I'm glad to see framing receiving increased attention. How we frame our position on a given issue is important. But, it's not the only thing to pay attention to: Frames are "sponsored" by social actors. This brings up the issue of who has access to the social locations where politics are being debated (media, the government, etc.). Living in a mass-mediated society, we have to deal with the media's frames (see Todd Gitlin's
The Whole World is Watching), which will filter our message for the reading/viewing/listening public. We have to take care as to how we present the frame. Language matters. Below, I want to play around with some issues related to presenting frames. More specifically, I want to talk about narrative, and dig into this question:
How do we frame stories?
I Framed, I Saw, I Conquered
By now, we're all aware of frames. It's been impossible to spend any time on dKos, or in any progressive circle, without the words "Lakoff" and "frame" coming into the conversation at some point. As a sociologist who studies social movements, this attention to the concept of frames feels a little old...we've been talking about frames for 20 years.
First, a framing primer. Here's something from an article I co-authored a few years ago:
The origins of frame analysis, in the work of Goffman [see
Frame Analysis, emphasize how frames sort out and organize the complex stimuli of everyday life. Goffman presents framing as a day-to-day sense-making technique; individuals create and rely on frames to make sense of daily interactions, conventional rituals, discourse, advertising, and other elements of social experience. Just about every aspect of the mundane can be parsed by frames.
In later extensions of Goffman, particularly as advanced by social movement theorists, the sense-making aspect has been retained, but the focus is more often on how individuals and groups frame contentious social issues. In this tradition, [William] Gamson and his colleagues describe frames as underlying structures or organizing principles that hold together and give coherence to a diverse array of symbols and idea elements. He offers two common English meanings of the word frame to aid us in understanding this concept. Frames, as in the phrases "picture frame" or "window frame," define boundaries and direct our attention to what events and texts are relevant for our understanding of an issue or situation. Like a window, we see the world through frames that determine our perspective while limiting our view to only a part of a complex world around us. At the same time, we can think of frames in terms of the "frame of a house," an invisible infrastructure that holds together different rooms and supports the cultural building blocks that make up the edifices of meaning.
(pp. 36-7) [Citations omitted]
Creed, Langstraat, and Scully, 2002. "A Picture of the Frame: Frame Analysis as Technique and as Politics." Organizational Research Methods. Vol. 5 No. 1, January 2002: 24-55.
Frames, then, organize our perception of reality (the frame of the house) by filtering relevant information into our interpretation of the moment, and keeping other information out (the picture frame). I'm going to concentrate on the structural side of things, the organizational aspects. In particular, I want to focus on the relational aspect of frames, the ways that ideas are linked to each other. Here's a bit from a paper I'm preparing for submission
The study of conflict between ideas in the area of contentious politics has been organized around the concept of "frames." This work has drawn from Goffman's initial formulation of frames as cognitive "schemata of interpretation" (1974: 8). The basic idea is that humans have certain conceptual relationships already in place when they encounter any situation. When this encounter takes place, people interpret the situation by drawing on cues from the environment and filtering them through the conceptual relationships they have acquired over the course of their lives. Frames take a potentially unlimited number of interpretations and organize them so that the new situation is coherent. Potential (appropriate) courses of action are also identified in this way.
Because there are multiple interpretations of any given situation, we cannot assume that any one interpretation will inherently come to the fore. Indeed, social conflict is always possible. If people holding different ideational systems come into a particular situation, contestation over which system will define the situation is probable. This is especially the case in political situations. Social movement analysts have referred to these as "frame contests" (Ryan 1991 (Prime Time Activism): Ch. 4). Multiple interpretations are possible and each "side" in these conflicts will put forth, or sponsor, their preferred interpretation (Ryan, Carragee and Meinhofer 2001). Frame sponsors will draw upon symbolic resources appropriate to the specific social arena in attempting to convince others that their position provides a better understanding of the situation. They will also try to influence the actions of their audiences (to mobilize supporters to take a particular action, for instance).
[snip]
It is these cognitive relationships that function as the frame. Thus, utilizing this network approach, frames can be understood as the particular arrangements of ideational relationships, within the overall conceptual universe, that are brought to bear in a given situation. Frame conflicts can be said to be social contestation over which arrangement will define the situation. [empahasis in original.]
Langstraat, in process. "Framing Knowledge." In preparation for submission to Social Studies of Science
So, that's an intro to frames. I want to move into how we sponsor frames, though. How do we get our frames into public discourse? One way is by telling stories.
"Here's what happened"
Storytelling is a human universal. It may be the primary way we convey information to each other. It's a powerful political tool.
Stories, like frames, organize experience. Narrative theories tend to agree that there are certain elements central to storytelling: Characters, action, and a plot (there are varieties of other elements that are brought in, but these three are central). Frames are snapshots of stories in time, like the individual frames on a film real. Stories are frames in motion. I'd like to take a look at this relationship with an investigation of these three central narrative elements.
Characters are the "who" of our stories. The exist in relation to each other, even if their presence is contingent to the story itself (think of the woman with the baby carriage who Lola kept bumping into in Run Lola Run). This relational quality is important, as it also brings in issues of characterization: how the characters are defined. Think of it this way: is "Romeo and Juliet" the story of rebellious teens whose impetuousness destroys them and their families, or is it a story of two people deeply in love who will go to any length, including death, in order to be together? Most of us would probably say both, but the description of the teens, who they are, changes with changes in the telling of the story. Was Rosa Parks a tired old woman who finally became fed up or a trained activist with the local NAACP who had a history of challenging Jim Crow restrictions? The choice of our description affects the dramatic effect of our story. So, in looking at how we frame an issue, we need to pay attention to how we describe actors.
Well, duh, I can hear people saying. We argue about terminology all the time. Theocrats, Religious Right, Christian Right, Radical Right...all of these terms and more have been used to describe our opponents. I don't know if any of them is the right one. The argument here, instead, is that the right descriptor depends on the story you want to tell.
Action is what happens. Who does what? What happens to whom? Were Romeo and Juliet defying their parents or defying the odds? Was the bus boycott a spontaneous eruption or a planned disruption? We filter out any number of actions and activities in the telling of our stories. We select those things that are deemed relevant to the overall story (more on plot below). When we tell the story of the Montgomery bus boycott we forget (or don't know about) the communication between the Montgomery and Baton Rouge branches of the NAACP, which had organized a similar boycott the year before (see Aldon Morriss's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement). What happens isn't self-evident. It requires someone to tell it. So, when we tell our stories, we must pay attention to the actions taking place and how they're described.
Plot. Things happen in stories for a reason. There is an order in which they occur, and reasons why they are significant. Plot ties these things together. Plot organizes the characters and actions in a story. It's what holds the story together.
Returning to the Rosa Parks story. I think we can distill the two sketches I've been drawing down to two themes: the power of a person; and the power of people. Rosa Parks, a tired old domestic worker who finally got sick of the indignity of Jim Crow vs. Rosa Parks, member of a movement that had been, and was looking to continue, strategically challenging Jim Crow in Montgomery and across the South. Both stories are true. But the significance of the different actors in each, their relationships to each other, which actions and activities take place and in what order all vary greatly in the two stories.
This is where I'd like to return to some of the literature on Framing. In their 1992 chapter "Master Frames and Cycles of Protest," David Snow and Robert Benford noted some of functions of frames (theirs is far from the only article dealing with these issues):
- They punctuate the situation, serving "as accenting devices that either underscore and embellish the seriousness and injustice of a social condition or redefine as unjust and immoral what was previously seen as unfortunate but perhaps tolerable" (137).
- They diagnose the problem, identifying what, and who, is responsible for the existing conditions. They identify which actions are responsible for the current state of affairs.
- They motivate to action. The identify potential courses of and targets for action (in large part based on the diagnosis).
These are particularly important when looking at the ways we tell stories, and telling stories is what we must do. Storytelling has been a central aspect of queer movement. It's no mistake that one of the most effective educational tools we have used has been the speakers bureau, where we sit in front of a room and literally tell our life stories. We discuss how similar our lives are to everyone else's (we pay the bills just like you...). We tell tales of difficulty (often involving our families of origin) to demonstrate the effects of living in a homophobic society. Hillary and Julie Goodridge told the story of a difficult childbirth and being kept apart because they weren't allowed to marry. All of these were strategic choices. All of the stories we tell are.
I hope you stayed with me. It's been interesting to see how popular "framing" has become, particularly for those of us who've been working on it for years. Lakoff's fine, as far as he goes. There's a lot more out there than Lakoff, though, and a lot he leaves out. I hope this helped fill in some blanks.