Start Here:

Social Ontology and Research Strategy

JACK KATZ
Department of Sociology, UCLA, USA

Abstract
_________________________________________________________________
Theory is about starting points. Research usually relies on theory to justify starting with
pre-commitments to independent variables, background factors, or structural conditions
that will explain historically and geographically varying phenomena, which are treated
as dependent, fungible, superficial upshots, or otherwise secondary and essentially
inferior. I propose that we start by trying to describe the phenomena to be explained as
they exist for the people living them. For this, we need theory of another sort, a theory
of social ontology that indicates the lines of inquiry required to produce a complete
description. If we start research by describing the nature of social phenomena as they
are experienced, it will make a difference in structuring data gathering; in developing a
research craft capable of seeing practice, interaction manouvres, and tacit embodiment;
in shaping a research agenda; and, ultimately, in where we end substantively.

Key Words ______________________________________________________________

criminology; phenomenology; social interaction; sociological theory; unconscious
processes.

In social science, ‘theory’ usually means historically and geographically generalized

assertions about what is most important in understanding why things occur. As such,
theory is a kind of ontology that promotes debates among researchers by stratifying social
reality into elevated and denigrated parts. Some forces, factors, conditions, features or
processes are treated as more full of being, more real, more consequential than others.
The favoured explanans undermines the existence of whatever explanandum it targets,
rendering it a relatively impotent effect, a hollowed out superstructure, a deceptive veneer.
Alternative explanations, initially standing as peer rivals, are ontologically subordinated as
they are relegated to the other side, their production itself comprehended by the favoured
 2
perspective.
Social theorists agree to disagree by championing different candidates among
more and less protean, structuring, or authentic orders of social being. Culture theorists
sing of the transcendence of the symbolic order, or at least defend its independent reality
against reductionist adversaries. Inequality hunters, mixing materialism and religiosity,
warn of groups whose interests underlie everything and generate dangers so powerful that
they threaten the purity of everyone’s environment. Analysts of psyches find behaviour
surfacing deep dispositions that thought can only indirectly reach. Social psychologists
demonstrate the irrationalities of existing power arrangements by stepping into a dream
world in which imaginary prisoners escape their mundane dilemmas; the game theorist
ironically finds a world that is at once more humane and less human. Also with unintended
irony, interactionists honour ‘the grounded’ and ‘the concrete,’ in the name of which they
study the symbolic and what lies behind literal meanings.[1] Each theoretical perspective
harbours indignation on behalf of some disrespected order of social life and, sometimes
gently, sometimes not so gently, encourages a posture of ridicule, even disgust toward the
claims of respect advanced on behalf of others.
By claiming to identify generally effective causes, social theory at once offers a
ubiquitous hermeneutic and, what is more immediately important to the researcher, justifies
putting less effort into describing those parts of social life that everyone currently presumes
to be causally insignificant. Thus theories may be sorted out either by the order of social
life that they honor or by the orders of social life that they justify ignoring.[2] As social data
collection and manipulation have become increasingly specialized and sophisticated,
theory has become ever more valuable for warranting ignorance.[3]
As careers develop, the deductive relationship between theory and data practice
is commonly inverted: supports for ontologically differentiating forms of social theory grow
out of research practicalities. Today many researchers are wary that too much talk of
theory borders on the ideological, and yet even without theory talk, the ideologist’s
inflexibility remains. The invariant in study after study is the form of data. Investigators
commonly structure a theory only implicitly, developing continuing themes in substantive
interpretation as they master a methodological craft for gathering and manipulating data
over a series of investigations.
As an implication of invariant research strategy, there is a great deal of theory

2
 3
floating about. Who, indeed, changes flexibly from one project to the next, starting with an
ethnography; then systematically analyzing videotapes of naturally occurring behavior; then
applying statistics to time series data; then constructing and assessing
historical/comparative narratives; then running lab experiments, etc.?
All research methodologies imply a substantive view of social life. Lab
experimenters tend toward mental states as explanations. If cognitive conditions or the fate
of expectations shape behavior, causes can be created and observed in a researcher-
controlled context. Conversely, if one is committed to conducting research on
undergraduates through temporally short exposures to stimuli set up in classroom-like
environments, theories about states of knowledge or expectation can be very attractive.
Survey researchers commonly develop theories stressing attitudes. If ‘attitudes on
race’ explain voting behavior, then telephone interviewing is a fine research strategy.
Conversely, if one is committed to a periodic administration of survey interviewing,
theoretical debates about the origins and effects of racial attitudes can be developed to a
fine subtlety.
Ethnographers tend to explain patterns and events as the outcome of collective
acts. If social action is not the product of a rich, multiple-party interaction, why go to the
trouble of gathering data for a detailed, textured social description? If one has gone to that
trouble, for example by undertaking two years of fieldwork, important phenomena better
not be explicable by psychological background factors or by invariant features of individual
biography that would make the bulk of the data set irrelevant.
Micro-analysts of audio or videotaped interaction repeatedly discover that what first
seems to be an individual’s action is in fact collaboratively produced. That this finding may
be a tautology is commonly disregarded. But note that it is a standard working procedure
in micro-analysis to establish the description of one party’s utterance on the basis of
another’s response. The very facts of a transcript are established by invoking the principle
of the collaborative production of social reality. What might be heard as an instance of
greeting such as ‘Hi!,’ or alternatively as a burp, a sigh, or the aborted start of two
successive utterances, perhaps a laugh and a lexical item that begins with ‘I,’ ‘Aye!,’ or
‘Eye’ is resolved, and the transcription is settled for all practical purposes, on hearing the
other’s soberly delivered response, ‘How are ya?’
As a practical matter, the first move in creating a theory that stratifies social

3
 4
ontology is the packaging of social life as ‘data,’ i.e., into a form that compels respect
despite the neglect of some facets of its naturally occurring existence. There is a
relationship between a discipline’s attitude toward theory and the respect it pays to the
materials it studies. In the humanities, it is common for scholars to write a series of
monographs before writing a generalizing work in which they proclaim a theoretical stance.
Through the early and middle phases of a humanist’s career, the facts themselves—
historical events, art and craft objects, texts-may be honoured as warranting attention in
their own right. Social scientists more commonly treat their empirical materials in a spirit
borrowed from the hard sciences, where specimens are treated in unproblematic fashion
as fungible and without unique value. In the social sciences, a commitment to generalize
starts early by blurring the idiosyncrasies of lives and events, which immediately become
‘cases’.
But it is not inevitable to use social theory as a stratifying ontology. Theory limits
research when it is an implication of invariant methods or when, by presuming some
factors to be especially consequential, it justifies disregarding the description of what it
regards as inconsequential. An alternative is to pick a different substantive problem from
research project to project, each time exploring the relative merits of a range of alternative
explanations, each time battling reification by using various forms of data, each time
changing hypotheses to fit what is distinctive to the substantive problem at hand.
A kind of theory more suitable to such research flexibility is implied by a naturalistic
social ontology. A naturalistic social ontology works as a caution against artificially
truncating descriptions or data gathering. The first commitment is to describe the
phenomena to be explained in the forms as they are experienced by the people living
them. One initially asks not what theories the data validate and which they invalidate, but
what theory will best guide the description of social life into forms of data. Such a theory
predicts nothing substantively differentiating about the causes of the matters to be
explained, but at the same time it does predict something essential. The central claim is
that unless the researcher describes phenomena according to their nature, explanatory
theories will surely be wrong.
Herbert Blumer was this sort of theoretician. With stuck-out chin, he dared the
reader to find any instance of social action in which the person was not shaping conduct
by anticipating how the action would appear from the standpoint of another, including self-

4
 5
as-other (Blumer, 1969). This is a theory that tells you what you had better do—in Blumer’s
case, look for interaction—or you will miss something essential that will limit the power of
explanation.
A naturalistic social ontology refuses to elevate any part of social reality above any
other. In the tradition of Blumer’s work, a phenomenon to be explained exists in the same
way as what explains it, as an instance of social interaction. Crime, for example, is not
seen as produced by another order of being (economic, psychological, power structure)
but is a form of social interaction built up through other forms of social interaction (often
grasped through the infelicitous metaphor of ‘learning’). Explanans and explanandum are
empirically and analytically separable but they are continuous in the flow of life and in their
ideational status, they merge in undifferentiated being.[4]
Now, ‘symbolic interaction’ is not the only universal in social life. In similar spirit,
both the American pragmatists and the European phenomenologists argued that all
contents of consciousness are intentional. Anything anyone ever perceives is perceived
in the process of some kind of doing. Everyone and every material environment we
encounter has a pragmatic significance for us, even if it is only as a ‘familiar’ environment
that, by requiring no special attention, enables us to focus energies on something for which
it is the framing background. Thus a second universal is the nature of behavior as part of
some kind of project. The meaning of conduct is shaped in interaction and by the actor’s
appreciation of conduct as a means of doing something, getting somewhere, or
materializing a foreshadowed future.
The interactionist and pragmatist aspects of social conduct were developed early
in the late 19th and early 20th century. A third element emerged somewhat later. Building
on Heidegger, developed most briefly and accessibly by Michael Polanyi, and flowering
especially in the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the new insistence was that thought
must break sufficiently from a Cartesian, egocentric, self-satisfied emphasis on thought,
and begin the empirical work of appreciating the implications of the fact that perception and
conduct are always embodied. (See also the line of thought on the embodiment of
perception opened up by James Gibson, in Gibson 1979; Gibson and Pick, 2000).
This last contribution remains the least used, probably because it calls for a radical
alteration of research practices. Thus unfortunately ‘the body of thought’ still is a colloquial
reference to thought’s content rather than to the fact that the body that thinks is, in one

5
 6
constituting corporeal region or another, always behind, beneath or beyond what it thinks.
Everything brought into focal attention, all contents of consciousness, any thought
contemplated, even the frames of awareness and the perceived context of action are all
always created through the action of a body that in some back region operates in the
shadows, beyond the immediate reach of awareness. Beyond the furthest reaches of
peripheral vision, eyes and head move to define the landscape.
These three universal aspects of social life offer a kind of theory that is rarely
considered in discussions of theories of society. It is not a theory that initially or as a first
commitment asserts why people do this or that, or why certain social formations are
present in some times and places but not in others. It is a theory of description asserting
that a researcher who would understand and explain any form of social conduct should
seek evidence about:

(1) how it is constituted through interaction, in one sense or another collaboratively

and in anticipation of its meaning from the standpoint of others;
(2) how everything, even the most seemingly idle comment or glance, is part of a
practical course of action, a project, the innovative execution of a recipe, an effort to do a
certain kind of social thing;
(3) how all awareness and action is created by corporeal processes that are
themselves beyond the actor’s direct awareness, but that are visible to the researcher.

Initially, naturalistic theory aims only at description. The theoretical concepts of a

social ontology are grounded in actors’ shaping of behavior in anticipation of its meanings
for others, in their purposive engagements and skilled doings, and in the senses that flow
under and through perception and conduct. There is no claim that one of these three
dimensions of social action and experience is more important, fundamental, or causally
prior to the others. All are always present.
But that does not mean that they are useless for explanation, which is always an
attempt to understand difference. In substantive application, a description that is
disciplined by the experience of social life immediately becomes a testable, empirically
grounded, causal explanation. Description becomes causal explanation, not by a priori
commitment to a causal form of analysis but because people are always actively engaged

6
 7
in the causal production of their social lives.
Any social act, from making love to making war, must be constructed if it is to exist.
Seen from the outside both sex and violence may appear to be a lot of wild thrashing
about, but from the inside they have coherent interactional meanings and are recognizable
as a distinctive type of activity because they develop along non-random lines. The actor’s
‘definition of a situation’ is not, as the phrase misleadingly suggests, an instant cognitive
decision; it is an objectively constrained process. If the researcher’s theoretical definitions
must track the definitions made and lived by the people studied, description will track, and
analysis will hew to, the contingent process of constructing distinctive moments of social
life. A researcher who would describe social action in a way that is not just theoretically
appealing but is empirically grounded, that traces what William James referred to as ‘the
joints of experience,’ must develop evidence of the necessary and sufficient conditions for
bringing that type of action into existence.[5]
A theory of social ontology explains the contents of experience by showing how
experience is constituted. As such, it always bears news for the prevailing theoretical
debates, just because other theories have commitments other than empirically grounded
description. They favour either substantive explanatory elements or methodologies that
block a full appreciation of social life as it is lived. The extraordinary modesty of a theory
of social ontology, as an effort simply to describe, takes on radical potential because of the
limitations that define substantive theories, and because of the cultures, both academic
and popular, that require them.
Thus a study of the foreground of crime, emotions, or neighborhood life will
ironically produce its own theory specifically by abjuring a pre-commitment to theory. By
‘foreground’ I mean the contents of social experience itself. Close description of what
actually goes on in the moments of committing a wide range of common crimes will show
the inadequacies of rationalist, economic, materialist and demographic explanations of
crime (Katz, 1988). Close description of what happens when people laugh, cry, get angry
or get ashamed will show that emotions are not, as they have almost always been
understood, in tension with thought, reason, or strategic self-examination. Just the
reverse: emotions are lived as metamorphoses toward thought, as movements from an
unself-conscious being-in-the-world to relatively more self-reflective postures (Katz, 1999).
Moreover, once an explanation of the foreground of social experience has been developed

7
 8
and tested, one can then work to understand relationships to various background
conditions, for example why it would be especially compelling to people in this or that social
condition to commit a given sort of crime, how certain occupations develop crafts in making
people laugh or cry, or how the sense of place varies among residents living in
neighborhoods that differ by social class, ethnicity, immigration status, and crime patterns
(Katz et al., in progress).
In the nine sections that follow, I take up three questions. What are the intellectual
foundations for a theory of social ontology? What are the implications for shaping research
projects? And how might a naturalistic commitment to theory orient contemporary research
on crime? Of the three inquiries required by a naturalistic social ontology, the first,
interaction, has many students and requires little explication here. The second, the
pragmatics of social conduct, studies the warranting of action as an instance of a given
type. It requires expansion because it has lived most vigorously in the relatively
unpopulated provinces of ethnomethodology. The third and most challenging line of
inquiry, into the visibly unconscious embodiment of action, receives the balance of
attention.

1. Starting with the Problem of Intersubjectivity

A theory of social ontology may seem more like philosophy than social theory, but the
relationship of philosophy and sociology must be reconsidered. Philosophy has already
turned to social research for guidance.
Within the traditions of philosophy, the turn to empirical inquiry has been the
distinctive—with regard to the intra-academic battles for domination, somewhat self-
defeating—contribution of phenomenology. The problem of mutual understanding, of
explaining how minds meet or how one can trust in the accuracy of one’s view of the
other’s outlook, was transformed from a philosophical into an empirical problem by Alfred
Schutz. Schutz noted that in routine social life, one takes for granted that he or she
understands others from their own standpoint. But his point was not that taking the
position of the other is an unproblematic operation. Intersubjectivity does not simply
happen; it is a contingent and defeasible presumption that is constantly negotiated in a
troublesome world.
Ironically, there is nothing taken for granted about taking for granted the

8
 9
presumption that one understands the other from the other’s perspective. Doubts, efforts
to verify, and agreements ‘for all practical purposes’ to act as if there is mutual
understanding are negotiated under the veneer that minds naturally meet. Even when
people in social life raise questions about the accuracy of mutual understanding, they make
ambiguity explicit and negotiate a restoration of presumptive mutual understanding
according to strictly constructed procedures that are themselves taken for granted (for an
exceptionally well-documented analysis, see Schegloff, 1992).

2. The Dualistic Pragmatics of Social Interaction

Because the maintenance of a taken-for-granted understanding that one is engaged in a
given line of action is itself never taken for granted, all social action has a dualistic
structure. Producing any socially effective form of social action requires producing it as a
typical, authentic, real, natural instance of its type (or, what is functionally the same thing,
as an instance marked as a recognizably ironic version). This indexical character of action
in turn requires a double action: self-disciplined, responsive attention to the world such that
conduct emerges in a recognizable form; and suspending doubt as to the problematics of
the typification.
There is what might variously be termed a double layered, laminated, or
action/commentary structure in all conduct. The person at once produces a recognizable
line of action and varying degrees and forms of commitment to, involvement in, distance
from, embrace of, or disdain for the conduct produced. Every step forward is a phase in
a more or less firm kick backward and moving away from; every throw outward brings
some measure of follow-through in its wake, whether an emphatically shouted ‘yes!’ or a
murmured and halting stutter of compromised conviction. Just as inaction is useful as a
way to go to sleep, so, inversely, action awakens a provocative consciousness about itself
that is simultaneously realized.
Implicitly known by everyone, the double-layered nature of action itself becomes
a theme for signification. Thus, action may be underwritten without ever being performed.
People commonly succeed in being taken seriously as really trying to perform a range of
actions that they never actually complete, from effectively threatening violence to
professing charitable concerns without ever writing out the cheque. More commonly still,
people willfully suppress doubts that another is effectively enacting a type of action, e.g.,

9
 10
delivering a coherent lecture, making love, telling a funny joke. It is powerful testimony to
the bootstrapped nature of social life that societies of all types and magnitudes are
reproduced in recognizable form day after day, even while their social forms are only
partially inhabited by proper spirits, even while so many people are seen as doing little to
flesh out social forms beyond gesturing their will to invoke them.
The researcher should be put on alert rather than taken in by the glossy veneer of
a well-oiled social machinery for reproducing society. Just barely under the surface, people
are always attending to the possibility that the production of taken-for-granted reality will
fail. Thus when Woody Allen, in his movie Take the Money and Run, hands a bank teller
a stickup note, he receives not cash but the calmly posed question, “What is a ‘gub’?” His
demeanor, which does not immediately warrant a presumptive definition of the situation as
a robbery, highlights ambiguities in his handwriting. Badasses, in contrast, develop an
expertise in manifesting the bona fides to execute crimes that they may never launch.
The ethnomethodologists took such unanticipated breaks in the presumption of
intersubjective understanding to set up research into the usually invisible practices for
sustaining intersubjectivity. But if they hold few positions in academia, they are not alone
in the world. An orientation to such breaks also shapes the foundations of the strategic
anticipatory postures and recurrent emotional responses that make up the personalities
of individuals and the characters of groups.

3. The Embodied Character of the Dualistic Structure of Social Experience

All social situations contain a theme of suppressed artifice because, while they require the
assumption of an unproblematic intersubjectivity, intersubjectivity is always created through
an incomplete intercorporeality. Minds meet when they are treated as having met, in
consequential constructions that always mask the divergent shades of understanding that
are made inevitable by the independent embodiments of biographies. However intimate
two people may become, each can never fully reveal self to the other because identity is
embodied and bodies, however intensely they may for some brief moments come together,
never always live in the same place.
There are always questions that could be raised about whether the appearance of
a shared reality is warranted. These doubts are suppressed so quickly and naturally that
the actors themselves will rarely be self-conscious about the process.[6] The dualistic

10
 11
structure of the social act thus bears a sensual, emotional, aesthetic character in its very
sinews.
How is the suppression accomplished? Most generally, by the same process that
raises the necessity for suppression, the embodied ongoingness of action. Consider a
common experience that occurs when a person struggles to use a foreign language. One
becomes unusually aware of the need to fake understanding while waiting/praying for a
moment to connect with the meaning of another’s talk. One nods on and on, encouraging
the other to continue in the hope that before long one will detect an opportunity for
coherent intervention. Something similar is more subtly present in our most familiar
environments. We do not, after all, hear meaning word-by-word but in large
retrospective/prospective swaths. For everything we understand of the other, we suppress
a constant, infinite range of possible interpretations that flare up and are as quickly
extinguished. And, aside from our emotional or bodily registering of comfort or dis-ease
in the process, we suppress the process of suppression.
We understand by willing understanding. We go on with the rituals of interaction
as vehicles that, we trust, will keep us connected with the orientations of others. Rituals
repeatedly prove their value for raising the spirits of shared understanding. Through body
motions we transcend sensed gaps in understanding. For example, we nod ‘yes’ not
necessarily to agree but to keep the other talking, and ourselves apparently listening, until
we get it. And we create an idiosyncratic realization of the suppression process in a
corporeal background that is partially hidden from the other. What one knows to be a
tentative nod is often, for the other, a firm basis for launching the next phase of
expression.
Doubt is suppressed by the ongoing, ubiquitous objectivity of our identities. We live
a symbolic objectivity that exists independent of our will and subjectivity, repeatedly
provoking us to respond. Everyday life is much less a matter of living according to plans
than of discovering commitments already made. The rare moments of acting deliberately
to manifest pre-defined versions of self are overwhelmed by the responses made
necessary by the discovery of the self already in the world. The self is already in the world
because it is not just interpretable symbol but obdurate object, a physical body made
obdurate by being incorporated into the embodied interpretations of others.
Thus whether prepared or not, the professor shows up for class on the

11
 12
understanding that students are in motion to arrive. If for Freud repression was an
inherently invisible suppression of inner impulses during childhood, for us in our everyday
lives, suppression of self-doubt is an ongoing necessity imposed by encounters with the
embodiment of our identities in the actions of others. If we need to appreciate how the
suppression of the corporeal libido gives rise to the imaginary, we need even more to
appreciate how the irrepressibility of the corporeally objectified nature of our identities
suppresses the imaginary. As students stamp out a version of the professor’s identity by
marching toward class, the professor extinguishes fantasies of not showing up. The
dialectical process that immediately animates our lives is a matter of defining a self in
confrontation with a self already defined by others.

4. The Sensual/Aesthetic Substrata of Social Action and the Intertwining of Person

and Environment
The transfer of the question of intersubjectivity from a philosophical to an empirical problem
was phenomenology’s first great contribution to social research. But as picked up from
Husserl by Schutz and brought into sociology by Garfinkel, Cicourel, and micro-sociological
analysis as outlined by Goffman, the message remained artificially cognitive or rationalistic.
The actor’s subjectivity was still treated in isolation from its objective environment. It was
not until the later work of Merleau-Ponty that we received an articulation of the grounds for
a dualistic understanding of the tacitly embodied nature of social experience: we are
always in some respects taken by the world as we are acting on it.
The subject/object distinction that had haunted philosophy was resolved by, again,
transforming the issue into an empirical phenomenon. A ‘philosophical’ claim became an
assertion about social ontology. Theoretical or philosophical debates between realism and
idealism, subjectivity and objectivity, solipsism and the presumption of an independent
world ‘out there’ may be tiresome, but only if these dialectics are treated as academic
oppositions. As people in the world, we live in the constant swing of a pendulum whose
arc these terms describe. A close tracking of experience in action will always reveal some
respects in which the person on the one hand finds him or herself already in the world,
taken, constrained, facing a landscape with more and less open paths for action; and on
the other, some ways in which the person appreciates being outside of the environment
to which he or she responds, engaged in making a response that ranges from ‘going along

12
 13
with’ to attempts to intervene and alter.
There are many terms we customarily use that falsely imply a point where and a
time during which the world ends and the person begins: ego, superego, id, cognition,
thinking, decision-making. The fact of being intertwined with the environment is hard to
grasp because the prosaic language we use to make the point inevitably speaks of person
as one thing and environment as another. We are advised that for clarity we should write
in the active voice, setting subjects formally off as if existentially independent from the
objects they act upon.[7]
But the empirical reality of intertwining has infinite demonstrations. It is perhaps
most readily conveyed by thinking about respiration. Breath is a critical definition of life.
We cannot identify a point where the not-me of the atmosphere becomes the me of
absorbed breath. A person is unambiguously separate from his or her bodily environment
only in an existence before and after life, as an image in someone else’s mind.
Consider also a promising candidate for the fundamental sensuality on which all
the others must rely (but not vice versa), the ‘sixth’ sense, proprioception. As if there were
a gyroscope at our centres, we constantly make adjustments flowing out to our extremities
in an unbroken responsiveness to the contours of our world at hand and to our changing
horizons. Whether the effort is to hear, to see, to touch, to smell, or to taste, our perception
requires the mobilization of a part connected seamlessly to the whole of the body, thus
implicating the centre of our posture and its rhythmically inclined relationship to the world.
Without thought (there is no time out from the process, no moment for thought to end, thus
no moment for thought to begin), the sensed body already complements the world as
perceived. A softening ground requires a different kind of step. A catcher in the distance
requires a different mobilization of the throwing body than one close-by. This gyroscope
is never turned on because it is never off. While problems may arise requiring focused
attention and decision-making, there is no natural point of break between us and the
contours of the world we bring into view through the gyroscope-guided motions of our body.

5. The Immediacy and Constancy of Repression

An understanding that the person embodies the environment and that the environment
incorporates the person is profoundly challenging to traditional protocols. We love to study

13
 14
language, whether it be the talk done in response to survey questionnaires or transcriptions
of recorded conversations. But the reason that language is so common in the data we use
is that it already registers a transformation from a transcending, always-already-there
intertwining in the world that is evolves beyond self-conscious awareness. Language is not
simply an expression of the self; it is a transmogrification, a shift in the embodiment of
spirit, a wrenching out of a deeper rooting of identity in its environment.[8]
Merleau-Ponty, and Michael Polanyi in his ‘from/to’ and ‘distal/proximate’
formulations (Polanyi, 1962 and 1966), vividly understood the dialectical character of the
dualism in social life. Every expression, to be effective, must also be an effacing, a wiping
out or covering up that hides in order that something be revealed for others to grasp. We
hear through the other’s speech; if we focus too much on the aesthetics of what we hear
or say, we lose touch with the train of thought. Listening requires a non-hearing, a
negation which can be as much or more effort as is the positive seizing on the other’s
meaning (Merleau-Ponty, 1973). ‘Face-to-face’ interaction requires a blindness to features
of the other’s face which, if dwelled upon, would disable both from a necessary
responsiveness. Conversely, each time I open my eyes to see what is around me, I throw
into the shadows a world of bodily awareness that had just been present.
The conceptualization of intertwined self/other or self/world identities goes a step
beyond an appreciation of the problem of intersubjectivity. The construction of any
collective action requires the definition of a working consensus on the situation at hand.
I have already referred to the dualistic structure of the definition of the situation as
requiring tacit activities that preserve the taken-for-granted sense of what is at hand and
in focus. It is another step to appreciate that this dualism in turn requires a division of the
presented self off from the bodily
transcending identity of each participant.
The body both roots the presentation of self in all social situations and provides an
ongoing continuity of experience as the individual enters and exits different situations.
What must most fundamentally be sustained as a taken for granted presumption for social
interaction is the segregation and suppression, from what is presented to the other, of a
range of transcending dimensions of life (compare Weber, 2001). These include a series
of immediate concerns about the implications of current action for social relations that are
lived in other times and places. In order to construct a collectively workable understanding

14
 15
of what is happening ‘here and now,’ each party to an interaction must repress the
appearance, to self as well as to the other, of the meanings the current situation has for
the person in relation to others encountered, and to be encountered, ‘there and then.’ This
repression is part of the minimally required work for presenting a self as available to the
other’s responsiveness. The person orients to the situation transcending meanings of the
interaction here and now in and through the body. Both expression and the hiding it
requires are done through the same body and at the same time. The aesthetic/sensual
character of social behavior and experience exists in the sinews of the presented/hidden
crafting of action. Theories that neglect these sinews will be inadequate. Research that
documents them will require innovation.

6. The Visible Unconscious and Innovative Methods

As opposed to Freudian and other psychological theories which rely on repression at Time
One shaping limitations on awareness at Time Two, the dualism of awareness and
unconscious being is being constituted constantly, and through processes which, if they
must be outside of the actor’s awareness in the moment of action, are not invisible to
research. An appreciation of the dualistic character of action reorients the agenda for
investigation. It is essential but not enough to describe what is within the actors’ mutual
awareness. There will also be intertwinings with the physical and social environment that
are causally essential to the action but outside of the actors’ attentions. It is essential, if
one is concerned to produce a complete description and thus explanation of conduct, to
describe the in vivo, in situ, repression of awareness that makes any socially presented
action possible.
Studying the represented self is practically and ethically much easier and much
more common than studying the parts of social life that are repressed as representations
are produced. One enters a field with relatively little reason to pause when the objective
is to study what others have already decided to make available for inspection: the talk
people project with the expectation that this version of self be perceived by someone else,
the categorizations made by officials, the culture produced to be advertised and sold. Such
data are convenient: the materials are already packaged to be heard or read in a
conventional manner.
As soon as research looks beneath and behind the self-consciously represented

15
 16
self, the inquiry becomes more burdensome by magnitudes and novel ethical issues
emerge. All represented action is generated from a behind that is politely kept beyond
legitimate gaze. Tracing the situated origins of any form of social life will always require
some indiscretion. And as a practical matter, the lived forms of intersubjectivity and
intertwining are not conventionally formed. It has required innovative transcribing
conventions to study the tacit processes by which the taken-for-granted character of
intersubjective talk is sustained. With regard to the study of emotions, the transcending
challenge increases geometrically as one struggles to develop practicable descriptions of
phenomena like screaming, whining, mortified shame, hysterical laughter, etc.
For the study of crime, the challenge is to appreciate how a subversion of
conventional understandings, and thus immunity from the reach of conventional research
methods, is intrinsic to the attractions of being a criminal. Consider the gambit of the
unrepaid personal loan. Joe asks Tim, a newcomer to their setting (work, prison,
neighborhood, school class) for a loan, to be repaid next Friday, and gets it. The amount
notably doesn’t matter for the meaning of what follows. Friday comes and Joe has other
problems and can’t repay. If Joe’s problems on the initial occasion were sufficient to justify
the loan, why shouldn’t his continued problems next pay day justify extending the loan?
The dodging of repayment goes on and on, until it becomes undeniably clear that Joe
does not intend to repay, that he is playing with Tim (who has discovered that Joe owes
many others as well), and that getting repaid will require violence. For the researcher,
there is nothing inherently invisible about the dominance strategy that is at play here. But
to grasp what is going on requires describing a perverse use of standard accounts. Tim
is compelled finally to get the point that Joe is using the convention of a loan, which stands
somewhere between an exchange and a gift relationship, as a front that Joe expects one
day to collapse, revealing the mean spirit that lies behind. But what makes the front
collapse is nothing more than repetition and time. It is the very silence, the force of what
is not said, that becomes increasingly prominent, and that makes every next encounter
between the two another occasion in which Joe is robbing Tim. To the police, and in
conventional criminology, there may be no crime here at all. In the world of Joe and Tim,
there is an ongoing, infinitely expanding criminality in the relationship.
In historical research on emotions and personal identity, there is always the choice
between using representational materials, such as advice manuals, popular literature and

16
 17
law cases, or trying to get at the lived experience behind and underneath what is produced
for others, including historians coming along centuries later, to see. Examples of the latter
include works that describe once-common practices (e.g. Corbin, 1998), and efforts to
recreate the sensual and aesthetic details of everyday life. An instructive example is Piero
Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams, a series of poetically written essays that convey the
interpenetration of material and imaginary worlds as sustained by the diet in much of
medieval Italy, which, when it did not stimulate fantasies of horror in periods of starvation,
stimulated dreams through the polluted, inebriating, disease-provoking and hallucinogenic
properties of the standard diet (Camporesi, 1989).
Perhaps the most important role for theory is to encourage the risk-taking required
by innovative methods. In this respect, theories that rely on and indeed celebrate
representational data are not just dismal, they are destructive. These include Durkheimian
formulations about the objectivity of social facts; psychological theories that impute causal
forces, from libido to shame, independent of observable behaviour; theories attributing
causal force to ‘culture’ independent of situated action; rational choice and economic
modeling that treats the descriptive tasks necessary to load preference or indifference
curves as some lower form of work. All make strategic appeals to the academic prestige
of ‘theory’ as a way of justifying anemic data gathering strategies and deflecting attention
from deficiencies in the description of what is to be explained.

7. Intertwining: The Fall Softened

The intersubjective challenge implies a nothingness, an existential gap between people.
The more that research reveals the elaborate and detailed work that people do to sustain
the belief that a common culture provides authority for their actions, the more doubtful that
any common culture exists. The implication is that if the emperor had clothes, we would
not have to exercise so much deference and engage in so much ritual to see them. This
was the first point American social science took from European phenomenology.
And then the appreciation of intertwining reversed the flow of ideas, emphasizing
the permanence of a transcendent embrace. So long as one breathes there is no gap
between self and world. It is an observable fact that my self is always rooted in the world,
never really as free-floating and subject to vanishing from moment-to-moment as my

17
 18
routinely impoverished self-awareness may suggest. As I type this, I have no need to
reinvent myself. I am provoked into existence simply by entering this place, sitting in a
chair with a familiar feel, looking up at the screen and finding the last passage I wrote
begging for improvement. From time to time I may lose track of my project and glance up
at the books that over the years I have arranged on my shelves as a gradually sketched,
complementary version of my working self. And if all else fails, I can always rely on critics
for barbed provocations that will demand a corrective response.
If we take the problematic maintenance of a presumption of intersubjectivity as an
analytical starting point, we can see that it is a powerful contingency of a variety of
emotional reactions, including paths leading through shame to anger and even violence.
But the variety of responses indicates that no one response is inevitable, and that the
response developed often depends on what is readily at hand. When shamed men realize
they will lose the fight, they can stop the movement to violence (Katz, 1988: 40-41) and
replace anger with resentment. When toddlers fall down in the playground, they don’t
necessarily cry. And often when toddlers do respond by crying, they don’t cry until they first
catch the gaze of a presumably responsive adult, preferably mother. The fall out of
intertwining with the world comes first, but what comes next is a revealing moment of
nothing. The crying response only acknowledges the fall when there is reason to see a
way to deny it, for example, the embrace of the mother. To answer an adapted version of
an old question, the sound of a child falling in a motherless playground is often silence.
Similarly, when people find shockingly distorted depictions of themselves in
funhouse mirrors, they sometimes ignore the mirror’s defects and, without missing a beat,
proceed to groom themselves, latching onto the mirror’s image as a personal tool. This
often happens when people are alone in front of the mirrors, or without someone with
whom they can treat the distortion as humorous. Lacking ready resources for making
humor, they fix their hair. Even the most extreme provocation to break a taken-for-granted
intertwining with the world does not necessarily force a recognition of a crisis in
intersubjectivity, although the grooming process implies a recognition that something
should be done to improve the fit of one’s self into others’ perceptions.
Falls, or recognitions of a breach in a presumed intersubjectivity, lead to various
emotional responses independent of shame. Thus a fall can lead to a recognition of a
deeper embrace, as in wit’s laughter; to a discovery of possibilities for embracing oneself,

18
 19
as in crying; or to a realization of the animosity behind a push that was directed at one as
a representative of a community, in which case one never was separated from community
and can justify violence in unbroken pride and with cold rationality. In many international
conflicts of the last hundred years, some parties were emphatically clear that their
aggression was a response to histories of shame and humiliation, but for those on the
attacked side, a violent response was sufficiently motivated by a cool logic of self-defence.
The variety of responses to breaks in intersubjectivity is a natural, universal
possibility owing to the multiplicity of ongoing intertwinings already objectively available in
the background of awareness. When, interrupted in a course of focal activity, we turn to
reassess our stance, we can look for breaks in any number of subterranean roots. A fall
is already a familiar catalyst to slapstick humor, the sort of thing an adversary would have
happen to us, an insignificant happenstance requiring nothing more than a temporary
technical repair to our foundations, etc.
On some occasions, the person will pause in appreciation that there is an array of
alternative constructions. After other falls, the person will get up with a construction of the
meaning well in progress. But the experience of the fall, both the literal physical event and
the metaphor of an experienced break in inter-subjectivity, is universal. People will already
have at hand an array of paths toward reconstruction that their culture has elaborated. And
the multiplicity of possibilities will already have become intimately personal. On turning to
re-examine his stance, the fallen individual will be able to find: sub-cultural, gender, age
and stratification roots, because posture and gait will already have been patterned on those
lines; other parties who are responsible, because every moment in social life is seamlessly
connected to a web of others; universal and impersonal dynamic strategies for managing
ongoing responses to the contour, texture and density of the ground; etc.
The Edenic fall, that moment of disengaged, self-doubting experience of existential
isolation, and the response of shame it inspires, is itself a myth that obscures the ongoing
involvements that never stop providing sustenance for the self. Thus while shame may be
universal in cultures and even in individual lives, shame not only is not inevitable in any
given situation, it is a mystification produced by self-reflection, a mystification that obscures
the inexorable embrace of the community. If so it should be expected that we will be
endlessly surprised at when people become ashamed and at what people become
ashamed about. Today, when there is a daily proliferation of social movements that search

19
 20
energetically into historical records to find experiences of group humiliation that were not
properly appreciated as such for decades or even centuries, we should be especially wary
that shame-to-rage theories beg inquiry into the problematic emergence of shame itself.

8. The Theory Paradox

A simple model, if valid, will be known to the people studied and will thus produce a
challenging paradox: people will respond with personal and collective anticipatory
manouvres, thus creating causal complexities that, to disentangle, will require a daunting
empirical analysis.
Consider two types of explanatory theories. The first is complex in the number of
variables it considers as influencing conduct, but the conception of how variables shape
conduct is simple. Each variable explains some part of the variance. The relationships
among variables may be multiple and interactive but they can be diagrammed in two
dimensions. The research challenge is to identify those variables which in combination will
describe the causal paths in a large percentage of cases. If one can find a few variables
that will do the job, so much the better, but a model that incorporates a large number of
variables that jointly explain most of the variance at issue will also be impressive. In either
case, the analytic action is concerned with the what and not the how of explanation. The
how of explanation, the narrative structure, is simple: this billiard ball bounces off of that
one, then that side of the table, then that other ball, changing speed and direction on until
the course is shaped to impact the target ball at a particular angle and with a particular
force.
A second type of theory is simple in the sense of describing a critical crucible of
experience, a universal challenge experienced by each person and taken as an
unavoidable provocation requiring some kind of response. Such a theory, if true, will
necessarily require complex narratives of causal process. The perspective on the ‘fall’ that
I have been offering can be summarized and conveyed in the form of a fundamental,
central or archetypical drama. The person, while always unself-consciously engaged in
the world, is constantly and self-consciously shaping conduct into socially situated forms.
Recurrently, the person recognizes the artificiality of the forms in which his or her conduct
has been shaped; the person repeatedly appreciates the necessity of making sense of

20
 21
relating what happens in transient social situations to the transcending, embodied courses
of his or her life.
The fall out of involvement in interaction gives rise to a range of emotions, but that
range is only a small part of the complications that arise in personal and social life.
Infinitely greater complications arise from the fact that people know the simple drama.
People know that they will repeatedly construct and exit from situations that, for the time,
they must live manifestly as all-involving. Because they anticipate the fall, they are not its
simple victims. They prepare responses before entering challenging situations. With
anticipation comes a range of strategies for insuring against surprise injuries, for pre-
arranging explanations of disruptions, and for avoiding risk and managing rejection when
it arises. Instead of a simple drama, there is a pre-commentary on the possibility of falls
that takes infinite forms, ranging from aggressive ‘attitude’ to humility, ‘pudeur,’ and styles
of modesty that blunt the pain of a fall by taking the initiative to manifest an awareness that
it is already in progress.[9]
Further complicating the analysis, none of these forms is a completely individual
creation. Thus in manifesting either an aggressive rejection or a humble acceptance of
being treated as inferior, isolated, or outside a community due to personal moral
incompetency, one is at the same time manifesting being with the community that has
generated this form of anticipatory response. What the form exhibits, the process of
manifesting the form may deny. Academics witness this strategy in the form of colleagues
who dramatize humility with great aplomb and self-confidence. As analysis begins to
appreciate the essentially ironic nature of the process, explanation becomes three-
dimensional.
The reality of the simple drama becomes geometrically more complex when we
appreciate that everyone knows that everyone else knows the simple drama. Thus every
time people enter a social interaction or relationship, each can anticipate that the other will
be using an unstated, unself-conscious strategy for fitting the interaction or relationship into
the ongoing range of his or her social life. One cannot ‘decide’ how to manage the
possibilities of falls because the ubiquity and ongoingness of the challenge will not allow
that level of self-consciousness. One must work out how much of one’s transcending life
to invest in any given situation ‘under the gun,’ i.e., while trying to read how the other is
making indications of a commitment on the same issue. People meet as mutually

21
 22
reflecting, distorting mirrors, each for the other casting an infinitely regressing/progressing
image of what the moment means in his or her life, each working out which of the
transcending images of identity shed by the other he or she manifestly should respond to.

9. The Social Ontology of Contemporary Crime

Just because the simple story is taken for granted as true by everyone, the researcher will
find that explanations will work simply for no-one. The implication for research is that
methods rich in narrative qualities will be necessary. Consider this candidate for the
overriding question about crime in the US today: will the burgeoning Latin American and
Caribbean immigrant poverty population recreate the rates of urban violence against
strangers that has been produced in the last half century by the African-American poverty
population? If black street criminality continues to decline, will the low income latino
population, which in California, in number and percentage, is already far larger than the low
income black population ever was, sustain a high level of danger in urban life?
The simple narratives proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, for example that urban
crime rates are somehow produced by social inequalities (Blau, 1982), have fared poorly
in the 1990s, as inequalities mushroomed and crime significantly declined. This structural
and materialist perspective was introduced as an improvement on the earlier
commonsense explanation of crime as a result of unemployment, an explanation which
had failed to withstand long-term historical testing, and which floundered especially
dramatically in the 1960s, which were ‘go go’ years both for crime and for the economy
(Cantor and Land, 1985). The inequalities argument never did get down to specifying the
narrative connections that would produce criminal violence, the matter being left at the
level of Durkheimian social fact, a level that always works quite well so long as one does
not question the arbitrariness of measures (‘inequality’, after all, has never been a simple
perception), which is feasible so long as the correlations hold. A similar fate was suffered
by demographic explanations of rising crime rates, which initially were widely accepted as
compelling but which, after the declines of crime rates in the 1990s, now require ad hoc,
post hoc scrambling to reconstruct (see the heroic efforts in Blumstein and Wallman,
2000).
Nor is there much reason to bet on a more complex narrative that sees crime as

22
 23
the outcome of shame. There is certainly no basis for assuming that the immigrant poverty
population is unusually indifferent to loss of face, situational falls from respectability, and
injuries to collective and personal pride. The histrionically brazen style of adolescent gang
life indicates the seductions of overcoming parental humility, which is readily visible in any
encounter with native authority, for example in the ‘Sunday best’ used to outfit the family
on trips to medical offices. Nor is there any reason to presume that this population is being
received with a historically unusual opening of sympathetic arms. Consider only the widely
read implications of Proposition 187 in California, a 1994 statewide measure denying public
services to undocumented immigrants; the classic terrorization of immigrants by the
Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, a long-running scandal that broke
in 1998 and is churning; the sexual torture of a Haitian immigrant by New York city
policemen. There is enough shaming and sensitivity to shame in this context to explain
any social problem one might wish to explain.
Instead, start with the problem of intersubjectivity. Go on to appreciate that even
as the meeting of minds must be constantly negotiated, at the same time, but on a less
self-conscious level, in the sensualities and aesthetics of action, everyone’s conduct is
always underwritten through a transcending body rooted in the social world. Keep in mind
that no-one always relies on this transcendence, least of all in and around adolescence.
And understand that, everyone already knowing of the danger of the fall, the people we
would understand will, in effect, anticipate our readings, with the result of producing vast
complications for our work.
Because people anticipate the prospect of falls, they work out strategies that seek
to avoid traumatic moments and that provide ready-made responses when they arise.
People may avoid situations in which they do not expect to be respectfully understood.
Groups can develop a culture that accepts some routine misunderstandings as existential,
historically unavoidable and intrinsically blameless, and that sees others as created
through malevolence. Shame is one response to a fall but not the only response possible,
and however the person responds on any given occasion, whether in being shamed,
pushed to anger, reduced to tears, elevated by laughter, or otherwise, he or she is also,
in some region of awareness of the possibilities, not living the other possibilities. It is
equally true that laughter often arises as a transformation of the appreciation that one
might be regarded as shamed, as that shame arises because, unlike some of one’s peers,

23
 24
one cannot laugh the matter off.
In some historical moments and with regard to some empirical questions, the role
of theory may be to summarize findings and predict what one is likely to find in the future.
With regard to the most pressing questions about crime today, we need a different kind of
theory, one that will warn us of what we dare not miss as we conduct the research that the
uniqueness of the current moment makes unavoidable. Given the complexities of the
phenomena, we need a guiding imagery that offers a ‘heads up’ for multi-method
ethnographic and historical inquiries that would try to situate a comparative ethnic
understanding of receding and emerging responses to brute gaps in the social life of urban
America.

Notes
Thanks to Willem de Haan for detailed comments on several drafts.

1. The same point applies to semiotic and hermeneutic theories in which the apparent
integrity of an element is subverted by breaking down its isolation. Instead of
representing what it claims to represent, the symbolic meaning of an item is located in
the sets of relations in which it figures as a part. This systemic perspective humbles
claims of autonomous meaning made on behalf of any element considered alone. Like
the functionalism it followed historically, ‘structural’ analysis honours the whole by
deconstructing the pretensions of a part.

2. Because the reader usually cannot know who in his texts is doing what when, it is
obvious that Michel Foucault must be a theorist. Having produced so many history
books that do not describe when the things analyzed occurred, Foucault must be a
great theorist. The substance of his theory of knowledge as a transcending and
disciplining power is conveyed to the reader by his transcendence and subordination
over the many documenting burdens that preoccupy less theoretical historians. The
very fact of his success in achieving a dominant position as an intellectual may be the
best evidence for his theory. In contrast a similarly comparative perspective on
substantively diverse, supervisory, disciplining institutions, each based on its own form
of specialized knowledge, Goffman’s Asylums, was too descriptive of historically

24
 25
situated realities to be widely recognized as ‘theory’.

3. Theory is also invaluable for sustaining discourse. In a conversation with the late Arthur
Leff, a Goffman-influenced law professor, I once made the mistake of characterizing
a question he raised as one of fact, to which he sensibly replied to the effect: ‘Question
of fact? Well, that’s a surefire way to end a great discussion!’ Because we consider
teaching to be good when it promotes discourse, college teaching, which cannot
practically accommodate extensive inquiries into the facts, is an immense institutional
support for social theory. Teaching also supports social theory as a valuable
convention for organizing textbooks and examinations into debates. By sorting works
out into a relatively few contrasting theories, teachers present themselves to students
as authorities with comprehensive understandings of areas of research that have been
developed by scores of researchers conducting countless studies for decades. And in
the rhetorical battles of academic life, theoretical postures ground efforts to rally
support around attacks on another’s work for lacking ‘significance’ and ‘reflexivity,’ or
for missing ‘the bigger picture’ and ‘sentimentally’ focusing on individual cases.

4. For this reason, the writings of ‘labelling’ theorists have often been misunderstood as
proposing differentiating, causally deterministic theories that are alternative to
explanations pointing to features in offenders’ backgrounds. Becker, Kitsuse and other
interactionist and phenomenologically inspired ‘labelling theorists’ are most accurately
read as trying to expand and shift the compass of inquiry to include the constitution of
prohibitions, detections, cultural preconditions and post-processing cultural
elaborations of official actions against deviants. Critics have often failed to appreciate
that what was different about labeling theory was not just the ‘labelling’ component but
also the conception of theory and research. The effort was to get out of the ‘pin-the-tail-
on-the-donkey’ game of theoretical debate, in which each team tries to transform the
causal forces proposed by other teams into ends or results which one’s own team can
explain.

Seductions of Crime (Katz, 1988) should also be read in this tradition. The central
point is not that background is irrelevant but that inquiry should start with the
foreground of crime, i.e., with a commitment to describe what always and uniquely

25
 26
occurs in the construction of different forms of deviant conduct. Once we sort crimes
by their homogenous meanings to people as they are doing them, we can pursue the
grounded relevancies of various background features (gender, race, social class,
immigration status, etc.), and we can frequently find novel relationships between the
backgrounds and foregrounds of criminal conduct.

5. The result is causal explanation without determinism, not prediction but retrodiction, a
specification of the processes that will have taken place if a given form of social life is
observed (see Katz, 2001).

6. In some work settings, the veneer of consensus is established with a dispatch that
allows little opportunity for the investigation of divergent understandings. As they
negotiate toward the disposition of routine criminal cases, prosecutor and defence
lawyer rapidly typify offenders and offences, acting as if they not only share a culture
of typifications but also, and even more problematically, share an understanding of the
facts of the offence and the offender’s biography. What the two work toward is a
‘meeting of the minds’ that will suffice for all practical purposes, and if the defendant
is confused or passive and the case is of little interest to others outside the negotiating
circle, adversarial minds may meet on a definition of crime that becomes highly
consequential for punishment despite being a substantially virtual reality (Sudnow,
1965).

7. See the injunction to the active voice in Becker (1986). My preference is to accept this
advice. In consequence, my writing highlights subjects’ innovations and struggles to
keep the reality of intertwining from disappearing. Much continental European
philosophical and sociological writing takes the opposite strategy, making institutions
and objects come alive with spirits and characters that act in the world without
bothering to have visible people as their instigators. Any writing style will run a risk of
failing to represent either the subject’s active movements or the subject’s experience
of the “always already there” framing of the social context, a sense of place and
dynamics of in the environment that is experienced as passively received. Whatever
style one selects, it is especially helpful to be aware of the inherent limitations of

26
 27
language for expressing the dialectic of social reality.

8. The reference here is to language as used in routine interaction. Poetic language is

distinguishable specifically because it resists the amputation of word meaning from the
embodied vehicle of expression. The form and the content of expression are fully equal
rivals in poetry’s effort to elicit a response, and this is the source of both the resonance
and the obscurity of poetic language, which by making the form of expression so
prominent hides the body of the poet lurking behind, paradoxically creating a safe place
for especially intimate, confessional statements.

9. Including the response of spinning a legend of a primordial fall (see Katz, 1996). The
Edenic story is a kind of blues song: if everyone has fallen, then no-one really has
since a communal embrace has already been guaranteed.

References

Becker, Howard. S. (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Blau, Judith R. and Peter M. Blau (1982) ‘The Cost Of Inequality: Metropolitan Structure
And Violent Crime’, American Sociological Review 47, 114-129.
Blumer, Herbert (1969) Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice
Hall.
Blumstein, Alfred and Joel Wallman (eds.) (2000) The Crime Drop in America. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cantor, David and Kenneth C. Land (1985) ‘Unemployment and Crime Rates in the Post-
World War II United States: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis’, American
Sociological Review 50, 317-332.
Corbin, Alain (1998) Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French
Countryside. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gibson, James J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Gibson, Eleanor J. and Pick, Anne D. (2000). An Ecological Approach to Perceptual

27
 28
Learning and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.
Katz, Jack (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New
York: Basic Books.
Katz, J. (1999) How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Katz, J. (2001) ‘Analytic Induction’, In Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds),
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, pp. 480-484.
Oxford: Elsevier.
Katz, Jack, Kusenbach, Margarethe and Peter Ibarra (in progress) Troubled Nests: Crime
and the Social Meanings of Neighborhood in Five Hollywoods.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1973) ‘Science and the Experience of Expression’, In Claude
Lefort (ed), The Prose of the World, pp. 9-46. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Polanyi, Michael (1962) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, Michael (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Scheff, Thomas J., and Retzinger, Susanne M. (1991) Emotions and Violence: Shame and
Rage in Destructive Conflicts. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1992). ‘Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided
Defense of Intersubjectivity In Conversation’, American Journal of Sociology 97,
1295-1345.
Sudnow, David (1965) ‘Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public
Defender Office’, Social Problems 12: 257-276.
Weber, Francoise (2001) ‘Settings, Interactions, and Things. A Plea for Multi-integrative
Ethnography’, Ethnography 2/4: 475-500.

JACK KATZ is a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His
research areas include: civil lawyers assisting poor people, prosecutors targeting white-
collar criminals, the immediate attractions of various deviant and criminal activities, the
detection of bias in social organizations, qualitative and ethnographic methods,
emotions in everyday life, and, currently, the foundations of neighborhoods in cities.

28
29

29