history. Addelson, a feminist philosopher, has found interactionism sufficiently useful to want to bring it to the attention of her disciplinary colleagues as well as to make the links between philosophy and sociology clearer to sociologists.

Audiences

As a result of the assignment and the mixed disciplinary affiliations of the authors, the papers address themselves to several audiences from several subject matter positions, with all the risks and potential confusions that entails. Most confusing, perhaps, and certainly the most numerous, are the papers that speak to symbolic interactionists from within that same tradition but from another content area. North American sociology is organized around content areas, not around methodological and conceptual approaches. Thus, there are sociologies of art, science, religion, and knowledge, into which the symbolic interaction approach has been incorporated, but symbolic interactionists have not developed a general approach to cultural studies.

Furthermore, practitioners of symbolic interaction research and thinking often have little in common beyond their common possession of certain "sensitizing concepts," their inductive approach to empirical research, and their adherence to the faith that the proper object of that research is "the natural world of every-day experience" (Blumer 1969: 148). They may know very little about what other symbolic interactionists are doing in content areas other than their own.

Rather, individual interactionists have arrived at positions on general theoretical questions by solving the problems of working with the specific data of their content specialties. So, for instance, symbolic interactionists create an approach to epistemology by dealing with problems created by such specific subject matter as scientific texts. But, as a group, symbolic interactionists seldom bring their solutions together to develop a more general approach through comparisons of the findings specific to their subject matters. The annual Stone Symposium is one occasion for such a comparative, intellectual exchange.

Most of the papers in this volume, then, tell symbolic interactionists, in one way or another, what their colleagues in related areas are up to. (The detailed bibliographies following the separate papers will help interested readers follow up these introductions.) Neitz, for instance, describes a body of work on religion which other interactionists should see as crucially related to the problems of identity and personal change they study in other milieus. Gilmore describes the symbolic interactionist tradition of research on the arts, and Clarke and Gerson do the same for science studies.

Boden and Hall bring news from other areas of sociology, and from other methodological and theoretical approaches. Boden speaks to symbolic interactionists from the flourishing specialty of discourse analysis. She renders an important service by making the connections between the two apparent, in order to make them more useful to each other than they have been in the past. Hall, discussing historical research, shows how concepts adapted from work by historians as various as Braudel and Kubler can be put to work in interactionist thinking, as well as the way findings from specific studies in cultural history can help solve our own research problems.

Other papers bring interactionists news of work on topics symbolic interactionists share with workers in other disciplines, particularly the papers by McCall and Wittner and by Glassner. McCall and-Wittner focus on a method-the gathering of life histories-that has provoked much argument and raised many basic analytic problems in a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. They bring discussions from both sides of the fence to bear on these questions, demonstrating concretely what each has to offer the other. Their paper, in its use of long quotations arranged in dialogue form, exemplifies some of the problems and solutions they discuss. Glassner uses a frankly postmodern approach to understand the social nature of the human body, an area to which sociology has given scant attention (although see Yonnet 1985).

Addelson's paper brings a different kind of news to interactionists. She reports on her efforts to construct a feminist ethic-an "ethic of respect" as contrasted with the "traditional" (patriarchal) ethic of "rights" (property)-based on Blumer's injunction to "catch the process of interpretation from the standpoint of the acting person." She thus shows a more practical connection between philosophy and sociology than many interactionists would be aware of.

What is Symbolic Interaction?

Symbolic interaction is a sociological tradition that traces its lineage to the Pragmatists-John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, particularly-and to sociologists of the "Chicago Schoolu-Robert E. Park, Herbert Blumer, Everett C. Hughes, and their students and successors. We can summarize its chief ideas, perhaps oversimply, this way:

Any human event can be understood as the result of the people involved (keeping in mind that that might be a very large number) continually adjusting what they do in the light of what others do, so that each individual's line of action "fits" into what the others do. That can only happen if human beings typically act in a nonautomatic fashion, and instead construct a line of action by taking account of the meaning of what others do in response to their earlier actions. Human beings can only act in this way if they can incorporate the responses of others into their own act and thus anticipate what will probably happen, in the process creating a "self" in the Meadian sense. (This emphasis on the way people construct the meaning of others' acts is where the "symbolic" in "symbolic interaction" comes from.) If everyone can and does do that, complex joint acts can occur. (Adapted from Becker 1988: 18; see also Blumer 1969:10.)

These ideas have furnished the basis of thousands of fieldwork (ethnographic) studies in such areas as community, race, class, work, family, and the sociologies of art, science, and deviance. Symbolic interaction is an empirical research tradition as much or more than a theoretical position, and its strength derives in large part from the enormous body of research that embodies and gives meaning to its abstract propositions.

What Is Cultural Studies?

We use the term cultural studies to refer to the classically humanistic disciplines which have lately come to use their philosophical, literary, and historical approaches to study the social construction of meaning and other topics traditionally of interest to symbolic interactionists, disciplines to which, in turn, social scientists have lately turned for "explanatory analogies" (Geertz 1983 : 23) as they "have turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one" (ibid.:19). The term is most closely identified with work carried on, since 1964, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England. The main features of cultural studies, according to scholars associated with the center, are "its openness and theoretical versatility, its reflexive even self-conscious mood" (Johnson 1986-87 : 38), and its critical (or "engaged") approach to its primary objects of study: working class and youth subcultures, the media, language, and the social relations of education, the family and the state (S. Hall 1980).

Perhaps because cultural studies is self-consciously non-disciplinary, and has resisted theoretical orthodoxy (ibid., 1980) and methodological codification (Johnson 1986-87), it has engaged many of the important intellectual currents of the last twenty-five years, in a way that symbolic interaction has not. Among them: the revolution in literary criticism; the "new social history" movement; the "complex Marxism" of Lukacs, Goldman, Walter Benjamin, and the "Frankfurt School"; the structuralisms, both the structural linguistics of Levi-Strauss and Barthes and the Marxist structuralism of Althusser and Gramsci; the feminisms (Weedon 1987; S. Hall 1980); and the poststructuralisms, developed in and from the work of Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser, and Foucault (Weedon 1987: 19; S. Hall 1980; Johnson 1986-87).

Symbolic interactionists, like many other social scientists, have for the most part not been very attentive to these major intellectual currents represented in cultural studies. But, as the humanities and social sciences have approached one another in recent years, a lively discourse has grown up along the border. The intention of this volume is to bring symbolic interactionists into that conversation, both as listeners and speakers.

The border: Topics and Methods of Mutual Interest

A number of major topics are addressed by workers in both traditions. Their interests converge most generally on the problem of meaning. Under that broad heading they find much of mutual interest in such topics as the nature of knowledge, our experience of our own lives and the lives of others, the relation between individual experience and action and the workings of social structures, the self and subjectivity, language and discourse. Both groups are interested, as well, in such concrete subject matters as art, science, education, and religion.

Empiricism

The great strength of the symbolic interaction approach to meaning is that it is empirical. The ultimate interactionist test of concepts is whether they make sense of particular situations known in great detail through detailed observation. You answer questions by going to see for yourself, studying the real world, and evaluating the evidence so gathered. Symbolic interaction takes the concrete, empirical world of lived experience as its problematic and treats theory as something that must be brought into line with that empirical world (Blumer 1969: 151).

Addelson argues, on just these grounds, that philosophers must become sociologists (by which she means symbolic interactionist sociologists) because symbolic interactionism is empirical and, therefore, gives better accounts of human nature, human action, and of human group life than traditional philosophy does. She applies this reasoning in a nice example of how the interactionist emphasis on process helps solve the traditional philosophical problem of rules and rulebreaking. She quotes Blumer: "It is the social process in group life that creates and upholds the rules, not the rules that create and uphold group life," and goes on to say that if this is true, it is the social process and not the rules that must be understood and conceptually analyzed and clarified to answer the question, "What is morality?"

Symbolic interactionists typically find that meaning is constructed in the process of interaction, and have always insisted that process is not a neutral medium in which social forces play out their game, but the actual stuff of social organization and social forces (Blumer 1969). Society, for them, is the process of symbolic interaction, and this view allows them to steer the middle course between structuralism and idealism John Hall recommends in his paper.

For symbolic interactionists, process is not just a word. It's shorthand for an insistence that social events don't happen all at once, but rather happen in steps: first one thing, then another, with each succeeding step creating new conditions under which all the people and organizations involved must now negotiate the next step. This is more than a theoretical nicety. It makes theoretical room for contingency, another point many workers in cultural studies want to emphasize (Turner 1986). Nothing has to happen. Nothing is fully determined. At every step of every unfolding event, something else might happen. To be sure, the balance of constraints and opportunities available to the actors, individual and collective, in a situation will lead many, perhaps most, of them to do the same thing. Contingency doesn't mean people behave randomly, but it does recognize that they can behave in surprising and unconventional ways. The interactionist emphasis on process stands, as Blumer insisted, as a corrective to any view that insists that culture or social structure determines what people do.

Neitz's discussion of religious conversion shows the utility of such a view for a variety of problems of interest to cultural theorists. Earlier analyses looked for the conditions that led people to be converted, but had no language to describe the back-and-forth, shifting character of what went on when they did. Such "instantaneous" theories of conversion failed to see the importance of the events that lead up to conversion and, perhaps more important, the events that follow conversion, reinforcing and solidifying what might otherwise be a momentary whim. The new research, according to Neitz, sees conversion as a process and, for that reason, can turn to symbolic interaction and its concern with process for help in understanding the fluid relationships between religious and social structures today.

Although much of the work in cultural studies, and particularly at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has been accused of being too theoretical, it has also been empirical, right from the start. Unlike symbolic interactionism, though, cultural studies has not been willing, or able, to privilege empirical work over theory: "we had no alternative but to undertake a labour of theoretical definition and clarification at the same time as we attempted to do concrete work in the field" (S. Hall 1980: 25).

Nor have empirical workers in cultural studies identified themselves as fieldworkers as thoroughly as symbolic interactionists have. Indeed, in Stuart Hall's words, "the tension between experiential accounts and a larger account of structural and historical determinations has been a pivotal site of Centre theorizing and debate ever since" Paul Willis's ground-breaking ethnographic work in Learning to Labour (ibid.:24). "While sharing an emphasis on people's ability to make meaning, critical theorists concerned with cultural production" differ in important ways from symbolic interactionists: their ethnographies are more "openly ideological" and they are more overtly concerned with locating human agency in social structure:

Both approaches emphasize human agency and the production of meaning and culture, but the critical production theorists ground their work on a moral imperative, [on a] "political commitment to human betterment." Moreover, the critical production theorists recognize the power of structural determinants in the sense of material practices, modes of power, and economic and political institutions. Unlike the more voluntaristic [symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists], the critical ... theorists remain accutely aware that, as Marx notes, "while men [sic] make their own history, they do not make it just as they please." Their recent work has focused in different ways on the need for a theory that will recognize both human agency and the production of knowledge and culture and will at the same time take into account the power of material and ideological structures. This dialectic between individual consciousness and structural determinants has led them to seek more developed theories of ideology, hegemony, and resistance, and to the development of what has been called "critical ethnography." (Weiler 1988:12-13)

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