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Part II. Social Realities: Fact and Facticity
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
Part II. Of a mini-lecture for sociology grad students sponsored in part by the Red Feather Institute and supported in part by Central Michigan University.
A. Social Realities are constructed by human beings using four or five sets of symbols to which they have been socialized in the first four to eight years of their lives.
1. Voiced symbols: There are some seven or eight ways to modulate the voiced plosives which come from mouth, nose and throat: tone, volume, pace, location, inflection and so on. These combine to create infinite variety of symbols upon which meaning can be located in the incredibly complex symbolic interaction of which human beings are capable.
2. Body talk: hands, face, body and legs change to dramatize or to emphasize meanings. They may match voiced symbols or they may be used alone. A lift of the shoulder, a glance or a wave of a hand conveys information. Do remember that voiced symbols may be tell you something different from body symbols...and that body symbols are usually more reliable to meaning...
3. Clothing and body decoration carry a wide variety of information. It is not true that clothes 'make the man.' Clothes help make the social occasion; give it meaning and signal degree of commitment to it. Clothing/body decoration carry with them a good deal of information about the larger social structures which pre-structure symbolic interaction. Gender divisions, authority stratifications, age grades as well as occupations are embodied by clothing/cosmetics.
4. Behavior: People use lines of behavior to convey a lot more information than is noticed by sociologists and psychologists. Good Psychiatrists can 'decode' puzzling lines of behavior to sort out anxieties and compulsions. Cycles of behavior lasting minutes, hours and years are part of the symbolic interactional process. Thanksgiving Dinner, Valentine's Day activities and other ceremonies 'talk' to and for those involved.
5. Architecture: The shape, height, building materials, color and configuration of a building or other interactional site tell us much about the meanings to be conveyed, the roles to be enacted, the institutions to be reproduced and the social occasions which can be embodied in them. Churches, Sports colliseums, Palaces, stores, factories and schools all have their own architectural peculiarities. Each has differing furnishings and decor. As with clothes, they set the background frames for specialied social activities.
B. Defininitions of the Situation. Symbols are used to define social occasions; occasions defined as real become real in the consequence. This proposition tells you that there are no social occasions before people come together, interact symbolically and thus construct social reality. All people are thus engineers of social facts; the facticity of which depends upon several interconnected processes:
1. The defining of the occasion; class meeting, church service, football game or whatever. Again, words, costumes, tools and body talk is used. Usually each different situation has different architecture, different uses of time/space.
2. The Reification process; in which that which is defined as real is taken seriously as a legitimate instance of the reality prophesied. Your students can have a lot of fun with this one by innocently asking a professor for his credentials during the first class meeting; by asking, during the middle of a game if people are ready to keep score or by taking notes during a date and telling the other person that this is not 'really' a date but an experiment. It is here that belief, trust, faith, hope and charity become important to the reality process.
3. The Performance process; in this phase, each and every work, body motion, behavioral act and furnishing must be deployed in such a way as to embody the occasion as defined. Students can have fun with this idea by dressing off, by using words appropriate to another occasion, by bringing tools from other social realms or by just doing nothing when they are supposed to be engaged in the sociology of it all.
3b. A subroutine of this is to define that which is inappropriate as 'not really there.' Farts, grunts, belches, sneezes, coughs are treated as non-game events. Most inappropriate behavior is overlooked [think about that the next time you go to a class in deviant behavior. The same is true for people...people who do not have the 'proper' social status are defined as nonpersons; waiters, repair persons, bums, clerks, and those with spoiled presenting identities; women, blacks, poor people and gays [remember Eddie Murphy going into the elite men's club to find the murdered of his friend...Beverley Hills Cops?
4. The Disengagement process; in which specific forms of reality are unambiguously terminated. Church services, class meetings, weddings, sports events and such...one can have fun with this by refusing to accept the end of, say, a class...try holding it over for even five minutes.
Thus is the 'self-fulfilling prophecy' fulfilled. Providing of course, that conflict or massification/depersonalization does not abort the symbolic interactional process does not obtain but that is another lecture. But note, even under the best of social conditions and the best, most supportive loving social relationships, the facticity of social occasions is always less than 1.0.
C. The Facticity of Social Realities: Sometimes the reality quotient of a social occasion approaches .001. But sometimes the reality quotient of a social occasion falls sharply: betrayal, deceptions, fraud, langauge problems, illness and stress all wedge between mind, self and other in all forms of social reality.
Under conditions of conflict, words strain and crack under the burden. Trust, faith, hope and belief are turned against those who use them innocently. Underground structures emerge with special languages, roles and secret agendas. Racism, sexism, class privilege, hierarchy and bureaucracy combine to weaken and dissolve the symbolic interactional process with which social reality is constructed. More about this in another lecture.
But most importantly, there is a growth industry in the sociology of Fraud...thousands of people trained in psychology and sociology hire out to advertizing agencies, politicians and large scale corporations to distort the truth value of statements made on behalf of a client.
This industry and its subversion of the meaning process; of symbol interaction itself is presented in a series of articles by myself, Garth Massey and John Welsh...all in the Red Feather Archives at:
http://www.tryoung.com/archives/archives.html
Generally, the more stratified the society, the more the interactional process is controlled by those at the top of the hierarchy...class, gender, racist and ethnic hierarchies subvert symbolic interaction...those who teach symbolic interaction should never, never forget that.
In these days, class elites, more and more, control the means to produce meaning...in marketplace, in politics, even in universities and in churches...Marx said it better: The Ruling Ideas of an epoch are the ideas of the ruling [elite].
TR Young