Figure 9.1 Ideal type personalities from status and power dimensions.
INDIVIDUALISM AND INWARDNESS AS SOCIAL PRODUCTS
IN THE PERSPECTIVE of IR chains, is there any place left for the individual? It might seem that the theory fails to do justice to individuals, and especially to their autonomy, idiosyncracy, and apartness. The modal character of IR theory seems to be a gregarious extrovert, always caught up in the mood of the crowd or the buzz of a conversation, seeking attention, shunning solitude. What about the nonstandard personality, going his or her own way, the individualist, the nonconformist? Can IR chains account for the introvert, the person who dislikes parties and noisy crowds, who prefers his or her own thoughts to others’ conversation? Why are there persons who find books interesting and people boring? Why are there moments when we would much rather be alone watching the clouds taking their shapes across the sky? In short, can IR theory account for persons who are deep rather than shallow, independent rather than approval seeking?
Since most readers of a book such as this, and most intellectuals generally, are likely to fall nearer the individualistic and introverted end of the spectrum, IR theory had better be able to account for them if it is to have any claim to general validity.
In the Durkheimian tradition, the individual emerges by an apportioning out of collective energies and representations. When a particular human body walks away from a social encounter, he or she carries a residue of emotions and symbols, and what he or she does in those moments alone comes from their interplay, whether reflecting backward in time, forward to future encounters, or into an inner space of thought, mind, or subjectivity. Mead’s symbolic interactionism gives another version of the same: the self is internalized from interaction. This has been the core sociological position throughout the twentieth century; our researches have accumulated plenty of evidence to support it. The only issue, it seems to me, is whether we have the nerve to go all the way with it, to confront the biases of modern culture that, in Goffman’s terms, make a sacred object out of the individual, and carry on a cult worshiping the image of the self. The image, be it noted, since in Goffman’s interaction ritual it is a social representation of what the self is supposed to be, not a true, inner, autonomous self. As Goffman said in the conclusion to The Presentation of Self (1959, 252): the self is the product of a successful interactional performance, “of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it.”
Standing against this central sociological tradition there are, to be sure, some respectable alternatives. There is the rationally calculating, selfish individual of the utilitarian tradition, enshrined in economic theory, and in a good deal of modern political philosophy, with a bridgehead in sociology itself. There is Freud’s conception of the id, the unsocialized core of human desire. Perhaps most importantly for persons who think of themselves as intellectuals, there is the tradition of the free-thinking artist, the rebel, defying convention and scorning success in order to follow the dictates of his or her wild, impetuous, creative soul—I have purposely let the description get carried away into its full nineteenth-century Byronic rhetoric, to remind us that this way of talking about the individual self is a historically situated tradition. When we extol individual genius in its struggle against social conformity we are, far from rebelling and displaying our uniqueness, revealing our membership in a widespread modern cult movement.
And finally, we might take note of a perspective that is not popular among contemporary intellectuals although it is there in the historical background: a religious perspective that holds that what is most real about the self is inward, not outward, not reducible to society or to anything else. Expressed in secular terms, this says that it is what happens inside that is ultimately most valuable, what takes place in your own consciousness, your particularized vantage point of the world and your own experience in it; that is what makes you what you are: “They may control my body, but they can’t control my mind; I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” With historical reflexivity one can see the social roots of this way of thinking; but that does not invalidate the substance of the argument: the inner individual is what counts.
The weakness of alternative lines of theory has been addressed in previous chapters. What follows here is a demonstration that IR theory can handle all the phenomena envisioned in these theories, and more. IR theory must show not only that there is a place for individuals in its conceptual universe, but it must set forth the social conditions under which the various forms of individuality, and ideologies about individuality, occur.
There are several subissues here to be separated out. First is the question of individuality, the existence of a large variety of different personalities. This is not in fact a very hard challenge for IR theory; and I will summarize points already made in previous chapters that give social conditions for different personality types. There are several dimensions of social causality operating here, which intersect one another; thus it may well be that every person is unique (at least in complex modern societies), even though each is compounded out of elements held in common with many others.
Second is the issue of explaining the type of personality who is distinctly non-sociable, which twentieth century terminology has called the introvert. There are, in fact, some half-dozen types of introverts, ourselves perhaps among them; all of these can be shown to be produced by particular kinds of IR chains. The most pronounced types of introversion appeared relatively recently in modern history; the next section will deal with that historical development. At the same time that introverted personality types were historically created, there came into being a broader ideology about individualism as a foundational principle for the modern world; and thus we will end by looking at how this ideology, unsociological and indeed anti-sociological as it is, came about. Going through these issues gives opportunity for pulling together the threads of the book.
THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF INDIVIDUALITY
The easiest way to summarize the effects of IR chains on individual personalities is to consider the main dimensions of stratified interaction. In chapter 3, these were referred to as status rituals and power rituals.
On the dimension of status rituals, persons differ in how close they are to the center of attention and emotional entrainment: the person who is always at the center, those close by or sometimes in the center, those further out, marginal members, non-members. In an older terminology of network analysis, these are sociometric rankings from sociometric stars outward; in ordinary language, social popularity. Sociologically we make the picture more complicated—in principle at least—by examining each situation the individual is in, and looking not only at his or her degree of centrality in the interaction, but also at the degree of ritual intensity (how much collective effervescence was aroused, to what extent did the IR succeed or fail); how bounded are these IRs (whether it is always the same persons or a changing cast of characters—what chapter 3 called the social density of interaction); finally, moving to the meso-level and summarizing over the course of the IR chain, to what extent is the individual repeatedly in the same kinds of IRs and in the same position within them (IR repetitiveness).
For purposes of demonstrating the social production of individual differences, we can use a simplified summary model, the amount of Durkheimian mechanical solidarity experienced by each individual. The more central an individual is in IRs of high intensity and high social density, and with a high degree of IR repetitiveness and high degree of network redundancy,1 the more he or she has strong feelings of solidarity with the group and its symbols, and expects conformity from others. He or she takes the group’s symbols in a concrete and reified way, as immutable and irreprochable realities not to be questioned or criticized;2 disrespect for membership symbols leads to emotional outbursts of righteous anger and ritualistic punishment.
These patterns are familiar in sociology as group dynamics or group cultures (Homans 1950). We can also view them as characteristics of individual personalities. There is a modal personality for high Durkheimian mechanical solidarity: conforming, traditionalistic, who thinks and talks particularistically about other concrete individuals and the lore of the group, which is to say the person is gossipy and localistic, warm toward familiar persons, suspicious of outsiders, vengeful toward violators. At the other end of the continuum is low mechanical solidarity, where persons are peripheral to groups, and / or their rituals are low intensity, low social density and high diversity of interactions, low IR repetitiveness, and low network redundancy.3 The modal personality is unconforming, relativistic, thinks and talks in abstractions, is cool in social commitments, tolerant of differences, lax on violators. In between the two extremes are personalities whose characteristics shade over from one type to the other.
Now for the second major dimension: power rituals. At one pole are order-givers, telling other people what to do, getting deference from others in their presence who at least pretend to accept their orders (i.e., who give a situational presentation of self as willing subordinates). Order-giving makes one proud, self-possessed, and identifying with the symbols in terms of which one gives orders. Persons enacting power rituals are frontstage personalities, identifying strongly with their official self, which they regard as more significant than their private self. At the other pole are order-takers, those who have no alternatives but to put up with taking orders and defer to those who give them. Order-taking creates a backstage personality; they identify against the frontstage show that controls them, and are cynical and alienated from authority to the extent that they have private backstages on which they can be free of official formality.
Between the extremes are persons who display these characteristics in lesser degree. Some of the intermediate positions on the power continuum have special situations and personality traits that should be singled out. There are two ways of being in the middle of the power continuum: One kind is an egalitarian situation, where persons neither give nor take orders, but interact horizontally. This position neutralizes the power dimension; personalities located here are neither frontstage formalists identifying with the vertical hierarchy nor backstage cynics withholding themselves from it, but merely embody the symbolic culture of the immediate local group. The other kind of position in the middle of the power hierachy consists in individuals who are in the chain of command, taking orders from those above and giving orders to others below. Especially distinctive here are the lowest echelon of order-givers, who give orders to those who are purely order-takers. This is the drill sergeant in the army, the foreman in factory, the first-line supervisor in the office, the petty official who enforces regulations on the public. Here is found the so-called bureaucratic personality, the petty rule-follower, enforcing rules to the letter rather than in the spirit of the enterprise, a sheer exercise of authority without vision of what the authority is for. Those who face this kind of petty order-giver from below are especially strongly alienated by being an order-taker. Their encounters are the front line of class conflict on the micro-level.
For present purposes, let us take the simplified, composite version of the two dimensions; combining them gives the table of personality types displayed in figure 9.1. This shows eight types of personalities, since I have divided the status dimension into two polar types, and the power dimension into four. We could just as well divide the status and power dimensions into more categories, since each of these is a continuum. It would be realistic to distinguish ten points along each continuum; combining these gives us the set of personality types in figure 9.2. These total one hundred distinctive personalities. Although it may be the case that some of the cells in this figure are relatively rare, and in some societies certain regions of the grid are not occupied at all, we would still expect there to be several dozen types of distinctive individuals in most communities.
And this is on the conservative side. After all, the status and power dimensions given here are composites of several subdimensions. If we broke up the “mechanical solidarity” dimension into the degrees to which individuals experience ritual centrality, ritual intensity, social density, diversity of connenctions, IR repetitiveness, and network redundancy, we would have a “personality space” in multiple dimensions, which would yield a very high number of distinctive combinations. We can cut the continuums as finely as we like, and combine as many subdimensions as we wish to see; thus it is entirely plausible that among millions of persons, each one is in some way or another a distinct individual. They are socially produced, by a small number of generic social processes, to be distinctive. I am leaving aside the arbitrary and particularistic details of people’s lives (such as whether they grew up in a little village in the western region of Hungary rather than a village in the eastern region) that make them different in content, if not in pattern. Individuality does not controvert a deeply penetrating, omni-explaining sociological theory; on the contrary, it follows from it.
SEVEN TYPES OF INTROVERSION
On the face of it, introverts seem to challenge the premises of IR theory, that the human being is an emotional energy seeker, and that EE is an offshoot of solidarity in social interaction. There are, indeed, many nongregarious individuals; some are even quite militantly anti-gregarious. (For those who may suspect me of a bias on the other side, I will go on record in saying that I count myself among the ungregarious.) To explain nonsociable persons, it is useful to recognize different types, which is to say, different pathways to unsociability. These are ideal types and thus can overlap.
Work-Obsessed Individuals
Some persons prefer working to socializing, and indeed to any type of collective ritual—political, religious, or entertainment. This type of person may be only a borderline form of introversion, however, since, as discussed in chapter 4, there are also IRs that take place on the job. Here it is a straghtforward case of an individual who gets more EE from interacting with other persons at work than he or she gets from opportunities for socializing: the busy stockbroker or business dealmaker who is in the center of the action; the lecturer who gets most of his or her deference in the classroom; the Napoleonic general who sleeps only a few hours per night because he is energized by controlling the action of combat.
A more difficult case are those who work alone.4 The blanket terms of modern slang do not discriminate well between interactional and solo work-obsessed individuals; “workaholic” refers to all of them, while “grind” and “nerd” imply the solo type. These latter are derogatory terms, implying the viewpoint of the gregarious socializer, with the term “nerd” in particular carrying the connotation of a socially inept person who is wrapped up in technical details and prefers machines to peoples (Eble 1996).
Consider such a person through the lens of IR chains. Individuals acquire their technical skills, not in solitude, but in chains of encounters. This learning occurs, not for the most part in formal schooling (Collins 1979, 16–17) but on the job, and especially by early, informal interaction with other persons who already have expertise. These skills have typically been monopolized by males—especially by networks of working-class and lower-middle-class males—above all because they are inducted into a technical world as teenage boys (or even younger) by being around their fathers, male relatives, and friends. Boys learn auto mechanics by repairing cars in the family driveway, just as they learn to operate heavy equipment by informal apprenticeship to their relatives who work on it. Similar patterns recur in late-twentieth-century computer culture (except it is more a horizontal network among the boys themselves rather than an intergenerational network).
Two points are salient here for the social character of being a technology-oriented, or technology-obsessed, otherwise unsociable person. First: these skills and interests arise in a particular kind of social interaction. They become internalized; the solitary practice of a technical skill is a form of second- and third-order recirculation of symbols of group membership. The technical skill itself is the symbol or emblem, the focus of subjective identification, just as much as the solitary religious prayer is a third-order circulation of religious membership symbols. And in the case of technical expertise, these are stratified emblems; they sharply demarcate those persons who know how to do it from those who haven’t a clue, with a middle ground of degrees of ineptness and apprenticeship in between. Just as non-nerds look down on nerds, nerds in their own element look down on those outside their charmed circle.
The second point is that there is another network operating besides the human experts. There is also a network from machine to machine, or technique to technique. I have shown this in the case of the community of scientists, from the time of the so-called “scientific revolution” (which is more accurately called the revolution in “rapid-discovery science”) through the present, where the networks of scientists became entwined with genealogies of laboratory equipment (Collins 1998, 535–38). New scientific developments typically come from tinkering with previously used laboratory equipment, modifying it to produce new phenomena for scientists to theorize, and by cross-breeding several genealogies of lab equipment to make new forms of research equipment. The two networks, human scientists and genealogies of machines, are entwined because typically only those persons who have worked hands-on with the previous generation of equipment are able to make them operate successfully when they are shifted to a new setting (for an example, see Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The same pattern, I argue, holds in the realm of virtually all technical expertise. When auto buffs gather in their garage to look under the hood, they size up what they see by its kinship with other motors they know. Much of their conversation consists in naming the genealogies—how this one relates to and differs from other models they have seen before or only heard about. Such technical talk, boring if not meaningless to outsiders, is no different in its own realm, from the gossiping about relatives, the latest doings of friends, and the reminiscing about old times that close-knit family networks carry out in their sociable gatherings (for a detailed description of the latter, see Gans 1962, 77). Granovetter (2002, 56–7) discusses what he calls “nerd culture,” which he finds both among late-twentieth-century computer hackers and among nineteenth-century American mechanical inventors, tinkering with their equipment and traveling about impressing one another with their achievements (see also Wright 1998).
When technology-oriented persons gather, they appear to be unsociable in the conventional sense—they are not ebullient, joking, storyswapping, or gossipy. In fact, they are often averse to interaction of this kind, find it draining, and thus give the appearance of being shy. This is a case of being specialized in a particular kind of IR chain that brings EE, and that they much prefer over other kinds of IRs in which their symbols and emotions do not match up with what other people are exchanging. Technical experts do become entrained in IRs, indeed engrossed in them, when they meet another technical expert; even here, the IR differs from ordinary sociability in that it is not usually conversation primarily but is centered on a piece of technical equipment. They appear to be staring at and manipulating a physical object more than talking to each other. They are communicating meanings in just the way that Wittgenstein (a complicated nerd if there ever was one) points out—by showing, doing, pointing, not by self-contained verbal description (Wittgenstein, 1953, 1956). In fact, they are interacting with each other via the equipment, and thereby tacitly invoking the rest of the far-flung network of machines related to the one in front of them, and the community of experts held together through these machines. The machinery is the sacred object of a cult. In the last analysis it is not a cult of technology itself; behind every Durkheimian sacred object is the community that is joined together by their focus upon it.
Socially Excluded Persons
A second type of borderline introvert consists of persons who are outside the center of social gatherings through no desire of their own. Interaction rituals are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) stratified between those who are in the center of attention, and are thereby the most engaged and socially oriented, out through a layer of attentioncontenders and followers, and finally reaching those on the margins of the group, and those totally excluded. The peripherals and outcasts have less EE than those nearer the group center; they are the lowest ranked in the stratification of EE.5 They are also less committed to group symbols (for evidence see Homans 1950), and in that sense they are nonconformists. But they are not necessarily full-fledged introverts, in the sense of being withdrawn into their inner pyschic experience. Depressed, wistful, sad, perhaps; in the absence of other structural conditions that move them into another type of introversion, they remain oriented toward the group with the hope that it will let them in some time. Such individuals may make pathetic compromises, being willing to play the fool or serve as the scapegoat, taking negative attention as better than no attention at all.
Situational Introverts
These are individuals who avoid particular kinds of sociability, but throw themselves into other kinds. They give the impression of being shy, diffident, or withdrawn when they are in situations where their stock of symbols and their EE loadings do not match up well with those of other persons present. In other situations, where they do match up well, they become outgoing, spontaneous, full participants. There is nothing schiozophrenic about these personalities; they are simply following principles of the IR market, attracted to EE-producing IRs, avoiding EE-losing ones. Structurally, such persons apear where they are located in complicated multi-centered networks, with intermittent opportunities for interaction in quite different milieux. It is the network that is schizophrenic, not the individual.
A subtype here might be called “peerless introverts.” The adjective “peerless” is used in a literal sense: these are elite individuals who lack peers on their own level to interact with, or even sufficiently distinguished followers. This type is frequently described in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biographies and novels.6 A member of the upper class living in a country house—especially the male head of household—often spent much time alone, withdrawn in his library; when dining en famille such a gentleman might waste few words in conversation with spouse or children at the table. This gives the impression of introversion, but its social motivation is lack of class-appropriate company. The same individual generally displays the conventional social graces when there are house parties and shooting meets in the country, and a complete sea-change in manners occurs when he moves into London for the sitting of Parliament and the social Season.7
The situational introvert is an ideal type, and an individual in this social situation might be a candidate for becoming an introvert in a stronger sense.
Alienated Introverts
We now reach the types of introverts who better fit the modern stereotype. Here is the rebellious individualist, who scorns the crowd and is proud of nonconformity. There are several pathways by which an individual could reach this position. Following IR theory, what all paths have in common is that the EE attraction of most available social interaction is lower than the alternatives, and indeed is negative, an emotional energy drain. There is always a certain amount of ideal type schematization in the viewpoint of the alienated person: he or she is negatively oriented by contrast to a crowd, scene, or group perceived as dominant, and which he or she is escaping from. The alternative to belonging or giving in to the overweening social presence, however, is not necessarily solitude. Alternatives include reserving one’s social participation for another social milieu, which is more highly but esoterically ranked: the artist versus the crass commercial mob; the sensitive person versus the superficial hilarity of the popular crowd; the social class superior avoiding class inferiors among whom he or she is, for the present, stuck. Another kind of alternative comes from commitment to internalized, third-order circulation of symbolic objects. Gatherings with one’s preferred group may perhaps be few and far between, so that most of the time one has the choice of unsatisfactory IRs or none at all; the alienated introvert chooses the latter.
In some respects, the position of the rebellious introvert passes through a phase that resembles the socially excluded type. But most of the socially excluded, I have argued, do not rebel but conform, hoping to get into the group as fortunes change. What makes the difference? In principle, a combination of two conditions makes introversion deliberate, self-conscious, self-constructed opposition to the group and its conformity. One is the existence of alternative opportunities on the IR market; I have sketched some of the ways this can come about.
A second pattern, complementary to the first is especially important for creating an attitude going beyond mere withdrawal to rebellion. That occurs when the interaction rituals of the dominant group—the group that controls the largest focus of attention—are not really so impressive in terms of purely situational stratification. That is where groups engage in empty and forced rituals. These are rituals with more form than substance—the group is gathered, markers and entry barriers clearly distinguish members from nonmembers, and those in the center of ritual attention from the secondary and lower ranked. But the emotional tone is flat; participants put in an appearance and go through the motions but without enthusiasm and without generating much collective effervescence. Such were gatherings of the British aristocracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foil for an underground of Victorian and Edwardian rebels;8 so were conventional upper- and upper-middle class rituals of sociability that were scorned and upstaged by the counterculture rebels of the 1960s.
The process is closely analogous to the devaluation of Catholic religious rituals at the time of the Reformation: the old rituals were not only empty, but forced; through pressures of status hierarchy, patrimonial household organization, or outright threat of violent punishment, the old rites were kept going but as an emotionally empty shell. Such rituals generate little EE and lose out in attraction to alternative rituals that appear unofficially and in an underground movement, that have emotional intensity and thereby charge up their participants with EE. It is this charge of EE that gives individuals the confidence to challenge the Establishment. To do so may be a courageous act, if negative consequences are risked; but often the situation is at a tipping point, and the bandwagon effect sets in—one need only follow the flow of emotions to feel where rituals are flat and where they are vivid, to know where the crowd is moving.
For this reason, the alienated introvert is often a transitory phenomenon. The type emerges in numbers precisely because social conditions are shifting, so that old rituals and forms of stratification built upon them are declining. Macro-historical shifts feed into the ingredients for staging a ritual (figure 7.1 feeds into figure 2.1). I will say more on this shortly, and only note here that older rituals underwent great strain during the shift from categorical identities to situational stratification, and that considerable deserting of sinking ships went along with it.
Solitary Cultists
There is a type of introversion that consists in solitary activity, centered on objects or procedures that have been charged up with membership significance. The prototype is private religious devotion. As I have argued, secular equivalents have become prominent in recent centuries: the solitary pipe-smoker, the hobbyist, the technology-obsessed. Under this rubric we may distinguish several different degrees or kinds of introversion, depending on whether these activities take place in a situation of second-order or third-order circulation of symbols. Secondorder circulation takes symbols charged up in primary ceremonial gatherings and treats them as tokens for further exchange. The main form of secondary circulation is conversation recycling symbols from elsewhere, but there is a solitary version, where the circulation is done by the mass media. Should we call someone an introvert if his or her favorite pastime is to watch TV or listen to the news by oneself? The example shows that there is an in-between type of withdrawal from overt social interaction, a sociably-oriented kind of introversion, obsessive sociability while physically alone.9
There is also third-order circulation of symbols in the internal conversations of one’s own mind. Such inner circulation may sometimes also be emergent, innovative, and unique, going beyond the conventional symbols into idiosyncratic individual usage. As sociologists, we do not know much about this systematically, in the absence of research on people’s inner dialogues. It is likely that much inner devotion to one kind of symbolic cult or another—religious, entertainment, technical, sexual—may take typical, widely recurrent forms (something after the fashion that at one time it was believed to be popular for madmen to imagine they were Napoleon). Even to the extent that private cults evolve on their own paths, these paths are laid down by social starting points, and the motivation to pursue them is determined by the resources and opportunities for EE-seeking on IR markets. Solitary, internal experience is programmed from the outside in; the distribution of solitary cults must be at least roughly correlated with the distribution of their social versions.
Intellectual Introverts
Intellectuals are in one sense a species of solitary cultists. But across the historical spectrum, this was not always the case. Modern intellectuals spend a good deal of time in private reading and writing, but in early periods there was less opportunity for privacy. Ancient and medieval intellectuals generally made their reputations in face-to-face debates, and in all historical periods intellectuals have supplemented their expertise in texts with the impressiveness of their lectures and discussions. Texts are always mediated, not only by other texts, but by the networks of intellectuals who orient to texts. There are, to be sure, historical variations in how much time intellectuals spend alone reacting to texts and creating new texts, and in that sense modern intellectuals are more introverted than traditional intellectuals.10
It is intellectuals’ experience in the network of intellectuals that constitutes them as intellectuals, and shapes the contents of their thinking as they take up a position vis-à-vis other intellectuals in seeking their niche in the attention space. The very motivation that causes some intellectuals deliberately to withdraw from interaction, spending long hours or years alone with their manuscripts, is precisely their deep internalization of the intellectual field as the framework of their minds. They withdraw precisely in order to concentrate on the creative action that will get them into the center of the intellectual attention space; and they get their emotional energy from the reinforcement that comes to them in putting sentence by sentence on the page, viewing their own moves by the standards of a field they know from inside.
The intellectual world (more exactly, each intellectual specialty) is a stratified network, and an intellectual’s type of introversion is determined by his or her IR chain within that network. At the center are those individuals who get the widespread attention that constitutes their reputations as the great creative thinkers: the Shakespeare, the Helmholtz, the Max Weber. To refer once more to evidence compiled in my study of philosophers and their networks (Collins 1998), the major thinkers are those most tightly connected to other important intellectuals: both in vertical chains across the generations from famous masters to their pupils; and in horizontal chains of compatriots who make their reputations together in the new generation, shaping their distinctive positions by engaging in quarrels with leading opponents. Comparison of the network pattern of these intellectual stars with the various degrees of lesser intellectual success, and intellectual failure, too, confirms the importance of positions within networks. It is relative lack of the crucial network ties, especially at the moment of launching one’s career and internalizing one’s stance vis-à-vis one’s predecessors and compatriots, that makes others fall short of the great creative successes. Successful intellectuals are the most socially penetrated of introverts.
Intellectuals at the center owe their success to their position in networks of other intellectuals. They have a strong pragmatic sense (not necessarily self-conscious and reflexive, but spontaneous, in-action) of what symbols are charged with membership significance in what circles of the intellectual world, and what chains of arguments and evidence flow in their train; they have a good sense of the mental alliances that they can put together via new combinations of symbols. They owe their speed in thinking up new ideas and publishing them before others reach similar conclusions to their strong sense of what alliances are coming up on the horizon. Less eminent and less successful intellectuals suffer their fates because they are less advantageously placed in these networks. They are too far from the hot center of action, and only acquire the ingredients for their own new ideas after they have already circulated through many other conversations and other minds. Some, firmly aware through career experience of their own derivative position in the networks, settle into a modest position of applying wellknown theories and techniques to specialized problems; or to being a teacher or textbook writer, recirculating the ideas that have been creative elsewhere.
Persons both at the very center of intellectual networks, and those in firm positions as modest followers, may well be introverts, in the sense of spending much time in solitary bookish pursuits; but both the stars and the followers are highly socialized by the intellectual community. They are for the most part neither alienated nor rebellious nor idiosyncratic introverts.11 Truly idiosyncratic intellectuals are found in other network locations. These include many persons on the outer margins of intellectual networks, especially autodidacts, operating far from the regular transmission networks of the field’s cultural capital, assembling a checkered combination of teachings remote from the current centers of intellectual advance. The autodidact chooses his or her own readings, more or less accidentally according to what comes along, and this can lead to a combination of intellectual positions from widely ranging fields and historical epochs. Their ideas are often genuinely idiosyncratic, although many of them are simply followers of positions that had their heydays in previous centuries (modern-day occultists are typically of this sort). A person who builds an intellectual identity upon this kind of random access to cultural capital is unlikely to meet much success in the stratified networks that make up the intellectual world; and this experience may make them not only idiosyncratic but alienated—individualistic and proud of it, sometimes belligerently so. This kind of intellectual introvert may be combined with other types, depending on the social conditions that come into play. He or she may become a solitary cultist, satisfied with one’s own idiosyncracy; or by bordering on mobilized political movements, become a terrorist or serial killer.12
These are exotic types, far more so than the average intellectual of whatever eminence, and no doubt rare even among autodidacts. To complete the gallery of portraits, let me add one more type of intellectual introvert that arises from a very significant network location. The intellectual world is structured by a limited amount of attention space in each specialty: historical evidence on reputations shows that there is room for only three to six major positions to receive attention in any one generation. This means that of the many intellectuals who get good starts, as pupils of previous stars and compatriots of those moving onto the new forefront of intellectual action, there is a high proportion who fail to receive attention for their contributions. Most intellectuals, by the time they reach mid-career, recognize their position and opt for a smaller niche. Those who choose to stand their grround and fight out their claim to be a major figure will thus include a number who are bound to be disappointed: not because their ideas are poor, but because their ideas are good, indeed deriving from as good a stock of intellectual capital and as good a sense of fruitful combinations and advances as those who get the star recognition. They are structurally squeezed out by “the law of small numbers.” It is this scenario that produces the embittered withdrawn intellectual introvert.
Call this the Schopenhauer syndrome: a bright young man who comes from the same universities as the star performers of the German Idealist movement, launched by the same network of famous names. But Schopenhauer is a little younger and comes along just at the time when Hegel and a few other stars have secured the major university positions and garnered the student audiences and the reading public. No one comes to Schopenhauer’s lectures, and he retires to a solitary, misanthropic life; he is redeemed only because he lives to a very old age, long enough to be rediscovered by the third generation of German intellectuals rebelling from the dominance of Hegel’s generation of Idealists. Not everyone, like Schopenhauer, throws his landlady down the stairs or shuns all company for a solitary routine of playing his flute, writing his notes for a book he expects no one will read, and visiting the brothels of Frankfurt. But the type is visible enough in today’s intellectual world, and if we look we see him in the shadows of intellectual success for many generations back.13
The embittered intellectual is a version of the alienated introvert, but alienated in a specialized location. He (or she) may or may not be alienated in the conventional sense of standing in opposition to the non-intellectual world; but the intellectual who is squeezed out of recognition by the limited attention space is often alienated against the intellectual world in particular. Given that the professional intellectual operates by deeply internalizing the social structures of the field into one’s own mind, this can be an especially intimate and painful form of introversion.
Neurotic or Hyper-Reflexive Introverts
Finally we come to the type of introvert that is perhaps most emblematic of the whole genre. This is the type, familiar in the culture of entertainment from Hamlet to Woody Allen, whose introversion is torn, conflictual, indecisive, self-destructive. The fame of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy in the twentieth century generated a huge literature and widespread public consciousness of this type. From the perspective of IR theory, I will add only two points.
One is to underscore the conclusion, implicit in the foregoing, that introverts can be either satisfied or dissatisfied. There are many social locations for the various types of introverts I have listed. Work-obsessed introverts, situational introverts, many solitary cultists, and many or most intellectuals, are neither socially conflicted nor personally unsatisfied. Some of them—especially work-oriented and intellectual introverts—have very high levels of EE, which they put into their solitary pursuits, and from which they reap considerable enjoyment. Socially excluded persons, on the other hand, are not usually very happy, but as an ideal type they are generally not very inward persons, and are not innerly conflicted. Alienated introverts are overtly conflicted but mainly against dominant social circles, and even then, they often become part of a social movement or a clique of similarly alienated persons; taken again as an ideal type produced by distinctive social conditions, alienated introverts are not necessarily inwardly torn.
This leaves us with the pure type of neurotic introvert; better to eschew technical terminology, and call them hyper-reflexive introverts. Such individuals apparently arise in combination with, and as a further complication of, one of the other types of introverts. Hyper-reflexive introverts are insecure in their social location; their internal dialogue is unusually multi-sided and contentious. This is Hamlet unable to make up his mind; Woody Allen second-guessing and bad-mouthing himself, dooming his prospects before they get started. Such a person must have internalized a complex network pattern.14
This would be a location in several networks of different shapes, or in networks that are changing drastically in form. We would not expect a hyper-reflexive person to emerge from a tightly bounded, redundantly connected network of Durkheimian mechanical solidarity; there an individual’s reputation might be low (if they are the scapegoat or outcast of the group), but their social reputation is simple and clearly recognized, and there is nothing else to internalize. To produce a hyper-reflexive inner self, there must exist networks that allow the individual considerable oportunities and freedom for solitary experience, but at the same time pulls his or her emotional energy in several directions at once. If true introverts appear because the attraction of the group consists of nothing more than low or negative EE, and on the other side there is a pull of strong positive EE from some form of solitary, third-order circulation of symbols, that is a formula not for inner conflict but for a straightforward choice in the market for EE. The neurotic or hyper-reflexive person is caught in a location among networks where the balance of EE attractions and repulsions is conflicting or ambiguous. Woody Allen’s character is pulled one way and the other; the symbols through which Woody does his thinking are charged with EEs that actively carry on the dialogue on both sides, or indeed on multiple sides. The hyper-reflexive person is certainly individualistic and idiosyncratic, and such a person may live in an inner world far more than in any outer world. But even this complicated type of introvert is shaped by social ingredients.
THE MICRO-HISTORY OF INTROVERSION
Of the seven types of introverts, several have probably always existed. There have no doubt always been socially excluded persons, marginals, outcasts, and scapegoats in tribal and agrarian societies. And there have always been some persons who worked alone—hunters, animal herders, farmers of far-flung fields, guards on lonely outposts. None of these, however, is likely to have had an inward orientation per se characteristic of modern introverts. Class-stratified societies created the conditions for situational introverts; but given the organization of patrimonial households, with their all-purpose rooms and their ubiquitous servants and retainers, the elite gentleman very likely took his privacy more by ignoring inferiors than actually being physically out of their presence. Only around the nineteenth century, when mansions were built with separate entrance corridors (instead of one room connecting into the next) and back stairways for servants (Girouard 1978) did the fully private peerless introvert become common. But all these types, I have argued, are only borderline introverts, without distinctively introverted culture or ideology.15
Intellectuals, too, have long existed. Since the development of writing there have been experts in texts, who perforce spent much time concentrating on reading and writing, and to some extent this time was in solitude; the scholar’s cell or study as a specially built room was one of the first structures specifically designed for individual privacy. But this was not all or even the main part of an intellectual’s life, especially in the collective living conditions of monasteries, churches and their universities, and aristocratic courts. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century there is no distinctive ideology of intellectuals as withdrawn and at odds with the world. One would not have found Confucius, Aristotle, or William of Ockham an introvert in the modern sense.16 The ideology of the distinctive personality type of the intellectual was formulated when the material bases of intellectual work shifted from church positions and aristocratic patronage to the commercial market for books. Thus it was around 1800 in Europe that some intellectuals could go it alone, and if successful, make a living purely from the sales of their writings (Collins 1998, 623–28, 754–74). Of course, not all who tried were successful, and here arises the cultural image of the starving artist living in garretts, the unknown genius at odds with the crass society who fails to accord recognition.
The era of the market-based intellectual began as the era of the Romanticist movement, which took as its favorite literary topic just this image of the sensitive rebel-outcast. The shift from patronage or institutional support for high-culture production to commercial markets happened more or less simultaneously in literature and in music, hence the appearance of the ideology, and the personality type, of the Romanticist / rebel / introvert in both fields.17 In painting, the shift came later, with the change from careers mediated by the official painting academies, to specialized commercial galleries promoting an avant-garde, at the time of the Impressionists (White and White 1965). Hence the uneasy and for the most part unacknowledged relationship between the artistic intellectual and the commercial market. The marketing of cultural products increased the emphasis on competitiveness and put a premium on innovativeness, forcing periodic changes in fashion, and concentrating a new level of attention on the distinctive personality of the writer, musician, or artist. The creative personality now was regarded as having a distinctive style permeating all his works, acting as a brand name for advertising and demarcating a unique niche. At the same time that intellectuals’ individuality was extolled and a stance of rebelliousness encouraged, the risks of failure became increasingly palpable, and aspirants were attracted to cultural production markets in numbers guaranteeing that most of them were bound to fail. The result was an ideology denouncing commercialism and the tastelessness of mass audiences, in just the places where intellectuals were most dependent upon such markets.
The Romanticist image was one source of the modern cult of the introvert; it might be combined with ideologies arising from movements of political rebellion, which became frequent beginning around the same time, from the French Revolution of 1789 onward (cf. Charle 1990). Modernity was structurally not only an expansion of capitalist markets but the development of centralized state organization, which provided arenas for revolution; even aside from the great moments of political drama, modern politics settled into a contest for power between what were now labeled the forces of tradition or reaction, and the forces of progress. The political ideology of individual freedom—which arose in a movement concerned largely to break into the aristocratic monopoly on power rather than to withdraw from it—was often blended with the ideology of the freelance writer, musician, or artist on the commercial market, with its two-faced offering of independence and danger of being left behind in the competition. The specifically Romanticist style gave way to other intellectual movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the cultural identity it formulated for the modern has remained more or less constant across all of them.
The ideology of the rebellious, solitary individual cannot be taken at face value. It arose within networks of intellectuals and is a collective product. It was not literally the case that the rebellious intellectual was a solitary individual. When Byron’s Childe Harold (protagonist of the poem that in 1812 was Byron’s first bestseller, and created the first big international mass publishing reputation) repudiates his homeland and launches out on his impetuous lonely voyage, he is accompanied by two servants. Byron himself, like the other Romanticist poets, was closely connected in rebellious esoteric cliques, like the ménage with Percy and Mary Shelley in a castle in Switzerland, where they competed with each other over who could write the most horrifying rejection of the modern world (Mary Shelley won with Frankenstein).
From the historical shift in the material bases of intellectual production came a cultural image charged with emotions that both reflected the original stance of intellectuals in the era of Byron and Beethoven, and shaped the emotional stance of intellectuals whenever the images were reinvoked. Alienation, rebellion, glorification of the inward, autonomous self, an oppositional self taking dominant society as its foil—this has become part of intellectual discourse, recirculating on many levels: as cultural capital for oganizing rebellious cliques in high schools, in Left Banks and artists’ enclaves, in political and counterculture movements; as a staple of ordinary conversation; as material for constructing fictional characters, literary plots, and opera librettos; and as contents of interior dialogues making up individual’s self-reflections and conscious identities. The image of the rebellious intellectual undervalued by conventional society has become a cult object circulating far from its point of origin. The life circumstances of many and perhaps most professional intellectuals does not fit the model, since even at the time of the expansion of commercial culture markets many intellectuals continued to work outside the commercial market; the expansion of the modern research university, the biggest employer of intellectuals, was taking off at just the time of the Romanticist movement. But although most intellectuals are very far from the Byronic image, the conditions of university life have kept the ideology relevant: the bohemian living conditions of graduate-student temporary poverty, the potential for university communities to become breedinggrounds for radical social movements, the strains of publish-or-perish careers even if they are in rather tame academic specialties. On the whole, the modern intellectual has, far more than the traditional intellectual, a structural basis in the conditions of everyday life for acting as a solitary introvert, and for recirculating the symbolic image of the alienated rebel.
The other main types of introverts are also created to a large extent by modern conditions. The neurotic / hyper-reflexive type of introvert spins off from other types of introverts, but is shaped above all by the complexity of modern social networks. It is, so to speak, not so much an individual phenomenon as a neurotic niche in the array of modern networks. Solitary cultists have expanded vastly through a combination of modern living conditions allowing privacy, the mass marketing of cult emblems that are specifically appropriate for private consumption, and the decline of the main premodern form of cult practice, leaving a vacuum into which modern solitary cults could spread.18
The main premodern form of cult that could be carried out privately was, of course, religion. The terms “introvert” and “extrovert” were first used in reference to spiritual activities. “Introversion” is first found in English in a 1664 passage on religious exercises: “Fastings, Prayers, Introversions, Humiliations, Mortifications.” “Introvert” was used as a verb in 1669: “The Soul … introverted into itself, and easily conforming to God’s will.” In 1788 the religious sense is still dominant: “Attending to the voice of Christ within you is what the Mystics term Introversion.” Around 1870 the terms begin to be used in a secular sense of psychological self-scrutiny; and only after 1910 does “introvert” and its counterpart, “extrovert” (or “extravert”), thanks to Jung’s version of psychoanalysis, become a noun meaning a personality type.19
Religious mystics engaged in meditation or inward prayer thus may be regarded as the early prototype of the introvert, and in that sense we might claim that the personality type exists as far back as 500 B.C.E. or earlier in Buddhism and other Indian religious movements, and in some of the Greek mystery cults preceding Christianity. But we should not project the modern concept of the individualist back onto this period. Monks typically did their meditation exercises collectively, as in a Buddhist meditation hall; in Christian monasteries they might have had individual cells, but their life was scheduled as a community routine and the hours of meditation and prayer themselves were set by rule. Religious mysticism was a strongly organized social regimen for group members to experience moments of inwardness. These experiences were not interpreted as being concerned with the self but with collective representations in the form of religious emblems.20 The aim of contemplative religious practice was to “withdraw from the world,” but the “world” meant what was outside the walls of the monastery, or outside the way of life of the monk; what was inside those walls and lifestyles was preeminently communal.
There were also monks and ascetics who withdrew more radically, to mountain caves or barren deserts; but this too was a socially connected withdrawal: the famous early Christian ascetics of the type of St. Anthony or St. Simeon Stylites were themselves cult objects, centers of pilgrimage by visitors attracted by their reputation for holiness. The famous hermit-monks, alike in the Christian Levant, India, and Japan were connected to chains of other monks, transmitting techniques of holiness and engaged in an implicit competition over feats of asceticism; their extremes of withdrawal and their inner experiences both were initiated from social groups and recirculated back into those groups.
Mauss (Mauss 1938/1985; Hubert and Mauss 1902/1972) traced the origins of the individual self even further back, into tribal societies. The magician or shaman was the earliest individualized, inwardly oriented person, since the practices of magic or of seeking trances involved physically withdrawing into deliberately chosen privacy and directing one’s consciousness inward.21 But Mauss’s theme is the social character of magic, since it often involved the private use of elements from group ceremonies, and depended for its sense of efficacy on a social reputation that the magician held among the group. We could add, too, that shamans quite often went into their trances not in solitude but as the focal point of a tribal gathering. If the magician is on the path to individuality and introversion, it is very much in the context of collective representations that see only impersonal and collective forces.
The transition from religious inwardness to the modern introverted personality was set in motion with the Protestant Reformation. Monasteries were abolished in Protestant regions, leaving religious devotions to ordinary Christians in the course of their everyday life, without collective scheduling and standardized interpretations. We should not overdo the contrast, since the most common devotions such as prayer and Bible-readings were often carried out collectively and out loud; it is only with the decline of the large-scale patrimonial household, and later with the politically motivated disappearance of religious ceremonial in schools and public gatherings, that religious exercises became perhaps predominanty inward and private.22 The Reformation was a decisive swing in the social organization of the means of ritual production of religious experience, even if it took three hundred years or more for the outcome to become strongly secular. The Catholic Counter-Reformation did its part as well. The Jesuit movement gave a similar impulse toward individuality and inwardness of religious devotions, like the radical Protestants curtailing ceremonial and disowning religious magic; above all the Jesuits promoted the practice of regular and frequent confession—which, although part of standard church sacraments, was little emphasized in the medieval church—thereby putting inner pressure on the individual Catholic to examine his or her conscience for the sum of all the actions of everyday life.23
Introverted personality types in the full, modern sense of the term appeared when religious practices became displaced from the center of public attention, and during the expansion of rival, secular means of ritual production. This brought not just the creation of introversion, but also the creation of extroversion, in a sense that could not have existed before the contrast developed between the two kinds of social orientation. One could say, broadly, that before the rise of modern conditions (the breaking up of collective living arrangements into smaller units, the differentiation of complex social networks, etc.) people were mostly extroverts; this is what Durkheim implied in his discussion of earlier societies characterized by mechanical solidarity, in which everyone is highly comforming, embedded in the group, highly similar to one another.24 But the notion that there are gregarious people with little self-reflection could not have been very sharp until there came into existence categories of people who were the opposite.
Modern introverts and extroverts were created as increasingly polar types, and by the same process. The expansion of the means of ritual production allowed secular ritual to be put to use in two different ways: as collective participation and at the other extreme by private appropriation of these symbolic objects in solitary practice. The extrovert became an individual personality type; whereas traditionally most people had simply taken part in the normal collective life (as in a medieval household or tribal community), under modern conditions extroversion became a distinctive alternative, calling for more reflection and self-consciousness both as to what form of extroverted activity to take part in, and by awareness that there are others not making this choice. The medieval peasant taking part in village festivals was not choosing an identity in the same sense that the contemporary fraternity boy or party animal is conscious of being different from the nerd (see, for example, Moffatt 1989). The decline in conditions that promoted categorical identities, and the shift toward a predominance of conditions of situational stratification, gave rise to a greater focus upon individual identities, whether these were based on reputations for extroverted participation or for introverted withdrawal. Introverts and extroverts could now come into conflict, forming their own status ideologies putting the other down.25 This is a distinctively modern form of situational stratification, not reducible to the categories of class, gender, and race, but operating on a much more personal level.
The expansion of the means of ritual production was also, to a considerable extent, the massive commercial expansion of niches in capitalist markets, retailing an increasing variety of ingredients for the production of first-order rituals, and of symbolic objects themselves.26 Thus there has been an expansion alike of first-order performance of secular cults; of second-order conversation about them, as well as the commercial broadcasting and rebroadcasting of first-order ritual events; and of third-order private solitary cult devotions to these objects. The modern extrovert now has many realms in which to operate: attending the big events and being up to date on the latest gossip so as to take enthusiastic part in talking about them. As an offshoot of these processes, introverts now have more symbols to fill their solitude with, and more permutations to construct into distinct individual inner experience. The distribution of symbolic objects is simultaneously a distribution of emotional energy, from the overt collective effervescence of public gatherings, to second- and third-order refocusing of EE in networks and inner experience.
Secular rituals and their cult objects, as we have seen, range across mass entertainment and sport; technical equipment; hobby materials; texts and objects of art; substances for bodily ingestion; the shaping of the body itself. These markets give rise to the modern fan, the nerd, the hobbyist, the intellectual and the connoisseur, the addict, the exercise or weight-control fanatic—personality types scarcely found in medieval or ancient societies.
Commercial markets provided the ingredients out of which these secular cult practices could be constructed. The actual development and popularity of these practices was determined by the shift in the ecological patterns of social encounters: the shift to ad hoc, voluntary gatherings, which displaced the involuntary participation in community and household gatherings that characterized traditional societies. The daily and annual rounds of activity in premodern societies were permeated with rituals that we would easily recognize as such by their formality; living in a patrimonial household in a medieval community (not to mention living in a tribal society) would have been something like what our lives would be if Christmas or Thanksgiving happened several times a month, along with many lesser ceremonies that punctuated every day. Because of the breakup of these structures of collective living and the differentiation of networks, modern life has its points of focused attention and emotional entrainment largely where we choose to make them, and largely in informal rituals, that it takes a sociologist to point out that they are indeed rituals.
The two shifts are correlated: increasing individual organization of social participation generates an increasing market for consumption of the means of ritual production, and for ready-made sacred objects connoting the most successful of such modern rituals. The two sides of figure 4.4, interactional markets and material markets, flow into each other; they have undergone a long expansive cycle for the past five centuries or more, accelerating considerably in the past century.
The complementarity of the extroverted and introverted paths flowing from the expansion of voluntarily staged informal rituals is illustrated by modern scenes of carousing and sexual display. This is a form of situational stratification, which spun off from the increasing autonomy of individualized marriage markets carried out by the participants themselves apart from family control. By the 1920s these had become scenes not so much for finding a marriage partner but for the sheer situational prestige of being in the center of collective effervescence. Drinking, smoking, and new styles of sexual display in clothing, dancing, slang talking, and faddish mannerisms, became socially prestigious; which is to say these became symbolic emblems of membership in a community, rather nebulous in its boundaries, which was enacted by being present at just such scenes. Being in such a scene became a membership ranked by how much collective effervescence was generated and how close one was to the center of the excitement. The situational stratification generated what might be thought of as a situational class struggle. On one side were those striving to get into the center, constructing themselves more and more devotedly as extroverted personalities. On the other side were those in opposition to these carousing scenes, on various grounds ranging from belonging to more traditional moral communities of social propriety, class, and religion, to alternative cults of intellectuals, the technology-obsessed, alienated introverts, and various kinds of solitary cultists. Persons in these various ritual locations come to identify themselves not only in terms of what their personal cult is centered upon, but also what it contrasts with; the nerd and the party animal are both parts of each other’s self-definition.
The most visible cults generate not only opposition but also private emulation. First-order participation in one of the modern cults holding the center of public attention tends to promote the spread of its symbols into private lives as well. Cigarette-smoking, which became glamorized in the party scene of the 1920s and near-universal in the ritualized solidarity of World War II, also generated a penumbra of private smokers, which has remained after the prestige of the public scenes declined. In the sphere of sexual behavior, the various phases of sexual display scenes (the 1920s, 1960s) promoted an increasingly eroticized culture; the spread of sexually suggestive clothing styles, advertisements, and increasingly explicit pornography has increased desire for contemporary forms of sexual behavior. Here the introverted and extroverted forms not only expand together but support one another. As we have seen (in chapter 6) masturbation, correlated with pornography consumption, is positively correlated as well with frequency of sexual intercourse; the age of sexual initiation in the twentieth century became younger and the variety of sexual practices wider. The intimate sphere of sexuality follows the pattern of Goffmanian sociology. There is much posturing and presenting of frontstage imagery—since in fact most people’s sex lives are not as active as they pretend to be—but the sexual frontstage is not thereby to be dismissed as an illusion. Society is not so much the repressor of a primordial sexual urge, as Freud thought, as the creator and shaper of drives through focus of attention and emotional entrainment. In sexual desire, as everywhere else, human beings are programmed from the outside in.
THE MODERN CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL
“This secular world is not so irreligious as we
might think. Many gods have been done away
with, but the individual himself stubbornly remains
a deity of considerable importance. He walks with
some dignity and is the recipient of many little
offerings. He is jealous of the worship due him,
yet, approached in the right spirit, he is ready
to forgive those who may have offended him. Because
of their status relative to his, some persons
will find him contaminating while others will
contaminate him, in either case finding that they
must treat him with ritual care.”
—Erving Goffman, [1957] 1967, 95
Goffman was, rather against his intentions, an historical observer. He was engaged in creating a scholarly specialty in the direct observation of the details of everyday life. To do so, he bracketed the historical setting, to focus upon the analytical features of situational interaction, as a level of analysis sui generis. In this respect he was in keeping with the functionalist anthropologists whose lead he followed. Goffman also bracketed out much of the substance of interaction, differentiating himself from older writers on “manners”; the sociology of interaction rituals is not moralizing, ironicizing, humorous, or satirical.27 He was not concerned with chronicling the changes in manners from one era to another, even though he was working in the midst of a very large change in precisely his line of vision.
We might, in fact, refer to this historical change, taking place between the 1950s and the 1970s, as the “Goffmanian revolution.”28 This was the shift toward greater casualness in interaction. The nuances of formal manners that Goffman enjoyed analyzing—the occasions for hat-lifting, door-holding, polite introductions, equally polite cutting of those persons not socially eligible to be recognized—were on their way out. Men stopped wearing hats—which obviated any distinctions between raising them to a lady or showing one’s tough nothing-but-business demeanor by keeping them on in the house; people stopped offering each other lights for their cigarettes and eventually repudiated cigarettes as a form of pollution; a male holding a door for a female became rejected as a sign of promoting subservience in the guise of deference. Formerly taboo verbal expressions became standard in sophisticated social circles; the formality of clothing styles, and of clothes specifically designed for particular social occasions, gave way to the predominance of the casual style. Traditional forms of address by title gave way to a more or less compulsory calling everyone by their first name or nickname, regardless of degree of acquaintance.
Goffman ignored all this, since he was attempting to single out the generic features shared by all interaction rituals. I have attempted to highlight those generic features in the theory of IR chains. With this analyical apparatus in hand, we are free to look at historical changes in the specific contents of rituals. The era of casualness, the near side of the Goffmanian revolution on which we live, remains ritualistic, even as the older rituals from which Goffman took most of his materials have been replaced by a different set of rituals. For the most part, Goffman’s rituals of politeness were forms of categorical deference—holding doors or lighting cigarettes for ladies, and thereby indicating one’s status as a gentleman. The distinctions, lady vis-à-vis gentleman as well as vis-à-vis non-lady and non-gentleman, have almost entirely faded; these have been displaced by situational stratification, which overtly recognizes only individuals and their reputations for being in, or out, of preferred scenes of social action.
Across this historical shift, Goffman’s emphasis on the “cult of the individual” continues to hold true. It even appears as a trend: there is an increasing degree of emphasis on the cult of individuality, and a concern to make the cult as inclusive as possible. The paradoxes and excesses of late-twentieth-century manners have sometimes been satirized under the label “political correctness.” This is hard for us to treat analytically, since it refers to conflicts over standards of everyday life, conflicts in which most of us are partisans on one side or another. Viewed sociologically, political correctness shows two classic features of social ritualism: First, it is a form of moral compulsion; it marks the boundary of what is considered to be a proper member of the larger community, and its weapon is moral scorn (which may also be followed up by legal compulsion) against those who violate these standards. Second, it is a concern to extend the status of individuality to everyone, above all to those who have historically been disprivileged; in everyday life, this is a form of hyper-sensitivity in taking the role of the other, ferreting out all the ways of possibly hurting the feelings of others who have been treated as underlings or social non-persons. To be sure, class stratification has not disappeared, and situational stratification exists as much as situational equality, so there is a certain amount of false consciousness in these rituals of conferring specially marked equality on some who thereby are given priority in the focus of situational attention. But this is the nature of rituals; they paste over structural incongruities as well as anything else, keeping the immediate flow of situations going. And through it all, we discern the longterm trend: greater inwardness of selves is assumed, and by being projected onto others, it helps create that inwardness. Even as occasions for extroversion promote the modern character of noisy entrainment in the scene of action, the sphere of introversion is expanded to give everyone the standing of at least honorary introvert.
I want to conclude with a reflection on what the perspective of radical microsociology means for our own view of ourselves. We are all socially constructed; all historically shaped. There is no “natural” inwardness about our selves; nor, for that matter, is there inevitability about the historical trajectory that we happen to be living in during the past several centuries. IR theory is an analytical model, which can be dropped down into any historical period, to examine just what configuration of ingredients for carrying out rituals happen to exist in a particular moment. It carries no connotations of trends in those ingredients and hence in their outcomes; each period can have its range of complications, and there is no guarantee that the larger historical pattern always flows in one direction. The kind of selves that will be taken as natural several hundred years in the future may be quite different than the selves that are taken for granted today, and the trend is not necessarily further along in the same direction that I have sketched in this chapter. There is no Hegelian evolution revealing that the pure essence of the human being is individuality and inwardness.
What, then, are we to make of ourselves? We are historical products of a period that has developed an increasingly widespread and increasingly penetrating cult of individuality; thus we are constrained to think of ourselves as autonomous, inward, individuals; all the more so if we have lived through the social configurations that make us intellectuals, alienated introverts, and other versions of specifically marked introversion. At the same time, the central lines of sociological theory—those emblematized by Durkheim and Mead—give abundant evidence for the mechanisms by which our selves are socially constructed.
The sociologized view of the individual runs against the grain of the symbols generated by twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century rituals. I have put the central formula as follows: human beings are emotional energy seekers, thereby linked to those interactions and their derivative symbols that give the greatest EE in the opportunities presented by each person’s social networks. If not EE-seekers, what else could human beings be? Are we simply pain-avoiders, as an older line of theory held, provoked into action by frustrations and obstacles in the flow of habits? The image is too inert, passive; human beings are active, excitement seeking, magnetically attracted to where things are happening. Are we material reward-seekers, a convenient simplification set forth by the utilitarian tradition and given wide currency by the institutional success of economics? Today’s economic sociology gives evidence against it; and material goods are not only subordinate to nonmaterial attractions, but are desired most intensely where they are symbols loaded with EE or are material means for ritual production. Are we power-seekers? Sometimes, but that is a particular kind of situational interaction by which some, necessarily limited, portion of people gain their EE. Are we seekers of love? Same answer. Are we idea-seekers? Again yes; but intellectuals devoting their lives to ideas, artists devoting themselves to art, are of all people the most deeply shaped in their very thoughts by the EE-loadings of symbols reflecting membership in the factions of professional networks.
Is there no genuinely individual experience, valid apart from society? Things that one experiences by oneself, that you cannot communicate to others, that are often best savored alone: the smell of new cut grass, the color-saturated world in the glint of a low-angled late afternoon sun, the feel of one’s muscles when stretching out at the end of a run, the nuances of a mood, the intricacies of one’s flights of fantasy—being with someone else at these moments is often a distraction, and attempting to relate the experience in the clichés of conversation tends more to destroy the experience than to expand it. Thus we might claim that there is an aesthetic realm of one’s own sensitivities, that is at least one clear bastion of the private self. And yet, it is our own biographies that have prepared some of us to attend to these moments, and others of us to ignore them; it is our stock of social symbols that opens the door. We are deeply socially constituted beings, from the moments as babies when we begin to make noises and gestures in rhythm with our parents, through the adult networks that induct us into cults of experience that we elaborate in our inner lives. Symbols make up the very structure of our consciousness. Symbols are the lenses through which we see.
We do see something through them. That experience is a reality, concrete, particular, individual; sometimes of the highest value to ourselves. That the pathway to those experiences is deeply social does not take anything away from them.
