Abstract
Playing-at-a-theme as the interactional mode of solving social inconsistencies has to be analysed more carefully. For two important social phenomena, anomie and alienation, seem to be related to typificatory processes and especially to the arisal of symbolic types. Three sociological characteristics of play can be distinguished.
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References
See sect. 4.52.
Most of the games studied by Berne in his Games People Play are such games of avoidance. Permanent gaps, if arising as idiosyncratic behavior patterns, are important origins for neuroses and Berne studies them from this perspective. See sect. 1. 3.
The notion of “flooding out” is introduced by Goffman similarly: “Transformation rules of an encounter oblige the participant to withhold his attention and concern from many potential matters of consideration….The matter in which he has been affecting disinvolvement suddenly becomes too much for him and he collapses… he floods out.” (Encounters, p. 55) Only, I am enlarging Goffman’s notion: One may “flood” a situation, also, with a most eloquent “sea of words.” Every teacher, preacher and politician often uses that device.
Huizinga, Homo Ludens, (p. 15). —Roger Caillois, too, rejects this interpretation of Huizinga: “Das Kind, das Eisenbahn spielt, kann sehr gut den Kuß seines Vaters zurückweisen und ihm klar machen, daß man eine Lokomotive nicht küßt; es will ihm deshalb keineswegs vortäuschen, eine wirkliche Lokomotive zu sein.” (Die Spiele und die Menschen, p. 30) —Caillois, on the other hand, takes this example as typical for a mode of playing he calls “mimicry.” But Caillois does not discriminate between “being a locomotive” (a perceptual type) and “riding a locomotive” (a social type constituted in a context of interaction).
Social Construction, pp. 50f.
A very concise presentation of the notions of “Entlastung” (unburdening, facili¬tation) and “Handlungskreis” (action-circuit) may be found in A. Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1957) pp. 17f. Gehlen developed these theo¬ries first in Der Mensch (Bonn, Athenäum, 6. Aufl., 1958). The first edition is from 1940. — Heidegger (1927) introduced the notion of “Entlastung” before Gehlen in a similar sense: “Das Man entlastet… das jeweilige Dasein in seiner Alltäglichkeit.” See: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 10. Aufl., 1963), § 27, esp. p. 127.
See sect. 6.3.
Gehlen, Mensch, p. 49.
op. cit., p. 223.
op. cit., pp. 220ff, for instance, and at various other places.
See sect. 6.31.
First published in 1795.1 quote: Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen in: Schiller’s sämtlichen Werke (Stuttgart, Cotta, 1889) vol. 12.
For details: see Ästhetische Briefe, 15th letter, (“Seine doppelte Natur”).
op. cit., 13th letter.
Durkheim’s “homo duplex” is an essentially social notion, while Schiller adhered to an individualistic concept of “human totality” characteristic for German idealism. The differences are best seen in Durkheim’s passionate defense of his anthropological position: “We distrust those excessively mobile talents that lend themselves equally to all uses, refusing to choose a special role and keep to it. We disapprove of those men whose unique care is to organize and develop all their faculties, but without making any definite use of them, and without sacrificing any of them, as if each man were sufficient unto himself, and constituted an independent world. The praiseworthy man of former times is only a diletante to us, and we refuse to give diletantism any moral value; we rather see perfection in the man seeking, not to be complete, but to produce.” Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York, Macmillan, 1933), p. 42. — For a morally less “engaged” statement see Durkheim’s “Individual and Colective Representations” in: Sociology and Philosophy (Glencoe, Free Press, 1953).
Division of Labor, preface to the 2nd edition.
E. Durkheim, Le Suicide ( Paris, Presse Univ. de France, 1960 ), p. 322.
E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Methods ( Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1938 ), p. 74.
A sharp distinction can already be drawn here between “anomie” and “reification”: The latter was described as a state,in which relations between types (the typificatory scheme) are taken as types themselves. See sect. 5.4.
Social Construction, pp. 85–96.
Social Construction, p.96.
op.cit., p. 94.
The notion of “symbolic type” shall neither suggest nor presuppose that these types are symbols in the usual meaning of this term.
In contradistinction, for instance, to Parsons’ notion of social role, I am stressing here the necessary role-condition of ongoing reciprocal typifications in role-formation. Social roles are correlative formations (student-teacher, father-son, etc.) coming about in face-to-face situations of interaction. The fool, for instance, has as a correlate the “non-fool,” but that distinction is based on a formal, predicative judgement (like “non-tree”) and induces merely an abstract, dual partition of the total situation.See chap. 8.
I quote in the following a study by Orrin E. Klapp, The Fool as a Social Type, AmJ. of Soc., 55, 1949, pp. 157–162. Klapp called “social type” what I have termed “symbolic type” above, since my usage of the term “social type” is much wider. —Klapp later tried to extend his observations into a theoretical frame calling his approach “Neo- Durkheimian,” but his elaborations of the theory of collective representations do not go far beyond Dürkheim. See: O. E. Klapp, Symbolic Leaders, Public Dramas and Public Men (Chicago, 1964 ).
See, for instance, English: Raymond Briggs, The Mother Goose Treasury (New York, Coward-McCann, 1966); Hank Ketcham, Dennis the Menace (New York, Fawcett, 1966). German: Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Struwwelpeter (Stuttgart, Loewe, no date); Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz (München, Braun-Schneider, 1965 ). Swedish: Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Langstrumpf ( Hamburg, Oetinger, 1968 ).
Fool as Social Type, pp. 158f.
More often, however, and to the delight of the defiant student, the “judge” turns “tyrant” and takes upon himself the task of imposing a reified action pattern upon the situation.
Fool as Social Type, p. 162.
See sect. 5.4.
Compare this statement with an earlier formulation in sect. 3.0: In case of a typical project, the reciprocal tendings are “indicated,” in case of a symbolic type they are “determined,” i.e., from the outset reified.
See Klapp, Symbolic Leaders.
In Albert Camus’social philosophy the symbolic type of “rebel” holds a central place. A rebel is a man “who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation....He confronts an order of things…with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate.”
In recent years, magazines, posters, clubs and the like have succeeded in creating the symbolic types of “playboy” and “bunny.” Whereas the symbolic type of playboy remains relatively close to the socially approved male-role, the “bunny” exhibits a strong “degeneration” of the female-role to a symbolic type. This becomes most obvious, for instance, in the totally reified patterns of a “bunny-calender.” The symbolic type of “bunny” serves, of course, to delineate by contrast the otherwise rather vague contours of socially relevant masculinity, which — according to this argument — is much more threatened than the female-role.
See, for example A. SchUtz, The Stranger, in: Coll. Pap., vol. 2, pp. 91–105, and his references to the extensive literature on this subject.
At present, I cannot pursue this problem of “incoherence of the situation.” I must turn back to the phenomena of play and their nomicS role in the constitution of symbolic types.
G. H. Mead, Mind, p. 158.
G. H. Mead, Present, p. 186.—Mead’s notion of game will be studied later. See chap. 7.
Compare sect. 5.3.
Mind, p. 173.
“They are children crying in the night” Present, p. 187.
Mind, p. 370.
Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen ( Jena, Fisher, 1899 ), p. 168.
Homo Ludens,p.15.
Preyer already explained this play (drinking from an empthy cup) by the child’s diffuse concepts, by “an incapability to unite constant characters into distinctly limited concepts.”
See sect. 7.2.
It is most interesting for the theory of social roles, in which ways and under which conditions this state of alienation in play does later break up in reciprocal typifications and type-formations in adult role interaction.
See sect. 7.3 for the notion of closure.
Psychotherapy has recognized this fact and employs play and games on this basis. See especially Thomas S. Szasz, Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
This problem is obviously different from the “coincidence” between mediate and immediate presentation of context, which is achieved by constituting a social type.
In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl assumes that the realm of the alter ego and of sociality has to be constituted in the consciousness of the “pure ego.” Any eidetic (i.e., roughly speaking: typical) forms of sociality arise from this fundamental intersubjectivity of ego and alter ego. — In a very interesting paper, Luckmann has proposed to reverse Husserl’s argument by adhering, nevertheless, closely to Husserl’s terminology and phenomenological method. See: Th. Luckmann, On the Boundaries of the Social World, in: Phenomenology and Social Reality. Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz, (ed.) Maurice Natanson ( The Hague, Nijhoff, 1970 ).
Recent experiments with hallucinatory drugs, like LSD, have shown, for instance, that the perceptual contours of one’s own body may become entirely vague or distorted. The subsequent shock has even led to sudden suicides. — The dissolution of social contours, accompanied by no impairment of the perceptual abilities of the individual in a state of anomie finds in those cases a curious reversal: perceptual coherence explodes and the discrepancies with one’s own stock of typified social experiences becomes unbearable. Durkheim’s notion of fatalistic suicide comes close to this case.
In the earlier example of mutual kite-construction (sect. 4.52) my son typified the total context by the incipient event “Center-of-Gravity.” In a later phase, the boy complained about stomach pains and asked, pointing to his stomach: “Are there any animals inside?” Consistent with the argument given above, one may interpret this incident as follows: For the boy, the contours of the social object “my body” are still vaguely drawn and not yet reduced to the notion of “human body.” Incipient events like “center of gravity” become “animated,” when they are merged in typificatory attempts into a typificatory scheme of “body,” which has not yet sufficiently lost its incipient character. — Luckmann argues in a similar way: Neither a distinction between inanimate and living bodies, nor an identification of the social with the human can be assumed as irreducible facts for sociological theory. The humanness of the human body is constituted in and not constitutive for social processes. “The sense living body,’ which is originally transferred to all things in the life-world, receives additional and specific support whenever perceptible transformations of the outside of the object are directly and consistently apprehended as changes of expression.” This original sense-transfer is later reduced, its “plausibility is weakened” on the basis of the experience that “some of the bodies to which the sense ‘living body’ was originally transferred do not move.” But this subsequent reduction of the realm of “living body” does not have to coincide with the boundaries of the “human body.” Ethnological studies of “animism,” “totemism,” “shamanism” and “fetishism” have presented data to the contrary. (Quotes from Boundaries of the Social World)
See the end of sect. 5.3.
Coll. Pap., vol. 1, p. 216. — See also sect. 5.22.
Charles S. Peirce interpreted this act of giving as one of the most fundamental forms of “conduct,” of “thirdness.” See his Coll. Pap., 1.345 and 1.475; also the excellent presentation of Richard J. Bernstein, Action, Conduct, and Self Control, in: R. J. Bernstein (ed.), Perspectives on Peirce (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 75. — In this context one should also mention Marcel Mauss, The Gift ( London, Cohen, 1966 ).
See the next section for more details.
G. H. Mead, Mind, p. 159.
See sect. 6.24.
Herbert Spencer and Karl Groos have established that tradition, and G. H. Mead and also J. P. Sartre defended it later.
An excellent example is the following give-and-take I played with a neighbor’s son, Daniel (4;6), who came into my study 3 weeks before Christmas presenting me with 3 buttons:
See sect. 3.0.
See, for the latter case, Goffman’s report on “barter” among the patients of Central Hospital: Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 274–286. — Goffman, however, interprets this phenomenon merely functionally as an “unofficial social exchange.” I would argue that these patients are desperately trying to grasp social relevance with their giving and taking of cigarettes and nickels. Their position is much more precarious than that of children who are taken — in case of failure — under the protective cover of an “It-is-just-play.”
See Berger-Luckmann’s notion of “universe-maintenance”: Social Construction, pp. 96–118.
In Middle European Christmas tales Santa Claus comes to visit with a big bag, into which he packs all the naughty children.
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© 1970 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Grathoff, R.H. (1970). Social Inconsistencies and Symbolic Types in Play. In: The Structure of Social Inconsistencies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3215-5_6
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