Expression And Interaction Research Paper

1. The Intellectual Legacy Of Symbolic Interactionism

Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead are two of the early theorists of symbolic interactionism who studied the processes through which new members of a group are socialized into their respective communities. Cooley ([1902] 1964) coined the term ‘looking-glass self’ to describe how an individual learns to see oneself from another’s point of view. Mead (1934) expanded the analysis of social learning beyond two-person interactions and showed that children gain increasingly complex understanding of the response of a variety of other people. Cooley and Mead’s emphasis on microsettings in which socialization of new group members occurs inspired later researchers to study how, just like the human self in general, the self of an artist is shaped through social interaction. It is, however, the work of Erving Goffman that offers one of the best examples of studies in the symbolic interactionist approach that focus increasingly on the centrality of the relationship between expressive symbols and interaction.

1.1 The Work Of Erving Goffman And His Followers

Goffman introduced the dramaturgical model of interaction in his earlier work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). He viewed social life as a ‘theatrical’ performance in which actors give creative interpretations to their roles. They employ ‘props’ and ‘scenery’ to support the impression of their self that they seek to convey to others. Much of such impression management takes place in public domains and individuals may withdraw to their private settings as a ‘backstage’ where they can prepare themselves for their next performance. Examining props and masks as expressive symbols manipulated for an audience, Goffman at the same time paid particular attention to the ways in which the conceptions of the self are shaped by the attitudes and reactions of other actors.

In his later work Frame Analysis (1974), Goffman abandoned his reliance on theatrical metaphor and shifted attention to the settings of recurrent human actions. Social interaction is made meaningful by frames, which tell an observer how to define the situations. Frames provide a way of organizing experience. Without them, the social world is a jumble of meaningless facts. Goffman showed how human behavior is subject to extraordinarily subtle frame manipulations.

Goffman’s insight is directly observable in a number of studies, a representative example being Manning’s research on police work (1977). Analyzing interactions between the police and citizens as actor and audience in Goffman’s sense, Manning examines ways in which the police develop a finely-tuned capacity to sort out ‘police work’ from other events of little relevance. In the drama of police work, affective or emotive elements of citizens’ messages are systematically recoded by the logical code of the police. Works in the tradition of symbolic interactionism such as Manning’s emphasize the role of social interaction in defining, creating, and transmitting meanings.

1.2 Identity Work

One of the key concepts in the symbolic interactionist approach is identity, which is produced and confirmed by social interaction. According to Goffman, a performance can be said to have succeeded if an actor has confirmed a certain self-identity to oneself and to the audience. In much the same spirit, Snow and Anderson examined the ‘identity work’ of the homeless in a city in Texas (Snow and Anderson 1993). They found that the homeless manage interactions so that they can project a certain image of themselves. Some embrace the homeless role and take pride in their freedom and ability to survive in the harsh conditions, while others distance themselves from such people, insisting that they are not like them and therefore do not need the services of relief agencies. Still others live in the fantasies of their past or future prosperity. Divergent as they are, the homeless are like any other person, performing impression management in their interaction with others in order to control the meanings they present to them.

Another striking example of identity work is provided by Allison in her study of a hostess club in Tokyo (1994). A hostess pours drinks, lights cigarettes, and makes flattering conversation with businessmen. The language and behavior at the table are sexually charged, yet sex is confined to conversation. Allison argues that sexuality that is all talk not only structures the identity of women but that of men. Night-time entertainment paid by corporations homogenizes male workers. Through a playful sexuality that titillates men’s egos and makes them feel self-assured, a particular construct of ‘maleness’ is developed that serves to align men with the workplace. Going to hostess clubs, therefore, is not primarily for or about sex. It concerns, rather, the confirmation of men’s identity as workers.

Notions of the self are like other cultural constructions in that they vary across cultures. Recent literature on self in Japan has emphasized the situatedness, multiplicity, and shifting nature of self (see, for example, Bachnik and Quinn 1994 and Kondo 1990). The unitary ‘I’ presupposed in the Western discourse is made anew each time according to the particularities of a given interaction.

In sum, from the symbolic interactionist point of view and many others that go well beyond its boundaries, the human self is susceptible to diverse outside influences so that interactions with others powerfully shape the course of individual action. Such human interactions, moreover, give rise to various forms of expression. Researchers have shown how an impression favorable to oneself, a proper identity as a homeless, or an identity as an efficient Japanese businessman has been expressed through theatrical performance, language and storytelling, or sexually charged conversation and behavior in a hostess club. The legacy of symbolic interactionism is apparent in three aspects of the relationship between expression and interaction examined in detail below. They are discussed in the following order: how expressions are produced, defined, and received as people interact with each other.

2. Production Of Expressive Forms And Interaction

Novice producers of various expressive forms usually acquire skills and motivations to produce from interactions with fellow workers and experienced mentors. What is more, even before novices are trained to create, they must often be taught that there is indeed an audience for their work. Without such knowledge, they may not be motivated to learn how to express themselves through creative work. Once they understand that audiences can recognize their work, they begin experimenting with their style. Expressive processes first of subculture and next of art are discussed in turn.

2.1 Subculture

The culture of a group is structured through an ongoing negotiation between members of the group. Rather than assuming the content and meaning of culture a priori, many studies of subculture follow symbolic interactionist theory and examine how microlevel group processes give rise to a set of symbols, meanings, and behavioral norms—often a whole way of life—that bind the group members. A representative case is Fine’s analysis of group culture or ‘idioculture’ that emerged in American little league baseball teams (1987). Specifically, he identifies five elements that are necessary for a cultural item to enter the life of a group that interacts intensively over a long period of time: the item must be known, usable, functional, appropriate, and repeatedly triggered.

Although the American subculture studies customarily avoid political questions, subculture often has explicitly political content. What is critical for understanding such subculture is to examine the relationship between a subculture and the social class within which it emerges and the relationship between a subculture and the dominant culture. When subculture is a site of political struggle, the central problem becomes understanding how interacting members of the social class connect and negotiate their lived experiences to subcultural representations. British Cultural Studies led by Stuart Hall, Tony Bennett, and associates at the Birmingham Centre emphasize the political context of subculture.

British Cultural Studies is often said to take much from Marxism and structuralism, but it is clear that it also incorporates many elements of symbolic interactionism. Using case studies and ethnographic methods, the emergence of subculture is analyzed as a collective solution to the problems faced by members of the social class such as lack of educational and employment opportunities. An illustrative study is Hebdige’s research on ‘style’ developed by postwar English youth, which includes dress, talk, rituals, and music (1979). Hebdige details the way in which the white working-class youth deal with their problems by developing a style that define their identity and prove their membership in a group. They create a new style by borrowing items from existing styles and putting them together in novel ways. Hebdige’s work illustrates that working-class youth possess few other means than creating their own style in order to attain some collective status within a society and to exercise some control over their lives.

One of the interesting phenomena concerning subculture is the development of a tension that members of a group experience between staying faithfully committed to the aesthetic goals of the group and compromising them for financial and reputational gain in the commercial world of the dominant culture. This issue is examined by Lachmann in his study of graffiti writers (1988). Lachmann analyzes how graffiti writers of New York created organizational and ideological bases for the allocation of fame, and why they eventually lost such bases. According to Lachmann, the vast majority of graffiti writers, called taggers, compete on the basis of the quantity of tags, while the minority become muralists who seek fame through their artistic styles. The latter meet at ‘writers’ corners’ to allocate fame for style among skilled colleagues. However, when the corners were destroyed by police harassment, some writers were recruited to paint graffiti for sale in galleries, which resulted in fragmentation of the graffiti subculture. Lachmann’s study shows how oppositional aesthetic standards of graffiti writers developed through social interaction with their mentors, colleagues, and audiences, and how such standards were weakened by co-optive interventions of the larger society.

Of course, subcultural expression is not limited to Western culture. Sato 1991 has described the teenaged bosozoku drivers (the ‘violent driving tribe’), who in tens, sometimes in hundreds, careen motorcycles and cars on the busy streets of large Japanese cities with deafening sounds. Many are dressed carefully in their elegant and bizarre costumes of kamikaze party uniforms combined with American punk, surfer, or rock-and-roll gear. Their cars and bikes are customized beyond recognition of their original appearance. The majority of bosozoku drivers are from middleclass families and seldom get involved in other unlawful activities. Analyzing the symbols, fashions, and customs of this youth subculture, Sato argues that such deviant lifestyles satisfy the cravings of the affluent youth for excitement and new experience in what is commonly regarded to be a harmonious and homogeneous society.

2.2 Art World

Values, norms, beliefs, and attitudes of a subgroup develop through interaction. However, it is not only such ‘implicit culture’ but also ‘recorded culture’ (Crane 1994) including information, entertainment, science, technology, law, education, and art that are produced as the results of social interaction. Artists such as painters, sculptors, novelists, and poets are generally considered to produce their works individually. Such a view of solitary creation has the danger of oversimplifying an activity that is usually much more collaborative. For example, novelists often receive a variety of help from editors when writing novels. Many paintings of the past were produced in the names of principal painters who supervised their teams of apprentices, assistants, and students.

Another popular image of an artist is someone who is engrossed in self-expression, oblivious of common thoughts and beliefs and activities of mundane everyday life. However, artists too have social existence in that they live and work within the constraints of institutions and conventions. Those who are rejected by existing institutions, audiences, and patrons are forced to face the problem: either they give up creative activities altogether or become determined to live as innovators. Some of the works of those that rejected conventions and became liberated from creating for the demands of others came to be appreciated by later generations of people, although they and their work were not typically understood by people of the time.

Social interactions thus sometimes permit, enable, and encourage producers of cultural works to engage in creative activities. Other times they constrain and discourage. One of the best studies of collaborative creators is provided by Becker who describes ‘art worlds’ as more or less institutionalized subcultural community (1982). Each world centers around one of four types of artists (integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, or naive artists) and the extent to which the community is organized differs according to the type of artist. The most institutionalized art world is that of integrated professionals, who produce canonical works following conventions current in the time.

Participants of a professional art world including artists, audience, critics, and support personnel share knowledge of conventional ways of dog things in that art. Such conventions are the terms on which participants cooperate. For example, there are conventions regarding materials to be used, abstractions to be employed to convey particular ideas or experiences, proper length of a musical or dramatic event, proper size and shape of a painting or sculpture, and relations between artists and audience specifying the rights and obligations of both sides. Because things do not have to be decided anew each time, conventions allow decisions to be reached quickly, and thus make it possible for artists and support personnel to coordinate their activities with ease and efficiency.

Becker’s analysis of an art world consisting of participants cooperating through the medium of conventions demystifies art. From this point of view, art is not a spontaneous creation of a genius, but is rather a well-planned and/orchestrated action of a variety of social actors. Moreover, because art is a collective process, without interaction among participants, it may not successfully result in public expression. The view of art as a collective process points to the danger of crediting only one artist for a particular work.

An art world as envisioned by Becker is a self-contained unit that is in some ways extremely isolated from other segments of the society or from other art worlds. An art world is decontextualized from the political, historical, and ideological movements of the time. Because of their intense focus on interpersonal factors to their relative neglect of attention to forces that influence creative processes external to an art world, it has been aptly pointed out that Beckerian micro-level studies concentrate less on the production of culture and more on the culture of production (Peterson 1994).

The application of the art-world approach may not be limited to the analysis of high culture or Western culture. Japanese traditional arts such a Noh play, samisen music, a mountain ascetic kagura dance (Fukushima 1995), as well as popular theater (Ukai 1994) have all been analyzed with particular attention paid to face-to-face mentoring through which performers acquire the critical body postures and movements.

2.3 Interaction With Other Social Actors

Various members of an art world including fellow artists, mentors, support staff, assistants, students, audiences, critics, dealers, buyers, producers, corporations in culture industries, and mass media influence expressive activities of an artist. However, it is not only interactions with members of the art world that shape the careers of artists. Nonmembers sometimes exert equally strong influence on artists and their work.

For example, marital and family experience may differentially affect the chances of men and women to become creators and audiences of cultural works. This is because, in general, an individual must be isolated from the flurry of daily activities in order to engage in a form of art. It is difficult for adult women who are busy with housework and child care to attain such isolation. Adult men, on the other hand, are usually free to abandon housework and indulge in the moment of solitude. The relationship between gender and isolation, however, works in the other way for children. Parents and teachers tend to permit girls to be quiet and withdrawn, but not boys who are encouraged to engage in activities outside. Rogers shows in her study of literary production and reception (1991) that such differences have consequences on men and women with the former over-representing as writers.

It has also been pointed out that the quality of the relationships with spouses and other significant partners may influence the quality of artistic activities. In his study of a ant-garde visual arts in the SoHo section of Manhattan, New York, Simpton has found that there was a tendency for successful artists to have supportive partners and unsuccessful artists to have overprotective and smothering partners (Simpton 1981).

3. Expressive Forms Defined Through Interaction

Art works themselves have typically been given a less central place in sociological studies of art than in humanistic studies. Art works have traditionally been treated as ‘black boxes’ whose meanings and interrelationships do not require analysis. Focusing on art objects has been problematic for some sociologists, partly because this was considered to bring them dangerously close to making value judgments about them. Contemporary social science disciplines, however, are questioning this approach (see, for example, Griswold 1986).

Social scientists have become increasingly aware that labels such as art and nonart, fine art and popular art, professional art and naive art, and art and craft are produced through social interaction. It has been shown that there is nothing inherent in objects, paintings, dances, or music that determines them as art or nonart. They become art or nonart when they are defined as such by social actors. Aesthetic standards of art works are set by artists, spokespersons, and influential members of the public. As in all other social fields, social meanings of art works arise in the interactions among the actors. This is why functional items such as toilets, hats, typewriters, and teapots are sometimes displayed in art museums as works of art. They become art when they are made nonfunctional both socially and technically by artists and displayed as such by museum owners (Becker 1982). Another example is contemporary jazz music, whose market has become so fragmented with regard to age, race, and musical idiom that the term jazz has become increasingly difficult to define (Rockwell 1983). It is suggested that jazz can now be more accurately defined in terms of its support system including club and concert circuits, record labels, and critical apparatuses than in terms of its content.

The distinction between art and craft is in fact not clear-cut. Craft workers are generally considered to follow the conventions primarily of utility and technical virtuosity, while artists are thought to place emphasis on uniqueness and beauty. However, Neapolitan has found that craft workers also have considerable pride in the beauty of their work, and furthermore, place high value on preservation of traditional values and ways of doing things (1986). In addition, there are craft persons who claim to work to express their inner feelings in their work. These people appear to be more fine art than craft oriented.

In his study of restaurant cooks, Fine argues that although the expressive side of production is often in conflict with other organizational goals such as efficient and profitable operation, aesthetic value is central to workers (1992). Just as artistry is constrained by market and institutional imperatives, factory work has a creative component. Not only is art like work then, but work is like art. Both art and nonart workers negotiate and renegotiate their standards of production in their chosen field where aesthetic autonomy and institutional control interpenetrate.

4. Reception Of Expressive Forms And Interaction

A common assumption is that it is possible to distinguish between the artists and the audiences for whom works are intended. In many sociological studies of culture, however, a sharp distinction between artists and audiences disappears, since both are participants in the creative process. Although audiences usually devote less time to any particular piece of work than artists or other professional members, the contribution that audiences make to art works is not slight. It is ultimately audiences that determine which artist’s works is to be displayed in a gallery or which musician is to hold a concert by participating or not participating in an event.

4.1 Period Eye And The Role Of Audience In Creation

If a piece of work is considered to be made anew each time an audience experiences and appreciates it, only those properties of the work that the audience takes note of can be said to exist in his or her experience. From this point of view, work of art is whatever that audience perceives. What audiences know and are capable of appreciating are extremely important.

Knowledge and skills used in appreciating art works are in part determined by experience and training the audience has had. Art works aimed at a certain segment of the population is usually made based on the assumption of what that particular segment knows. Therefore, concerts attended by an inner circle of students will be different from those held for the lay public, just as books written for adults are not the same as those intended for children.

The knowledge and skills audiences rely on to appreciate art works also vary according to time and place. A cognitive style is rooted in society so that people of particular period and culture have their own ways of appreciating art works. Baxandall has called this ‘period eye’ (1972). Audiences use skills of the period when appreciating art works, and artists respond to this. For example, fifteenth-century Italian merchants were trained in mathematical understanding of lines and shapes. Such understanding constituted a significant portion of the merchants’ intellectual life, as many played games, told jokes, and otherwise took pride in their prowess in it. They were naturally sensitive to pictures which used the same devise. Painters were thus encouraged to display mathematical skills in works for merchants, who were their good patrons. Baxandall asserts that it was in fact for these skills that merchant patrons paid the painters. Most present-day audiences have lost the ability to respond to the elements of fifteenth-century Italian paintings.

4.2 Symbolic Manipulation Of Signs

A clear distinction is also difficult to make between producers and receivers of subcultural expressions. Members of a subcommunity take turns in engaging in and appreciating expressive endeavors, and rewards are allocated within the subculture. The view of reception as an active process has been proposed most forcefully by theorists of British Cultural Studies and those inspired by them (see, for example, Cruz 1994, Morley 1986, and Press 1991). Reception may be at the end of a communication process, but it is by no means automatic. Asserting active and creative interpretations by audiences, researchers have explored the ways in which consumers make critical use of elements of popular culture.

For example, in the aforementioned study of British youth subculture, Hebdige shows how the working class youth challenge the symbolic order of the society by reinterpreting mass-produced materials in a way oppositional to the dominant culture. By displaying a mismatch between what the materials are intended for in the dominant culture and how they are used by the resistant youth, they challenge the inevitability and naturalness of class, gender, and other stereotypical categorizations found in the society. Mass-produced goods become tools for motivated communication. Reception can be a site of political struggle.

4.3 Reputation

Finally, contrary to the idea that there is some quality inherent in the work of art that determines its value, the reputations of artists and works are also in part outcomes of social processes. In the case of visual arts for example, art dealers, critics, auction houses, museums, government, corporate, and individual patrons, and finally, mass media all play roles in determining the value of works and artists (see, for example, Moulin 1987 and White and White 1965). Of course, artists themselves have a large stake in protecting and projecting their reputations, and they can achieve this by such means as keeping adequate records of their works and making arrangements for their proper custodianship. In addition, whether or not there is a survivor dedicated to preserving the value of their works will influence the durability of their reputations.

In their study of the once relatively popular form of art, etching, Lang and Lang (1988) ask why the reputations of many women etchers who were critically acclaimed during their lifetimes are forgotten while those of men have survived. They find the primary reason in different efforts expended by the spouse and family on behalf of the deceased to preserve and enhance the artist’s reputation. The Langs show that the surviving wives typically worked diligently to link their husbands’ works to influential networks. However, the likelihood of there being survivors with similar financial or emotional stake in perpetuating female etchers’ reputations was lower. Even if married, many women usually outlived their husbands and sometimes their children. Much of the work of female etchers has been lost to posterity, not because of the second-rate quality of their art but because of their marital and family relations.

In sum, social scientists have attempted to study art and artists like any other human beings and actions that cannot escape being affected by interactions with surrounding networks of people. If demystification of art and artists has called into question the conventional distinction made between varying qualities of art, art and nonart, artists and their collaborators, and artists and audience, future research can no longer continue to shy away from analyzing art works themselves. At the same time, more research will make efforts to link different levels of analyses, since an art world, just like human communities in general, is not immune to profound changes recent rapid innovation in information technology will bring. It will become increasingly important to examine how changes in the social world including the electronic media revolution directly or indirectly influence interactions and expressions at the microlevel.

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