More on the Encounter/Unit Act. Part II

September 22nd, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Unit Act

The match of the professional sports encounter and the model (the unit act) that describes it is wonderfully close. The rules are recorded in an official manual. The informal lore of the game is widely, if unevenly, dispersed. Large sectors of various peoples understand enough of their local popular sport to watch any instance of its playing with appreciation. The impact of the environment (what I have called the ecology) is understood (even if not completely). And the interaction of the teams, the actual game, follows a precise pattern. Each game within each sport is the same as all others, and yet each is as fresh and unique as a shining daisy in a green field. And the outcome is unknown and undecided until the end of the sequence.

When we move out to the encounter in other social sectors the match of model and event begins to wobble. What is going on is less precise.

We enter now a dense world of social experience that we all share. In school, at work, at stores and markets, in theaters, in transit. Partying. Participating in a ritual. At home with family. Encounter and more encounter over again. We hardly have the time to stop and consider what we are about. It is obvious. For the most part it is automatic, requiring no introspection or articulated thought.

A few ideas on some of the issues: One. There are long established social spaces called institutions or thought of a institutionalized. Rules and norms are written and codified. The experience approximates that of the game. The examination of a witness by a lawyer in court; the relationship of domestic pairs; the employer-employee meeting, and such. The interaction sequences vary widely but within a known context.

Two. A sector of important encounters involve socialization–teaching, conversion, indoctrination, therapy, training, and such. The culture is directly in play. Interaction will develop around the willingness, the indifference or the resistance of the student. We usually want to know what the others are about, to be in on the mystery and the secret. The process will approximate that of the acquisition of language. The inability to fully participate measured as a gap in the knowing. On occasion the conversion is reversed, the teacher changes instead of the student. In Somerset Maughan’s story “Rain” the minister brings old-time-religion to the call-girl and finds a contrary sensual way for himself. In general we should look for a sub-text within the interaction sequence concerned with the maintaining, building-up, or changing of the governing culture.

Three. If the two parties in an encounter can’t agree on the definition of the situation we have a situation of another kind. Wild comedy can follow. Charley Chaplin retrieves a red danger flag that has fallen off a truck and intent on replacing it chases down the street after the truck. At that moment a mass of revolutionary workers turn the corner and follow Charley. The police see a man with a flag and presume he is a revolutionary leader. A violent melee follows and Charley is carted off to jail. Spend a pleasant evening among friends dreaming up and describing such confusions.

Four. I would suggest at least three stages or moments in an interaction rolling-out: the pair must decide, if they can, their shared socio-cultural place and the rules that govern (what they are about.) Then they carry out the actions that are required (adjusted to the acts of the other and to one’s on goals and purposes.) And finally the end when they break and wander off.

Five. There is a serious question of method where the cultural rule and value governing, so carefully set-up in a manual for the professional sport, might not be readily discoverable. In its extreme form we would have an action pattern without a concept. Suppose I watch a dance instructor tell her class (the second actor) to slide the right foot forward and back which they do. The sequence goes order-action. The order is a local building of culture shared by those present. Now suppose the instructor leaves and then I enter and see the students sliding their right feet forward and back–an action pattern but where is the rule? Was it a co-incidence or did each person follow his own rule–one generating electric friction, another exercising a fallen arch, a third mimicking a skiing motion? I will fall back on interviewing–testing the subjective understanding of the actors. Or I will speculate off of my own subjectivity–proving the culture as cause by thinking I already know it. The results are sticky but that is the nature of what we are about.

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Famous important persons–we can’t get enough of them. Even their casual or ephemeral papers are saved and sometimes published as part of their works. And some of these important ones seem to have written continuously through life. You would sometimes wonder how they had time for anything else. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is an example. He carried on frequent letter correspondence with others, writing in long hand. I visualize him writing very quickly like one might talk in an ordinary conversation. His exchanges with Harold Laski, a British political scientist and active member of the Labour Party, went on for years. They mainly wrote about books they were reading or had read or were recommending, both avid bibliophiles committed to law and politics. Holmes was a vigorous old man when they started and Laski a young man still establishing a career and a family. I believe they only met once before their correspondence commenced, but at this meeting they agreed to trade letters and that started the sequence. A scholar specialist of Holmes’ life and work has published their exchanges with annotations. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Editor) “Holmes-Laski Letters, 1916-1935.”

The form of letter exchanges is an interaction sequence. The action and the record of it are the same. I think of such exchanges as slow motion dyads (two-person groups). The exchanges are private but since recorded are available, if saved, for the outside observer later. The third person onlooker does not intrude at the moment of the action. The writer knows that a record is being made but whether it will be preserved is problematic.

My idea, that these preserved written sequences, these slow motion interactions form a sub-group of all such dyads–regardless of the media of expression–and can be studied and modeled for themselves. They belong to the class of unit acts. Unfortunately I never accumulated enough spare energy to carry the project to a sensible start. The problem: to find a way to describe and characterize the contingencies of the relationship, to show the direction and content of the resulting joint production as a construct of the two participants. I haven’t solved this. I know that Laski, who was the junior in age and social status and fame, wrote more frequently than Holmes and wrote at greater length. The letters did not take a simple exchange pattern, though they hovered around this form, where each act (letter from ego) had a precise response (following letter from alter) but rather one would frequently write more than one letter without response from the other. In other words this symmetrical pattern of initiation and response, like in a ping-pong or a tennis game, is not necessarily how the interrelationship proceeds. Every statement does not necessarily have an answer. People talk and act past each other. Responses are muted or hidden or delayed.

Another question: what holds these two people together? They actually met very infrequently. There was some value to them in the letters themselves, something enriching. The stimulation of another way and of another person. Laski was young, bright and British, assimilating–moving away from his parental Jewish culture. Holmes a greatly admired legal scholar, an aging veteran of the American Civil War, wounded twice, with an important post in government and the legal system in USA. A great honor for Laski and a shot of youthful energy and connection for Holmes. One could argue that the purpose of this relationship was to construct itself.

You get some idea of the complexity of interaction/relationship. The references to books and other people. The formality of tone. Places and things they will not visit, that they avoid. The skills of the historian and literary critic are required here.

The option of establishing codes and generating statistical information. Coding emotions, kinds of facts, recommendations, and so on. Or to summarize and characterize each letter or each short sequence of letters. Identifying connects with culture and personality; ecological constraints.

Other letter sequences. “Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie, 1943 - 1972.” (A novelist and a literary critic) “The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov ” (Two American poets, between 1953 and 1985). “The Holmes-Pollock Letters” also edited by Howe.

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Other access to unit acts: transcripts of interrogations, medical interviews and examinations, attorney’s examination of a witness at trial, gambling bookie taking bets over telephone, and etcetera. The recollection of participants is most accessible for any researcher. A review of one’s own experience? Of course this only gives half the story.