11

On Social Routines and That Access Hollywood Bus

Bruce Mannheim

For D. E. D., whose ghost is haunting me from down the street.

Deborah Cameron’s chapter in this volume identifies two themes that run through the now-infamous Access Hollywood video (Fahrenthold 2016): the creation of bonded male social space and an assertion – and performance – of dominance by Donald Trump, the latter likely enhancing his political prospects.¹ This video, in which Trump bragged about his sexual conquests (counterintuitively by admitting to a failure) and was affirmed by the laughter aboard a studio bus, is an instance of a social routine – a social ritual – so common in American culture that it is hiding in plain sight.² An Alpha individual establishes a superordinate position with respect to other participants (i.e. the In-group) by targeting an individual or group of individuals (i.e. Targets) outside the interaction, often by identifying the victim or victims with a social stigma (Goffman 1963b). The stigma extends beyond the duration of the routine, and so has consequences for the Target that extend well beyond the seemingly innocuous duration of the routine, often (but not always) violently threatening their physical well-being. The routine is familiar to the participants (it is occasionally named, as in “mean girls,” after the film by Tina Fey of the same name, but so familiar as to be unnamed), and – as social routines do – recruits the Alpha and the In-group to their respective roles in an automatized way. There are significant social consequences for not participating as an In-groupie, including exclusion from the group of interactants (again, in an enduring way) or even becoming the next Target.

Such routines, out of which our social and political lives are built, rarely announce themselves in advance. Routines are interactional pre-fabs, embedded in the small spaces of everyday life (Canessa 2012, Pouillon 2015: 19–20), seemingly innocuous, and often effervescent (Durkheim [1912]1995), experienced as fun. Social routines frequently suck all the air out of an interaction; in this case, one of the few ways to avoid being drawn into the socially subordinate role is to take the social risk of challenging the routine in both its more horrific and its everyday guises. Because routines are both cumulative and specific to social surroundings, they might be understood differently by those who have experienced them repeatedly from those for whom they are relatively new and opaque. It is for that reason that I concur with Professor Cameron’s observation that the Access Hollywood video may have actually enhanced Trump’s election possibilities.

11.1The Structure and Function of a Routine

Before returning to Trump’s performance on the bus, I unpack here the dynamics of a social routine. My starting point is a high school in the northeastern United States in the late 1960s. While we like to think of adolescence and teenage years as being socially offstage, these are periods of intense and complex social interaction, in which linguistic routines, experienced and re-enacted, carry substantial social consequences. They sort people socially (often in ways that they neither intend nor understand), create affiliations and exclusions, and establish personal styles of interaction that follow them well beyond adolescence and youth. Adolescent and youth interactional sociolinguistics (ranging from language variation to very complex, interlocking interactional routines) have been an especially fruitful domain for understanding racism, ethnicity, class, and gender (Eckert 2000, Goodwin 1990, and Mendoza-Denton 2008 are milestones).

Consider the following example, from an urban high school late in the 1960s, with a student body that consisted overwhelmingly of English-speaking Whites. James, a high school student, went to the cafeteria, filled his tray, and went to sit at the same table with the same boys day after day. When he arrived one day, they were grouped around one of the boys, who was sketching while the others were laughing in near hysterics. As James recalled it, he looked down at the sketch, and it was of an African American woman singing a line from a recent Motown hit, musical notes around her head. She was drawn with stereotyped thick lips, and the microphone in front of her (an oversized, old-style microphone of the sort one saw in 1940s movies) had the call letters of a soul music radio station then popular in New York, changed ever-so-slightly into a racist slur. James didn’t say anything but stood there, frozen for milliseconds longer than it would normally take to answer. His face turned a shade of green, as the artist looked up and said, “Don’t worry, James. This is just what we White liberals do to let off steam.” James still didn’t say anything but took it as in invitation to put his tray down at another table, sitting by himself. James’ high school memories from that point on have him hanging around with the burnouts at the corner.

What was that about? James walked into a social routine that is likely familiar to anyone who grew up – and went to high school – in the United States, a social routine that the students in my classes today call “mean girls.” Everyone recognizes it, and many acknowledge having participated in one version or another of the routine. Here is how it is structured. A focal individual – I’ll call him or her an “Alpha” (the artist in the example) – makes outrageous claims, which the other participants – the “In-group” – acquiesce to in their laughter. The Alpha has broken the social conventions by which the In-group – and the other denizens – of the high school lunchroom normally live. These are conventions that normally go without saying, not conventions that can be reduced to explicit rules. The conventions normally live in the background of everyday social interactions. The break in conventions is funny in the same way that a waitperson balancing several dishes and then dropping them all is funny. It is a frame breaker.

But laughter is as socially intricate as any other aspect of an interaction (Glenn 2003). The other boys at the table were laughing with rather than laughing at the Alpha, their laughter constituting a shared social alignment. The timing of laughter, who laughs first, whether there is a break in the flow of activity, whether the laughter is sequenced into or overlaps the rest of the activity are all key to the ongoing interaction. The laughter does not reflect the break in frame alone, nor the emotional energy of the shared activity alone, but establishes a common ground or shared public space among the participants that builds a consensus about the relationship between the participants and their Target. And while the joint activity is experienced as effervescent (Durkheim [1912]1995: 220 and 313, Collins 2004), as a moment away from the tight structures of everyday interaction, it is in fact tightly wound up and closely tracks the relationship between the Alpha and the In-group. Here Deborah Cameron’s observation of the Access Hollywood video (this volume) that “What it’s really about is men’s relationships with one another” rings absolutely true. The Alpha sets up the conditions and the timing of the laughter. The laughter in turn provides the “just banter” alibi that Cameron methodically refutes.

Social routines (or “social rituals”), like all social interactions, involve mutual entrainment among the interactants, an entrainment that coordinates their expectations of each other’s contributions to the interaction (Watson 1975: 53, Goffman 1979, Collins 2004: 47–101, Lempert 2014, Mannheim 2018). The expectations of each interactant depend on other interactants interpreting their contributions in particular ways. Social interaction, then, is more like a dance than a series of soliloquies (Goffman 1976: 310, cf. Mannheim and Tedlock 1995). When it is successfully established, coordination among interactants is indexed by a common rhythm, a rhythm that synchronizes all contributions to the interaction, be they verbal, gestural, gaze, or physical positioning, each interactant unconsciously adjusting their individual behavior to the broader situation with a microsecond swiftness, within a window of about eighty milliseconds, just above the threshold of perception. (James’ delayed response in the lunchroom is likely what the Alpha responded to when he made the comment.) A description of a social routine, therefore, must be holistic. All the participants in the interaction act in concert: The people seated at the table, the Alpha, and someone just happening upon the scene who is drawn into it (in this case, James) are part of the situation, but their behavior is only intelligible in the perspective of the whole.

But since situations like this are pre-choreographed, recognizable to a socially competent individual much as the sequence of events at a child’s birthday party would be (Feldman-Savelsberg 2020), you don’t simply decide to take on your prescribed role in the routine. Rather, the routine comes and gets you, particularly because it is a single all-encompassing engagement (Goffman 1963a: 154). McDermott and Tylbor (1995: 220–22) described this as “collusion.” Regardless of your avowed beliefs, you are recruited into the routine, “stumbling toward the same ends,” as they (1995: 222) wrote. Resistance is futile. The laughter ratifies the cohesion of the group – bringing with it emotional energy, as sociologist Randall Collins (2004) shows – but it also establishes a social hierarchy, in which the In-group validates the momentary power of the Alpha. The routine itself need not include a large In-group. Under the right circumstances it need only include one or two individuals, provided that they are able to establish a shared public space. So, collusion, power, and emotional energy.

So far, I have focused on two essential parts of the routine (the Alpha and the In-group), but not the third. The artist targeted a generic African American woman, though by the label on the microphone it was clear which of these two attributes was being singled out. The “mean girls” routine must have a Target, though that Target can be a stigmatized individual – someone singled out for almost any reason or none at all – as occurs in the movie, Mean Girls; or among faculty in a university Department of Geography targeting a female colleague who has achieved national recognition for her research; or a member of a group of people socially stigmatized for race, language, gender, religion, sexual preference, disability, past illness, and so on, one of the “categories of persons whose members pay a very considerable price interactionally” (Goffman 1983: 6). These need not be (and in my experience, often aren’t) mutually exclusive. A stigma obtains, Goffman tells us, when “an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. He possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated” (1963b: 5). When Goffman refers to “us” and “we” he is referring to the non-stigmatized, which he (somewhat ironically) calls the “normals.” Even nominally temporary stigmas are enduring; someone who has undergone psychiatric treatment, for example, continues to carry a stigma for their illness.

The issue here – and one relevance of the “mean girls” routine – is that the routine defines the boundary between a stigmatized individual or group and the normals. Not all exclusionary routines identify Targets as members of stigmatized groups. “He said, she said,” a routine among African American adolescent girls in Philadelphia described by Goodwin (1990: 190–225), targeted individuals in order to rearrange the social hierarchy within a peer group, as does “talking shit” described by Mendoza-Denton (2008: 181–86). And there are no social parameters, such as the fratriarchy described by Cameron, that in themselves constitute normalcy. It is the routine itself, as a ritual, that defines “normalcy” (we might also call it the “unmarked” or default social status, or the shared public space) by exclusion of the Target, whether for an individual stigma (for example a birth defect), having been born into a particular ethnic or religious community, or being a woman who received a major research grant that a male colleague coveted.

Informal evidence suggests that sometimes the In-group includes an individual who is also identified as a Target, sometimes manifestly so, and sometimes because a stigmatized individual has worked to conceal their identity (“passing”), a move that has its own psycho-social consequences (Newheiser and Barreto 2014). A gay man might find himself among a group of men who are configuring the In-group around heterosexuality, and join in the by-talk and laughter that stigmatizes himself; sometimes a woman is invited to an otherwise all-male group as they take on individual Targets as generic stand-ins.

The production of “normalcy” is not restricted to routines like this. Jane Hill’s (2008: 682–83) work on Mock Spanish, the jocular use of deliberately mangled Spanish such as “Hasta la vista, baby” as a mechanism for the production of White public space (that is to say, normative angloness) is an example. The marked use of stereotyped and grammatically mangled “Spanish” in English-language conversation marks English as doubly normative, first as the unmarked background to the Mock Spanish expressions, and second as the standard against which Spanish grammar and pronunciation is measured. It too is effervescent, producing solidarity among the interactants as first-language English-speakers, while excluding the speakers whose language is being mocked from shared interactional space. Its effervescent quality marks it as socially harmless when in fact the opposite is true. It remains to map these sociolinguistic mechanisms to understand how stigmas are socially reproduced through the society, in small – one might say “capillary” – ways. The identification of the Target, which may be generic or may be individual, is critical to the routine, and while individual members of the In-group might, when asked, profess no ill will to the Target, they still collude in both the stigmatization and in constituting themselves as “normals,” enhancing their self-identification with the pleasure afforded the routine (“emotional energy” in the sense of Collins 2004: 102–40, equivalent to Durkheim’s “effervescence”). The outcomes can be relatively private (e.g. default racism in the case of the lunch table), but can damage careers (e.g. professional “mobbing” [Harper 2013]) or inflict horrors beyond description (e.g. gang rape or lynching).

Because of the nature of social routines – that they conscript all participants in the interaction – there are very few options available to someone who wants to disable them on the fly (Jefferson et al. 1987: 169, Glenn 2003: 127–31). One can walk away, either literally or figuratively, with the social risk that one becomes the new Target. (In the earlier high school example, I have no idea whether James had become the new Target.) Or one can directly disrupt the interaction, by speaking up against it, for example. The consequences of the latter can be social but can also be physical.

11.2Sucked into Trump’s Male Routine

Trump, whom I’ll refer to by his “Alpha” role in the routine described below, was a well-known television personality when he was contracted to make a guest appearance on the soap opera Days of Our Lives in September 2005. Access Hollywood, a program of celebrity features produced by the same television network, piggybacked on the appearance by recording a “behind the scenes” segment and interview. Alpha arrived on an Access Hollywood bus, along with Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush, a nephew of then-President George W. Bush, and seven others, including a two-person film crew from Access Hollywood.³ The crew audio-recorded the conversation on the bus on the record (both Bush and Alpha were wearing microphones), paused, set up a camera outside the bus and video-recorded Alpha and Billy Bush stepping off the bus to be met by an actress from Days of Our Lives (Fahrenthold 2016). There are two parts to the video recording of the event. The first part consists of the audio recording from inside the bus, while the video shows the outside of the bus arriving at the spot at which the camera is set up to record Alpha stepping off the bus. The second part begins with the traditional footage of the guest and co-host arriving, the door of the bus opening, and the guest stepping down to be escorted to the set. Both parts include offensive talk, but here I concentrate on the portion that instantiates the routine, which is to say, the one-minute, thirty-three-second audio from inside the bus (Fahrenthold 2016; video excerpt starts at 0.07).

In the transcription, the lines are numbered for ease of reference.⁴ I use letters rather than names below because my analysis focuses on the roles these parties are playing in a social routine (as opposed to their identities as ordinarily understood).

((The door to the bus opens again, A steps off the bus, followed by B. A addresses the waiting actress, his pitch rising about an octave))

There are two sections to the interaction. In the first, lines 1–18, the Alpha narrates his fruitless effort to get the other co-host of Access Hollywood to sleep with him. He very deliberately controls the narrative by repeating phrases across the laughter and comments by Bush, and perhaps by a third party. Notice that he is discussing a specific individual but treating her as one example of a larger class (essentially that of women who might interest him). In the second, he sees the actress who is to escort him to the set of the soap opera, first commenting on her, “Look at you, you are a pussy” (line 28), again as an individual as an instance of a larger class, then seamlessly switching to a generic: “they let you do it” (line 43) and “you can do anything” (line 44) and “grab ’em by the pussy” (line 46), with Bush inserting himself into the “In-group” role through laughter and occasional counterpoint: “whatever you want” (line 45). Here again, Trump is using repetition to control the floor (Norrick 1987), establishing himself as Alpha in an interaction that is constructed jointly with Bush. For example, Trump repeats the phrase “I moved on her,” three times between lines 1 and 9, resetting himself as the focus of the interaction. In less hierarchical interactions, parallelism and other forms of repetition frequently bleed across speaker turns (Silverstein 1984), but here Trump is largely flying solo, leaving Bush to play a subsidiary role in constructing male public space; it is the shift from specific to generic (lines 37–39) that is critical in establishing the interaction as male public space. The effervescence of the moment, reflected in Bush’s laughter and intromissions (and in the laughter of others present on the bus) brought the fratriarchy into relief – both Trump’s dominance and the exclusive maleness of the interaction. Bush was a perfect foil. At the same time, Bush avoided the immediate consequences of refusing the routine. But shortly after the Access Hollywood video became public, he “resigned” from a prestigious hosting position he’d just been promoted to, effectively ending his career.

The reactions to the release of the Access Hollywood video tended to treat it as the expression of a single individual in isolation – the Alpha – or, at best, the Alpha with Billy Bush acting as an accomplice. But beyond the politicians and the commentariat (as the film goes, “We’re shocked, shocked”) who systematically misread the interaction as improvised, it was one more instantiation of a familiar social routine, one which regimented power relations doubly: between the Alpha and the In-group (hence my conclusion that “shorty” referenced Billy Bush in line 51); and between the interactants as In-group, and the Target. As noted above, too, the Target is initially an individual as instantiation-of-generic women, then moves to a generic Target, and returns to an individual. The genericity of the Target is critical. Generic language constitutes a named category both as integral and as possessing a shared essence around which a secondary structure of stereotypes can be built (Nguyen and Gelman 2012) and is pivotal to the construction of social stigmas (Leslie 2014). Critical too, is that it is an interactional routine, which means that it is available to this end, ready to vacuum up any co-present individuals who have – up to that point – been interacting with each other. And it is its status as a social routine that made it – and its social consequences – transparent beyond the individual disavowals. Whatever it was, it was not some individuals just blowing off steam, not just “locker-room banter” (Cameron, this volume). The individuals are appropriated to the routine, not the other way around. Has this analysis let Billy Bush off the hook? No In-group, no routine; Bush was essential to its interactional success. And in the years that followed the release of the Access Hollywood video, an entire country has allowed itself to be appropriated as both In-group and foil.

Notes

1.This chapter was instigated by the brilliant analysis by Deborah Cameron (2016 and this volume) and presented for the first time to the Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory at the University of Michigan and to an informal, unscheduled session on pedagogy at the American Anthropological Association, both in 2016. It was completed at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, jointly supported by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France. I am grateful to my audiences and co-conversationalists in these venues, especially to Alaina Lemon and to Jessica Lowen. Michael Lempert prodded me on pedagogical issues around this analysis. I wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge Professor Susan U. Philips, of the University of Arizona, who first encouraged me to think interactionally.

2.I am fairly certain that the routine I am describing here is intelligible to anyone who has grown up Anglophone in the United States. I don’t know whether it holds anyplace else in the Anglophone world. The only place I know of with a routine of similar texture, Peru, has a superficially similar routine – la raja – but its interpersonal organization is distinctly different. There is an initiator, who does not establish a relationship of power with respect to the In-group. The Target is normally a member of the In-group; to be the Target of raja identifies the Target as sharing social characteristics with the people involved in it, rather than a stigma. The virulent racism found in Lima is reproduced by other means (see Zavala and Back 2017).

3.I don’t know the gender of the two-person film crew; the remaining passengers were all men.

4.Transcription conventions used in the chapter include the use of CAPITALS to indicate talk spoken with special emphasis. Colons after a vowel indicate an elongated vowel sound. A left bracket ([) marks the onset, and a right bracket (]) marks the offset of overlapping talk. Numbers in parentheses – for example, (1.2) – note the length of silences in seconds, while a single period in parentheses (.) indicates a micropause of less than 0.1 seconds. A dash (-) marks the cut-off of the current sound. An equal sign (=) indicates “latching,” where talk starts up in especially close temporal proximity to the end of the previous talk. Transcribers’ comments and non-verbal action descriptors are italicized in double parentheses ((like this)); single parentheses, (like this), around talk indicate a problematic hearing. Punctuation symbols are used to mark intonation changes rather than as grammatical symbols: a period indicates a falling contour; a question mark, a rising contour; and a comma, a falling-rising contour, as might be found in the midst of a list. Each line of text (without a hard return) indicates talk spoken within a single breath group.

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