A somewhat similar set of arrangements can be found as the basis of action in car racing. Typically, difference in mere capacity for speed of cars similarly classed is not relevant enough to win races. A driver wins by more frequently approaching the limits where speed will take his car out of control than the other drivers are competent or daring enough to approach.81 In fact, it is the possibility of restructuring routine activity so as to allow limits-pressing that transforms routine activity into a field of action. For example, on the highway cars often spread themselves out in a pattern whose stability is produced by each driver assessing what other drivers would not dare to do, and then, in effect, patrolling these limits; one’s place in the traffic is therefore sustained. To “make time” on the road when traffic is heavy is to press beyond the point other drivers have judged as protecting their position.82
If margin-pressing effort is to be possible, the equipment the actor uses may have to be restricted appropriately. After all, bullfighting could hardly test a man if a Weatherby 460 were used instead of cape and sword. Similarly, if a challenge is to be made out of crossing the ocean, one must forego liners in favor of rafts. If a fish is to be constituted into a fighting opportunity, then line, hook, and rod must be selected with the nicest of self-limitation, and often are.83 If big game hunting is to be to risky as well as costly, then telescopic sights seem hardly “fair”; in fact, the rifle itself might better be given up for bow and arrow.
Arrangements that call forth marginal effort generate the possibility of action. One further action arrangement might be considered. It is found when a series can be created by consecutive winning turns, such that each further turn adds the same additional probability of terminating the series while adding more than the previous turn’s value to the series as a whole. For example, in bowling, an individual’s reputation as a bowler is related to his maximum attained score. And score is dependent on number of “strikes” during any one series or string of shots, with the score mounting more than linearly with the number of strikes made in sequence. Further, a full-scoring next shot tends to be mentally assimilated to what the individual already has achieved, so failure to achieve it constitutes a “blowing” of a scoring sequence that the player “had going.” As the gain to be made with each bowl mounts, the difficulty of maintaining skill does likewise. Something similar is to be found in casino gambling in connection with the practice of “letting it ride,” namely, betting all the previous win on the next play, and continuing to do this for a sequence of plays. He who manages to “parlay” or pyramid his wins in this way is often given respect as someone who has “nerve,” is “hot,” and “knows when to bet.” And since the bet (in an even-money game) is being doubled each time, the fifth or sixth straight win will be very much heavier than the second or third. And so the player finds that money and psychic gain increase more than arithmetically, while at the same time ever new opportunities for total loss must be faced.
A final issue must be raised concerning the organizational basis of action. Earlier I suggested that persons present in a social situation can serve not only as witnesses but also as the very objects upon which the individual acts, and that his record in this regard will be of special significance. When these other-involving acts entail fateful chances intentionally created just so they can be taken, then a special type of action results in which the persons who are present to the actor themselves pro-vide the field for his action. Hemingway provides a wonderfully crude illustration, one that is also provided by circus performers who throw knives, and small boys who throw snow balls:
One of the attractions Mary had set up in the park was a shooting booth she had hired from a traveling carnival. Antonio had been a little shocked in 1956 when Mario, the Italian chauffeur, had held up cigarettes in his hand in a gale of wind for me to cut off their lighted ends with a .22 rifle. At the party Antonio held cigarettes in his mouth for me to shoot the ashes off. We did this seven times with the shooting gallery’s tiny rifles and at the end he was puffing the cigarettes down to see how short he could make them.
Finally he said, “Ernesto, we’ve gone as far as we can go. The last one just brushed my lips.”
The Maharaja of Cooch-Behar became another addict of this light-hearted amusement. He started conservatively using a cigarette holder but abandoned it immediately for the pufBng school. I quit while I was still ahead and refused to shoot at George Saviers because he was the only doctor in the house and the party was just under way. It went a long way.84
While one person is providing a field of action for another, that other can in turn use the first individual as his field of action. When this reciprocity of use is found and the object is to exercise a skill or ability of some kind, we speak of a contest or duel. What occurs at these scenes might be called interpersonal action.85
Interpersonal actions seem occasionally merely to dupli-cate the ordinary kind. In a pistol duel, for example, one individual is the passive target field for the other, while at the same time the other is the passive target field for the first—excepting, of course, the minor stratagems of standing at an angle to present the least surface to the opponent, and using the arms as shield for the heart. In fact, a pistol duel can be analysed as an arrangement for collapsing together two separable functions: target competition and a payoff scheme for winners and losers. More often, however, reciprocality is more intimate and more interesting. The very act by which one participant exercises his capacities in the face of the other can itself provide the field for the other’s competing or countering action. The figure one participant cuts will be cut out of the figure the other participant cuts. Even in Hemingway’s target amusements there is a flavor of this: the coolness exhibited by Antonio in submitting to the target role requires for its field of action the marksman efforts of Hemingway.
Just as there are social arrangements for ensuring action, so there are arrangements for ensuring interpersonal action. An important example is the widespread practice of handicapping in contests.86 This device ensures that however badly matched the contestants may be, each will have about the same chance of winning or losing and each will have to depend on pushing himself to the limit. The outcome is thus guaranteed to be not only unpredictable and therefore attention sustaining, but also a matter of marginal effort, the win going to the contestant who pushes himself closer to his limits than the others push themselves to theirs. The last extra bit of effort deter-mines outcome. A handicap contest, then, is an arrangement nicely calculated to transform two individuals into fields of action for each other, with the additional bite that one person’s success must be balanced by the other person’s failure. It might be added that self-imposed equipment limitation in hunting and fishing can also be seen as a type of handicapping; the prey is transformed into an opponent and a “fair” (or rather, almost fair) contest results. Fair games require fair game.
In various games and sports, then, individuals may use one another as fields of action, usually, in a segregated arena, physically and temporally cut off from serious life. But obviously the mutual use of one another as a field of action is more general. As a bridge from games to the world let us glance at dealings between the sexes.
All of the situations of action described so far are much more the scene of male activity than of female; indeed, action in our Western culture seems to belong to the cult of masculinity—in spite of lady bullfighters, female aerial-ists, and a preponderance of females in the slot machine pits of casinos.87 There are records of a few duels fought by European women, but these encounters seem to be held up as a perversion of the fair sex, not its ornament.88 But, of course, females are involved in one kind of action in a special way; they are the fields of play for sexual and courtship action. Adult males may define a female as an object to initiate a sexually potential relationship with. The risk is rebuff, misalliance, responsibility, betrayal of prior relationships, or displeasure of other males; the opportunity is for the kind of confirmation of self that success i
n this area alone can bring. This action is sometimes called “making out.”
In our society there are special times and places set aside for making out: parties, bars,89 dances, resorts, parks, classrooms, public events, association meetings, office coffee-breaks, church gatherings, and public streets of ill repute. Making out itself is of two kinds, according to whether the circle in which it occurs contains persons who are acquainted or unacquainted. Among the acquainted we find flirtatious exchanges and the initiation of affairs; among the unacquainted, interchanges of signs of interest and pickings-up.
Among the unacquainted, organizational facilitation of making out takes many forms: the institution of social hostess at resorts; telephone bars; bartender mediation in the buy-you-a-drink routine; etc. I cite at length the situation in Nevada casinos.
Casino tables are by definition open to any adult with money to spend. In spite of the apparent impersonality of the operation, strangers at the same table find that a slight camaraderie is generated by a joint and mutually visible exposure to fate. Big bettors, with an implied involvement because of the size of their bets, and the implied status of the visibly moneyed, render themselves somewhat accessible to fellow players and even to watchers. Imputed mutual responsibility for outcome (in the limited but constant sense in which this is imputed) adds to mutual exposure and relatedness. And between the sexes additional openness prevails. Males can almost always give a little free advice to neighboring females, gradually joining with them into a coalition of hope against the dealer. Further, if a female happens to play in a way that can be interpreted as profitable to all, a bet can easily be “put up” for her and mutual involvement heightened. Similarly, when acquaintance with a female is struck up, she can be treated to play without obviously compromising her position. Her keeping all or some of her wins can then seem natural. Tables thus provide the first move in the acquaintance game and also a very graceful cover under which cash payment can be made in advance for social and sexual favors granted later in an uncommercial manner. Thus is making out organizationally facilitated.
It should be noted that there are many males who shy away from actively involving themselves in making out, even when attending places established for the purpose. There are many others who are everywhere on the lookout for these opportunities, whether in the home, at places of work, or in service contacts. And they face each day with such potentialities in mind.90 These chronically oriented males must be classed with those who are ready to transform any event into a betting proposition, or any task into a contest of strength, skill, or knowledge.
Attempts to initiate a sex-potential relationship are, of course, only one variety of the interpersonal action that occurs in the community at large. Another important type occurs when the individual serves as a field for action by virtue of his capacity to receive and give injury of both a physical and a verbal kind. To find those who indulge in this sport we are likely to look to “outsiders” who, like adolescents, have not been tightly woven into organizational structures. Presumably among them these fateful activities will be least disruptive and the most tolerable; it is a case of having little to lose, or little to lose yet, a case of being well organized for disorganization. The study of corner gangs of aggressive, alienated urban youth provides an illustration:
The quickened tempo of the testing of relationships on corners, in contrast with, for example, work groups, arises in part because leaders do not control important amounts of property, because there are few privileges or immunities they can bestow, and because there are no external institutional pressures that constrain members to accept the discipline of the gang.91
Among such youths the notion of “kicks” has its fullest bearing. Here the culture and cultivation of recognized sports is not present to mask the gratuitousness of the chance-taking; the community itself is transformed into a field for action, with special use made of peers, unprotected adults, and persons perceived as symbols of police authority. Walter Miller provides a good statement:
Many of the most characteristic features of lower class life are related to the search for excitement or “thrill.” Involved here are the highly prevalent use of alcohol by both sexes and the widespread use of gambling of all kinds—playing the numbers, betting on horse races, dice, cards. The quest for excitement finds what is perhaps its most vivid expression in the highly patterned practice of the recurrent “night on the town.” This practice, designated by various terms in different areas (“honkytonkin’,” “goin’ out on the> town,” “bar hoppin’”), involves a patterned set of activities in which alcohol, music, and sexual adventuring are major components. A group or individual sets out to “make the rounds” of various bars or night clubs. Drinking continues progressively throughout the evening. Men seek to “pick up” women, and women play the risky game of entertaining sexual advances. Fights between men involving women, gambling, and claims of physical prowess, in various combinations, are frequent consequences of a night of making the rounds. The explosive potential of this type of adventuring with sex and aggression, frequently leading to “trouble,” is semi-explicitly sought by the individual. Since there is always a good likelihood that being out on the town will eventuate in fights, etc., the practice involves elements of sought risk and desired danger.92
A student of lower-class Boston Italians provides another statement:
For the action-seeker, life is episodic. The rhythm of life is dominated by the adventurous episode, in which heights of activity and feeling are reached through exciting and sometimes riotous behavior. The goal is action, an opportunity for thrills, and for the chance to face and overcome a challenge. It may be sought in a card game, a fight, a sexual interlude, a drinking bout, a gambling session, or in a fast and furious exchange of wisecracks and insults. Whatever the episode, the action-seeker pursues it with a vengeance, and lives the rest of his life in quiet—and often sullen—preparation for this climax, in which he is usually said to be “killing time.”93
VIII. Character
Beginning with a boy’s chance-taking, we moved on to consequentiality; from there to fatefulness of the dutiful kind (noting that this could lead to construing the situation as a practical gamble voluntarily undertaken); and from there to action—a species of activity in which self-determination is celebrated. And we saw that the fatefulness, which many persons avoid, others for some reason approve, and there are those who even construct an environment in which they can indulge it. Something meaningful and peculiar seems to be involved in action. Hemingway’s description of the human situation of one of his favorite bullfighters provides a hint of what we must look for:
We had spoken about death without being morbid about it and I had told Antonio what I thought about it, which is worthless since none of us knows anything about it, I could be sincerely disrespectful of it and sometimes impart this disrespect to others, but I was not dealing with it at this time. Antonio gave it out at least twice a day, sometimes for every day in the week, traveling long distances to do it. Each day he deliberately provoked the danger of it to himself, and prolonged that danger past the limits it could normally be endured, by his style of fighting. He could only fight and he did by having perfect nerves and never worrying. For his way of fighting, without tricks, depended on understanding the danger and controlling it by the way he adjusted himself perfectly to the bull’s speed, or lack of it, and the control of the bull by his wrist which was governed by his muscles, his nerves, his reflexes, his eyes, his knowledge, his instinct and his courage.
If there was anything wrong with his reflexes he could not fight in this way. If his courage ever failed for the smallest fraction of a second, the spell would be broken and he would be tossed or gored. In addition, he had the wind to contend with which could expose him to the bull and kill him capriciously at any time.
He knew all these things coldly and completely and our problem was to reduce the time that he had to think about them to the minimum necessary for him to prepare him
self to face them before entering the ring. This was Antonio’s regular appointment with death that we have to face each day. Any man could face death but to be committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic move-ments and do this again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton, which you love, is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer. Antonio had to kill quickly and mercifully and still give the bull one full chance at it when he crossed over the horn at least twice a day.94
If one examines moments when an individual undergoes these chances, whether as part of serious work or dangerous play, certain capacities, certain properties of his make-up, appear to be of intrinsic or “primary” relevance: in high construction work, care and balance; in mountain climbing, “condition,” and stamina; in bullfighting, timing and perceptual judgment; in game hunting, aim; in gambling, a knowledge of the odds; and in all cases, memory and experience. Often these primary capacities can be created by training. Significantly, the same capacities can be exercised during unconsequential circumstances, when the chancy features of actual occasions are avoided altogether or merely simulated. Thus one finds dry runs, target practice, trial efforts, war games, and stage rehearsals. Organized training uses this kind of simulation extensively. Here a good or bad showing need not be fateful in itself nor in its effect on the reputation of the actor. Similarly, primary capacities can often be exercised on occasions when effective performance is easily and unthinkingly achieved, when, in brief, the results are consequential but not problematic.
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