Hello, and welcome to episode 29 of Structured Visions. Structured Visions is a space where I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and you are very welcome here. I'm very grateful for you listening today.
Today, I would like to explore further an idea who's theme I've picked up on in previous podcasts about this relationship between the individual and society. Now, the problem is when I speak in these really abstract terms when I'm talking about society, I often see this happening in classroom situations if I happen to be talking about society, and I'm drawing on social theory to talk about society or about students to read things about social society, about society. There's a tendency to kind of belay us over a little bit because we move into the world of abstractions, and it's kind of hard to get your head around it because what it requires is for you to accept somebody else's model of what society looks like, and invariably that model is put forward in such abstract terms that it's difficult to have a felt sense that, yes, I agree with that model or I don't, and for me personally, in order to actually engage with something, I need to know where my position is in relation to it. And for me, a good way of looking at it is to really make it practical to be a lot more grounded and situated.
So just to give you an example of what I mean by abstractions, in terms of this relationship between the individual and the society, I've talked about at least two different ways of understanding that relationship, and one is the idea that society constitutes individuals. It determines individuals, so the self is not separate from society, it's not autonomous from society, the only reason there even is a self is because society has made one, or has made this notion that selfhood exists if you like. And I've often associated that idea that society constitutes individuals with a theorist, Michel Foucault, although he's not the only one, but he's the person I kind of assigned if you like to that particular way, looking at the relationship between society and individuals. And the other idea is that individuals exist within a society, but they have enough autonomy, they have agency, they can act within their social world and their social structure such that they can negotiate the resources that society provides.
And that's what's called a practice theoretical perspective, where that's one aspect of practice theory. And I've in the past talked about Pierre Baudieu, Tony Giddens is another person who uses a practice theory, perspective, work in critical discourses is often rooted in practice theory perspectives, and even though some of the sociolinguistic work, like the research by Mary Baudieu's on the nerds, that's a practice theory perspective. Often people like that better because there's a sense in which individuals aren't just within iron cages, it's sometimes called. Anyway, regardless of those two things, the point is that those are very abstract ways of understanding that relationship, and that those levels of abstraction, like I said, can either tend to make people glaze over, or sometimes you can just sort of move off into this sort of happy, airy, fairy world of talking about abstractions, and that kind of drives me a little bit.
So what I'm going to do today is try to ground this idea. I'm going to talk about individuals. I think the notion of the individuals is relatively easy to grasp, but rather than talking about society, which feels like more of an abstract concept, I'm going to think about the group. So we can think about specific individuals, and we can think about their relationship with specific groups.
So for the purposes of today, it's going to be about individual group and non-individual and society. And we maybe we'll see if we can abstract out from there, but we'll kind of start with that. And I'm just also going to pick up on a couple of little fragments of stories and experiences that I shared in the last few podcasts. You might have noticed there's a kind of theme around the notion of walking into a classroom.
So in case you haven't been listening, I told one story about what it was like for me as a very young teacher to walk into a classroom for my first ever actual teaching experience really, lecturing to a group of first-year students who were French, they were learning, they were students of English, but they were French themselves, if that makes sense. In how terrifying that was. And I described it in terms of my relationship to the group. So I said it was a felt experience.
I tried to describe how I felt walking into the classroom. So I tried to explain that I felt scared, I felt threatened. I felt that I was being judged. But I also had an image of how the environment was constructed.
How it was shaped, might be a better way of saying it. And if I were to draw a picture of that shape, I would draw a big circle to represent the class. And I would draw a little circle to represent me. And I would position me in front facing that big circle that's the class.
And the reason I'm using those visual terms is because that is the best way I can think of to express my experience of it, and especially my experience of my relationship with the other people in the room. And the most important thing that I want to draw attention to about that relationship was the fact that I was conceptualizing them, not as distinct individuals with distinct personalities, but rather as a big group. And I say the word conceptualize as if it was a really intellectual thing. But it wasn't intellectual.
It was like a gut feeling. And if I can put it in those terms, it was like a feeling that made me want to shrink a little bit in my skin. If you've been listening to these, you know how important it is for me to understand some of the stuff in terms of embodiment. And so I can describe this in terms of this.
It felt in my gut like there was this big massive people. And it made me want to shrink down a little bit. It was difficult to sort of stand upright. Because I didn't feel scared for my life, but I felt scared for my role, what I was supposed to be doing.
And sometimes I don't think you always can tell the difference when we're thinking about bodies and embodiment, and the difference of being scared for your life and being scared of what you're supposed to be representing. And I was supposed to be representing a competent authority figure. So I describe that situation. But the important thing to focus on there is that shape the mass, which is the big circle, and the individual, which was me, which was the small circle.
And a couple of other stories I showed. So I also shared a story I think it was last week about a first year student at a university who was talking about her psychology course, and how she wasn't enjoying it. And so she was trying to describe what it was about the course that she didn't enjoy. In fact, somebody had asked her, you know, what, you know, do you have a lot of people in her course.
She's not very social. And then in order to describe that, interestingly, she described it in terms of what it was like to walk in the classroom. So that kind of catches my attention because I've already described my experiences of walking in the classroom. And the way she told the story, and unfortunately enough to have the transcript of that, was the thing is you arrive at your lecture, you sit down, the lecture goes on, and then you leave.
So what I find interesting about that is here we have a student's perspective. However, it doesn't actually shape wise. If you were going to draw that as a shape, it doesn't to me seem that much different from my experience. Now, this student's name is Ali, or her student name is Ali.
She's not describing being scared or threatened or anything like that, but when she's describing the self, which is the you, you arrive at your lecture, you sit down, the lecture goes on, and then you leave. It isn't an embodied you. It isn't an embodied self, and the self isn't in the first person. It isn't in I.
And interestingly, it's not situated in time. When she's using tense-wise there, you arrive at your lecture, you sit down, the lecturer goes on, and then you leave. The thing is, so is a verb, you arrive, arrive as a verb, you sit down, sit as a verb, the lecture goes on, and then you leave. Is, arrive, sit, goes, leave.
It goes on and leaves, and leave. And if you were to ask yourself, okay, well, what tense is that are those verbs in? And if you're up on your tenses, you'll notice that they're all in the simple, present tense. And the simple, present tense in English.
So we can compare the simple, present tense with like the simple, what's it called? The simple, progressive, simple, progressive. I think. So I am leaving.
I am arriving. I am sitting. Is the progressive, simple, progressive. Sorry.
The present progressive is the word I'm looking for. So we've got the simple, present, and the present progressive. Sorry about that. So if there was a classroom full of students in front of me, they would be going, erasing things on their notes.
Anyway, so you've got the simple, present, and the present progressive. And the present progressive is, you are arriving. You are sitting down. The lecturer is going on, and you are leaving.
And the simple present is, the thing is, you arrive. You sit down. Goes on and then you leave. Now, the present progressive in English is used to describe your experiences kind of in the moment.
What are you doing right now? I am drinking a cup of tea. Right? So if the simple progressive says, at this moment, I'm going to circle around this moment in time, in the present.
And I'm going to ask you to tell me to describe what's happening. And you do that in the simple progressive. So what do you use the, sorry, the present progressive? So what do you use the simple present for?
And that, among other things, you can use to describe habitual events, things you do every single day. Every day I wake up. Not, I am waking up. Every day I am waking up.
Or every day I wake up, I have a cup of coffee. What are you doing now? I am having a cup of coffee. What do you do every day?
I have a cup of coffee. Got it? So the present progressive is like drawing a circle around a space in time. And the time is now, what are you doing?
And the present simple is, one of the things it does is habitual events. What do you do every day? I do this, I do that, I do that. Okay.
So I'm sorry about the confusion that I wasn't planning on talking about tense today. It just came out, which is why I didn't have the terms right at the top of my head. So here she is telling the story. It's a habitual event.
It's happening every day. And the self, like in my story, we've got the class and we've got the lecturer. And, but from Ali's perspective, the story is from the students perspective. So the self is a student's self.
But there's still evidence to suggest that that student's self is not an individuated, sort of unique, distinct self. Because, when I talked about this last week, she's using the second person, the generic you, you sit down. So it could be anybody. And it could be any day.
It happens any day. You sit down. And you arrive on the lecture goes on and you leave. So even though we were to draw a picture of Ali's story, we might have pictures, circles to indicate, you know, who these use are, the whole use would be exactly the same or all the selves would be exactly the same.
And the same representation would be there for every single day. And the lecturer would be there for every single day. So there's a similarity, let's say, between her story and mine. Her experience of it conveys notions of boredom, consistency, lack of interest.
Nothing interesting is happening. Nothing novel or new is happening. And there's no distinct, individuated or original self. So if we were to describe her felt experience, it might be one of boredom and disappointment.
Whereas my felt experience was one of terror. But we've got kind of similar pictures. We've got a kind of a mass of unindividuated people and a lecture who sort of stands at the front. So just some other stories that I've been told or that I've experienced about.
Let's just focus on the classroom situation. So again, individual group, individual group. Yes. Oh gosh.
This happens more than you would actually think. Whereas, where, at Sheffield Hall in my mode, in addition to being a lecturer there, I'm also a course leader. I've been a course leader for various degrees. And one of the things, one of the important things about that role is that students can come to me with concerns they might have about their course.
And more often than not, I have students coming to talk to me about how, about their attendance. Usually when their attendance has been poor. And it's like, okay, let's see if you can get to the bottom of our attendance system and so forth. And more often than not, I'll get a situation in which a student will say to me, I'm scared to walk in the classroom.
They often don't use the word scared. But they say, I can't bring myself to walk in the classroom. I can't walk in the classroom. I really just can't walk in the classroom.
Now, first of all, the student tells me that I'm so impressed with their courage to actually say that. Because I think that is a more common experience than you think. Or that you want to believe. And sometimes students will just disengage.
They don't want to walk in the classroom, but they'll come up with a different reason. Like, you know, I overslept, which maybe they did. Or, oh, I got the times wrong. Oh, I got to work.
Where are they scheduled? They're working timetable. So that it overlaps with their walking into the classroom. But when I get a student who actually admits I'm scared to walk into the classroom, I'm always really, really impressed.
Because that's a quite courageous thing to actually be truthful about. And so when we get to the bottom of why are you scared to walk in that classroom, the answers sometimes are, the students are judging me. When I walk in, all the other students in the classroom, sometimes the teacher, but often it's the students. When I walk in the classroom, all the students are judging me.
And the more time I spend away from that classroom, the more they're judging me because I walk in and they think, who is she? We never see her. We don't even know who she is. She has me engaged in this classroom.
That's the experience sometimes of walking into a classroom. Now compare that with my experiences of teacher walking into a classroom. You walk in, there's a massive student, and they all speak with one voice, and they're all saying negative things about the individual, in my case me, the lecturer. And in these other students cases, them, a student who doesn't show up that often.
So an interesting parallel, but again, the individual and the group, the individual walking into the classroom and seeing them as a group. Okay, any other stories about it? This one comes to mind. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to analyze it, but I remember my dad once telling me the story.
He was, dad has been an educator throughout his life, and he still is. And so he once went to a conference where for other educators, and they were asked to tell stories about bad experiences they had as kids in classrooms. Because I think, I'm not entirely sure why they had to do that. I think it was about developing empathy for your pupils and your kids.
I could be one of that. I told me the story a long time ago, so I might get it wrong. But what I remember my dad's story being was that in the first grade, so he walks into the first grade. So this is effectively your first year of really formal teaching in the US.
So first grade, he walks in and the teacher says to him, you know, says his name, Roger Clark, the female teacher, I think. And I guess dad who's about five, you know, nods his head. And the teacher says, you're related to Peter Clark, you're Peter's brother, you're related to Duffy Clark, you're Duffy's brother. So these are my, my, obviously my dad's older, older brothers.
He's dad nods his head, yeah, those are his brothers. And the teacher says to him, sit behind the door. Well, awful. You walk into the classroom and just like virtue of, you know, your brothers having left this impression on his teacher's mind.
You are but told that you have to sit behind the door. So that was so terrible. So anyway, this part of that is to draw attention to the fact that the space of the classroom itself is a structuring mechanism. So in that case, it wasn't so much the relationship between the individuals and my dad at the age of five and the group.
But it's a relationship between my dad and the teacher and my dad in spatial relation with the rest of the class who presumably were sitting in places that were visible and open and you know where they could see the chalkboard. Whereas, you know, dad was positioned to sit behind the door. So that notion that the spatial orientation and the representation and the fact that spaces in particular spaces within the spatial orientation have values, right? Sitting behind the door is less valuable.
There's a moral judgment there as to where you have to sit. So lots of different stories about actually walking into a classroom. And you might have some, so I would invite you to just stand a couple of seconds thinking, do I have experience? Everybody has experiences walking into a classroom.
And how would you describe, express, draw, represent the relationship of you as a self or you as an individual with the larger group? And in this case, the larger group might be the students in the classroom or it might be, you know, the teacher in the classroom. And what would that look like? And hopefully you've got a few more positive ones than the ones that I've just described.
The negative ones tend to stick in your mind. So they're useful. So here's the question. Can we take those stories?
Now that we've just made those stories more concrete, we've gone from individual society to individual in the classroom. And I don't mean this to be an exercise in teaching methods. I mean it to be a way of concretizing the abstraction that is society. And now let's think about it in terms of those two models for understanding the relationship between individual and society that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.
So one in which society constitutes individuals, society determines the shape, if you like, of the individual. So we're thinking in terms of shape. So let's say that according to this view, society is shaped in a particular way and the individual is required to fit within those shapes. And if the individual does not fit within those shapes, then the society will shape it such that it does.
And I've been in it since just come to mind. You know those little games you have? You give to toddlers that have their little wooden boxes and they've got a square hole at the top of the lid of the box. They've got a circular hole, a triangular hole and a star shaped hole.
And then you've got these little blocks that are supposed to be fitted into these different holes. So your star has to be fitted within the star shaped hole. Your star block goes in the star shaped hole. And your cylinder goes in the circle shaped hole, etc.
And so that's the task for the toddlers to make sure that the right blocks go in the right holes. And to think in terms of society's constituting the individual, we could see that as the metaphor, the visual metaphor, that individual blocks have to be shaped to fit within the societal box. Now, let's make it even a little bit more gruesome because we have a model within that idea that even if the individual doesn't shape, doesn't fit in this, isn't shaped in such a way as to fit into those boxes. That the box will make it so the individual fits.
You can imagine like a razor along the sides of the holes on top of the box where you put the block in and keep pushing it in until it's finally whittled down to the right shape to fit inside the box. Oof! You know, so my dad walks in the classroom and the teacher says, your Peter's brother, your Duffy's brother, sit behind the door. And you imagine the shape of the classroom is one in which there are some good kids and there are some bad kids.
And I can tell whether you're a good kid or a bad kid based on who your family is. And I'm going to tell you you're a bad kid and you sit behind the door. Now what's likely to happen? The kid's going to become a bad kid, right?
It's like that block went into the pole on top of the societal box and gets whittled into being a bad kid. So it becomes a self-affirming prophecy. Now that's that idea that society constitutes individuals, right? Or, you know, I walk into the classroom and I'm so scared of this big, massive people who are all thinking negative things about me.
And then what happens is they turn into, by virtue of this structure, they turn into that massive people who think horrible things about me, right? So really, really about that happen. So that notion that society constitutes the individual. And I think we all, maybe, well, I won't speak for everyone.
I certainly have experienced that. Where I walk into a room and I feel that the social structure is structuring me, right? I am becoming that thing that society has determined I will become. Now you can understand why people don't like that way of looking at it.
It's a bit depressing, right? So, okay, let's move on to the other one. So let's think about how individuals negotiate society. That second, that practice theoretical model.
So individuals are actors within a social world. Okay, so like if we imagine the society is like this big C, right? So it's this big massive thing with lots of power. And you're in your sailboat.
So you're an individual within this C and you've got your sailboat and you're negotiating the winds and the waves. To the extent, so the winds and the waves are always there. You can't avoid them, but you can harness them to your own desires. So you can go into society, according to the sort of practice theory model.
You can go into society and you say, do you know what? I can't avoid society, meaning the wind and the waves. But I can navigate through it. Ooh, could you say the metaphorical verb there, huh?
So I can navigate through it. So I'm going to make use of the societal elements, like the waves and like the wind. And I'm going to use these things to push me along skillfully in the direction that I want to go. And you can't always control it.
In fact, you can never actually control it. All you can do is use what are these structural resources. They're sometimes called the wind, the waves, the directions, to navigate through it to move through your social world. So that story might be like, okay, let's imagine the kid who's told that he's got to sit behind the door because it's determined that he's a bad kid.
Well, you could say one thing he could do is become a good kid. Well, that's one thing that he could navigate through that social world. But another thing that he could do is actually draw upon the resources of that classroom, which is to say, draw upon this binary between bad and good. And he could be very, very, very bad.
I mean, he could make that teacher's life a living hell. You could make use of the concepts and say, you haven't seen bad yet, lady. And making use of those concepts, he could navigate his way through that classroom. And what might be, you know, he could get a whole bunch of kids to be bad.
I don't think he might die. I don't think he might die. I don't think he had any of these things. But you could get a whole bunch of kids to be bad with you.
You could upset the system. You could make the teacher's life a living hell. You could even get yourself kicked out of the classroom. And so that's you, although you've been shaped as a bad kid, you've drawn upon that resource of the concept of bad.
And you've created a way of navigating through this difficult societal situation. So that would be a way of looking at it by where we say individuals negotiate society, right? So society constitutes individuals. There we've got our round blocks and our square holes.
Individuals negotiate society. There we've got somebody on a cell note navigating through the sea and the wind. How about another way of looking at it? How about something different?
How about the idea that society and the individual are co-constructing? Several podcasts ago I suggested the idea that we personify these notions, the individual. We create a new myth where the individual is a character in this play and society is another character. And we talked about the fact that new society would probably be the big bad, the lightest character.
And the individual would be tainted. He's going to try to do something about it. And I said, let's keep the personification, society and the individual. And let's imagine that society is a different type of individual, right?
Let's imagine the situation where society actually wants to change. It's set in a particular way and it actually wants to change. That's one myth here. A myth that's, you know, is a kind of parallel.
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive for another. But let's have a myth where we've got these two personified characters, society and individual. And what if they come together to actually create co-construct, co-constitute a vision, if you like, a vision of the social world? A vision of the environment, right?
So rather than me walking into the classroom and me being constructed by the social constraints and the kids being constructed by the social constraints and all the individuals battling to use the resources, the structural resources. What if the society, the group and the individual and the concepts and the images and the shapes of the society and the individual, what if when they came in contact, new things were possible? And both were changing both, right? So, okay, we need a metaphor for that.
And the metaphor I think of for that would be in a way of actually understanding this in its ambiguity is something we did in science when I was in like the fourth grade. We did a lot of cool things in science in the fourth grade. Anyway, when I was in the fourth grade, I remember the teacher was telling us about magnetism and you might have done this exercise before in your science classroom. I'll see if I can find a link to a YouTube video where somebody does it.
But you take an iron bar, sorry, a magnetic bar, and the magnetic bar has a North Pole and a South Pole. And then I think she stuck it on an overhead projector and then she put a clear plastic overhead sheet on top. And then she sprinkled some iron filings over the plastic sheet. And the iron, this is so cool.
If you've never seen it, it's just the main, this amazing thing. It's a fourth grade, of course, I've already told you I need to learn press, but this was so cool to watch. So iron filings shape themselves around the magnetic field that is there by virtue of the magnet being in place. So the magnet has this magnetic field that is invisible.
And when you sprinkle the iron filings all over it, suddenly the magnetic field becomes visible. So what you have is like, it's like, how do you describe it? It's like at the ends of the bar, the North end and the South end. It's almost like they're showering out the showering out little drops of water and they kind of circle around and meet at the top and they circle around and meet at the bottom.
So it's almost like a figure eight. I'll put a picture on the blog. So we have iron filings and we have a magnetic bar. And those, when those two things come in contact, a shape is made visible.
So let's now extend that and say, okay, one is society and one is the end of one represents society and one represents the individual. So we could say, okay, the magnetic bar is, what is it? Is it society? Is the magnetic field around the magnetic bar?
Is that society? And those little individual iron filings, those are the individuals. And when you sprinkle individuals all over the magnetic field, they're going to be shaped in a particular way. Is that the way we look at it?
So that is actually kind of in keeping with that deterministic idea that society shapes the individuals. Or do we look at it differently? Let's turn it on its head. Let's imagine in this extended metaphor that the magnetic bar is the individual.
And the individual has the capacity to shape the social world around it, in almost like an invisible magnetic force kind of way. And all of the elements of society, the iron filings, fall into place around the individual. There's an interesting idea. So when I describe a situation where I walk into a room and there's a mass of people, what if my idea about the social world is my magnetic field?
And then all of the components that make up the social situation fall into place around my idea of the social world. And if I have a different idea of the social world, then all of the social components of it fall into a different shape. Isn't that a cool idea? Isn't that a cool image?
So society is shaped around the individual. And so there's a co-creation between society and the individual, but it's the individual's conceptual field, if you want to call it, that is doing the shaping and society's falling into place. Okay, I don't know whether we've kept that abstract. So let's just explore...
No, I'm not going to go into detail because I'm running out of time. But I promised you last week that I would look at a piece of dialogue. And I'm going to break that promise. You're going to have to wait until next week for that.
I'm going to leave you with the image of the individual as the magnet. Keep that idea in your head. Be ready to explore that notion of how the individual might affect the social world around them. And then next week, I promise, that we're actually going to analyze some more conversational data and see how that might play into that image.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you'll join me again next week. Until next time.