Participantes principales en la propuesta

I deliberately began with examples drawn from the natural sciences, since one value of our device is to invite cross-fertilization between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ disciplines. This is important because one clear pattern within sociological discourse is the drawing of an un-crossable line between those disciplines that supposedly deal with ‘meaning’ and those that deal with meaningless causal Pattern 137

forces (Weber, 1903–1917/1949). What possible relevance can a swarm of starlings have to a meaningfully constructed human society?

According to Mark Erickson (personal communication), sociologists rarely write directly about pattern, but spend their whole careers seeking them out. Perhaps the origin of this ambivalence is the highly abstract and temporal nature of social patterns. I have stated that even ‘physical’ patterns can be understood only as products of process. When it comes to social events such as a conversation or a dance, however, we are dealing with something maximally temporal that, like a piece of live music, endures in only a minimally spatial manner.

The less spatially evident a pattern is, the harder it is to visualize and understand. It is easier to visualize the built environment of a city than the social processes that sustain it. Sociologists must struggle even to describe their basic subject matter. The classic texts can be read as offering means to grasp abstract patterns in a more concrete and manageable form. Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’, for instance, are patterns in the sense of ‘exemplars’ that bring out more clearly the contours of otherwise thoroughly abstract matters: charismatic authority is a prototypical pattern to be contrasted with traditional and legal/ rational authority (ibid.). Marx saw in the relation to the means of production the key pattern for understanding human history and for predicting and inter - vening in its future (Marx, 1848/1948). Durkheim sought patterns in suicide rates that could be correlated with different modes of social organization because he recognized that mundane concepts were tacitly patterned by social factors. Parsons hoped to better describe different social systems in terms of the five dichotomies he called the ‘pattern variables’ (Parsons, 1977). To find a ‘social’ pattern is to discern a regularity: something predictable that recurs. Micro-sociologists (and also psychotherapists), for instance, have long spoken of repeated interpersonal and intra-psychic patterns, as when certain people appear recurrently to select abusive relationships (Scheff, 1994). A pattern repeats. Rather than attempt to survey the socio logical application of pattern, I will focus on two exemplars: Kuhnian paradigms and Eliasian figurations.

Paradigms

According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the words ‘pattern’ and ‘patron’ became differentiated as late as 1700, and still today the word pattern conveys the sense of a model, exemplar or ideal that deserves imitation. Christ provides a model for Christians to pattern themselves after, for instance. In this usage, the derivation from pater – the Latin word for father – is clear, and hence the relation to words such as paternity, patriarchy, patrimony and patronage. Other more familiar meanings of pattern arguably derive from pattern in this sense of exemplar. It easily extends to the notion of pattern as a design or plan for making something (such as a knitting pattern), or to a decorative design (as on a Paisley shirt).

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Kuhn (1969) introduced the notion of a scientific paradigm. Since the late 1800s, ‘paradigm’ has meant something like ‘thought pattern’. For Kuhn, indeed, paradigms provide exemplary patterns for the activities of ‘normal science’. Thanks to the paradigm, these activities become a predictably structured set of values, techniques, educational practices, etc. (a disciplinary matrix). In the postscript to the 1969 edition of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn attempts to ward off misunderstandings by stating clearly that the primary meaning of paradigm is as exemplar rather than as disciplinary matrix.

Interestingly, in Kuhn’s work we encounter once again our pattern of gathering and dispersal. That is to say, the paradigm/pattern is an exemplary piece of scientific work that has the improbable effect of transforming a state of confused and chaotic dispersal into a gathered unity of scientific practice. The paradigm-as-exemplar (e.g. Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Optiks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry or Lyell’s Geology) commands an agreement and a commitment that is unprecedented. It unifies. The exemplar organizes the many disparate scientists into one paradigmatic venture, since the paradigm must be ‘sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ (ibid.: 10). Thus the paradigm, for Kuhn, collects the mulitiplicity into a gathered unity, and puts an end to the scene of rival camps squabbling at cross-purposes in their different theory languages. This discovery was a genuine surprise to Kuhn: ‘What is surprising. . . is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear’ (ibid.: 17).

A paradigm thus gathers a previously dispersed multiplicity into an order with clear aims, norms, etc. Not unlike a religion, the paradigm provides a pattern that can be transmitted through time. Not unlike the body of a starling, an established science is a process of continual regeneration of pattern amidst a continual turnover of ‘the many’ components (scientists) of the pattern. Pattern is thus central to notions of order, structure, stability, and so on. Nevertheless, sciences, like organisms, also change, and pattern is also pivotal to an understanding of transformation. We might say that it lends a little stability to change and a little change to stability. Change can thus follow a pattern – e.g. from mechanical to organic solidarity – but such change is also change in pattern.

There are two clear modes of advancement: (1) by gathering more and more details into patterns that are already assigned, and (2) by way of the invention of novel patterns (Whitehead, 1938/1968: 57). In the context of the development of mental patterns (‘schemata’), Piaget called (a) ‘assimilation’ and (b) ‘accommodation’. In the context of the history of science, Kuhn wrote of (a) ‘normal science’ (in which scientists ‘mop up’ facts in accordance to accepted paradigmatic practice) and (b) ‘revolutionary science’ (in which a novel pattern of scientific practice accommodates anomalous findings). The history of a given science thus reflects the pattern of our starlings, with periods of (gathered) normal science being interrupted by the dispersal of revolution Pattern 139

until the new paradigm establishes itself (cf. Stenner, 2002). When a scientific discipline changes paradigm, or when a child crosses a threshold of develop- ment, there is a change in dominant pattern: in form of thought as well as content. We once again begin to see patterns in common between sociology and the natural sciences: ‘scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process’ (Kuhn, 1969).

In returning to the pattern of gathering and dispersal, my intention is not to make the absurd claim that there are no relevant differences between swarming starlings and the development of science. Recognizing this pattern demands a feat of abstraction. It is only by dropping practically all of the detail in both situations that their structural equivalence can be grasped. The structural equivalence is the manner of the contrast between gathered and dispersed states of a multiplicity. The details about the nature of the multiplicity at play – the differences between birds and scientists (or what we could call the differences in the forms of matter involved) – are not necessary for the identification of this manner. Indeed, such details of matter are likely to distract us from the pattern. A pattern, as Whitehead (1927/1928: 115) suggests, is the ‘manner’ of a complex contrast abstracted from the ‘matter’ of its concrete embodiment. The matter, however, may well be highly relevant for explaining the pattern. It is here that differences between the natural and social sciences become distinctly relevant. It makes a considerable difference if the many agents that make up one’s pattern are termites, starlings or people. Developments in science involve highly intelligent agency absent among the starlings.

Figurations

Although science has been dominated by number, the question of pattern lies beyond all questions of mere quantity. One learns little by attending only to the sheer number of starlings involved in a swarm. Having said that, number is itself nothing but an extreme (and useful) form of abstraction characterized by pattern. Given three rocks, three rabbits and three Rabbis, their matter is irrelevant to the manner of their ‘threeness’. This differential importance of pattern and number is particularly apparent in the social sciences, where number is often used merely as a proxy to help visualize the actual data, as in suicide statistics (Durkheim, 1897/1951). To illustrate the value accorded to pattern in sociology, I will turn briefly to the work of a sociologist who took process seriously: Norbert Elias.

Norbert Elias used the word pattern regularly, but the concept is best expressed in his core construct: figuration. As Goudsblom and Mennell (1998) point out, Elias derived figuration from the Gestalt notion of configuration. In adapting the notion to sociological matters, Elias emphasized that human beings are interdependent and never to be understood as simply self-contained individuals. More specifically, lives are lived in social figurations that – much like a tango, mazurka or some other dance – require specific men and women to compose them, but exist as a pattern relatively independently of those 140 Paul Stenner

specific individuals who happen to be ‘dancing’ here and now. Consistent with our analysis so far, the temporary unity of figuration is a pattern that persists despite the constant turnover of its elements or components, and which accordingly entails dynamics of its own that are engendered by, but not reducible to, the agency of its elements. Like dances and paradigms, figurations change and develop over time, and are nested within larger figurations that also change.

For the most part, Elias concerned himself with changing and historically specific issues, but there is one pattern that he considered universal. This concerns the established-outsider figuration that Elias and Scotson (1965/1994) discuss in a book based on fieldwork with working class communities near Leicester in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An established-outsider figuration, as the name suggests, is a pattern involving the relations between at least two interdependent groups in which the ‘established’ group reserves good things for itself (such as social positions with a high power potential) and excludes members of the other group(s) from them (and otherwise exploits them). This figuration recurs in numerous forms throughout history, as with feudal lords and their villeins; ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’; Gentiles and Jews; men and women; capitalist and proletariat; powerful nation state and relatively powerless; and so on. A key part of the pattern at play is that the more powerful group considers themselves superior as people and as endowed with a unique group charisma, which merits their powerful position. The interdependent less powerful group, by contrast, is viewed as deserving its position due to innate inferiority and lack of virtue.

To investigate how these practices, images and beliefs are actually produced and maintained, Elias and Scotson conducted a detailed study of a particular example of the figuration. As Elias puts it:

one encountered in this small community what appeared to be a universal regularity of any established-outsider figuration: the established group attributed to its members superior human characteristics; it excluded all members of the other group from non-occupational social contact with its own members; the taboo on such contacts was kept alive by means of social control such as praise-gossip about those who observed it and the threat of blame-gossip against suspected offenders.

(ibid.: xvi) What is particularly instructive about the Elias and Scotson study is that this pattern was played out between two neighbouring communities that seemed identical in practically all respects (class, ethnicity, religion, income, education, standard of housing) except that ‘one group was formed by old residents established in the neighbourhood for two or three generations and the other was a group of newcomers’ (ibid.: xvii).

The study could thus be thought of as an examination of the minimal conditions required to engender the established-outsider pattern (and as such Pattern 141

it is a precursor to Henri Tajfel’s (1970) Minimal Groups Paradigm in social psychology):

one could see that ‘oldness’ of association, with all that it implied, was, on its own, able to create the degree of group cohesion, the collec- tive identification, the commonality of norms, which are apt to induce the gratifying euphoria that goes with the consciousness of belonging to a group of higher value and with the complementary contempt for other groups.

(Elias and Scotson, 1965/1994: xvii) The phrase ‘with all that it implied’ is not inconsequential here. Indeed, what ‘oldness’ of association implied in this case was a significant difference in the cohesion of the two groups. Families that had known each other over generations had evolved a common set of norms and mode of living with an internally complex hierarchy, and this itself constitutes a significant power advantage with respect to a barely integrated set of newcomers. It enabled the established group to reserve influential social positions for its own members, for instance, and this in turn enhances cohesion while denying it to the excluded. In this case, cohesion = power.

In other words, in relation to the pattern that has been the theme throughout this chapter, the ‘established’ community was relatively gathered and the ‘outsider’ community relatively dispersed. Elias suggests that inequalities we typically attribute in other situations to more obviously visible factors, such as race or class, may actually be underpinned by the less visible factor of cohesion. The unexpected parallels with the history of science should be immediately apparent: a paradigm creates an establishment in a science, which is to say that it establishes it. It is interesting that the discovery of this pattern appears to have been no less a surprise for Elias than it was for Kuhn:

The sameness of the pattern of stigmatisation used by high power groups in relation to their outsider groups all over the world – the sameness of this pattern in spite of all the cultural differences – may at first be a little unexpected. But the symptoms of human inferiority which a high-powered established group is most likely to perceive in a low-powered outsider group, which serve their members as justification for their own elevated position and as proof of their own superior worth, are usually engendered in members of the inferior group – inferior in terms of their power ratio – by the very conditions of their outsider position and the humiliation and oppression that go with it.

(ibid.: xxvi)

Subject/object

Before concluding, a brief abstract detour is necessary if the device of pattern is to fulfil its potential. Is pattern something in the world or merely something 142 Paul Stenner

in the eye of the beholder: an illusion that might disappear when properly understood? Carefully conceived, I suggest that the device of pattern can help precisely to avoid this kind of bifurcation of the world into subject and object, observer and observed, in which the subjective mind of the observer projects its imaginary patterns on to a supposedly real material world (patterned or not as it is, whether ‘experienced’ or not). This will require a non-representational (Gibson, 1966; Brown and Stenner, 2009) articulation of the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity in relation to pattern.

First, with respect to subjectivity, it is important not to deny the phenomenon that Bartlett calls effort after meaning, whereby people tend to impose meaningful patterns on what may turn out to be random events, or the Gestalt psychological phenomenon of Prägnanz, whereby we simplify perceptual data into the most convenient pattern (see Ash, 1998). The swarming starlings clearly do not occupy simply two states, one gathered, one dispersed, but take on innumerable positions, none of which will ever be exactly repeated. In fact, part of the joy of watching them is the experience of ‘Bergsonian’ duration, whereby one configuration ‘melts’ into the next as when a musical melody unfolds in real time.2 _{There is nevertheless a tendency for my perceptual}

experience to identify and enhance contrast effects, ‘cutting out’ or ‘parsing’ simplified patterns of image from the undivided flux that Bergson called the ‘fluid continuity of the real’ (Bergson, 1911/1998). As the Gestalt psychologists emphasized, this tendency is nothing less than a search for the relative invariants of regularity, repetition and predictability (i.e. of pattern), without which the complexity and perpetual novelty of the experienced-world would overwhelm us. In principle, this is also why social scientists are interested in patterns: grasping a genuine pattern renders the world more comprehensible, predictable and tractable.

There is no doubt, in short, that ‘subjectivity’ is characterized by what we might call patterning: the more-or-less active and creative tendency to lend pattern, rather than to merely receive and transmit what is given. Patterning is characterized by ‘subtraction’ in that it entails a reduction in complexity with respect to the possibilities offered by the data at issue. Patterning, in short, is a matter of selectivity: out of all the possibilities for experience offered by the world, only this experience is actualized, and it is actualized in accordance with the present concerns and past experiences of the subject. As Whitehead (1927/1928: 21) insists, an occasion of experience (a happening) involves a subject entertaining its objects and selectively patterning them into a unity. Let us call ‘subjectivity’ nothing but this process of patterning or lending pattern as experienced from the perspective of the emerging event. In a given subjective occasion, the many (data) are grasped as one, and thereby increased by one (the pattern enters the world). Once the patterning has happened, we are left with the pattern. Let us therefore call the pattern thus produced an ‘object’ to distinguish it from the subjective process of patterning. This pattern/object can then take its place as one of the many patterned objects to be entertained and patterned in the event of the next happening. Since a subject patterns its objects, we might say that subjectivity objectifies. The world

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is objectified in a given pattern. Subjectivity is the becoming of objectivity, and objective reality is the expression of experience. In this resolutely non- representational account, subjectivity is not a stage-play about the real world, but a key ingredient in its concretion, and the device of pattern is pivotal to its articulation.

Elsewhere, following Whitehead and Bergson, I have suggested that a key problem with representational thought based on a bifurcated nature is, first, that subject and object are divorced and, second, that subjectivity, agency, experience and so on are construed as purely a matter of the high-level, conscious experiences of human beings (Stenner, 2008). Instead, subject and object must be seen as intimately related moments of experience and expression (patterning/patterned), and experience, subjectivity and agency must be recognized as being distributed throughout nature, albeit with more or less relevance and consequence. It is not by accident, for example, that Hofstadter refers to his ants as agents, as it is their (minimal) selectivity, taken in unison, that generates the emergent powers of the colony. Termites, likewise, have comparatively minimal agency, but it is their capacity to differentiate between a large and a small lump of clay and to act differently towards them that