When I taught an undergraduate course on the sociology of everyday life, I would assign essays, lead discussions and even give lectures on such topics as friendship, love, strangers and casual acquaintanceships, as well as parties and other kinds of gatherings. My point was to show how the circumstances of these situations constrained the lives of people and would make the students aware that invisible social structures had an impact on their lives. I think that by and large I failed because students did not make the leap from psychology to sociology. They looked at the motives that led them to behave in a way and to identify the feelings or emotions they might feel in that situation. So strangers were understood as lonely and in need of solace and companionship when what I was getting at was Georg Simmel’s insight that a stranger was a person who was only very partially understood by other people with whom they narrowly engaged and so, paradoxically, became, like bartenders and psychotherapists, the people with whom someone might confide.
It is very strange that students could not engage with that subject matter in that, after all, they could engage with a discussion in a course on social policy even though they had not previously thought that there might be four or five plans to structure a national medical insurance plan, a topic of popular concern at the time, and even though the students had not before the course that there were ways to objectively compare and analyze alternative plans, social design a way of thinking about government rather than saying just yea or nay, ardently in favor of or having contempt for a policy just because their party or favorite candidate said so. I pointed out that in the 2000 Democratic primary campaign Kerry's catastrophic health insurance plan would cover anyone who had a road accident but insurance would not cover medical checkups and so cover big bills but at low cost while Dick Gephardt wanted the equivalent of Medicare for All, which was comprehensive but very expensive and no one seemed to care about a policy’s assumptions and implications and when Obamacare was adopted people got to like it only when the citizens got the benefits. Very curious that social policy was readily on the agenda, somehow legitimated, even if it was arcane, but everyday life was not a topic, an object of contemplation, even briefly, remained obscure, even though everyone understood what it was to have a friend or a stranger in their midst .Social life is very perplexing if you bother to consider the obvious social things around you.
Here is another topic for everyday life: blemishes. I do not mean those large scale disfigurations such as being crippled or looking like an elephant man that Erving Goffman considered a stigma that spoiled or unsettled a person's identity. I mean, rather, the usual marks and discolorations that can be present in any person: Jimmy Durante’s snooze, or Mikael Gorbechev’s blood stain on his head. These marks are clear and easily managed, just a feature of their lives. I knew a young woman who had a large mole on her leg. She didn’t discuss it because there was nothing to be said, though she might have been concerned about it when she was very young. Or an attractive woman who didn;t even have a mark but was rather squat and dumpy and so was part of her nature rather than a deformity., which leads to thinking of blemishes as a rather overt version of just a physical characteristic of a person, distinct and noticeable and easily transferred to matters of personality, which are invisible but whose character is readily enough “observed”. Say someone is moody and other people will tell them to avoid them when they are moody, or there is someone else who is quick to take offense or get angry. These are kinds of blemishes because the characteristics depart from a well balanced or modulated character, some more prominent than others and more given to define a character than perhaps other psychological traits than another, though it does not take very much work to notice the characteristics there are to a person’s personality even if it takes a good deal of familiarity, as with a spouse, to notice some of the subtler moods or tendencies of another person. If abstracted that way, a blemish is a more particular way in which a person can be characterized, noticed as a feature of the person, and so disappears as a physical marker even as such remain among the multiple features that mark a person as defining that person.
If that abstraction takes place, then the acknowledgement of types of people, of some people as being different from other ones, can be entertained with objectivity, which means accurately described without the need of metaphysical flourishes, as when people look for causes of why there is a blemish or a characteristic, a reason why it happened, and that the heart of the matter about the characteristic. So a blood spot is a sign of a bad seed, or bad people can bee seen in their natures, as still remains in Shakespeare, where Richard III is explained and shows his evil nature in his humped back, or Othello born or made into hot tempered because he is a Moor. More generally, objectivity, if treated as a fact of life, does not make a claim on the future. Hot blooded people do not have to get violent. They just may or may not retain that characteristic. Nothing is fated and, similarly, the trait of mother love cannot ruin a young boy’s life, as Freud thought somehow, in one way or another, there would be a drama in which the conflict and resolution had to be inevitably fought. Stories are different from and independent of characteristics, which are facts and occasions but not causes.
Strictly speaking, objectivity means treating an item as an object. It is easy enough to see as an object that you have a wart. Unlike goffman, who thought that people will hide their disfigurements if they can, ordinary people decide whether to disregard or not their blemishes. They take no mind or think of them as afterthoughts though sometimes cover up a blemish with powder when getting dressed up so as to put themselves on display. I would suggest, though I cannot prove, that women are more self conscious of their blemishes than are men because women want to be looked at while men do the looking, a clean bowling shirt, as the joke goes, the male equivalent of dressing up. And, in general, perhaps, women are more attentive to their presentations than are men, and so are therefore taken to be superficial, when in fact there are other ambitions afoot.
It is harder to objectify when it comes to personality traits, to a bloodstain on your heart, as it were. It means bringing forward as something akin to exterior a feeling which seems unalienable and therefore part of nature rather than distinct from your nature. You are what you are rather than to be recognized as moody, though other people may be more adroit at noticing that about you than you will notice or attribute to yourself, emotions just a cauldron where feelings blend quickly with other ones and then become again dissociated into separate ones. Drawing that out, objectifying, can be considered hard work, as in the process of psychoanalysis, but some people are considered superficial if they very quickly come to characterize themselves as friendly or even loving along with being kind to animals, without allowing for the maelstrom within the cauldron of emotions, too quick to assign oneselves labels rather than feelings. So when and how to objectify is itself a difficult adventure, that process itself a murky matter which may better define what is the character of a person more than its overt traits, like bravery or loyalty, and that often unnoticed but universal process, the choices about objectification or not, whether to know oneself as vain, perhaps, as a struggle and so an adventure, the adventure, of a life, though one that may never be resolved, even unto death, when a person, most people, still wonder whether they are phonies in that they have acted as if a scholar or loyal or faithful in their fashion, as the curtains descend on their lives. Eternal and paradoxical questions that are secret and struggled, the warp and woof of a real life rather than the more surface struggles about work and love that more overtly occupy us.
Imagine a whole new set of stories, of lives, that have percolated underground but are as palpable as open life, Freud without exclusively about sex, more about a sense of gender rather than just the urges of expressed and suppressed lust. That is what blemishes are about: contouring multiple assertions of feeling and identification and not at all clear when and how much the mix amounts to, people thereby recognizable as free to make choices and yet also to not just appear to be but actually wafted about by feelings barely felt and understood. That is what human life is actually like.
Nor has literature failed to recognize this complexity as the way things are. Civilization knows that the gods in the Iliad are both forces that get things done and also are representations of the auras of how people behave, uncertain and unclear but somehow true to themselves if you think about it. Or consider all those figures, from Eve to Abraham to Joseph, whose motives are clear to the observer even if their reasoning, how they think inside themselves, which are obscure however definitive. It is hard not to recognize Jane Austen for having this psychology of blemishes, whereby people who know something about themselves and others, objectifying sometimes their own blemishes and th of others, confront other people, sometimes they more complex than others, sometimes like Mr. Collins, so objectified for his moralism and his firmly held social order, as to be a joke. Consider how Elizabeth and Darcy wander about trying to grasp what are the main threads of their lives. The two dislike one another, then they find themselves attracted for reasons unclear and uncertain, and then they objectify the other as unworthy, Elizabeth siding on Mr. Wickham, falling for his superficial charm, and Darcy finding her unworthy even if she is attracted to her, and then evolving, which is the right name for it because it is a metamorphosis based on conflict and change, into finding that they are fated with one another in the time honored sense that they become the goals they had previously wanted and imagined.
Rather than cite literature to illustrate the nature of blemishes, look at social theory. Talcott Parsons developed a theory of action to summarize what I think everyone knew and continues to know about how people operate. He said that the means or the resources of a person become an end or action when they are mediated by their norms or customs. That means that people vary very greatly rather than just do in an inevitable logical manner because some cultural factor that is historical can allow people to see things differently than otherwise and so act accordingly. Eskimos act like Eskimos and not just how people in the cold will inevitably behave and the same is true of Frenchmen and Ukranians who, we discover, have a strong sense of nationalism that leads them to resist Russia rather than allow themselves to be occupied .Who disagrees with this commonplace observation?
Well, I do. A normative theory is something of a straightjacket in that something external is coercing us to act in that way, playthings of our tribes and ethnicities and nations. Also, you know what the norm that is directing you only after it happens. Ukranians have a norm of bravery you did not know until it happened, just as the norm that men can’t any longer rub women’s shoulders is a rule until when it happens and attribute that belief or custom to have been there before but suppressed rather than allowed by women who really always had minded. Norms come and go like a pop tune. Rather than pop tunes ranked by relative merit over the long run, whereby “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” lingers.
Here is an alternative theory of action. The relation of means and ends is modified by reflection, which means the same thing as objectivity, in that a person has a mix of objectified and otherwise just sensed sets of emotions to which they address decision making, norms just a brief take on sensing and noticing whether people should behave in the customary way they effortlessly or most easily do. That makes action a choice in that the complexity of objectified and unobjectified emotions is part of the psyche rather than outside as a cultural product.That is the way you, as a person, has evolved so that you take an event, what it will mean to you, out of your history, how you have trained yourself to understand the world as it comes at you, everyone having made their history into a better or worse equipped instrument for assessing what just happens and happened.
Turn the screw one more time. Objectivity itself can be treated as a blemish or a characteristic of a person rather than a free floating given of transcendental logic. The operations of creating and maintaining objectivity are themselves a personal quality whereby a pursen, for whatever reason, pursues that quest. Some people are objective while other people are not even if most people do have a modicum of objectivity so that they can, for example, see the point of view of a bully or an enemy rather than simply remain adamant and angry about an adversary. We all or most of us can see the other point of view and to do so is an effort of imagination however much we may abandon it when heated up. You pick and choose why your boss is tormenting you, whether he or she has selfish reasons or is indifferent to your own interests, or is onto some other goal such as his or her own promotion. These are the boss’s characteristics, be them what they may and it is useful to decide which of those person’s characteristics are in play and how their actions might play out even if not fated to inevitably fire or promote you. Remember that Spinoza, the arch proponent of reason, did not think it was transcendental in that reason was a passion which people might embrace, an inclination or characteristic for parsing out reality even if the details of reasoning could be objectified nd that the same logic, the same path in reasoning was shared by a number of people so that logic was a universal language rather than just one or another grammar and so seems transcendental rather than cultural.