I’m hitting 70 as I’m writing this, though I’ve only actually reached my late 50s in my ‘sociological autobiography’. But I can please myself what I write when: no publisher to satisfy. So in this fragment I’m drawing on Schutz plus some thinking of my own (in a continuing collaboration with Aksel Tjora) on familiarity. It is a topic for analysis that has grown in salience over the last decade or so.
In his Phenomenology of the Social World Schutz distinguishes between types of relation. He differentiates past, present and future by reference to predecessors, consociates or contemporaries and successors. Like Bauman, he acknowledges the impact of past and future on the present, but he has most to say about relations in the present.
The everyday to-ing and fro-ing that comprises the lifeworld has a number of different dimensions. Most obvious are those face-to-face relations that are the very bread and butter of social interaction (in Schutz’ terminology, the ‘pure’ or ‘we-orientation’). These relations find individuals actively participating in each other’s lives: two interior streams of consciousness are synchronised. Face-to-face interaction outside of this degree of intimacy are characterised by a ‘thou-orientation’.
But the dimension of consociates or contemporaries has a much broader remit than this: it encompasses people who are known but are only encountered in passing; people who have not been encountered but in likelihood will be in the near future; people who are not known but afford points of reference for future activity and projects; and what Schutz calls ‘collective realities’, for example government agencies, that can affect people’s lives in the absence of direct contact. Schutz writes in these instances of a ‘they-orientation’.
Ok, so this is a bit much for what purports to be a largely personal as well as chronological narrative; but there is a purpose. It is a fragment about the importance of familiars: predecessors, consociates/contemporaries and successors, and extending beyond the actual to the virtual (a step at the time beyond Schutz’ grasp).
A certain amount should be axiomatic. As I’ve recounted, my parents are gone; but of course they persist in my life (and as if in confirmation of this I have black and white photographs of them in my bedroom). They remain – a poignant reference group – even though they’ve gone: the past is in my present and my future. (The sad and premature death of Gareth Williams a few weeks prior to writing this doesn’t mean that he has gone from my life.) Characters who are predecessors and successors – as well as fictitious personnel – can also constitute telling reference groups. This much is obvious. But how to encapsulate it all?
I want to differentiate between actual and virtual types of familiar that continue to play a significant role in my biography, and where possible to provide some illustrations: I aspire to do a bit of sociology even as I peruse my life-events.
Typologies can be useful heuristic devices, that is, they can: (a) provide a frame within which thinking differently can be introduced, and (b) act as catalysts, paving the way for more precise, sophisticated and adventurous endeavours. Let’s begin with the relatively straightforward world of consociates or contemporaries. My indebtedness to Schutz is as clear as is the tentative nature of what follows!
We-orientation
- Intimates: partners, family and sometimes kin, plus long-term (proven) friends who are also confidantes;
- Solidaries: those with whom one experiences/acts out (tribe–like) bonds of solidarity, the like-minded, close work colleagues, fellow club members, similarly committed socio-political activists;
Thou-orientation
Acquaintances: those who are neither intimates nor solidaries but with whom there is regular and affective contact, ranging from neighbours and other casual relations to shopkeepers and barristas;
- Passers-by: routine accomplices in the business of daily living to whom one nods acknowledgement as they pass by;
They-orientation
- The generalised other: borrowing Mead’s term, this comprises the ‘world-at-large’;
- Collectives: akin to Schutz’ ‘collective realities’, organisations, bodies, groups with whom dealing is or becomes essential;
- Peers: people in relation to/against whom one judges oneself, putative arbiters;
- Fictional others: non-existent others from literature, films, tv, social media who constitute telling reference groups.
Ok, it’s just a start, and I confess it. But Weberian ideal types like this don’t have unambiguous empirical referents, so cut me some slack. Plus, people can feature in more than one category.
As far as predecessors and successors are concerned, I am sorely tempted to suggest that the same typology – as it were, at a step removed – has applicability. Further, this might apply also to the virtual domain to which Schutz had no point of access.
A few examples might clarify these assertions. Take my parents, Ron and Margaret, intimate protagonists in prior blogs. Obviously they continue to afford a poignant node of reference despite the unequivocal bluntness of their absence: they remain intimates beyond their graves. So too for me do a plethora of once-known – solidary – if now deceased, philosophers and social theorists, like Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jurgen Habermas and Roy Bhaskar for example. I cannot conceive of a future devoid of their influence and input.
Thanks to my daughter Rebecca I was co-opted into the virtual on my retirement (‘something for you to do’). It strikes me now that intimate and solidary relations can be established and consolidated via social media like Twitter and Facebook (I appreciate that UK’s youth has already moved on from such platforms). I cannot here go into (tedious) detail, but it seems apparent with reference to virtual representatives of ‘thou-‘ and ‘they-orientations’, for example, that even fictional others can exercise an influence via the imaginaries of dream- (or Walter Mitty-like) fantasies. As Schutz signalled, there is a profusion of ‘multiple realities’ (a profusion extending, it has transpired, well beyond his ken).
I guess it’s not altogether inappropriate to ‘go sociological’ in what was from the start tagged as ‘a sociological autobiography’, but there you go. Let’s hope that normal service is resumed shortly. In the meantime I humbly, and as it were in retrospect, acknowledge the near-infinite supply of others of all types who feed, as Sartre wisely insisted, not my being but my becoming. A handful of days off my 70th birthday, the biblical three score and ten, there remains a smidgeon or more of time left to re-invent myself or to inject something – hopefully positive – into what will become the being, when all’s said and done, that I leave behind. In any case I will live on awhile in a handful of others’ presents.