In the Active Voice (Routledge Revivals)

Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136721144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1982, this collection of essays is a reproach to a form of the sociology of religion that treats people as the passive objects of impersonal social influences. In opposition to this, the author seeks to assert an active voice style of thinking about the relations between individuals and their cultural environment, whether in economics, history or literary criticism.

This collection is assembled with the guiding principle that all the essays touch upon the borderland between economic values and personal judgements of quality. Several essays illustrate the theme from the place of economics in anthropology and the place of economic behaviour in sociological and cultural criticism. The essay on 'Cultural bias' suggests a systematic method of analysis for investigating social influences on judgement and choice.

1 Passive voice theories*

in religious sociology

‘Passive Voice Theories’ include all sociological and psychological approaches which imply a passive human object influenced by impersonal forces. This paper argues that a sociology of religion which purports to take account of human intentions and do justice to individual beliefs can develop an active voice theoretical approach. This would proceed by tracing the accountability systems which individuals develop when they make claims against each other, and which they reinforce by appeals to unseen powers or attributes of the personality. Accountability systems rest on moral assumptions but can be investigated anthropologically by tested methods. They can provide a basis for objective comparison of beliefs between different cultures.

A wide range of criticisms of sociology and psychology agree in protesting against mechanistic procedures and naive determinism. One form of complaint is that the theoretical apparatus treats the human agent as a passive arena in which impersonal forces are alleged to contend. The passivity attributed to the agent gives me my title and focuses a question I wish to address about the relations between language and theory. Some of these critics maintain that if terminology were to be changed, right thinking would follow. I do not agree that a switch into the active voice in speaking about the human agent is enough; there still would have to be new theoretical approaches to match the new form of language.

‘Sociological determinism’ stands for an attitude on the part of the sociologist. We can treat it as a kind of belief, not one necessarily adopted by the sociologist personally, but an attitude which is implicit in the terms in which the inquiry is set. It assumes, for the sake of inquiry, that some social forces external to the individual are acting upon him. The external agencies are active; the individual is a passive respondent. The sociologist's belief or attitude is itself like a passive response to a theoretical framework which requires it. By using this theoretical framework, the sociologist expects to carry out an important sociological enterprise. He intends to discover and measure the extent of social pressures upon belief.

However, by one of the several paradoxes inherent to the case, he cannot use the theoretical framework to investigate his own professional attitude. The machinery of analysis has these blind spots. It cannot study the validity of religious beliefs in the way that it is designed to study the validity of beliefs that the weather will change. The methods of natural science seem to have this disadvantage in religious studies: they cannot say anything about subjective experience. This gives the sociology of religion four famous disadvantages. It is intended for studying beliefs, yet beliefs are what it cannot study. It is intended to be objective, yet the observer's bias belittles the status of the belief. It tries to study meaning, by a method that reduces meaning to behavioural response. And, it eliminates the subject as an active agent. The dignity of the human subject and of the beliefs espoused by him are both reduced to epiphenomenal disturbances of a normal state. The social causes of beliefs are just as crude a bludgeon as the physiological causes of states of mind. In either case, the autonomy of the subject and the validity of the subject's statements is irrelevantly impugned by a whole system of causation: ‘You don't really mean it, your indigestion makes you irritable;’ ‘It is not surprising that you should subscribe to the Episcopal church, given your upward social mobility.’ Believers can certainly try to shrug off the insult, with a tu quoque, ‘You only belittle the active human subject and distort beliefs because you are talking sociology.’

But mud-slinging will not save the sociology of religion. Too many serious thinkers worried by these well-known problems have given up the sociological enterprise altogether and turned to a literary mode for thinking more profoundly on the human estate. The result has been a shift of sociology as a rigorous explanatory discipline into a richly evocative literary mode, full of insight and beauty. However, the new mode completely shirks the initial project of discovering and estimating the power of social pressures upon individual belief. A century of sociological endeavour is rolled back and, instead of analysis, we are offered essays that are as absorbing and elegant as excerpts might be from War and Peace, The Brothers Karamozov, even Pride and Prejudice in modern dress. The old sociological questions about belief lie rustily on the shelf.

Proposal

If we are to stay with the original important problems — assessing social factors in belief — we need to change our theoretical stance and our language as well. The problem is not confined to the sociology of religion. Social psychology and the sociology of knowledge both study social factors in belief and both are without a strong theoretical approach. An agnostic or deterministic view does not undermine their work so drastically. They can honourably chip away at part-problems. But the trouble is much more acute for the sociology of religion than for any other branch of inquiry because it loses all its claims to serious scholarship unless it can surmount the several difficulties simultaneously. Nor can religious studies be greatly helped by those who believe that careful attention to an active voice terminology will be enough to turn the direction of thought towards taking into account the autonomous human agent in the analysis.

This belief, that language is strongly determinant of thought, addresses our problems in what can be called the passive voice. It is almost a parable for this essay. It assumes, implicitly, that to correct the language will correct the thinking: the thinker is reduced to a passive element to whom linguistic things happen. It is another exemplification of the error we are examining. The hidden assumption is that the speaker does not exert an independent control over his thought; it is channelled and directed by the structure of his language. Only one step removed from cultural determinism, speech determinism is an uncomfortable assumption with which to attack mechanistic, deterministic thinking in the social sciences.

I would like to take Roy Schafer's challenging book The New Language of Psychoanalysis (1976) as a model for this discussion. Schafer is fully apprised of these problems and has expressed them very forcefully. However, his own solution is to change the vocabulary. He maintains that if the form of words gives live agents the credit for their own actions, clearer thinking and better theorizing will result. Most of his examples of the use of the passive voice come from the psychoanalyst in the clinical context, when the patient is given a mechanistic model of the self struggling with extraneous forces. The analyst will say mildly: ‘You broke through the internal barriers against your feelings of love.’ Since Schafer does not believe in internal barriers, the new action language that he advocates would say instead: ‘You finally did not refrain from acting lovingly,’ thus pinning on the patient the full responsibility for his own emotions. Using passive voice language the analyst will say: ‘Your chronic deep sense of worthlessness comes from the condemning voice of your mother.’ But Schafer does not believe that the voice of the mother is really there. Action language would translate: ‘You regularly imagine your mother's voice condemning you, and you, agreeing with it, regard yourself as being essentially worthless.’ Passive analytic language says: ‘You are afraid of your impulse to throw caution to the winds.’ Schafer does not believe in impulses as entities to be afraid of any more than he believes in barriers, so his action language retranslates.

Schafer expects careful adherence to action language will pin responsibility where it belongs. It recognizes the human agency of will and purpose. It would accurately convey psychoanalytic thinking instead of condoning or colluding with the patient's wish to deny his own intentions. For example:

If one looks at the idea of ‘slip of the tongue’ from the standpoint of disclaimed action, one notices several facts immediately: First, it is being maintained through circumlocution that it is the tongue, not the person, who (that) has slipped — as if the tongue regulates its own activity. Second, it is being maintained that what has happened is an accident — a slip — and not a meaningful extended action… In psychoanalytic practice we do not accept these disclaimers. We do not believe that there has been an accident. (Schafer, 1976, p. 130)

The slip is not a disrupted action, but a special kind of action in which two courses are taken simultaneously, corresponding to ambivalence in the speaker.

Once action language is fully adopted, a range of picturesque metaphors will be dropped, because they misleadingly allow the speaker to split elements off from himself, to endow them with initiative and energy, and thus to disclaim his own responsibility. Anger can no longer be treated as a substance — liquid when it spills over, solid when it crushes or penetrates the consciousness, or gaseous when the challenge is to keep the lid on it. (Schafer, 1976, p. 281)

To love and act lovingly are the proper focus for rendering the idea of love in action language. Having thereby lost its status as an entity in this language, love can no longer make the world go round; it can no longer glow, grow, or wither; and it can no longer be lost or found, cherished, poisoned or destroyed… it is we who glow, love more or love less, love at all or stop loving. (Schafer, 1976, p. 279)

The reason for radical criticism of the current language in psychoanalysis is that physical science deals with forces, causes, determinants and effects. It cannot deal with meaning and with subjects entertaining meanings. The analysis of the human psyche needs to focus on situations, meaning, actions and reasons. These four terms co-define each other. No situation can be envisaged unless it is interpreted as such or given meaning; nor can it arise unless human actions have created it; nor can the human actions be explained except by the interpretation of situations which generate reasons for acting.

This same foursome which Schafer proposes to put in place of mechanistic causes and forces in psychology will do well for the equivalent switch in terminology in the sociology of religion. But Schafer allows himself to rest there, whereas sociology must go on. Schafer has only the limited aim of reconciling clinical practice with high psychoanalytic theory, proposing the same language for each. Benefits surely would flow automatically from any such reconceptual-izing exercise. But there must be real conceptualizing, not mere vocabulary change. Schafer thinks that if we change the sentences from the passive to the active voice, a new theoretical scheme will emerge. But this is surely a mistake. First, he only proposes to change the clinical practice of speaking as if to a passive patient. This will do nothing to change the high theory of which he is mainly critical. It also will create awkwardness and counter-productive strain in the clinical situation. For the passive voice corresponds to a particular social intention. Sociologists who use mechanistic theories and passive voice language in respect of individual beliefs also have an explicit intention set by their theories. The psychoanalyst in his clinic has a social situation to deal with, which would get out of hand if he were to use active voice language for explaining to the hypersensitive patient the full extent of his own responsibility. An active voice theory of the relation of words to thought would take systematic account of the intentions of speakers who have chosen to use the passive voice to describe their own thinking. To hear Schafer subscribing to a passive voice theory of language convinces one that thinking the problem through requires more theoretical energy, more questioning and rethinking of the basis of the study than he is prepared to give at this stage.

Analysis

I will illustrate further the contrast between passive and active voice theories by drawing an impressionistic contrast between Müller's (1873) theory of the disease of language and Whorf's (1956) theory of the restrictions placed by language on thought.

Müller vs Whorf

Müller, the great philogist, has become an antique curiosity in the history of religion. His theory about how some peculiar religious beliefs originated is relevant here. Müller never doubted the human power to reach spiritual heights of imagination or to conceive abstract ideas. He was prepared to credit humans with such powers. In so far as the gods of classical antiquity were alleged to behave with justice and decorum, he felt no need to explain religious beliefs by any pathological tendency. But to explain stories about their more idiosyncratic and lusty feats, he developed his theory of mythology deriving from a disease of language. This disease he attributed to a universal human weakness, inability to retain an abstract idea as first conceived: a word once devised to carry a complex meaning would soon fall away from abstraction and spirituality and be used only to convey a crass, particular, material sense. This disease of language would always be leaving daily speech cluttered with great words demeaned. Empty of their original connotation, a host of hybrid anthropomorphic agencies poses puzzles for worthy lexicographers whose trade drives them to invent stories about them. In this way, the odder parts of Greek and Roman mythology would be seen as later additions to purely intellectual and moral philosophy.

The disease of language theory was dismissed for many reasons. Surprisingly, in the wider modern context, it was held utterly implausible . Yet other linguists who have proposed equally unconvincing theories about the relation of thought to language have been taken very seriously. Whorf speculated that syntactic structures would tend to limit the possibilities of thought. He presented thought as a kind of moving flow of traffic through the structures of language, channelled and restricted by the latter. The implication is that for each kind of language, only certain ways of thinking are possible. In Whorf's view, thought is limited by language. In Müller's view, thought is limited by itself; language can say anything that humans want to say but, unfortunately, their wants change. They do not always need the more difficult concepts for which they have developed words. This seems to have some long-run plausibility. Contrasted with Whorf, we can place Müller on the side of those who take meanings as prior and speech constraints as secondary. He did not see language itself as a barrier or constraint to thought and held failures in thinking responsible for a process by which abstract theo-gonies degenerate into mechanistic, material models. Psyche becomes a seductive girl; Zeus a lecher in comic opera disguises. Going beyond more speculative generalization, Müller actually proposed his rule as a tendency in language. He can be credited with a theory of downward semantic drift.

In like fashion, sociologists who mean to investigate the intellectual and emotional life of human beings have drifted away from their intentions. They talk about human agencies, meanings, and actions. They have not let their grammar lead their thought, but their thought has left their wider intentions stranded, doing justice only to their natural science assumptions and methodology. The use of natural science methodology and its terms have produced rich insights into religious sociology. But our failure to hold to the original complexities of the enterprise have left us with extraordinary entities in our dictionary, belittling of the believers and the beliefs which we would like to understand. We now have to cope with causes (such as relative deprivation, or upward social mobility) and effects (such as routinization and secularization). At the same time, there is no reason to suppose that we cannot throw out the distracting elements of our language and start with a new effort of will to reinstate Zeus and Psyche in their full majesty.

To justify Müller's idea further, we can easily find words which reify strange mechanical forces credited with anthropomorphic intentions. When we view these carefully, we recognize that the words are not doing something to our thoughts; out intentions have weakened and narrowed, our thinking has lost its sharp edge. We have fallen into inertia and exemplify the disease of language.

Ordinary speech attributes to other entities the agency which belongs to ourselves. In everyday locutions, we attribute spatial properties to the mind: ‘It went clean out of my mind'; ‘Murder entered my mind'; ‘Suicide was at the back of my mind.’ These are examples given by Schafer. Recall also the legal formula which speaks of the mind as a machine with a definite equilibrium: ‘While the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ Then sometimes we refer to the mind as an autonomous agent: ‘My mind plays tricks on me'; ‘I wish I knew my own mind'; ‘I am in two minds.’ These phrases do not mislead the listener. They are couched deliberately as disclaimers of responsibility in which the speaker's goodwill is guaranteed, and guaranteed all the more because, by implication, what the mind will do is left in doubt and outside the speaker's control (Schafer, 1976, p. 132). There is nothing irrational about such disclaimers: ‘A mad impulse seized me'; ‘The words poured out of my mouth.’ Everyday speech has good reasons for interposing another agent between the speaker and his own actions. It is more courteous to say: ‘It must have escaped your memory’ than to suppress the ‘it’ and simply accuse ‘You forgot me.’ Some care for the feelings of others justifies these polite disclaimers.

This sensitivity to our own everyday use of the passive voice gives a clue to the approach in the sociology of religion which I wish to propose. Many of the religions of the world have doctrines of multiple personality according to which the individual is divided between several more or less co-ordinated persons. These constituent persons of the person tend to have different intentions and capacities attributed to them. A person who has incu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Passive voice theories in religious sociology
• 2 Goods as a system of communication
• 3 Money
• 4 Food as a system of communication
• 5 Good taste: review of Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction
• 6 Population control in primitive groups
• 7 Lele economy compared with the Bushong: a study of economic backwardness
• 8 The exclusion of economics
• 9 Cultural bias
• 10 Maurice Halbwachs, 1877-1945
• 11 Judgments on James Frazer
• 12 The debate on the Holy: review of The Making of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown
• Name index
• Subject index