THE MAKING OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

By the same author

MAKING PEOPLE PAY DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL (joint editor) DRUGS AND POLITICS (editor)

The Making of Symbolic Interactionism

Paul Rock

© Paul Rock 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1St edition 1979

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First published 1979 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rock, Paul The making of symbolic interactionism I. Symbolic interactionism - History I. Title 30 I. 1 I HM24

ISBN 978-1-349-04086-5 ISBN 978-1-349-04084-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04084-1

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For Peter Manning and Robert Scott

Contents

Preface IX

I Symbolic Interactionism as an Understated Sociology

2 The Roots of Symbolic Interactionism 24

3 Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism 59

4 The Self 102

5 Problematic Aspects of the Interactionist Idea of the Self 147

6 Participant Observation 178

7 Conclusion 2 I 7

Notes 239

Index 2 6 5

VII

Preface

There was a perverse strain in much of the sociology which I learned as an undergraduate. My education introduced me to a number of simple principles. Like many others, I was encouraged to distrust ideas that stemmed from my own experience and reason. Sociology was presented as a science whose precepts necessarily contradicted lay thought and common sense. Its competence was emphasised by the scale of contradiction. Ideas which seemed plausible and sensible were most liable to be in error. Those which were extraordinary and incredible became candidates for serious attention. I was led to recognise distinctions between manifest and latent functions, ideol­ogy and science, false consciousness and truth. If assertions were not amazing or confusing, they were likely to be either trivial or false. In a sense, then, the world was turned on its head. All appearances became deceptive, and descriptions which deferred to them were defined as 'journalistic' or superficial.

Sociology thus became a form of high mystery. The initiate was required to shed worldly knowledge and take on the trappings of intellectual innocence and naIvety. Learning revealed the hidden order of things, an order which was immeasurably complex, profound and subtle. Simple analyses were redefined as simplistic; focused studies were held to lack context and breadth; and interest in meaning indicated an improper fascination with the epiphenomenal. For a while I was almost made to believe in a nightmare realm in which all was strange and unexpected. Sociology being a mystery, abstruseness became a guarantee of authentic knowledge. The more opaque the analysis, the more arcane the thought, the greater was the possibility of an argument being profound and illuminating. My fellow students toyed with Talcott Parsons, the graver Marxists and the weighty debates of grand sociology. They dismissed sociology which was literate and lucid because it smacked of insubstantial and frivolous thought.

It took me some time to discover that there were other sociological possibilities. Anyone who studied symbolic interactionism in the

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England of the early 1960s had to be an autodidact. Sociology students had to build up a working knowledge of the approach in a solitary and faltering fashion. They had to assemble bibliographies and intellectual histories without any assistance from those who had been formally trained in the sociology. After all, there was no older generation of British interactionists. More'over a Ph.D. from a British university hinges on an examination by thesis alone. It is acquired without the organised co-operation and preparation that prevail in North American centres of graduate education. Instead of the joint work that is imposed by mandatory courses, the British student proceeds in an environment of structured neglect. Intellectual innovation is encouraged, but so is solitude. There are real bars to the development of a network of peers and patrons. There is no orderly arrangement of meetings between those who think alike. On the contrary, all such encounters are either fortuitous or calculated to be staged at a relatively late period in an intellectual career. It is only when ideas are published and gossip emerges that academic anon­ymity wanes.

Those who explored interactionism in the 1960s were then isolated for some time. Many produced personal syntheses which fused the orthodox and the heterodox together. Some even created genuinely novel observations and comparisons. 1 Lacking a common tradition which might have suppressed distinction, they formed an array of moderately independent thinkers. In time they were to emulate their American counterparts by building a social world for themselves. 2 It was a fairly cohesive world which celebrated shared interests and a shared marginality. Britain is small enough to permit the develop­ment of a close association between the few who were concerned with symbolic interactionism.

The thought of that world was curiously intertwined with the original American sociology. At one level it was little more than a reflection and refraction of American ideas. There was a borrowing, sifting and redrafting which formed part of an unacknowledged division of labour. Much work was performed on American arguments; there was copious exegesis; controversies arose and declined; and revisions were adopted and discarded. In the main the American interactionists were unaware of those echoing debates in Britain. Those who came to Britain were bemused by the extent of the interest which they excited. That unawareness still persists. There is very little reference in American writing to what transpired outside the American universities during that period. British ideas did not

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feed back into thinking in the United States. At another level the British version of interactionism possessed

deviant qualities. It was frail and unstable because it was not anchored in an enduring tradition. Borne by a small number of identifiable and changing people, it was itself volatile. Estrangement from the parent tradition also made the subtler and more incommunicable contents of interactionism inaccessible in Britain. The British adaptation was compounded out of diverse ideas which are only infrequently discussed in the United States. There were strands of Marxism and existentialism which are quite foreign to American writing. More important, that adaptation was the property of a distinct group which acquired its own history, authority and intellectual autonomy. The transformations undergone by British interactionism depended, in part, on the comparatively contained and peculiar nature of its context.

A few of the eccentric characteristics of this book must be explained by my own initial experience of isolation and subsequent exposure to the people working in Britain. Mine is a personal construction of interaction ism which was modified as I came to know various members of the group who had flirted with the sociology. I have never had an orthodox education in the approach. Yet it is that education which has conferred many of the special qualities of interactionism. As I shall argue in Chapter I, the sociology is lodged in something of an oral culture which has been carried by three generations of American scholars. Those scholars have tended to treat the sociology as a version of normal science, refraining from the analysis which might expose its philosophical basis and supports. Their abstention from philosophy is itself a philosophical stance, but it is a stance that is covert and largely unexamined. My own intellectual marginality is perhaps best illustrated by this book's concentration on the historical and epistemological roots of in­teractionism. I have described the sociology in a way that is probably uncongenial to those who are more centrally placed.

In brief, I have attempted to expound interactionism as a particular kind of answer to the dilemmas which confront all sociologists. The fundamental problems which first produced sociology remain unsettled, and interactionism is one significant strategy for contend­ing with them. Those problems revolve around the basic nature of social life, the observer's relations with that life, and the sorts of question which can properly be asked of it. Symbolic interactionism is a working amalgam of two rather discrete solutions: the formalism

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of Simmel which stressed the partial, evolving and synthetic a priori character of social knowledge; and the pragmatism of Mead, Dewey and James which emphasised how valid knowledge must be grounded, practical and experiential. Both strains abjured systematic a priori expositions of sociology. Both denied the legitimacy of proceeding as if society were a tangible entity whose innermost essence could be understood. Both advanced an interpretation of society as a shifting combination of forms which were variously in conflict, harmony and contradiction. They refused to describe the social as unambiguously or obviously organised. Rather they maintained that it can be understood only through a detailed process of enquiry whose conclusions are destined to be provisional and partial. It was held that enquiry, in tum, must be embedded in an active investigation of observable social phenomena. It cannot be deductive, speculative or contemplative. It cannot establish truths about the unobservable. Neither can it prepare the way for substantial generalisation.

Those conceptions of society, sociology and scientific work mirror one another. A sociology which portrays society as fluid and often unknowable cannot itself be highly structured. It tends to shun abstract reasoning and theorising, being justified by works. An appropriate motto for the sociology might be facta non verba. Indeed the principal member of the sociology department which founded symbolic interactionism announced in the first volume of the AmericanJournalofSociology, 'the most impressive lesson which I have learned in the vast sociological laboratory which the city of Chicago constitutes is that action, not speculation, is the supreme teacher.' 3

And Charles Peirce, the man who framed the pragmatism that animated interactionism, declared 'modem students of science have been successful because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in their laboratories and in the field.' 4

Interactionism is significant and it ought to be part of the range of alternatives which all sociologists should consider. But it clearly produces paradox. Sociology is an academic pursuit which, like all such pursuits, is conveyed and refined in writing and talk. A form of sociology which devalues theory and metaphysics will tend to silence itself. It becomes a mute whose influence is reduced and whose exposition is a contradictory enterprise. My own discussion is accordingly a wayward undertaking for an interactionist. It expounds what wilts with description. Its task is therefore a little absurd. I have tried to accomplish it by relegating a discussion of contemporary

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symbolic interactionism to later passages in the book. Chapters 2 and 3 will dwell on the more articulate ideas which were to become recognised as symbolic interactionism. By working as if I were writing a history of ideas, I have systematically reconstituted a relatively unsystematic sociology. It is those mute and unschematic properties which I address in Chapter I. They are significant not only because they have led to a radical misrepresentation of interaction ism, but also because they are the very core of the sociology. I am not unaware of the irony that arises as a result. Plummer has argued 'is not the core issue the inherent ambiguity of interactionism, which permits talk, but works against reificatory, systematizing writing?' 5

If this book should fail, it will be partly because that core issue presents insoluble dilemmas.

Most of the book was written whilst I was an academic visitor at Princeton University. I am grateful to the Sociology Department, and especially to Marvin Bressler and Robert Scott, for allowing me to spend such a pleasant and profitable year. My interest in interactionism was first stimulated by Philip Hughes. It is to him that I owe a great deal, for without him I might never have left the nightmare realm. I would also like to thank Howard Becker, Peter Manning, Kenneth Plummer and Robert Scott for their kindness, advice and support. They gave me invaluable guidance which corrected many of the mistakes which I might otherwise have made.

Paul Rock London School of Economics