There are a number of social phenomena, some fresh and some standard, that should be reconceptualized as properly ellusive and multi-dimensional rather than distinct and singly operative, as is the case with usual sociological concepts, such as class, status and party, to use Weber’s terms, if these new or newly appreciated phenomena are to be understood accurately. These topics should be seen as if it were seen with a squint, so to speak, rather than right on, which is the way most sociology operates. These matters, old and new, seem ephemeral, however much they are also ubiquitous. They make up the flavor or texture of social life rather than its structure. A shift so radical in the method of theorizing from the invisible but real forces of social life to concepts that are, as it were, seen out of the corner of the eye, deserves being called a new name and “Jello sociology” will do until something better comes along because it conveys the sense that social things are a set of ever changing objects difficult to pin down rather than the firm though invisible forces that prevail-- or at least, more likely, when the time disappears as unnecessary to point out that there has been a more careful definition of sociological analysis rather than a distinctive one.
A good example of an under-examined phenomenon is the deja vu, ordinarily a mental quirk of little significance but which resonates with much else in social life. It is elusive in that it is just barely perceived even if it is ubiquitous and necessary, good objects, one would think, about which sociologists might ponder. A deja vu is the readily recognized perception that an event in the past is repeating itself again although it is not clear why it is happening and even whether it is happening. So you think you met a first time acquaintance at another dinner party, or that you went down a street that somehow lurked as a memory rather than a fresh event, or you heard a person say something that seems uncanny because you hear what is said as having been said before. What the analyst does, however, is provide an explanation for the event rather than describe the experience itself, perhaps because it is too eerie to face on whole. Psychologists say that what has happened is that a memory barely remembered has in fact become registered as a memory or else that some mental quirk has classified or marked a present event as a past one or even that it is part of epilepsy or some serious mental malfunction, but otherwise than that last one, eminently forgettable.
Even those explanations might lead a sociologist to ponder the matter more deeply. A deja vu or a similar experience whereby there is a quirk that reassigns time signatures can account for the persistence through time of the past in the present. Either auditory or visual sensations can echo from the past to the present. What is called socialization includes such echoes, a child hearing in the other room what a parent might well have said a day ago and so internalized as what we anciently called a superego. The same happens as well in dreams. My dead wife still “speaks” to me as if she were an AI recording, piecing together remarks reminiscent of what she said but modified into being what I think she would have said even if it is her kind of remark but a fresh one nonetheless. Such memories that haunt us from the past may have been of considerable influence in a pre-rational primitive mentality where dead people are sensed as somehow alive but in a parallel sphere.
A true deja vu is a rare version of those pre-rational hearings and seeings of another time where we have stripped away how the echoes take place except for the eerie and rare ones called deja vus. But even thinking itself is an ordinary everyday process that also arises out of having thoughts emerge out of you, pop into mind. A thought that is cultivated in the ruminations of the past pop out as a moment of insight occurs when at least a bit more clarity is achieved even if it takes a number of additional steps are to be taken so as to move from an intuition to a full fledged statement, its character being that we do not have time signatures of its previous stages of a thought. You sort of remember a fleeting thought over time that you did hear as a similar remark made long previous, but where you notice why it struck you as an event not remembered as such rather than as a reverberation of being already experienced. Or, to use what might seem a now threadbare theory of the same thing, that your unconscious was doing its dreamwork or had been in a dream and so because the unconscious follows certain archetypes, it will produce an experience reminiscent of an experience already had or imagined in a dream or a reverie or a projection or a hope. In that sense, there is a collective unconscious that consists of all those things collected unawares in your own head rather than in the transmission between real souls to a group soul, however tidy it may think there is some such thing.
Sometimes you can track down the source of what becomes a constructed memory. I had seen on Google Streets the incline of the road of my house I lived in when I was a child in the Bronx as well as the width of that street and the benches across my street that faced my building. Years later, I had actually walked up that block and had an eerie sense of having that exact incline and width and appurtenances that I had remembered. That could be explained easily enough. I had walked that block thousands of times in my childhood and so it stuck with me and had already been recaptured in Google Streets and so now seeing the actuality of it was a current, existential event, as well as a memory and a newer memory recovered and so multiple reinforcements, in fact and in imagination, of something that occurred. That explained away what would have been a deja vu, that experience, if I did not have the factual references. But it was still like a deja vu because it was eerie and because it was recovered as if from nothing when, in fact, I knew from which it had been recovered.
The point of the deja vu, like the other of these phenomena, are diffuse and variegated and just barely perceivable, even more so that they are about times conjoined rather than hallucinations, which are a different thing in that they spring from a single source or distortion rather than from an amalgam of memories, near memories and current presentments. The difficulty is to find evidence not because it is not apparent everywhere, but because it is difficult to ascertain whether the part of the whole is related to another part of the whole, as would be the case in a bureaucracy, where obligations are delegated from one office to another more inferior office, rather than a constantly topologically transformation of elements that mesh and disengage at any number of parts. Similar to deja vus in their structure but not the same thing are dreams, where we capture and combine images and thoughts and actions from all sorts of time; magical invocations, when words are able to become actions in a shorthand rather than because one is a description while another is not; miraculous interventions, when nature is suspended in the name of hope; and the exchanges between the living and the dead that have preoccupied humankind since Gilgamesh or before. These are all species of a genus.
An even more fresh experience than deja vus is what Roland Wulbert would call “common insights”. Wulbert notices that a perception he has, in this case about politics, is that there seems a serious disjointment between politics as about feelings, on the one hand, and interests, on the other, has become apparent to him and also to me and also to various commentators who are heard of in columnists and talk show people, each of them inventing this insight independently and yet doing it simultaneously or nearly so, so that they seem to be repeating one another though there is no reason to think they have all heard of one another. Basically there is in America what at one term was called a social malaise which in this case is that a number of people have gone crazy in that they think coronavirus vaccines give computer implants or that Republicans seem weird because they aren’t in favor of anything, have no agenda other than opposition, rather than an alternative agenda to Democrats. Now, I am dubious about those particulars. Close to twenty percent of the electorate will agree to anything, no matter how bizarre, if the possibility is put to them, and Republicans have been oppositionist for a very long time and have used covers like small government or deficit reduction to cover that up, but there does seem to be an experience of a nation out of joint, and Hamlet was not able to pick it out, to find an explanation, until the ghost of his father showed up to tell him what he wanted to know as the correct explanation.
Now look at this Wulbert experience, which is what I would call common insights. Wulbert notices that a perception he has, in this case about politics, which is that there seems a serious disjointment between politics as about feelings, on the one hand, and interests, on the other, has become apparent to him and also to me and also to various commentators who are heard of in columnists and talk show people, each of them inventing this insight independently and yet doing it simultaneously or nearly so, so that they seem to be repeating one another though there is no reason to think they have all heard of one another. What so all of these things pop up at the same time, as if there were indeed a kind of collective consciousness, or else, at least, there was a cultural moment which circumstances led the simultaneous creations arise as if they were like the independent thoughts I have cited as arising in ever more complicated ways in a person’s own mind?
There is a rush to find explanations rather than to focus on the phenomenon itself. People do what one another reads and so absorb what they think and come out with it, or else there are similar insights drawn from the fact that similar circumstances will develop them. Newton and Leibniz famously both discovered calculus because, I suppose, the state of mathematics had developed to the point where that would be the next thing that happened. There are other explanations. Back in the day, sociologists engaged in what were called diffusion studies whereby the sources of innovation could be traced back to its origins, as if it were a patient zero who had started an epidemic, though the example used was how drugs were marketed from one doctor to another until large numbers of physicians had adopted that drug, each independently, and then found that pharmaceutical detail men had been visiting single practitioners and spreading the word of a new drug available on the market, and so had debunked the experience as simultaneous invention by showing the social process at work that made the transmission work.
Look at the phenomenon for itself. What is it to feel that at the moment people are discovering some light similar to those who are learning it at just about the same time? Is it like a clap of thunder? Or is it that it has been creeping up on you until a person is ready to expose it to themselves or to others as assured enough to be voiced or communicated? Another possibility is that there are old cliches that get repeated when relevance or talk show hosts mobilize them, just as everyone has adopted “shots in the arm” as the way to refer to vaccine injections when the term is clear in that it is not a shot in the tush. Why bother “in the arm” other than that it has become conventional? Maybe that is all that there is, of no significance, but people say they are wary of shots because they are new is inaccurate if they mean untested or just leary of all authority, which is what some people say. Interviews with vaccine resisters that pressed them to explain themselves however impolite or impolitic that might be might reveal some underlying malaise of which vaccination is only a symptom and one that predates Trump in that he was not an anti-vaccinator.
Moreover, from the sociological point of view, what is more important than politics, which often makes visible the flow of social currents, such as FDR giving hotdogs to the King and Queen of England because of FDR’s very strong sense that the American people would become more friendly to the Brits if he did do, and Dick Chaney thinking, perhaps unwisely, that American casualties would sour a war on Afghanistan if he had used American troops to go after Bin Laden at the outset, there are any number of other social occasions where there is a change of heart that is replicated throughout the society that rings true for a moment and even for more so. At the moment, Brittany Spears seems unjust to having her father become a conservator over her fortunes when ten years ago it seemed generally to be the humane thing, and Simone Biles is a hero rather than a loser for having given up on the Olympics. One thing to remember is that things can turn on you, heroes to goats and vice versa, it takes years for people to see Harry Truman as splendid rather than a time server thrust into a role recently marked by greatness. It was not clear what Truman would be about. Reversals as well as affirmations are part of the process of what is commonly inspired.
There are other social phenomena which have the same character as deja vus and simultaneous invention, the second of them often thought of as part of a culture in that it is a shared experience, a set of similar or same beliefs and feelings, though that does not seem quite right as a description of what we are talking about because cultures have persistence and very general applicability and have to do with something central about a society. Here are two of them: norm and role
A norm was defined by Emile Durkheim as a guidance people follow with regard to any number of aspects of social life, not just legal or legislative ones, but the warp and woof of everyday interaction. His insight was that norms were established by unusual behaviors: what is statistically normal becomes normatively required. Durkheim offered an explanation for this phenomenon. Norms provided the way for people to engage life in an orderly and expected way and so was essential for existence much less for the high quality of a society. He rushed to explain why it was important to have norms. Ever since, people are also out to establish the quality of norm as a thing in itself. A norm has the characteristic in that whatever it is seems to be permanent to a person following a norm rather than something that is self limiting and so its being incumbent rests not only on social pressure but also on a personal orientation to what seems inevitable and self-evident. Poor people will leave school if a parent gets sick because schooling is a luxury while well off students remain in school even if there are financial reverses to the family because college seems a necessity for going ahead. The function of the norms differ but the sense that this activity, whichever one it is, is the obvious thing to do covers both norms. And so it is possible to elaborate on the nature of norms, however difficult it is to pin them down once people look closely at them and see their function or specificity rather than just the aura that is conveyed, as is also the case with deja vus and common insights. An additional part of the aura of norms, for example, is that people would be embarrassed to say they were just following a norm, as if they had no independent mind, or embarrassed to spell one out because that would make a norm self-conscious and so a violation of the smoothness with which people transmit themselves from their intentions to their behavior, making up your mind inherently unalienable, without, one hopes, as a stutter. There is a lot to be said about the matter’s Jello-like quality as norms escape easily being pinned down but nevertheless part of social ambiance, should one think it to be a necessary construct and that seems to be the case for most sociologists.
Also difficult to pin down is the concept of role, which seems very overt as the name of various positions in life, such as being a wife or a baker or a U. S. Senator. The problem with the problem is, however, in its very conception. A position is a metaphor, alluding to something geographical or at a place, when what the term is clearly meant to infer is something that is like a position but that is not in that it is a social construct rather than a place. There are bakers in London, Ankara and St. Louis. What are they? My best definition is that a role is an activity which has been given a name that makes it objective and communicable. There may be underlings that are not given particular names and so a glazed doughnut maker may not be given a title, except that language is flexible enough so that there are bakery workers without specifying the particular activity but the class of activities, just as labor unions can organize industrial workers as such rather than insist on looking for designations as distinctive trades such as ladies garment workers or boilermakers. You can always find a name to find the category of role a person plays, or is in accord with, just as you can create some norm to name a practice which you had never before thought of as being what had guided your behavior.
The trouble with roles is elsewhere. It is how people can so readily recognize, fill the gestalt, so that a person has one role in all its richness, what with all you associate with glazing buns, rather than as distinct from another role, as a baker from a candlestick maker. You know what will happen with a baker, knowing immediately without thinking that the person will not sell you pork chops. And you can ponder and elaborate what a wife should do or might do in extremis so as to protect its young or its spouse, this much of legal argument an exposition of what the contract or implicit contract or the law sets about the duties and the particularities of having one role or another. How extensive are the regulations that cover whether a landlord is allowed to intrude in the privacy of a tenant who has rented an apartment? So roles, like norms, are Jello-like in that a person is always looking at the limits of a role, however much in organizational theory one might think a role was a very stable system when it is stable only in the case when an organization such as a bureaucracy works very hard to delineate what are considered the boundaries of a role, when a role, rightly considered, is a direction, an intent that goes along with usual processes and that can be modified in the name of the activity, so that pastries sold in a supermarket are also seen as the result of bakers who may nonetheless have no bake stores on their own. There are nowadays any number of people called tech workers and I would not know the name of any number of the ones who have specialties with regard to doing information systems. Yet we are able to say we can “place” them, even if, as I have suggested, that is the wrong or inaccurate word.
What happens in a role, I would suggest, is what is similar with a face. A person has a gestalt of a face. You recognize someone without particularly pointing out the features of the face that assemble into being the face of the person even though those who deal with computer simulation will identify a face by matching one feature after another until you assemble or distinguish one person’s face from another. Similarly, you know a person is a baker without noting it says “Bakery” on a sign outside. You get the loaves in the window or the aromas and even an apron around the baker’s waist. All together or one by one, it all adds up. The question is how some people are credible in a role and some are not. So that a tax attorney does not have a separate office leads you to think he is not a very good one because able ones have enough money to have decent digs, while barbers or tv repairmen may not. You don’t trust a home visit from a social worker if the person doesn’t have a card. The whole presentation makes it work, just as a mother being both solicitous and friendly and also providing a meal or a snack. Everyone decides whether a parent has done a good job at being one without having been provided a manual that includes checklists of how people should do the job which is not even correctly seen as a job but just one way of being, moms and uncles and elders just part of the landscape, each one identified as what they are and expanded or adapted or somehow changed by circumstances. I knew a woman whose mother had sheparded her through Auschwitz, washing her one dress so that she could remain clean, and then lost interest in her when the two of them were liberated, her mother remarrying and going to the West rather than the East Coast of America.
As the daughter put it to me, her mother had put in a lot of mothering in a short time, and was well rid of it, wanting a different life. Some might have thought otherwise. Roles are not prisons, just a way of doing a kind of activity. There was no rule in following a role because her mother had decided how to shape being a mother, there being no common motherhood, just variously described ones, some considered good or bad, or something in her own case extraordinary. Yet somehow the same thing however different and inventive are all called by the same thing, recognized all as the same role. There are all these adjectives that can apply and language is flexible to give all the different things on various levels of abstraction that fix the general term as including all those activities, whether nurturing or engaging in body work, or feeding, or providing companionship, as well as the emotional components so that both Medea and Gertrude are mothers. That is the conundrum: how it is that a single term sums up so many different things, just as when different facets of the same face come together to be a distinct thing. And yet we do this for thousands and thousands of different roles and faces.
If you put together all of these phenomena and include old concepts like norm and role that have become redefined, then we might conceive that there has been a revolution in the thinking of sociology or at least a realignment that downplays the objective even if invisible social structure as having composed of discrete categories, each one of them having a specific impact on social interaction. Weber thought that status, class and party were clearly delineated from one another, that Parsons thought the four functions of society and any other group, for that matter, were each understood independently. That Kroeber and Mead understood what was a culture as an inclusion of beliefs and customs and usages within a group, while sociologists were dubious about Marx’s “false consciousness” because it was too elastic in that it seemed just whatever Marx disagreed with rather than a phenomenon to which one could point out. But maybe sociology should expand itself out of the very specific phenomena understood with regard to bureaucracies and demographics for understanding the real texture of society as including all of those phenomenon that are seen as askance, just at the edge of the field of vision, that are jello like in that the shape of it is always changing and being reassessed, a kind of fuzzy logic for social life.