The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this book sociologist Randall Collins:

* The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity.

* Individuals who participate in IRs [interaction rituals] are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would
emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the
presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense IRs; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose IR participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed. Emotional energy (abbreviated EE) flows from situations when individuals participate in IRs to situations when they are alone. Encounters have an emotional aftermath; it is by this route that persons can pursue their interior lives and their individual trajectories, and yet be shaped by the nodes of social interaction. EE ebbs away after a period of time; to renew it, individuals are drawn back into ritual participation to recharge themselves.

* The distinctive IRs of intellectuals are those occasions on which intellectuals come together for the sake of their serious talk: not to socialize, nor to be practical. Intellectuals set themselves apart from other networks of social life in the act of turning toward one another. The discussion, the lecture, the argument, sometimes the demonstration or the examination of evidence: these are the concrete activities from which the sacred object “truth” arises.

* Intellectuals tend to feel that an idea has not fully entered into their reality until it is in the system of cross-referenced books and journals which constitutes the products of the intellectual community.

* Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects. But what is it that distinguishes such gatherings of intellectuals from any other kind of IR? One difference is in the structure of attention. The key intellectual event is a lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when one individual holds the floor to deliver a sustained argument on a particular topic. This is different from the give-and-take of sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because the focus shifts too often. Intellectuals giving their attention for half an hour or more to one viewpoint, developed as a unified stream of discourse, are thereby elevating the topic into a larger, more encompassing sacred object than the little fragmentary tokens of ordinary sociable ties.

* The intellectual IR consists not in giving orders or practical information but in expounding a worldview, a claim for understanding taken as an end in itself. The audience is in the stance of pure listeners, not subordinates nor participants in the moral community of faith which is invoked by religious ritual. Intellectual
discourse focuses implicitly on its autonomy from external concerns and its reflexive awareness of itself.

* An intellectual IR is generally a situational embodiment of the texts which are the long-term life of the discipline. Lectures and texts are chained together: this is what makes the distinctiveness of the intellectual community, what sets it off from any other kind of social activity.

* Without face-to-face rituals, writings and ideas would never be charged up with emotional energy; they would be Durkheimian emblems of a dead religion, whose worshippers never came to the ceremonies. Texts do not merely transcend the immediate particulars of the here-and-now and push toward abstraction and generality. To be oriented toward the writings of intellectuals is to be conscious of the community itself, stretching both backwards and forwards in time. Intellectual events in the present—lectures, debates, discussions—take place against an explicit backdrop of past texts, whether building upon them or critiquing them. Intellectuals are peculiarly conscious of their predecessors. And their own productions are directed toward unseen audiences. Even when they lecture to an immediate group, perhaps of personal students, disciples, or colleagues, the message is implicitly part of an ongoing chain, which will be further repeated, discussed, or augmented in the future.

* The focus is on a peculiar kind of speech act: the carrying out of a situation-transcending dialogue, linking past and future texts. A deep-seated consciousness of this common activity is what links intellectuals together as a ritual community.

* emotional energy (EE) [is] the kind of strength that comes from participating successfully in an interaction ritual. It is a continuum, ranging from a high end of confidence, enthusiasm, good self-feelings; through a middle range of lesser emotional intensity; on down to a low end of depression, lack of initiative, and negative self-feelings. Emotional energy is long-term, to be distinguished from the transient, dramatically disruptive outbursts (fear, joy, anger, etc.) which are more conventionally what we mean by “emotions.”5 Emotional energy is the most important kind of emotion for its effects on IR chains. It fluctuates depending on recent social experience: intense ritual participation elevates emotional energy, rejection from ritual membership lowers it; dominating
a group situation raises emotional energy, being dominated lowers it; membership rituals within a high-ranking group give high amounts of emotional energy, membership rituals within a low-ranking group give modest
emotional energy.

* Individuals are motivated to participate in rituals of highest solidarity, gravitating toward those encounters in which their repertoire of symbols and their level of emotions mesh with those of other persons so as to generate high degrees of solidarity, and away from those encounters in which they are subordinated or excluded. If the network is stratified, one attempts if possible to dominate one’s ritual interactions; lacking the resources to do this, one attempts if possible to evade rituals in which one is subordinated.

* Consider now the trajectory of an individual’s career across the intellectual milieu as an IR chain. The intellectual world is a massive conversation, circulating cultural capital in intermittent face-to-face rituals as well as in writing. What makes one an intellectual is one’s attraction to this conversation: to participate in the talk of its “hot center,” where the ideas have the greatest sacredness, and if possible to attach one’s own identity to such ideas so that one’s ideas are circulated widely through the conversation, and one’s personal
reputation with it. The conversation of intellectuals is competitive, an implicit shouldering aside and grasping of one another to get as much into the focus of attention as possible. How does one succeed in this struggle for ritual centrality? One can make two kinds of claims: “My ideas are new” and “My ideas are important.”

* Successful ideas must be important, and importance is always in relation to the ongoing conversations of the intellectual community.

* Intellectual creativity comes from combining elements from previous products of the field. The references found in a paper are a rough indication of the cultural capital it draws upon. Derek Price (1975: 125) has calculated from citation patterns that in contemporary natural science, it takes on the average 12 “parent papers” to give birth to one “offspring paper.” Turning the structure the other way, we can say that the most eminent intellectuals are those whose papers end up being cited the most; their ideas are “parents” to the greatest number of “offspring.” Their ideas make it possible for other people to make their own statements.

* We know from Derek Price’s studies that the most eminent intellectuals—in this case, scientists of the mid-1900s whose work receives the most citations—are the most prolific publishers; and they are the individuals who stay in the field the longest, while others drop out. This evidence suggests that eminence is largely a matter of having access to a large amount of CC, and turning it over with the greatest rapidity, recombining it into new ideas and discoveries. This would make creativity a matter of sheer activity, of emotional energy in using cultural capital. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton (1984, 1988) has shown that creative persons in a variety of fields produce large amounts of work, only portions of which receive recognition. Their formula for success seems to be to range widely and try out new combinations of ideas, some of which become selected for recognition by the intellectual community.

* The emotional energy specific to creative intellectual fields is not the same as the confidence and aggressiveness of persons in other arenas of social life. It is not the same as the emotional energy of the successful politician or the financial entrepreneur, of the sociability star or the sexual hotshot.

* If intellectual life is constructed by rituals in which speakers become centers of attention, and in which ideas and texts symbolize the continuity of an intellectual community across time, we can expect that individuals’ intellectual EE will be driven upward or downward by their type of contact with these situations and sacred objects. The crucial variable is how closely one is drawn into participation in these symbolic activities. The speaker at the seminar increases his or her emotional energy if the audience is responsive; so do the listeners, if they have the personal cultural capital, and the trajectory of their own intellectual projects, that makes their ideas mesh well with the line being expounded. In the opposite direction, the inability to carry off the lecture for that audience, or the inability to follow it, perhaps even the sense of having one’s ideas excluded, depresses one’s EE. One’s personal level of EE is like a reservoir filled up or drained by the amount of experience one has with such favorable or unfavorable situations, and by the balance between the two.

* Since possessing high emotional energy is one of the things that enables a person to attract attention in a ritual interaction, and which affects creativity in general, there is a tendency for persons who are already well started in EE to become even more “energy-rich” over time. A high level of energy reaches a plateau or goes into a reversal if one’s career trajectory takes one into levels of competition for attention in which one becomes overmatched. This occurs when someone who has become famous within a particular research specialty is propelled into a larger arena, perhaps interdisciplinary or in the eye of the wider public, where one may not have the resources to match up with the existing competition. The effect of starting with low levels of EE is likely to
be even more emphatically cumulative. Just as success breeds the ingredients of success, failure breeds intellectual failure. Depression, writer’s block, the shifting of one’s attention away from intellectual projects and back onto the everyday world: these are typical pathways by which would-be intellectuals fail to make a mark and drop out of the field. The majority of the intellectual field at any time consists of persons who are in this transient position. The core experiences of intellectuals are their immediate interactions with other intellectuals. EE is also affected by vicarious experience of the intellectual community.

* Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain—something like a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting, “Listen to me!” This is the intellectual attention space. Why would
anyone listen to anyone else? What strategy will get the most listeners? Two ways will work. A person can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd. Now, suppose everyone is tempted to try it. Some arguments start first, or have a larger appeal because they contradict the positions held by several people; and if other persons happen to be on the same side of the argument, they gather around and provide support. There are first-mover advantages and bandwagon effects. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of argument. The law of small numbers says that the number of these successful knots
is always about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual
life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.

The other way these intellectual attention seekers can get someone to listen is to find a topic someone else is talking about and agree with it, adding something which extends the argument. Not “No, you’re wrong because . . .”
but “Yes, and furthermore . . .” This transforms the relationship into teacher and favorite student. The plain full of dispersed egotists becomes clumped another way, into lineages of master-pupil chains.

* The motivation to make oneself a sacred object is an energizing force of intellectual careers. One of the reasons why there tends to be a chain from one highly creative intellectual to another is that the younger
person draws energy from the older as just such a symbolic hero. It is not merely a matter of transmitting cultural capital from one generation to the next, since we are dealing here with creative departures rather than loyal discipleship. The protégé’s consciousness is filled by the image of what it is to be an intellectual hero, by an ideal to emulate, even while one challenges the content of the master’s ideas.

* A thoroughgoing omni-skepticism is a deep trouble, the counterpart to the regulative ideal, the most central sacred object of intellectual life, the ideal of absolute truth.14 That is why skepticism is repeatedly revived, even though hardly anyone is ever convinced by it.

* Over the long term, the major intellectual driving force is the dynamics of organizationally sustained debate. Factions which keep their identities during many generations of argument become locked into a long dance step with one another; increasingly impervious to outside influences and turned inward upon their mutually constituted argumentative identities, they drive the collective conscience of the intellectual attention space repeatedly to new heights of abstract self-reflection.

* All persons move toward those IRs in which they get the largest payoff in emotional energy, and away from those which are an energy drain.

* Each person is trying to get the best intellectual status membership he or she can, not only directly but vicariously. Everyone is attracted to thinking high-status ideas as well as associating with high-status persons. The problem is that negotiating alliances is a mutual process. One side, looking up the status ladder, might wish to make an alliance, while the other side, looking down, is less eager; the successful intellectual may welcome followers but is unlikely to give them much recognition in return.

* Each intellectual faces a strategic choice. One can go all out, try to be king of the mountain, which means trying to be alone or nearly alone at the center of one of the major intellectual positions. Or one might cut one’s losses and aim for a more modest position: as loyal follower… Initially most intellectuals aim unrealistically high, and are driven down emotionally by the structure.

* Thinking is driven by the emotional loadings of symbols charged up by the dynamics of the markets for social membership. One’s emotional energy at any given moment selects the symbols which give one an optimal sense of group membership. Thinking is a fantasy play of membership inside one’s own mind. It is a maneuvering for the best symbolic payoff one can get, using energies derived from recent social interactions and anticipations of future encounters.

* The most notable philosophers are not organizational isolates but members of chains of teachers and students who are themselves known philosophers, and/or of circles of significant contemporary intellectuals.

* The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals to create problems at the very moment they solve them.

* The structure of intellectual life is governed by a principle: the number of active schools of thought which reproduce themselves for more than one or two generations in an argumentative community is on the order of three to six.

* As the raw size of intellectual production goes up, the reward to the average individual goes down—at least the pure intellectual rewards of being recognized for one’s ideas and of seeing their impact on others. The pessimism and self-doubt of the intellectual community under these circumstances is not surprising.

* Secularization means removing control of intellectual production from the authority of the church. That authority had been backed up by the coercive power of the state… The exhaustion of politicized church conflict led to secularization, the gradual neutralization and downgrading of the role of the church in the state, and the loss of church control over the means of intellectual production.

* abstract philosophy was usually produced by professional teachers, monks and priests, in organizational structures turned inward and away from the ordinary world. In contrast, writers’ networks are more closely connected to, even embedded in, the status order of society, and their cultural content is much closer to lay concerns of class-appropriate entertainment, topical morality and politics… With the shift to a writers’ marketplace comes more room to maneuver, but the power of the audience results in a division between writers oriented toward the mass market and an inwardly oriented elite of writers pursuing their own standards of technical perfection. The latter group sets up a possible rapprochement with academic carriers of culture, but the meeting is laden with tension.

* In Germany the intellectual world became academicized before anywhere else…

* Religious tracts had always been the biggest seller since the inception of print media.

* Sartre was the first philosopher in history to be heavily publicized by the popular mass media…

* Dostoyevsky’s own explicit doctrines, no doubt sincerely held but serving also to make his materials palatable to government censorship, extol a religious doctrine of passive suffering; but it is his villains who drive the drama and provide the atmosphere of impassioned philosophy that would appeal internationally to intellectuals. What made Dostoyevsky a literary success was that he combined this material with the style of the mass market novel, often taking the form of a murder mystery or police thriller. Dostoyevsky exploited the intellectual’s self-examination made successful by Turgenev, purged of its polite drawing room qualities and transposed into the melodrama of popular fiction.

* Economically, the highbrow segment rarely has been able to support itself on returns from the market. It arises where writers turn inward upon their professional connections within the network of peers; the audience which alone is given legitimacy to set standards of judgment are other elite writers.

* highbrow writers survive by patronage, sometimes the self-patronage of wealthy inheritors (Flaubert and Proust), reinforcing the self-image of the artist as the true aristocrat. Some highbrow writers hold alternative jobs (Baudelaire as journalist-critic, T. S. Eliot as bank clerk), the despising of which usually figures into the theme of artistic alienation from the ordinary commercial world which fails to support their art. Another common external niche is an academic job, which bruises the writer’s self-esteem because its bureaucratic routine contrasts with the freedom and creative exaltation which the writers’ market holds out as its ultimate reward. Most common of all is economic failure.12 This gives rise to the image of the artist starving in a garret, melodramatically ending as a youthful suicide rather than be forced back into the mundane world. In fact, most highbrow writers (perhaps middlebrow writers as well) spend only a youthful episode in writing, like Rimbaud from 17 to 19, before economic realities force them back into a conventional career.

* The best chances of success for highbrow writers exist where many aspiring and part-time writers are concentrated in a community. Sheer size is the crucial variable in making a critical mass which can support at least a few technically oriented esoteric writers on the proceeds of their works… This concentrated mass of intellectual aspirants, together with failures who had not yet given up their highbrow identities and their network contacts with the culture production business, made up a local market supporting viable careers for a few pure intellectual creators, whose lives became emblems for the rest. Such was the market structure in which the Sartre circle forged a brief episode of high-level creativity merging philosophy and literature.

* When intellectual life came alive in medieval Christendom, proofs of God became a standard turf for tests of philosophical skill, not primarily for converting unbelievers but for precedence in the intellectual community. It was a pure intellectual game; there was no premium on accepting proofs, and rejection of inadequacies of rival argument was taken as a mark of superiority.

* Deep Troubles: Free Will and Determinism, Substance and Plurality. A deep trouble is a doctrine containing a self-propagating difficulty. Alternative paths open out, each of which contains further puzzles. Exploration of such conundrums becomes a chief dynamic on the medium to higher reaches of the philosophical abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Intellectual life gets its energy from oppositions. It thrives on deep troubles because these provide guaranteed topics for debate. Once a deep trouble is discovered, it tends to be recycled through successive levels of abstraction. The recognition of deep troubles enables us to reformulate with greater precision a basic principle of intellectual creativity: oppositions divide the attention space under the law of small numbers, not merely along the lines of greatest importance to the participants, but along the lines of the available deep troubles. Monotheism is fruitful for advance along the abstraction-reflexivity sequence because it is a major source of deep troubles. One of the simplest of these is the issue of free will. The question of free will arises only at a level of abstraction capable of generating contradictions within a pair of opposing
concepts.

* The drive of the mathematical networks into higher abstraction and reflexivity is what gives the distinct edge to the philosophy of the modern West.

* The intellectual situation since about 1700 in this respect is historically unique. An anti-mathematical stance of this sort would have been inconceivable to most Greek, Islamic, and medieval Christian philosophers,29 for whom
mathematics would have been not seen as a bringdown to mundane calculation but as the essence of the transcendental, even mystical hierarchy. Mathematics was the ally of religion and faith. It was only after the great reversal of alliances, at the time of the secularization of the intellectual world in the late 1600s, that an anti-science and anti-mathematical front appeared. Moreover, this front consisted not merely of religious reactionaries, but of a secular opposition to the main line of philosophical development.

* The individual thinker, closeted in privacy, thinks something which is significant for the network only because his or her inner conversation is part of the larger conversation and contributes to its problems. If a brain flickers and brightens with statements which are true, this happens only because that brain is pulsing in connection with the past and anticipated future of a social network. Truth arises in social networks; it could not possibly arise anywhere else.

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The Energy Stars (3-20-22)

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 The situation is the boss
03:00 The power of emotional energy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142897
07:00 Elliott Blatt joins
12:00 Karen Carpenter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Carpenter
15:00 How did Ukraine become sacred?
25:00 Stalemate in Russia v Ukraine
52:10 Who’s Who in the Dissident Right: Andrew Anglin, https://archive.org/details/WWITDRAndrewAnglin
55:50 Edward Dutton on Copium
1:05:00 The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142919
1:11:50 Richard Spencer’s experiences on RT bashing American foreign policy, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1503895582779138049
1:20:00 Why is Israel such a happy country? https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article259560039.html
1:24:00 Why Richard Spencer changed his mind on Russia, NATO, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1504956702612865026
1:26:00 Richard Spencer on traitors
1:27:00 Dissident Right rejoices in Russia bombing globo-homo
1:41:00 DR admires Putin as a bad-ass traditionalist
1:56:30 Richard’s ex-wife Nina Koupriianova, Why Am I Being Trolled? | Toxic Social Media Bullying | Mental Health & Personality, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rn7ggtwhDU
2:00:00 Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer on Russia-Ukraine, Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer on Russia-Ukraine, https://odysee.com/Ukraine-march-20-22:21729ee75cbbc0cd74ab0ec4943bbbb77b841c97
2:01:00 Putin as the savior of the West nonsense
2:02:30 Are we living in clown world?
2:08:00 How Putin propaganda worked on Richard
2:12:00 Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have removed their pronouns from their Twitter profiles

Posted in Energy, Russia, Ukraine | Comments Off on The Energy Stars (3-20-22)

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Luke Ford

This is the most important book I’ve read in 2022.

Psychologist Roger Barker had set out to discover why people behave as they do by recording their activities in minute detail as they went about their everyday lives. With his colleague Herbert Wright, he set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station in Oskaloosa (population 750), and began following a group of children from the instant they woke up in the morning to the moment they were put to bed at night.
From their exhaustive observations, a distinct pattern emerged. As one scholar notes, “Barker and his colleagues found that there was a great deal of order, consistency, and predictability in the children’s behavior.” But this order was not a product of the children’s personalities, nor their intelligence, nor any other internal quality. Rather, the factor that overwhelmingly determined the way the children acted was the place in which they were observed. As Barker himself reported, “The characteristics of the behavior of a child often changed dramatically when he moved from one region to another, e.g. from classroom, to hall, to playground, from drugstore to street, from baseball game to shower room.”
Barker’s “Midwest Study,” which ultimately extended over a quarter-century, generated reams of evidence that the spaces in which we spend our time powerfully shape the way we think and act. It is not the case that we can muster the ability to perform optimally no matter the setting—a truth that architects have long acknowledged, even as our larger society has dismissed dismissed it. Christopher Alexander, author of the classic book A Pattern Language and an architect who celebrates the hard-earned wisdom embedded in folk architecture, laments “the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings.” To the contrary, Alexander writes, “a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.” He adds: “Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.”
Today, we too often learn and work in spaces that are far from being in harmony with our human nature, that in fact make intelligent and effective thinking “very difficult.” Yet the built environment—when we know how to arrange it—can produce just the opposite effect: it can sharpen our focus; it can sustain our motivation; it can enhance our creativity and enrich our experience of daily life. A tour through recent research in psychology and neuroscience, and through the varied kinds of places that humans have long created, can show us how to turn space into an extension of our minds.

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The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are excerpts of a review of this Randall Collins book:

* Great doctrines must have great imperfections it they are to continue to generate excitement (32). And those who are most theoretically creative in developing these doctrines will typically be individuals with exceptional amounts of drive, stamina and independence of mind. Such attributes of emotional energy (EE) are in part reducible to individual character formation; but they also ebb and flow in intensity to the degree that their bearers are at the center of the cultural fray. Those who possess EE are likely to cultivate more of it in a value-added spiral as their careers’ progress; however, EE may also dissipate when a thinker overreaches himself or when the stakes of the debate in which he has been focally implicated change. Moreover, while cultural capital (CC) and EE typically feed off and reinforce each other, they are best thought of as independent variables. Hence someone with a great deal of EE, but without the cultural capital to exploit it, is likely to become frustrated and disappointed; as a result, native ambition and enthusiasm may simply drain away.

* “It is a deep-seated part of intellectual structures that questions are asked, debates take place; polemics and denunciations also often occur, in a circulating structure that resembles equally the kula ring, the potlatch, and the vendetta. Even when intellectuals sit silently in the audience, they are conscious of their own part as members of this ongoing community. Their own ideas have been formed by the chain from the past; the situation before them is merely one more link in that formation” (28).

Yet intellectuals, directly or vicariously, face a key constraint: the boundedness of their audience’s “attention space.”

* “The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.”

* Creativity – the transformation, recombination or negation of ideas – is prompted by rivalry but mediated through various “circles,” the number of which turns out to be remarkably small: some 15 of them have dominated European philosophical thought in the eleven generations from 1600 to 1965 (531). Typically, such circles are characterized by an organizational leader who arranges the group’s material resources, and an intellectual leader who is the legendary symbol of its doctrine: respectively, for example, Mersenne and Descartes, Fichte and Kant, Bauer and Marx. Occasionally, however, organizational and intellectual roles are combined in one person, as they were in the case of Goethe (626-7) and, one might add, in that of Durkheim.

* Intellectuals, in Collins’s portrait, are essentially attention seekers faced with the constraints of a finite attention space; their goal is to prevail in the battle of ideas which requires access to and, if possible, a predominance over intellectual networks. The “feeling of exultation” accompanying bursts of emotional energy arises from the sensation of “ideas that feel successful” (52), and it is “the ideas which have mattered historically” (3) that Collins wishes to explain. “My sociological criterion for creativity is the distance across generations that ideas are transmitted” (58). Furthermore, “creativity comes to those individuals optimally positioned to take advantage” of “market opportunities” (51). But what, then, has happened to the “inner processes of intellectual life” now that creativity has been subsumed under attention seeking, the emulation of heroes, and the brute realities of success and reputation (69)?

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Interaction Ritual Chains

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2010 book by Randall Collins:

* humans have intrinsically limited cognitive capabilities, and that they construct mundane social order by consistently using practices to avoid recognizing how arbitrarily social order is actually put together. We keep up conventions, not because we believe in them, but because we studiously avoid questioning them. Garfinkel demonstrated this most dramatically in his breaching experiments, in which he forced people into situations that caused them to recognize indexicality (i.e., that they rely on tacit acceptance of what things mean contextually) and reflexivity (that there are infinite regresses of justifying one’s interpretations). Interestingly enough, the reactions of his subjects were always intensely emotional. Usually it was an emotional outburst: becoming nervous and jittery, shaken, displaying anxiety and sometimes shock (Garfinkel 1967, 44, 221–26) Sometimes it was depression, bewilderment, or anger at having been put in a situation where they constructed a reality they later discovered to be false. In short, when people have to recognize that they are tacitly constructing their social worlds, and in an arbitrary and conventional way, rather than simply reacting to a world that is objectively there, they show intense negative emotions.

…conventional social reality is a sacred object. Garfinkel’s experiments, violating the sacred object, call forth the same effects as violating a ritual taboo would have for a tribal member, desecrating the Bible for a Christian, or defaming the flag for a patriot. In Durkheim’s theory, moral sentiments attach to sacred objects. When they are violated, this positive sentiment of moral solidarity turns negative, into righteous anger directed against the culprit. Just so in Garfinkel’s experiments: there is outrage against the violator of everyday cognitive conventions. Garfinkel’s strategy parallels Durkheim’s: to show the conditions that uphold a social fact by revealing the opposition that occurs when it is broken.

* Interaction ritual produces pockets of moral solidarity, but variably and discontinuously throughout a population.

* Persons who are full of emotional energy feel like good persons; they feel righteous about what they are doing. Persons with low emotional energy feel bad; though they do not necessarily interpret this feeling as guilt or evil (that would depend on the religious or other cultural cognitions available for labeling their feelings), at a minimum they lack the feeling of being morally good persons that comes from enthusiastic participation in group rituals.

* Feelings of moral solidarity generate specific acts of altruism and love; but there is also a negative side. As Durkheim pointed out, group solidarity makes individuals feel a desire to defend and honor the group. This solidarity feeling is typically focused on symbols, sacred objects (like a tribal totemic emblem, a holy scripture, a flag, a wedding ring). One shows respect for the group by participating in rituals venerating these symbolic objects; conversely, failure to respect them is a quick test of nonmembership in the group. Members of the ritual group are under especially strong pressure to continue to respect its sacred symbols. If they do not, the loyal group members feel shock and outrage: their righteousness turns automatically into righteous anger. In this way, ritual violations lead to persecution of heretics, scapegoats, and other outcasts. Such events bring out clearly yet another transformation of emotion by rituals: from specific initiating emotions to their intensification in collective effervescence; from collective effervescence to emotional energy carried in individuals’ attachment to symbols; and from symbol-respect to righteous anger.

* Insofar as there is successful role-taking on both sides (and that is at the core of any successful ritual), the order-giver feels both his / her own sentiment of mastery, and the order-taker’s feeling of weakness. On the other side, the order-taker has a mixture both of his / her own negative emotions—weakness/depression, fear—and the mood of the dominator, which is strong emotional energy, dominance, anger. This explains why persons who are severely coerced (concentration camp inmates, marine corps recruits, beaten children) tend on one level to identify with the aggressor, and will enact the aggressor’s role when possible in the future: they have an emotional complex of fear and anger, although situationally the fear side is dominant when they are taking orders. Conversely, order-givers who use extreme coercion acquire sado-masochistic personalities, because of the role-taking that goes on, thus blending anger / dominant feelings with a sense of the fear and passivity that they invoke in their subordinates. Thus the experience of momentary, situationally dominant emotions gives rise to long-term emotional styles, which is a large part of what is meant by the term “personality.”

* Pride is the social attunement emotion, the feeling that one’s self fits naturally into the flow of interaction, indeed that one’s personal sense epitomizes the leading mood of the group. High solidarity is smooth-flowing rhythmic coordination in the micro-rhythms of conversational interaction; it gives the feeling of confidence that what one is doing, the rewarding experience that one’s freely expressed impulses are being followed, are resonated and amplified by the other people present.

* Chambliss (1989) has studied this interaction in the case of athletic contests (competitive swimmers), and has found that there is a major difference in outlook between high-level performers (consistent winners) and lesser performers (losers). The difference is manifested in the details of behavior: winners are meticulous in performing their routines in ways that they have deliberately developed; they have built up their own rhythms and stick to them in the face of competitive opposition. The winners make themselves the focus of attention; they set the expectations around themselves. Losers, however, let the winners become the focus, and adapt their micro-behavior toward them. This implies that a winner (perhaps dominant persons generally, in dominance contests more widely as well as in athletics) has a sense of control throughout the situation: winners maintain and build up their own rhythmic coordination, their anticipation of what they will do, setting the micro-rhythmic pace. Losers (and persons who are subordinated in dominance contests) allow someone else to break their own flow of anticipation of what will happen in their own activities. These dominated persons can cope with the situation, can maintain some anticipation about what will happen only by focusing on the other person as the lead, rather than by projecting their own volitional future. In effect, such a person can recoup some emotional energy from the situation by becoming a follower, attaching themself to someone else’s lead. 15 The more they resist such attachment, the less emotional energy they will have.

* In terms of the IR model, one could also say that the dominant person makes oneself the focus of the interaction. He or she becomes, in some sense, a Durkheimian sacred object. Microsociologically, that is just what a “sacred object” means—it is the object upon which attention of the group is focused, and which becomes a symbolic repository of the group’s emotional energies. When someone feels oneself in this position, they have a store of emotional energy for their own use; it makes that person “charismatic.” For others, the person who is a “sacred object” compels attention.

* Persons inside the social realm of winning / dominance experience a mere routine, in which they have smooth anticipated control of situations—that is, a great store of “emotional energy” available to them in contest situations. But persons on the outside looking in see a mystifying difference, a gulf to greatness that they feel they cannot cross.

* Further, the group itself by a successful emotional contagion can generate its own enthusiasm (which is what the flow of conversation at a party does).
These kinds of positive emotional outbursts are relatively short and temporary in their effects. They happen upon a baseline of previous emotional energy: for a group to establish this kind of rapport, its members need to have previously charged up some symbols with positive attraction, so that these symbols can be used as ingredients in carrying out a successful ritual. A previous cumulation of emotional energy is thus one of the ingredients in making possible the situational buildup of positive emotion. Frequently, the positive emotions (joy, enthusiasm, humor) are generated by a group leader, an individual who takes the focus, who is able to propagate such a mood from his or her own stores of emotional energy. This individual thus serves very much like an electric battery for group emotional expressiveness. Persons who occupy this position in IR chains are what we think of as “charismatic.” In general, “personality” traits are just these results of experiencing particular kinds of IR chains. (This is true at the negative end as well, resulting in persons who are depressed, angry, etc.)

* Psychologically, anger is often regarded as the capacity to mobilize energy to overcome a barrier to one’s ongoing efforts (Frijda 1986, 19, 77). This means that the amount of anger should be proportional to the amount of underlying effort; and that is the amount of emotional energy one has for that particular project. High emotional energy may also be called “aggressiveness,” the strong taking of initiative. This can have the social effect of dominating other people, of lowering their emotional energy, of making them passive followers. This implies that there is a connection between the generic quality of high emotional energy—especially the EE generated in power situations—and the expression of the specific emotion of anger.

* The disruptive form of anger, however, is more complicated. That is because anger in its intense forms is an explosive reaction against frustrations. Truly powerful persons do not become angry in this sense, because they do not need to; they get their way without it. To express anger is thus to some extent an expression of weakness.

* One can predict that righteous anger is proportional to the amount of emotional charge of membership feelings around particular symbols.

* Righteous anger is a particularly intense emotion because it is expressed with a strong sense of security: the individual feels that they have the community’s support, and not merely in a loose sense. Righteous anger is an emotion that is an evocation of the organized network that has been previously established to use violence. Persons who feel righteous anger are evoking their feeling of membership in an enforcement coalition.

* In the case of negative emotions, there is a long-standing clinical tradition that sees traumatic situations as the major determinant of longterm social and psychological functioning. Particular experiences of intense anger, fear, or shame are regarded as controlling one’s whole subsequent functioning. This may well be true, to a degree; but it should be seen against the background of the overall level of emotional energy. A person who generally has favorable, if undramatic, experiences on the power and status dimensions of their everyday interactions, will likely get over an episode of extreme anger, fear, or shame. It is only when the individual’s overall “market position” of interactions is on the negative side that particularly intense dramatic experiences are stored up and carried over as “traumas,” especially in highly charged memories of the sort that Freudian therapy is designed to ventilate. Max Weber’s conception of stratification as inequality of life chances in the market thus extends not only to material economic chances but to the realm of emotional health.

* The simplest version of stratification is an energized upper class, lording it over a depressed lower class, with moderately energized middle-class persons in between. Take this pattern as an ideal type; it does yield a crucial point, that stratification generally works because those who dominate have the energy to dominate situations in which they encounter other persons. The winning generals are usually the most energetic ones; so are the richest financiers; in the specialized realm of intellectual domination, the stars of world science, philosophy, and literature generally are what I have called “energy stars” (for evidence on generals, see Keegan 1987; on philosophers, Collins 1998). …My argument is far from holding that the upper classes are uniquely energetic individuals; they are products of processes that affect all of us, and in which all of us (very likely) are pretty much interchangeable.

* Persons with lower amounts of EE are impressed by those who have accumulated a lot of it; such people have an EE-halo that makes them easy to admire. They are persons who get things done; they have an aura of success surrounding them. And since having high EE allows one to focus attention, one can get a certain amount of rise in one’s own EE by following them, becoming part of their entourage, taking orders from them, or even viewing them from afar. Thus high EE gives dominant persons a kind of micro-situational legitimacy.

* Bodily postures and movements . High EE is generally expressed in an erect posture, moving firmly and smoothly, and taking the initiative in relation to other persons. Low EE is indicated in postures and movements that are shrinking, passive, hesitating, or disjointed. Since high EE is social confidence, it is manifested in movements toward other people, especially movements that take the initiative and that lead to establishing a pattern of rhythmic coordination. coordination. Low EE, conversely, is found in movements and postures of withdrawal, and low initiative; low-EE persons in a social situation show a pattern of following others’ nonverbal leads, or a freezing of movement. Conflict at moderate levels of EE may be indicated by a rapid or jerky alternation between orienting toward and away from the others. Scheff and Retzinger (1991) describe this pattern, which they interpret in terms of the self-oriented emotions of pride (turning toward the other person) and shame (turning away).

Eyes . Solidarity is directly expressed in eye contact. As Scheff and Retzinger (1991) show, persons in a situation of high attunement look at each other. This occurs in a rhythmic pattern, viewing the other person’s face, responding with micro-expressions, then periodically looking away (to avoid staring). In moments of intense solidarity (such as group triumph or erotic entrainment) the mutual gaze is longer and more steady. In a situation of low attunement, persons lower their eyes and turn away for prolonged periods. These are measures of high or low attunement or collective effervescence, and they tend to be symmetrical across participants. EE is seen in the eyes, as in the case of bodily postures and movements, as a temporal pattern for each individual as they approach the situation. Initiative or lack of initiative can be seen in establishing eye contact; high or low EE is manifested in dominating or avoiding mutual gaze (Mazur et al. 1980; Mazur 1986).
Voice . The amount of enthusiasm, confidence, and initiative (high EE) versus apathy, withdrawal, and depression (low EE) can be measured paralinguistically, that is, in the style rather than the content of talk. (See Scherer 1982, 1985, for studies of the emotional dimensions of recorded speech.) Since the flow of speech in an interaction is also a measure of the amount of attunement or collective solidarity, we must be careful to observe in micro-detail the patterns of the individuals as they approach the vocal interaction, as distinguished from the degree of attunement that is reached collectively.

* Two high-EE persons do not necessarily get along with each other well. Each is used to being in the center of attention, taking the initiative, dominating the conversation, controlling the ritual. In politics, charismatic leaders are not close associates of each other but are usually quite separate; they might even be rivals, each surrounded by their distinct social circles. 6 And so it goes with popular hostesses, leaders of street gangs, ebullient jokers who are the life of the party. There is room in any gathering for only a limited amount of attention space, and for some to be in the center means others must be more passive or peripheral.

The theory of IR chains implies that persons who already have very high EE, and thus are good at charging up a gathering as its emotional leader, will choose gatherings in which they are most likely to be in the center of attention, and to avoid gatherings where they have to share the spotlight with others of equal emotional dominance. At the opposite end of the spectrum, very low-EE persons may be consigned to each other’s company by the IR market, but that does not mean they will seek each other out. One generally observes that low-status, marginal persons at the fringe of a cocktail party do not create countercircles with their own effervescence rivaling those at the center of the party, but remain relatively dispersed.

* An individual whose EE is very high compared to his or her relative symbolic resources in that situation (i.e., the person is used to dominating interactions but is currently overmatched by being unfamiliar with the local membership symbols being used) is unlikely to act humbly enough to learn the new symbols by paying deference to those who can impart them. High-EE persons thus tend to stay within their own orbits of cultural exchange; if the IR market moves away from them, they may have difficulty adjusting, becoming embittered and angry at the loss of their centrality.

* Whether one is most attracted to a church service, a political rally, or an intimate conversation is determined by each individual’s expectations of the magnitude of EE flowing from that situation.

* Religious ceremonial is not the only kind of interaction ritual, although for a period it was the leading sector that organized the most energy and attracted the most material investment. The period of secularization in Europe that began with the Renaissance and Reformation was to a large extent the spilling over of the market for IRs into secular channels, at first through the courts of the nobility, later into a vast middle-class market for entertainment and status display.

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