Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ from dreams of social physics—covering laws, unified science, operationalism, and all that—are hardly any better equipped. For them, the general muddling of vocational identities could not have come at a better time. If they are going to develop systems of analysis in which such conceptions as following a rule, constructing a representation, expressing an attitude, or forming an intention are going to play central roles—rather than such conceptions as isolating a cause, determining a variable, measuring a force, or defining a function—they are going to need all the help they can get from people who are more at home among such notions than they are. It is not interdisciplinary brotherhood that is needed, nor even less highbrow eclecticism. It is recognition on all sides that the lines grouping scholars together into intellecutal communities, or (what is the same thing) sorting them out into different ones, are these days running at some highly eccentric angles.

      The point at which the reflections of humanists on the practices of social scientists seems most urgent is with respect to the deployment in social analysis of models drawn from humanist domains—that “wary reasoning from analogy,” as Locke called it, that “leads us often into the discovery of truths and useful productions, which would otherwise lie concealed.” (Locke was talking about rubbing two sticks together to produce fire and the atomic-friction theory of heat, though business partnership and the social contract would have served him as well.) Keeping the reasoning wary, thus useful, thus true, is, as we say, the name of the game.

      The game analogy is both increasingly popular in contemporary social theory and increasingly in need of critical examination. The impetus for seeing one or another sort of social behavior as one or another sort of game has come from a number of sources (not excluding, perhaps, the prominence of spectator sports in mass society). But the most important are Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life as language games, Huizinga’s ludic view of culture, and the new strategics of von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. From Wittgenstein has come the notion of intentional action as “following a rule”; from Huizinga, of play as the paradigm form of collective life; from von Neumann and Morgenstern, of social behavior as a reciprocative maneuvering toward distributive payoffs. Taken together they conduce to a nervous and nervous-making style of interpretation in the social sciences that mixes a strong sense of the formal orderliness of things with an equally strong sense of the radical arbitrariness of that order: chessboard inevitability that could as well have been otherwise.

      The writings of Erving Goffman—perhaps the most celebrated American sociologist right now, and certainly the most ingenious—rest, for example, almost entirely on the game analogy. (Goffman also employs the language of the stage quite extensively, but as his view of the theater is that it is an oddly mannered kind of interaction game—ping-pong in masks—his work is not, at base, really dramaturgical.) Goffman applies game imagery to just about everything he can lay his hands on, which, as he is no respecter of property rights, is a very great deal. The to-and-fro of lies, meta-lies, unbelievable truths, threats, tortures, bribes, and blackmail that comprises the world of espionage is construed as an “expression game”; a carnival of deceptions rather like life in general, because, in a phrase that could have come from Conrad or Le Carré, “agents [are] a little like us all and all of us [are] a little like agents.” Etiquette, diplomacy, crime, finance, advertising, law, seduction, and the everyday “realm of bantering decorum” are seen as “information games”—mazy structures of players, teams, moves, positions, signals, information states, gambles, and outcomes, in which only the “gameworthy”—those willing and able “to dissemble about anything”—prosper.

      What goes on in a psychiatric hospital, or any hospital or prison or even a boarding school in Goffman’s work, is a “ritual game of having a self,” where the staff holds most of the face cards and all of the trumps. A tête-à-tête, a jury deliberation, “a task jointly pursued by persons physically close to one another,” a couple dancing, lovemaking, or boxing—indeed, all face-to-face encounters—are games in which, “as every psychotic and comic ought to know, any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality.” Social conflict, deviance, entrepreneurship, sex roles, religious rites, status ranking, and the simple need for human acceptance get the same treatment. Life is just a bowl of strategies.

      Or, perhaps better, as Damon Runyon once remarked, it is three-to-two against. For the image of society that emerges from Goffman’s work, and from that of the swarm of scholars who in one way or another follow or depend on him, is of an unbroken stream of gambits, ploys, artifices, bluffs, disguises, conspiracies, and outright impostures as individuals and coalitions of individuals struggle—sometimes cleverly, more often comically—to play enigmatical games whose structure is clear but whose point is not. Goffman’s is a radically unromantic vision of things, acrid and bleakly knowing, and one that sits rather poorly with traditional humanistic pieties. But it is no less powerful for that. Nor, with its uncomplaining play-it-as-it-lays ethic, is it all that inhumane.

      However that may be, not all gamelike conceptions of social life are quite so grim, and some are positively frolicsome. What connects them all is the view that human beings are less driven by forces than submissive to rules, that the rules are such as to suggest strategies, the strategies are such as to inspire actions, and the actions are such as to be self-rewarding—pour le sport. As literal games—baseball or poker or Parcheesi—create little universes of meaning, in which some things can be done and some cannot (you can’t castle in dominoes), so too do the analogical ones of worship, government, or sexual courtship (you can’t mutiny in a bank). Seeing society as a collection of games means seeing it as a grand plurality of accepted conventions and appropriate procedures—tight, airless worlds of move and countermove, life en règle. “I wonder,” Prince Metternich is supposed to have said when an aide whispered into his ear at a royal ball that the czar of all the Russians was dead, “I wonder what his motive could have been.”

      The game analogy is not a view of things that is likely to commend itself to humanists, who like to think of people not as obeying the rules and angling for advantage but as acting freely and realizing their finer capacities. But that it seems to explain a great deal about a great many aspects of modern life, and in many ways to catch its tone, is hardly deniable. (“If you can’t stand the Machiavellianism,” as a recent New Yorker cartoon said, “get out of the cabal.”) Thus if the game analogy is to be countered it cannot be by mere disdain, refusing to look through the telescope, or by passioned restatements of hallowed truths, quoting scripture against the sun. It is necessary to get down to the details of the matter, to examine the studies and to critique the interpretations—whether Goffman’s of crime as character gambling, Harold Garfinkel’s of sex change as identity play, Gregory Bateson’s of schizophrenia as rule confusion, or my own of the complicated goings-on in a mideastern bazaar as an information contest. As social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the language of pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes), the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of skeptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices.

      III

      The drama analogy for social life has of course been around in a casual sort of way—all the world’s a stage and we but poor players who strut and so on—for a very long time. And terms from the stage, most notably “role,” have been staples of sociological discourse since at least the 1930s. What is relatively new—new, not unprecedented—are two things. First, the full weight of the analogy is coming to be applied extensively and systematically, rather than being deployed piecemeal fashion—a few allusions here, a few tropes there. And second, it is coming to be applied less in the depreciatory “mere show,” masks and mummery mode that has tended to characterize its general use, and more in a constructional, genuinely dramaturgical one—making, not faking, as the anthropologist Victor Turner has put it.

      The two developments are linked, of course. A constructionalist view of what theater is—that is, poiesis—implies that a dramatistic perspective in the social sciences needs to involve more than pointing out that we all have our entrances and exits, we all СКАЧАТЬ