Harrison C. White, a founding giant of the relational turn in American sociology, has produced and developed some of the most influential analytical tools to date in social network analysis, including vacancy chains, structural equivalence and blockmodels, and kinship and producer markets modeling, among others (Boorman & White, 1976; Lorrain & White, 1971; White, 1963, 1970, 1981, 2002; White et al., 1976a; White & Breiger, 1975; White & Heil, 1976b). Furthermore, he has also left us a monumental theoretical model that explains how social formations emerge (White, 1992, 2008).
White’s model begins analytically with identities triggered by stochastic processes at any scale, from individuals to empires. Once decoupled from their environments, identities seek footings vis-à-vis other identities in control efforts to reduce uncertainty. In the process, they self-organize in disciplined social molecules to accomplish vital tasks and secure perduration. Signaling and comparability among identities are key. Specialization ensues. Increased complexity triggers further control efforts, and hence identities polymerize ever more intricate social networks and domains (netdoms) that merge in social ties, delivering sets of reflexive stories and temporalities. Identities switch across these shifting netdom topologies seeking further footings and changing contexts that spark new meanings. The entire process is scale-free and recursive.
Throughout his theoretical model, White (2008, p. 18) captured social organization through vivid imagery of polymerizing gels in provisional phase transitions, local ensembles in the midst of turbulence, that are “messy and refractory, a shambles rather than a crystal.” In his own words (1992, p. 337–338):
We are creatures living within social goos, shards, and rubbery gels made up by and of ourselves. We, like gels, may dissolve into a different order under some heat. Even the frozen shards exhibit only limited orderliness, and even then an orderliness lacking in homogeneity.
Moreover, as I elaborate below, White recognizes that unlike polymer gels of physical systems, human polymer gels of social systems are different in that they have emerged language and meaning. Thus, a natural language—with its open-ended meaning capabilities and reflexive context-making mechanisms—is our species’ differentia specifica that unleashes the next emergent leap in systems complexity. As he put it, “polymer molecules don’t tell stories about their encounters or strategize in those encounters. Human [social] molecules do, but in ways shaped by their social gel” (White, 1992, p. 211).
White’s captivating “spatial-time stretching” metaphors on the nature of the social as polymerizing gels in various states of turbulence and phase transitions is his response to the more conventional and rigid metaphor of social structure. Arguably, these polymer metaphors can be traced to his early training in solid-state physics, including holding a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. I have explained elsewhere (Fontdevila, 2018) White’s relational foundations in depth and have conducted an exegesis of his complex theoretical model of social emergence—a model built on the creative interplay of three axiomatic primitives (identity, control, and switching) and two principles (self-similarity and dispersion). In this short essay honoring his extraordinary legacy, I will focus on White’s sociolinguistic contributions to networks and our mutual collaboration.
In the 1990s, Harrison White recognized the mounting limitations of formal network analysis in capturing social actors’ phenomenological switches across complex netdom shapes and temporalities (the so-called Nadel’s paradox, see later). The problem becomes evident in complex human organization when the same individual can activate or deactivate different types of social ties with another individual. For instance, someone can switch back and forth from job supervisor to nephew of another individual, decoupling and invoking on the spot identities and story sets of expectations that are embedded in netdoms of different shapes and temporal scales. So to further explain complex mechanisms of netdom emergence, White turned to the constitutive and reflexive capacities of language to produce sociality. More specifically, he turned to Peircean metapragmatics and linguistic indexicality to theorize cultural meaning and context-making in social networks. A set goal of his turn to language pragmatics was to unveil meaning-making mechanisms that could enrich formal network analysis.
Early influences on White’s turn to sociolinguistics came from Halliday (1985) on choice grammar and speech registers, Gumperz (1982) on contextualization cues, Labov (1972) on sublanguage varieties, and Gal (1979) on code-switching and networks. However, linguistic anthropologist Silverstein’s (1976, 1993) studies on indexicality and indexical orders occupy center stage in shaping White’s views on language. Silverstein pioneered the application of Peircean semiotics of indexes to the pragmatic analysis of language and culture. In Silverstein’s (1976, p. 11) own words, the indexical “analysis of speech behavior—in the tradition extending from Peirce to Jakobson—allows us to describe the real linkage of language to culture, and perhaps the most important aspect of the ‘meaning’ of speech.”
Indexes are more or less grammaticalized elements that point to features of the social and physical world, and that speakers use reflexively to create and lay out the contextual parameters of their social interactions. Unlike referential symbols which denotate, indexes are signs that signify by spatiotemporal contiguity. Thus, from deixis (e.g., this and now), pronouns (e.g., I and you), and verb tenses to code-switching, registers, deference and status markers, prosodic tones, silences, and so on, indexes anchor the linguistic code in practical contexts of use. Austin’s famous performatives carrying illocutionary force (e.g., I promise you and I sentence you) are simply one example of indexical signs that so happen to be grammaticalized in many Indo-European languages (Silverstein, 1993). But other linguistic indexical strategies can also constitute or perform the social contexts in which they are uttered. For instance, two people “switching” to first-name basis “index” (constitute) a new context of status proximity, or coworkers “switching” from slang to formal register “index” the resumption of their professional context. In short, indexes enable speakers to constitute and negotiate their relative footings and social ties, rendering other more complex semiotic processes (e.g., metaphor, myth, and narrative) fully operational in communicative practice. Indexes are the primitives of meaning that bridge semiosis and communication in social life.
Based on this rich field of sociolinguistic influences, by the mid-1990s, White was writing his reflections and ideas on language and networks in a series of unpublished manuscripts (White, 1994, 1995b, 1995c) that culminated in a seminal paper (White, 1995a). In one of his earliest statements, White announced that his perspective on language and networks had been “reopened by sociolinguistic results of the past 15 years” and that in his view the “pragmatics of socio-cultural action replaces the semantics of referential as central... grammaticalization replaces grammar ... [and] multilingualism describes a socio-cultural battlefield in a political economy rather than merely an objective mapping of ingrained habits” (White, 1994, p. 1–2). Moreover, White proclaimed that “events of language use mediate human sociality” and that language, through its indexical and reflexive capacities, is mostly about “keeping relationships going” rather than predication about the world.
In short, White recognized the constitutive power of language to produce social context through switches in indexicalities. Moreover, contrary to Silverstein’s “heroics of indexicality” replicated with phenomenological effort in every face-to-face situation, White maintained that indexical work need not be in “myopic messiness of dyads” but rather channeled by broader spatiotemporal patterns of network switchings (White, 1995b, p. 4). Indexical switching of various speech registers and sublanguages across netdoms thus becomes central to his theory as “vehicles of meaning for identity and control” (White, 2008, p. 17). In other words, language matters to social networks because through reflexive switches of indexical markers (e.g., switching forms of address, ironic tone, and informal vs standard registers), social actors renegotiate and reshape, often unintentionally, their dynamic network topologies. In analytical terms, indexical switching is the social mechanism that speakers in interaction use reflexively to decouple or embed ties and netdom topologies of various shapes and affiliations.
It was in the context of these intellectual frontiers that I, as a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1990s, had the honor and privilege to cross paths with Harrison. I enrolled in all his graduate seminars, in particular his mind-opening seminar on the sociology of language, and eventually wrote a comprehensive and systematic review of the sociology and anthropology of language (Fontdevila, 2010 for the analytical version). Harrison and I connected intellectually, and after I graduated and became a sociology professor, we collaborated on a series of important publications diving deeper into these sociolinguistic and network theoretical matters.
In two publications (Fontdevila & White, 2010, 2013), we argue that the reflexive and indexical dimensions of language are critical to explain how identities manage ambiguity when they switch across netdoms within post-industrial domination orders. First, we introduce three key dimensions of reflexive and indexical language, namely, metapragmatics (i.e., reflexive awareness of the pragmatic rules of linguistic interaction), heteroglossia (i.e., reflexive use of multiple narratological viewpoints or “voices”), and poetics (i.e., reflexive use of linguistic formal features and esthetic styles for persuasive purposes).
We then show that (1) “metapragmatic control” of stories acquired in countless netdom switchings leads to strong footings securing resources and opportunity; (2) institutional rhetorics that include rich “heteroglossic voicing” via structural holes generate stories that can be reflexively transposed to other institutional arenas; and (3) “poetic control” of speech styles transforms identities into power-law constellations with robust footing that decouple to preserve quality. We conclude that indexical and reflexive dimensions of language (metapragmatics, heteroglossia, and poetics) are inherently implicated in relations of power and crucial to identities’ struggles for control—of footing or domination—across rapidly polymerizing netdoms.
In another well-cited collaboration (Fontdevila et al., 2011), we agree with systems theorist Luhmann that meaning is central to social life but challenge his strong claim that modern society’s subsystems are based on communicative self-closure. We argue that there is refuting evidence from sociolinguistics and show how language’s indexical and reflexive devices (metapragmatics, heteroglossia, and genres) are transported across institutional contexts with significant netdom consequences. In contrast to Luhmann’s theory of systems communication, which is based on binary codes governed recursively within differentiated subsystems to reduce uncertainty, we conclude that “systems closure” does not solve the problem of uncertainty in modern social life. In fact, lack of uncertainty is itself a problem. Order is necessary, but order at the edge of chaos. In short, systems communication in post-industrial orders is about indexically and reflexively managing ambiguity across subsystems through myriad netdom switchings.
I close this section by noting that my fruitful collaboration with Harrison incorporating sociolinguistics into network thinking should be contextualized as part of a larger effervescent period of relational thinking in sociology that developed in the second half of the 1990s across New York City’s top universities and research centers. This extraordinary period of intellectual exchange and multiple collaborations has been identified as the New York School of relational analysis by Mische (2011). Informally led by relational visionaries such as Harrison White, Charles Tilly, and Mustafa Emirbayer, among others, the New York School consisted of a city-wide network of workshops, mini-conferences, dissertation committees, and informal groups of faculty and graduate students. An important intellectual goal of these citywide exchanges was to reformulate and update the theoretical stalemate of formal network analysis in light of recent developments in comparative-historical sociology (Fontdevila, 2018, p. 235; Mische, 2011, p. 81; for further collaborations on reflexive language with other former students, see Mische & White, 1998; White et al., 2007; White & Godart, 2010).
In light of the above, to state that my sociological perspective was profoundly shaped by Harrison White’s vast knowledge is an understatement. I now turn to my own empirical work to show how some of White’s analytical understandings of indexical meaning across netdoms have influenced my research and can be productively transposed to different social phenomena. Thus, in my ethnographic research on sexual practices and HIV risk-taking among men who have sex with men in Southern California, I apply indexical and metapragmatic semiotics to explain risky context-making and identity formation across sexual networks (Fontdevila, 2009, 2020, 2023).
For instance, drawing on Peirce’s triadic notion of the sign (representamen, object, and interpretant), I have applied fine-grained indexical analysis to rich ethnographic data on HIV disclosure dynamics across US local and migrant networks of gay and bisexual men (Fontdevila, 2023). Thus, in encounters across sexual networks and domains (e.g., bathhouses and sex parties), HIV can be transmitted through indexical misinterpretation. For some local networks, silence about not disclosing HIV status and not requesting condoms during sex may index (constitute) contexts of “bareback” identity and group belonging. In other words, silence is the “marked” index used by some HIV-positive men to metapragmatically signal netdom contexts of resistance against stigma and rejection. However, for recent migrant Latino men who are new and unaware of the metapragmatic rules of these sexualized spaces, silence during condomless sex may index a different context in which sex partners can be trusted to disclose if they are HIV-positive.
These different indexical framings—silence of HIV disclosure indexing “resistance” versus “trust”—across sexual netdoms are ultimately performative expressions on the ground of disease stigma rooted in larger sexual inequalities. Paradoxically, it is the empowering semiotic response to stigma and rejection by some HIV-positive gay men in sexualized spaces that creates contexts of HIV transmission that migrant men may encounter. This research has significant HIV prevention implications because it reveals how misinterpretations of indexical semiotics during sex can create pathways for HIV transmission. In other words, sexual contexts of HIV risk are created through the encounter of two different systems of indexical metapragmatics when local and migrant netdoms intersect (Fontdevila, 2023).
With this analysis and others where I also apply semiotic mediation within a pragmatist framework of social mechanisms, my goal is to show how emergent properties (e.g., structural stigma and HIV disparities) of complex systems affecting migrant populations are partly realized via indexical semiotic mechanisms at the meso- and microlevels of netdom interactions. Thus, I have also analyzed other indexical pathways of HIV transmission, including “liminal spaces” among Latino bisexual men and “double-edged” stigma linked to biomedical prevention among young Latino gay men (see Fontdevila, 2020; Sawyer, 2005 for metapragmatics and emergence).
Now, it is worth remembering, many of the analytical tools that I have productively deployed in my research—e.g., metapragmatics, indexical meanings, identity, context-making, and netdoms—I first learned from Harrison and our memorable intellectual discussions.
I will conclude with “Nadel’s paradox” and Harrison White. In relational sociology, Nadel’s paradox refers to the intractable difficulties of formalizing network structures in isolation from the subjective and cultural understanding that shapes and changes them in real time (see, for example, McLean & Song, 2023 for the operationalizing challenges of “side-directed behavior” in networks; Erikson, 2013; Kirchner & Mohr, 2010; Mohr, 1998; Pachucki & Breiger, 2010). Dimaggio (1992, p. 119–120) has articulated this paradox by observing that:
A satisfactory approach to social structure requires simultaneous attention to both cultural and relational aspects of role-related behavior. Yet cultural aspects are qualitative and particular, pushing researchers toward taxonomic specificity, whereas concrete social relations lend themselves to analysis by formal and highly abstract methods.
In light of this tension, I pose a paramount question: Did Harrison White solve Nadel’s paradox? I strongly believe he got closer than anyone else to solving it. That was his genius! Many attempts have been made to solve the paradox, but either reflexive “context” or formal “mathematics” tends to get lost in the process. White kept them both in focus at a sophisticated level. So, for instance, in a rigorous attempt to formalize meaningful discourse and market networks, White (2000a, p. 130) recognized that “actual modeling of reflexive indexing will prove the most demanding mathematically.”
Many relational scholars dedicated to analyzing context and meaning from a relational perspective often avoid the formal mathematics of complex network shapes and emergent effects that work behind social actors’ backs. Relational virtuoso Elias ([1939] 1994), for example, demonstrated uncanny insight in bridging socio-genesis and psycho-genesis—network and meaning—through his historical concept of figuration, but without formalizing. It may be the case that to remain recognizable and useful, sociology will always require some level of idiographic understanding and narrative story concerning the struggles and motivations of actual historical peoples, as Brint (1992) via Weber reminds White. However, in the spirit of Harrison White, the challenge for a fully developed social science will still be parameterization and measurement without bleaching meaning (White, 1997, 2000b).
To conclude, Harrison will be missed, but his extraordinary social scientific and intellectual legacy lives on through all of us, many generations of disciples and students. In my view, it is because of Harrison White’s genius and monumental ideas that we can still, in the 21st century, believe in the scientific project of sociology!