Self & Mental Illness

• Self is often implicated in mental illness
• The “illness” lies in a person’s failure to regulate their behavior according to social norms (malfunctioning of self-control)
• Mental illness in this case is regarded as a form of social deviance (pg. 221)
• The medical definition, however, stresses the clinical nature of mental illness

Problem with DSM Definition

“The concept of mental disorder, like many other concepts in medicine and science, lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations… Mental disorders have also been defined by a variety of concepts. Each is a useful indicator for a mental disorder, but none is equivalent to the concept, and different situations call for different definitions.” DSM-IV. xxi

What is Mental Illness?

• Disorders of the mind
• “Abnormal” behavioral malfunctions
  • “odd” - “bizarre” or “strange”
  • “bad” - “harmful” to oneself or others
  • “insane” - “out of one’s mind”
• Normative stigma
  • - e.g., psychotic neurotic

Limitations of the Theatrical Metaphor

“A character staged in a theater is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence [sic] man; but the successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques - the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” p. 254-5

Mental Illness

• What is mental illness?
• The medical definition
• The sociological definition
• Self and mental illness

The Real Self Can Be False

“While we could retain the common-sense notion that fostered appearances can be discredited by a discrepant reality, there is often no reaon for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embrarrass… For many sociological issues it may not even be necessary to decide which is more real, the fostered impression or the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving… We will want to know what kind of impression of reality can shatter the fostered impression of reality, and what reality really is can be left to other students.” pg. 66

What Is Behind the Mask?

• There is no “real” self behind the mask: pg. 252
• The self is a performed character or a dramatic effect: pg. 252-3
• We are what we perform, and, in that sense, the mask is the self: pg. 253

Notes from Sociology of Self, S. Zhao - November 24th, 2008

Deviance Managment

• Two “verbal management” strategies
  1. Aligning actions - by the perpetrator
  2. Altercasting - by the perpetrated

Model of Altercasting

Altercasting

• A verbal technique that is employed to cast others into a particular role that makes them behave in the way the perpetrator wishes them to behave.
• This is accomplished in order to avoid formal confrontation and physical violence.

A young girl enjoys an ice cream cone.

She is observed by her younger brother, who desires to have some of her ice cream.

The mother interveines and tells the older sister to “be nice” and share the ice cream with her younger brother, thereby “casting” the older sibbling into the role of the “good sisiter”.

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It was no coincidence that jazz’s rise to prominence was at the juncture of World War II and the increasing demands for social equality from Blackamericans, many of whom including those that were jazz musicians, participated in the war and wanted their public and political due. These were the tumultuous times that would give birth to jazz, or more correctly, bebop. And from this unique American musical form would come a art form that would challenge and resist the status quo of dominant white thought regarding the inferiority of blacks as well as incubate new a consciousness of black intellectualism.

To appreciate bebop’s stance in history, one must observe the history that precedes jazz; specifically, the history of Blackamericans and their ascendance out of slavery and a culture that, as of the 1940’s, was still pro-Jim Crow, either de jure in the North or de facto in the South. For many black musicians, bebop was a means of both insulating and protesting against a cultural system that produced signs and signifiers of black inferiority. These sentiments were gelled in the minds of Blackamerican musicians after returning from World War II, a war that was supposed to have been fought against the notion of racism. And yet, many blacks felt that hypocritically, that same government that sent them off to war still perpetrated state-sanctioned discrimination against Blackamericans, and turned a blind eye to public hostility; both physical and psychological. Thus, it was no coincidence that bebop took musical form with high tempos and hard driving polyrhythms, characteristics that would define its sound, struck back against the ideology of the dominant white culture just as percussively and psychologically as they perceived themselves to be attacked.

Jazz’s musical roots come primarily from the blues, a form of folk music that has its roots in Africa, and secondarily, swing, big band and ragtime music, coming out of the early decades of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Much like its musical forefather, jazz lamented over its existential crisis of being subjugated by a dominant white power. Unlike the blues, however, bebop was not to remain a catharsis, sung in waiting for the hope of salvation through the benevolence of God. Rather, rather jazz sought to beseech the wrath of God, its music being fueled with the anger and rage of a people’s mistreatment for some three hundred-plus years. This anger was so prevalent in the music, that by the latter part of the 20th century, bebop and its alternate forms, such as post-bop and avant-garde, were perceived as “the angry black man’s music”. This collective anger is evident in the recounting of how jazz was perceived even as late as the 1970’s, by Ed Michel, a music produced for one of jazz’s most prestigious labels, Impulse!:

By the seventies “it seemed as though Impulse became the label characterized by the angry black tenor man,” .

Not content to site on the sidelines, jazz throughout its history would comment time and time again on social justice topics ranging from the plight of Blackamericans in the prison-complex system (such as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, an album in direct reference to the 1971 Attica Prison riots) to such lamentations of the past as John Coltrane’s Song For The Underground Railroad.

At the transition point between jazz and swing/big band music, was a desire on the part of these musicians to be taken seriously. Many felt that as members of swing bands, they were forced to take a back seat to the audience – a predominantly white audience at that. Their music was reduced to a sort of ambiance, where particularity of the musician was inconsequential. Billy Ekstine, who led one of the most famous jazz ensembles during the 40’s and 50’s, commented that many popular songs were re-arranged with fast tempos where the audience could not dance to them, forcing them to pay attention to the band as the primary focus.

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Human beings learn to act and behave in a variety of ways in society. The various modes of behavior depend on to whom one is speaking and what the objective is. This behavior is learned from nearly the cradle and is negotiated to the grave. In Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life, we see just how intricate and deeply ingrained this form of face-to-face interaction is between human beings. But is this necessarily how it needs to be and perhaps more importantly, what would it look like if face-to-face interaction operated in a different paradigm. Those are the questions we will examine here and now.

Before we can ask the question of what a different paradigm of face-to-face interaction would look like, we must first examine its mechanics and what it is made up of. To jump straight in, Goffman’s definition of face-to-face interaction is based on the use of the self as a tool in which we negotiate with others. When initiating this intercourse between others, the individual in question will wish to employ a number of tactics to achieve the desired goal. This may run the gamut of a calculative approach to a manipulative one. And while the situation and nature of the other may greatly influence the approach the individual takes, the objective is always the same: garnering a positive reaction from the other. From superiors, equals, and subordinates, the individual is nearly always seeking a positive reaction and reception of themselves from the other.

To grasp this agenda of the individual, we will need to flush out some of the terminology that Goffman uses to describe these kinds of encounters. In fact, encounter itself is a term Goffman uses to define the interplay between individuals when they are in one another’s immediate presence. Here, individuals ply their various techniques of influence on one another in a reciprocal fashion, in hopes of controlling the situation to give off the best possible impression.

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From its very beginning, the Nazi regime sought to engender a sense of purity and beauty, wrapped around and embodied within a race of people: the German people. Through the manifestation of this aesthetic through the German folk, the Nazis were able to completely dominate all definitions and concepts of beauty within German society. That which appeased the Nazi sensibility of beauty, aiding it in its objective of societal domination, would be appropriated as pure art or pure beauty (as was in their obsession with classical Greek or Roman art). And in a move of complete and total control, that which fell outside the pale of consideration was labeled base and deviant. Through examining the ways in which the Nazis appropriated art to further their cause we can learn more about the role that art plays in war and tyranny.

In many ways, one can simplify the approach that the Nazis took, in relation to the co-opting of art for their purposes, as a two-pronged approach. One involved the designation and appropriation of Greek, Roman and Nordic art forms. The Nazis had a fascination with antiquity and the ancient that would border on fanatic. But their association with these historical art histories went further than misplaced admiration. They saw themselves as the inheritors and benefactors of these great art and civilizational traditions. The second concerned banishing certain forms of art as deviant and abnormal. The Nazis even went so far as to suggest the modern maladies that society faced were in direct correlation to deviant art. Abstract paintings that might show a disjointed face was in fact a catalyst for mental health instability. This strain of thought permeated to all forms of human disfiguration. By having an iron grip on the possibility of aesthetics, the Nazis held total sway over the public discussion and consumption of art in German society.

The above statements illustrate the methods of how the Nazi regime held sway of the German conscience of art but the totality of how the Nazis saw themselves as a living aesthetic goes even further. With their chief ideology, Adolph Hitler, heavily influenced by other anti-Semitic artists such as Richard Wagner, Hitler borrowed many of the themes from Wagner’s operas, such as Twilight of the Gods, an opera that saw the death of its hero as an act of aestheticism. This would prove to be a haunting foreshadowing of how, in the final days of the Nazi regime, the Nazis would fall and more importantly how they would see their own demise as a list will and testament to beauty. There was a great deal of fetishism over the beauty of death in Nazism. From the above mentioned view on their own demise as a sort of Götterdämmerung, the Nazis took it a step further to incorporate this into their works of architecture. Many of the designs of buildings and structures were provisioned with age and decay, a longing for the Nazis and the German people to fade into antiquity much like the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Death was not the only sentiment the Nazis sought to evoke in their use of art. Another equally important notion was that of struggle and resistance. Despite their admiration of ancient Greek art traditions, such as statues, the Nazis saw themselves embroiled in conflict against the rest of the world and that manifested in their art. Unlike the Greek busts, Nazi statues were often portrayed with a sense of pain and anguish on their faces. Male bodies were overtly muscular. With these contorted faces and straining bodies, this art conveys a sense of intense agony and grimace. That, in an almost Calvinist work ethic, this anguish takes a pseudo work ethic.

Marxist analysts of culture, as well as sociologists, have always struggled with the problem of how to explain the social nature of art without making art into an appendage to ideology, that is an expression of class interests. Most Marxist art historians agree that reflection theory, i.e. artistic works a reproduction of the norms and values of a social group - such as the Boston elite for example - is a rather crude way of defining the relations between artistic production and social surroundings. Reviewing various Marxist approaches Janet Wolff tries to find a more subtle approach.

Wolff asserts that all art is ideological, in a broad sense, in that it is socially and historically situated, related to people’s material conditions.

“Works of art (…) are not closed, self-contained and transcendent entities, but are the product of specific historical practices on the part of identifiable social groups in given conditions, and therefore bear the imprint of the ideas, values and conditions of existence of those groups, and their representatives in particular artists” (49).

Marx himself has left ambiguous, contradictory statements on the relation of art to society. In The German Ideology, he affirms that ideas reflect material or class interests; that culture is a representation of the bourgeoisie’s, the ruling classes desire to organize society according to its interests. In Grundrisse (the draft version of his critique of the political economy), he explains the paradox that Greek art, though created by an economically backward people with a slave economy, still sets aesthetic standards and gives us enjoyment. Marx never wrote systematically on the topics of culture and art.

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