IV. On The Repercussive Character of Involvement Offenses
I have suggested that disenchantment with an interaction may take the form of preoccupation, self-consciousness, other-consciousness, and interaction-consciousness. These forms of alienation have been separated for purposes of identification. In actual conversation, when one kind occurs the others will not be far behind.
When the individual senses that he or other participants are failing to allocate their involvement according to standards that he approves, and in consequence that they are conveying an improper attitude toward the interaction and the participants, then his sentiments are likely to be roused by the impropriety—much as they would be were any other obligations of the ceremonial order broken. But matters do not stop here. The witnessing of an offense against involvement obligations, as against other ceremonial obligations, causes the witness to turn his attention from the conversation at hand to the offense that has occurred during it. If the individual feels respon-sible for the offense that has occurred, he is likely to be led to feel shamefully self-conscious. If others seem responsible for the offense, then he is likely to be led to feel indignantly other-conscious in regard to them. But to be self-conscious or other-conscious is in itself an offense against involvement obligations. The mere witnessing of an involvement offense, let alone its punishment, can cause a crime against the interaction, the victim of the first crime himself being made a criminal. Thus, during spoken interaction, when one individual is stricken with uneasiness, others often come down with the disease.
A note of qualification should be added. The individual may become misinvolved and yet neither he nor others may become aware that this is the case, let alone become improperly involved because of this awareness. He commits a latent offense that only awaits someone’s perception of it to make it manifest. When others come to see that he is misinvolved, and convey the fact of this judgment to him, he may become self-consciously flustered in consequence, as he may also do when he discovers this fact for himself. Thus an individual may “come to” from a brown study and embarrassingly find himself in the midst of an interaction but patently alienated from it.
V. The Affectation of Involvement
When a conversation fails to capture the spontaneous involvement of an individual who is obliged to participate in it, he is likely to contrive an appearance of being really involved. This he must do to save the feelings of the other participants and their good opinion of him, regardless of his motives for wanting to effect this saving. In doing so he has a damping effect upon the repercussive consequences of misinvolvement, ensuring that while he may be disaffected his disaffection will not contaminate others. At the same time, however, he drives a wedge between himself and the world that could become real for him. And the gap that is created in this way he fills with that special kind of uneasiness that is characteristically found during conversation; the kind of uneasiness that occurs when involvement obligations can neither be laid aside nor spontaneously realized; the kind that occurs when the individual is separated from the reality of interaction, yet at a time when interaction is all around him.
As a form of contrivance, affected involvement will be differently judged according to the motive the alienated individual has for contriving it. Some shows of involvement are felt to be cynical because the individual seems to be interested ultimately not in the feelings of the others but rather in what can be gained by deluding the others into a belief that they have captured his attention. He gives the impression that he is occupied with the talk but proves to be really occupied with the task of giving this impression.
On the other hand, if the alienated individual is genuinely concerned with the feelings of the others, as important matters in their own right, then any act that protects these feelings may be considered a form of tact and approved on this ground.
It should be noted that often the show of involvement given by the tactful interactant is not as good a show as he is capable of giving. Some power that is almost beyond him will force him to demonstrate to others and to himself that this kind of interaction with these participants is not the sort of thing that can capture his attention; someone must see that he is perhaps above or beyond it. Here we find a form of insubordination carried on by those who may not really be in a position to rebel.
The ways of not quite concealing tactfully concealed misinvolvement constitute, then, the symptoms of boredom. Some symptoms of boredom suggest that the individual will make no effort to terminate the encounter or his official participation in it but that he will no longer give as much to it. The initiation of side-involvements, such as leafing through a magazine or lighting a cigarette, are instances. Other symptoms of boredom suggest that the individual is about to terminate official participation and function as a tactful warning of this.7
To manifest signs of boredom is an inconsiderate thing. But in a certain way he who does so assures the others that he is not affecting something that is not felt; they at least know where they stand with him. To suppress these signs completely is suspect, for this prevents others from obtaining the benefit of feed-back cues that might tell them what the situation really is. Thus, while there is one obligation to affect involvement, there is another one inducing the individual not to affect it too well. It is an interesting fact that when the self of the boring individual is deeply committed to the proceedings, as it may be, for example, during leave-takings and avowals of affection, then the bored individual is likely to feel a strong compunction to conceal signs of alienation and thoroughly affect involvement. It is thus at the most poignant and crucial moments of life that the individual is often forced to be the most contriving; these, too, will be the times when the boring individual will be in greatest need of candor from others and least able to bear receiving it.
I have suggested that a show of involvement may be affected by cynical participants and by tactful ones; the same show may also be affected by those who feel selfconsciously embarrassed. They may even add to their production by affecting signs of boredom. A condition that casts doubt upon the individual himself is thus exchanged, he hopes, for one that casts doubt upon the others. There is a psychological doctrine that carries this observation one step further and argues that when the individual is himself convinced that he is bored, he may be trying to conceal from himself that he is actually embarrassed.8
Conversational encounters in which participants feel obliged to maintain spontaneous involvement and yet can-not manage to do so are ones in which they feel uneasy, and ones in which they may well generate uneasiness in others. The individual recognizes that certain situations will produce this alienation in him and others, and that other situations are quite unlikely to do so. He recognizes that certain individuals are faulty interactants because they are never ready to become spontaneously involved in social encounters and he will have folk-terms such as “cold fish,” “kill-joy,” “drag,” “wet blanket” to refer to these refractory participants. Those who fail to support conversations with their social betters he may call gauche; while those who disdain involvement with their inferiors he may call snobs; in either case condemning these persons for putting rank before interaction. As previously suggested, the individual will also know some persons who are faulty because their manner and social attributes make it difficult for others to become properly involved. It is apparent, too, that in any interaction a role-function develops which ensures that everyone becomes and remains spontaneously involved. This sparking function may be fulfilled by different participants at different times in the interaction. Should one participant fail to help keep the interaction going, other participants will have to do his share of work. An individual may acquire a reputation for this kind of labor, creating gratitude or resentment as one who is always the fife of the encounter.
VI. Generalizing the Framework
1. The Context of Involvement Obligations. One limitation we have set ourselves is to deal with situations where all those present to one another are o
fficially obliged to maintain themselves as participants in conversation and to maintain spontaneous involvement in the conversation. This is a frequent enough condition to serve as a reference point, but there is no need to be ultimately bound by it. Involvement obligations are in fact defined in terms of the total context in which the individual finds himself. Thus there will be some situations where the main involvement of those present is supposed to be invested in a physical task; conversation, if carried on at all, will have to be treated as a side-involvement to be picked up or dropped, depending on the current demands of the task at hand. There will be other situations where the role and status of a particular participant will be nicely expressed by his right to treat a conversation in a cavalier fashion, participating in it or not, depending on his inclination at the moment. A father sometimes has this right regarding the mealtime conversation maintained by lesser members of the family, while they do not.
I should like to cite another way in which the individual may accept a different allocation of involvement for himself from that expected of others. In the teasing that the young receive from the old, or in the interrogations that employees receive from employers, loss of composure on the subordinate’s part may be accepted by the superordinate as an expected and proper part of the involvement pattern. At such times the subordinate may feel he would like to be spontaneously involved in the talk but is in too much of a panic to do so, while the superordinate may feel that for him the appropriate focus of attention, and one he can sustain with comfort, is not the actual talk but the wider situation created by the humorous plight of the inferior as he struggles in the conversation.9 In fact, if the subordinate shows composure on these occasions, the superior may feel affronted and embarrassed. Similarly there will be occasions when we feel an individual ought, out of respect for the difficulties he is in, to be preoccupied or over-involved. This misinvolvement may somewhat disrupt the interaction, but perfect poise on his part might so scandalize those present as to disrupt the interaction even more. Thus while it is true that sometimes an individual will be thought an interaction hero if he remains involved in a conversation under difficult conditions, at other times such loyalty will be thought foolhardy.
Differential obligations regarding the same spoken inter-action may be seen most clearly in large-scale interactions, such as public speeches, where we are likely to find specialization and segregation of involvement roles, with a division between full participants, who are expected to talk or listen, and non-participating specialists, whose job is to move unobtrusively about and look after some of the mechanics of the occasion. Examples of these non-participants are domestics, ushers, doormen, stenographers, and microphone men. The special alignment these officials have to the interaction is their particular right and obligation; it is accepted openly by them and for them, and they would in fact cause uneasiness were they to become manifestly involved in the content of the talk. They show respect for the occasion by treating it as a side-involvement.
Participants, themselves, in large-scale interaction can have a license in regard to involvement that could not be afforded them in two- or three-person talk, perhaps because the more participants there are to sustain the proceedings, the less dependent the occasion will be on any one participant. In any case, we often find in large-scale interaction that it is permissible for a few participants to enter for a moment into by-plays and side-discussions, providing they modulate their voice and manner to show respect for the official proceedings. In fact, a participant may even leave the room for a moment and do this in such a way as to convey the impression that his main focus of attention is still held by the talk, even though his body is not present. On such occasions, main involvement and side-involvements may become fictions maintained officially in form while alternate involvement patterns are actually maintained in practice.
2. Pseudo-conversations. We have so far restricted our attention to interactions that have as their constituent communicative acts the turns at talking taken by participants. We can extend our view and consider conversation-like interactions in which the token exchanged is not speeches but stylized gestures, as in the interchange of non-verbal greetings,10 or moves of some kind, as in card games. These unspoken yet conversation-like interactions seem to be similar, structurally, to spoken interaction, except that the capacities that must be mobilized in order to carry on such interaction seem to have more to do with muscular control of limbs than in the case of spoken interaction.
3. Unfocused Interaction. I have suggested that speech-, gesture-, and game-interactions are characterized by a single official focus of cognitive and visual attention that all full-fledged participants help to sustain. (The focus of visual attention may move, of course, from one participant to another as one speaker gives up his speaking-role and returns to the role of listener.) With this focused kind of interaction we must contrast the unfocused kind, where individuals in one another’s visual and aural range go on about their respective business unconnected by a shared focus of attention. Street behavior and conduct at a large social party are instances.
When we examine unfocused interactions we find that involvement obligations are defined not in relation to a conjoint focus of cognitive and visual attention but in relation to a role that can be suggested by the phrase “decorous individual noninterferingly going about his proper business.” Once we shift to this point of reference, however, we find that all the kinds of misinvolvement that occur during focused interaction also occur during unfocused interaction, though sometimes under a different name. Just as an adolescent may become self-consciously uneasy when talking to his teacher, so, in walking into a full classroom, he may feel that he is being critically observed and that his way of walking, which he feels is stiff and wooden, reveals his social anxiety. Just as we can have preoccupied persons in conversational interaction, so in un-focused interaction we can have “absent-minded” participants, who by their posture, facial expression, and physical movements suggest that they are momentarily “away,” that they have momentarily let fall the expressive costume that individuals are expected to wear whenever they are in the immediate presence of others. And, of course, boredom, too, can occur during unfocused interaction, as we may observe in almost any queue of individuals waiting to buy a ticket. And just as agencies such as alcohol and marijuana may be employed to transform a conversation into something that is not embarrassing or boring, so these may function to put individuals at ease in the wider scene provided by unfocused interaction. Just as a witticism may do honor to the conversational moment, so the wearing of new or special clothing, the serving of rare or costly food, and the use of perishable flowers can draw attention to the unique value of a wider social occasion. Clearly, then, there are ways in which the perspective employed in this paper can be used for studying unfocused interaction.
We must not, however, expect the similarity between the two kinds of interaction to be ‘complete. For example, it appears that individuals are more frequently unself-conscious in their capacity as participants in unfocused interaction than they are as participants in focused interaction, especially focused interaction of the spoken kind. In fact, in spoken interaction, spontaneous “normal” involvement seems to be the exception and alienation of some kind the statistical rule. That is understandable. On the one hand, participants are required to be spontaneously carried away by the topic of conversation; on the other hand, they are obliged to control themselves so that they will always be ready to stay within the role of communicator and stay alive to the touchy issues that might cause the others to become ill at ease. On the one hand they are obliged to adhere to all applicable rules of conduct, and on the other they are obliged to take enough liberties to ensure a minimum level of involving excitement. These obligations seem to be in opposition to each other, requiring a balance of conduct that is so delicate and precarious that alienation and uneasiness for someone in the interaction are the typical result. Unfocused interaction does not seem to require the same
delicacy of adjustment.
VII. Conclusion
Many social encounters of the conversational type seem to share a fundamental requirement: the spontaneous involvement of the participants in an official focus of attention must be called forth and sustained. When this requirement exists and is fulfilled, the interaction “comes off” or is euphoric as an interaction. When the encounter fails to capture the attention of the participants, but does not release them from the obligation of involving them-selves in it, then persons present are likely to feel uneasy; for them the interaction fails to come off. A person who chronically makes himself or others uneasy in conversation and perpetually kills encounters is a faulty interactant; he is likely to have such a baleful effect upon the social life around him that he may just as well be called a faulty person.
Of any individual, then, it will be significant to know whether his status and manner tend to hinder the maintenance of spontaneous involvement in the interaction, or to help it along. It should be noted that this information pertains to the individual in his capacity as interactant, and that, regardless of the other capacities in which he may be active at the time, the role of interactant is something he will be obliged to maintain.
Social encounters differ a great deal in the importance that participants give to them but, whether crucial or picayune, all encounters represent occasions when the individual can become spontaneously involved in the proceedings and derive from this a firm sense of reality. And this kind of feeling is not a trivial thing, regardless of the package in which it comes. When an incident occurs and spontaneous involvement is threatened, then reality is threatened. Unless the disturbance is checked, unless the interactants regain their proper involvement, the illusion of reality will be shattered, the minute social system that is brought into being with each encounter will be disorganized, and the participants will feel unruled, unreal, and anomic.
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