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"Individuality" and "freedom," very troubling words. Well, now, that statement probably took you off guard! What's so troubling about individuality and freedom? They are, after all, part of the foundation and ideology of America. We couldn't have America without those words. But the problem is we take these words for granted and don't really consider what they mean. And they are troubling in the sense that we aren't really sure where the lines are. In other words, where do individuality and freedom begin and end?
As we have seen, to be human is to be social. And to be social is to exist as part of a collective. Certainly when we speak of individuals we mean human individuals. But if to be human means to be social, how then can an individual human exist? You don't use your own language to think. And you don't have exclusive perspectives from which to view the world. Imagine if you did, what would happen? Think about it . a person who uses their very own language to think and who sees the world in a way that nobody else around them does. There are such people. What do we call them? Crazy. And what do we do with them? Put them away so they can't hurt us. So to be individual and free are comparative issues. You are an individual only insofar as you are part of a group! You're an individual because you are a little bit different then the rest. If you are too much different, well, then, we will put you away. And the same is true with freedom . you can only experience so much freedom. Too much freedom and you become a danger to us all (including yourself . since your life is dependent upon being human!).
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So, how can you be a social human and a free individual ? It's troubling because humans are social through and through. And it's troubling because to be human also means to exercise freedom and individuality! See what I mean about these words being troubling?
And they have troubled sociologists for as long as we have been around. On the one hand, we know we need to have social structures and socialization in order to exist. Humans depend upon social organization to survive. Yet on the other hand, we need to have individuality and freedom in order to progress (remember our chapter on deviance). So, how do these two work forces work? We have some pretty good theories about how they work. And these theories generally fall into two different camps. The one camp sees society as a social fact, a thing that exists in-and-of itself and that is external to and coercive of the individual. In other words, society is a structure that "determines" what we do. This kind of thinking is represented in the picture below. What you'll see is that the influence of society is very strong (as represented by society being on top and by the thick arrow). And while the individual does have some choice and influence, it is very weak (as pictured by the thin upward arrow). There is very little individuality and freedom in this way of looking at society.
The other camp sees society simply as a set of intersubjective meanings or perspectives. And these perspectives exist as potentials rather than determinations. In other words, we may or may not take a particular social perspective. This way of seeing things emphasizes agency (individual choice) and is pictured below. Society looks pretty different from this point of view. First of all, it isn't seen as a thing; society is only found in interaction from this perspective. We also see that the relationship between the individual and society is very different. It isn't top-down and coercive. When looked at from this point of view, society actually emerges out of interactions. So, for example, from this perspective of society there is no such thing as race or gender until we act like there is. Obviously, there is much more room to understand individuality and freedom with this kind of perspective.
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I should mention that these two viewpoints in sociology have come about because people were trying to explain different things. For example, the structural theorists (like conflict and functionalism) want to explain how things persist overtime , things like inequality and racism or structures like family. When we considered institutions in this course, we looked at them from a structural point of view. The interactionists, on the other hand, are more interested in explaining how people create meanings and selves in face-to-face interaction. So, in a sense, both these perspectives are "true." There are structures that strongly influence us (like language and gender), but we really do have to re-create them in interactions. And so there is more freedom than we usually think there is.
In sociology, most of the theoretical perspectives come from the structured point of view. That is, most sociologists see society as sets of structures that help to determine the way people feel, think, and act. There are a few theoretical perspectives in sociology that see society in much more flexible terms. Among them is a theory called "symbolic interaction." Though Herbert Blumer coined the term, George Herbert Mead is generally considered the conceptual father of "symbolic interactionism." Symbolic interactionism (usually termed "SI") rests on three basic premises: humans act on the basis of meaning; meanings do not abide in the object; and meaning is emergent. So, SI's assumptions are different than most other perspectives in sociology; and those differences make for a different kind of sociology. SI assumes that the most important thing for people is meaning, that producing meaning is the way that humans survive in the environment. But this meaning does not exist in any object, per se. For example, there is a social object called "female," but what does it mean? (And the important thing here is that the object's meaning is its reality for us.) Is "female" a human that does not have the legal standing of citizen, whose function is to produce babies and provide for the emotional and sexual welfare of a man? Or, is female a human with equal standing as male? What "female" means is not a part of the thing-it-self, but it is a meaning that humans place over it.
And this meaning isn't predetermined at all. This lack of predictability is what symbolic interactionists are trying to get at when they say that meaning is emergent. Meaning is something that is achieved in and through interactions; it doesn't exist in the object or in the culture in any determined way. So, let's take our example of female again. Can the meaning, and thus the reality, of female change from one interaction to another? Sure. A woman may have an interaction wherein she is treated with respect as a professional colleague, but in the very next interaction be treated as a sexual plaything, an object of gaze. But it is even more complex . all these meanings are subject to negotiation within each and every interaction. So the professional woman may see someone that she finds attractive and thus try to get his attention so that she can be an object of gaze for him. The meaning of any social object thus depends on the interaction and how we use symbols.
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But this doesn't imply that meaning is absolutely free floating. SI does argue that there are institutions, but these institutions aren't like the structures that we have seen in functionalism or conflict theory. Those institutions are macro-level entities that by and large determine human behavior from the top down. Mead argues that institutions are "nothing but an organization of attitudes which we all carry with us" and "organized forms of group or social activity--forms so organized that the individual members of society can act adequately and socially by taking the attitudes of others toward these activities" (Mead 1934, pp. 211, 261-262). So, in any interaction there may be several different attitudes or perspectives that we can take and through which we can organize our behaviors. In general these perspectives are called the "definition of the situation." The definition of the situation refers to the reigning characterization of any interaction. In other words, most encounters can be defined in some broad manner--as university classroom, for example. The specific perspectives that we take are roles within the definition of that situation. Roles are behavior clusters or scripts that are characteristic of some position in a community. So, in a university classroom we would expect to find the roles of professor and student.
But notice that the definition of the situation isn't as clear-cut as the above example would indicate. I may be at the grocery store and the role of professor doesn't live in that definition of the situation. However as soon as a student calls me Dr. or Professor Allan at the store, the definition of the situation changes. The same is true for our above example of female. The role of "date partner" doesn't exist in her professional situation, yet she may define the situation differently, and thus make available a new set of scripts or roles, by simply winking her eye or by allowing a touch to linger longer than expected. Thus we can never tell in advance what definitions, roles, or meanings are going to come out of an interaction--they all emerge.
So, all of what we've talked about so far can be summarized by stating that human action is not determined or released in response to institutionalized pressures, but it is built up and emerges through the negotiated definition of the situation. Further, human society must be studied in terms of acting units and research methods and theory must be geared toward understanding the meaning to the actors. The only acting unit is real people in real interaction, because that is where meaning is achieved and where people produce roles and selves. And, according to symbolic interactionists, theory can't be general, other than a few orienting concepts, because human nature is symbolic (not empirical like Durkheim and Marx argue) and human behavior cannot be predicted.
Another important point for symbolic interactionists is that the self is seen as one of many social objects in the environment, all of which must be indicated as important and defined by participants. So, the self isn't something that is essentially anything either. Like all social objects, it is something that must be symbolically denoted and then given meaning. And like all social/symbolic objects the meaning of the self is flexible and emergent.
Let's consider an example. My brother-in-law (Don) and my sister (Patti) both told me about an incident in back-to-back telephone conversations. Don is a distance runner and was training for the Pike's Peak run. During one of his training sessions at the Peak, he experienced heart fibrillation on the way down. He didn't tell Patti at that time but ran the race a week later. He did not experience any further problems. After the race, he told Patti about the training incident over dinner and margaritas. Patti got upset. And she told me about it. She said that Don is too much into machismo posturing and doesn't deal with reality (her definition of Don's self). The "reality" that Patti referred to is that he is 65 years old and had previously experienced a five-hour fibrillation problem at the doctor's office. In this interaction with me Patti referred to herself as a "care-giver and an organizer." That's her self as she sees it vis-à-vis Don. Don told the same story, as far as the actual events are concerned. But the meaning of all the events changed, as did the definitions of the selves involved. Don defined the "condition" as not life threatening, as one that is normal for athletes, and he said that lots of doctors say its okay for an athlete in his condition. Don defined himself as a "competitor and an optimist" and Patti as a " worrier that mothers too much."
Now the important thing to see is not that every individual has an interpretation of an event . that would be more psychological than sociological. What's important to see is what is happening socially: these two people are negotiating with a third party over the meaning of an event as well as the kinds of selves that that event indicates that they have. Out of this interaction and negotiation emerges a definition and a sense of self for each of the participants. The process through which that occurs is what is of concern for symbolic interactionists.
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