INTERNALIZED SYMBOLS AND THE SOCIAL PROCESS OF THINKING
IN IR THEORY, thinking is the third-order circulation of symbols. It follows upon the first-order creation of symbols in intense IRs, and their second-order recirculation in conversational networks. Thinking is yet another loop, now into imaginary internal conversations, which are themselves IRs taking place in the mind. Perform a gestalt switch: instead of starting with the individual engaged in thinking, start with the overall distribution of symbols among a population of people. Visualize what the pattern would look like if you could see it from the air, through a time-lapse photography in which symbols were marked in colors, so that we could trace where they flow, and follow their EE levels as intensities of brightness. We would see symbols circulating as streaks of light, from person to person, and then—our camera zooming in for a close-up—flowing in chains within a particular person’s mind.
The effort here, as in previous chapters, is to dynamize Durkheim, to set his model in motion. Durkheim presented an abstract, static sociology of knowledge: the categories in which people think are collective representations determined by social morphology. My aim is to broaden and particularize the theory, to explain who will think what at particular times. Similarly with the other major sociological theory of thinking: Mead’s theory of internal conversation among parts of the self, internalized from social interaction; thought as imaginative rehearsal through taking the role of the other. Again, we are presented with an abstract model, in this case, of the inner structure of the self; but not of what thinking occurs in particular situations.
Combining the two theories yields a radically microsociological theory of thinking. Conversation is interaction ritual, charging up symbols with membership significance; thought is internalized conversation, flowing on the EE charges that symbols have at a particular moment in time. In the conversational market an individual moves toward those conversations in which his or her stock of symbols and level of EE produces the highest IR effervescence, and avoids those conversations that reduce EE. The same happens in the internal conversations of the mind: thinking flows into those internal conversations that generate the most EE in the unfolding mental situation.
We shall have to confront an additional complication: whereas external conversations are constrained by the immediate situation of the persons matching up their stock of symbols and EE levels, an internal conversation presumably could go off in any direction whatever; after all, the person who is doing the thinking is imagining the other side of the conversation as well as his or her own side, and thus could supply any possible match-up. Nevertheless, as I will attempt to show, internal conversations are not unbounded or random but have a shape that resembles IR chains. Thinking always takes place in some situation in time, and thus is surrounded by overt IR chains, which both set the starting point for internal thinking, and supply its symbolic and emotional ingredients. Some kinds of thinking stay close to the external situation; these are the easiest case for sociology to deal with. Some kinds of thinking are very strongly shaped by internalizing a structured social network of communications; such is the case with intellectual thinking, which I will present as our best evidence so far for the sociological theory of thinking. There remains the kind of thinking that floats away from its starting point into chains of associations; this will be most difficult to handle sociologically, but even here, as we shall see, patterns can be found.
METHODS FOR GETTING INSIDE, OR BACK OUTSIDE
What methods can a sociologist use for studying thinking? I raise the question here, not out of a positivist belief that there is a single correct method that must always be applied, but out of the practical sense that theory advances best in tandem with empirical observations. This has been the case with Durkheim, Mead, Goffman, Weber, and virtually any other important sociological (or psychological) theorist that one might mention. By the same token, it is clear that one cannot lay down in advance what empirical research methods must be. This is particularly so among the leading microsociologists. Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, Scheff, Katz, and other key innovators have invented methods as they went along, and they would hardly have made their discoveries if they had followed a methods textbook, say, as published in the year 1950.
Methods involve confronting obstacles, looking consciously at the problems that arise. How can we get inside other people’s heads? Are we confined to describing what is inside our own? Biases may arise because each of us is different from other people. And the bias may go deeper: even in examining one’s own thought—or getting other people to report on theirs—there is the issue of how thought is changed by self-conscious reflection, and by interrupting it so as to report on it. There is also the problem of nonverbal thought, thought in images, physical actions, and emotions; and quasi-verbal thought, not formulated into the articulate speech in which we externalize it. Nevertheless, obstacles are not necessarily blockades, but can be stimulants to ingenuity and openings to further directions of theory and further devices for research. If the problem of the sociology of thinking were simply a matter of getting what is inside outside, some of these problems might be more severe. But we have good theoretical reasons to believe that what is inside began with ingredients, and is shaped by processes, which were internalized from social interaction. We are not in the position of the philosopher dealing with the problem of solipsism and trying to deduce the existence of an external world from the viewpoint of a hermetically sealed individual mind.1 There is no rigid barrier between the interior or mental and the external or social; these are regions that are connected by processes, going both inward and outward. By studying these processes we can learn much about the sociology of thinking.
1. The obvious method of studying thought is introspection: observing one’s own thoughts and reporting them. These thoughts could be the researcher’s own; or other people’s thoughts that have been reported for various reasons, either spontaneously or because a researcher has asked them to recall their thoughts. Another kind are thoughts as described by a novelist using the technique of stream of consciousness. Now consider the methodological problems: are these thought reports biased as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative? Such a verdict cannot be asserted in advance; we will know how representative or unrepresentative they are only by making comparisons. And comparisons always take place under a theoretical scheme. We are interested, as sociologists, in the form that thinking takes. There are often some details of content that are unique in each instance; although we should not overrate this, before looking at the amount of stereotyping of mental expressions that actually exists. But what we want to know is whether a theoretical model can account for the patterns and the variations. It is useless to consider empirical observations without some theoretical questions in mind. If we are only idly observing thoughts without any conception of what patterns they might flow in, it is glib to conclude that there is no pattern. In this case, I want to show that thinking is related to the external chain of social situations in which the thinking takes place, and we can hardly assess whether such patterns exist if we do not look for them. I further want to consider the internal chain of thoughts as a kind of IR chain; and that calls for examining the patterns of all the instances of introspection against such a model.
Are our own introspections fatally biased, or are someone else’s thought-reports? Is it better or worse to have the introspections generated by an explicit research scheme, or are they best taken when they are presented accidentally and without the interference of researchers? We have hardly advanced far enough in collecting and analyzing a great deal of introspections to answer these questions definitively.2 But anticipating what I will present later, I suggest that problems of representativeness and bias do not loom large. Once we see that there are several types of thought, and that these arise in particular situations of external IR chains and follow particular patterns of internal flow, it appears that—as a crude initial generalization—there is no reason to rule out any particular kind of introspective data as invalid. Similarly with the alleged problem of distortions introduced by self-consciousness and self-interruption arising from the research process: for one thing, self-interruption is a form of thought that occurs naturally as well. In addition, introspective reports vary in terms of just where self-consciousness intrudes: often an observer (who might be oneself) remembers a considerable chain of thoughts before self-consciousness over the reportability of these thoughts breaks in; and the patterns of these chains before the self-conscious break are similar to introspections collected in other manners.
2. Another method is to catch thought on the way in, during the process of internalization. This is the classic data used by Cooley and Mead in formulating what became the symbolic interactionist theory of the self; parallel work was done in Russia by the school of Vygotsky (1934/1962) on the development of child’s language. Here is one instance:
Julia, a 30-month-old child, is in the kitchen alone while her mother is out of the room. There is a bowl of eggs on the table. When the mother reenters the kitchen, Julia is dropping the eggs on the floor, one after another, while saying to herself: “NoNoNo. Mustn’t dood it. NoNoNo. Mustn’t dood it!” (from Wiley 1994, 63)
Julia is speaking in her mother’s voice, imaginatively taking the role of the other. Eventually the voice will become completely internal and silent, and develop into a form of self-control. In symbolic interactionist theory, the Generalized Other is being formed as a stance incorporating all outside interlocutors and their viewpoints. At the age of two-and-a-half years, the child is still carrying on a process of semi-external thinking, speaking the parts of the dialogue aloud; later during the period from three to five years, the dialogue becomes silent and internal, constituting thought in the form that makes up the adult mind.
This childhood material is evidence for the sociological model of thought as internalized from external conversations. It does not give us particular details for how this process continues to go on among adults; for the most part, it appears, adults do not have an intermediate phase during which they speak the other’s part to themselves aloud before internalizing it. But this sometimes happens, especially when one learns a new word, or someone’s name, that one is trying hard to remember; or when a particularly striking thing is said in a conversation or a public performance, so that the hearer wonderingly or admiringly repeats it aloud. The latter is an instance of an intensely focused, emotionally entraining interaction encapsulated in a symbolic expression; the heightened entrainment is visible in the overt repetition of the symbol. It is a testable hypothesis that speaking words aloud in this fashion makes them especially likely to be remembered, and to become a prominent part of one’s internal conversation.
3. Conversely, there is internal thinking on its way to externalization, blurting out before its time, or before it takes the shape that conventional conversational rituals are supposed to have. Goffman (1981) broached the topic under the heading of “response cries.” These include apparently involuntary exclamations, grunts, sounds of effort or pain, as well as mutterings to oneself in verbal form. Goffman’s line of analysis is that the social situation is always something to be dealt with, even when the interaction is unfocused. Human beings in each other’s physical presence, like animals warily grazing on the same landscape, have at least a back-channel consciousness of what each other is doing. For the most part they are concerned only with signs of normalcy, and against this background they become alerted to signs of abnormal shifts in others’ action that might come to involve them. Hence an individual acts to make oneself accountable, engaging in a form of self-dramatization that broadcasts what he or she is doing, including occasions when the action has to be shown to concern only oneself. Grunts and mutterings are not designed to communicate, that is, to draw other people into a focused interaction. But they are social expressions, called forth by the presence of other people; as Goffman says, “they do not mark a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding of relevance in” (Goffman 1981, 121).
Goffman is pursuing the Durkheimian program, making everything into a version of social interaction. How then can we deal with similar expressions, which are made in private, when there are no other people around? These must be internalizations of once-external situations; one can cry by oneself because one once cried for others; one makes overt sounds of grunting in moments of physical effort because one has previously displayed one’s efforts to others in this way. This line of analysis would have to be checked empirically, and it may be doubtful whether it would cover all the instances of the inarticulate sounds people make when they are alone. What is more important is that we can pay sociological attention to a class of expressions that are a kind of thinking out loud, both when alone and in the presence of other people. This is where we catch thinking in transition, on the wing, without having to resort to introspective reports; and thus we can examine its form and its connection to social circumstances.
The most obvious, articulate version of such externalizing thought is rehearsals, where an individual prepares a speech that he or she intends to make to another person. Here the more interesting instance is not the speech for a formal gathering, which may well be written and then spoken aloud, but the speech for more informal, sociable interactions (but also for work interactions, such as asking the boss for a raise or telling an employee that he or she is being fired). As noted, uppermiddle-class persons have more hesitation pauses in their speech than working-class persons, micro-moments during which the speaker is subvocally trying out alternative things to say (Labov 1972). This is evidence that differences in typical social class interaction produce differences in thinking, not just in form but in the amount of internal dialogue. Working-class speakers tend to use more formulaic utterances, which are reeled off without a hitch and thus without a pause for thinking. There is a social distribution of thought-rehearsals.
Thinking out loud, sometimes referred to as self-talk, is the most socially accessible version of thinking. Some of this can be made available for research only by self-reports, namely self-talk that takes place when one is alone. An important borderline form is cursing. This is sometimes actual communication to another person, but since that is dangerous, the most common form of cursing appears to be in situations of being alone or quasi-alone, as in Katz’s (1999) study of drivers cursing in their cars at other drivers. Cursing is particularly revealing because it makes available for analysis the most highly ritualistic forms of thought, where the content matters much less than its action as a kind of magical incantation, and as a transformer of emotional energy.
4. Intellectuals’ thinking is especially accessible, since intellectuals formulate their thoughts for publication. Since the audiences that will read or listen to an intellectual’s productions are highly structured, it is easiest to show in this instance just how the internal and external structures correspond to each other. And since writers go through a series of phases between reading and taking notes on others’ publications and talks, formulating their own shorthands, outlines, drafts, and their final publications, we are in good position to see how points along the continuum from internal to external (and vice versa) differ from each other. We need not assume that internal thought simply mirrors external communication, but can investigate the conditions that make it vary.
5. There are different kinds and types of thought: differing among persons as personality styles; differing among moments for the same person. This variation provides no grounds for objection to the sociological approach; we can turn these differences to our analytical advantage, by using them for comparisons, and showing the conditions under which one or another type of thought takes place. Indeed, if thought were invariant in form, it might be harder to give a theoretical explanation of it, as we would not be able to use the method of comparisons to find what theoretical model best fits. Thought takes place in words, but in different degrees of conventional articulateness; it also takes place in pictures and other kinds of sensory imagery, and sometimes in motor schemes of bodily movement. Can we connect these differences in mode of thought with different situational circumstances, in external and internal chains?
One dimension of difference that yields good theoretical results is the speed at which thinking takes place. Some forms of thought are quick, indeed fleeting and hard to catch; other forms are plodding, even deliberately so; others occupy the middle ground between. We can document these speeds especially well in studying writing, in its various degrees of externalization. The speeds of thought correlate nicely with different situational contexts, and mesh with the IR model of rhythms and emotional energy.3
In what follows, I will draw on a variety of these methods. In some parts the argument is necessarily essayistic, given the stage of our research in this field. Since Mead developed his theory of the self engaging in internal dialogue, the principal sustained theoretical investgation along these lines has been Norbert Wiley’s The Semiotic Self (1994). I will push the argument further away from Mead’s emphasis on the inner structure of the self, and more in the direction of Goffmanian radical microsociology. Throughout these various methods of investigating thinking, let us keep an eye on the goal: a theory that tells us under what social conditions thinking takes one form rather than another.4 In what situation will a particular individual think a particular thought, and what form will that thought take? These situations are places in IR chains, moments in time when symbols have been charged up with a given social and emotional history, and when they are ready for use in an anticipated situation just coming up on the horizon. I will begin by reviewing what we know about intellectual thinking, the kind about which we know the most.
INTELLECTUAL NETWORKS AND CREATIVE THINKING
In what follows, I draw upon my study of philosophers across world history (Collins 1998). This provides evidence that symbols, and thus the topics that intellectuals think about, are internalized from personal interactions in networks. So too with the emotional energy that drives individuals, in particular network locations, along their chains of thought more enthusiastically, confidently, and obsessively than others. It shows us too how new ideas are created out of the distribution of symbols already available at a moment in time, by being reshaped for anticipated audiences.
Successful intellectuals have more network ties to other successful intellectuals than less successful intellectuals do. I put it in these terms to indicate that this is the judgment of history on the importance of these thinkers’ work: in ordinary terms, the great philosophers are more closely connected to other great philosophers than are those in any other rank of philosopher; secondary philosophers have somewhat fewer ties into the core of the intellectual community; minor philosophers have the fewest ties of all.5
Such ties are of several kinds, all of which are stratified in the same way. The more important the philosopher, the more likely he or she is to have been the pupil of one or more teachers of high rank. These chains concatenate across the generations from teacher to pupil: the highest ranked philosophers, the biggest stars among the major figures, tend to come from dense networks that have built up among a series (indeed parallel and interacting series) of eminent thinkers. Hence the more eminent the philosopher, the more indirect as well as direct ties to eminent predecessors he or she has on the average. Secondary thinkers have fewer indirect as well as direct ties to important thinkers, and minor thinkers have fewer still.6
These ties concatenate both upstream and downstream, across the generations both backward and forward in time. Great philosophers have more pupils and grandpupils who are relatively successful than lesser philosophers do; intellectual success propagates forward but also backward—having pupils who do important work is part of what gets an individual a long-term historical reputation as having had very important ideas. This last point seems counterintuitive; presumably the future cannot cause the past; what happens after one’s death cannot determine what a thinker will do while he or she is alive. Here again we need to make a gestalt switch. The individual is not determining what the network does, but rather vice versa; it is the action of the entire network across generations that determines how much attention is paid to the ideas that are formulated at any particular point in it. And given that ideas are always multi-sided symbols that are linked to other symbols both by chains of grammatical exposition and by connotation and nuance, ideas become reinterpreted in different contexts. Thus the “importance” of a particular thinker’s formulations is not established until following generations of intellectuals have done their work on them. This is not an argument that canonical reputations are merely constructed, irrespective of what the merits of those ideas actually were; it is an argument that the merit of those ideas is not contained in themselves, in some platonic sphere outside of history, but is created by the entire network as it works with ideas that are constantly being decomposed and reintegrated in varying combinations. That image of a few lonely isolated minds, rising like mountain peaks above their mere worldly compatriots, is understandable enough as a Durkheimian emblem that the intellectual community makes out of those whom it puts in its focus of collective attention. As sociologists, we should be looking not through the lens of the myths, but at the larger structure that produced those myths, which is to say the formulation and long-term flow of ideas in networks.
In addition to the vertical concatenation of ties across generations, horizontal ties to important contemporaries are more common among successful than less successful thinkers. These ties are to both friends and foes. Eminent philosophers are especially likely to have had disputes, directly and reciprocally, as well as at greater distance, with other important philosophers. On the friendly side, we find that important thinkers tend to belong to groups of other thinkers as personal acquaintances. These groups tend to form early in their careers; these are not merely the clubbing together of persons who are already famous, but groups of would-be thinkers who have not yet done the work that will make them famous. Again we find a pattern that might tempt us to teleology, the future determining the past. Breaking the individualistic gestalt, we can say that the group makes its career together, their interaction promoting the intellectual creativity of all.
These network patterns are visible at long distance across the expanse of history. Shifting the resolution of the microscope, let us ask just how the network is affecting the thinking of individuals in these situations. What does one get from an eminent teacher that will make him or her creative? It cannot be simply passing along the teacher’s own ideas, a transmission of cultural capital; to receive and repeat one’s teacher’s ideas makes one a follower, at best a minor thinker—and in general it is the lack of strong originality that distinguishes minor thinkers from more important ones. To be an important thinker in one’s own right means to create new ideas. Often that means breaking with one’s teacher. Such breaks have been interpreted as an Oedipal rebellion against the father-figure, but the Freudian model provides no explanation. They are far from universal, since minor figures do not break with their teachers, but occur only when structural conditions are present that open up space for new positions to be formulated.
If not ideas, then, what does the future-great pupil get from the great master? One pattern that is transmitted, even across breaks in ideas, is high EE. Eminent thinkers are energy stars. They are highly productive, turning out large amounts of published (and often unpublished work), only some small portion of which becomes famous. They work extremely long hours, seemingly obsessed with their work; their thinking is itself energizing for them, as if they are magnetically drawn along by their chains of thought. At the peak of momentum in these spells of thinking (which often takes the form of writing), ideas come into their heads—in some cases, they report, as if they are taking dictation. This pattern, found among those most magnetized by their work, gives some credence to the notion of “inspiration,” as if the creative thinker is a genius, uniquely in touch with a creative flow from some higher region. The metaphor is misplaced, but it translates into a sociological truth: there are particular locations in intellectual networks where a few individuals become highly focused, highly energized, putting together streams of symbols in new ways; and those symbols do indeed come from outside, not from a mysterious realm of creative spirit, but from the dynamics of the intellectual community internalized in that person’s mind and now on their way to being externalized again.
Not all creative individuals have the same flamboyance—and the same publicity focused upon their private behavior—but they all have relatively high degrees of emotional energy concentrated in their work. The eminent teacher is impressive because he or she transmits this attitude, this intense focus upon intellectual symbols as important above all else, and as magnetically enthralling and energizing for those who come into their orbit. The network ties that count in my evidence are personal contacts: the patterns described earlier occur by being physically in the presence of the other person, as well as (sometimes) corresponding with him or her. The network patterns that we summarize as eminence breed eminence; intellectual creativity is contagious, operating as a kind of tribal mana, transmitted by sound of voice and personal touch on pieces of paper from one to another. The pattern of network ties holds across all historical periods, from India, China, and Greece in the 500s BCE on through Europe of the 1940s;7 that is to say, it holds across periods with vastly different forms of communication, both where most intellectual life occurred in direct debate, and where the mass production of texts has made them available almost everywhere. Across these changes, the importance of personal contact has not shifted. The Vienna Circle of the 1920s and ’30s and the Paris existentialists of the 1930s and ’40s have the same kinds of network patterns that can be found in the generations of Socrates or Mencius. Although modern intellectuals make their reputations as writers of texts, the social process that goes into making these individuals creative in this way is still structured around face-to-face interactions.
Contact with the impressive teacher is an IR at a high level of intensity. The lecture or other encounter focuses attention on words, concepts, and techniques of thinking that become sacred objects, indicating membership in the center of the intellectual community. These symbols become internalized in the minds of the listeners, a version of what I will refer to later as reverberated talk. Creativity takes place inside the individual mind as a recombination or development of these ideas and techniques. How this takes place we will see more fully after adding a few pieces to the puzzle.
Consider now what happens in a horizontal membership group. Here we find a different type of network structure. Where vertical master-pupil chains connect lineages and mediate remote links, the group of peers is a high redundancy network producing a strong sense of collective identity and of participation in a common project. Such a group assembles in coffee houses, student taverns, sometimes in roommates’ bull sessions, sometimes in salons, in publishing houses, bookstores, or editorial offices. There are enacted repetitive chains of IRs, with a high focus of attention on intellectual topics, making these mental worlds more vivid than the external world of ordinary affairs. The intensity of the informal discussion, like the formal lecture, again makes sacred objects out of central ideas, topics, techniques of argument. The group can reinforce the status of teachers as sacred objects, giving them more reputation among initiates than among the general public. This increases the attention and repect given to teachers in lecture classes and makes these occasions more successful as rituals—indeed sometimes elevating a mediocre lecturer into a memorable figure by dint of the atmosphere of celebrity. The group also generates criticism of eminent figures of the previous generation, giving mutual support for breaking with them in new directions. This, for instance, is how Karl Marx was launched into his intellectual trajectory: in the Berlin coffee house group called “Die Freien,” members competed among themselves to radicalize their critiques not only of Hegel but of those who had not broken with him far enough.
The group mobilizes EE collectively, and launches their careers collectively, moving up into the larger attention space. At this point, typically, the group breaks up, as its former members sharpen their differences to form separate positions. During the earlier phase, when the group was still intact, members may have engaged in plenty of arguments among themselves, providing much of the emotional effervescence that made the group a center of action. Now the friendly arguments of comrades-in-arms turn unfriendly, sometimes becoming bitterly hostile. Again Marx provides a good example, constructing his first notable works by attacking the rest of “Die Freien,” while keeping alliance only with one intellectual compatriot of his youth, Engels.
We are trying to infer the micro-situations of individuals at central locations in intellectual networks. Zoom back out to capture another pattern visible in long-term networks across the generations: new positions appear together as rivals. Within a single generation, an active lifetime of intellectual work of about thirty-five years, there are typically three to six big names constituting rival positions in an intellectual field such as philosophy. This is also the number of intergenerational chains or schools of thought simultaneously perpetuated from teacher to student. I call this pattern the “law of small numbers.” The number of important thinkers or schools occasionally goes below two, or above six, but these high and low configurations are inimical to creativity. When a single position dominates, there is no creativity: a single eminent teacher or teaching lineage dominates; there are no star pupils working creatively in new directions, only loyalists who break no new ground. Creativity occurs in a situation of rivalry. Rival intellectual chains depend tacitly upon each other, and structure each other’s direction of thought.
Two positions is the rock-bottom minimum for creative development, but three is more typical. Two positions can easily give rise to a third, as a plague-on-both-houses. A chief mechanism of producing new ideas is to recombine pieces of past ideas in different selections and with different emphases. With the existence of prior intellectual networks, there are plenty of ingredients to recombine into new ideas. It is not dearth of ingredients that limits the formulation of new ideas. Creativity is also done with an eye toward the receptivity of audiences. Such recombinations of ideas can occur successfully up to about six positions. Beyond this upper limit, the history of networks shows that some of the lineages become cut off in the next generation, failing to recruit new students who carry on the impetus. Violating the upper limit can occur only for a short time, and is penalized by the breaking off of some lineages until the total falls to six or less. The structural limit is not usually consciously recognized by intellectuals during the generation when it is being violated, but it is felt in a sense of crisis of making one’s way among a welter of positions, a sensation of being squeezed out by lack of recognition for the importance of one’s work.
The law of small numbers fits two pieces into the puzzle. It shows how ideas are shaped, not only by combination and further development of ideas and techniques from prior networks. The most “creative,” which is to say widely influential, ideas are shaped by oppositions, formulating a stance in controversies that attract the most attention. Opposing schools of thought carve up the attention space into niches, giving each other their identities and boundaries. Creative thinking is a process of making coalitions in the mind both positively and negatively. Ideas are symbols of membership and simultaneously of nonmembership, marking who is inside the thought-collective and who is beyond its boundaries. Intellectuals depend both on allies and even more on their rivals; the closer to the core of the network, the better they know the cutting points that carve up niches in the attention space.
Intellectuals at the core of networks have an intuitive, immediate sense of who lines up with and against whom on what issues. Their thinking covers ground swiftly; unlike for marginal intellectuals, there is no need to spell things out; they know what arguments follow from what concepts; ranging ahead, they have a sense of what arguments can be further constructed, what directions can be opened up, what applications made. The symbols that make up the content of their thinking are loaded with EE; they represent not just their object of reference, but the activity of thinking and talking that goes on in intellectual groups. Thus for the core intellectual in the vortex of creative thinking, the symbols flow rapidly together into new combinations and oppositions, as if by magnetic attraction and repulsion. The role of the thinker is to concentrate them in one focus of attention in his or her consciousness, and to set their flow in motion.
The law of small numbers shows another reason why network position is crucial in launching a star intellectual career. What one picks up from an eminent teacher, besides his or her EE and stock of symbols, is a demonstration of how to operate in the intellectual field of oppositions.8 Star intellectuals are role models, to use that much-abused term, but in a fashion that cannot be picked up at a distance, and only by seeing them in action.
From the law of small numbers it follows that every individual’s intellectual career passes through a structural crunch. Star teachers have many more pupils than three to six; and there are many more young discussion groups than can become creative and famous. Each person’s career trajectory consists in coming to grips with the recognition of what one’s opportunities are in the intellectual field. Each experiences in their own way an impersonal sorting process going on around them. Some decide to become followers of an existing position: retailers of some other theorist’s ideas to a peripheral audience of students or textbook readers, or its representatives out in the intellectual provinces away from the hot center where the ideas were formulated, like followers of Parisian ideas in American literature departments. Another way to make a career as a follower is as a specialist, applying theories and techniques to particular problems, especially on the empirical side. These moves create smaller attention spaces, with their own jockeying for positions of leadership, governed by their own local law of small numbers.
Others stay the course of their youthful ambitions, modeled directly upon their star teachers and predecessors. Among these, careers pass through a tipping point. Cumulative advantage goes to those who find a vacant niche in the attention space, one of the slots available inside the law of small numbers. Their ideas receive attention from the field, giving them still more EE, more motivation and capacity for obsessive work, more speed in developing the possibilities for expanding their ideas at the forefront of current debate. On the other side of the tipping point are those intellectuals in the process of being squeezed out. Their work, although initially promising, meets little recognition, sinking their EE. They experience lessening confidence, less energy for performing sustained hard work; they become more alienated, less oriented toward the scene of current action. They become liable to extraneous problems, susceptable to being knocked off their career trajectory, “calamity Janes” to whom bad things just seem to happen, makers of excuses, embittered carpers. The micro-processes feeding back and forth between intellectual networks and an individual’s thinking are cumulative, both in positive and negative directions. What kind of thinking one does depends on one’s location in the network, both at the beginning of a career and as the career develops. There is a sociology of unsuccessful thinking, as well as of the kind that history extolls as creative.
NON-INTELLECTUAL THINKING
Intellectual thinking is only a small proportion of thinking. Consider now the thinking of nonintellectuals, and of intellectuals when they are “off duty,” engaged in more ordinary types of thought.
The general theoretical aim is to see how thinking is predictable from the situation within an IR chain in which the person is situated.
Anticipated and Reverberated Talk
The simplest and most predictable form of thinking is that which is closest in time to the situation of action. Such thought consists in words on the verge of being spoken, or of words already spoken that have such emotional entrainment that they carry over into the individual’s mind almost literally by reverberation. These forms of thinking, as noted, may pass through an intermediate phase between inside and outside as self-talk.
The following example is an office clerk talking to herself:
“I’d better get the DPOs for the new supplies. Oh no! We’re not using those any more.” (Wiley 1994, 61)
Here the self-talk conforms closely to the pragmatist model of George Herbert Mead. The clerk gives herself instructions for what to do next. The verbal thought creates a mental situation of thinking ahead; in this situation she finds the first plan of action is not going to work (the DPOs, Department Purchase Orders, are no longer being used), so she tells herself that, and begins to formulate a different plan of action.9
A great deal of ordinary thought is of this form. When engaged in practical action, one often engages in a kind of running commentary or thought-instruction on what is to be done; this happens as well in sociable rather than utilitarian situations—as in carrying out a conversation—as when one pauses briefly to consider which words to say next. Here another aspect of the pragmatist model is in evidence. According to Mead and his forebears (especially Dewey and James), actions proceed habitually, without conscious reflection, as long as things are going well; it is only where the action encounters an obstacle that conscious thinking intervenes. This formulation is somewhat exaggerated, since thinking about upcoming actions can take place considerably before an obstacle is encountered (and in addition, there is a form of thinking, which we consider later, that is free-floating and more of a form of sociable talk within the mind). Consonant with the pragmatist model, when an action is in full swing amd one is entrained fully in the physical rhythm, there is no need for verbal self-commentary. The thinking that anticipates an upcoming situation is often is tied to a feeling that special concentration needs to be put upon the action.
Anticipatory thinking to guide a practical action is also visible where an action is rehearsed immediately beforehand, in physical movements: the batter taking practice swings, the golfer’s waggle of the club before a shot. These are truncated representations of what will happen when the planned action actually occurs; and thus are a form of thinking ahead: this is what I intend to do. But they are also ritualistic confidence builders. Some of these rituals have overtly stereotyped elements, such as crossing oneself, which draw on larger ritual solidarities (one professional basketball player during the 2002 season was viewed blowing a kiss toward the basket whenever he lined up for a free throw). Other preparatory rituals, although more idiosyncratic, are ways of getting into a rhythm set by oneself, rather than becoming entrained in the rhythm set by one’s opponent. Verbal self-instruction can be ritualistic in the same fashion.
Some thought-instruction occurs a little further along the time line, not just monitoring but acting as a form of cheerleading during action: okay, that’s good … all right! got it! a little more now…. Here we have another aspect of self-talk, even in what appear to be purely practical situations. The talk is not merely practical, but motivational. Athletes report such self-talk in moments of intense competition. A golfer:
“Walking off 16, a lot of things went through my mind,” he said. “I was like, is this the way you want to lose another major? Is this the way you want to be remembered, screwing up an Open championship?” (San Diego Union, July 22, 2002)
A tennis player:
“My legs today were getting tired,” Serena said. “I had to keep thinking, ‘OK, Serena, five and one? Or four and two? Which do you want?’ That got me motivated just to keep running and to keep fighting.” (Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2002)
Self-talk of this sort appears most frequently when the situation is an anxious one, or when the sense of momentum has not yet been established. It is often visible when a course of action is first being initiated, and especially when the speaker is moving from a position of inertia to one of action.
“All right, let’s get going. What do I want? What do I need to do today?”
This is self-talk while waking up in the morning; it has an undertone of writer’s block, too, as the thinker (myself) is wrestling to get himself settled into a time-consuming task of carrying out a writing obligation. Such self-talk tends to be repetitive, using the same formulas over and over again; the repetition itself acts as a kind of incantation, a rhythmic entrainment in one’s own words, which operates to focus one’s attention, to “pull oneself together.”
Thought Chains and Situational Chains
The more difficult case to explain sociologically is thinking that strays from the immediate situation into chains of association toward elements that may be quite remote. Here we have two leads: the thought chain begins in a particular situation, and it constitutes a chain of situations in the thought sequence itself. Such chains are more far-flung when the situation is one of “inner sociability,” just thinking for the sake of entertaining oneself, much in the way that sociable conversationalists are talking for the sake of sociability. But the chain can also be seen when the starting point is utilitarian.
In the following example, a young waitress is hurrying to work:
“Only eight minutes, takes five to change. I’ve got to book [hurry].” Imagery: a disgustingly filthy locker room. Visions of me running from table to kitchen table. Sounds. Forks and knives scraping plates, customers yelling over each other. “I have to make money. At least it’s not as bad as last summer.” Memory imagery: a tiny dumpy diner. Visions of me sweating. Sensations of being hot. Visions of thirty marines eating and drinking. Sounds: country music on a blaring juke box. “Miss, miss.” “I’ll be right there, just a minute please.” Sensations of burning my arms in a pizza oven. Visions of dropping glasses. Sounds: glass breaking, manager yelling, marines cheering. “Oh God, get me out of here.” Sensation: cringe, humiliation. “I hate waitressing. Can’t wait to graduate and get a decent job.” Visions of a paneled, brightly carpeted office with scenic pictures and healthy plants. Visions of me fifteen pounds thinner in a new skirt suit from Lord and Taylor. A great-looking co-worker pouring us coffee. Sounds of a clock chiming five o’clock. “Sure, I’d love to go out Friday night.” (Wiley 1994, 64)
The thought-chain begins in a practical situation: the waitress is noting how much time she has and tells herself to hurry. Her thought now expands into a chain of memories and imagined situations, some real and some fantasy. The chain switches modalities: some parts are visual; some are imagined sounds (voices, music, glass breaking); some are physical sensations (being hot, sweaty, burning oneself); some are emotions and bodily sensations (cringing, humiliation—two aspects of the same experience, since humiliation is a sense of shrinking away bodily before the gaze and jeers of other people). This is not simply an internal dialogue in the sense of one voice answering another. The voices themselves speak in a variety of stances: her own statements in the internal dialogue (“I’ve got to book…. I have to make money…. I hate waitressing”); her own voice imagined in past dialogues (“I’ll be right there, just a minute please.”); other people’s voices remembered from past dialogues (“Miss, miss.”); her own voice remembered in past internal conversation (“Oh God, get me out of here.”); her own voice in an imagined future dialogue (“Sure, I’d love to go out Friday night.”).
This internal “conversation” is not carried out simply among voices representing parts of the self. Instead, the waitress’s own voice, speaking in the present, is the central self who holds the thought process together and sets it on its course; this voice is “answered” typically by images of various sorts. She tells herself she has to hurry; she receives a visual answer, first of the locker room where she will change clothes, which is unpleasant enough. And then the unpleasantness theme is amplified by the next set of images of all the unpleasant aspects of her job. She then replies to the unspoken message by telling herself: “I have to make money. At least it’s not as bad as last summer.” These are two arguments; apparently she is not convinced by the first, so she goes on to the second one, comparing the present to last summer. Now the imagery replies again, building into a full-fledged replay of a humiliating situation. This was in fact an intense IR, the group of marines all focused on her, cheering together at her (to them, no doubt comic) debacle; the scene crystallized symbolically in her mind, in the very words she said to herself at that moment of emotional intensity: “Oh God, get me out of here.” The words reverberate in her mind; the current situation with its degree of similarity—the unpleasant feelings of going to work at a job she detests—brings back the emblem of the old situation as if magnetically linked.
Nevertheless, in the ongoing inner thought sequence of the present, she pulls herself together in her own voice. First by reflexively distancing herself from the situation, objectifying it and commenting on it: “I hate waitressing.” This is just the method that Blumer extolled by which one begins to get control of a situation by redefining it. She goes on to add further imaginative leverage over the immediate situation: “Can’t wait to graduate and get a decent job.” This statement is responded to by visual imagery again: the office scene that she would like to be in. And now the bandwagon is rolling in a positive direction. She embellishes the situation in favorable respects: losing fifteen pounds, having an expensive new suit; and—why not?—a new social circle and love life.
The thought sequence shifts across time away from the immediate upcoming situation; nevertheless it is held together by a common theme or mood. It starts as self-talk for a practical purpose, getting ready for work; but the problem of work is not just the utilitarian one of making sure the timing is right, but a motivational one, of getting up the energy to carry out a job she dislikes. Her own voice is the part of her self pushing toward a goal. The conversational “partner” is the imagery, remembered sounds, sensations, past voices, past thoughts, which respond to her. These images do not so easily go along with her goal-oriented, optimistic theme, and, in fact, tend to “argue” against her. But she—her own present voice—perseveres, and finally the imagery-as-conversation-partner falls into the positive mood, and even embellishes it. The present voice keeps more of an even keel; the imagery is more extreme, both negatively and postively. The whole thought episode is what we might call, in ordinary terminology, working up one’s willpower. Wiley (1994, 67, 108–9, 121–24) describes this as a process of generating solidarity among the parts of the self, an internal interaction ritual that generates emotional energy.
In the following example the thought chain does not begin in a practical situation, but in a moment of idle thought, “down time” between tasks or social encounters. A professor (myself) is walking to his lecture:
Music is going through my head, an aria from Don Giovanni, which I had seen the previous weekend with my wife. “What scene is that from?” Vague images of different scenes in the opera. I notice a woman, of professorial age and dress, ahead of me amidst the crowd of students on the walkway. “Is that the egregious Elizabeth Dougherty?” On closer approach, it is not the woman professor I am thinking of. “Damn economists.” Vague imagery of economists on a university committee. “Economists have bad values.” Feeling pleased with myself for the lapidary formulation.
Here again is an interplay of “conversational participants,” in which imagery takes its turn and sets off further responses. Images, words, the music itself carry an emotional tone that weaves the associations together. First, the tune from Don Giovanni is quite strongly playing in my head, not in snatches but from beginning to end. The music is related to the act of walking: both are actions, with an ongoing rhythm; both, in this case, are filling a period of dead time. (I do not generally listen to recorded music, and thus when I hear live music it reverberates vividly in my mind during several days afterward.) The thought that follows is idle curiosity, a pleasant conversation with myself to name the tune.
Now I notice a woman who resembles my colleague, a professor who is superficially pleasant and smiling, but who almost always takes the opposite side of issues from me in committee meetings. The previous weekend, in gossipy conversation with my wife, after our pleasant night at the opera, I had complained about this woman. There is an associational link between this recent conversation with my wife, the opera Don Giovanni (which is also about love and deception), and this woman. In the immediate situation where I think I recognize her, there now intrudes the interactional problem: do I have to exchange polite pleasantries with her, if she is going the same direction I am?
That problem is quickly obviated because it is a misidentification. But the theme sticks in my mind. “Damn economists.—Economists have bad values.” Elizabeth Dougherty is an economist, who happens to hold a position in the sociology department in which I am a member. The comment is echoing another theme that came up in a series of department meetings during the past months: another colleague had objected to hiring a new professor, not on the grounds that this person was not a good scholar, but because he was trained as an economist rather than a sociologist. I had not agreed with that argument when it first came up, but as my disagreements with the economist in the department had become more obvious to myself in recent weeks, I was somewhat rueful about having dismissed the argument so quickly. Imagery then comes into my mind of economists on another university committee, where I do not so much disagree with them but find their manner of assessing faculty promotions to be a bit ridiculous in their emphasis on a rigidly quantitative scheme of ranking professional publications. This committee (which was scheduled to meet that very morning just after my lecture, and thus was in my upcoming situational chain) shares a certain amount of intermittent humor in poking fun at economists’ terminology in their letters of recommendation. Thus I feel pleased, at the end of this internal conversation, for summing things up with a phrase about economists, which although no doubt (objectively viewed) is unfair as a generalization, has a nice ring of bringing the matter to a conclusion. Successful ritualistic formulations generally sacrifice accuracy for pungency.
Overall, this thought-episode moves from solidarity to solidarity, with a challenge in the middle: it starts with the up-beat of the opera, and resonates with the solidarity of a weekend with my wife (who had traveled across the country to join me); it meets the challenge of having to deal with someone whom I pretend to get along with, and against whom I assemble an imaginery coalition that includes my departmental colleague who warned against economists; then, broadening the enemy coalition to other economists whom I don’t like, the thoughtsequence adds the solidarity of a larger group who also puts economists down.
IR chains are EE-tropic; we make our way from encounter to encounter, and within a conversation from topic to topic and utterance to utterance, picking up immediately past symbols and moving onward from them in search of the greater EE outcome. A similar pattern appears in the thought chains of inner conversation: one symbolic representation leads to another, not merely because of similarity but because they have been charged up with similar kinds of membership significance, and because they are weighted emotionally by recent interactional usage, and by past interactions that were especially emotionally intense. The inner thought chain is also an EE-tropism, magnetically drawing in those images, verbal and otherwise, which put together the strongest internal solidarity one can imagine out of presently available ingredients. The thought chains of ordinary thinking in this respect resemble intellectual thinking, formulating coalitions in the mind.
The Metaphor of Dialogue among Parts of the Self
Consider now the theoretical framework in terms of which we conceptualize thought as a social process. The preeminent model comes from Meadian symbolic interaction: “Thinking is simply the reasoning of the individual, the carrying-on of a conversation between what I have termed the ‘I’ and the ‘me’” (Mead 1934, 335). “I talk to myself, and I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The ‘I’ of this moment is present in the ‘me’ of the next moment…. I become a ‘me’ in so far as I remember what I said…. It is what you were a second ago that is the ‘I’ of the ‘me’” (Mead 1934, 174). Wiley elaborates the model with an alternative formulation from Charles Sanders Peirce: “[A]ll thought is addressed to a second person or to one’s future self as to a second person” (quoted in Wiley 1994, 42). In this version, the internal conversation takes place between the “I” and the “you,” addressing yourself in the second person. This is a form of self-address that is particularly noticeable in self-imperatives, such as in the utilitarian situations noted earlier, and thus fits the pragmatist emphasis on practical action in the upcoming situation.
Nevertheless, there are forms of thinking that are not overtly in a dialogue form. In the examples analyzed earlier, for the most part there is no dialogue between speakers. (The chief exception is the office clerk: “I’d better get the DPOs for the new supplies. Oh no! We’re not using those any more.”) In the waitress’s thought chain, she remembers a conversational sequence: “Miss, miss.” “I’ll be right there, just a minute please.” But this is not in her present voice; and it is the imagery that keeps up the interlocutor’s part of the conversation and carries along the thought-sequence or internal interaction. The professor’s thought sequence begins, not with a statement by the “I” or any other voice, but by the imagined sounds of music, which just “came into his head”; the professor did not consciously intend to start singing this music to himself. He then makes various statements, but never replies to them in words; what strings the sentences together into a coherent line of thought is the intervening images and the memory connotations of past conversations.
Wiley (1994, 58) broadens the symbolic interactionist model of the internal conversation to include six kinds of participants: me, I, you, temporary visitors (particular imagined persons), permanent visitors (the Generalized Other), and the unconscious. This is an effort to deal with the complexity that thought sequences can display. But it is not yet complex enough, if we consider the role that imagery can play in keeping up a part in the “conversation”; and we also might say it introduces complexity where we need a different kind of simplification. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether a thinker addresses oneself as “you,” “I,” “me,” or “we,” or even leaves the hearer of the utterance unaddressed. Many of these utterances can be equivalent as speech acts, that is, as moves in the internal turn-taking that is the thought sequence.
Thus Mead’s basic concepts, “I,” “me,” and “Generalized Other” are not so much roles that one plays in an inner conversation, as theorist’s categories for designating the various kinds of structures, or better yet structured processes, which make up the human self. As we have seen in chapter 2 in reviewing evidence on the development of children’s talk, it is possible to analyze the capacity for taking the role of the other, and we see the phases and social conditions through which it arises. It is important not to reify this concept, for the role-taking process varies not just developmentally but across situations; children generally expand their role-taking from particular other people to a Generalized Other, but not all others are equally generalized (this is implied in the data of chapter 3 on concrete and abstract modes of thinking), and even persons with quite widely Generalized Others can on occasion do their thinking in terms of a particular audience. Having an internalized standpoint of other people makes it possible to formulate a self-conception, which sociologists might want to designate as “me.” In languages that differ greatly from English, the terminology becomes less appropriate, but people who use these languages nevertheless have self-conceptions, capacities for taking the role of the other, and actor viewpoints.10
The same kind of thing should be said about Mead’s “I,” which he formulated as an unsocialized self, an impulse to action. For Mead, the “I” has no content, since it is pure action; once it has taken action, or formulated a thought-statement, it now becomes visible for inspection as a “me,” but has lost its spontaneous quality as the “I”: “I cannot turn around quick enough to catch myself” (Mead 1934, 174). The “I,” as Wiley says, is a reflexive blind spot, a standpoint that can be seen from but which cannot be seen except by turning it into something else. But this formulation of the “I” mixes two points: that the self is organized around a viewpoint in the ongoing present; and that there is a spontaneous impulse to action. That the self is an ongoing viewpoint of consciousness, and as such is analytically distinguishable from everything else, appears to be true. But this hardly means that the self, as impulse to action, is unamenable to further analysis. Impulses to action vary a great deal, in their energy, forcefulness, confidence, or in lethargy and timidity. From the point of view of IR theory, the “I” is emotional energy. Thus it is far from being an autonomous element irreducible to anything in the social situation: one’s “I” is called forth in varying strengths by present interactions and past symbolic residues, magnetically attracted to some situations and repelled by others.11 And this dynamic operates, as I have tried to suggest, in the inner chains of situations that make up sequences of thought.
The Meadian framework of “I,” “me,” and “Generalized Other” has been a useful step in the development of a sociological theory of the self; and the model of internal conversation among parts of the self has given us a model around which to accumulate many observations, especially in child development. But we should recognize that these are metaphors, a loose language for conveying something like what we want to say as sociological theorists. We need to improve on the metaphors, as we move into a more refined sociological theory of thinking.
VERBAL INCANTATIONS
Consider now the class of mental expressions that operate not so much for the content as the form. These can be silent or vocal, part of inner dialogue, muttered “under one’s breath” or in talking to oneself, pseudo-addresses to others who do not really hear, and even interjections into overt talk with other people. The most accessible example is cursing.
The most elaborate study is Jack Katz’s “Pissed off in L.A.” (in Katz 1999), in which he asked students to interview someone about the experience of getting angry while driving. Cursing arises in the specially structured situation of driving a car, which involves a combination of frustrations. You are liable to have other drivers obstruct the smooth flow of your driving by cutting you off, driving too slowly or too close, not allowing you to change lanes; and such frustration is amplified because there is generally a lack of communication with the driver who is frustrating you. Katz emphasizes that cursing and other angry responses result from the feeling that one is being ignored as a conscious agent. What an angry driver does is an attempt to get “in their face” in a situation that is not at all physically face to face, but pretty much all facing in the same direction, and generally face to tail pipe. An alternative interpretation is that drivers get angry because they feel endangered by the other driver’s behavior. But this seems not to be the main component, since drivers react similarly at low speeds, as in traffic jams or parking lots; and on the highway, their response is generally to do something equally or more dangerous.
Cursing is not the only thing that frustrated drivers do. They also attempt to communicate their anger, and make known their presence, by cutting the other driver off in return, tail-gating him or her, or shining their bright lights in the other’s mirror. The fact that typically the other driver either does not recognize these signals, or takes them as just bad driving behavior calling for further retaliation, makes the first driver still angrier. Angry behavior in driving is an attempt to establish normal communication in a situation where most conditions frustrate it and the messages sent are generally misread. The same actions that from the point of view of the angry driver are righteous forms of communication, to “teach the other guy a lesson” for bad driving, are from the point of view of the recipient just the kind of action that calls for righteously angry lesson-teaching.12 Viewed from the angle of an ensemble of acts among a population of drivers, there is a cycle of bad driving behavior promoting more bad driving behavior, a kula-ring of negative Maussian gifts circulating on the highway.
Cursing, in Katz’s view, is a “magical” act. It is not an overt behavior to communicate about or ostensibly rectify the situation, but is carried out in the privacy of one’s own car, usually with little sense that the other driver knows that he or she is being cursed. Cursing has no practical effect, but it gives the air of setting things right, as if by magical pronouncement.13
What I wish to focus on here is not the driving situation per se, but the micro-dynamics of cursing. We may take Katz’s formulation further: cursing is not only “magical” but ritualistic in the full sense. It is stereotyped, repetitive, and rhythmic; it strongly focuses attention, builds up emotional intensity, and establishes social membership boundaries, in this case by placing emphasis on the barrier of exclusion between inside and outside and in pronouncing those on the outside of the barrier as the essence of polluted and evil. Cursing, for all its bad moral reputation in “proper” social manners, is a moral act; it is carried out with a sense of self-righteousness, and a compulsory quality as if the curser is being pulled into the action by a larger force. As Katz shows in the case of drivers cursing (and otherwise retaliating against) what they consider to be bad drivers, the angry person feels that he or she is voicing the claims of the larger community of drivers, teaching the offender a lesson. Cursing is a kind of primitive justice, magical punishment in a special form adapted to the modern social environment of individual selves demanding ritual respect.
What does the individual get out of cursing, as a mental action taking place in the situational flow? Two elements: antinomian energy and rhythmic self-entrainment. Cursing is the expression of taboo words. The words have special emotional force precisely because they are taboo; they call for attention because they break a barrier against what is supposed to be improper to utter. To be sure, some forms of cursing become so popular that they lose some of their antinomian status; but they continue to be spoken with a special intonation or emphasis to indicate that they do stand out. The person who peppers his or her talk with “shit,” “fucking,” and other expressions that were once highly improper in polite society still invokes a counterpart social world somewhere in which these terms are still taboo; without this, the terms would lose all rhetorical significance.14
In the IR model, a central process is the transformation of an initiating emotion by intensification. Taboo words get their force from their connotation of being prohibited; they are products of IR chains, carrying along the emotional loading given by the persons who are shocked. Taboo words are reflexive products of prior rituals, encapsulating in imaginary form the emotion that goes with rupturing the skin of a primary, highly proper ritual, and building on this a secondary ritual of performing that rupturing. This is one thing that a person gets out of cursing: antinomian energy, the jolt of something different from normal. A curse focuses attention and energizes the situation. Seeking antinomian energy is a principal attraction for people to insert cursing in their thought-train.
The other thing that one gets from cursing is rhythmic self-entrainment. It is a way of enhancing the rhythmic aspect of one’s own utterances, getting oneself into a flow. Cursing is a way of pulling oneself together, focusing one’s attention, building emotional energy through a brief private ritual.
The mechanism becomes visible if we examine the details of the vocal action. Typically, when one starts cursing (e.g., triggered by some momentary frustration), one keeps on cursing until the full phrase has been said, even if the little problem has solved itself by that time. Consider “Damn it to fuckin’ hell, you stupid son of a bitch,” uttered at the maddening delays and irrelevant replies of a telephone automatic voice system: the positive aspect of the experience is the feeling of getting the body engaged, the bite of the mouth, the vigorous shaping of the words on the lips and tongue. Curses are a workout for the vocal muscles, and allow one to throw one’s body into it. The above phrase can be parsed as a series of heavy beats: “damn it to fuckin’ hell, you stupid son of a bitch.” These are institutionalized phrases, formulaic, negative talismans, ritualistic in a strict sense, as if they have to be said just that way or else they lose their efficacy. The experience is palpable: if you cut off a curse in mid-beat, or wind up uttering the rest of the formula without the proper intonation, you lose the energy of the utterance as it trails off at the end, a disagreeable sensation of not accomplishing what you set out to do—cursus interruptus. You have not ritually countered the negative situation, but just added a pallid ritual failure onto the primary negative. Imagine yourself saying, “damn it to fuckin’ hell, you stupid … oops, i beg your pardon, no problem….”
Cursing provides some measure of emotional energy, mobilizing oneself to counter a frustration that momentarily stymies one’s flow of action and train of consciousness. The energy comes from the rhythmic formula, and the self-entrainment built up by expressing it bodily. Cursing is an action of EE-seeking, not merely a displacement from frustration to aggression. As Katz noted, drivers generally become angry not because they are already in a bad mood, frustrated at some other event in their lives that they are displacing onto other drivers, but quite often in situations where they feel good because they are in a nice flow of driving on the open road. It is where that smooth flow, the expanded self-entrainment of driver in the motion of the car, becomes blocked by some other driver, that this special form of social frustration occurs, which is countered by ritual measures to restore the flow. The positive appeal of cursing is not explained by the Freudian repression model as a catharsis of bottled-up energy. Rather the curser builds up energy over the course of uttering the formula, getting self-entrained in its rhythm. It is a ritual of self-solidarity.
Cursing is not part of the deep self, but is called forth by the emotional dynamics of the situation. Katz noted that persons who curse will express whatever negative stereotype can be fitted to the situation. Racial slurs come out when the offending driver can be identified as a racial type; but the mechanism is opportunistic and unprincipled: old people, young people, women, men, rich people, poor people, all are categories for insult if there are cues for identifying the bad driver as such.15 Cursing is formulaic and therefore stereotyped. It is repetitive, because the rhythm is a large part of its appeal; it is obsessive and trans-individual, pulling the individual out of him or herself into a collective act of imprecation. For all these reasons, cursing is impersonal, not really honed to the case at hand; and it is insincere. It does not express deep seated attitudes of racism, sexism, and all the other taboos of liberal tolerance. Instead, the taboo quality of these stereotypes is just what gives them a magnetic attractiveness to the ritualistic situation of cursing. This is part of what it means to describe cursing as “magical.” Cursing is cobbled together for the sake of the ritual, providing a moment of remedial self-solidarity, but it has no practical effectiveness. It does not even have any real cognitive content; what one says in cursing cannot be taken literally, or even seriously. As Katz notes, moments later, after coming out of the magic spell, the person forgets what he or she said, or feels ashamed of it.
Let me now extend the argument, first to the range of situations in which cursing happens, and then to other forms of thinking that have a similar structure of incantation. We have examined cursing as a form of self-talk, unheard by the target of the curse, or by anyone else as intended recipient.16 There is also:
1. Cursing at someone, a move in the escalation of conflict in a direct confrontation. As noted, here the ritual tends to entrain its recipient into the same kind of formulaic verbal expression.
2. Cursing at someone/something, a target not present, in the course of conversation. Here the curse is a collective stance (or at least an attempt to bring others in on one’s side), expressing group shared hostility or mockery.
3. Cursing to punctuate one’s remarks; not attacking anyone, but just showing generalized antinomianism. This style of talk is often benignly regarded as “salty,” “colourful,” among other euphemisms, which is to say that it is taken as entertaining, a mark that the extra rhythms and emotional emphases of interpolated taboo words come off as a stylistically successful performance.
This third type of cursing, denatured and inoffensive, leads us into the larger category of verbal incantations. As a borderline case, note the type of “swear words” that are not in themselves obscene or taboo in a negative sense. The exclamation “Jesus Christ!” or “Oh God!”—when uttered by a person who is not religious—is similar to expressions used to invoke antinomian energy; except in this case the words themselves are holy words, names of high respect. As Durkheim noted, the sacred is a realm of what is set apart from ordinary, mundane affairs; it must be approached with respect, and is dangerous even when regarded as beneficent. Taboos and positively valued sacred objects share the same dynamics. It is the invocation of special ritual status that brings the little shock of attention and jolt of emotional energy; there is a quasi-antinomian flavor in so far as a religious term is being used in a nonreligious and disrespectful way. Religious terms that have been turned into mere exclamations or incantations can be regarded as historical residues in an era of secularization; but their incantational use also keeps a sense of their sacred quality alive, without which the terms would no longer serve even to punctuate one’s talk.
In the historical background of these formulaic expressions are oaths. An oath was originally a ritual, carried out publicly, in which someone bound him or herself to carry out an action, or otherwise to give special weight to one’s words as in claiming to tell the truth. An oath, like a contemporary verbal incantation, is a form of pulling oneself together; self-entrainment in the rhythmic formula produces a little momentary rise in emotional energy. Under another terminology, EE is willpower; an oath, similarly, is a ritual of commitment, binding one’s will, better yet, will-enhancing or even will-creating. Oaths still survive today in the narrow circumstances of public organizations at their most formal: oaths taken in court, in the ceremony of swearing in to public office, and, to a diminishing extent, in marriage ceremonies. The historical trend has been to replace formal public oaths with private and transiently situational exclamations and curses.
Historically, an oath invoked symbolic objects. One said not merely “I swear,” but “I swear by …” a god or religious object, one’s own honor, or some other object held in high regard. The vocabulary of today’s exclamations carries over to some extent from historical oaths. The counterpart of the formal public oath, binding oneself in front of witnesses to a course of action, was, on the negative side, a formal cursing. This was a communal action, not merely an individual one.17 When the pope excommunicated someone (typically a secular lord who claimed the right of making clerical appointments or collecting revenues on church property), the formula was to proclaim that the excommunicated was damned to hell. In a long chain of secondary and increasingly secular circulation, these symbolic emblems were formed into such expressions as “Damn you!,” “Oh hell,” and eventually the merely emphatic “Hell, yes!”
Among verbal incantations are exclamations. These may arise in situations of surprise or celebration, but they do not necessarily express an existing emotion so much as they create the emotion felt to be appropriate for the occasion. Just as body contact among participants is a way of carrying out a celebration, stereotyped vocal expressions are also called for, whether along the lines of “Hooray!” or “Awright!” or quasi-meaningful expressions such as “Unbelievable!” and other variants of hyperbolic comment on the extraordinary nature of the occasion. Celebratory rituals are EE-enhancers and EE-prolongers.
These kinds of verbal incantations are intrinsically social, entraining the group into a collective, heightened mood. They also have a place in the internalized and quasi-internal rituals of thought, exemplifying a range of favorite personal expressions that individuals use to keep up their flow of attention, and to keep oneself oriented in a direction of intended projects. One’s silent thought stream is punctuated by private incantations: curses, exclamatory emphases, and expressions idiosyncratic to the individual, which one uses to keep oneself in rhythm, or to start up the rhythm when one feels stalled or sidetracked.
The stronger the entrainment felt (or sought for), the more the impulsion to utter the expression aloud. The extrusions of inner conversation into overt self-talk occur when the impulse to rhythmic self-entrainment is strong. Silent forming of the words is not as effective as the full physical expression with lungs and vocal apparatus, and for really strong statements, gestural accompaniment.18 Similarly with cursing: there is relatively little forcefulness in cursing in inner conversation. The motor action of speech is central to feeling like you are expressing a true curse; and via the James-Lange principle of bodily action enhancing the emotion, the emotional resonances are felt more strongly when the cursing is aloud.
The pattern can be confirmed by comparison. Vocal self-talk occurs when there is a block in the flow of action, a need for an incantation to get oneself going or to get back into one’s trajectory. Self-talk does not happen when there is a smooth flow of action, self-entrainment already going on either in a physical action or in a mental chain. In the midst of thinking about a project, or engaging in intellectual thought, there is little impulse to vocalize (which would tend to slow down the thought); it is only when something external happens to slow things down—for example, a momentary problem with the computer—that one is likely to lapse into vocal self-talk.
SPEEDS OF THOUGHT
There is great variety in kinds of thought, but these can be grouped in ways that make them amenable to sociological explanation. Grouped by topic or purpose, there is practical thinking, sociable thinking, and serious thinking: that is, there is a form of thinking that parallels each of the institutional arenas of external life. There is thinking that corresponds to the activities of political institutions, economic activities, religion, the intellectual world, family life, recreation, and so forth. Most of this thought is easy to chart from the outside in, since most of it stays close to the activities in which the individual engages in that sphere; it is typically anticipatory or reverberating talk from those chains of activities. Much thought is rather predictable because it is tied to institutionized interactions that are themselves routine. The main forms of thought that depart from being close extensions of these activities are intellectual thought (whose patterns we have already considered) and what we may call sociable thought.
The latter is thinking that takes the form of a sociable conversation with oneself—aimless, unconstrained, time-filling—much in the way that a sociable conversation with a friend meanders wherever it can get to while passing the time in an entertaining way. Nevertheless, as we have seen, external conversations are highly constrained by matchups of stocks of symbols and complementarity of emotions, and are shaped by the dynamics of IRs, and these have counterparts in the inner chain of thought. Inner thought can be much looser than external conversations, however; why and how this is so is part of what we must now consider.
Kinds of thought differ also in their medium. Some thought occurs in words; some in visual or other sensory imagery; some in motor schemas. The last of these we can largely neglect in a sociological analysis. Thinking in motor schemas is the earliest form of representation in human development (Piaget called it “sensory-motor intelligence”; Bruner referred to it as “enactive” representation), and it continues to operate throughout adult life. Without it one could hardly walk, sit down, drive a car, or otherwise get around and feel at home in the physical environment; special forms of it are acquired when one learns how to release a bowling ball, swing a golf club, or play a piano. But for the most part, thinking in motor schemas happens close to the actual physical action itself; there is sometimes a brief moment of preparation, anticipating the overt action, but people hardly go off into long streams of thought in the form of motor schemas.19 For the most part motoric “thinking” is closely analogous to verbal anticipatory talk, predictable from the same conditions that explain the physical action itself.
Is thinking in imagery closely tied to the external situation, like motor schemas, or does it float off into remote chains of association, as verbal thinking sometimes does? Both; but under different circumstances. Turner (2002) infers from evolutionary evidence that the human animal first developed visually dominant, with its larger brain wired more closely to visual input instead of the olfactory input important for most animals, giving it the capability of spotting danger at a distance. In Turner’s argument, verbal thinking is too slow for the practical exigencies of life; if the human animal hunting on the savannah had to rely on the plodding formation of sentences in an internal conversation to make decisions, we would have been killed off long ago. This argument seems to me not decisive, since alongside this capacity for linking visual imagery to quick motor action humans have added the skills of fine-tuning verbal rhythms and picking up auditory nuances; thus some persons (and perhaps most modern persons) are verbally dominant in their thinking, even though on occasion they think in imagery.
When people think exclusively in imagery, I would suggest, the imagery is closely tied to the immediate or upcoming situation. This is the type of scenario envisioned by Turner (and in the examples that Mead gives of imagining prospective situations, with Mead’s usual pragmatic emphasis on physical action): the human animal sees signs of a danger, visualizes the alternatives, and plunges into one of them. (It could equally well be signs of opportunity: the auto driver visualizing an alternative route around a traffic jam ahead; the erotically attuned glimpsing signs of receptivity from another person and imagining scenes to follow.) Here again, if the concern is to give a sociological explanation of the content of the thought, the situational dynamics will do the job, since the thought is closely connected to them.
Visual imagery goes further afield, for the most part, when it is part of a sequence of inner conversation. In an earlier section, both of the extended analyses of inner conversation (the waitress and the professor) involved sequences of inner talk and imagery responding to one another. The imagery was not simply free-floating: it acted as a conversation partner to the verbal voice, arguing against it or allying with it by bringing in supporting materials. The imagery, as it appears at a particular point in time, is a move in the interactional sequence of the self, part of the construction of the inner IR chain. Here imagery follows the same temporal rhythm as the inner voice;20 it seems to be part of the same rhythm in which the self is entrained during that episode of the stream of consciousness. The imagery is being called out by the verbal thinking, and vice versa; but the rhythm (and generally speaking, the topic or issue) is set by the verbal voice. It is this voice that you identify with as yourself; it is the center of consciousness, your capacity to speak in an inner conversation. This suggests that if we can sociologically explain verbal thinking, we will explain a good deal of visual imagery-thinking along with it.21
A crucial dimension along which to array kinds of thought is their speed. We have seen, for instance, that incantational self-talk is relatively slow. The emphatic rhythm is central to its effectiveness; a strongly felt verbal incantation must be spoken aloud, which makes it slower than most inner thought. If one wants to carry out a verbal incantation silently, one must slow down one’s verbal thinking, just in order to mark the rhythmic emphasis. (The reader may demonstrate this by thinking a curse or celebratory exclamation.) Silent thought, far down the continuum, flashes by, skipping much of the grammar of overt talk. When one is groping for a new idea, it often takes the form of a mere gestalt, an incipient speech-action, that one struggles to “put into words.” This gestalt, however, is not usually a picture; it is an action-trajectory in the chain of verbal utterances, a sentence or set of sentences that one wants to say, that one has a sense that one will be able to say, but which is not yet formulated. Some of these incipient sentences are never formed: thought drifts off in other directions; the little bubbles do not float to the surface and coalesce into a big, publicly visible bubble. These are some of the inner depths of thought; we can put them into some sociological order by considering the entire continuum of speeds of thought.
To examine this continuum, look at the special case of writer’s thought. This ranges along different degrees of externalization.
At one extreme is the writing of formalities, such as official documents, boilerplate wordage that can only be plodded through by a lawyer. It is written as if by a nonperson, as objectively as possible, cutting off any spark of human interest.
Next is writing intended for publication. This may have different rhythms, but they are generally all relatively slow to write. One feels this immediately when sitting down to turn one’s notes into a publishable paper or book, or when writing up a spoken lecture. Publishable writing has a deliberate, relatively slow-paced rhythm; part of the difficulty of getting oneself to write it is pushing past this barrier, shifting from the mode and speed of thinking in the more informal media into writing for the imaginary audience implied by publication. It is, more than any other form of writing, for the Generalized Other.
Writing personal letters, by contrast, is writing for a particularized other; it can be breezier in tone, more rapid in flow, more casual in vocabulary. It is relatively more backstage, where publishable writing is frontstage, the construction of a formal ritual frozen in print.
Email as of the turn of the twenty-first century is still a new form, with not yet settled customs. Some writers treat it as a version of personal letter-writing, others as closer to casual conversation, or as rapidly dashed-off notes, without concern for punctuation or spelling, much less ritual greetings. Because of this variability in social interpretation, email is an ambiguous form of communication. Sometimes cryptic messages are perceived as hard to follow or viewed as insulting; it is prone not to be taken seriously by recipients, who regard it as a less significant call on their attention than other forms of written or spoken communication. From the writer’s side, email is fast and casual, tempting one to think little but to send the thought on the fly. Lacking the nonverbal presence of face-to-face talk and the rhythmic entrainment of telephone talk, it is only loosely disciplined by the imagined audience.
Notes written to oneself, not intended for anyone else, are easy and quick to write. There is no pressure to make sense that can be read objectively; words and phrases, along with idiosyncratic diagrams, symbols, and shorthand, are shaped only to remind oneself of a train of thought. (Of course, one can make notes which are closer to the form of published writing; I am setting out the ideal types along the continuum.) Notes to oneself are similar to the most casual and unformed parts of inner thought: they represent trajectories, intentions, tension vectors for future thought-action. Eventually they may become transformed up the continuum, becoming notes to others, letters, drafts, publications. Or they may remain stuck at one of the lower stages, notes clogging old boxes in the offices of writers and would-be writers, just as most random thoughts remain nothing but random thoughts, never formed into overtly spoken sentences.
For the professional writer, there is another form of writing, intermediate between notes to oneself and the pathway toward publication: outlines that put notes into order, getting thought-topics and arguments into a sequence in which they can be turned into grammatical sentences and organized paragraphs, sections, and chapters. This activity is generally concerned with the meta-grammar, the overall architecture of the argument (or the fictional plot, the literary effect, etc.). In the process of making an outline, further thinking and creating is often done: arguments are developed by trying to fit the pieces together; difficulties are encountered that call for replies; concepts are found vague, ambiguous, multi-sided, contradictory, and these must be worked into into a coherent overall statement. The writer during this phase is moving outward from fragments of ideas, leading edges that have the feel of going somewhere, while the path to creating a meaningful statement for an audience remains vague. Working out those trajectories is a process of confronting the imaginary audience more concretely: one imagines what a reader will say, tries to meet objections, thinks of ways of appealing to the concerns and interests of the audience—easiest to do if it is a specialized intellectual audience and one knows its previous work and current concerns well.
Writing an outline is intermediate in degree of structuredness, between inward thought-like notes (or cryptic thoughts themselves) and the publishable text. Writing an outline sometimes moves quickly, sometimes slowly; quickly when one sees how it will hang together for some distance ahead, indeed sometimes so quickly that one cannot keep up with all the branches that open up as one visualizes the whole; slowly when one encounters obstacles, has too many fragments without sequence, too many pieces that have not yet been worked through in relation to each other, or too many parts of the overall argument that remain blank. Writing at this stage is often like laboriously piling up pieces, this way and that, until the mound is high enough, and the roller coaster plunges down hill. At some point the outline is done (at least for the time being), and writing goes into its next phase, transforming fast-moving insights into full grammatical sentences that flow at normal readable speed.
Consider now the differences among the thought processes at different points along the writer’s continuum. Thought moves slower or faster, depending on several conditions. One is how much concern there is for grammar and form. Grammar is part of the public structure: the sequence among words, and the proper treatment of relationships among parts of speech, is a matter of making one’s thoughts clear to persons who are distant, unacquainted with one’s immediate personal context. It is also a following of rules that are customary in public and especially in published discourse, rules that are upheld by canonical authorities (academies, writers of grammar textbooks, school teachers). Following these rules is taken by readers as a sign of membership, and failure as a sign of nonmembership, in a community of literate persons. Grammar is ritualistic in just that sense.
Formal, grammatical writing (and hence turning one’s thinking into that form) is generally slower and less fluid than informal and private thinking. There are subvariants, however, since one who has internalized the grammar, and is in full flow of writing momentum in the formal mode, may move along quite rapidly (although not as fast as the same person’s informal thought); whereas someone who is not a comfortable member of that writing community, or who is struggling with a writing block at that moment, will think ponderously, slowly, and indeed even sometimes grind to a halt.
Grammar, the most public and constraining form of language, contrasts with other aspects of verbal thought. Writers’ notes and outlines (judging from my own), consist largely of isolated phrases: most often nouns, sometimes adjectives; there are relatively few verbs, and those are typically in the form of gerunds (“writing”), infinitives (“to explain”), or imperatives (“check”—i.e., typically instructions to myself, meta-comments rather than part of the writing content itself). The grammatical and architectural structure of writing at this incipient stage is mostly left unformulated, indicated only by the ordering of phrases on the paper (often indicated by arrows or numbering), or by private short-hand (use of dashes, equal signs, directional arrows). Writers’ thinking is thus only potentially, and as a vector of future action, oriented toward the full external community. One reason that intellectuals’ published writing is often bad, is because it has not been fully transformed from self-oriented notes and drafts into fully grammatized writing; since the notes are heavy in nouns and weak in verbs, and those few verbs are rarely in a form in which they do the work of driving a sentence, much such writing is heavy, leaden, insufficiently dynamicized. This might lead one to infer that inner thought—at least among intellectuals—is heavy, undynamic, a mere file-cabinet of abstract nouns. That is not so, at least for creative thinkers, since their inner thinking is fluid, intuitive, putting together new combinations, moving blocks around; it is precisely because the thinker wants to move them around rapidly, try them out in new combinations, that he or she encrypts them into their most portable units, into nouns with a minimum of trailing grammar that would drag long expressions in their train. Inner conceptual thinking moves to its own rhythm and thus has to strip away the rhythm of fully spoken or written sentences.22
If verb inflections along with grammatical particles are the most public form of speech, nouns are not entirely private, even among creative intellectuals. Nouns too are Durkheimian collective symbols, for those factions of intellectual networks that circulate them and focus on them as the center pieces of their arguments; they are collective representations of how groups of intellectuals see the world, and are thus the entities that are regarded as most truly existing. A good theory—which is to say a widely successful theory—crystallizes into nouns.23 If the nouns that thinkers use as shorthand are more fluid, their connotations not yet developed, their arguments still to be worked out, that is in their character as raw Durkheimian collective symbols in the process of formation, or intended formation; they are hypothetical membership emblems, resonating with some memberships in intellectual circles that already exist, but in the process of being reshaped into membership coalitions that, if actually established, will give that thinker the reputation for having thought something “creative.”
Thought moves faster or slower, then, in part because of how constrained it is by the formalities of public utterance. Thought, like writing, is arrayed on a continuum from intuitive, unformed, and fragmentary, to well-arrayed sequences. Toward the external end, social forms are stronger and impose rhythms as well as structured sequences and connectives that are omitted at the informal end. But although thought can flow faster near the informal end, it can also get slowed down at any point along the continuum, if there is blockage, difficulty in negotiating the social demands of that thought-coalition or that external social interaction. Another aspect revealed by differences in speed of thought is how organized the thought is, in contrast to how scattered. Some thought is highly directional, flowing off toward a goal; other thought is disorganized, moving by fits and starts, changing directions, wandering aimlessly, stopped in its tracks. As internal IRs, directional thought has a high degree of EE, moving with confidence and energy; typically, too, it has an internal rhythm that carries it along—much in the way that sentences and paragraphs form beneath one’s fingers on a keyboard when one’s writing is in full flow. Scattered thought is low EE, whether lethargic and depressed, or fitful and nervous, or even complacent but with no sense of any place to go. This is the difference between successful and unsuccessful IRs, taking place in the interactional chains of the mind. Directional and scattered thought can each happen at various points along the continuum of internal / informal to external / formal thinking. An attempt to move from one level to another—from an internal level that feels comfortable, to a more external level that places more social demands than the thinker can meet—is one of the situations producing a shift from directional, coherent thought to scattered thought.
INTERNAL RITUAL AND SELF-SOLIDARITY
I have developed the argument using the case of writers’ thinking, since this is more easily open to inspection, and has been considered at some length by professional writers. Non-intellectual thought exists along a similar continuum, although with less emphasis—in modern societies, at least—on the formalized end of the continuum, and less concern to move one’s thoughts from the inner to the external end; and there may be fewer devices for moving inward and outward, such as notes to oneself and outlines for writing projects. Otherwise, the patterns of variations in speed, grammaticality, and other formalities of expression, in blockage of flow, and in directionality versus scatteredness are also found in ordinary thought.
If humans are EE-seekers, they use internal IRs to get through difficulties and entrain themselves in a flow. We have seen this in the case of verbal incantations. We see it also in the way that writers deal with blocks, the devices they use to keep up their flow of expressable thoughts. A writer can get oneself going by rereading what he or she has written up to that point—like a long jumper backing up and covering old ground to get up momentum. Hemingway’s device was to stop a day’s writing session, not when he had run out of things to say, but when he was in a good flow; resuming the next morning, he would reread the previous day’s pages and plunge onward into what came next (Cowley 1973, 217–18).
There are several kinds of writer’s blocks, each with its remedies, and each with analogues in the scattering and refocusing of non-intellectual thinking. There is the long-run writer’s block: a sense of not knowing what topics will lead somewhere successful, of floundering from one inchoate project to another, accompanied by chronic depression and lack of EE. This kind of block is the result of not being well enough embedded in the networks in which such works are written, and thus attuned to the audiences to be imagined that would constitute one’s target. Somewhat similar to this kind of long-term block is the one that occurs at the career tipping point described above, where an intellectual has to confront the alternatives of finding a unique slot in the attention space, or throwing in one’s lot as as a follower, specialist, or retailer of others’ ideas to naïve audiences. Here the remedy, if there is one, is long-term and structural, a working out of one’s place not only in one’s mind but in external social networks.
In a very different time frame is short-run writer’s block, where it is just a matter of getting up the moment-to-moment momentum. Here the solution is the devices of self-entrainment in one’s previous flow of writing.
Analogously in non-intellectual thinking, there are long-run network patterns that constrain what one can think with what degree of articulateness; changing one’s position in social networks changes these thought patterns, whether one likes the results or not. In the short-run, ultra-micro sequences of thinking, non-intellectual thought is most similar to writers’ techniques in getting oneself moving; both use versions of self-entrainment.
Subjectively we live in a world of symbols loaded with membership significance, and with EE levels built up in prior interactions. Woven into the interstices between the external IRs that one goes through with other people are the inner IRs that constitute chains of thought. The guiding principle of these inner chains, too, is EE-seeking. The longer one stays inside one’s own subjectivity in the realm of inner thought, the more the goal becomes not so much direct solidarity with other people but solidarity with oneself. Symbols used in inner thought become decomposed, recombined, tried out for new purposes, aiming at imaginary coalitions not only with persons outside but also coalitions among the parts of oneself. Following the analogy of the intellectual thinker trying out new combinations, the human being in private thought tries out projects, tendering symbolic alliances that are not yet formed, entertaining mere trajectories.
Here, we have seen, the inner depths of thought can be scattered and unfocused. Individuals develop their devices for getting themselves focused, their methods for entraining themselves. IRs, as I have stressed from the beginning of this book, are variable. They do not always succeed; they range from mere ingredients to high solidarity. This variation is just as true of the inner rituals of the mind. Some reach high degrees of solidarity with oneself; at these moments, one feels focused, directional, and most clearly conscious. At other moments (and with more such moments in the lives of some persons than others) inner IRs do not come together: thought is episodic, scatterred, inarticulate. Such persons do not necessarily have incoherent lives; they likely prefer their outer lives if things are better organized there to produce solidarity and EE. This is a source of the difference between introverts and extroverts.
Inner lives have varying degrees of privacy. But the forms that privacy takes are not necessarily unique. The devices that we use to entrain our thoughts, to get ourselves together, may be largely imported from standard models available in external social life. Verbal incantations—traditionally, in the form of prayers or magic; contemporarily in the form of pep talks and curses—are just some of the devices with which external rituals are taken into the self. No doubt there are other such inner rituals to be discovered.
The world of thought is generally regarded as a vast territory. So it is; but it may not be so fantastic as it is touted to be. We have a prejudice that thought is free, untrammeled, infinitely open, unapproachable from outside. And yet—if thought is an internalization of rituals from social life, further developed by decomposition and recombination of its symbolic elements, in the train of impulses to externalize them again—how strange can it be? The private thinking among Chinese villagers in the Han dynasty must surely have been similar to each other because it was related to the rituals that they performed overtly, and thus differed in specifiable ways from the private thoughts, say, of middle-class Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Much of our sense of the strangeness of thought comes because it has not yet been very widely explored sociologically. If we had a large collection of chains of thoughts from people in particular situations, it might well turn out that they think many of the same elements, even arranged in many of the same combinations. With greater theoretical abstraction, examining the formative conditions of inner IR chains, the commonality we find must be still greater. Human beings differ in detail, but we are everywhere mentally akin, since we are constructed of the same ritual processes.