This is the fifth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class Communication and Culture.

Required Reading:

• Mead, G.H. Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934. Chapters 3, 7, (8, 9), 10, 11, 22 [on line]
• Mead, G.H. "The social self." The journal of philosophy, psychology and scientific methods 10: 374-380, 1913

Transition notes
Ruth Benedict left us with a set of problems that appear to concern above all the theory of culture but are also central to all theories of communication. She obliges us to think about: systematicity the production of difference the transformation of items of behavior when they are placed in a new context.

 

Conversation? (struggles with the source and control of meaning) Pragmatism (Dewey, Pearce, Royce, James) Internalization Conversation, gestures, control

1. Pragmatism and the person in relation to society
   1. G.H. Mead is most famous for his contributions to the theory of the self as the product of participation in particular social fields ("cultures"). Only rather recently has his use of "conversation" as the fundamental mechanism of social action be taken up as more than a metaphor. The movement from the first view of Mead's contribution to the second (and still controversial one) is what we are focusing upon today.
   2. Specifically, we are concerned with what is involved in conversation, the act of talking to someone else to achieve some goal.

      George Herbert Mead is grouped with John Dewey as a "pragmatist." While Dewey is classified as a philosopher, Mead is classified as a social scientist who greatly influenced generations of sociologists and is considered one of founder of social psychology, though one that stood as a critic of it as when he wrote:

      The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. (Mind, Self and Society 1934:1)

   3. This is also what I try to do in this course. The issues have to do with the understanding of "society" or "social order" and the perennial concern with what happens to individuals in an ordered society.

      Let us back up briefly to summarize the core issues first from their philosophical/political angle, and then from their analytic angle.

2. Internalization and the self as foundations of social action.
   1. A philosophical and political issue (see John Dewey's reflections on the human prerequisites of a democratic polity).
   2. Society is a problem for democratic individualism: how can the evidence that no biologically human person can be fully human apart from participation in society be made consistent with the desire to construct a society where the person, the INDIVIDUAL, can be (build?) an OWN self. Various political theorists of the 18th century proposed different solutions that were institutionalized in very different ways in the European democracies that evolved in the 19th century
      1. France, the primacy of the polity and the defended, resistant, existential 'I'.
      2. America the emphasis on consensus, the personal appropriation of a group's ideals through education, socialization or enculturation (the central concept of "community") (Varenne 1977);
   3. A social scientific problem: what are the grounds of sociability and also the grounds of personal constitution and agency. This a general problem that operates at the level of humanity as a whole.
      1. As such Mead is not concerned with "culture" and "difference" in the classical anthropological sense. (contrast with Mauss). He is above all a sociologist fundamentally concerned with the activity of persons. Thus he addresses psychology and is somehow caught in its own problematics, particularly the nature of mind and the constitution of the self.
         1. The need not to threaten the central place of the individual and thus the paradoxical attempt to "socialize" the individual by placing society within. This produces a concern with, and theories of:
            1. internalization
            2. socialization
            3. enculturation or acculturation
            4. melting-pot (in the socio-political context of immigration into the United States).
      2. His is a fundamentally COMmunicational issue with the emphasis on the latin root "cum" for with: what is the basis for people acting WITH others? To the extent that Mead's sociology is directly concerned with personal action in the presence of others, it starts with a critique of theories of the psyche that focus solely on inner processes. Thus
         1. The limitations of a purely behavioristic psychology;

            Think about how this might apply to a purely Freudian psychology, or to a pure sociobiology of genes.

         2. The emphasis on the role of the Other
      3. WITH others, in communication, the Self as that which has taken the position of the other in the language (symbols) of the other. To this extent, the self is never quite "one's own."
      4. Does this allow to say that "The self arises in interaction with the other?
3. Conversation: the 'I', the 'Me', and the third:
    
   The the "conversation of gestures" (p. 14-15 & 47) is central to Mead's methodology.
   1. However, as one becomes concerned with the actual conversational (interactional) process, it is easy to reconstruct the 'Me' as the primary focus, and thereby discount uncertainty, variability and agency within the conversation.
      1. It seems that the first students of Mead took his talk of a "conversation" as mostly metaphorical: the concept was to serve purely as an introduction to the discussion of internalization, and the "significant symbol," "meaning," (p. 78) and the self.
         1. as I understand the development of social psychology, particularly in the work of the symbolic interactionists, the interaction itself became a black box, and there was little investigation of it directly.
            1. the prototypical research: Black children and white dolls
               1. experimental results
               2. interpreted as implying an acceptance of the view of whites
               3. no direct evidence of this
               4. assumption of a kind of generalized averaging of experiences
                  1. the paradoxes of policy: dolls, self-esteem, Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education
            2. the minority view (possibly because of the technical difficulties that made it difficult to look directly at interaction until the development of cheap film and particularly video:
               1. M. Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: national character (culture) arising in early interaction
               2. Bateson in California and the sociogenesis of schyzophrenia.
   2. Current developments: Ethnomethodology and conversational (interactional) analysis.
      
      An example of what can happen when opening the black box to illustrate what Mead may have been talking about when he talked about meaning not being a mental state and as "triadic". One example taken from my Successful Failure:
   1. a choir singing together (commonality of action) and yet allowing for multiplicity of points of view and thus the development of a conversation of gesture even as the common focus persists:
   2. towards a theory of the radical 'I' at work in particular conditions (see Mead, Chapter 22 )

 

Some questions (in the context of this lecture on G.H. Mead) [note that all questions should start with " For G.H. Mead ..." and consist of at least one paragraph in his style.  You might weave your objections as something that he might address with a comment like "some might say that ... but..."]

Sketch what a statement would look like the meaning of which might not be dependent on the response of another person.  Is it possible for 'I' to have a name? Is unacknowledged knowledge knowledge? Is unacknowledged ignorance ignorance? Is unacknowledged disability disability?