Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations

rules. In both cases, though via different mechanisms, these systems gave actors a stable reference point toward which they could orient behavior. What changes in the less-institutionalized settings of postmodernity is that this stability gives way to situational contingency, and so trust becomes something that must be constantly achieved and reachieved, what Giddens (1994) refers to as the idea of “active trust.” That is, in postmodern situations trust can no longer proceed from shared community membership as in premodernity or the predictability of role performance as in modernity, but rather its establishment must be worked for in contingent situations. Still, this process remains grounded in other situational layers, even if the nature of that grounding has changed. REALITY AND FUTURE OF SITUATIONS The above discussion raises an important question about the reality of the historical changes in situations that we have described. As already argued, we see the experience of a situation as a gestalt. While actors may manipulate frames or interpretively move between them, the multiple layers of a situation are generally experienced in a nonreflective and holistic manner. We should ask, then, whether these frames, and the historical variability we describe in their content and interrelation, are representative of actual social reality or are collective fictions reinforced through habitual ratification. At the risk of seeming to elide the question, our answer is that they are both. In a sense we are appealing to the Thomas dictum (i.e., “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”; Thomas and Thomas 1928) but also to Goffman’s caveat that “[the] statement is true as it reads but false as it is taken. Defining situations as real certainly has consequences, but these may contribute very marginally to the events in progress. . . . Ordinarily, all American Journal of Sociology 1744 [actors] do is to assess correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly” (Goffman 1974, pp. 1–2). By this Goffman meant that attempts to change the definition of a situation may have negligible effects—say, the embarrassment of the individual attempting and failing to alter reality—but aside from minor negotiations the requirements of the situations are largely set long before the individual walks into them. Goffman’s rejoinder, we think, aligns nicely with our view on the reality of the ideal-type frame-layered situations we describe in this article. Structural and social forces compel certain historical patterns of interaction rooted in normative beliefs about appropriate and legitimate behavior (e.g., rationality in modernity). The result is a shared self-reinforcing narrative. A situational gestalt is largely preestablished and is arrived at through the claims of those present, and interaction that follows generally serves to sustain it. This does not mean that interaction is easy (although it may be highly habitual) but, rather, that it is composed of an iterative, interrelated process of actors orienting and reorienting themselves, both interpersonally and temporally, to each other and to the shared activity of the situation. The key is that reality, even if arrived at through a process of bootstrapping, requires general consensus—otherwise we call it the delusion of the individual. From our vantage point we can, of course, look back historically and recognize that much of what passed for reality in the past was in fact a fiction, but to see this from the inside is far more difficult. The reality and fictitious nature of situational frames are intimately connected, then, but still analytically distinct even if this distinction can often only be seen from a temporal distance. We can see this clearly in the court cases presented in earlier sections. Each case reflects historically and culturally specific notions of the law, yet individuals entering into those situations were still bound by their rules. William Webbe, for instance, need not have believed in the divine nature of order in the medieval English countryside, but to have any chance at winning his case he was compelled to act as if he did, and by doing so he would help reinforce its narrative “reality.” Much of the time, however, this is not a problem because the reality and rhetorics of situations are tightly coupled. Partly this is because the need for high levels of consensus in order to achieve shared activities makes it difficult to depart from the arrangement and nature of situational frames. There are, of course, moments when these two become decoupled, yet outside of large-scale transformations and structural turning points it 27 In FA Goffman offers a similar relationship between the reality and rhetoric of frames when he writes, “indeed, in countless ways and ceaselessly, social life takes up and freezes into itself the understandings we have of it” (1974, p. 563). Toward a Historical Sociology 1745 is difficult to sustain serious rhetorical departures from the consensus about reality. How exactly actors and groups do manage to challenge dominant rhetorics, and sustain such challenges, is an important next step in this work and requires more of a focus on dynamic processes than we have given in this article. Importantly, challenging a dominant rhetoric also means understanding and acknowledging its “reality” insofar as its being the grounds for legitimate interaction. That is, for a counterclaim about situations to be successful it must recognize the existing dominant narrative and use it as a starting point. This is, we think, why our structural view of situations adds an important and necessary dimension to the more processual view of frames found in the social movements literature. Successful counterclaims about interactional gestalts never challenge every aspect of interaction, only certain parts. And to be understandable and meaningful, challenges need to reflect awareness of the situational order and its moral underpinnings. This also means that the degree to which orientations in a situation can depart from a gestalt consensus is heavily tied to the structural nature of the situation itself. So what is the trajectory of social situations going into the future? With the picture we have drawn so far we could imagine several possible scenarios. First, it might be the case that growing levels of informality have generated only incremental variations in situations. That is, the transformations ascribed to postmodernity are vastly overstated, and what we see in the contemporary world are only minor injections of informality into what are otherwise still highly structured situations. This would suggest a future not so different than the present. A second possibility, and the one predicted by Weber, is that the rationalizing process of modernity continues until it ultimately undermines itself by sweeping away all rationales for collective order. At that point there will be nothing left to generate shared reality, and we will enter a phase of what Weber describes as re-enchantment in which people live, side by side, in incommensurate lifeworlds, a scenario he compared to a return to polytheism (1946). That is, the trajectory we describe of increasing fragmentation continues until situations become completely independent and decoupled from each other. 28 Conversely, this conceptualization may offer another way of thinking about psychosis, Asperger’s syndrome, and other mental health issues that problematize routine social interaction. Within this framework we can see such conditions as related to systematic situational misframings and misalignment between frame layers. 29 A more contemporary version of this Weberian disenchantment can be seen in the work of Philip Rieff (2006). Rieff wrote about postor late modernity in terms of what he called “third-world culture,” which he defined almost exclusively in terms of its nihilistic rejection of all visions of sacred order inherited from previous epochs. American Journal of Sociology 1746 Finally, a third possibility is that the current state of postor late modernity is the end of a social cycle, a Kuhnian moment of paradigm breakdown that will eventually reach a new equilibrium through the emergence of a different type of order (Kuhn 1962). This possibility would lead us to ask about the end of major civilizations and if the final days of, for instance, the Roman or Greek empires were preceded by a period of rhetorical and structural decoupling much like some see in the condition of the contemporary world. Again, though, in posing these three possible scenarios we run up against the limitation of not possessing a historical theory of situations—we cannot answer questions about how much situations are actually changing or about the direction and nature of change until we explore them more systematically and comparatively.