The Micro-Mechanics of Intellectual Life: Selves, Texts, and Meetings as Interaction Matrices

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  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Social Behavior and Social Interaction

Abstract

Internalist accounts of intellectual life, focusing on how social actors create and distribute ideas, have not extensively explored symbolic interactionism’s attention to the social process of thinking. This article answers this challenge by constructing a model of intellectual life based off the work of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It interprets Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chains as an incomplete framework, providing an anemic theory of intellectual self that depends on face-to-face interactions for creative expression. However, Mead’s concept of the “interaction matrix” in Mind, Self, and Society is a superior model for the social mind, presenting the self as a symbolic extension of social relations made possible through reflexive thinking. Moreover, Collins is inattentive to Goffman’s pluralist forms of interaction rituals, including self-interaction, re-keying, and strategic play, which make Mead’s concept applicable across historical intellectual contexts. This article first synthesizes Collins, Goffman, and Mead to derive a theory of self, textual performativity, and interpersonal contact as interlocking interaction matrices of symbolic content. It then briefly demonstrates this model’s potential through the case of Søren Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous writings can be modeled as situational matrices that symbolically extended philosophical debates in nineteenth-century Copenhagen without resolving them, leading to his articulation of existentialism. This framework increases the analytic purchase and range of the sociology of knowledge when indexing idea generation, while also treating the content of thought as constitutive of social behavior.

Author

• Thomas Krendl Gilbert, University of California-Berkeley