Interaction Ritual Chains by Collins Randall

Author:Collins, Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

INTERNAL RITUAL AND SELF-SOLIDARITY

I have developed the argument using the case of writers’ thinking, since this is more easily open to inspection, and has been considered at some length by professional writers. Non-intellectual thought exists along a similar continuum, although with less emphasis—in modern societies, at least—on the formalized end of the continuum, and less concern to move one’s thoughts from the inner to the external end; and there may be fewer devices for moving inward and outward, such as notes to oneself and outlines for writing projects. Otherwise, the patterns of variations in speed, grammaticality, and other formalities of expression, in blockage of flow, and in directionality versus scatteredness are also found in ordinary thought.

If humans are EE-seekers, they use internal IRs to get through difficulties and entrain themselves in a flow. We have seen this in the case of verbal incantations. We see it also in the way that writers deal with blocks, the devices they use to keep up their flow of expressable thoughts. A writer can get oneself going by rereading what he or she has written up to that point—like a long jumper backing up and covering old ground to get up momentum. Hemingway’s device was to stop a day’s writing session, not when he had run out of things to say, but when he was in a good flow; resuming the next morning, he would reread the previous day’s pages and plunge onward into what came next (Cowley 1973, 217–18).

There are several kinds of writer’s blocks, each with its remedies, and each with analogues in the scattering and refocusing of non-intellectual thinking. There is the long-run writer’s block: a sense of not knowing what topics will lead somewhere successful, of floundering from one inchoate project to another, accompanied by chronic depression and lack of EE. This kind of block is the result of not being well enough embedded in the networks in which such works are written, and thus attuned to the audiences to be imagined that would constitute one’s target. Somewhat similar to this kind of long-term block is the one that occurs at the career tipping point described above, where an intellectual has to confront the alternatives of finding a unique slot in the attention space, or throwing in one’s lot as as a follower, specialist, or retailer of others’ ideas to naïve audiences. Here the remedy, if there is one, is long-term and structural, a working out of one’s place not only in one’s mind but in external social networks.

In a very different time frame is short-run writer’s block, where it is just a matter of getting up the moment-to-moment momentum. Here the solution is the devices of self-entrainment in one’s previous flow of writing.

Analogously in non-intellectual thinking, there are long-run network patterns that constrain what one can think with what degree of articulateness; changing one’s position in social networks changes these thought patterns, whether one likes the results or not. In the short-run, ultra-micro sequences of thinking, non-intellectual thought is

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