#randall collins

[vigorouslycoy]

"you can do sociology anywhere. all you need is to have a willingness to look for patterns"

[fairest]

On violence

“Violence is hard because humans are hard-wired for interactional entrainment and solidarity and this propensity is stronger than mobilized aggression. Thus most people stick at bluster and bluff. To be violent, most people have to overcome fear and tension, and this happens either in ritualized encounters in which status concerns are primary, as in duels, or in unusual situations when people are sucked into a tunnel of violence, when normal perceptions are distorted, pulse rates accelerate as cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, and there is forward momentum down, forward panic, found especially in micro-conflicts in which bullies attack the weak without mercy, but found also in wars, when one army falters and begins to flee, emboldening the other to rush forward and engage in a killing frenzy. This forward panic leads to most of the lethality in war.”

—Michael Mann in On Wars discussing Randall Collins's: Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory

[dutlukdergi]

Felsefe tarihinin haritası

Martin Heidegger ‘Hegel’in Tinin Fenomenolojisi’ni neden yazmıştır ya da Hans-Georg Gadamer ‘Hegel’in Diyalektiği’ni veya Henri Bergson ‘Plotinos’u? Jung’a o devasa ‘Nietzsche’nin Zerdüşt’ü Üzerine Seminerler’i yaptırtan nedir? Alain Badiou, ‘Platon’un Devleti’ni neden yazmış olabilir? Ve Spinoza, ‘Descartes Felsefesinin İlkeleri ve Metafizik Düşünceler’i neden yazdı? (Şöyle de sorabiliriz: İslam…

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[m-tea]

Goffman concluded: “not men and their moments, but moments and their men.” In gender-neutral language: not individuals and their interactions, but interactions and their individuals; not persons and their passions, but passions and their persons. “Every dog will have its day” is more accurately “every day will have its dog.” Incidents shape their incumbents, however momentary they may be; encounters make their encountees. It is games that make sports heroes, politics that makes politicians into charismatic leaders, although the entire weight of record-keeping, news-story-writing, award-giving, speech-making, and advertising hype goes against understanding how this comes about. To see the common realities of everyday life sociologically requires a gestalt shift, a reversal of perspectives. Breaking such deeply ingrained conventional frames is not easy to do; but the more we can discipline ourselves to think everything through the sociology of the situation, the more we will understand why we do what we do.

Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains

[eka-mark]

Garfinkel’s most important contribution is to show that humans ... construct mundane social order by consistently using practices to avoid recognizing how arbitrarily social order is actually put together. We keep up conventions, not because we believe in them, but because we studiously avoid questioning them. Garfinkel demonstrated this most dramatically in his breaching experiments, in which he forced people into situations that caused them to recognize indexicality (i.e., that they rely on tacit acceptance of what things mean contextually) and reflexivity (that there are infinite regresses of justifying one’s interpretations). Interestingly enough, the reactions of his subjects were always intensely emotional. Usually it was an emotional outburst: becoming nervous and jittery, shaken, displaying anxiety and sometimes shock (Garfinkel 1967, 44, 221–26) Sometimes it was depression, bewilderment, or anger at having been put in a situation where they constructed a reality they later discovered to be false. In short, when people have to recognize that they are tacitly constructing their social worlds, and in an arbitrary and conventional way, rather than simply reacting to a world that is objectively there, they show intense negative emotions.

Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (pp. 103-104)

the reference is to Garfinkel’s book Studies in Ethnomethodology

[j2parman]

While labor has gradually been replaced by technology for the past 200 years, with the rise of information technology and, in the very near future, artificial intelligence, that process is currently reaching its apogee, in at least two respects: first, it has vastly accelerated, and second, having in the second half of the 20th century destroyed the manual working class, it is now attacking and about to destroy the middle class as well - in other words, the new petty bourgeoisie that is the very carrier of the neocapitalist and neoliberal lifestyle of 'hard work and hard play,' of careerism-cum-consumerism, which may indeed be considered the indispensable cultural foundation of contemporary capitalism's society. ... Electronization will do to the middle class what mechanization did to the working class, and it will do it much faster. The result will be unemployment in the order of 50 to 70 percent by the middle of the century, hitting those who had hoped, by way of expensive education and disciplined job performance (in return for stagnant or declining wages) to escape the threat of redundancy attendant on the working classes. The benefits will meanwhile go to 'a tiny capitalist class of robot owners' who will become immeasurably rich. The drawback for them is, however, that they will increasingly find that their product 'cannot be sold because too few persons have enough income to buy it. Extrapolating this underlying tendency,' Randall Collins writes, 'Marx and Engels predicted the downfall of capitalism and its replacement with socialism,' and this is what Collins also predicts.

Wolfgang Streeck, “Introduction,” How Will Capitalism End? Verso, 2016, pages 9-10. Randall Collins is a contributor to Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford, 2013.

[eka-mark]

[T]he intellectual who is squeezed out of recognition by the limited attention space [in academia] is often alienated against the intellectual world in particular. Given that the professional intellectual operates by deeply internalizing the social structures of the field into one’s own mind, this can be an especially intimate and painful form of introversion.

Interaction Ritual Chains - Randall Collins

[eka-mark]

This is a typical dilemma created by all exclusionary rituals: to attempt to destroy the ritual that imposes lower status on outsiders, or to force one’s way in.

Interaction Ritual Chains - Randall Collins