David R. Maines - The Faultline of Consciousness: A View of Interactionism in Sociology

First published 2001 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright 2001 by Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012021205

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maines, David R.

The faultline of consciousness : a view of interactionism in sociology / David R. Maines.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : A. de Gruyter, c 2001.

ISBN 978-0-202-30646-9

1. Symbolic interactionism. I. Title.

HM499.M34 2012

302.2223--dc23

2012021205

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30646-9 (pbk)

We all remember the puzzle about whether or not a falling tree in the woods makes any noise if no one is there. The answer, of course, is that it does not make any noise, since the membranes of the ear are required for noise to be brought into existence. By the same token, those membranes must be activated by the air disturbances mobilized by the falling tree, and therefore a person with fully functioning membranes who is in a situation with no air disturbances would just as obviously be in a noiseless environment. Accordingly, we can conclude with certainty that in this instance the hearing subject and falling object are both required for noise to come into existence. As anyone conversant with pragmatism would say, noise exists not merely as a thing nor as an individual experience but rather as a transaction. In the vocabulary of interactionism, noise is said to be produced from the conjoint acts of subjects and objects in a process of mutually constituting one another.

This viewpoint is easy enough to comprehend when considering the physical properties of wave lengths and frequencies in relation to the neu-rophysiological properties of auditory processes. It appears to be a bit harder, though, when the puzzle pertains to questions of society, and we can note how forms of that puzzle have made their way into social seien-tifie inquiry in ways that mask the same obvious answer. For a long time, many social scientists, sociologists in particular, have taken the position that, metaphorically speaking, the falling tree will indeed make noise even if no one is around. American sociologists have especially liked that idea, which they think was proved by Durkheim when he wrote about social facts. They took Durkheims notion that there was something left over after adding together all the parts in Spencers organic unity, and they began trying to figure out how those leftovers (social facts) did things. Weve all read sentences from those sociologists such as social systems require ... or population density does ... or organizational structures need ... or sex ratios permit... and so forth. Those sociologists would fill out those kinds of sentences by referring to other social facts, such as rules or balance or normative change or to characteristics of people such as conformist or decision-making capacity. There is no doubt that we all collectively learned some useful things from using that approach in which we pretended that falling trees make noise all by themselves, but we paid the price of committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and thereby have more or less lost our way. Sociologists started thinking that structures and organizations and fertility rates and power distributions actually do things all by themselves, which clearly is an ontologically spurious position. Even the postmodernist and cultural studies crowd seem to have been infected by this way of thinking to some extent as well. They like to write a lot about texts, and in writing about them we read that texts create subject positions or that texts read people. Texts, it would appear, do all sorts of things to us. Like fertility rates or sex ratios, though, texts clearly do not do anything at all. Certainly they exist, as do ratios and rates, and can become quite important in some situations, but to confer action or agency on them is to argue that falling trees out of earshot make noise.

Pragmatism represents a set of ideas that allows scholars who like to think falling trees make noise to keep their integrity and simultaneously help to reconfigure their thinking in a more productive and ontologically realistic manner. One of the appealing features of pragmatism is that one doesnt have to like philosophy or sophisticated social theory to make use of it. Certainly pragmatism can be sophisticated and complexly argued, but I am merely suggesting here that, for sociologists who are somewhat impatient with pure philosophical argument, such as myself, taking seriously the basic principles of pragmatism can contribute to improved sociological work. Most sociologists know about George Herbert Mead and his significance for sociology. The reason that Mead is such a good anchor for sociology, though, is not so much because of his discussions of the I and Me, as depicted in so many textbooks, but because he remained faithful to the characteristics of human beings as a species of animals. That is, he took Darwin seriously. Along with John Dewey and other pragmatist theorists, he appreciated the fact that through evolution humans acquired Ian-guage and symbols, they acquired abstract time systems, and that in the course of those processes they acquired a very sophisticated and complex way of making objects of themselves which has had enormously significant consequences. These are simple facts of our species that should not be lost on our imaginations. Moreover, Mead gave us the idea that there also is the world that is there that is independent of human experience, and there is the world of human experience that has emerged through evolutionary processes. While both are real and neither can be denied, human group life exists not solely in one or another but in their dialectical relationships. It is this kind of thinking that allows the pragmatist to solve the puzzle of falling trees, a puzzle that cannot be solved at all either by realist or idealist philosophy.

Symbolic interactionism, the way I have come to understand and use it, is merely the concerted application of pragmatist principles to sociological inquiry. One of the better and more general characterizations of the inter-actionist perspective comes from Stone and Farberman (1970), which draws attention to processes through which people transform themselves and their social worlds as they engage in communication. There are three basic elements to this characterization. First, people transform themselves: