Interaction and Identity

Harmut B. Mokros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351293501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Scholarly interest in issues of self-identity has exploded across disciplines within the humanities and social sciences in recent years. Common to these concerns are the assumptions that self-identity is not an a priori, not given or fixed, but created in the process of communication. This also assumes that social institutions and values are produced and reproduced by individuals in interaction. To capture the essential characteristics of a person requires analysis of how the social and psychological intersect in moments of communication.

Interaction and Identity contributes, theoretically and empirically, to contemporary scholarly interest in issues of identity. Chapters and contributors to this stand alone volume include: "Part/Whole Discovery: Stages of Inquiry" by Thomas Scheff; "Communication" by Gregory Bateson; "Internal Muzak: An Examination of Intrapersonal Relationships" by Linda Lederman; "The Constitution of Identity as Gendered in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Ideology and Interaction" by Margaret Carr; and "The (Reconstruction and Negotiation of Cultural Identities in the Age of Globalization" by Getinet Belay.

The multiple disciplines of social research with contemporary interest in identity are ably reflected in Interaction and Identity. The authors are drawn from eight disciplines: anthropology, communication, information science, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology. This book will be invaluable to scholars in all these areas—above all in communication research as such.

1

Introduction: From Information and Behavior to Interaction and Identity

Hartmut B. Mokros

Scholarly interest in issues of self-identity has exploded across disciplines within the humanities and social sciences in recent years (e.g., Chames, 1993; Fitzgerald, 1993; Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Keith & Pile, 1993; Lorraine, 1990; Shorter & Gergen, 1989; Taylor, 1989; White, 1992). Common to this interest is the assumption that self-identity is not a priori, not given or fixed, but communicatively constituted. The “transdisciplinarity” (Rowland, 1988) characterizing this interest may itself be seen as reflective of concern and dissatisfaction with traditional disciplinary identities and the intellectual trade restrictions they have imposed. Hyper-specialization, methodological obsessiveness, and theoretical impotence are no doubt among the more visible disciplinary qualities to have stimulated desire for new looks and lookings. Within this climate the grounding of such traditionally important, and discipline supporting, oppositions as subject/object, body/mind, individual/society, male/female have been thrown into question. It is a climate within which communication has come to occupy notable centrality. This is particularly evident in contemporary writings, which share in their move away from developmental perspectives (e.g., Erikson, 1980) a view of identity as contingent (White, 1992), as discursively and interactively constituted (e.g., Gergen, 1991).

Interaction and Identity, volume five of Information and Behavior, aims to contribute, theoretically and empirically, to contemporary scholarly interests in issues of identity. Although the focus of contributions to this volume is on identity, its development and scope is embedded within theoretical discussions of communication that have been a concern of this series since its inception. It is within the context of such discussions that this volume was conceived and developed as a contribution to Information and Behavior.

From Information to Communication

Information and Behavior was inaugurated in 1983 to provide an interdisciplinary forum for examining the implications and increasing centrality of information in contemporary life and scholarship, in what has come to be called the “Information Age.” The concept of information gained widespread currency and analytic clout with the rapid development and proliferation of information technologies during the later half of this century. The impact and opportunities that these revolutionary technological innovations pose for everyday experience—from redefinitions of the workplace and experiences of leisure, to the types of competencies and skills necessary to succeed in contemporary society— clearly motivated the founding of this series.

As the series has evolved, however, the concept of communication has become an increasingly explicit concern, from a focus on Mediation, Information and Communication in volume three (Ruben & Lievrouw, 1989) to a look at the relationship Between Communication and Information in the last volume, volume four (Schement & Ruben, 1993). With a stated aim “to map out the research front addressing the relationships between communication and information” (Schement & Ruben, 1993, p. xi), volume four called attention to the conceptual inseparability of communication from discussions of information and behavior. But there is more at issue in discussions of the relationship between communication and information than claims of conceptual inseparability. Specifically, how concepts of communication and information relate to our understandings of everyday experience is of particular relevance.

Reading across contributions to volume four and earlier volumes of Information and Behavior reveals two distinct paths for discussing the linkage between communication and information, with the first emphasizing information and the second communication. While communication and information are commonly treated as interchangeable along the first path, there is, nevertheless, a clear distinction made, with information extended priority and communication subordinated to information. This priority would seem to be based in the idea of information as a representation of reality, as a representation of the object world in which human experience is situated. Information is seen to “stand for” something, that is, to represent reality out there. As a representation of things out there, information itself assumes the stature of thingness, becomes an entity, whose value increases the more so that it economically, parsimoniously, and objectively represents this reality or enables the reorganization of existing information so as to allow individuals to cognitively experience reality in a new way. Communication, within this framework, is the process by which representations are coined and ratified as information and, more visibly, the process by which information is exchanged between individuals. Underscoring this definition of communication in information terms is the common employment of efficiency and fidelity as criteria for the evaluation of this exchange process. Communication is thus treated as a tool for labeling reality and a tool through which access and ownership of information may be realized by individuals.

Along this first path information achieves priority through the implicit assumption that information enables the cognitive capture, organizationally and representationally, of reality out there. It is this assumption that is contested along the second, a path that regards communication as primary. To make communication primary for understanding behavior is to view communication as “constitutive” rather than as an exchange process between two information processors. When communication is viewed in this way, “known” properties of reality are assumed to be contingent upon, or only made possible by virtue of communicative action. This then implies that tokens of information are not simple representations of external reality that reduce uncertainty, or qualities of “the organizational work a message enables its receiver to perform” (Krippendorf, 1993, p. 488), but are instead embedded within communicative activity, and thereby sensible not in relation to some essential, objectifiable reality, but in relation to other informational tokens.

The relative value of any token of information (including the concept of information as a token) is thereby seen to not be a function of the economy, parsimony, and objectivity in its ability to represent external reality for “knowing” individuals. Instead its value derives from its preferential use, its currency in discourse. This then implies that information tokens are politically and ideologically laden and dependent, discursive realizations within the constitutive moments of communicative action. From this perspective, information tokens create the illusion of a singular knowable universe in so far as they are treated as representations and guides for knowing an assumed independent reality. Obscured thereby is a view of information tokens as effects of communicative action. Seen as effects, information tokens first and foremost reflect the reality of social organization and value that communicative action unavoidably reveals.

From Behavior to Identity

The distinctions between these approaches are not merely matters of intellectual debate or paradigm difference. They entail radically divergent conceptualizations of the nature of human experience and its adaptive and transformative course (cf. Benhabib, 1992; Deetz, 1994). The information path focuses on the role of information in relation to the behavior of persons (with institutions, organizations, and societies similarly personified), with persons assumed to be autonomous, rational, self-contained processors and producers of information (viz. behavior) within this framework. Information innovations are envisaged as potentiating greater autonomy and rationality, thereby furthering what has been called the modemist or enlightenment project of the self (e.g., Giddens, 1991). The principal experience of the self is conceived to be cognitive, in the Cartesian sense. This assumption of the primacy of cognition in lived experience makes the acquisition of information a morally progressive good in the service of the knowing self.

The communication path contests this basic assumption of the primacy of the knowing self and the privileged status that information derives from this assumption. Rather than being viewed as a tool or a process of message exchange, as is the case within the information approach, communication is viewed as a site within which experience achieves a sense of coherence, structure, and meaning. The communicative moment occupies the intersection of the psychological and the social, within always present, yet changing and socially modifiable, biological and physical environmental constraints. Within communicative situations and through communication practices, social institutions and values are produced and reproduced by individuals in interaction (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984). Just as communication practices inevitably produce and reproduce social institutions and values, they also produce and reproduce individual identities in terms of institutions and values. Through interaction with others, persons derive a sense of identity, a sense of place. To then capture what is a person, what are the qualities of lived experience, how is change in a person and in social institutions possible, commands attention to the intersection of the social and psychological in communicative moments (of others).

Study of persons from the perspective of communication, at the intersection of the psychological and social, requires making problematic the linkages between, and concepts of, person and behavior. As a concept, behavior presupposes unilateral agency. By extension, it is then quite straightforward to treat behavior as information that is indexical of a person’s competencies, beliefs, and desires; that is, of a person’s “intemality.” To emphasize instead a view of behavior as communicatively situated and thereby as communicative practice, is to see behavior as an expression of interactional contingency occasioned within a system of social constraints and enablements. This then directs attention away from behavior as indexical of a person, toward a recognition that what is regarded to be the behavior of an individual is a collaborative social sensemaking activity, within which statements of identity in relationship to others are continuously realized.

The Communicative Constitution of Identity

Identities of persons may be said to be communicatively constituted in two senses: discursively and interactively. The discursive constitution of identity references the impact of sociocultural knowledge or discourse on social practice. Discourse, from this perspective, identifies the expressive possibilities and permissibilities—that is to say, the systems of etiquette—that guide human agency and provide the parameters within which self-identity is constituted and evaluated. This framework has been by far the most active locus of scholarly interest in the study of identity as communicatively constituted, particularly within the context of what has come to be called social constructionism (e.g., Shotter & Gergen, 1989, 1994). Within this framework social conditions, as these are reflected in discursive possibilities, are of primary interest, not “lived moments of social interaction” (Pearce, 1994). Thus, although social interaction is acknowledged as the site within which discourses and identities—as discursive expressions—are constituted as productions and reproductions, specifically how identities are constituted in lived moments of social interaction and what is entailed in an interactional analysis of identity has been largely underdeveloped.

One obstacle that has stood in the way of such interactional analysis is the failure to make problematic the concept of interaction. In its least productive, yet most common usage, the term interaction serves as a gloss for encounters between one or more persons or personified things. This is seen in studies that claim to be studying interaction for no other reason than because their data come from dyadic conversations, for example. Interaction in such cases is conceived in terms of an event (namely, social encounter) rather than as a process.

A second sense of the term interaction emphasizes process, in particular a process of mutual influence (e.g., Capella, 1981). McCall and Simmons (1966) provide a familiar statement of this perspective. They write, “Whenever a relationship of deterministic influence between two events cannot be resolved into a simple function of one but must instead be treated as joint function, as a mutual or reciprocal influence, we have a case of interaction” (p. 47). Events, and the agencies that give rise to events, are prior to interaction within this conceptualization. Social interaction is regarded as equivalent to the concept of interaction as an effect within the familiar analysis of variance model, an effect which accounts for some proportion of total variance unaccounted for (e.g., Kenny & Malloy, 1988).

Although these two senses of interaction appear quite distinct, they share in common an assumption of the primacy of persons and things. In both formulations interaction is regarded as a discrete entity. In the first sense, interaction is the event constituted by social engagements. In the second, it is a potentially emergent property that arises within social engagements. Conceptualization of interaction in these terms is antithetical to a constitutive perspective. A constitutive perspective rejects the priority of events and objects and instead posits the priority of an interactional system within which events and objects are achievements (of identity), not as stable entities, but as contingent realizations.

Contributions to Interaction and Identity

While theoretical discussions focusing on the discursive or textual constitution of identity have been many, empirical examinations of identity as interactionally constituted have been few. Contributions to this volume have been selected to address this imbalance and to thereby encourage empirical study of identity as interactionally constituted and theoretical implications of interactional perspectives on identity.

These contributions have been divided into five sections. Included are: (1) discussions of issues of theory and method relevant to empirical study of identity as interactionally constituted; (2) empirical studies of identity as interactionally constituted; (3) examination of interactional properties of enduring statements of identity; (4) considerations of the blockages, barriers, and potential consequences that the denial of a constitutive conceptualization of identity creates in interactional engagements; and (5) formulations that argue for the remaking of identity from an interactive stance.

Issues of Theory and Method in Interactional Study of Identity

Difficulties involved in conceptualizing data that capture the process of interaction while incorporating hierarchies of contextual parameters requires bridging the separation between theory and research, through a grounding of theory in concrete, well-described phenomena, with theory and data then entering into an ongoing dialogue. The chapters by Scheff, Bateson, Duncan and colleagues, and Bruneau each speaks to this issue.

“Contemporary scholars and scientists,” writes Thomas Scheff in chapter 2 in this volume, “seem to have difficulty visualizing part/whole relationships. In the current division of labor, the organic connection between part and whole is lost…[as] theorists deal with wholes but not parts [and] researchers deal with parts but not wholes.” This is in part a product, he continues, of artificially defined and rigid disciplinary boundaries which “make it practically impossible to generate and test general theories.” Scheff offers an approach to analysis that he calls part/whole analysis, namely, “proceeding from the smallest possible minutia up to the largest possible theory,” antecedents of which he traces to the writings of Goethe and Wittgenstein. Central to this approach is fine-grained “morphological” study of concrete phenomena. Although Scheff does not specifically concern himself with identity, the relevance of his analytic approach for the development of an interactional conceptualization of identity is obvious.

A similar theme is apparent in Gregory Bateson’s chapter (chapter 3). This chapter, written as the introduction to a well-known interdisciplinary collaboration entitled, The Natural History of an Interview, has previously only been available on microfilm (McQuown, 1971).¹ Although completed more than thirty years ago, this chapter, by certainly one of the intellectual giants of the century, remains surprisingly timely and pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: From Information and Behavior to Interaction and Identity
• Part I Issues of Theory and Method in Interactional Study of Identity
• Part II Identity as Interactive Construction
• Part III Statements of Identity as Interactively Constructed
• Part IV Barriers to Interactive Conceptualizations of Identity
• Part V Remaking Identity Interactionally
• Contributors
• Citation Index
• Subject Index