Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30 (Studies in Symbolic Interaction)

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Series Editor: Norman K. Denzin Recent Volumes: Volumes 1–29:

Studies in Symbolic Interaction

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION VOLUME 30

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY

NORMAN K. DENZIN University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

JAI Press is an imprint of Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2008 Copyright r 2008 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84663-930-2 ISSN: 0163-2396 (Series)

Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS D. Mark Austin

Department of Sociology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Daniel Bryan

Peace and Justice Programs, Brethren Colleges Abroad, Quito, Ecuador

Ronald Burns

Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Patricia Ticineto Clough

The Graduate Center CUNY, Queens College, Flushing, NY, USA

Roberta L. Coles

Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Corey J. Colyer

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

David R. Dickens

Department of Sociology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Ju´lio Emı´lio Diniz-Pereira

School of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Patricia Gagne´

Department of Sociology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Elz_ bieta Ha!as

Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Regina Hewitt

Department of English, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA ix

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Christine K. Holland

Department of Communications, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

Barbara J. Jago

University of New Hampshire at Manchester, Manchester, NH, USA

John M. Johnson

Arizona State University, School of Justice and Critical Inquiry, Tempe, AZ, USA

Michael A. Katovich

Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Michal M. McCall

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Clark McPhail

Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Bernard N. Meltzer

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University, MI, USA

William J. Meltzer

Adult Services, Worthington Libraries, Worthington, OH, USA

Lawrence T. Nichols

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

James J. Nolan III

West Virginia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Morgantown, WV, USA

Celine-Marie Pascale

Department of Sociology, American University, Washington, DC, USA

Stephynie C. Perkins

Department of Communications, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

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List of Contributors

Robert Prus

Department of Sociology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., Canada

Joseph Schneider

Department for the Study of Culture and Society, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA

David A. Snow

Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA

Phillip Vannini

Royal Roads University, School of Communication and Culture, Victoria, BC, Canada

ELABORATING THE DISCURSIVE CONTEXTS OF FRAMING: DISCURSIVE FIELDS AND SPACES David A. Snow The ‘‘March of the Penguins’’ was released to theaters on June 24, 2005. Not only did this film about the annual winter migration of the Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin quickly become the second highest grossing documentary of all time, but just as quickly it also became political fodder. As reported in the September 13, 2005 issue of the New York Times: At a conference for young Republicans, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made a ‘‘strong case for intelligent design.’’ (Miller, 2005, p. D2)

And the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved is reported to have said that this is ‘‘the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child rearing’’ (Miller, 2005, p. D2). Several months later, following the November 8, 2005, election defeat of all eight Dover, PA school board-members for the interjection of ‘‘intelligent design’’ as an alternative to the theory of evolution, the religious broadcaster and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson issued a firm warning to the town’s residents, saying: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your cityy . God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger is his eyes Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 3–28 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30001-5

3

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DAVID A. SNOW forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. (Associated Press, 2005)

About the same time Robertson was issuing his latest apocalyptic warning, France, and particularly its Paris region, was in the throes of several weeks of civil unrest that began in response to the deaths of two teenagers in a poor community in a suburb of Paris on the evening of Thursday, October 27. The ‘‘riots,’’ as the disturbances were called across the European community and North America, appeared to beg for causal accounting and analysis judging from the media attention and commentary they received. For example, in a study of two paired-newspapers in six countries (Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States) over a 3-week period that I conducted with two colleagues (Snow, Vliegenthart, & Corrigall-Brown, 2007), we identified 418 articles on the ‘‘riots,’’1 with sometimes striking variation in the characterization of their causes, ranging from attributing them to unemployment, racism, and the failure of France’s minority incorporation polices to out-of-control youth and gangs, Muslims and radical Islamists, to the failure of France’s immigration programs. Each of the foregoing sense-making claims or charges is an instance of framing. In each case, an event pregnant with interpretive possibilities is framed in a way that provides one possible diagnostic or prognostic answer to the question of ‘‘What is going on?’’ or ‘‘What is being said?’’ or ‘‘What does that mean?’’ – questions that invite, according to Goffman (1974), among others, the application or construction of interpretive frames. Thus, a movie about penguins is claimed to make a strong case for creationism/intelligent design rather than evolution; a local election is said to be an affront to God rather than an example of democracy at work or a reasoned victory for rationalism; and several weeks of rioting in the city of light and its environs are said to be attributable to underclass material-based grievances rather than to the religious heritage and antiquated culture of the participants, or vice versa. To date, examination of these various diagnostic framings, especially from the vantage point of the framing perspective on social movements, would likely take one of three paths: descriptive identification of one of the framings and elaboration of its functions; identification of the factors that have affected the development or production of the frames in question; and examination of the effects or outcomes of those frames. A less likely path would involve systematic examination of frame variation across movements, groups, or time.2 And an even less likely research trek would entail an

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

5

examination of the discursive contexts in which those frames are embedded and out of which they have evolved. It is this least traveled path that I will traverse in this article. What I intend to do is to problematize and elaborate aspects of the discursive contexts impinging on framing in relation to social movements and politics more generally. In the case of the foregoing illustrations, for example, I would first contend that they cannot be fully understood by inspecting them apart from the discursive contexts in which they are ensconced, and then examine those contexts and how specific features of them are related to the various frames that grow out of them and their respective life courses. There is, it is important to note, a primary exception to this neglect of discursive contexts, and it is associated with some recent work on what is called ‘‘the discursive opportunity structure (DOS).’’ But that concept, as I will argue, does not encompass the full complement of contexts in which framing is embedded. Thus, my intent is to address this lacuna by elaborating the concepts of discursive fields and space. And in doing so, I will also add to the conceptual architecture associated with the framing perspective on social movements. I will begin with a critical discussion of the idea of DOS, which provides a point of departure for my elaboration of discursive fields and spaces. As the discussion progresses, it will become clear that the conceptual elaboration is partly rooted, theoretically, in what I take to be a number of the orienting principles of symbolic interactionism, namely the principles of interactive determinism, emergence, and human agency (see Blumer, 1969; Snow, 2001). Additionally, I will illustrate and buttress my arguments and observations by reference to two studies in which I have been involved – one on the processes of frame articulation and elaboration within the context of a right-wing social movement organization (Snow & Clark-Miller, 2006), and the other entailing the previously mentioned assessment of frame variation in response to the French riots in the fall of 2005 (Snow, Vliegenthart, & Corrigall-Brown, 2007).

DELIMITING THE CONCEPTION OF DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES As the framing perspective has evolved, there has been growing recognition that framing processes cannot be adequately understood apart from the broader enveloping contexts in which those processes occur. One such

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DAVID A. SNOW

context recently has been conceptualized as discursive opportunities or the DOS. To date the concept has been examined most closely and carefully in relation to the media, most notably in Koopmans research on how the strategies of the German radical right have evolved partly in response to various media reactions and constraints (Koopmans, 2004) and in Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht’s (2002) comparison of abortion discourse in the U.S. and Germany (between 1970 and 1994) via the media. Koopmans provides the most straightforward and researchable conception of discursive opportunities, defining them in terms of three selection mechanisms that affect the probability of a proffered message or framing being picked-up and diffused. They include ‘‘visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc. – react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive)’’ (Koopmans, 2004, p. 367). The work of Koopmans (2004) and Ferree et al. (2002) constitutes an important contribution in identifying and empirically examining one set of contextual factors that affect the career of proffered framings. I accent one set because the focus of their work has been on the role of the media in shaping movement discourse and framing – on, that is, the media DOS in particular rather than on a DOS in general. My preference is that we think in terms of institutionally specific discursive opportunities, such as the media’s, rather than in terms of some general, over-arching DOS for two reasons: First, I fear that if we talk and write in terms of the DOS, its fate will parallel that of its parent concept, the political opportunity structure (POS). That is, DOS, like POS, will be invoked to explain everything and thus nothing.3 Additionally, it is not all that clear how to distinguish between general, overarching political and DOSs. Are they duplicative in some respects, thus making one or the other redundant? If, for example, a political regime becomes increasingly repressive banning public gatherings and speech, is the absence of oppositional protest and rhetoric explained in terms of the tightening of the POS or the DOS? It is also important to keep in mind that political or discursive opportunities do not determine the substance of discursive processes but delimit the spaces in which those processes occur. The overlapping concepts of submerged networks (Melucci, 1989), abeyance structures (Taylor, 1989), subcultures of accommodation (Johnston & Snow, 1998) and free spaces (Polletta, 1999), and the dramaturgical distinctions between front stage and back stage (Goffman, 1959), and public and hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990) remind us that oppositional discursive process, including framing, often proceed in the face of repressive structures, albeit cautiously and in private, hidden, or

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

7

submerged rather than public contexts. In light of these observations, I think we will be better served conceptually and analytically by conceptualizing DOSs in terms of specific institutions, as with the media, rather than too generally. A second reason for being cautious about thinking in terms of general DOSs is that the concept leaves little conceptual space for considering other discursive contextual factors and their implications for examining and understanding aspects of framing. In what follows I substantiate this concern conceptually and empirically by elaborating two such discursive contexts: discursive fields and discursive space.

DISCURSIVE FIELDS The concept of ‘‘discursive fields’’ has been invoked as one way to conceptualize at least one component of the context in which framing and discourse are embedded more generally (see, e.g., Spillman, 1995; Steinberg, 1999). Discursive fields, like the kindred concepts of organizational fields (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), multi-organizational fields (Klandermans, 1992; Rucht, 2004; Curtis & Zurcher, 1973), and identify fields (Hunt, Benford, & Snow, 1994), are constitutive of the genre of concepts in the social sciences that can be thought of as ‘‘embedding’’ concepts in that they reference broader enveloping contexts in which discussions, decisions, and actions take place. The ‘‘field’’ concept has been bandied about for some time in the social sciences, wherein it is perhaps most closely identified with the psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951) and his field theory, and has also figured prominently in the writings of Victor Turner (1974), and Pierre Bourdieu (1984).4 But it does not appear to have been until the relatively recent claimed ‘‘cultural turn’’ that the concept of discursive fields gained a footing within sociology, principally among sociologists working in the cultural area. To provide a sense of how discursive fields have been conceptualized and used in the cultural area, and to provide a footing for a reformulation of the concept, I refer briefly to its treatment and usage in three different but interrelated works. The first is Robert Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse (1989), which examines the ways in which the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the ascent of Marxist socialism were influenced by the contexts in which they arose, the ways in which they became institutionalized, and the ways in which their associated ‘‘ideologies were shaped by and yet succeeded in transcending their specific environments of

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DAVID A. SNOW

origin’’ (1989, p. 5). For Wuthnow, discursive fields constitute not only ‘‘a space y within which discourse can be framed’’ (1989, p. 555), but also provide ‘‘the foundational categories in which thinking can take place’’ and ‘‘establishes the limits of discussion and defines the range of problems that can be addressed’’ (1989, p. 13). Also writing within the sociology of culture, and tussling with the structure/culture connection, Spillman (1995) proffers the discursive field as the mediating link between the two – that is, ‘‘between structure and meaningful action’’ (p. 139). Like Wuthnow, whose conceptualization of discursive fields she invokes, Spillman regards discursive fields as the site or locale of ‘‘creative cultural work,’’ such as meaning making or framing. But Spillman also extends Wuthnow’s analysis by bootlegging social structure into her conceptualization by contending that ‘‘discursive fields express structured constellations of social relations’’ (p. 142) that are ‘‘presupposed in interaction’’ and thus limit or constrain meaning-making or cultural work (pp. 143–144). The last illustrative work is Mark Steinberg’s examination of repertoires of discourse among 19th century English cotton spinners. Steinberg draws on Spillman’s treatment by conceptualizing discursive fields as ‘‘dynamic terrain in which meaning contests occur’’ (1999, p. 748) and agreeing that fields both constrain and enable in the sense of limiting meaning construction as well as providing the tools for meaning work. But Steinberg appears to part company a bit with Wuthnow and Bourdieu, among others, in terms of the clarity of field boundaries, arguing ‘‘that the boundaries of a discursive field are never entirely fixed or clear’’ (p. 749). Taken together, these three treatments suggest that discursive fields are the contexts in which meaning-making activities, such as framing, are embedded; that the ideational stuff that gets discussed and the rules or grammar for the discourse are contained within the field; that the field is also constituted by a set of patterned relations imported from the outside; and field boundaries, while not fully transparent or fixed, are skewed in the direction of fixity and clarity. Although I agree with the proposition that framing can be best understood within the context of a discursive field, I find the above conception of discursive fields too restrictive insofar as it is maintained that they ‘‘establish the limits of discussion’’ and ‘‘the range of problems that can be addressed.’’ Or, as Spillman puts it, ‘‘They limit the range of potential meanings and values which might sensibly enter interaction’’ (1995, p. 144). I am not so sure that is empirically the case. If it were, then I would argue that the ideological bases for the movements with which Gandhi and Martin

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

9

Luther King are so prominently associated would have been framed quite differently, as both Gandhi and King drew from articulated strands of different ideologies and cultural perspectives – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity in the case of Gandhi, and Christianity, Gandhism, and the U.S. Constitution in King’s case. Both had something of the flavor of what the historian George Mosse has called ‘‘scavenger ideology(ies)’’ (1985, p. 134). Consequently, I think we would be better served if we turned what appears to be taken as a constant within the cultural area into a variable feature of discursive fields. In other words, why not treat interpretive constraint as a matter of degree rather than as a given. To insist on the obverse suggests to me a kind of closed system approach to innovation, and a rather stilted view of agency. To be sure, some cultural sociologists relax this contention by suggesting that ‘‘some cultural autonomy exists in the particular meanings and values emerging in the interaction’’ (Spillman, p. 144) or that ‘‘the boundaries of a discursive field are never entirely fixed or clear’’ (Steinberg, p. 749). But I sense that such boundary- or constraint-relaxing statements are in part a reflection of what often appears to be an almost schizophrenic view within the sociology of culture of the tensions between the constraining power of culture and individual and collective agency. This tension is not so profound or immobilizing for symbolic interactionists, however, who have generally argued, following Blumer (1969), that while social actors take into account the structural and cultural constraints (e.g., roles, norms, values) that impinge on situations in which they find themselves in the course of developing their respective lines of action, those constraints are not singly determinative of that action, including the generation and/or application of interpretive frames. And this is especially true in the contexts of contentious politics and social movements, wherein the relevance or legitimacy of extant cultural codes and framings are likely to be ambiguous, open to question, and/or contestable. Accordingly, I would argue for a more relaxed or elastic view of discursive fields and their boundaries, one that stretches on a continuum from emergent fields to highly structured fields. To get a handle on the way in which discursive fields are structured, I turn to the concept of organizational fields as developed within the sociological study of organizations. Spillman, as suggested earlier, contends that discursive fields ‘‘carry the power of structure into meaning-making’’ through the ‘‘patterns of structural relations’’ they ‘‘express’’ (1995, p. 144). I agree! However, I think the notion of ‘‘structural relations’’ that supposedly characterize a discursive field is insufficiently developed, and

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that the concept of organizational fields provides a way to think more concretely about the constitution of discursive fields. The concept of organizational fields was originally propounded by DiMaggio and Powell to conceptualize the set of organizational actors that ‘‘constitute a recognized area of institutional life,’’ such as, in a given area of economic life, the ‘‘key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services and products’’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). Not only has the concept found wide application within the study of organizations and institutions, but it’s conceptualization has also been broadened to include any relatively organized ‘‘system of actors, actions, and relations y whose participants take one another into account as they carry out interrelated activities’’ (McAdam & Scott, 2005, p. 10), including social movement activity (see, especially, Armstrong, 2005; Davis, McAdam, Scott, & Zald, 2005; Morrill & Owen-Smith, 2002). The analytic utility of the concept is that it focuses attention on the array of relevant actors engaged in and contributing to a process or practice and, consistent with the interactionist principle of interactive determination, on the relationships among them and their patterns of interaction.5 Of course the degree of field organization or the system of relations among the actors can vary on a continuum from unstable or unsettled to stable or settled. Unstable fields exist when the actors or participants and the system of relations among them are emergent or just evolving, or when the system of relations is dissolving due to a shift in attention to a more recent, noteworthy event, or to contestation among the actors. Stable or highly structured fields, on the other hand, exist when there is an ordered and legitimated system of relations among the various actors, such that there is an understanding of the decision-making process and the relative influence of the different actors in that process. Incorporating these observations into an expanded understanding of discursive fields suggests a conceptualization that includes not only relevant cultural materials that can be drawn on, in the sense of Swidler’s ‘‘tool kit’’ approach to culture (1986), but also the range of actors participating in the discussion and the system of relations among them, rather it be emergent and unstable or highly ordered and structured. This suggests, then, that discursive fields can vary on a continuum ranging from emergent and relatively unstructured and unstable at one end to highly structured and stable at the other end. Since discursive fields are constituted when two or more individual or collective actors discuss some relevant event or issue, and since there can be

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Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

considerable variation in the extent of agreement or disagreement regarding the focal event or issue, it is also clear that discursive fields can vary on a continuum ranging from consensus to heated contestation. Some scholars who have found the concept of discursive fields of analytic utility would argue otherwise, contending that they are ‘‘grounded in ongoing contention’’ (Steinberg, 1999, p. 749). But neither all debates nor meaning contests are grounded in contention, nor do they automatically or always become hotly contested and thus contentious. Here again I would argue that caution needs to be exercised so that we do not treat what is a variable feature of a process as an invariant property.

A Typology of Discursive Fields The cross-classification of the emergent/structured and consensual/ contested continua yields a fourfold typology of discursive fields, which is schematically summarized in Fig. 1. Cell 1 contains recently emergent Emergent Field (1)

(2)

Tsunami Initial response to 9/11

Katrina French Riots

March of the Penguins Consensual Field

Contested Field London Terrorist Bombings

Religious Sectarianism Iraq War ID Movement Local Right-Wing SMO

(3)

(4) Structured Field

Fig. 1.

Discursive Fields.

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DAVID A. SNOW

discursive fields in which there is considerable agreement or near consensus about framing the event either diagnostically or prognostically. The discursive field that emerged in response to the December 26, 2004 earthquake-triggered Indian Ocean and southeast Asian tsunamis is illustrative. Not only was there immediate, near diagnostic consensus about the causes of the disaster – a 9.1–9.3 magnitude earthquake, but it prompted, as well, a huge worldwide effort to help victims of the tragedy, with billions of dollars being raised for disaster relief, symbolized in this country by the joint efforts of Presidents 41 (G. W. Bush) and 42 (W. J. Clinton). In time, of course, prognostic debates began to percolate as to the timeliness and sufficiency of the response, and the disaster response field became more structured as well. But these observations bring into play temporal considerations, which contribute to the dynamic character of discursive fields, which I will discuss shortly. Cell 2 includes emergent fields in which there is heated contestation among the actors. Examples include the contested and unstable fields that emerged in response to the hurricane Katrina disaster and the Paris riots that began on October 27 and reportedly ended on November 17, 2005, when the police ‘‘declared a return to a normal situation throughout France, saying that the 98 vehicles torched the previous night corresponded to the usual average’’ (Wikipedia, 2005, p. 1). A picture of the contested character of the French riots’ discursive field is indicated in Table 1, which shows the different diagnostic frames proffered by various actors and commentators within the field. Across the top row, we see six different diagnostic frames, three of which cluster together as non-structural or category-based and three as structural. A more graphic sense of the difference between these two clusters of frames is provided by the following contrasting selections from the New York Times and the Washington Times. In the New York Times piece, the author, a French social scientist, argued that: ythe reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence. Rather we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to Los Angeles and beyondy . The rioters are generally 12–25 years old, and roughly half of those arrested are under 18y . They express simmering anger, fueled by unemployment and racism. The lesson, then, is that while these riots originate in areas largely populated by the immigrants of Islamic heritage, they have little to do with the wrath of a Muslim community.’’ (Roy, 2005, p. 27)

In stark contrast, an article in the Washington Times argues: There’s no scarcity of terminally sensitive apologists eager to make the usual excuses for the lawless. And it’s true that the housing projects ringing Paris, keeping the poor out of

Diagnostic Framing by Various Countries, Sources, and Time Periods (%). Diagnostic Framing Non-structural

Riff-raff (n ¼ 138)

Structural

Over-reaction Minority and/ Failure of by authorities or religious minority (n ¼ 185) groups (n ¼ 89) incorporation (n ¼ 208)

Total

Housing (n ¼ 59)

Economy and/or education (n ¼ 104)

Other (n ¼ 42)

Total (n ¼ 825)

Total

16.7

22.4

10.8

25.2

7.2

12.6

5.1

100.0

Country Netherlands Germany UK US Canada France

15.0 15.8 16.3 8.3 17.3 27.1

20.8 28.8 26.6 28.0 18.2 10.0

9.2 9.4 5.4 15.2 15.5 12.9

25.8 22.3 30.4 21.2 26.4 23.6

14.2 4.3 5.4 6.8 5.5 7.9

13.3 10.1 12.0 13.6 14.5 12.9

1.7 9.4 3.8 6.8 2.7 5.7

14.5 16.8 22.3 16.0 13.3 17.0

7.2 22.6

30.1 8.9

8.8 12.9

25.5 27.4

6.9 10.5

14.1 13.7

7.5 4.0

37.1 15.0

76.8

2.4 45.9

13.4 29.7

6.1 13.5

1.2 5.4

5.4

10.0 4.5

3.3

10.0

53.3

10.0

3.3

3.6

Source Media French government Sarkozy French opposition International actors

3.3

16.7

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

Table 1.

13

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Table 1. (Continued ) Diagnostic Framing Non-structural Riff-raff (n ¼ 138)

Residents/ participants Other Week 1 2 3

Structural

Over-reaction Minority and/ Failure of by authorities or religious minority (n ¼ 185) groups (n ¼ 89) incorporation (n ¼ 208)

Total

Housing (n ¼ 59)

Economy and/or education (n ¼ 104)

Other (n ¼ 42)

Total (n ¼ 825)

13.6

38.8

3.9

18.4

6.8

15.5

2.9

12.5

7.0

15.5

12.0

35.9

8.5

15.5

5.6

17.2

20.9 16.5 13.9

37.3 22.0 11.1

3.3 8.7 22.8

17.6 27.8 24.4

7.2 7.7 5.6

7.2 13.0 16.1

6.5 4.3 6.1

18.5 59.6 21.8

DAVID A. SNOW

Source: Adapted from Snow et al. (2007)

Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing

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sight, are islands of misery and woe. But it’s impractical to blame the French government for not assimilating the Muslim tide from Africa and Arabia when these Muslims by and large not only do not want assimilation, but resist it, insisting on bringing to France with them the eight-century culture that makes life such hell in their homelands. (Pruden, 2005, p. A04)

These two antithetical framings illustrate not only the poles of the various framings within the French riots discursive field, but also the highly interactive, dialogic character of framing activity within the field.6 That is to say that the various framings, including the juxtaposed ones just mentioned, are not independent but interdependent and recursive in the sense of being built up partly in response to each other, such that one framing may lead to a counterframing which in turn may generate a ‘‘lamination’’ (Goffman, 1974, pp. 82, 156–157) of the initial framing, ad infinitum, until the event in question is superseded by another event, a particular framing becomes dominant over competing frames, or there is frame crystallization (convergence around a proffered framing). Equally contested, but somewhat more structured, was the discursive field that emerged in response to the documentary, ‘‘The March of the Penguins.’’ It was emergent in the sense of being unanticipated because the contested interpretation of the documentary’s deep meaning caught people off-guard, but the field was initially more structured than the Katrina or Paris riots fields because the contested framings were in accord with the fields that were already organized around the creationist and intelligent design movement and the anti-gay marriage countermovement. Cell 3 encompasses discursive fields in which there is considerable consensus among actors who are positioned or situated in relation to each other in a structured and relatively stable fashion. Here two illustrative cases are presented. The first is the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings of London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour. Three bombs exploded within less than a minute of each other on three underground trains and in a bus about an hour later. All told, 56 were killed and around 700 injured. Since it was an unanticipated event, the discursive field that emerged with it as an object of discussion is positioned almost in the middle of the continuum, but skewed slightly toward the structured end because the discussion was highly orchestrated and strongly consensual, suggesting rapid frame crystallization (convergence around or toward a proffered framing). The second illustration of a consensual, structured discursive field is provided by the right-wing SMO that Jason Clark-Miller and I studied (along with Jennifer Murdock and Bill Bunis) in the mid-1990s. The SMO

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advertised itself as a ‘‘Constitutional Forum’’ for citizens wanting to educate themselves about the country’s constitution and how it is being ‘‘misinterpreted and abused.’’ The group met regularly on a weekend morning for at least two hours at a local cafeteria, with typically 30–40 dues-paying members, another 10–20 regulars, and roughly 10 guests in attendance. Members and other attendees generally arrived around 8:00 to purchase breakfast and socialize with each other before the meeting was called to order formally with a few pronouncements and a prayer, followed by an invited talk and open discussion that usually lasted for an hour. The group was highly structured in that it was organized hierarchically in a pyramid fashion, with the two leaders at the top and the rank and file participants and the speakers at the points of the base. We were interested in the processes through which frames were articulated and elaborated through the discourse, so we monitored the conversations ethnographically and taped or took notes on the speeches, questions, and comments that constituted the substance of each meeting, noting the topics discussed, what was said about them, the different frames that emerged, who said what and when, and how the discussions were conducted. Although there was often some debate, it was rarely conflictual as the flow of the meetings and the frame articulation and elaboration of the different topics was orchestrated by the two leaders without any contentious opposition. Nonetheless, since there was occasional indication of discursive tension, I positioned this SMO as straddling, slightly the line between consensual and contentious discursive fields. Cell 4 is the last type or category of discursive fields schematized in Fig. 1. It includes discursive fields that are structured in varying degrees, but in which various issues, events, or practices are not merely debated but also hotly contested. Examples include the fractionated but structured discursive fields associated with the build-up to sectarian splits, whether resulting in large-scale ones such as the Protestant Reformation (Wuthnow, 1989) or smaller-scale ones such as the factionalism and defection that occurred within the Hare Krishna movement in the late 1980s (Rochford, 1989), with the Iraq war, and with the ongoing creationist/intelligent design and evolution debate. In each of these cases, and others like them, the discursive field consists of the various actors on different sides of the issue, practice, or event in question and is thus fragmented into what social movement scholars have theorized as conflict and alliance systems (Klandermans, 1992; Rucht, 2004). But the system of relations among these fragmented or contentious actors is still structured inasmuch as it is organizationally or institutionally embedded, and patterned or relatively stable, as is typically the case with divergent political parties.

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Thus far I have argued that discursive fields are not all of the same cloth or form but can vary along two dimensions that, when cross-classified, yield four types into which real-life discursive fields can be categorized. But actual discursive fields, like organizational fields, are not static or fixed entities, but ‘‘dynamic terrain’’ (Steinberg, 1999, p. 748). However, not all fields are equally dynamic. So what other factors or variables, other than the consensual/contested and emergent/structured dimensions, affect the extent of dynamism or turbulence or stability of a discursive field? In other words, what additional factors account for variation in discursive fields and associated framing processes?

Temporality and the Stream of Events I now focus attention on two interrelated factors implied but not articulated in the foregoing discussion: one is time, and the other is the stream of events. The importance of time is nicely illustrated by Elizabeth Armstrong’s (2005) study of how the field of lesbian/gay organizations in San Francisco changed rather quickly in a short span of time. In the late 1960s the movement was dominated by organizations emphasizing societal transformation and anti-identity goals; by 1973, these goals had been replaced by the celebration of diversity and gay identity. ‘‘This turn toward identity building,’’ Armstrong writes, ‘‘was accompanied by rapid political consolidation,’’ with, ‘‘for the first time,’’ gay organizations agreeing ‘‘upon a national gay rights agenda’’ (p. 161). This transformation, she argues, was due in large part to field settlement or crystallization, involving a movement from inter-organizational conflict and fractionation to convergence and coalescence. To refer to organizational or discursive field settlement or crystallization is, of course, to refer to a temporal process. ‘‘Time matters,’’ to borrow from the title of Andrew Abbot’s recent set of essays on theory and method (2001), and it matters greatly when examining the life course of discursive fields and associated framing processes.7 This is shown quite clearly in two data displays drawn from the previously mentioned study I conducted with Rens Vliegenthart and Catherine Corrigall-Brown on frame variation in response to the recent French riots. The first display is the previously referenced Table 1. The last panel of the table is most relevant here, as it shows the descriptive results for our findings on diagnostic framing across a three-week time-period, from the inception of the riots on October 27th to, according to the police, their cessation on November 17th. Here we see a

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general decline in framing the problem in terms of social categories or groups, such as criminally oriented youth and over-reactive control agents, and a corresponding increase in framing the problem in terms of structural factors, such as the failure of minority incorporation and/or the economy and the public education system. Aside from the intriguing questions such findings raise about the causes and generality of this temporal shift in the problem locus of diagnostic framing over the 3 weeks, they also direct attention to the relationship between the event (or events) and the temporal fluidity of the discursive field for which the event has become a focal issue and perhaps its raison d’eˆtre. More concretely, if there are changes in the character of framing over the life course of an event, might not we expect changes in the life course of the relevant discursive field as well? The second data display (Fig. 2) from our study provides an illustrative answer. Here we see a close linear relationship between the life course of French riots, as measured in terms of vehicles 1600

250 vehicles burnt

1400

arrests made 200

1000

150

800

framings

vehicles burnt/arrests made

total framings 1200

100

600 400

50 200

ov N

ov

18 -

N

ov N

16 -

ov N

14 -

ov

12 -

ov

N 10 -

N 8-

N 6-

29 -O

Fig. 2.

ov

0 ct 31 -O ct 2N ov 4N ov

0

Temporal Variation in Riot Intensity and Riot Commentary (Daily Total Framing); Adapted from Snow et al. (2007).

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burned and arrests, and the total number of diagnostic and prognostic framings (correlation of 0.79 and 0.78) in the newspapers, with the decline in framings corresponding to the dissipation of the riots. If multiple framings associated with an event are taken as an indicator of the existence of a discursive field that exists, in part or totally, to discuss and make sense of that event, then Fig. 2 also suggests the temporally fluidity of discursive fields, especially emergent ones, as well as their event-dependence. These observations lead to the second additional factor I mentioned earlier as accounting for variation in the life course of the discursive fields and associated framing processes. Here I refer to what I call the stream of events. By that, I mean the ongoing flow of events or happenings that are candidates for public and political attention, especially through the media. Events can be actual or real, as with the occurrence of the December 2004 tsunami, the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and the October/ November 2005 Paris riots; or they can be fabricated or contrived in a fashion akin to Daniel Boorstin’s ‘‘pseudo-events’’ (1961), such as the charge that Iraq had purchased material for nuclear bombs from an African nation. Whatever the substance of an event, there is little question but that a central aspect of the everyday world is the continuously flowing stream of events. The flow may not be constant, and there is considerable variability in the probability of any single event receiving media attention and public visibility because of the media’s various event-selection mechanisms (Gamson, 2004; Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988; Koopmans, 2004), but there is always an abundance of events that are available, especially with the advent of the Internet and the diffusion of its access, for discussion and debate. And it is around these events that discursive fields rise and fall, as sketched in Fig. 3, which diagrams how I conceive of a full-blown discursive field. What accounts for variation in the public life-span of an event is not well understood. Clearly some events have a relatively short life-history, such as the French riots as shown in Fig. 2, although discussion of the event may continue in highly structured and focused discursive fields, as occurred in the aftermath of the 1960 urban riots in the U.S., as well as after earlier riots (Feagin & Hahn, 1973, pp. 199–262; Platt, 1971; Walker, 1969). For other events, attention wanes because of so-called ‘‘compassion fatigue’’ (Moeller, 1999) or sheer boredom. For still others, public interest in the event may be culturally patterned, such that it expands and contracts over the course of the year (Bunis, Yancik, & Snow, 1996). And still others may be crowded out by the glut of events flowing upstream. Whichever of these explanations is operative, they all have implications for the life course of any event-related discursive field and the associated framings, but the

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Public (Potential Constituents & Antagonists)

Ideology Ideology Counter Movement

Target, e.g., State, Government, Church

Social Movement d

Stream of Events

Ideology

Discursive Field

Fig. 3.

Sketch of Discursive Field with Stream of Events.

character of those implications are yet to be worked out and thus call for investigation.

DISCURSIVE SPACE Having extended and elaborated the concept of discursive fields and suggested some ways in which they can affect framing processes, I now turn to the final concept I want to elaborate and relate to both discursive fields and framing. It is the concept of discursive space. By discursive space, I mean, very concretely, the total volume or amount of space available for talk, discussion, commentary, and/or reportage – whatever its form (e.g., a speech, a question, an answer, a comment on a speech, question, answer, or a comment) or context (e.g., an interactional encounter, office meeting, broader social occasion, the media in general) – that is or can be bounded in time, and often in physical space as well. Thus, discursive space can be the total amount of column space in a newspaper, the length of an interactional

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encounter involving two or more people, or the time span of a board meeting, a class, or a press conference; and it can be measured in terms of the total number of words, lines, or sentences (or some other metric) within the bounded space. Analytically, discursive space constitutes the base or denominator for calculating the proportion of space consumed or appropriated by some included discursive unit of analysis, such as the various categories of actors/ speakers that populate the space or discursive field, the topics or events discussed, speech acts, and the resultant frames or other discursive products, such as narratives. To illustrate, let us return to Table 1 on diagnostic framing associated with the French riots, and let us assume that panel 2 captures the range of actors or voices included in the riot discursive field and the range of their diagnostic comments. In doing so, the last column of the table could be read as indicating the amount of discursive space consumed by each set of actors. In this example, it is not surprising that the print media consume a disproportionate share of the space, since it was the source of our data. More interesting, however, is that the range of actors’ mirror what might be expected to constitute the French riot discursive field. That is, the French government, opposition parties, international actors, and local residents and participants are all included. The one actor that stands out because he is an individual rather than a group or set, like the other actors, is Nicholas Sarkozy, the former French Minister of the Interior. We treated him as a separate source because of his polarizing position during the career of the riots. For example, more than any other actor, he was unambiguously clear about his view of the rioters, whom he called ‘‘scum’’ and ‘‘dregs,’’ and of what should be done, calling for ‘‘a war without mercy’’ against them, including immediate ‘‘deportation’’ of rioting immigrants (New York Times, November 10, 2005). This raises interesting questions about the character of frames that catapult some actors into the spotlight. My hypothesis is that it has to do with the clarity and unambiguousness of the framing. Whatever the case, our Paris riot data hint at the analytic utility of considering the concept of discursive space, as it provides the base for actually comparing actors in terms of their discursive position in the field, and thus enables us to address the relative influence of different actors or voices via empirical documentation rather than argument by assertion. This can be seen even more clearly by returning to the previously mentioned study that Jason Clark-Miller and I conducted of frame articulation and elaboration in a right-wing group. We measured the discursive space for our analysis in terms of the total number of lines in our

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Table 2. Distribution of Frame Relevant Speech Acts and Discursive Space by Participants in Right-Wing Group. Participants

Leaders Members Speakers

Frame Speech Acts (N: 406)

Frame Discursive Space (N: 29,053 Lines)

Number

%

Number

%

194 137 75

48 34 18

12,785 9,629 6,639

44 33 23

Source: Adapted from Snow and Clark-Miller (2006).

discourse-relevant field notes and tape recordings. That discursive space was defined in terms of nearly 40,000 lines (38,062). In order to get an analytic handle on all of these lines, we clustered them into more manageable units called speech acts and examined, among other things, the distribution of frame relevant speech acts and discursive space consumed by the three sets of actors. As shown in Table 2, we see that all three sets of actors are co-participants, but not equally, as the leaders are clearly dominant in terms of both the proportion of speech acts and the discursive space consumed. Taken together, the above case materials suggest how incorporating the concept of discursive space into analyses of discursive fields and framing processes provides considerable analytic purchase by facilitating the empirical examination of the relationship between framing processes, the actors involved in those processes, and the relative influence of competing frames.

CONCLUSION In this paper, I have argued that discursive frames – such as those noted at the outset of the paper regarding the meaning of ‘‘The March of the Penguins,’’ the electoral defeat of the intelligent design advocates on the Dover, PA school board, and the 2005 French riots – can best be understood within the cultural and structural or organizational contexts in which they are embedded. I have elaborated three such contexts: discursive media opportunity structures, discursive fields, and discursive spaces, focusing on the latter two. Discursive fields evolve during the course of discussion and debate, sometimes but not always contested, about relevant events and issues, and

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encompass cultural materials (e.g., beliefs, values, ideologies, myths) of potential relevance and various sets of actors (e.g., targeted authorities, social control agents, countermovements, media) whose interests are aligned, albeit differently, with the issues or events in question, and who thus have a stake in how those events and issues are framed. The discursive processes of frame articulation and elaboration draw selectively upon these cultural materials and are conducted in relation to the various sets of actors that constitute the discursive field. Discursive space, on the other hand, refers to the volume or amount of space available for discourse within a temporally and/or locationally bounded context that, analytically, constitutes the base or denominator for calculating the proportion of space consumed or appropriated by some included discursive unit of analysis. Considered together, the concepts of discursive fields and spaces, as I have elaborated them, enable us to generate and examine empirically a host of questions that should extend and refine our understanding of framing processes and the contexts in which they occur, and especially how those contexts constrain and facilitate framing in relation to social movements and politics and perhaps even more generally. Such questions include:  To what extent and in what ways will framing processes vary by the relative stability of the discursive field? Are framing processes more variable and wide-ranging in emergent and less structured and unstable fields?  What is the relationship between framing processes and whether a field is skewed organizationally in the direction of participatory democracy or bureaucratic hierarchy (see Polletta, 2002; Rothschild & Whitt, 1986)? Does the prospect or likelihood of frame crystallization (convergence around or toward an extant frame) vary by the form or type of organizational structure?  What is the relationship between field crystallization and frame crystallization? Is there a tendency toward frame crystallization or congruence as the actors within the discursive field become more cohesive?  Are some frames more dominant than others as measured in terms of the volume of discursive space consumed? Or are there other more telling indicators of dominance, such as the proponent’s or articulator’s ‘‘standing’’ (‘‘having a voice in the media’’ [Ferree et al., 2002, pp. 86–104])?  To what extent is frame dominance affected by the form of field structuration? Is frame dominance more likely in fields organized hierarchically?

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 What is the relative discursive influence of different actors within the field? Are some more dominant than others as measured in terms of the amount of discursive space consumed? And, if so, is such dominance partly a function of position or ‘‘standing’’ within the organization (Ferree et al., 2002)? In other words, are discursively dominant actors also likely to be organizationally dominant actors?  Does the consumption of discursive space translate into greater influence within the field, and within one’s group or SMO, in terms of the resonance or carrying power of ones’ framings?  What is the relationship between discursive space consumed and leadership within a discursive field and an SMO? Is the relationship, if any, more indirect and a function of certain characteristics, such as rhetorical ability and ‘‘social skill’’ (Fligstein, 2001)? These and other kindred questions one might ask underscore the potential theoretic, analytic, and empirical yield of the conceptualization of discursive fields and spaces I have elaborated herein, and invite more nuanced analyses of the relationship between framing and organization at a field-level and particularly the relations between frame dominance, discursive dominance, and organizational dominance. In turn, these concepts add to the developing conceptual scaffolding associated with the framing perspective on social movements. Among the interconnected concepts and processes that have surfaced as the framing literature has expanded, there are at least five that can be thought of as cornerstone concepts and processes in that they provide a conceptual architecture that has stimulated much of the research exploring the relevance of framing to mobilization both empirically and theoretically. These key concepts or processes include: collective action frames, master frames, core-framing tasks, frame alignment processes, and frame resonance. The concepts of discursive fields and spaces extend this conceptual architecture. And, in doing so, this conceptual elaboration links the analysis of framing processes within the study of social movements more closely to both the sociological study of culture and organizations.

NOTES 1. We place the term riots in quotation marks because of our understanding that it is an inexact designation that may conjure images of the events that bear an untidy relationship to what exactly transpired. As well, it can be and has been construed as a politically convenient label that not only focuses attention on one segment of the participants, but may imply something demeaning about their character. These and

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related concerns have been noted in examination of the ‘‘ghetto riots’’ of the 1960s in the United States. See, for example Feagin and Hahn (1973, fn 4, pp. vi–vii) and Silver (1969). We thus use the term riot advisedly, but we do so because it was by far and away the predominant descriptor of the disturbances that gripped France for the better part of three weeks. 2. For a summary and overview of the framing perspective on movements and much of the associated research, including work on these different research paths, see Benford and Snow (2000), Snow (2004), and Polletta and Ho (2006). 3. See, for example, Goodwin and Jasper’s (1999) critique of the political opportunity perspective on social movements in a special issue of Sociological Forum, as well as the responses. 4. See Martin’s elaboration of field theory, which he conceives as ‘‘a more or less coherent approach in the social sciences whose essence is the explanation of regularities in individual action by recourse to position vis-a`-vis others’’ (Martin, 2003, p. 1). 5. The symbolic interactionist ‘‘principle of interactive determination stipulates that understanding of focal objects of analysis y cannot be fully achieved by attending only to qualities presumed to be intrinsic to them (but) requires consideration of the interactional contexts or webs of relationships in which they are ensnared and embedded. For all practical purposes, then, neither individual or society nor self or other are ontologically prior but exist only in relation to each other; thus one can fully understand them only through their interaction, whether actual, virtual, or imagined’’ (Snow, 2001, p. 369). 6. The use of the term ‘‘dialogic’’ in relation to the analysis of discourse can be traced back to at least the Russian literary scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (Todorov, 1984). For its application to an instance of collective action, see Steinberg (1999). It is interesting to note that, in some respects, Bakhtin’s dialogic principle bears a striking family resemblance to the symbolic interactionist principle of ‘‘interactive determination’’ (see Note 5). 7. The importance of time or temporality to understanding social processes and life has long been acknowledged within symbolic interactionism, in large part because of Mead’s lectures on the topic entitled The Philosophy of the Present (1932). For a summary discussion of Mead’s perspective on time, see Flaherty and Fine (2001), and for a more general discussion of the relevance of temporality to sociological inquiry, see Maines (1987).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The initial draft was written for presentation as the Peter M. Hall Lecture at the Midwest Sociological Society 2006 Annual Meeting. I thank Peter Hall for inviting me to give the 2006 lecture. I also acknowledge the assistance of a number of colleagues, including Jason Clark-Miller, Catherine CorrigallBrown, John McCarthy, Calvin Morrill, Francesca Polletta, Rens Vliegenthart, and Mayer Zald, who have worked with me on several relevant projects to which this paper is partially beholden or who have

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provided valuable insights as well as serving as constructively responsive sounding boards.

REFERENCES Abbott, A. (2001). Time matters: On theory and method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armstrong, E. A. (2005). From struggle to settlement: The crystallization of a field of Lesbian/Gay Organizations in San Francisco, 1969–1973. In: G. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zelda (Eds), Social movements and organization theory (pp. 161–187). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Associated Press. (2005). Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster. November 11. Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Boorstin, D. J. (1961). The image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bunis, W. K., Yancik, A., & Snow, D. A. (1996). The cultural patterning of sympathy toward the homeless and other victims of misfortune. Social Problems, 43, 387–402. Curtis, R. L., & Zurcher, L. A. (1973). Stable resources of protest movements: The multiorganizational field. Social Forces, 52, 53–61. Davis, G., McAdam, D., Scott, W. R., & Zald, M. N. (Eds). (2005). Social movements and organization theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The Iron Cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147–160. Feagin, J. R., & Hahn, H. (1973). Ghetto revolts: The politics of violence in American cities. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company. Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: Democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Flaherty, M. G., & Fine, G. A. (2001). Present, past, and future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s perspective on time. Time & Society, 10, 147–161. Fligstein, N. (2001). Social skill and the theory of fields. Sociological Theory, 19, 105–125. Gamson, W. A. (2004). Bystanders, public opinion, and the media. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & S. H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 242–261). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Anchor/Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books. Goodwin, J., & Jasper, J. M. (1999). Caught in a winding, snarling vine: The structural bias of political process theory. Sociological Forum, 14, 27–45.

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Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. L. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 53–78. Hunt, S. A., Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (1994). Identity fields: Framing processes and the social construction of movement identities. In: E. Larana, H. Johnston & J. R. Gus field (Eds), New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp. 185–208). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Johnston, H., & Snow, D. A. (1998). Subcultures and social movements: The emergence of the Estonian Nationalist Opposition. Sociological Perspectives, 41, 473–497. Klandermans, B. (1992). The social construction of protest and multiorganizational fields. In: A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 77–103). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Koopmans, R. (2004). Movements and media: Selection processes and evolutionary dynamics in the public sphere. Theory and Society, 33, 367–391. Lewin, K. (1951). In: D. Cartwright (Ed.), Field theory in social science. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Maines, D. R. (1987). The significance of temporality for the development of sociological theory. The Sociological Quarterly, 28, 303–311. Martin, J. L. (2003). What is field theory. American Journal of Sociology, 109, 1–49. McAdam, D., & Scott, W. R. (2005). Organizations and movements. In: G. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zald (Eds), Social movements and organization theory (pp. 4–40). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present: Social movements and individuals needs in contemporary society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Miller, J. (2005). March of the Conservatives: Penguin film as political fodder. The New York Times, 13(September), D2. Moeller, S. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war, and death. London: Routledge. Morrill, C., & Owen-Smith, J. (2002). The emergence of environmental conflict resolution: Stories and the construction of collective action frames and organizational fields. In: A. J. Hoffamn & M. J. Ventresca (Eds), Organizations, policy, and the natural environment (pp. 90–118). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mosse, G. L. (1985). Nationalism and sexuality: Middle class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Platt, A. M. (1971). The politics of riot commissions. New York: Collier Books. Polletta, F. (1999). Free spaces in collective action. Theory and Society, 28, 1–38. Polletta, F. (2002). Freedom is an endless meeting: Democracy in American social movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polletta, F., & Ho, M. K. (2006). Frames and their consequences. In: R. E. Goodin & C. Tilly (Eds), The Oxford handbook of contextual political studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pruden, W. (2005). No more lessons from French tutors. Washington Times, November 8: Section A, 04. Rochford, E. B. (1989). Factionalism, group defection, and schism in the Hare Krishna movement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 162–179. Rothschild, J., & Whitt, J. A. (1986). The cooperative workplace: Potentials and dilemmas of organizational democracy and participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Roy, O. (2005). Get French or die trying. New York Times, November 9: Section A, 27. Rucht, D. (2004). Movement allies, adversaries, and third parties. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 197–216). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silver, A. A. (1969). Official interpretation of racial riots. In: R. H. Connery (Ed.), Urban riots: Violence and social change (pp. 150–163). New York: Vintage Books. Snow, D. A. (2001). Extending and broadening Blumer’s conceptualization of symbolic interactionism. Symbolic Interaction, 24, 367–377. Snow, D. A. (2004). Framing processes, ideology, and discursive fields. In: D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule & S. H. Kriesi (Eds), The Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 380–412). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Snow, D. A., & Clark-Miller, J. (2006). Frame articulation and elaboration in a Right-Wing Group: An empirical examination of framing processes. An unpublished manuscript. Snow, D. A., Vliegenthart, R., & Corrigall-Brown, C. (2007). Framing the French riots: A comparative study of frame variation. Social Forces, 86, 385–415. Spillman, L. (1995). Culture, social structures, and discursive fields. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 15, 129–154. Steinberg, M. W. (1999). The talk and back talk of collective action: A dialogic analysis of repertoires of discourse among nineteenth-century English cotton-spinners. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 736–780. Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286. Taylor, V. (1989). Social movement continuity: The women’s movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review, 54, 761–775. Todorov, T. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The dialogic principle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walker, D. B. (1969). Intergovernmental response to riots. In: R. H. Connery (Ed.), Urban riots: Violence and social change (pp. 175–187). New York: Vintage Books. Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia. (2005). 2005 civil unrest in France. Available at http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Paris_suburb_riots, December, 5. Wuthnow, R. (1989). Communities of discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

INVITED COMMENT: FRAMING, ACTIONS AND FEEDBACK Clark McPhail As a longstanding fellow-traveler and occasional critic of symbolic interaction, I read Dave Snow’s paper with the following five basic Scientific Interest (S.I.) assumptions in mind: (1) there are no immaculate perceptions; (2) no object, actor, action, or situation has intrinsic stimulus properties; (3) therefore there are no inherent meanings for any object, actor, action, or situation; (4) the meaning of any object, actor, action, or situation is the response made to it; (5) therefore, there are as many meanings for any object, actor, action, or situation as there are responses made to it. In other words, meanings are constructed. Hence the different responses – the different meanings for or meanings of – the Fall 2005 Paris Riots and the current Spring 2006 Paris protests. I am also mindful of William I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas’s (1928) statement of what has come to be known as the Thomas theorem: ‘‘Whatever men [sic] define to be real is real in its consequences.’’ Given those assumptions and that theorem, I submit that one of the fundamental sociological questions must be: How do any two persons ever come to make similar responses to – to construct similar meanings for – an object, actor, action, or situation; and, how are those definitions – that are themselves both covert and overt actions – consequential for other actions they take toward that object, actor, action, or situation? Goffman’s (1974) Frame Analysis was a useful effort to unpack the Thomas Theorem and in doing so to address the implications of framing for

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the organization of individuals’ experiences and the consequences of that organization for individual and collective action. The work of David Snow and his colleagues has been enormously useful for students of collective action and social movements seeking a more sociologically informed and sociologically sensitive model of the purposive actor than the rational calculus model sociologists and political scientists had borrowed from economics. No matter the nits that might be picked with, or problems identified in, Snow and his colleagues’ extensions of frame analysis, it is one of the more significant contributions to collective action and social movement scholarship in the last half of the 20th century. What then can be said about the current effort – today’s paper presentation – to further unpack and apply frame analysis with regard to the discursive fields and spaces that influence the development of frames? If we look back over the period of time since the original 1986 piece on frame alignment, we see successive constructions of additional levels of expansion of the concept of frame analysis: the 1988 paper on ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization, and the introduction of core framing tasks: diagnostic; prognostic; and motivational framing. The 1992 chapter on master frames and cycles of protest elaborates on the diagnostic and prognostic features of framing. Diagnostic framing designates and defines the object, actor, action and/or situation; prognostic framing both prescribes additional actions to be taken and their possible or probable consequences; motivational framing answers the question ‘‘Why take this alternative action rather than another?’’ and thus opens up more degrees of freedom – more ways to answer the question why? – than is allowed by the singular minimax principle of rational calculus actors. All of these additional levels are insightful, useful, and promising. However, in 1997, Rob Benford wrote an insider critique of frame analysis in which he acknowledged that there had as yet not been the demonstration of a connection between ‘‘frames’’ and purposive individual action, let alone a connection between similar or related frames and purposive collective action. The same acknowledgment was implicit in Benford and Snow’s (2000) piece on framing processes and social movements in the Annual Review of Sociology. My hope was that today’s paper would report on the relationship between frames and actions. To his credit, Snow reports on both the framing actions of speakers, leaders, and rank-and-file members of one social movement organization over a period of time; and, on the framing acts in newspaper accounts – by editors, reporters, and the acts they attribute to riot participants and onlookers – regarding the Fall 2005 French riots. Today’s paper

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is an interesting and informative effort that once again demonstrates Snow’s methodological scope and acumen. Will Rogers once said that all he knew was what he read in the newspapers. Indeed, many sociologists – myself included from time-to-time – have practiced what I call Will Rogers Sociology with content analyses of what is written about collective action in the newspapers. David is ambidextrous. He can do Will Rogers Sociology but he also observes and records what people do and for this he is to be applauded. He is a symbolic interactionist that counts in more ways than one! (An aside: Dave has no patience for the useless and divisive debate between quantitative and qualitative sociology; he argues for the far more productive distinction between good and bad sociology). How might it be possible to move the frame analysis project forward beyond merely adding one more level of conceptualizing about conceptualizations of framing? Frame Analysis should not become just another theoretical house constructed by stacking one level of conceptual cards upon another. It is essential to get action and feedback into the mix! We know more about the characteristics of framing acts and, from today’s presentation, about the discursive fields and spaces in which framing acts take place; we need to know more about the action consequences of framing acts, and the negotiated alignment of frames of two or more parties. There are useful threads in other recent work by Snow and colleagues. I refer to their (1998) piece on ‘‘Disrupting the Quotidian’’ in the collective action/social movement journal Mobilization. In their attempt to revisit the failure of relative deprivation as the cause of collective action, Snow and colleagues ask us to examine more carefully the taken-for-granted routine grounds of everyday activity – the quotidian – in the lives of people, and to look for occasions when it is disturbed or disrupted. The implication of that argument is that people will act or adjust their actions to return the quotidian to its original standing, or sometimes, to a different and higher standard. We would be well served by the reminder that Goffman – in Frame Analysis – says much the same thing about the ‘‘guided doings’’ of purposive actors (1974, p. 22). Actions must be adjusted to achieve the intended consequence and to maintain it in the face of random or deliberate disturbances. In Goffman’s words: A serial management of consequentiality is sustained, that is, continuous corrective control, becoming most apparent when action is unexpectedly blocked or deflected and special compensatory effort is required.

When we combine this with the notion of diagnostic framing – ‘‘What’s happening Now’’ – and one version of ‘‘What should be happening?’’ we can

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see the possibility of the tension or disparity between the two as an occasion for, if not the cause of, adjusting actions to make ‘‘what should be’’ into ‘‘what is happening.’’ Moreover, we will then have moved from the conventional and traditional ‘‘linear analysis’’ of the relationship between framing action at time 1 and other actions at time 2 to a ‘‘recursive analysis’’ of consequences of action, feedback on the framing action itself. Frames have consequences for action, but actions also have consequences for frames. This is particularly true if we are considering the adjustments that must be made to fit together the activities of two or more purposive actors. We not only have to adjust our actions to realize our goals but we also sometimes have to adjust our goals as well. This idea of a recursive negative feedback formulation dates back to the work of the Pragmatists – James (1890), Dewey (1896) and Mead (1899) – at the turn of the 20th century. Shibutani (1968) argues Mead’s (1938) theory of the act was a forerunner of the closed-loop, negative feedback model in Wiener’s (1948), Ashby’s (1952), Beer’s (1959) and Pask’s (1961) cybernetic theories and applications (Pickering, 2002) in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Miller, Galanter and Pribram’s (1960) TOTE model, Powers’ (1973) perception control theory and Goffman’s (1974) ‘‘guided doings’’ in the 1970s. It also underlies the model of agency in complexity theories’ assumptions of autonomous, heuristic, interdependent and adaptive actors in the 1990s (Lewin, 1992; Kauffman, 1993; Coveney & Highfield, 1995; Decker, 2001; Macy & Willer, 2002). Shibutani says about Mead’s theory of the act: Each act is constructed as an organism makes a succession of adjustments to conditions (external and internal) that are undergoing constant change. Overt behavior is generally only the final phase of an act; in most cases it is preceded by a number of preparatory adjustments, including various subjective experiences. (1968, p. 332) The key to all such self-correcting adjustments is feedback; all purposeful behavior requires negative feedback. The principle is relatively simple: the results of one’s own action are included in the new information by which subsequent behavior is modified. Thus, by responding to what he observes of his own activity, a person makes necessary corrections. (1968, p. 333)

If we bring action and feedback into frame analysis, we can bring frame alignment via significant symbols back into our sociological efforts to understand social behavior and collective action; or, more ambitiously stated, we could bring symbolic interaction back into sociology. Thanks for the opportunity of reading and commenting on the paper. I hope my

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comments will be helpful in continuing to move the frame analysis project forward.

REFERENCES Ashby, W. R. (1952). Design for a brain. New York: Wiley. Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and management. New York: Wiley. Benford, R. (1997). An insider’s critique of the social movement framing perspective. Sociological Inquiry, 67, 409–430. Benford, R., & Snow, D. (2000). Framing processes and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Coveney, P., & Highfield, R. (1995). Frontiers of complexity: The search for order in a chaotic world. New York: Fawcett-Columbine. Decker, E. (2001). Self-organizing systems: A tutorial in complexity, Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex-arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Kauffman, S. (1995). At home in the universe the search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewin, R. (1992). Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos. New York: Macmillan. Macy, M., & Willer, R. (2002). From factors to actors: Computational sociology and agentbased modeling. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 143–166. Mead, G. H. (1899). The working hypothesis in social reform. American Journal of Sociology, 5, 369–371. Mead, G. H. (1938). The philosophy of the act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, G., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pask, G. (1961). An approach to cybernetics (2nd ed.). London: Hutchinson. Pickering, A. (2002). Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask. Social Studies of Science, 32, 413–437. Powers, W. (1973). Behavior: The control of perception. Chicago: Aldine. Shibutani, T. (1968). A cybernetic theory of motivation. In: W. Buckley (Ed.), Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist (pp. 330–336). Chicago: Aldine. Snow, D., & Benford, R. (1992). Master frames and cycles of protest. In: A. Morris & C. Mueller (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 135–155). New Haven: Yale University Press. Snow, D., & Benford, R. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research, 1, 197–217. Snow, D., Cress, D., Downey, L., & Jones, A. (1998). Disrupting the quotidian: Reconceptualizing the relationship between breakdown and the emergence of collective action. Mobilization: An International Journal, 3, 1–22.

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Snow, D., Rochford, B., Worder, S., & Benford, R. (1986). Frame alignment processes, micromobilization and movement participation. American Sociological Review, 51, 464–481. Thomas, W., & Thomas, D. (1928). The child in America. New York: Knopf. Weiner, N. (1948). Cybernetics. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

CELEBRATING WORK Patricia Ticineto Clough It is a pleasure to comment on the celebration of my work by three of my dearest friends and most respected colleagues. At first I fretted over whether I had produced a ‘‘work,’’ especially one that could be celebrated. So the comments offered by Joseph Schneider, Michal McCall, and Norman Denzin at the World Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2005 and published in this issue were a gift to me. Schneider, Mc Call, and Denzin have drawn a line of thought through my writing, which has invited me to reflect on my career as a scholar and teacher in the discipline of Sociology. I want to express my gratitude to them and I will do so at the close of these remarks. It does not surprise me that I was worried at first about my writings adding up to a work. I have long thought of myself as moving from one set of ideas to another, moving from one theoretical perspective to another, moving toward what seemed intriguing and relevant. And when I had to justify myself, I did so by arguing that I thought it is important to keep up with the newest theoretical formulations and to explore the way, in which they touched me and led me to understand the ever changing world, in which we live. That response might be expected. After all, I began my career in the early 1980s, when ‘‘theory’’ was ‘‘in,’’ when it was exciting and innovative. However, the innovative theory, which at that time was called critical theory, was being developed for the most part in the humanities at some distance from Sociology. So I learned not only to move from one theoretical perspective to another but to cross from one disciplinary field of study to another. This inclination to move across disciplinary boundaries and theoretical perspectives was to become an ingrained practice as

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I became engaged with feminist theory, which, after all, constituted itself initially as a transdisciplinary endeavor. My engagement in feminist theory not only gave me an understanding of doing transdisciplinary work but it catapulted me into the ‘‘deconstruction of the Subject,’’ part of the broader identity politics and politics of representation, heatedly debated by feminist theorists and others throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Initially I tried to translate the epistemological crisis of representation and identity provoked by the deconstruction of the Subject from the language of the humanities to that of the social sciences. It was this effort to translate that first led me to think about the convergence of critical theory and the self-reflexive criticism of methodology in what would become known as ‘‘the critique of ethnographic writing.’’ If my writings have a line of thought it surely made its first public appearance in The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Clough, 1992). If I would say now that End(s) produced a lineage of thinkers, I also would say that at the time End(s) was published, what I was trying to convey about the critique of ethnography failed to translate successfully into Sociology. But, at that time something else – something that might be called autoethnographic writing, did make its way into Sociology as an effect of the critique of ethnography. While I have a deep appreciation for the experimental autoethnographic writing that did develop in Sociology and surely my own autoethographic writings are quite important to me, nonetheless, the critique of ethnography that interested me from the start was one that could stay mindful of the deconstruction of the Subject especially as it was becoming linked to postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, Marxist cultural studies, and science studies. These critical theories were not only questioning the ethnographic tradition in relation to the epistemological foundation of Western modern thought. They also offered an understanding of writing that was broader than the one being deployed in experimental ethnographic writing, especially most autoethnographic writing. Writing was understood in terms that Jacques Derrida had offered when he proposed that ‘‘Writing’’ was as original as voice or speech. Of course, Derrida’s ‘‘Writing’’ is meant to play havoc with the very notion of originality, as the history of associations linked to writing point to its artificiality or even its perverse appropriation of voice or speech, as if writing is always secondary to voice or speech. The important lesson offered by Derrida’s early work is about language and how it is linked in modern Western thought to voice or speech, what Derrida also referred to as breath or spirit. As speech, language invites a more humanistic orientation to the

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subject than writing does. This is even so in the case of the most radical theories of language, such as Saussure’s semiotics and Lacan’s deployment of Saussurian linguistics in psychoanalysis. I especially mention these examples since it was Lacanian influenced semiotics, rather than Derridean grammatology or Foucaultian disciplinary genealogy, with which feminist theorists first engaged as they made their impact felt on discussions of representation, identity, speech, and voice across the humanities. While these feminists questioned the politics of identity as well as experience as a ground of knowledge of reality, they nonetheless were concerned with experience and identity, reality and knowing. They meant to emphasize speech and voice, even while engaging these as nonintentional expressions of subjectivity shaped by unconscious desire. While End(s) drew more on these feminist theorists than Derrida or Foucault, the works of Foucault and Derrida were introduced in End(s) because I knew there was something these works offered that was different than feminist psychoanalytically inflected semiotics. But, it would not be until End(s) went to press, when I first read Judith Butler’s assemblage of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault’s theories that I saw a way to move in order to take up writing in a way I had only begun to explore in End(s). Linking Derrida’s ‘‘Writing’’ to Lacan’s unconscious and Foucault’s disciplinary production of bodies, Butler’s work also suggested linking the body to technology and not just writing technologies of the subject (as I had used the term in End(s) to refer to ideological mechanisms productive of the subject) but also biotechnologies in relationship to what Foucault would call biopolitics and what more recently Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics, where power is ‘‘less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented by the ‘massacre’’’ (Mbembe, 2003). While Butler inspired my move to rethink bodies, technologies, and matter beyond psychoanalytically inflected semiotics, she did not herself make such a move. Her psychoanalytic semiotic approach to the body surely recognizes the material effects of a discursive construction of the body, that is, the performative realization of bodily matter. Yet, Butler has remained concerned with the human body and with its psychosexual morphology, shaped in subjugation to lack (Clough, 1994). I found myself moving away from her perspective and being drawn to what I would call in Autoaffection, ‘‘the future of thought.’’ (Clough, 2000) As I understood it then, the future seemed to be drawing us to it through a reconfiguration of bodies, matter, and technology, in the context of ongoing transformation of the political,

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the economic, and the cultural. At least it seemed that the future would be retrospectively described in terms of a new cofunctioning of politics, culture, and economy which, at the very end of the twentieth century, was being called, if not celebrated, as globalization. Leaving the feminist tradition that Butler’s queer theory so deeply informed in order to set off in another direction proved to be a rather difficult project. Since 2000 and the publication of Autoaffection, I have been Director of Women Studies and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center CUNY and so I am never very far removed from feminist thinking about how and how not to theorize technology and bodies. I also feel called on to see clearly those worldly events that have occurred since the turn of the century so as to be sure to meet the challenges facing feminist theorizing in the differences of women lives, the different effects of the present reconfiguration of bodies, technology, and matter on women and men in various sites around the world. It is however these differences and these changes, which move us into the counter/terrorist environment of this time and which have pushed me most to think boldly about biopolitics and the reconfiguration of technology, matter, and bodies. I have been especially motivated to stretch my thinking about war, massacre, violence, and global capitalism to biotechnological transformation of life and the part played by capital invested technoscience in drawing life into political economic relationships of exchange. In Autoaffection, I already had begun to script my movement from the psychoanalytically inflected feminist semiotic approach of End(s) to a Derridean deconstruction of the Subject pointing to the inseparability of subjectivity from writing technologies and archiving machines. For me, Autoaffection was meant to mark the way deconstruction cut into the fabric of self-feeling, self-presence, or the autoaffection that allows the unconscious fantasy of the unity of subject identity, its self-same presence. I kept as the title of the book the very term I was to critique throughout the book because I wanted to mark how hard it is not to dwell in the fantasy of autoaffection. In Autoaffection, I settled on what finally I thought autoethnography to be. It is autoaffection and if not thoughtfully staged and unstaged, it will become oblivious to theorizing the social or what Brain Massumi describes as ‘‘the chaotic cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural dimensions.’’ Massumi goes on to suggest that if now the social is a chaotic cofunctioning, it is because each self-reproducing system – the political, the economic, the cultural are operating out of a generalized complexity, ‘‘the production of order out of chaos’’ (Massumi, 1998).

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Masssumi links this chaotic cofunctioning to the subsumption of life itself into capital, such that affective bodily capacities have become directly manipulatable. Massumi therefore refers affect to a substrate of potential bodily responses, autonomic responses, which are in-excess of conscious states of perception. But while Massumi connects affect to autonomic bodily responses, he also draws the autonomic to the biophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze, drawing on it, as well as on Spinoza and Bergson, and recent theories of chaos, complexity, and dissipative structures. As such, affect is understood as preindividual bodily capacities. Affect is a virtual bodily potential, its actualization understood in terms of thresholds, bifurcation, and emergence, that is, in terms of complexity and dissipative structures. The capacity to affect and to be affected, to move and be moved, to act and to act upon, to become attentive or inattentive arises in and emerges out of a nonlinear complexity, a corporality that is indeterminate. Being drawn to rethink the social in the terms that Massumi suggests led me to go beyond Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari especially their thinking about affect. I was making a turn in my writing to engage bodily capacities and the technologies invested by technoscience and capital that have brought these capacities into market relations of exchange. There was a shift in emphasis in what was always there in my writing. I had always been engaged with the difference of writing and technology. That is, to say, I always understood writing to be techne deferred and techne to be physis deferred, such that the natural and the technical are indissociable. I always suspected, if not expected that the discourse about writing technologies of the subject would eventually veer off from a politics of representation, identities and subjectivity, veer off toward matter, bodies, and life itself. The turn to affect, however, would necessarily involve me with many graduate students and colleagues (including those who celebrate my work here). It would take a collectivity in order to find ways to touch the complexity of the early twenty-first century, to grabble with it and to recognize its in-excess-ability to the grasp of capital or technoscience, both of which were seemingly the conditions of possibility of the very complexity that exceeds them. This collective effort had one realization and, that is, a book of essays written by graduate students who studied with me, as together we addressed the economy of affect and biopolitics. The Affective Turn: Toward Theorizing the Social addresses capital’s putting to labor the very capacity of the human being, the human being’s very potential or vitality; more specifically it points to the technologies that reproduce preindividual life capacities outside the body, such as the mass

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production of genetic material. In this sense, biotechnologies are assisting capitalism to shift its accumulation to the domain of life, while at the same time providing units for the measurement of expended energy and its costs in terms of informational logic (Clough, 2007). That is, to say, in its effort to reduce life to information, biotechnologies offer a quantitative unit through which qualitatively different aspects of life, if not the risk of living or having a valued life, can be made exchangeable. Here not only life, but death too, becomes value-producing, as various populations are differently marked for the exchange of risks to being a valued life or becoming a valueless life. All that has been thought as the condition of social reproduction has become a matter of the capitalist economy, has been subject to the capitalist market, just as now life capacities are coming to be. Not only is ‘‘bare life’’ or biological life being drawn into the political as Georgio Agamben has argued, borrowing from Foucault, but life itself is being drawn into economy as well. Thus, if a necropolitics is an intensification of biopolitics, it is also something different, something that takes Foucault’s theorization of power into the twenty-first century, into the environment of recent counter/terrorism and global capitalism. To rehearse Foucault’s argument, there is a difference between discipline and biopolitics. While forms of disciplining are directed at the individual subject, optimizing the powers of its body, its usefulness, along with socializing or interpellating the individual as a subject, by the late eighteenth century, biopolitics begins to overshadow discipline. The individual body is not so much the focus as is the species body and the regularities of the aggregate effects of individual bodies, which institutes a politics of population. If there is now a necropolitics, a beyond biopolitics, which Mbembe argues, returns to colonization (which Foucault did not do or not insistently enough) as well as moves forward to the present conditions of counter/terrorism, there is also the meshing of politics, of biopolitics, with an economy of affect, where bodily capacities have become unhinged from the human body and its particular dependencies on spaces or forms, or its reduction to corporeal manifestation in space or positions in the chronological continuum of time. The biotechnologies of an affect economy are allowing a more immediate reach to preindividual bodily capacities. So, the managing and the controlling of statistical risks across populations in relationship to life, the valuing of life differently in relationship to different populations, now extends globally, as capital invests technoscience in its effort to capture the productivity of preindividual bodily capacities.

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Such a situation not only draws thought to violence, massacre, endless war, it also makes problematic the configuration of state, economy, private, and public as it was conceived for modern society in the first classics of Sociology. How politics, economy, and culture will now cofunction in the production of order differently around the world requires new empirical studies as well as new theoretical perspectives to assist such study. What the affective turn is doing is alerting Sociology to the necessity of rethinking the social and to take as a starting point an engagement with the various levels of life being mapped by biopolitics and mined by capital. It is a time for Sociology to rethink its relationship to science, to physics, and biology, their understanding of matter, and their deployment of information theory and complexity theory as these intersect with a global capitalism and a biopolitics of war and massacre. To me, the line of thought, which I have reflected on here and which my colleagues have drawn out in my writing, moves along with the history of ‘Writing,’ not only as a thought but as a materialization of technicity, which now touches down on bodily matter, and matter generally as it undoes any distinction of the natural and the technological. But the line of thought making itself through my writing might also be a materialization of the very affective capacities that arise in my being, arouse my being to move, to attend, to see, to feel, to act. The line of thought is as well autobiographic. The effort to engage the autobiographic, to explore it as the underside or inside of intellectuality has also been central to my writing. Writing autoethnographically has not only come back to me as an intensification of intellectual life but it has also gone from me to students, enabling them to explore experimental thinking and the social. So finally, if I may I want to close with some thank you’s. I want especially to thank Joseph Schneider not only for organizing the celebration of my work but for taking up the most recent turn in my line of thought, as he addresses my engagement with affect. His take on this aspect of my writing has enabled me to see more clearly what I have done and what is yet to be done. Of course, Joseph is not new to the task of being a support to me and my writing. He has been there from the start. We have grown in support of each other as colleagues and have enjoyed the pleasures of learning and thinking together. In some very strong sense, he must be recognized for actually throwing me the line that I now see as the line of thought in my writing. Like Joseph, Michal McCall too has been a long time support and one of the most delightful readers of my writing. Along with Norman Denzin, she and I have been part of a small group, who for many years until very recently appeared together giving performances of what we call

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autoethnographic writing. As we came to share a certain critique of autoethnographic writing, Michal and I moved together from Derrida to Deleuze, from Lacan to French feminism, from writing technologies to biotechnologies. All through this time, we have maintained our differences, remembering our different paths taken from the qualitative methods in Sociology, Symbolic Interactionism, and the like, which we learned in our graduate training. Our disciplinary memories have come to merge through autoethnography with our personal memories, giving us a very special understanding of being intellectuals. And finally I thank Norman Denzin who brilliantly mentored me when I was his graduate student and who since then has brilliantly mentored so many more in their pursuit of Sociology, cultural studies, and critical methodologies. He is the model that inspires me and informs my own efforts in mentoring graduate students as we learn together. Like no one else, Norman has made it possible for me and others to insist that students can do graduate work in a Ph.D. program without forsaking the complexities of their life’s stories. He has developed methods to make these stories enrich our understanding of the social. So Norman brings me back to think autoaffectionately, to think how autoaffection does not have to turn in on the self but rather can point to a life force, a life capacity that is shared collectively not only beyond the individual subject but at the preindividual level of life now threatened by the capture of the capital invested technoscience, but also released for political engagement, a project drawing us to the future.

REFERENCES Clough, P. T. (1992). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Second edition published by Peter Lang, Inc., New York in 1998. Clough, P.T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (Ed.) with Jean Halley. (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (1998). Requiem for our prospective dead (toward a participatory critique of capitalist power). In: E. Kaufman & K. J. Heller (Eds), Deleuze and guattari, new mappings in politics, philosophy, and culture (p. 47). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(Winter), 11–40. See my treatment of Butler’s work (1994). In: Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell.

SAVING SOCIOLOGY Michal M. McCall In her first three books, Patricia Clough gave sociology a new subject, to replace the static, fully conscious, volitional, 19th century ‘‘self’’ who was not only the sole source of meaning but the author of society itself. In her newest work – The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duke University Press, forthcoming) – Patricia leads sociology beyond the subject to rethink ‘‘society’’ since, since as she says, ‘‘it is not from the position of the subject that sociality can now be grasped’’ (forthcoming, p. 32). In her first book, The End(s) of Ethnography (Sage, 1992), she gave us the Lacanian subject who read and wrote to create a unified subject-identity. Her argument was that all writings/readings are expressions of unconscious desire. More specifically, narrative writing is an expression of the desire for a unified subject-identity or self. The desire, that is, to maintain a ‘‘symbiotic identification with the m(other)’’ while at the same time ‘‘becoming selfidentified like the father figure’’ (p. xiii). Now, a unified subject-identity is never really possible because ‘‘the Oedipus complex is never completely or successfully resolved’’ (Clough, 1998, p. 4). But/so it can be/is fantasmatically constructed by constructing narratives, by authoring the self as the subject of a story (p. 18) – whether a narrative fiction like Hollywood film, or a ‘‘factual’’ narrative like ethnography. In her second book, Feminist Thought (Blackwell, 1994); Clough traced the connection between the subject and realist narrative fictions in feminist film theory. Following Althusser, feminist film theorists argued that ideology produces what counts as reality – ‘‘what can be seen, thought, or believed as the reality of experience’’ – and also ‘‘constructs a subject as the

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point of intelligibility.’’ For them, as for Althusser, ‘‘ideology is not a matter of consciousness but of the unconscious; that is, ideology is lived as reality through the workings of a subject’s unconscious desire’’ (1994, p. 75). Thus, they proposed ‘‘that in cultural productions, post-oedipal fantasies are elicited from and projected onto the reader or writer not only to interpellate them again and again as subjects of (ideology) but in doing so, to authorize only certain modes of reading reality. ‘‘[Kaja] Silverman described these fantasies as unconscious scenarios of ‘authorial desire’ which constitute both the political unconscious of the social formation of Western, modern capitalism and the fantasmatic of the modern subject’’ (1994, pp. 77–78). Feminist Thought revealed to readers who were following Clough’s thought what she had done in the first End(s) of Ethnography: she had extended the argument about reading, writing, and subjectivity from the fictional narratives of Hollywood cinema, where it originated, to the nonfiction, ‘‘scientific’’ narratives of sociological ethnography. Silverman and other feminist film critics whose understandings of narrative and unconscious desire informed Clough’s understanding, focused exclusively on realist, narrative Hollywood cinema. The originality of Clough’s argument was based in her recognition that narrative cinema is only one among many writing technologies or technical substrates of unconscious memory. She understood that narrative cinema, television melodrama, realist novels, computer simulation, and various forms of sociological ethnography were all writing technologies implicated in the production of subjectivities and social reality. In her ‘‘Preface’’ to the second edition of The End(s) of Ethnography, Clough said her idea of ‘‘writing technologies’’ was influenced by Derrida’s notion of ‘‘technical substrates: the writing pad, the moving camera, the computer’’ from which ‘‘memory or the unconscious’’ can never be separated (1998, p. xiv). Feminist film theorists ‘‘drew on Lacan’s rereading of Freud, especially Lacan’s elaboration of Freud’s treatment of the ‘mirror stage’’’ to understand ‘‘the viewer’s unconscious identification with film images, which y promote the society’s ideology’’ (Clough, 2000, pp. 47–48). If they had also drawn on Derrida’s alternative rereading of Freud, as Clough did, they might have been led to the question Clough asked in her next book: Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology: ‘‘what is to be made of the unconscious if the cinema is no longer taken as its machine metaphor or as its only machine metaphor?’’ If they had followed Derrida following Freud from neurology to ‘‘the mystic writing-pad to ‘‘sophisticated archiving machines’’ (Derrida, 1996) of various sorts, as Clough did, they might have been led, as she was,

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to imagine that it may be television that has drawn [feminists] to rethink the gaze and move it from a transcendental position of mastery somewhere near the camera behind the viewer’s back and locate it instead across from the viewer at the lit-up screen/image y [to] imagine that the emergence of television metaphors not only gives a new sense of the gaze, but gives the very idea that visuality can be changed with different technologies, and that therefore the unconscious is historically specific. (Clough, 2000, p. 58)

In Autoaffection, Clough began to theorize the nonnarrative writing technology of television. Unlike cinema, television, and the computer – the two teletechnologies characteristic and even constitutive of ‘‘the age of teletechnology’’ – are not narrative media. There is no beginning, middle, and end to TV and computer images; they are always ‘‘on.’’ [This is more obvious if you also consider ‘‘MCI or AT& T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail’’ (Derrida, ibid., p. 16)]. Instead, as Clough put it, TV and the computer are about the ‘‘ceaseless flow’’ or circulation ‘‘of information and images’’ (2000, p. 92). Therefore, ‘‘the interface of computer technology and television’’ – these new writing technologies – shapes the unconscious differently – today – than cinema shaped the unconscious in modern, industrial capitalism, since, as Clough says: ‘‘neither narrative nor stories are necessarily or primarily the way in which the viewer and television are attached to each other’’ (ibid., p. 99). And this is what frees the unconscious from ‘‘confinement in the oedipal narrative’’ (ibid., p. 140): television leaves behind what has been crucial to the cinematic apparatus: that is, the linking of images by means of relays through subject positions. The cinematic apparatus, after all, works by machining the cut-up components of subjectivity into the narrated movement of the image. Indeed, as feminist film theorists have made clear, the important function of the oedipal narrative is to suture what has been cut up in order to give the machine vision back to the subject, as if it were a human vision, as if it were the viewer’s vision. In giving up this concern for relaying images through the subject, perhaps suspending any linkage between images altogether, television presents itself as a machine apparatus for the non-subjective movement of images; it presents itself as a machine apparatus for an unconscious without the oedipal narrative. (ibid., p. 59)

The subject of teletechnology is no longer split; rather it is mesmerized or traumatized by a loss it cannot acknowledge. Clough brought together her ideas about writing technologies and the historical specificity of the unconscious with Judith Butler’s feminist queer theory of ‘‘heterosexual melancholy’’ or trauma, because she realized it would help her ‘‘shift the unconscious to a post-cinematic or televisual regime’’ (Unpublished

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manuscript, p. 12). Butler had argued that along with the prohibition of the incestuous heterosexual object choice or even ‘‘prior to it, there is a prohibition of the incestuous homosexual object choice – the mother for the girl and the father for the boy.’’ And this loss ‘‘unlike the loss of the heterosexual incestuous object, is denied completely’’ and therefore ‘‘cannot be grieved’’ or ‘‘internalized and displaced onto others.’’ Rather, it is ‘‘ ‘melancholically incorporated’ and thereby kept alive in and as part of the one who cannot grieve’’ (Clough, 2000, p. 119). As she later wrote: In the psychoanalytic y account y trauma is about the incapacity of the subject to speak the past. Although there are efforts to work out trauma, more commonly trauma is acted out or compulsively repeated; the effort to overcome the repetition fails and fails to put an end to forgetting and the paralysis of voice. Trauma is understood as a symptomology substituting for something that was never experienced as such, a seemingly wasteful yet actually productive repetition. The ego’s defense being breached, a hyper-defensiveness results, a passivity even, an avoidance of pain in an involuntary or automatic shutting down of the perceptual apparatus, the conceptual apparatus, the cognitive apparatus, and even the motor apparatus.’’ (Unpublished manuscript, p. 12) [The] subject of y trauma lacks a well-defined ego with a well-fashioned identity. Yet, rather than thinking of this figure of subjectivity simply or solely in terms of pathology, it seem[s] desirable to also think of it as a prefigure of a subjectivity drawn to the transformations of the cinematic and the becoming of the teletechnological. In this sense, trauma, it might be argued, raises the possibility of thinking the passing of the regime of cinematic representation and the becoming of a global regime of intensified ‘technomemory.’ In this sense, the trance-like, affective response in trauma [and TV watching, turn] repetition into the always already rerun, provoking nothing but anxiety about the speed at which moments flee, are wasted, with no chance of recovering mastery, the speed at which traumatic events arise to demand our attention over and over again unto the exhaustion of desire. (ibid., p. 20)

The argument that the unconscious is historically specific – that it is shaped differently by the characteristic writing technologies in different ‘‘ages’’ – was brilliant in itself. So was the connection Clough made between the long-distance writing technologies characteristic of the late-20th and early-21st centuries and the traumatized, mesmerized subject of postmodernity. But in Autoaffection she also began to revise the social1 in the age of teletechnology. She warned, the teletechnological joins, if not displaces what sociologists of western modernity have referred to as the social structural. In the age of teletechnology, the social structural is being ‘‘smoothed out’’ or ‘‘ungrounded,’’ to use Gilles Deleuze’s terms, or ‘‘unbundled,’’ to use Saskia Sassen’s term. Even as the transnational or the global becomes visible, proposing themselves as far-flung extensions of social structure, they are ungrounded by

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that upon which they depend: the speed of the exchange of information, capital, bodies and abstract knowledge and the vulnerability to media event-ness. This transformation not only involves postmodern western or northern societies, where the arrangement of social spaces presumed in subject-centered, nation-centric discourses has been characteristic, at least until recently challenged by the teletechnological. It also involves societies in neocolonialism, where this arrangement of social spaces is not necessarily presumed, and, if imposed, not necessarily accepted, but where, nonetheless, the teletechnological speeds of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, as well as the vulnerability of exposure to media event-ness, are having their effect in the ‘glocalization’ of cultures and the production of technoculture and technonature. (2000, pp. 3–4)

In her newest work, Clough focuses on global changes in the social by joining Deleuze’s work on societies of control (1995) with what she calls the affective turn in cognitive psychology, literary studies, and neurology (Clough, forthcoming, p. 39). For scholars in these and other disciplines ‘‘affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, to connect’’; thus, the ‘‘turn to affect is a shift from the social construction or discursive construction of the body or bodily matter explored in the critical theory of the late 20th century’’ (ibid., p. 2). According to Deleuze, control societies are ‘‘taking over from disciplinary societies’’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 178) because of a ‘‘mutation in capitalism’’: the shift from industrial to global/electronic capitalism, which he calls ‘‘capitalism in its present form’’ (p. 180). The mutation [of capitalism] has been widely recognized and can be summarized as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the factory into the site of confinement, with the capitalist owning the means of production and perhaps other similarly organized sites (workers’ homes, schools). As for markets, they were won either through specialization, through colonization, or through reducing the costs of production. But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries. It’s directed toward meta-production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells finished products: it buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets y Markets are won by taking control rather than by establishing a discipline, by fixing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products rather than by specializing production y Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is shortterm and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. (1995, pp. 180–181)

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Discipline was the form of power characteristic of industrial societies because industrial capitalism required ‘‘docile bodies.’’ As Foucault put it: The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the manifestation of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it y Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile bodies.’ Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). (1979, p. 138)

Foucault also talked about discipline in terms of subjection: This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (2004, p. 331)

The connections Clough made between Deleuze’s statement that global capitalism ‘‘seeks to sell services, and seeks to buy activities,’’ and the ‘‘affective turn’’ allowed her to see that whereas ‘‘disciplining engages a politics or representation’’ and is ‘‘part of a cinematic regime of representation,’’ the ‘‘target of control is not the production of subjects’’: rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, and potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles, and preference listings, that is to say, in bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data). Control is an extension of what Foucault referred to as biopolitics, where the individual body is not so much the focus as is the species body and the regularities of the aggregate effects of individual bodies which institutes a politics of population. Control is a biopolitics that works at the molecular level of bodies – and not necessarily, or only, human bodies. (Clough, forthcoming, pp. 25–26)

This, in turn, allowed her to define global capitalism as ‘‘an affective economy’’ and to write about ‘‘the meshing of biopolitics’’ with this affective economy: In the meshing of biopolitics with an affective economy, there is a marking of populations at various scales of living, some as valuable life and others as without value. Increasingly, it is in these terms that differences such as those of ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality and nation are materialized. Some bodies or bodily capacities are

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derogated making their affectivity super-exploitable, or exhaustible unto death, while other bodies or body capacities collect the value produced through this derogation and exploitation. The bodies marked to become valuable call forth intensive investment in the realization of their affective capacities. The movement of value from some bodies, usually statistically determined, to other bodies, also so determined, can be found, for example, in the relationship of migrant bodies and the overly invested middle-class children in contemporary China. Or it can be seen in the relationship made between victimized, terrorized, and hated bodies brought forth for the discourse and practices of terrorism, counter-terrorism, surveillance and unending war. (Ibid., p. 35)

Another example of this meshing is the complex of problems peasants and subcontracted (‘‘sweatshop’’) workers suffer in countries of the South as a result of globalization (or economic imperialism): labor migration and exploitation, human rights abuses, depeasantization and the destabilization of rural communities, environmental degradation, food insecurity, increased poverty, disease, and death. As McMichael explained subcontracting: ‘‘With the opportunity for global coordination (and mobility) embedded in informational technologies, transnational corporations subdivide production sequences y and shift labor-intensive activities to offshore export platforms or processing zones. Parent firms tend to monopolize high technologies (e.g., production design blueprints), with component processes (assembling, etching, and testing computer chips), component goods (pharmaceutical stock, engines, and auto parts), and consumer goods (cameras, electronic games, TVs, and video recorders) moved offshore for production in cheaper sites, export processing zones, or sweatshop districts’’ (2004, p. 84). China, he says, ‘‘has become perhaps the prime location for low-wage production in the global economy’’ (ibid., p. 81). With 1.2 billion ‘‘educated but impressively cheap (25 cents an hour as compared with $1.50 in Mexico) and well-regimented’’ workers, China ‘‘now produces about half of the world’s shoes and a proliferating array of electronic items, toys, and garments for the global economy’’ (ibid., p. 82). For example, Shenzhen, near Hong Kong ‘‘has a booming economy and accounts for half of China’s GDP.’’ But ‘‘it is an economy powered by millions of migrant workers who are desperate enough to accept long hours, low pay and dangerous conditions because the alternatives back home are worse’’ (Ash, 7/20/02, p. 1). ‘‘More than 100 million rural Chinese have moved to cities like Shenzhen’’ (ibid.). And no wonder. ‘‘150 million people live in the Huai River Basin in central China. Many of them are poor farmers and fishermen now threatened by water too toxic to touch, much less drink.’’ Their wells and fields are contaminated, their fish and shrimp are dead, and many of them

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are dying or have died of cancer. According to the New York Times: ‘‘Pollution is pervasive in China [of the 20 cities with the worst air in the world, 16 are Chinese, according to the World Bank]’’ but ‘‘leaders are now starting to clean up major cities, partly because urbanites with rising incomes are demanding better air and water. In Beijing and Shanghai, officials are forcing out the dirtiest polluters to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. By contrast, the countryside, home to 2/3 of China’s population, is increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Local officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Refineries and smelters forced out of cities have moved to rural areas. So have some foreign companies, to escape regulation at home’’ (Yardley, 9/12/04, p. 1). Of course this transfer of value from populations defined as ‘‘human waste’’ (Clough, forthcoming, p. 35) to populations defined as worthy of investment also happens globally, not just within countries. And the global flow of finance capital is one important way the transfer is affected. As Wayne Ellwood wrote: the ‘‘deregulation of global finance capital [the end of fixed currency-exchange rates after President Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1973; and the requirements debtor countries had to meet to qualify for World Bank/IMF ‘‘structural adjustment loans’’ in the 1980s, including ‘‘opening domestic markets to international trade and foreign investment, privatizing investment in public utilities and natural resources, ending most protective labor laws, and enacting powerful domestic and international safeguards for private property rights’’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 259)] coupled with the microelectronics revolution has sparked a surge in the flow of capital. This uncontrolled speculation has eclipsed long-term productive investment and poses a huge threat to the stability of the global economy’’ (Ellwood, 2002, p. 72). Since global markets began to deregulate in the early 1980s, short-term speculation has become the single-largest component in the flow of international investment. Managers of billion-dollar hedge funds, mutual funds and pension plans move money in and out of countries at lightning speed based on fractional differences in exchange rates. For every dollar that is needed to facilitate the trade in real goods, nine dollars is gambled in foreign exchange markets. (ibid., p. 73)

Again, according to McMichael: ‘‘In a world in which US $2 trillion circulates daily, the total value of foreign exchange transactions is double that of production, and 97.5% of foreign exchange transactions is speculative, it is not surprising that financial crisis has become part of the landscape’’ (2004, p. 231). He refers to the collapsed economies of Mexico in 1994–1995; Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia in 1997; Brazil and Russia in 1998;

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Argentina in 2000; and Venezuela in 2002, the results of which have been ‘‘increased poverty, violence, disease and death and increased dependence on European and US corporations to provide virtually all consumer products, employment and even public services’’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 267). Finally, Clough’s affective turn allowed her to see how we academics support ‘‘the great violence, disinterest, and arrogance of those [in] control’’ through our emphasis on professional ‘‘know-how.’’ She calls on us to confront ‘‘the social, changed and changing which exceeds all efforts to contain it, even ours to contain it conceptually.’’ If we ignore the changes that are ‘‘not already marked for our easy assimilation’’ (Clough, forthcoming, p. 39), we are complicit in their ghastly consequences. So, she is once again saving sociology or trying to do so.

NOTE 1. Thanks to Joseph Schneider for reminding me/us that the term ‘‘social’’ need not and should not be ‘‘taken to imply the involvement of humans alone’’ (2005, p. 37).

REFERENCES Ash, L. (7/20/02). Inside China’s Sweatshops. BBC World News. Clough, P. T. (1992). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Clough, P. T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power and academic discourse. Oxford, UK & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (1998). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (forthcoming). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (Unpublished manuscript). Deleuze, G. (1995). Postscript on control societies (pp. 177–182 in Negotiations). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ellwood, W. (2002). The no-nonsense guide to globalization. London, UK: Verso. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. Random House: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2004). In: J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power. New York: The New Press. Johnson, C. (2004). The sorrows of empire. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. McMichael, P. (2004). Development and social change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Schneider, J. (2005). Donna Haraway: Live theory. New York: Continuum. Yardley, J. (9/12/94). Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer. New York Times.

REWRITING THE SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE WORK OF PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH$ Joseph Schneider The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity. (Deleuze in Pearson, 1999, p. 12)

This essay and those collected with it emerge from a network of friendships stretching back 20 years and more that have been regularly reignited at meetings of Midwest and US professional sociology. Before that, Norman Denzin, Patricia Clough, and Michal McCall were, respectively, young professors and graduate students at the University of Illinois, and Michal and I, for at least for a semester before then, had been fellow students at the University of Iowa. Norman did his Ph.D. work at Iowa where he and I briefly shared graduate student status. Patricia and I became acquainted through recurrent intersections of these and other colleagues and friends at various professional meetings.

$

Parts of this essay were presented on November 2004 National Communications Associations conference in Chicago and at first annual conference on Qualitative Inquiry held at University of Illinois in Urbana, May 2005.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 55–77 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30005-2

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Over the ensuing years, we three have paid attention to what Patricia has said and written and often have engaged her thought in ways productive to our own. We four are respected friends with no small emotional investment in what each imagines the others’ thoughts and feelings about her or him to be. Those personal intersections make our comments about Patricia’s work redolent with meanings that exceed the disciplined forms of scholarly social science performance and subjectivities: dear and trusted friends, respected colleagues, subjects and objects of desire – all of these and more. For me, the respect and affection linked to Patricia and her work are part of an ongoing challenge to think, as Foucault put it, differently and then to see where that could lead. In the more than two decades that I have known her, she has consistently written scholarship as though her life depended on it. In that, she inspires colleagues and students in the best traditions of the academy, intellectual inquiry, and cultural criticism. The project of our, with others, writing about Patricia’s work emerged in the wake of her first and pathbreaking book and the essays that it collects, The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998 [1992]). A first set of published commentary emerged from a panel done at the 1999 meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society (see Kassabian, 2001; McCall, 2001; Schneider, 2001; Neitz, 2001). The essays collected here variously take account of her subsequent work, which, in similar fashion, leads sociological readers and writers to places many have not been before. From our own early encounters with Patricia and her work, the three of us who write here, each saw that she saw things differently than we and others named ‘‘sociologists’’ usually did, and we saw that what and how she saw constituted a difference that aimed to help us move our thought, again after Foucault, elsewhere. I think it was clear to us even then that both what Patricia saw and the passion of her vision were rarely available in our own disciplinary canons of sociology. She always seemed to be reading ‘‘other stuff,’’ and bringing news that was both fascinating and troubling to our sociological ways. Somewhat alien, then, to these ways, Patricia was interdisciplinary before it was fashionable or even allowed, and at a time when defenders of the canon were as likely as not to call such work ‘‘confused,’’ ‘‘irrelevant,’’ or, worse (we perhaps then thought), ‘‘not sociology.’’ What Patricia writes and says often has brought me and my own projects up short. One such project has been sustained but the very particular interest in what sociologists have called the self and what interdisciplinary studies scholars in the humanities and human sciences are more likely to call the subject or subjectivity. The self or subject that I want in particular to

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address here is the one who professes to know, the subject of knowledge and inquiry, including of course the kind of inquiry that all ‘‘we’’ students of the social-cultural do. Using a favorite term from Donna Haraway, Patricia’s writing on the subject of knowledge has been ‘‘tropic’’ for the work I have done and I am sure that others among us could say the same, offering their own stories of what it has meant to take her arguments seriously.

THE END OF ETHNOGRAPHY? YOU MEAN, WHAT I AM DOING? In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of influence, my writing then was focused especially on various ‘‘social constructionist’’ projects, first with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called ‘‘grounded theory’’ and with Howard Becker about ‘‘doing sociology.’’ Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or field work and ‘‘writing it up,’’ as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is defined as ‘‘mainstream’’ (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.). Truth be told, I think many of us believed (and may still believe) that there is a kind of moral superiority to this qualitative/interpretive theory method as well. It was both more true and good because it took human beings and selves, as I thought of them then, more seriously: it listened to what those subjects said to their social science interlocutors; it believed them, in some sense; and it watched carefully what they did, all toward trying to ‘‘get it right,’’ so to speak, on their (and the world’s) terms. And the kind of social constructionist sociology of social problems and morality that I was writing required the familiar detachment of conventional social science method: unlike the Marxists and feminists and other ‘‘engaged’’ or ‘‘sympathetic’’ colleagues, we constructionists – at least, those of us in that ‘‘wing’’ of it – stood on the sidelines (we thought) with

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our cherished warrant to abstract and then convey the claims making and responding activities – the ‘‘definitional activities’’ – that so-called ‘‘members’’ pursued relative to what the theory marked as ‘‘putative conditions.’’ The theoretical requirements of this position were quite clear to me and I was writing then in a way that insisted on them as a definition of what social constructionist argument was. But I had met Patricia and had begun to listen, with both fascination and dis-ease, to her arguments about qualitative, symbolic interactionist sociology and ethnography that she presented at meetings and had begun to publish. She then was working on chapters of a manuscript that became The End(s) of Ethnography, and Clifford and Marcus (1986), and Marcus and Fischer (1986) had just published their critical and reflexive analyses of how cultural anthropology produces true knowledge, especially through its signature practice of ethnography. Patricia drew their criticisms to qualitative sociology and fieldwork, adding her own critical insights from psychoanalysis and feminist film theory. Having been a political activist and from an Italian Catholic, working class family, what she already knew about Marx had been then recently elaborated at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar where she read new Marxist theorists influenced by continental and especially French poststructuralist scholars. In her first book, Patricia said that conventional ethnographic and sociological writing produces a closed and gendered narrative that ensures both authoritative knowledge of a world external to the observer, on one hand, and the solidity of a masculinist ego, self, or subjectivity of the sociologist/observer him- or herself, on the other (no matter the sex/gender embodiment of the particular author). In discovering, representing, and documenting factual truths about the world – enacting the discourse of scientific realism – through a person-centered, narrative form, the social scientist secures his own self as strong and centered, a self that the writing technology of empiricism both successfully creates and effaces as, finally, not relevant to knowledge of the objects discovered ‘‘out there.’’ Her criticism insisted, by contrast, that the truth of the representations of the social, of peoples, of totalities, in these texts and the coherence, unity, and respect of their subject-authors are inextricably entwined. That is precisely what such writing technologies seek to deny. Clearly, this feminist, psychoanalytic poststructural criticism unsettles the dominant story of ethnography as a universally valid view of ‘‘how things really are’’ and makes it clear that it is not only so-called quantitative or ‘‘positivist’’ social science that relies on realist assumptions to ground knowledge practices but most qualitative work as well.

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Reading studies of the nineteenth century novel as relevant to the realist narrative form typical of sociology and social science, Patricia insisted that this common form appeals to readers in that it offers them this same desirable subject position for their conscious and unconscious identifications: that of the narrator/observer in his heroic and always successful quest. This realist narrative form had defined mass media at least since the nineteenth century and, she argued, is at the heart of twentieth century popular cinema and apparent also in much computer simulation (but less apparent in television). As she wrote those chapters in the mid- and late-1980s, she was herself in a psychoanalysis at the same time she was reading its foundational and revisionist texts. From all of this and from her life, she knew that the centered and rational self inscribed – perhaps, at the least – in the canonical texts of academic sociology and social science is a fantasy that, historically, has been especially difficult for women, as well as others ‘‘on the outside,’’ successfully to sustain and perform.1 While she appreciated the pleasure such discursive practices bring, she drew attention to how they help enact structures of dominance in power/knowledge across an array of effaced if not erased differences, contributing to and variously shoring up human suffering and pain. What then (and perhaps still) seemed so striking to Patricia, was that her own discipline of sociology had so little to say about the operation of such an important set of linkages. Rather, as is true of most if not all conventional social science practice, sociological writing usually took these links as points of departure for its theory and methods rather than as topics for critical study. As I said, all of this gave me pause about my own practices of work, writing, and subjectivity. It became apparent that taking her arguments seriously, indeed, would mean the end of ethnography as usual for me.

TROUBLING THE EYE/I OF EXPERIENCE Beyond her critique of masculinist discursive authority in the subject of conventional ethnographic knowledge, another of Patricia’s contributions to sociology, to women’s studies, and to feminist scholarship is her critique of feminist standpoint epistemologies. Leading feminist scholars in the social sciences – political scientist Nancy Hartsock, in her Money, Sex, and Power (Hartsock, 1985) and sociologist Dorothy Smith, in The Everyday World as Problematic Smith (1987) in particular – drew on Marx’s hopeful proposition that workers could come to see capitalism ‘‘truly, for what it is’’

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in ways that capitalists themselves were structurally unable to see. Hartsock, Smith, and other feminist scholars used Marx’s argument to found a parallel view of women in patriarchy. Women, because of their structural location, their position, in capitalist and modernist patriarchy, it was argued, could understand more fully and accurately how the larger political and economic systems in which they were subordinates were ‘‘put together,’’ to borrow a phrase from Smith. While history had been written by men – and one could add, white, first world, colonial, and presumptively heterosexual men – yet offered as stories about all, women’s story (among other stories) – which these theories saw as more accurate – had been ignored. Such standpoint epistemologies offered grounding for the figure of ‘‘Woman’’ and of women’s voices, which were then to be offered up as an empirical corrective to supposed universal truths about society, culture, life – that is, ‘‘the world.’’ Indeed, as the word epistemology announces, these arguments sought to provide a foundation for more than merely an alternative view. The position was not simply one of ‘‘multiple perspectives’’ but rather offered in the familiar form of (the) ‘‘Truth,’’ just, in some sense, as had the white, colonial anthropologist’s ethnography that Patricia and feminist postcolonial critics had taken up for deconstruction. While that feminist postcolonial criticism, which was then emerging, would appreciate multiplicities in matters of truths, realities, and subjectivities – even or especially among women – these standpoint epistemologies were offered not as one of several but rather as the truth about (in this case) the sexist, patriarchal, and capitalist worlds taken as given in that work and, of course, also about ‘‘women’’ and their lives. Patricia and we might enjoy a sense of justice done by these feminist standpoint arguments, given the reign of conventional masculinist histories of all inclusive ‘‘truth.’’ But their foundational and closed quality could not launch a new and truly open way of thinking critically about the social that could survive in the already global world of postmodern capital into which they were offered, not to mention into the contentious whirl of ‘‘post-’’ discourses that were enlivening the academy as critiques of disciplined and disciplinary knowledge. What was so stunningly insightful for me about this argument, made, among other places, in her Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse (Clough, 1994) – not to mention brave – is the way it takes on a deconstruction of the relationship of experience and identity as the ground of true knowledge.2 It focuses on many of the same questions that her critique of ethnography does, but here Patricia writes criticism of feminist

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argument from within feminist theory itself. It is the form of discursive authority in these works that she sees as all too familiar to their masculinist counterparts, which these and other feminists criticize and that she takes as her topic of criticism relevant to all knowledge projects beyond feminist theory. It is the position–experience–representation–truth connection that is under scrutiny here and that Patricia aims to deconstruct. Clearly, this critique of feminist standpoint epistemology from within feminism has been difficult and even fraught for feminist writers, but the very credibility of feminist theory and criticism, and, indeed, of deconstructive criticism in all its versions rests on seeing all foundations for an untheorized truth as vulnerable (even if understandable) investments in fantasies of wholeness, presence, and solidity. This critique requires us, in effect, to take a deep breath and then seriously engage the claim that there are, finally, no guarantees for true knowledge except those we put there as a result of a collective moral/ethical choice (a ‘‘putting’’ that is then usually forgotten as having been done so that it can then be used as a foundation). With this deconstruction, the concerns of epistemology – namely, what are the grounds of truth and how are they justified? – give way to more immediate and moral/political questions, such as: Who gets to be part of the ‘‘we’’ of this process, how and when and where? Who is privileged and who is silenced? Who benefits/suffers from it and in what various ways (cf. Star, 1991)?3 How are these provisional, partial, and always vulnerable points of truth arrived at, sustained, and reviewed?

TECHNOLOGY, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND AUTOAFFECTION In the introduction to her third book, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, Patricia (Clough, 2000) writes: With thought becoming indistinguishable from affect, the unconscious, and desire, cultural criticism not surprisingly not only has focused on rethinking bodies. It also has turned reflexively upon knowledge and science, calling into question their epistemological underpinnings in rationality and its discursive forms of legitimizing authority. (p. 14)

Accordingly, her book interrogates ‘‘feminist theory, Marxist cultural studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory’’ and ends with a consideration of ‘‘the cultural studies of science, especially the new sociology of science and the criticism of [the discursive authority of ] ethnographic

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writingy’’ (p. 14). With this work and continuing in the most recent project, Patricia further develops her perceptive critique of cultural studies scholarship and cultural theory. The production and deployment of discursive authority in science has been one of Patricia’s abiding concerns. Her commentary on the relevance of the contributions of poststructuralism and a developing new appreciation of bodies and materiality to this critical analysis of science is, like all her work, rich and provocative. I want to mention here two themes from Autoaffection that bear rather directly on the subject of and in knowledge and on the implications of what Patricia has written for thinking differently about that subject and its linked knowledge. These are (1) the place of the human subject in relation to what Patricia calls, drawing on Derrida, ‘‘the technical substrate of unconscious memory’’; and (2) the returned ghost of full subject presence in the autoethnographic writing in sociology, cultural studies, and elsewhere, on the other. I use the main title of Patricia’s book in this section heading, above, because I think it reminds us of what is at stake in this affection for the authority that writing of all kinds, and perhaps especially today the writing of ostensibly true knowledge, brings.4 As she explains this key term from Derrida’s early work, autoaffection is ‘‘ ‘giving-oneself-a-presense or a pleasure,’ ‘hearing oneself speak’ in the closed circuit of mouth and ear, voicing and hearing.’’ This, she says, gives the natural grounds to the subject privileged in the western modern discourse of Man. It is autoaffection that allows the presumption of the unity of speech and precommunicated thought, giving the subject an inner presence, an inner voice, so that the subject, when it speaks, is presumed to speak its own voice, to speak its intention and to express its inner being. (Derrida, in Clough (2000, p. 17))

Suffice it to say that this suggests a very strong psychic investment by the speaker in continuing to speak (and write, as well, although that is a somewhat different matter), where the position of the speaker certainly includes, at the least, you and me and our far-flung academic colleagues. Allowing that in this figure Derrida marks the indissociable intersection of the bodily, the physical/affective, and the symbolic or cultural, we can see in a general way why poststructuralism has been such a disconcerting practice of analysis and criticism for many who might be marked as ‘‘us,’’ especially given the extent to which these elements have been storied as fundamentally distinct and dual. Patricia has contributed to rewriting such stories toward a portrayal of human subjectivity as dispersed, fragmented, and operatively linked in complex networks involving diverse other entities, including machines and

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nonhuman life. Following from Derrida, when Patricia speaks of the importance of the ‘‘technical substrates of unconscious memory’’ she indexes an argument perhaps recognized most widely in early feminist film theory. These arguments, deeply influenced by psychoanalytic criticism and Althusser’s discussion of relations between cultural texts and the formation of the unconscious, pointed to the ways that the technical apparatus of film and film production qua technology profoundly implicated the possible ways in which spectators could ‘‘see’’ and ‘‘become’’ themselves through these complex texts. This was not a simple determinism, but rather an argument for the implication of technology in the human and the possibilities for dynamic subjectivity that seemed to make it clear that the nature of this relationship – between technology and the human – was not merely, as some had thought, a diminution of the latter. Forefronting the ways that teletechnologies map the spaces or conditions of possibility for human being, Patricia (Clough, 2000) argued that from Derrida we can see the relations of ‘‘being and technicity y nature and technology, body and machine, the virtual and the real, and the living and the inert’’ not as oppositional but rather as ‘‘diffe´rantial’’; as always already ‘‘inextricably implicated, always already interlaced’’ (p. 11). Here, the human, while not erased, is certainly displaced from its fantasized sovereign position in knowledge and administration. In this, Patricia joins other cultural theorists such as Bruno Latour (1986, 1999) when he describes what he calls ‘‘centers of calculation’’ that mix ‘‘actants’’ including machines, microbes, and humans into a new sort of ‘‘community’’; and it is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s (1997, 2003, 2008) visions of ‘‘cyborgs’’ and ‘‘material-semiotic entities,’’ such as ‘‘the chip, the gene, the fetus, the bomb, the genome, the database’’ and, most recently, relationality between dogs and humans, in which diverse organic and inorganic, living and not, entities collectively constitute what can be thought as ‘‘agency.’’ In all of this work, the nature of the human and the personal and how they are to be marked are dramatically transformed and displaced according to a logic or calculus that is not centered inside ‘‘the individual’’ human being. While writers such as Latour and Haraway, unlike Patricia, do not draw explicitly on the idea of an unconscious or even a reworked discourse of psychoanalytic criticism, Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2004), in their writing of queer theory and on the materiality of bodies and teletechnology, certainly do. Patricia elaborates how their ideas help move thought beyond its focus on human and humanist subjectivity, especially as it has been framed by oedipal narrative particular to particular geopolitical times and sets of places and even beyond the consciousness of any

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subject. In this there is an important but difficult move that displaces the Western humanist subject and considers the emergence of what has been called the ‘‘postpersonal,’’ ‘‘posthuman,’’ and ‘‘affective.’’ As Derrida saw, love of the self; and the bodily hearing, feeling it become make this movement quite hard for many of us to appreciate and understand as anything other than a frightening dream, even as we are now living it, and, often, quite robustly so. It can take time to see that this work is not antihuman even as it is premised on and contributes to a stunning deconstruction of humanism. A second relevant argument from Patricia’s Autoaffection and one that she continues in her most recent work, discussed below, is her critique of autoethnography, the form of the practice that requires a self-reflexivity that is forbidden in canonical prescriptions, both in anthropology and sociology, for what ethnography is and how it should be done. It surely was not part of the form Patricia criticized in her first book, where the observer–scientist– hero was the only source and bearer of the light but where he himself was never lighted as a character in the story’s drama. As Patricia notes, one legacy of the criticism of that untheorized, colonialist ethnographic practice has been the rise and popularity of multivocal texts in which those once only portrayed as simple objects have become complex, often quite politically savvy and, as we should expect, self-serving, speaking subjects. Thanks to this criticism, speaking for any others has become a considerably more fraught project than it used to be among human science scholars. Part of that legacy of criticism has been the development of experimental ways of writing true stories about others that aim to disturb and displace the authority at the center of knowledge – the one who sees and knows – and the opening that once seemingly solid center to a fragmented and fluid subjectivity that itself also becomes the object of the writing. The so-called ‘‘autoethnography’’ has been one such popular form, and Patricia, arguably, has been its most productive, even loving critic. Such work would seem to invite a truly multiple, even dizzying, and potentially creative simultaneous movement of the ‘‘object’’ – even the notion of an outside – and the ‘‘subject’’ of knowledge and its ‘‘inside’’ that could allow if not encourage serious consideration of the stakes and ends of/in knowledge work of all sorts. But Patricia (Clough, 1997) has argued that central to perhaps the most popular form of autoethnography (but not exhaustive of it) is a ‘‘selfconscious self-reflection’’ on the part of the subject of knowledge that typically is ‘‘personal’’ in ways that resemble autobiography and television melodrama.5 In its reliance on these latter, this form of autoethnography paradoxically enacts a return of experience as the ground for authenticity

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and, by extension, truth (with the case of that ‘‘t’’ usually left ambiguous). In the wake of the criticism of the social scientist and cultural critic speaking for others, autoethnographic writing has offered qualitative researchers a way seemingly to speak for one’s autoethnographic self and avoid the vulnerability involved in speaking for others. When we remember that symbolic interactionist and other phenomenological traditions in interpretive social science tend to privilege if not sympathize with such speech, theorized to come from an experiencing and centered self – a self very similar indeed to that of ‘‘Woman,’’ discussed above – we begin to see how certain forms of autoethnography do not in fact follow poststructuralist argument in its deconstruction of the humanist being. Rather, they easily can underwrite a return of that very being now speaking, unabashedly, for him- or herself as one who sees/experiences and represents/reports what that seeing/experiencing is and what it means. This is especially apparent when the author in question speaks both as a social critic/analyst and as a member of any category of persons who, it is believed, have not heretofore been heard or been ‘‘given voice.’’ If such writing does not embody an appreciation of the internal fragmentation of the speaking/writing subject, in history and time and body, such as that which psychoanalytic criticism in its reworked feminist versions offers, the fantasy of an authentic voice from/of experience can go untroubled. And in that it would seem we are back precisely at the place where the critique of standpoint theories began. Because of this, Patricia has been hesitant to encourage autoethnographic work as a productive way to trouble the construction of discursive authority in scholarly writing and criticism oriented toward the future. Of it she has said: ‘‘the subindividual finite forces realized with the deconstruction of the subject have little play [t]here; indeed, the subject of autoethnography often ends up full of its selfidentity’’ (Clough, 2000, p. 17).6 From this hesitance, she has considered what if any experimental versions of this genre might produce texts that are more open and mobile, not organized around the narrative scholar/subject/author ostensibly telling his or her story of (heroic) knowledge work done, but also not in the least denying how forces move through the writer – and are inflected by that writer – but not fully under her or his control. In the collection of essays by Patricia and her former graduate students discussed in the next section, one finds engagements with autoethnography that grapple with these problems of how to write a reflective and reflexive story in which both many and far-flung subjects – often unknown – speak as ghosts in and through bodies that often are not their own and that are sometimes only so in pieces (see, e.g., Kim, 2007; Cho, 2007).

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AFFECT, BODIES, AND OPEN COMPLEXITY: TOWARD REVISING CULTURAL THEORY AND CRITICISM FOR THE BECOMING NOW In Patricia’s most recent essays (2004, 2007, 2008), we see her address changes in the very conditions of possibility for the social itself as they emerge in the new millennium. Arguably her boldest and most wide-ranging writing to date, these inquiries contribute to an analysis of the social, cultural, and historical changes, worldwide, that in her view ‘‘pressure’’ writers of cultural theory and cultural criticism to reconsider both what they see and how they argue. In this, Patricia again sees more clearly and earlier than most both the significant and entwined details of these global-local changes as well as some of the changes that critical thought about them must make to remain productively critical. As she has done throughout her career, Patricia here reaches across disciplinary boundaries to open and connect writings that resonate productively when drawn together but that often remain unknown within disciplinary practices that deem them irrelevant. In this she argues less that current cultural studies and cultural theory are no longer productive as they are insufficient to engage increasingly prevalent and important aspects of global geopolitics, flexible capital, labor subsumed by capital, and experiments in technoscience (Clough, 2007; and see Clough, 2004). She offers a friendly criticism of traditions from which she herself regularly has drawn – psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, symbolic interactionist sociology, and feminist poststructuralism – proposing that changes in the world involving information, affect, technology, bodies, movement, time, memory, capital, and value are the occasion to supplement currently conventional cultural analysis. To paraphrase her own account of the new direction in her work that these projects are, ‘‘I am there because capital and technoscience and telecommunications – all and more – already are there.’’ In an introduction to the essays collected from work by her former students in courses in Sociology and Women’s Studies, Patricia marks a ‘‘shift in y critical theory’’ from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life; from y [presuming] equilibrium-seeking closed systems to engaging the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions of metastability; from focusing on an economy of production and consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-individual bodily capacities or affects in the domain of biopolitical control. (Clough, 2007, p. 2)

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Although this shift indexes and suggests a wide range of topics, here I want to note very briefly, following Patricia, how these implicate understandings of the human subjects taken up in cultural theory and research and the subjectivities of the cultural critics themselves as well; in short, I want to point out how in this she continues the rewriting of the subjectivity that is this essay’s theme. Certainly, one of the most challenging aspects of these movements for cultural theorists and cultural studies scholars – and, certainly, for qualitative social scientists – is the decentering of signification, representation, and meaning. This is not a matter of announcing yet again that there is a crisis in representation but rather a taking note of work that disattends representational practices and signification, arguing that they are not at the center of the questions coming into view. That is, to study the social today does not necessarily mean giving prime place to a study of meaning, at least as it has been treated in most cultural theory, semiotics, and phenomenology. That is quite a claim. And to say that meaning and representation are not always at the center of the social is to say more. It is to say that the figure who/that operates these practices is, if not superceded in this then, certainly, disarticulated by diverse movements that at the least supplement those of the human and most certainly the humanist subjects caught up in these processes. This attention to the distributed and dynamic rather than only to the centered and static or fixed – a focus that is also found in science studies and feminist science studies (see Latour, 1985, 1999; Pickering, 1995; Haraway, 1997, 2003; Barad, 2007) – insists that there are multiple, diverse, and everongoing sources of movement in the social-cultural, among which is the figure of the signifying and representing human(ist) subject. Another way of putting this, as briefly noted earlier, is that the treasured humanist conception of agency is rewritten as distributed beyond and within the human and what Patricia calls ‘‘organic [as distinct from non-organic rather than inorganic] life.’’ Pearson (1999), commenting on the Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari notion of ‘‘machinic assemblage’’ – one that much aids understanding of these arguments – and what he calls ‘‘new work in the philosophy of mind,’’ writes: These developments call for a major reconfiguration of ethology since behaviour can no longer be localized in individuals conceived as performed homunculi, but has to be treated epigenetically as a function of complex material systems which cut across individuals (assemblages) and which traverse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries (rhizomes). This requires the articulation of a distributed conception of agency. (pp. 170–171)

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Such an approach to agency should not be read to suggest that interest turns away from the human even though it is no longer premised or centered on the humanist subject and its trauma. Patricia argues that the attempts to rethink the human as other than an essentialized subject or even the traumatized subject of psychoanalysis take us beyond Foucault’s disciplinary society and its normalizing/socializing/ideological enclosures, which operate through representation and interpellation, and are premised on a view of the human body as whole organism to be shaped and ‘‘trained to work’’ (Parisi and Terranova, in Clough, 2007, p. 17). She notes several sources of such thought – Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of ‘‘bodies without organs’’ and of bodies as ‘‘machinic assemblages’’; the earlier and enormously consequential rewriting of entropy in cybernetics by Claude Shannon and a subsequently developed view of the body as an information processing and computational system; the emergence and impact of molecular biology and genetic technologies, allowing views of the human and other bodies in terms of preindividual capacities not defined primarily in terms of their contributions to the homeostasis of an imagined ‘‘larger’’ unity. Especially in seeing bodies as information processing systems, information is understood mathematically, as ‘‘an uncertain and probabilistic milieu by reducing it to sets of alternatives that determine more or less likely sets of possibilities on the basis of a given distribution of probabilities as determined by the relationship between channel and code’’ and where ‘‘the universe is [seen as] mobile and probabilistic regardless of the categories of understanding applied to things by human perception’’ (Terranova in Clough, 2007, p. 17). Here, Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle becomes less a description of a human(ist) subject’s knowledge (epistemology) but more a question of the undecidability of matter. Patricia draws our attention to the way the human body – as one body among others – in its virtually endless preindividual and molecular capacities has been disarticulated and pursued by increasingly flexible capital entwined with various nationalisms, war machines, and self-reflexive systems that monitor risk in service of what Deleuze has called control societies. At the same time, bodies have been reviewed and opened up by wide-ranging technoscientific experimentation. Although the reign of organic metaphors and the moral weight of equilibrium, balance, and harmony characteristic of homeostasis as the telos of all conventionally ordered systems make it difficult to appreciate, this attention to preindividual bodily capacities helps us see a complexity that is effaced in the wholism that characterizes Enlightenment thought. Pearson’s (1999)

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characterization of machinic assemblage, on which Patricia draws, underlines the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept intends not to respect familiar boundaries, organic or otherwise: ‘‘A machinic assemblage connects and convolutes the disparate in terms of potential fields and virtual elements, and crosses techno-ontological thresholds without fidelity to relations of genus or species’’ (p. 170). Following the origins of complexity theory from biology and physics to postcybernetic thought and insights gained from reading Deleuze, Patricia takes up questions that aim to rework the very notion of evolution or the theory of change inherited from Darwin. While the latter suggests we understand change as a linear movement from simple to complex forms, Patricia urges a consideration of what biologist Diane Margulis and Dorian Sagan have called ‘‘endosymbiosis’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 12). This argues that it is out of a chaotic and turbulent complexity – arguably consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘machinic assemblage’’ and at least some of what is named as ‘‘entropy’’ in cybernetics – that new and dynamic forms of order or pattern can emerge through an evolutionary capacity that does not simply reproduce what has been before. This rewriting of chaos and disorder as possible sources of creative emergence can be found in several lines of recent work outside the social sciences, including that of Donna Haraway (1997, 2003), drawing on Alfred North Whitehead; by Karen Barad (2007), writing from the work of Neils Bohr; of N. Katherine Hayles (1999) and Luciana Parisi and Terranova (2000) who have written on the history of cybernetics and postcybernetics; and by Keith Ansell Pearson (1999), Mark Hansen (2004a, 2004b), and Brian Massumi (1998, 2002), who comment variously on the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Patricia describes her own sense of surprise and interest at reading Pearson’s criticism of the theory of autopoiesis as set forth by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, which she has used in her earlier work. Pearson’s point, following Deleuze, is that the autopoietic system that Maturana and Varela describe, while dynamic and self-regulating/sustaining and while forefronting the coevolution of environment and system/ organism, stories a system that remains informationally and organizationally closed to its outside and thus reiterates and depends on the maintenance of that very inside/outside dualism. That is, while external circumstances are recognized to impact the system’s internal operation, this happens only insofar as the system selects those aspects of its outside that contribute to the maintenance of its past and established form and function, its ‘‘inside.’’ While we may say that it ‘‘interacts’’ in this exchange (but see Barad, 2007 on ‘‘intra-action’’), it does so only selectively and to serve its own

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homeostasis, striving to deflect and nullify inputs that disserve the continuation of a smooth and reiterative operation. In short, its form, function, and operation do not evolve. Patricia draws on Pearson (1999) for a conception of system – including the organism, including the human organism – that is both informationally open and considerably more turbulent. This system maintains – sometimes only barely – orderliness in far from equilibrium conditions from which new dynamic forms of being, life, and thought might emerge (and which, by definition, do not conserve what has been and, as such, can be both exciting and frightening to the humans involved). Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis, says Pearson (1999), does not take into account ‘‘the extent to which all living systems and their boundaries are caught up in machinic assemblages that involve modes of transversal becoming’’ (p. 170). Central to Patricia’s thought about what she calls preindividual bodily capacities is her focus on affect and affectivity, which in some sense displaces her earlier attention to the more discursively situated psychoanalytic topic of desire. She writes, quoting Brian Massumi, that affect, which social scientists might misread as ‘‘emotion,’’ refers to: a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness. y [A]ffect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or [to] the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive – that is, aliveness or vitality. y Affect constitutes a non-linear complexity out of which the narration of conscious states such as emotion are subtracted but always with ‘‘a never-to-be conscious autonomic remainder.’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 2)

Affect is the complex ‘‘out of which’’ that the narrated objects emotion and desire are drawn by and through subjects who are themselves emergent in those narratives and in narrative time. Not ‘‘presocial’’ and not thought only in reference to human bodies – especially human bodies as organic wholes – this understanding of affect has emerged through the use of and careful attention to new technologies the operation of which enables its very conception and si(gh)ting. Here, the technical becomes inextricably part of the very ‘‘felt vitality’’ named. This attention to affect requires a shift away from theories of the social or discursive construction of bodies and matter. Affect is not ‘‘a conscious matter; it is not even unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense’’ and: [t]he affective turn throws thought back to the disavowals constitutive of western industrial capitalist societies, bringing forth ghosted bodies and the traumatized remains of erased histories. It also sends thought to the future – to the bodily matter and bio-technologies of technoscientific experimentation. (Clough, 2007, p. 3)

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And this sense of affect requires that time, as opened up in Deleuze’s work, be understood to exceed the familiar subject-based, narrative conception found in that critical theory. Patricia points to Mark Hansen’s discussion of the work of video artist Bill Viola to help us consider the unfolding of such dynamic and becoming capacities through the technology of digital imaging of human faces. Viola’s dramatically slowed images allow us to see affect – which, without this technology, emerges much too fast for the naked eye to recognize – as existing prior to perception and emotion, the ‘‘out of which’’ these latter are made but that exists at a scale and in a materiality that has not been noticed by most cultural theory (see Hansen, 2004a). Although I cannot here pursue these fascinating ideas as Patricia does, it is clear that the ‘‘excess’’ of which she speaks, above, is outside of human perception and consciousness but very much of the human body and a dynamism. Following a long line of feminist critics of disembodied dreams of the virtual (see Hayles, 1999), Patricia takes very seriously the dynamic materiality – what Haraway might call the ‘‘fleshiness’’ – of the matter at hand, although perhaps in a way that some of those colleagues might not at first recognize as such. Long seemingly kept at arm’s length in much cultural analyses, matter and the material here are of central importance, although not as determinative and prior. In fact, the materiality that Patricia finds most exciting is one that emerges from Pheng Cheah’s (1996) friendly critique of Judith Butler’s vision of (bodies that) matter. That is, this is a materiality that reflects the insights of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism while reworking key elements of each (and see Massumi, 2002). The challenge in these discussions, among others, is how to take dynamic matter into account in critical and cultural theory – that is, of course, in discourse – in a way that does not reduce it to culture’s and language’s impoverished ‘‘other’’ needing to be ‘‘given meaning’’ by the human(ist) subject in order to become significant. What does emerge, then, when meaning is made cannot be seen as ‘‘constructed’’ by a sovereign subject who is in control, but rather more as a joint ‘‘invention’’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 12), a coevolutionary emergence that did not exist before. This project, arguably, might hold some of the most exciting questions for those who do qualitative inquiry, but it does require a modesty about the contributions of human(ist) consciousness. These writers observe that fluid, flexible, and global capital long since has pursued the promise of affect and the capitalization of preindividual bodily capacities in service of its own vitality and, increasingly, for its own protection as entwined with technoscientific developments on which these changes rest. Patricia and her colleagues describe the emergence of an

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‘‘affect economy’’ that turns not primarily on the disciplining and interpellation of laboring selves and subjects, but, rather, on the subsumption of myriad preindividual vitalities that have come to assume their own particular market value. This is a change that is seeable ‘‘not only in terms of biotechnology, biomedicalization, and genetics but also in terms of a technologically dispersed education/training in self-actualization and self-control at the pre-individual, individual, communal, national and transnational levels’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21). Drawing on the work of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and George Caffentzis to help extend her own vision shaped from Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine what she calls ‘‘the postcybernetic bodies of the early twenty-first century’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21), Patricia calls our attention to a growing shift from economies that focus on the control of production and consumption to those organized in terms of the circulation and modulation of affect, where ‘‘it is not the surplus labor of workers around the world that is producing value but rather the calculation of the risks to [and quality of] their lives and to[/of ] life itself’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 21). Recalling her own earlier critique of standpoint epistemologies, she notes that position-based epistemologies – for instance, thinking of ‘‘the worker’’ as subject – cannot provide an understanding of these movements: the conception of the social she draws on here cannot be thought in terms of the humanist subject (and see Hardt, 1995, pp. 40–41). With the real subsumption of labor by capital, she writes, quoting Negri, ‘‘labor finds its value in affect, if affect is defined as ‘the power to act’’’ (Clough, 2007, p. 25), and it is in the modulation of affect as this potential that capital has itself invested (see Hardt, 1995, pp. 38–39). In such an economy, bodies and elements thereof are differentially valued with reference to these capacities, often described in terms of statistical population aggregates. Some are demeaned, exploited, even exhausted completely to death in war and massacre while others are the objects/subjects of enormous investment and elaboration (Clough, 2007, pp. 24–25) evident in a global biopolitics that can have mortal local effects. Anthropologist Ann Anagnost’s (2004) study of the ongoing transformation of China’s economy and the operation of capital accumulation in those shifts offers Patricia an example of just this sort of subsumption. Anagnost directs attention to the relationship of two sorts of Chinese bodies: that of the rising urban middle class one-child-only child, on one hand, and that of the uneducated and unskilled rural-to-urban migrant, on the other. What brings these two bodies into dynamic relationship is the notion of suzhi or ‘‘quality’’ of the lives involved. More specifically, the concern is to raise the quality of some lives while derogating or leaving behind the quality or

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capacity of others. Anagnost points out that this concern, which has emerged discursively if not yet as official policy, arises just at the time when China has moved to what is called, increasingly, a ‘‘post-socialist’’ and ‘‘global’’ economy, which is to say one of increased privatization, capital accumulation, and an explosive interest in and desire for operation of ‘‘the market.’’ Increasingly, Anagnost argues, it has become important to sort Chinese lives into categories for investment in their future possibilities. In this, the middle class, urban, postsocialist child has become the object and subject of a great deal of what Negri, who both Patricia and Anagnost cite, would call ‘‘affective labor’’ in service of higher quality and more promising potential along diverse dimensions as well as toward enhanced well being and vitality. Here, the very notion of production is transformed from a focus on a product or task relative to that product to ‘‘the continuous modulation, variation and intensification of social cooperation that occurs through interaction and linguistic performances which y far from giving rise to a final product, exhaust themselves in the communicative interaction that their own ‘performance’ brings about’’ (Virtanen, 2004, p. 225). Patricia argues that the calculus that connects these two bodies is in terms of a conception of a biomediated body invested by capital around and in which an ‘‘informational logic’’ provides the basis for the determination of the energies and costs of this affective labor. In this body, diverse qualities of life as well as the value of life itself can be calibrated and compared in a common measure and ‘‘be made exchangeable.’’ While in all of this, Patricia and her colleagues see the subject and her actions/thoughts as less central, we cultural analysts and critics mostly still write uncritically from just such an autoaffected place of our own. Although we may have encountered and engaged, more or less productively, the inevitable trauma of the subject that psychoanalysis long since has announced, most of us have not yet begun either to examine the flows of affectivity and their capture and modulation that she and others describe; and perhaps we have not even noticed the ways that our own bodies and subjectivities are rewritten by them, not to mention imagining our own bodily involvement in the trauma of war, violence, terror, and the calculation of worthy and not worthy life/lives itself/themselves. In this, as she has done before, Patricia invites us to follow thought toward the future, a future in which we must not only see the human figured differently – and, arguably, as ‘‘less’’ if read only from the fantasized position of a humanist subject – but as more internally multiple and diverse; as itself a machinic assemblage linked to other assemblages with diverse lines of energy that push and pull in many directions at the same time. Most of

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the orthodoxies through and in which cultural theory and cultural studies emerged 25 or 30 years ago fail to appreciate the complexity of the material– semiotic entities, to borrow Haraway’s term, that here can be seen. One might even empathize with the cultural critic who is inclined to turn back to the more familiar forms of analysis. Thankfully, for her readers, Patricia never has found that sort of move to be one she can make or, if made, sustain (which is not to say that it sometimes has been appealing). For her, we might say that Voltaire’s ‘‘best of all possible worlds’’ – to which I allude, through Pearson and Deleuze in this essay’s epigraph – cannot be those that are safe and mostly known but rather must be and always have been those that still are unknown and at least somewhat out of control. And of course that is not all. They must have some sort of human promise, even if we cannot know quite what that means. While now difficult to see in the affective turn to which she points, the question of how these shifts might be resources not only for capital and its interests, but also for effective ‘‘resistant projects’’ involving human bodies and linked heterogeneous subjects/actants and objects provides the condition for her work. That she cannot now quite see the forms and possible effects of such projects and that she knows there are no (and never have been any) ‘‘guarantees’’ as to their results become grounds not for despair but for hopeful engagement. From the daring and courage of her intelligence in these pursuits, and from the life she has given them, we, her readers and interlocutors, also have been moved elsewhere, which, indeed, is not a small thing.

NOTES 1. Much as it was impossible for any but select members of a certain class of white, Protestant gentlemen to be credible witnesses to the appearance and performance of nature in the experimental laboratory of Robert Boyle in seventeenth century London (see Haraway, 1997, pp. 23–39; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). 2. And see Scott (1991) on experience. 3. I am here reminded of this question as set forth by Susan Leigh Star (1991), who writes in feminist science studies, and whose work is discussed by Donna Haraway. Star’s version of the question is, simply, ‘‘Cui bono? ’’ 4. Here I draw very selectively from the rich and diverse array of questions bearing on teletechnology and the unconscious that Patricia addresses in her book. 5. The foremost proponent of autoethnography of this kind has been sociologist Carolyn Ellis. Beyond her Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness (1995), about which Clough (1997) writes, see her recent book, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (2004).

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6. See my discussion of reflexivity in the work of Steven Woolgar as seen by Haraway (Schneider & Wang, 2000, pp. 241–251).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Patricia Clough, Michal McCall, and Norman Denzin for their encouragement and support in this work.

REFERENCES Anagnost, A. (2004). The corporeal politics of quality (suzhi). Public Culture, 16, 189–208. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘‘sex’’. New York: Routledge. Cheah, P. (1996). Mattering. Diacritics, 26, 108–139. Cho, G. (2007). Voices from the teum. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 151–169). Durham: Duke University Press. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (Eds). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clough, P. T. (1994). Feminist thought: Desire, power, and academic discourse. New York: Blackwell. Clough, P. T. (1997). Autotelecommunication and autoethnography: A reading of Carolyn Ellis’s Final Negotiations. Sociological Quarterly, 38(1), 95–110. Clough, P. T. (1998 [1992]). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism. New York: Lang. Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (2004). Future matters: Technoscience, global politics, and cultural criticism. Social Text, 80(22), 1–23. Clough, P. T. (2007). Introduction. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 1–33). Durham: Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory Culture and Society, 25(January), 1–22. Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. (1992 [1980]). Deviance and medicalization: From badness to sickness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, C. (1995). Final negotiations: A story of love, loss, and chronic illness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Hansen, M. (2004a). The time of affect, or bearing witness to life. Critical Inquiry, 30, 584–626. Hansen, M. (2004b). New philosophy for a new media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium. FemaleManr_meets Oncomouset: Feminisn and technoscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. J. (2003). Companion species manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M. (1995). The withering of civil society. Social Text, 45, 27–44. Hartsock, N. (1985). Money, sex, and power. New York: Longman. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in science, cybernetics, and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kassabian, A. (2001). The ghosted writing of a haunted poststructuralism, or how I learned to read. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 542–544. Kim, H. (2007). The parched tongue. In: P. T. Clough & J. Halley (Eds), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 34–46). Durham: Duke University Press. Kitsuse, J. I., & Schneider, J. W. (Eds). (1984). Studies in the sociology of social problems. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Kitsuse, J. I., & Schneider, J. W. (1989). Introduction: Typification and social problem construction. In: J. Best (Ed.), Images of Issues: Typifying contemporary social problems (pp. xi–xiv). Hawthorne: Aldine De Gruyter. Latour, B. (1986). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Massumi, B. (1998). Requium for our prospective dead (toward a participatory critique of capitalist power). In: E. Kaufman & K. J. Heller (Eds), Deleuze and Guattari: New mappings in politics, philosophy, and culture (pp. 40–64). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. McCall, M. M. (2001). Clough and Derrida at the scene of writing. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 544–549. Neitz, M. J. (2001). On rereading the ends of ethnography through displacements in the field. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 553–557. Parisi, L., & Terranova, T. (2000). Heat-death, emergence, and control in genetic engineering and artificial life. CTheory, www.ctheory.com/article/a84.html.5 Pearson, K. A. (1999). Germinal life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge. Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, J., & Wang, L. H. (2000). Giving care, writing self: A ‘‘new’’ ethnography. New York: Lang. Schneider, J. W. (2001). The end of ethnography? Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 549–553. Schneider, J. W., & Conrad, P. (1983). Having epilepsy: The experience and control of illness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, J. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773–797.

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Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technology, and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions. In: J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters: Power, technology, and the modern world (pp. 26–56). Oxford: Blackwell. Virtanen, A. (2004). General economy: The entrance of multitude into production. Ephemera, 4(3), 209–232, www.ephemeraweb.org

PRODUCING, CONSUMING, AND PROVIDING INSTRUCTION ON POETIC TEXTS IN THE CLASSICAL ROMAN ERA: THE PRAGMATIST CONTRIBUTIONS OF HORACE, LONGINUS, AND PLUTARCH$ Robert Prus ABSTRACT Although it is often assumed that the study of human group life as ‘‘something in the making’’ is a product of the more distinctive emphasis of 20th century American pragmatist scholarship, the roots of the analysis of the social construction of activity run much deeper. Whereas poetics (i.e., fiction) represents only one arena in which earlier scholars have more explicitly addressed the matters of human knowing and acting, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch, three authors from the classical Roman era (c. 200 BCE-500 CE) contribute notably to an understanding of the ways in which people accomplish activity. While Horace and Longinus focus primarily on the production of poetic texts, $

Paper presented at the Couch-Stone Symposium (Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction) held at the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, May 5–6, 2007.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 81–103 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30006-4

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Plutarch addresses the matter of reading, comprehending, and utilizing fictional materials within instructional contexts. The texts of Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch are generally valued for the insight that they cast on the Roman and Greek life-worlds in the classical Roman era, but they also assume considerable importance as detailed reference materials for developing a more informed, comparative (i.e., transhistorical) analysis of the study of human knowing and acting in contemporary contexts. Because of the particular subject matter they address, their extended levels of involvements in the communication process and their detailed analysis of people’s roles as authors, instructors, and readers, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch provide much valuable insight in the production and use of written texts. Moreover, given their associated attentiveness to the matters of authenticity and misrepresentation, persuasion and intrigue, and interpretation and inference, these statements should have considerable value to a wide range of scholars and educators.

INTRODUCTION There is a fact, however, which we must recall to the minds of the young not once merely, but over and over again, by pointing out to them that while poetry, inasmuch as it has an imitative basis, employs embellishment and glitter in dealing with the actions and characters that form its groundwork, yet it does not forsake the semblance of truth, since imitation depends on plausibility for its allurement. (Plutarch, Moralia, I: 25:7 [Babbit trans.])

The analysis of human group life as ‘‘an interactional, humanly constructed essence in the making’’ is often linked to American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot symbolic interaction.1 However, a number of classical Greek and Roman scholars not only established the foundations of a pragmatist approach to the study of human group life but also provided a number of instructive portrayals of group life as practical accomplishment. As part of a larger study of the contributions of classical scholarship to the social sciences,2 this paper considers the works of three poets of the Roman era who address matters of human knowing and acting in more explicit and sustained terms.3 While the texts introduced here represent only a portion of the fuller range of the classical poetical materials that have survived the ravages of time, they provide a considerable amount of material pertinent to the study, analysis, and representation of human lived experience.

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Although well-known as classical authors, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch generally are not recognized as philosophers, educators, historians, or social scientists. As a result, their work has been much neglected by people in these latter areas of scholarship. Still, whereas the texts considered here have been developed with respect to the production and consumption of fictional materials, these materials also (a) represent ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Roman and Greek life-worlds, (b) generate particular insight into the ways that people engage poetic endeavor, and (c) provide some comparatively astute analyses of humanly engaged activities more generally. As well, because these texts have been developed in notably detailed manners, they (d) constitute a valuable set of reference materials (data) for transsituational and transhistorical comparative analysis for scholars attentive to the study of human group life on a more generic or transcontextual level.

POETICS IN THE ROMAN ERA: FOUNDATIONS, EMPHASES, AND AUTHORS Before focusing on the three authors introduced here, it may be instructive to acknowledge the broader foundations and emphases of fiction in the Roman era.4 First, although much of the fictional literature of this era was written in Latin, it is important to be mindful of the classical Greek literature (c. 700-300 BCE) that not only preceded but also informed subsequent Latin and Greek poetics in the Roman era. Indeed, whereas the material from the Roman era has been central to the development of Western European scholarship more generally, Roman (Latin Roman and Greek Roman) scholarship of all sorts is deeply indebted to those working in the classical-Greek era. Like other peoples of record, the early Romans, appear to have developed a wide range of casual fictional representations. However, while Lucius Livius Andronicus (c. 284-204 BCE), Gnaeus Naevius (c. 260-200 BCE), Quintus Ennius (c. 240-170 BCE), and Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE) are frequently identified as among the first to generate more sustained Roman poetical texts (Fantham [Kennedy, 1989, Vol. 1, 220–245]), these and other early Roman poets adopted Greek texts and models before they more systematically began to compose their own literature. Expressed in other terms, Latin epic or heroic fictions, tragedies, and comedies were based on earlier Greek templates where these materials were

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not more extensively copied from Greek sources. Notably, as well, a great many Greek literary terms and concepts were directly absorbed into Latin thought because the Romans lacked a vocabulary with which to articulate and convey these notions.5 Further, since Greek educators had been employed in Rome (instructing Romans on Greek scholarship) for some centuries prior to the Roman occupation of Greece, the integration of Greek thought into Latin scholarship was fairly extensive as well as enduring. Still, some important divisions persisted. Although some Greeks worked as instructors in what later would become West (Latin speaking) Rome and some Romans pursued educations in what would be known as East (Greek speaking) Rome, two rather separate, language-based realms of scholarly activities were evident in the classical Roman era and would persist for centuries beyond. Thus, despite their common classical-Greek base, the interconnections between Latin- and Greek-speaking scholarship are somewhat tenuous at best. Relatedly, following the Roman takeover of Greece in 146 BCE, it is essential to recognize the somewhat concurrent body of literature developed by Greek authors. As with the classical-Greek literature (c. 700-300 BCE), only some Greek and Latin texts from the Roman era have survived to the present day. Nevertheless, these texts also have a remarkable intellectual quality, the likes of which would only begin to become effectively approximated in Western Europe during the 12th–14th centuries.6 Further, because they had access to, and dialogued with, various classicalGreek texts, some of the materials that the later Greek and Roman authors generated provide present day scholars with an additional, comparative historical dimension that otherwise would be lost.7 Still, one encounters great unevenness in the ways in which these authors approached and represented matters of human knowing and acting in their poetic endeavors. Somewhat like contemporary symbolic interactionists, certain authors from the Roman era have been directly attentive to pragmatist considerations of language, multiple viewpoints, reflectivity, persuasive interchange, identities, relationships, emotionality, and activity of both individualized and collective sorts. Although this paper deals with only three authors whose works are relevant to pragmatist considerations of human knowing and acting in the classical-Roman era, it is hoped that this discussion may help readers appreciate a largely untapped set of resources pertinent to the study of human lived experience.8

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ON HUMAN KNOWING AND ACTING Homer (Iliad and Odyssey, c. 700 BCE) and Hesiod (Theogony and Works and Days, c. 700 BCE) are generally acknowledged as the most consequential of the earliest poetic authors of record. Other especially prominent Greek poets include: the playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE), Sophocles (c. 495-405 BCE) and Euripides (c. 480-406 BCE) who are particularly renowned for their theatrically contrived tragedies; Aristophanes (c. 450-385 BCE) who is well-known for his theatrically developed parodies, and Menander (c. 344-292 BCE) who is appreciated for his ‘‘new’’ (softer) comedies. It is difficult to tell exactly how attentive the authors of the Roman era were to particular instances of classical-Greek texts, but these materials generally were highly inspirational as well as conceptually enabling to those who followed.9 Among the Latin and Greek poets of the Roman era who address human knowing and acting in more sustained and analytic manners, the most pertinent are Horace (c. 65-8 BCE), Ovid (c. 43 BCE-18 CE), Dio Chrysostom (c. 40-120), Plutarch (c. 46-125), Longinus (c. 100 CE), and Lucian (c.120-200). However, the present paper will concentrate on some texts from Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch; statements that address the production and usage of poetic materials in more explicit, detailed, conceptual terms. However, and somewhat ironically given their notably parallel emphases on the nature, production and consumption of poetic materials, there is little evidence that the three authors whose works are considered here were especially attentive to Aristotle’s (394–322 BCE) Poetics or his related analysis of persuasive endeavor in Rhetoric.10 Likewise, although the three authors from the classical-Roman era make more extensive reference to Plato (427–347 BCE), it is not evident that they are fully mindful of the analysis of fictional materials that Plato (see Republic, Laws) develops amidst his condemnation of poetic ventures as misrepresentative, if not more extensively corrupting, influences. Still some further qualifications are in order before we deal with Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch in more direct terms. First, instead of addressing the larger corpus of materials that these people have developed (most of which are more entirely poetically expressive in quality), particular attention will be given to those statements that deal with human knowing and acting in direct and sustained terms. As well, because these authors have focused on different sets of issues and have developed their texts amidst highly variable sets of poetic materials, their works will be presented in a flow that diverges somewhat from a strict chronological ordering. Third, although these

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authors discuss somewhat related conceptual notions, it is not apparent that they read one another’s works. Instead, the coherencies of their texts are more likely to reflect contacts with earlier Greek scholarship as well as the matter of authors experiencing and addressing somewhat parallel realms of human endeavor. Focusing more precisely on the production and consumption of fictional representations, we begin with (1) considerations of generating poetic texts by Horace (c. 65-8 BCE) and Longinus (c. 100 CE). This is followed by (2) a discussion of how to teach and read poetic materials developed by Plutarch (c. 46-125 CE). Addressing the ways that people engage fictional representations, as producers, instructors, and consumers, these authors take us into some broader considerations of educational and philosophic realms of endeavor as well as a variety of humanly enacted worlds and moral assessments of people’s activities and life-styles. Thus, while concentrating primarily on poetic endeavors, these authors provide us with an instructive set of materials pertaining to the sociology of knowing (especially representing, sharing, and comprehending information). With these qualifications in mind, we begin with two overtly instructional statements on how poetry should be pursued or accomplished as a craft. Whereas Horace writes in Latin and Longinus writes as a Greek, both authors (as participant–observers, analysts, and instructors) attend to poetics as social constructed essences. In addition to acknowledging the enabling quality of language as a communicative device for achieving intersubjectivity with the other as well as the importance of attending to human lived experience, Horace and Longinus are also highly mindful of the developmental, technological base of poetical endeavor.

HORACE Now listen to me, as I tell you. What it is that I – and with me the public – expect. You must note the ways in which each time of life behaves. And give a fit grace to their varying natures and years. The child who is able already to form his words. And set firm steps on the ground is eager to play. With those of his own age; for the smallest cause. He flies in a rage and as lightly recovers again. Changing from hour to hour. The beardless youth. Freed at last from his tutor, takes his delight. In horses and hounds and the grass of the sunny Campus.

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As soft as wax, easily molded for evil, Brusque with his counselors, slow to make needful provision. Free with his money, spirited, full of desires. But swift to abandon things that he formerly liked. With altered pursuits, a man in the prime of life. Seeks riches and friends, becomes to have done already. What soon he will do all in his power to change. There are many misfortunes that circle a man when he’s oldy (Horace, The Art of Poetry [Dunsany and Oakley (Trans.), pp. 292–293])

Although Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BCE) is particularly wellknown for his odes and satires, our primary interest in his work revolves around ‘‘The Art of Poetry [or The Epistle to the Pisos].’’ Horace also wrote a number of satires, focusing on matters such as greed, vice, ambition, madness, fortune seeking, and the like, that offer some ethnographic insights and generic appreciations of human practices and relationships. However, both the fleeting presentations and more thorough poetic encasements of these materials detract notably from their value as reference materials for the social sciences.11 Fortunately, although Horace’s The Art of Poetry (AOP) also is intended to entertain, this statement has a more distinctive analytical emphasis. Indeed, while Horace’s AOP is much less enabling and astute than Aristotle’s Poetics (of which Horace and other Latin poets seem unaware), Horace’s analysis of poetics not only has had a notable impact on the subsequent analysis of fictional representation in Western European scholarship but still appears better known in many literary circles than is Aristotle’s Poetics (see Burns, 1990, pp. 28–29). While highlighting themes that are particularly relevant to a pragmatist analysis of fictional representation in AOP, I will be relying on the translation of Lord Dunsany and Michael Oakley (1961). References refer to the page numbers in that volume. Still, since I have maintained the overall flow of Horace’s statement, readers using other texts should be more readily able to locate particular sections of Horace’s statement in those texts. Sharing his insights on the broader field of poetic endeavor with the Pisos (a father and his two sons, the latter of whom appear to be considering careers as authors of fiction), Horace (AOP, p. 287) introduces his text with an explicit recognition of the poetic license that artists and poets may assume in presenting wide ranges of (often discordant and insincere) images to others. Still, Horace cautions prospective authors to focus on subject matters that can be developed effectively within their own abilities and familiarities. Relatedly, they may strive for eloquence, clarity and charm while addressing things familiar to their audiences.

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Although Horace (AOP, pp. 288–289) also encourages writers to introduce their readers to new names and terms of reference, he points out that it is the common or more generalized public practice rather than the poetic usage of particular words and phrases that establishes the popularity, decline, and possible resurgence of particular linguistic expressions. Noting that poetic artistry involves more than developing beautiful expressions, Horace (AOP, pp. 290–295) emphasizes the importance of authors relating to their audiences. Thus, Horace stresses the importance of writers (a) using words that match the emotions to be conveyed, (b) attending to the context of the events being featured, and (c) maintaining the coherency of any characters introduced. He also points to the practical value of authors (d) following tradition (and audience familiarities) in the materials they present and (e) introducing more novel features toward the end of their statements or in ways that more readily blend into notions that audiences already accept as viable. Writing many centuries before William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Horace (as indicated in the introductory passage; AOP, pp. 292–293) also explicitly encourages authors to attend carefully to people’s positions in the life-cycle and to the sorts of interests, activities, and limitations that characterize particular categories of people. Then, observing that people generally believe the things they see more than the things they hear, Horace (AOP, p. 293) emphasizes the importance of authors (as playwrights here) focusing on the more direct visual images they generate in staging presentations of their works. At the same time he indicates the importance of playwrights finding effective ways of verbally conveying images (e.g., through the use of actors’ reports on stage) of things (e.g., battles, floods) that cannot be presented on the stage. Horace (AOP, p. 294) also discusses the ways in which the chorus and musical accompaniment may be introduced to enhance the overall impact of their presentations. In an interim summary statement of sorts, Horace (AOP, p. 209) stresses the importance of authors attending to the matters of familiarity, coherence, and flow so that they might enable audiences to more readily and completely engage the presentation. Then, following a consideration of the construction of verses, Horace (AOP, pp. 296–297) emphasizes the importance of (Roman) writers not just attending to but also more completely internalizing Greek authors as the models to be followed in developing one’s materials. Horace (AOP, p. 297) also encourages authors to actively search for flaws in their own productions. He instructs those who intend to be competent authors to keep rewriting their texts until their materials are flawless.

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Then, referencing Socrates, Horace (AOP, p. 298) directs poets to strive to become familiar with the roles of a wide cross-section of people in the community. This way, Horace observes, authors will better know how to represent the parts of particular types of people and the ways that certain kinds of people relate to others. Indeed, Horace notes, carefully defined characters may more effectively delight audiences and sustain their attention than the particular verses authors provide. If poets intend to give instruction through their works, Horace (AOP, p. 299) encourages them to be brief and to provide materials that are easily understood and remembered by their readers. When writing to please audiences, Horace instructs authors to stay close to everyday life so that credibility does not become an obstacle. Still, Horace contends, it is in mixing pleasure and sound advice that authors are more apt to achieve fame and financial success. Later, in discussing technique, Horace (AOP, p. 302) takes issue with those who argue that the best poetry is either a natural gift or a purely technical matter. Thus, while arguing that explicit instruction and practice are essential to the development of an accomplished poet, Horace also insists on the importance of people’s existing abilities as the base on which instruction and technique may be most adequately developed. Horace (AOP, pp. 302–303) also explicitly cautions authors about the folly of attending to those who flatter them. Instead, he encourages poets to seek out and keep company with those who will provide them with more sustained editorial feedback. Horace (AOP, pp. 303–304) ends his statement on the art of poetry with an insistence that poets (as creative essences) not only be allowed to live the life that they choose but also that they be allowed to pursue the time and manner of death that they prefer (unencumbered by the moralities and interventions of others). Albeit a comparatively short statement, Horace’s AOP is filled with insight for those interested in how people accomplish poetic endeavor and other creative writing projects. Since Horace writes as an insider (participant–observer) who is endeavoring to explain the very craft he addresses, these materials are particularly valuable. In the next text, Longinus’ On the Sublime (OTS), the author undertakes a somewhat related task. This statement also is intended to be instructional and, like Horace’s AOP, appears to be written by a highly accomplished author in the field. Taken together, these two texts provide a particularly instructive base for approaching the study of the production of written materials more generally and poetic materials more specifically.

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LONGINUS ON THE SUBLIME Although On the Sublime only appears to have been rediscovered by European scholars in the 16th century, this text represents a noteworthy, systematic, and sustained attempt to define literary eloquence on the part of a Greek author (c. 100 CE).12 While recognizing the entertaining, often playful, qualities of poetic materials, Longinus engages poetics in a rigorous, analytic-instructional manner. Indeed, On the Sublime is the most sustained analytical consideration of poetics on record from the classical-Roman era. After stating (OTS, I: 1) that the sublime consists of an eloquence and distinction of language that not only persuades audiences but also effectively transports audiences beyond themselves, Longinus (OTS, III: 2-VI: 5) identifies a series of weaknesses that keep authors from attaining the sublime. These include: (a) more ambitious attempts to obtain grandeur, (b) attempts to please all audiences, (c) the extended, unwarranted use of emotionalism, (d) a failure to develop style, and (e) an excessive passion for novelty. Observing that it is difficult to define excellence or the sublime, Longinus (OTS, VIII: 8) proceeds to identify five ways by which authors may pursue the sublime. These revolve around the matters of (a) fully developing one’s ideas, (b) invoking emotional sentiments appropriate to the text being developed, (c) striving for carefully controlled images through figures of thought and figures of speech, (d) pursuing nobility of phrase, and (e) attending to overall effects of dignity and elevation. Then, after observing that emotionality is not a requisite for sublimity (OTS, VIII: 2–4), Longinus illustrates these notions by invoking an assortment of Greek authors prior to focusing more directly on amplification. Stating that amplification (OTS, XI: 1–XIII: 1) is commonly achieved by the piling up of related phrases pertaining to particular topics, exaggerating the matters at hand, and stressing specific elements in sustained detail, Longinus differentiates amplification from sublimity. Amplification may emphasize quantity or matters of presence in various ways, but it does not guarantee grandeur. Likewise, elevation or sublimity sometimes may be achieved through direct or compact expressions. Longinus also notes that although amplification emphasizes particular things, amplification is not the same as providing proof for something [some text is lost]. Longinus (OTS, XIII: 2–XIV: 3) then proposes another route to sublimity. He suggests that those who zealously imitate the great authors (i.e., particular Greek historians, poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers) of

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the past will find much enabling inspiration. Then, seemingly finding inspiration in his own suggestions, Longinus in an exceptionally eloquent and instructive passage encourages contemporary authors to ask themselves not only what certain classical authors would say in particular situations but also how these classical authors would assess the particular productions of present day authors and their associates. By adopting the viewpoints of these classical scholars, it is anticipated that contemporary authors might develop text that is more fitting for all times: We, too, then, when we at working at some passage that demands sublimity of thought and expression, should do well to form in our hearts the question, ‘‘How perchance would Homer have said this, how would Plato or Demosthenes have made it sublime or Thucydides in his history?’’ Emulation will bring those great characters before our eyes, and like guiding stars they will lead our thoughts to the ideal standards of perfection. Still more will this be so, if we give our minds the further hint, ‘‘How would Homer or Demosthenes, had either been present, have listened to this passage of mine? How would it have affected them?’’ Great indeed is the ordeal, if we propose such a jury and audience as this to listen to our own utterances and make believe that we are submitting our work to the scrutiny of such superhuman witnesses and judges. Even more stimulating would it be to add, ‘‘If I write this, how would all posterity receive it?’’ But if a man shrinks at the very thought of saying anything that exceeds the comprehension of his own time, then must all the conceptions of that man’s nature be like some blind, half-formed embryo, all too abortive for the life of posthumous fame. (Longinus, OTS, XIV: 1–3 [Fyfe, trans.])

In an immediately following passage, Longinus provides a succinct but compelling commentary on the centrality of images in poetic endeavor: Weight, grandeur, and energy in writing are very largely produced, dear pupil, by the use of ‘‘image.’’ (That at least is what some people call the actual mental pictures.) For the term Imagination is applied in general to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word has now come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience. That imagination means one thing in oratory and another in poetry you will yourself detect, and also that the object of poetry is to enthrall, of prose writing to present things vividly, though both indeed aim at this latter and at excited feeling. (Longinus, OTS, XV: 1–2 [Fyfe, trans.])

Clearly appreciating parallels between poetics and rhetoric, Longinus (OTS, XV: 8–12), notes that while poets often can exceed the limits of credibility in invoking the imagination, rhetoricians have the task of forging a highly believable version of reality in the instances in which they pursue judgments. It is through the use of the imagination in rhetoric that speakers may not only convince audiences of the viability of their claims but also more completely direct their minds and actions.

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Focusing on the production of images in other people’s imaginations, Longinus (OTS, XVI) embarks on what will be an extended consideration of invoking ‘‘figures’’ (of thought, of speech) in pursuing the grandeur associated with sublimity.13 Noting that the apparent or deliberate use of figures tends to arouse suspicion on the part of audiences (as in concerns with deception, misrepresentation, and treachery through image manipulation), Longinus claims that figures are most effective when they are concealed by the speaker or author and the effects appear to emerge more naturally.14 In addition to building on the familiar or the taken for granted, Longinus notes the value of ‘‘figures of question and answer,’’ wherein the speakers or authors raise questions and, then, offer answers as if these were coming from other sources. Likewise, speakers may introduce flashes of emotion, possibly amidst a series of seemingly disconnected phrases or instances of repetition and vivid presentation, often in rapid order, as subterfuge for projecting particular images that the author wishes to convey. Longinus also references ‘‘inversion,’’ wherein words or phrases are deliberately presented out of their usual order to create certain effects. Here, as well, the emphasis is on generating figures (and images) that appear natural or spontaneous rather than planned or contrived. Subsequently, Longinus (OTS, XXIII) suggests that authors consider the effects of accumulation (by invoking ‘‘figures of many cases’’), variation or differences, and building statements to climaxes as devices for making one’s images more compelling. Longinus (OTS, XXIV) also observes that the changing of terms of reference from singular to plural and vice-versa may generate stronger images in some cases. Longinus (OTS, XXV) further indicates that authors may achieve stronger images of things from the past by redefining audience’s notions of time, as when events from the past are recast or transposed in ways that give them a heightened sense of immediacy. Somewhat relatedly Longinus (OTS, XVI) notes that authors may be more able to fully engage audiences in their presentations by addressing them more directly and singularly at certain points in the text (as in ‘‘This is important, don’t you think?’’). Longinus (OTS, XXVII) then considers authors’ abilities to assume the roles of the specific characters of whom they were speaking (wherein authors suddenly begin to personify the very characters that they had earlier been discussing as third parties).

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Next, Longinus (OTS, XXVIII–XXIX) attends to ornamentation, wherein one dresses up one’s words and phrases (as in ‘‘Gilding the Lily’’). While acknowledging some gains to be made in this manner, Longinus also cautions readers about the risks of excessive ornamentation (lest it have the effect of flattening, trivializing, or dulling the message). After noting that beautiful words (as in majestic terms) are to be used in contexts befitting their applications [some text is lost here], Longinus (OTS, XXXI) observes that vulgar words also may be strategically employed to create certain, more compelling images. Longinus (OTS, XXXII) subsequently considers the use of metaphors, noting the particular potency of these comparative figures as image-shaping devices. He also acknowledges the advantages that can accrue to authors who invoke sustained sets of metaphors (themes) in dealing with commonplace descriptive matters. Still, like other figures that writers may use, Longinus cautions that an excessive use of metaphors tends to render texts ineffectual. Then, in a substantial shift of emphasis, Longinus (OTS, XXXIII) asks whether (in developing poetic materials or prose) it is more desirable for authors to pursue grandeur with some flaws or to strive for impeccable precision while developing material of a more mediocre content. In developing his answer, Longinus notes that whereas an emphasis on precision often results in triviality, grand projects inevitably result in some failings. He also observes, somewhat ironically, that while the beautiful qualities of texts soon fade from memory, people often dwell on the imperfections they find in others’ works. Still, noting that technical merits in themselves do not constitute greatness, Longinus argues that greater projects should be preferred for their nobility of enterprise. Later, Longinus (OTS, XXXVI) makes the argument that flaws are to be considered in proportion to authors’ overall accomplishments in developing their texts. After this commentary on precision and grandeur [some missing text], Longinus (OTS, XXXVIII) addresses the use of hyperboles (wherein matters are particularistically stretched and reshaped) in generating images. Again, he emphasizes, figures have the greatest effect when they are introduced in manners that appear to have been more natural in their development. Longinus (OTS, XXXIX–XL) turns next to the arrangement of the contents of one’s texts. First, he encourages authors to be attentive to the ordering of their words and the harmony they generate therein. Then, Longinus stresses the overall configuration of the passages that authors assemble in developing their text. Longinus observes that even less adequate authors can produce

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superior products by attending to the overall composition of their works and the verbal carpentry entailed in generating the product they produce. As an extension of the overall effect, Longinus (OTS, XLI) next cautions authors to be mindful of the overall flow or rhythm of their texts. While encouraging authors to avoid weak or disruptive flows, as well as superficial jingles, he also discourages authors from developing rhythms that are so pronounced that they detract audiences from the message being developed. Some last bits of instruction (OTS, XLII–XLIII) involve cautions about being overly brief, avoiding the use of trivial words to describe grand events, and becoming diverted from more central themes by attending to marginal matters. Longinus (OTS, XLIV) next laments the general decline of sublimity. While noting that many have claimed that democracy is the inspiration of noble minds, Longinus questions the integrity of this claim. Contending that the emphasis (in his democratic era) is on the love of money (and greed thereof ) rather than concerns with dignity or virtue, Longinus also notes that even philosophy, as it is presently practiced, offers no way out. Thus, rather than being inspired to achieve excellence, human minds are wasting away through insidious neglect. Following his brief commentary on the dangers of avarice, Longinus indicates that he will next address emotionality. He says that he has written on emotionality before [no available earlier text] and sees the topic as one that is closely connected with the pursuit of sublimity. [The rest of the text is lost .] As practitioners in the art of poetics, the Latin author Horace and the Greek author Longinus provide instructive ethnohistorical statements on the construction of fictionalized materials and the quest for excellence in the materials that poets and other authors might prepare for their readers. Our third author, Plutarch, adds yet another dimension to the ways in which people might engage written text. Focusing more explicitly on the roles of those consuming these texts and even more specifically on those who might instruct others on how to read text, Plutarch acknowledges the intersubjective, reflective, purposive, instructed, and enacted aspects of written communications.

PLUTARCH Plutarch of Chaeronea biographer or historian presents pairs of famous texts, Plutarch discusses

(c46-125), a Greek author, is best known as a of sorts because of a series of texts wherein he Greek and Roman figures in Lives.15 In this set of matched sets of Greek and Roman figures whose

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situations are similar in certain respects (as in founders of states, lawgivers, conquerors, and rhetoricians). Still, whereas Plutarch’s Lives attend to the circumstances, preparations, and activities of prominent historical characters, Plutarch seldom is identified as a bona fide historian. Indeed, his work has a notably pronounced fictional as well as an apparent moralistic quality. Thus, these statements are guided by considerations of people’s moral choices and are defined by Plutarch’s evaluations of their activities rather than by more sustained (pluralist) scholarly analysis. Plutarch, himself, is quite attentive to these matters and says that he writes about lives and moralities rather than historical facts. Nonetheless, focusing on well-known individuals and presenting his cases in a more entertaining style, Plutarch’s Lives generated much attention following the rediscovery of his texts in Western Europe during the 16th century Renaissance. For our purposes, as students of the human condition, some materials from another collection of texts, Plutarch’s Moralia,16 are considerably more relevant. Although also presented in somewhat popularistic and moralistic terms at times, the topics in Moralia pertain more directly to the study of human knowing and acting. These include considerations of education and philosophy, and friendship, love, and interpersonal relationships, as well as emotionality, religion, morality, and character. Still, in keeping with the statements on poetics developed by Horace and Longinus, it is most appropriate in the present context to concentrate on Plutarch’s commentary on how young people should study poetry.17 Even though this text is often regarded as a minor, interim statement that simply deals with people’s education on route to the more serious study of philosophy, Plutarch’s How the Young Man Should Study Poetry is particularly important for appreciating (a) the ways that people consume or experience poetry as well as (b) the implications of fictional materials and instructional emphases for the development of people’s characters.18 Plutarch does not conduct a sustained ethnographic study of how people read or come to know written text, but he still provides some very valuable materials on how both instructors and students might engage poetics in more direct and enabling terms. Relatedly, Plutarch suggests a number of worthwhile themes that contemporary scholars might pursue in greater ethnographic detail from the viewpoints of both instructors and students. Thus, whereas Plutarch’s statement is intendedly instructional, he generates considerable insight into the ways that people (as instructors and students) enter into the processes of interpreting, assessing, and learning from all manners of poetic text.

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It is apparent that Plutarch shares many sympathies with Plato as a theologian and moral advocate. However, Plutarch does not assume the censorial postures toward poetics and poets that Plato’s spokespeople adopt in Republic and Laws. Hence, instead of censoring or outlawing poetic expression, Plutarch envisions poetics as a communicative medium. Nevertheless, poetic material is to be qualified through an instructional, interpretive process. For Plutarch, thus, poetics are to be selectively engaged by instructors in order to (a) help young people acquire character (as in virtue, bravery, and self-control), (b) develop wisdom and judgment, (c) achieve an understanding of the situations of poets as well as the particular people and other objects that poets represent, and (d) prepare people for the study of philosophy more generally. Plutarch begins his statement (How the Young Man Should Study Poetics [HSP]: 14) with an observation that while fictional texts can generate pleasure on the part of young people, it is important to instruct young people on how to find inspiration and utility from poetics. Noting that it is virtually impossible to prevent young people from accessing fictional texts, Plutarch (HSP: 15) reasons that it is essential to ensure that these materials are engaged as appropriately as possible. Thus, rather, than keeping prospective philosophers from reading poetry, Plutarch (HSP: 15–16) envisions poetry as a resource to be used in finding value in the things that young people enjoy and to teach them to identify those materials that are not of value. Plutarch (HSP, 16) then explicitly states that poets tell lies. He notes that it is typically easier for authors to develop fiction rather than pursue the truth. Audiences, also, are likely to prefer fiction to more authentic representations. Indeed, Plutarch emphasizes, it is essential that readers be acutely mindful of the seductive powers of poets; not only with respect to deliberate deceptions but also the inadvertent fabrications that poets may develop in highly compelling manners. Plutarch (HSP, 17) follows this observation with illustrations of the fictions that Homer and Sophocles knowingly presented about the gods. For reasons of this sort, Plutarch (HSP: 17–18) insists that newcomers be instructed on poetics as an imitative art and be encouraged to be explicitly attentive to the matter of assessing the plausibility of the imitations that poets generate. Plutarch also reminds readers that poets need not approve of or intend to promote the things they represent. In some cases, thus, Plutarch (HSP: 19) states that poets sometimes qualify their depictions of characters, actions, and events by directly interjecting critical commentary. Likewise, in a manner paralleling philosophers, Plutarch

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(HSP: 20) notes that poets may intend that their text be used as a means for condemning or encouraging specific kinds of activities as well as a means of instructing people on particular matters. Still, an important task for instructors is to help readers distinguish authentic imitations from poetical attempts to astonish and excite readers. Where authors do not adequately clarify these matters, Plutarch (HSP: 21) says that it is advisable for instructors to draw explicit attention to these limitations. Another tactic (HSP: 22) for dealing with troublesome poetic text is for instructors to provide synonyms, explanations, or other clarifications of particular words or passages. Then, addressing poetic representations of the gods, Plutarch (HSP: 23) illustrates the sorts of license (as in words, phrases, and diverse meanings) that poets assume in matters of theology. Plutarch (HSP: 24) then observes that readers need to be mindful of the ways poets use words in reference to other topics as well. Readers should attend to the ways in which poets use particular words for different purposes and consider other words that would better characterize the specific matters being depicted. Shifting frames somewhat, Plutarch (HSP: 25) then observes that the alluring feature of poetics is its attentiveness to authenticity. However, he stresses that it is the mixing of truth and falsehood that results in astonishment and enjoyment. Because of poets’ abilities to co-mingle authenticity and fabrication, Plutarch stresses the importance of readers developing a sense of skepticism about the materials they encounter. This skepticism (Plutarch, HSP: 26) not only is to encompass the poets as authors but is to be extended also to the characters those whose lives and activities are being depicted. Plutarch further encourages his readers (as is his own habit) to pointedly invoke moral judgments on the characters of whose activities they learn in these narrations. Plutarch (HSP: 27) defines a goal of instruction to induce young people to imitate and develop preferences for more virtuous characters and activities. Relatedly, Plutarch (HSP: 28) instructs readers to judge the virtuous and evil qualities of the characters that poets present and ask whether the acts and dispositions of the characters are consistent. Then, after indicating the desirability of those reading poetic materials to monitor their own behavior and to quest for moderation in their own characters, Plutarch (HSP: 29) notes the instructional value of attending to the ways in which different people (societies as well as individuals) deal with challenging situations (as in bravery in warfare). Next, having observed that individual readers may appreciate notably different aspects of any poetic endeavor (e.g., novel or unusual events vs.

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elegant expression), Plutarch (HSP: 30–32) focuses on the particular use of poetry for generating character, as in managing one’s anger or being more attentive to the value of forethought. Approached in this manner, and attending to matters of civility and diplomacy as well as bravery in community contexts, Plutarch stresses the value of poetics for people learning valuable lessons of life. With appropriate guidance, thus, young people can gain instruction and wisdom even from materials of more unsavory sorts. Moving toward a conclusion, Plutarch (HSP: 35) again stresses the lessons of character that may be achieved through an instructionally enabled approach to poetics. In particular, Plutarch encourages an emphasis on moderation, accompanied by magnanimity of character. Hence, while condemning things that are evil, Plutarch stresses the importance of people dealing with life’s obstacles, challenges, and defeats with determined but controlled and congenial dispositions. Then, making a fleeting reference to Plato’s notions of virtue, Plutarch (HSP: 36–37) concludes by stating that tutelage of this sort in poetics will prepare students for studies in philosophy.19

IN PERSPECTIVE Although their works have long been valued for their artistic and instructional qualities by scholars in literary circles, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch are almost unknown to educators, philosophers, and social scientists. However, when examined on their own, and especially in concert with one another, the texts discussed herein not only provide some very insightful materials on the ways in which people develop and engage fictional texts but also have a much broader relevance for the study of human knowing and acting. By attending to the ways that people actively engage the symbolizing or meaning-making process as authors,20 instructors, and readers, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch introduce materials that have important implications for a pragmatist sociology of knowledge. Some may be tempted to dismiss these works as the quaint productions of the classical-Roman era. However, when situated within a broader historical context, amidst considerations of representing human knowing and acting in poetic terms – from Plato (Republic, Laws, Ion) and Aristotle (Poetics, Rhetoric) onward to John Dewey (1934, Art as Experience), Louise Rosenblatt (1978, The Reader, The Text, The Poem), and Becker (1982,

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Art Worlds) – the relevance of these materials from Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch for education, philosophy, and the human sciences becomes even more compelling. That these texts were developed almost 2,000 years ago is even more valuable since they allow contemporary scholars to develop transhistorical and transcultural comparisons of a highly enabling sort. Moreover, because of the mixes of intentioned authenticity and playful fabrication as well as deliberate persuasive endeavor and inadvertent ambiguity that authors may invoke or otherwise generate in the production of written texts, along with the associated challenges of interpreting, comprehending, and utilizing these materials on the part of consumers and instructors, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch provide an invaluable set of reference points with which scholars of all ilks may reflect on their own productions and those of their more immediate associates as well as the materials developed within their respective academic fields.

NOTES 1. Briefly expressed, symbolic interactionism (see Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969; Strauss, 1993; Prus, 1996, 1997, 1999 Prus & Grills, 2003); may be characterized by the following premises. Human group life is (1) intersubjective (is contingent on community-based, linguistic interchange); (2) knowingly problematic (with respect to ‘‘the known’’ and ‘‘the unknown’’); (3) object-oriented (wherein things constitute the contextual and operational essence of the humanly known environment); (4) multiperspectival (as in viewpoints, conceptual frameworks, or notions of reality); (5) reflective (minded, purposive, deliberative); (6) sensory/embodied and (knowingly) materialized (acknowledging human capacities for sensation and motion, as well as practical (enacted, embodied) physiological limitations and fragilities); (7) activitybased (as implied in the formulative (engaging) process of people doing things with respect to objects); (8) negotiable (whereby people may anticipate, influence, and resist others); (9) relational (denoting particular bonds or affiliations); and (10) processual (as in emergent, ongoing, or temporally developed). 2. While building extensively on the pragmatist components of the works of Plato (c. 420-348 BCE) and Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE), the larger project attends to a much wide range of classical Greek (c. 700-300 BCE) and Roman (c. 200 BCE-500 CE) scholarship. Thus, in addition to poetics, attention also has been directed toward pragmatist motifs in rhetoric, ethnohistory, religious studies, and philosophy. See Prus (2004) for a conceptual overview of the larger project. 3. In developing this statement, I have used the term ‘‘poetics’’ more generically to refer to a broad range of fictionalized discourse (including rhymes, prose, theatrical productions, and the like) as well as the subcategory of materials that comment on poetic materials (as in criticism, analysis, and advice). 4. Although the Roman Empire existed in various conditions (sizes, continuities, and states of coherence and disarray), one might, somewhat generously, locate the

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classical Roman era in the period c. 200 BCE-500CE. The division of Rome into West Rome (Latin) and East Rome (Greek) took place in 286 CE. 5. Thus, while Cicero (c. 106-43 BCE) openly laments the limitations of the Latin language when compared to the analytically rich Greek language and strives to promote a more distinctive Latin-based scholarship, it should be noted that welleducated Romans of Cicero’s day would be fluent in spoken and written Greek as well as Latin. Although presently known almost exclusively as an orator or rhetorician, Cicero also is attentive to a considerable range of issues pertinent to a pragmatist analysis of human knowing and acting (see Prus, 2006). 6. Whereas the Latin literature would dominate the Roman Empire and become especially consequential in the development of Western European thought (and scholarship), the residues of classical-Greek scholarship (albeit notably constrained by various theological emphases) would provide the essential base for education in Eastern Europe as well as the southeastern Mediterranean arena. 7. It should not be assumed that the popular, 16th century Renaissance provided an adequate representation of classical-Greek scholarship. It did not. Indeed, some of the most consequential materials of a humanist, philosophic sort from the Greek, Roman, and (subsequent) Latin eras were largely ignored in the more expressive, poetical, artistic emphases of the 16th century Renaissance. Also see Durkheim (1904–1905). 8. Because this statement focuses on texts that deal with human knowing and acting in more explicit and extensive terms, little attention is given to some particularly wellknown Latin poets, such as Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus; c. 254-184 BCE), Terrence (Publius Terentius Afer; c. 185-159), and Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro; 70-19 BCE). Like the Greek poets that they imitate (e.g., Homer and Menander), these Roman authors present people as acting and interacting essences who engage the world in purposive, multiplistic, reflective, and linguistically enabled terms. Still, like the Greek poets they imitate, these Latin authors appear more intent on entertaining and/or moralizing with audiences than describing and analyzing human group life in more overt terms. 9. Readers are referred to Gilbert (1940), Dukore (1974), Kennedy (1989), and Sidnell (1991), amongst others, for a greater sense of the continuity of classicalGreek thought in Western poetics. 10. For a fuller appreciation of Aristotle’s relevance for pragmatist scholarship, see Prus (2003, 2004, 2007). 11. Of his many satires, Horace’s ‘‘An Apology for Satire’’ (Dunsany & Oakley, 1961, pp. 153–157) is among the most instructive from a pragmatist viewpoint. Horace considers the ways in which things are defined and known, including poetic productions. Although he does not pursue this matter very fully, Horace asks whether satirists, whose texts more closely resemble everyday discourse, should be called ‘‘poets.’’ Relatedly, he asks whether comedy, which is also essentially prose, ought to be recognized as poetry. Still, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of ‘‘An Apology for Satire’’ is Horace’s (Dunsany & Oakley, 1961, pp. 156–157) explicit commentary of the role of his father as a moral guide. Indicating how his father anticipated, instructed, questioned, and advised him through an assortment of situations and behaviors, Horace credits his father with minimizing the misadventures and vices that Horace experienced in his formulative years. Even in this somewhat meandering poetic rendition, Horace’s

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attentiveness to the persuasive (speech-related) role of the other for the knowing and acting of the target is unmistakable. Horace’s ‘‘Satire on Satire’’ also offers some valuable insights on the human condition. As Horace observes, since virtually everyone has failings or vices of one or other sorts, anyone could be selected as the target for satire or derision of some sort. 12. I am grateful to W. Hamilton Fyfe (1932) for his translation of Longinus, On the Sublime, as well as his introductory commentary on this text. Although authorship commonly is attributed to Longinus or Dionysius, the exact source as well as the broader dating (c. 100-300 CE) of this text is uncertain. For convenience, I will refer to the author as Longinus. 13. Readers familiar with Goffman’s (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life may appreciate the notably sophisticated analysis of impression management of poetic endeavor that Longinus provides. Also see Horace’s concerns with image work on the part of poets and Plutarch’s attempts to prepare students for the mixtures of fabrication and authenticity associated with poetical ventures. 14. This attempt to introduce more compelling images to an unexpecting audience may help account for some of the more intriguing, elusive, playful, and mystical effects of poetic and rhetorical endeavor. By contrast, much scientific explanation and pragmatist instruction (e.g., following the style of Aristotle) attempts to be clear, direct, and openly accessible. 15. Eighteen of Plutarch’s 22 sets of parallel lives have survived to the present time. See Perrin’s (1914) translation of Plutarch’s Lives (11 volumes in the Loeb series). 16. See the Loeb (15 volumes) translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. 17. I am indebted to Frank Cole Babbit’s (1927) translation of How the Young Man Should Study Poetry in Vol. I of Plutarch’s Moralia. 18. Those familiar with Emile Durkheim’s (1902–1903) Moral Education may appreciate some noteworthy parallels in Plutarch’s and Durkheim’s emphases on the development of character as a socially enabled process. Blumer’s (1933) study of the ways that young people experience movies (i.e., interpret, reconsider, and integrate aspects of film fiction into their activities and senses of self) is also instructive in this respect. 19. Like his statement on studying poetry, Plutarch’s somewhat related text, ‘‘On Listening to Lectures’’ (LL) also considers the ways in which people may engage roles as students and instructors. Still, whereas HSP is more exclusively directed toward instructors, LL seems intended to be read by students as well as instructors. Amongst other things, Plutarch uses LL to alert readers to differing kinds of academic instruction; to encourage students to distinguish between sophistical instruction (as in shallow, fluffy, but often popular instructors who deliver superficial materials in more pleasing and flattering styles) and more sincere, demanding instructors. Somewhat relatedly, Plutarch also indicates a number of ways that people engage student roles with respect to levels of dedication, styles of participation, and modes of self-expression. Attending to the mutuality that undergirds the student–instructor role, Plutarch (with some underlying frustration from personal experience as a lecturer) encourages students to be attentive and to strive to glean as much as they can by pleasantly, but actively, engaging the role of a learner. Responsibly assuming the role of listener, thus, is seen as an important step in the process of becoming a more genuine scholar.

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20. Albeit focused on the development of historical accounts, Lucian of Samosata’s (120–200 CE) account of writing history (1959) offers some instructive parallels with the texts featured here (see Prus, 2008).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Beert Verstraete for his thoughtful discussions with me on these and related texts. I also would like to thank Norman Denzin for his thoughtful editorial assistance.

REFERENCES Aristophanes [c. 450-385 BCE]. (1938). The plays of Aristophanes (Introduction and Collected Works). In: Whitney Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr. (Eds), The complete Greek drama (Vol. II, pp. 421–1116). New York: Random House. Aristotle [c. 384-322 BCE]. (1984). The complete works of Aristotle. Jonathan Barnes (Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Becker, H. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blumer, H. (1933). Movies and conduct (Reprinted 1970. New York: ARNO). New York, NY: Macmillan. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. (Reprinted, 1986, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Burns, E. (1990). Character: Acting and being on the pre-modern stage. London: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin. Dukore, B. F. (1974). Dramatic theory and criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. New York, NY: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Durkheim, E. (1902–1903), (1961). Moral education. E. K. Wilson and H. Schnurer (Trans.). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1904–1905), (1977). The evolution of educational thought. P. Collins (Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gilbert, A. H. (1940). Literary criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press (1962). Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: AnchorDoubleday. Hesiod [c. 700 BCE]. (1988). Theogony and works and days. M. L. West (Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Homer [c. 700 BCE]. (1990). The Iliad. Robert Eagles (Trans.). with Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York: Penguin. Homer [c. 700 BCE]. (1991). The Odyssey. E. V. Rieu (Trans.). New York: Penguin. Horace [c. 65-8 BCE]. The Art of Poetry. pp. 287–304 in The Collected Works of Horace. L. Dusany and M. Oakley (Trans.). London: Dent. Kennedy, G. (1989). The Cambridge history of literary criticism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Longinus [c. 100 CE]. (1932). On the Sublime. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lucian [c.120-200]. (1959). How to Write History. K. Kilburn (Trans. in Vol. VI of) Lucian (VIII volumes). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1913). Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato [c. 427–347 BCE]. (1997). Plato: The collected works. J.M. Cooper (Ed.). Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Plutarch [c. 46-125]. (1914). Lives [11 volumes]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch [c. 46-125]. (1927). Moralia [15 volumes]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prus, R. (1996). Symbolic interaction and ethnographic research: Intersubjectivity and the study of human lived experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (1997). Subcultural mosaics and intersubjective realities: An ethnographic research agenda for pragmatizing the social sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (1999). Beyond the power mystique: Power as intersubjective accomplishment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Prus, R. (2003). Ancient precursors. In: T. R. Larry & J. H.-K. Nancy (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 19–38). New York, NY: Altamira Press. Prus, R. (2004). Symbolic interaction and classical Greek scholarship: Conceptual foundations, historical continuities, and transcontextual relevancies. The American Sociologist, 35(1), 5–33. Prus, R. (2006). In defense of knowing, in defense of doubting: Cicero engages totalizing skepticism, sensate materialism, and pragmatist realism in Academica. Qualitative Sociology Review, 2(3), 21–47. Prus, R. (2007). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: Laying the foundations for a pragmatist consideration of human knowing and acting. Qualitative Sociology Review, 3(2), 5–45. Prus, R. (2008). Writing history for eternity: Lucian’s (c.120–200) contributions to pragmatist scholarship and ethnographic analysis. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 37(1), 62–78. Prus, R., & Grills, S. (2003). The deviant mystique: Involvements, realities, and regulation. Westport, CN: Praeger. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Sidnell, M. J. (1991). Sources of dramatic theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, A. (1993). Continual permutations of action. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

IDENTITIES AND INVOLUTES: SOME REFLECTIONS ON NARRATIVE ETHICS Regina Hewitt ABSTRACT This paper proposes that narrative inquiry adopt the concept of the ‘‘involute’’ – a passage stored in memory from reading that is later enlisted as a problem-solving device – to further the goal of understanding the identity work performed through reading and writing. Three related examples are given – one from Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenthcentury essayist who coined the term and used an involute in fashioning himself as a scholar; one from Jane Addams, who used an involute from De Quincey to separate the role of the social worker from that of the literary critic; and one from the contemporary New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, who used an involute to create a socially engaged identity for literary researchers. Considering these examples, I argue that involutes offer insights into the connections between selves and others, words and acts, past and present that should advance interdisciplinary study and advocacy of morally responsible discourse.

[M]y main effort is to find ways of talking about the ethical quality of the experience of narrative in itself. What kind of company are we keeping as we read or listen? (Booth, 1988, p. 10) Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 30, 105–130 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)30007-6

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[T]he decision to treat stories as a moral discourse simply places narrative in the service of an objective that is different from the analysis of social factsy [They become] a means for being with others. (Bochner, 2001, pp. 140, 142)

INTRODUCTION The two epigraphs above call attention to the interest in ethics that saturates narrative inquiry throughout the fields – sociology, anthropology, communications research, literary, and cultural studies – in which it is now practiced and studied. As chapters on both ‘‘Writing’’ and ‘‘Narrative Inquiry’’ in the Handbook of Qualitative Research point out, people pursuing these practices are most often concerned ‘‘with the development of ethical selves,’’ with openness to others, and with replacing oppressive and exclusive plots with more respectful and inclusive storylines (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, pp. 959, 972; Chase, 2005, pp. 667–669). Presenting narrative inquiry as an evolving mode, however, Chase identifies several areas that might benefit from expansion or amplification. An ethical thread runs through these areas, making them all, to some extent about the creation of responsible selves and the fulfillment of responsibilities to others. For example, narrative researchers need to learn more about non-Western concepts of self and other, about the nature of identities and relationships in virtual environments, and about how and why any particular story mobilizes any particular audience to work for social change (pp. 670–671). In addition to the large and collective goals for development that Chase identifies, I suggest that narrative inquiry could also benefit from more attention to how and why individuals selectively make what they read part of the identities by which they characterize themselves, plot episodes in their lives, and present themselves to others. To be sure, much work in narrative theory itself as well as in reader response criticism and autoethnography has already shed light on these processes. For instance, Bakhtin (1981, 1986) has revealed how the uniqueness of utterances makes reading a creative and ‘‘dialogic’’; Fish (1980) has located individual readers in ‘‘interpretive communities’’ that condition responses; Booth (1988) has conceptualized individual response as a comparative process of ‘‘coduction’’ and described reading itself in terms that evoke role-taking (points to which I return later). With concern for the power relations involved in telling and listening, Maines (1991, 1993) has analyzed how individual stories may be plotted along or against collective narratives;1 Richardson (1997) has indicted the ways in which culturally dominant stories tend to suppress other voices and

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has encouraged the expression of collective stories that elude this control; along with Ellis (2004) and Bochner (2001), Richardson (1997, 2006) has emphasized the importance of empathy and identification by which readers recognize another’s story as their own and may even develop the solidarity with others characteristic of the social movements.2 To this body of work, I would contribute the concept of the ‘‘involute’’ – a ‘‘personal link’’ between lived and textual experience that has recently been recovered from the work of the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey (Burwick, 2001b). Involutes can help us describe and explore the relationships that develop between selves and others – whether the others are textually or physically present – and thus can further our understanding of the identity work performed through reading and writing. I find one opening for the term and concept of the involute in Richardson’s and Lockridge’s Travels with Ernest (2004). Throughout the chapter on Copenhagen, Richardson and Lockridge have been using recollections of their reading to work out the problems of professional and personal responsibility they confronted in that setting. At the end of the chapter, they talk directly about the significance of remembered literature. Marveling at Ernest’s penchant for ‘‘spout[ing] y quotes,’’ Laurel asks ‘‘where those lines come fromy . [W]hat does it mean to you for literary quotes just to pop into your head? y Do you then see the world through those words? Or do those words describe the world to you?y Do the words enlarge the world? Settle it in a different place?’’ (pp. 124–125). Ernest begins answering hesitantly, ‘‘I don’t know y I’m not surey .’’ but then reflects that the quotes may position the world ‘‘in the same way a myth deepens and clarifies raw experience. The Myth of Sisyphus. Hamlet. The Little Mermaid. Myth and literature help order and direct your life, so you’re not just traveling fecklessly about. They’re like a map. We’re able to map ourselves onto literature and onto myth’’ (p. 125). In resolving the question with the map metaphor, Richardson and Lockridge generalize about their use of literary recollections and draw the chapter to a close. A new dimension of this inquiry might be opened up if a vocabulary for this kind of socio-literary engagement existed. Richardson’s and Lockridge’s dialog shows that we do not yet have terms for describing how particular quotations can function when particular readers evoke them in particular situations. The lack of terms reflects, perhaps, the low value assigned to such reading in traditional disciplines. The process is too individualistic for both sociology, which until recently valorized verifiable scientific results, and for literary studies which until recently valorized stable unified texts. Involutes supply some missing terms and thus serve the ethical goals of

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interdisciplinary narrative inquiry, which seeks to understand reading and writing as socially situated behaviors. Involutes are, by definition, problem-solving devices, which show us how people use what they’ve read to interpret new experiences. They are part of the reorganization and reinterpretation processes that Richardson and Lockridge later described through a shelves-and-boxes metaphor: Laurel: y [W]hen you’re reading, time and space become one. You are connected to others historically – those in your space and not in your space, those alive and those who have never lived off the pagey . Ernest: The past can seem to stand still, unlike the present as we live it. Then, when we write about the past we set it back in motion, but in whatever order we may choose, connecting dots to reveal hidden similarities, camouflaged patterns of cause and effect – y. [and we] rearrange [the patterns] together on a shelf. Laurel: That process of putting things on a shelf offers to others a strategy for reshelving, if you will, the boxes and jars that have constituted their livesy. [S]eeing structure helps readers make connections to and in their own lives, too.’’ (2004, pp. 144–145)

The value of involutes lies in their helping us to see the structures that people are using to make sense of particular occurrences. They can contribute to interactionist studies – in the spirit of Perinbanayagam’s Presence of Self (2000) – that are interested in how imaginative encounters become part of the self and therefore part of that self’s future interactions. And because involutes are individualistic, varying from person to person and from situation to situation, they illuminate narrative’s ability to resist uniformity and universalizing (characteristics pointed out by Chase (2005, p. 667, and Kroeber, 1992, p. 9), yet they show that individuals are nevertheless ‘‘universal singulars’’ (to borrow a term from Denzin, 1997, p. 39) – i.e., individuals whose personal experiences reflect collective concerns. I will elaborate on involutes primarily through two related examples – one from De Quincey, who conceptualized them, and one from Jane Addams, who used an involute from De Quincey in a crucial passage in Twenty Years at Hull-House ([1910] 1990).3 In addition to illustrating the concept, the examples perform historical recovery and redemption. Since narrative is involved with reordering the past, reconsidering De Quincey’s and Addams’s stories recasts the relationship present-day scholars have to these significant figures from the histories of literature and sociology. It reveals how De Quincey’s and Addams’s identities were conditioned by tensions between literature and science, escapism and activism, selfishness and altruism that remain part of the ‘‘legacy’’ still influencing attitudes toward cultural studies – attitudes that kept involutes from receiving much attention

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during the past century.4 By recovering De Quincey’s confidence in literature and redeeming Addams’s skepticism about it, present-day scholars can resist the binary oppositions of the