Doing Modernity

Yesterday, Professor Mark Juergensmeyer gave a talk at the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival entitled “Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State”.  He is an excellent speaker with a great slide show of images to accompany his talk.

Religous violence often takes a common form today.  A group, often outside of mainstream power, proclaims that there is a great struggle taking place between good and evil.  A religious group asserts that there is something corrupt about secular politics, and that they are resorting to politics themselves to defend the faith and protect against the forces of immortality and irreligion.  They aim at the moral deficiency of the secular state and at the loss of spiritual identity.

The reason this is happening now is because globalization has made us “nowhere people without a rudder”.  Or so those who resort to religious violence claim and believe.

This summer I am teaching a class in group dynamics at Antioch University Santa Barbara.  This class applies social psychological theories and methods to understanding real-world group dynamics in these students lives.  Of course, I spend a considerable amount of time discussing Critical Interactionism.

Many of the readings I use for the class present "mainstream" thinking on topics such as decision-making and leadership, but I try to introduce alternative ways of thinking about workplaces and organizations.  Specifically, I am interested in advocating non-hierarchical forms of social organization, such as used in many progressive groups across the globe.

In Doing Equality (June 16, 2008), I wrote:

Here I want to consider the social processes through which non-hierarchical social organization get done?  What are the interactional dynamics of consensus decision-making?  What does turn-taking organization look like among equal, respectful partners?  How do we "do equality"?

To understand inequality, we need to examine equality, so that we have a "baseline" with which to compare.  Is equality done through a special symmetry of interactional moves, so that, for example, you often see equal amounts of listening and talking by each?

Work on micropolitics has pointed to some types of turns as more dominating: interruption, topic changes, storytelling, evaluative statements, the silence of not paying attention.

I want to do participant observation of "formal consensus" in progressive, grassroot political social movements, such as the Santa Barbar InfoShop, Food Not Bombs, and other local groups attempting to use non-hierarchical means to achieve social justice and social change.

This is what blogs look like when they are just an emrgent idea.

RESOURCES

The Formal Consensus Website

August 28, 2008

Wayne Martin Mellinger

We Swim in Oceans of Ideology that Pass as Commonsense

My goal throughout "Doing Modernity" is to articulate an approach to studying everyday life that brings together several distinct intellectual concerns.  In particular, I am interested in "grafting" approaches concerned with the dynamics and particulars of social interaction in concrete instances of social life with critical theoretical concerns for domination, inequality, alienation and ideological hegemony.  I call this approach Critical Interactionism, and draw inspiration from many others attempting to develop similar interests, such as Harvey Molotch, Dorothy Smith, Norman Denzin, James Forte, and many others.

Recently, I have explored reflexivity in several blogs, including "Reflexive Praxis and Being an Ally" and "Reflexivity and Reflexive Modernity".  I am particularly interested in our potential awareness that our mundane actions create and re-create the social world.  Moreover, I have argued that this supposedly increasing consciousness of our ability to change the world through altering the specifics of our actions is a constitutive feature of modernity.  Supposedly, earlier humans often treated the social world as "out there", merely constraining personal actions, but not really created by them.

For example, I and many others are aware that our shopping patterns and modes of consumption have consequences for the sustainability of our planet.  When we stop and thoughtfully consider a purchase and contemplate its effects on our planet we are engaging in reflexive praxis.  As I have written (July 18, 2008):

"To engage in reflexive praxis is to take action in the social world based upon awareness and insight into our role in perpetuating or not perpetuating societies structured in dominance."

I referred to reflexive passivity as knowingly not taking an action that could make the social world better, and being aware of how one’s inactions contribute the maintenance of the status quo.  My concern here is with how much of our behavior remains unreflexive, that is, we remain unaware of how our actions help to maintain a society structured in dominance.  We often swim in oceans of ideology that pass as commonsense.

There is so much of our world of which we are absolutely unaware.  As much as some of us attempt to become conscious of our roles in reproducing societies structured in dominance, we are going to be blind to much of our complicit behavior.  This fact is sad but true.

In talking to students about the "social construction of social problems", I am reminded that before the concerted efforts of organizations such as MADD (Mother Against Druck Driving), people had little conception of "drunk driving" as a social problem.  And the same is true for numerous other important social issues–before vast organizational efforts did the "work" of raising people’s awareness, most people had no inkling of their existence–sexual harassment, domestic violence, litter,… It can take extensive consciousness-raising efforts to get people to be aware of many critical concerns of our world.  I have learned this first-hand in my years as an anti-oppression educator.

That being the case, the question must be asked: how many of our own society’s current social problems remain hidden from our awareness and remain unarticulated in the realms of social discourse?  In this particular class I argued that 50 years from now our MIStreatment of mentally ill people, children, and pets and other animals will be seen as utterly appauling.  As we today look back on hundred-year-old photographs of crowds of laughing children at public lynchings and wonder in horror "what were they doing?", people will similarly look back at our age and at activities we can’t even fathom and react similarly.

Increasingly as I approach the topic of the "knowledgeability" of social actors, I realize the immensity of the issues, and the challenges faced by social analysts if they are to avoid the Charbydis of "cultural dopeyness" and the Scylla of "enlightened resisters".  By cultural dopeyness I refer to the image of modern humans as passive, unreflexive ‘no-nothings’ who are well socialized into their roles as happy consumers.  This was the dominant image of social actors in the Parsonian functionalism of the late 1950s.  By enlightened resisters I refer to the image of modern humans as active, reflexive ‘know-it-alls’ who have perfect awareness of the dominating structures of contemporary societies and who ongoingly engage in creative acts of resistance.  This was a prevalent image of social actors in some versions of American cultural studies in the late 1980s.

It seems that every generation of social theorists reacts against the previous generations.  My teachers, reacting against the orthodox consensus of the early 1960s, and its conception of social actors as "oversocialized" (Dennis Wrong) "cultural dopes" and "cheerful robots" sought to return robust knowledgeability and agency to modern subjects.

The social theories that I was drawn to as a graduate student during the 1980s (i.e., ethnomethodology and the cultural studies) sought to conceive of social actors as knowing why they do what they do, reflexively aware of the domination of the systems in which they operate, and creatively resisting the cultural ideologies circulating around them.  This is what I mean by ‘robust knowledgeability and agency’.

Anthony Giddens, drawing upon these traditions famously articulated his "stratification model" of consciousness and motivation, in which societal members are seen as possessing varying levels of discursive and practical consciousness, and remain unconscious of other matters (Giddens 1984).  Drawing upon Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor, the classic British ethnography of working-class youth dropping out of secondary schools, a powerful image emerged of the "lads’s" awareness of what the dominating structures of the schools were doing to them (preparing them for working-class jobs) and actively struggled with those sytems through creative acts of resistance.

The reflexive awareness and creative resistance of Willis’s lads is the dominant image of the knowledgeability and agency of social actors as found in that generation (1980s) of social analysts.  Accordingly, oppressed people are not mere "cultural dopes", blind to the powers of dominant ideologies.  Moreover, they react against these systems and these powerful ideas through their mundane actions.  It is against this image of "enlightened resisters" that I now react.

My point is that many modern social actors are often unreflexive and unaware of the oppressive ideologies that circulate around them and through them.  I have learned this first-hand in my efforts for the past 20 years as an anti-oppression educator.  People are often blind to dominant ideologies and creative resistance can be much more marginal than the cultural populists proclaim. While Willis’s lads might be aware of the role that schools play in reproducing capitalist inequalities, many working-class college students that I have worked with are unaware of their own sexist, racist and homophobic behavior.  We swim in oceans of ideology that pass as commonsense.

I also learned about this through my study of early racist imagery in American popular culture.  Specifically, I was concerned to see if senders of postcards with images of African Americans sent between 1893 and 1930 ever produced "resistant" readings of those images, as found in their flip-side messages.  I examined about 1000 blatantly racist postcards and their flip-side handwritten messages.  I NEVER found a resistant interpretation of these degrading images of "happy darkeys" and "savage brutes". (Of course, why would the consumers of these images oppose their racist content?). The predominantly white postcard senders bought into the "dominant ideology" of the time.  (Duh!) Resistance to these images was easily found in the wider culture and I explored the creative resistance found in the artwork of John Henry Adams, a prominent proponent of the image of the "New Negro" (Mellinger 1997).

Of course, this is not very surprising.  Yet, the cultural theory emerging in the late 1980s when I conceived and launched this study suggested that "resistance" would be readily found, and that ordinary people are wise to the ways of ideological domination.  As I wrote, the power of dominant ideologies “… may blind consumers to other interpretations” ( Mellinger 1994:775).

The Power of Ideologies to Blind Us

There is a prominent social theoretical tradition that speaks to human unawareness, "false consciousness", and our vulnerability to ideological blinders. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s project of historical materialism famously created an approach to modernity which highlighted workers’s lack of awareness of their own oppression under capitalism. "Class consciousness" is a reflexive understanding of one’s place in the capitalist relations of production.  "False consciousness" is an unreflexive consciousness about one’s place in the capitalist relations of production.

For Marx, dominant ideologies often become accepted by subordinate classes as "the ways things actually are".  Following in Marx’s footsteps, Antonio Gramsci developed these ideas into the notion of ideological hegemony, in which ruling ideas become commonsense.  For a review of my approach to understanding "dominant ideologies" as discursive texts, see my blog entry: "How Ideologies Work".

Our understanding of the world is powerfully shaped by our culture. The dominant ideologies of our times can be so powerful that they blind us to other interpretations.  I want to take the line of thinking used by Marx to talk about class consciousness and broaden it to incorporate all systems of ideology, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and also our ideological notions of progress, justice and our relationship to the Earth.

Unreflexive consciousness might be another way to discuss our lack of awareness of the dominant ideologies to which we fall victim. We remain unaware of how our ideas help to perpetuate a society structured in dominance. Obviously, there are varying levels of this, and to some extent we must all remain unreflexive about some issues.

One of the important things to note is that unreflexive consciousness can be "raised".  To raise consciousness is to remove ideological blinders, to become reflexively aware of power dynamics in modernity, and to understand one’s role in reproducing these oppressive systems.  For example, a worker’s "false consciousness" can be removed and the worker can become class consciousness.

I have been greatly impressed with Erica Sherover-Marcuse’s work on "unlearning oppression", and have developed hunks of my life and significant coursework around many of her insightful understandings on how oppression is learned, what it consists of and how it can be "unlearned".

That there is so much oppression to be unlearned is a testament to the power of dominant ideologies to blind us.  From my experience, most people have "work" to do on these topics, and I see myself as ongoingly unlearning oppressive attitudes from my childhood–around women, people of color, around gays and lesbians, disability, around adultism, speciesism, … Yes, we swim in ocean of ideology that pass as commonsense, but we can also unlearn oppressive ways of thinking and acting!

Rightly, the cultural populists have taught us that culture is a "site of struggle" and that domination is not total nor complete.  They have rightly opened our eyes to the possibility of resistance. Now we need to train our eyes and figure out how much resistance there really is.  Some workers are reflexively conscious of their position in the class system, others are not.  These are empirical questions.

Moreover, the cultural populists have taught us that cultural texts are multivocal and different interpretations are possible.  Ordinary people do not have to "buy into" the dominant ideologies offered by popular media culture.  We must research people’s consciousness, reflexivity, awareness and levels of ideological ‘indoctrination’.

The concerns for the relationships between knowledge and society are fundamental to any social scientific approach to society.  I want to go back to some of my initial concerns in the sociology of knowledge concerning our "embeddedness" in cultural belief systems that we largely cannot escape.  In 1983 when I read Mel Pollner’s dissertation on "mundane reasoning" and "reality disjunctures", I was fascinated by his discussion of Evans-Pritchard’s work on Azande witchcraft, and how their beliefs frame the very assumptions of their minds.  (Back then, I was interested in researching neopagan witches I met in San Francisco and some of their metaphysical beliefs concerning the "personal construction of reality").

I know that talk about "false consciousness", "mass delusions" and "weird beliefs" can presuppose an "objective reality" to which the speaker has access.  Like everyone else, I think my particular ideas about the world are correct, and that most others believe "unrealistic" stuff.  I realize that others think the same way.

Relativism and loving tolerance are pragmatic ways out of this bind.  I totally, lovingly accept that you think very differently than me, and I take a "live and let live" attitude on the surface.  But deep down, and to myself, I think you are deluded, and wonder why you fall for all these crazy ideas.

Wayne Martin Mellinger

August 16, 2008

This morning Brian Lovato, a Ph.D. student in Political Science at UCSB and I created The Santa Barbara Psychogeographic Society-a group with a web link on Facebook.  Our page states:

"This group is dedicated to understanding the psychological effects of carrying out our everyday existence in the city of Santa Barbara. Exploratory activities will be scheduled in the near future. How does it feel to be on State Street by the mall? What does it feel like to be by Casa Esperanza and where the homeless congregate? Why do the ghosts of the Chumash haunt me when I am at the Presidio? How do the different places in Santa Barbara feel? What is our lived experiences of these spaces? Baudrillard said : On the aromatic hillsides of Santa Barbara, the villas are all like funeral homes. Between the gardenias and the eucalyptus trees, among the profusion of plant genuses and the monotony of the human species, lies the tragedy of the utopian dream realized. In the very heartleand of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: "What are you doing after the orgy?" (America p. 30)

What are the effects of the remnants of imperialism on our suburban space?

By some estimates, this land that you and I walk on today was Chumash land for 40,000 years. During this day of "Fiesta" (1 August 2008), in which Santa Barbara celebrates "Old Spanish Days", let us pause for a moment to remember the indigenous population of this landscape. Let us never forget the reign of terror which began in the 1780s when Spanish soldiers and priests began to "settle" Santa Barbara.

On April 21, 1782 the Presidio began to be built. It seved as a fortress for the Spanish Army and ran all campaigns that led to gaining permanent control of the land.

On December 4, 1796, the Old Mission began to be built, which created a settlement for the Padres of the Catholic Church. Natives were used as slave labor during the long construction of these buildings.

These two buildings, now two of the most popular tourist attractions in our city, were central to the destruction of a culture, the displacement of a community and the massacre of a population.

While these are remnants of imperialism, we have a severe case of cultural amnesia. We have beautiful artistic festivals beneath the towers of the Mission (the chalk art of I Madonnari), forgetting the blood that was spilled on this ground). Perhaps the beautiful rose gardens across from the Mission lead us to forget the names of the hundreds who died of whiteman’s illnesses on these grounds.

Now Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture is the "official" look of downtown. Even the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall, built in the early 1990s, is made to look like an Old Spanish village–red tile roofs, adobe-like walls, and Roman arches. Ah, such Mediterranean grace, the tourism brochures proclaim.

SFZero: The Santa Barbara Version

We opened a dialogue about creating the Santa Barbara version of SFZero, the urban games played by many across the globe.  I am amazed at the exponential growth of the ‘game’ SFZero (or SF0), and liked the idea of seeing that as a potential of the Santa Barebara Psychogeographical Society.

I am (sometimes) sorry that I depend on Wikipedia to learn things, but here is a link to their description of SF0:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SFZero

Here is the SF0 homepage:

http://sf0.org/

Flash Mobs, Urban Games, and Art Sabotage

Throughout "Doing Modernity", I have advocated a Critical Interactionist approach to understanding everyday life that focuses on how people create and recreate the social world through their historically-specific practices in concrete instances of life. I have particularly been concerned with locating the practices through which "societies structured in dominance" (Stuart Hall) are made, re-made and consciously changed.  For example, I have outlined some practices involved in "doing inequality" and "how ideologies work".

In this entry I want to consider how we can consciously change the world through reflexive praxis, a mode of acting on the world filled with keen awareness of our ability to alter reality.  This will be contrasted with our unreflexive behavior–our habitual modes of "going along" with the status quo.  I will relate these two modes of acting on the world to issues of unlearning oppression and the work of being an ally.

It might not be apparent but virtually every blog entry I create begins with an observation from my lived reality, and a brief ethnographic fieldnote on that happening in a journal I keep.  Today my observation concerns an argument I started with an acquaintance at the Santa Barbara Roasting Company. 

Many of the people I know are good, honest, working-class men in "recovery" from alcoholism and addiction who are evangelical Christians whose language is often peppered with colorful phrases drawn from street culture.

"Peppered with colorful phrases drawn from street culture" is a polite and euphemistic gloss for what I often times feel is oppressive and discriminatory language in which women, people of color, lesbians and gays, and others who are ‘different’ are openly denigrated and castigated.  For many of these men, women are ‘bitches’, gays are ‘fags’ and Mexican immigrants are ‘beaners’.  Imagine being an anti-oppression educator living in this social world!  I often feel very alienated.

As I wrote in Unlearning Oppression, becoming an "ally" in struggles against injustice involves understanding our own roles in systems of oppression.  I argued that:

"Everyday oppression sometimes occurs through inaction rather than through overt actions.  The passivity of well-meaning people, fueled by ignorance and indifference, is critical to the operation of dominator culture.  We often live in denial, refusing to acknowledge the consequences of our behavior."

In other words, there are consequences to our simply "going along" with oppressive jokes, comments and words.  Because oppressions exist as an interconnected web, reinforcing one another, our inactions are essential to the systems’s perpetuation. In "going along" with oppressive actions we actually help to maintain the status quo.  Going along with oppressive actions we play a part, an essential part actually, in reproducing those hierarchical systems.  This is un-reflexive behavior–routine actions operating within ideologies which serve to maintain and reproduce the (hierarchical) status quo.

In Reflexivity and Reflexive Modernity, I wrote about how in contemporary societies we are now (supposedly) much more aware about how our actions and interventions have the potential to change the world.  This "reflexive attitude", I have argued, is an essential aspect of modernity.  Of course, because I am not fully aware of all of the taken-for-granted aspects of my own behavior which end up contributing to our hierarchical society, I must be careful in singling out those behaviors of others that are oppressive.  Nothing is worse than hypocritical goody-two-shoes so keen on seeing others’s missteps that they are blind to their own thoughtless stumbings.

To engage in reflexive praxis is to take action in the social world based upon awareness and insight into our role in perpetuating or not perpetuating societies structured in dominance.  Employing a reflexive attitude, we hopefully do not simply "go along" with the status quo.  We do not do the "routine" and "polite" and the "taken-for-granted" accepted behavior, but instead, choose to use our actions as interventions in the world, interventions with the potential of making the world a better place.  Clearly, reflexive praxis is an essential aspect of being a change agent.

I have called Critical Interactionism the "microsociology of domination" and have urged us all to be participant observers to how societies structured in dominance are ongoingly reproduced all around us through our actions / inactions and the actions / inactions of others.  We need to more fully examine the everyday local practices through which power and hierarchy are constituted and resisted.

Our norms of "politeness" and "civility" can act as powerful deterrences to our reflexive praxis concerning oppressive behavior.  To be polite can be to not "stir things up", not draw attention to degrading and thoughtless comments, archaic and offensive terms, and ugly and disgusting jokes. "Nice" people supposedly pretend not to hear these "indiscretions", and allow others to "save face" by ignoring these actions.  My own privileges as a white man can also act as deterrence to my reflexive praxis concerning oppressive behavior.

Back to my situation this morning.  My acquintances were talking loudly in the coffee shop while one of the baristas was wiping the counter clean.  One of them makes a comment to her about his just coming back to the counter to admire her beauty.  She flirtatiously goes along with his comment.  The other guy makes a joke saying something like "oh I thought you were coming here to look at me".  The first guy responds, "I would be really weird if I was looking at you, wouldn’t I".

(I acknowledge how important it would be to have recordings of events like these to capture in their fullest detail what actually happened. My ethnographic gloss of the event is very rough.) 

I responded: "You must think I’m weird, Joe!"  As a gay man I found his comment offensive.  He seemed to be saying that any man who looked at another man as attractive is "weird" and abnormal.  Impulsively, I choose to say something to draw attention to the presuppositions underlying his remark.  In so doing, I might have been a little "rude" in that I did not allow him to "save face".  In fact, by publicly drawing attention to his comment I might have embarassed him, and perhaps that was my goal.

To intervene in routine actions to draw attention to oppression is reflexive praxis.  We choose to take a stand.

To be an ally is to stand up for other people’s oppression.  This is even harder.  Twenty minutes later when the grumpy sea captain across from me at the counter made a comment about the lesbian couple ordering coffee being "dikes", I choose to say nothing.  I was involved in checking my email, and don’t really consider him as worth me spending time debating this topic, so I just silently "went along" with his comment.  At that moment I failed as an ally, and know that my passive inaction contributed to the maintainance of a society structured in dominance. Perhaps we could call this reflexive passivity because I am aware of my inaction’s contribution to the status quo. I was probably afraid that if I stood up for these women as lesbians, he would have thought I was gay.  I know that he thinks that I am straight and I am often able to assume privileges as a "straight-looking" gay man.

As these events were occurring I thought about what a conversation analysis of "being an ally" would like like.  To be an ally is going to involve specific types of sequential turn-taking mechanisms, including disagreements and other turns at talk that can be considered "beginning arguments".

Critical interactionism moves beyond treating oppression and resistance as abstract theoretical concepts and seeks to locate these concerns as members’s accomplishments through social practices in concrete instances of everyday life.

Just some thoughts on everyday life as it happens: the coffee shop.

Wayne Martin Mellinger 07-18-08

I am teaching Racism and Sexism in America at Antioch University Santa Barbara this summer quarter. I call my class "Unlearning Oppression" because I deal with the interconnections of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, ability, immigration status, etc.  My goal is to create a climate in which students can both deal with their own issues as people who are oppressed and deal with their issues as people who are oppressors. 

To unlearn oppression and to dismantle the foundations of our "dominator culture", we must acknowledge our everyday oppressive practices.  Moreover, we must engage in critical self-reflection, get the correct information, deal with our negative emotions, gain insight into our own passivity and become actively anti-oppressive.

Oppression is the acts and effects of domination, including ideological domination and institutional control.  Ann Cudd (2006, p. 52) defines oppresion as "the existence of unequal and unjust institutional constraints".  These constraints involve harm to at least one other group on the basis of a social institution that serves to the benefit of another social group.  This harm comes about through coercion, or the use of unjustified force.

There are many systems of oppression in the US, including racism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ageism, ableism.  These are interlocking societal, economic, moral and religious values that keep many people down to ensure the power and advantage of a few groups of people.

There are three different forms of oppression:

1. institutional oppression–which occurs through the ‘normal’ ways that society operates.  No individually-motivated hatred needs to be in operation for institutional oppression to work;
2. interpersonal oppression–which occurs between individuals and is usually based on personal prejudice;
3. internalized oppression–when members of an oppressed group oppress one another and their own group.

My theoretical approach is informed by the writings of Patricia Hill Collins, Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, and Anne Bishop. I supplement this theoretical model with prominent readings from the sociological literature on social stratification, ‘race relations’, gender inequality, LGBT studies, etc.

Through reading Paul Kivel’s "The Power Chart Revisited", we learn that we are all potentially both oppressors and oppressed. We deconstruct the categories of those "with power" and those "without power" to see that the dualistic logic that underlies our Western thinking on these subjects often hides the complex realities.

Learning Oppression as Children

We learn oppression through our own oppression as children. Several authors point to early childhood experiences as central to developing "power over" mentalities.  As Sherover-Marcuse states:

"People hurt others because they themselves have been hurt.  In this society we have all experienced systematic mistreatment as young people often through physical violence, but also through the invalidation of our intelligence, the disregard of our feelings, the discouraging of our abilities.  As a result of these experiences, we tend both to internalize this mistreatment by accepting it as ‘the way things are’, and externalize it by mistreating others."

Adultism and the oppression of children are at the heart of my understanding of the nature of oppression in modern society.

The Matrix of Domination

Patricia Hill Collins urges us to reconceptualize race, class and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, what she calls the "matrix of domination".  As she states:

"Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. In this system, for example, white women are penalized by their gender but privileged by their race. Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed."

Everyday Oppression

Everyday oppression refers to those practices which, while so much a part of our everyday lives that they seem normal and thus go unquestioned, discriminate against members of some "minority" group.

Everyday oppression occurs within interactions routinely and includes all actions, verbal and nonverbal, which result in negative consequences, regardless of intentionality.  Thus, oppression does not have to be blatant, conscious or deliberate.  Therefore, many well-intended people are unaware that their actions are oppressive.

Everyday oppression sometimes occurs through inaction rather than through overt actions.  The passivity of well-meaning people, fueled by ignorance and indifference, is critical to the operation of dominator culture.  We often live in denial, refusing to acknowledge the consequences of our behavior.

Types of Everyday Oppression

1. stereotypes are faulty generalizations that we make about groups of people;
2. misinformation about group differences (ethnic groups, genders, sexual minorities, ability groups, etc)
3. discomfort dealing with cultural and social differences;
4. apprehension about different groups
5. taking privileges (as whites, or males, or temporarily able-bodies, or…..)
6. paternalistic attitudes ("we need to help those poor people");
7. self-righteous liberal pride ("but I’m colorblind", "we have gay friends",….)

In her book On Becoming an Ally (2001), Anne Bishop is concerned for "how many people, deeply engaged in the liberation of their own group, seemed not to be able to see their role in oppressing others, and how that comes full circle and perpetuates their own oppression".  She has created a guidebook for would-be allies, underscoring the complimentary processes of both becoming aware of one’s own oppression and one’s possible roles in being an oppressor of others.  There are six steps in becoming an ally:

1. Understanding oppression, how it came about, how it held in place and how it stamps its pattern on the individuals and institutions that continually recreate it;
2. Understanding different oppressions, how they are similar, how they differe and how they reinforce one another;
3. Consciousness and healing;
4. Becoming a worker for your own liberation;
5. Becoming an ally;
6. Maintaining hope.

Bishop rejects the notion that there is a hierarchy of oppression.  Oppressions work as an interconnecting web, reinforcing one another.  "All oppressions are interdependent, they all come from the same worldview, and one can be solved in isolation."

At the root of modern oppressions are "power-over" elites who take over other societies and accumulate resources for their own use that were formerly used to maintain life for most of the population.  Class, Bishop argues, "is both the result and the foundation of all other forms of oppression".

No one chooses to be an oppressor–"we do so unconsciously out of our scars".

Most people have experienced both the roles of oppressed and oppressor.  We must draw on our experiences as both to step out of the monination worldview.

To understand different forms of oppression requires a deep exploration of difference.  We must understand the visible and invisible forms of difference and the varied histories of diverse people.  We must learn to appreciate the similar ways in which oppression operates through power and hierarchy, stereotyping, violence and desire to separate and distinguish.

Learning about ourselves as oppressors is difficult because, by definition, some of the information we need to overcome the role is hidden from us.  "Part of the process of becoming a member of an oppressor group is to be cut off from the ability to identify with the experiences of the oppressed."

Related to learning about ourselves as oppressors is to be able to acknowledge our own privileges.  A "both / and conceptual stance", as Professor Collins calls is, requires us to see all groups as possessing varying amounts of penalty and privilege.  A central goal is to raise our consciousness about penalty and privilege in our own lives.  Consciousness raising can be a process of see these often taken-for-granted aspects of social life.

Unlearning Oppression and Critical Interactionism

Throughout this blog I have advocated a critical interactionist (CI) perspective on social life, which links close inspection of the everyday life to critical theoretical concerns for domination.  I have described critical interactionism as "the microsociology of domination".  Living in a world of gross inequalities, various types of oppression, and ideological hegemony, I am interested in exploring how that world is produced and reproduced through concrete instances of social activity in the mundane moments of everyday life. 

Applying the critical interactionist framework to the concepts of "unlearning oppression" several interesting research topics emerge:

• how exactly do we learn oppression in moments of our everyday lives?
• how exactly is it unlearned?
• what does "becoming an ally" look like in terms of how it managed in the instances of daily life?

I have already advocated using CI to examine "doing inequality"–that is, paying close attention to the social processes through which inequality is produced and reproduced.  I have also advocated studying resistance to oppression and domination, as well as how "consent" is manufactured.

Wayne Martin Mellinger 07-10-08

I have describe modernity as a term that is used to describe our contemporary era.  In it broadest sense modernity refers to the forms of social life that emerged in the 19th century, that involved industrial capitalism and urbanization, particularly as found in Western societies.  Of course, social life is very different in 2008 from 1908, and different in Mexico City than it is the Stockholm.

Clearly modernity takes many forms.

As I have been writing this blog I continually note features that seem uniquely "modern".  What are the defining features of modernity?

Here is a list:

1. industrialism
2. capitalism
3. urbanization
4. rapid increase in sophistication of technology
5. surveillance
6. military / state power
7. reflexive attitude
8. dynamic nature and rate of social change
9. persistent concern for examining everyday life through reflexive monitoring
10. self-identity as a reflexive project
11. globalization
12. quest for authenticity
13. individualism, loss of conenctedness
14. awareness of the absurdity of existence
15. ecological ruins
16. massive levels of addiction
17. mass inequality
18. mass psychology of misery
19. instant global communication
20. civil inattention

TO THE INITIATE

By

Wayne Martin Mellinger

Dionysus cries out in the streets.  In the squares he raises his voice.  At the entrance of the city gate he speaks: “How long, O foolish ones, will you love being foolish?  How long will sufferers continue in their suffering and refuse to hear my words of wisdom?  Listen to what I have to say as I make my thoughts known to you.”

A set of secrets will be revealed to you – secrets which have been known to the wise ones throughout history.  They are rivaled by those of any secret society – Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, or Freemasons.  As Plato states in Phaedo (69c): “For many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the bacchoi”.

Fascism now pervades our everyday lives, shaped by a consumerist materialism which destructively represses our desires.  We all need to escape alienation and transgress the boundaries of conventional society.  We all need to explore our desires and decode its flows.

A sacred general economy has guided the movement of humanity through its need to survive.  On the one side we have order, law and creation – represented by the Greek god Apollo.  On the other side we have chaos, transgression and destruction – represented by the Greek god Dionysus.

Not one or the other, but both sides now.

Friedrich Nietzsche rediscovered what he considered to be the “truth” of humanity within the ancient Dionysian cults.  An unconscious lifeforce propels us to ecstatic desire.  We are creatures of crave “jouissance”.  Another truth that Nietzsche discovered is that there is no truth.  All moral judgments are relative to geography.

On the one side we have Apollo who represents beauty, permanence and perfection.  On the other side we have Dionysus, who represents tragedy, intoxication and reverie.

Not one or the other – but both sides now.

Modern humans have become debased by absolute adherence to order and stability.  Through this Apollonian triumph we have lost our essential meaning and have become “things”.   How we yearn to return to the immediacy of life at the edge of chaos.  How we yearn to dance again with Dionysus.

Nietzsche called for a return to the repressed side of the Dionysian, though he knew it was a Promethean task.  “Are we up to it?”, he asked.

That which brings the greatest joy also brings the greatest pain.  That which makes us suffer most also keeps us going.  This is the paradox of our drive for jouissance.  Nietzsche knew the impossibility of life without jouissance.  You cannot close off all awareness of jouissance is a world based on the rational ego, capitalist production and bureaucratic efficiency.  This is impossible.  Jouissance will break out anyway.

While I urge you to tear off your chains and examine your desires, a strong caveat is in order.  Look what happened to me!  In unleashing my repressed desires and pursuing pleasure to excess I had hoped to become a liberated nomad exploring a thousand plateaus.  I have learned that if you venture too far “bodies with organs” can become “bodies with brains”.  Exploring is a good thing.  Falling off cliffs is a bad thing.

Yet, although I have lost everything and am on this day imprisoned by our drug war machine, I do not regret my pursuit of pleasure to dangerous excess.  How many people in our culture can claim to have lived their fantasies, to have gotten in touch with their deepest desires and to have decoded its flows.  I do not regret dancing with Dionysus

I have become a wounded healer, possessing knowledge of the dark, the shadow of chaos and evil which haunts all aspects of life.  I have learned to maintain balance by drawing upon my experience of intimacy with the universe.

Wayne Martin Mellinger 0-7-07-08

Who is this mild and unassuming man?  And what kind of intellectual wars has he created?  This is Harold Garfinkel, the "founder" of ethnomethodology, and he has created the Ethnomethodological Wars.  Over the last forty years ethnomethodological studies has taken on many different forms, and there is currently some squabbling among Garfinkel’s heirs over whose work really represents ethnomethodology.  At most times the family holds together, but at other times it risks being torn apart.  Usually, family relations are friendly, but sometimes that are bitter exchanges between cousins.

All versions of ethnomethodology are interested in exploring the defining features of social activities that make them what they are, how those activities are accomplished in real-world situations, and the specific methods by which they are done.  There are many other features that hold the discipline together.

As I have written in several blog entries there is a healthy diversity of versions of ethnomethodology, and several hybrids have formed. In that same blog entry just hyperlinked, I discussed George Psathas’s five types of ethnomethodological study. The major division threatening to divide ethnomethodology is between those doing conversation analysis and those following Garfinkel’s later and "radical" research suggestions, such as found in the "studies of work" program.

I first learned about the division in ethnomethodological studies in the mid 1980s when I was presenting material from my MA thesis on 911 calls at major conferences, including the American Sociological Association and the International Conference on Talk and Social Structure.  Here I first met large collections of other ethnomethodologists, and learned that many did not do research as we were learning to do it in Santa Barbara, and did not see ethnomethodology as helping to build a natural observation science of the interaction order, as we were attempting to do in Santa Barbara.

I will provide a list of relevant reference at the end of this entry, for those wanting to find key articles.  My thinking is heavily influenced here by Thomas Wilson (2003) and Ilkka Arminen (2008).

Arminen states that ethnomethodology is torn between scientific and radical aspirations.  The scientific aspirations are found in conversation analysis, which accepts standard scientific criteria to assess the merits of empirical arguments.  Noted adherents include Emanuel Schegloff, John Heritage, Don Zimmerman, Doug Maynard, Steve Clayman, and many others.  "Radical" ethnomethodolgy comes primarily out of the writings of the later Garfinkel (1986, 2002), and is unwilling to become another "interpretive" approach to social science, with all the inherent flaws involved in such an enterprise.  This later research program hopes to remain "pure" in its study of mundane reasoning, and hopes to totally "bracket" everyday resources.  Key representative here on Michael Lynch, Eric Livingston, Melinda Baccus and Mel Pollner.

Arminen observes that the divide is caused by the two versions having different solutions of the "topic / resource dilemma", famously posed by Zimmerman and Pollner (1970).  I will not comment more on the "war" among ethnomethodologists here.

What I liked most about Arminen’s article was his call for an "ethnomethodological social science" (EMSS) that is a synthesis of these differing approaches.  Unfortunately, I think it will be easier for the CA folks to accept this synthesis than it will be for a "radicals".

EMSS can, Arminen states, invigorate "our understanding of social action and revive Sacks’s original vision of the science of social life". Phenomenon should be properly investigated through observation and discursive reporting so that others can make use of these reports for further inference and action. EMSS should explore people’s tacit resources of social action, their common sense and interactional competence.

Arminen sees EMSS as addressing "action in interaction"–the "ordering and relative positioning of any kind of action, move and utterance" (186).  Social actions are investigated as situated accomplishments that emerge from practical management with language, social configuration and objects.  This synthesis can explore the elementary properties of action that make up the taken-for-granted basis of social life.

Further, according to Arminen, EMSS, by studying members’ methodical ways of accomplishing social action can help us to understand the achievement of collaboration and the practices through which different participants’s perspectives are brought into alignment.

RESOURCES

Arminen, Ilkka. (2008). "Scientific and ‘Radical’ Ethnomethodology: From Incompatible Paradigms to Ethnomethodological Sociology".  Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38

Berard, Tim. (2003). "Ethnomethodology as radical sociology: An expansive appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s ‘Constitutive and mundane versions of labeling theory’". Human Studies 26(4): 431-48.

Garfinkel, Harold. (1986) (Ed.) Ethnomethodological Studies of Work.

(2002). Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism.

Garfinkel, Harold, M. Lynch and E. Livingston. (1981). The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar.  Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11: 131-58.

Lynch, Michael. 1999. "Silence in context: Ethnomethodology and social theory." Human Studies 12: 211-33.

Pollner, Melvin. (1991). "Left of ethnomethodology: The rise and decline of radical reflexivity." American Sociological Review 56: 370-380.

Wilson, T.P. (2003). "Garfinkel’s radical program".  Research on Language and Social Interaction 36: 487-94.

Wayne Martin Mellinger 07-04-08

Think of it.  Another world is possible.  We are now more aware than ever before that we can, and perhaps must, construct a different way of social life for the future survival of our species and our planet.  That we are conscious of other imaginal worlds, and conscious that our actions will create a different world, are particularly "modern" phenomenon.  We know that the world will change and that those changes will be the result of changes in our actions.  In earlier times in human history, people thought of the world as just being "the way it is", and did not regard it as connected in any signficant way to their personal behavior.  The world was seen to exist "out there", constraining personal action, but not really created by it.

"Doing Modernity" is a blog in which I reflect upon how humans create the world through our everyday actions.  Subtitled "A Sociologist Looks at Everyday Life In Contemporary Society", I am articulating a critical interactionist perspective which links microsociological and interpretive approaches to social life with critical social theoretical concerns for domination, inequality and alienation.  I set my explorations within the context of Anthony Giddens’s agency / structure problematic.

As I have written (5-26-08), "With every action, we make the world.  With every action, we potentially make the world better or worse.  Our ordinary activities count.  For it is through these everyday behaviors that the social world is ongoing constituted as an orderly event."  Here I want to brief reflect upon our awareness of our ability to make the world, and to make the world differently through our mundane actions.  This brings us to the concepts of "reflexivity", "the reflexive attitude" and "reflexive modernization".

REFLEXIVITY

There are several meanings of the term "reflexivity".  One understanding of reflexivity is as a universal human condition involving monitoring one’s own actions, enabling the maintenance and transformation of social relations.  As Giddens states:

"reflexivity is a defining characteristic of all human action.  All human beings routinely ‘keep in touch’ with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it" (Giddens 1990: 36).

This form of reflexivity is also referred to as "reflexive monitoring"  Again, quoting Giddens:

"actors not only monitor continuously the flow of their activities and expect others to do the same for their own; they also routinely monitor aspects, social and physical, of the contexts in which they move" (Giddens 1984: 5)

Thus, at the individual level reflexivity involves self-reference–a subjective process of self-consciousness.

REFLEXIVE MODERNITY

A second understanding of reflexivity is at the institutional level and is a specifically modern phenomenon.  Giddens states:

"The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character" (The Consequences of Modernity 1990: 38).

Society, in this version, is both the subject and object of rational intervention.  We are aware that our historically specific social practices have the ability to alter the course of history (even if only slightly).  We alter our behavior in light of what we ongoingly learn about the world, and we are aware that through our changed behavior we, in turn, change the world.  For example, learning about the dismal situation of our planet’s ecology we hopefully are adopting more ecological lifestyles, knowing that our actions are necessary to save our planet.

It is as if we have become much more aware of Marx’s dictum: "Men make history…".  This is "reflexive modernity" and "reflexive modernization"–society is becoming more self-aware, reflective and hence reflexive.

On his "Meet the Director" page at the London School of Economics website Giddens discusses "reflexive modernization" as coming to terms the the "limits and contraditions" of the modern order, and how that order becomes "the object of its own forces … a self-confrontation created by the dynamics of modernization" in which the "constantly renewing flow of information constituting society simultaneously revises that society’s modernity".

We are no longer tied to the past as we were in pre-modern societies, in which actions were legitimated by their relation to tradition, and were defended because that is the ways "things have always been done".  No longer justifying our actions by traditions frees us to create new and different realities, new and different social worlds!

The idea that the world is able to be changed by our actions and interventions is a defining feature of modernity.

REFLEXIVE ATTITUDE

For example, I can have a "reflexive attitude" about my gender role performance–an awareness that I can assume either masculine privilege at times and go along with my societally-given masculine norms of behavior, or I can choose to "undo" gender, to withdraw from the masculine privileges that are offered to me (or that I take), to be a "gender traitor", a feminist man, a gender-bending non-conformist.  I am aware that patriarchy, in part, exists through my actions and can be changed by my actions.

This is a contrast with the "natural attitude" in which it is taken-for-granted that the world is constituted as a naturally-given external reality.  With the natural attitude, patriarchy is a "thing" that is external and constraining to my actions, a so-called Durkheimian "social fact".  With the reflexive attitude, patriarchy becomes a "practical accomplishment", locally tied to my situated conduct.  I become aware that I "do gender" and "do patriarchy" through my everyday conduct.

RESOURCES

Professor Lord Giddens, Center for the Study of Glaobal Goverance, London School of Economics.

Beck, Giddens, & Lash. 1994. Reflexive Modernization.

George Soros. The Theory of Refexivity.

Wayne Martin Mellinger 7-2-08