The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like,
compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because
the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive IRs,
which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It
is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people
reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense.
Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred
objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively
raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were
self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social
structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into
property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.
As individuals move through this grid of encounters, they generate their
own histories of ritual participation. We may call this an interaction ritual
chain. Each person acquires a personal repertoire of symbols loaded with
membership significance. Depending on the degree of cosmopolitanism and
social density of the group situations to which they have been exposed, they
will have a symbolic repertoire of varying degrees of abstraction and reifica-
tion, of different generalized and particularized contents. This constitutes their
cultural capital (CC).^4
And they will have, at any point in time, a level of emotional energy (EE),
by which I mean the kind of strength that comes from participating success-
fully in an interaction ritual. It is a continuum, ranging from a high end of
confidence, enthusiasm, good self-feelings; through a middle range of lesser
emotional intensity; on down to a low end of depression, lack of initiative,
and negative self-feelings. Emotional energy is long-term, to be distinguished
from the transient, dramatically disruptive outbursts (fear, joy, anger, etc.)
which are more conventionally what we mean by “emotions.”^5 Emotional
energy is the most important kind of emotion for its effects on IR chains. It
fluctuates depending on recent social experience: intense ritual participation
elevates emotional energy, rejection from ritual membership lowers it; domi-
nating a group situation raises emotional energy, being dominated lowers it;
membership rituals within a high-ranking group give high amounts of emo-
tional energy, membership rituals within a low-ranking group give modest
emotional energy.
An individual’s trajectory of action at any given moment depends on where
that person is situated in relation to the local social structure, the networks in
which one participates. From the individual’s point of view, this is his or her
opportunity structure. From the point of view of understanding the whole set
of individuals, we need to know what the whole network looks like: How
many other persons does each one have contact with, and how is each matched


Coalitions in the Mind • 29
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