Structural Idealism: A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Structural

Idealism A

Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Douglas Mann

Structural Idealism A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Structural Idealism A Theory of Social and Historical Explanation

Douglas Mann

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Mann, Doug, 1955Structural idealism : a theory of social and historical explanation Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-391-1 1. Social sciences—Philosophy. 2. History—Philosophy. 3. Idealism. 4. Culture—Philosophy. I. Title.

HM484.M35 2002

191

C2002-900748-8

© 2002 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Cover design by Leslie Macredie.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical— without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Go, gentlemen, every man unto his charge: Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls: Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. March on, join bravely, let us to’t pell-mell; If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell. —Richard III, act 5, scene 3

Contents

List of Charts .................................................................................. x Acknowledgements ...................................................................... xi Introduction.................................................................................... 1 The Road Ahead............................................................................... 1 Definitions and Clarifications ........................................................... 5 Mapping Social Theory..................................................................... 8 Tilting Marx Sideways ................................................................... 13 The Structure of This Book ............................................................ 18 Chapter 1 The Nature of Social Consciousness: A Theory of Mind .......................................................................... The Sympathetic Social Mind ......................................................... Embodiment .................................................................................. Passionate Action........................................................................... Purposive Action ............................................................................ Intellectual Action ......................................................................... Language as Symbolic Social Action ............................................... Social Rules and the Creation of Social Roles .................................. Power, Hierarchy, and Social Structure...........................................

21 21 26 29 31 33 36 40 44

Chapter 2 Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation ................................................................... 49 Prologue ........................................................................................ 49

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The Varieties of Rationality ............................................................ Intention ....................................................................................... Meaning ........................................................................................ Structure .......................................................................................

51 55 61 70

Chapter 3 A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance .................................................................... Labelling/Transactionalist Views of Deviance.................................. New Subcultural Theory ................................................................ A Structural Idealist Understanding of Deviance and the Question of Causality ......................................................

81 81 86 94

Chapter 4 Reconstructing the Past: A Structural Idealist Approach ......................................................................... 99 Collingwood’s Re-enactment Thesis .............................................. 100 Problems with the Thesis ............................................................. 106 Structuring Human Actions .......................................................... 117 The Centrality of Meaning in Historical Explanation .................... 121 The Reconstruction Thesis ........................................................... 125 Construction, Reconstruction, and Objectivity............................... 126

Chapter 5 The Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Late Modernity......................................................... A Cook’s Tour of Late Modernity ................................................... Nietzsche: From Morality to the Genealogy of Morals ................... Freud: From Mind to Psyche ........................................................ From Sociology to the Sociology of Knowledge ...............................

131 134 138 146 155

Chapter 6 The End of the Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Postmodernity .......................................................... The Basic Themes ........................................................................ Foucault: From Truth to Power/Knowledge ................................... Derrida: From Meaning to Play .................................................... Lyotard and Baudrillard: From an Incredulity to Metanarratives to Embracing Simulacra .................................... The Search for Meaning in Depth as a Disenchantment of the Social World ........................................... From the Unmasking Mind to the Liquid Body .............................

159 159 169 177 181 192 197

Contents

ix

Chapter 7 A Secret History of the Liquid Body: Image and Counter-Image in Twentieth-Century Culture ......................... A Theoretical Sketch .................................................................... Body Images, Power, and Levels of Meaning ................................. The Channels of Communication .................................................. A Periodization ............................................................................ A Case in Point: British Subcultural Styles, 1963-1978 ................. The Liquid Body and the Question of Freedom .............................

199 199 203 206 209 217 220

Chapter 8 The Contribution of Structural Idealism to Cultural Critique .................................................................... Prologue: What is Culture? .......................................................... Voices in the Wilderness: A Tour of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, 1978-1995 .................................................... Explorations in Contemporary Cultural Criticism ......................... A Sketch of a Structural Idealist Theory of Cultural Critique ................................................................... Towards a Unified Social Theory ..................................................

223 223 224 249 259 266

Notes ............................................................................................. 269 Bibliography ............................................................................... 289 Index ............................................................................................. 301

List of Charts

Chart 1

Mapping Social Theory ...............................................

Chart 2

A Model of Social Consciousness ................................ 26

Chart 3

The Varieties of Rationality........................................ 52

Chart 4

Mapping Deviance Theory .......................................... 93

Chart 5

The Canadian School of Cultural Critique: Points of Entry into the Nature/Culture/ Technology Triad ......................................................... 251

Chart 6

Mapping the Canadian School Triad onto My Triad of Social Explanation ......................... 252

Chart 7

David Cronenberg’s Films as Illustrations of the Unintended Consequences of Scientific Inventions.................................................... 258

x

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Acknowledgements

This book can be traced back, through copious revisions and additions, to my doctoral thesis in philosophy at the University of Waterloo, itself in part the product of papers I wrote for various graduate courses. To this end I would like to thank James Van Evra, my thesis supervisor, and the rest of my thesis committee for making the process of writing my thesis as painless as possible. Further, I would like to thank Lorne Dawson and Rick Helmes-Hayes of Waterloo’s Sociology Department and Karin MacHardy of Waterloo’s History Department for providing a fertile ground in their graduate seminars for papers that eventually found their way into my book. I would also like to thank all my friends and colleagues from my Waterloo days who contributed in a less direct way to the ideas in this book, and Heidi Hochenedel for looking over my Introduction. Lastly, I want to thank the editors of the Critical Review and Clio for allowing me to reprint versions of articles that appeared in their journals: chapter 2 originally appeared as “The Limits of Instrumental Rationality in Social Explanation” in Critical Review 13 (1999), while chapter 4 originally appeared as “Reconstructing the Past, A Structural Idealist Approach” in Clio 27 (1998).

xi

Introduction

The Road Ahead One of the most enduring divisions within metaphysics and, in a more vague sense, within philosophy as a whole is that between those who posit mind and those who posit matter as ontological starting points. Idealists like Bishop Berkeley declared that all objects of the senses are mere ideas in our minds, or ultimately in the mind of God, while materialists today argue that there is only one substance in the cosmos, matter, and that the realm of spirit is an empty one, spun out of the hopeful illusions of folk psychology (to borrow Paul Churchland’s term). This division between idealists and materialists gets played out within sociology as the debate between agency—the focus on individual decision making, with the associated assumption of a relatively free, rational subject—and structure—the focus on the social, economic, and in general the material forces that shape, guide, or determine human behaviour. It also gets reflected in the philosophy of history and in historiography in the debate between historical idealists like Hegel, who argued that a conflict between ideas is propelling history toward the telos of the Absolute Idea, and historical materialists like Marx, who claimed that economic life and the structures it generates is the basic motive force in history. It may seem trivial to point out that both the idealists and the materialists have grasped but part of a larger truth. However, only Notes to introduction are on pp. 269-70.

1

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STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

a few social and historical theorists have attempted to put forward a position that encompasses both of these poles. One such exception is Anthony Giddens, the noted English social theorist, who attempts to do just this with his structuration theory, an approach similar to my own. This is precisely what I will do here: put forward structural idealism as a model for social theory (speaking synchronically), historiography (speaking diachronically), and cultural theory. “Structural idealism” is an expression I have coined to refer to the need to explain human actions simultaneously in terms of the ideas that human actors bring to the situation and to the way that previous actions have created social structures that condition the ideas of present actors. My goal will thus be to bring together idealist and materialist ways of explaining social action, to marry the spirits of Hegel and Marx in what I hope will be a happy union. At the core of my structural idealism are what I call “structural ideals,” which I take to be extensions of Max Weber’s ideal types. As an example, Weber delineated the ideal types of authority as traditional, legal, and charismatic forms of leadership. He didn’t think that these pure forms actually existed in real societies, but saw them as methodological tools that help us to understand real, mixed forms of authority. He did not, however, see them as ethical ideals. This is where I think Weber unfairly limits himself: my structural ideals will include all the ways in which values are applied by human actors to social interactions insofar as these interactions result in explicit or implicit forms of social structure. These values aren’t solely ethical: like Wittgenstein’s language games, they come in many varieties, perhaps without a single common foundation.1 Some concern classical moral dilemmas (“should I get an abortion?”); some are aesthetic (“this car is ugly, and I won’t buy it”); some are bureaucratic or legalistic (filling out a form, or waiting for the little green man to appear in a traffic light before crossing the street); some involve economic rationality (moving across the country to a strange new city in pursuit of a career). Yet all involve some sort of value judgment, even if it’s so deeply embedded in the social act as to appear transparent to the casual observer. My structural ideals echo Weber’s ideal types in another sense: they are the ideas that the theorist distills out of an analysis of concrete interactions, yet they are no more “real” than any other idea in an individual mind. This is a sore point for idealists of all stripes: too often their focus on the primacy of ideas is taken as evidence of

Introduction

3

a fuzzy spiritualism (although this suspicion was quite justified in Berkeley’s case). Ideas are not ghosts in the machine of the self: they permeate the conscious life of individuals. Indeed, insofar as you are reading and understanding this introduction, your mind is full of ideas. To say that we “understand” something, say a social act, is to apply what we take to be an appropriate idea to that act— otherwise, it’s just nonsense, or empty mechanical movements. So from one point of view, what I will call “methodological idealism” is just common sense: people act socially based on ideas they have in their minds. Now the tricky part comes when we go deeper and ask, “where do these ideas come from?” and “are we entirely conscious of them, or is there a separate realm of unconscious thought not entirely accessible to rational scrutiny?” It will take at least half of this book to answer these seemingly innocent questions, though as a first indication of my answers to these questions, my reply to the second is a resounding yes. I’ll return to this problem in the section entitled Definitions and Clarifications in this introduction. Structural ideals are the missing link between, on the one hand, the historical idealism of R. G. Collingwood, and the focus on agency and individual reasons for acting found in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and in symbolic-interactionist theory (for example, the work of Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman); and, on the other hand, the social-structuralist approach of the Marxist tradition (including its continuation in the twentieth century in the work of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Sartre). Human beings are by reflex intentional (as the phenomenologists observe) and meaning and value creating (as Nietzsche made clear ad nauseam). This is true even if we conceal our baser intentions beneath mists of idealistic rhetoric. Further, the flowing of human intentions into meaning and values is not an isolated, solipsistic process carried out in private worlds of our own creation, but a social process. We produce and reproduce patterns of behaviour that are embodied in legal and moral codes, standard operating procedures (e.g., filing systems, timetables, stopping at a red light and going on a green, etc.), rules of etiquette and politeness, “rational” ways of attaining goals, and so forth. As I’ve already hinted, we can speak of all these patterns of behaviour as pointing towards ideals (e.g., perfect politeness, social order, ethical behaviour) that are seldom if ever attained, yet all the same inform our everyday thought at both the surface and at deeper psychological levels. The search for these ideals is the task

4

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

of the social and cultural theorist and the philosopher of history, just as the task of the empirical sociologist and the working historian is to describe the way that these ideals manifest themselves in practice in specific temporal and spatial locations. Yet all this intentionality flowing into values and into the production of meaningful social objects does not come from perfectly free, unrestrained, and creative individual human spirits. Instead, the social structures bequeathed to us by past efforts at the creation and preservation of social meaning and values loom up before us, to no small degree like those ancient Mayan pyramids that emerged from the jungle of the Yucatan to startle the nineteenth-century explorer, covered with obscure hieroglyphs that at first seemed indecipherable to their discoverers. We know, more or less, what these structures are, but few of us question where they come from, how they affect our social actions, or whether they have any value for us in the present. Like those Mayan pyramids, social structures have solid material bases, in the way that economic arrangements are constituted in the society in question—an observation long familiar to historians and sociologists, but one that is all too often forgotten by philosophers in their almost single-minded preoccupation with the argument itself divorced from the social and historical context from which it came.2 Thus, in arguing for a structural underpinning for social rules I am at the same time arguing (in part) for a historicist foundation for philosophical argumentation. Too often professional philosophers blithely ignore the social foundation of an argument in favour of its purely rational peak. Yet having said all of this, I believe that Collingwoodian idealism, and its allies in social theory (e.g., Weber, Winch, and the symbolic interactionists), have something important to say to social structuralism. “All history is the history of thought” is Collingwood’s famous dictum: we can understand the past only by rethinking the thoughts of past actors, of the agents of history, by telling the story of past acts, not just of events.3 Of course, these thoughts must leave behind them palpable evidence for us to rethink them, such as documents, buildings, art, coins, etc. We think through these objects to the thought behind them. So far, so good. But too many interpreters of Collingwood’s method (if indeed it is a method and not just a description of the a priori conditions of history in general, as interpreters like William Dray have suggested) have claimed that it closes the door to social and economic interpretations of the past

Introduction

5

due to its methodological individualism, its ignorance of the role of unintended consequences, and its excessive rationalism. I would like to suggest instead that if we are prepared to play somewhat roughly with Collingwood’s central doctrines, and to do a bit of extending and reshaping, we can indeed tie his idealism to a social structural interpretation of human behaviour. This is, and will remain to the end, the basic telos of this work, although it may seem at times forgotten in my sideways explorations of a number of connected issues over the next few hundred pages.

Definitions and Clarifications Let me now define a few key terms and clarify where I think structural idealism stands in the broad terrain of social theory (in the next section I will be more specific on its location in this terrain). The point of social theory is the understanding and explanation of social life. I take it as evident that social theory (and history for that matter) is what Wilhelm Windleband called an “idiographic” science, one that focuses on values and meaning (as opposed to a “nomothetic” science like chemistry, which uses causal, law-like explanations). Yet such an idiographic science must explain not only the ideas, reasons, or motives we have for acting in the social world, but also the structures that result from these actions, and which in turn shape future ideas and actions. To do this, I want to argue that social and historical explanation has to be both structuralist and idealist at the same time. When we try to understand an individual social act, or a collection of such acts, it’s not enough just to give an account of the intentions of the actor. Nor is it enough to list the external factors, whether economic, political, or biological, that influenced or caused that act. A full account of a social act requires an explanation that shows how individual intentions are related or shaped by structural factors, and how in turn these structural actors are instantiated and sustained by individual acts (without this sustenance, they would cease to exist). So we need a notion of how deep structures “produce” action. The way these structures operate is through our structural ideals, which social theorists bring to light by understanding and explaining the social meaning of actions. What is idealism? On the most basic level, it is the notion that ideas are primary in whatever field is being explained—whether

6

STRUCTURAL IDEALISM

that field is history, social action, or external reality. There are several distinct types of idealism that should be sorted out before we move ahead. Firstly, there is the largely discredited metaphysical idealism of Bishop Berkeley: things are real if and only if one can perceive them. All things are just ideas in someone’s mind. Needless to say, this is not the sort of idealism I have in mind here—I have no intention of arguing that we have to go through a process of Cartesian angst over the reality of the external world before being able to explain social action or write history. To act in the world we have to assume that physical things are really “out there,” and separate from the human mind. Secondly, we have the historical or teleological idealism of Hegel and his followers (including Francis Fukuyama in our own day). Such an idealist argues that not only is history propelled forward by a dialectic of ideas, but this dialectic is going somewhere: it has a telos. Although this sort of idealism sounds more promising, the notion that history has a telos is an unprovable hypothesis that asks too much of us, metaphysically speaking. The problem with such a notion is simple: it assumes some sort of ideal ontological realm where such teloi live, independent of individual human consciousnesses. Put this way, it seems absurd, akin to Hume’s occult qualities. Lastly, there is the methodological idealism I want to defend as one of the two major components in my structural idealist hybrid. This is Collingwood’s idealism. Simply put, it is the notion that we understand a social, cultural, political, or any other act largely in terms of the ideas in the mind of the actor. This is what I take Collingwood to mean by his dictum that “all history is the history of thought”: we can know the past only insofar as we can think it. He’s not denying that the ruins of Knossos or the Parthenon or Hadrian’s Wall don’t really exist—of course they do. The same can be said of ancient texts, coins, and other evidence. But their meaning can be understood only insofar as one can discern the thoughts of their builders and users. Staring at a moss-covered brick in an ancient wall in the English countryside—or even submitting samples of it for a detailed chemical analysis—won’t help us very much to explain the wall’s purpose, nor the events that took place on and around it. To do so, we must apply our analytical and critical faculties to the evidence at hand, and to construct a narrative of events based on that evidence. On the other side we find structuralism. To speak once again in the simplest terms, a structuralist is someone who believes that to

Introduction

7

furnish an explanation in a given field of inquiry—whether it’s language, history, anthropology, psychology, or economics—we have to discover the structures that shape and dominate that field. Ferdinand de Saussure is the founder of structural linguistics. He argued that we have to see language as governed by structural relationships between its signifiers and the things they signify, and that we need a “semiology,” a science of the signs, to understand how language works. Roland Barthes later applied de Saussure’s semiology to literature and culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss moved structuralism into anthropology, finding similarities in the structures of ritual and myth across widely divergent cultures. He found a number of binary pairs, like the raw and the cooked, or the sacred and the profane, at work in cultures all around the world, concluding that the myths held by these divergent cultures shared structural similarities. Yet the dean of structuralists for the purposes of social theory is undoubtedly Karl Marx. His historical materialism laid out a structuralist model of social action in its starkest and most enticing form. I will try to show how Marxism can be integrated into my structural idealism at greater length in the section entitled Tilting Marx Sideways in this introduction. Suffice it to note here that Marx’s basic premise that economic life results in social structures—most importantly competing classes—that determine human consciousness and action resulted in a model of social and historical explanation that remains highly influential down to this day. Why the need for a structural element in social explanation? Because the ideas a person can discursively express as the reasons for their action are only a part of what shapes that action. Many other factors—class, gender, social notions of morality, economic common sense, aesthetic values, and so on—combine to influence action, sometimes in ways that the actor is only dimly aware of, if at all. Social structure is real insofar as people choose to act in ways that can be seen as expressive of preconscious and unconscious social assumptions and values they had little hand in creating. I will come back to this point time and time again in this book. So social structure is deeply embedded in the unconscious and preconscious ideas we bring to the social world. For social theory to be an idiographic inquiry and still be able to offer a comprehensive account of social action, we need some sort of bridging concept between individual conscious human intentions and these deep structures. This bridging concept is social meaning, which is usually

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expressed in the form of a description and narrative of what I’ve termed structural ideals. This is how sociologists, historians, cultural theorists, and others actually explain the social world: not as a bundle of individual intentions, nor as a collection of impersonal deterministic forces (except in the case of the most reductionist works), but as meaningful descriptions of how various ideals shaped, prodded, seduced, and cajoled people to do what they did. The fact that social actors don’t always know what they’re doing, or how things will turn out, or whether their actions will have unintended consequences merely goes to show that there is more to a social act than the subjective meaning ascribed to it by the actor. One last point. I want to make it clear that the “idealist” moment of explanation is not just synchronic, and the structuralist moment diachronic. We must think of each mode of explanation as sharing synchronous and diachrononous attributes. Notably, our structural ideals are not static entities, but dynamic, dialectical things, always in flux. They survive only insofar as they are sustained by daily interactions between real social actors. For example, the structural ideal of private property survives only insofar as the majority of citizens believe in the abstract ideal of the individual ownership of things, the validity of the law against theft, and the authority of the police to enforce that law. If everyone woke up tomorrow firmly convinced that private property was evil, and communicated that conviction, it would very quickly cease to exist.4

Mapping Social Theory Now that I’ve defined some basic terms, I want to provide a road map through the expansive territory of social theory, and to situate my structural idealism on this map. This will give us an even clearer idea of the road ahead. We can map much of modern social theory on a two-dimensional matrix, as illustrated in Chart 1. This matrix shows us where the emphasis of each theorist or school of social theory lies along two distinct continua: one that stretches between human agency and social structure, another that connects consensus and conflict. This map of social theory is painted in broad strokes, so it should be seen as a useful sketch of a very large theoretical field, and not the last word on such things. The first continuum is the methodological one that features social explanation in terms of individual human agency (with its associ-

9

Introduction

ated emphasis on human freedom) at one pole, and social explanation in terms of social structure at the other. This is the continuum mentioned at the start of this introduction, and it is a continuum that has driven debates in sociological theory for over a century. The second continuum lies between an emphasis on consensus as “natural” to social life at one pole, and an emphasis on conflict at the other. Again, this division has been at the centre of debates in social theory since its inception in the Enlightenment. The result of this mapping of social theory is four possible theoretical positions on social life. In the bottom right corner we find Marxism, with its emphasis on the way that deep economic structures control human action and thought. Marx famously noted that it is not our consciousness that shapes our social being, but our social being that shapes our consciousness.5 Since this shaping takes place in the context of struggles between economic classes, we can characterize Marxism (including its twentieth-century variants) as a structural conflict theory. Chart 1. Mapping Social Theory The explanatory emphasis is placed on…

Social Consensus

Social Conflict

Individual Agency

Social Structure

Herbert Blumer and Symbolic Interactionism

Emile Durkheim’s Social Facts

Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgy [leaning
]

Talcott Parsons’s Structural Functionalism

Max Webster’s Vershtehen Sociology

Marx and Engels’s Dialectical Materialism

Gramsci’s Theory of R. G. Collingwood’s Methodological Idealism Hegemony Peter Winch Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory [although leaning] Early Jean-Paul Sartre

The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse) The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies Late Jean-Paul Sartre

At the opposite corner of our matrix, we find theorists such as Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman, who see social life as a collection of symbols and social roles created in everyday interaction. These symbols and roles can’t be sustained without continuous individual social interactions. I don’t want to suggest that the symbolic

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interactionists were hidebound conservatives hostile to social change. Instead, I situate them in the “agency-consensus” intersection simply because they see the social roles we inhabit in our everyday interactions as working together to create a stable flow. Indeed, Goffman explicitly maintains that social actors don’t come to their performances free to improvise their roles as they see fit: they must adapt their performative talents to the roles already in place on the stage of everyday life. Small improvisations may be permissible. Yet it is painfully evident when actors make mistakes, or fail to play their roles appropriately. This is true because the rules that define a “mistake” are largely established at any given point in time. In the upper right corner of the matrix we find the largely discredited schools of Durkheim and the functionalists. When one thinks of the cultural capital exercised by structural functionalism in North American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was the dominant theoretical paradigm, one is reminded of lines from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. Talcott Parsons was the high priest of functionalism in those days. His mighty tomes outlined in detail the structure of the American social system. Parsons and other functionalists said that the point of social life is for individuals to fulfill the essential functions of the social system: control, stratification, leadership, the provision of reigning beliefs, stable family life, and the reproduction of the species. Yet as C. Wright Mills and other critics of the 1950s and 1960s pointed out, structural functionalism was a static picture of a self-satisfied American society run by interlocking power elites, suppressing outsiders such as blacks, women, the poor, and the artistic avant-garde. The monuments of structural functionalism now stand abandoned and uncared for, like Shelley’s “vast and legless trunks of stone” lying alongside Ozymandias’s shattered visage. As testimonies to a highly artificial ideological status quo dreamed up in the American academy in the mid-twentieth century, they are best left that way.

Introduction

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Lastly, in the bottom left corner we find those theorists who focus on individual agency, yet don’t back away from the reality of social conflict. Thinkers such as Max Weber and R. G. Collingwood emphasize the need to start any social and historical explanation with an account of individual subjective meaning. The common theoretical source for this way of thinking is the German/Idealism of the early nineteenth century, especially Hegel. Yet this genealogy must be taken with a grain of salt. Hegel was no doubt an idealist in the sense that he believed that ideas shape human development. Further, he clearly believed that conflict drove the development of ideas: hence his famous dialectic. But Hegel’s idealism wandered from the methodological notion that ideas shape action to the metaphysical notion that ideas are somehow more “real” than individual people and the material objects they encounter. This tied into his teleological idealism, his notion that history was a sort of march toward a predetermined goal. We find evidence of these latter two varieties of idealism in Hegel’s claim that the real is rational, and the rational is real (i.e., that what has happened had to have happened), and in his application of the “cunning of reason” to history. Both imply detachment of ideas from the minds of individual actors, a detachment that Marx and others rightly castigated as so much metaphysical fog. Ultimately, what I want to do in this book is to transcend both of these continua. First, I want to show how social and historical explanation must comprise the poles of agency and structure at the same time. The only way we can make sense of social structure as a factor that shapes or influences action is by seeing it as instantiated in individual acts.6 Yet it is real all the same. We see it operating in the clothes people wear, in the way they speak to each other, in the things they buy and use, the cars they drive, the books they read (or don’t read). Social structure is a permanent and durable social reality. What I hope to show in this book is how this durable social reality finds its way into individual consciousness by way of structural ideals that channel and shape our social actions. These ideals parallel Max Weber’s ideal types, and often rely on semi-conscious and unconscious ports of entry to find their way into our lives. So we need a layered model of the social mind alongside, or preceding, an account of social theory. I should confess right at the start that my initial base of operations in my effort at transcendence of this matrix will be the

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Weber/Collingwood/Giddens camp of social and historical explanation. Ultimately, social life is made up of individual social interactions, themselves governed by our ideas about social reality (as Peter Winch makes clear). In addition, it seems equally evident that conflict drives social life: economic resources, political power, personal status, fame, and so forth are fought over by pretty well everyone, saving the odd hermit or withdrawn mystic. That there may be no specific battles being fought right now in no way disproves the fact that la lutta continua: real wars are usually made up of short bursts of extreme violence interrupting long periods of boredom. Social life is no different, though the conflict there is less likely to involve overt violent acts, and is usually repressed to allow for civilized interactions. Two bridges must be built out of this camp to allow for a complete model of social explanation. The first bridge is the one I’ve already hinted at above, that between individualist and structuralist accounts of social life. I believe that the social theorist has to understand how and why individual human action can produce social structure, and how this social structure feeds back into individual thinking to influence future action. So we need to build a bridge from a voluntaristic idealism to a structuralist account of social conflict. Secondly, we need to build a bridge from the conflict side of social explanation to the consensus camp. This will be considerably less difficult to construct than the previous one: there’s nothing inherent in an account that centres on human agency that biases it toward a conflictual view of social life. Indeed, since much of everyday interaction takes place through rituals and customs conducted in a relatively peaceful atmosphere, it’s easy enough to believe that fairly stable ideas about the social roles we inhabit or perform shape our actions. Everyday life may be deeply conflictual, but on its surface, it appears quite calm. Battles between opposed parties rarely flare up in everyday life, but when they do, they are probably portents of deeper conflicts. For the most part, our social struggles take place in our repressed frustrations and barely stated bitternesses.7 Like all good maps, this one might seem to be overly complex to the casual reader, full of names and symbols they don’t fully grasp. Yet as I move through the chapters of this book, I hope to explore most of the locations indicated on it, notably the ideas of the thinkers and schools of thought listed on the human-agency side of the matrix. All the same, I must admit that the great figure whose pres-

Introduction

13

ence will be discerned only in fleeting shadows throughout this book is that of Marx. The Marxist notion of social life as tied to economic conflict is a powerful one, one that goes a long way to explaining why we do what we do. So yet another theme in this book will be how to account for the way that economic and cultural capital, and the structures they generate, influence our ideas and thus our actions, without losing sight of a methodological idealist understanding of social life. One way that this balancing act can be accomplished is by seeing these structures as expressed in interests, whether economic or otherwise. We shape our social interactions with others partly in terms of how we perceive they will affect these interests. Where Marx went wrong was to reduce these interests to purely material things, independent of concrete intentions, and to see them as operating automatically on human consciousness. This led less reflective Marxists to describe human actors as the puppets of abstract economic forces, to fall into the positivist trap of worshipping the false idol of the Naturwissenschaften as the principal deity of social theory.8 In the following section I’ll show how we can tilt Marx sideways by dematerializing his account of social action, and thus accommodate Marxism to my structural idealism.

Tilting Marx Sideways Karl Marx declared in an afterword to the German edition of Das Kapital that his historical materialism was in effect a turning of Hegel on his head, an extraction of the rational kernel of his thought from its mystical shell (Marx and Engels 1978: 301-302). I wish to return the favour by trying to show how my structural idealism is in effect a tilting of Marxism sideways, an attempt to take Marx’s structural conflict theory seriously as a methodological tool by showing how it would actually work if Marx had thought things through on the level of everyday social interactions. As already noted, Marx saw human consciousness as causally determined by the social reality that individuals found themselves in. In other words, he saw our economic relationships as forming the foundations of human life, with our ideas about politics, art, philosophy, and religion being so much ideological smoke generated by the engines of these primary interactions. He does see ideas as the product of human interactions, but only of those involved with “material” life.

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Marx’s historical materialism took it to be a basic fact that our ideas have little or no independence from these material interactions. Here is Marx and Engels’s account of their materialism in The German Ideology: We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (1978: 154-55) Further, not only are ideas the product of material life, but they are used by the ruling class in all societies to enforce their domination— in part by inducing a false consciousness amongst the oppressed classes about the reasons for their subjection and thus naturalizing this oppression: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx and Engels 1978: 172) What sense can we make of Marx’s historical materialism? First of all, it hardly seems supportable that ideas are merely the phantoms of one’s brain, or the sort of theory that Marx himself developed wouldn’t be possible. After all, how could these revolutionary phantoms develop in the brain of a petty bourgeois intellectual? More generally, even if much of human conflict is generated by dis-

Introduction

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putes about economic resources, if we can find a handful of cases where people transcend or ignore economic questions in their ideas about social life, the status of Marx’s historical materialism as a universal theory is thrown into question. And there is lots of evidence that such transcendence takes place.9 It seems eminently more reasonable to claim that ideas or consciousness and life interpenetrate each other. In fact, to claim that either constitutes separate categories is to engage in reification. To make our “material life” the ontological ground of our ideas about social life is to assume that there is a clear boundary between it and other forms of life: some things are part of material life, some things are not. It won’t do any good to draw a circle around material objects here and claim that these constitute “material life”: obviously, it’s our interactions with these objects that Marx had in mind when he said that social life conditions consciousness. Yet if material life is a matter of interactions with objects and other people engaged in economic activities, when does it end, and other forms of life begin? This isn’t to deny the reality of economic interactions. It is, however, to deny the notion that we can reify economic interactions as an ontologically distinct form of life that acts as the sole wellspring for our ideas. In short, ideas emerge out of life, yet in turn shape that life. If they didn’t, we would be mindless automatons, or at best mere reflections of whatever economic activities we engage in. None of this disputes a vaguer version of Marx’s claim that economic life influences our ideas. Our interests, or at least what we take to be our interests, are for the most part connected to our economic concerns. We often defend these interests tooth and nail, so much so that ideological notions connected to them seep into our preconscious and unconscious assumptions about other parts of life (e.g., politics, intellectual life, even religion). Yet, like every other social relationship, these interests involve notions of value, at least the value of property—that certain things are “mine.” They involve ideals. If ideas were merely epiphenomena of economic structures, they would have a hard time operating diachronically. The synchronic operation of such heavily conditioned ideas would tend to generate a series of identical sets of social relationships. Things would never change, unless natural disasters intervened to destroy a culture, or an oppressed group turned to violence to end their oppression. Yet even in the latter case they would have to “change their minds”

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about how to conduct themselves with regard to their rulers. In short, social change seems to imply the irruption of an idealist moment into the life of economic structures. Even more strongly, I would argue that structure itself requires ideals (as opposed to ideology) to operate. When we tilt Marx sideways, we find that ideas are indeed the product of human social interactions, of which economic life is obviously central. Yet the structures that result from these interactions have force only insofar as they are value-laden ideals, notions about the right or most pleasant or most beautiful way to act. People act socially because they want something in the social world. Now, as I’ll show in chapters 1 and 4, there are some desires—such as those for food and sex—that are so primitive that social theory has a hard time reconstructing them. They have to do with the body and its needs. Yet even these take place according to cultural and economic notions of value, notions that can be reconstructed meaningfully. If we move up the ladder of desire somewhat, we find actors entering the social world in pursuit of other things—money, cultural capital, refinement, entertainment, political power, friendships, marriage, etc. All of these fields are governed by ideals about how to proceed. For example, successful capitalists seek to make their customers happy; successful politicians don’t alienate large portions of the electorate with racist remarks; brides wear white. Admittedly, some of these structuring ideals have a practical value too. Yet even practical success is a value in and of itself (not to mention the fact that “success” is defined socially, and is not just a “phantom” in the individual’s brain). The structures of everyday life require ideals to keep them alive. Values are the fuel that keeps the fire of social structure burning. This critique of Marx also applies to the notion that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of an epoch. The ruling class rules in part through the control of culture and communication; for one thing, it controls the media and cultural industries: newspapers, radio, film, and television. Yet there are cracks in this wall of corporate control of modern means of communication: alternative papers, non-profit radio, democratic state-sponsored radio and television networks such as the BBC and CBC, and the Internet. All these taken together are less enthusiastic about acting as mouthpieces for the ruling class, and often express views at odds with their ideologies. The attack on the globalized economy in our own day is a case in point.

Introduction

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The ruling class does have the power to structure our lives according to the values that it holds dearest, one of which is forms of property, and thus control over the material goods and forms of interaction associated with those goods (e.g., power structures within corporate hierarchies, and sometimes even government). This power works basically on two levels: rarely, by means of brute force, as when the police assault strikers or protestors against some aspect of the ruling class’s power; more commonly, by means of our ideals, our values and perceived interests. If I decide that I have no desire to pursue a career in private enterprise, and I further decide that my needs are quite limited and that I can avoid buying expensive consumer goods, I can largely avoid being engaged with modern corporate life. Yet few people in Western societies are able to make such a decision: they take these needs as such basic values that they become naturalized.10 Marx was right about ideas flowing out of real life, and not out of some Hegelian heaven, but wrong—or too limited—to characterize “real life” as purely and simply economic. We need to dematerialize Marx to make him relevant to social theory today. One way to do this is to reform his notion of “real life” or “social life” so that it includes all types of value, all sorts of capital: economic, cultural, and political. Secondly, and more difficult for Marxists to swallow, social theory has to account for the obvious fact that the ideals that flow out of social life influence that social life in the future—they operate diachronically, over time. My social actions today shape my social actions in the future by means of the ideas that my past social actions created or sustained. As a postscript to my discussion of Marxism, I would like to bring to light a second spectre that will periodically haunt my work, that of postmodernism. Although a many-layered social, cultural, and intellectual phenomenon, the specific spectre I have in mind here is that which whispers to social and historical theorists that there is no truth, that all values are equally valid, that metanarratives are ailing, that the author is dead, and that the individual human subject is an illusion. Although I will address postmodernism as a social phenomenon in chapter 6, it is important to note early on how postmodernist doubts about our capacity to either understand the social present or to reconstruct the historical past lurks phantom-like in the wings of this intellectual production. I see this book very much as an attempt to navigate, Odysseus-like, between the Scylla of a law-governed “objectivist” social science à la Marx and the Charybdis of postmodern relativism.

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The Structure of This Book The first half of this book is largely methodological. In it I present a theory of the social mind, then offer my account of social explanation, apply this account to a subfield of social theory (deviance and subcultures), and finally connect my ideas about social explanation to Collingwood’s philosophy of history. In my first chapter I sketch out a theory of social consciousness that will feed into the broader model of social and historical explanation I wish to put forward in this book. My theory of social consciousness provides a phenomenology of mind for the historical and social theory to come. Part of this involves taking seriously R. G. Collingwood’s suggestion, at the beginning of Speculum Mentis, that all thought exists for the sake of action. Drawing on Collingwood’s, Freud’s, and Gilbert Ryle’s philosophies of mind, Anthony Giddens’s social theory, and the Scottish Enlightenment’s notion of moral sentiments as the ground of ethical life, I suggest a four-part division of our social consciousness between embodiment, passionate action, purposive action, and intellectual action. In addition, I look at theories of rhetoric and language provided by Kenneth Burke and Pierre Bourdieu to suggest that social consciousness involves the use of language as a symbolic form of social action, which produces social rules, social roles, and hierarchical structures. In chapter 2 I outline what I take to be the basic elements of my structural idealism by presenting a tripartite model of social explanation. This model encompasses the intentions of the actor, the (social) meaning of the act, and the social structures implicating and implicated in that act. Overall, I argue that social explanation requires an account of each of these three elements—intention, meaning, and social structure—to be complete. Further, I lay out here a detailed account of the various types of rationality in social explanation, and go on to claim that a social science that pretends to explain human action solely or mainly in terms of instrumental rationality is fundamentally flawed. In chapter 3 I apply this intention/meaning/structure model to two theories of deviance: the labelling or transactionalist view of deviance found in the work of Howard Becker and Stan Cohen, which sees deviance as the product of a “labelling” process undertaken by various “moral entrepreneurs” (i.e., the state, the church, the media) that control most of public discourse, and what I term “New Subcultural Theory,” the Birmingham School of Stuart Hall,

Introduction

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Dick Hebdige, and others, which sees deviance, especially as found in subcultural groups like the mods and the punks in Britain, as the product of an attempt by largely working-class youths to resist the ideological hegemony of the ruling classes. By matching up these two approaches to the template of my structural idealism, I show how they are each only partial theories that blend into each other at their methodological edges, i.e., they fit somewhere within the “meaning” band of my intention/meaning/structure theoretical spectrum. Chapter 4 is my central historiographical chapter. In it I “rehabilitate” Collingwood’s philosophy of history by reshaping it into my structural idealist framework. The basic focus of this chapter is Collingwood’s re-enactment thesis, taken both as an a priori condition for historical knowledge and as a concrete methodological tool. This thesis says that in order for historians to explain the past, they have to re-enact the thoughts of the relevant historical actors in their own minds. I argue that Collingwood’s reenactment thesis can be modified so that it fits into my structural idealist framework. In the second half of the book I shift to applications. In chapters 5 and 6 I look at intellectual history, specifically, Continental philosophy and its shaping by modern and postmodern economic, cultural, and technological forces. In chapters 7 and 8 I look at modern culture. First, I apply structural idealism to the dialectical development of body images in the twentieth century. Lastly, I survey a number of developments in grand theories of culture over the last forty years, using these as raw materials in the forging of a general outline of a structural idealist grand theory of culture. In chapters 5 and 6 I attempt to do some large-scale sociology of knowledge within the spirit of my structural idealism. In chapter 5 I look at the general social and intellectual contours of modernity, claiming that the “essence” of modernity (roughly speaking, most of the last hundred or so years) is the search for meaning in depth, taking Nietzsche, Freud, and the sociology of knowledge as case studies of this search. I show how this search for depth meaning is connected to the structural meta-ideal of rationality. I go on in chapter 6 to show how the essence of the postmodern condition is the abandonment of the search for meaning in depth, speculating on the social and economic conditions that gave rise to this abandonment, looking at Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard as cases in point. This chapter ends with a glance at four of the “selves” that dominate

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the contemporary social/intellectual landscape: the performing self, the cynical self, the narcissistic self, and the private self. In chapter 7 I move away from grounding recent intellectual history in a dialectical development of structural ideals to show how we can see twentieth-century consumer culture as presenting body images to the consuming masses in terms of a dialectic of image and counter-image, once again grounded in these shifting ideals. Starting from this basic premise, I go on to discuss how these images are transmitted by the principal channels of communication of the last hundred years, and then periodize the century in terms of changes in these channels. Lastly, I talk about how body images relate to the question of freedom. In chapter 8 I look at the potential of my structural idealist model as a springboard into cultural critique by examining the social critics Christopher Lasch, Frederic Jameson, Albert Borgmann, Charles Taylor, and John Ralston Saul. I also look at critical discourse analysis and at what I call the “Canadian School of Cultural Critique.” I believe that the dualistic and fluid nature of my model, one that gives credence to the reality of both the material basis and the intellectual and ideological aspects of social consciousness, opens the door to wider possibilities of cultural critique than are possible in more monistic and rigid modes of social and historical understanding, without opening the door to an empty relativism. I end by making some suggestions of what a unified social theory might look like, calling for a revival of the expansive eighteenthcentury use of the term morals. I will now turn my attention to a theory of social consciousness, of the human mind acting socially and historically, that will act as the “metaphysical” foundation for my structural idealism. I begin by asking the question, “how do we approach the social mind?” I thus echo Hobbes’s Leviathan and Hume’s Treatise in giving the reader an account of the mind before moving on to more substantive moral and political questions.

1 The Nature of Social Consciousness A Theory of Mind

The Sympathetic Social Mind At the end of Book I of what is perhaps the greatest single philosophical work in the English language, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, the author expresses his frustration at his failure to reach the comforting port of certainty after his circuitous voyage through the rough waters of a skeptical metaphysics: But before I launch out into those immense depths of philosophy, which lie before me, I find myself inclin’d to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage, which I have undertaken, and which undoubtedly requires the utmost art and industry to be brought to a happy conclusion. Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d ship-wreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculNotes to chapter 1 are on pp. 271-72.

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ties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity. (Hume 1888: 263-64) Hume would have to try another route to reach that port, through an analysis of the human passions, eventually ending up in moral waters (taking morals in the expansive, Enlightenment sense of the term). When navigating through these waters his guiding sextant is the concept of sympathy. He took it as obvious that in all creatures, that prey not upon others, and are not agitated with violent passions, there appears a remarkable desire of company, which associates them together, without any advantages they can ever propose to reap from their union. This is still more conspicuous in man, as being the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of society, and is fitted for it by the most advantages. We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoy’d a-part from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable. Whatever other passions we may be actuated by; pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge or lust; the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor wou’d they have any force, were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others. Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man: Let the sun rise and set at his command: The sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him: He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy. (1888: 363) Without getting into Aristotelian teleology, it seems fairly obvious that we human beings are social animals and that we have some awareness of what can be done and cannot done as social animals. We may not always be sociable, but we are always social, insofar as we share ideas about how to behave with others. The power these

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shared ideas have over us is not due to their logical clarity or distinctness, but to their capacity to move our passions, including not only our egos and interests, but also our sense of responsibility (however attenuated) to other people. The seas and rivers may indeed roll as we please, but the first step on the long road towards a complete explanation of human social behaviour must be the assumption of shared sentiments. There was a methodological side to Hume’s view of the power of sympathy: we can explain the similarity of manners and customs within a nation or people in terms of the principle of sympathy. In his Treatise, Hume observes that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another”: we reflect each other’s emotions, passions, and sentiments, presumably through discourse (1888: 365).1 Indeed, Hume finds there to be no quality of human nature “more remarkable…than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.” To this principle “we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation,” even over the influence of soil and climate (1888: 316-17). Here Hume uses the principle of sympathy more or less in a “methodological idealist” way—people’s actions are determined by ideas, not material circumstances—to account for the uniformity of social behaviour within a specific country or time. Adam Smith agreed with Hume wholeheartedly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in the case of the self-interested egoist, there is a principle of sympathy that moves us to be concerned with the plight of others: How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.…That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. (Smith 1908: 3)

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Like Hume, Smith moves his discussion of sympathy from seeing it as a salutary psychological principle to seeing it as a means by which moral and other social beliefs are communicated. According to Smith, moral approval and disapproval are based on the degree of synchronicity of sentiments between the actor and the person judging them: “If, upon bringing the case home to our own breast, we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to coincide and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them, as proportioned and suitable to their objects; if otherwise, we necessarily disapprove of them, as extravagant and out of proportion” (1908: 18). So in judging others, we try their words and actions in the court of our own sympathetic minds. The principal concern of social theory is to sort out the best theoretical methods to try these words and actions, including sorting out what counts as evidence in this courtroom. Society is grounded in the communication of moral, political, aesthetic, and other sentiments in pre-rational ways to other people. Without supposing sympathy to be the foundation of social action, the theorist would have a very hard time explaining how “society “ comes into existence, being left solely with the rational calculations of Hobbesian human atoms as his or her starting point. The social mind is structured in many ways.2 But to even begin to understand this structure, we must assume that Hume and Smith were largely right in seeing social consciousness (part of what Hume would term “human nature” or “morals”) as founded on sympathy. By “sympathy” I do not mean a sort of weepy hand-holding of a friend in pain, but the social-psychological connection with others and a communication of sentiments by means of this connection. Indeed, this connection may communicate entirely antagonistic sentiments. This connection, as we will soon see, is effected by and large by means of language as a symbolic form of social action. Thus by sympathy I mean simply a pre-rational communication of sentiments of judgment. It is the basis of our individual human consciousness of ourselves as social beings. As Collingwood puts it, the relations “between sentient organisms as such are constituted by the various modes of sympathy which arise out of psychical expression of their feelings.” We can understand the words of others only by attributing to them the idea or ideas which these words arouse in ourselves, by treating them as our own words (1938: 248, 250). To understand the words or actions of others, we must first “sympathize” with the motives, reasons, feelings, and so on affecting the person being judged, and make

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judgments based on this constellation of prior factors. It is all too easy to withhold this understanding by refusing to enter the psychological universe of the Other. In short, judgment abhors a vacuum: it requires a network of shared social meanings between judges and judged. Social life is constituted by this network of shared meanings. Social consciousness involves the sympathetic communication of sentiments of judgment. This communication is at the heart of the social mind. Consciousness can be defined as “social” (as opposed to personal) insofar as it intends, or points toward, shared objects, objects that are social in the sense that they are shared. To intend purely private objects is to be non-social, if not anti-social. This intending of shared objects, if mixed up with sentiments of some sort, points toward some sort of action. So thought and action in the social realm cannot be clearly separated. I will use the term thought/action to refer to the various ways of acting socially. Isolated thinking may either intend nothing, or not seek to “act” socially in any way. But all social consciousness, to be social, is both intentional and active. We point toward objects with our thoughts, and attach sentiments of value to these objects. And, as previously argued, social consciousness is sympathetic in Smith’s and Hume’s sense: our minds reflect our collective judgments back and forth in an endless swirl that acts as the raw material out of which is constructed social rules, roles, structures, and hierarchies. My model of social consciousness can be represented as a sliding scale of forms, with each form linked in an equilibrial flow with the forms before and after it. So my model will present an organic, layered model of the social mind, one full of ebbs and flows, unlike the models of the mind coming of out contemporary cognitive science, which appeal to the machine-like logic of the computer. We start with the individual sympathetic social mind, which acts in the social world by interacting with other people. This interaction produces meaning through discourse, chiefly by means of using language as a symbolic form of social action. The social world exists in part due to our creation of mutually comprehensible symbols, through a sharing of values (or at least an understanding of how our values differ). Discourse produces social rules of many varieties, some of which flow together into constellations we call social roles, sets of fairly stable rules which define a person’s lot in life (e.g., in terms of their profession, their being a husband or wife, a friend or an enemy, etc.). Finally, some of these constellations of rules issue

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in uneven relationships between one type of role and another, where a person in role A can act as the author of the social rules for persons in roles X, Y, and Z. In this case we see how some people have power over others. And when power comes into play, it is inevitable that hierarchies are constructed. And these hierarchies cycle back, reshaping the various forms of action of the individual social mind. The model of social consciousness I will defend in this chapter appears in diagrammatic form in Chart 2. It should be seen as a fluid and interlocking series of concepts whose highest level turns back on its lowest, like the proverbial snake eating its tail. I’ve indicated the sections of this chapter that each level of the model correspond to, and the principal theorists I rely on to describe each level. Chart 2. A Model of Social Consciousness (The sections in this chapter where each element is discussed in greater detail are indicated in parentheses, along with the principal theorists discussed there) ➣ The individual Sympathetic Social Mind [Bodily, Passionate, Purposive, and

Intellectual Thought/Action] (2-5/Smith, Hume, Freud, Collingwood) ➣ Interactive Discourse, which creates social meaning; including Language

as Symbolic Social Action (6/Gadamer, Burke, Bourdieu) ➣ Social Rules (7/Ricoeur, Ryle, Collingwood) ➣ Social Roles, which are semi-stable, spatio-temporally

situated collections of rules followed by a social agent (7/Goffman) ➣ Power (8/Van Dijk, Bourdieu) ➣ Hierarchy, and other forms of

social structure (8) [back to the individual mind]

Embodiment The phenomenological starting point of any model of human consciousness is the body. As James put it, the “sense of my bodily existence, however obscurely recognized as such, may then be the absolute original of my conscious selfhood, the fundamental perception that I am” (1904: 41). Embodiment is the basic level of social interaction. We exist as a body in a space filled with other bodies. We are a body, regardless of what else we are. We are, to use religious language, “incarnated” into the world.

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We can speak of bodily thought/action insofar as our body has basic needs and drives, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire, security, and so on, and seeks to fulfill these needs and drives in its social interactions. Of course, the nature of social interaction drives us almost instantaneously beyond the unsullied pursuit of physical satisfaction alone in all but the most extreme cases (e.g., the man dying of thirst who stumbles half-dead into a bar in the desert and gropes for a glass of water), leading us to express our bodily drives in passions and purposes that embody these drives in more complex forms of discourse. We do not, under normal conditions, simply lunge at objects of sexual desire, hunger, or thirst without plan, purpose, or etiquette. Indeed, there are usually elaborate social conventions and rules surrounding the pursuit and consumption of these objects. On this level we are directly aware of our body and its surrounding environment. In this state of awareness, we feel the sensuous and perceptive flux immediately around us, considered in and of itself. Freud’s tripartite division of levels of consciousness comes in handy here. Bodily action straddles the psychic dimensions of the unconscious (that which is not before the mind but is operative all the same), the preconscious (that which is not before the mind but is recoverable by “paying attention”), and the conscious (that which is before the mind), but excludes self-consciousness (being aware of something that is before the mind).3 Awareness of body is not reflective, but immediate. Once it becomes reflective, we become aware of a self with bodily drives, and move up the ladder to higher forms of thought/action. The closest we could come to understanding what pure bodily awareness would be like is to imagine a wild animal held in the vice grip of a primitive instinct, like a hungry wolf on the hunt, or an angry lion defending its pride. As Collingwood points out, it is probably most useful to see mind and body as the same “thing,” expressed in two different ways (1971: 11). This parallels the point that Ryle makes in his Concept of Mind about mind and body belonging to different logical categories, categories that we use different types of language to describe. Mental categories are distinct from physical ones: there is indeed no point in looking for universities or team spirit in academic buildings or cricket bats. Both mentalistic and physicalistic language can be used to describe the same human action and neither be mistaken, or at least not be mistaken in the same way. Yet to do

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social theory, we have to leave Ryle’s quibbles about category errors behind. Social actions are performed by incarnated selves saturated with ideas about what they’re doing. I won’t even attempt to solve the mind/body problem here. My point is simply that it doesn’t need to be solved for us to suppose that the body and its drives can be examined as a separate theoretical category from other levels of thinking and action. If we isolate bodily action from other levels of thought/action, we find that it is unwilled and pre-purposive. On its most primitive level, the psychical expression of feelings is uncontrollable. A grimace, physiologically speaking, is indeed an action, but it simply comes and overwhelms us (Collingwood 1938: 234). Our embodied selves exist prior to reason, intention, or purpose. In terms of distinguishing feeling from thought (this distinction being yet another useful analytic fiction), we can follow Collingwood (1938: 159) in comparing the flux of feeling to the flow of a river, and thought to the relative solidity and permanence of the soil and rocks that make up the channel. Similarly, in terms of distinguishing our incarnated from our passionate, purposive, and intellectual selves, the separation is no clearer than that between the watery flux of our bodily drives and the sandy banks of the passions and purposes that they give birth to (not to mention the rocky islands of the intellectual apparatus that we invent to glorify, excuse, or justify them). Analytical thought, including logic, gives us the power to separate different types of feeling, bodily drives from mathematical calculations, premeditated crimes from crimes of passion. Yet these separations come into being largely after the fact: in their primitive form, we feel them all mixed together, our attention allowing us to pick out one from all the others (as when we concentrate on a mathematical equation and ignore the hunger calling us to lunch). When we write the “history” of embodiment as a pure and separate form of human experience, we cannot do anything more than record what Benedetto Croce called a “chronicle,” a recitation of various states without any conceptual or narrative structure to tie them together. This chronicle would consist of a list of statements like “hunger pang X was caused by the firing of neuron 9234 in Y’s brain,” without any information about how they are connected to Y’s emotions, reasons, or plans. To move to a true narrative, we need to connect physical events to the inner acts of human minds across bridges of time. We need to postulate passions or purposes on the

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part of the agent that can be reconstructed by third parties. The reconstruction of these passions and purposes moves us beyond pure incarnation, to my second and third levels of thought/action.4

Passionate Action On this level of action, which subsumes embodied drives at the same time as it points ahead to purpose and the intellect, people act on the basis of their passions. This is not to suggest that purposive and intellectual action, contra Hume, is not driven in some way by the passions, but instead that we can analytically separate the passionate aspect of purposive and intellectual action from its other components. All the same, there would be no human acts at all if it were not for the passions that drive us to act (whether it is to court an object of desire, conquer a province, or invent the atomic bomb), just as there would be no human passions if it were not for the living body that serves as their locus. Once again, we have to remember that the individual social actor always exists as an organic whole, on all four levels of consciousness at the same time. At its most basic level, we can speak of a feeling as having two elements: a physiological or sensuous element, such as sensing a colour, or the twitch that causes one to grimace, and the affective charge attached to that element, e.g., the unpleasant sense that accompanies the grimace (Collingwood 1971: 18) When we have a “feeling,” there is something within us that responds to our physiological change emotively. We can also speak of feelings as radiating out from a central focal region, where they are more precise and intense, toward an outer zone of dimness and confusion (Collingwood 1971: 21-22). This regionalization of feeling is both spatial and temporal: one’s hatred of a despised enemy decreases as he or she leaves the room and walks away; it also fades as time passes, unless he or she reappears to excite it once again. When a given feeling, whether of cheerfulness, whimsy, or depression, invades our consciousness and colours our entire present experience, we can speak of a meta-feeling, or mood, as dominating us. Yet moods, like feelings, eventually fade away too, although unlike feelings they are usually nonspatial, i.e., not continuously dependent on any physically immediate cause (although they can certainly be triggered by such a cause). A person emerges from a state of simple feeling by an act of conceptual and practical consciousness: they identify the feeling that is

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affecting them, and decide to do something about it (Collingwood 1971: 48). This leads to action taken in its more traditional sense: i.e., doing something of a physical nature that can be observed (at least potentially) by others. Collingwood says that appetite “is what thought makes out of feeling when thought develops by its own activity from mere consciousness to conceptual thinking” (1971: 52). We can call an unreflective practical decision to act on an appetite or bodily drive a passionate decision, and its result a passionate action. At this level we see human beings passionately acting on embodied drives in the social world. It is here that we can speak of desire, of projecting onto some object—the “object of desire”—some passion or other, whether it is love, hate, possessiveness, hunger, or even indifference. The difference between appetite and desire is that whereas appetite is a mere wanting X, desire is knowing that you want X (Collingwood 1971: 74). Borrowing from Freud, passionate action is where cathexis takes place, where the amoeba-like arms of the human passions reach out into the world to embrace the desired object over some period of time. Again, as with embodiment, passionate social consciousness straddles the mental spectrum unconscious/preconscious/conscious. It would be lax at this point not to address one of the central issues of psychoanalytic theory, as it is of great importance to the way that passionate and purposive thought/action interface with each other. In his passing salute to psychoanalysis, Collingwood speaks of its value in exposing the various ways in which consciousness can be corrupted. Specifically, he mentions the disowning of experiences, which we call repression; the ascription of our experiences to others, or projection; their consolidation into a homogeneous mass, or dissociation; and the building up of a bowdlerized experience that we take for our own, or fantasy-building (1938: 218-19). We can see these corruptions of consciousness as cases of our unconscious passions distorting our purposive and intellectual thought/action. The classic case of a corruption of consciousness is the first, repression, a forced return of our basic sexual and aggressive drives to their home in the underworld of the id. In his view of the psyche, Freud saw the conscious and perceptual part of the mind, the ego, acting as a constitutional monarch over the psyche as a whole, “without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by

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Parliament” (Freud 1962: 45). It is a psychic figurehead as far as repression goes: it has to use borrowed forces (aided by the internalized punishing father, the superego) to keep in hand the reins of psychic power and hold in check the id. The result of repression on a social level is a discontented civilization, one where our incarnate drives, especially our sexual ones, are frustrated by social mores. As Freud says, it is easy for a barbarian to be happy, but much harder for a civilized person (1969: 58, 42). Purely passionate actors would be free and happy social agents if they could avoid worrying about the consequences of their actions. They would wear, in spirit, the Ring of Gyges. Yet a society of such actors would, no doubt, be full of nasty, brutish, and short lives. When we leave the state of nature of our unrepressed childhood, we leave behind our unregulated passions, picking and choosing which of these we will pursue. We turn some of them into purposes, suppressing or repressing the rest. By adopting purposes, we allow those passions to be satisfied in a social environment full of other actors seeking to fulfill their own passions.5

Purposive Action So human beings are incarnated things who desire various objects to satisfy their bodily drives. Most people who desire objects form plans to obtain them. We act according to preconceived notions about the point of our actions. When we act by forming plans to attain an object of desire, whether we successfully carry out the plan or not, we can say that we are acting purposively, or, more simply, that we are doing something on purpose. This purposiveness can be either conscious or self-conscious. Needless to say, not all acts are purposive (e.g., the unconscious swatting of a fly that lands on the back of your neck), and not all purposes are clearly thought out before we take action. But once we decide to formulate a plan that involves one or more future actions directed towards an object of desire, we can say that we have a purpose in mind. This object could be anything: food, a sexual partner, a job, or the solution of a mathematical equation. To be an object of desire, it’s enough that we want it. Indeed, once we get to the level of purpose we can speak of an action being moral or immoral, for we can identify a prior state of mind (whether we call it a reason, a cause, or a purpose) that led to the action and which can be judged as fair or foul.

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“Goodness” is a thing of the mind bestowed upon whatever possesses it by the mind’s practical activity in the form of a desire, and discovered by the mind’s reflective activity acting purposively. Collingwood suggests that we can answer the question “why did you do that?” three ways: (a) because it is useful, (b) because it is right, or (c) because it is my duty (Collingwood 1971: 82). Whether this list is exhaustive of all possible descriptions of human purposes is hard to say. Yet we can say that social consciousness is easiest to understand and reconstruct as rule-governed, involving people collectively doing or not doing “the right thing”; while personal or biographical consciousness is more easily described in terms of people acting according to utility or duty.6 Social roles are very much constituted by groups of actors who chose to do “the right thing.” In general, there is an important sense in which past human acts must have a purposive component to be fully reconstructible at a later date. This is obviously of crucial importance to the historian, who must assume some sort of teleological component in human acts if these acts are to be understood. Although we can certainly understand goals based on personal utility or a sense of duty, it seems to be a reasonable first hypothesis that actions done out of a sense of their “rightness” (taking this rightness as a social thing) are of the most interest to social theorists who look at purposive action. We can explain human purposes either in terms of reasons or causes. Even when we explain an action in terms of a person’s character or motives, we are identifying a reason for the action (Ryle 1949: 89). On the level of purposes, we must look first to the reasons stated by the relevant actors as our starting point in social explanation. Collingwood prefers rational to causal explanations of action, partly on the ground that the point of history and philosophy is to study the mind in its logical and rational mode, leaving to psychology a study of its irrational, sensuous elements. This preference for rational explanations is tied to his re-enactment thesis, as we’ll see in chapter 4: for history to be scientifically rigorous, it must be able to reconstruct the past in convincing fashion. It cannot do this with human passions and physical drives, claims Collingwood, so it’s best to limit our claims to “knowing” the history of these. Yet just as purposes cannot be reduced to purely physical processes, we cannot understand them purely in term of reasons either. As Ricoeur suggests, “one can see how fluid the border is between reason-for-acting, forward-looking motive, mental cause,

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and cause as such (a grimacing face made me jump). The criterion of the question why? is therefore firm; its application surprisingly flexible” (1992: 69). Indeed, the grammar of notions like “drive,” “affect,” “disposition,” and “emotion” can force us to articulate the rational and intentional character of an action into a type of causal explanation: the teleological (Ricoeur 1992: 78). Perhaps it is better to echo what Ryle and Collingwood have said about the mind/body split: that rational and causal explanations of human purposes are just two different ways of describing the same thing. Or better still, to realize that the divisions between the body and our passions, purposes, and intellect I’ve set out in this chapter are purely heuristic, and in real life fade into each other at their edges. Only when we have got to the level of purposive thought/action in our journey through the levels of the social mind can we speak of choosing reasons for an action at all, for only here does a judging consciousness first appear. Our passionate consciousness does not reason, but grasps, gropes, or lunges. Our intellectual consciousness only reasons, from time to time recording these reasonings on paper or a computer file (as I am doing right now). It is our purposive consciousness that chooses to accept one or several reasons to act over others, although only the most dogged defender of free will would suggest that this choice is undetermined by physical and psychological background factors. Purposive consciousness is the lynchpin of social theory written in the mode of Weber, Collingwood, and Winch. We can only verstehe (understand), in Weber’s sense, an action done for a subjective reason. Yet there is more to said by social theory.

Intellectual Action Last but not least, we come to intellectual action, or thinking abstractly. Intellectual action is at least conscious, if not self-conscious (as it should always be within the realm of philosophy). It is usually associated with theorizing about the world in some sense, as when a sociologist theorizes about society, a psychologist about the mind, or a historian about the past. So this is “reason” taken in the good old rationalist sense, the sort of reason that Hume tried to deconstruct in the Treatise. Hume was right in saying that our reason is the slave of our passions, but wrong in thinking that this was the end of the story. It is best to see reason as a sort of travel guide for our passions and purposes: the tourist (i.e., the person of pas-

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sions and purposes) decides what province or country to visit, the guide (i.e., our reason) makes the travel arrangements and chooses the most interesting local sites to visit. More generally, intellectual action, “reason” in the traditional sense, is an analytically separable form of thought/action, but one that very much rests on the foundations of our incarnate selves guided by passions and purposes. How does rationality enter into individual social consciousness? We can sum this up in terms of a “rubric of rationality,” which follows: “Given purpose X motivated or driven by passion Y, what is the best, i.e., the most rational, means to fulfill this purpose and therefore satisfy this passion?” I believe that, outside perhaps of someone contemplating an abstract theoretical problem “in one’s closet,” as Hume would say, this rubric governs all human intellectual thought/action, and is thus the principal way that rationality enters into social consciousness. The problem that arises in debates over social rationality comes when we try to define the word “best” in the rubric above: do we mean by “best” that which is instrumentally efficient? or that which tends to produce a whole and authentic self? or aims at some sense of communal organic good? or at a transcendent religious sense of the good? These are questions concerning the moral content of rational decision making, a content that varies, but all of which can be theoretically contained within the structure suggested by my rubric of rationality. We can here follow Collingwood’s distinction (1971: 100) between theoretical reason, which involves making up your mind that, e.g., a given proposition is true or false, and practical reason, which involves making up your mind to, e.g., fly a kite, invent a perpetual motion machine, etc. Intellectual action can be conveniently fitted into Collingwood’s category of theoretical reason, while practical reason neatly covers purposive action (and perhaps the fringes of passionate action). Theoretical reasoning, whether or not it’s oriented to immediate movements in physical space, is a form of action and is directed towards purposes, motivated by passions, and takes place, in a curious way, “within” a body. The failure to see human beings as either integrated wholes or as fields where our various psychic and physical forces do battle led to Descartes’s famous dualist dilemma, and Ryle’s somewhat less famous attack on the Cartesian solution as a category mistake. Just as idealism and structuralism each paint only an element of a larger picture with respect to social and historical theory, dualism and physicalist

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monism each capture only an element of a larger truth with respect to being human. The former sees consciousness as autonomous, but overestimates the degree of its ontological independence; the latter too quickly reduces the mental to the physical, failing to account for the qualia that constitute most of what is interesting in our social lives. The ghosts in the machine of life, art, and culture are real, productive of things that are both great and horrible. We have no need to believe in detached Cartesian egos floating around us to know this to be true. Intellectual action takes place through various forms of discourse, the most important of which is symbolic language. Spoken or written languages are the most important cases of such symbolism, although not everything within a spoken or written language is symbolic. Symbolism is intellectualized language (speaking figuratively, the “expression” of intellectual emotions). Intellectual language has both expressiveness and meaning: as language, it expresses emotion; as symbolism, it refers to the thought whose emotional charge it is (Collingwood 1938: 269). And we must not forget that there are many activities that display qualities of the mind, but are not intellectual operations, e.g., playing a sport (which can display a sense of physical space) or singing a song (which displays emotional depth) (Ryle 1949: 26). Having said all this, intellectual action refers to the level of social consciousness that involves theorizing, in Collingwood’s sense of knowing that something is the case. It is the symbolic expression of feelings, passions, purposes, and facts, and of the relations between them. In Speculum Mentis, Collingwood speculated that the map of the mind could be divided into five provinces of knowledge: art, religion, science, history, and philosophy. He saw these five provinces as distinct concrete forms of experience and activities of the cognitive mind, but at the same time as not autonomous or mutually exclusive, but as dialectically linked together (1924: 39, 306). To bring together my discussion of the social mind, I will mirror Collingwood’s dialectical scale of the forms of knowledge by suggesting that we see the four levels of social consciousness as a dialectically linked scale of forms that interpenetrate each other in real human actions. Contra Sartre’s rigid division of the in-itself (inert and determined physical things) from the for-itself (free human consciousness) as a description of being-in-the-world, social consciousness is a continuum of these four levels dialectically linked

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to each other. I separate them only because I believe this separation to be heuristically useful when one is trying to build either a social theory or a philosophy of history. The main reason I want to separate these four levels of thought/action is to sort out which elements of human action can be described, explained, and/or reconstructed, and which ones cannot. Analytic separations in the philosophy of mind are only useful against the background of the realization that human thought/action takes place within an arena where physical, psychic, and spiritual forces are constantly warring, where even sleeping, and perchance dreaming, offers no escape from the conflicting drives of being human. Be that as it may, they can help the theorist to understand how human beings behave and should be at the core of any truly persuasive social or historical hermeneutic. Action is that aspect of human doing that calls for narration or storytelling. And it is the function of narration to determine the “who of action,” to construct a self. When we write a narrative, the internal dialectic of character transmutes chance into fate, constructing the identity of the character (Ricouer 1992: 147).7 The fate of individual characters, or social actors, is constructed out of speculations on and reconstructions of their goals, purposes, and ideals. Life plans take shape “thanks to a back-and-forth movement between more or less distant ideals, which must now be specified, and the weighing of advantages and disadvantages of the choice of a particular life plan on the level of practices” (Ricouer 1992: 157-58). These ideals are partly individual and intentional, and partly structural, as we will see in the next chapter. They are mostly expressed in language as a symbolic form of social action, to which I now turn.

Language as Symbolic Social Action At it most basic level, language is an imaginative activity that expresses emotion by means of some bodily organ (Collingwood 1938: 225, 235). If we engage in a bit of whimsical archaeology surrounding the origins of language, we might guess that the first attempts at regularized communication between proto-humans involved physical gestures accompanied perhaps by grunts and squeals. It is in this sense that Collingwood might not be too far off the mark in calling dance the mother of all languages (1938: 244), insofar as dance expresses emotion through purely physical ges-

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tures. As we move from practical to theoretical consciousness, language becomes more and more symbolic, torn from the somatic and passionate foundations that fuel this expressiveness. Symbolic, intellectual language presupposes imaginative language. But those who call for a purely symbolic language, where each symbol has a single invariant meaning or use (as in symbolic logic), tend to forget this: without a significant emotion to express, even the most pristinely perfect symbolic language is pointless, an empty shell.8 “The grammatical and logical articulations of intellectualized language are no more fundamental to language as such than the articulations of bone and limb are fundamental to living tissue” (Collingwood 1938: 236). In this sense, I believe that an analytic philosophy uninformed by phenomenology and the findings of the social sciences (especially sociological and political theorists) can never provide us with an adequate social theory, for it seems incapable of understanding the meanings behind human action, meanings tied up with emotions and values. If we call any attempt to communicate meaning to other living beings, by whatever means, “discourse,” we can call “language” any attempt to formulate discourse into a formal code of marks, sounds, or gestures with which diverse people can communicate with each other. It might sound almost trivial to make this claim, but human thought/action becomes meaningful, generally speaking, only when it expresses passions and purposes by means of some form of symbolic language. As Wittgenstein observed, the meanings of words and phrases uttered or written in everyday life vary with their use. They are not rigorously invariant (as in formal symbolic languages such as logic and computer codes). Yet their use shares family resemblances to the degree necessary for others to comprehend our actions as the expressions of passions and purposes.9 We can establish a link here with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, taken with a grain of salt. He suggests that language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the allembracing form of the constitution of the world” (1976: 3). If we mean by “world” our social world as constituted by symbolic and expressive language, then our being-in-the-world is indeed constituted by language. He further suggests that it is not our judgments but our prejudices that constitute our being, and that language is a reservoir of tradition whereby we exist and perceive our world (1976: 9, 29). I believe that Gadamer is half right here: it would be

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more proper to say that our judgments and our prejudices (which come from tradition) are indissolubly interconnected, assuming we take the word prejudice not in its English sense of “unfair bias,” but in the German sense of Vorurteil, or in French préjugé (prejudgment). Our prejudgments, our basic presuppositions, affect our judgments, and vice versa.10 When we make a judgment we do not make it in a vacuum, but draw from a reservoir of past judgments that have congealed into social rules and norms. Judgments are ontologically grounded in this reservoir, but they can also transform it (or else social changes would never take place). Another useful way of seeing language as a form of symbolic action is through rhetorical theory. Kenneth Burke, who originated the notion of language as symbolic action, has put forward a rich set of theoretical notions that have significance outside his ostensible subject matter of rhetoric. For Burke, “Man, qua man, is a symbol user. In this respect, every aspect of his reality is likely to be seen through a fog of symbols” (Burke 1969: 136). Our being-in-the-world, to engage in some Gadamerian excess, is thus both linguistic and symbolic. Within a symbolic system, we transcend animality and become human, entering the realm of symbolic action. Within this system we often attempt to persuade others to do things. And wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, just as wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 166, 160). Burke’s definition of rhetoric combines the classical notion of rhetoric with modern social-scientific ideas: rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents.” It is “rooted in an essential function of language itself…the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (qtd. in Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 157). Social consciousness is not entirely symbolic, although insofar as we can understand it, it is. Symbols constitute the realm of the social for all human beings. Given that most social action isn’t conducted under a direct threat of violence, we can see how important persuasion, and thus rhetoric, is in creating the ideals that we intuit and use to shape our lives. Persuasion in the social realm makes use of symbols that the persuader hopes we share. We see this process at work in family life, in television commercials, in political campaigns, and in romantic relationships. The “outsider” is someone who explicitly rejects the symbols common to the collectivity in question, who says, “these things mean nothing to me!”

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Burke suggests that a complete understanding of the motive of a given rhetorical act, a given act of persuasion, can be given only in terms of his pentad, which consists of act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. The “act” is any conscious, purposive action; the “scene” is the ground, location, or situation where the act takes place; the “agent” is the group or individual who acts; “agency” refers to the means or instruments used to accomplish the act; and the “purpose” is the overt or covert purpose the agent has for performing the act (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 168-70). Burke is describing rhetorical acts with his pentad. But it could be adapted quite neatly to social and historical explanation, especially a Collingwoodian or Winchian sort of explanation that emphasizes conscious and rational action. Similarly, it could be used to explain at least what I call purposive thought/action along the structural idealist lines I’m arguing for in this book. His pentad gives us the structure of a purposive act, from both external and internal points of view. Burke’s pentad offers the social theorist a rhetorical model to explain human motivation. Yet human beings for Burke are not only symbol-using animals, but also beings that aspire towards perfection in word and deed. We have ideals. In fact, we are haunted by these ideals in our everyday actions, only rarely living up to them. Burke’s definition of a human being incorporates this striving for perfection: Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection. (Burke, qtd. in Foss, Foss, and Trapp 1985: 182) The fact of our being rotten with perfection, through the use of the “negative” in judgment, plays a structuring role in social consciousness. We negate the bad, the ugly, the inappropriate, the inefficient, and affirm their opposites. These negations create the ideals that collectively guide human action. Pierre Bourdieu expands on Burke’s notion of language as symbolic action by pointing out how this action, by creating a symbolic capital that gives different weight to the linguistic actions of different agents, creates a symbolic domination (1991: 72). Bourdieu points out that from a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can

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say anything. But from a sociological point of view, they cannot, except at their peril. A private in the armed forces cannot order a general to attack, nor students correct their own tests, nor children tell their parents that they cannot have dessert if they do not behave. One cannot separate an act of speech from its conditions of execution, from the social world that it is part of. The claim to act on this world “through words, i.e., magically, is more or less crazy or reasonable depending on whether it is more or less based on the objectivity of the social world” (Bourdieu 1991: 74-75). So the use of language as symbolic action is not just a freely willed, spontaneous, creative act, but also a tapping into already existing rules to express an emotion or achieve a purpose, which (as we will see) produces hierarchical structures.11 But before we leave this discussion of language, it is important to take note of Ricoeur’s ontological vehemence in favour of the priority of the flesh as a mediator between the self and the external world. It is upon a prelinguistic relation “between my flesh localized by the self, and a world accessible or inaccessible to the ‘I can’ that a semantics of action is finally to be constructed which will not lose its way in the endless exchange of language games” (Ricoeur 1992: 325). Our embodied selves are always “there,” at the core of social interaction and consciousness. The body always returns, in the form of embodied drives and the passions they support. The most sublime mathematical thinking is quickly interrupted by a sexually attractive passing body; the deepest metaphysical speculations are dissolved by a pang of hunger at lunchtime. Indeed, symbolic language is often merely a sophisticated means by which the flesh seeks out its objects of desire. The psychic wheel constantly spins back from intellectual thought/action to its corporeal ground.

Social Rules and the Creation of Social Roles Language games move us to another level of social interaction, where conscious and unconscious social rules are constructed, obeyed, or violated. Social action is governed by what Ricoeur calls “constitutive rules,” rules that turn what in itself is a meaningless physical or linguistic act into a social meaningful one. An example is the gesture of shifting the position of a pawn on a chessboard: it would not count as a “move” without a constitutive rule that gives the gesture its meaning as a move. Constitutive rules are not moral

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rules in themselves; they simply rule over the meaning of particular gestures, making them “count as” waving hello, hailing a taxi, etc. But they point towards moral rules (Ricoeur 1992: 154-55). Constitutive rules constitute the meaning of a given act as a social act. Without constitutive rules, no one could use language as a symbolic form of social action, nor could the social theorist reconstruct such actions as meaningful. We can observe many intelligent performances in social life without their involving explicitly formulated rules or criteria (Ryle 1949: 30). Indeed, the following of rules often becomes second nature in a skilled performer: we know that someone understands the game of chess and is a good player by observing the moves he or she makes and avoids. This is equally true of political leadership, economic wheeling and dealing, or barroom flirtation. Yet there is more to social action than the mere following of rules. In the chess example, we can follow Ryle in noting there is a great difference between following the rules of the game and applying tactical principles to the game to achieve victory: we cannot reduce chess strategy to a mere following of rules (1949: 41, 78). Skilled performance involves an intuitive, aesthetic, or strategic grasp of the ebb and flow of the activity under question, especially if it has game-like qualities. Most social action is not merely the following of rules, although it in some sense instantiates these rules. Also, we aren’t always able to explicitly formulate the rules underlying social action in the same way as we can lay out, point by point, the rules of a game like chess or a sport like hockey. Social action also instantiates what Giddens calls “practical consciousness,” which refers to “the tacit knowledge that is skilfully employed in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively” (1982: 31). Every day of our lives we instantiate this practical consciousness in a hundred little ways—how do deal with one’s boss or underlings, how to talk to a stranger, how to cross a busy street, how to interact with clerks in a grocery market, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Indeed, imagine the cultural outsider (perhaps the “Martian” of philosophical speculation) who arrives in our city one day bereft of this tacit knowledge, but aware of English vocabulary and grammar. The outsider might wind up starving to death (being unaware how and where to purchase food), being arrested for theft (growing hungry and just stealing some food), or getting run over by a car while crossing the street. So social life is an interlocking web of rules of

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both types: ones we can explicitly formulate, like that a green stoplight means “go,” and ones we’re only implicitly aware of, like how to interact with a person in a given social role. Rule-governed social action, the product of practical consciousness, can be contrasted with other sorts of action. As Collingwood observes, regularian explanations are partial ones: they never explain why someone does this specific act, just why they do an act of this kind (1971: 115-16). We can speak of regularian social action when a person in situation X decides to perform action Y because it is the right thing to do, given these circumstances. One contrast to regularian thinking is a consciousness of duty, where one might think of oneself as an individual, unique agent in an individual, unique situation performing an individual, unique action because one is compelled by duty (Collingwood 1971: 128). We can still attempt to understand this way of thinking as a case of a person acting purposively without ever reaching the level of instantiating a social rule in his or her acts. Yet even dutiful actions take place against a social background of rule-following actors and acts. It would not be too hyperbolic to metaphorically describe social consciousness as a web of social rules that we agents have spun for ourselves, over time, only to find ourselves (or later generations of actors) caught in this web, circumscribed by seemingly independent structures not of our own making.12 Social roles are more or less stable collections of rules situated in specific spaces and times followed by individual social agents, for the most part only semi-consciously. One can play the role of a student, a professor, a mother, father, chess player, artist, and so on by following the rules associated with each social game (e.g., the artist by living in a garret, painting, and trying to sell the work; the mother by caring for her children, etc.). How one follows these rules varies, just as how different chess players play the game varies. Yet these rules roughly define the social roles that define mothers from non-mothers, artists from non-artists, as so on. Most people’s lives are interlocking constellations of these roles, like links in a chain. Erving Goffman’s sociology is helpful here in showing how social roles are constituted. For Goffman, when actors take on a social role, they find that a particular front has already been established for it. The actors must both perform the task they aim at and maintain the front at the same time (Goffman 1959: 27). Actors also project a definition of the situation

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that attempts to buttress the legitimacy of their front/role. This projection involves an implicit or explicit claim on a person of a specific kind, which “automatically exerts a moral demand upon others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect” (13). In other words, a person performing a social role is making a moral claim that others respect this role and obey the rules associated with it (e.g., in the case of the teacher, listening attentively to her lecture; in the case of the policeman, according him the respect formally associated with an agent of law enforcement). The performances of social roles, in Burke’s sense, are rotten with perfection: they project idealized versions of agents and their acts. But they also invoke the negative, again in Burke’s sense, by concealing or underplaying those activities, facts, and motives that are incompatible with this idealized version of the agents and their products (Goffman: 48). Through the arts of impression management, social agents construct a series of roles by which they constitute themselves, in large part by using language as a symbolic means of social action. And those around the agents engage in similar attempts at self-constitution through impression management. Through this impression management, communicative acts are translated into moral ones: the “impressions that the others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral character” (Goffman 1959: 249). These claims are claims to some degree of perfection, to an ideal or ideals embodied in the agent’s social acts. The result of all this rule following and role creation is social consciousness. In its simplest terms, we can see social consciousness as a will to exist socially, as a form of practical consciousness to become a member and to go on being a member of that society (Collingwood 1971: 139). I don’t want to imply here that social agents sign some sort of social contract, either really or tacitly, but simply that insofar as their actions involve the following of social rules or the cooperation with others, they embody a social consciousness. If all we mean by “social contract” is a preconscious or unconscious acceptance of a collections of social rules, then the contract theorists are right. But the social contract is not primarily the product of the rational deliberation of a group of independent agents. It is embodied in symbolic language, inherited rules and roles, and the passive acceptance of certain regulatory ideals as natural.

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As Ricoeur notes, to a large extent “the identity of a person or a community is made up of these identifications with values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which the person or community recognizes itself” (1992: 121). Social practices can be seen as moments when the character of the individual and the roles and structures of that individual’s society mesh together in a multitude of ways. The result is social consciousness, as evidenced in social rules and roles. But these roles do not exist on a level playing field. Inevitably, some roles are constituted as having power over others, and hierarchies of roles (and thus of social agents) are formed.

Power, Hierarchy, and Social Structure When we attempt to link together discourse, rules, roles, and domination in social interactions, we need some sort of theoretical interface. Van Dijk, a critical discourse analyst,13 suggests that such an interface can be provided by what he calls “social cognition.” The exercise of power involves control of the public mind, of these social cognitions: Socially shared representations of societal arrangements, groups and relations, as well as mental operations such as interpretation, thinking, and arguing, inferencing and learning, among others, together define what we understand by social cognition. [They] mediate between microand macro-levels of society, between discourse and action, between the individual and the group. Although embodied in the minds of individuals, social cognitions are social because they are shared and presupposed by group members, monitor social action and interaction, and because they underlie the social and cultural organization of society as a whole. (van Dijk 257) One of the major functions of a dominant discourse is to manufacture consensus, the acceptance by the relatively powerless of the legitimacy of the dominance of the powerful. We can speak of “hegemony” when the minds of the dominated are influenced through political ideology and mass culture to accept the interests of the powerful as their own. In the present day one could say (with John Ralston Saul) that a corporatist ideology has achieved a par-

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tial hegemony. This is not to claim that there are not many people who oppose this hegemony. Simply put, to claim that corporatism has achieved a hegemonic status in our society is to claim that it is pushed as political “common sense” in the media and educational institutions, and assumed as the starting point of casual conversations and over coffee and toasted bagels in local diners. Van Dijk’s definition of social cognitions and his description of how these contribute to hierarchies of the dominant and the dominated plays neatly into what I term structural ideals, the collection of ideal social types that structure everyday life. Like van Dijk’s social cognitions, my structural ideals structure social consciousness and thus social action by providing actors with a series of presuppositions (usually in the form of social rules and roles) that they take for granted when engaging in social interactions. They also contribute to the formation of social hierarchies. Kenneth Burke suggests that in using rhetoric, we inevitably invoke the principle of hierarchy: the “hierarchic principle is inevitable in systematic thought. It is embodied in the mere process of growth, which is synonymous with the class divisions of youth and age, stronger and weaker, male and female, or the stages of learning, from apprentice to journeyman to master.” The “naturalness” of the hierarchy’s grades rhetorically reinforces the protection of privilege, these grades often being transformed into rigid social classifications (Burke 1969: 141). Inasmuch as a rhetorical act can be defined as an attempt to use language to persuade others to act, then these acts are a core element of social action, and contribute largely to the formation of social structures and hierarchies. Bourdieu attempts to link language, social rules, social structure, and hegemony in his theory of practice in a way that echoes both van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis and Burke’s theory of rhetoric. His ontological premise is that the whole social structure is present in each linguistic interaction (1991: 67). Bourdieu sees this social structure as transmitted by means of habitus and doxa, roughly social habits and ideological beliefs (I will discuss these in greater detail in chapter 2). Bourdieu rejects the idea that interpersonal relations are ever purely individual. Echoing Ryle (probably unconsciously), he concludes that “it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions” (Bourdieu 1991: 82).14

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Bourdieu envisages a sort of “linguistic market” wherein social agents attempt to exercise their linguistic competences in a competitive struggle for profits of distinction. Extending the Marxist analysis of capitalist economic competition to social interaction, these profits of distinction cause linguistic capital to accrue to successful competitors (Bourdieu 1991: 55). Once established as dominant, the linguistic practices of the upper classes are deemed “legitimate,” against which are measured all other practices.15 This acceptance of the linguistic dominance of the upper classes becomes rooted in bodily dispositions, expressed in what Bourdieu calls “bodily hexis.” The everyday order of things imposes, through these bodily dispositions, thousands of “seemingly insignificant constraints and controls of politeness,” different ways of talking and of bodily deportment that exact recognition of hierarchical differences between the classes, sexes, and generations (Bourdieu 1991: 86, 88). Thus for Bourdieu hierarchy penetrates all levels of social action, right from embodiment to intellectual action (although his clear emphasis is on how hierarchies are constituted by the linguistic marketplace). Bourdieu’s analysis of language, structure, power, and hierarchy is useful in its synthesizing mode, although he reifies his concepts and over-objectifies the controlling influence of linguistic social power on individual lives. Like Foucault, Bourdieu looks for insidious hegemonies in every nook and cranny of social interaction. Nevertheless, he is right in linking language as a form of symbolic social action to the dominance of powerful groups and classes within a society. Bringing together van Dijk, Burke, and Bourdieu, we can see that the spirit of hierarchy naturally invades the constitution of social roles and the social cognitions that support them. When we symbolically express our allegiance to a social role through language, we feed symbolic capital into that role, thereby supporting any claims to dominance it makes over other social roles. Social agents, by adopting given roles, find themselves situated within a hierarchy that is usually not of their making, but which they all the same support insofar as they play their roles according to pre-established rules associated with it. To put what I have said in this chapter in a broader perspective (and thereby to build a bridge to my theory of social explanation, as outlined in the next chapter), the general presupposition of my structural idealism (following Giddens) is that action and structure dialectically presuppose each other, and that action is not a series of dis-

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crete acts, but a continuous flow of conduct (Giddens 1979: 53, 55). This flow of conduct aspires towards ideals that are both individual and structural, channelled by “interpretive schemes,” standardized elements of stocks of knowledge applied by actors in the production of interaction. These form the “core of mutual knowledge whereby an accountable universe of meaning is sustained through and in processes of interaction” (Giddens 1979: 83). These social cognitions, otherwise known as “paradigms” (Kuhn), “absolute presuppositions” (Collingwood), “forms of life” (Wittgenstein), “epistemes” (Foucault), or “structural ideals” (me), are sustained and reproduced in the flow of social encounters. Our interpretive schemes sustain our social consciousness through all four of its levels—the body, the passions, our purposes, and our intellect—as it expresses itself symbolically in language, and by so expressing itself creates social rules and roles. This whole process creates an external social world structured in various ways. Ultimately, as Collingwood noted early in his career, this external world is a picture of the mind itself, one that with time grows firmer and harder, takes surface and polish and steadiness, eventually becoming the “Mirror of the Mind,” reflecting in detail the mind’s own face (1924: 313). Of course, material reality is worked and reworked by social action. But “the construction of external worlds— works of art, religion, sciences, structures of historical fact, codes of law, systems of philosophy and so forth ad infinitum—is the only way by which the mind can possibly come to that self-knowledge which is its end” (1924: 315). When we do social theory or reconstruct the past, we are investigating social and historical consciousness, investigating the human mind as an incarnate, active thing. We are mirroring in our own minds the past and present thought/action of other social agents. This mirroring is at the heart of all social theory, which is why I began this chapter with an account of sympathy as the core of social consciousness. To be social, we must take the Other into account. To do this, we must have sympathy for that Other, defining “sympathy” in the perhaps odd sense I have in this chapter. We must see the Other as a meaning-generating organism whose acts express social ideals, as least in some small way.

2 Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation1

Prologue In this chapter I will propose a tripartite model of social explanation. My goal here is to produce a bird’s-eye view of the archaeology of a social act within what I term a “structural idealist” model. Like Schliemann at Troy, where he discovered seven distinct levels of the ancient city, layered one on top of another, the social archaeologist can, I believe, unearth three distinct strata within any given social act: the intentions of the actor, the meaning of the act independent of those intentions, and its structural context.2 Each of these levels involves its own distinctive panorama of forms of rationality, as we shall soon see. Intention is univalent and can usually be identified on a surface level with an actor’s reply to the question (assuming they’re telling the truth), “why did you do that?” It is a good part of what Weber refers to as “subjective meaning.” An intentional account of an act must take the actor at his or her word as far as motivation goes. Meaning is another matter. I take it in a broader sense, as a series of bivalences—i.e., those between stated and unstatable intentions, conscious and unconscious thought, nature and nurture, or rationally justifiable political beliefs and disguised class interests—that requires a penetration beneath the surface intentionality connected with the act. This middle term I see as “hard-wired” into the everyday sense of what a statement or action “means” over and above the Notes to chapter 2 are on pp. 272-76.

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conscious intention of the actor, as when we say, for example, that “her expression of anger towards her friend really means that her marriage is on the rocks and she is taking out her troubles on those around her,” or “his libertarianism on the surface may be an expression of his love of freedom, but on a deeper level it shows that he is an apologist for the rich.” It’s when we say of a belief that it means something other than that which its holder intends it to mean. Naturally, actors are not consciously aware of the full meaning of their social acts. Meaning comes to light primarily through a narrative that attempts to understand and explain these bivalences. Structure is multivalent, subsuming both intention and meaning, but not submerging them. It illustrates how the concrete individual act is connected with other individual acts. Social structures are those webs of social rules and roles I spoke of in the previous chapter that actors take as natural, or which they follow without very much thought. Structures can affect individual intentions only through structural ideals, which we explain in large part by penetrating into the social meaning of an act or series of acts performed by individual agents. Structural ideals are those ideals that “intend” social objects. They add values to these objects, and thus either maintain, shape, or destroy them. They are the rules that a social actor considers to be “givens” (whether morally, aesthetically, or practically) within their given situation. One could imagine the existence of personal ideals, i.e., those ideas that do not intend social objects, as a noumenal ground for structural ideals. In addition, there are certainly many “ideas” or thoughts that are non-intentional, e.g., me simply picturing a canoe gliding across a Northern Ontario lake. However, as soon as this picture is charged with a longing to be in that canoe, it becomes in some small way intentional, perhaps expressing my desire to escape the noise of bustle of the city for a week or two. I will term the theory I sketch out here “structural idealism” (although “structural interactionism” may have been just as appropriate) because I see social structure as expressed first and foremost in the collective and shared ideals that constitute social reality for a group of actors, yet at the same time is a real institutional horizon for social action.3 These shared ideals are not the benign functions discussed by Talcott Parsons and other structural functionalists. They can lead to social stratification, to the social power of dominant economic classes and the hegemonic power of dominant

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cultural actors and groups in ways that are morally suspect. Be that as it may, I hope to use each of these three central terms—intention, meaning, and structure—in ways that stick to their ordinary English-language senses, with suitable clarifications. This model will be metatheoretical, a prelude to social theory in general, a sort of “critique of sociological reason.” The point of this chapter will be to show how to arrive at a complete case of social explanation. As to what such a case involves, it must explain in a satisfactory way the human acts under investigation by telling a true story of these acts.4 The truth of this story involves an interpretive web the theorist casts over events, involving narrative on some level. This narrative is intended to convince the reader. It relates the events being considered to other (similar) events, social actions to other social actions, the rules followed by Actor A to those followed by Actor B. As stated in chapter 1, I will not argue for sociological or historical laws here, and for causal explanations only in a limited sense, i.e., in the sense that we can say that human “purposes” (whether conscious or unconscious, intended or unintended) “cause” events to happen. Instead, I believe that social theory should aim at a true interpretation of human actions that in some way generalizes their meaning beyond their original narrow temporal and spatial context by means of a bridging concept like structural ideals. I will discuss each of my three methodological levels in turn. But before doing this, I want to sketch out a typology of theories of rationality to show how each type of rationality interacts with each level of social explanation.

The Varieties of Rationality One of the burning questions of the day in social and political theory is to what degree human action can be explained in rational terms. In order to answer this question, we have to get clear just what we mean by “rationality.” I believe that we can categorize the varieties of rationality discussed by social theorists into three broad camps, with a number of further subdivisions (see Chart 3), as follows: 1. Systemic Rationality (SR): Under systemic rationality, agents are assumed to have reasons for their actions in order for those actions to be comprehensible to the social theorist. This doesn’t mean that all human actions occur for a conscious “reason,” or even

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that all human actions can have specific reasons ascribed to them by a theorist. It does mean, however, that we must take as a methodological principle the notion that human action is significantly governed by some form of rationality (no matter how flawed) that can be understood independent of the actor’s internal mental processes by an external observer. Thus human social action is in some sense rule governed (but not especially selfish, or instrumentally rational, or part of a historical process that is moving toward some grand telos). If it weren’t, all we would have is intellectual solipsism, or, at best, pure “description,” if such a thing were possible. On the most basic level, systemic rationality implies that human action isn’t random—it can be explained by those not present at the time and place where the act occurred. Chart 3. The Varieties of Rationality 1. Systemic Rationality (SR) 2. Instrumental Rationality (IR) 2.1. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR) 2.1.1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR) based on Material Goods (DSIR-m) or Objects of Pleasure (DSIR-u) 2.2. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR) 2.2.1. Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR) 3. Teleological Rationality (TR) 3.1. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR) 3.2. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR)

2. Instrumental Rationality (IR): Agents either do or should chose the best (most efficient, most cost-effective, etc.) means to whatever end they value the most in a given situation. The goals of our actions are kept separate from the means by which we choose to pursue them. The passions, in short, do not cloud our instrumentally rational pursuit of the goals stipulated by those passions. There are two varieties of IR: 2.1. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR): This is the classic instrumental rationality of rational-choice theory, imported from economics. As a matter of fact, says the DIR theorist, human beings seek the best means to achieve their goals, to pursue their considered preferences. In its strongest form, the DIR theorist claims that social actors pursue their preferences along the route that they see as the

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most promising (and “cost effective”) way of getting to their destination. In its weaker form, the DIR theorist admits that perhaps not all human behaviour lives up to the high standards posited by instrumental rationality, but that we have to assume that presently and for the most part it does pursue these standards in order for us to theorize and do empirical research in the social sciences. Thus we can speak of “literal” and “methodological” versions of DIR. 2.1.1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR): Further, we can speak of a descriptive version of rationality that posits that human being habitually seek selfish ends using instrumental means. It can be further broken down into two versions: one version (DSIR-m) defines the selfish ends that human beings supposedly seek as material goods, mostly financial ones, while another version (DSIR-u) merely stipulates that these selfish ends involve “objects of pleasure,” or utilitarian goals more broadly defined. 2.2. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR): This is the simple claim that people ought to instrumentally pursue their considered preferences, come hell or high water. It is the importation of Homo economicus from the realm of economic theory into that of normative discourse. As with its descriptive cousin, we can also imagine a Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR), which tells us that we should seek selfish goals by the most efficient means possible (as Ayn Rand’s objectivism suggests). 3.1. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR): This third camp defines the goals of human action as either actually or prescriptively rational in terms of the social and historical goals actors can be seen to pursue. This is perhaps the most sweeping application of rationality to social theory: it is the claim that human society, or some sub-section thereof, is, as a matter of fact, moving toward some goal that the theorist defines as “rational.” We can see evidence of this in Christian eschatology, in Condorcet’s hope for democratic liberation in the coming Tenth Epoch of history, in Hegel’s claim that history is moving toward some form of rational freedom, and in Marx’s claim that the historical evolution of the class struggle will lead to a revolution against capitalism and the inauguration of a golden age of equality and prosperity. Individuals may indeed participate in this rational telos; but by and large this individual participation is engulfed within a broader social process by the cunning of reason. In short, for the DTR theorist, the rational is real, and the real is rational.

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3.2. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR): The PTR theorist urges us to move towards some social or historical goal defined by the theorist as rational, even though this goal is not in any sense inevitable. A certain type of liberalism might fit in here: the idea that we have a moral duty to build a society where tolerance, freedom, and human decency come to dominate the polity. Teleological Rationality has a long and storied history, and the moralist should by no means be quick to abandon its prescriptive variety. An exclusively social-structuralist understanding of social theory might lead us to DTR (indeed, I think that DTR has a natural tendency to ally itself with such a structuralism, as we can see quite clearly in Marx and Engels’s historical materialism). But any serious attention paid to subjective reason, whether it’s merely systemic or more rigorously instrumental, will surely lead us away from embracing DTR. A purely teleological account of rationality is best left to prophets (DTR) and moralists (PTR). So the real issue for debate in grounding social explanation is whether there is any need to move from the admittedly thin view of rationality encompassed by its systemic variety to the thicker view held by instrumental rationality theory. I will argue here (following in the spirit of Weber, Collingwood, and Peter Winch) that we definitely need some sense of systemic rationality, some sense that we can understand from a distance the motivations of social actors, in order to explain (as opposed to merely describe) human action. However, even within the realm of intentionality, things other than pure instrumentality shape behaviour, things such as what Michael Taylor (1995) calls “normative” and “expressive” behaviour, social identification, and intrinsic motivation.5 When we move on the “meaning” level, instrumentally rational behaviour loses even more ground to such motivations as unconscious impulses and normative and expressive behaviour, while when we arrive at the social-structural level of explanation, all we really have left is a minimum systemic rationality, the idea that people do things for reasons of some sort. The logic of collective action involves so much more than the instrumental pursuit of clearly understood and ordered preferences. Social forces shape our actions in a variety of preconscious and unconscious ways by impelling, enticing, cajoling, or seducing us to accept structural ideals (roughly speaking, group norms) to guide our actions in a myriad of circumstances.

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I’ll return to the issue of rationality throughout this chapter. Let’s now look at each level of social explanation in some detail.

Intention A convenient starting point for social explanation is Weber’s own starting point, the subjective meaning social actors attach to their acts. As he himself puts it, we can speak of a social action only insofar as actors attach a subjective meaning to their acts (1978: 4). Part of this meaning is the actor’s taking into account the attitudes and actions of others. Human intentionality on this level of analysis is univalent in the following sense: the observer must accept the actor’s own definition of the intention behind the act. There is no depth to be plumbed in the analysis of intentionality: although the meaning of an act may refer to something lying below the surface of an actor’s stated reason(s) for acting, the actor’s intention is simply the statement of that reason. This intentionality presupposes only systemic rationality to get started: there is no particular reason why even a clearly stated and understood intention need be instrumentally rational (unless we define instrumental so broadly that it loses any power to distinguish itself from non-instrumental behaviour). Building on this Weberian foundation of social explanation, Peter Winch (1958) notes that the categories of meaning that underlie sociological investigations are dependent on social interactions between human beings. Further, the problems generated by these investigations are in fact philosophical problems, with such terms as language and intelligibility requiring prior philosophical analysis before we proceed along the road to social theory (Winch 1958: 43-44). Understanding social actions involves grasping the point or meaning of what was done or said. This has nothing to do with causal laws, but is methodologically closer to the way we look at realms of discourse (115). The first step on the road to social explanation is indeed to grasp the point of what was done or said. This is how we understand an intention. If we do not take this first step, we risk misrepresenting the character of a social action, of not understanding why it happened. So we should start by sorting out what an action meant to the actor himself or herself. More recently, Anthony Giddens (1982: 49) has pointed out that if we want to connect human action with structural explanation we

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need a theory of the human agent or subject, an account of the conditions and consequences of actions, and an interpretation of structure as somehow produced by or producing these conditions and consequences. All of this seems obvious. Yet I believe that Giddens’s “theory of the human subject” should have a dual nature, that of intentionality and meaning, if it is to be part of a complete theory and if it is going to be able to provide a link to social structure. This is the “bridging concept” I mentioned in previous chapter. Further, human intentions are not discrete things. It would be more proper to say, following Giddens (1986: 543), that there is a context of intentionality and practice that “saturates” any given social product. Human thought and human interaction are in reality processes, not collections of atomic units, although the analyst must, to some degree, treat them as units to get on with his or her analysis. The boundary that separates a given interaction from other interactions, and from external things or objects, is quite fuzzy at the edges. As Giddens (1982: 31) reminds us, intentional behaviour is itself a process, and it takes place in the durée of everyday life. Each decision, thought, or act that we can reflect on and isolate from the others surrounding it is saturated with the physiological grounding, emotive colouring, and mental logic of its neighbours when experienced in its immediate and original location in time and space. Consciousness is intentional insofar as it is directed towards objects, whether physical or ideal. For the purposes of understanding a section of the flux of consciousness and the way consciousness is played out in social acts, it is useful to introduce an “analytical atom” that the social theorist can focus on and examine. This atom I will call the “phenomenological moment.” It is an act or series of human acts that the social theorist accords unity for heuristic purposes. It is a slice of space/time containing a discrete quantum of human interaction. The size of this slice varies according to the interests and purposes of the social theorist, so its content cannot be defined in advance, any more that a list of things a ruler can measure can be defined in advance of the ruler’s manufacture and use. I want to argue that within each phenomenological moment, we can discern the entire intention/meaning/structure network at work. A given phenomenological moment can be understood synchronically, as crossing the three elements of our theoretical network at a given point in time. Or it can be understood diachronically, within

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one level of analysis alone (say, just in terms of the actors’ intentions), by showing how it is connected to prior and later moments in the same local series. For the social theorist, history and sociology are methodologically indistinguishable, although they are too often assigned the separate tasks of analyzing social diachrony and synchrony respectively in the traditional academic division of labour. A full analysis of a given phenomenological moment should include both history, with its more diachronic flavour, and sociology (at least taken in its structuralist mode), with its greater sense of synchrony. Of course, for reasons of time or interest, such full accounts are rare. An interesting analysis of a province of intentional discourse comes from Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman (1968), who discuss the accounts people attempt to give of their untoward behaviour. They divide these accounts between excuses and justifications, detailing several types of each. Their more general point is that the success or failure of an account offered to a given group, subculture, and so on will depend in part on the background expectations of each party (i.e., of the person offering the account and those listening to it). The point that Scott and Lyman make with respect to accounts can be generalized in a discussion of all sorts of behaviour: that the “success” or “failure” of actions often depends on a correct reading by the actor(s) of the background expectations, or structural ideals, relevant to the situation. Thus the success of intentional discourse can to a large degree be measured by the social meanings attributed to it by its intended audience, these meanings being themselves to some degree structural products. The wrong meaning attached to a given discursive effort may doom the actor to being misunderstood or ignored. As I’ve already mentioned, at the level of a strictly intentional account of human behaviour, we must assume at least a systemic rationality for human action to make any sense at all. Ferejohn and Satz (1995: 78-79) take this a step further, and claim that intentional explanation must be privileged in the social sciences, for only thus can we achieve the partial universalism they hope for. This is part of their attempt to situate rational-choice theory—which they see as a a mild version of what I call descriptive instrumental rationality—at the centre of political science. However, even if we accept the centrality of intentionality in social explanation, it is a rather large category error to leap from this assumption to the conclusion that we must give any explanatory privilege to DIR. Even

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acts with clear intentions behind them do not always aim to achieve their goals along instrumentally rational paths. Our core values and our passions (not to mention our social identifications) too often cloud the sunny skies of the pretended utility maximizer. As the psychologist Robert Abelson (1995: 27) puts it, the instrumental state of mind is part of a mindset that can be switched on and off at different times, with different people having different mixtures of instrumental and non-instrumental orientations.6 Blumer’s presentation of the premises of symbolic interactionism act as a useful methodological sextant with which to navigate our way through this level of analysis to the next, i.e., through intentionality towards meaning: a. Human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that things have for them. b. The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows. c. These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters. (2) Blumer castigates what was traditional social science in his own day, e.g., the positivists and functionalists, for failing to go directly to the empirical social world in its work (1969: 32) (although attacks on functionalism today might seem to be little more than red herrings). This critique is especially well taken on the level of intentionality, for it is easiest to get at the actual reasons that these actors have (or would give, if asked) for their acting by asking them directly, or by using reliable written accounts of their actions.7 We have to take the empirical world seriously when doing social theory or social research. Blumer and symbolic interactionism contributed to social theory the very useful notion that social interaction always occurs within a universe of social meanings that actors bring to their interactions, and which these interactions in turn generate anew through the interpretive process these actors bring to their interactions. Intentionality in concrete human social interactions is always mediated by the meanings brought to these interactions. Part of this meaning is indeed the stated, conscious intention of the actor (or at least an intention that could be stated, given a

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moment of reflection). Yet other meanings are brought to social acts by actors, meanings that cannot always be stated, even given such a moment of reflection.8 These elements of meaning include things like our unconscious drives, our metaphysical and ideological presuppositions, the social space and “spirit of the age” that an act takes place in, and the unintended consequences of an act. All of these phenomena (and others too) are tied to, but in various ways transcend, the intentionality of the individual. The classic sociological case is, of course, the way that a series of individual acts can carry a social meaning intended by none of the individual actors—these acts have an unintended consequence. It would not be hyperbolic to claim that economic life is driven by such consequences: currency fluctuations, stock market crashes, inflation, and so on are only in part the result of intentional acts. It is true, as Giddens (1979: 5) notes, that all actors have a degree of “discursive penetration” of the society in which they live. They are aware, on the level of discursive consciousness, of the social rules of the game. Even if individual investors didn’t intend to contribute to a decline in stock prices by selling off their portfolios, they can usually still understand, after the fact, how their individual acts could contribute to such a fall. Yet this awareness is inevitably less than total, both because of the cognitive limitations on the individuals’ awareness of all the discursive knowledge that there is out there, and also because their awareness is channelled or dammed up by the phenomena I see as central to the second level of social analysis, social meaning: the unconscious mind, our basic presuppositions, the limited social and mental space that acts take place in, and the unintended consequences of our acts.9 This relates back to the depth model of human thought/action I presented in chapter 1: what we have in our mind at a given moment is only a fraction of what influences our actions. Most importantly, social structure resides largely in our preconscious and unconscious assumptions about the social symbols we interact with. Because social structure is so deeply embedded, in our unreflective moments we sometimes forget that it’s there. Or we believe, with some structuralists, that it’s ontologically real, somehow separate from individual human minds. The image of an iceberg comes to mind: the tip is always visible, clear and sparkling under a northern sun, while its massive base is hidden beneath the surface of the sea. Yet both elements are

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part of the same whole, part of the same thing, just as agency and structure are part of every social act. To illustrate how this model of social explanation works, allow me to introduce two fictional characters. Tom is an impressionable young undergraduate at a local university; Mary is a professional woman in a dual-income suburban family. Within each of their social worlds, they intend to be successful. Tom is trying to maintain his straight-A average, something he sees as instrumental to the career in accounting he has established as one of his life goals. Mary, a middle-level manager at Globex Inc., seeks to climb the corporate ladder to, for the most part, earn a higher salary. On this basic level, we can see how they could both engage in instrumentally rational thinking to plan for and achieve their goals: they both aim at courses of action that will result in successful careers and financial well being. Whenever Tom encounters Professor X at school, he automatically and unconsciously treats him with deference, with a degree of formal respect. Similarly, when Mary encounters a police officer on the street, she accords him the same sort of respect. Built into these interactions are the subjective intentions of the actors. Yet there is also something more. This formal respect paid to authority figures is a sort of status. The intentions of each actor explain only in part the according of this status—there are unconscious fears and worries at play in both Tom and Mary’s cases. In addition, this respect can be explained in terms of instrumental rationality to only a limited degree, e.g., in terms of Tom getting a good mark in his course with Professor X, or Mary establishing good relations with the police. In each case, they express a certain normative acceptance of the respective institutions receiving the respect (i.e., the university and the police force). For example, Tom may indeed ridicule Professor X behind his back for his clumsy and forgetful manner, but he abandons this attitude of ridicule in his presence. This ridicule is not incompatible with the formal respect he pays X. This respect is “structural” in the sense that it is shared by Tom with most, if not all, of his fellow undergraduates as a given notion and is ingrained in Tom’s practical consciousness. It is anchored in the reality of concrete interactions with the professor. Its “meaning” may reflect on Tom’s public character (“he’s such a polite young man”), on his upbringing, on an unconscious projection of a stern and scolding father-image onto the professor, etc. Both the

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meaning and the structure of Tom and Mary’s respect for authority figures are tied to the phenomenological moments when each encounters these figures in a given time and space, i.e., in interacting with them, whether passively (e.g., in avoiding walking by the professor’s office when one’s assignment is late) or actively (e.g., in politely asking a traffic cop for travel directions). I conclude by noting that such a simple and common feeling as respect for authority can assume a multidimensionality when we try to bring it within the realm of social theory. In a sense, we can enter into any of the common notions associated with social interaction on any of the three levels I discuss in this chapter, in terms of the actors’ intentions, the act’s meaning, or the associated social structure, and from that initial “slice” spread out our analysis into the other two terms. At the same time, we can see not only instrumental rationality at work in the social phenomenon of respect, but also elements of expressive and normative behaviour, not to mention social solidarity. I suggest that none of the three levels of analysis has any special privilege, either methodologically or chronologically, although it seems more pragmatic to start with the subjective intentions of the actors in explaining what happened in a given case because (a) this avoids the holist bias endemic to some social science and (b) we are both morally and epistemologically obliged to take into account the individual actors’ view of themselves before we impose any social meanings or structures upon that self- understanding. To revive the archaeological metaphor I used at the start of this chapter, when social theorists “dig” into a given social act, all three strata of explanation are simultaneously available if they work hard enough to get at them. The stratum investigated depends on the theorists’ particular interests, though a complete archaeology of a social act should investigate all three strata. Theorists should not just ignore the rubble covering their primary object of interest, as Schliemann did at Troy, for all social rubble has some significance.

Meaning When we leave the conscious intentions of the actor behind and ask what is the meaning of his or her act, we must consider a series of bivalences within the social act that constitute its meaning. These bivalences include (although this list is by no means exhaustive) conscious intentions vs. unconscious drives, conscious and truth-

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fully stated intentions vs. conscious but falsely stated intentions, intended vs. unintended consequences, the prior conditions of the act of which the actor was aware vs. those of which the actor was not aware, the actor’s reflexive interpretation of his or her own past acts vs. others’ interpretations of them. “Meaning” encompasses both sides of each of these binary pairs. In Economy and Society, Weber claims (6) that actions that cannot be related to an actor’s intended purpose are devoid of meaning, but two pages later he tells us that there are two types of understanding (Verstehen): direct observational understanding and explanatory understanding. This latter mode of Verstehen is what he terms a “rational” understanding of motivation which involves “placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning” (8).10 Leaving aside the questionable validity of a separate “direct observational” understanding of a social act, I want to argue here that what Weber calls “explanatory understanding” is analytically distinct from an understanding of the actor’s intentions and can be more simply stated as a search for the social meaning of an act. When we understand why an actor did X, we can ask them to tell us their reasons or motivations. Yet when we want to explain X, this isn’t enough: we also have to understand the context (both external and internal) of the act. As Parkin (1982: 26) points out, in one sense Verstehen seems to be based on the idea that actors are typically aware of their motives and of their subjective states of mind, thus having no place for Marxist (or other) notions of “false consciousness.” Yet Weber himself admits that only rarely is the full subjective meaning of an act present in the consciousness of the actor: The theoretical concepts of sociology are ideal types not only from the objective point of view, but also in their application to subjective processes. In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to “be aware” of it in a vague sense than he is to “know” what he is doing or be explicitly self-aware about it. (1978: 21) This tension built into Weber’s analysis of subjective meaning can be dispelled if we are willing to admit that analysis “meaning” is a separate category from “intention.” Meaning goes beyond the

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strictly intentional to unconscious motivations and knowledge, and to the unintended consequences of actions. The constitution of “meaning” as a separate level of analysis frees us from Weber’s self-contradiction on the question of how to understand the subjective meaning of an act as being, at the same time, both intentional and unintentional. The way that the meaning of our social acts escapes us leads me back to Blumer and symbolic interactionism. The philosophical premise of the interactionist analysis of the social act is Winch’s observation that our social relations with our fellows are permeated with ideas about reality, and thus we can say that social relations can be seen as ideas about (social) reality (1958: 22). We come to our interactions with a set of preconceived notions about how this or that type of interaction will proceed, how we can treat others in the type of situation we’re in, along with a rough idea of what not to do in the situation at hand. Social interactions are micro-level forms of life, ways of being-in-the-world. Blumer moves forward from this Wittgensteinian premise to suggest that the “worlds” we live in consist of “objects” created by symbolic interaction. Human life is one vast process of forming, sustaining, and transferring these social objects, which have no fixed status unless their meaning is sustained (Blumer 1969: 10, 12). The social object is the focal point for the production of any meaning in a social act over and above that contained in the conscious intention of the actor.11 The social meaning of an object, say this book, cannot be exhausted by even a thorough examination of the intentions of the actors participating in it, in this case my intentions in writing it. It is a social object at all only insofar as others read their own meanings into it (keeping in mind that these meanings might parallel quite closely my own in writing it), and also insofar as we consider the circumstances (biographical, political, and economic) of its production to be part and parcel of its social meaning. We can speak of what the author “meant to say” in a given text, but also of what that text “means” in the greater context of his or her life, the “historical meaning” of the work, or even what the ideas contained in the text “meant” to the lives of its readers. That is, unlike an actor’s intentions, the meaning of a social object must be interpreted (either reflectively by the actor, or by someone else, perhaps a theorist). And these interpretations can themselves also be interpreted (as the sociologist of knowledge does) as having their own “meanings,” as the product of certain material or ideological structures.

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Meaning is constructed by means of a narrative of human action. The narrator transforms constellations of intentions, consequences, unintended consequences, unconscious drives, background factors, and purely structural factors such as social status and class origin into a historical narrative that hopefully compels the readers’ attention, and which asks them to make a cognitive judgment as to its truthfulness (or at least its likelihood). Once this transformation successfully takes place, the narrator has produced the social meaning of the actions in question. To merely list a series of the actors’ intentions would hardly constitute an adequate narrative of events (although it might work in diaries). Similarly, just to provide a record of the structural causes of behaviour without taking into account the actors’ purposes would be too reductionist to be either true or useful. A narrative can present the social meaning of a series of actions only insofar as both the actors’ intentions and the relevant structural factors are accounted for and linked together in a coherent way. The sociology of knowledge is vital to an understanding of the “meaning” of social acts. Berger and Luckmann (1966: 1) take as their basic premise the notion that reality is socially constructed, and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the process whereby this occurs. For the sociologist of knowledge, over and above any concern with intellectual history, the central focus must be the world of common-sense knowledge, that knowledge which constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist (14). This world of everyday life has a paramount reality and is organized around the “here” of my body and the “now” of my present (21-22). Indeed, the analysis of this “here and now” has become an important part of sociology and history in the last twenty years, fuelled in large part by feminism and postmodernism, and especially by Michel Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge and genealogies of the enchained body. This is as it should be: our bodies situate us in time and space, are the centre of our existences. All social interactions revolve around them, like planets orbiting a corporeal sun.12 Our understanding of this world of everyday knowledge requires us to move beyond the stated intentions of the social actors to the preconscious practical knowledge and unconscious processes that sustain everyday life. The social self is in a continual process of construction from moment to moment by the attribution of meaning to it by those in contact with that self. We in turn evaluate or reject

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that construction, insofar as we can become aware of it, by attributing various values to the judgments of others. Part of this process of self-construction is tied to our practical consciousness. This is our awareness of “how to do things,” which calls forth, as Berger and Luckmann point out, “recipes” for the mastery of routine problems (1966: 43). The uncovering of the “recipes” embedded in practical activities is part of what I mean by reconstructing the “meaning” of a social act. Needless to say, the actor may know how to use a recipe without being able to explicitly formulate it. It may be preconscious, or even unconscious—if asked “how do you do that?” the actor’s only reply might be “well…like this,” followed by a repetition of the action. Social theory, insofar as it seeks to produce a phenomenology of everyday life, has to take into account how these recipes allow actors to perform on the stage of the social in competent or incompetent ways. It also has to recognize that social actors may not be able to explicitly formulate the elements of these recipes, even if they can cook the dishes described by them quite competently. Without getting too deeply into the question of the social construction of the self, it is important to remember that our self-image and our image of others is the end product of a never-ceasing process of reflecting reflected images.13 We see ourselves as reflections of the way others talk about us and act towards us, which influences our future performances, which in turn influences the way these others will either maintain or revise their images of us. The social meaning of individual acts is usefully seen as tied to a series of performances given within the framework of an infinitely reflexive (and, as Lasch reminds us, sometimes narcissistic) construction of the self. This construction takes place largely by means of images communicated from the others present in the collection of phenomenological moments we call everyday life. Weber saw hidden “motives” and repressions as one of the limits on the understanding of subjective meaning (1978: 9).14 These were the subaqueous formations inaccessible to the surface-sailing social theorist. If we seek to understand the subjective meaning of an act, it becomes a problem for us if there is a realm of motivation inaccessible to our casual observation. Yet, as Giddens notes, beyond discursive or intentional accounts of social action, there are many other forms of knowledge embedded in and constitutive of that action (1986: 536). He goes on to suggest that we must trace the origins of social meaning to the methodological apparatus embedded in

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the “practical consciousness” of the routines of day-to-day life (538). This “practical consciousness,” this preconscious sense of how to do things, acts for Giddens as a link between conscious and unconscious forms of knowledge. An understanding of both our practical consciousness and our unconscious drives must enter into any full account of the meaning of any given phenomenological moment; a failure to do so is the great mistake made by rational-choice theorists, at least on the level of social explanation. Although the stated intentions of actors have a certain methodological primacy, we must further come to understand the practical knowledge that allows (or fails to allow) them to complete the act, along with the possibility that our awareness of the actors’ unconscious impulses might help us to more fully comprehend the context of their intentions and therefore the meaning of the act. Thus a complete social theory would see social acts as the product of intentional consciousness, practical consciousness, and unconscious drives, all at the same time. This is what I mean when I say that social theory should come to an understanding of the social meaning of an act. Social theorists notoriously argue over the status (or even the possibility of understanding) this “meaning.” This lack of agreement has led to the postmodernist refusal to search for the “true” significance of behaviour. To generalize amongst at least the “skeptical” postmodernists (to use Pauline Rosenau’s term), the social world is one great text for them, full of signs that can be read in a variety of ways. The problem that postmodernism presents to social theory is that of true interpretation: if the signifiers of the social world are infinitely flexible, subject to an infinite number of interpretations, none of them better than any other, then the theorist is in big trouble. If the skeptical postmodernists are right about truth and signification, then the narratives spun by sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists are just stories, no better than the tall tales parents tell children about goblins and elves and Easter bunnies. Intuitively, this seems wrong-headed. We offer interpretations of people’s social interactions almost every day of our lives, usually without adding the caveat that, of course, this is only one of an infinite number of interpretations of this situation. I’m not suggesting we resurrect intact the Scottish School of Common Sense, and use everyday discourse as a sextant to guide us to an effective social theory. Yet I will argue that common sense is right, at least in this instance: even if there are a number of different plausible

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interpretations of a given social act, it is possible to be mistaken in such interpretations. To start with, I think that understanding a social act isn’t quite like reading a text, at least the texts read by post-structuralists. Social theory can attempt to understand the meaning of a social act because that act is tied to extratextual social objects, to movements of bodies in space, to speech, to concepts. The meaning of an act is not like an empty ship adrift on the ocean, one that can be pulled by the determined tugboat/theorist any which way. It is instead anchored on the one side in the subjective intentions of the actor and on the other in the structural ideals that shaped the act, not to mention the physical space where the act took place. Our intentions, our social concepts, and the spatial and temporal frameworks in which they occur are not floating signifiers that can be interpreted in whatever way a theorist wants. A social act always takes place at place X and time Y; it is motivated by one or several intentions, and is shaped by one or more structuring ideals. Since these intentions and values are not arbitrary to the actor, it would be strange indeed if they suddenly became arbitrary to the interpreter. Although a social epistemology cannot provide a clear and precise formula to guide us to the “objective” meaning of a social act, if we keep ourselves firmly anchored to both intention and social structure we can avoid the postmodernist tendency to drift far out into the dangerous waters of epistemological relativism.15 As we escape pure intentionality and move toward interpreting the social meaning of human action, it should become clear that explanations of behaviour in terms other than pure instrumental rationality have to be considered. Specifically, part of the “meaning” of a social act is the sense in which it can express values, class, gender, or other social group solidarity (or lack thereof), or some motivation of which the actor isn’t conscious. Yet when we look for the social meaning of an act, we can begin to talk about a limited sense of teleological rationality as part of social explanation. Jeffrey Friedman (1995) rightly suggests (in line with a number of other critics of rational-choice theory) that instrumental rationality is a “learned” way of thinking that is largely accepted in economic life, but is seen as less than holy in the political arena. Friedman goes on to applaud a Verstende approach to social science, calling for a “transcendent critique that would historicize, as the contingent products of Western rationalism, the

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strategic maximizing modern academics may find plausible as a universal explanation simply because we (among others) often engage in it” (1995: 15). In short, we should look at instrumental rationality as part of what it “means” to live in the West at the start of the new millennium, where more and more a narrowly economic instrumental model dominates the discourse of daily life, especially media reportage and academic and political debate. This type of rationality can be seen less as hard-wired into the central processor of human nature and more as a semi-conscious telos for a given group of people in a given place and time. Another dimension to explore as part of our tour through social meaning is the question of ideology, whether political, economic, or religious. It would seem almost trite to claim that an important part of an analysis of the meaning of a social act lies in some understanding of the ideological presuppositions of the actor (or of the theorist, for that matter). But this is true all the same. Ideology is one of the principal means by which unconscious assumptions about social life enter the conscious world of interactive discourse. Let’s return to Tom and Mary at this point to help us understand how ideology can affect everyday social acts. Part of the social context of Tom’s everyday life is the politically charged atmosphere of the campus he visits five days a week. Feminism, environmentalism, corporatism, and other political concerns influence the way classes are taught, the way students dress and relate to each other, and the way that Tom speaks and acts towards those he sees as bearers of different ideological positions. For example, Tom is especially mindful that he does not say anything disrespectful of women when in the presence of his friend Jane both because he is quite attracted to her (the meaning of his acts being influenced by a strong biological drive) and because he knows that she is a radical feminist and will thus not tolerate the “looser” language that Tom’s male friends use. His “stable and ordered preference” is to sleep with Jane, and he adjusts his behaviour so as not to offend her. However, even though deep down Tom is a laissez-faire relativist on moral and religious issues (thus proving Alan Bloom right about university undergraduates), according others the right to believe whatever they see fit as long as they do not try to impose their beliefs on him, he reacts with some degree of horror at politically incorrect expressions of sexism and racism on the part of his fellow students (admittedly in part simulated in order to impress

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Jane). In short, Tom is ideologically confused: his behaviour is a mixture of instrumentally rational motivations (“yes, you’re absolutely right, Jane!”) and normative goals (“we should all love each other, regardless of race, religion, or culture”). Mary, however, is in quite another boat. Although herself quite sympathetic to feminism, she works in the competitive environment of the middle management of a large corporation, with both men and women in positions of authority. Many of her fellow managers have no sympathy for her political views, and tell her so to her face. Some of her male colleagues even claim that Mary’s feminism is just a way of her compensating for her lack of success, so far, at climbing the corporate ladder. This infuriates Mary, but at the same time it has taught her that she must shelve her ideological position in most of her everyday relations with her co-workers. Instead she pretends to adopt, with some degree of cynicism, the ideology of competitive economic individualism favoured by those in positions of power in the corporation, but she retains a strong social identification with the women’s movement outside her office. The point of these two brief cases is that the environments that Tom and Mary work within allow them a distinct lists of choices on their ideological menus. And each has real restrictions imposed on them by the social structures they live and work within, the structural ideals of their friends, colleagues, and superiors shaping their own ideals and thus their behaviour. Of course, each brings with them their own preferred selections on these menus. As is the case in the social construction of the self, the construction of the individual’s ideological position is tied to a process of reflecting one’s own initial “gut feelings” in the mirror of the world around us, having this reflected back on us through the speech and actions of others, re-evaluating our initial ideological gut feelings, and so on, ad infinitum. In this process of construction, instrumental rationality tells only part of the story: intrinsically held values, along with various social identifications, are also important. When determining the social meaning of an act it is important to look at the actor’s conscious ideological position, the ideological “environment” of the act, along with any unstated ideological presuppositions influencing the act (thus opening the door to the sort of sociology of knowledge to which Mannheim was sympathetic). Any explanation of the meaning of a social act is less than complete if it fails to address ideology as such a multitextured phenomenon.

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Structure I return to Weber to introduce the third level of analysis in my methodological triad, namely structure. Weber saw the necessity of constructing “ideal types” of purely rational courses of action to evaluate how these courses of action were influenced by irrational factors. He later says that collective concepts must be treated solely as the result of ways of organizing a collection of particular acts of individual persons (1978: 6, 13). One of the standard criticisms of Weber is that this focus on subjective, individual meaning prevented him from evoking any sense of social structure in his sociology. Talcott Parsons takes up this criticism in noting that Weber’s suspicion of a functionalist approach to social science is based on his sense of the indispensability of an analysis of individual motivation (1947: 20). Obviously, Parsons’s functionalism was more interested in explaining how systems variables operated, how the social system as a whole worked. Parsons was a structuralist as well as a functionalist, and he was little interested in how the individual subjective meanings contained in social acts help to constitute social structure. But he was interested in how individual actions are expressions of the broader social functions that allow for the creation and maintenance of a stable social system. This position is very much at odds with Weber’s seeming methodological individualism. Yet, in fact, Weber often resorted to structural explanations himself, such as his exploration of the effect of Protestant religious beliefs on the development of capitalism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. To resolve this seeming paradox, we can once more look to Weber himself for a solution. His notion of the “ideal type,” originally manufactured as a methodological tool to analyze the various aspects of social reality (e.g., “charismatic leadership” as a concept to describe something that inevitably includes, in its actual empirical instances, other leadership styles), can be redescribed in normative terms and thus rehabilitated to serve as a starting point for our analysis of structure. I take this rehabilitated “ideal type” to be a mental phenomenon that, as instantiated in everyday thinking, structures action in a way that transcends individual choice. It is a structural ideal. As R. G. Collingwood points out in his Idea of History (1946: 200), that a certain people live on an island in itself has no effect on their history, while how they perceive that insularity, as a barrier or as a highway, does have an effect. In other words, the “hard facts” of a situation are the hard

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facts of the way the actor sees the situation (Collingwood 1946: 317). When these perceptual “hard facts” are accepted as a constellation of unquestioned assumptions across a given social group, class, culture, or subculture, we can speak of a structural ideal and thus identify, with varying degrees of certainty, an element of social structure.16 These ideals connect actors both to the material resources available to the society in which they live and to that society’s most cherished values and assumptions. We can thus imagine a web linking material goods to social actors by means of these structural ideals: thus is born class, both as a theoretical construct and a practical reality. Social structure is a set of values that we explicitly, tacitly, or unconsciously accept as valid ways of structuring our relations with others. These values are real to the actors acting upon them and are shared by at least some other actors across space and time. So in this sense social structure is both virtual—in the sense that it exists only in people’s minds—and real—in the sense that people within a given status group or class might share similar social values—at the same time. These values are transmitted from insiders to outsiders (e.g., immigrants), and from adults to the young, through a variety of channels: paternal discipline, the schools, the media, social interactions in public spaces such as offices and shopping malls, the dreaded look of the Other, even texts from time to time. The net effect of these transmissions is to order the social world of the affected actors in a normative way: certain things are more valued than others. This helps to shape one’s way of speaking and interacting with friends, family, and coworkers, one’s dress and deportment, one’s economic life, one’s connection to culture and politics. To some degree, Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and doxa capture what I mean by “structural ideal.” However, both of his concepts have their limitations. The former is a set of ingrained dispositions within a given group or class. Bourdieu (1992: 85) feels that habitus is necessary for objective social structures to succeed in reproducing themselves in the form of durable dispositions in organisms living within the same material conditions of existence. Sociology must treat as identical all biological individuals who support the same habitus, with an objective view of social class having as its object of knowledge not aggregates of individuals, but class habitus, “the system of dispositions (partially) common to all prod-

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ucts of the same structure.” People sharing the same habitus are in fact related in terms of homology, of diversity within homogeneity, which unifies the singular habitus of different members of the same class. Although this implies some diversity of world views, for Bourdieu the history of the individual is never anything else than a certain “specification” of the collective history of his group or class, with individual systems of dispositions being seen as structural variants of the group or class habitus (1992: 86). At times Bourdieu’s habitus acquires all-encompassing causal powers, putting into question some of its power to explain social action. He says that as a system of acquired “generative schemes” adjusted to particular conditions, “the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others” (1992: 95). If he means by this simply that some sort of norms or ideals inform social action, then one can agree (although without much enthusiasm for his pretended discovery). In this case, habitus could be seen as fluid, as constantly changing. But if he means that people working within a given habitus are controlled and directed by it in a more rigid way, and that this habitus is fairly stable (which I don’t think Bourdieu would want to say, although he sometimes comes close to doing so), then we would have to abandon his ideas as some form of structural determinism that tries to sweep under the carpet the thought-side of action, reducing intentionality to a mere function of systemic variables. So if we can read Bourdieu’s habitus as a non-deterministic notion of how certain normative habits become engrained in a given class, it comes close to what I mean by structural ideals. Doxa is Bourdieu’s term for the naturalization of the arbitrariness of a given social order in the mind and body of the social agent. He writes (1992: 164) that when there is a quasi-perfect fit between the objective social order and subjective principles of organization, “the natural and social world appears as self-evident,” an experience he calls doxa, to “distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs.” In the doxic mode, “the world of tradition is experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted.” When we see all things as good and right with our social world, we have slipped into a doxic mode of thinking. Doxa becomes orthodoxy when challenged by non-believers in this normalized social order, their own views being a heterodoxy.

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What I mean by structural ideals would have to include all three of Bourdieu’s ways of organizing responses to social solidarity— doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy—as all three can structure social thought/action. The peaceful surfaces of social life may be controlled by doxic thought and action; when these are challenged by heterdoxic thought/action, the forces of social order erect orthodox barriers to change. Bourdieu’s intention in coining these terms is to explain social conflict and control, whereas my intention in this chapter is to explain all social actions, not just the conflict/control aspect of these actions. Bourdieu’s distinction is useful, however, in showing that social conflict, on the structural level, is composed of three distinct ways of thinking about order: as normal, as needing to be defended, or as requiring change. The “structural” component of social explanation should take into account the way social forces affect behaviour, keeping in mind that social forces exist only when certain ideals are taken to be doxa by large numbers of actors. These forces include the unstated (or unknown) prior conditions of action, historical inheritances, social status, and social roles. Needless to say, these structural elements tend to flow into each other in a concrete analysis of a given social act. It is useful to bring in Giddens’s concept of the “duality of structure” at this point to break out of the dualism of agency and structure.17 Under this concept, social structure should be seen as both the medium and the outcome of the human actions it recursively organizes (Giddens 1986: 533).18 Social actors are able to carry out their day-to-day activities only by instantiating certain structural properties or, to use my own terminology, by invoking or applying (whether consciously, unconsciously, or on the level of practical consciousness) a network of structural ideals. Structure influences the individual actor through the sort of collective concepts that Weber was so suspicious of. We must allow for the possibility that the historical preconditions (including a society’s economic arrangements, its political system, and its cultural values) and the unintended consequences of our actions generate structural ideals that impel people within a given social group to define certain actions as “good,” “lawful,” or “useful,” and so on, and others as belonging to the opposite categories. When these ideals become sufficiently spread out and temporally durable, we can begin to use concepts like “class,” “subculture,” or “nation.” As Giddens (1979: 9) notes, institutions can be seen as the structured social practices followed by most people taking place in space

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and in the longue durée of time. We can thus see an institution like the university as a spatio-temporal meeting point of the social practices (e.g., teaching, research, writing, going to the pub, etc.) of a loosely defined but more-or-less regular body of actors (i.e., students, faculty, staff). The “structure” of these practices exists in the general notions that each group of actors brings to the situation, these notions organizing actions within a given space (e.g., the buildings of the university) that take place over a given span of time (e.g., a lecture hour). Although the rules that make up these practices do restrain the actors who follow them, they also make these practices possible, and thus we can add a “duality of power” to Giddens’s “duality of structure.” Power is both restraining and creative. Hierarchy and power relationships help to constitute social practices on an everyday level. Returning to my example of university life, someone has to decide who will teach “Introduction to Social Theory,” where the class will be held, its hours, its significance to an undergraduate’s degree, and so on, not to mention hiring support staff, determining tuition fees, and setting entry standards for incoming students. Even if these decisions are made democratically in committees, they still illustrate how power can be exercised by small groups of people to help generate meaningful social practices for larger groups. On one level, structure has a virtual reality only. We cannot put our finger on a structural element like “class” but only indicate the beliefs, practices, and material signs that point to its “existence.” All the same, structure seems quite real to most actors. For example, in a society with striking differentiations of wealth, poverty is a real restraint on freely thinking and acting. It may be true that property is a “notion” sustained by symbolic interactions between the members of the society where it exists as a legal concept, but the “virtuality” of this poverty seems to melt away when the social agent begins to worry about paying next month’s rent, buying food and clothing, etc. The reality of a concept like poverty exists in its ideational sedimentation in political and economic ideologies, in the legal system, and in everyday economic interactions. Indeed, the most important structural ideals may be those that organize, distribute, and legitimize the physical and informational objects we call “property,” a regional structure of control that, as Enlightenment Scots such as Adam Smith, William Robertson, and John Millar were the first to really point out, dominates many other

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regional structures of control (including the law, political ideologies, forms of government and public administration). The acceptance of concepts such as private ownership, the division of labour, and social stratification as givens by the vast majority in a society limits the flow of resources to the poor and thus seems to deny on the level of practice what seems evident on the level of theory, namely, the virtuality of social structure. When we arrive at the point where significantly large social groups blindly or subserviently accept ideals that structure their lives and positions as obvious truths, we have discovered the operation of hegemonic power, the ideological substructure of what is commonly termed “economic” or “political” power. Thus we can define power in the negative sense as the capacity of an individual or group to compel another individual or group to accept certain structural ideals as valid.19 A parallel to the way that structural ideals influence everyday action can be seen in Goffman’s discussion of how impressions of reality are fostered by our public performances. As human beings, we have variable impulses and moods. Yet we are expected in our social performances to exhibit a more regular picture of ourselves to those around us, thus requiring a certain “bureaucratization of the spirit” (Goffman 1959: 56). This is obviously connected to the social roles an actor has taken on: the rules that constitute a given social role are largely already in place, and we as individuals are expected to bureaucratize our spirits according to these rules (or else be called “bad workers,” “bad husbands,” “bad girlfriends,” etc.). This leads the actor to feel a strong obligation to appear in a steady moral light, to be an effective “merchant of morality,” one whose wares are known and trusted by those who consume his or her performances (251). In the narratives we spin about each other, we assume a certain consistency of performance from the Other. There seems to be an innate tendency to assume that there are “selves” out there whose social acts can be understood, if not predicted. Goffman’s self is a product of a collection of dramatically staged public performances. These performances help to create the nebulous structure we call “character.” The tendency to bureaucratize one’s actions, to produce a pattern of activities that point to a coherent, core self, is accomplished partly by instantiating a coterie of structural ideals into everyday thinking and acting. We choose certain qualities, virtues, and tastes as distinctly “ours” at a given point in our life, and act towards oth-

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ers in such a way as to “impress” the reality of this construction of our self on those around us. Naturally, others share our ideals. We see these patterns in phenomenological moments where other actors use phrases such as “she’s such a nice woman,” “he’s a hard worker,” or “your taste in music is exquisite,” to describe the “self” in question. Lévi-Strauss tells us that just as music makes the individual conscious of his physiological rootedness, mythology makes one aware of one’s roots in society (1969: 28). With the caveat that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to see structures as operating independently of individual human motivation, if we extend his ideas a bit, we can see broadly accepted structural ideals as the modern “myths” that give us a sense of rootedness in everyday life. If someone rejects key elements of these myths, we term that person an “outsider,” “a rebel,” or, in extreme cases, “mentally ill.” The social theorist does not have to be concerned so much with the moral truth or falsity of these myths/ideals but with the epistemological question of their content and influence, and the way that they change over time. The analysis of social structure is equally a sociological and a historical pursuit. At the structural level of social explanation we leave instrumental rationality behind. When “social forces” influence behaviour, they work, almost by definition, in the province of values and identifications of which actors are only partly conscious. People’s ethics, political affiliations, styles of dress, codes of deportment, and definitions of economic self-interest are structured by ideals of which they are usually only dimly aware (unless they engage in a Socratic process of self-examination). These ideals don’t work by presenting actors with menus of choices, each with its own distinct cost or benefit; instead, they define the menus themselves, or, to speak more accurately, they structure what items on the menu social actors take seriously and which ones they automatically discount. When speaking of the way that social structure shapes social action, conscious rational choice is the exception, not the rule. If it weren’t, then we would be back at the level of intention, and social structure would vanish in a puff of smoke. Even if one side of social structure is only virtual, this doesn’t mean that it must be willed into existence from moment to moment by all the actors whose lives are shaped by it for it to continue to exist. It exists in the preconscious and unconscious social values these actors share, in their structural ideals. These ideals are considerably more durable than the concrete intentions of

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individual actors, and they sometimes have substantial economic, legal, and political powers backing them up. Let’s pay one last visit to Tom and Mary. Tom’s life is structured in space and time by the social practices of university life. He may bring with him to the university certain class or cultural ideals, and these may continue to influence his actions in part. However, the institution of the university tends to generate its own structural ideals. These include class timetables and the associated assumption of punctuality, an attitude of respect that is generally expected by professors from students, and the sense that education has a positive value either in itself or as a means to the future end of employment. Further, Tom imbibes subconsciously modes of dress and ways of speaking that reflect his status as a stylish male undergraduate at the turn of the century. He wears a Nike cap and shoes, brand-name jeans, and sports an earring, a stylistic ensemble that expresses his solidarity with the mock non-conformity of his friends. As Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and the rest of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies showed in the seventies (and as I will discuss in the next chapter), such ensembles express various forms of subcultural identity. In this brief interval between childhood and the working world of the adult, Tom wishes to be part of a psuedo-subculture that defies what he sees as the dull conformity of middle-class suburban life (although if he gets his accounting degree and marries Jane, he will enter this world soon enough). Ironically, his identity with this subculture is expressed in modes of dress and deportment that are given to him in the form of structural ideals he blindly accepts: he is, in short, just as much the “victim” of social forces as rest of his undergraduate male friends. Although Tom chooses his way of being for various reasons, which he can to some degree articulate (i.e., he is systemically rational), this way of being is given to him by structural ideals not of his own making (i.e., he is plugged into a sort of teleological rationality of which he is only dimly aware). Of course, by choosing to conform to the modes of dress and deportment of his friends, he helps to keep these ideals alive. Mary’s corporate environment is perhaps more rigorously structured in terms of organizing its employees in space and time. Like Tom’s university environment, Mary’s corporate life hands out status and respect differentially by means of a set of structural ideals that its members generally accept, or at least act in accordance with. We can speak of her corporation as being part of a capitalist

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economic structure insofar as it exists in a network of regular (often competitive) interactions with other conglomerations of actors with similar structural ideals. Mary’s primary motivation in working for Globex Inc. is money, with a tip of her cap to social status. But she, like Tom, presents her body in a specific stylistic ensemble that embodies her acceptance of the structural ideals of her professional position and class. She dresses in power suits and tight skirts, her hair tied tightly back, as if to symbolize the aerodynamic efficiency of her physical self and thus her value to Globex as a performative employee. This ensemble also expresses her social identification and normative connection with corporate life. Further, she revels in the gossipy chit-chat about who’s on the way up and who’s on the way down within Globex’s hierarchy. In fact, this attention to her company’s hierarchy is how she integrates her feminism into her work life: she is a tireless worker for employment equity and for more women in the boardroom. If one were to ask Mary about all of this, she would explain her actions in terms of individual instrumental and normative reasons (i.e., money and sexual solidarity). Yet, like Tom, the network of structural ideals (of dress, deportment, organizational rules, and ideology) within which she lives and works is not of her own making. In summary, Tom and Mary’s intentions govern their social acts, which the social theorist understands as having certain meanings, which meanings sometimes come together to produce certain structures. These structures, taken as real by other actors, then in turn influence their future intentions in an endless feedback loop. Social causality is like the wheel of fortune at a carnival: round and round it goes, and where it stops, nobody can fully know. Before I leave behind my account of social structure, I want to make one last caveat. A social explanation framed solely in terms of social structures would be a very strange beast. Structural accounts of social actions are meaningful only insofar as they are connected with the consciousness of actors and the subjective meanings they assign to their acts. We lose much of the richness of social explanation if we fail to go beyond the level of structure. Structure is not some sort of “occult quality” or deus ex machina that we can pull out of our theoretical hats whenever we are puzzled by a given set of social events. Hume observed a similar tendency in metaphysicians:

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But as nature seems to have observ’d a kind of justice and compensation in every thing, she has not neglected philosophers more than the rest of the creation; but has reserv’d them a consolation amid all their disappointments and afflictions. This consolation principally consists in their invention of the words faculty and occult quality. For it being usual, after the frequent use of terms, which are really significant and intelligible, to omit the idea, which we wou’d express by them, and to preserve only the custom, by which we recall the idea at pleasure; so it naturally happens, that after the frequent use of terms, which are wholly insignificant and unintelligible, we fancy them to be on the same footing with the precedent, and to have a secret meaning, which we might discover by reflection.…By this means these philosophers set themselves at ease, and arrive at last, by an illusion, at the same indifference, which the people attain by their stupidity, and true philosophers by their moderate scepticism. They need only say, that any phaenomenon, which puzzles them, arises from a faculty or an occult quality, and there is an end of all dispute and enquiry upon the matter. (1888: 224) All the same, social theorists should retain structural explanation as an important weapon in their theoretical arsenal if they hope to fully explain “what happened” in a given phenomenological moment—provided they remind themselves once in a while that a deterministic structure that exists wholly independent of individual consciousnesses is indeed an “occult quality.” This is why I tilted Marx sideways in my introduction, to de-occultize his notion of “real life” from his mythological “material” realm to that of social values and practices. When we see social structure as separate from individual human minds, we are indeed thinking in occult terms. In summary, I see social explanation as requiring the following elements: 1. An account of the individual intentions of the relevant social actors. 2. An account of the social meaning of these acts (as embodied in a narrative). 3. An account of the social structures underlying these individual intentions and the social meaning of these acts.

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4. An acceptance that these three levels of explanation are separate things only in a virtual sense, in the act of analysis, and that in a concrete phenomenological moment they are inextricably intertwined. 5. A regulative and heuristic concept like “structural ideals” to explain how social structure is inculcated in individual acts and in the meanings both the actors and the theorist ascribe to those acts. ——— ••• ——— In my next chapter I will discuss two schools of thought concerning deviance, namely, labelling theory and New Subcultural Theory, and look at how my structural idealist model fits each. My point in doing this is to set up an enriching equilibrium between my own metatheory and these two approaches within the theoretical province of theories of deviance. I believe that in applying the metatheoretical model found in this chapter to deviance theory, we can arrive at a fuller theory than is put forward by either of these perspectives in isolation from each other.

3 A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance

Labelling/Transactionalist Views of Deviance I now turn to two major schools of thought in the sociology of deviance as case studies of how well my intention/meaning/structure triad works as a general model for social explanation. Firstly, I will examine views of deviance based on symbolic interactionism. These views are usually termed either “labelling theory” or transactional analysis. I will concentrate on two works in this tradition, Howard Becker’s Outsiders, and Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, keeping in mind that it is suspect to categorize either work, but especially Cohen’s, as being pure instances of labelling theory. Yet at the core of each is a study of how the labelling of certain acts as “deviant” creates subcultural outsiders. The transactionalist sees deviance as the outcome of a process of social interaction wherein a group of people is labelled deviant by those with the power to make rules. This analysis is further fleshed out by looking at what happens to those labelled deviant after the label has been successfully applied by the societal control culture (e.g., the courts, police, mass media, social welfare agencies, etc.). This new approach to deviance has been termed a “skeptical revolution” in that it abandoned the debate over values that dominated sociological thinking on deviance up until the 1960s in favour of focusing on the process of becoming a deviant.1 In many cases, transactionalists “went native” and studied deviant subcultures Notes to chapter 3 are on p. 276.

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from within, becoming participant observers, phenomenologically bracketing their own (presumably middle-class) values in order to more fully understand the subcultural rules of the game. Becker’s Outsiders stands as a landmark in this tradition. Becker’s central thesis is that social groups create deviance by making rules whose breaking constitutes deviance, after which they are labelled deviant (1973: 9). Thus deviance is the outcome of a transaction between rule creators and rule breakers. But this labelling of the rule breaker as an “outsider” does not come out of nowhere; it is the result of moral enterprise. Moral entrepreneurs, whether politicians, priests, or media pundits, use whatever publicity-generating techniques they have at their disposal to mobilize social forces in favour of some set of new rules they favour, or to “blow the whistle” on a group that is violating an existing rule. Their enterprise, if successful, results in the creation of a new fragment of the “moral constitution of society” (Becker 1973: 122, 128, 145). Becker’s transactional approach focuses on the intentions of each of the two central players in the sociological drama—the rule makers and the deviants—and how their interactions result in new definitions of acceptable behaviour. As he himself puts it, it has the great merit of refusing to settle for mysterious and invisible forces as explanatory mechanisms (Becker 1973: 193). Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics uses some of the insights of transactional analysis to look at the phenomenon of the rise and fall of a particular pair of folk devils, the Mods and Rockers of mid-sixties England. Cohen sees the creation of “folk devils” as the end product of a successful moral panic engineered by moral entrepreneurs within the societal control culture. The mass media is the main channel of dissemination for a moral panic. The media, with its power to dramatize social life, reports heavily on deviance, telling the public the shape that folk devils can assume. Cohen draws from Lemert the premise that social control leads to deviance, and not vice versa, echoing Becker’s notion that rule creation is a necessary precondition for the creation of outsiders (Cohen 1987: 17, 15). Cohen uses a sequential model adapted from studies of reactions to natural disasters to describe a moral panic. He simplifies the seven-stage model he borrows from these studies to four stages, around which he structures his book: warning, impact, inventory, and reaction (1987: 22). His study of the Mods and Rockers phenomenon moves from the initial warning and impact of the distur-

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bances in the seaside towns of Clacton, Margate, and Brighton in southern England to the “inventory” that the press, national political leaders, local government, and ordinary citizens make of the deviance, to what is really at the core of Cohen’s study, the social reaction to these seaside scuffles with police, petty vandalism, etc. However, in the case of a moral panic, unlike a natural disaster, the model is circular and amplifying, with built-in feedback systems that serve to increase future deviance as society’s control culture reacts to the initial cases of misbehaviour (1987: 24). This leads Cohen in his last chapter to propose a model of deviancy amplification that looks like this: 1. The Initial Social Problem (the structural/cultural position of working-class youth) ----> 2. Initial Solution (deviant acts, deviant styles) ----> 3. Societal Reaction (involving misperception & distortion) ----> 4. Operation of Control Culture/Creation & Exploitation of Stereotypes (sensitization, dramatization, escalation) ----> 5. Increased Deviance, Polarization of Deviant Groups ----> 6. Confirmation of Control Culture’s Stereotypes Part of the amplification effect is the “pyramidal conception of blame and responsibility,” which, tied to the belief that the deviance is just the tip of a more broadly based social malaise, Cohen takes as important prerequisites of a successful moral enterprise (in a conscious attempt to expand on Becker’s own criteria for such an enterprise) (1987: 113). The moral panic emerges only if the local control culture can convince the greater part of society that the local problem is also their problem and that it will not go away unless wider social forces are mobilized against it. Without getting too deeply into the twists and turns of Cohen’s argument, we can summarize his position by looking at the subtitle to his book: deviance in general, and the Mods and Rockers specifically, were created by the reaction of the societal control culture to a disparate collection of acts by hooligans on holiday that in themselves did not constitute anything like the assault on values and property by organized gangs that the press portrayed it as. Becker (1973) deals with two groups of outsiders: the marijuana user and the dance musician. The former case is the more interesting of the two and better illustrates how Becker’s transactionalism works. He suggests that many kinds of deviance are socially learned, the proto-deviant having to be introduced to “new pleas-

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ures” by participating in a subculture organized around these pleasures (Becker 1973: 30). The case of the marijuana user shows how new social interpretations of an ambiguous physical experience (i.e., smoking a joint) creates “deviant motivation” from deviant behaviour, and not vice versa (42). In itself, a marijuana high is morally neutral: moral entrepreneurship must intervene and label the act of smoking a joint as “deviant” before we can speak of “deviancy” as a corrupt element of a person’s character. According to Becker, marijuana use does not continue unless the smoker (a) learns the proper smoking techniques, (b) learns to recognize the effects and connect them with the drug, and (c) learns to enjoy the sensations (58). Naturally, once all of this occurs, the smoker “joins” the deviant subculture of marijuana users, learning in interactions with this subculture such things as how to find a safe supplier of the drug and, how to hide its effects in public, as well as a set of rationalizations with which to defend the use of the drug. Cohen’s book, although it focuses on the scene at English seaside resort communities on mid-1960s holiday weekends, is also a generic primer on moral panics and the creation of folk devils. The successful creation of folk devils involves portraying them as atypical actors against an over-typical background, the labellers drawing on a ready-made stock of images to brand these “atypical” actors as deviant (Cohen 1987: 61, 73). Stereotyping is the key to the creation of folk devils. This takes place by means of a process of symbolization: a word, e.g., “Mod,” become symbolic of a certain status, objects (such as dress) come to symbolize the word, and, finally, these objects themselves become symbolic of a negative status (1987: 40). The whole phenomenon started on a cold and wet Easter weekend at Clacton in 1964, with groups of youths scuffling and throwing stones (the impact), followed by an unorganized local response, and then by the media’s inventory, consisting largely of a gross exaggeration of the seriousness of the events (29, 30). Out of this initial inventory came the invention of the Mods and Rockers as distinctive and hostile groups, despite their common working-class origins and the fact that they were never “gangs” in any meaningful sense (165). Cohen speculates that youth deviance has its origins in the fact that working-class adolescents, faced with leisure goals they could not reach, manufactured their own entertainment, making things happen out of nothing. They were generally aware of the absurdity

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of both their problem and their solution (182). In a word, they were intelligent social actors. The danger that society at large saw in groups like the Mods was that they lived in leisure time, and created themselves as Mods in that time (188). They defined themselves outside of the workplace and thus outside of their usually low-status position in the English economic hierarchy. This leads me to the broader question of the position of transactional theory within the framework I have outlined in the previous chapter. I will come back to this question at the end of the next section, but as a preliminary answer I suggest that transactional theory uses the intentions of the actors it studies to penetrate into the social meaning of their acts. In explaining deviance as the outcome of a labelling process (Becker), and then showing how the process of labelling different groups of adolescents as “deviant” works (Cohen), the focus is on the intentional acts of two groups (the labellers and the labelled), and how these groups interact to produce new social objects (outsiders, folk devils, etc.). There are some important caveats to make at this point, however. Becker notes that those whose position gives them the weapons and power to make and enforce rules are the most successful at doing so, thus tipping his hat to the role of legal and political power in the creation of outsiders (1973: 17). In addition, in his addendum to Folk Devils and Moral Panics, “Labelling Theory Reconsidered,” Cohen tells us that it is a misinterpretation of labelling theory to see it as suggesting that labelling causes deviance: stick-up men don’t stick up people because of having been labelled stick-up men (1973: 181). Nevertheless, the structural element is largely absent from labelling theory. There is certainly enough evidence, at least in Becker’s Outsiders, to suggest that labelling theorists see deviance as a social object that is in some sense “created” by the intentional action of moral entrepreneurs. For Becker, outsiders are manufactured by horrified or Machiavellian paragons of virtue. The case for at least a “passive” structural element being present in Cohen’s work is stronger than for Becker’s. In the Introduction to the 1987 edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (the original work came out in 1972), he complains that his book was misinterpreted as implying no need for a structural explanation of deviance, saying that it was more of a study of moral panics than of folk devils (iii). He suggests that the whole beach scene was structured by the lack

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of leisure choices offered to youth by society, and further that “endogenous” factors like the youth culture and the structural position of working-class adolescents are difficult to keep separate from the societal reaction to deviance (183,190). Lastly, Cohen shows how the manipulation of the appropriate symbols by the control culture is made easier when the group under attack is highly visible and structurally weak (which was more the case with the Rockers than the Mods) (198). All of this adds up to a greater sensitivity on Cohen’s part than Becker’s to the structural ideals guiding the actions of each of the players in the drama of deviance. However, structural explanations are kept firmly in the background in both of these transactional studies in favour of the “intentional” route into social meaning. This certainly cannot be said of the other group of social theorists I will examine, to whom I now turn.

New Subcultural Theory The second approach to deviance I want to consider here is what I will call “New Subcultural Theory,” a catch-all term to cover the neo-Marxist sociology that came out of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the early seventies and on. I will focus on two works here: the essays contained in Hall and Jefferson’s germinal work Resistance through Rituals, originally published by the centre itself, and to a lesser degree Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, one of the more powerful statements of the “resistance through rituals” theme. For New Subcultural Theory, “spectacular” British youth subcultures such as the Teddy Boys, the Mods, the Skinheads, and the Punks were attempts by working-class youth to resist the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, as incorporated in their schools, homes, workplaces, and mainstream popular culture, through the magical formula of style (which is taken to include dress, music, slang, and behaviour). Capitalist societies are still riddled with class contradictions; but, as Gramsci suggests, these contradictions are papered over by bourgeois hegemony, which makes the rule of the dominant classes seem natural and normal by reframing all competing definitions of the world within its range of acceptable definitions (Clarke et al. 1976: 38-39). Thus for New Subcultural Theory the struggle between classes on the level of social and material life always assumes a further struggle over the distribution of cultural power.

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Since culture and social structure are intimately linked in New Subcultural Theory, the centre felt it necessary to “de-construct” youth culture as a purely generational phenomenon, to get at its deeper social, economic, and cultural roots, and thereby “re-construct” this youth culture in structural terms (Clarke et al. 1976: 11, 16). There was more going on in youth subcultures, they thought, than a rejection of their parents’ culture. They aimed to do this by looking at post-war youth subcultures in Britain in structural and historical terms, especially in the way that they either resisted or succumbed to the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes (Hall and Jefferson 1976: 5). As the title of their sociological manifesto suggested, the centre found time and time again that these subcultures resisted hegemony through rituals, through the self-defeating but nevertheless magical formula of style.2 This whole project was by and large a reaction to interactionist and transactionalist approaches to deviance, which the centre’s theorists found “naive” in their focus on public labelling as the chief origin of deviance (Hall and Jefferson 1976: 5). As Brian Roberts notes, only rarely did the transactionalists look at the relation between the poor and the powerful in structural rather than interactional terms (1976: 248). Overall, New Subcultural Theory’s search for structural explanations of deviance and skepticism with regards to middleclass values made it critical of both traditional (largely American) subcultural theory and interactionist approaches because of their attempts to frame their analyses in terms of an assumption of the need for some sort of bourgeois social consensus. The fact that these earlier schools of thought largely wanted to preserve this consensus distorted their understanding of deviance. The theoretical foundation for New Subcultural Theory’s analysis of subcultures and style came from Phil Cohen’s work in the early1970s. Cohen concluded that “the latent function of subculture is…to express, albeit ‘magically,’ the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture” (qtd. in Murdock and McCron 1976: 204). Youth’s expression of class contradictions through subcultural activities was a result of the fact that the life-options for working-class adolescents at work were limited, so they “articulated” their class locations through consumption and leisure (205). Yet it was a class (and not generational) location being expressed all the same. Given the largely mythical quality of the “affluence,” political “consensus,” and the “embourgeoisement” of the working class, themes that dom-

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inated the social analysis of the 1950s and 1960s in Britain, the centre drew attention to the fact that class stubbornly refused to disappear as a major dimension and dynamic of social structure (Clarke et al. 1976: 25). These class locations were “negotiated,” according to New Subcultural Theory, through the construction of distinctive leisure styles (Murdock and McCron 1976: 203). The shared experiences of adolescents in a given location in the social structure were the breeding ground for these styles. As Corrigan and Frith note, postwar youth should not be seen as pop-corrupted teens, as entirely passive consumers, but as “exuberant, proud, belligerent” makers of their own cultures (1976: 237). Even though New Subcultural Theory tends toward structuralism, it still sees social actors as creative and intelligent, and not as dupes of economic forces. Three ways that these cultures were made stand out in the ethnographic section of Resistance through Rituals. Firstly, Tony Jefferson thinks that the Teddy Boys of the fifties, who were sort of English greasers in neo-Edwardian jackets, can be “decoded” as attempting symbolically to defend a constantly declining space and declining status of old working-class neighbourhoods and values (1976: 81). Dick Hedbige sees the Mods of the mid-sixties as trying to compensate for their relatively low daytime economic positions by exercising complete control over their leisure pursuits (1976: 91). Lastly, John Clarke feels that the Skinheads of the early seventies tried to magically recreate, through the football mob and an aggressively proletarian style, a traditional working-class community as a substitute for that community’s real decline (1976a: 99). However, the “magical” solutions to class contradictions created by these subcultures do not address the real material causes of their class subordination. Their solutions are not mounted on their real terrain of economic and political struggles and thus fail to pose a counter-hegemonic challenge to the parent culture (Clarke 1976b: 189). Their importance lies in their winning of space for workingclass youth through the distinctive leisure styles that embody their way of life. This way of life, as I have already hinted, is personified in the creation of subcultural styles. New Subcultural Theory suggests that subcultural groups choose objects for their individual style that are homologous with their central beliefs and activities. There must be some fit between the elements of the style and the way of

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life it personifies. A group must be able to recognize itself in the repressed meanings of the symbolic objects that go into making the style (Clarke 1976b: 179). As Dick Hebdige claims in Subculture, the punks (who postdate the earlier Resistance through Rituals essays) constructed a homologous ensemble of symbolic objects out of “the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the ‘soulless’, frantically driven music” (1979: 114). The self-consciousness and self-image of the punk subculture was expressed in the elements of dress, language, music, and behaviour, which punks cobbled together to produce their own unique style. A central element in New Subcultural Theory’s analysis of style is the fact that adherents of subcultures are not just passive consumers. When they appropriate a commodity, they redefine its use and value, and thereby relocate its meaning within a different context (Hebdige 1976: 93). They are, in short, bricoleurs.3 “Bricolage” involves an individual or group taking objects with already “sedimented” meanings and reordering or reconstructing them so as to communicate fresh meanings (Clarke 1976b: 177). Whether it is the punk’s safety pins, the mod’s stylish jacket, or the skinhead’s braces and boots, subculture is read by New Subcultural Theory as undermining the traditional meanings of social objects through their stylistic ensembles. The point of this undermining exercise is to communicate group identity and significant difference, both from other subcultural groupings and from mainstream culture (Hebdige 1979: 102; Clarke 1976b: 180). These differences serve as a convenient hook for the media (and the control culture as a whole) to latch on to in their efforts to stigmatize subcultures as evidence of a more general social malaise, sometimes leading to the sort of moral panics Cohen talked about. Dick Hebdige describes the meaning of subcultural style as even more explicitly confrontational that do most of the other centre theorists: Moreover commodities can be symbolically “repossessed” in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them…the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is

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expressed obliquely, in style.…Our task becomes, like Barthes’, to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as “maps of meaning” which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal. (1979: 16-18) Hebdige is clearly interested in the social meanings contained within subcultural styles. Yet unlike the interactionists, he will read these meanings through structurally tinted sunglasses. Under Hedbige’s schema, subcultural style acts as a coded response to community changes (1979: 80). Indeed, “coding” (and the need for decoding) is one of the key contributions of New Subcultural Theory to the analysis of subcultural styles. It linked these codes back to their structural roots, usually class. The subculture Hebdige discusses the most in his book are the punks, largely working-class kids whose stylistic ensemble (e.g., safety pins, ripped T-shirts) involved icons living a double life, reflecting in heightened form their perceived condition of exile from the parent culture and from other recent subcultures (1979: 65-66). Sadly, as one can imagine from Hebdige’s general tone, these symbolic acts of resistance to hegemony are destined to self-destruct, as the original innovations of the style become frozen commodities for sale at the local mega-mart. Hebdige concludes that youth “cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions” (1979: 96). The engine of consumer capitalism consumes these styles and spits them back out as mass-produced objects no longer tied to the counter-hegemonic meanings they originally signified.4 For New Subcultural Theory, commodities have no distinct meaning in and of themselves: they are “social hieroglyphs,” as Marx put it. This raises the broader question of how New Subcultural Theory connects meaning and structure in its analysis of class and subcultural styles. The centre’s theorists admit that commodities are cultural signs that often seem to have fixed and natural meanings, but quickly add that this is an illusion, and that they “mean” something only because they have been arranged within cultural codes that assign meanings to them (Clarke et al. 1976: 55). They thus add to Marx’s social hieroglyph just a bit of Derrida’s floating signifier when it comes to interpreting stylistic ensembles. A couple of cases

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in point help to show how New Subcultural Theory connects structure and meaning in explaining deviance. The way the Teddy Boys dressed is seen by Tony Jefferson as a symbolic way of negotiating with their social reality, of giving “cultural meaning to their social plight” (1976: 86). Their snappy river-boat gambler image acted as a compensation for the loss of both physical and ideological space by, and the implicit “humiliation” of, the metropolitan English working class in the 1950s. Jumping ahead twenty years, Hebdige sees lurking beneath the “clownish makeup” of the punks “the unaccepted and disfigured face of capitalism; that beyond the horror circus antics a divided and unequal society was being eloquently condemned” (1979: 115). He saw the punks as mirroring the inequality, powerlessness, and especially the alienation of bourgeois society in their decisive break not only with the parent culture but with their own location in experience (1979: 121). In a word, New Subcultural Theory sees the meaning of subcultural style as expressing in code class contradictions, exhibiting from the fifties to the seventies an increasing alienation by working-class youth from bourgeois hegemony in Britain. The meaning of subcultural styles lies in the fragmented structures that gave them birth. One of the best summaries of New Subcultural Theory, which is at the same time a powerful critique of it, came in Stan Cohen’s 1987 introduction to the new edition of his Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Although to some degree sympathetic to the work of the centre, he attacks New Subcultural Theory principally on four grounds: (a) that it fails to connect the symbolic elements of subcultural style with the conscious intentions of its bearers; (b) that New Subcultural Theory’s decoding technique is too free-ranging and unverifiable; (c) that it is ideologically remote from concrete interactions; and (d) that it over-romanticizes the youthful deviant. Taking these one at a time, Cohen feels that New Subcultural Theory’s focus on the structural underpinnings of subcultures brings the social theorists’ too far away from the subjective consciousness of the actor, suggesting that their focus on historical and structural explanations relieves them of having to show that the symbolic meanings of subcultural styles are actually a part of the awareness of their bearers (1987: xiv). This I read as the claim that New Subcultural Theory too often severs the connection between subjective intention and social meaning, certainly a valid criticism.

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Secondly, Cohen questions the whole “decoding” technique: Above all else, the new theories about British post war youth cultures are massive exercises of decoding, reading, deciphering, and interrogating. These phenomena must be saying something to us—if only we could know exactly what. So the whole assembly of cultural artefacts, down to the punks’ last safety pin, have been scrutinized, taken apart, contextualized and re-contextualized. The conceptual tools of Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, a Left-Bank pantheon of Genet, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser have all been wheeled out to aid in this hunt for the hidden code. The result has been an ingenious and, more often than not, plausible reading of subcultural style as a process of generating, appropriating and re-ordering to communicate new and subversive meaning. (1987: ix) As one can see, Cohen is partly sympathetic to these decoding exercises, but with serious reservations. For example, he questions (with good reason) New Subcultural Theory’s decoding of subcultural styles purely in terms of resistance and never in terms of accommodation to the parent culture (1987: xii). This second problem feeds back into the first, for the effectiveness of decoding is in large part tied to the theorist’s remaining true to the intentional content of the symbols used by subculture members. The third and fourth elements in Cohen’s critique are New Subcultural Theory’s ideological remoteness from and romanticism towards the youthful deviants it studies. Cohen thinks that this remoteness leads to premature ideological closure, for the intellectual pyrotechnics of New Subcultural Theory are too cerebral and remote from the “emotional tone” of the actual deviant acts (1987: xxiv, xix). He seems to suggest that a bit of participant observation (Cohen himself was at some of the English seaside resorts on holiday weekends in the mid-sixties, interviewing his “folk devils” on the scene) would cure the centre’s theorists of their structuralist decoding excesses. Lastly, Cohen takes aim squarely at Hebdige’s celebration of the Punk Refusal and other subcultural “resistance” as involving a romanticization of delinquents as the “vanguard” of the revolution to come (1987: xxvi). New Subcultural Theory’s neoMarxist reading of working-class subcultures as centres of resist-

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ance, if not as proto-revolutionary, certainly opens the door to this sort of romanticism. So how can we situate labelling theory and New Subcultural Theory? I suggest that we can map these two schools of thought with respect to social deviance onto my intention/meaning/structure theoretical network (see Chart 4). Chart 4. Mapping Deviance Theory Labelling Theory ====================>