Harrison White: Narrative struggles for control

While comparable and compatible to systems theory, White’s central conceptual building block is the network rather than the system.⁷⁵ Like all general theories in the Social Sciences, it is far more substantial than is helpful or necessary for the present purposes and I will therefore present only a few key points. Before I do so, however, one caveat is worth raising: making interdisciplinary use of White’s model is made more challenging by the fact that he extensively operates with neologisms and re-defines common-language terms, which makes the theory difficult to access and complicates both its use and any brief presentation. The following will thus introduce only a selection of White’s terminology for the purpose of communicating the relevant key theses.⁷⁶

control of the communications he mediates. A translator with rare language skills on the other hand might be in quite a different position.

75 White, Harrison. Identity and Control. How Social Formations Emerge. New York 2008² is White’s magnum opus in its second, heavily revised and re-structured edition. A summary is provided by Holzer 2010², 81-93, who worked with the first edition that evidently suffered from structural problems largely resolved in White’s revision.

76 Rather than using White’s central concept of identity as epidemically as he does I will continue to speak of actors in the sense outlined above. Only two things are described as identities or identity: a) situationally reproduced and adapted, memorized sets of interaction expectations, i.e. the concrete manifestation of the actor, and b) the sum of all these interaction expectations in a relational network that constitutes the actor in the abstract (White 2008², 17f.). For the sake of clarity the central concepts of netdom, discipline, and style will be abandoned as they seem ultimately to express subdivisions of networks on the basis of ideal types. It may be worth re-emphasising that the aim of this chapter is not to identify a specific network methodology to be applied to the letter, but to develop an eclectic, historiographical method.

The most important of these is that actors fundamentally strive for control over the insecurity of world experience, of its contingency, by creating safe(r) sit-uations through action.⁷⁷ Action generates what White terms social footing and equates to situational control. White thereby considers the actor to be created by and contingent upon his interaction with the world, rendering his approach con-structivist in nature.⁷⁸ Every social situation is then fundamentally agonistic, which also happens to allow White to smoothly explain social inequality.⁷⁹ The construction of the world order, which effectively reduces contingency in general, happens by switching from one social situation to the other.⁸⁰ This process of transferring expectations (inherent in footing) into new situations creates an aware-ness of the experiences being remembered, establishing them as modes of inter-action, which can then be further reproduced in interaction with other actors.

White calls these patterns of action identities and uses them as the basic units of his inquiry.⁸¹ New interactions establish new links between these identities, generating changing configurations – a constantly shifting hierarchical mesh in-side the actor’s psyche that White imagines as a network of identities that lends

77 White 2008², 7; 17; 20. His approach is thus comparable to that of systems theory (cf.

Luhmann 1984, 156-162) and White generally considers his model compatible with systems theory (White 2008², 1 n. 1).

78 White 2008², 2: “Identities trigger out of events – that is to say out of switches in surroundings – seeking control over uncertainty and thus over fellow identities. Iden-tities build and articulate ties to other idenIden-tities in network-domains, netdoms for short. […] Thus the world comes from identities attempting control within their relations to other identities. In their search for control, identities switch from netdom to netdom, and each switching is at once a decoupling from somewhere and an embedding into somewhere.”

79 White 2008², 298f. Cf. Luhmann 1988², 6: “Kommunikation kommt nur zustande, wenn man die Selektivität einer Mitteilung verstehen und das heißt: zur Selektion eines eigenen Systemzustandes verwenden kann. Das impliziert Kontingenz auf beiden Seiten, also auch Möglichkeiten der Ablehnung […]. Eine Rückkommunikation von Ablehnung und die Thematisierung der Ablehnung in sozialen Systemen ist Konflikt.

Alle sozialen Systeme sind potentiell Konflikte; nur das Ausmaß der Aktualisierung dieses Konfliktpotentials variiert […].”

80 White 2008², 17: “Switchings are the vehicles of meaning for identity and control.”

This theoretical postulate is highly significant for historical analysis as such processes of transfer and re-contextualisation can on occasion be identified in the source ma-terial.

81 Cf. accordingly Luhmann 1988, 94: “[Alle Kommunikationen] bilden (2) Strukturen als Selektionsschemata, die ein Wiedererkennen und Wiederholen ermöglichen, also Identitäten […] kondensieren und in immer neuen Situationen konfirmieren, also generalisieren.”

meaning to the world.⁸² In certain contingent situations, these identities can fur-ther coalesce into a compound, abstract identity, most visibly as self-reflexive personhood.⁸³ To avoid terminological confusion, I will on occasion refer to the former as sub-identities, or simply as expectations for future interaction. Such expectations only define which interactions are more or less surprising, or antici-pated, in a given social context, i.e. what results in perception of contingency and what does not. White’s model thereby escapes theorising social determinism.⁸⁴

The theory’s key principle is the notion that actors are constantly competing for control of social situations by exerting agency.⁸⁵ The very structures of social action are thereby understood as continuous processes of negotiation about the control of identities and agency, which are further formulated and exchanged in narratives – White speaks of stories – and codified in memories both individual and collective.⁸⁶ Meaning and order are generated by collective participation in such narratives that interpret the lived reality of the interaction network and are themselves to be understood as networks of meaningful sub-elements.⁸⁷ This results in an integral paradox: control is generated both by the action-dampening effect of the world order, which itself makes action expectable and offers security, and by the exertion of agency in opposition to or within this order.⁸⁸ Order is

82 White 2008², 17f., 337. White’s concept of identity is complex and possesses five aspects, the first of which is the one described here: “The first sense is identity as the smallest unit of analysis. Persons consist of a bundle of these identities.”

83 White 2008², 17; 20; 129f. This is White’s fourth category of identity. It emerges from the constructivist approach, which implies that a person has no abstract existence but can only be situationally constructed either by itself or by others. The reassuringly static nature of identity is thus mere illusion.

84 Constructivist approaches have a problem with determinism because actors are con-ceived as striving for the absence of contingency. This should theoretically lead them to complete assimilation to expectation to the point of static determination. See Luhmann 1984, 414 and cf. Düring, Marten and von Keyserlingk, Linda. “Netz-werkanalyse in den Geschichtswissenschaften. Historische Netz“Netz-werkanalyse als Me-thode für die Erforschung von historischen Prozessen”, in: Rainer Schützeichel and Stefan Jordan (eds.). Prozesse – Formen, Dynamiken, Erklärungen. Wiesbaden 2015, 337-350, here 340.

85 White 2008², 292f.

86 On stories see White 2008², 20-38; on agency as a product of control, i.e. situational security, see White 2008², 292f. On memory and its significance in the attribution of meaning see Luhmann 1988, 44-46. On individual and collective memory see esp.

Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich 1992, 34-42, who summarises the work of Halbwachs.

87 White 2008², 31, 37, 158.

88 White 2008², 279-292, 297: “Getting action thus has to take account of meanings and to rely upon them; but the principal task is to stay ahead of and strip away meaning.”

(282); “Hegemony seems to rest on stasis, whether or not authority speaks of change.”

thus a dynamic and, at an abstract level, infinitely delicate, but nevertheless non-contingent result of continuous processes of negotiation within and ‘in between’

networks. It is maintained by control-regimes, collective narratives that provide so-cietal ‘meta-control’, so a level of control beyond the individual’s constant search for footing.⁸⁹

What bearing does White’s model have on the project pursued here? Its great value lies in the conceptual link it creates between the term ‘network’ and other central terms, such as actor, identity, agency, contingency, and – crucial to this project and Ancient History with its literary sources – narrative. Rather than pre-supposing a ‘coherent’, empirically static actor – e.g. an individual described as acting in a historical source – White makes us look inside the actors and em-phasises that their constitution is itself socially constructed and dependent on the networks an actor moves in on many different levels. Foucault and Callon had already made us aware that an essential form of power consists in providing an individual with identity, a process that provides order and structure, but also enrols it in narratives of control.⁹⁰ White now highlights that the entirety of the world, ranging from a single individual’s composition to macro-societal processes, can be conceived of as a continuity of narrative interrelations that can be ad-dressed as networks, which may in turn show dynamics we discussed above.

White’s perspective allows us to relate actor and action on all levels of analysis, as they are conceptualised in the same terms: just as an actor appears as a dia-chronically reconfiguring network of identities that is constantly under tension due to the dynamics of contingency control, its interaction-based social networks are structured on the same principles. Finally, the fundamental agonality of social existence in White’s model makes the question of control present in every nar-rative, and thus in every historical source. This provides a conceptual opening that allows us to attach further considerations about power, since unfortunately White himself does not specifically discuss it.⁹¹

(292); “[…] [C]ontrol must be a two-edged concept: control may be realised by stopping change and thus blocking action, as well as by getting action […].” (297).

89 See White 2008², 220-229, esp. 222f.

90 Foucault 1987, 243-247; Callon 1991.

91 White 2008², 298. That said, the model itself is obviously concerned with questions closely related to power.