Category: Theory

Embodied knowledge vs. flesh and blood

As DiMaggio (1997) originally noted, most sociological theories of action make assumptions about the nature of cognition even as they dismiss any explicit discussion of cognition in favor of “social” explanation. Thinking about how culture comes to be taken up by the mechanisms of cognition and how it influences action through those mechanisms would, theoretically, address deficits in sociological theories of action and, at the same time, correct the bias towards extreme individualism that pervaded the cognitive sciences from the 1950s to the 1990s (which, as Dryfus (1992) has been screaming for his entire career, made them useful for writing chess-playing programs and little else). Persons, according to this view, are not mere symbol-processing machines, but culturally-informed symbol-processing machines, whose chaotic interaction with the myriad cultural forms of everyday life naturally produces both behavioral and cultural variation (DiMaggio, 1997: 272).

As new theory tends to do, these symbolic-schematic accounts of how action comes to be solved some problems and created a few more. In cognitive science, the symbol-processing model simply failed to manifest its promises in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, most programmers and engineers tried to mimic intelligent behavior by writing programs composed of internally consistent symbol systems. While this produced some laudable feats (one thinks of Deep Blue’s famous triumph over the then world chess champion Gary Kasparov), they were limited to extremely bounded tasks that lent themselves to abstraction. In contrast, physical tasks that nine-month-old babies did with ease were arduously recreated by robotics engineers only to fail as soon as the environment in which they were performed was slightly altered. This begged the question: if human intelligence is basically a complex symbol-processing mechanism, then why are artificial symbol-processing systems so unbelievably inept at tasks so simply any human could perform with without any amount of thought or attention?

In sociological theory, the symbol-processing model of culture and cognition painted a picture of an agent who, rather than simply responding to culture, could explore and engage with it. But the nature of the mechanism(s) that allowed for this remained opaque. In other words, if culture is internalized as cognitive architecture, what is the process of internalization? How are the cultural “logics,” “schemas,” and “heuristics” that, in interaction with the social world (or “stimuli” for the cognitive scientists) acquired and applied?

Embodiment in Social Theory

Enter the embodiment perspective. The turn towards embodiment, both within culture and cognition (Ignatow, 2007; Strand & Lizardo, 2015; Winchester, 2016) and, increasingly, within cognitive science itself (Edelman, 2004; Rowlands, 2011), has been an attempt to address these issues. In social theory, the embodiment perspective accounts for culture’s internalization by theorizing that the systems of thought that ground our ability to engage with the world – perception, the formation of habits, and the execution of habitual behavior – are essentially informed by the iterative interactions of the body with the world. For some thinkers, a capacity for “deliberation” is a feature of embodiment (Joas, 1996; Winchester, 2016), this capacity itself depends on the repertoire of habits that result from the body’s immersion in the world. Our capacity for action and the cognitive schemas and logics on which it depends finds its root in the body’s grounding in a stable world from which, through infinite experimental explorations from the first day of life until the day we die, it amasses “embodied knowledge.”

This theory of cognition has been extremely fruitful for cognitive scientists and robotics engineers. Robots fitted with exploratory learning algorithms have fared far better at problem-solving in various arenas compared to their symbol-processing predecessors (Edelman, 2004). In sociology, too, the conceptualization of knowledge as fundamentally embodied is enjoying somewhat of a heyday in sociological theory (e.g. Martin, 2011). And no wonder, since theories of embodied knowledge have several advantages over symbol-processing theories of cognition. For example, they provide an explanation of how cultural knowledge is acquired, maintained, and changed over time. In addition, they lend themselves to habit-oriented theories of action. And finally, they continually situate subjects within the world they inhabit, making a retreat into the theatre of the mind in order to “deliberate,” “calculate,” or “problem-solve” in a wholly abstract fashion analytically unnecessary. This feature of the embodiment perspective has been particularly attractive for action theorists interested in dismantling the legacy of the Cartesian model of the human subject (Crossley, 2013; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987; Turner, 1984; Whitford, 2002), and for sociological theory more generally because it provides a detailed explanatory account of the inseparability of individual and society (Joas, 1996; Martin, 2011).

Beyond Representationalism

Nevertheless, despite the radical situatedness advanced by contemporary theories of embodiment in culture and cognition, a specter of their theoretical predecessors remains. Specifically, the theorization of embodied knowledge tends to conceptualize that knowledge not as a feature of the flesh and blood of the physical body in the world, but as a series of representations of bodily capacities developed and stored in the brain. Ignatow (2007: 122), for example, refers to a “repertoire of embodiments…stored in memory with cognition and language rather than in a separate location.” This makes sense intuitively. The brain, after all, is the ultimate site of the choreography of habitual behavior. We might speak of “muscle memory,” but the effortless sequencing of movements to which that phrase refers relies on patterned neuronal connections in the motor cortex. By themselves, the muscles that articulate activity know nothing of these connections. It is therefore often easy to ignore the physical body in favor of the cognitive representations that map the repertoire of habits it has access to.

But to do so is to mistake the choreography for the dancer. When we neglect the role that the flesh and blood of the physical body plays in the development and maintenance of habitual behavior, we describe embodiment only in its foundational capacity, its ability to give rise to the world immersion that characterizes experience in moments of habitual flow. Even in these moments, however, embodiment is continually vulnerable to breakdown. When we are ill or injured, for example, the cognitive infrastructure that encodes embodied knowledge can no longer make itself manifest. This aspect of embodiment – its vulnerability to disorientation and ungroundedness – is as much a feature of its nature as its ability to act as the bedrock of being-in-the-world.

This is an observation that Maurice Merleau-Ponty made more than half a century ago. Like contemporary theorists of culture and cognition, Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 102) conceived of habit formation as “a rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema”; but he was also always careful to emphasize that the corporeal schema, or “habit-body”, was only intelligible when married to a corresponding “body at this moment.” The specific habit-creating character of human subjectivity, “always already” immersed in its world, relies fundamentally on the fact that the flesh and blood of the physical body (unlike its cognitive representation in the nervous system) extends into that world.

As such, the body is simultaneously an objective part of the world, on the one hand, and the foundation for subjective experience, on the other. This insight allows Merleau-Ponty to account both for the effortless enactment of habitual behavior that structures daily life and the ever-present possibility of a breakdown in the flow of experience it gives rise to: “The fusion of soul and body in the act, the sublimation of biological into personal existence, and of the natural into the cultural world is made both possible and precarious by the temporal structure of our existence” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 97, italics added).

Recognizing the possibility of breakdown as an essential element of embodiment is important for its conceptualization for two reasons. First, it is simply an accurate description of the reality of embodied experience: our habits are accessible and deployable only to the extent that we possess a body capable of enacting them. “Embodied knowledge” is not enough. Second, a recognition of the tenuousness of embodied knowledge opens up a novel space for theorizing how ruptures in the flow of existence produce behavioral variation. Like disjunctures between ideology and the material conditions of life (Swidler, 1986), or ruptures in the relationship between habitus and history (Bourdieu, 2004), breakdowns in the relationship between the physical body and the cognitive structures that map its history of activity give rise to opportunities for creative behaviour, as subjects are forced to contend with the experience of being “thrown” into an action that they are newly incapable of performing.

References

Bourdieu, P. (2004). The peasent and his body. Ethnography, 5(4), 579–599.

Crossley, N. (2013). Habit and habitus. Theory & Society, 19(2–3), 136–161.

Drefus, H. L. (1992). What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Edelman, G. (2004). Wider than the sky. New York: Yale University Press.

Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural and cognitive sociology? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.

Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. New York: Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge.

Rowlands, M. (2011). The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N., & Lock, M. (1987). The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond World Images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory, 33(1), 44–70.

Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286.

Turner, B. S. (1984). The body and society: Explorations in social theory. London: SAGE.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve pragmatic privilege. Theory & Society, 31, 325–363.

Winchester, D. (2016). A hunger for god: Embodied metaphor as cultural cognition in action. Social Forces, 95(2), 585–606.

Beyond Good Old-Fashioned Ideology Theory, Part Two

In part one, I examined two recent frameworks for understanding ideology (Jost and Martin) and explained how both serve as alternatives to the good old-fashioned ideology theory (GOFIT). Ultimately, I concluded that Martin’s (2015) model has specific advantages over Jost’s (2006) model, though the connection between ideology and “practical mastery of ideologically-relevant social relations” needs to be fleshed out. This is particularly true because any strong concentration on social relations seems to preclude any serious attention to cognition. But without it, the argument is vulnerable to crying foul over reductionism.

In this post, I sketch a model of cognition that checks the boxes of GOFIT ideology: distorting, invested with power, supports unequal social relations. But it is different for reasons I specify below. To do this, I use a famous experiment in neuroscience—Michael Gazzaniga’s “split-brain” hypothesis— and draw an analogue between it and a possible non-GOFIT ideology.

Galanter, Gerstenhaber … and Geertz

But before doing that, it seems reasonable to ask about the purpose of even attempting a non-GOFIT ideology. Is GOFIT a strawman? Why is it problematic? To answer these questions, and to indicate why a holistic revision of ideology away from GOFIT seems to be in order, consider Clifford Geertz and his essay (1973) “Ideology as a cultural system,” which presents what is to date arguably the most influential, non-Marxist approach to ideology in the social sciences. Geertz’s burden is to make ideology relevant by providing it with a “nonevaluative” form. And the way he does this, using modular or computational cognition, is what I want to focus on.

Ideology here is not tantamount to oversimplified, inaccurate, “fake news” style distortion that is, above all and categorically, what science is not. But if it isn’t to be censured like this, then for Geertz ideology must be a symbolic phenomenon that has something to do with how “symbolic systems” make meaning in the world, and in turn serve to guide action  (e.g. “models of, models for”). To make this argument, he does, in fact, make ideology cognitive by drawing from a psychological model: Eugene Galanter and Murray Gerstenhaber’s [1956] “On Thought: The Extrinsic Theory.”

As Geertz summarizes:

thought consists of the construction and manipulation of symbol systems, which are employed as models of other systems, physical, organic, social, psychological, and so forth, in such a way that the structure of these other systems– and, in the favorable ease, how they may therefore be expected to behave–is, as we say “understood.” Thinking, conceptualization, formulation, comprehension, understanding, or what-have-you, consists not of ghostly happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the wider world … (214)

Geertz returns to this same argument in arguably his most thorough approach to the culture concept (“The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind”). Importantly, there too he does not conceive of culture or symbols absent a psychological referent, which he consistently draws from Galanter and Gerstenhaber.

Whatever their other differences, both so-called cognitive and so-called expressive symbols or symbol-systems have, then, at least one thing in common: they are extrinsic sources of information in terms of which human life can be patterned–extrapersonal mechanisms for the perception, understanding, judgment, and manipulation of the world. Culture patterns–religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, ideological–are “programs”; they provide a template or blueprint for the organization of social and psychological processes, much as genetic systems provide such a template for the organization of organic processes (Geertz, 216)

How does this apply to ideology? It makes ideology a symbolic system for building an internal model. Geertz is distinctively not anti-psychological here but instead seems to double down on the “extrinsic theory of thought” to define culture as a symbol system through which agents construct models of and for some system out in the world, effectively programming their response to that system. Ideology refers to the symbol system that does this for the political system:

The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped … Whatever else ideologies may be–projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity–they are, most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience (Geertz, 218, 220)

Geertz mentions the example of the Taft-Hartley Act (restricting labor unionizing) that carries the ideological label the “slave labor act.” Geertz emphasizes how ideology works according to how well or how poorly the model (“slave labor act”) “symbolically coerces … the discordant meanings [of its object] into a unitary conceptual framework” (210-211).

If GOFIT is a set of assumptions widely held about ideology, then we probably find little to disagree with in Geertz’s argument, at least at first glance. Much of it should ring true. If we object to anything it might be the heavy-handed language that Geertz uses that evokes modular or computational cognition (e.g. “programs”). But maybe Geertz himself is not responsible for this. His sources, Galanter and Gerstenhaber, were explicit in making these assumptions about cognition, and this I want to argue is important for a specific reason.

To Galanter and Gerstenhaber, “model” clearly meant the sort of three-dimensional scale models that scientists construct in order to understand large-scale physical phenomena. In this sense, they solved the “problem of human thinking” by defining it as a lesser version of idealized scientific thinking. And they were not alone in that pursuit. At least initially, cognition was presented as antithetical to behaviorism in psychology by allying itself with resources that were quite deliberate and quite reflexive: “[mid-century] cognitive scientists … looked for human nature by holding an image of what they were looking for in their [own] minds. The image they held was none other than their own self-image … ‘good academic thinking’ [became the] model of human thinking” (Cohen-Cole 2005).

This is not only the context for Geertz’s theory of ideology. His understanding of “symbol systems” writ large cannot be removed from this specific gloss on and an extension of “good academic thinking.” For our purposes, this should beg the question of whether using symbol systems to form internal models about the external world and  to manipulate and creatively construe those models as equivalent to “symbolic action” should be the template or basis for defining ideology on nonevaluative grounds, that is to say, for defining ideology in the way that Geertz himself does: as cognitive. 

Ideology and the Split-Brain

What I will try to do now, after this long preamble, is sketch a different possible cognitive basis for a theory of ideology, one that I think is compatible with Martin’s (2015) field-theoretic approach to ideology discussed in part one of this post. It develops a cognitive interpretation of what “practically mastery of ideologically relevant social relations” might mean. It also situates Marx as the contrary of Geertz by making social relations a necessary condition for ideology as a cognitive phenomenon, not something that needs to be bracketed (or pigeonholed as “strain” or “interest”) for ideology to be cognitive.

This different basis is Gazzaniga’s research (1967; 1998; Gazzaniga and Ledoux 1978) on the split-brain and the process of confabulation of meaning on the basis of incomplete visual input. It is important to mention that I use the split-brain as an analogue (in “good academic thinking” terms) to convey what ideology might mean as a cognitive phenomenon if it is not a symbol system. I do not imply that ideology requires a split-brain as a physical input.

For Gazzaniga, the two sides of the brain effectively constituted two separate spheres of consciousness, but this could only be truly appreciated when the corpus callosum was severed (what used to be a procedure for epileptic patients) and the two sides of the brain were rendered independent from each other. When this happened, the visual field was bissected as the brain stopped communicating information together that came through the right and left visual fields (hereafter RVF and LVF). What was observable in the RVF was received independently from what was observable in the LVF. As Gazzaniga found, the brain is multi-modal. The left hemisphere is the center of language about visual input. So when a word or image was flashed to the RVF and the information was received by the left hemisphere, the patient could provide an accurate report. When a word or image was flashed to the LVF, the patient could only confabulate because the non-integrated brain could not combine the visual information with the language functions of the left hemisphere. The split-brain patient effectively “didn’t see anything,” even though she could still connect visual cues to related pictures on command.

When visual information is presented to a split-brain, the mystery is how the verbal left hemisphere attempts to make sense of what the non-verbal right hemisphere is doing. This is the recipe for confabulations or “false memories” as Gazzaniga (1998) puts it, because here we witness the effects of the “interpreter mechanism.”

Thus, when the RVF and LVF of a split-brain patient were shown pictures of a house in the snow and a chicken’s claw, and the patient was asked to point to relevant pictures based on these visual cues, she pointed to a snow shovel and a chicken head respectively. Here is the interesting part:

the right hemisphere—that is, the left hand—correctly picked the shovel for the snowstorm; the right hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, correctly picked the chicken to go with the bird’s foot. Then we asked the patient why the left hand— or right hemisphere—was pointing to the shovel. Because only the left hemisphere retains the ability to talk, it answered. But because it could not know why the right hemisphere was doing what it was doing, it made up a story about what it could see—namely, the chicken. It said the right hemisphere chose the shovel to clean out a chicken shed (Gazzaniga 1998: 53; emphasis added).

“It made up a story” refers here to the verbal left hemisphere attempting to make sense of why right hemisphere had been directed toward a shovel. Flashing a picture to right hemisphere lacked any narrative ability, and yet the split-brain patient could still point at a relevant image even though this did not “pass through” language.

The argument here is that this serves as a good analogue for a theory of ideology that does not make computational or modular commitments. The important point is that confabulation is not just some made up story, but what the split-brain patient believes because his brain has filled in the blank (e.g. “I chose the shovel because I need to shovel out the chicken coop”). Ideology as a cognitive phenomenon does not, in this sense, mean programming the political system according to an extrinsic symbol system; in other words, building an internal model (a three-dimensional one) of that system and drawing entailments from it, as any good scientist would do. To be “in ideology” means filling in the blank as the normal way to cognitively cope with disconnected inputs, some with a “phonological representation,” others that are “nonspeaking.”

The Split-Brain and Social Relations

We can theorize that where practical mastery of social relations becomes important, in particular, social relations that are “ideologically-relevant,” it is because they generate an equivalent of a split-brain effect and its “interpreter mechanism.” In social relations arranged as fields, practical mastery consists of the “felt motivation of impulsion … to attach impulsion … to positions … [and have] the ethical or imperative nature of such motivations [be] akin to a social object, external and (locally) intersubjectively valid, that is, valid conditional on position and history” (Martin 2011: 312).

Fields refer to one type of social relation conducive to ideological effects, particularly if they are organized on quasi-Schmittian grounds of opponents and allies (Martin 2015). Marx is clear that other types of social relation (like capital) are specifically resistant to influence by any sort of cognitive mediation. Still, he achieves some understanding of those social relations by examining their “being thought … [through] abstractions” (see Marx 1973: 143). For instance,  the commodity fetish can be seen as analogous to a split-brain effect: the “social relation between things” is an LVF interpretation, while the “social relation between people” is equivalent to an RVF input. A split-brain is an analogue of mental structures that correspond to these objective (social) structures.

Taking the split-brain as the basis (not the “extrinsic theory”) for ideology as a (non-GOFIT) cognitive phenomenon, then, we can speculate that only certain social relations (fields, capital) have an ideological effect. The ideological effect they do have is because they generate a split-brain scenario with disconnected inputs. Agents are subject to social relations in which they do not have direct access (RVF). They fill in the blank of the effect of those inputs through “abstractions,” i.e. explicit endorsements or propositional attitudes that take linguistic form, often mistaken on their own terms as ideology (LVF).

To be continued … [note: Zizek (2017: 119ff) also finds the split-brain useful for thinking about ideology, though his argument confounds and mystifies with Pokemon Go]

 

References

Cohen-Cole, Jamie. (2005). “The Reflexivity of Cognitive Science: The Scientist as a Model of Human Nature.” History of the Human Sciences 18: 107-139.

Galanter, Eugene and Murray Gerstenhaber. (1956). “On Thought: The Extrinsic Theory.” Psychological Review 63: 218-227.

Gazzaniga, Michael. (1967). “The Split-Brain in Man.” Scientific American 217: 24-29.

_____. (1998). “The Split-Brain Revisited.” Scientific American 279: 51-55.

Gazzaniga, Michael and Joseph LeDoux. (1978). The Integrated Mind. Plenum Press.

Geertz, Clifford. (1973). “Ideology as a Cultural System.” in Interpretation of Cultures.

Jost, John. (2006). “The End of the End of Ideology.” American Psychologist 61: 651-670.

Martin, John Levi. (2015). “What is Ideology?” Sociologica 77: 9-31.

_____. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford.

Marx, Karl. (1973). The Grundrisse. Penguin.

Zizek, Slavoj. (2017). Incontinence of the Void. MIT

 

Where Did Sewell Get “Schema”?

Although there are precedents to using the term “schema” in an analytical manner in sociology (e.g., Goffman’s Frame Analysis and Cicourel’s Cognitive Sociology), it is undoubtedly William Sewell Jr’s “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1992 that really launched the career of the term in sociology.

In our forthcoming paper, Schemas and Frames (Wood et al. 2018), we briefly sketch the history of the schema concept in the cognitive sciences—from psychology and artificial intelligence to anthropology and cognitive neuroscience. We note how certain ambiguities in Sewell’s formulation renders it unclear whether it is compatible with the concept as used in the cognitive sciences. Part of the reason, I would suggest, is because Sewell did not get this concept from the cognitive sciences, not even cognitive anthropology.

First, we must discuss (briefly) Giddens’ intervention. To summarize (following Piaget 2015:6–16) the defining features of the various varieties of structuralism—in mathematics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics—include: (1) patterned-wholes are not mere aggregates, (2) patterned-wholes presuppose some principles of composition or transformation which structure them, and (3) the dynamics of wholes, as the product of these underlying principles, result in self-maintenance such that the process which constitutes the patterned-whole is not immediately terminated.

Giddens’ innovation, first articulated in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), and later in Constitution of Society (1984), involved separating aspects (1) and (2) above. He referred to the patterned-whole as a social system and to the underlying principles of composition and transformation as structure. In essence, he asks for a Gestalt shift in how sociologists approached the regularities of social life. This, in turn, places structure as operating “behind the scenes,” or in Giddens words, “structure as a ‘virtual order’ of differences” (Giddens 1979:64)

In response to this move, Sewell uses the term schema for the first time in this passage:

Structures, therefore, have only what [Giddens] elsewhere terms a ‘virtual’ existence (e.g., 1984, p. 17). Structures do not exist concretely in time and space except as ‘memory traces, the organic basis of knowledgeability’ (i.e., only as ideas or schemas lodged in human brains) and as they are ‘instantiated in action’ (i.e., put into practice). (Sewell 1992:6)

Giddens also, confusingly, defines “structure” as consisting of “rules and resources”  (1979:63–64). The latter of which, Sewell points out, is not virtual. He goes on to demonstrate Giddens term “rules” isn’t virtual either as it implies public prescriptions. Sewell focuses his intervention here (1992:7):

Giddens develops no vocabulary for specifying the content of what people know. I would argue that such a vocabulary is, in fact, readily available, but is best developed in a field Giddens has to date almost entirely ignored: cultural anthropology. After all, the usual social scientific term for ‘what people know’ is ‘culture,’ and those who have most fruitfully theorized and studied culture are the anthropologists… What I mean to get at is not formally stated prescriptions but the informal and not always conscious schemas, metaphors, or assumptions presupposed by such formal statements. I would in fact argue that publicly fixed codifications of rules are actual rather than virtual and should be regarded as resources rather than as rules in Giddens’s sense. Because of this ambiguity about the meaning of the word ‘rules,’ I believe it is useful to introduce a change in terminology. Henceforth I shall use the term ‘schemas’ rather than ‘rules’.

Beyond noting that he is inspired by the work of anthropologists, Sewell offers few clues as to what motivates his use of schema.

Is Sherry Ortner and Michigan’s CSST the source?

Despite referring to “schema” over a hundred times in the essay, he cites almost no scholars. In a footnote, he states “It is not possible here to list a representative example of anthropological works that elaborate various ‘rules of social life.’” In the same footnote, after citing Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures as the most influential discussion of culture, he states “For a superb review of recent developments in cultural anthropology, see Ortner (1984).” As this footnote suggests, it may have been Sherry Ortner who motivated his conceptualization.

In the essay, Sewell cites Ortner’s 1984 piece “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” and includes Ortner among several scholars he thanks for feedback on his AJS piece. However, in the cited article, Ortner’s only mention of “schema” is in a quotation from Bourdieu  (1978:15). In this essay, she outlines the main cleavage within symbolic anthropology in the 1960s was between the Turnerians and the Geertzians. Geertz’s “most radical move,” according to Ortner, was arguing “culture is not something locked inside people’s heads, rather is embodied in public symbols” (1984:129). Ortner identified as “Geertzian,” as he was her advisor at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1960 to 1970, before leaving for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (David Schneider, another Parsonsian symbolic anthropologist, was also her teacher at Chicago).

Sewell received his Ph.D. in history at Berkeley in 1971, and was an instructor at the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1971, before becoming an Assistant Professor there from 1971 until 1975 — overlapping with Ortner’s graduate studies there. He then had a five-year stint at the Institute for Advanced Study with Geertz in residence. From 1985 to 1990, Sewell was faculty in the history and sociology at the University of Michigan, overlapping again with Ortner, a faculty member in anthropology from 1977—1995. However, the overlaps between the two (and Sewell with Ortner’s mentor), is speculative evidence of their interactions.

In 1991, the relatively new American Sociological Association Sociology of Culture Section gave an honorable mention for the best article to Nicola Beisel for “Class, Culture, and Campaigns Against Vice in Three American Cities.” Her advisor at Michigan was Sewell, and in the Culture section newsletter’s interview with her, she states (1991:4-5):

Certainly, the biggest influence on my work was the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Social Transformations (CSST), a group of sociologists, social historians, and anthropologists that was started by Bill Sewell, Terry McDonald, Sherri Ortner, and Jeff Paige. The year I spent as a CSST fellow was one long and extremely fruitful discussion of culture, structure, agency, and social change….I do think that we have to demonstrate to our colleagues who think they do work on ‘hard structures’ that culture plays a vital part in the constitution and reproduction of those structures. In thinking about these issues I have been greatly influenced by Bill Sewell’s and Anthony Giddens’ theorizing the duality of structures, particularly the discussions in Sewell’s forthcoming AJS article.

In a recent interview about her 1995 essay, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH), Ortner also refers to the founding of CSST:

In 1995 I was still at the University of Michigan and was involved in the formation of an incredibly exciting interdisciplinary discussion group, Comparative Studies in Social Transformation or CSST (not to be confused with the journal CSSH!). CSST was populated by anthropologists, historians, and a few folks from other fields, with many shared theoretical interests (Marxism, culture theory, practice theory, feminism, Foucault, etc.) and with overlapping cultural and historical interests in–broadly speaking–issues of power, domination, and resistance. If you look at the acknowledgments of “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” (and I am a big believer in looking at acknowledgments), you will see the names of many of the key participants in that group, and it is an amazing roll call of some of the leading anthropologists, historians, and other social and cultural thinkers of that generation.

Sewell was among those acknowledged (alongside, Fred Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Nick Dirks, Val Daniel, Geoff Eley, Ray Grew, Roger Rouse, Julie Skurski, Ann Stoler, and Terry McDonald). Curiously, Sewell acknowledges none of those members of CSST in his 1992 article — only Ortner. This strongly suggests there was, at least, cross-pollination between Ortner and Sewell.

Where Did Ortner Get “Schema”?

20180816-Selection_017.png
Ortner’s sketch of the Gyepshi altar in Sherpas Through Their Rituals

We may speculate, therefore, that Sewell received the schema concept from Ortner through, either informal talks, discussions at the CSST, or something of Ortner’s he read but did not cite in the AJS article. That is, it is strange that in the single essay of Ortner’s cited by Sewell, she does not really refer to “schemas” beyond a quoting Bourdieu.

In Ortner’s first book (1978), Sherpas Through Their Rituals (based on her dissertation), she references schemas only once, in quoting Ricoeur: “the stain [defilement] is the first schema of evil” (Ortner’s addendum). In a collection of reactions to Ortner’s “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” by Maurice Bloch, Jane Collier, Sylvia Yanagisako, Thomas Gibson,  Sharon Stephens, and Pierre Bourdieu—based on the 1987 American Ethnological Society invited session, held at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in Chicago and published as a working paper by the CSST—Ortner offers the following in her response (1989:102-103, emphasis added):

And finally, my own recent work on Sherpa social and religious history utilizes a notion of cultural schemas, recurring stories that depict structures as posing problems, to which actors must and do find solutions. Here again structure (or culture) exists in and through its varying relations with various kinds of actors. Further, structure comes here as part of a package of emotional and moral configurations, and not just abstract ordering principles.

The work she is referring to here is in her 1989 book, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. It is here that “schema”— specifically “cultural schema”—is used numerous times (54 in total). In the opening chapter, Ortner describes two “notions” of structure will be used in the analysis (1989:14 emphasis added):

The first is a concept of structural contradictions—conflicting discourses and conflicting patterns of practice—that recurrently pose problems to actors. The second is a concept of cultural ‘schemas,’ plot structures that recur throughout many cultural stories and rituals, that depict actors responding to the contradictions of their culture and dealing with them in appropriate, even “heroic,” ways.

In chapter four, Ortner argues “Sherpa society is founded on a contradiction between an egalitarian and hierarchical ethic.” She furthermore argues that recognition of this contradiction is “culturally formalized, in the sense that important cultural stories both depict such competitive relations and show the ways in which they may be resolved….the stories collectively embody what I will call a cultural schema” (1989:59, emphasis added; see also her 1990 chapter “Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Founding of Sherpa Religious Institutions”).

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Ortner then offers a short survey of the “pedigree” of this concept in anthropology, beginning with what she called “key scenarios” in her dissertation and a 1973 American Anthropologist article. These are a particular kind of “key symbol,” which “implies clear-cut modes of action appropriate to correct and successful living in the culture…they formulate the culture’s basic means-ends relationship in actionable form” (1973:1341). Ortner outlines how numerous different contexts—like seating arrangements, shamanistic seances, ritual offerings to gods—were structured as if they were a hospitality event. Therefore, the “scenario of hospitality” acted as a “cultural schema,” transposable across situations and providing prescriptions for action.

Next, Ortner identifies other exemplars, including Schieffelin’s ([1976] 2005) examination of reciprocity and opposition as “cultural scenarios” among the Kaluli of New Guinea, Turner’s (1975) “root paradigms” like martyrdom in Christianity, Geertz’s  “transcription of a fixed ideal” in Negara (1980), and Sahlins’ “structures of the long run” in Historical Metaphors (1981) (1981). Ortner argues that cultural schemas have “durability” because “they depict actors respond to, and resolving…the central contradictions of the culture” (1989:61). After High Religion, Ortner refers to schemas only once, in a retrospective on Geertz in 1997.

What is absent from Ortner’s otherwise exhaustive review of anthropology in the 1984 essay, and throughout her work on cultural schemas, is any references to “cognitive” anthropology. She offers no reference to Goodenough, Lounsbury, Romney, D’Andrade, Frake or others, and only referring to Bloch’s work prior to his turn to the cognitive sciences as exemplified by his 1991 article “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” In fact, it is odd that she does not reference a 1980 review essay in the American Ethnologist, titled “On Cultural Schemata” written by G. Elizabeth Rice, a UC-Irvine PhD. Nor is there a reference to the 1983 Annual Review of Anthropology essay, “Schemata in Cognitive Anthropology,” written by Ronald Casson, a student of D’Andrade and Frake while at Stanford. Furthermore, she does not cite the work of Robert I. Levy who studied Nepal (1990) from a cognitive-anthropological perspective (in fact, both Levy’s and Ortner’s book on Nepal are reviewed in the same issue of the American Ethnologist). Originally trained as a  psychiatrist, Levy was brought to UC-San Diego in 1969 to help establish the nascent field of “psychological anthropology.” In Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands (1975), he applies the concept of schema—which he attributes to the psychiatrist Ernest Schachtel’s study of memory and amnesia.

Several more such examples can be found. We can conclude that Ortner’s conceptualization of schema (and therefore Sewell’s and likely Sewell’s students) appears to be largely independent of its parallel development in the cognitive sciences (including cognitive anthropology) forming in the U.S. west coast (briefly discussed in my post on connectionism).

References

Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara. Princeton University Press.

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Vol. 241. Univ of California Press.

Levy, Robert I. 1975. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. University of Chicago Press.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1989. High Religion. Motilal Banarsidass.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1973. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75(5):1338–46.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1978. Sherpas Through Their Rituals. Cambridge University Press.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1):126–66.

Piaget, Jean. 2015. Structuralism (Psychology Revivals). Psychology Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. “Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 344.

Schieffelin, E. 2005. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. Springer.

Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” The American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1–29.

Turner, Victor. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press.

Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2018. “Schemas and Frames.” Sociological Theory, Forthcoming.

 

Beyond Good Old-Fashioned Ideology Theory, Part One

The concept of ideology is surely one of the sacred cow concepts of sociology (and the social sciences more generally) and is one of the special few that circulates widely outside the ivory tower. It is also a concept that is arguably the most indebted of all to the presumption that cognition is a matter of representation, nothing more or less. Ideology has, from its French Revolution beginnings to the present, been associated closely with ideas and more specifically with ideas that project meaning over the world in relativistic and contentious ways. Almost universally ideology is characterized by representation; historically it has also been characterized by what we can call (unsatisfactorily) distortion. For ideologies to be representations they must be capable of generating reflexively clear meaning about the world. For ideologies to be distortions those representations must generate meaning in some way that concerns the exercise of power. Since ideologies are distorting they must consist of representations that either support or contend with some current configuration of power, by prescribing its direction. This means that people do not believe ideologies because ideologies are true. Instead, some combination of social factors and self-interest leads people to believe them.

This will have to do as a (quick/dirty) summary of the most common set of referents generally associated with ideology. Let’s call it good old-fashioned ideology theory (GOFIT) for short. Even a brief perusal of the recent news would probably suggest that the world (or at least the US) is becoming increasingly “ideological” on GOFIT terms as ideology seems to be more and more important for more and more stuff that it had been irrelevant for as recently as a decade ago (e.g. restaurant attendance, college enrollment, cultural consumption). If these impressions are even partially correct, then an enormous weight is placed on ideology. It is a concept that we (sociologists included) need  in order to make sense of the fractious, tribalizing times in which we live. But it is fair question to ask whether GOFIT ideology is up to the challenge.

On the above terms, GOFIT ideology essentially consists of something like the “rule-based manipulation of symbols” type of meaning construction, unreconstructed from its heyday in the classical cognitive science of the 1950s and 60s. This should make us pause and take a second look at the concept. The goal of this post is to (not exhaustively) examine whether ideology can do without these commitments and whether the concept can be removed from GOFIT and placed on new cognitive ground. I argue that ideology can do without these commitments and that it already has been placed (or is being placed) on new cognitive ground, which makes it an important point of focus not only for substantive phenomena (all around us today) but because ideology is closely entangled with the wider theoretical stakes of relevance to this blog, and it has been since at least The German Ideology when Marx and Engels tried for a final push of idealism into the dustbin.

In this first post, I will compare two arguments that try to move beyond GOFIT. In a second post, I will sketch a different approach that tries to extend a non-GOFIT ideology even further.

Psychologists, it seems, have beaten everyone to the punch in providing key evidence attesting to the present-day significance of ideology. Here, we can point to the influential work of John Jost (2006; website) and the research program he develops against the mid-century “end of ideology” claims. Those arguments hard largely eliminated ideology as a key conceptual variable, in one sense because large disagreements over how to organize society seemed to end sometime in the 1950s, at least in the US (“even conservatives support the welfare state,” as Seymour Martin Lipset famously quipped). But in a more important sense, the “end of ideology” also meant a paradigm in political psychology built around the presumption that “having an ideology” was a mystery and that only a small minority of people actually had one. Jost resurrects ideology by developing a new question in political psychology, one that at this point probably seems grossly redundant, but which summarizes a vast body of research inside and outside the academy, all of which asks some more or less complicated version of it: “why [do] specific individuals (or groups or societies) gravitate toward liberal or conservative ideas[?]” (2006: 654).

Jost here distance himself from the political scientist Philip Converse and his claim (esp Converse 1964) that probably no more than ten percent of the population possesses anything resembling an ideology (e.g. “political belief system”). For Converse, this meant that for the vast majority of political actions, especially voting behavior by a mass public, ideology is basically irrelevant. Jost argues that, on the contrary, even if the highly rationalized, systematic commitments of true ideologues is found  only among a small minority, we cannot dismiss peoples’ attraction to conservative or liberal ideas. Relaxing a strong consistency claim, Jost finds placement on the conservatism-liberalism spectrum as highly predictive of voting trends, and not only because where people self-identify on the ideological scale closely overlaps with their party affiliation. Ideas matter too, especially if we measure them as “resistance to change and attitudes toward equality” (2006: 660), which are (presumably) the source of the major ideological differences between the left and the right.

As Jost continues, these “core ideological beliefs concerning attitudes toward equality and traditionalism possess relatively enduring dispositional and situational antecedents, and they exert at least some degree of influence or constraint over the individual’s other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors” (2006: 660; my emphasis). Here Jost hits on a problem with influence inside and increasingly outside the academy today. Research on the “dispositional and situational antecedents” of attraction to liberal or conservative ideas has become something of a cottage industry, as evidenced in popular works by luminaries like George Lakoff (2002) and Jonathan Haidt (2012), and in Jost’s own work (see 2006: 665) that finds, among other things, unobtrusive-style evidence (“bedroom cues”) that strongly correlates with placement on the liberalism-conservatism spectrum (like whether one has postage stamps lying around the house instead of art supplies). Even Adorno’s (et al 1950) arguments have been buoyed by this conversation as prescient and timely (see Jost 2006: 654) after they had been summarily dismissed by mid-century psychologists. “Right-wing authoritarianism” as a personality measure helps define antecedent conditions that lead people to be attracted to ideas (or to Trump) with different ideological content. Adorno thrives as the research winds have changed.

The key presumption of this research is that ideologies are information-lite and  not complicated, at least not in a reflexive way, as Converse thought they must be (“complicated systems of relations between ideas”). But we might reasonably wonder whether, in their lack of complication, “ideological differences” in this literature do in fact count as differences of ideology and not something else. Jost himself does little to explain what it means to be “attracted” to liberal or conservative ideas (is this the same as believing them?), and what he calls “ideas” can only be distinguished from what he (confusingly) also calls “attitudes” if we presume that ideas involve some sort of deductive, rule-based manipulations (e.g. because I believe in equality, I will support politicians that promise to help the poor). On both fronts this makes his approach problematic. While Jost is successful at clearing many of the hurdles that stand in the way of making the concept of ideology relevant again, he retains some of the strongest presumptions of GOFIT.

If political psychology has largely been resurrected by making something significant of the widely held sense that “ideological differences” are of critical significance for politics today, there is at least one other alternative to GOFIT available which has similar motivations but which does not make nearly the same commitments. John Levi Martin has developed an approach to ideology on the basis of redefining it as non-representational. Ideology does not consist of a representation of the world, in this view, but serves rather (more pragmatically) as “citizens’ way of comprehending the nature of the alliances in which they find themselves” (2015: 21). While he shares with Jost the fruitfulness of engaging with GOFIT on the relationship between “social factors” and ideologies, in Martin’s case in particular, this comes with a considerable twist: ideologies are not given autonomy as a kind of rule-like content that allows for deductive logic. As Martin argues, what appear to be ideologies are not reducible to an equation like values + beliefs = opinions. Rather, they are the means through which individuals comprehend “the alliances” in which they find themselves (which is important). What we can call ideological differences, in other words, maps onto patterns of social relations and not to differences that might be ascribable to the content of ideas.

If we take his example of whether people say they support a policy that will provide assistance to out of work, poor and/or black people, “the classic [GOFIT] conception imagines a person beginning with the value of equality, adding the facts about discrimination (say) and producing support for the policy.” Jost would probably explain this as their attraction to some view of equality, whether fueled by a personality trait or some other dispositional antecedent (just as Lakoff and Haidt would, in different ways). In Martin’s alternative, the process is entirely different: “The rule is, simply put, ‘me and my friends are good’ and ‘those others are bad’ …  [The] actual calculus of opinion formation is sides + self-concept = opinion” (27). This is what Martin calls a political reasoning source of ideology formation. Whether one would support the above policy is dictated by what it signifies about one’s position in “webs of alliance and rivalry, friendship and enmity.” It is that positioning that makes it an ideological choice, not that it is driven by some sequence that begins (or ends) with a commitment to certain ideas.

Martin provides a bit fleshier example to illustrate how political reasoning of this sort is “totally relational” and therefore endogenous to alliance/rivalry coalitions:

I once saw a pickup truck in my home town that had two bumper stickers on the rear. One had a representation of the American flag, and words next to it: “One nation, one flag, one language.” The other side had the Confederate flag. This is the flag used by the short-lived Southern confederation of states during the Civil War, when they tried to break away from the Union in order to preserve their “peculiar institution,” that is, slavery of Africans and their descendants. They wanted there to be two countries, and two flags (25)

Such infelicitous placement of the two bumper stickers would be a contradiction from a GOFIT point of view in search of the content of the ideas and how this organizes a decision to place the two stickers from some kind of logical deduction. For GOFIT, such behavior quickly becomes incomprehensible (as does the person). In fact, Martin argues, the two flags demonstrate this person’s practical mastery of the political landscape in the USA circa 2015ish: “Displaying the Confederate flag in the United States does not imply anti-black racism. However, it does imply a lack of concern with being ‘called out’ as a racist—it implies fearlessly embracing aspects of American political culture without apology … it does demonstrate anti-anti-racism” (26). The other bumper sticker (one nation, one flag, one language) demonstrates the person’s response “to certain political initiatives to ease the barriers to American citizens, residents, and possibly others who read (or speak) Spanish but not English.”

Together, the two bumper stickers make sense. But to see how we first need to bracket whatever ideas they might seem to express and situate the stickers instead in sets of social relations in which they become meaningful for this person. When we do this, we see that this person demonstrates a combination of social oppositions that together situate him/her against the “liberal coalition.” The placement of the bumper stickers is a political action, not as the expression of some commitment to underlying ideas, but as this person’s theorization of their politics: “it is their attempt to come up with an abstract representation of the political alliance system in which they are in, and the nature of their opponents” (26).  

Pace Jost, then, Martin argues that patterns of ideological difference are not ultimately driven by absolute differences between conservative and liberal ideas, though this is not to say that ideas (or words) cannot themselves become points of ideological difference. So much is this true that political reasoning itself provides an ontology and can dictate the nature of reality in way that is impervious to criticisms of ideological “distortion” and their presumption of a GOFIT mind-to-world relation that is mediated by something like a belief system. The nature of the world itself can (and has) come to be an expression of oppositions and alliances with an ideological significance. Martin and Desmond (2010: 15), for instance, find that liberals and conservatives with high political information both significantly overestimate the extent of black poverty and are much more likely to be wrong about it than are moderates and liberals and conservatives with less political information. This is an effect of political reasoning, they claim, and anticipates a sort of post-truth scenario in which facts themselves also become a means to theorize one’s political position. For high information liberals and conservatives alike, “their knowledge is that-which-helps-us-know-what-we-want-to-fight-about” (Martin 2015: 28). In other words, they become more ideological as they become more ensconced in relations of alliance and rivalry, not as they internalize complicated belief systems.

Martin, then, reinterprets ideology as the way that people comprehend their situation in relations of alliance and opposition using whatever means might seem to adequately express the accumulation of friends and the distinction from enemies. Martin surpasses the GOFIT assumptions more successfully than Jost largely because his approach to ideology does not rely imputing a content to ideas that would make them “liberal” or “conservative.” In principle, any idea could be liberal or conservative in his framework (just as any bumper sticker could, or any fact about the world could, or any political candidate) depending on whether people use it to map alliances and oppositions and comprehend the boundaries of coalitions of friends/enemies.

This, I argue, makes Martin’s approach more adequate, and historically relevant in way that Jost’s approach cannot be, for understanding what seems to be the rapid proliferation of ideological differences today, or more impressionistically the increased presence of ideology today, presumably as people use more things to “theorize” their political position inside alliances/rivalries than had been used before, complicating those groupings (at least in the interim). Once again, this is much easier to understand if we do not attempt to situate individuals into fixed categories on the basis of antecedent dispositions that give them some fixed attraction to ideas with a certain content.

But this also suggests that Martin’s approach to ideology is non-GOFIT mainly because it is (or seems to be) non-cognitive. Martin succeeds because he takes ideology out of the mind and places it in social relations. Things (e.g. bumper stickers, art supplies, flags, welfare policies) become “ideological” when they symbolize relations of alliance and rivalry, as comprehended through them and (following Marx) never in their absence, though we might ask if there is any relevant difference between using things to comprehend these relations and using things to construct them. Jost leaves ideology in the mind (in ideas), so it remains for him at least partially GOFIT, though he emphasizes that ideology is supplemented by non-cognitive things like personality or situational factors (e.g. traumatic events, like 9/11, or private ones) that make ideas carry different degrees of attraction.

When something vaguely cognitive enters Martin’s framework, it usually comes under the heading of “political reasoning in practice,” which does appear to serve adequately as an alternative to a GOFIT conception of mind. In the next post, I attempt a definition of  “practical mastery” of ideologically-relevant relations as a cognitive trait and how this is absolutely required if we want to finally (once and for all) separate ideology from its GOFIT background.

 

References

Adorno, Theodor et al (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Studies in Prejudice, edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Converse, Philip. (1964). “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Critical Review 18: 1-74.

Haidt, Jonathan. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Norton.

Jost, John. (2006). “The End of the End of Ideology.” American Psychologist 61: 651-670.

Lakoff, George. (2002). Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think. UChicago Press.

Martin, John Levi. (2015). “What is Ideology?” Sociologica 77: 9-31.

Martin, John Levi and Matthew Desmond. (2010). “Political Position and Social Knowledge.” Sociological Forum 25: 1-26.

 

To Feel or Not to Feel? That is No Longer the Question

It is highly likely that most readers recall learning about Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, had the misfortune of having a 3.5 inch, 13+ lb. metal rod (with a diameter of 1 ¼ inches) impale him. The rod went through his open mouth, behind his left eye, and out of his skull. What was exceptional in all of this, was that it neither exited his skull completely nor did he die from this injury for 12 years! Considering the state of medical knowledge and technique, this was a rather incredible and improbable survival, and I would bet that is what most people remember about his story.

Yet, for a theorist and sociologist, there is much, much more to this anecdote than the sensational. His memory, for instance, was discernibly unaffected, but the injury, by accounts of both former employers and professional “trained” in the “psychology” of yore, had somehow peeled back the protective human layers of socialization. That is, he was described as vacillating between his “intellectual faculties” and “animal propensities”; his behavior and language could be “coarse,” “vulgar,” and offensive to any “decent” people he might encounter. In spite of this, he spent seven of the 12 years left of his life in Chile, working as a long-distance stagecoach driver; which, in 1852, would have demanded a lot of cognitive skills given the temporal and physical and social demands. He was clearly successful.

What can we learn from this case? On the surface, probably not much. A debate between contemporary neuroscientists centers on how much we can draw from MRIs of a skull with no direct empirical evidence. Gage’s former employers may have maligned his reputation to protect their financial interests; doctors of the day were rarely scientific in their orientation or beholden to a professional association backed by the force of legislation; and, psychology was barely in its infancy. Nonetheless, it is not incorrect to say that damaging the brain, in most cases, leads to changes in behavior and personality.

But, what does Gage have to do with sociology and cognition? His case and others that would follow in the early 20th century inspired a body of research examining brain lesions, particularly the prefontal lobe, which is responsible for rational decision-making. For instance, in one of many experiments, Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) provided “normals” and patients with a $2000 loan, and provided them with four decks of cards and some basic instructions: don’t lose money, but make $$ if possible. Turning a card in pile A or B rewarded $100 while C and D only $50. The catch: some cards in A and B, unbeknownst to the player, demanded a sudden high payment (e.g., $1250), while C and D, on occasion, only asked for small, modest payments (e.g., $100). Normals began by sampling all the decks, showing preferences for A and B at first, but gradually learning that C and D are the best bets. Those with damaged brains, however, started the same way but did not switch to C and D, no matter how many times they bankrupted.

From a series of follow up experiments meant to tease out specific hypotheses about rewards and punishments, and his own clinical work with lesion patients, Antonio Damasio (1995) cogently posited—at the time—a revolutionary thesis: reasoning and rationality are inextricably entwined with emotions. The classic Cartesian model of brain v. soul that undergirds seemingly false (but commonly, often unconsciously, accepted) dichotomies like rationality v. irrationality, cognition v. emotion collapses under the weight of empirical evidence.

This seems eminently sensible. Marketers draw on psychology to appeal not only to our cool rationality, but to our feelings and sentiments. We choose Crest or Colgate, Ford or Toyota, and so forth based on emotions no matter how much “instrumentality” we employ in the decision-making process (see, for example, Camerer 2007). These, of course, are mundane, arbitrary decisions; imagine if we extend this thesis to much more complex decisions, like choosing a partner, a reciprocal gift, or to make amends. It seems true that we can only make big decisions when our brain’s neural systems are linked up and our emotion centers are communicating with various other aspects of our brain (LeDoux 2000).

So, for instance, as information enters the brain it is routed to the hippocampus where it is converted into memories and indexed as either semantic or episodic. The former are general “facts” about things, people, events, and so forth that escape temporality, whereas the latter are person-specific memories with time-stamps. Our self, then, is rooted in memories that are both generalized and specific. At the same time, this information is fed into the amygdala and tagged with a valence, or level of intensity, making them more or less relevant to one’s self—that is, more intensely tagged memories are easier and more likely to be recalled. And, if the most self-relevant information comes from interactions with significant others, then the most basic unit of social organization – the human relationship – is anchored in affective moorings (Lawler et al. 2008; Cozolino 2014).

In particular, knowledge about the social self (semantic autobiographical knowledge), formed in episodes, tagged with powerful affect, and confirmed or activated frequently in encounters, comes to be generalized too, but is differentiated from the other two types in that it activates normally distinct places in the brain they do—that is, it remains rooted in the emotion centers and is what makes our global sense of self perceived as stable and consistent over longer durations and, moreover, drenches appraisals of our own actions as well as others in affect (Turner 2007). This also means, using more familiar sociological terms, goal setting, strategizing, habit, decision-making, selfing and minding are saturated with emotions (Franks 2006).

Memory works because of emotions; our senses work because of emotions; the construction, maintenance, alteration, and destruction of self, depend on our brain’s emotional neuroarchitecture as much as on the social environment’s input. Thus, if we are to take cognitive science seriously, as sociologists, then we must also take seriously the role emotions play in action and organization.

Folk Psychology and Legal Responsibility

If folk psychology is false, is legal responsibility dead?

If legal responsibility is dead, is everything permitted?

Maybe not, but such questions have received growing attention in the legal field, as the field confronts the prospect of an emergent “neuro-law.” Neuroscience challenges the unacknowledged background of commitments to theories of action that underwrite the law. In this post, I want to argue that it does so in a way that could have particular significance for a similar neuroscientific challenge to sociology. At least for some legal scholars, what drives the issue is nothing less than the explanatory merit of folk psychology itself: “The law will be fundamentally challenged only if neuroscience or any other science can conclusively demonstrate that the law’s psychology is wrong and that we are not the type of creatures for whom mental states are causally effective” (Morse 2015: 262).

Here, I want to argue that as these debates unfold in legal fields, they seem to translate in some vaguely interesting ways to the way similar debates unfold in sociology, not least because the primary definition of action found in sociology comes from Max Weber, i.e. “the lawyer as social thinker” (Turner and Factor 1994). Turner and Factor reveal that the predominant action accounting scheme present in sociology (Weberian) was essentially created by Weber’s “transformation of the categories of legal science into the basic categories of sociology” (Turner and Factor 1994: 1). Weber, of course, passed the German referendar and both his dissertation and habilitationsschrift were on the history of law (medieval commercial and Roman agrarian to be exact). It makes sense, then, that his approach to sociological categories (like action) should be situated against the “significant prehistory in the legal writing of his own time,” in particular the work of the legal philosopher Rudolf von Ihering (see Lizardo and Stoltz 2018).

Much of Weber’s theoretical legacy repurposed the conceptual frameworks of legal science in order to fundamentally strip sociology of any strong “social” theory by removing emphasis from collectivities, social forces, developmental principles, and social evolution. In their place, he relied on probabilistic causality, that was contingent on subjective meaning, and ideal-typical concept formation that involved “redefinition and substitution.” The goal was to devise an approach and categorical framework that would “eliminate questions that require an ‘ultimate cause.’” All of this appropriately situates Weber’s category of action in a legal tradition because it becomes clearly marked here as a category that targets the causal responsibility carried by individual actors and which is assigned in an attributivist manner that is not different from what happens in a courtroom and how legal practitioners reconstruct a line of action and attribute responsibility using the “language of the lawyer” (Turner and Factor 1994: 5).

As Omar and I argued (2015), Weber’s “basic sociological categories” approach to action remains the genealogical seed of present-day theories of action in sociology that span differences on the margins between interpretivist, rational choice or the DBO model. If Weber himself was essentially doing legal philosophy when he defined his category of action, then it seems worthwhile to examine what neuroscience means for the law and whether any lessons can be learned from a kind of (weak) comparison between sociology and the law as loosely allied fields. Nowhere does this seem more true than in making subjective meaning the best way of attributing causal responsibility (as Weber himself advocated).

While modern legal systems vary a great deal in their traditional practices (e.g. Napoleonic versus Common Law traditions), the basic concepts are surprisingly general and span different legal systems, as they all revolve around the attribution of responsibility and liability (Hart 2008). For our purposes, the most important facet of the law is that it features (as it did for Weber) an “act requirement,” which basically means that the only things that can count as illegal are actions. Legal codes are effectively long lists of “illegal” actions (about 7000 actions in the US federal legal code).  Even a non-action must be made to resemble an action (by featuring a cognitive state at the very least) in order to be illegal.

How does the law define action? For the law, the most important aspect is that an action have an agent. And the only class of agents that count as legitimate agents for the law are human agents (not “autonomous agents” or non-human animal agents or force of God agents, etc; Hage 2017). This is important because to legally define human agency we must apply a framework that gives access to the mental states that make person X the agent causally responsible for this illegal act Y. While the act itself is illegal apart from this agent, it is only this agent that makes this action an action in a worked out legal frame. For this illegal action to count as an action, then, three main mental states must be attributable to the responsible agent, which serve as legally acceptable “dispositions” that do the most important job of linking him/her to the illegal act: “motivational states of desire, wish or purpose; cognitive states of belief; conative states of intending or willing” (Moore 1993: 3).

The focus on linking an agent to an action is the most important and (for my argument) most theoretically interesting part of how modern legal frameworks attribute agency. The fundamental and seemingly unconventional term underwriting this is, of course, “causal-responsibility.” As Hart (2008[1968]) notes, there are different types of responsibility and liability recognized by the law generally speaking: in addition to causal, there is role-responsibility, liability-responsibility, capacity-responsibility. Yet in every case, liability and responsibility can be assigned only if an “act occurred.” And in order for an act to have occurred, there must be an agent linked to it, and that agent must have had a motivational state, cognitive state, and conative state in order to be linked to it.

So what does neuroscience mean for the law? It potentially means that the conventional and critically important link between agents and actions (an analogue to Weberian subjective meaning) in modern law is scrambled beyond recognition. Any skepticism about folk psychological states will create problems if, as the argument goes, acts (not agents) are illegal but those acts require an agent-linkage that only works through attributative folk psychological states. Neuroscience potentially makes “acts” legally unrecognizable by jeopardizing the logical connection between agents and actions that takes standard form in a belief/desire deduction. As this is established in the “grammar of the law” (Boltanski 2014), it means that criminal responsibility cannot  be adequately served by attributing states of mind.

And that is exactly the problem as Morse (2008) sees it, because neuroscience promotes a sort of “no action thesis” in response. Namely, “the truth of [neural] determinism is consistent with the existence or non-existence of agency, with the causal role or non-causal role of mental states in explaining behavior. Responsibility depends on agency, on the causal role of mental states, and the new discoveries arguably deny the possibility of agency as it is traditionally conceived.” Thus, neuroscientific correlates can make it seem as if the act did not occur because of an agent. The basic problem is that the legal “reality of the act” is now independent from what the law can recognize as the “agent of the act.”

Ultimately Morse defers to something like Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” (1987) as a deflationary move, which foregrounds the sheer pragmatic value of attributive styles that are (now) mainly conventional by comparison. This is a safe solution and, for him, it is the most likely solution, even if neuro-law is here to stay. A revolutionary displacement in law will not occur, at least not anytime soon, for reasons not the least of which have to do with the heavy weight of judicial precedent. Legal traditions consistently outrun the introduction of new explanatory frames.

It still seems reasonable to ask whether a tour down this rabbit hole has any bearing on the way sociologists explain action, the historical Weber connection notwithstanding. Turner and Factor (1994) argue that there is a significant difference in at least one critical respect: lawyers are constrained by the “dogmatic framework of the law” in attributing responsibility for illegal acts. The sociologist does not have exactly the same burden, but tries to satisfy instead a “conceptual framework of the audience … a shifting, ‘eternally young’ framework” (e.g. what Weber called the “language of life”). In a very conventional sense, this runs up against determinism of a different sort (“social determinism”). But this could actually leave sociology positioned to translate neuroscience into action accounting schemes that embrace a “no action thesis” and do not try to work around it by conventionalizing certain frameworks.

Stephen Turner’s new book (2018) introduces the catchy phrase “verstehen bubble.” One application of it could very well be to entire fields that become trapped within the circular limits of categories that enable both communication and introspection and make phenomenon unrecognizable or incommunicable except as the tokens of self-reinforcing or looping types. Presumably, there are not too many fields that will feature both classes of categories, but as the above discussion suggests, a verstehen bubble seems to characterize the law while sociology is arguably less prone by comparison. Its categories of communication (at least) can find the language of intention, belief and desire problematic, though counter-vocabularies are either very carefully partialized (see Kurzman 1991) or even combined with introspective categories (becoming a paranoid style [Boltanski 2014]). Nevertheless, its unique position as both introspective and communicative would, perhaps by that fact alone, make sociology a venue for producing “surrogates” (in Turner’s terms) that reach toward an explanatory domain located somewhere beyond the verstehen bubble.

 

References

Boltanski, Luc. (2014). Mysteries and Conspiracies. London: Polity.

Dennett, Daniel. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press.

Hage, Jaap. (2017). “Theoretical Foundations for the Responsibility of Autonomous Agents.” Artificial Intelligence and the Law 25: 255-271.

Hart, HLA. (2008). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford UP.

Kurzman, Charles. (1991). “Convincing Sociologists: Values and Interests in the Sociology of Knowledge” pp. 250-271 in Ethnography Unbound. UC Press.

Lizardo, Omar and Dustin Stoltz (2018). “Max Weber’s Ideal versus Material Interests Revisited.” European Journal of Social Theory 21: 3-21.

Morse, Stephen. (2008). “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges for Responsibility from Neuroscience.” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology 9: 1-36.

Morse, Stephen. (2015). “Neuroscience, Free Will and Criminal Responsibility.” in Free Will and the Brain. Cambridge UP.

Strand, Michael and Omar Lizardo. (2015). “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.

Turner, Stephen. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

Turner, Stephen and Regis Factor. (1994). Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker. London: Routledge.

 

 

Bourdieu as a (Hetero)phenomenologist

Toward the beginning of Pierre Bourdieu’s newly published 1999-2000 lectures from the College de France (Manet: A Symbolic Revolution), a perplexed art student asks Bourdieu the following question, one that the verbatim lectures show to have worried and preoccupied the great theorist of practice:

Your recent conferences have astonished me. For when you speak of developing a theoretical approach to art, taking note not of the intentions of the artist but of his dispositions, this implies that the artist cannot be the author of a theoretical work, as Kandinsky was, because he cannot be conscious of the dispositions that he has acquired unconsciously. As an artist, I find this point of view difficult to accept, for I see in it a risk of alienation that is heavy with consequences and, in this case, must I conclude that I am unable to write a thesis? (Bourdieu 2017: 60)

This question comes after Bourdieu makes claims like the 19th century French artist Edouard Manet included “explosive” qualities in his work “without necessarily being aware of it” (27), that if we were to ask about any Manet painting “Did Manet consciously want to do that and did he premeditate what he put into that painting?” the answer must be an unambiguous “no” (45), and finally, as Bourdieu claims, “What I am describing here is … not the conscious mind of the painter … [but] a painter who finds himself practically engaged with the creation of his picture. He has, then, a practical intention, which is not at all his conscious, premeditated intention” (49-50). No wonder the student was perplexed.

The Manet that appears in Bourdieu’s lectures is not a great conversationalist and really has no unique insight into the nature of his craft. Truly as dumb as a painter, as the old saying goes. If, on a given day, you were to ask Manet “what are you doing?” he would very likely give a most honest reply: “I’m painting a picture.” As Bourdieu continues, “He might even have said a little more, for example: ‘I want to paint something that’ll be a work of art. I want to show that you can make something modern out of a classical model.’” Bourdieu believes that a similar boring answer would be given by Zola or [fill in the blank] writer of renown, or really any one of us as we engage in any activity (I am writing a blog post. I’m not quite sure what it is about. I believe something about Bourdieu). “But that does not make [Manet or Zola] or us either totally unconscious automata, or perfectly lucid subjects” (2017: 49).

What is so interesting about these lectures, and other of Bourdieu’s late work on art (1996), is that here we see the application of practice for the purposes of phenomenology, seeking a reconstruction of direct experience, but which I want to claim fits more the profile of a true heterophenomenology (Dennett 1991; 2003), which I’ll explain. Bourdieu wants to put himself and his readers in the artists’ shoes. He wants to know what it was like to be in the world from the “artist’s point of view,” confront the pragmata they confronted, their problems and their solutions for those problems, which he ultimately claims is the legacy they leave behind for other practitioners in a field to recapitulate (e.g. “Beethoven’s solution” or “Manet’s solution”). An opus infinitum, as Bourdieu confesses, and on several occasions in the lectures he admits his embarrassment at what does not know and never will. Yet there is merit in the task, as he explains, especially when the topic is art, or “pure practice without theory” (as Durkheim said).

Heterophenomenology is a coinage of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and my argument is that it is particularly useful for understanding exactly what Bourdieu is up to in this work, as a particularly relevant application of practice. As Dennett claims, heterophenomenology is, quite basically, the “phenomenology of another not oneself” (2003: 19). It is therefore a third-person accounting scheme (e.g. “Manet does”), but one that takes the “first person point of view [e.g. “I did”] as seriously as it can be taken.” What this means is that a heterophenomenologist (mouthful, hereafter HPist) understands that answers to to questions that, seemingly, give access to dimensions first-person experience (“What were you thinking when you painted X?”) are actually third-person investigations that invoke a person’s verbal capacity to link an internal state to a proposition (“I was thinking that …”). An HPist does not dismiss that kind of data, but neither does she take it at face value.

Rather, the job of the HPist is comprehensive. It involves generating a “fictional world … populated with all the images, events, sounds, smells, hunches, presentiments and feelings that the subject sincerely believes to exist in his or her (or its) stream of consciousness. Maximally extended, it is a neutral portrayal of exactly what it is like to be that subject” (Dennett 1991: 99).

The catch is that even though the HPist trusts the person, and “maintains a constructive and sympathetic neutrality” toward what people say about their experience and their action, this does not make those people the authority on the truth of the experience. What the world is like to them is at best an “uncertain guide” to what is going on for them as they experience and act. But neither does this mean that they are zombies (Dennett) or unconscious automata (Bourdieu). The point is that the HPist tries to compile a definitive description of the world according to subjects, but uses everything in that description as primary data, part of a “fictional world,” that is just the beginning of the analysis. It is what must be explained.

Dennett (2003) demonstrates what this using the following example from a famous experiment by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Melzer (1971). Shepard and Melzer asked subjects whether the two drawings below (Figure 1) were of different objects or just different views of the same object. Nearly every subject reported that they solved the puzzle by rotating one of the figures in their “mind’s eye” to make a comparison. But were they really doing this mental rotation? If we were to ask a hundred people (including me!), they would probably all say that, yes, I mentally rotate the object on the right in order to answer that, indeed, these are two different views of the same object. The phenomenologist would be satisfied with this. The HPist, however, is more intrigued by “mental rotation” as a belief about conscious experience. She willfully submits that what this experience is like for subjects could have nothing to do with what is going on for subjects as they have this experience. But we first need to know that “mental rotation” is what the experience is like for them (see Pylyshyn 2002; Foglia and O’Regan 2016 for literature on mental imagery).

 

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Figure 1

Dennett’s HPist strategy bears a none too faint resemblance to the method Bourdieu uses in answering the art student and in his remarkable analysis (68-72) of Manet’s painting Luncheon on the Grass (1863). Here, he attempts to put himself and his audience in Manet’s “historical place … a kind of imaginary reconstruction [of] Manet’s point of view as he was engaged in producing the Luncheon” (2017: 69). Thus, what Manet does here is basically create a tableau vivant, those still life paintings of groups of people arranged in some kind of scene that were so fashionable under Napoleon III. But he does something more than this. Bourdieu’s analysis is too detailed (even though he declares his shame about lacking the “necessary competence to do it”) to reproduce in its entirety. I’ll just point to two examples that resemble a heterophenomenology, ones that relate specifically to mental imagery.

First, Manet’s “symbolic revolution” is found in microcosm in the Luncheon because he had placed himself in an impossible situation in relation to his models: “he got [them] to adopt a classical pose, but through [their] clothing and his pictorial manner, he gave [them] modern connotations” (2017: 70). Did he intend to do this? Bourdieu says no. And to build that case he says that Manet effectively “pictured in his mind’s eye” a Venetian painting  that he had seen at the Louvre (Marcantino Raimondi The Judgment of Paris … people in the bottom right corner).

Second, the woman in the background is a mystery. The kind of wallpaper effect of the woman suggests Japanese art as a model. But Bourdieu argues that Manet likely had a work of “[Jean-Antoine] Watteau in mind” (maybe the Feast of Love, that woman in the righthand background) someone he admired a great deal. He puts this woman in as a “nod to Watteau … [that] closes the triangle of the three figures … She is treated differently: the brushstrokes are light, as in the style of Watteau” (71).

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Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, 1863

 

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The Judgment of Paris, Raimondi ca. 1510-1520

 

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The Feast (or Festival) of Love, Watteau 1718-19

As Bourdieu finishes this “very strange exercise” he feels ashamed doing it, because he does not have the necessary competence. The problem is that those who do have the competence (art historians) don’t think of doing it and remain instead in the role of “interpreter, observer and analyst.” The question here is not a matter of “influence.” It is rather the HPist’s question that what painting the Luncheon was like for Manet gives no special insight into what was going on for Manet as he painted.

According to Bourdieu, what was going on for Manet was practice. This is particularly true because Manet was really never one to serve as Cartesian observer of his own interior process and usually gave boring, trite, cliche answers about his revolutionary work, including to Zola when Manet was doing his portrait. He seemed to be a zombie when he spoke about painting, but of course he was anything but a zombie. That in itself is data to the HPist, as it suggests a dimension of experience running so far past what we can access simply by recording verbalized beliefs about that experience.

At the end of this long examination, motivated by the art student who is despairing at the thought that his first-person experience may not have complete authority, Bourdieu finally gets around to answering him in the best way he can, with a kind of practical charity principle:

[Manet] was not entirely sure of what we wanted to do: he had a vague plan … And it was in the process of doing it that he found out what he wanted to do, as we do ourselves when we do something … To reply once again to the question put to me, which has caused me to slow down and fill out my argument: one can be very intelligent with one’s body, without using language, of course, when one is a dancer or pianist. Having said this, there is the particular problem of the executant as opposed to the person who produces his own text, or his own work of art. So there is an intelligence of the body … Painters know how to adopt towards painting a viewpoint that is a practical understanding; they have a practical perception which is based on know-how … they understand a savoir-faire as savoir-faire, and don’t write lectures on it (73)

 

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. (2017). Manet: A Symbolic Revolution. London: Polity.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Dennett, Daniel. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay

Dennett, Daniel. (2003). “Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10: 19-30

Foglia, Lucia and Kevin O’Regan. (2016). “A New Imagery Debate: Enactive and Sensorimotor Accounts.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7: 181-196.

Pylyshyn, ZW. (2002). “Mental Imagery: In Search of a Theory.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 157-182.

Shepard, Roger and Jacqueline Melzer. (1971., “Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects” Science 171: 701–3.