Updating Charles H. Cooley by Natalia Ruiz-Junco Baptiste Brossard

Author:Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Baptiste Brossard [Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Baptiste Brossard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367585082
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Although Cooley is explicit in suggesting that pride and shame are social emotions, he made no attempt to define either emotion. Instead he used the vernacular words as if they were self-explanatory.

But the meanings of vernacular words for emotions are usually quite ambiguous. For example, in current usage in English and other European languages, the word pride used without qualification usually has an inflection of arrogance or hubris (“Pride goeth before the fall”). In order to refer to the kind of pride implied in Cooley’s analysis, the opposite of shame, one must add a qualifier like justified or genuine. Using undefined emotion words is an invitation to the Tower of Babel.

However ambiguous, Cooley’s analysis of self-monitoring does clearly suggest that pride and shame are the basic social emotions. At this point, intellectual history takes a somewhat surprising turn. Elaborating on Cooley’s idea of self-monitoring, G. H. Mead and John Dewey based their entire social psychology upon the process of role taking, the ability of humans to continuously monitor themselves from the point of view of others. Yet, neither Mead nor Dewey mention what was so obvious to Cooley. Mead and Dewey usually treat role taking, their basic building block of human behavior, as a cognitive process. Neither has anything to say about pride and shame, as if Cooley never existed.

Perhaps Cooley’s formulation of the LGS, when conjoined with Goffman’s embellishments, can be used to broaden Mead’s social psychology, so that it refers not only to cognition and behavior, but also to feeling. Representations of human conduct that omit feeling are only two-dimensional. Cooley’s formulation offers the possibility of showing all three dimensions, hand, mind, and heart.

Until recently, there has been little attempt to elaborate Cooley’s idea into a usable hypothesis. Some 65 years after Cooley proposed the LGS, I pointed out that there are two basic components: shared awareness (intersubjectivity, mind-reading or attunement), on the one hand, and the emotions that result, on the other (Scheff 1967). In this chapter, I propose that these two ideas can be formulated as concepts and that the relation between the two concepts can be used to develop a fundamental conjecture about the basis for human behavior.

In Goffman’s basic work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (PSEL), no mention is made of the LGS. There are three references to Cooley, but none concerns the looking glass. Yet, in some ways, Cooley’s idea can be seen to form the basic structure of all of Goffman’s earlier writings, especially PSEL. For this reason, Goffman’s work can be used to further develop Cooley’s idea to the point that it might provide a foundation for sociological social psychology. Like Cooley, Goffman’s elaboration on the theme of the LGS is also ambiguous, but in an entirely different way. Cooley’s prose is simple and unassuming, only slightly removed from ordinary language. But Goffman’s, besides being dazzlingly brilliant, is also incredibly convoluted and complex. It is dense with meaning, innuendo, impromptu classifications, qualification, and expansion. It is also humorous, ironic, and witty in a way that both entertains and irritates, reveals and conceals.

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