Framing Social Interaction by Anders Persson

Author:Anders Persson [Persson, Anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367897246
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

Contingency: the social climate of public places and the transformation of the gaze

Contingency, certainty, ontological uncertainty, security, fear, risk, and trust are all frequent themes in late modern sociology and are usually connected to the modernisation of society and, in its wake, to, for example, individualisation, globalisation, rationalisation, commodification (see, e.g., Bauman, 1989, 2006, 2007; Beck, 1992 [1986]; Giddens, 1990). Goffman did not contribute to this particular sociological theorising – he died before the above-mentioned sociologists came to dominate the stage. But at the beginning of the 1970s a kind of contingency theme appears in his texts, e.g., in the chapter ‘Normal Appearances’ in his book Relations in Public, and then as a problematisation of the atmosphere of interaction in public places that connects ‘micro’- and ‘macro’-sociological perspectives. In this chapter, vulnerability is made up of a contingency at the ‘micro-level’ that is charged by chains of events from different places in society, such as plane hijackings, gang wars, and street violence, and that affects interaction – not least eye work – in public places.

The gaze has a special role when it comes to interaction in public places or places where strangers meet. One of the best-known historical works that deals with this theme is Norbert Elias’s study of the gradual civilising process of Western society during the most recent half millennium, where he argues that what has determined the civilising development of the West is people’s growing mutual dependence on each other combined with violence being largely removed from everyday social interplay. The growing mutual dependence, then, refers precisely to individuals who do not have close relationships with one another. When it comes to violence, argues Elias (1982, p. 238), this has been confined to barracks and only intervenes in the life of the individual in emergency situations. A social mechanism thus comes into existence, he writes, ‘in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints’ (Elias, 1982, p. 242f). The mechanism is portrayed as more coercive than human will or reason, but Elias does not quite explain what happens when mutual dependence results in social interaction free of violence, and violence in the form of self-discipline is transferred inside human beings. Is this a mechanism in a person’s psychological equipment or in the social structure or both?

Those familiar with Elias’s descriptions of how sociological research should be conducted may find reason to answer that the civilising process is an order in both directions. This is because Elias considered the sociological object of study to be the mutual dependence between individual and society, while he at the same time criticised both structuralist sociology for reifying the social structure, and individualist sociology as naïvely egocentric (Elias, 1978). However, when it comes to the study of the civilising process, Elias is not always faithful to his sociological ideal, and he cannot quite hold onto a description of the civilising process as a slowly progressing anonymous change of the form taken by the mutual dependence between individual and society. In

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