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0:25
Okay, everybody. I think that uh we can uh resume our conversation and um we're picking up uh on the next set of uh readings um in the course and um I uh let's see if I remember what it's uh I think I remember what it's called. Yes. Uh we we've talked about conformity and isolation and in a way that is a perfect u uh leadin to the conversation we want to have this week which on the reading list is called selves uh or we could call it the self plural of the self selves
1:09
and interaction. And uh it it lends itself to the prior week's discussion in that we're trying to explain conformity. Uh that's another way of putting it. That is uh by by investigating or thinking about what the self is uh and how interaction works among people. Maybe we will have a way of understanding, my bet is we will, how conformity works and why you saw what you saw, why the Mgrim experiment has the outcome it has, why the Ash experiment has the outcome
1:50
uh that that it has. Uh and um how to understand uh all of that. Well, uh the most important uh thing that we see when we look at the world uh is ourself and uh I remember uh a funny story. I was in a locker room once uh in California and a guy came out of the sauna and he was uh an older man and he sat on the bench in a very thoughtful mood and he said, "I may not be much, but I'm all I ever think about." And uh I think that uh that is more generally true. Uh it's I
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think true of the people in this room. I think of all the things we think about the thing we think about most is ourselves. And uh but that's not any simple straightforward thing and indeed it's a very complicated thing. And probably we are the only creatures on the earth who do think about ourselves. That is we introspect. We are not only an actor in this world but we are an object of our own thinking about our own acting. And there's a lot of debate in the social sciences and
3:12
between sociologists and biologists about what is distinctly human. And all of you have had many of you at least have had pets and particularly people who have had dogs. uh genuinely believe that their dogs are humanlike. And indeed, I think that I've come to learn that the other creatures in the world have more in common with us than I used to think they did. But nonetheless, this capacity to think um in particular ways, we are the thinking things. And one of
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the things we think about that does mark us off from other creatures seems to be the fact that we can think about ourselves. Uh and we are therefore introspective. I can think about me and you can think about you. Uh and that's probably not true for Lassie uh and other talented dogs um and other talented creatures uh who are non-human. So with all due respect to the uh non-human creatures, we seem to be outstanding uh in this regard. The question then is okay, well how do we do
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that? Because in a way it's a contradiction. How can something be both the subject that is me thinking about whatever uh and the object at the same time? It seems an almost grammatical impossibility um as well as perhaps an existential impossibility. Yet we manage to do it. And the question is how do we think about how we think about that uh how we think about ourselves? Well, um we do it through first of all symbols. Uh and words are symbols. uh the very words I'm using as I make this case as
5:06
I'm in front of you as I've been in front of you now numbers of times talking about the chair that you're sitting on uh talking about uh uh famous uh people or not so famous but famous to us sociologists type people uh these are all done in words with words and when you think about anything your consciousness is filled with words. So, you're thinking all the time with words which are symbols. Symbols meaning that there's a a thing like the word chair, C H A I R, and it stands for the very uh
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object that you are resting your backside on. And when I use the word chair, something like that object is able to be invoked in your mind. When you think, when you dream, you are dreaming with these symbols. Uh, and also with signs like stop signs, um, which are kind of like symbols. That is, they're things that stand in for something else. Through these symbols that are running through our mind, we have a capacity to interpret. And that's a word that sociologists use an awful
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lot. and also use to dis to demarcate differences between human beings and the other creatures. They we don't think interpret they don't interpret the way we interpret. That is we not only see a sign like say even a stop sign or the word on it that says stop but we can process that and think well actually it's a sign that says stop but it's was I'm in someone's house. It's their idea of clever. Somebody somewhere along the way took the stop sign from the street
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or wherever else they got it and now they've put it in the family room. Hardy har. Isn't that charming? But it doesn't mean that on my way to the bathroom I'm to stop. So in the way that a robin when the robin sees the red breast of the male robin coming right along bop bop bop and along there's a song about that. The robin stops right away because this is going to be action and boom out it comes innate fixed action patterns. It is sometimes called fixed action
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patterns or what we otherwise might call instinct. There's not a kind of wait a minute. This is uh a stop sign. All right, but this is in somebody's house. So, it doesn't mean what it might otherwise mean if I were in a car uh driving on the street uh or if uh there was a great forest fire and I had to move through this intersection in order to save my life and other people's lives. This means not stop in those cases. I interpret the world, look at all the little details and act
8:24
accordingly. So that's another wonderful talent that we have. We are interpreters and we do it through this bouncing world of symbols in the form of words primarily and those are the mechanisms uh through which we um fill our brain fill our mind including about ourselves. Now how do we do it about ourselves? Well, I'm going to turn to this dead person uh 1931 uh, George Herbert me, who was actually not a sociologist, but a professor of philosophy, uh, at the University of
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Chicago. And, um, I think his mark in philosophy is less important to philosophers than his mark in sociology is to sociologists. George Herbert me also is although a great thinker someone who actually didn't publish uh in today's world he would never get tenure at the University of Chicago or at NYU we would have let him go probably after two years uh because nothing was happening we would say about this guy uh so what we know about the way he thought comes through the notes that his
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students took keep that in mind by the way as you're writing down what you're writing and he has become a very important person by virtue of his students notes which have been published in various various forms and the the phrase that we associate with George Herbert me is this phrase symbolic interaction and hopefully by the end of today's class those words will come alive and make more sense than they do um at this moment upon your first uh hearing of them. I like to tell the story of um I'm
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sort of in fact mired in the story of when I lived in a real house, a single family house. I had a driveway, I had a dog, I had a Volvo, I had all these things that I don't have anymore. And one day, um I uh come out of my driveway and I see that not my dog, but my neighbor's dog um has in my driveway. And this happens really quite routinely with this uh particular big dog. And um I'm I'm annoyed. And so uh the dog comes running toward me to sniff me up and wagging its tail, a happy dog.
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And I'm not happy at all because I'm rushing off to go teach or whatever else I'm doing. And um now I've got to stop um and get a shovel, which I kept near for this purpose. Uh and then get rid of the stuff and all of that. uh very unpleasant little activities. And so I pick up the newspaper, which is also in the driveway, and I see the dog, and I go like this to swipe the dog, not brutally, but you know, get it away. And uh because I'm I'm dealing with the this
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this pile of stuff and I got this big dog, you know, being my pal. So I want to get rid of the dog. I pick it up like that. The dog's name was Daiqua, by the way, after the drink. And I pick it up and I'm about to swipe Daiquiri and I see my neighbor who is on a slight incline above me where her front door is and her porch. She's coming out and she's about to wave to me. So now I got this issue on my hands of I'm about to hit her dog and she is giving me a friendly greeting. So what I do is my
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arm which is coming down on the dog instead goes up into a friendly hi how you doing? Um and uh and so uh I've changed course haven't I? Um what's happened is is that my little brain has been filled with little symbols. And what it's been filled with is my anticipation of what's going to happen if I fulfill that movement and hit the dog. Here's what's going on is that I am looking at myself through her eyes. A another famous dead sociologist called it the looking glass self. The looking
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glass self. a famous professor at the University of Michigan who's long gone as well. Um the looking glass self and it means that the way I have a sense of myself is by seeing my how I'm being reflected in the eyes of others. And so here I'm about to hit the dog. this neighbor will think that I am an animal hater, a disrespecttor of her as my neighbor. Um, one who does not love a charming dog like Daiquiri. What kind of a mean and after all she's done for me
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uh baking me brownies uh and many other truly good wonderful things uh she now will see me uh for what I am an ingrateful bastard and so I'm exaggerating uh and so I see that what she will see that do you get it I see what she will see and that stops my arm. So what's happened here is is that there isn't a distinction between what I think, what I am, and what I do. It is through the doing, in this case me swiping the dog, that these thoughts came into my brain about what she will
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see. And then the next move I make, which is to wave to her rather than hit the dog, is formed through the self I am creating. Now, George Herbert me used a somewhat technical vocabulary that we've picked up for this. It's not crazy technical. It's in fact very simple. He used the terms the I and the me. The I and the me. The I is is the is a subject. I act. The thing that acts and the me and just the English grammar the me is an object. It's the objective form of self. Me is
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the object. So I the active piece starts to make this move, but I see the object in my path as I'm about to do it. And that object comes from the anticipated viewpoint of other human beings and that stops me. So in a way I is moving forward the active part but I see I glimpse I the me which is the part of self that acts that is an in objective form is an object in this and it's an object created by the evaluations of others toward what the this person is about to do.
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Okay, now are you starting to get the picture? What this means is is that well to get right to it, we're all interlin. Our sense of self is formed through the evaluations of others. And I am and each of you are in effect an accumulation of those evaluations that others have provided as you interpret them to be. So you're a collection of your mothers and father's moments of saying good boy, bad boy, good girl, bad girl. You're slow at this. You're fast at that. You're moral.
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You're immoral. You're irresponsible. You were good to your grandmother. you were bad to your grandmother. All of these things are the kind of uh accretions uh that build up over our being over our biographies. And here's the radical punchline. We are nothing but that. That is our self are those things. So, let's contrast this with a lot of sort of um um uh amateur psychology and pop psychology which constantly talks about being your true self, right? Don't don't go with that
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boyfriend. Uh don't uh become uh a doctor. Uh don't become a poet. Do become a poet. Whatever. Move to Chicago. Don't move to Chicago. Be true to yourself. Don't let these others influence you. Well, that won't wash in this s in this way of understanding how the world works, how the world works, what we are, and indeed how we could be, how there could be a self. There is no other way for you to have a sense of self to fill in that empty box apart from your interaction with others.
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That's where it comes from. So there is no true self apart from the social self. And the social self exists through these interactions with other people who are constantly laying stuff on us as we like to say. But we can't live without these other people laying stuff on us. That stuff on us is us and it is the only way we have a sense of self that we can have any integrity in the world um whatsoever. So now, are the words making sense a little bit? I hope they're
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gathering up a little bit of of steam. Symbolic interaction. That's what's going on. And I'm going to give you some more um ways of u thinking about that. It's not just to summarize where we are. Um we anticipate action through our actions. We anticipate the reactions of others that changes the actions that we actually um that we actually carry on. So it's not thinking versus action, action versus thinking. Action and thinking are part of the same process. The self is always evolving because at
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any given moment and in the smallest way, the evaluations of others are accumulating on us and we're sensitive to it. You're sitting there right now perhaps next to another person. If that person is taking up like on an airplane just one quarter of an inch of your space, you are annoyed at that person who can't respect yourself, your space. And who are they to think about you that way? And who are you to think about them that way? If someone is nudging you right now, taking up your little too
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much space on your armrest, there is this awareness and sensibility. We never stop. That's the point. We are constantly as we live our life, no time out, gathering up impressions from others and refining, constantly refining what we are, who we are. It drives us forward toward social interaction. It drives us away in that we get burned. But that's life. Life is a job. This ain't easy. Uh nobody said it would be a picnic. Um but it's the dynamic uh that uh makes us get up in the morning and
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probably makes us want to go to sleep at night and in severe cases causes us to withdraw um and in radical ways sometimes even suicide. So this is a way of of thinking about self self and others. It's not self versus others. Self and others are part of the same process. It's not thinking versus action. Self-thought others action is a single thing. It is a process, not a thing. I use the word thing. Um it's not it's a process and it's a process that thus generates conformity because if you
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don't do the right thing uh as interpreted by your mother, your father, your uh your your your mates in the dormatory, your teachers, your um uh your the captain of your team, whatever it might be, your teammates, if you don't do the right thing, they will think badly of you and you anticipate precisely how they'll feel um as best you can uh as best you can which is not always uh which is not always so easy. So it means that we can have something like social order in the world because
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we are all anticipating what others will think and that means we don't go running off doing crazy nutty things visav the culture and the society in which we are in. So if you're in a culture or society that is a duck oriented one you will do ducks because otherwise you will be considered a bunny kind of renegade. If you are in India and the sacred cows are walking around and you grab a newspaper and start um chewing or pummeling or hurting that cow then you are a bad
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person and you know that that is what will be delivered to you. So it's not morality from a biblical message from the Quran from the ten commandments. It isn't anything like that. The basis of social solidarity of moral behavior of of uh is is the is the need to get along. We go along to get along and uh and and what is at stake is our very sense of self. So this is a profound kind of set of ideas of what is um of what is happening as we engage in symbolic interaction uh with other human beings.
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So uh for people who follow in the footsteps of of of of this kind of way of thinking of symbolic interaction and in George Herbert me they have tried to systematize this in various ways and one of the ways is to say that some people are more significant to us than others. We now use the term significant other um in ordinary English language to imply uh boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that um on party invitations. Do people still do that? Bring your significant other. Do they say that?
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You've heard it. Okay. Well, this is another case where the sociology word has become part of common English language. That word comes from the um and that term comes from this theory of the symbolic interactionists. And what and it and it they came up with this term in order to say that all people are not equal to all of us in the power that they have to uh shape how we think about ourselves. That some people are more significant than others. And the people
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who do this kind of work call it those are the significant others. Uh and they are significant in that regard. They have control over your sense of self. Then there are people who are relevant. Uh they are not um critical but they count um in a way that others other people don't count. So if I let's say I said to you that um uh the students in this room your co- students uh think that the way uh you acted uh when you uh raised your hand um in class and made that speech about how you were captain
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of your basketball team um when you were in high school. That that really was stupid. um the that counts because all of you are are relevant to each other and your opinions count in some way. They don't make or break you, but they count in some way. uh as opposed to for example if I said um how the um how how how uh the uh leading factions in Iran regard the fact that uh you women in the class um walk around um and wear tight tight clothes and you let your hair be
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seen um and I think your attitude is yeah so it has no dent uh no dent whatever. So, they're not they're irrelevant others. They're certainly not relevant others. Well, what also happens is is that some people are relevant um because they are members of a group who really matter to you. And in fact, I used that example just a minute ago without realizing it. So, the other the students at NYU uh are in a way a reference group. What are students at NYU doing in a way that say what are
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terrorists up to these days is not a reference group. You don't look to terrorists in wherever they might be to get your cues as to what kind of person you you need to be because of how they might think about you. So without thinking about the specific individuals involved, you probably have a vague idea of what um what what sociology majors in general will think of you. Uh if you, for example, uh declare you're a Republican, uh I can clue you in. Uh they'll think you're odd. Um and that uh
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you're probably not really a sociology major uh after all. uh they'll suspect something like you're from Stern uh or god knows or god knows what else. So um you have reference groups who uh you have a sense of what they in general think. Um, and you may shape your behavior to those groups more than to other groups that uh you care less about because they and it then it then is the case that they have less control over your soul, over your being, over your notion of yourself. And then finally,
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there is what the symbolic interactionists call the generalized other. And that just means that somehow it is so in the air that if we're in India, of course, it it's not about whether this human being, that person, that neighbor uh thinks that uh cows are um special creatures who need to be respected. It's it's what everybody thinks. And so I just know in a general kind of way that if I act in a certain way, they won't like it. So our they is our general understanding of the
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cultural others. Uh they won't like it. uh we generalize um without having to think about the specifics of which types of individuals, which type of groups in the world in which we we live, we know they uh anybody will think that somebody who does that is not a cool person and I don't want to be a non-cool person and so I will um I I will go along. So that's the story significant other others relevant others reference groups and generalized other their ways of just
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sort of uh disagregating making distinctions within this process however in which uh what is at stake what is at stake is our is our being our sense of self and according to me's theory there's a kind of behavioral push to it which is that the behavioral push is that this drive and there I've just used an almost biological word that when we think about why we do things what's the the animous if we're windup toys what's the mechanism what's the windup and the windup is to seek a positive sense of
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self that sociology is not big on instincts we don't we think animals follow instinct um and some biologists think that human beings follow instincts. And to some degree, maybe they do. Uh but for sociologists, what we're interested in is not the instinct part, but the non-instinct part. And so then what what is for us the basic drive? Uh we do acknowledge hunger, food, sex. We do think those things count, but they're not interesting to us as drives. What is interesting to us as
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a kind of drive is the seeking of a positive sense of self. We each want to believe in ourselves and we go to great lengths to do that to have a positive sense of self and that's what all this social interaction is doing for us. It means that we're uh going about it that way. Now think about we'll just jump ahead of the course a little bit. Think about what that means in terms of other people's theories. So for example, Sigman Freud, the psychologist of many would say the founder of modern
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psychology. For Sigman Freud, there are drives that are biologically based that shape how we how we think and what we think about and what how we behave. It's all emanating from some deep circumstance and maybe our earliest um infant experiences uh with our key caregivers and then the little machinery is set in motion and out comes a human being um as living their lives uh anxious about their mother's breast or anxious about their toilet training uh or such this one
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thing or for Carl Marx where it's all about economic betterment. That is the drive for money, the drive to increase domination and wealth over another person. That's the core basic drive of human beings. And virtually all economists have something like that as what's pushing people on. For me, that's not what's pushing people on. The core push is to get this positive sense of self. And it leaves open how you might get that. You might get it by, for example, making a lot of money and
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buying a fabulous car or buying a helicopter or whatever else. And people will admire you and say, "Well, aren't you great?" But it also might be by serving humanity, by becoming a nun, by working at the soup kitchen. Maybe that's the way. or in fact martyrdom committing suicide and taking along with you say another 40 80 200 3,000 people that is the way you develop a positive sense of self so this theory of symbolic interaction and George Herbert me leaves a range of possibilities as to why
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people behave and what generates ates um the kind of activities that we um see see around us all the time. Well, let's get back to this um mechanism of forming self and mechanism of of of um individuation um and yet um uh conforming. So I I just want to emphasize that although I've been using the word conforming a great deal, what also is going on is individuation. So one of the things that people sometimes worry about is the contrast, the opposition between the individual
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and society. I've referred to that contrast. And what symbolic interaction does is it it it is eliminating that contrast. It's trying to say no no no no there isn't this kind of contrast that in creating the individual you're creating society and at the same time society is creating the individual. I've been using the word conformity but in fact in a way it's obvious that's not the whole story either because each of us is different from everyone of us. We are all individuals.
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How can I do that? How can I save the individual? Uh when I've just discussed how in fact we're all just sort of putty in each other's hands and conforming to uh the significant others, the relevant others, the reference uh the reference groups and the generalized other. Well, the answer is is that each pathway toward this evolving sense of self is different. There there is no um there is no sense of self dictator who's pulling the strings who's organizing us. That's
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not the way each of us in this room is going to walk out these doors and run into somebody different. And that somebody different is going to say, "Oh, uh I like your glasses. When did you get them?" Uh, or I heard you got a B+ in in calculus and I know that was a challenge for you. That's great. And somebody else is going to get something else. And somebody else is going to get a dirty look and somebody else is going to be told, "No, they're not going to go out
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with them next weekend." Um, and you're going to think, "Oh, it's because I'm ugly." Uh, or whatever. And so each of us then because in a way our root our social route our interaction um location uh our pathway is different from every other is going to evolve in different ways and we make choices along that path where we say no I'm uh I'm dropping out of NYU this was a stupid idea in the first place I'm going to Cornell where I can be in a place with lawns and that's
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where I'm going. And I'm not going to be with these kinds of people here anymore. Uh or I'm not going to be with that um uh girlfriend, boyfriend, uh or that religion. I'm out of here. And in that way, we shape ourselves in a way get from one jump from one lifeboat onto another lifeboat. But that lifeboat is always going to be of the same sort which is this um set of other human beings through which we make up who we are and who we make up in turn. We're all connected. There's something
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zen-like I've always found about this because it means that all us human beings are in an interconnected web of shaping the being of everyone of other human beings. It's I think um has a a zen-like quality to it in which we are all one as it were even as we are each one distinct uh and unique uh from all the others. Well, a couple of your um authors I found con convenient or helpful um in spinning off and elaborating um some of these ideas because when we talk about
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for example different uh reference groups um and the way uh groups form that starts advancing us into the next sections of the course where the uh uh the power and significance of things beyond the individual start matter. mattering a lot. And later on in the course, there's a section on race and ethnicity. And so we're anticipating that section a little bit, but by through the writings of a um of a sociologist of a scholar uh named WB uh Dubo um no longer alive as well. Uh
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you can see he lived a long long life in which an enormous number of things happened. um and he's famous for numbers of books, numbers of works and in fact he wrote uh 22 books off the over the course of his life and one of them is the souls of black folk which is um on your reading list. The reason why I put it in this section and wanted to discuss it at the same time I talk about George Herbert me is that within me's vocabulary which uh Dubo did not use um his uh intellectual tradition was
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somewhat different but within Dubo's vocabulary um uh there is a kind of orientation to George Herbert me and indeed they were contemporaries so uh for part of the time so it um it does make sense um and that is this idea of double consciousness. So a way to talk about double consciousness is to say that for African-Americans and uh Dubo was an African-American uh the the first by the way African-American to get a PhD from Harvard University. one of the first
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probably to get a PhD from anywhere um in the United States but uh the in fact the very first from Harvard. Um for um uh for web de boys uh the critical f fact of his life is that he is an African-American a negro and uh that means that he's living in a world which is basically divided between two sets of human beings white people and black people. and he's writing at a time in coming of age, at a time before we had other um mass migrations to worry about, especially in
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the American East Coast. He didn't live in the West, so he doesn't uh have that as part of his orientation of the world. So, as for many other Americans, there are two kinds of uh people in the racial world, uh black people and white people. And um he is aware of how aware he is of white people and what white people think about black people. And he's saying therefore that and he's saying this is asymmetric because white people don't particularly care what black people think about them.
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So for black people, white people are an important reference group, but for black people, white people are just a kind, excuse me, for white people, black people are a kind of irrelevant in terms of this dynamic of forming sense of self. So the soul of black folk, you can think of the word soul as the as the self in the George Herbert me sense. He is saying that an ongoing an ongoing phenomenon of consciousness of black people is the fact of white people and what white people make of
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black people. And he thinks that this is a source of oppression that it is a source of damage. It is a source of complication and it is a burden. So other people can walk into a room, interact with people and only have a kind of single consciousness. For uh for Dubo, there is a double consciousness. you're thinking about yourself, but you're thinking about yourself and your people, black people, always w in within the framework of what white people might make of it.
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And so he says about um the negro born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields which yields him no true self-consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. Can you hear the influence of George Herbert me in that? uh no true self-consciousness but only lets him see himself only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness this sense of
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always looking at oneself through the eyes of others of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. one ever feels his tuness, an American, a negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two waring ideals in one dark body, and so forth and so on. Now for our class this idea of double consciousness should not be so strange because what I'm what I've tried to prepare you for before greeting this idea of double consciousness is that all
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of us have multiple consciousness that it doesn't come neat I was using examples like what does your mother think what do your father think what do your grandparents think what do your buddies think your your dorm pals your high school friends, they don't all think the same thing. Some of them think that you should go to the dance and get stoned. And some of the think think, you should go and help take care of your grandfather because he needs you now. Or that you should study for your midterm
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in sociology. That's your primary duty in this world. So all of these different things are at war with each other and we've got to through our interpretive capacities we've got to grapple with that and I used the term last time from the social psychologists that there were in fact I think I used that there were cross pressures yes I did when we talked about the Mgrim experiment there are cross pressures and these cross cross pressures come from the fact that you're
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damned if you do and damned if You don't the psychologists call it a double bind. You can't win. And we're all we all know those moments, those circumstances. That is indeed a great problem. And it's because of the fact that we can't please all our relevant others, all our reference groups at once. And so we're walking around thinking about, well, what will they think? What will they think? What do they think? What do they think? And that's enough to drive you
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crazy. I mean it does drive people some people absolutely and utterly mad. But now we enter into the language of Web Dubo who says wait a minute there's something systematic about this. It's not just you and your grandmother and you and your dates and you and your this and you and your that. But it kind of comes in packages. It's a package deal. And if you are African-American, in addition to thinking about what does your mother think, your father think, your brother think, and all of that, you
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have to think what do white people think? How will this uh create um something disparaging uh about me because I'm black? How will this influence their attitudes toward black people in general and me in particular? That's a kind of load that he his idealized white person doesn't have because they may have all these other little balancing acts, but black people carry all of that plus this other big deal. And when you read the this article, you will see this piece. It's
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just a chapter of of his book of one of his books. You will see him trying to indicate um in just a little bit that you read. Of course, you should read more WB de Boys if you're interested in this. Uh you will see the ways in which it does damage to the group um and creates um crises in their lives. And uh Dubo was interested in explaining black black crime. He was interested in explaining education. He had uh ideas about how education should be reformed. Um and um uh there there he is. Uh uh
46:55
that's good. I didn't mention that. Dubo was also besides being an academic who who taught by the way uh at the uh Negro colleges which is the only places that uh would have him um despite his brilliance. And I think just reading this small piece will give you an idea of his brilliance. but he was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is um arguably the most important civil rights organization uh we've had uh
47:26
we've had in American history. He became very discouraged uh toward the end of his long life that there would ever be appropriate reform on race relations in the United States and moved to Ghana. uh and um the students here who go to NYU ACRA will see um institutions that are there as a result of uh Dubo having spent the last part of his life. There's um a memorial to him um a library u institution. Now um how else does it work? So what I've given you is the way in which um for dubo
48:08
reference groups and all this process of forming self are are organized by groups. Um someone who really didn't think much about groups but did think very much in the tradition of symbolic interaction and was very schooled in it. Nothing uh uh nothing uh coincidental there. um is this guy Irving Gooffman um who did not have a very long life. Um became president of the American Sociological Association uh um was elected but uh never served because he died um before he could do that. Um
48:47
Gooffman taught at Berkeley um and the University of Pennsylvania and um he's known for his many many books which examine micro interaction and how it is that micro interaction takes place uh and um and people perform in a kind of orderly and appropriate way um as a result of their need to provide themselves with a positive sense of self by accumulating the positive evaluations of others. Gooffman didn't exactly use that language, but it's something like that that I think gets across what he was
49:29
what he was up to. So for Gooffman there is a kind of backstage in which we uh prepare our performances and Gooffman used the language of the theater quite a lot and you all know your Shakespeare uh all the world's a stage and we're but actors upon it. Well, everything I told you about George Herbert me and then in fact uh reading also u following up with um Dubo there's a lot of performing in all of that in fact I think for George Herbert me we are nothing apart from our performances
50:11
uh these are the critical ways in which we uh win the audience uh to our side and by winning the audience to our side we create ourselves in a way that we can live with as positive enough to go on from day to day. So, how does Gooffman say we do it in a micro way? Well, I gave you some examples when I talked about you're sticking your elbow a little bit too much close to the student who's next to you. Uh or maybe you engage in some major snoring uh while the lecture is going on. We've all been
50:43
at lectures where uh someone's bothering us this way or playing with their cell phone or whatever else. There's all sorts of things that we do that disturb other human beings. Gooffman says that as we go through our life, we we prepare our performances backstage and then we take those performances front stage. The backstage might be our bathroom when we're all alone and we're fixing our hair. The backstage may be the way we um organize our clothing to go out. We can do a survey here. Um
51:22
there's a sociologist uh uh at the University of Pennsylvania who asked his students and he's accumulated data over the years uh in Philadelphia how many of them before they go out um let's say on a date change their clothes that is they they they put on a set of clothes to go out and then they take them off and put on another set of clothes uh and then they take them off and put on still another set of those. So, I want to do a survey here. I want to know how many of
51:55
you have ever done one of those things. That is that it's time to go out. You put on some clothes and then you decide, "No, I'm not going to wear those clothes. I'm going to wear another set of clothes." Raise your hand if you've ever done that. Okay, almost everybody. Thank you very much. Now, how many of you have done it twice? You put on a set of clothes and nah, I don't like those. You put on another set of clothes and you ah I still don't like these. And then you put on still another set of
52:25
clothes. Okay. So you're now in your third set but your second going outset. Raise your hand if you've ever done that. We have quite a few people who have uh raised their hand. Now uh that's consistent. I can't remember the number, but but for his students at the University of Pennsylvania, two, three, four, five times uh is what people do commonly. And contrary to the stereotype, the young men do it as well. They don't do it as many times, but it isn't true that they just go out. Uh I
53:02
noticed, by the way, sometimes in the men's room, now if I see any of you in the men's room, you're going to be very a wary of this aware of this. When women um look in the mirror, I never watch them in women's rooms, but I watch them in life. Uh when women uh are in front of the mirror, they're with each other and they're like going like this and like this and how do you like it now? How do you like it now? Uh I like a little more there, a little more there, like that. Right. And in the men's
53:27
rooms, uh men don't do that, uh because they don't care. Uh but what you see is is that as they're going out and maybe zipping up, you know, their eyes are on the mirror and then they quickly go, "What are they going to do?" Um like on the run, like they don't care. And that's a kind of gender difference. But what it points out is that the presentation of self takes place, the backup job takes place in this quasi private space. The public toilet of course is not so private. Uh but
54:04
compared to what happens outside um and that it's influenced by many things including gender and exactly how they do that. But the the young men the men uh young or old um are also preparing presentation and part of that presentation is the presentation of not caring about the presentation and that's what's done with that precise repertoire of gesture that I tried to capture in what I was doing um what I was doing here. Here's my favorite one of my favorite
54:38
examples uh from Gooffman. Um he doesn't use exactly this one. And I make it up a little bit as I go, but if you're in the library, say you're in Bop and somebody is um at the stacks, you're sitting at one of those um desks and you hear a crashing of books and it's because somebody has inadvertently knocked over uh a section of books or knocked over some books from uh from their uh uh from their shelf. And I'm uh just as I'm talking to you and I get a little uh
55:09
nervous, I fidget, and I'm going like that. Oops. Okay. Now, that word oops is supposed to be a meaningless word. Uh you won't find it uh when you study English if you're uh studying from the French or the Italian. Uh oops is not in the in the in the vocabulary. Uh it's probably in the dictionary. I don't know. But we think of it as not a word at all. Maybe even we think of it as involuntary. That somehow the O's lead to the P lead to the S at the moment of the shock. Well, for Gothman, there's
55:42
something very meaningful about oops. And what oops is doing is that it is saying to somebody uh anybody who might be around, I am in control. It seems as though you may suspect that there is a random madman uh going through boast, which does happen uh here in New York. Quite conceivable. Uh but that's not what you're hearing. So you can relax, you can get back to your book, your notes, your work, everything's cool, everything's okay. And the word oops is the display that I
56:21
know what seemed happened was weird uh or may seem weird and that you might be concerned that I am a crazy person. Well, relax. You're not. I'm not. uh and and so you can uh go back to thinking that you're in the presence of a competent NYU human being. All's all right. That's what oops is doing. And that analysis of oops comes from Gooffman. And it's to say that to show that every move we make uh and in ways that uh we don't advertise are indeed presenting self. And
57:05
one of the things we do when we present self driven as we are by this zeal for goal of being seen as competent um and a positive sense of ourselves for our own thinking about ourself is one of the things that we're doing is creating the capacity for us to be together. Because you see, if we were constantly worried about everybody in our environment in boasted being a crazy person, if I had to worry and you had to worry about each person in this room being a kind of random actor, uh like a
57:48
like the crazy people we do sometimes run into in New York, say on the subway, um especially if they've not had their prescription, uh and they are kind of loose on the on the scene. It means that we can't do our thing. We can't listen to our our our iPhone. Um we we have to uh be wary and attentive. Uh and we won't want to use this subway car. We may not even want to use the subway system. And indeed people pulled away from using the subway system uh when
58:22
there was a lot of erratic um and screwy behavior in which people couldn't depend on the conforming moves of other human beings. And the reason we give those conforming human be those conforming moves is that we are engaged in this process of developing a positive sense of self uh through the eyes of other human beings. That's what um that's what we're up to as we uh move through the world. Gooffman used the term no time out. That as we do this behavior, if if
59:01
you take if you take a moment out that that blows the whole thing. You can't go into the library um and say uh just a simple thing like take off your shirt. Um only take you a moment and put it right back on. If one of you saw someone you uh know from this class doing that, uh that move would be just the oddest thing. Or suppose this, suppose you're in the cafeteria uh and uh or or in a restaurant and you see and you're next to someone, one of the students uh that
59:33
you recognize vaguely from NYU, but you don't know, and they reach over and take one of your French fries. It's it's a small thing. You don't care about the French fries. They're spilling out anyway. I mean, when they're putting them in the thing, some of them are falling off onto the tray and or onto the floor or whatever, what's another French fry? But if somebody reached in and took that French fry, it'd be like, "Oh my god, uh, you know, what kind of a
59:57
person am I dealing with?" And what kind of a random world am I dealing with? So, that would create problems. So, Gooffman says for another great concept from Gooffman, he speaks of civil inattention. And my there are a few students here who've had my other class know about this civil inattention. So um here's what we do as we make our lives as you're walking through the streets of New York. Um as you're on the subways uh even as you're coming and going from
1:00:28
this classroom, you manage your eyes in a very careful way. So and I manage my eyes in a very careful way. So, you're all looking at me, but I'm this poor young woman in a red sweater. I am just looking at her and she's not liking it. Uh, it's an issue. And the reason is is that even as I look across this class, there are a few seconds where I can be looking at your face and anything longer is like weird because what's he up to? Does he think I'm cheating? Is he think
1:01:01
I'm um um I'm a problem child in some way? uh uh is he is his flirtation. And that's what happens when you're on the street, of course, is that anything longer than say a second or so is something else is going on here. Something else. We don't know what, but something else is going on here. And it could be that this is a crazy person because crazy people do stare at us and they don't know to to do civil inattention. They they just keep staring, which is just bad. And it's
1:01:35
something we have to then move away from. Uh and other people are not crazy but they're up to something or so we start thinking. And if they're not up to something, they must be crazy. Up to something i.e. uh they uh want to date us or they think we stole their iPod last year or something plausible like that. Uh otherwise it's just it's just bizarre. this capacity to look only for a second or two except when we do mean business of some kind. Uh is an amazing skill just like walking
1:02:17
together on the street is an amazing skill and we all have it and we have it because there's no time out. That is this capacity that Gooffman's talked about this capacity to uh take the role of the other and that's a phrase that we use a lot in sociology take the role of the other what will it look like if I do that in their eyes and come back to me as what I am this capacity to take the role of the other even at this minute level of holding a glance of managing
1:02:56
ing it only for a second or so except when I mean business of a certain sort or so and then of course it's not just staring blank it's not it's just instead of one second maybe it's three seconds and that then suspect causes them to think maybe he means something she means something by this look and then I have the choice to give it back just a little longer and we have a flirtation We may have a date. Uh we may have a marriage. We may have a bonding. Uh we may have two significant others um
1:03:35
forming as as one. Well, um we're moving toward uh the end of this great um conversation in which I've tried to explain how individuation occurs, how social order is made possible um yet in the same way that each individual is unique. And now we come to in a way uh another way of summarizing what symbolic interaction is. It's the interaction of symbols. That's just like that language says. Um but it's an interaction of symbols which makes possible mind which is an
1:04:16
interaction in our mind is interaction. Our mind is not a thing. It's not stable. It is in constant flux and that flux is made possible by the human beings um and the objects which are social symbols. All words are social agreements that it means this and it doesn't mean that. So the mind is an interaction of symbols. The self is an interaction. It is these individuals um in relationship to me that are forming who I am. So for me to have a sense of self, for there to be a self, there must
1:04:58
be human interaction. Otherwise, I die alone uh in the old age home or in the uh in the nursery uh for for for infants. And then society is interaction. Uh what is society but the sum of all of these pieces of all of these creatures in their interacting glory uh that uh yield up um uh making up the individuals as those individuals make up society as those that society makes up those individuals and so it is all u one one grand process. So that's the uh ladies and gentlemen
1:05:43
that is the theory of symbolic interaction. It is one of the significant um orientations in sociology. It is particularly used by ethnographers who do qualitative sociology. Um it's harder to quantify and play with in quantitative terms but as we'll see as we move along in the semester that sometimes has happened as well. So uh that's it for today. Have a great Wednesday and I'll see you on Thursday.
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