Rise Of The Avatar

The Conversation of Gestures and Significant Symbols

For Mead, the gesture is perhaps the most important entryway into understanding social interaction and communication. A gesture, according to Mead, is an act by an organism that calls out a response in another organism. All living organisms inhabit, he argues, a conversation of gestures, calling out meaningful responses to and from one another. Mead uses the example of a dogfight to exemplify what he means by the conversation of gestures. The act of a dog snarling at another dog calls out for a response from the other dog to, for example, snarl back or retreat. The response from the second dog, in turn, calls out a further response from the first dog, and so on and so forth.

Mead argues that humans similarly live in a conversation of gestures, but that our conversation also includes significant symbols. Significant symbols, he states, are gestures that arouse in us the same feelings that they are meant to arouse in those they are directed at. With significant symbols, Mead argues, we take the perspective of others toward the symbol as our own, like when we learn to feel patriotism when looking at the national flag or when we take the perspective of both buyer and seller into account when bargaining over the price of a commodity. Once internalized, significant symbols are also what allow thinking—a silent conversation with ourselves in which we think over and through multiple perspectives to address a problem or issue.

Self

For Mead, what we call our sense of self stems from the human ability to be self-conscious, to take ourselves as objects of experience. A sense of self, he argues, only arises as we begin taking the perspectives of others toward ourselves, internalizing them as our own perspective and viewpoint on “who I am.” The self, then, is an emergent product of social experience. Only by being able to take others’ perspectives can we gain a viewpoint from outside of our own egos from which to think about and evaluate our personal identities.

“We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances. We discuss politics with one and religion with another. There are all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions. It is the social process itself that is responsible for the appearance of the self; it is not there as a self apart from this type of experience. A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal, as I have just pointed out”

(Mead)

The “I” and the “Me”

Central to Mead’s theory of the self are the concepts of the “I” and the “Me.” While it’s tempting to think of the “I” and the “Me” as two separate parts of the self, in Mead’s thinking, it’s more accurate to see the “I” and the “Me” as a dynamic relationship that actually forms what we call the self. The self, in other words, is the relationship between the “I” and “Me.” The “Me” is the internalization of others’ perspectives on ourselves—the perspective we get of ourselves from how others treat us (as a man, for example, or an “at-risk youth”). The “I,” then, is the part of us that responds to these internalized attitudes—how, for example, we act based on others’ perspectives of us as a man or a troubled youth. The perspectives of the “I” and the “Me” may sometimes fuse, Mead argues, but often the “I” acts creatively in response to the “Me,” conforming to the “Me,” to be sure, but rarely in a total way.

Discourse

Foucault was interested in the phenomenon of discourse throughout his career, primarily in how discourses define the reality of the social world and the people, ideas, and things that inhabit it. For Foucault, a discourse is an institutionalized way of speaking or writing about reality that defines what can be intelligibly thought and said about the world and what cannot. For example, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that a new discourse of "sexuality" had fundamentally changed the way we think about desire, pleasure, and our innermost selves. In Foucault’s argument, discourses about sexuality did not discover some pre-existing, core truth about human identity, but rather created it through particular practices of power/knowledge (see next entry).

Power/Knowledge

For Foucault, power and knowledge are not seen as independent entities but are inextricably related—knowledge is always an exercise of power and power always a function of knowledge. Perhaps his most famous example of a practice of power/knowledge is that of the confession, as outlined in History of Sexuality. Once solely a practice of the Christian Church, Foucault argues that it became diffused into secular culture (and especially psychology) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the confession (a form of power) people were incited to “tell the truth” (produce knowledge) about their sexual desires, emotions, and dispositions. Through these confessions, the idea of a sexual identity at the core of the self came into existence (again, a form of knowledge), an identity that had to be monitored, cultivated, and often controlled (again, back to power). It is important to note that Foucault understood power/knowledge as productive as well as constraining. Power/knowledge not only limits what we can do, but also opens up new ways of acting and thinking about ourselves.

Discipline

Foucault argues that discipline is a mechanism of power that regulates the thought and behavior of social actors through subtle means. In contrast to the brute, sovereign force exercised by monarchs or lords, discipline works by organizing space (e.g. the way a prison or classroom is built), time (e.g. the set times you are expected to be at work each day), and everyday activities. Surveillance is also an integral part of disciplinary practices. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that modern society is a “disciplinary society,” meaning that power in our time is largely exercised through disciplinary means in a variety of institutions (prisons, schools, hospitals, militaries, etc.).

Governmentality and Biopower

In his later work, Foucault coined the now influential concept of governmentality. According to Foucault, governmentality is the “art of governing,” not simply at the level of state politics, as we generally think of it, but the governing of a wide array of objects and persons such as entire populations at the most abstract level and one’s own desires and thoughts at a more micro level. Foucault was especially interested in how, in contemporary times, the governing of conduct was increasingly focused on the management of populations. Unlike disciplinary power aimed at the training of individual bodies, the management of populations relied on biopower, understood as the policies and procedures that manage births, deaths, reproduction, and health and illness within the larger social body.

Modernity and Morality

Bauman’s personal experience with anti-Semitism and his later research on the Holocaust led him to question whether modern forms of social organization and rationality, often championed as signs of human progress, actually undercut moral obligation and responsibility. In Modernity and the Holocaust, for example, Bauman provocatively argues that the Holocaust, far from being a barbaric counter-example to modern morality, was actually in line with many modern principles of rationality that are seen as morally superior in most other circumstances. Modern principles such as instrumental rationality, rule-following, the ordering and categorization of all of social life, and a complex division of labor all played a role in making the mass extermination of Jews possible. In his later writings, Bauman explores the possibilities for ethics in a more “postmodern” social world.

Postmodernity and Liquid Modernity

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bauman was known as a key theorist of postmodernity. While many theorists of the postmodern condition argued that it signified a radical break with modern society, Bauman contended that modernity had always been characterized by an ambivalent, “dual” nature. On the one hand, Bauman saw modern society as being largely characterized by a need for order—a need to domesticate, categorize, and rationalize the world so it would be controllable, predictable, and understandable. It is this ordering, rationalizing tendency that Max Weber saw as the characteristic force of modernization. But, on the other hand, modernity was also always characterized by radical change, by a constant overthrowing of tradition and traditional forms of economy, culture, and relationship—“all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx characterized this aspect of modern society. For Bauman, postmodernity is the result of modernity’s failure to rationalize the world and the amplification of its capacity for constant change.

In later years, Bauman felt that the term “postmodern” was problematic and started using the term liquid modernity to better describe the condition of constant mobility and change he sees in relationships, identities, and global economics within contemporary society. Instead of referring to modernity and postmodernity, Bauman writes of a transition from solid modernity to a more liquid form of social life.

For Bauman, the consequences of this move to a liquid modernity can most easily be seen in contemporary approaches to self-identity. In liquid modernity, constructing a durable identity that coheres over time and space becomes increasingly impossible, according to Bauman. We have moved from a period where we understood ourselves as “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning to one where we act as “tourists” in search of multiple but fleeting social experiences.

Social Forms

In everyday social life, we often focus on the content of our social interactions with others—for example, “what is the right thing way to react to my boss’ outlandish work demands?” or “what the heck was my husband thinking when he said that to me?” But, for Simmel, the task of the sociologist was less about looking at the contents that distinguish types of social interaction from one another and more about illuminating the shared social forms through which a variety of seemingly different interactions take place. For example, for Simmel, it isn’t the specific demands of your overbearing boss that are of primary sociological interest, but rather that the interaction takes the form of a relationship of domination and subordination, a social form that we can see taking shape not only between bosses and their employees, but also regularly between wealthy and poor, white and black, husbands and wives, and so on.

Simmel was interested in the fact that many different contents could take the exact same social form. Interactions within families, gangs, and businesses, for example, all regularly take on the social form of conflict. Conversely, Simmel noted that the exact same content (the desire for money, for example) could be expressed through a variety of social forms, like cooperation, for example, or competition, or outright warfare. By exploring the many forms by and through which we engage in social interaction, Simmel saw the sociologist as devising what he called a “geometry of social life.”

The Stranger

It’s often noted that many of Simmel’s concepts are characterized by combining seeming opposites into a synthetic whole. Simmel’s understanding of the stranger is perhaps the best example of this aspect of his thought (but so is the Tragedy of Culture, explained below). For Simmel, the stranger is a social role that combines the seemingly contradictory qualities of nearness and remoteness. The stranger is connected to the broader social community by only the most general (and generic) commonalities, yet is still relied on by large groups of people. By virtue of the stranger’s simultaneous nearness and distance from others, the stranger is often valued for his or her objectivity, for being able to take a distanced and dispassionate view of events and relationships. The stranger may also be someone we turn to, paradoxically, as a close confidant because their social distance from us prevents them from judging us too harshly.

The Tragedy of Culture

Simmel viewed human culture as a dialectical relationship between what he termed “objective culture” and “subjective culture.” He understood “objective culture” as all of those collectively shared human products such as religion, art, literature, philosophy, rituals, etc. through which we build and transform our lives as individuals. “Subjective culture,” in turn, refers to the creative and intelligent aspects of the individual human being, aspects of ourselves that Simmel argued could only be cultivated through the agency of external or “objective” culture.

The Tragedy of Culture, Simmel theorized, occurred as societies modernized and the massive amounts of objective cultural products overshadowed (and overwhelmed) the subjective abilities of the individual. Presented with more options than one person can possibly ever hope to experience in a lifetime, the modern individual runs the risk of stunting his or her social psychological growth.