Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.
One year ago on Round and Square (2 May 2011)—Indiana (by George Sand)
Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts:
Marine Biologist The Doorman Opposite George Newman's Mail The Bootleg Marriage
Just Dessert Sleep Desk Late Coffee High Stakes Motor Oil Downtown
Code Cracking Nonfat Yogurt Bad Boy It's Not You I Can't Be... Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach The Close Talker The Alliance Broccoli Coated Culture Dinner Party
George's Friend Jerry's Haircut Face Paint Mustachioed Smoking East River
Pool Man Dunkin' Joe Life Lessons Reckoning Dog Medicine Shower Heads
Looking Busy George Tips Kramer's Job Empty Tank Bathroom Book Pretzel Thirst
George's Swoosh
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.
One year ago on Round and Square (2 May 2011)—Indiana (by George Sand)
Marine Biologist The Doorman Opposite George Newman's Mail The Bootleg Marriage
Just Dessert Sleep Desk Late Coffee High Stakes Motor Oil Downtown
Code Cracking Nonfat Yogurt Bad Boy It's Not You I Can't Be... Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach The Close Talker The Alliance Broccoli Coated Culture Dinner Party
George's Friend Jerry's Haircut Face Paint Mustachioed Smoking East River
Pool Man Dunkin' Joe Life Lessons Reckoning Dog Medicine Shower Heads
Looking Busy George Tips Kramer's Job Empty Tank Bathroom Book Pretzel Thirst
George's Swoosh
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.
Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific
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| [b] Swoosh pattern RF |
It stings.
Pay attention to the order of events. The clip is "backwards." The key scene comes first, followed by the dénouement and then the backstory. In other words, there are three disjointed scenes, but it is the only clip available for this sequence. I am sure that you can handle it.
"I'm the only person at the table who didn't become violently ill."
Non-conformity has a few benefits, you see. The larger question in George's world, though, is how he could even think that he could survive on a team—any team. There is no "I" in "George," perhaps, but he is one of literature's most solipsistic characters since Narcissus. George lives for himself, and mostly by himself (when he isn't living with his parents). This episode casts him in the socio-economic role of supplicant. He wants the job, and, toward that end, he buys himself a suit. Most employment advice makes it clear that this was a good choice. Look the part, and walk with the confidence of a well-tailored man.
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| [c] Secure RF |
And there is the problem. George wants badly to fit in—to join this little band of bothers on the big island of conformity. "Have a bite, George." "You will if you're one of us."
Conformity has its own towering, limiting deity, and its name is Escherichia coli.
*** ***
I have chosen several readings that deal in one way or another with the idea of conformity. The first is from one of my favorite books, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Rousseau speaks of natural man and civil man, and the latter is found wanting. These examples are vintage Rousseau, and show his use of classical images in many of his arguments. Suffice it to say that he contrasts even these with the abysmally denatured Parisians of his own day.The second text was written 131 years later by another Frenchman, Emile Durkheim. In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim discusses the nature of sanctions in the social world, and the final lines are among the most famous in all of social theory. Finally, we jump ahead to a sociological classic from the 1950s. In the last decade or so, at least two New York Times columnists—David Brooks and Joseph Nocera—have touted it as a fine study of management, as well. We'll look at "belongingness" in a snippet from William Whyte's The Organization Man.
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| [d] Natural ADV |
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the absolute whole which is relative only to itself or its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole, which is the social body. Good social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one but a part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole. A citizen of Rome was neither Caius nor Lucius; he was a Roman. He loved the country exclusive of himself. Regulus claimed he was Carthaginan on the grounds that he had become the property of his masters. In his status of foreigner he refused to sit in the Roman senate; a Carthaginian had to order him to do so. He was indignant that they wanted to save his life. He conquered and returned triumphant to die by torture. This has little relation, it seems to me, to the men we know.
The Lacedaemonian Petaretus runs for the council of three hundred. He is defeated. He goes home delighted that there were three hundred men worthier than he to be found in Sparta. I take this display to be sincere, and there is reason to believe that it was. This is the citizen. A Spartan woman had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. A Helot arrives; trembling, she asks him for news. "Your five sons were killed." "Base slave, did I ask you that?" "We won the victory." The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods. This is the female citizen.
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing. To be something, to be oneself and always one, a man must act as he speaks; he must always be decisive in making his choice, make it in a lofty style, and always stick to it. I am waiting to be shown this marvel so as to know whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time.[1]
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| [e] Delict ADV |
Emile Durkheim (1893)
The link of social solidarity to which repressive law corresponds is one whose break constitutes a crime; we give this name to every act which, in any degree whatever, evokes against its author the characteristic reaction which we term 'punishment'. To seek the nature of this link is thus to ask what is the cause of punishment, or, more precisely what crime essentially consists in....
[A]n act is criminal when it offends strong and defined states of the conscience collective. The statement of this proposition is rarely disputed, but it is ordinarily given a sense very different from that which it ought to have. We take it as if it expressed, not the essential property of crime, but one of its repercussions. We well know that crime violates very general and intense sentiments; but we believe that this generality and intensity derive from the criminal character of the act, which consequently remains to be defined. We do not deny that every delict is universally condemned, but we take as agreed that the condemnation to which it is subjected results from its delinquent character. Then, however, we are hard put to say in what its delinquent character consists...
The only one which satisfies this condition is the very opposition between a crime, whatever it may be, and certain collective sentiments. It is, accordingly, this opposition which forms the crime, rather than being a derivation of crime. In other words, we must not say that an action shocks the conscience collective because it is criminal, but rather that it is criminal because it shocks the conscience collective. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.[2]
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| [f] Belongingness ADV |
William H. Whyte (1956)
Whether the urge to co-operate is in fact man's most dominant drive, it does not follow that the co-operation is necessarily good. What is he going to co-operate about? What ends is the group working toward? But these questions do not greatly interest Mayo, and he seems to feel that the sheer fact of "spontaneous" co-operation carries it own ethic. "For all of us," Mayo states, "the feeling of security and certainty always from assured membership of a group." Suppose there is a conflict between the individual and the group? Mayo sees conflict primarily as a breakdown in communication. If a man is unhappy or dissatisfied in his work, it is not that there is a conflict to be resolved so much as a misunderstanding to be cleared up. The worker might not see it this way, and most certainly the unions do not, but we have already been told that the individual is a nonlogical animal incapable of rationally solving his own problems or, in fact, of recognizing what the problem is.
At this point the human relations doctrine comes perilously close to demanding that the individual sacrifice his own beliefs that he may belong. The only way to escape this trap would be through the notion that by the process of equilibrium, a clarification of which never seems to detain anyone very long, what's good for the group is good for the individual. In speaking of the primitive group Mayo writes, "The situation is not simply that the society exercises a forceful compulsion on the individual; on the contrary, the social code and the desire of the individual are, for all practical purposes, identical. Every member of the group participates in all social activities because it is his chief desire to do so."
How to get back to this idyllic state? Mayo does not recommend a return to the Middle Ages. Too much water—and damn muddy water too, if you ask Mayo—has flowed under the bridge for that. The goal must be "an adaptive society"—a society in which we can once again enjoy the belongingness of primitive times but without the disadvantages of them.
Notes
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education [Translated by Allan Bloom] (New York: Free Press, 1979), 39-40.
[2] Emile Durkheim, Selected Writings [Edited by Anthony Giddens] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 123-124.
[3] William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 35-36.
Bibliography
Durkheim, Emile. Selected Writings [Edited by Anthony Giddens]. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1972.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile: Or On Education [Translated by Allan Bloom]. New York:
Free Press, 1979.
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
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Elaine Delivers
Elaine flounders in her pursuit of Chinese food delivery from the restaurant down the way.
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