The Past and Future of ‘Symbolic Interactionism’ (original) (raw)
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The paradox of Durkheim's manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method
Theory and Society, 1996
In summary, my three formulations of Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method as a manifesto have progressively found it to be epistemologically and pedagogically embedded in its object of scientific interest. In the first and most limited formulation, Durkheim's text was a violent and strategic preparation for his vision of sociology, that laid its grounds, but was ultimately inessential to sociological practice itself. It marked what he hoped was a historical rupture in western thought, after which true sociological reason could get underway. In my second formulation his text was the creation of a precise sociological object and moral reality. And while constituting sociology's first action, the manifesto could then be superseded as this morality began to sustain itself. Nevertheless, more than in the first formulation, it actively produced a new “social fact” in European culture. Finally, in the third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is an ongoing moment of sociology itself (in the sense of a Hegelian “moment,” which is fully visible only in its first conflict-ridden appearance, but subsequently constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon's makeup). This manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new “social facts,” they are also “collective representations” themselves, that reveal how the collective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is deeply intertwined with the phenomena it seeks to explain, and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically. The implications of understanding sociology as a collective representation are manifold. But among the most important is that sociology develops by way of a dialectical relation to its object. Not surprisingly, a century after the appearance of Durkheim's manifesto, popular mass culture is permeated with reified sociological language, The most general of such utterances include: “society says,” “society wants,” and “society makes us.” The third of these contemporary common-sense observations picks up especially well on a central Durkheimian theme that we are both constituted (“made” human) by social forces, and necessarily constrained by them (“made” to act in particular ways). while cultural and mass-media studies have become a central interest of contemporary social theory. One could even speculate what Durkheim might say about late twentieth-century North American or European culture, and the place of sociological images therein. Would he, like one might imagine Freud, despair at the popular tropes and metaphors that he helped produce? Would he see only a monster of his own creation? Unlike Freud, who might be able to condemn popular psychoanalytic language as itself an indication of an immature culture looking for therapeutic fathers, Durkheim formulated the inevitability of the reification and deification of sociological language. For example, he explains that his own time was dominated by the language of the French Revolution: ...society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even today, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege. Durkheim, On Morality and Society, 176. He gives “Fatherland,” “Liberty,” and “Reason” as examples of the sacred language inherited from the Revolution. And although he understands that these ideas are historically contingent, he nevertheless defends their value, especially the value of “Reason.” Evidently, Durkheim is not troubled by the knowledge that thoughts are shaped by the sacred ideas of their time. Noting the popularity of his own texts in the undergraduate classroom, Durkheim might ask how they function now. He might ask how The Rules of Sociological Method is an academic collective representation. He might also ask more generally how the word “society” has come to be used as a moral reality, or a social fact. How do speakers gain a moral stronghold on conversation by invoking “society” as the overarching totem (signifying everything from tradition and order to constraint and oppression)? Durkheim would probably conclude that in its current usage “society” means many things, and perhaps is even reducible to a dada utterance. Society is the punishing god and the forgiving god; it is used to authorize the judge and justify the deviant. It is, most generally, the way our culture signals its attempt to formulate itself by way of its sacred images. And yet, to avoid concluding that sociology, as it proceeds, ultimately becomes another instance of the object it studies, one must see Durkheim as providing the opportunity within his images and tropes to make them more than religion or ideology. In other words, although social reality has traditionally been represented as the Judaeo-Christian god in western cultures, that does not mean that “Society” will in turn become the new god of the organically solidary collective. As Durkheim provided sociology with a basic manifesto orientation (in all three of my formulations of sociology as strategic, moral, and interpretive), he also provided the opportunity for sociology continually to change its object by studying it. While normally for scientists their influence on their object constitutes a disastrous error, because the data have been contaminated by the act of observation, Durkheim makes clear that sociology inevitably has this effect (indeed it has this moral obligation and responsibility). Sociology encourages a culture where the openness of human identities and practices is generally known, and where this openness does not lead to anomic despair. This was Durkheim's promise to his time - i.e., that looking at ourselves as agents of our collective condition provides an opportunity to produce sacred objects that are sacred by the very fact that they are patently produced collectively. One could, for example, make a case for “liberty, equality, fraternity” as self-consciously sacred objects which were understood by the revolutionaries as products of mass action, while still being elevated to the status of the sacred. But given the self-destructive nature of the revolution through its leaders' attempts to deify all of its aspects, their irony toward this sacredness seems lacking. A contemporary example is found perhaps in “identity politics” which in its strongest form takes democracy as the ironic and rhetorical opportunity for new gender, sexual, and racial identity constructions. See Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). While all collectives produce representations of themselves, what is peculiar to the sociological culture is that it is supposed to be able to identify these as such - it is supposed to see its own totem building. This requires a certain ironic orientation grounded in an insight that the collective could be drastically otherwise, without provoking a crisis of meaning. In this way, sociology is a system of beliefs without being an ideology or religion. And, of course, within a sociological culture change does occur. Once these sociological tropes are established, they undergo interpretation and reinterpretation as they are disseminated, circulated, and used in popular discourse. As the dialogue between academic language and popular language continues through time, sociologists are required to imagine sociological interventions that keep these images dynamic rather than ideological. Hence, as sociology contributes to the sacred language used by opinion (or doxa), it is neither reducible to opinion, nor fully distinguishable from it. Sociology seeks to influence the way opinion recollects its basis (i.e., social life), and in so doing must change its own language to continue to induce para-doxa. It is possible therefore that the tropes and images introduced by Durkheim have served many rhetorical purposes and need to be reinterpreted by each new generation of sociologists as they consider the particular sociological “rules of method” of their own time. But what is inexhaustible about the Durkheimian legacy is his insight that sociology must look for its effects at a general discursive level, remaining cognizant that it is a part of modernity's particular collective representations. Thus formulated, the grounds of sociological thought are necessarily present even in the most specialized of contemporary research, as each topic covertly speaks about collective representational desire. Sociology also meets its own limits (even the possibility of its own death) at the very point where it becomes self-conscious as a cultural practice - i.e., its various inevitable “crises” as to its relevance point to its entanglement in the representational anxieties characteristic of modernity in general. It seems to me crucial that sociological practitioners acknowledge and orient to this condition so that sociology remains vital to itself and to the collective life it studies. Or in stronger, more polemical words: sociology is a significant cultural force to the extent that it understands itself already to be one.
This chapter proposes to refine the Symbolic Interactionist project by incorporating Peircean semiotics and Neo-Weberian interpretation. Symbolic Interactionism appears to have forgotten key sources of its American Pragmatist roots. Peirce's indirect influence on Mead and Blumer, for instance, is often undertheorized but should be made central to foundational narratives of Symbolic Interactionism. This calls for more sophisticated understandings of meaning-making that incorporate Peirce' semiotic triadic model and classifications of signs where symbols are just one kind of signs among others. Here I take on these matters and expand on my Pragmatic Sociology (Bakker, 2011b) to introduce the emergent project of a Semiotic Sociology. In stepwise fashion, I lay foundations of a meta-paradigmatic synthesis-a "Big Tent"-based on five key arguments that build upon each other, including Blumer as its anchor point, American Symbolic Interactionism, global Interactionism, Neo-Weberian interpretive analysis for crosshistorical comparison, and Peircean Semiotics as culminating paradigm that pulls it all together. The Cold War is over (Menand, 2021). But new conflicts are on the horizon (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2019). Only one social science is highly respected by key elite decision-makers: Neoclassical economics. The other social sciences are more fragmented. US sociology, in particular, is focused on political issues having to do with intersectionality, but it is also
Society and Self: A Symbolic Interactionist Framework for Sociological Practice
Clinical Sociology Review, 1994
Interactionist concepts and explanations of human behavior prevalent among major psychological theory groups are traced in relationship to the symbolic interactionist principles of emergence, voluntarism, and process. I argue that most theory central to psychology is interactionist in nature; that central tenets of symbolic interactionism are woven throughout psychological theory; and that the same interactionist premises can equally form the foundation for clinical sociology as a form of sociological practice.
From Durkheim to the Chicago school: Against the 'variables sociology' paradigm
Émile Durkheim is often thought of, at least within many North American interpretations, as closely associated with 'variables sociology,' a tradition commonly understood to be in opposition to the Chicago school of sociology, which is commonly thought of as more qualitatively focused. Upon closer examination, it is apparent that Durkheim and the Chicago school share a great deal more points of connection than are commonly acknowledged. These similarities have been blurred due to (1) a lack of distinction between the later, qualitatively focused Chicago school of sociology researchers with the more quantitatively-based work of the original school and (2) a pervasive misunderstanding of what Durkheim meant by treating a 'social fact' as a thing. A more accurate account reveals that the two research traditions are both heavily empirical, pragmatic, contextually based approaches to studying non-individualized, collective behavior. These points of convergence show that the Chicago school of sociology, and American sociology in general, constructed many of the same solutions to similar theoretical problems as did Durkheim. If a science of societies exists, one must certainly not expect it to consist of a mere paraphrase of traditional prejudices. It should rather cause us to see things in a different way from the ordinary man, for the purpose of any science is to make discoveries, and all such discoveries more or less upset accepted opinions.
Self and Society in Durkheim, Weber and Goffman
This essay discusses the contributions of Durkheim, Weber and Goffman to the historical development of sociological theory in which sociologists interests are shown to move from scientific enquiry to a focus on social action, its meaning and the agency of the individual. A historical survey of movements in sociological theory is provided as a context within which the theorists are placed, showing each theorist's impact and tracing the movement from Durkheim's 'social facts' to the 'social constructions' of symbolic interactionism. Examples of Durkheim's theoretical work are placed within a discussion of positivism in sociological theory and a discussion of subsequent criticism from non-positivist sociologists follows, beginning with Weber. Weber's nuanced and deliberate balance of historical enquiry, observation of patterns in social behaviour and focus on the meaning of this behaviour to the individual (verstehen) in his theoretical work is claimed to be a major innovation in social theory, highlighting the role of individual consciousness and motivation (Kalberg 2005). This leads into a discussion of the focus on the self in the microsociological tradition, of which symbolic interationism is a part (Collins 1994). Though Goffman's theory differs in some respects from symbolic interactionism, his focus on the construction and maintenance of the self places his work in the microsociological tradition (Collins 1994).
Toward semiotic sociology. A synthesis of semiology, semiotics and phenomenological sociology.
Departing from the common view according to which structuralist semiology (the Saussurean tradition), pragmatist semiotics (the Peircean tradition) and phenomenological sociology (Husserl, Schutz, Berger and Luckmann, Garfinkel) are seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, the article attempts to outline their synthesis. The net result of the synthesis is that a conception emerges wherein action theories (rational choice, Weber, etc.) are based on phenomenological sociology, and phenomenological sociology is based on neo-structuralist semiotics, which is a synthesis of the Saussurean and the Peircian traditions of understanding habits of interpretation and interaction. This provides us with a research programme for semiotic sociology.
EMILE DURKHEIM'S SOCIOLOGY BETWEEN UNIVERSALISM AND SOCIOLOGISM
Defendologija, 2020
Examining the whole of Durkheim's teaching, the conclusion is unequivocally that his understanding of sociology and social sciences can be characterized as sociologism, which means that he believed that society is primary in relation to the individual, ie that the individual finds his existence exclusively within society. It is indisputable that this French thinker was among the most prominent sociologists who advocated the idea of the primacy of society in relation to the individual, and such thinking led him to the idea of considering all social aspects and elements in the spirit of sociological views. Many theorists agree that sociologism is most fully presented in the explanation of the religious phenomenon, which is constituted on a special and not understood by the individual glorification (worship) of sociability. Durkheim's culture, politics, and economy were necessarily understood in accordance with the idea of the primacy of society. Universally understood, society is a special entity that lives for itself, independently and separately from the lives of different individuals, acting in its own name and striving for goals different from those that guide those individuals. Durkheim's entire idea of the calling of sociology required that this new science cross the threshold of the university classroom and address a wider audience, even all of humanity.
Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006
A Review of Cormack, Patricia. 2002. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mill and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Introduction: Durkheimian sociology in philosophical context
Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 1996
The history of philosophy is significant for the history of the social sciences in much the same way that it is for the history of the natural sciences. Even before Thomas Kuhn's landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), historians of science had come to realize that scientific theories are adjudicated against a background of metaphysical and methodological assumptions. To make sense of a scientific controversy, it is important to uncover the philosophical positions of the various parties to the debate. At the same time, the history of epistemology is more intelligible when it is placed in the context of the history of science. Philosophers no longer appear to have been engaged in abstract discussions of purely academic interest, but are understood to have been debating foundational issues in the sciences of their day. Historians have documented how sciences as diverse as astronomy, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemistry, geology, evolutionary biology, and electrodynamics have occupied the attention of philosophers at various times in history. With regard to the social sciences, history shows us that an even broader range of philosophical investigation, including ethics and political philosophy as well as metaphysics and epistemology, has been relevant to their development.
Social semiotics: Towards a sociologically grounded semiotics
Semiotics and Its Masters, eds. Paul Cobley & Kristian Bankov. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton., 2017
Semiotics has defined its field as the study of meaning, which is entirely legitimate. However, if we wish to reach a deeper interpretation and explanation of semiotic texts, we need an articulation of semiotics with an epistemologically superior level. Semioticians have looked for this articulation in the framework of an individualistic paradigm, in biology or sometimes in psychology; we counter-propose a sociological paradigm. Our paper reviews earlier attempts at such an articulation in sociosemiotics and sociolinguistics and argues that they range from a weak awareness of society dismissed in the name of semiotic relevance (Greimas and Courtés) to the systematic articulation of language with the social (Bernstein). Finally, we demonstrate how an articulation between semiotics and society (in the sociologist's sense of the word) can illuminate semiotic analysis through the example of case studies from Antiquity to our own times. The anchoring of semiotic systems in society challenges both Peircean global semiotics and cognitive semiotics, which both imply the historical priority of biology as an explanation of cultural semiotic systems. Both approaches try to pass directly from culture to biology, but the recognition of the mediating role of society creates major epistemological problems for a biological approach to semiotics.