HAROLD
GARFINKEL (1)
ABSTRACT
Communicative
work directed to transforming an individual’s total identity into an identity
lower in the group’s scheme of social types is called a “status degradation
ceremony.” To reconstitute the other as a social object, the denouncer must get
the witnesses to appreciate the perpetrator and the blameworthy event as
instances of an extraordinary uniformity, in dialectical contrast to ultimately
valued, routine orders of personnel and action. The denouncer must publicly
claim and manage the status of bona fide representative of the group of
witnesses. From this position he must name the perpetrator an “outsider.”
Organizational variables will determine the effectiveness of a program of
degradation tactics.
Any
communicative work between persons, whereby the public identity of an actor is
transformed into something looked on as lower in the local scheme of social
types, will be called a “status degradation ceremony.” Some restrictions on
this definition may increase its usefulness. The identities referred to must be
“total” identities. That is, these identities must refer to persons as “motivational”
types rather than as “behavioral” types, (2) not to what a person may be expected
to have done or to do (in Parsons’ term, (3) to his “performances”) but to what
the group holds to be the ultimate “grounds” or “reasons” for his performance.
(4)
The grounds
on which a participant achieves what for him is adequate understanding of why
he or another acted as he did are not treated by him in a utilitarian manner.
Rather, the correctness of an imputation is decided by the participant in
accordance with socially valid and institutionally recommended standards of “preference.”
With reference to these standards, he makes the crucial distinctions between appearances
and reality, truth and falsity, triviality and importance, accident and essence,
coincidence and cause. Taken together, the grounds, as well as the behavior
that the grounds make explicable as the other person’s conduct, constitute a
person’s identity. Together, they constitute the other as a social object.
Persons identified by means of the ultimate “reasons” for their socially
categorized and socially understood behavior will be said to be “totally”
identified. The degradation ceremonies here discussed are those that are
concerned with the alteration of total identities.
It is proposed that only in societies that are
completely demoralized, will an observer be unable to find such ceremonies,
since only in total anomie are the conditions of degradation ceremonies
lacking. Max Scheler (5) argued that there is no society that does not provide
in the very features of its organization the conditions sufficient for inducing
shame. It will be treated here as axiomatic that there is no society whose
social structure does not provide, in its routine features, the conditions of
identity degradation. Just as the structural conditions of shame are universal
to all societies by the very fact of their being organized, so the structural
conditions of status degradation are universal to all societies. In this
framework the critical question is not
whether status degradation occurs or can occur within any given society.
Instead, the question is: Starting from any state of a society’s organization,
what program of communicative tactics will get the work of status degradation
done?
First of all,
two questions will have to be decided, at least tentatively: What are we referring to behaviorally when
we propose the product of successful degradation work to be a changed total
identity? And what are we to conceive the work of status degradation to have
itself accomplished or to have assumed as the conditions of its success?
I
Degradation
ceremonies fall within the scope of the sociology of moral indignation. Moral indignation is a social affect. Roughly
speaking, it is an instance of a class of feelings particular to the more or
less organized ways that human beings develop as they live out their lives in
one another’s company. Shame, guilt, and boredom are further important
instances of such affects.
Any
affect has its behavioral paradigm. That of shame is found in the withdrawal and covering of the portion of
the body that socially defines one’s public appearance prominently, in our
society, the eyes and face. The paradigm of shame is found in the phrases that
denote removal of the self from public view, i.e., removal from the regard of
the publicly identified other: “I could have sunk through the floor; I wanted
to run away and hide; I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me.” The
feeling of guilt finds its paradigm in the behavior of selfabnegation-disgust,
the rejection of further contact with or withdrawal from, and the bodily and
symbolic expulsion of the foreign body, as when we cough, blow, gag, vomit,
spit, etc.
The
paradigm of moral indignation is
public denunciation. We publicly
deliver the curse: “I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he
appears but is otherwise and in essence (6) of a lower species.”
The social affects serve various functions both for
the person as well as for the collectivity. A prominent function of shame for
the person is that of preserving the ego from further onslaughts by withdrawing
entirely its contact with the outside. For the collectivity shame is an “individuator.”
One experiences shame in his own time.
Moral indignation serves to effect the ritual
destruction of the person denounced. Unlike shame, which does not bind persons together, moral
indignation may reinforce group solidarity. In the market and in politics, a
degradation ceremony must be counted as a secular form of communion. Structurally,
a degradation ceremony bears close resemblance to ceremonies of investiture and
elevation. How such a ceremony may bind persons to the collectivity we shall
see when we take up the conditions of a successful denunciation. Our immediate
question concerns the meaning of ritual destruction.
In the
statement that moral indignation brings about the ritual destruction of the
person being denounced, destruction is intended literally. The transformation
of identities is the destruction of one social object and the constitution of
another. The transformation does not involve the substitution of one identity for
another, with the terms of the old one loitering about like the overlooked
parts of a fresh assembly, any more than the woman we see in the departmentstore
window that turns out to be a dummy carries with it the possibilities of a
woman. It is not that the old object has been overhauled; rather it is replaced
by another. One declares, “Now, it
was otherwise in the first place.”
The work of
the denunciation effects the recasting of the objective character of the
perceived other: The other person becomes in the eyes of his condemners
literally a different and new person.
It is not that the new attributes are added to the old “nucleus.” He is not
changed, he is reconstituted. The former identity, at best, receives the accent
of mere appearance. In the social calculus of reality representations and test,
the former identity stands as accidental; the new identity is the “basic
reality.” What he is now is what, “after all,” he was all along. (7)
The public
denunciation effects such a transformation of essence by substituting another
socially validated motivational scheme for that previously used to name and
order the performances of the denounced. It is with reference to this
substituted, socially validated motivational scheme as the essential grounds,
i.e., the first principles, that his
performances, past, present, and prospective, according to the witnesses, are
to be properly and necessarily understood. (8) Through the interpretive work
that respects this rule, the denounced person becomes in the eyes of the witnesses
a different person.
II
How can one
make a good denunciation? (9)
To be
successful, the denunciation must redefine the situations of those that are witnesses
to the denunciation work. The denouncer, the party to be denounced (let us call
him the “perpetrator”), and the thing that is being blamed on the perpetrator
(let us call it the “event”) must be transformed as follows: (10)
1. Both event and perpetrator must be removed from
the realm of their everyday character and be made to stand as “out of the
ordinary.”
2. Both event and perpetrator must be placed within a
scheme of preferences that shows the following properties:
A. The preferences must not be for event A over event
B, but for event of type A over event
of type B. The same typing must be
accomplished for the perpetrator. Event and perpetrator must be defined as
instances of a uniformity and must be treated as a uniformity throughout the
work of the denunciation. The unique, never recurring character of the event or
perpetrator should be lost. Similarly, any sense of accident, coincidence,
indeterminism, chance, or monetary occurrence must not merely be minimized.
Ideally, such measures should be inconceivable; at least they should be made
false.
B. The witnesses must appreciate the characteristics
of the typed person and event by referring the type to a dialectical
counterpart. Ideally, the witnesses should not be able to contemplate the features of the denounced person without
reference to the counterconception, as the profanity of an occurrence or a
desire or a character trait, for example, is clarified by the references it
bears to its opposite, the sacred. The features of the maddog murderer reverse
the features of the peaceful citizen. The confessions of the Red can be read to
each the meanings of patriotism. There are many contrasts available, and any
aggregate of witnesses this side of a complete war of each against all will
have a plethora of such schemata for effecting a “familiar,” “natural,” “proper,”
ordering of motives, qualities, and other events.
From such
contrasts, the following is to be learned. If the denunciation is to take
effect, the scheme must not be one in which the witness is allowed to elect the
preferred. Rather, the alternatives must be such that the preferred is morally
required. Matters must be so arranged that the validity of his choice, its
justification, is maintained by the fact that he makes it.” The scheme of alternatives
must be such as to place constraints upon his making a selection “for a
purpose.” Nor will the denunciation succeed if the witness is free to look
beyond the fact that he makes the selection for evidence that the correct alternative
has been chosen, as, for example, by the test of empirical consequences of the
choice. The alternatives must be such that, in “choosing,” he takes it for
granted and beyond any motive for doubt that not choosing can mean only
preference for its opposite.
3. The
denouncer must so identify himself to the witnesses that during the denunciation
they regard him not as a private but as a publicly known person. He must not
portray himself as acting according to his personal, unique experiences. He
must rather be regarded as acting in his capacity as a public figure, drawing
upon communally entertained and verified experience. He must act as a bona fide
participant in the tribal relationships to which the witnesses subscribe. What
he says must not be regarded as true for him alone, not even in the sense that
it can be regarded by denouncer and witnesses as matters upon which they can
become agreed. In no case, except in a most ironical sense, can the convention
of true-for-reasonable-men be invoked. What the denouncer says must be regarded
by the witnesses as true on the grounds of a socially employed metaphysics
whereby witnesses assume that witnesses and denouncer are alike in essence. (12)
4. The
denouncer must make the dignity of the suprapersonal values of the tribe
salient and accessible to view, and his denunciation must be delivered in their
name.
5. The denouncer
must arrange to be invested with the right to speak in the name of these
ultimate values. The success of the denunciation will be undermined if, for his
authority to denounce, the denouncer invokes the personal interests that he may
have acquired by virtue of the wrong done to him or someone else. He must
rather use the wrong he has suffered as a tribal member to invoke the authority
to speak in the name of these ultimate values.
6. The denouncer
must get himself so defined by the witnesses that they locate him as a
supporter of these values.
7. Not only
must the denouncer fix his distance from the person being denounced, but the witnesses
must be made to experience their distance from him also.
8. Finally,
the denounced person must be ritually separated from a place in the legitimate
order, i.e., he must be defined as standing at a place opposed to it. He must
be placed “outside,” he must be made “strange.”
These are the
conditions that must be fulfilled for a successful denunciation. If they are
absent, the denunciation will fail. Regardless of the situation when the
denouncer enters, if he is to succeed in degrading the other man, it is necessary
to introduce these features. (13)
Not all degradation ceremonies are carried on in
accordance with publicly prescribed and publicy validated measures. Quarrels
which seek the humilitation of the opponent through personal invective may
achieve degrading on a limited scale. Comparatively few persons at a time enter
into this form of communion, few benefit from it, and the fact of participation
does not give the witness a definition of the other that is standardized beyond
the particular group or scene of its occurrence.
The devices for effecting degradation vary in the feature
and effectiveness according to the organization and operation of the system of
action in which they occur. In our society the arena of degradation whose product,
the redefined person, enjoys the widest transferability
between groups has been rationalized, at least as to the institutional measures
for carrying it out. The court and its officers have something like a fair monopoly
over such ceremonies, and there they have become an occupational routine. This
is to be contrasted with degradation undertaken as an immediate kinship and
tribal obligation and carried out by those who, unlike our professional
degraders in the law courts, acquire both right and obligation to engage in it through
being themselves the injured parties or kin to the injured parties.
Factors
conditioning the effectiveness of degradation tactics are provided in the organization
and operation of the system of action within which the degradation occurs. For
example, timing rules that provide for serial or reciprocal “conversations”
would have much to do with the kinds of tactics that one might be best advised?
to use. The tactics advisable for an accused who can answer the charge as soon
as it is made are in contrast with those recommended for one who had to wait
out the denunciation before replying. Face-to-face contact is a different
situation from that wherein the denunciation and reply are conducted by radio
and newspaper. Whether the denunciation must be accomplished on a single
occasion or is to be carried out over a sequence of “tries,” factors like the
territorial arrangements and movements of persons at the scene of the denunciation,
the numbers of persons involved as accused, degraders, and witnesses, status
claims of the contenders, prestige and power allocations among participants,
all should influence the outcome. In short, the factors that condition the
success of the work of degradation are those that we point to when we conceive
the actions of a number of persons as group-governed. Only some of the more
obvious structural variables that may be expected to serve as predicters of the
characteristics of denunciatory communicative tactics have been mentioned. They
tell us not only how to construct an effective denunciation but also how to
render denunciation useless.
[UCLA]
1.
Acknowledgment is gratefully made to Erving
Goffman, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and to Sheldon Messinger, Social
Science Research Council pre-doctoral fellow, University of California, Los
Angeles, for criticisms and editorial suggestions.
2.
These terms are borrowed from Alfred Schutz, “Common
Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (September,
1953).
3.
Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, “Values,
Motives, and Systems of Action,” in Parsons and Shils (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951).
4.
Cf. the writings of Kenneth Burke, particularly Permanence and Change (Los Altos,
Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1954), and A
Grammar of A Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1945).
5.
Richard Hays Williams, “Scheler’s Contributions
to the Sociology of Affective Action, with Special Attention to the Problem of Shame,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Vol. IT, NTo. 3 (March, 1942).
6.
The man at whose hands a neighbor suffered death
becomes a “murderer.” The person who passes on information to enemies is
really, i.e., “in essence,” “in the first place,” “all along,” “in the final
analysis,” “originally,” an informer.
7.
Two
themes commonly stand out in the rhetoric of denunciation: (1) the irony
between what the denounced appeared to be and what he is seen now really to be
where the new motivational scheme is taken as the standard and (2) a
re-examination and redefinition of origins of the denounced. For the
sociological relevance of the relationship between concerns for essence and
concerns for origins see particularly Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives.
8.
While
constructions like “substantially a something” or “essentially a something”
have been banished from the domain of scientific discourse, such constructions
have prominent and honored places in the theories of motives, persons, and
conduct that are employed in handling the affairs of daily life. Reasons can be
given to justify the hypothesis that such constructions may be lost to a group’s
“terminology of motives” only if the relevance of socially sanctioned theories
to practical problems is suspended. This can occur where interpersonal relations
are trivial (such as during play) or, more interestingly, under severe
demoralization of a system of activities. In such organizational states the frequency
of status degradation is low.
9.
Because the paper is short, the risk must be run
that, as a result of excluding certain considerations, the treated topics may
appear exaggerated. It would be desirable, for example, to take account of the
multitude of hedges that will be found against false denunciation; of the rights
to denounce; of the differential apportionment of these rights, as well as the
ways in which a claim, once staked out, may become a vested interest and may
tie into the contests for economic and political advantage. Further, there are
questions centering around the appropriate arenas of denunciation. For example,
in our society the tribal council has fallen into secondary importance; among
lay persons the denunciation has given way to the complaint to the authorities.
10.
These are the effects that the communicative
tactics of the denouncer must be designed to accomplish. Put otherwise, in so
far as the denouncer’s tactics accomplish the reordering of the definitions of
the situation of the witnesses to the denunciatory performances, the denouncer
will have succeeded in effecting the transformation of the public identity of
his victim. The list of conditions of this degrading effect are the
determinants of the effect. Viewed in the scheme of a project to be rationally
pursued, they are the adequate means. One would have to choose one’s tactics
for their efficiency in accomplishing these effects.
11.
Cf. Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1951), pp.
212-27.
12.
For bona
fide members it is not that these are the grounds upon wvhich we are agreed but
upon which we are alike, consubstantial, in origin the same.
13.
Neither
of the problems of possible communicative or organizational conditions of their
effectiveness have been treated here in systematic fashion. However, the
problem of communicative tactics in degradation ceremonies is set in the light
of systematically related conceptions. These conceptions may be listed in the
following statements: 1. The deainition of the situation of the witnesses (for
ease of discourse we shall use the letter S) always bears a time qualification.
2. The S at t2 is a function of the S at t1. This function is described as an
operator that transforms the S at ti. 3. The operator is conceived as
communicative work. 4. For a successful denunciation, it is required that the S
at t2 show specific properties. These have been specified previously. 5. The
task of the denouncer is to alter the S’s of the witnesses so that these S’s
will show the specified properties. 6. The “rationality” of the denouncer’s tactics,
i.e., their adequacy as a means for effecting the set of transformations
necessary for effecting the identity transformation, is decided by the rule
that the organizational and operational properties of the commuriicative net
(the social system) are determinative of the size of the discrepancy between an
intended and an actual effect of the communicative work. Put otherwise, the
question is not that of the temporal origin of the situation but always and
only how it is altered over time. The view is recommended that the definition
of the situation at time 2 is a function of the definition at time 1 where this
function consists of the communicative work conceived as a set of operations
whereby the altered situation at time 1 is the situation at time 2. In strategy
terms the function consists of the program of procedures that a denouncer
should follow to effect the change of state St1 to St2. In this paper St1 is
treated as an unspecified state.
No comments:
Post a Comment