#interaction ritual chains

Garfinkel’s most important contribution is to show that humans ... construct mundane social order by consistently using practices to avoid recognizing how arbitrarily social order is actually put together. We keep up conventions, not because we believe in them, but because we studiously avoid questioning them. Garfinkel demonstrated this most dramatically in his breaching experiments, in which he forced people into situations that caused them to recognize indexicality (i.e., that they rely on tacit acceptance of what things mean contextually) and reflexivity (that there are infinite regresses of justifying one’s interpretations). Interestingly enough, the reactions of his subjects were always intensely emotional. Usually it was an emotional outburst: becoming nervous and jittery, shaken, displaying anxiety and sometimes shock (Garfinkel 1967, 44, 221–26) Sometimes it was depression, bewilderment, or anger at having been put in a situation where they constructed a reality they later discovered to be false. In short, when people have to recognize that they are tacitly constructing their social worlds, and in an arbitrary and conventional way, rather than simply reacting to a world that is objectively there, they show intense negative emotions.

Goffman concluded: “not men and their moments, but moments and their men.” In gender-neutral language: not individuals and their interactions, but interactions and their individuals; not persons and their passions, but passions and their persons. “Every dog will have its day” is more accurately “every day will have its dog.” Incidents shape their incumbents, however momentary they may be; encounters make their encountees. It is games that make sports heroes, politics that makes politicians into charismatic leaders, although the entire weight of record-keeping, news-story-writing, award-giving, speech-making, and advertising hype goes against understanding how this comes about. To see the common realities of everyday life sociologically requires a gestalt shift, a reversal of perspectives. Breaking such deeply ingrained conventional frames is not easy to do; but the more we can discipline ourselves to think everything through the sociology of the situation, the more we will understand why we do what we do.

[T]he intellectual who is squeezed out of recognition by the limited attention space [in academia] is often alienated against the intellectual world in particular. Given that the professional intellectual operates by deeply internalizing the social structures of the field into one’s own mind, this can be an especially intimate and painful form of introversion.

This is a typical dilemma created by all exclusionary rituals: to attempt to destroy the ritual that imposes lower status on outsiders, or to force one’s way in.

[I]ntellectual creativity is contagious, operating as a kind of tribal mana[.]

That image of a few lonely isolated minds, rising like mountain peaks above their mere worldly compatriots, is understandable enough as a Durkheimian emblem that the intellectual community makes out of those whom it puts in its focus of collective attention. As sociologists, we should be looking not through the lens of the myths, but at the larger structure that produced those myths, which is to say the formulation and long-term flow of ideas in networks.

If we start with money as the common denominator, we cannot incorporate nonmonetary, social goods into a common metric; if we start with EE [emotional energy] as the metric, then material-monetary goals become measurable in terms of their direct social and indirect social-symbolic EE payoffs.

Durkheim’s theory of crime ... holds that punishment has the effect of reinforcing the group’s commitment to its symbolic ideals, whether or not it is successful in deterring the violator from future transgressions. ... [P]unishing criminals is carried out not as a utilitarian act to manipulate the reinforcement schedule of the criminal, but as a ritual to maintain the group’s solidarity.