MICHEL FOUCAULT
The History of Sexuality

Background Info:

From Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, 1991

Foucault rejects the equation of reason, emancipation, and progress of modern theory and argues that an interface between modern forms of power and knowledge has served to create new forms of domination. His project is to write a ''critique of our historical era,'' to write about subjects that seem natural but that are contingent on sociohistorical constructs of power and domination. Systematizing methods of study produce reductive social and historical analyses; knowledge is perspectival in nature, requiring multiple viewpoints to interpret a heterogeneous reality. Modern theories see knowledge as neutral and objective (positivism) or emancipatory (Marxism), but Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is indissociable from regimes of power. Power is ''a multiple and mobile field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination are produced.'' It is plural, fragmentary, differentiated, indeterminate, and historically and spatially specific. He rejects the idea that power is anchored in macrostructures or ruling classes and is repressive in nature. Power is dispersed, indeterminate, heteromorphous, subjectless, and productive, constituting individuals' bodies and identities. It operates through the hegemony of norms, political technologies, and the shaping of the body and soul. In this book, Foucault argues that power operates not through the repression of sex, but through he discursive production of sexuality and subjects who have a ''sexual nature.''

Part I: We ''Other Victorians''

Repression is a sentence to disappear, an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such subjects. Repression has been seen as the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age and nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required to free ourselves from it. If sex is repressed, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.

It has been argued that repression coincides with the development of capitalism. Sex is repressed because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. However, according to Foucault, the essential thing is not the economic factor, but the existence of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, and the promise of a new felicity are linked together. Foucault's objective is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality.

Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis
Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse

The 17th C was an ''age of repression.'' But since that time there has been a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex. Christianity played a large role in this by emphasizing the importance of confession and of verbalizing sexual matters. In the 18th C, sex became a ''police'' matter, not in the repression of disorder, but in an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces. It was deemed necessary to regulate sex through useful and public discourses. These discourses on sex did not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as a means of its exercise. Mechanisms in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice incited, extracted, distributed, and institutionalized sexual discourse. A wide dispersion of devices were invented for speaking about it, for having it spoken about, for inducing itself to speak, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it. Rather than massive censorship, there has been a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.

Chapter 2: The Perverse Implantation

Has increased discourse been aimed at constituting a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative? Foucault doesn't know if this is the ultimate objective. But reduction has not been the means employed for achieving it. The 19th and 20th C have been an age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ''perversions.'' the discursive explosion of the 18th and 19th C led to an emphasis on heterosexual monogamy and a scrutiny of ''unnatural'' forms of sexual behavior. These polymorphous conducts were drawn out, revealed, isolated, and incorporated by multifarious power devices. The growth of perversions is the product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.

Part III: Scientia Sexualis

While there has been a proliferation of discourse on sex and an increase of awareness of a multiplication of sexual conducts, it nonetheless seems that by speaking of it so much, one was simply trying to conceal it: a screen discourse, a dispersion-avoidance. One also claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of science, a science subordinated to the imperative of a morality whose division it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm.

Throughout the 19th C sex has been incorporated into two distinct order of knowledge: a biology of reproduction and a medicine of sex. There was no real exchange between them, no reciprocal structuration. This disparity indicates that there was no aim to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence.

Historically there have been two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. Many societies endowed themselves with ars erotica (erotic art), whereby truth is drawn from pleasure itself. Western society, however, has scientia sexualis, procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power found in confession. In confession, the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks, but in the one who questions and listens.

How did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual confession come to be constituted in scientific terms?
through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak
through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality
through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality
through the method of interpretation
through the medicalization of the effects of confession

Thus, 19th C society did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. It set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. It created a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure.

*** A hypothesis of a power of repression exerted by our society on sex for economic reasons is inadequate for explaining the proliferation of discourse, the solidification of the sexual mosaic, and the production of confessions and an establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality
Chapter 1: Objective

The aim of this inquiry is to move less toward a ''theory'' of power than toward an ''analytics'' of power, i.e., toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. This analytics can be constituted only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation of power called ''juridico-discursive.'' This power is characterized by the negative relations between power and sex, the insistence of the rule, the cycle of prohibition, the logic of censorship, and the uniformity of the apparatus. Foucault wants to get rid of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. Instead he wants to advance toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material - the history of sexuality.

Chapter 2: Method

The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. Power must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization. Power's condition of possibility is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.

Propositions of Power:
Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relationships of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic, knowledge, sexual), but are immanent in the latter. They re not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, whenever they come into play. Power comes from below (I'm not quite sure what he means by this); i.e., there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations. Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. They re imbued with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. Where there is power, there is resistance and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.

One must analyze the mechanisms of power in the sphere of force relations. As far as sex is concerned, the important question, then, is: In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places, what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work? We must immerse the expanding of production of discourses on sex in the field of multiple and mobile power relations. There are four rules to follow in order to carry this out: Rule of immanence: one cannot assume that there exists only a certain sphere in sexuality to be studies. instead, one must start an inquiry with the ''local centers'' of power-knowledge. Rule of continual variation: Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are ''matrices of transformations.''

Rule of double conditioning: No ''local center'' or ''pattern of transformation'' could function if it did not eventually enter into an overall strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if it did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving as its prop and anchor point. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses: There exists a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a point of resistance, and a starting point for an opposing strategy.

Chapter 3: Domain

Sexuality is a dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young and old, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, and an administration and population. Since the 18th C there have developed four strategic unities which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge-power centering on sex:
a hysterization of women's bodies
a pedagogization of children's sex
a socialization of procreative behavior
a psychiatrization of perverse behavior

These strategies led to the production of sexuality. Relations of sex thus gave rise to two systems: the deployment of alliance (marriage, kinship, etc.) and the deployment of sexuality. The deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power. The deployment of alliance aims to produce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control. The deployment of sexuality was constructed on the basis of a deployment of alliance. The family is the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality, and it conveys the economics of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance. Because of this interchange, the family became a major factor of sexualizatio

Chapter 4: Periodization

The chronology of the techniques relating to sex (i.e., in the fields of medicine, pedagogy, and demography) do not coincide with the hypothesis of a great repressive phase of sexuality in the 17th century. Rather there was a perpetual inventiveness, a steady growth of methods and procedures. In addition, it seems that the deployment of sexuality was not established as a principle of limitation of the pleasures of others by the ruling classes. Rather the first deployment of sexuality occurred within these upper classes. This is because the primary concern was not repression of the sexuality of the classes to be exploited, but rather the vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ruled. It was a question of techniques for maximizing life. What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through the enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self. Sexuality then is originally, historically bourgeois, and in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects.

Part V: Right of Death and Power Over Life

Over time the ancient right to take life or let life was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Starting in the 17th C, the power over live evolved in two basic forms: an anatomo-politics of the human body (the body as a machine) and a bio-politics of the population (regulatory controls on the species body). Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. The politics of sex revolved around the fours issues outlined in chapter 3 because they were at the juncture of the ''body'' and the ''population.'' Thus sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death. The blood relation long remained an important element in the mechanism of power; but slowly the symbolics of blood have been replaced with an analytics of sexuality. The mechanisms of power are addressed to the body and to life.

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SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents

Chapter I

The ego - our feeling of our own self - appears to us as something autonomous, unitary and set off distinctly from everything else. This appearance is deceptive, however, because the ego actually continues inwards without any sharp delimitation into an unconscious mental entity - the id. The ego serves as a kind of facade for the id. Usually the ego appears to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation, but sometimes (being in love, for instance) the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. In general, Freud sees pathology as a kind of condition where boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.

With the recognition of an external world (external to the ego, that is) the tendency arises to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening 'outside.' This process of distinguishing what is internal and what emanates from the outer world is one of the first steps towards the introduction of the reality principle that dominates future development of the individual.

Freud, if nothing else, cannot be faulted for ignoring the importance of developmental phenomena. In fact he launches on a big example (a couple pages worth) of what it would be like if the city of Rome kept on growing without tearing down old buildings to make room for the new. His point is that unlike physical processes or entities, only in the mind (a psychical entity) is a preservation of all earlier stages along with the final (or current) form possible. Ie. we carry around our old baggage with us.

In the opening of the chapter Siggie mentions that a friend to his had described religious feeling as having some kind of ''oceanic''(a cosmic or eternal) quality. If such a thing is actually felt by all humans (or 'men' as the 'big S' would say), Freud thinks that is actually derives from an early phase of ego-feeling. So, the origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness and the concomitant need for the father's protection.

Chapter II

Religion provides a system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains the riddles of the world with enviable completeness, and on the other assures humanity and a careful Providence will watch over people's lives and compensate them in a future existence for frustrations suffered in the present. Freud contends (surprise, surprise) that ''the common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father.''

Life, however, is hard and brings with it pain and difficulties. Therefore, we tend to construct palliative measures to help us cope. He cites three: powerful deflections that cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions which diminishes misery; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Freud then brings up the big question: ''What is the meaning of life?'' Luckily he doesn't really try to answer it (and I don't think I would want to hear his answer if he had one). But he does address the question of what people themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their actions. Freud believes that we all obviously strive after happiness. This endeavor has both a positive side (experiencing strong feelings of pleasure) and a negative side (absence of pain and unpleasure). What decides the purpose of life is the programme of the pleasure principle, but there is in reality no possibility of its being carried - all of the regulations of the universe run counter to it (presumably Freud is an expert on all of the physical and mathematical laws of the universe). More specifically, we are threatened with suffering from three directions: our own bodies, the external world, and our relations to other persons.

There are a wide variety of ways in which we can deal with these pressures. We may choose to isolate ourselves from others to avoid any unhappiness that may flow from others, but on the other hand but might choose to become a member of the human community. This latter option might allow us to take part in the subjugation of nature to human will through techniques guided by science. A more internal strategy might be an attempt to control our instinctual impulses. Displacement of the libido, for instance, shifts instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. A more extreme rejection of the external world would be the attempt to gain satisfaction through illusions (a hermit's attempted ideal recreation of the world and religions of mankind as mass-delusions of humanity are both counted among this strategy).

Others pursue a way of life that makes love the center of everything. Sexual love, according to Freud, has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness. Although some may exhibit an aesthetic attitude, Freud believes that 'beauty' and 'attraction' are originally attributes of the sexual object. {A little tidbit of Freudian wisdom: ''it is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters.''}

Although the pleasure principle in its pure form is unattainable, we do adopt a sort of reality principle according to which we seek to gain as favorable a balance of happiness as we can by a combination of experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain. People tend to hedge their bets, however, and seldom look for the whole of their satisfaction from a single aspiration.

Chapter III

Freud believes that we basically resign ourselves to the fact that the external environment and our bodies are inevitable as potential sources of suffering. We, however, tend to refuse to admit that our relations with other people should not actually be a protection and a benefit. According to this latter contention, what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery and we should be much happier is we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions - ie. an attitude of hostility toward civilization. For instance, people have observed that since the Industrial Revolution, the newly-won power over space and time, the subjugation of the forces of nature (which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years) has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from love and has not made them feel happier.

By civilization, Freud means the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes - to protect people against nature and to adjust their mutual relations. An early stage of the process of civilization recognizes as cultural all activities and resources (ie. tools) which are useful to people for making the each serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature, etc (ie. the notion of cultivation). With every tool humanity prefects its own human organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.

At the risk of wasting time and killing trees, I thought I would share this jag Freud goes off on about fire and its importance to civilization. This should give you a pretty good indication about why I think this guy is for the most part full of shit. This quote is taken from one of the footnotes (where he tries to sneak in his really outlandish stuff) - I might have to put on my hip-waders for this one:

It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating ... was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural forces of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward of his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.
Call me crazy, but I kinda doubt that this was how human civilization got off the ground.

Another general (and early) characteristic of the process of civilization is the tendency to create ideal conceptions of omnipotence and omniscience which are embodied as gods. These gods are cultural ideals in the sense that peoples attribute to them everything that seemed unattainable to their wishes, or that were forbidden to them. Among the other requirements of civilization, Freud stresses: beauty which we recognize and value in nature, and seek to (re)create in our handiwork; cleanliness - dirtiness of any kind seems incompatible with civilization; and order - establishing once and for all a set ways of doing things.

Freud feels that perhaps the best feature to characterize civilization is its esteem and encouragement of mankind's higher mental activities - intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements - and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life. If we assume quite generally that the motive force of all human activities is a striving towards the two confluent goals of utility and a yield of pleasure, we must suppose that this is also true of the manifestations of civilization.

The final characteristic feature of civilization that Freud addresses is the manner in which the relationships of persons to one another - ie. their social relationships - are regulated. Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as 'brute force.' Members of a community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knows no restrictions. Building upon justice as a requisite of civilization, there should develop a rule of law to which all community members have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts and which leaves no one at the mercy of brute force. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on individual liberty and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions.

Chapter IV

Once primitive humans discovered that they possessed the ability to improve their lot by working, other humans came to acquire value as fellow-workers with whom it was useful to live together. Freud believes that the communal life of human beings had a two-fold foundation: 1) the compulsion to work with was created by external necessity; and 2) the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object (ie. the woman), and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her (ie. her child).

Although love is important here as a source of satisfaction, it can be powerful source of suffering as well. Therefore, people make themselves independent of their object's acquiescence by displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the object by directing their love, not to single objects but to all man (ie. mankind) alike; and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim. Both sensual (ie. sexual) and aim-inhibited (non-sexual) love extend outside the family and create new bonds with people who before were strangers. A prominent character of the civilization process is a progressive increase of restrictions placed on sexual relations - in terms of who you can do it with and who you can't. This takes the form of narrowing circles of potential sexual partners across the developmental stages of civilization, ranging anywhere from polymorphous perverse bisexuality to heterosexual monogamy.

Chapter V

Neurotics, who cannot tolerate the frustrations they experience their sexual lives, create substitutive satisfactions for themselves in their symptoms. These symptoms wither cause suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering by raising difficulties in relations with the environment and society. Freud traces the difficulty of cultural development to the inertia of the libido. the antithesis between civilization and sexuality can be derived from the circumstance the sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals. Civilization summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale to strengthen the communal bond by relations of friendship.

In the context of a discussion of the concept of ''love thy neighbor as thyself'' Freud has the occasion to relate a little passage originating with a writer named Heine. It goes a little like this:
''Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, hew will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrongs they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies - but not before they have been hanged.''

So what is the moral of the story? Freud believes that ''men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.'' This inclination to aggression is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbors and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure of energy to prevent the disintegration of civilized society. One technique for managing this aggression (particularly in smaller cultural groups) is directing outward in the form of hostility against intruders.

Chapter VI

Freud seeks to the concurrent existence of Eros (a libidinal instinct) with a death instinct, which he believes act in opposite directions but are difficult or impossible to distinguish as discrete items in reality. Freud thinks that the most fruitful way of conceptualizing the death instinct is as being directed toward the external world, so that it comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness that can be directed at some external object rather than the individual (ego). The death instinct when directed inward cannot usually be isolated - the exception would be when it is alloyed with Eros and turns up in something like masochism.

Freud believed that the evolution of civilization amounts to the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species; it can be described as the struggle for life of the human species.

Chapter VII

What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it? Aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is sent back to where it came from - that is, it is directed towards the individual's own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of 'conscience,' is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is what we call a 'sense of guilt' - this expresses itself as a need for punishment.

Guilt comes from the intention of a deed of doing something 'bad.' Obviously the issue of right/wrong is a complicated one. Freud believes that there is an influence extraneous to the individual at work in determinations of good/bad. The individual's motive in submitting to this extraneous influence is a fear of loss of love, a consequence of that person's helplessness and dependence on other people. The larger human community constitutes this extraneous influence, an authority which is eventually internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The guilt arising from fear of the super-ego (ie. fear of loss of love) is particularly persistent since even after renunciation of a forbidden wish, this wish still persists and cannot be hidden from the super-ego. In formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a conscience, innate constitutional factors (biological/genetic) and influences from the real environment act in combination. And of course he wouldn't be Freud if he didn't say ''We cannot get away from the assumption that man's sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the gather by the brothers banded together.'' {This last bit is apparently something he went into a lot of detail about in Totem and Taboo, but is basically referred to as a primordial symbolic thing here} ''It was the same act of aggression whose suppression in the child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt.''

In response to the remorse felt after the act of aggression against the primal father, the super-ego is set up by identification with the father. Agency is given to the father's power as though a punishment for the deed of aggression against the father, and also created are restrictions intended to prevent a repetition of the deed. Chapter VIII

Freud contends that the sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization and it shows that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt. In the end guilt is a form of anxiety. Remorse is the general term for the ego's reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It contains sensory material of the anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and can include the need for punishment.

Owning to the omniscience of the super-ego, the differences between an aggression intended and an aggression carried out looses its force. When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.

Freud makes explicit a connection that implicitly runs through much of the book: the process of human civilization and the development or educative process of individual human beings are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of objects.

The development of the individual seems to be a product of the interaction between two urges: the urge towards happiness - egoistic urge; and the altruistic urge toward union with others in the community. The analogy between the process of civilization and individual development can be extended in an important respect, by asserting that the community also evolved a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds.

Ethics can be regarded as a therapeutic attempt, an endeavor to achieve by means of a command of the super-ego something that has not been achieved by any other cultural activities.

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HAROLD GARFINKLE
Studies in Ethnomethodology

Chap. 2 ''Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities''

From the point of view of sociological theory the moral order consists of the rule governed activities of everyday life. A society's members encounter and know the moral order as perceivedly normal courses of action - familiar scenes of everyday affairs, the world of daily life known in common with others and with others taken for granted. Garfinkel is concerned with the activities of everyday life and that which is taken for granted, he is interested in how things are perceived and defined. He wishes to explore it as a topic and as a methodology. Sociologists commonly overlook the socially standardized and standardizing, ''seen but unnoticed'' expected background features of everyday life. This is a glaring oversight because the member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation. Garfinkel bases his arguments and conclusions concerning ethnomethodology on a series of 'breaching' experiments, in which students deliberately breech the understood, but unspoken, rules of everyday encounters. These experiments are not really experiments, but more like demonstrations.

We begin first by exploring common understandings. Understandings cannot possibly consist of a measured amount of shared agreement among persons on certain topics. Garfinkel illustrated this point with an example of conversation between two people. When one examines the exchange, one realizes that there are many things that are understood between two people, especially those who have a standing relationship, than are actually mentioned. Also, many understood matters were understood on the basis of what was unspoken, the temporal series of utterances determined what was understood, and matters that were understood in common were understood only in and through a course of understanding work that consisted of treating an actual linguistic event as document or representation of some other real, experienced event. Of course, understanding also hinges on prior relationships and events, as well as the form of conversational interaction. Sometimes what is said is specifically vague and what is expressed may only be understood through further exchange.

Garfinkel argues that all of these realizations about conversation point to underlying properties of conversational exchange and the rules which govern them in daily life. Persons require these properties of discourse as conditions under which they are themselves entitled and entitle others to claim that they know what they are talking about, and that what they are saying is understood and ought to be understood. To test his hypotheses, Garfinkel sent forth a legion of students to conduct conversational breaching experiments. Students were instructed to question everything they were being told by asking what was meant. Example:
(S) I had a flat tire.
(E) What do you mean you had a flat tire?
When these experiments were conducted, the students often received responses of puzzlement, anger, concern, and frustration. Such responses demonstrated the importance of shared knowledge and understanding, as well as the rules which govern exchanges in conversation.

Other experiments and their conclusions included the following. In no one experiment was student participation 100%. There were also some variations in responses in all cases.

- Undergraduate students were asked to spend 15 mins. - 1hr. in their homes viewing its activities as if they were boarders with no history in the household. Persons, relationships, and activities were described without respect for their history, for the place of the scene in a set of developing life circumstances, or for he scenes as texture of relevant events for the parties themselves. Students were surprised to see how personal the interactions and treatments of others were, and how formal manners and protocol were often disregarded. Family members were confused, angered and often hurt by students' formal behavior. Students were often relieved when the experiment was over. Conclusion: Background understandings (mutually recognized texture) are necessary for adequate recognition of commonplace events.

- In a variant, students were asked to act as boarders in their own homes for the same length of time. They were supposed to be formally polite, and again unassuming in regards to relationships, common patterns of behavior, and the set up of the household. Familial response again involved anger, suspicion, frustration, and the like. In most cases, families vigorously sought to make the strange actions intelligible and to restore the situation to normal appearances. Explanations by family members were sought in previous, understandable motives of the student: overwork, sickness, personal troubles. When offered explanations by family members went unacknowledged, there followed withdrawal by the offended member, attempted isolation of the culprit, retaliation and denunciation. At the end of the experiment, students filled their families in on the little experiment, and while he families were forgiving, many were not very happy about playing the role of the guinea pig. Unlike the first experiment, relief was often only partial, and anticipatory fears were low. Conclusion: This too supports the idea that background knowledge is important and is understood as such when it is shared.

Background understanding has important social affects, but he role that a background of common understandings plays in the production, control, and recognition of these affects, however, is terra incognita. The existence of a definite and strong relationship between common understandings and social affects can be demonstrated and some of it features explored by the deliberate display of distrust, a procedure that produced highly standardized effects for Garfinkel. Distrust was chosen because on the everyday level, to treat a relationship under a rule of doubt requires that the necessity and motivation for such a rule be justified. Another experiment was in order: Students were instructed to engage someone in conversation and to imagine and act on the assumption that what the other person was saying was directed by hidden motives which were the real ones. Most students tried this with friends or families, and reported little embarrassment, but many hurt feelings on the part of the interactants. The two students who interacted with strangers were unable to complete the interaction.

Enough with the experiments for awhile, Garfinkel returns to the theory behind ethnomethodology. The possibility of common understanding does not consist in demonstrated measures of shared knowledge of social structure, but consists instead and entirely in the enforceable character of actions in compliance with the exigencies of everyday life as a morality. Common sense knowledge of the facts of social life for the members of the society is institutionalized knowledge of the real world. Common sense knowledge acts in the manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, the features of the real society are produced by persons' motivated compliance with these background expectancies.

Garfinkel extends this reasoning to claim that the firmer a societal member's grasp of What Anyone Like Us Necessarily Knows, the more severs should be his/her disturbance when the 'natural facts of life' are impugned for him as a depiction of the real circumstances. This is what the breaching experiments are intended to test. Individuals are presented with events that can only be understood by changing the objective structure of the familiar, they cannot be understood in terms of the understood background structure. Presumably, individuals will tend to try to normalize any incongruities.

Background knowledge often requires assumptions. Garfinkel refers to Schutz and his theories on assumptions, which can easily be compared to Goffman. According to Schutz, the person assumes, assumed that the other person assumes as well, and assumes that as he assumes it of the other person, the other person assumes it of him. (With all this going on, who has time to interact? - JPG) The actual assumptions made center around such things as the 'facts', what is said and what is meant, affectivity of objects or interactions, and various other interactive affects of objects and social structure. Only when one makes all of these assumptions, and the event has for the witness all of enumerated determinations, is it an events in an environment of common knowledge. Such attributions are features of witnessed events that are seen without being noticed.

Now, back to the experiments. Garfinkel came up with a new set of experiments designed to breach common understandings and produce confusion. All of the experiments satisfied 3 conditions: the person could not turn it into a joke or deception of any kind, the person could not 'leave the field' or have sufficient time to redefine the real circumstances, and the person would be deprived of consensual support for an alternative definition of social reality. One experiment was:

- Medical students were interviewed under the pretense of discovering why a med school interview was such a stressful situation. The interviewer posed as a rep from a prestigious school. During the 3 hour interview, the interviewer would play for each student a recorded interview with someone who had bad manners, was pompous and rude, and all in all a general 'bad interview', but the interviewer would act as if the recorded interview was ideal. The med students were then asked for their opinions and analysis. Results: Almost all students fell for the line. They often asked what others thought and after initial derogatory opinions, they worked hard to reconcile their previous statements with the interviewer's positive view of the recorded tape. 22 of 28 students felt marked relief when the experiment was explained to them afterwards.

Garfinkel is very critical of previous studies which treat individuals as cultural dopes who simply reproduce society without being aware of it. Such studies treat common sense rationalities of judgment as epiphenomenal. To test the idea of people being judgmental dopes, another experiment:

- Garfinkel sent out 120 students to stores where they were required to pick an item and offer to pay a price other than the one that was marked on the item. Most trial were conducted by offering a lower price for either an item under $2 or an item over $50. Most students found the most tense part of the experiment to be the anticipation phase, before they approached a sales person for the first time. Anticipatory fears declined for those with multiple trials. There was less discomfort in bargaining for high-priced merchandise, and more results of price negotiation. Sales persons can be dismissed as either having been dopes in different ways than current theories of standardized expectancies provide, or not dopes enough. A few showed anxiety, occasionally one got angry.

Such findings suggest that one can make the member of the society out to be a cultural dope by portraying individuals as those who follow rules when in actuality they have anticipatory fears of alternate situations, by overlooking the practical and theoretical importance of mastering fears, or if upon arousal of troubled fears, an individual strives to avoid the very situations in which they might learn about their fears. The more important the rule, the greater the likelihood that knowledge is based on avoided tests.

In standardized theories, persons may also be made out to be dopes by either over-formalizing, or over-simplifying the effects and texture of the environment, or by portraying routine actions as those governed by prior agreements, and by making the likelihood that a member will recognize deviance depend upon the existence of prior agreements.

In conclusion:
The study of common sense knowledge and common sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the actual methods whereby members of a society, lay or professional, make the social structures of everyday activities observable.

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CLIFFORD GEERTZ
''Deep Play:'' Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.''

Of cocks and men

Balinese men identify with their fighting cocks to a great extent. Their cocks represent their masculine identity and they take immaculate care of them, spend much time grooming them and training them, etc. The cock symbolizes maleness, the penis, as well as being a hated animal (the Balinese find all animals repugnant) and an object of fascination.

The fight

The rules of the cock fight are passed form generation to generation as part of the general legal and cultural tradition of the villages. The cock fight can be viewed as a sociological entity. The people who watch cock fights are not a ''group'' or a ''crowd,'' but a ''focused gathering'' of people -- persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. There is a connection between Balinese collective life and this sport.

Odds and even money

It is the formal asymmetry between balanced center bets (bets central to the game) and unbalanced side ones (bets made on the side lines of the game and not between players) that poses the critical analytical problem for a theory which sees cock fight wagering as the link connecting the fight to the wider world of Balinese culture. It also suggests the way to go about demonstrating the link. The center bet, with so much riding on it, makes the ''depth'' of the game (Jeremy Bentham). The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, ''deep'' match by making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks matched will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the outcome as unpredictable as possible.

The question of why such matches are interesting takes us out of the realm of formal concerns into more broadly sociological and social psychological ones, and to a less purely economic idea of what ''depth'' amounts to.

Playing with Fire

Bentham's concept of ''deep play'' is play in which the stakes are so high that, from a utilitarian stand point, to play is irrational. Nonetheless, men do engage in such play both passionately and often, even in the face of the law (it is against the law in Bali to engage in cock fights). In deep Balinese cock fights, much more is at stake than material gain : status. The more money one risks, the more status one risks.

The big players are the focusing element in these focused gatherings. These men generally dominate and define the sport as they dominate and define the society. What makes the Balinese CF deep is thus not the money itself, but what the money causes to happen: the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cock fight.

The CF is a representation of the complex fields of tension set up by the controlled, ceremonial, deeply felt interaction of male (narcissistic) selves in the context of every day life. The CF is deliberately made to be a simulation of the social matrix, the involved system of cross-cutting, overlapping, highly corporate groups - - villages, kin, etc. -- in which its devotees live.

There is a pattern of tiered hierarchy of status rivalries between highly corporate but variously - based groupings. The cockfight is fundamentally a dramatization of status claims. for instance:

Men never bet against a cock owned by a member of their own kin group
Men involved in highly institutionalized hostility relations will bet against each other
Men avoid betting when loyalties are split
Men involved in the center bet are typically leading members of their group (village, kin group)

The Balinese are fully aware of the symbolism in their cock fights.
The more a match is between near-status individuals, the deeper the match. The deeper the match, the closer the identification of cock and man. the greater emotion and absorption in the match, the higher the betting, the less an economic and more a status view, and the ''solider'' the citizens will be who will be gaming.

Feathers, blood, crowds and money

Like any art form, the cock fight renders ordinary experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and reduced to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated. The CF puts a construction on death, masculinity, rage, pride, chance, etc. the function of the CF is a means of expression neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but to display them.

The importance of the CF is not, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations, but that it provides a methodological social commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function is interpretive.

Saying something of something

Reading cultural practice as text: the Balinese, by attending a CF, learns what his cultures ethos and his private sensibility look like when spelled out externally in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated in the symbolics of such a text; and -- the disquieting part -- that the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits. Not only does the CF bring the assorted experiences of everyday life into focus, but it creates the paradigmatic human event -- one that tells us less what happens than the kind of thing that would happen if life were art and could be freely shaped by styles of feeling. Yet art regenerates the very subjectivity it pretends to display. CF's are positive agents in the maintenance of such a sensibility. (WAIT!!! I THOUGHT GEERTZ SAID THE COCK FIGHT SHOULDN'T BE VIEWED FROM A FUNCTIONALIST STAND POINT!???!! -EA).
Anyhow, one way to look at the symbolic forms of the culture of a people is as an ensemble of texts. To ''say something of something'' to someone is at least to open up the paths of analysis which attend to their substance.

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CLIFFORD GEERTZ
''Religion as a Cultural System.''

I. The culture concept to which Geertz adheres denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

II. A paradigm consists of sacred symbols which function to synthesize a people's ethos -- the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style -- and their world view. A paradigm is presented as representing/accommodating an actual state of affairs. It objectivizes moral and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit in a world with a particular structure. It supports received beliefs about the world's body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth.

How does religion tune human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and project images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience?

Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish a powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

''A system of symbols which acts to...''

A symbol is used for any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a meaning. Cultural patterns are social events. The symbolic dimension of social events is itself theoretically abstractable from these events as empirical totalities.
Culture patterns are extrinsic sources of info. They are models ''for'' and ''of''. They have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it themselves. Symbols can also be models ''of'' and models ''for'''
Two dispositions are motivated by religious activity: motivation and moods. Motivation is a persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feelings. Motivations are directional. Moods go nowhere. they vary only as to their intensity and they are induced by sacred symbols. We interpret motives in terms of their consummations, but we interpret moods in terms of their sources.

''By formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and...''

Religion must affirm something. Man depends on symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his ''creatural viability,'' and as a result, his sensitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience raises within him great anxiety.
First of all, men seek out lucidity and experience anxiety when empirical phenomena don't make sense. The conviction that ''the odd'' can be accounted for must be sustained. Second, there is the problem of suffering. The question is HOW to suffer. Religion on one hand anchors the power of our symbolic resources for formulating analytic ideas in an authoritarian conception of the overall shape of reality; on the other hand it anchors the power of our resources for expressing emotions. This helps humans resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness from pain. Third, religion helps men deal with evil. Our symbolic resources provide us with a workable set of ethical criteria and normative guides to govern our action. It responds to the disquieting sense that one's moral insight is inadequate to one's moral experience. The problem of evil is in essence the same sort of problem as bafflement or suffering -- NO ORDER.
The religious response to each case is the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for the ambiguities of human experience. The effort behind religion is not to deny the undeniable, but to deny the inexplicable, through symbols.

''And clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that...''

How is it that the denial mentioned above comes to be believed? Religious belief involves a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that experience. The religious perspective is ''he who would know must first believe.'' This perspective differs from the common sense perspective in that it moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is not action upon those wider realities , but of acceptance and faith in them. The religious perspective differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of every day life in terms of non-hypothetical truths. It differs from the aesthetic perspective in that it deepens concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of actuality.
It is in ritual - consecrated behavior - that the conviction that religious directives are sound is generated. It is in ceremonial form that moods and motivations which sacred symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate -- reinforce one another. Religious acts for participants are enactment's, materializations of religion -- not only models of what they believe, but also models for the believing of it. The acceptance of authority that underlies the religious perspective that the ritual embodies flows from the enactment of the ritual itself.

''that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic''

Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar positivism would have it, it describes the social order, but because it shapes it. The movement back and forth between the religious perspective and the common sense perspective is actually often ignored by social anthropologists. Religious belief in the midst of ritual, where it engulfs the total person and as a remembered reflection of that experience in the midst of everyday life are distinct. Religion alters the whole landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a way that the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seem themselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given the way things ''really'' are. Hence, religion changes man and his common sense perspective.
It is the particularity of the impact of religious systems upon social systems which renders general assessments of the value of religion in either moral or functional terms impossible.

III. Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to prove a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experiences can be given a meaningful form. A set of religious beliefs is a gloss (makes them graspable) and a template (shapes them) for the mundane world of social relationships and psychological events

Tracing the social and psychological role of religion is a matter of understanding how it is that men's notions of the ''real'' induce in them and color their sense of the practical and the moral.
The anthropological study of religion is two -stage:
1)analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up religious power 2)the relating of these systems to social structural and psychological processes.
Only when we have a theoretical analysis of symbolic action comparable in sophistication to what we now have for social and psychological action, will we be able to cope effectively with those aspects of social and psychological life in which religion (or art, science, or ideology) plays a determinant role.

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IRVING GOFFMAN:
Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life

''Interaction Ritual''

Goffman is concerned with the study of social interaction; that is, the countless patterns and natural sequences of behavior occurring whenever persons come into one another's immediate presence. This is not the study of the individual and his/her psychology. Rather, it is the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another.

Chapter 1: On Face-Work

A line is a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which a person expresses his/her view of a situation and his/her evaluation of the participants, including him/herself.

Face is the positive social value a person effectively claims for him/herself by the line others assume s/he has taken during a particular contact. It is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes. A person becomes attached to his\her face (Goffman actually uses the word ''cathects'') and therefore s/he considers participation in any contact with others a type of commitment.

To have, to be in, or to maintain face means a line a person effectively takes presents an image of him/her that is internally consistent and supported by other participants.

To be in wrong face occurs when a person's social worth cannot be integrated into the line that is being sustained for him/her. To be out of face means a person participates in a contact with others without having ready a line of the kind participants in such situations are expected to take. both of these situations usually cause the person to feel ashamed or inferior. Poise is the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others.

An expressive order is an order that regulates the flow of events so that anything that appears to be expressed by them will be consistent with the person's face.

A person is not only expected to have self-respect by maintaining his/her own face, s/he is also expected to sustain a standard of considerateness during an encounter with another person to save the feelings and face of that other person.

The maintenance of face is a condition of interaction, not its objective. To study face-saving is to study the traffic rules of social interaction; one learns about the code a person adheres to in his/her movement across the paths and designs of others, but not where s/he is going, or why s/he wants to get there.

Face-work means the actions taken by a person to make whatever s/he is doing consistent with face. All members of society are expected to have some knowledge of face-work and some experience in its use. This is called tact, savoir-faire, diplomacy, or social skill.

Goffman distinguishes between two basic kinds of face-work:
1) The avoidance process: to prevent threats to his/her face, a person simply avoids contacts in which these threats are likely to occur.
2) The corrective process: when a person fails to save face, s/he is likely to try to correct for the effects of this incidence. An interchange is a sequence of acts set in motion by an acknowledged threat to face. There are four elements in an interchange:
a) the challenge: participants call attention to the misconduct
b) the offering: the offender is given a chance to correct for the offense and reestablish the expressive order
c) acceptance: the persons to whom the offering is made can accept it as a satisfactory means of reestablishing the expressive order
d) sign of gratitude: the forgiven person is thankful to those who have given him/her the indulgence of forgiveness

Sometimes an encounter between people is less a scene of mutual considerateness in maintaining face-work, but rather a contest whose purpose is to preserve everyone's line from inexcusable contradictions while at the same time scoring as many points as possible against one's adversaries (e.g. digs, snubs, bitchiness, etc.). Often when face has been threatened, people cooperate to do face-work and thereby save the situation. Resolution of the situation to everyone's apparent satisfaction is the first requirement; correct apportionment of blame is typically a secondary consideration. Examples of this cooperation are social etiquette, polite hints, and reciprocal self-denial (when the person compliments others first to get attention temporarily away from him/herself).

The Self:

Goffman uses a double definition of self: the self as an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking; and the self as a kind of player in a ritual game. The rules of social interaction rely on a system of checks and balances by which each participant tends to be give the right to handle only those matters which he will have little motivation for mishandling. The rights and obligations of an interactant are designed to prevent him/her from abusing his/her role as an object of sacred value.

Spoken Interaction:
There is a functional relationship between the structure of the self and the structure of spoken interaction. A person determines how s\he ought to conduct him\herself during an occasion of talk by testing the potentially symbolic meaning of his/her acts against the self-images that are being sustained. In doing this, s/he incidentally subjects her/his behavior to the expressive order that prevails and contributes to the orderly flow of messages. His/her aim is to save face; his/her effect is to save the situation. The person's orientation to face is the point of leverage that the ritual order has in regard to him/her; yet a promise to take ritual care of his/her face is built into the very structure of talk.

Human Nature:
Societies everywhere must mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of doing this is through ritual. A person is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self and a self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and a certain amount of poise. These elements of behavior which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him/her as an interactant constitute a universal human nature. A person becomes a kind of construct, built up form moral rules that are impressed upon him/her from outside, from social encounters.

Chapter 2: The Nature of Deference and Demeanor

In this chapter, Goffman tries to reformulate a version of Durkheim's social psychology mentioned in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He explores the ways in which a person in our urban secular world is allotted a kind of sacredness that is displayed and confirmed by symbolic acts. Durkheim wrote that the individual's personality can be seen as one apportionment of the collective mana, and that rites performed to representations of the social collectivity will sometimes be performed to the individual him/herself. Two examples of these rites are deference and demeanor. Goffman uses data collected from observations of mental patients to elaborate on these points.

Rules:
A rule of conduct is a guide of action that is suitable or just. Attachment to rules leads to a constancy and patterning of behavior. Rules of conduct impinge upon the individual in two ways: directly as obligations, establishing how s/he is morally constrained to conduct him/herself; and indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound to act in regard to him/her. When an individual becomes involved in the maintenance of a rule, s/he tends to become committed to a particular image of self. An act that is subject to a rule of conduct is a communication, for it represents a way in which selves are confirmed. Rules of conduct transform both action and inaction into expression.

There are two classes or rules of conduct:
1) symmetrical: a rule that leads an individual to have obligations or expectations regarding others that these others have in regard to him/her.
2) asymmetrical: rule that leads others to treat and be treated by the individual differently from the way s/he treats and is treated by them

Goffman also distinguished between two types of rules:
1) substantive: rules that guide conduct in regard to matters felt to have significance in their own right
2) ceremonial: rules that have primary importance as a conventionalized means of communication by which people express their character or convey their appreciation to other participant in the situation.
Deference and demeanor are two basic components of ceremonial rules. They illustrate how the self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object which must be treated with proper ritual care and must be presented to others in proper light.

Deference functions as a symbolic means by which appreciation is regularly conveyed to a recipient of this recipient. It has two forms:
1) avoidance rituals: forms of deference which lead the actor to keep at a distance from the recipient and not violate what Simmel has called the ''ideal sphere'' that lies around the recipient.
2) presentational rituals: acts through which the individual makes specific attestations to recipients concerning how s/he regards them (e.g. salutations, invitations, compliments)

Demeanor is conveyed through deportment, dress, and bearing and serves to express that the person is of certain desirable or undesirable qualities. The individual creates an image of him/herself for others.

Conclusion:
Deference and demeanor are examples that the Meadian notion that the individual takes toward him/herself the attitude of others is an oversimplification. Rather the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him/her of which s/he is allowed only to paint certain parts. The urban secular world is not so irreligious as we might think. The individual him/herself remains a deity of considerable importance.

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PAUL HIRSCH
Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems

I think this is a paper on the organization of the culture industry, rather than a paper on organizational culture. However, it does link up nicely with dudes like Hebdige, and provides a distinctly different perspective on the production of cultural objects than does, say, Geertz.

Organizations engaged in the production and mass distribution of ''cultural'' items are often confronted by highly uncertain environments at their input and output boundaries. They develop three adaptive coping strategies to deal with this uncertainty: the deployment of ''contact men'' to organizational boundaries, overproduction and differential promotion of new items, and cooptation of mass media gatekeepers.

Hirsch thinks analysis of innovation has focussed too little on the throughput sector, consisting of orgs which filter the overflow of information and materials intended for consumers. From an organizational perspective, two questions pertaining to any innovation are logically prior to its appearance in the marketplace: 1) by what criteria is it selected for sponsorship over available alternative? and, 2) might certain characteristics of its organizational sponsor, such as prestige or size of an advertizing budget, substantially aid in explaining the ultimate success or failure of a new product or idea?

Entrepreneurial orgs in cultural industries confront a set of problems interesting to students of interorganizational relations: goal dissensus, boundary-spanning role occupations with nonorganizational norms, legal and value constraints against vertical integration, and, hence, dependence on autonomous agencies (esp mass media gatekeepers) for linking the org to its consumers.

For Hirsch, a cultural organization is a profit-seeking firm producing cultural products for national distribution (ie, Virgin Records, but not the NEA). The cultural industry system is comprised of all orgs engaged in the process of filtering new products and ideas as they flow from creative personnel in the technical subsystem to the managerial, institutional and societal levels of organization (these org levels are from Talcum Powder's work on orgs). Artist and mass audience are linked by an ordered sequence of events: the object dee art must 1) succeed in competition with others for selection and promotion by entrep. orgs and 2) then succeed in receiving mass media coverage in such forms as book-reviews, radio air play, and films criticism.

Cultural organizations constitute the managerial subsystems of the industry systems in which they operate. Cultural industries' technical subsystems are organized along craft lines (from Stinchcombe: location of professionals in the technical subsystem and administrators in the managerial one), and this organization is a function of demand uncertainty and cheap technology. Demand uncertainty is caused by shifts in consumer tastes, legal and normative constraints on vertical integration, and widespread variability in the selection criteria employed by mass media gatekeepers.

Competitive advantage for a cultural org firm lies with firms best able to link available input to reliable and established distribution channels. The mass distribution of cultural items requires more bureaucratic organizational arrangements than the administration of production.

The organizational separation of producers of cultural items from their dissemenators places definite restrictions on the forms of power cultural orgs can exercise over gatekeepers; autonomous gatekeeps present the org with the control problem of favorably influencing the probability that a given new release will be selected for exposure to consumers.

The mass media constitute the institutional subsystem of the cultural industry system. The diffusion of particular fads and fashions is either blocked or facilitated at this strategic checkpoint. Organizations at the managerial level of cultural industry systems are confronted by 1) constraints on output distribution imposed by gatekeeps and 2) contingencies in recruiting ''raw materials'' for organizational sponsorship. To minimize dependence on these elements of their task environments, the three strategies noted above have developed.

1.Contact men. Professional agents on the input boundary (eg, editors who woo authors) must be allowed a great deal of discretion in the activities on behalf of the cultural org, and thus, though essential and duly highly rewarded, pose a control problem. Cultural orgs deploy additional contact men at their output boundaries, linking the org to retail outlets and surrogate consumers in mass-media orgs.

A high ratio of promotional personnel to surrogate consumers (contact men to disk jockeys, for instance) appears to be a structural feature of any industry system in which goods are marginally differentiated, producers' access to consumer markets is regulated by independent gatekeepers, and large scale direct advertising campaigns are uneconomical or prohibited by law.

2. Differential promotion of new items, in conjunction with overproduction. Overproduction is a rational org response in an environment of low capital investment and demand uncertainty. It is more efficient to produce many failures for each success than to sponsor fewer items and pretest each on a massive scale to increase media coverage and sales. Cultural orgs maximize profits by mobilizing promotional resources in support of volume sales for a small no. of items. These resources are not divided equally among a firm's new releases. The strategy of differential promotion is an attempt by cultural orgs to buffer their technical core from demand uncertainties by smoothing out output transactions.

3. Cooptation of institutional regulators. For instance, hit records are featured by radio stations in order to sell advertising. Goal conflict and value dissensus between cultural orgs and gatekeepers are reflected in frequent disputes over the legitimacy and legality of promoters' attempts to acquire power of the decision autonomy of surrogate gatekeepers. Cultural orgs struggle to control gatekeepers to the extent that coverage for new items is 1) crucial for building consumer demand and 2) problematic (eg. Donnie Osmond's new album). Cultural orgs are less likely to deploy boundary agents or sanction high pressure tactics for items whose sale is less contingent on gatekeepers actions (eg, classical music).

Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley)

Focus of the Book