G

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

continuity to social life at all, most actors must be right most of the time;
that is to say, they know what they are doing, and they successfully
communicate their knowledge to others. The knowledgeability
incorporated in the practical activities which make up the bulk of daily life
is a constitutive feature (together with power) of the social world. What is
known about the social world by its constituent actors is not separate from
their world, as in the case of knowledge of events or objects in nature.
Testing out just what it is that actors know, and how they apply that
knowledge in their practical conduct (which lay actors engage in as well as
social observers), depends upon using the same materials - an
understanding of recursively organized practices - from which hypotheses
about that knowledge are derived. The measure of their 'validity' is
supplied by how far actors are able to co-ordinate their activities with
others in such a way as to pursue the purposes engaged by their behaviour.
There are, of course, potential differences between knowledge of the
rules and tactics of practical conduct in the milieux in which the agent
moves and knowledge about those which apply
((91))
in contexts remote from his or her experience. How far the agent's social
skills allow immediate ease in culturally alien contexts is obviously
variable - as, of course, is the meshing of different forms of convention
expressing divergent boundaries between cultures or societies. It is not just
in knowledge - or belief claims - which agents are able to formulate
discursively that they display awareness of broader conditions of social life
over and above those in which their own activities take place. It is often in
the manner in which routine activities are carried on, for example, that
actors in circumstances of marked social inferiority make manifest their
awareness of their oppression. Goffman's writings are replete with
commentaries on this type of phenomenon. But in other respects when we
speak of 'the knowledge actors have of the societies of which they are
members' (and others of which they are not), the reference is to discursive
consciousness. Here there is no logical difference between the criteria of
validity in terms of which belief-claims (hypotheses, theories) are to be
judged in respect of lay members of society and social observers.
What - on a general plane, at any rate - are the types of circumstance
that tend to influence the level and nature of the 'penetration' actors have
of the conditions of system reproduction? They include the following
factors:
(1) the means of access actors have to knowledge in virtue of
their social location;
(2) the modes of articulation of knowledge;
(3) circumstances relating to the validity of the belief-claims
taken as 'knowledge';
(4) factors to do with the means of dissemination of available
knowledge.
Of course, the fact that all actors move in situated contexts within larger
totalities limits the knowledge they have of other contexts which they do
not directly experience. All social actors know a great deal more than they
ever directly live through, as a result of the sedimentation of experience in
language. But agents whose lives are spent in one type of milieu may be
more or less ignorant of what goes on in others. This applies not only in a
'lateral' sense - in the sense of spatial separation - but also in a 'vertical'
one in larger societies. Thus those in elite groups may
((92))
know very little about how others in less privileged sectors live, and vice
versa. However, it is worth mentioning that vertical segregation of milieux
is nearly always also a spatial segregation. In category (2) above I mean to
refer both to how far belief claims are ordered in terms of overall
'discourses' and to the nature of different discourses. Characteristic of most
commonsense, everyday claims to knowledge is that they are formulated in
a fragmentary, dislocated way. It is not only the 'primitive' who is a
bricoleur: much day-to-day talk among lay members of all societies is
predicated upon claims to knowledge that are disparate or left unexamined.
The emergence of discourses of social science, however, clearly influences
all levels of social interpretation in societies where it has become
influential. Goffman has a large audience, not limited to his professional
sociological colleagues.
So far as (3) is concerned, it is enough to point out that individuals may
operate with false theories, descriptions or accounts both of the contexts of
their own action and of the characteristics of more encompassing social
systems. There are obvious sources of possible tension here between
practical and discursive consciousness. These can have psychodynamic
origins, in repressions which separate off or muddle the reasons why
people act as they do and what they are inclined or able to say about those
reasons. But obviously there can be more systematic social pressures that
can influence how far false beliefs are held by the members of a society
about features of that society. Particularly influential in respect of (4), it is
almost needless to say, are the relations, historically and spatially, between
oral culture and the media of writing, printing and electronic
communication. All of the latter have made a difference not only to stocks
of available knowledge but also to types of knowledge produced.
Critical Notes: Freud on Slips of the Tongue
As an example of some of the notions analysed in this chapter I propose to
consider interpretations of slips of the tongue in discourse. What Freud
calls 'parapraxes' (Fehileistun gen) refer not just to verbal infelicities but to
miswriting, misreading, mishearing and to the temporary forgetting of
names and other items. Freud treats these as belonging together in some
part because the terms designating them have a similar root in German, all
beginning with the syllable Ver- (Versprechen, Verlesen, Verh�ren, Vergessen).
All parapraxes involve errors, but most refer to seemingly unimportant
ones which are without lasting significance in the activities of the
individuals who commit them. 'Only rarely', Freud writes, 'does one of
them, such as losing an object, attain some degree of practical importance.
For that reason, too, they attract little attention, give rise to no more than
feeble emotions, and so on." In fact, he tries to demonstrate, these minor
infractions supply clues to key characteristics of the psychodynamics of
personality.
Whether or not parapraxes do actually form a single class of errors I
shall not be concerned to discuss here. I shall concentrate only upon slips
of the tongue. Employing a classification established by the linguist
Meringer and by Mayer, a psychiatrist (with whose views he otherwise
disagrees), Freud mentions the following types of verbal error:
transpositions (the 'Milo of Venus' instead of the 'Venus of Milo');
pre-sonances or anticipations ('es war mir auf der Schwest... auf der Brust so
schwer' - 'Schwest' is a nonexistent word); post-sonances or perseverations
('ich fordere Sie au f, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzutossen', rather
than 'anzustossen'); contaminations ('er setzt sich auf den Hinterkopf', a
combination of 'er setzt sich einen Kopf auf' and 'er stellt sich auf die
Hinterbeine'); and substitutions ('ich gebe die Praparate in den Briefkasten',
instead of 'Br�tkasten').2
Meringer tried to explain these in terms of phases of neutral
((footnote))
*References may be found on p. 109.
((94))
excitation. When a speaker utters the first word of a sentence, a process of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki