Spectator-Player Relationship. Part I

September 26th, 2007 Posted in Unit Act, Encounter, Asymmetrical Relationship

Say a card game with seven players around a table. No chairs left. An eighth man, excluded from the central action, patrols the perimeter, watching and listening and gabbing. He is the kibitzer, the spectator, the gadfly, the superfluous person. What he does is outside of the game and frequently taken as useless noise. A mildly comic figure yet he is empowered by his very distance and often able to launch a decisive critique.

This spectator-player model is a sub-class of the unit act we have discussed in past posts. Based on a watcher-doer relationship it is not limited by number or subject content, so the large crowds gathered to watch a professional sport can be visualized as being the same as the single on-looker at the card game. The game (a plural entity) can be one actor, a large grouping of spectators another.

The unrolling sequence of this new dyad clearly is made up of different kinds of acts on each side–emphasizing seeing and hearing for the watchers and kinesthetics or extended speech for the players. The acts of the sides are categorically unalike. We’ll call these asymmetrical dyads.

This gives us a large formal class of encounters that we would not ordinarily consider together. I’ll list a few.

(1) sporting events in field or stadium

(2) table games

(3) lectures in a classroom

(4) political rallies in a hall or field

(5) parades and demonstrations along a street

(6) Unexpected incidents in public places.

(7) Man in constructed scenes or landscapes.

(8) Man watching constructed images–film, electronic.

(9) Theatrical displays before an audience.

In all of these situations a player (P) meets a watcher (W) for an asymmetrical interaction sequence. There is also a strong tendency for the following differences to surface…

(1) Individual is ….Known (P) versus Anonymous (W)

(2) Quality of Action…Skilled, Precise, Fine (P) versus Limited, Crude (W)

(3) Location… Stage Center (P) versus Sideline (W)

(4) Action Focus…Direct (P) versus Reactive (W)

(5) Critique..Toward Self (P) versus Toward Other (W) (More complex in the teacher student setting)

(6) Senses emphasized…Kinesthetic or Fine-verbal (P) versus Seeing, Hearing, or Crude-verbal (W)

^^^^^

Once we humans know where we are and agree on what we are about we can construct and enact complex social orderings. But on occasion something happens that negates the governing order. The people involved, according to their perceptions and understandings move toward a new consensus and construct (or find themselves in) another social pattern. These are flex points (or times if they evolve slowly). The duration of the new pattern can vary from a flicker to a permanent change. The description and understanding of these flexes and their consequences and perhaps a critique of a particular flex event are valid tasks for the sociologist.

We will share a few notes on this flex-and-change process at the level of the unit act/encounter in our next post.

All the best.