Reading Berger and Luckman's thought-provoking The Social Construction of Reality probably led me to refine an idea I had about dichotomous vs. continual spaces and institutions. Basically: encounters with social institutions elicit simplifying decisions about otherwise more continuous reality. A courtroom epitomizes this process. The jury filters information from complex situations outside and inside the trial, ultimately choosing from a fixed set of options to answer a fixed number of questions. The choice they make -- prototypically, "guilty" or "not guilty"-- then sets in motion a large number of processes which vary widely based on the answer but cannot be fully predicted from it. Let's think about this decision point as a socio-spatio-temporal nexus.
I'm didn't call it "socio-spatio-temporal" (just) to be pretentious. Rather, I mean to distinguish this type of point from from other points in space time. It's easy to see any point-moment as pivotal or nexus-like by virtue of its conical extension of influence backwards and forwards through space-time. I want to talk about moments characterized by (a) stark, irreversible, dichotomous and uncertain choices with (b) socially meaningful inputs and outputs. (This concept itself, like most I use, exhibits more properties of a continuum -- or "family resemblance category" -- than of dichotomous inclusion or exclusion.)
Examples in approximately descending order:
- The outcome of an election (say, for example, a contemporary US presidential election). Diverse and large scale social processes cause a vast multitude of individuals to cast ballots for particular candidates. This in itself is a nexus of some salience (the impact of individual ballots is probably far greater for individuals voters than it is for the outcome of the election as a whole), but the election as a whole massively overshadows it. The electoral college algorithm is applied to the votes (which is not to say that some of these votes might not be fraudulent) to yield a single winner, who is then at liberty to blow up the entire fucking world four to eight years. The significance and complexity of inputs and outputs, combined with the absolutely dichotomous nature of the choice (it's a "winner-take-all game!") make this, for me, the single best example of the type of nexus I'm talking about.
- The judge's decision in a debate round. An extended process of research and movement all comes to a head in the debate round itself, which does its own work in channeling these processes towards the decision point. Debates reify arguments and establish sides, reducing nuances and promoting allegiances between sets of arguments that prepare the way for the judge to make a final decision between the two sides. The point of the judge's decision becomes an even more significant nexus point (and therefore, more of nexus point) in elimination rounds. [Note to the uninitiated: debate tournaments contain preliminary rounds, usually eight, followed by elimination rounds. Everyone participates in preliminary rounds. The top group of teams (usually 32, but can be any power of 2) then begin another tournament, seeded by performance in preliminary rounds, in which only the winners of each round advance to the next.] Because preliminary rounds operate in conjunction to produce and order the set of teams advancing to elimination rounds, teams can compensate for losing one round by winning others. No such compensation is possible in elimination rounds; more rides on each decision. To extend the courtroom analogy, being in an elimination round is like being out of appeals.
- A student's answer on a true-or-false test. A whole universe (world-historical, mathematical, or biological, etc.) is filtered by a particular educational configuration and then by a student, who must in turn make binary decisions about facts within that universe. I consider this a slightly less prototypical nexus situation than, say, a debate round, because it allows a larger temporal window for reversibility and because the capacity to compensate for wrong answer is higher. Put another way, the larger the number of parallel events, the less nexus-y an event is, since the statistical effect of an increasingly large sample size cancels out the dichotomous effect of the yes-or-no structure.
- Word choice. Deliberately vague example, because I want to call attention to the broad spectrum of sample spaces for word choice, some of which exhibit "nexus" qualities quite well, and others of which barely do at all. At the former end would be the first (referential/unironic) decision an obviously ideologically charged term (like "fag" vs. "homosexual" or "terrorist" vs. "freedom fighter") in a socially important setting (like the first time meeting new people or a presidential address). Choices like these have relatively high consequences because of the psychological and social commitments they entail. At the opposite end of the spectrum would be the use of a seemingly unimportant term in a less emotionally charged situation. (If yesterday I once again told a close friend that I "loathed" economics, it won't matter much to either of us when today I tell her that I "detest" economics.)
- A socially relevant coin flip (or any other gamble on a functionally random event) is almost there, but not really. This type of things defines the periphery of the category I'm trying to discuss, and the analysis below only sort of applies to it. This event only meets half of my criteria in (b) above, since the input isn't really socially relevant to the outcome, but the output can certainly be determinative... of, e.g., sides in a sporting event or debate rounds. The spatio-temporal visualization of this event (in the social context) would be only a single (forward-facing) cylinder of influence, not the double cylinder of past causes and future effects.
These nexuses fascinate me because they focus our attention on the operation of causality in the world. If parallel universes exist and we were able to classify them, our taxonomies would group them according to outcomes at these nexuses. (The "uncertainty" required by the definition enables the existence of parallel universes with counterfactual outcomes, although here I'm playing fast and loose with a correspondence between uncertainty for the observer and causal uncertainty. The assumption here is that the more uncertain a situation is for observers, the more likely it is that small changes that are relatively proximate/prior in space-time will be able to switch the outcome. This might not hold true in weird circumstances, like when causes well up from the distant past or, more mundanely, when observers just have bad information.)
These events may "bend" social behavior around them in predictable/generalizable ways:
More emotional charge surrounds nexuses than other moments in human experience. Even if the outcome of a nexus is less important than the total impact of an ongoing non-nexus process or behavior, temporal compression makes the nexus appear more salient. Indeed, in the short run, confronting a nexus makes more sense than contemplating longer-term patterns expressing themselves along continua... but this short-term tradeoff might paradoxically be considered irrational in the long run. The impact of the long-run behavior might not only be larger; it might produce a systematic bias on each short-run nexus.
Put another way (sociologically or politically, rather than psychologically), nexuses raise the stakes of social interaction which could influence them. maximize conservative and loss-averse behavior from entities reasonably invested in the status quo. Irreversible large changes elicit fear from those who stand to lose from these types of changes, whereas incremental change, even if it ends up in the same place, is less threatening, because of higher reversibility and lower uncertainty. Inversely, (although probably not proportionally, given what we know about general tendencies toward loss-aversion... not to mention revolutions in this millennium), the severely disempowered and disadvantaged are more likely to take risks to ensure a favorable outcome at a nexus moment; these moments afford unique leverage over the course of history, and an opportunity for large gains in an otherwise insurmountable situation.
Nexuses contribute to socialization. (Here's where some influence comes directly from Berger and Luckman). The a complex set of interacting social forces determine the outcome of a nexus; as a result, nexuses drive actors to interact with other relevant actors. The mere fact of interaction in itself furthers socialization, as involved entities calibrate concepts with each other and appeal to shared bases of knowledge in order to be persuasive. The decision-makers, as the ones motivating nexus-associated behavior, possess asymmetric control over the socialization process. Candidates have to cater to voters. A student taking a test concerns herself not so much with "objective" truth, but with truth as presented by the teacher. That these interactions are strategic amplifies the socialization, since fully integrating oneself into a relevant symbolic regime maximizes one's ability to affect the outcome. It seems to me that the most effective candidates with respect to a particular population, students with respect to a particular material, or debaters with respect to particular judges, are those who most completely think in the same framework as their audiences. But even if that
turns out to be completely not true, at minimum actors acquire intellectual and social resources that influence future behavior.
So, is this completely crazy? And if not, can y'all think of other general characteristics of nexus-defined situations? I bet there are a lot more (e.g., "thickening history"), but it's getting late and I sort of feel done with this entry. OK.
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