A Difference in Meaning
Greer Brigham
SOC 0020
3/3/18
What happens when meaning, which must exist in common for society to function, is not shared? How do we deal with a having a different socialization from our peers? The result leads to situations like the one described below:
Your newfound friend on campus comes to see you late one night. He is distraught and needs to talk. He tells you that he is having a very difficult time this semester. He says he feels very much out of place on campus and can’t seem to figure out what is bothering him; somehow, he does not feel comfortable with himself; he is isolated, lonely, and very afraid.
In this essay, we will use a symbolic interactionist approach to show how differential life experiences and socializations lead to situations like the one that has occurred for your new friend (let’s call him John). We will begin with an overview of how the self is created as a process, followed by the mechanisms through which John’s socialization sets him apart. Then, we will show how this incongruence leads to both John’s inability to act, and his common encounters with problematic situations. Throughout the process, we will show how these trends leave him in his isolated, lonely, and fearful emotional state. Finally, we will wrap up on a lighter note, with an exploration of ways in which both you and John could make his current situation less problematic (so to speak).
The Social Self
According to symbolic interactionists, we live in a world where meaning must be created and shared with others, and not merely learned from the world itself. For people of one place and one upbringing, this is easy; the meanings of everyday symbols are shared and interactions between people can take place. This shared meaning is not developed automatically however. How one interacts with society is learned through a process called socialization, wherein the shared meaning of objects are learned through repeated interactions with those around us. Without this common socialization, problems arise. This can occur both for people in the same geographic area, depending on the job, social class, or religion of one’s parents, and people who move from one community to another.
The importance of socialization and the differential understanding of meaning immediately comes to bear on our understanding of the ‘generalized other’. As a child, we begin to imagine ourselves from the perspectives of specific other people, like our parents, teachers, and friends. Eventually, these specific understandings become synthesized into an understanding of people in general. This sense of a generalized other informs us as to how most people would react to our actions, and how they would assign meaning to them. In the case of our friend John, this creates problems since his generalized other was formed in a different environment than the one of people on campus. If these two settings jar greatly, then the meanings his peers try to impart on him fail, and he is likewise unable to convey meaning to his peers. In other words, he is unable to see himself in the eyes of others.
This comes through most clearly in the ‘I’ vs. ‘Me’ phases of thought. At all times, there is an internal conversation between a person’s impulses and the knowledge of the meaning that others would assign to an action if an impulse were followed through. The ‘I’ represents this impulse phase, where spontaneous, unorganized actions are brought to mind. The immediately following ‘Me’ phase is essentially an operationalization of the generalized other; the person imagines how others would attach meaning to a certain action. Depending on what the ‘Me’ says, the person can choose the behavior that best suits the meaning they are trying to convey. For our friend John, however, his ‘Me’ phase is essentially faulty due to his different socialization. It will not inform him of the meanings that will be imparted, and thus his impulses are not well refined to his surroundings. The degree to which having a different ‘Me’ (or generalized other) can complicate interactions is made clear in a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, where Gladwell breaks down a conversation between two Koreans — Mr. Kim, an employee, and Kwacang, his boss. Notice how even after translation, a different socialization has transformed the meanings of certain phrases.
KWACANG: It's cold and I'm kind of hungry.
[MEANING: Why don't you buy a drink or something to eat?]
MR. KIM: How about having a glass of liquor?
[MEANING: I will buy liquor for you.]
KWACANG: It's okay. Don't bother.
[MEANING: I will accept your offer if you repeat it.]
MR. KIM: You must be hungry. How about going out?
[MEANING: I insist upon treating you.]
KWACANG: Shall I do so?
[MEANING: I accept.]
This conversation works because both Kwacang and Mr. Kim’s ‘Me’ phases are in line with each others, and they both understand the same meaning behind each phrase. However, imagine the chaos that would ensue if either conversationalist had a general American socialization and listened with less of an ear for subtlety. As Hewitt and Shulman say, “each ‘Me’ is the result of an effort to imagine how we appear from another person’s perspective, and can fall prey to failures or errors of imagination.”
With a different socialization from the Brown community, John likely is having this error of imagination, where his words are not being understood in the right context and the words of others seem to him to have a different meaning than the one they would like to impart. In his description, he says that “he feels very much out of place on campus…” This out of place feeling may occur because he fails to blend in with everybody else and cannot go through the routine act of exchanging everyday meaning.
The Social Act
Delving into the social act itself, John’s problems of understanding meaning continue. A social act is defined as having four parts: an impulse, a perception, a manipulation, and a consummation. The act begins with the impulse, when an existing state is disturbed. To use an example, imagine you are standing on the subway when a stranger bumps into you. Now, you must react to this impulse, but how? The next step, your perception, places this impulse in context with its environment. Perception determines how you will act towards the object of the impulse. Will you say, “excuse me?” Will you start a fight? Following this decision, you must manipulate your environment. This is a physical action which you use to achieve whatever goal your perception has outlined. Following manipulation can come consummation (i.e. the goal is reached). However, a wrench is thrown into this system in the form of misperceptions. If an object is misinterpreted — given a different meaning than the one it should, then manipulations will be misguided and fail to result in consummation. In the example, if an accidental bump is mistaken for an intentional shove, a fight could occur where a simple apology would have resolved the situation.
An inability to perceive the meaning that one’s actions will give to others, as we noted in the ‘I’ versus ‘Me’ section above, prevents an individual like John from reaching consummation. He is thus constantly frustrated from reaching his goals. In a sense, he is prevented from acting socially, leaving him feeling powerless within in his environment. As Hewitt and Shulman show, emotions arise primarily in our efforts to complete social acts. When consummation is reached, we get feelings of satisfaction or elation. The opposite occurs when social acts meet obstacles. These reactions become evident in John’s description: “Can’t seem to figure out what is bothering him; somehow, he does not feel comfortable with himself.” Here, John’s faulty ‘Me’ and inability to act lead him to his negative emotions. Since his ‘Me’ most likely worked fine in the past, he is confused by the current state of affairs and cannot understand his own negative feelings.
Situations
Situations are the intersection of a meaningful time and place, and are likely one of the central problems for someone like John. Here, it is critical for everyone to share a set of meanings in order for the process to go smoothly. Hewitt and Shulman lists these meanings as including the central nature of a particular setting, the activities that occur and reoccur there, the objects one needs to recognize, and the meaning of the other people that are present. These are a lot of things to keep coordinated, which is difficult for someone with a different socialization. It gets more complicated; this last meaning, the meaning of people in a situation, or the “situated identity”, is among the most important and most complex meanings. This identity is defined as the meaning that someone wants to be attached to themselves by those in the interaction, and it can only exist when it is confirmed by others in the interaction. When this coordination fails, it can have devastating effects on an individual. Hewitt and Shulman use the example of a shopkeeper that ignores a customer’s arrival at the store’s counter. Since the shopkeeper denies the other’s self-designation as a customer, she denies that person their identity. She essentially turns them into a “nonentity in the situation… It is as if [they] don’t exist. In terms of a situated identity, [they] actually don’t.”
John’s different attribution and expectations regarding meaning lead to problems
When identities fail to match, which happens often given John’s different understanding of meaning, John can turn into a non-entity. This emotion appears in his description, “he is isolated, lonely.”As an object without a defined meaning, this isolation follows logically from his condition.
Beyond the personal level, John’s confusion can lead to the collapse of whole situations themselves. Most situations are routine, where people assuming that definitions of the situation will be shared, others will have the same definition, and assumptions do not need to be checked. This is normal, and collective goals can be attained. In comes someone like John however, and his disruption of a shared meaning leads to a problematic situation. People in the interaction may feel uncomfortable in their situated identity; John may not like the identity given to him by others, just as they may not enjoy the one given by him. It becomes impossible to reach the group’s goal without this definition, and chaos ensues.
As a problematic element, John is affected emotionally. He says he “he feels very much out of place on campus…very afraid.” He sees himself as the source of this problem, and out of place in the situations with which he engages. This, in turn, leads to his fear of the effects that he may cause.
Additional Effects on John
In addition to his other problems, John likely suffers an issue with his identity. Traditionally, a person’s biographical identity consists of the cumulative memory of meanings that have been regularly attached to them over all past interactions. It is externally reaffirmed and relatively stable. However, in this new place of new meanings, John may be frequently assigned different meanings from the one that has traditionally been given to him. This leaves him with two options; on the one hand, he can maintain his former meaning, leading to dissonance and the problematic situations described above. On the other hand, he can pretend to go along with the meaning assigned to him by others and act in this way.
It appears that he has been choosing the latter, with the negative emotions that follow. In his description, John says, “Somehow, he does not feel comfortable with himself… lonely.” John feels uncomfortable with himself because, in his new environment, he is not the old self he is used to. This leads to an uncomfortable dissonance in his life, not unlike the emotive dissonance described by Hewitt and Shulman. They describe the sense of self-estrangement and distress that is often felt by workers like waiters who are forced to adopt emotions that are inconsistent with their true feelings. Goffman also notes this process, which he calls “‘Self-distantiation,’ namely, that process by which a person comes to feel estranged from himself.” Here, John’s false identity leaves him feeling drained and self-estranged.
John’s problems, particularly those in situations, have an additional effect on his self-esteem. In the symbolic interactionist paradigm, self-esteem is a combination of our how others view ourselves (“an imputed sentiment”) and a sort of “self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” In addition, we derive self-esteem depending the success with which we claim a personal identity, which is in turn built by our ability to take action in the social world. As you may recall, John is confused as to how others give him meaning, though his frequent creation of problematic situations doubtlessly lead him to assume they see him in a negative light. This fact, combined once again with his inability to act socially, likely leads to a low self-esteem. This fact appears in his description, “he does not feel comfortable with himself…lonely.”
Getting Better
John has several options for resolving the situation. As Elliott says of problematic situations, there is always the possibility of leaving. If John were to return to an area filled with people with similar generalized others, his agency and identity would be restored overnight alongside many of the other now-negative metrics. Since simply leaving is likely not ideal, this could be solved in a similar manner if John sought out people of similar backgrounds on campus. There are many groups and housing options at Brown based on social identities, which is a sort of identity that lasts beyond single situations (i.e. race, social class, religion, etc.) and often affects the way in which meaning is perceived and assigned. Among these peers, John could find not only a refuge where social acts and situations are more possible, but also a community of people that could serve as translators to point out for him the different meanings given on campus. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor discussed this very issue during her recent lecture at Brown, and in her autobiography. Coming from a community where attending college was not part of regular life, she described being unaware of the meaningful markers of success that are part of a college education. What is a good grade? What is a good number of classes to take? How many extracurriculars should I sign-up for? She recommended to President Paxson that there be some way for new students from diverse backgrounds (and therefore diverse generalized others) to know these markers while attending college. In addition, she noted in her book how helpful her latina community on campus was for her own success. Clearly a change in John’s community itself would result in the resolution of many of his problems.
Without changing the community itself, there are still options for him. At the beginning and right after the act, there are also avenues to do “remedial work” to resolve the situation, as Erving Goffman shows in Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. Goffman assumes in his descriptions of remedial work that both the actor and the audience agree on the worst possible readings of an act. In the case of John, who we have determined suffers from a failure to connect meaning, this is not the case. However, Goffman’s strategies can still be used to great effect in the context of an actor that knows they have done something wrong, even if the specific error is unknown to them.
First, Goffman suggests that the actor could offer an account that stresses the context of the action. If John were to articulate the circumstances of the act, such as his different upbringing and understanding of meaning, the audience could change it’s view of him. As Goffman says, “The more an actor can argue mitigating circumstances successfully, the more he can establish that the act is not to be taken as an expression of his moral character.” Goffman also suggests that the actor could offer a counter-denunciation, by shifting the blame towards the audience for the offense. John could suggest that the audience’s misinterpretation of his meaning was due to their own ignorance of his background, culture, religion, etc. However, as may be expected, this latter technique is noted for having limited success.
Second, Goffman notes apologies as another means to remediation. In an apology, a person, “splits himself into two parts, the part that is guilty of an offense and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule.” This technique separates John from his mistake even while recognizing that an error has occurred, which could lead to a more sympathetic audience. This could be made to great effect if used alongside an account.
Third, Goffman brings up requests as an additional avenue. Requests, unlike accounts and apologies, occur before or during the initial stages of an act. Here, the actor asks for permission from a potentially offended person to follow through with an ambiguously offensive act. This shows that the actor acknowledges the potential offensiveness of an act, and allows the audience to prevent the act from taking place. For John, this request would allow him to remain in the good graces of the community and prevent many of the problematic situations that normally would take place. In addition, the request allows for advice from the audience, which could improve John’s chances of success in social acts.
Finally, Goffman notes in his other text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, shows how you can help your friend as member of the same team. Goffman defines a teammate as someone whose “dramaturgical co-operation one is dependent upon in fostering a given definition of the situation.” He notes a good teammate as one who never gives the show away and cooperates willingly with other teammates. In terms of cooperation, this means that each teammate remains loyal to each other and supports the team’s definition of the situation. A bad teammate, in contrast, publicly questions the meaning that the others on the team are trying to impose. They may question this meaning privately beforehand, but never publicly. This sort of interaction plays out clearly in one of Goffman’s examples, taken from a study done in a small city:
“If one has been engaged in community work on any scale at all, he is impressed over and over with what might be termed the ‘principle of unanimity.’ When policy is finally formulated by the leaders in the community, there is an immediate demand on their part for strict conformity of opinion. Decisions are not usually arrived at hurriedly… [but] when the time for discussion is past and the line is set, then unanimity is called for.”
This large-scale description models how effective teams function even on the smallest level. In John’s case, you can consider whether you are in fact being a good ‘teammate’ for him in social situations. Do you debate the correct meanings of actions with him before and after the situation occurs, but stick with his defined meaning in public? Or do you publicly question him? As Goffman shows, being a good teammate can improve the chances for successful actions, which we have shown helps John’s emotional state. Clearly, being a good teammate here means being a good friend.
In sum, John’s misattributions of meaning lead him into a dire, but not quite hopeless situation. His failures cause him to miss many of the social symbols in the community, leading him into failed social acts and problematic situations. However, his situation is not unique, and avenues of support exist for him on campus. Through a combination of accounts, apologies, and requests, his true situation will become clearer for his peers while he slowly learns how meaning works in this new environment. As a friend, you may help him define meaning with those around him, and his time on campus can soon be filled with the satisfaction of his former life.
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