#howard becker

[rescatandoletras]

“La cuestión de hasta dónde está dispuesto a llegar un grupo que intenta imponer sus reglas sobre otros grupos de la sociedad nos plantea un problema diferente: ¿quién puede, de hecho, obligar a unos a aceptar sus reglas y cuáles serían las razones de su éxito? Ésta es, por supuesto, una cuestión de poder político y económico. [...] Por el mornento alcanza con decir que, en los hechos, la gente está todo el tiempo imponiendo sus reglas sobre los otros, aplicándolas sin mayor consentimiento y en contra de la voluntad de la otra parte. En gran medida, por ejemplo, las reglas para los jovenes son formuladas por sus mayores. Si bien los jóvenes de este país ejercen una enorme influencia cultural —los medios masivos de comunicación están hechos a la medida de sus intereses—, muchos tipos de reglas que se aplican a los jóvenes están hechas por los adultos. [...] Esto es visto como algo legítimo, ya que se considera que los jóvenes no tienen ni la sabiduría ni la responsabilidad suficiente para instituir sus propias reglas.

Del mismo modo, en más de un aspecto también es cierto que en nuestra sociedad los hombres hacen las reglas para las mujeres [...] Los negros están sujetos a normas hechas para ellos por los blancos. Los de origen extranjero y quienes tienen alguna particularidad étnica suelen tener que cumplir reglas establecidas por la minoría protestante anglosajona. La clase media hace las reglas que la clase baja, debe obedecer en las escuelas, en las cortes y todas partes.

La diferencia en la capacidad de establecer reglas y de imponer a otros responde esencialmente a diferencias de poder (ya sea legal o extralegal). Los grupos cuya posición  social les confiere armas y poder para hacerlo están en mejores condiciones de imponer sus reglas. Las distinciones de edad, sexo, etnia y clase están relacionadas con las diferencias de poder, que a su vez explican el grado en que cada uno de esos grupos es capaz de imponer sus reglas a los otros.

Además de reconocer que la desviación es producto de la respuesta de la gente a ciertos tipos de conducta, a las que etiqueta de desviadas, tampoco debemos perder de vista que las reglas que esos rótulos generan y sostienen no responden a la opinión de todos. Por el contrario, son objeto de conflictos y desacuerdos: son parte del proceso político de la sociedad.”

— Outsiders: hacia una sociología de la desviación, Howard Becker (Apuntes sobre Marginación y Exclusión Social IV)

[thecottoncandyprostitutes]

"Los colegios secundarios y las universidades, si bien pretenden ser comunidades de intelectuales que discuten temas de interés común en forma libre y desinteresada, no son tal cosa. Los profesores saben más que los alumnos y tienen las credenciales para demostrarlo, toman examen a sus discípulos y califican sus monografías, y están sentados en la cima de la montaña en todas las maneras imaginables mientras los estudiantes continúan en la base. Algunos se resienten ante tamaña desigualdad; pero los estudiantes inteligentes —que aspiran a ser intelectuales algún dia— la aceptan de buen grado. Al igual que Rosanna, creen que los profesores que les enseñan saben más que ellos y deben ser imitados, mas allá de que sus actos tengan sentido o sean un completo despropósito." Manual de escritura para científicos sociales: cómo empezar y terminar una tesis, un libro o un artículo, Howard Becker

[crionic-soc]

Becker also points out that any social group, insider or outsider, ends by divorcing itself from the group it’s supposed to be serving. “Everyone has an ideal student or audience in mind, and we never get them,” he points out. This makes teachers impatient with students, and jazz musicians suspicious of audiences. Jazz musicians smoked weed to get high, but one of the effects was to set them off from the night-club-going customers they despised. “This insight looks original only now,” Becker says. “If you were playing, that was all you heard: ‘Fucking squares, now look what they want!’ I remember learning to leave the stand quickly, before any one could ask me to play ‘Melancholy Baby.’ That was the stuff of every minute of what you were doing.” He adds, “The originality—I shouldn’t even call it that—was to pay attention to it as something worth talking about.”

This insight turned out to apply to a lot more than marijuana smokers. “My dissertation supervisor, Everett Hughes, loved the idea that anything you see in the lowly kind of work is there in privileged work, too, only they don’t talk about it,” he says. “Later on, he went to the American nurses’ association and they hired him as a consultant, and he said, ‘Let’s do some real research: why don’t you talk about how nurses hate patients?’ There was a shocked silence and then someone said, ‘How did you know that?’”

- The Outside Game: How the sociologist Howard Becker studies the conventions of the unconventional by Adam Gopnik

[igiveup]

In his classic Art Worlds, sociologist Howard Becker shows how many roles are implicated in the creation of art, ranging from the person considered the artist to those who make the paintbrushes to those who curate collections. His point was that the idea of “artist” as a lone genius is absurd. One cannot create 'art' without a web of interconnected people, each serving an essential role that makes it possible and shapes its meanings. Now, as has happened before, upended by technological change, previously distinct roles in musical art worlds have broken down. Artists can, at least in the abstract, fulfill any role themselves. But to do it all, let alone do it all well, pushes the boundaries of human capabilities.

Nancy Baym (Playing to the Audience)

[cohen-stark]

I almost bought a Howard Becker's book about how to smoke weed and have a good "trip" while doing it

I love sociology hehehehe

[emblematik]

The Swiss playwright Max Finch, in his play, ‘Biography: A Game,’ embodied this thought in an interesting dramatic situation. A mysterious stranger (”The Recorder”) appears to the main character, Hannes Kürmann, one day, offering him the opportunity to go back over his life, the details of which are available to him through a computer terminal and operator located stage right throughout the action, and change anything he likes. The hero relives a number of crucial moments in his life. The play begins with him trying to change the episode of the party at which he first meets, and eventually sleeps with Antionette Stein, who, as he knows, he will marry and finally kill. When the taxi driver who was called to take her home from the party rings the bell, they both ignore it. Now, looking back, he wants, instead of getting involved with her, to send her away politely, but finds that he cannot change his actions--his character apparently does not have the will to do it--in such a way as to change the eventual outcome. Finally, when the Recorder asks if he wants to change the murder itself, they have this exchange:

Kürmann: I know how it happened. Recorder: By chance? Kürmann: It wasn’t inevitable.

Which expresses nicely my first point, about the nature of this sort of explanation, which conceives events as neither random nor determined. 

But, having chosen not to commit the murder, Kürmann learns that, instead of spending at least twelve years in prison, he now gets cancer, and is on his way to a mean death, with his wife, whom he meant to give a new life by making his new choice, now condemned to visit him religiously.

So far, contingency. But now the Recorder turns to Kürmann’s wife, Antoinette:

Recorder: Frau Kürmann. Antoinette: Yes? Recorder: Do you regret the seven years with him? [Antoinette stares at the Recorder.] If I told you that you too could have the choice, you too can start all over again, would you know what you would do differently in your life? Antoinette: Yes. Recorder: Yes? Antoinette: Yes. Recorder: Then go ahead...You too can choose all over again.

They then replay the opening scene, in which she meets Kürmann for the first time. But this time, when the taxi driver rings, she says goodbye, and walks out of Kürmann’s apartment, and his life, for good.

Kürmann: What now? Recorder: Now she has gone. Kürmann: What now? Recorder: And now you’re free. Kürmann: Free...

And so we are reminded that everything that happened in Kürmann’s life, of course, depended not only on his own actions and choices, but also on what all the other people he was involved with did. If Antoinette changes her life, his will necessarily change as well. He cannot marry and murder someone who walked out of his life so definitively. We might call the dependence of his actions on her intercontingency.

Peirano quotes Norbert Elias speaking of much the same thing:

In contrast [to ‘determinism’], when the indeterminacy, the ‘freedom’ of the individual is stressed, it is usually forgotten that there are simultaneously many mutually dependent individuals...More subtle tools of thought than the usual antithesis of ‘determinism’ and ‘freedom’ are needed if such problems are to be solved. (Elias 1970, 167)

- Howard Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It

[the-beattokeep]

In 1982, Howard Becker developed a concept that is essential for understanding how art is produced. In his view there is not one genius artist alone who creates art, but there is a group of people with a shared knowledge and shared convention who produces art. Art would not exist if the artist, in an enclosed privacy, creates it and leaves it there. The artist needs people who distribute the art, who know about the means that are necessary to produce the art, who know about how to get finances to produce the art, and, last but not least, to know how to get the art to the audiences.

[volim-te-iskreno]

“En medio del océano hay un lugar especial, que es la Puerta del Dragón. Tiene una propiedad maravillosa: cualquier pez que la atraviese se transforma inmediatamente en dragón. Sin embargo, la puerta no tiene un aspecto diferente a la de cualquier parte del océano. De modo que es imposible encontrarla buscándola. La única manera de saber dónde está es advertir que los peces que la cruzan se transforman en dragones. No obstante, cuando un pez la cruza y se transforma en dragón, no cambia de aspecto. Parece exactamente el mismo pez que era antes. Entonces, no podemos saber dónde está la Puerta del Dragón observando atentamente hasta encontrar el lugar donde ocurre el cambio. Además, cuando los peces cruzan la Puerta del Dragón y se transforman en dragones, no se sienten diferentes y, por lo tanto, no saben que se han convertido en dragones. Simplemente son dragones a partir de entonces.” Usted también podría ser un dragón.

Howard Becker