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Choices

Calling attention to the distinction between a public road or path and a private one where the right of way crosses privately owned property. If members of the public use the way for a year without hindrance by the owner the public right is established and the owner can not arbitrarily block it later. If the public conversely fails to use this right for a year the owner can reassert his ownership right and close off passage again. (Note: this pattern will vary with place and time. It is not asserted as a universal.)

When West 116th Street traversed the Columbia University campus and private autos were driven across daily the school blocked access one day each year to maintain its right. Eventually it paved the street over and closed out the possible contingency of choice in its own favor.

There is a similar concept in the world of the brawl, though perhaps more informally established. The distinction is between the private fight between sides to settle an otherwise intransigent issue and a free-for-all in which anyone so inclined may join without any purpose except the exercise of excessive exuberance.

Social settings and social order take a form similar to the game in that they have rules and understandings accepted by the participants that govern the within-space actions. Social organizations and institutions and orders have rules that may not be as precise or complete as found in professional sports but they are game-like. All of us have entered fields of action that seemed senseless and arbitrary and have asked the question: “What game are we playing?” What are the patterns of behavior? What is the purpose? Like a buying frenzy at a local store that only makes sense when we learn that there is a sale (lowering of price) for a limited time with a limited amount of merchandise offered.

The pattern (and the rule in place that governs it) means that some actions are permitted, others rejected. A can or must do and a can not or must not do. Social actions in being (sometimes called the positive) and others that are refused (called the negative). This is an important part of sociological work with the concrete: to distinguish between the positive and the negative and to understand that the refused is part of the on-going reality. Not present does not mean non-existent. It is there, latent, in the wing, ready to go on stage.

“You were only fooling while I was falling in love” is a line from one of the passing parade of popular songs. It sums up the confusion of games in life outside of sports. “What game are we playing?” can be a significant question. Some of the game differences can be purely local, others trivial. People may have different reactions. But the culture of rules, regulations, and conventions is built on (each moment and item out of which the whole is constructed) a multiplicity of parts and all of them assert and reject. The whole is a big bang of choices. Even a large batch of trivials can be, altogether, serious and grave.

(I am going to repeat two of my favorite examples of the combo of positive and negative in the mix. If you have been with this series of blogs for awhile you might recognize them and skip over. Use the opportunity to sketch out some examples of your own. You possess the concept by translating it into your own voice. )

In art they distinguish the figure from the field–the portrait and the background. Non-objective art escapes the distinction except that the eye of the beholder in its immediate focus picks out its own positive (the center of attention.) The viewer is forced to accept the freedom to choose.

The situation of the bull in the ring encountering the matador (if I can presume to know his thought from his behavior) is stark. He has been challenged by the noise and the darts the picadors have placed in the back of his neck and now he faces an apparition made up of man and moving cape. Instinctively he focuses on the subtly flapping cloth. There is a beautiful sequence of movements of the bull and the athlete. The animal, intent on striking his antagonist with his horns, passes harmlessly under the outstretched arm of the matador (if and when the trick works). The positive space for the bull is the cape (an illusion) and he fails to see and realize that the man with the hidden sword (the negative space–the rejected fact) should be his true object of attention.

If the bull is used in demonstrations and not killed in the process he learns, sees a larger reality, and if used again will butt the man and not the cape.

Sometimes the choice is deadly serious.

The choices between opposed values and ways can be finely drawn. While it is difficult to entertain contradictions together they can alternate according to situation and setting. Under democratic capitalism the system of commercial advantage based on egoism is replaced by communal sharing and altruism in the immediate family and to some extent among kin, neighbors and friends.

The state intervention into the financial and banking worlds in reaction to crisis leads some capitalist purists to fear a shift toward socialism. This involves a misunderstanding of the two ideological ways. The proposed intervention is merely a slight broadening of the legal frame in place that sets and maintains the system of market trade based on jockeying for advantage. The capitalist state may limit the reckless search for profit, interest and dividend and tamp down, for awhile, the boom and bust cycle, but I doubt that this will lead to a slide into the socialist way. Any move toward a democratic socialist order, I would guess, can only occur successfully with an affirmative choice and commitment by the entire society–a mass conversion experience.

Meanwhile there are the commercial models governing the use of technological innovations that assure the direction of the movement of advantage and share of the surplus to the inventors of the particular social order used. In industries involving telephone, cinema, radio and television, transportation, news gathering and distribution, medical practice and availability, the ordering of the internet, and the exploration and use of outer space, and I suspect right down the line of all the ways we do things now, this idea of choice, social choice, is applicable. In each case alternate ways have been rejected or ordered into priority lists. Ways of being and doing have been determined and then the fact that a decision has been made has been forgotten (even suppressed). And I would argue that revealing these choices and their consequences is the mainly unfulfilled task of ordinary sociologists. Like the bull, it is probably better for us to go, as best we can, toward the big, complete picture.

Finish your drinks and all go home.

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