Wiley’s Contribution to Symbolic Interactionist Theory

Randall Collins

Published online: 16 February 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract History of symbolic interactionism is reviewed from its pragmatistprecursors (Peirce, Dewey), through the Idealist philosophical context of GeorgeHerbert Mead, to Blumer’s creation of a sociological interactionism. Wiley modelsinteraction among parts of the self to account for both successes and failures ofreflexive self-direction. Wiley thus provides a mechanism for agency or will, makingthese empirical topics via the study of internal dialogue.

Keywords Symbolic interaction . self . sign . interpretant . pragmatism . agency .

will . internal dialogue

Norbert Wiley’s The Semiotic Self is the most important advance in symbolicinteractionist theory in the past 35 years. The last such landmark would be HerbertBlumer’s Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method in 1969. In the theory ofthe self, which is where Wiley’s contribution lies, the main past reference point mustbe George Herbert Mead’s own posthumous lectures, Mind, Self and Societypublished in 1934.

Although we tend to think of symbolic interactionism as an old movement goingback to the early 20th century, in fact the intellectual context has shifted drasticallyover the generations. We must beware of projecting our current interpretationsbackwards onto our intellectual ancestors. Blumer is important for many reasons.Among others, he named the field of symbolic interactionism (in 1937), and heorganized it as an intellectual movement inside sociology. Blumer presented himselfin his lectures at Chicago and Berkeley as merely the faithful expositor of Mead; asgraduate students at Berkeley in the 1960s we often heard the phrase “as Mr. Meadwould say...” But if one immerses oneself in Mead’s papers, his other posthumouscollections such as The Philosophy of the Act (1938), and his sole published book,The Philosophy of the Present (1932) one is in for a bit of a shock. Mead was a

Am Soc (2011) 42:156–167DOI 10.1007/s12108-011-9125-2

R. Collins (*)University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USAe-mail: collinsr@sas.upenn.edu

philosophy professor throughout his career, and although some of his lectureseventually became popular with sociology students, his concerns were first andforemost in the field of philosophical debates. He began in a milieu in which thestruggle was between scriptural religion and science; like his teachers and patronsRoyce, James, and Dewey, Mead was to a considerable extent an Idealist. This is theposition that the universe is constituted of mind or spirit; Idealism was a mediatingposition or half-way house between religion and secularism, and Idealist philosophiesappeared in every Western country during the 19th or early 20th century at the time thattheir university system made the transition from church control to secularism. Germanyunderwent this university revolution first, at the turn of the 19th century, hence itsIdealists are early; American religious colleges were reformed on the German line in thegeneration of Mead’s teachers, chiefly in the 1880s and 90s.

The second generation of American Idealists gravitated away from pure Idealism,into hybrid forms such as pragmatism. Hence this second generation wavered quite alot in their stances, as they incorporated various pieces of cultural capital from thesciences. Peirce, like many others, amalgamated evolutionism into Idealism, butgave this a distinctive twist by incorporating conceptions from higher abstractmathematics, making the universe into an evolution of sign systems. Dewey, forwhom Mead was a kind of lieutenant during the early part of his career, distancedhimself from religious Idealism by touting the new experimental science ofpsychology, which he conceived of as experimenting with the connections betweenindividual souls and the absolute cosmic Self. Eventually this shifted from whatDewey called “experimental Idealism” to “instrumentalism”, the emergent on-goingprocess of creation and discovery of new forms of reality.

The emphasis on psychology brought some further ingredients into the mixthat give Dewey and Mead’s positions an odd tone by the standards of latter daysymbolic interactionism. Psychology at the time was conceived as a hybridbetween physiology (from medical schools, the source of James’ training, as wellas Wundt’s and other pioneers’) and of philosophy; for the first generation ortwo, psychological labs were housed in philosophy departments. Hence thestrange blend of on the one hand Idealism, on the other hand the physiology ofthe nervous system. Dewey’s famous theory of the reflex arc—which waselaborated by Mead up through the 1920s—held that all action is habitual andunconscious, a mere running off of neural impulses in existing channels; thegreat exception is, when habitual action encounters an obstacle in theenvironment; then the organism wakes up by adding a reflexive loop or arc.This is what constitutes consciousness: an effort to deal with interruptions in theflow of habit, by reorganizing one’s actions to overcome the obstacle. Oncehaving achieved the goal, action can go back to being unconscious. One can seemany elements here of the pragmatist position, and we can assimilate this to thelater symbolic interactionist emphasis on the emergent quality of social action.But in the intellectual context of the early 20th century, the emphasis wasdifferent. For one thing, the reflex arc applies equally to animals and to humans;both are nervous systems operating in alternation as it were between sleep-and-awake, habitual unconsciousness and moments of problem-solving. And theorganism is far from an intrinsically active: for the most part it habitually moveson well-worn grooves of a smooth environment, jolted into reaction when

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something in the environment goes wrong. (This bears a striking resemblance toGarfinkel’s ethnomethodological formulation in the 1960s, but on the level ofhabitually accepted stocks of knowledge, which are jolted only when a repair hasto be made.) In this view, humans are not action-seekers, but reaction-makers;they are active only because the social environment is so unpredictable.

There is a second strange mixture in the psychology which was Mead’s chiefinterest in the years between 1900 and 1920. Mead was a close friend of John B.Watson, a graduate student at Chicago in the early 1900s, and they experimentedwith animal behavior together. Watson of course was the first radical behaviorist,proclaiming that psychologists did not need the concept of mind at all but couldexplain everything humans did by principles of observable behavior; again animalsprovided the model that could be extended to humans. This was happening at justthe time that psychology departments were pulling free from philosophy depart-ments; behaviorism was a useful ideology in legitimating the break. But Meadstayed in philosophy; the residue of Watson’s behaviorism was that he came to callhis own position social behaviorism. Taking another strand from older Idealistarguments for the external reality of Mind and Soul, Mead came to emphasize thepoint that mind is not really individual, but emerges from the communication ofgestures among organisms.

But Mead is still a philosopher rather than a sociologist; the problem he wasconcerned with was to show how mind can be constituted in a physical world; orindeed, as he wandered between the naturalist and the Idealist sides of thephilosophical field, how one can show that the physical world is ultimately to beunderstood as a kind of mental process. Thus in his lectures around 1930—within ayear of his death—he was arguing that the solidity of physical objects exists onlybecause human beings project themselves into them, taking the role of the physicalobject and imagining ourselves pushing back. Trying out another angle, rather likeWhitehead’s recent lectures attempting to reconcile science and religion (Processand Reality, 1929), Mead argued that perspectives exist objectively throughout thephysical world, and that planets, molecules and indeed everything constitute eachother by taking perspectives on each other. It is a view that Peirce too hadexpounded in various ways, as if the world were an infinite number of different sign-usages all constituting each other. When Mead lectured in a different Chicago courseon Social Psychology on how human beings acquired their minds by internalizingthe perspectives of social others, this was but a particular instance of a far moregeneral process. This was the very course in which Blumer was the graduateassistant, and which Blumer would take over when Mead dropped dead in mid-termin 1931.

This is why there needed to be someone like Blumer if symbolic interactionismwas to emerge as a field of sociology: that is to say, cut loose not only fromontological debates in philosophy, but from physiological and behaviorist psychol-ogy as well; with a clear line drawn between behavior of animals (non-symbolicbehavior, Blumer would say), and symbolic behavior based on mutual role-taking inhuman social interactions. Mead had never made up his mind whether to be anaturalist or an Idealist. For Blumer there was no question; the social world ashumanly experienced is the only real world that he is interested in. Blumer did notdo all this by himself, of course; he drew on the movement of interpretive and

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interactional sociology that existed in the early 20th century, going as far back asCooley, Thomas, Znaniecki, and others. In effect, the move Blumer made incrystalizing symbolic interactionism was to bring Mead into the social interpretationschool of sociology—or rather to show how the social interpretation school could beconstrued as a derivation of Mead’s theory of mind.

As organizer and leader of a movement of sociological researchers and theorists,Blumer had many concerns. He was best known throughout his career (until histhematic position-defining statement published late in the 60s) with polemicizingagainst the methods pursued by other schools of sociology: he especially attackedsurvey research with its concept of variables cut loose from interactional situations.He criticized both culture and structure as explanations, since they failed to engagethe real site of the social, the interactional process itself. His opponents in rivalschools called him “the grave-digger of sociological research” for his consistentlynegative attitude. Blumer also helped nurture and legitimate a movement ofempirical researchers using ethnographic and interpretive methods, of whom HowieBecker was the archetypal hero. (Of course there were many others in themovement, among them Everett Hughes as particularly inspirational to students atChicago.) Fields such as deviance, mental illness, work and occupations, andsociology of the arts became dominated by researchers of symbolic interactionistinspiration. Blumer himself worked empirically in the fields of collective behavior,social movements, and race relations, giving these an interpretive twist.

When Blumer came to making a theoretical statement, his emphasis was on theprimacy of social interaction as the basis for everything sociologists are concernedwith; and on action and fluidity over stasis. Action is intrinsically meaningful;people act on the basis of the meanings that things have for them, and things areconstituted by the actions by which humans refer to them or point to them. Blumer’sposition in this respect follows the intentionality of objects formulated by 19thcentury Idealists like Royce and after him by James, as well as by the pre-phenomenological philosopher Franz Brentano (and therefore in the backgroundlineage of Schutz and Garfinkel): objects are whatever people refer to or make actsof attending to. Objects can be physical things, other humans, social categories,abstractions—all are on the same plane because they are constituted by the processof social reference. The process of meaning-construction is social; persons maketheir meanings during mutual role-taking with other persons.

What I want to stress here is that so far Blumer is concerned largely with activitieswhich are external to the individual. Meaning-construction and the negotiation ofnew meanings is central to everything in sociology, but it happens most centrally inan extroverted world where people are interacting with each other. Blumer isechoing the Thomas Theorem (stated already by W.I. Thomas and Dorothy SwaineThomas in 1928: “If men [people] define things as real, they are real in theirconsequences.”) But this leaves mysterious the mechanism of social interpretation ormeaning-construction. Is this necessarily a collective process, externally imposedupon the individual, as in labelling theory? Can we paraphrase Marx in symbolicinteractionist language: “Men [people] make definitions of situations, but not just asthey will, but under circumstances not of their own choosing?” In short, is this just atheory of collective emergence of meaning, in which the individual can only goalong?

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Blumer does add an internal aspect, in noting that all this is possible because of theinternal structure of the self. The individual can make interpretations only because he orshe has a self. The self is itself an interpretation, socially constructed by referring to it.But furthermore the self is an internal realm of interaction; one interacts with oneself, bycommunicating with oneself, addressing oneself as a person and responding to what onesays. Blumer’s discussion of self-interaction is relatively short, but central: the humanbeing is not merely incorporating the social structure of one’s group, nor even merelyresponding to it; the human being makes indications to oneself and responds to one’sown indication. There is an internal conversation of gestures. What happens in thatconversation is emergent. Just as two persons interacting with each other work out a lineof action together, the different parts of the self mold a line of action. The self isgenuinely active, not merely reactive; in old fashioned terms it is capable of will power;in contemporary terms it has agency. One can interpret past lines of conduct, pastversions of oneself, accept or reject them; one can plan for the future, start new lines ofaction and abandon them.

The key to understanding human action, for Blumer, is to get inside the definingprocess. But Blumer does not go much further than this on the analytical level.Concretely, one can study a particular kind of action and just what it becomesdefined as (Becker did this archetypally in his paper on becoming a marijuana user).But these kinds of researches become theories of particular kinds of social action,not theories of the self-in-action.

Around mid-century there also developed a burgeoning field of research on thesocial self. This was not really to the point of the processes of action within the self;chiefly it was concerned with the self concept as formed by social experience.Morris Rosenberg’s and Ralph Turner’s syntheses are the monuments of thissubfield; there is also a large literature on self-esteem, and another literature onchildhood development of the self. This research is concerned chiefly with the “me” partof the self including how one deals with multiple selves from playing inconsistent oroverlapping social roles. Here again the emphasis is on the self as imposed from theoutside, but also with the way in which roles are chosen or remade—again, in their outerproducts.

There is some theoretical emphasis, elsewhere in the literature, on the “I” side ofthe self; the side of the self which by definition is spontaneous, impulsive,untrammeled. The existence of the “I’ can be taken as evidence of the existence offreedom, of pure action uncontrolled by society. But the argument is not convincingin its own terms. It is not clear that a pure impulsive “I” can have any success in theworld; nor indeed could it formulate any goals or projects. Free will cannot merelybe posited by the existence of an “I”. The “I” does not get its way by overcoming the“me”, nor by overcoming social processes whether external or internal. As bothBlumer and Mead argued, no action at all is possible without the meshing ofcomponents of the self; no external action will work without taking the role of theother and working out a course of action that will succeed, even if it is an action aswillful as a gunman gesturing to make sure his victim understands his threat and hisdemand for money. There is no getting away from the structure of interaction. So thequestion remains: how can we understand the process of interaction among parts ofthe self which sometimes succeeds in forging new and creative paths of action, andsometimes fails?

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Wiley cuts through the issue at this point. The answer must lie in the structure ofthe self, and the inner dialogue among the parts of the self. Wiley goes back beyondBlumer, beyond social self theory, back to Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society. To breakfree from our clichéd readings, he brings in an alternative, based Charles SandersPeirce. There is an element of intellectual fashion in this; Peirce was enjoying arevival in the late 20th century, as the great American contribution to a theory ofsigns, an alternative to the Saussure lineage which led to French structuralism. Weshould be aware, of course, that both the Peircean semioticians, and Wiley’s Peirceanself-dialogue theory, are selections from a much bigger and more chaotic corpus ofPeirce’s work. It is a myth quite often to assume that the name of a famous thinkerrefers to a unitary intellectual personality, as if they had an essence which pervadedall their work; and that is doubly true in the case of Peirce (and as I have arguedabove, in the case of Mead). There is nothing wrong with extracting a segment, andbuilding an interpretation on it for one’s own purposes; that is the way of theintellectual world as it moves across the generations. My point here is merely toremind ourselves that it would not have been possible for Wiley’s position on thedialogic self to have emerged in 1890, say, out of a contemporary reading of Peirce;nor could symbolic interactionism have emerged in the 1920s among Mead’sstudents if they had simply listened to him more carefully. It took Blumer to makeMead-cum-Chicago-sociology into symbolic interactionism; and it took Wiley tomake Peirce into a contributer to an ultra-sophisticated advance on a Meadian theoryof the dialogic self.

The first move in this synthesis might seem superficial. Wiley substitutes Peirce’s3 parts of the self—I, me, and you—for Mead’s more familiar trio of I (self asaction), me (self-image), and Generalized Other (internalized social viewpoint oraudience). Peirce’s trio emphasizes the time dimension: “I” is present self,spontaneous and free; “me” is the past self, hence already determined and unfree;“you” is the future self. Peirce casts the “you” as interlocuter because he conceivesof the internal dialogue as addressing oneself as “you”.

What difference does it make what we call the parts of the self? The particularforms of mental self-address of English speakers is not the same in all languages;some languages (such as Chinese) do not emphasize separable pronouns at all, andmany grammars incorporate references to persons only as word inflections.Obviously what we are concerned with is a deeper theory of the structure of theself, found in all humans and not shaped by the particularities of given languages. Itwould be absurd to say that a Chinese person could not engage in self-dialoguebecause of lack of use of terms like “I”, “me”, and “you”. The terminology is onlymetaphorical. Wiley’s move is to bring out the characteristics of those structuralparts.

Wiley also expands the types of Other, or social viewpoints inside the self. Inaddition to I, me, and you, the self contains temporary visitors (as in imaginingoneself in dialogue with a particular person), permanent visitors (particular personswhom one regularly takes as an audience viewpoint), and finally the GeneralizedOther (G.O.) as impersonal or universalistic viewpoint which can be projected ontoany other person (and thus which could also at times be construed as “we”), whichthus is crucial for the process of role-taking). We could array these along acontinuum: “you” is oneself cast as other; temporary and permanent visitors are

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particular others, but sliding up towards a more generalized audience and viewpoint,the G.O.

Wiley’s expansion of the parts of the self has several implications. Not all personshave the same degree of generalization in their G.O.; the G.O. of a child ofintermediate years is not very generalized, but carries many particularities of theviewpoint of known social networks. And persons in different kinds of networks—relatively more dense and closed, or more sparse, far-flung and varied—will havedifferent kinds of internal audiences and different kinds of assumptions built intoboth their role-taking and their internal dialogues. That is why there can be largedifferences by social class, gender, and other kinds of social location in people’scommunicative behavior and thinking. Wiley’s expanded model of the self pointsexplicitly to the continuum along which these differences can be located, and to theprocesses by which they are produced.

It should be emphasized, though, that underneath these complexities there arenecessarily 3 basic components of a human self (at least after the first few years ofearly childhood): self-actor (I), self-image (me), and an internalized audience ofviewpoint, into which various kinds of contents can be projected. Call it you,temporary visitor, Generalized Other, and so forth, these are all made possible bystructuring the self to include an audience viewpoint or Other. Mead gives theabstract form of the basic theory, while Wiley shows how complexity can beintroduced into it.

Wiley’s second move comes from the recognition that Mead gives an inadequatetheory of what a sign is, and indeed what language is. Here Wiley invokes Peirce’striad of thought: the 3-cornered relation among sign, interpretant, and object. Thiscan also be construed as the relationship between an idea (sign) and the externalworld (an object); this of course is the long-standing philosophical issue ofepistemology, how do we know that our ideas correspond to objects in the externalworld? Peirce’s answer is that they do not correspond, at least not in anystraightforward way. Sign and object, idea and external world are always connectedby a third party, the interpretant, or human actor. It is human action that connectssigns and objects.

Now we could recognize this as the basis of the pragmatist position, thatknowledge is always action-using-ideas, leading to results in the world; truth is whatleads to good results, getting where we want to go. But for Peirce, the triad ofthought (one of his earliest formulations, already in the late 1860s, long before hispragmatist phase) is part of a far-reaching program of logic and Idealist ontology.Mind / matter / Ideas are equivalent to subjects, predicates, and the interveningconnection made by an interpretant mind. The logical copula is a sign relation; themind is nothing more than a user of signs. Like other Idealist philosophers, Peirceattacked the empiricism which derives knowledge from the association of ideas withsensory objects. The missing link is the sign intervening between object and mind.

Signs are never isolated atoms, but part of infinite series of signs flowing off inseveral dimensions. The interpretant (mind) is itself a sign, and so are every part of asubject-predicate expression. Signs have habitual connections with one another;grammar, fields of semiotic word-meaning, iconic resemblances among the signsthemselves (or which phonetic resemblance is one version), all connect signstogether into a vast tapestry. Cartesian omni-doubt is impossible; the very thoughts

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in which doubt is formulated are composed of signs, whose meaning is given by thesystem of signs. Peirce gave this an Idealist twist: the universe itself is nothing but avast network of signs, formulating logical relations with each other, and thusevolving through time—Peirce’s Idealism is evolutionary. Hence the objects whichmake up the world are defined not by their separable qualities but by their relationswith other objects. Nature is an endless string of signs, each pointing beyond itself;“even plants make their living... by uttering signs.” There is nothing beyond signs:“Reals are signs. To try to peel off signs and get down to the real thing is like tryingto peel an onion and get down to (the) onion itself.” (quoted in Collins 1998: 677)

Wiley, like Blumer and other late 20th century symbolic interactionists, is not anIdealist metaphysician, but a naturalistic sociologist. Wiley’s concern is a morelimited one, but central to the sociological project. He sets out in the clearest fashionyet what is sociology’s distinctive contribution to understanding the humancondition, and hence its distinctive position vis-à-vis other intellectual disciplinesthat lack or misconstrue the nature of the human self. Against downward reductions,Wiley points to the sign-using character of the self; the self cannot be merely aphysical object subject to physical laws (including biological ones), since it isembedded in a stream of signs that come to it from without—from itscommunications with other humans. This sphere of meaningful communication isempirically real; it can be observed and studied in detail; but it is a realm sui generis.In the same way, individuals cannot be reduced to isolated atoms of self-interest (in themanner of economics or rational choice) since the formulation of self-interest and choiceis deeply structured by the internalized communicative process of sign-use. So farWiley’s argument resonates with the lineage of Idealist and Geisteswissenschaftpositions against reductionism. But Wiley makes sure the human self does not get lostby being assimilated to upward reductions, into free-floating structures or sign-systems of the Parisian structuralist sort. These overplay the stream of signs and losethe distinctive human characteristic, the reflexive structure of the self as sign-user.Although we are permeated by signs that stream through us, there is also an internalstructure of the self, which generates its own eddies in the stream, and issues forthagain with new, personally-constructed meanings and hence lines of action.

Wiley’s key move is to bring together the stream-of-signs model (Peirce) with thereflexive structure of the self (Mead). This can be done in two steps. First, the basicstructure of communication has the form: (1) speaker—(2) message—(3) audience.We recognize here the generic version of the Meadian internal dialogue: the I speaksabout the me to the Generalized Other. (Or in Wiley’s adaption of Peirce’sterminology, the present self speaks about the past self to the future self.)

Second: take Peirce’s triad of thought and put it in the place of the message. Themessage itself is a thought; now we are trying to unpack its taken-for-grantedmeaning, to see what makes up a message. Now we have: (1) speaker—(2)[combination consisting of (2.1) sign (“I”)—(2.2) interpretant (“me”)—and (2.3)object (other/ audience)]—and finally (3) audience who hears the message (Fig. 1).

This might seem to be redoubling the parts: there is both (1) a speaker (outside themessage) and (2.1) a sign/ “I” (inside the message); and again (2.3) an object/ world/audience (inside the message) and (3) an external audience (outside the message).But this is a necessary complexity. Thought does have this boxes-within-boxesstructure; it genuinely is like an onion which contains other layers of onion inside its

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outer layers. Role-taking takes place on the level of the outer layer: (1) the speakerimagines him/herself in the place of (3) the audience by projecting one’s G.O. into it;this is the reflexive loop by which persons align themselves with others, or indeedsecond-guess them and anticipate and manipulate them.

There is a parallel structure inside (2) the message, the content of the thought. Thethought has a meaning only because it has the structure of a message, and hencecomprises within it (2.1) a speaking or acting “I”. It also must include (2.3) an externalreference outside the self. Inside the message, the “I” (2.1) takes the form of a sign (orrather the emission of a stream of signs; the “I” is speaker-of-sign-streams).

Moreover, the sign does not just exist in a self-enclosed cage; a sign (2.1) alwaysintends an object (2.3) (in the sense of intentionality discussed above). Thus itimplies an object which exists in the world, more precisely an object which is pickedout as having meaning because a human sign-user has picked it out. And it impliesan external world consisting of the audience; signs circulate around in acommunicative process, and take their meanings from the way in which they areconnected together into communicative streams. Symbolic interaction is as far aspossible from solipsism; there is nothing in to deny the existence of a world externalto the individual human, and indeed the whole theory presupposes that such a worldexists, comprising other human beings, as physical but communicative animals.

Peirce: Triad of Thought

SIGN(idea)

OBJECT(externalworld)

INTERPRETANT(human actor)

Wiley: Structure of Communication

1. SPEAKER 3. AUDIENCE

2.1sign(“I”)

2.3 object (other/we)

2.2 interpretant(me)

1. SPEAKER 2. MESSAGE 3. AUDIENCE

reflexive loop

Fig. 1 Embedded triadsstructure of communication

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Finally, we may ask: why should the interpretant (2.2) be identified with the“me”? Remember, the “me” is the past self; it is self as ongoing project, since theknife-edge of the present is always falling off into the past, building a further historyof the me. The interpretant self is necessarily this me-anchor, since the future self hasnot yet come into being and is only a blank space; even when one imagines a futureself with specific content it is an extension of the me, a usage of the me-structure ofthe self in order to hold a particular image as something that can be thought. And the“me”, of course, is the self as seen from outside, from a social viewpoint; thus the“me” is just the right connection between current use of signs (by the I, therebyconstituting the I at this moment of speaking, thinking or internal dialogue) and theobject/audience world.

In place of the rather simplified, Meadian version of the self (and Blumer’s evenmore cryptic rendition), Wiley puts a complexly recursive self. It has at least a 5-partstructure of relationships, with reflexive loops among them. Polillo (2005) analyzesthis as the “network structure of the self”, since there can be patterns of stronger andweaker ties among different parts of the self, which undergird different kinds ofaction, including ways of being stuck as well as ways of reflexively liberatingoneself from onerous social circumstances. Wiley himself points out there is roomfor a variety of maneuvers that can take place inside the self. Borrowing from myown neo-Durkheimian theory, he shows how interaction rituals can take part withinthe self, thus resulting in varying degrees of self-solidarity, ranging from the lowself-solidarity of an innerly conflicted or alienated self, to the high self-solidarity ofsomeone who really “has oneself together” and is able to generate confidence andinitiative that I have called “emotional energy” (Collins 2004). Summers-Effler(2002) has elaborated the model by including the emotional dynamics among self-parts which lead self-processes in one direction or another.

Beyond these theoretical developments, Wiley makes another major contributionon the level of an empirical research program. The Semiotic Self is centrallyconcerned with the internal dialogue; it is here that we see the dynamics ofinteraction among parts of the self. Wiley breaks new ground by launching researchon the internal conversation. He cobbles together exemplars from a variety ofsources, some published incidentally to some other purpose, some newly collected.The conventional reaction of social scientists might well be: how could oneobjectively study something as ephemeral and subjective as thoughts one has withoneself? What could be more unreliable, more subject to interpretative bias? Wileygets around the problem in part by citing data of persons who think out loud. But healso plunges into the heart of the process by collecting ethnographies, descriptionsthat persons give of the sequence of their own thoughts.

Methodological rules laid down in advance have the unfortunately side-effect ofblocking the development of research. This is particularly the case where themethodology takes the form of prohibitions formulated on high by a meta-theoreticalor epistemological argument. Pioneers such as Goffman, Becker, and Garfinkelwould hardly have produced their strikingly new results if they had been narrowlyconfined by the rules of social science laid down by textbook writers (with theirVienna Circle bias) as of the year 1950. The same can be said for Wiley and researchon the inner dialogue. Positivist social science and psychology since the early 20thcentury have ruled out what they call “introspection”, but we should bear in mind

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that such rules were formulated as political devices in attempting to legitimateparticular kinds of research programs while delegitimating others. In fact,questionnaire research on values and attitudes is just as subjective as interrogatingother persons (or oneself) about one’s internal dialogues; yet values and attitudes areartificial constructs, limited to the question-and-answer format which forces theminto the conventions of the interlocuter instead of what the subjects wouldspontaneously think for themselves. Values and attitudes do not exist as such, butonly as inferences from the flow of internal dialogues and social conversations. Thusstudying internal dialogues would be a much more realistic way of understandingwhat it is that people really think.

The pragmatist approach is to try it and see. Does it turn out that the segments ofinternal dialogue we have collected so far are chaotic, patternless, and unamenable toanalysis? Far from it. Do they turn out to be subject to recollection biases, so that theimportant parts are left out, and only highly favorable views of the self are reported?Not in what we have seen in Wiley, and others now following up this pathway.Margaret Archer (Archer 2003) has launched her own version of an empiricalresearch program on internal dialogues, using focus groups to formulate major typesof dialogue that persons carry out with themselves, and interviewing a wide cross-section of persons to find the distribution of types of internal conversation by socialclass, gender, and other social locations. My own work (Collins 2004) explores avariety of self-interactions, ranging from full-fledged dialogues among distinctivevoices, to truncated self-utterances, and the process by which the more cryptic formsare sometimes elaborated into full-scale grammatical utterances. We find how self-rituals work, including incantations such as curses and other emotion-laden,rhythmic repetitions that build up self-entrainment and control of one’s ownemotional energy.

In short, there is a definite structure to internal dialogue. Studying it yields goodresults; it not only develops theory in keeping with the broad symbolic interactionistconception of the structure of the self, but it is a discovery-making process. Ourresearch on self-processes is yielding knowledge of patterns we did not know before;that is the pragmatist definition of success, the only kind of criterion that anintellectual program should have.

At the outset, I called Wiley’s The Semiotic Self the most important theoreticaladvance in symbolic interactionism in the past generation; I should add, one of themost important advances in empirical research as well. Symbolic interactionismhas always been closely allied with empirical research. And this is above all thecase with its core theoretical topic, the structured process of the human self. Mead,like Cooley before him, observed the aspects of the human self in whatever manneravailable, from children, similarities and contrasts with animal gestures, overheardself-talk, self-reports. Wiley explicitly makes this into a theoretical researchprogram. His emphasis is on reflexive process, that which makes up human actionin the strongest sense of the word: action which is emergent, constructed, free. Inone of his cases, he analyzes the dialogue going through the mind of a waitress onher way to work. She is alienated by her job conditions; but she prods herself to getgoing by self-commands and visual imagery of what tasks lie ahead. Part of herselfrebels against facing it; imagery crops up from the past and she relives incidents ofpain and humiliation. But other parts of herself continue the dialogue, working her

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way towards a vision of the future where she will get beyond her presentcircumstances. In this case, Wiley gives an empirical analysis of the components ofwill-power.

Freedom, agency, will: these hitherto rather metaphysical entities are now broughtout into the light of day where we can study them. Instead of forms of rhetoric,conceptual entities about which we can only preach, they become a sociologicaltopic about which we can make discoveries. This is moving the frontier indeed. Thisachievement makes Wiley’s The Semiotic Self a guidepost of how far we have comein the long and vivid history of symbolic interactionism, and a pointer towards whatwe will discover in the future.

References

Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge University Press.Collins, R. (1998). The sociology of philosophies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Polillo, S. (2005). The network structure of the self. Paper delivered at conference on State, Culture and

Social Change, University of Pennsylvania.Summers-Effler, E. (2002). The micro potential for social change. Emotion, consciousness, and social

movement formation. Sociological Theory, 20, 41–60.

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