The Roots of “Radical Interactionism”

A plea has been made for replacing the perspective of “symbolic interactionism” with a new interactionist's perspective—“radical interactionism.” Unlike in symbolic interactionism, where Mead's and Blumer's ideas play the most prominent roles, in radical interactionism's, Park's ideas play a more prominent role than either Mead's or Blumer's ideas. On the one hand, according to Mead, the general principle behind the organization of human group life was once dominance, but it is now “sociality.” On the other hand, according to Park, this general principle is now and has always been dominance. Blumer takes a position much closer to Mead's than Park's arguing that the general principle underlying the organization of human group life is sociality. Under certain special conditions, however, it can become dominance. Although like radical interactionism, symbolic interactionism is rooted in pragmatism, unlike in radical interactionism, symbolic interactionism is still plagued with strains of utopian thought, among which the notion of sociality is the most virulent. Sociality may be the principle on which human group life is organized in heaven, but, down here on earth, it remains organized on the basis of domination. Thus, radical interactionism provides a much‐needed antidote to the idealistic overtones still found in symbolic interactionism.     

Kurt Lewin's Leadership Studies and His Legacy to Social Psychology: Is There Nothing as Practical as a Good Theory?

This paper re‐examines Kurt Lewin's classic leadership studies, using them as a concrete example to explore his wider legacy to social psychology. Lewin distinguished between advanced “Galileian” science, which was based on analysing particular examples, and backward “Aristotelian” science, which used statistical analyses. Close examination of the way Lewin wrote about the leadership studies reveals that he used the sort of binary, value‐laden concepts that he criticised as “Aristotelian”. Such concepts, especially those of “democracy” and “autocracy”, affected the way that he analysed the results and the ways that later social scientists have understood, and misunderstood, the studies. It is argued that Lewin's famous motto—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is too simple to fit the tensions between the leadership studies and his own views of what counts as good theory.     

G.H. Mead's Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research

The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech (what Mead often referred to as “the vocal gesture”) is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as “Tinbergen's Four Questions,” developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research on human speech. It is used in this paper to organize the comparison of Mead with contemporary scholars. The analysis concludes that Mead was, in a sense, “beyond” the Four Questions by recognizing the limitations of reductionist methods in understanding the nature of conscious phenomena, especially language. Mead's socially situated model of the nature of human speech makes him relevant to today's field where some see an undervaluation of the treatment of language as a social process.     

Siting Praxeology. The Methodological Significance of “Public” in Theories of Social Practices

The concept of “site” is at the center of current debates in theories of social practices as well as in cultural anthropology. It is unclear, however, how to assess the associated methodological assumption that overriding social structures or cultural formations can manifest themselves in sites. The article draws on the conception of social practices and introduces the notion of “publicness” in order to explicate how and why sociality and social structures can be accessed through “siting”. Sites as well as social practices, it is claimed, have to be conceptualized as essentially public and thus principally observable phenomena. This assumption of publicness implicit to both site ontology and theories of social practices is unfolded on the basis of a praxeological reformulation of the paradigm of joint attention elaborated in developmental psychology. To avoid presentist misinterpretations, we then conceptualize sociality as chains of practices across time and space, drawing on the works of Theodore Schatzki, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Bruno Latour. The public carriers of practices (artifacts, symbols, media, bodies) and the translocal structures they establish acquire particular significance in these approaches. In a further step, we present some methodological consequences of the “publicness assumption” and support our arguments by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's study on Distinction.     

Experience,Subjectivity, Selfhood: Beyond a Meadian Sociology of the Self

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post-Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience.     

试论费孝通的“乡寰视野”

本文根据费孝通的有关理论、观点提出“乡寰视野”、“劦业乡”两个概念，尝试以此来诠释费孝通关于中国城乡社会发展与世界经济之“休戚与共”的理论和实践活动。文章阐述了费孝通“乡寰视野”观的渊源、演进；从概念结构上解明“乡寰视野”中的“乡”和“寰”，以及“劦业乡”各自的内涵构成；通过对映衬费孝通“乡寰视野”历史意识的理论梳理，以及对费孝通晚年就“乡”“寰”关系问题所作阐述的把握，试图以更具综合性的视域对费孝通的这一重要思想作出较为系统的学理解释。文章最后指出，费孝通倡导“文化自觉”体现出了更为宽广、更为仁至的人文关怀的情愫。“乡寰视野”中的纯真的愿景，是“‘美好社会’的意念”。     

Contingency and Social Change: Collective Engagement in Conditions of Radical Uncertainty

This paper addresses the nexus between contingency, social engagement and change, through investigating the potential of severe (“disruptive”) contingency to bring about new forms of joint agency. By challenging Boltanski's notion of existential tests (which can only be experienced in isolation), the paper argues that social actors can experience disruptive contingent events in an inherently intersubjective manner. Although they severely hinder social interaction, disruptive contingent events enable a possibility of what might be called “negative common knowledge” between social actors which in turn renders certain societal norms meaningless. This possibility is mediated through processes of mutual engagement (calls between actors) that could, further, be transformed into a new “norm circle” (Dave Elder-Vass). Social domination – in particular its “complex” variety – in this context appears as the obstructing of such transformation. A recent political episode in Serbia is analyzed to demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contingency and the logic of complex domination.     

广松涉物象化论在日本左翼运动中的位置与影响

战后日本的旧左翼运动呈现追随大众现实意识状态的倾向,新左翼运动旗手广松涉对此展开批判,他主张发达资本主义国家的革命具有首要意义,认为马克思主义迎来了“第三阶段”,在日本应该通过理论斗争与实践运动相结合的方式实现社会变革。一般被视为纯哲学问题的广松物象化论就是用来指导新左翼运动的理论武器。与“异化革命”论相比,物象化论是对资本主义价值体系进行的原理上的、更加彻底的批判,因而不容易与现实运动形成直接关联,广松立足于物象化论的革命论自然也无法解决他自己所批判的在革命运动中“前卫”与“大众”相脱离的问题。     

Beyond Husserl and Schütz. Hermann Schmitz and Neophenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology is one of the most recognized approaches for explaining the constitution of social behaviour and the construction of social reality. To this day, phenomenological sociology usually belongs to the tradition of Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and to Alfred Schütz's mundane phenomenology, thus generally presenting itself as sociology of lifeworld, sociology of everyday life, and sociology of knowledge. In contrast to this, this paper intends to outline an alternative kind of phenomenological sociology that finds its philosophical foundation in Hermann Schmitz's “New Phenomenology”. With regards especially to Schmitz's theory of the felt body (“Leib”) and his theory of situation, the basic principles of Neophenomenological Sociology (NPS) will be introduced. Their main components are (1) felt body and affective involvement as the pre-personal apriori of sociality, (2) felt-bodily communication as the basic unit of sociality, and (3) joint situations as the socio-ontological foundation and empirical manifestation of sociality. With these specific key concepts, NPS proves itself to be a socio-theoretical approach whose foremost strength is that it can identify and properly analyse the pathic dimensions of social behaviour and social situations that social sciences tend to overlook.     

He Knew How to Make Himself Irreplaceable

Now that Sobchak is no longer with us, the remarks he made not long before his premature death take on the force of an invocation, a prophecy. I met with him—just think!—only last Monday in his small office on Nevskii Prospekt. It was Valentine's Day, and I felt that I was not intruding too much in Sobchak's family plans. "Lana," he told his wife on his mobile phone, "you didn 't know, but I am talking with Sosnov. No, I won't be late for dinner."     

The Social as Heaven and Hell: Pierre Bourdieu's Philosophical Anthropology

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical‐sociological investigations presupposed and, at the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory (latu sensu), and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition (“symbolic capital”) appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”.     

Scientific-Technical Progress and the Higher School

Not long ago I had occasion to be present at a meeting of the comrades' court of Housing Operation Office No. 16 of Moscow's Bauman District. A statement by Citizeness Kh-va accusing the M-v couple of unseemly behavior ("They curse, threaten, put garbage in the soup …") was being considered. M-v is a young scholar — an art specialist. I am his research director, and naturally I am not at all indifferent to how he conducts himself in his home life.     

The self as the locus of morality: A comparison between Charles Taylor and George Herbert Mead's theories of the moral constitution of the self

This paper provides a critical comparison of two leading exponents of the relationship between morality and selfhood: Charles Taylor and George Herbert Mead. Specifically, it seeks to provide an assessment of the contribution each approach is able to make to a social theory of morality that has the self at its heart. Ultimately, it is argued that Taylor's phenomenological account neglects the significance of interaction and social relations in his conceptualisation of the relationship between morality and self, which undermines the capacity of his framework to explain how moral understandings and dialogic moral subjectivity develop in a world of shared meaning. I then argue that Mead's pragmatist interactionist approach overcomes many of the flaws in Taylor's framework, and offers a grounded conceptualisation of the relationship between self and morality that is able to provide a basis for a properly social account of moral subjectivity.     

无须德性的伦理生活——黑格尔论现代社会的理念

比较黑格尔的伦理概念与古代伦理概念的区别有助于澄清现代社会的理念。在亚里士多德那里,“伦理”是一个借助习惯、法律和政制搭建起来的、旨在塑造人的欲求和欲望的生活方式。对于处在自然德性和思虑德性之间的伦理空间而言,习惯、法律和制度并不是自足的,它们着眼并取决于德性。相比之下,在黑格尔那里,现代人无须具备多么高的德性,仅仅通过服从健全的法律和制度就能够驯化自己的欲望,从而赢得他人的承认和自由。不过,我们需要反思,在法律和制度的健全和完备之外是否还有其他可能性？或许,这仍然取决于我们能否在自身的文明传统中再度唤醒某种伦理特质,去驾驭这些理性化的法律和制度,营造出一种值得欲求的共同生活。     

The Romantic Realism of Michel Foucault The Scientific Temptation

Beatrice Han has argued that the theories of subjection (determinism: structure) and subjectivation (freedom: agency) are the “the blind spot[s] of Foucault's work.” Furthermore, she continues, as historical and transcendental theories, respectively, Foucault left them in a state of irresolvable conflict. In the Scientific Temptation I have shown that, as a practicing researcher, Foucault encourages us to situate the theories of the subject in the context of his un‐thematized search for a metaphysics of realism, the purpose of which was to ground his complementary reach for a possibility of naturalism. In Returning to Kant I now argue that it is this fundamental feature of “Foucault's Foucault” that drives his returns to Kant, the purpose of which was to resolve the conflicting theories of the subject and thereby solve his Giddensian problem of structure and creativity. Locating the returns and their purpose in the context of my own arguments for the recovery of human agency, I argue that Foucault's attempts to solve his Giddensian problem led to two unfortunate solutions. In the first return, his resort to Baudelaire's aesthetic subject is a regression to a pre‐noumenal conception of the Kantian subject. With the second return, the reinstatement of the Kantian subject as causally empowered, minus the noumenalism, is nothing more than a reclamation of Kant's conception. I argue that only a reconstruction of Foucault's scientific realism permits us to understand that he could have moved beyond mere reclamation to the actual recovery of human agency.     

The monamine hypothesis,placebos, and problems of theory construction in psychology and psychiatry

Can there be scientific theories in psychology, medicine or psychiatry? I approach this question through an in-depth analysis of a typical experiment for clinical depression involving the monoamine hypothesis, drug action, and placebos. I begin my discussion with a reconstruction of Adolf Grünbaum’s conceptual analysis of what a placebo is. I then use his notion of “intentional placebo” to discuss a typical experiment using the monoamine hypothesis, two drugs, and a placebo. I focus on the theoretical aspects of the experiment, especially on the notion of causal explanation. I then raise five conceptual and methodological problems for theory construction. These problems focus on questions of the causal efficacy of placebos and drugs; ad hoc versus ceteris paribus explanations in biomedicine and psychology; and the falsifiability of the monoamine hypothesis. I conclude by pointing out the need for further, rigorous philosophical analysis concerning the possibility of theory construction in psychology, medicine or psychiatry.     

The later social adjustment of a group of borderline defective delinquents trained at the oaks school 1

In Part 1 of this article, the author provides an overview of the history of psychoanalytic treatment of those identifying as homosexual. In Part 2, the author interviews “Rob” to more fully demonstrate the corrosive effects over a lifetime of analytic and psychotherapeutic treatment, as it had once been practiced. Rob, a man primarily attracted to men, spent many years in treatment with different therapists and analysts during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Now in his early eighties, Rob is married and remains closeted to all but a few close associates. When Rob entered treatment many years ago, he was told that his homosexual attractions were symptoms of an illness and with treatment he could change. Rob's experience is uncannily similar to multiple reports that exist in the professional and lay literature. Rob knows that nothing can undo the damage he suffered, yet it remains his wish that the psychoanalytic community would acknowledge, and even apologize, to all those who were harmed—including the many who took their lives—by theories and practices that were once so central to mainstream psychoanalysis.     

The Flesh and the World: Intercorporeal Body-selves,Ageing and Dancing

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address the role that embodiment, embodied consciousness and what can be termed “extradiscursive” experiences such as body memory and ekstasis as a form of ecstatic experience assume in understanding the body-self of mature dancers. I argue that the body-self of the dancer becomes increasingly intersubjective in maturity through her/his bodily practice, and that this can be understood in terms of the notions of intercorporeity, and of the “flesh” derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. I argue that ways of manifestation of intercorporeity in bodily experience are discursively elusive, drawing on two forms of bodily experience—body memory and ekstasis—and examining experiences narrated by mature dancers who were interviewed in my Ph. D. study on ageing, gender and dancers' bodies. I contend that the experience of ekstasis is the “glue” of a corporeal subjectivity that transforms itself through momentary identification with the world, that calls on the invisible as well as the visible. Body memory also challenges Western dualist conceptions of consciousness and bodily experience, and is more easily aligned with Eastern understandings of consciousness as embodied. Finally, I suggest that the concept of body memory is useful for imbuing the body-subject with a cohesion and authenticity through the body's capacity for nonconscious remembrance of movement through a proprioceptively stored “body history,” which enables the constitution of a coherent body-self in older age.     

“桑梓情谊”的现代转化：费孝通社会理论的情感维度

费孝通的社会理论在社会结构方面更受学界重视，而其中的情感维度尚未得到足够关注。本文试图在费孝通早年有关中国现代化的理论视域中，梳理他有关“桑梓情谊”与“亲属情谊”“乡土工业”“村镇地方团体”之间关系的探索和讨论，进而呈现费孝通社会理论中对于情感的重视。 在费孝通看来，中国的现代化应该以中国传统社会组织为基础来嫁接西方现代技术， 从而推动整个社会从传统向现代的有效过渡。 在此过程中，他尝试将既旧且新的“桑梓情谊”阐释为现代中国社会的情感基础。 文章认为，“桑梓情谊”表征并构造了本地的根源与大社会的流动以及地方与国家的人际关联， 是理解费孝通社会理论之情感维度的关键，对我们思考当代中国现代化建设也有一定的启示。     

Szasz and His Interlocutors: Reconsidering Thomas Szasz's "Myth of Mental Illness" Thesis

It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter‐arguments of his critical interlocutors. It presents a defence of the Szaszian conception and emphasises the continuing relevance of his earliest work. Additionally, the paper discusses Szasz's thesis in light of the work of the influential French philosopher of medicine, Georges Canguilhem.