ASCAP Oct 91, 10, 3-10
Professor Russell Gardner, Jr, MD
Fax:
0101 409 722 4288
From: Dr J.S. Price, Odintune, Plumpton,
Dear Russ,
The two modes: agonic and hedonic
Michael (Chance) has been staying with me for a
few days and we have had the opportunity to have some discussions on his
concept of the two modes, so we thought we would send you a note in the form of
a sort of communique.
Consensus statement on
two modes of social relating, hedonic and agonic. By John Price and Michael
Chance. (ASCAP, Oct, 1991, Vol
4, No 10, p 3-10).
History
Let me just recap a little for the sake of
those who are not familiar with the two modes concept. Michael first used the terms to describe the
difference between macacque and chimpanzee
groups. His long-tailed macaques, for
instance, seemed to be perpetually testing out the rank order of the group and
were oriented towards fighting most of the time, even though actual fighting
was not common. The subordinate monkeys
were either testing out the dominants, looking for an
opportunity to rise in rank, or avoiding the random aggression which was
directed down the hierarchy. The
dominants, for their part, were watching for signs of imminent rebellion among
their subordinates. As a result the
animals all seemed tense and edgy, and their attention was preoccupied in
monitoring the position and activity of more dominant animals. Because the animals are all oriented towards
agonistic behaviour, Michael called this style of group interaction the agonic
mode.
In
contrast, chimpanzee society, both in captivity and in the wild, is much more
relaxed. Although fighting for status
occurs, the fights are over relatively quickly and complete reconciliation
usually takes place, so that there is no longer any tension in relationships
which have recently been in dispute. The
animals seem relaxed most of the time, and their attention, instead of being
focussed on the dominants, is free to engage other objects and facilitates
exploration. This relaxed acceptance of
the results of fights, even of rank reversal, may be due to the fact that rank
is not very important in chimpanzee society:
food is widely dispersed, there is no shortage of sleeping sites, and
sexual opportunities are very little influenced by rank. In macaque society, on the other hand, mating
opportunities are highly correlated with rank, so that rank matters and is
worth fighting about. Michael called the
relaxed chimpanzee style of interaction the hedonic mode.
Michael makes two main points about the kind of adjustment which occurs
with each mode. First, macaques are used
to living with social uncertainty, particularly with contested social
rank. According to the principle of the coevolution of ritual weapons and ritual defences, they
have evolved thick "skins" for dealing with the chronic tensions and
"pecking" of the agonic mode.
Chimpanzees, on the other hand, are used to living in the relaxed
conditions of the hedonic mode. The
price they pay for this is that their behavioural repertoires, and probably
their physiology, are not adapted to spending long periods in the agonic mode,
and if this is forced on them, as it was by the provisioning carried out by
Jane Goodall, their behaviour disintegrates; they are not able to maintain the ritualised
aggression characteristic of the macaque agonic mode, and they start seriously
injuring each other; probably also the
unaccustomed social stress causes ulcers and other psychosomatic
disorders. Presented with highly
desirable bananas confined to a small space and only available for short
periods in the day, they found they had, for the first time in their lives,
something that really mattered to fight about.
Michael's second point is that primitive man probably had a chimpanzee
kind of organisation and spent most of his time in the hedonic mode. This left his attention free to organise and
dominate his physical environment. The
disadvantage was that, like the chimpanzee, he did not develop the macaque's
tolerance for long periods in the agonic mode, and therefore if he finds hmself in the agonic mode for any length of time he lacks
the resilience and the behavioural inhibition characteristic of the macaque and
is susceptible both to psychosomatic disorder and to uninhibited outbursts of
agonistic behaviour such as temper tantrums, wife battering and child abuse.
The
problem we now face with the two modes concept is to adapt it for use with
human beings. It was derived from a
difference between species, but we want to use it for differences within a
species, partly to describe differences between human groups, but mainly to
describe changes within human groups from time to time. This seems at the moment the most promising
use of the concept, to describe the way that human groups (or dyads) can switch
from the hedonic mode into the agonic mode and back again. This kind of switching describes a phenomenon
with which we are all familiar (particularly in marital relationships) but
which our existing terminology lacks descriptive terms for. In order to prepare the two modes concept for
this task, we need to "humanise" it and to clarify its meaning so
that it really does shed light rather than confusion on what is undoubtedly a
very complex and confused field of study.
Much progress towards this end was achieved by Michael's book Fabrics
of the Mind, but some loose ends remain.
To
begin with, we distinguished between the agonic and hedonic modes in a dyadic
relationship and the same two modes in a group of three or more. They are not necessarily the same. In a large group of human beings there is a
tendency for polarisation into two opposing factions, so that the group as a
whole is in the agonic mode but each faction on its own is in the hedonic
mode. Romeo and Juliet is a good
example of this. The social action in
the streets of
Thus,
in humans, the modes define dyadic relationships; and not as a trait variable but as a
state variable, implying that relationships may switch from one mode to the
other, so that the modes could be said to define episodes in
relationships.
Although the term mode should be restricted to relationships, the terms
agonic and hedonic may be used to qualify other things. Thus, an agonic society is one in which most
of the relationships are agonic, an agonic personality is one who tends to have
agonic relationships. Also we feel that
we should be able to say that a person is in an agonic mentality when his
social action is dictated by a relationship in the agonic mode (although we
realise that Paul has reservations about this last usage).
Definition of the two modes
Michael's original definition of the agonic
mode stated that the animals were oriented towards fighting, although fighting
was not actually taking place. This
emphasised the fact that in a group of macaques the psychological,
physiological and muscular preparations for fighting are in operation when the
mode is agonic, and these preparations may be continued for a long time in the
absence of fighting. This concept is
important for psychosomatic medicine.
However, in humans, fighting (in the form of the exchange of catathetic signals) may be so subtle that it is almost
impossible to tell whether it is occurring or not; and there is the added problem that
omission of an anathetic signal, such as a customary
act of deference, may be equivalent to a catathetic
signal (frustrative non-reward) so that even if nothing is actually happening,
the fight may still be going on.
Therefore it seems best in humans to use the term agonic to describe a
relationship which is oriented towards fighting, whether or not fighting is
actually going on. We think this slight
change of definition may make the concepts easier to use in relation to humans,
and therefore more useful.
We
think we can get a more precise definition than "oriented towards
fighting". Gregory Bateson and his successors at the Mental Research Institute
in
To
give a clinical example, one patient of mine was a submissive wife whose
depression enabled her to accept her husband's definition of their
relationship, which was that he was having an extramarital affair. Then he redefined the relationship by
bringing his mistress to live in the house, ostensibly as a live-in
babysitter. The wife could not accept
this new definition and offered a counter-definition, which was that the
mistress should leave. The wife suffered
many months of humiliation, driven into the kitchen while the husband and the
baby-sitter disported themselves in the sitting room, and this made her very
depressed. But even her new depth of
depression did not make her sufficiently apathetic to accept the new definition
by the time she came for treatment, and she was still feeling angry with her
husband (a symptom of an agonic relationship).
When
we come to a larger group, going by what we said above, the group is in the
hedonic mode when the definition statements of the two most powerful
individuals are redundant. This should
generally be true, except in cases when numbers three, four and five are strong
enough to gang up and challenge one and two.
This definition accounts for the persisting hedonic
mode in the
In the
course of these discussions, Antonia pointed out that Bateson
only told half (or two thirds) of the story when he divided communication into
definitional and informational components.
She said that she spends a lot of time comforting people who are in
trouble, often over long periods, and it is neither the informational nor
definitional aspects of their communication that she is attending to; rather, she is
hearing what might be termed the expressive/affective component of their
communication. This ties in with Talcott Parsons' distinction between the expressive female
role and the male instrumental role (although both sexes perform both
functions, particularly in the present age!).
We could say that, in the agonic mode, the ear is tuned to hear the
definitional component;
in the hedonic mode, when the social action is task-oriented, the
ear is tuned to the informational component;
in the hedonic mode, when the social action is oriented towards
nurturance and care giving/receiving, the ear is tuned to the
expressive/affective component of whatever communication is taking place. There is, of course, a reflexive loop between
mode and communication, in that the communication helps to determine the mode,
and the mode determines what aspect of the communication is attended to (and
how it is interpreted) as Cronen et al. pointed out
(3).
Uses of the two modes concept
I have gone on at some length about the two
modes because I think the concept is important.
It has clarified my own thinking, to such an extent that it is becoming
difficult to communicate with people who are not familiar with the concept. So many things vary with mode. For example:
1.
Reinforcement - is it positive or negative? Consider the simple act of turning away: in the agonic mode, if the other person turns
away, it is a submissive signal and therefore rewarding and anathetic; in the hedonic
mode, turning away is a signal of inattention and therefore aversive or catathetic.
2. The modes explain the change of individual
behaviour with social context (see Pauls
recent ASCAP contribution). For instance, a couple is in the agonic mode,
quarrelling or maintaining hostile silence. They then go out to dinner, where
the husband is the "life and soul of the party". They then go home
and, as so many wives report, "as soon as the door closed behind him his whole personality
changed and he became hostile or silent."
The husband is simply behaving according to the mode of the social group
he is in. His marriage was in the agonic mode, so alone with his wife, both before and after
the party, he behaved agonically. But the group at the party was in the
hedonic mode, and so he behaved hedonically - still competing, but competing by showing off
rather than by putting down.
The
two modes concept also draws attention to switching from one mode to the
other. Switching from the hedonic to the
agonic mode is similar to the "disassuagement"
of Heard and
Hedonic competition
The agonic/hedonic dichotomy should not be
confused with the difference between cooperation and competition. There is no cooperation in the agonic mode,
but there is competition in the hedonic mode. However, it is quite different from agonic
competition. Paul (Gilbert) has pointed
out that whereas agonic competition is based on intimidation, hedonic
competition is based on attraction (6); two rivals in the hedonic mode,
instead of trying to intimidate each other, vie for attractiveness in the eyes
of one or more third parties. The most
advanced form of hedonic competition is the political election, but similar
activity is going on all the time in an informal way. The third parties vote by expressing
approbation or disapprobation, and the end result is the differential
allocation of prestige to the two rivals.
The differential prestige is the basis of a ranking system, so we should
not think of the hedonic mode as only applying to egalitarian social
groups. The important thing is that the
ranking in the hedonic mode is decided by third parties, rather than by the
rivals themselves. The two rivals may
not meet, or if they do they may have an agonic relationship, but they know
that they cannot influence their relative rank by the methods of the agonic
mode. This was illustrated well in the
film All About Eve in which the two rival actresses had a relation of
agonic bitchiness, but they knew that the more bitchy they appeared, the less
attractive they appeared to their judges; only when they were on their own was
it possible to "put the boot in" in the hope of making the other
depressed and therefore less attractive to others. Since there are always at least two rivals and
one judge involved, this kind of competition could be called polyadic to distinguish it from the dyadic competition of
the agonic mode.
The
competition of the hedonic mode is not homogeneous over time. There are times
when people are actively evaluating each other (as in an election, or a formal
meeting, or a contest of some sort, or at receptions where name-dropping and
jockeying for position occur), and these occasions have been described by
Irving Goffmann as being "on-stage" whereas
at other times evaluation is not on the agenda and these times may be thought
of as "off-stage"; although it
is probably true to say that there is no time at which some form of evaluation
is not occurring, even if it is an evaluation of how good someone is at getting
"off-stage". To extend Goffmann's metaphor, if we call the dyadic interaction of
the agonic mode "the (boxing) ring", then we can say that social
competition normally takes place in the "arena" which includes both
the agonic ring and the hedonic stage, while the hedonic off-stage is
relatively free of social competition.
The
hedonic mode is also compatible with a rank order which has been established by
fighting or other agonic means but which has come to be accepted by the losing
parties; then
the definition components of the communications are redundant, and the
requirement of the hedonic mode is met.
Hedonic anathetic
signals
The approbation and disapprobation which are
administered in the hedonic mode are by definition anathetic
and catathetic signals because they raise and lower
self-esteem (RHP). But they are
different from the equivalent signals of the agonic mode. In the hedonic mode anathetic
signals are not submission signals as they are in the agonic mode; usually they are
neutral or non-informatory about the relative rank of
the sender and receiver of the signal.
This means that they can be used between equals and in a down-hierarchy
direction. We get the paradox that a down-hierarchy
anathetic signal runs the risk of being interpreted
as a catathetic signal if the definitional component
is not accepted by the receiver. Thus
patronising or condescending behaviour is received as anathetic
by someone who views the sender as higher-ranking (in the way that Mr Collins
is flattered by the "condescension" of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice), but as catathetic by someone who views the sender as equal. Between equals there can be no implications
of superior relative rank in anathetic signals,
otherwise they are no longer anathetic.
Dimension or
category?
Should we talk about a relationship being
either agonic or hedonic, or should we use a dimensional terminology and say
that it is more agonic or less agonic?
Paul and I have discussed this and we feel that a categorical
terminology is justified because the middle ground between the two modes tends
to be unstable, subject to positive feedback processses
whose end-points lie in one mode or the other.
This reflects the common feeling of "The more angry he got, the
more she retaliated." There must be
exceptions, such as cases when one member of a dyad behaves as though the
relationship is agonic when the other is behaving as though it is hedonic, but
such instances are probably exceptions, examples of pathological social
functioning, and worthy of study as such.
Conclusion
Should we define the agonic mode as orientation
towards fighting or as non-redundancy (of the definitional component of
communication)? Are these two things the
same? No, because non-redundancy can
theoretically be dealt with by the methods of the hedonic mode, particularly by
metacommunication (talking about the
non-redundancy). Let me illustrate this
by an example from fiction. In her novel
September Rosamund Pilcher
depicts a hedonic marriage which, after eight years, experiences its first
non-redundancy. The couple gradually
realise that they have incompatible ideas about the education of their eight
year old son (the American wife wants him to go to day school,
the Scottish husband wants him to go to the family boarding school). They have never decided who should choose the
school for the boy, nor have they decided who should decide who should choose
the school. They both realise that they
can never give in on this issue, and the marriage switches into the agonic
mode. In the novel they do not metacommunicate, but if they had done, they might have
remained in the hedonic mode. One of
them could have said, "Look, we have an irreconcilable difference, what
shall we do about it?" and the other might have replied, "We could
toss a coin to decide the winner, or we could go to arbitration, such as
Marriage Guidance." In this way
they might have avoided the drift into the agonic mode, which must have been
the usual method of resolution of non-redundancy in precultural
times (and even now). Of course, it
would have been easier for the couple to deal with school problem before they
got married, or at least before it arose in acute form: non-redundancy is very much a case of
prophylaxis being easier than the cure.
Best of all to negotiate all possible definitions while at least one of
the couple is still in love - surely one of the main functions of the state of
being in love must be to facilitate the negotiation of definitions.
It is
interesting that the advice to resove conflict by
arbitration is given in the I Ching, said to
be the oldest book in the world (7).
Under the sixth ideogram, entitled "Confict",
the following advice is given, "You feel yourself to be in the right, and
therefore you proceed with complete confidence.
The path you have chosen, however, will lead you into a state of
Conflict....you cannot engage in conflict with your adversaries, for this would
lead to misfortune....it would be in your best interests to place the Conflict
before an impartial authority who can make an unprejudiced decision."
On the
whole I think it is preferable to define the agonic mode in terms of
non-redundancy because this directs our attention to the cause which may be
amenable to therapy. The exception, when non-redundancy is detected and
communicated about and resolved in the hedonic mode, is of such rare occurrence
that it deserves to be the exception that proves the rule.
I hope
that this rather imperfect summary of my recent discussions with Michael will
help to clarify the two modes concept, and if any ASCAP contributors still have
any doubts about the definition, usage or usefulness of the terms, I hope they
will speak out. We know that terms can
become so imprecise that they do more harm than good, as has happened with
"hysteria" and "aggression". I think the two modes terminology catches a
subtle but real and important variable in the genesis of psychopathology, and
it is worth expending some effort to make the terms as useful as possible.
References
1. Sluzki, C.E. and Beavin, J.
(1965) Symmetry and complementarity: an operational definition and a typology
of dyads. Acta psichiatrica
y psicologica
de America Latina, 11, 321-330. Reprinted in Watzlawick, P. & Weakland, J.H. (Eds) The Interactional
View.
2.
Patrick, J. (1973) A
3. Cronen, V.E., Johnson, K.M. & Lannamann,
J.W. (1982) Paradoxes, double
binds, and reflexive loops: an alternative theoretical
perspective. Family
Process, 21, 91-112.
4.
Heard, D.H. & Lake, B. (1986) The
attachment dynamic in adult life. British Journal of Psychiatry, 149,
430-438.
5. deWaal, F. (1989) Peacekeeping
among Primates.
6.
Gilbert, P. (1989) Human Nature and Suffering. Hove:
7. Wing,
R.L. (1982) The Illustrated I Ching. Dolphin/Doubleday.
I am, anathetically, your humble and obedient servant.....