Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change

5. Narrative Performance

5 Narrative Performance before we get to the performance of symbiotic networks of meanings, connotations , objects, practices, and narratives, some advance work will be necessary. values, habits, feelings, and instrumental rationality have all been gathered into ideographs at various points in the book thus far. in addition to these orientations to social action, chapter 1 mentioned the category imitation; this chapter returns to that topic as a preface to an evolutionary approach to policy change that relies on symbiotic associations for both repetition of practices and changes to them. I. ImItatIon and cooper atIon Weber (1978) organized his social action typology with a reason-giving individual actor in mind, as noted in chapter 1. but because of his emphasis on the self-conscious orientation to one’s social milieu, one category that Weber excluded from his schema was imitation as proposed by Gabriel Tarde (1903). imitation did not meet Weber’s criteria of social action. Though Weber had read Tarde and considered adding imitation as a fifth category, he decided against it because there would be “no meaningful orientation to the actor imitated” (Weber 1978, 23). Social action would be purely reactive were imitation to be included in Weber’s view, as imitation is not meaningfully determined. it would Narrative Performance / 75 not be an acceptable reason for action for Weber’s purposive social actor. However , this limitation on the social actor’s reason for acting would not work if Weber’s autonomous, intentional individual were instead a decentered subject. Studies in emotion and social interaction are suggestive of the social implications of imitation. Psychologists have noticed a tendency for people “to mimic and synchronize their movements with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and instrumental behaviors of others” (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994, 10; also see 47). To take a simple example, smiling often elicits smiles in others. emotional signals, such as smiling, can trigger automatic nervous system activity and other behavioral manifestations, indicating the possible spread of an emotional state. This research raises the possibility that emotions do not necessarily come from deep within one’s soul but may be transported interpersonally. in the age of the internet and mass marketing, concepts such as imitation, replication, mimesis, emotional contagion, and “gone viral” deserve recognition as ways of stimulating the performance of social action. The decentered subject is exposed to the inscriptions left by imitation and replication even if the robust, autonomous individual is not. Things that repeat themselves fascinated Tarde (1903, 6), and he distinguished between the sort of repetition observed in (1) the chemical, physical, and astronomical worlds, named vibratory repetition; (2) biological organic reproduction, named hereditary repetition; and (3) resemblances of a social origin, such as custom imitation, fashion imitation, sympathy imitation, obedience imitation, precept imitation, education imitation , naïve imitation, or deliberate imitation—different forms of imitative repetition . Resemblances and repetitions are the necessary themes of difference and variation that exist in all phenomena, he theorized. A narrative approach would leave Tarde’s thesis of vibratory repetition, which applied to chemistry, physics, and astronomy, for knowledgeable others to judge. Meanwhile, his hereditary repetition seems derivative of Darwin. imitative repetition, however, was both an original contribution to social thought and relevant to social action. Tarde (1903, 191) extended the scope of imitation broadly: “Red tape and administrative routine, the etiquette of government, increase day by day with differentiation in government. Architecture requires its followers to become more and more servile in the repetition of the consecrated types that are for the time being in favor. This is true also of music. Painting also requires its servants to reproduce with more and more photographic exactness the models of nature or tradition.” Tarde interpreted many things—from obedience to buying furniture to repeating something from the newspaper—as another iteration of imitation. indeed , “[U]nless man in society is inventing, a rare occurrence, or unless he is fol- 76 / Chapter 5 lowing impulses which are of a purely organic origin, likewise a rarer and rarer occurrence, he is always, in act or thought, imitating” (Tarde 1903, 391). To the degree that humans are social, they are essentially imitative. As Hoffer (2006, 17) mused, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” Like imitation, replication does not require teleology or purposeful intent; accident plus selection are about all that there is. in Darwinian terms, symbolizations evolve and adapt to their environments...