The language of sociology traditionally deals with or-ganizations, structures, roles and statuses, and is not well adapted to describe the behavior of persons by virtue of their presence among one another. The term “interaction,” alas, has meant everything, and the units of analysis required if we are to focus on face-to-face interaction have been little considered. A translation is required, then, from structural to interactional terms, even while the key to the sociological method, the focus on rules and normative un-derstandings, is retained. In fact, to describe the rules regulating a social interaction is to describe its structure.
As a means of beginning the analysis of face-to-face be-havior, three basic interaction units may be recommended. The first is social occasion: an event, such as a dinner party, that is looked forward to and back upon as a unit, has a time and place of occurrence and sets the tone for what happens during and within it. Social occasions seem to merge into what the psychologist Roger Barker calls behavior settings, especially in the case of occasions that are informal and little perceived as entities in themselves.
Second, I use the term gathering to refer to any set of two or more individuals whose members include all and only those who are at the moment in one another’s immediate presence. By the term social situation I shall refer to the full spatial environment anywhere within which an entering person becomes a member of the gathering that is (or does then become) present. Situations begin when mutual monitoring occurs and lapse when the next to last person has left.
When persons are in a gathering, they can come together to sustain a joint focus of visual and cognitive attention, mutually ratifying one another as persons open to each other for talk or its substitutes. Such states of talk I call encounters or engagements. These focused gatherings must be distinguished from those cases where persons are present to one another but not engaged together directly in sustaining a state of talk, constituting thereby an unfocused gathering. Focused interaction is the kind that goes on in a state of talk; unfocused interaction is the kind that goes on, say, when two persons size each other up while waiting for a bus, but have not extended to each other the status of co-participants in an open state of talk.
The rules regulating the initiation, maintenance and ter-mination of states of talk, comprising an important part of what Bateson and Ruesch call metacommunication, have been somewhat considered in the literature, especially in connection with descriptions of so-called psychotic verbal production, and of course in small-group research and descriptions of group psychotherapy. In any case, this aspect of situational conduct fits fairly well with the occupational bias of the two-person room and the quiet talk that psychiatrists have brought to their consideration of psychotic behavior. What has been overlooked in this area, perhaps, are the rules governing encounters among the unacquainted, the rules, that is, regarding accosting and ap-proaching strangers, and, in addition to this, rules regarding the state of being “with” someone.
Rules regarding unfocused interaction—sheer and mere copresence in the same situation—have been little considered systematically; what suggestions are available come either from descriptions of withdrawal, for example Bleuler’s, or from etiquette books. Sociologists who specialize in collective behavior have focused on panics, riots and crowds, with little thought to the structure of peaceful human traffic in public places. The respect that transforms mere physical boundaries such as walls and windows into communication boundaries; the well-structured civil inattention accorded persons present, whereby one treats the other as if he has been seen but is not an object of undue curiosity; the maintenance of one’s face and appearance as though one were ready at all times to receive direction and information from the setting; the expression of a proper allocation of involvement as between main involve-ments and side involvements (such as smoking)—these normative requirements of mere presence have not yet been systematized in any way.
Similarly, little attention has been given to the manage-ment of accessible engagements, that is, engagements that are sustained in the same social situation as are other engagements and other unengaged individuals. We have only begun to study, under the influence of ethologists, the rules about spacing, whereby the conversational circles and unengaged persons in a social situation divide up available space so as to maximize certain variables, modulating sound accordingly. We have little considered the debt that a participant in an engagement owes to the engagement relative to the situation at large, a debt which persons fail to pay when they manifest various forms of disaffection and distraction; nor, correspondingly, have we much considered the debt the engagement as a whole owes to the social situation and social occasion—obliging those in the engagement to become caught up in it but not carried too far by the progressive development of the engagements activity.
When a patient acts in a classically psychotic way, it is relative to these various rules, and the units of association they support, that he is active. I want to argue now that there is an extremely wide range of motives and reasons for the individual indulging in such conduct. When a brain-damaged patient and a functionally ill patient manifest similar misconduct—for example, a failure to respond to the initiation of an engagement—psychiatry finds reason to confirm the belief that conduct can be a medical symptomatic thing, whether the illness is organic or functional. But surely this is an inversion of nature. It is the organic patient’s behavior that mimics a socially structured delict, much as an owl’s unblinking silence is read by us as a sign of wisdom, and it is the functional patient who manifests withdrawal from contact in its fuller and original form. An upper-middle-class girl who ignores the hoots, calls and invitations of slum-dwelling youths illustrates the act of being out of contact in an even more usual form. I know of no psychotic misconduct that cannot be matched precisely in everyday life by the conduct of persons who are not psychologically ill nor considered to be so; and in each case one can find a host of different motives for engaging in the misconduct, and a host of different factors that will modify our attitude toward its performance. I want merely to add that mental hospitals, perhaps through a process of natural selection, are organized in such a way as to provide exactly the kind of setting in which unwilling participants have recourse to the exhibition of situational improprieties. If you rob people of all customary means of expressing anger and alienation and put them in a place where they have never had better reason for these feelings, then the natural recourse will be to seize upon what remains—situational improprieties.
Let me try to summarize the argument. When persons come into one another’s immediate physical presence, they become accessible to each other in unique ways. There arise the possibilities of physical and sexual assault, of accosting and being dragged into unwanted states of talk, of offending and importuning through the use of words, of transgressing certain territories of the self of the other, of showing disregard and disrespect for the gathering present and the social occasion under whose auspices the gathering is held. The rules of face-to-face conduct obtaining in a given community establish the form that face-to-face co-mingling is to take, and there results a kind of King’s Peace, guaranteeing that persons will respect one another through the available idiom of respect, keep their social place and their interpersonal commitments, allow and not exploit a traffic flow of words and bodies and show regard for the social occasion. Offenses against these rulings con-stitute situational improprieties; many of these delicts are injurious to the rights of any and every one present and and constitute publicly broadcast offenses, regardless of the fact that many appear to be motivated by the offender’s particular relationship to particular persons present or even to absent parties. These improprieties are not in the first instance a linguistic type of interpersonal communication but examples of public misconduct—a defect not in information transmission or interpersonal relating, but in the decorum and demeanor that regulate face-to-face association. It is in this world of sanctioned forms of association that psychotic symptoms have t
heir natural home, and it is by getting a systematic picture of the constraints of approved public conduct that we can obtain the language for neatly and effectively talking about symptom-atology. Rules for behavior while in the presence of others and by virtue of the presence of others are the rules that make orderly face-to-face communication of the linguistic kind possible; but these rules, and the many infractions of them which psychotics and other cut-ups systematically exhibit, are not themselves to be considered first of all as communications; they are first of all guidelines (and their disruption) of social organization, the or-ganized association of persons present to one another.
* * *
* Reprinted with permission from Disorders of Communication, Research Publications, A.R.N.M.D., vol. XLII: 262-69. Copyright © 1964 by the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.
Where The Action Is
“To be on the wire is life;
the rest is waiting/’*
A decade ago among those urban American males who were little given to gentility the term “action” was used in a non-Parsonian sense in reference to situations of a special kind, the contrast being to situations where there was “no action.” Very recently this locution has been taken up by almost everyone, and the term itself flogged without mercy in commercials and advertisements.
This paper, then, deals with a term that points to some-thing lively but is itself now almost dead. Action will be defined analytically. An effort will be made to uncover where it is to be found and what it implies about these .places.
I. Chances
Wheresoever action is found, chance-taking is sure to be. Begin then with a simple illustration of chance, and work outward from there.
Two boys together find a nickel in their path and decide that one will toss and the other call to see who keeps it. They agree, then, to engage in a play or, as probabilists call it, a gamble—in this case one go at the game of cointossing.
A coin can be used as a decision machine, much as a roulette wheel or a deck of cards can. With this particular machine it is plain that a fully known set of possible out-comes is faced: heads or tails, obverse or reverse. Similarly with a die: in ordinary manufacture and use,1 it presents six different faces as possible outcomes.
Given the two outcomes possible when a coin is tossed, the probability or chance can be assessed for each of them. Chances vary from “sure” to “impossible” or, in the language of probability, from 1 to o.
What a player has in hand and undergoes a chance of losing is his stake or bet. What the play gives him a chance of winning that he doesn’t already have can be called his prize. The payoff for him is the prize that he wins or the bet that he loses. Bet and prize together may be called the pot.2
In gaming, theoretical odds refers to the chances of a favorable outcome compared to those of an unfavorable one, the decision machine here seen as an ideal one; true odds are a theoretical version of theoretical ones, involving a correction for the physical biases found in any actual machine—biases never to be fully eliminated or fully known.3 Given odds or pay9 on the other hand, refers to the size of the prize compared to that of the bet.4 Note that outcomes are defined wholly in terms of the game equipment, payoffs in terms of extrinsic and variable resources currently committed to particular outcomes. Thus, with theoretical odds and given odds, somewhat the same term is employed to cover two radically different ideas.
Weighting the pot by the chance on the average of win-ning it, gives what students of chance call the expected value of the play. Subtracting the expected value from the amount bet gives a measure of the price or the profit on the average for engaging in the play. Expressing this measure as a proportion of the bet gives the advantage or percentage of the play. When there is neither advantage nor disadvantage, the play is said to be fair. Then the theoretical odds are the reciprocal of the given odds, so that he who gives or lays the odds, gambling a large sum in the hope of winning a small one, is exactly compen-sated by the smallness of his chance of losing to the individual who takes the odds.
There are plays that allow a multitude of possible out-comes to choose among, each of which pays differently and may even provide the bettor differing disadvantage. Casino craps is an example. Still other plays involve a set of favorable possible outcomes that pay differently so that the expected value of the play must be calculated as a sum of several different values: slot machines and keno provide examples.
In the degree to which a play is a means of acquiring a prize, it is an opportunity; in the degree to which it is a threat to one’s bet, it is a risk. The perspective here is objective. A subjective sense of opportunity or risk is quite another matter since it may, but need not, coincide with the facts.
Each of our coin tossers can be defined as having a life course in which the finding of a nickel has not been an-ticipated. Without the find, Me would go forward as expected. Each boy can then conceive of his situation as affording him a gain or returning him to what is only normal. A chance-taking of this kind can be called opportunity without risk. Were a bully to approach one of the boys and toss him for a nickel taken from the boy’s own pocket (and this happens in city neighborhoods), we could then speak of a risk without opportunity. In daily life, risks and opportunities usually occur together, and in all combinations.
Sometimes the individual can retract his decision to pursue a line of activity upon learning of likely failure. No chances, whether risky or opportune, are taken here. For chanciness to be present, the individual must ensure he is in a position (or be forced into one) to let go of his hold and control on the situation, to make, in Schelling’s sense, a commitment.5 No commitment, no chance-taking.
A point about determination—defining this as a process, not an accomplished event. As soon as the coin is in the air, the tosser will feel that deciding forces have begun their work, and so they have. It is true, of course, that the period of determination could be pushed back to include the decision to choose heads or tails, or still further back to include the decision to toss in the first place. However, the outcome (heads or tails) is fully determined during the time the coin is in the air; a different order of fact, such as who will select heads or how much will be chanced, is determined before the toss. In brief, an essential feature of the coin tossing situation is that an outcome undetermined up to a certain point—the point of tossing the coin in the air—is clearly and fully determined during the toss. A problematic situation is resolved.
The term problematic is here taken in the objective sense to refer to something not yet determined but about to be. As already suggested, the subjective assessment of the actor himself brings further complication. He may be quite unaware that something at hand is being determined. Or he may feel that the situation is problematic when in fact the matter at hand has already been determined and what he is really facing is revealment or disclosure. Or, finally, he may be fully oriented to what is actually happening—alive to the probabilities involved and realistically concerned over the consequences. This latter possibility, where a full parallel is found between objective and subjective situation, will be our main concern.
The causal forces during the period of determination and prior to the final result are often defined as ones of “mere chance,” or “pure luck.” This does not presume some kind of ultimate indeterminism. When a coin is tossed its fall is fully determined by such factors as the prior state of the tosser’s finger, the height of the toss, the air currents (including ones that occur after the coin has left the finger), and so forth. However, no human influence, intended and legitimate, can be exercised to manipulate the relevant part of the result.6
There are to be sure chancy situations where relevant orders of humanly directed determination are involved by virtue of skill, knowledge, daring, perseverance, and so forth. This, in fact, marks a crucial difference between games of “pure” chance and what are called contests: in the former, once the determination is in play, the participants can do nothing but pas
sively await the outcome; in the latter, it is just this period that requires intensive and sustained exercising of relevant capacities. None the less, it is still the case that during contests something of value to be staked comes up for determination; in terms of the facts and often their perception as well, the intended and effective influences are insufficiently influential to render the situation unproblematic.
A crucial feature of coin-tossing is its temporal phases. The boys must decide to settle the matter by tossing; they must align themselves physically; they must decide how much of the nickel will be gambled on the toss and who will take which outcome; through stance and gesture they must commit themselves to the gamble and thereby pass the point of no return. This is the bet-making or squaring off phase. Next there is the in-play or determination phase, during which relevant causal forces actively and determinatively produce the outcome.7 Then comes the revelatory or disclosive phase, the time between determination and informing of the participants. This period is likely to be very brief, to differ among sets of participants differently placed relative to the decision machinery,8 and to possess a special suspensefulness of its own. Finally there is the settlement phase, beginning when the outcome has been disclosed and lasting until losses have been paid up and gains collected.
The period required by participants in a given play to move through the four phases of the play—squaring off, determination, disclosure, and settlement—may be called the span of the play. The periods between plays may be called pauses. The period of a play must be distinguished from the period of playing, namely, the session, which is the time between making the first bet and settling up the last one on any one occasion perceived as continuously devoted to play. The number of completed plays during any unit of time is the rate of play for that time.9 Average duration of the plays of a game sets an upper limit to rate of play, as does average length of pauses; a coin can be tossed 5 times in half a minute; the same number of decisions at the track requires more than an hour.
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