Sociology Chat_

	Hello! Welcome to Sociology Chat. I'm Lisa and this is my co-host Emerald. How is everyone doing this evening?
	Meow.
	Good evening.
	Hello.
	Hi!
	HELLO
	Collins, turn off your capslock.
	Hello. I'm still haunted by the muses, thanks for asking.
	According to those who have authority over such matters, it seems that I am dead.
	It doesn't matter, welcome to the discussion. Our topic tonight is "Accounting for Interactions and Encounters in Society."
	Ironic that we're using the internet, huh? Given some of our guests' feelings about bodily co-presence?
	Indeed, without communication through visual readings of body language, it is difficult to frame and categorize. People cannot ‘read’ each other, and as a result, role taking and self-presentations become awkward, making all normatizing efforts problematic (159).
	Really? So how does internet chat seem to 'work', then?
	When we fail to see others, we imagine what they look like and what visual cues they give. The more emotions are aroused in an interaction, the more we try to visualize the facial expressions and body movements of others (1).
	You use your imagination, in other words.
	Yes, but even in real world encounters, people must work at face-to-face contact to keep it on track, as can be seen in the constant use of rituals and in the animation of vocalizations (3).
	Yes, exactly. When human bodies are together in the same place, there is a physical attunement: currents of feeling, a sense of wariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere (34).
	I believe the Internet, like journalism, enables people to deal with life more and more at second hand (31).
	Why might people want to experience life second hand?
	Humans are a primate -- really just an evolved ape -- and this fact has important implications for how humans interact. Interaction does not transcend biology. (28)
	Humans are more than just animals! Human culture and intentional activity have to so large an extent taken over from what is instinctual in other animals that it makes no sense to think of human beings in purely biological or animalistic terms... (23)
	What's so bad about being "just" an animal?
	Nothing's bad about it. It just influences the way that sociologists understand social interaction.
	For example, I argue that focused encounters involve considerably more effort for most individuals than do unfocused encounters, and the reason for this has much to do with our biology as an evolved ape (66).
	Freud was right about one thing, at least: Humans are neurotic creatures. Social encounters operate against the background of diffuse anxiety, control of which suggests itself as the most generalized motivational origin of human conduct (54).
	So, do interactions/encounters create anxiety, or is aniexty part of the general human condition, which in turn affects interactions?
	Well, we do live in an age in which neurotic anxiety has mounted out of all proportion...
	Primate or otherwise, the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (25).
	Tell me about it.
	What about the role of agency?
	The structural properties of social systems are like the walls of a room from which an individual cannot escape but inside which he or she is ble to move around at whim (174).
	Move about at whim? Look around you! We are entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification! (189)
	That's one way to look at it, but I argue that this capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstarction is the source of modern man's power (31).
	If you mean man literally, Mr. Barrett, then you are correct. Capitalist industrialization removed grown children, grandparents, and nonfamily members from the household and sharply curtailed men's participation in family life (5).
	How does this affect interactions and encounters, Dr. Chodorow?
	Psychoanalysis provides a systemic, structural account of socialization and social reproduction. It suggests that major features of the social organization of gender are transmitted in and through those personalities produced by the structure of the institution--the family--in which children become gendered members of society (39).
	That sounds kind of deterministic...
	The critical point is this: because humans are apes, it is likely that they exhibit behavioral propensities for weak ties, loose and fluid social structures, personal autonomy, and individual freedom (57).
	Freedom? I disagree, due to the nature of IR chains.... because of the physiological effects of human propinquity, a physical attunement takes place during human interactions. This attunement allows for a focusing of energy -- and energy is the outcome of interaction rituals. The level of emotional energy, whether it is weak or strong, carries over from ritual chain to ritual chain.
	The ritualistic nature of these interactions implies a lack of agency. So our only agency lies in which interactions we choose to take part in?
	If you find that unpalatable, my structuration theory is based on the proposition that structure is always both enabling and constraining, in virtue of the inherent relation between structure and agency (and agency and power) (169).
	Structure doesn't seek to enable! The role of structure is to set up a new economy of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution, so that it should be neither too concentrated at certain privilege points, nor too divided between opposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogenous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body (80)...
	Meow?
	...Exercises, not signs: time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits… but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him... (129)
	And all this is merely in the normal routine of being a responsible citizen within a mass society (31)!
	MEOW! =(
	It's okay, Emerald. Nobody expects you to navigate mass society. You aren't even allowed out of the apartment, really.
	You see, the cat is imprisoned because power is being enacted on its person.
	She is able to move freely within the confines of the home, just like human actors are able to move freely within the constraints of structure. Furthermore, we can see that the structure is both constraining and enabling to her. The structure of her "society" surely enables her to carry out all sorts of productive cat tasks, whether those may be.
	Stop talking about me like I'm not in the room!!
	The "room"? What room? This is all merely text on a screen.
	Many humans (and cats, I guess) seem to understand cybersapce as a new spatial dimension.
	You know, night time was a 'frontier' of social activity as marked as any spatial frontiers have been. I suppose I mention this because cats can see in the dark.
	That's right, temporal frontiers, spatial frontiers, digital frontiers... cats know about these things. The cat race gained special collective knowledge after Schrödinger's dastardly experiments on my brethren. We could already see into other dimensions, but do you have any idea what it's like to experience being simultaneously alive and dead?
	I do. I may not be a cat, but I've done LSD. They call the feeling 'ego death'...
	Ah yes, the encounter with nothingness! What Foucault and the cat claim toexperience is exactly what most human beings spend their entire 'rational' lives trying to avoid.
	Emerald, I've told you, those were just thought experiments. We have to be careful not to cross the line between social theory and conspiracy theory! ...Anyway, everyone, to sum things up: How do you account for interactions and encounters in society?
	Structuration theory suggests that power can be both restrictive and enabling. Furthermore, it is in fact our agency that makes us human, because to be human is to be a purposive agent, who both has reasons for his or her activities and is able, if asked, to elaborate discursively upon those reasons (including lying about them) (3).
	Human beings, in their prototypical stage, were solitary creatures who preferred weak ties. After the evolutionarily advantageous addition of the neocortex, which allowed for the recogniziton of complex emotion signals, humans were able to form stronger social bonds, but still retain their primordial skittishness beneath it all. Thus encounters take a lot of face-to-face work, require bodily co-presence, and have the potential to result in social solidarity.
	Because the family is the core institution of our society, its psychodynamics ought to be interesting to sociologists. Furthermore, the concept of intentional socialization does not properly explain the reproduction of mothering in our society, because motherhood cannot be coerced; rather, certain psychanalystic processes produce outcomes on a social level.
	My theory is a theory of situations, where each situation is a stand-alone “interaction ritual.” As human beings move from one interaction ritual to the next, they gain or lose emotional energy depending on what happens in each sequential situation; these interactions thus form a chain, where emotional energy is carried over from one situation to the next. The emotional energy created in Ritual Situation A has the potential to alter the success and EE outcome of Ritual Situation B, and so on. Situations that yield high levels of EE also yield high levels of Durkheimian solidarity.
	Rationalization is driving us crazy. Our collective suppressed fear of death comes out in our interactions, in that when emotion does manifest, it is in the form of a vague, all encompassing anxiety. “With civilizations, as with individuals, the outer fact is often merely the explosion resulting from accumulated inner tension, the signs of which were plentifully present, though none of the persons concerned chose to heed them (25). In other words:
	Social interaction takes place under the strict watch of the Panopticon. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (205). We monitor one another while simultaneously being monitored by the state because of our modern infatuation with discipline and gaze.
	Well, there you have it. As with so many things in this world, the consensus is that there is no consensus...
	Verschrankung!
	Thank you and goodnight!_