Goffman's Legacy

Goffmanv’s Legacy

Legacies of Social Thought Series Editor: Charles Lemert

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Visions of Social Inequality: Class and Poverty in Urban America William Julius Wilson The New Psychoanalysis Phyllis W. Meadow

Goffman’s Legacy Edited by A. Javier Trevifio Foreword by Charles Lemert

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ROWMAN & LITnEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com PO Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Chapter 1: “The Goffman Legacy: Deconstructing/Reconstructing Social Science” copyright 0 2003 by Thomas J. Scheff. All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Goffman’s legacy / edited by A. Javier Trevifio. p. cm. - (Legacies of social thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7425-1977-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-7425-1978-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Goffman, Erving. 2. Sociologists-United States-Biography. 3. Sociology-United States. 4. Social interaction. I. TreviAo, A. Javier, 195% 11. Series. HM479.G64G642003 301’092-dc21 2003002361 Printed in the United States of America

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For Edward “Doc” Rybnicek, who first taught me to appreciate the wonders of sociological theory

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Goffman’s Enigma: Series Editor’s Foreword Charles Lemert

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Introduction: Erving Goffman and the Interaction Order A . Javier Trevifio

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The Goffman Legacy: Deconstructing/Reconstmcting Social Science ThomasJ. Scheff

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The Personal Is Dramaturgical (and Political): The Legacy of Erving Goffman Mary F. Rogers

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Interaction and Hierarchy in Everyday Life: Goffman and Beyond A n n Branaman

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“Much Ado about Goffman” Norman K. Denzin Of Kindred Spirit: Erving Goffman’s Oeuvre and Its Relationship to Georg Simmel Uta Gerhardt Blumer, ‘Goffman, and Psychoanalysis Philip Manning vii

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Contents

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7 Goffman as Microfunctionalist James J. Chris

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8 Framing and Cognition

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Luiz Carlos Baptista

9 Orders of Interaction and Intelligibility: Intersections

between Goffman and Garfinkel by Way of Durkheim Anne Warfield Rawls

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10 Ethnomethodological Readings of Goffman Gregoy W, H. Smith

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

Several people, each in their own way, helped with the preparation of this volume. In particular, I would like to thank Howard S. Becker (University of California-Santa Barbara), Alain Blanc (University of Pierre Mend&-France), Randall Collins (University of Pennsylvania), Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern University), Carol Brooks Gardner (Indiana University), and Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University). I especially thank Horst J. Helle (University of Munich) for his many helpful and kind gestures.

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Goffman’s Enigma Series Editor’s Foreword Charles Lemert

Some time ago, but well after Erving Goffman had died in 1982, I was seated at dinner at the University of Oxford beside one of that institution’smost distinguished philosophers. We had very little in common, save for a need to redeem the accident of the evening’s misplacement. In the search for something to say to one another, we very quickly came to Goffman. He told me the story of a similarly awkward evening he had once spent with the great but inscrutable American sociologist. The Oxford man’s story turned on the presence of his then adolescent daughter who was, apparently, ever more baffled by that evening’s uncertainty. Until, that is, she transcended her youth in the discovery of an interest she shared with a man she had been told was very famous---a qualification not exactly telling to a girl of Oxford where everyone is famous for some or another dreary reason. She, however, learned that this man Goffman shared her enthusiasm for second-hand clothing. Thereafter, as the story was told to me, the daughter of the English philosopher and the great American sociologist were consumed with stories of outfits and bargains they had enjoyed in several of the cities of Europe and North America. The father of the daughter told me this story with great relish, as if relieved to have found something to ease the situation he and I had found ourselves in. Indeed, from then on our evening passed quickly, with moments of pleasure, as he and I permitted the story of Goffman’s enigmatic interests to enliven several of our own. But how, exactly, did this come to pass that Goffman rescued us from one of the more baffling of social riddles? What is one to say to another who is uncomfortably placed in our company, the very placement serving as a signal given by a third party who determined, for obscure reasons, that we xi

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ought to have some interest in each other? The condition of our participation in a third party’s arbitrary attribution of relative worth is that we follow the script by suffering the time in another’s presence under the visible guise of a satisfaction untrue to the invisible despair occasioned by our discovering the situation, if not the other, conversationally enigmatic. As it happens, the English philosopher and I got out of the quandary by coming upon a story of the enigmatic Goffman, who, some years after his death, excused us from having to feign an interest in each other’s work. As the time passed, we spoke animatedly of any number of subjects-none of them professional, all of them more or less on the same common plane as how to manage surly teenage children or comprehend the mystery of second-hand clothing. I do not tell this story of the story told me about Goffman to suggest that he somehow was endowed with superhuman powers of inspiration. Quite the contrary, the point of the original story and its sequelae is the social power of the enigma, which may in turn be the key to the enduring sociological power of Goffman’s thinking, now nearly a quarter-century after his death and a half-century after his rise to fame. It is, I mean to say, quite possible that Goffman continues to breathe fresh air into creative scholarly works, such as those gathered in this book, precisely because his writings always, almost without exception, were in their way enigmatic. Begging one further reference to the great English university, the Oxford English Dictionay , in a rare concession to parsimony, offers a plain and uncomplicated definition of word enigma: “A short composition in prose or verse, in which something is described by intentionally obscure metaphors, in order to afford an exercise for the ingenuity of the reader or hearer in guessing what is meant; a riddle.” Goffman, the man, and the works of his pen were nothing if not that. But what might it mean to say that a man, as distinct from his writing, is enigmatic? Goffman’s writings surely were that. But was he enigmatic by personal nature? Was enigma the proper name for his performance of self? What encourages the inquiry is the odd fact that the stories one hears, and tells, of Erving Goffman are very much like the one told to me. By many reports, not to mention my own experience, he was indeed a person who offered himself up in public in forms that called out the genius of those party to the performance. At no time was this quality more poignantly in evidence than in the words he wrote, near death, for the American Sociological Keview’s issue (vol. 48 D9831: 1-17) containing his undelivered presidential address, “The Interaction Order.” I have no recollection of where the American Sociological Association gathered in 1982, the year of Goffman’s presidency. Still, I remember as if it were yesterday Bob Merton coming into a discussion in which some of us were engrossed to tell us just how sick Erving was. Though none of us was close to him, as few were, we all felt the void, immediately-a void Goffman

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himself addressed, with his usual irony, in the preface he wrote to that undelivered paper. They are words, by the way, that must have been written sometime in the few months between the August meetings and his death in November of that year: In theory, a presidential address, whatever its character, must have some significance for the profession, even if only a sad one. More important, readers who were unable or unwilling to make the trip have an opportunity to participate vicariously in what can be read as the culmination of a meeting they missed. . . , Not the best of warrants. My expectation, then, was not to publish this talk but to limit it to the precincts in which it was delivered. . . . But in fact I wasn’t there either. What I offer the reader then is vicarious participation in something that did not itself take place. A podium performance, but only readers in the seats. A dubious offering.

The offering to which Goffman refers was, of course, that of the empty podium. The paper itself was anything but dubious-possibly one of his finest, certainly his most hilarious, essays. You could not have a better instance of the Goffman enigma than his preface to “The Interaction Order.” He introduces a prose essay that, though written out well in advance (even before he knew how quickly death was gaining on him), he claims to have intended only as a talk and only available to those in attendance. On the difference between writing and talk, no one knew more than he. Goffman had to have known very well that, whatever he intended, these addresses are always published in the American Sociological Review. He was, therefore, obscuring the truth of his intentions in order to invite a question. Goffman meant, then, as so often, to transport those who attended to him out of the realm of his presence-in this case, into the transcending class of similar addresses offered as talk in a local precinct but written and published for the absent to read. When he alludes to the significance of some of those talks as “sad,”one may reasonably assume that he is not calling forth the sentiment in the name of his illness and pending death but the sad nature of some of those addresses. He was, thereby, enigmatically reaching down, or out, to all of us who have been in our youth in the position of the English professor’s daughter-we, that is, who have inexplicably sat through presidential orations in the absence of any comprehension of their fame. Goffman knew, of course, that his address, had he delivered it, would have been well received. It was funnily written, but it was also one of the most concise cases he ever made for the interaction order-the preoccupation of a lifetime of writing that had brought him world notoriety of such significance that two characters stuck with each other at a table in Oxford could turn to Goffman to relieve their suffering. An enigma turns on an intended use of the obscure in order, in the words of Oxfords dictionary, “to afford an exercise for the ingenuity of the reader

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or hearer in guessing what is meant.” This, I have long believed, is the secret of Goffman’s literary genius and hence of his enduring power as a resource to sociologies of all kinds. His final undelivered talk could not have been planned as it happened, but it did happen just as Goffman might have planned it had it been within his power to plan such things. Contrary to the impressions of those who have read his early books quickly and against assignment deadlines, m e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Stigma (1963) make a point not obvious to the passing eye. Goffman’s scorn, especially in the latter of the two books, for the ideal of the pure self as the unqualified recognition of one’s own identity was anything but an argument for a sociology of arbitrary social contexts. The interaction order was always socially constrained, even as it was vulnerable to local performances. Thus, the order of his absent interaction at the presidential address devolved not so much from a role (then the word of the day) as from an interaction ritual. Rituals are, if anything, more (not less) stable than roles. Goffman’s way of managing their determining effects was what today we might call irony, of which the enigma is a particularly powerful type. To obscure the presentation of self in whichever setting is precisely to invite those in attendance into the play, if only to attempt to figure out what the hell is going on. So much sociology, especially in Goffman’s day, is closed and sealed upon delivery-a kind of made-to-order system by which the novice workers are meant to paint according to the numbers. The story of sociology’s odd resistance to the uninvited idea has been told so many times as to not bear very much repeating. Still, one of the ironies in the history of American sociology is that the once reigning king of debunkers, Alvin Gouldner, famously attacked Goffman and Harold Garfinkel with the charge of being mere microfunctionalists. The irony descends upon the fact that, rightly or wrongly, Gouldner is the one largely forgotten today, along with Talcott Parsons, whose sociology he was alluding to in the microfunctionalist crack, while the sociologies of Goffman and Garfinkel are very much alive, as the essays in this collection demonstrate. To refer to Goffman’s enigma is, to be sure, to refer to his own presentation of self. He was indeed the kind of man who could absent himself from the expected conversational rituals in order to make himself present to one of the least of those in attendance-ne like the teenager in the story with which I began. This humble story of an event in the course of a great man’s public life is precisely of the same form as the story he delivered upon the undelivered final event of his life among professional sociologists. Both stories, and the others one hears, offer up a self the presence of which is obscured by its withdrawal from the scene. The dubiousness of this offering lies in the play between presence and absence. The moralists have of course criticized Goffman for this, saying he was too remote. Against them, I believe

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that the enigmatic withdrawals are the keys to the enduring value of his books and essays. We forget that at the heart of any sociology worth a good spit is an enigma of precisely the same sort as Goffman’s. Put simply, the edlfying enigma of sociology is to be found in the incommensurable axioms of our subject, of which there are three: 1. A sociology is nothing i f it is not an account of social structures (otherwise, we would not have needed Durkheim to get us out of psychol-

ogy). 2 . Yet, the very structuresfor which a sociology exists are irrevocably invisible (that is, they cannot be observed as such; they can only be reconstructed out of the data). 3. Hence, the essential obscurity of any sociology: Sociologies aim to be empirical sciences of social things (structures) that are not availabde to empirical obseruations. One could just as well compose the history of sociological thought on a simple binary scheme: on the one side, those who overwork the empirical operations in order to assert the observable nature of the unobservable structures; on the other, those who reduce the structures to a figure of speech in the deep background of observable local events. Either way, hardly anyone does not in his or her heart of hearts realize that the alternatives are bogus, if necessary unto professional advancement. Goffman, in his way, took sociology’s enigma with utter seriousness and allowed it to stand free of the corrupting extremes of small-minded professional interests. By this I most decidedly do not mean that he described facts as he saw them. In fact, his books and essays are only occasionally filled with observations. Nor are they compendia of theories. They are, more deeply, a disconcerting literary form whereby Goffman wrote of the world in a way that brought forth all the most obscure of its features in order that the reader herself might find her way to account for them. From his earliest essays such as “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1951) and “On Face-work (1953) to his last, in my view most brilliant, “Felicity’sCondition” (1983), Goffman wrote as if to create the social space of the enigma-that is, the social space into which the reader brings her unasked questions not to find a covering answer but to understand the ubiquity of her concerns for which the solutions are never pat. Two books of the early 196os--~sylums (1961) and Stigma (1963)-were the extreme expressions of the themes found in Presentation of Self(1959). In effect, in these books and most (if not all that followed them), Goffman’s writings called readers out of the impossible expectations of the Normal into the world they all know to be there-the world of normal deviancy.

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who does not realize that the line distinguishing the normal from the deviant is so far from being merely fine as to be utterly porous? Yet, we do not talk about the conclusive fact of social life that must issue from ths realizationthat the line between the good and bad is one drawn by the invisible hand of social structures. The work of structuring is the work of lending legitimacy to the most universal of all social facts-that the differences between and among us are the arbitrary e n t a h e n t s of a hunger for social order. Prisons and mental hospitals, like detention halls and soup lutchens, are the reminders that there is a limit, even if, on average, those on the inside differ from those on the outside only by virtue of the bad luck of the hands dealt them. Even so, where the difference is real, we temporarily on the outside understand perfectly well the methods of those incarcerated in any structured imprisonments of an orderly society. Though Goffman offered up no formal theory of social structures (making him susceptible to the Gouldner complaint of being all too micro a sociologist), the truth is that-more than anyone in his day, more even than most of us t o d a y 4 o f f m a n took sociology’s foundational enigma for what it is: We must be empirical about structures which by their nature are outside experience, hence outside the deepest meaning of the empirical. As a consequence, sociologists can only imagine the structures for which it is their duty to provide reliable, if seldom valid, accounts. It is an impossible situation the sociologist faces. Goffman faced it long before anyone known to the general public began to write about it. The structures themselves are the enigmas of our work. We cannot see them, not even when we limit ourselves to ethnographies of the local. We can only re-create the social space in which their disturbances are most commonly experienced-and that would be the social space of the undifferentiated deviants. It is too often said that Goffman’s idea of normal deviancy meant that the rule breaking and the rule abiding obey the same rules. Of course, Goffman himself said something llke this near the end of Stigma. But the force of his perversion of the Normal is just the reverse. The naive expectation of normals with a calling that they are deservedly superior to the deviant is the Big Lie of social order. The truth is that we are all perverse. The rules of the interaction order are those that, above all others, demand that behaviors directed toward the presentation of self, or to the reaccredidation of a lost face, are precisely and exclusively about information control. It is not that the abnormal are llke us, but that we who presume are like them. The normal course of life is replete with deviations that depend entirely on the centrality of the Lie. Information control, by its nature, privileges the strategic lie over truth telling. Information control in the name of one’s face is always, and necessarily, the accrediting or secreting of discrediting information. Goffman, in short, was not so much amoral (as some complain) as morally honest to a degree that the social moralist cannot afford.

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The interaction order that Goffman’s critics would dismiss as “merely micro” is in fact, whatever its shortcomings conceptually, the proper order of all honest witnesses to daily life-we all cheat, lie, dissemble, covet, steal, prostitute, embezzle paper clips, pass bad paper, steal, masturbate, even kill on occasion. Social order would be improbable without a robust and nearuniversal respect for rule breaking. Indeed, rules would be worthless without this steady stream of violations. And, contrary to the moralizing sociologies, the rule breaking is not so much a tragic necessity as a happy circumstance of ordinary humanity. This may well be why, apart from the limitations that pertain to all who write in and for another time, Goffman endures so well so long after his definitive absence from the social scene. He is the one sociologist of his time, and one of few since, who embraced sociology for what it must be. He refused to engage the argument over structures and individuals (which, we must recall, had its own urgency in that day through C. Wright Mills’s 1959 essay, me Sociological Imagination). Had he lived, Goffman he would have aligned himself, if with any, with Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, possibly even Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida-those who by one means or another rejected the confusions wrought when sociologists think of themselves as objectivists or subjectivists-as, that is, proponents of structures or of agents; as (God forgive us for the language) macro- or micropeople. He uttered barely a word that could be taken with final seriousness on such questions. Rather, Goffman was content to work in the one social space where, in the practical life, structures meet the concrete individual. This is a space not of tragic social pressures imposed by the structures (as Weber and Durkheim, even Marx in his way, seemed to believe) or of the romantic individual bringing all goodness into being by the force of his moral strivings (as the American pragmatists had it). Rather, it is the space of the irresolute enigma of all sociologies, including those of the common teenager who likes second-hand stuff: We are who we are in spite of the structured pressures, but the only way we can be in such a situation is by breaking the rules the authorities impose. A sociology of such a dilemma must itself be enigmatic, as Goffman’s was, because the riddle has no answer-nly the persistent questionings of those who are willing to use their genius to enter the world itself, and to live it. We are all born into second-hand clothes of the same sort of hospital issue most of us will die in. Such is life. Such is the social reality into which Goffman invites us now from the other side of the grave-wherever that might be.

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Introduction Erving Goffman and the Interaction Order A. javier Trevifio

My legacy will be like cash, which is distributed to many heirs, each transforming his portion into a profit that conforms to his nature: this profit will no longer reveal its derivation from my legacy. 4 e o r g Simmel (1918)

Erving Goffman, the twentieth century’s preeminent sociologist of the structure of face-to-face interaction-what he termed “the interaction order”established his own unique domain of inquiry and methods of research. His books-written in an accessible and engaging style, and thus widely sold not only in college bookstores but in commercial bookstores as well-have been received as part of the canon in microsociology, and in particular symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and conversation analysis. Goffman’s work is also regarded as one of the fundamental references for the wider community of scholars, most notably in cultural anthropology, psychiatry, social psychology, and sociolinguistics. Moreover, many of the colorful and captivating words and phrases that he coined-impression management, stigma,passing, total institution, presentation of se& to name only some of the more widely circulated-have now become part of our common parlance. Ironically, during most of his life (and even now) Goffman remained a marginal and controversial figure in academic sociology. When first published, much of his work was subjected to severe critical analysis from his peers; it continues to garner criticism even today. To be sure, Goffman’s sociology leaves few of its readers uncommitted one way or the other. They either embrace it in all its fullness or else dismiss it as theoretically unsystematic, methodologically suspect, and, depending on one’s sociological orientation, insufficiently subjectivist or insufficiently structuralist. 1

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These criticisms notwithstanding, Goffman’s, like that of Simmel’s, is a cash legacy. His ideas have been so widely disseminated that many of them have gained common currency in many quarters, in and out of academia. Indeed, many of Goffman’s conceptions have infused our popular culture. In sociology, more specifically, his cash legacy has yielded huge dividends not only in the areas of theory and methodology but also in regard to mode of expression. But lest we risk forgetting that much of our cultural capital derives from Goffman’s intellectual estate, let us consider some of what he has bequeathed to us. First, Goffman goads us to pay close attention to the routine, seemingly trivial social behaviors (e.g., involvement obligations, situational proprieties, remedial interchanges) and emotions (e.g., embarrassment, “flooding out,” interactional euphoria) that most of us take for granted most of the time. Second, he leaves us a rich array of metaphors (drama, game, ritual, frame), rhetorical techniques (the use of irony and disclaimers, writing in a sardonic literary style), and conceptual schemes (based on animal ethology, and the use of taxonomies and other typifications) through which to conduct a penetrating analysis of the organization of face-to face interaction. Third, Goffman provides us with a powerful, if largely unarticulated, research methodology that consists of, among other things, a “serious” ethnography, naturalistic and unsystematic “observations,” and qualitative data analysis. Finally, and perhaps most profound of all, even as he makes us acutely aware of its precariousness, Goffman shows us that an exquisite social order, based on ritual and morality, pervades everyday social life. In their own manner, each of the ten essays that comprise this volume address these and other conceptual inheritances from Goffman. However, to best appreciate what the essays reveal about his intellectual legacy, it is necessary to situate them in the larger context of Goffman’s life and work.

ERVINC COFFMAN: HIS LIFE AND WORK It is well known that Goffman was notoriously secret about his personal life, which he assiduously strove to keep completely separate from h s professional work (Fine, Manning, and Smith 2000, vol. 1: XI. In Goffman’s view, anyone who desired to acquire a detailed understanding of his work did not need to know anything about his life (Winkin 1999: 20). What is more, he eschewed the “hero worship” of any thinker, including himself (Verhoeven 1993: 343). Accordingly, Goffman most definitely did not want his writings to become a discrete object of sociological attention. Why, then, provide biographical details in the introduction to a book celebrating his legacy? Two answers are proffered in response to this question. First, as is the case with most luminaries, the curtain separating Goffman’s private life from his public life-his backstage from his frontstage, as it were-is bound to be

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rendered somewhat transparent by the glare of the celebrity spotlight. And it is almost inevitable that any luminary’s fans, including Goffman’s, would want to get a glimpse of h s personal life and character. As his biographer, Yves Winkin, points out, when Goffman “opted to become a scholar, to write and to publish, he attracted attention to himself and thus became public property. . . . Once Goffman became a public figure he was . . . dispossessed of himself and of his privacy” (1999: 20). There is, however, a less voyeuristic and more pedantic reason for taking a measured glance at a theorist’s personal background. As every student of sociology knows, ideas do not issue from disembodied minds but from fleshand-blood individuals who are subject to the constrains and stimulations of their time, place, history, society, and culture (Merton 1971: vii). Thus, to truly understand and appreciate Goffman’s life and work-his domain assumptions, methodology, and major writings-it is necessary to locate them in his personal background-his biography, intellectual influences, and sociohistorical context.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND Biography Erving Goffman was born on June 11, 1922, in Manville, Alberta, Canada, to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. The family later moved to Dauphin, near Winnipeg, where he attended St. John’s Technical High School. After graduating from high school in 1939, Goffman attended the University of Manitoba, where he majored in chemistry. During 1943-44, he worked at the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa, where he met the future sociologist, Dennis Wrong, who encouraged Goffman’s interest in sociology (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: xi).’ In 1944, during his senior year, Goffman enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he studied with the functionalist anthropologist, C. W. M. Hart, who introduced him to, among other writings, Emile Durkheim’s Le Suicide and Talcott Parsons’s 7%eStructure of Social Action. Another of his teachers was Ray L. Birdwhistell, who also inspired Goffman to read widely in cultural anthropology and sociology. In 1945 Goffman graduated from Toronto with a degree in sociology, and as a result of a chance meeting with Everett C. Hughes, one of the great masters of American sociology, Goffman decided to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago, where Hughes, a fellow Canadian, was teaching (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: xiii). Thus, during the fall of 1945 Goffman moved to the University of Chicago to begin graduate work. At that time, the University of Chicago, along with Columbia and Harvard (but also somewhat at odds with them), was recognized as one of the leading

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centers of American sociology. It is therefore not surprising that at Chicago Goffman came under the influence of an impressive array of faculty, including Louis Wu-th, Everett C. Hughes, W. Lloyd Warner, Anselm L. Strauss, and Herbert Blumer, among others. Also at Chicago Goffman fell in with a number of fellow graduate students who would themselves later become well known in sociology: Howard S. Becker, Fred Davis, Joseph R. Gusfield, and Gregory P. Stone. In 1949 Goffman completed his M.A. thesis, “Some Characteristics of Responses to Depicted Experience,” a statistical attempt to understand the responses of a select audience of a then-popular radio soap opera, Big Sister (Manning 1992: 7). To collect ethnographic data for his Ph.D. dissertation, Goffman was sent by his thesis adviser at Chicago, W. Lloyd Warner, to one of the Shetland Isles (Unst) off the coast of Scotland with the intent of studying the social structure of that crofting (subsistence farming) community. Instead, the dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” which Goffman wrote in Paris and completed in 1953, turned out to be a study of the social interaction between the locals and visitors to the small Scottish island. With this effort, Goffman not only earned the Ph.D. degree but also began delineating a new field of study that would serve as the central focus of his life’s work. He christened this field the interaction order, or the domain of faceto-face interaction “where two or more individuals are physically in one another’s presence” (Goffman 1953: 343; 1983: 8). After a brief stint as a research assistant for Edward A. Shils at the University of Chicago, Goffman, his wife, and young son moved to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed “visiting scientist” at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. From the fall of 1954 to the end of 1957, Goffman was a member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at NIMH. Those three years at NIMH were extremely productive for him. Not only did he conduct his research as participant observer at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., but he also produced his important early essays on face-work, deference and demeanor, embarrassment, and alienation. And in 1956 Goffman’s Ph.D. dissertation was published as a monograph by the University of Edinburgh under the title m e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Two years later Goffman was hired by Herbert Blumer (who had since moved from Chicago) to teach in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Like Chicago in Goffman’s student days, Berkeley was a major department in the field outside the more mainstream Harvard and Columbia programs. In addition to Blumer, the department included such notables as Seymour Martin Lipset, Kingsley Davis, Neil J. Smelser, Nathan Glazer, Reinhard Bendix, and Philip Selznick. Goffman’s decade-long tenure at Berkeley was exceedingly productive. During his first years there, his career skyrocketed. In 1959 me Presentation

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of S e s revised and expanded, was reissued in the United States as a massmarket paperback by Doubleday, Anchor Books. The book was an immediate success and gave Goffman name recognition in the field. This was followed, in 1961, by Asylums and Encounters. Goffman’s star was rising; he was promoted quickly and became professor of sociology. The year 1963 saw the publication of two more volumes, Behavior in Public Places and Stigma. In 1966-1967, Goffman spent a sabbatical year as a fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, where he collaborated with the economist and military strategist, Thomas C. Schelling, from whom he reinforced his understanding of game metaphoric accounts of social interaction. Then, just prior to his departure from Berkeley, Goffman produced Interaction Ritual. In 1968 Goffman resigned his position at Berkeley and accepted the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Chair in Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. This chair, which initially excluded sociology from its name, shows that the disciplines that welcomed Goffman and his work were outside his chosen field. To be sure, his office was not even located in the sociology department but in the University Museum. His marginal status in the field notwithstanding, the move to Pennsylvania did not slow down Goffman’s research productivity. By decade’s end, his books had become so popular among the general public that he was profiled in Time magazine (the article includes a rare photo showing him in a relaxed posture and holding a cup and saucer). Later that year he came out with Strategic Interaction, which was largely a product of his research with Schelling on the mixed motive game analogy during his stay at Harvard. In 1971 Goffman published Relations in Public and was simultaneously working on the book he hoped to be his magnum opus, Frame Analysis, which eventually appeared in 1974. At Penn, Goffman cultivated close contacts with the Annenberg School of Communication and the Department of Linguistics, and as a consequence, during the last decade of his life, his interest turned increasingly to sociolinguistics and communications theory. This change in focus led Goffman to publish GenderAdvertisements in 1976, Forms of Talk in 1981, and “Felicity’s Condition” in 1983. But what was Goffman like as a scholar? To begin with, he was “an immensely well-read sociologist” (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: xxxv) with an incredible breadth, as evident from the heavy footnoting found in almost all his volumes, in which he cites a vast array of literature: from the scientific to the popular, from manuals of etiquette to newspaper articles. To be sure, no other sociologist has ever marshaled such a wide assortment of references in explicating his work. Interpersonally, Goffman seems to have come across very much as he does in his writings. John Lofland describes Gofman’s persona as follows: ‘‘In conversation, he was given to whimsical observations, pithy and cynical

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remarks, teasing, puns, twists of meaning, and a variety of other modes of commenting he seemed to intend as humor and hoped that others would find so” (Lofland 1984: 20). Bennett M. Berger gives us a glimpse into Goffman’s unsettling sociological insights: “I have seen people become fidgety when Goffman walks into a room, suddenly self-conscious that their apparently effortless sociability might reveal something unintentional” (1973: 354). But it is perhaps Gary T. Marx’s reminiscence of his former teacher at Berkeley that gives the clearest portrait of the man: Goffman presented himself as a detached, hard-boiled intellectual cynic, the sociologist as a 1940s private eye. His was a hip, existential, cool, essentially apolitical (at least in terms of the prevailing ideologies) personal style. As a Canadian Jew of short stature working at the margins (or perhaps better, frontiers) of a marginal discipline, he was clearly an outsider. Goffman was drawn to disjunctive scenes. He had a voyeur’s interest in the intimate details of other’s lives, and a strong eye for the ironic and poignant. His humor was dry and indirect. A part of his appeal involved a fascination, like Simmel’s, with the secret. There is a sense of self importance and power that may come with the feeling that you are “wise” or in the know. For persons feeling powerless, marginal, and unsure of their place in the order of things, possession of such knowledge (or the belief that one has it) can be very attractive. (1984: 653)

Whatever those around him may have thought of Goffman as a personand despite the fact that his fellow sociologists had, throughout most of his career, maligned his work-they nonetheless saw fit to elect h m the seventythird president of the American Sociological Association in 1982. On November 20 of that year he died of cancer at the age of s‘xty. By that time, Erving Goffman was arguably the most famous sociologist of his generation.

Intellectual Influences Any list that purports to name the significant intellectual influences on Goffman has to begin with two European, fin-de-si&le, pioneering sociologists: Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly when Goffman begin reading Simmel, Smith (1989) contends that Simmel’s sociology constituted a significant element of the intellectual milieu at the University of Chicago while Goffman was a graduate student there.2 Thus, having obtained a working knowledge of Simmel’s ideas early in his career, these not only served Goffman “as a mandate for the detailed study of everyday life” (Manning 1992: 19) but also provided him with Simmel’s “formal”analysis (as opposed to interpretive description) of social activity. To be sure, in the preface to his first book, i%e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman acknowledges the similarity between his microsociological approach and Simmel’s.

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But, throughout much of Goffman’s early work, Simmel’s ideas are connected with those of Durkheim in that he essentially applies Durkheim’s macroanthropological concepts to Simmel’s microsociological topics (Davis 1997: 378). Two of Durkheim’s concepts, found in The Elementay Forms of Religious Life U19121 1995),3which Goffman appropriated and ingeniously employed in the study of the interaction order are the notion of ritual, which Goffman uses to explain the moral underpinnings of social intercourse, and the idea of the sacred, which he employs as a crucial characteristic of the self. Another early influence on Goffman’s distinctive creativity was the social psychology of George Herbert Mead, which explains Goffman’s preoccupation with the concept of the self as a product of social interaction-that is, the idea that interactants take into consideration that they take one another into consideration. Mead, having been at the University of Chicago from 1894 until his death in 1931, had left an indelible imprint on the so-called Chicago School of sociology, of which Goffman was a product. Mead’s posthumous Mind, Sez and Society (1934) was doubtless required reading in Goffman’s classes, particularly in those he took from Herbert Blumer, who himself had been a student of Meads and whose major contribution was to organize various social-psychological concepts and methods under the rubric of symbolic interactionism.* But by far the most influential of Goffman’s teachers at Chicago was Everett C. Hughes. Under Hughes’s leadership the graduate students at Chicago undertook fieldwork-based studies of city neighborhoods, professions, and institutions. Little wonder that, toward the end of his life, Goffman stated that “If I had to be labeled at all, it would have been as a Hughesian urban ethnographer” (Verhoeven 1993: 319). There are at least two ways in which Hughes made a deep impression on Goffman’s thinking. First, as a student in Hughes’s seminar on Work and Occupations, Goffman first heard the concept of “total institution,” which was coined by Hughes and later became important in Goffman’s writings. Second, as Tom Burns points out, Goffman learned well Hughes’s repeated injunction “that basic patterns of behavior and institutional structures were best looked for in the analogies which underlie seeming incongruities” (Burns 1992: 11). This explains Goffman’s habitual examination of the actions of a variety of social types (con artists, mental patients, surgeons, casino gamblers, spies, etc.) in order to discover similarities between their behavior and that which occurs in everyday interaction. (This is a technique that John Lofland and others have referred to as “perspective by incongruity,” and we will have more opportunity to discuss this strategy later in this introduction.) Other figures important to the development of Goffman’s sociology include Sigmund Freud (whose ideas on psychoanalysis Goffman absorbed and then reacted against), Talcott Parsons (whom Goffman first met as a student at Toronto and whose concepts he employed in his early writing^),^

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Harold Garfinkel (with whose ethnomethodology Goffman had been familiar since the 1950s and whom he encouraged his Berkeley students to study), A. R. Radchffe-Brown (Goffman’s influence in cultural anthropology and a model for his essayist writing style), Ray Birdwhstell (Goffman’s early mentor at Toronto and later his colleague in nonverbal communication at the Annenberg School of Communication), Gregory Bateson (from whom Goffman learned about ethology and appropriated, in modified form, the use of the term frame), and Alfred Schutz (a late influence on Goffman concerning the phenomenology of multiple realities and the corpus of experience). All these intellectual influences and trends made Goffman what he truly was: a twentiethcentury sociologist who was constantly chronicling and responding to the mood and tone of everyday life in the United States during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Sociohistorical Context Not only was Goffman’s sociology the product and record of three erasthe 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s-it also accurately described and, at times, even presaged the interactional actualities of their respective zeitgeist. Charles Lemert (1997: xxiii) contends that Goffman’s early work was distinctly a product of the American scene of the 1950s. Having achieved his first fame at the end of that decade, Goffman’s writings on failure, embarrassment, and self-presentation stand out as a product of the Eisenhower age with its Cold War paranoia, mass society, and the rising social malaise among the urban middle classes. “Goffman’s early writings,” states political scientist Marshall Berman, “warned his readers of the deep tensions and absurdities in the structure of their social life. However, he seems to have believed-as virtually all of us believed, back in the mid-1950s-that American society had the capacity to contain its troubles” (1972: 2). During the 1950s Talcott Parsons’s theoretical program-alternatively called functionalism, systems theory, and action theory-reigned supreme in sociology. Throughout his work, Parsons repeatedly underscored the idea of social order and the notion of shared moral values. He believed that what was needed to maintain stability and conformity during the mercurial postwar period was the proper socialization of individuals so that they would be sure to make the “legitimate”choices that society required of them (Trevino 2001: xxiii). It is against this theoretical backdro-ne that was not only waning in influence but increasingly being maligned for being “conservative” and “consensual”-that Goffman’s work appeared. In muted opposition to but not directly critical of Parsons’s ideas about order, stability, and conformity, Goffman was, relative to Parsons, not only viewing the social world differently but was viewing a different social world. And he found this world to be, if not exactly paradoxical, then at least increasingly ironic and

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absurd. In this sense, Goffman was truly a sociologist of the postmodern era as “his social ideas covered, if at a certain remove, the basic facts of late modern times: that both moral consensus and social hope are imaginary constructs; and that the essence of social reality has little to do with essences, least of all with essential values” (Lemert 1997: xxxiii). Far different from the critical scholarship that was beginning to take shape in sociology during the late 1950s, Goffman’s study of the micro-social world was nonetheless an alternative to Parsonsian sociological theory.6 But more than merely providing another perspective, Goffman’s most popular work of this period, 7;be Presentation of SelfT actually ‘yoreshadowedthe 1960s critique of the mindless conformity and social phoniness of the 1950s” (Collins 1980: 206, emphasis added). Most scholars, however, contend that it is really against the 1960s as a whole that Goffman’s work makes most sense (Jameson 1976: 122). For it is at this time that, with the decline of Parsonsian functionalism, the interactionist approach experienced a resurgence at the hands of Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Harold Garfinkel, Herbert Blumer, and others. One of those others, of course, was Goffman who, between 1961 and 1969, produced no less than six of his now-classic volumes, including Asylums, Behavior in Public Places, and Strategic Interaction. Randall Collins (1980: 205) credits Goffman with possessing a keen sense of where the popular movements of the 1960s were going. This is clearly the case with the antipsychiatry movement galvanized by such controversial figures as Thomas s. Szasz and R. D. Laing. Indeed, Goffman’s study of the social situation of mental patients in Asylums was influential in bringing about changes in mental health policy, in particular changes leading to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and consistent with antipsychiatry. In the volumes that he published during this period, Goffman, with typical adroitness, “treated games and strategies, con men and international espionage amid the nuclear shadows of the CIA-mfested 1960s. He conveyed a sense of why people are wary of each other on the public street that went far beyond the violence of crime, protest, and ghetto uprising” (Collins 1980: 171). In Relations in Public (but particularly in the longest essay in that volume, “Normal Appearances”), Goffman captured this vague sense of wariness of other-a crisis in trust-that for many had begun to characterize the uncertain conditions of the late 1960s. In describing the prevalence of a social paranoia of sorts, Goffman was informing his readers that American society had changed in deeply disturbing ways since the publication of Behavior in Public Places, eight years earlier. During that span of time, as Alan Dawe explains, “Behavior in public places [had] given way to relations in public, not in a sociological progression, but in the progression from relative, if precarious trust, to the dissolution of trust by the murderer’s knife, the assassin’s bullet, and the saboteur’s bomb” (1973: 252).

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Through it all, Goffman adopted a detached, sardonic style of writing about the world around him that troubled some of his readers: Although he was magnificent at evoking human situations, he seemed somehow to lack empathy with actual human beings. People seemed to exist for him only as manipulative players in an endless series of games people play. Feelings, emotions, love, hate, the self, did not seem to come in anywhere at all. As American society grew more and more turbulent and explosive through the 1960s, it became harder and harder to connect the world in which we were living with the cool world where Goffman’s works took place. (Berman 1972: 10)

Goffman concluded the 1960s by concentrating on his most ambitious proiect, Frame Analysis. Relying partially on the theater of the absurd for its conceptualization, not only did Frame Analysis seem “to reflect the living theatre of the hippie era,” but Goffman’s attempt at explaining the phenomenology of social experience led him “to a deeper level of reflexivity upon the mindblowing happenings of the psychedelic era” (Collins 1980: 206, 171). To be sure, Frame Analysis, with its focus on meaning, has a contemporaneous Castaneda-like quality to it, offering, as it does, a new perception of reality. Goffman began the 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania. His move from Berkeley, and the radical social ferment of the place, also marked a decisive shlft in his intellectual focus away from the study of how people participate in social activity and toward a depth-analysis of how people distinguish between different kinds of activity. Pushing further the phenomenological approach he had laid out in Frame Analysis, Goffman subsequently undertook a frame analysis of two weighty matters that had begun to engage the intellectual world: gender and language. To be sure, Goffman’s last two books-Gender Advertisements and Forms of Talk-are detailed studies of these two frame-analytic subjects. It is difficult to say precisely what sparked Goffman’s interest in gender that led to his three publications on that topic during the 1970s (Goffman 1977a, 1977b, 1979b). But in all likelihood, as Carol Brooks Gardner, his last Ph.D. student at Penn, states, it was “the general, then-fashionable interest in gender that was responsible, taken together with the undeniably large number of his own students who were women (many, like me, carrying feminist agendas)” (personal communication, 2OO2).’ In addition to his feminist students, at Penn Goffman also came in contact with the anthropological linguist, Dell Hymes, and Goffman’s former professor at Toronto, Ray Birdwhistell, both of whom sparked his interest in sociolinguistics, nonverbal communication, and the role of implicit meaning in communications systems. Indeed, it was Goffman’s concern with the relationship between language and interaction that led to his linguistic writings of the mid to late 1970s: the essays that were later collected in his last book, Forms of Talk, as well as the posthumously published “Felicity’sCondition.”

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To be sure, Goffman, in many ways, anticipated what later came to be known as the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences.

DOMAIN ASSUMPTIONS Before undertaking an earnest appraisal of Goffman’s analysis of the interaction order, I will first briefly examine three of his domain assumptions, or those explicit and unconscious metatheoretical presuppositions that inform and guide his analysis. I begin by considering those sociological conceptions to which Goffman, in explicit opposition, developed his sociology. It is noteworthy that Goffman always refused to align himself with any particular “school”or theoretical tradition in sociology. Indeed, he explicitly spurned the various microsociological paradigms with which others frequently attempted to associate his work. About social constructionism Goffman states: “But where I differ from social constructionists is that I don’t think the individual himself or herself does much of the constructing. He rather comes to a world, already in some sense or other, established. So there 1 would differ from persons who use in their writing the notion of social construction of reality” (Verhoeven 1993: 324). About ethnomethodology: “I don’t take a radical, evaluational, subjectivist view. I’m not an ethnomethodologist by any means” (Verhoeven 1993: 327). Finally, about the sociological perspective with which his work has been identified most closely, symbolic interactionism, Goffman says: [It] doesn’t provide you with the structure or organization for the substantive area you are studying. It is “anti“system, that is “anti”any systemic kind of finding. . . . [Sociologists]are interested in showing that there is some sort of organ-

ization, or structure to [social phenomenal. Otherwise, you haven’t found anything presumably. , , . [A] very abstract approach of symbolic interactionism . . . doesn’t provide any patterns. , , . You have to end up with a natural history of something, with phases, structures, patterns, or you haven’t said anything. Or you haven’t analyzed it. And none of those things are really part of symbolic interactionism. (Verhoeven 1993: 33435l8 It seems rather obvious from these comments that the chief reason Goffman distanced his particular approach to understanding the interaction order from these three microsociologies-social constructionism, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism-is that they repudiate a patterned, structuralist view of social reality, which he, on the other hand, assiduously abided by in his work. This epistemological realism’ is still salient in one of his last books where Goffman writes: “Organizational premises . . . are something cognition somehow arrives at, not something cognition creates or generates” (Goffman 1974: 247).

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A second epistemological premise that Goffman holds is that “there is no presuppositionless null point from which to begin an exploration” of social reality (Williams 1983: 100). Thus, contrary to a radical form of epistemological realism, Goffman was not an extreme positivist. For him, understanding the social world required employing various heuristic techniques that serve as windows into the particular domain of activity being examined. For instance, concerning the six essays that comprise Relations in Public and that deal with face-to-face behavior, Goffman states that each of the essays “develops its own perspective starting from conceptual scratch. . . . I snipe at the target from six different positions unevenly spaced (1971: xviii). Thus, as part of his conceptual methodology, Goffman developed a vast and largely unsystematic analytical repository of “sociological tropes” that can be subsumed under three heuristics: concepts, rhetorical devices, and taxonomies. Only through these arbitrary and selective coinages-which, once utilized, Goffman typically handles in a throwaway manner-can the sociologist truly approach knowledge of the interaction order. Another of Goffman’s metatheoretical presuppositions is discussed by Anne Warfield Rawls (1987), who states that issues of morality, but in particular the notion of moral obligation, remained a central underlying feature throughout Goffman’s work. By moral obligation, Goffman, in essence, means that the individual, as well as the group, has an inherent duty to respect the other, and vice-versa.’O Thus, regardless of whether such moral obligations emanate from structural or interactional commitments, “Goffman seems to treat all obligations as moral obligations” (1987: 144). These three domain assumptions serve to inform and guide not only Goffman’s theory and research but also his larger views on society and individuals.

Society

According to Randall Collins, Goffman’s sociology has a distinctly Durkheimian cast, and, in the tradition of Durkheimian social facts, Goffman “takes the standpoint of society as fundamental, for without it nothing else would exist” (1980: 182). As indicated already, Goffman’s work is premised on an epistemological realism. Accordingly, from the beginning of his career until the end, he contended that social organization and social structurecrucial aspects of the macro social world+onstitute “the core matters of sociology.” As he put it: “I personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual’s current involvements to be second” (Goffman 1974: 13). But it is in precisely these latter microsociological matters of the interaction order, such as the individual’s involvements, with which Goffman was most concerned. He therefore proposed that a “loose coupling” exists between the interaction order of the micro world and the social organization of the

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macro world (Goffman 1983: 11). At the nexus of this loose coupling is the notion of social order. Like many students of society before him, including Talcott Parsons, Goffman was very much concerned with the “Hobbesian problem of order,” which poses the fundamental question, How is social order possible? But whereas Parsons, from his macroscopic perch, was interested in the institutional bases of social order, Goffman, from his microscopic perspective, putting a finer point on Parsons’s view, was primarily interested in how social interaction is sustained. For Goffman, social order consists of a “set of moral norms” that “condition and constrain” the way in which individuals pursue ends (Goffman 1963a: 8, 1971: x-xi). Accordingly, for him, and very much in line with Durkheim, social order is based on moral obligations-on a ritual respect (or “deference”) for the sacred self (or “face”) of others. Simply put, for Goffman, social order “depends upon the small kindnesses that men bestow upon one another” in their everyday encounters (Gouldner 1970: 379). In this view, social order-the very structure and organization of social lifeoccurs at the intersection of society and its individuals.

Individuals Even though Goffman always held the individual to be a secondary concern of sociology, he devoted his entire career to exploring the everyday social world of individuals. Goffman justifies his focus on the individual as follows: My ideological view is that what I’m doing is the structural Social Psychology that is required, or is natural for, Sociology. That is, given Sociology is a central thrust, what can we say about the individual?Not that the individual is the central unit that permits us to study society; but if you take society as the basic and substantive unit, you can still ask yourself the question-given social organization as the central reality-what is it about individuals, what is it we have to assume about individuals, so that they can be used or be usable socially? That’s the kind of sociology I do. Now it ends me up in what looks like Social Psychology because I’m always looking at the individual. (Verhoeven 1993: 322-23)

In attending to the individual’s fate in society, Goffman derives three basic portraits of the individual. To begin with, Goffman was keenly aware of the dialectical interplay between what we now refer to as structure and agency. For instance, on the one hand, for Goffman, the individual’s very identity is controlled, even determined, by such overwhelming societal forces as institutions, roles, and social frames. In the most extreme case, the individual may undergo a mortification of self--the destruction of an individual’s personhood-as a result of the total control that a social situation exerts on him or her. On the other

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hand, Goffman shows how the individual, through a variety of small strategies of resistance (such as “secondary adjustments” and “role distance”), even if not exactly able to achieve complete self-determination, can at least affirm and preserve the autonomy-the dignity-of his or her personhood against such powerful structural forces. For Goffman, then, individuals exercise agency, but that agency is curbed in the face of social structure.” Another, more cynical picture that emerges from Goffman is the individual as manipulative con artist, a conniving casino gambler, an espionage agent engaged in “strategic interaction,” all in an effort to enhance and promote the self. In this strategic view of life, people “are seen less as products of the social system, than as individuals ‘working the system”’ for their own self-serving ends (Gouldner 1970: 379). Finally, Goffman also depicts individuals as being “anxious, fearful, roleplaying, risk-avoiding’’and compulsively “driven by the need to avoid embarrassment” (Schudson 1984: 634). Engaging in “impression management,” and being in a seemingly perpetual state of “cold sweat,” individuals make their way through life under a tenuous social contract whose major clause is a quid pro quo (viz., I won’t embarrass you as long as you don’t embarrass me) premised on mutual trust and respect.I2 Goffman, very early in his career, recognized this overriding penchant to avoid embarrassment: “There is no interaction in which the participants do not take an appreciable chance of being slightly embarrassed or a slight chance of being deeply humiliated. Life may not be much of a gamble, but interaction is” (1956~:156). In sum, Goffman’s general depiction of the individual in society is that he or she has limited agency; such agency, moreover, is invariably employed for the purpose of self-promotion and/or self-protection. For Goffman, “individuals and society have their separate existences as well as their mutual comminglings” (Strong 1983: 352). Regrettably, Goffman utilized several interchangeable, and frequently inconsistent, designations in referring to the individual, including “self” “role,” “person,” and “identity.” His conflicting use of these conceptual labels (sometimes in the same book) serves only to confuse and frustrate his reade r ~ .However, ’~ the concept most essential in understanding Goffman’s view of the interacting individual is that of “self.”

Self It is undoubtedly true that Goffman, from beginning to end, pretty much maintained the “self as a basic unit of analysis (the other two basic analytical units are the encounter, the focused interaction in which participants agree to sustain a single focus of cognitive and visual attention, and the frame, about which more later). But it is important to understand that, for him, the self is not a fixed entity “housed”within the individual (not merely

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an “ego” in the psychological sense); instead, it is first and foremost a social product or, better yet, a social process. Accordingly, for Goffman, the best way of understanding the social self is not by starting “with a subject’s verbal description of himself” as is done by “pencil and paper students of the self,” but rather by observing “the various ways in which the individual is treated and treats others, and deducing what is implied about him through this treatment” (Goffman 1971: 342, n. 5). Goffman’s approach, then, places the self squarely at the center of the interaction order: not within the individual but within the social encounter. As such, he presents a more rigorous conceptualization than Mead’s simplistic notion that the self is merely the internalization of others’ attitudes toward oneself. Goffman summarizes his view of the social self as follows: “In analyzing the self then we are drawn from its possessor, from the person who will profit or lose most by it, for he and his body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg; in fact these means are often bolted down in social establishments” (1959: 2 53). According to Goffman, the self, as a social process, is a dynamic, fluid entity that is easily and frequently transformed by its possessor. It is a self in action that changes, as situational proprieties warrant, through the enactment of different roles, as in, for instance, when we practice “audience segregation.” Goffman, however, also gives his “three cheers for the self” in acknowledging that the self is not a free-floating Platonic essence; instead, it is always “anchored” in an individual’s “continuing biography,” before and after every social event (1974: 294, 287). Finally, Goffman’s account of the self as a sociological concept-that is, his theory of the self-changes depending on which metaphor of his conceptual methodology he employs in analyzing the interaction order (Branaman 1997: hii). Thus, the self may be seen as a product of dramatic performance, a sacred object of social ritual, a field of strategic gamesmanship, or as a constellation of frame functions.’* It is Goffman’s conceptual methodology, and, concomitantly, his metaphorical models of society, that I consider next.

CONCEPTUAL METHODOLOGY Commentators on Goffman and his work tend invariably to speak of him as both an unusual theorist and an atypical researcher. The following observation is representative: “He was neither a traditional ethnographer nor an orthodox social theorist: his ethnography was too theoretical and his theory too ethnographically rich” (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: ix). Bearing in mind that there exists an interplay between Goffman’s conceptualizations

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and empirical findings-they are inextricably linked because they inform one another-in this section I discuss his conceptual methodology, and in the following section, his research methodology. Much has been written about whether Goffman’s microanalyses of the interaction order really amount to a full-fledged, systematic sociological theory.l5If we take Goffman at his word, and his inclination, the answer would have to be no. First, in contradistinction to the grand theorists of sociology such as Pitirim A. Sorokin and Talcott Parsons, Goffman was convinced that a general theory of interaction was, at the very least, premature. Rather than a grand theoretical scheme, Goffman favored “a modest but persistent analyticity: frameworks of the lower range” (198lb: 4). As he put it in colorful, evocative terms early in his career: “Better, perhaps, different coats to clothe the children well than a single splendid tent in which they all shiver” (Goffman 1961a: xiv). Two decades later, and shortly before his death, Goffman reiterated his position regarding the development of a formal, general theory: I am impatient for a few conceptual distinctions (nothing so ambitious as a theory) that show we are getting some place in uncovering elementary variables that simplify and order, delineating generic classes whose members share lots of properties, not merely a qualifying similarity. . . . Casting one’s endeavor in the more respectable forms of the mature sciences is often just rhetoric. In the main I believe we’re just not there yet. (as cited in Strong 1983: 349)

Goffman’s suspicions of grand theory aside, many commentators (Lofland 1980: 31-32; Collins 1980: 175; Rawls 1987: 136; Williams 1987: 147) deny that his endeavor constitutes a proper hermetic theory.I6What Goffman left us is not so much a theory, as a formal analysis in the manner of Simmel. In his effort to analyze the social world in “formal” terms, Goffman provides three general heuristic tools for gaining perspectival knowledge about the forms-that is to say, the structure and organization-of social encounters: (1) concepts, ( 2 ) rhetorical devices, and (3) taxonomies. Concepts

Rather than develop a coherent systematic theory, Goffman was always more interested in “spinning out elaborate conceptual webs with which to catch the essence of social life” (Williams 1987: 147). Consequently, in practically every essay and book of his, Goffman invents, modifies, and organizes various concepts into an analytical framework that helps him to articulate various aspects of the interaction order. This conceptual inventiveness yielded a plethora of poignant terms (e.g., cooling out, Jlooding out, fucework,role-distance,frume) that present a vivid (if at times, discomforting) view of daily social behavior and that have now entered the sociological lexicon. But, as helpful as these concepts are, there are basically two problems with Goffman’s seemingly endless array of coinages.

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First, as Peter K. Manning (1976: 16-19) notes, Goffman frequently employs multiple concepts either to refer to the same thing (as we already saw with regard to his various designations for the individual), or uses one concept to refer to more than one thing (e.g., referring to “self‘ “as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members” [Goffman 1961a: 1681, and later in the same book he implies that “self‘ refers to what one defines as one’s view of one’s own conduct [Goffman 1961a: 3201). Additionally, given his proclivity for piling definition upon definition, Goffman’s concepts, at least at first glance, appear to be terribly inconsistent throughout his writings. Another related reason why Goffman can be hard to read and even harder to summarize is that once he uses his concepts in a particular book, he discards them, and without warning or explanation he invents an entirely new terminology in the publication of his next book. All this notwithstanding, Goffman did develop and consolidate a stable core of basic concepts-an identifiable vocabulary-for the analysis of social interaction that, as we will see later, gives his work remarkable consistency. It is noteworthy, however, that Goffman generated, developed, and elaborated the majority of these concepts through the use of certain rhetorical devices. Rhetorical Devices

Most commentators agree that Goffman’s distinctive genius lay not only in inventing new concepts but also in employing unique rhetorical devices through which he continuously developed and updated his ideas on the interaction order in a principled manner. Three of these literary tropes, which are central to his conceptual methodology and which I will discuss in turn, are his use of metaphors, irony, and disclaimers. Metaphors

According to Daniel Rigney in me Metaphorical Society (2000, a metaphor, or figurative comparison, is a mode of thought wherein we interpret one domain of experience through the language of another. Despite its literal absurdity, the metaphor’s goal is to reduce complex and unfamiliar phenomena to simpler and more familiar terms (Rigney 2001: 2-3). Clearly, Goffman’s earliest and most pervasive conceptual method is his use of extended metaphors. In his skillful hands metaphors are primarily conceptual models-perspectival devices-that, when applied directly, serve to explore, map, and interpret different aspects of the micro social world. S o , even though Goffman did not explicitly formulate theoretical propositions, he did the next best thing: he employed novel metaphors to express the complex relations between his concepts. He did this mainly by stretching his metaphors to apply to a number of discrepant social phenomena,

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thus forging connections between them and, in the process, giving them some conceptual order. In this way, “[klids riding merry-go-rounds are likened to surgeons conducting an operation, confidence tricksters’ sidekicks to practicing psychiatrists” (Taylor 1968: 837). Serving to evoke powerful poetic images that guide our understanding of social intercourse, the metaphor, in Goffman’s conceptual methodology, is essentially “perspectivism in miniature” (Williams 1983: 101); it is a little window that affords us a peek into the structure, processes, and products of the interaction order. Throughout his oeuvre, Goffman proffered four theoretical metaphors to help him better describe and interpret social encounters in new ways. These are the dramaturgical, game, ritual, and frame metaphors. The Dramaturgical Metaphor Beginning with his first book, f i e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman employs the dramaturigcal, or theatrical, metaphor as a means of describing the organization of face-to-face interaction. Here Goffman’s focus is on self-presentation, or the notion that people, as social actors, endeavor to engineer a particular conceptualization of themselves before others. Through the dramaturgical metaphor Goffman develops a view of everyday social life as something like a staged drama, a theatrical production, in which social actors, on the basis of their appearance and manner, attempt to form favorable impressions of themselves before audiences. Like professional actors on a stage, social actors enact roles, assume characters, and play through scenes when interacting with one another. In short, they put on “performances,” and hope that these are sufficiently convincing to others. Audiences can therefore unsettle social actors, for they may look for evidence of deceptions, discrepancies, and other information that can discredit the actors’ performances, subjecting them to painful embarrassment and humiliation. In addition to its use in T%e Presentation of Self, the dramaturgical metaphor is also used as a main framework in Stigma and to a lesser extent in Asylums. However, by the early 1960s, Goffman had largely abandoned the extended application of this analogy as he began to examine the untheatrical aspects of everyday behavior. Recognizing the severe limitations of dramaturgical imagery in capturing the entirety of social experience, including that of the theater, Goffman notes that, “All the world is not a stage4ertainly the theatre isn’t entirely. (Whether you organize a theatre or an aircraft factory, you need to find places for cars to park and coats to be checked, and these had better be real places, which, incidentally, had better carry real insurance against theft)” (1974: 1). The Game Metaphor Even before he utilized the dramaturgical framework in T%ePresentation of Self, Goffman had employed game imagery in describing social interactions. To be sure, he used the social life-as-game model as early as 1952 with the publication of “On Cooling the Mark Out.”

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In this seminal essay, where social interaction is seen in terms of a “con” game, Goffman contends that we are all like “con artists” (confidence tricksters) scheming to win the confidence of others with our contrived and selfserving presentations of self. In this sense, the social actor is an exploiter and manipulator of situations. By the mid-1960s, and having been influenced by the nuclear arms race analyses of Thomas Schelling, Goffman further sharpens the metaphor and begins describing social life as a “strategic”game. In those writings where this game-theoretic model is principally employed-“Fun in Games” (in Encounten), “Where the Action Is” (in Interaction Ritual), and Strategic Interactionwe enter the high-stakes world of gamblers in casinos, of diplomats and espionage spies in a Cold War d i e u . Here social actors are seen as engaging in calculative mutual d e a l i n g s i n moves and counter moves-and in controlling and managing information, all for the purpose of maximizing their chances of winning and minimizing their chances of losing. Philip Manning notes a strength and a limitation of Goffman’s game metaphor. Perhaps the main advantage is that Goffman wrote about the game perspective in such a way as to emphasize its heuristic use rather than, as with the dramaturgical approach, its merely descriptive power (1992: 48). The metaphor’s major shortcoming, however, is that it obscures “the importance of the ritual and trust which underpin our ability to carry on comfortably in daily encounters with a vast collection of people whom we know only through proximity” (Manning 1992: 71). In order to account for ritual and trust-and by extension, morality and social order-in everyday social life Goffman had to turn to a different metaphorical tradition, one with its basis in the social thought of Emile Durkheim. The Ritual Metaphor Ann Branaman (1997: lxiv) states that, depending on which metaphor is emphasized, there are essentially two readings of Goffman’s view of the interaction order: social life is either manipulative or moral. Clearly, the game metaphor underscores the manipulative aspects of social interaction with its focus on strategic calculations and con artistry, the management of mformation, and the attempt of social actors to gain the upper hand in competitive interactions. Thus, game-metaphoric accounts of social interaction, much like dramaturgical accounts, present a picture of the cynical, largely amoral, orchestrations of everyday performances by individuals in pursuing their own self interests. What is lacking in both the dramaturgical and game models is a consideration of the moral features-the integrative forces-of the interaction order. Goffman, following Durkheim’s ideas about morality, rituals, and the sacred in n e Elementay Forms, contends that these moral features are expressed as common courtesies or ceremonial rules: “the little salutations, compliments, and apologies which punctuate social intercourse” (Goffman 1967: 57). Thus, the moral order is affirmed through the interpersonal ritual

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behaviors-the reciprocal obligations and expectationssocial actors exhibit toward each other as a way of showing respect for the sacred self. As Goffman puts it in the essay entitled, “On Face-work: “One’sface . . . is a sacred object, and the expressive order required to sustain it is therefore a ritual one” (1967: 19, emphasis added). Like the game metaphor, Goffman’s ritual metaphor had its early beginnings in his Ph.D. dissertation where he seems to give preference to the latter conception as he writes: “Even more than being a game of informational management, [social] interaction is a problem in ritual management” (1953: 103). For Goffman, then, respect for the other, and the social order, is paramount. Consequently, the social actor “must conduct himself with great ritual care, threading his way through one situation, avoiding another, counteracting a third, lest he unintentionally and unwittingly convey a judgment of those present that he is offensive to them” (Goffman 1953: 103). The ritual metaphor is pervasive in Behavior in Public Places; in the first four essays in Interaction Ritual-“On Face-work,” “Embarrassment and Social Organization,”“Alienationfrom Interaction,” and (employed most forcefully in) “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”-and in Relations in Public (particularly in two chapters, “Supportive Interchanges,” and “Remedial Interchanges”).” The Frame Metaphor It is perhaps the frame metaphor, more than any other, that not only sustained Goffman’s interest the longest but that he took the greatest care in developing. Indeed, he entertained the frame metaphoror better yet, the procedure for applying the metaphor, which he calls frame analysis-from the mid-1960s to the end of this career. Here the metaphor, social life-as-a-picture-frame, gives us the image of a picture (the event) and the perspective from which it is viewed (the frame).18 Thus, Goffman suggests that social experience is structured by “frames,” schemes of interpretation, that guide us in defining the multitudinous social situations we find ourselves in. Social interaction is made meaningful because frames help us to make sense of what is going on. The frame metaphor informs all of Goffman’s works from 1974 on; this includes Frame Analysis, Gender Advertisements, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes,” Forms of Talk, and “Felicity’sCondition.”

Irony Another textual technique (and one almost as analytically powerful as the metaphor) that forms part of what has been referred to as Goffman’s “socioliterary method” (Manning 19761, and through which he developed and advanced his concepts, is his frequent use of irony, or “perspective by incongruity.”19John Lofland contends that Goffman’s use of perspective by incongruity-f taking a word or concept usually applied in one setting and

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transferring its use to another setting-is what gives his writings a unique “Goffmanesque touch” (Lofland 1980: 25). According to Lofland, Goffman employs the stylistic art of perspective by incongruity in two ways. First, he sprinkles his texts with incongruous phrases that serve to give his writings a “sparkling”quality. Consider the following three examples. In “On Cooling the Mark Out,” Goffman suggests, by way of analogy, that everyday life consists of “con artists” and their “marks.” Marks who have been conned, or duped, have to subsequently be “cooled out,” or consoled after their loss of face. This loss causes a deep humiliation that results in the “death” of their social self. Thus: The dead are sorted but not segregated, and continue to walk among the living. (Goffman 1952: 463)

In his discussion of involvement obligations in the essay “Alienation from Interaction,” Goffman states that participants in a conversation are ritually obliged to be involved in the conversation and not to engage in any alternative side involvements. To do so would be seen as a discourteous offense by the participants who will feel offended. Therefore: Those who break the rules of interaction commit their crimes in jail. (Goffman 1967: 115)

In “On Face-work,’’Goffman explains that all those characteristics that societies, through ritual, motivate their members to possess for successful interaction-to be perceptive of others, to have a self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, tact, and a certain amount of poise-are frequently referred to as elements of human nature. These traits, however, must be taught by society. Thus: Universal human nature is not a very human thing. (Goffman 1967: 45)

The second and more theoretically rigorous way in which Goffman uses perspective by incongruity is by creating an ideal-typical model and applying it to various areas of social life not usually connected to each other. This conceptual use of irony has its connection to three interrelated modes of analysis that we have already discussed: Everett Hughes’s early admonition to Goffman to search for basic social patterns in the analogies that underlie seeming incongruities, Simmel’suse of social forms to study various types of social contents, and the utilization of social metaphors.20For example, Goffman advanced Hughes’s notion of “total institution” (an ideal type) by tracing the comparable features between different kinds of social arrangements in order to create new concepts with which to explore various aspects of a

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particular setting. In this sense, by likening mental hospitals to prisons, both of which he considers to be total institutions, Goffman can focus on the former’s more punitive and custodial character. In addition, mental patients and prisoners have similar experiences given that they are both “inmates” living in controlled, self-enclosed environments. Presumably, very much the same kinds of social experiences are also shared by the residents of other social settings with many of the characteristics of the ideal-type total institutiona closed place of residence and work in which the inmate’s daily activities are tightly regulated-including monks in monasteries, the aged in nursing homes, lumber jacks in logging camps, and children in orphanages. Disclaimers

Finally, the third rhetorical device that Goffman implements quite frequently throughout his writings is the disclaimer. Contrary to his use of metaphor and irony, however, his use of the disclaimer is not intended as a method to help him formulate, refine, or link his concepts; rather, its purpose, as a defensive textual technique, is to preempt or deflect criticism of his ideas. Perhaps the most famous of Goffman’s disclaimers (replete with his sparkling Goffmanesque phrasing) is found in the introduction to Frame Analysis where he offers a sort of apologia pro vita sua to those leftist critics, 2 la Gouldner, who charged him with practicing a conservative “microfunctionalism” devoid of any concern with power politics: This book will have weaknesses enough in the areas it claims to deal with; there is no need to find limitations in regard to what it does not set about to cover. , , , The analysis developed [in this book] does not catch at the differences between the advantaged and disadvantaged classes and can be said to direct attention away from such matters. I think that is true. I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people snore. (Goffman 1974: 1514)*’

Taxonomies

In addition to Goffman’s bewildering array of concepts, his four main social metaphors,22and his textual use of irony and disclaimers, the other conceptual method that Goffman increasingly turned to is the creation and application of taxonomies. According to Philip Manning (1992: 141), through the course of his writings, the direction of Goffman’s conceptual methodology moved from the literary to the schematic. “As he became more confident of his findings,” Manning explains, “metaphors were gradually replaced by formal definition and classification” (1992: 141).

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Goffman’s concern with social taxonomies, with descriptive categories of interaction, is most likely a result of his interest in ethology, a field in which the scientific classification of animals’ interactional practices in their natural territories is a crucial and central analytical tool. Indeed, in his attempt to develop a “human ethology,” a study of territoriality and face-toface interaction, Goffman created endless taxonomies and, within these, further taxonomies of subtypes. Thus, throughout his writings, but especially the later ones, we find dizzying enumerations of social types and varieties. Three examples serve to illustrate the point. In one of his early books, Asylums, Goffman begins by giving a fivefold classification of total institutions in order “to provide a purely denotative definition of the [general] category as a concrete starting point” (196la: 5). A decade later, in “Normal Appearances” (found in Relations in Public), Goffman borrowed the term Umwelt from animal ethology to represent that region around the individual from which alarming signs come. He then identifies four types of sources and signs of alarm as they exist in the Umwelts of human beings: the furnished frame, lurk lines, access points, and the social net. However, by 1974, Goffman, in Frame Analysis, had outdone himself in regard to taxonomic proliferation. For instance, here he informs us that there are two basic types of frames that can be transformed by five types of keyings (and several subtypes), two types of fabrications, and two types of retransformations. What is more, the frames are anchored in five anchoring devices. In each case, Goffman gives precise definitions of these typologies. Frame Analysis, then, is Goffman’s most complex classificatory endeavor; it is also the practice of his exhortation: to work “like a one-armed botanist” in “delineating generic classes whose members share lots of properties, not merely a quallfying similarity” (Strong 1983: 349). As with his other conceptual methodologies, there are strengths and weaknesses to Goffman’s employment of taxonomies. First the main advantage: It is doubtless the case that, to a far greater extent than his concepts and metaphors, social taxonomies give Goffman’s sociology a more systematic quality. Collins (1980: 173) correctly contends that by generating comprehensive taxonomies Goffman was able to organize his materials in careful analytical sequences. Clearly, his categories function to tidy u p a lot of conceptual messiness. “One of the pleasures of reading Goffman,” writes English literary critic and playwright Alan Bennett, “is in taxonomy: items that one has had lying around in one’s mind for ages can be filed neatly away” (1994: 307). To be sure, Goffman, from very early on, appeared to show an inclination for typologizing and categorization. In 1957 he wrote, “If one has a really nice hypothesis, why not reverse the prescribed procedure [of fitting the data to the hypothesis] and look for the categoly of social life that beautifully fits it?” (Goffman 1957b: 323, emphasis added).

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There are, however, a couple of drawbacks to Goffman’s taxonomic approach. First, his near-obsession with the classification of social behaviorthat is, with its organization and description-did not allow him to develop a proper explanation of it. Thus, for Goffman, causal analysis always took a backseat to analytical arrangement. Second, even when he is at his conceptual best-when he renders rich and detailed depictions of social life through the use of countless lively illustrations-Goffman’s examples are not primarily intended as exemplifications of social behavior; instead their first goal is to exempllfy the usefulness of a classijkation of social behavior (Manning 1992: 151). In sum, the whole of Goffman’s conceptual methodology-from his concepts to his metaphors to his taxonomies-amounts to a sociology of typijications. It is through such typifications that Goffman, like Simmel, brought serious conceptual order to an understanding of the micro-social world. As mentioned previously, and as we will see in the next section, given that they inform each other, Goffman’s unorthodox conceptual methodology is connected in some interesting and complex ways to his unconventional research methodology.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Scholars generally agree that Goffman’s incomparable conceptual methodology contributed to an understanding of the structure of everyday experience in many important and significant ways. Yet Goffman always denied he was a theorist of any sort, claiming instead to be, first and foremost, an empirical researcher, an ethnographer of the minutiae of everyday life. There is, however, an irony here. On the one side, there is no doubt that Goffman was a highly productive researcher, as evidenced by his numerous empirical studies; on the other side, he conducted relatively little firsthand research. Moreover, he has been roundly criticized on three levels: (1) for the kinds of research methods he employed, (2) for the types of data sources on which he relied, and (3) for the quality of the information he obtained. Thus, his methods are said to be too casual, his sources too unreliable, and his information too suspect. Perhaps the most notorious of Goffman’s techniques from his research methodology, and the least defensible in regard to the three aforementioned critiques, is his use of data that he himself makes up. This invention of a data source-that is, of fabricating examples of interaction and speech-violates all the protocols of social science research. The best illustration of this technique is found in the essay, “Replies and Responses” (in Forms of Talk), where Goffman creates fictive conversations. However, if we understand that Goffman’s ultimate goal of providing data is not as evidence of real rife

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but as evidence for his concepts, then it really doesn’t matter if his illustrations and examples are factual or contrived, precise or embellished. He explains that the intended value of his examples of social interactions, whether empirical or made up, “is not as records of what actually happened, but as illustrations of what would be easily understandable if they had happened and had happened with the interpretive significance I give them” (Goffman 1971: 140, n. 31). However that may be, Goffman’s research methodology stands out in one important respect: It is, to say the least, highly eclectic. He gathered data from a wide variety of sources ranging from novels, biographies, and newspaper clippings, to scholarly texts, radio “bloopers,”and photographs used in advertisements. Moreover, in much the same way that he refused to be pinned down to any particular theoretical tradition in sociology, Goffman employed a number of research designs, including his own careful ethnographic studies on particular social settings, informal note taking from radio broadcasts, as well as a content analysis of ads and news photos. He simply used whatever techniques afforded him the best information in making or supporting a conceptual point. The practices of invoking a diverse repertoire of data sources and of employing disparate research techniques was established in his early work. In the preface to The Presentation of Self; Goffman writes, “The illustrative materials used in this study are of mixed status: some are taken from respectable researches where qualified generalizations are given concerning reliably recorded regularities; some are taken from informal memoirs written by colorful people; many fall in between” (1959: xi). In addition to his preference for and reliance on a variety of unorthodox data sources and methodological techniques, when it comes to applying these techniques, Goffman gives the impression of not only being “cavalier” about the process (Giddens 1988: 250; Atkinson 1989: 60) but also “secretive” (Manning 1992: 142). Consequently, we know very little about the procedural bases of his research methodologies, which basically consist of two: participant observation and qualitative data analysis.

Participant Observation Goffman’s explicit eschewal of formal theory coupled with his reputation as an astute student of “small behaviors” have served to associate his name and work with one particular research method-participant observation-in a way that has not happened with other sociologists. Goffman’s best-known books, those of his early period, are ethnographic studies of communities, organizations, and social situations that have been read by countless college students, journalists, policy analysts, literary critics, and others who, as a result, have come to regard “doing sociology” as essentially involving a careful watchfulness of daily social behavior and sociologists as licensed voyeurs.

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Goffman’s reputation as an attentive observer of the everyday is not undeserved, for regardless of the other data-collecting techniques that he utilized, particularly in his later works, his main research method always remained participant observation.*3 It is, therefore, understandable, and perhaps even excusable, that British sociologist Laurie Taylor would romanticize and overstate Goffman’s image of the sociologist-as-participant observer in saying that “[wlhile others were compiling the grand theory, he was found peering through cottage windows in the Shetlands, enjoying a smoke with catatonics in a closed ward, or making the scene in Las Vegas” (1968: 835). Although Goffman was virtually silent in discussing the procedures for conducting ethnographic work, there are a few important ideas that he articulated on the method. To begin with, he was very serious in calling for a “serious ethnography” intended to accomplish two objectives: to describe the natural units of social interaction, and to uncover the normative orderthat is, the patterned behaviors-prevailing within and between these units (Goffman 1967: 2). Additionally, in a talk he gave on fieldwork in 1974, Goffman made several practical suggestions to researchers contemplating doing participant observation. These include (1) subject yourself to your subject’s life circumstances; (2) note their gestural, visual, bodily response to what’s going on around them; (3) be empathetic; (4)be a “witness”to how they react to what gets done around them; ( 5 ) to cut down on distractions, have as few resources as you can get by in the field; (6) open yourself up to any overture, friendly or not; (7) get a mix of changing costume that isn’t complete mimicry on the one hand, and that isn’t completely retaining your own identity; (8) as a test of penetrating the group under observation, you should feel you could settle down and forget about being a sociologist; (9) be strategic and militant about the way you handle hierarchical social relationships in the setting; (10) spend at least one year in the field to achieve deep familiarity. In a nutshell, “you should be able to engage in the same body rhythms, rate of movement, tapping of the feet, that sort of thing, as the people around you. Those are the real tests of penetrating a group” (Goffman 1989: 129). However, in tandem with his first pursuit of serious ethnography-which involves conducting close, firsthand observations and then carefully and systematically recording them-Goffman frequently relied on another, secondary mode of inquiry: naturalistic obsemation. This consists of a potpourri of “observations,” regarded as largely unscientific according to the tenets of social scientific research, which include informal interviews, snippets of overheard conversations, recollected incidents (sometimes in the distant past), informal note taking, vignettes, and even hearsay. Throughout his writings, but especially in his footnotes, Goffman presents anecdotal information, usually by prefacing his remarks with “I have seen,” “The following scene was reported to me,” “I am told,” or “I cite a personal example.” These naturalistic methods of obtaining data result in a great number of unsubstanti-

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ated assertions which Goffman makes without the support of solid evidence (Goffman 1971: xiii-mi). Philip Manning (1992: 148) suggests that not only were Goffman’s naturalistic observations unsystematic, because he collected them from diverse situations as fate allowed, but they were also highly selective, because he chose to focus on certain aspects of interaction and ignore others. Whatever the merits and shortcomings of his serious ethnography and naturalistic observations, Goffman deftly employed these two research methodologies to produce some of the most famous studies in participant observation; studies of communities, organizations, and social situations that not only sealed his reputation as one of the great ethnographers but also provide some of the most penetrating sociological insights into particular settings of the interaction order. Goffman conducted several such studies, some minor others truly influential, throughout his thirty-year career. I first discuss in some detail his two most well-known studies on participant observation: of a small island community and of a mental hospital. The Island Community

Goffman’s first participant observation study was for his doctoral dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island C~rnmunity.”~~ He spent eighteen months, from December 1949 to May 1951, collecting ethnographic data on the face-to-face interactions of the inhabitants of a small isolated community, which he called “Dixon,” on one of the Shetland Islands, located about one hundred miles north of Scotland. Purporting to be an American college student interested in the agricultural techniques of island farming, Goffman settled down in Dixon and endeavored to absorb as much as he could about the everyday lives of the island’s inhabitants. He explains, “I tried to play an unexceptional and acceptable role in community life” (1953: 2). Underscoring his participatory role, and not merely his observer role, Goffman writes, “My real aim was to be an observant participant, rather than a participating observer” (1953: 2). His participation, however, was markedly circumscribed. On the one hand, Goffman took an active part in community life and spent most of his time in public places, where the islanders entered into face-toface interaction with each other, but particularly the community hall’s “reading room,” which had a billiard table, where the men played two evenings a week from October to May. Goffman was also present at funerals, weddings, and parties and attended almost all of the community “socials”(held every other week from September to March). His goal in being at all these occasions was “to ensure range and depth of participation” (Goffman 1953: 3). On the other hand, Goffman adopted a disengaged and distanced observational stance, and the islanders regarded him as “a kind of solitary figure

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in a world of his own” (Winkin 2000: 194). At first, they did not know what to make of the stranger who did not want to talk much with them. Wondering what he was doing in Dixon, the islanders exchanged a lot of gossip about him. Some saw Goffman as some kind of hermit; others suspected he was a spy. With the exception of the islands retired mail carrier, who was “the living memory and monument of the community,” and “Dr. and Mrs. Wren” (all three were probably key ethnographic informants), Goffman spoke at length with only a handful of people and had no intimate contact with family life. He never joined in the dancing or singing at the socials, nor did he attend services at the church (although he did frequently dine with the minister). Having fewer than three hundred residents, Dixon is located on the small flat island of Unst, which is approximately nine miles long and four miles wide and has little vegetation to partition the landscape so that the islanders lived in almost continual sight of one another. Dixon thus served as a most convenient natural laboratory in which to study social interaction. This small, isolated community enabled Goffman to witness the ways in which the islanders disclosed and hid information from each other. He observed, close up, their everyday rituals and practices and jotted down, verbatim, bits of conversations and gestures. In addition, he examined the manner in which the personnel staffing one of the local hotels dealt with outsiders, including himself. Throughout these observations Goffman’s conceptual assumption was that “all interactions between persons took place in accordance with certain patterns” (1953: 3). Initially, Goffman took a room the Springfield Hotel, which primarily served tourists to the island. For two months, while staying there as a guest, he observed the staff interacting with the middle- and upper-class guests. Then in early 1950 he rented a small cottage located directly behind the hotel. He took most of his meals in the hotel’s kitchen and worked part-time as second dishwasher, giving him the opportunity to further observe the staff. Clearly, Goffman was strategic in selecting the Springfield Hotel as his main observation post for it was “the single institution on the island most devoted to public relations and impression management” (Schudson 1984: 640). As Goffman rightly states, he did not do a study of a community but in a community (1953: 8). In a radical departure from the Chicago tradition, of studying city neighborhoods, professions, and institutions, Goffman opted to study interaction practices. As he pus it: “I was especially concerned with those social practices whose formulation and analysis might help to build a systematic framework useful in studying interaction throughout our society” (Goffman 1953:1). His was an observational study of conversational interaction, the continuous and uninterrupted interchange of messages between concrete persons who are in each other’s immediate presence. Goffman warns that it is im-

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portant to contextualize conversational interactions by obtaining information concerning the interacting participants’ occupation, socioeconomic status, friendship and kinship ties, and personality characteristics. However, he contends that it is not always feasible to obtain this information through structured research techniques such as interviews and questionnaires. Instead, Goffman prefers a more informal and unsystematic ethnographic approach; one which is derived partly “by direct observation, [partly]by properly timed offhand inquiry, and part of it is thrust upon [the ethnographer] by members of the community in order that he may participate without awkwardness in conversational interaction which makes no sense without such information” (Goffman 1953:4). This use of naturalistic observation to study interaction practices was, to say the least, novel at the time Goffman conducted his participant observation study of the island community. The Mental Hospital

In 1954, the year after completing his Ph.D. dissertation, Goffman joined the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health. During this time, he did some brief participant observation studies in the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. For two months, Goffman participated in the social life of the hospital’s Ward A in the official capacity of a normal control in a pharmacological research study. While there he ate and socialized with the patients during the day and occasionally slept overnight in a patient’s room. Goffman also spent time in Ward B-the unit given over to the study of schizophrenic girls and their schizophrenogenic m o t h e r e i n the capacity of staff sociologist (Goffman 1967: 48, n. 2). The data obtained in these fieldwork studies of ward behavior were used in the essay “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (in Interaction Ritual) “on the assumption that a logical place to learn about personal properties is among persons who have been locked u p for spectacularly failing to maintain them” (Goffman 1967: 48). Then, in 1955, Goffman moved his family to an apartment near St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., in order to conduct a year’s participant observation study there. At the time, St. Elizabeth’s was the country’s largest mental institution with over seven thousand patients. At the hospital, Goffman was made an assistant to the athletic director, a position that gave him access to all parts of the institution and that allowed him to roam freely without arousing undue suspicion. Only the top management of St. Elizabeth’s was aware of his research, the main goal of which was to “try to learn about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively experienced by him” (Goffman 1961a: ix). In order to learn about this world, Goffman believed it was necessary for him to submit himself to the daily round of petty contingencies to which the hospital inmates were subjected.

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Goffman explains that he did not allow himself to be committed (even nominally) as a hospital patient because taking on such a role would have greatly restricted his range of movements and roles, and hence his data. He also elected not to employ the usual kinds of quantitative research methodologies (e.g., survey research) because, he says, these would not have allowed him to gather data on “the tissue and fabric of patient life” (Goffman 1 9 6 1 x). ~ While at St. Elizabeth’s, Goffman did not carry a key or sleep in the wards. He also admits to taking the “side,”ethnographically, of the mental patient, not the hospital staff, and gives two rationales for that position. First, Goffman contends that in order to describe the patients’ situation faithfully, it is necessary to be partisan, to see the world from the patients’ perspective. Second, he correctly points out that, at the time, almost all professional literature on mental patients had been written from the point of view of the psychiatrist. Goffman, therefore, spent most of his time with the patients and intentionally avoided sociable contact with the staff. Finally, exhibiting a candor that is typical of him but that eludes most other ethnographers, Goffman confesses another prejudice: that he came to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital “with no great respect for the discipline of psychiatry nor for agencies content with its current practice” (196la: x). A battery of severe criticisms has been leveled at Goffman’s fieldwork study of the social situation of mental patients at St. Elizabeth’s-the study that resulted in one of his most famous books, Asylums, and that contributed important research data for Behavior in Public Places and “Role-Distance” (in Encounters). One common critique raises the question of whether Goflman could have faithfully portrayed what it was like to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital, given that he was not involved in patient care, had no direct responsibility for patients’ well-being, and could not feel their psychic pain (Weinstein 1994: 357-58). Indeed, Raymond M. Weinstein writes that Goffman “probably misjudged the patients’ situation because he wrote the book [Asylums]divorced from the day-to-day psychiatric practice” (1994: 361). Gary Alan Fine and Daniel D. Martin (1990) state that in reading Asylums, one gains little systematic knowledge about how St. Elizabeth’s Hospital operates because Goffman leaves out some very basic ethnographic information. He does not, for example, describe the physical layout of the hospital or its appearance. Nor does Goffman say how many and what kinds of personnel are employed or institutionalized, what a typical day is like for the patients or the staff, or which f o r m of therapy are used. However, these and other criticisms of Goffman’s observational techniques are wide of the mark if we understand the complex interconnection that exists between his conceptual methodology and his research methodology. When we recognize that Goffman primarily used his research data not as an accurate or detailed description of a particular social setting but in order to support his concepts, then we see Asylums for what it really is: “an

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ethnography that is less a study of a specific hospital and more an ethnography of the concept of the total institution itself‘ (Manning 1992: 9). Goffman’s ethnographies, then, are, first, of concepts and, second, of people and places. Other People and Places

Aside from his two most well-known participant observation studies of the residents of an isolated community in the Shetland Islands and the patients in a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., Goffman also conducted ethnographic research on at least three other populations and settings. Sometime during the late 1950s and/or early 1960s, Goffman observed the surgical staff of the operating rooms at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California. Here Goffman examined the roles and role activity of the interns, junior residents, scrub nurses, and the chief surgeon. His observations of the interactions and communication exchange (in particular the irrelevant talk and byplays) that transpired between these medical personnel in the surgical wards helped in exemplifying his concept of role distance, or the process whereby one deliberately distances oneself from a social role. The data obtained from these studies were used in the essay “Role Distance” (in Encounters). From the mid- to late 1960s Goffman undertook an ethnographic study of casino gambling, conducting observations of the croupiers, dealers, and blackjack players at the Station Plaza Casino in Las Vegas. Indeed, Goffman made frequent trips to casinos in Nevada and later trained, qualified, and worked as a blackjack dealer and was promoted to pit boss (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: xii). We can only surmise on the aggressive posture Goffman must have taken in his efforts at doing participant observation in the casinos. He played blackjack for ethnographic reasons, but also with obvious hopes of winning since he tended to wear trousers with extra long pockets. Sometime in 1965 the Las Vegas Police contacted the president of the University of California, Berkeley, inquiring about a professor of sociology named Goffman. The police had received protests from casino managers who saw Goffman as a “disturbing element” in their establishments (Winkin 1999: 29). Goffman used the vlformation derived from h casino studies in several works but in particular “Where the Action Is” (in Interaction Ritual). In this essay, Goffman develops the concept of “action,”referring to those chancy and intense activities-endemic to games or sports of various h d s - e n g a g e d in by individuals that are consequential, problematic, and undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake. Gambling is the exemplar of action. Finally, sometime between the mid- to late 1970s, in what was perhaps his last fieldwork project, Goffman briefly observed and interviewed a disc

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jockey at a classical music radio station in Philadelphia. The purpose was to record and analyze the radio broadcaster’s professional on-the-air remarks and search for speech faults-influencies, slips, boners, gaffes-to see which remedial actions, corrective efforts, the announcer took. For Goffman, contrasting radio talk-whether it involves recitation, aloud reading, or “fresh talk’’-with ordinary face-to-face conversational interaction “allows a glimpse of the distinguishing structural features of everyday discourse” (1981a: 324). The material that Goffman collected in his participant observation study of a disc jockey at work was used in “Response Cries” and especially “Radio Talk: A Study of the Ways of Our Errors” (both found in Forvzs of Talk.).

Qualitative Data Analysis In addition to his primary method of participant observation, Goffman, as he continued his efforts to conduct a naturalistic study of human foregatherings and comminglings, relied on a number of techniques involving qualitative data analysis. We have already seen that his various data sources include such eclectic materials as manuals of etiquette, newspaper articles, memoirs of spies, scholarly texts, extracts from fiction, and even his own students’ research papers. For example, in addition to doing participant observation and interviews, Goffman, in writing “Radio Talk,” also took informal notes on radio broadcasts over a three-year period, examined twenty-four hours of taped radio programming from three radio stations, and (“for want of proper field work”) did a content analysis of radio “bloopers,” humorous mistakes made by radio announcers, which were recorded in eight of the LP records and three of the books produced by writer and radio producer Kermit Schafer. If these data-this “personalistic social psychological material,” as Goffman refers to them-are criticized as trivial, it is only because social life is itself, by and large, “trivial”(Verhoeven 1993: 340). And if these types of records are dismissed as merely anecdotal, Goffman explains, they are nonetheless “fully responsive to our demands-which are not for facts but for typifications” (1974: 14). Perhaps the best-known example of Goffman’s use of qualitative data analysis, content analysis, is found in GenderAdvertisernents, a study of how advertising reinforces sex-role stereotypes. For this study he collected approximately five hundred commercial advertisements (showing professional models in prearranged poses) and news photos of “actual” persons (i.e., of models pictured in their own capacity.) that illustrate gender stereotypes. The pictures were unrandomly culled from newspapers and popular magazines that were easily available to Goffman. He intentionally chose pictures that would fit into distinct categories having to do with the displaying, delineating, or mocking u p of a discrete gender theme. Painfully aware of the limi-

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tations of this type of unrepresentative content analysis, Goffman states, “Since there is little constraint on what I elect to identlfy as a theme (a ‘genderism’), or which pictures I bring together in order to display what is thus identified, or on the way I order the stills within a given series, [it could be argued that1 success here requires nothing more than a small amount of perversity and wit and a large batch of pictures to choose from” (197713: 60). In sum, if Goffman’s research methodology seems inexplicably skewed away from the formal and systematic and toward the impressionistic and naturalistic, it is only because he believed that sociological research, much like sociological theory, had not yet attained full intellectual maturity. As he explains toward the end of his last published article, “For myself I believe that human social life is ours to study nahlralistically, sub specie ueternitutis. From the perspective of the physical and biological sciences, human social life is only a small irregular scab on the face of nature, not particularly amenable to deep systematic analysis. And so it is. But it’s ours” (Goffman 1983: 17).

MAJORWORKS As we have already seen, Erving Goffman’s socioliterary method-which involved creating a new conceptual vocabulary and employing such rhetorical tropes as metaphors, irony, and disclaimers-was as idiosyncratic as it was controversial. Closely related to this is his style of writing and how it influenced his style of sociology. While Goffman was clearly a first-rate sociological observer, his talent was every bit as much as a writer-an essayist-with a literary sensibility rarely found in sociology today. To be sure, in sharp contrast to Parsons, whose ponderously abstract works had, since 1937, set the standard for sociological writing, Goffman burst on the sociological scene with works that exhibited a highly readable prose. Although he certainly wrote in a typical pedantic voice, Goffman was also given to frequently employing mundane anecdotes, literary allusions, and colloquialisms-informal techniques that set a highly personal tone and thus attracted, to his writings, a variety of readers outside academic sociology: literary critics, journalists, public intellectuals. There are, however, several peculiarities that are especially salient in Goffman’s writing style. First, as is obvious to even the most casual of readers, his writings seem to lack “an obvious direction” (Manning 1992:156) as well as a “certain cumulative quality” (Giddens 1988: 251). One reason is that, rather than a unified intellectual production, almost all of his books are either collections of essays (many widely spread in time and place) or else extended versions of essayist writing. Regrettably, there is no work in which Goffman

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consolidates his main ideas in a fully developed manner. In addition, he seems to have relished arbitrariness in his selection and development of topics, an arbitrariness that was bound to subvert cumulation in his work (Williams 1988: 69-70). Consider the following two statements as examples of Goffman’s acknowledgment of the self-conscious arbitrariness in his writings: To begin with, I must be allowed to proceed by picking my span and level arbitrarily, without special justification. (Goffman 1974: 8) So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trails, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact. (Goffman 1981a: 1)

Finally, his refusal to acknowledge connections to other sociological thinkers prevented Goffman from grounding his work in a recognizable theoretical tradition, a clear intellectual lineage, that would have lent greater coherence to his writings.25 Second, Goffman’s popular writing style, while certainly appealing to many of his readers, “virtually always teeters near hyperbole, excess, grotesquerie, a seamy voyage into the absurd” (Manning 1976: 21). There are, to be sure, several aspects of his essays that merit these characterizations. For example, Goffman is sometimes given to overstatement in order to drive home a point: “To walk, to cross a road, to utter a complete sentence, to wear long pants, to tie one’s own shoes, to add a column of figures-all these routines that allow the individual unthinking, competent performance were attained through an acquisition process whose early stages were negotiated in a cold sweat” (Goffman 1971: 248). Moreover, Goffman often attempts to grab his readers’ attention by shocking them with gruesome, or at least unnerving, descriptions of the details of everyday experience. What reader of Stigma, for instance, can ever forget the passage with which Goffman opens the book: a letter signed “Desperate” (taken from Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts), which vividly recounts the hardships endured by a sixteen-year-old girl who has a big hole in the middle of her face because she was born without a nose? Or consider the following startling observation offered by Goffman: “A person with a carcinoma of the bladder can, if he wants, die with more social grace and propriety, more apparent inner social normalcy, than a man with a harelip can order a piece of apple pie” (1971: 353). Goffman, then, consciously wrote in a manner intended to shake up his readers into confronting the truly unpleasant, indeed painful and existential, aspects of daily life. He seemed to (almost sadistically) delight in depicting these outlandish and embellished scenes throughout his texts. Thus, his socioliterary imagination, his “Goffmanesquetouch”-with its paradoxes, juxtapositions, and incongruities, as well as with his apparent fascination with

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psychosis, physical deformities, colostomies, and so forth-has been aptly described as “Gothic” or “Kafkaesque”(Berger 1973: 355). Indeed, Berman considers Goffman a contemporary Kafka “because he communicates so vividly the horror and anguish-as well as some of the absurd comedy-of everyday life” (1972: 1 1. Perhaps the clearest summation of Goffman’s writing style and sociological style-which result in a kind of rhetorical analysis, an impressionistic sociology-is given by Charles Lemert: What Goffrnan was doing in writing as he did was to create an imaginative form in its own right. He was not attempting . . . to represent social reality in what he wrote. He was not so much speaking for the reality to which he referred, as speaking in it at a remove. . . . Goffrnan’s sociology was a kind of fiction, but a televisual fiction as much as a literary one. . . . [Hlis view of social reality was such that he could write about it in no other way but one that approaches fiction. (1997: xxxvii)

By the end of his career, Goffman’s oeuvre consisted of some eleven books (three of which are collections of essays) and over twenty-five essays. Many of these books have run to tens of printings and have been translated into many languages. Whether his concerns were with the rituals of everyday life, deviance, bargaining maneuvers, multiple social realities, or conversational talk, one central focus runs through all of these works: the interaction order. In the remainder of this section, I briefly summarize four of Goffman’s major works and their exploration of the interaction order.

The Presentation o f Self in Everyday fife (1959) Goffman’s first and most famous book, 7%ePresentation of Self in E v e y day Life, initially printed by the University of Edinburgh in 1956 and reissued, in revised and expanded form, in the United States in 1959, quickly became a best-seller and brought him immediate acclaim as a brilliant social analyst. In 1961 the volume was granted the American Sociological Association’s MacIver Award for contributing in an outstanding degree to the progress of sociology. In continuous print since its publication, it has now sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Goffman offers 7%ePresentation of Selfas “a sort of handbook,” a “report” in which he advances a conceptual framework of theatrical performance that can be applied to the study of face-to-face interaction, or the “reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence” (1959: 15). He begins with the premise that when an individual enters the presence of others, he will try to guide and control-through setting, appearance, and manner-the impressions (usually an idealized version) they form of him; at the same time, the others will seek to acquire information about him in order to infer what they can expect

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of him and he of them. A corollary of this premise is that all of the participants in the social encounter will ordinarily engage in certain practices in order to avoid embarrassment to themselves and others. Accordingly, each of the participants enacts a performance, or an activity that serves to influence the other participants. However, because it is commonly the case that the impression projected by a particular participant is also important to the copresent others, all of them will tend to cooperate intimately, to collude, as a team in staging performances that create and sustain the desired impression. As Goffman puts it, “Sincewe all participate on [performance] teams we must all carry within ourselves something of the sweet guilt of conspirators” (1959: 105). Moreover, performances are contextualized in a region, a place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception. Front region refers to the place where the performance is given before an audience and the favorable aspects of the desired impression, conception of self, are accentuated. By contrast, the back region, or backstage, refers to that hidden or private place where information that might discredit the fostered impression is controlled, kept secret. It is also the place from which members of the audience are excluded. However, individuals with discrepant roles-such as that of informer, shill, and go-betweenby masquerading as team members, have access to back regions where they can acquire this secret, discreditable information that can potentially “give the show away” and cause embarrassment to the performers. Goffman further states that when an individual presents himself to others for purposes of interaction, he will tend to maintain the line that he is who he claims to be; that is, he tends to stay in character. However, in times of great crisis when performances are difficult to sustain, inadvertent outbursts such as “Good Lord!”and “My God!” represent a form of communication out of character that can contradict and discredit the “ideal” conception of self fostered by the performer. At the heart of all of these dramaturgic practices, however, is the art of impression management, or the activity through which a performer endeavors to present a favorable impression of herself before others. It is through impression management that the performer avoids “creating a scene” that can cause her embarrassment and disrupt the social order of the interaction. In order to prevent the occurrence of unpleasant incidents, and the embarrassment consequent upon them, it is necessary for all the participants in the interaction to exercise tact as a way of protecting the performer’s performance and “saving the show.” 7he Presentation of Selfis the first sociological effort to truly treat face-toface interaction as a subject of study, as an order, in its own right, at its own level. In writing this book, Goffman rescued the study of interaction not only “from the place where the great social psychologists and their avowed followers seemed prepared to leave it” (Goffman 1981d: 62) but also from the dominance of psychology that regarded the self as merely a fact of person-

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ality. As Goffman succinctly explained later in separating this psychologism from his own social-structural approach, “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men” (1967: 3).

hteraction Ritual (1967) Interaction Ritual is a collection of six essays. The first four-“On Facew o r k (19551, “Embarrassment and Social Organization” (1956b), “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (1956a), and “Alienation from Interaction” (1957ahwere published during the 1950s while Goffman was a member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies (NIMH). The fifth, “Mental Symptoms and Public Order” (1964a), is also a reprint, and the final one, “Where the Action Is,” was prepared by Goffman specifically for the collection. Because of space limitations, I will summarize only the first and last of these essays here. In “On Face-work,” Goffman’s central focus is on the concept of face, or that positive image of self, charged with pride and honor, that individuals project during encounters with others. Goffman makes it clear that face, as a sociological construct of interaction, is neither inherent in nor a permanent aspect of the person; rather, it “is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter” and “on loan to him from society” (1967: 7, 10). Once individuals project that positive social self, that face, to others, they are then committed-constrained, in fact-to live u p to its demands. “Approved attributes and their relation to face,” writes Goffman, “make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell” (1967: 10). Individuals risk being embarrassed or discredited, they risk losing face, when their verbal and nonverbal acts are inconsistent with their projected image of self. What is more, because all social occasions, whether parties, business luncheons, or casual meetings, are potential sources of acute embarrassment for all interactants, and because the person is, as Goffman puts it, “a ritually delicate object,” interactants are constantly guarding against incidents that can threaten to cast them and others in an unfavorable light. In addition, individuals have a moral obligation to prevent the defacement of others, and thus they are compelled to engage in face-work-that is, prophylactic and corrective actions taken by them to make whatever they are doing consistent with face. All social interactants, then, abide by the rule of mutual considerateness, and through the ritual of face-work tacitly cooperate to save each other’s face; in this way, social situations are also saved since loss of face can undermine the encounter’s delicate balance. In every social interaction, individuals have two tracks to choose from (and usually choose both). On the one hand, because they are obliged to show self-respect, this leads them to take on a “defensive orientation” in

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which they carefully monitor their actions to avoid potentially embarrassing and discrediting encounters; on the other hand, individuals are morally required to show respect, ritual honor and care, toward others, and this leads them to adopt a “protective orientation” in which they endeavor to save other’s face through tactful and courteous behavior. Thus, the goal of facework is to maintain the “ritual equilibrium” of everyday social life through ceremonial rules and expressions: little salutations, compliments, and apologies. These common courtesies, these “gestures which w e sometimes call empty,” Goffman writes, “are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all” (1967: 91). In explicating the concept of face-work, Goffman applied Durkheim’s theory of religious ritual to suggest not only that the self of every individual is a sacred thing, and should therefore be respected, but that everyday encounters must be pursued with ritual care lest their social order be seriously disrupted. For Goffman, it is through ritual face-work-the implicit reciprocal agreement between social participants to support each other’s face-that society, in order to exist as society, mobilizes its members “as self-regulating participants in social encounters” (1967: 44). In the longest essay, “Where the Action Is,” Goffman combines the ritual metaphor he had employed in the volume’s previous essays with the game metaphor. Here Goffman takes as his starting point the notion that everyday social situations present individuals with various risks and opportunities. Individuals take a gamble, a chance, when they embark on risky opportunities that require them to relinquish their control of the situation. An activity that is both problematic, because it presents risks, and consequential, because it offers the chance of a payoff, Goffman calls “fateful.” Social situations almost always have some degree of fatefulness and this makes them double-edged swords: on the one side, they may be opportunities for introducing favorable information about oneself (a gain); on the other side, however, they can also be risky occasions in which discrediting facts may be disclosed (a loss). Goffman uses the concept of action, “a term that points to something lively but is itself now almost dead” (1967: 149), to refer to those chancy activities that are consequential, problematic, and, while avoidable, nevertheless undertaken simply for the thrill of it. Indeed, it is through action that individuals surrender themselves to the passing moment, wager their holdings on activity that occurs quickly and precariously, and are aroused to excitement. The prototype of action, says Goffman, is gambling. Although action is routinely found in various activities and places (e.g., horse racing, mountain climbing, pool halls, living the high life), Goffman is most interested in the action that bears on an individual’s character, or moral capacity to maintain full physical and emotional self-control-composureunder the stress of fateful activity. Individuals have the opportunity to exhibit composure in social situations, particularly in those everyday encounters

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having to do with interpersonal action, face-to-face contacts in which two interactants aggressively use each other as a field of action to express or affirm their character at the expense of the other’s character. This leads to a character contest, an interpersonal dispute, a game of skill and cunning, that involves doing battle by and for character. As Goffman states, “Every day in many ways we can try to score points, and every day in many ways we can be shot down” (1967: 240). While character contests are rare in the run of daily events, given that individuals tend to avoid threats to their selves and wish to maintain the ritual order, they nevertheless occur periodically because people seek excitement and aggrandizement. “These naked little spasms of the self occur at the end of the world” Goffman notes dryly, “but there at the end is action and character” (1967: 270). On the whole, in the collected papers that make up Interaction Ritual, Goffman advances two basic interrelated conceptions of the individual. The first is based on the notion that individuals in face-to-face encounters typically pay ritual respect to each other and as a result maintain the normative order of society. The second is premised on the idea that by engaging in certain fateful activities individuals sometimes take a chance at increasing their self worth. Goffman’s first conception of the individual emphasizes courtesy; the second. calculation.

Frame Analysis (1974) After ten years in preparation, Frame Analysis was published in 1974. A big book at nearly six hundred pages, it was regarded by Goffman as his magnum opus. Although still concerned with the naturalistic study of human foregatherings and comminglings, Goffman, in Frame Analysis, makes a slight but significant conceptual shift: his sociological exploration is now “not necessarily restricted to the mutually monitored arena of a face-to-face gathering” (1974: 8). As he states later in the volume: “The first issue is not interaction but frame” (1974: 127). Frame Analysis, then, is Goffman’s attempt at explaining how contexts, “frames,” structure individual’s perceptions of the social world. It is, therefore, a book not about the organization of society but about the organization of eqerience. Goffman begins with the assumption that when individuals attend to any current situation they will, explicitly or tacitly, ask the question, What is it that’s going on here? Frames-subjective principles of organization that define social situation-help individuals answer the question. The study of the organization of social experience, Goffman callsframe analysis, and here he makes good use of the picture frame metaphor to illustrate how people structure (frame) the content (picture) of what they are experiencing (observing). The frame metaphor also helps Goffman to account for the various levels of experience, or multiple social realities, that people have to deal

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with: for if we can look at a picture with its frame around it, we can also draw and observe another framed picture at the center of the first picture, and draw and observe yet another framed picture at the center of the second, and so on. Thus, individuals make sense of social life either as a series of “strips,” arbitrary slices of experience cut from the stream of ongoing activity, or as various frames-within-frames of the same social situation. Only in this way can people distinguish between a wedding and a wake; between a “real-life” wake for a deceased person and a “performed’ wake put on by actors in a stage play. Were it not for frames, people would not be able to make sense of most of the everyday situations and activities they partake in, and social life would be chaotic. According to Goffman, most basic frames are prima y frameworks that render what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of a scene into something that is meaningful. People recognize two types of primary frameworks: events occurring in the natural world and those occurring in the social world. Naturalframework define situations in terms of events that are purely physical and unguided by human agency, such as the weather; social frameworks, by contrast, make sense of events in terms of human agency that is involved in “guided doings,” such as the newscast reporting of the weather. Goffman focuses on social frameworks. A social framework can be keyed, or transformed into something that is patterned on it but seen as something quite different from it. For example, a soap opera is a copy of everyday life; it is not, however, everyday life. The five basic keys employed in transforming social frameworks are make-believe, contests, ceremonials, technical redoings (rehearsals, exhibitions, role playing, and the like), and regroundings (substituting one motive for another in a performed activity). To discuss only one of these keys, the make-believe key transforms, or transcribes, a serious activity into some type of entertainment, and there are, according to Goffman, three types of make-believe frames: playfulness, fantasy or daydreaming, and dramatic scriptings (e.g., radio, television, stage productions). For example, two professional actors may be staging a fight for a scene, so it is not a “real”fight, only a staged one (a dramatic scripting). What is more, keys may be rekeyed thus transforming the meaning of the initial key as well as that of the primary framework: the actors are merely rehearsing the staged fight; it is not the “actual”staged performance. A rekeying can itself be rekeyed: while the actors were rehearsing the fight, they got caught up in the scene and were genuinely fighting since they broke each other’s ribs. Goffman describes this as adding a lamination, a superimposition, to the activity being transformed. Thus, there are many laminations to a strip of ongoing social reality that individuals can define in order to answer the question, What is it that’s going on here? Situating his inquiry within the fields of phenomenology, communication theory and semiotics, Goffman’s goal in Frame Analysis was “to construct a

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general statement” regarding the structure, or form, of experiences individuals have at any moment of their social life (1974: 14,131.Given that the book deals explicitly with the issue of social epistemology and social phenomenology“with the way one comes to understand how the world around oneself is defined, ought to be defined, and can get to be misdefined” (Verhoeven 1993: 342hit was not widely accepted by sociologists; it did, however, resonate with the ideas of cognitive scientists.

Forms ofTa/k (1981) Recognizing that a multitude of social interactions arise and are sustained out of talk, in his last book, Forms of Talk, Goffman undertook a frame-analytic exploration of the organization of everyday conversation. The book consists of five essays, most of which were previously published: “Replies and Responses” (1976b1, “ResponseCries” (19781, “Footing”(1979a1, “The Lecture”(1976a), and “RadioTalk” (1981~). The first essay, “Replies and Responses,” is by far one of Goffman’s most technical. He begins with a basic normative assumption about face-to-face talk as a communication system: “that, whatever else, [the message] should be correctly interpretable in the special sense of conveying to the intended recipients what the sender more or less wanted to get across’’(1981a: 10). In other words, the speaker needs to know whether her message was received, and if so, whether it was passably understood, and the recipient needs to show that he received the message correctly. In order to facilitate clear and effective communication on the part of the speaker and recipient, there exist various linguistic system requirements, such as the fact that the message must be clearly heard and that there must be a way of signaling that the message has ended (e.g., by a pause). In addition to ensuring smooth flow of communication between interactants, reciprocal conversations, or ritual interchanges, also oblige interactants to help each other preserve face, and for this certain social ritual requirements are necessary. Three such ritual requirements are (1) that speakers convey information about themselves and their relationship to their listeners; (2) that potentially offensive acts be remedied, through accounts and apologies, to the satisfaction of the offended parties; and (3) that offended parties are obliged to induce remedies from those unwilling to supply them. Finally, Goffman concludes that while it is the case that linguistic system requirements commonly reinforce social ritual requirements, much face-to-face dialogue is meaningful only within the context of the social situation in which it occurs. In other words, talk must be framed. In the second essay, “Response Crises,” Goffman continues with the fame-analytic notion that certain blurted verbalizations-self-talk, imprecations, and response cries--can be understood only with reference to the

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social situation outside states of talk. Self-talk refers to the fact that when individuals are all alone, they sometimes make passing comments aloud. However, an adult who indulges in public self-talk is usually seen to be acting in a situationally inappropriate way. In most cases, public self-talk “is a threat to intersubjectivity; it warns others that they might be wrong in assuming a jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility among all persons present” (1981a: 85). Self-talk, however, is excusable, indeed expected, during certain exceptional situations as when an individual is being “informed” of the death of a loved one. Self-talk, therefore, is not a conversational impropriety but a situational one. Goffman then considers response cries, or exclamatory utterances that are not full-fledged words; these include Oops! Phew! and Ype! “Spill-cries”such as Oops! are outbursts made by individuals when they have momentarily lost control of some feature of their world: a woman, rapidly walking to a museum exit, passes the door, catches her mistake, utters, “Oops!”and backtracks to the right place. By publicly remarking, “Oops!”the person draws attention to the fact that the error was minor, a mere accident that can easily be rectified and nothing to be really concerned about. In addition, response cries show that the exclaiming individual is alive to the demands of the social situation, and, as a show of respect, provides copresent others in this way with certain information needed in framing the situation. The upshot is that self-talk, imprecations, and response cries “are creatures of social situations, not states of talk” (1981a: 121). The remaining essays in Forms of Talk provide additional illustration of the frame-analytic theme that all talk needs to be situationally contextualized.

BEYOND GOFFMAN In August 1982, Erving Goffman was to deliver his presidential address at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Due to the rapid progression of his cancer, he never delivered that address. It was, however, posthumously published the following year in the ASAs flagship journal, the American Sociological Review, under the title “The Interaction Order.” Tellingly, that was also the title of the last chapter of his doctoral dissertation completed thirty years previously. Goffman’s reinvocation of the title can doubtless be taken as a gesture that, at the end of his career, he “brought a sense of closure to his intellectual ideas” (Fine et al. 2000, vol. 1: xiii). Thus, perhaps his foremost legacy is his dogged investigation of the interaction order in its own right. This, then, is Goffman’s singular contribution to sociological theory, and it is this contribution that remains capable of guiding future disciplinary thought. Goffman ends “The Interaction Order” by telling sociologists that their efforts have not been all for naught in studying human social life:

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There’s nothing in the world we should trade for what we do have: the bent to sustain in regard to all elements of social life a spirit of unfettered, unsponsored inquiry, and the wisdom not to look elsewhere but to ourselves and to our discipline for this mandate. That is our inheritance and that so far is what we have to bequeath. (1983: 17)

Goffman himself bequeathed to us an intellectual inheritance-the close scrutiny of the interaction order-that allows us to move now, as the title of an important book has it, beyond Goffman. The ten essays that follow contribute to that forward direction.

NOTES 1. Wrong, an eminent sociologist in his own right, modestly but quite erroneously, states that his having urged Goffman to try sociology “may well be the only thing I am remembered for in future histories of sociology!” (Wrong 1998: 213). 2. This is undoubtedly true, as evidenced by at least two facts: First, between 1893 and 1910, a number of Simmel’s sociological writings appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the majority of them in translations by Albion W. Small, who was at that time the chair of the Department of Sociology at Chicago. Second, Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess gave Simmel a prominent position in their landmark text-reader Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), which includes ten selections from Simmel and was required reading for several generations of students at Chicago. The “three degrees of separation” phenomenon characterizes the intellectual connection between Simmel and Goffman. During 1899-1900, Park studied with Simmel at the University of Berlin. Everett Hughes learned his Simmel from Park while a student at Chicago during the late 1920s. Thus, it seems quite likely that twenty years later, Goffman, as a student of Hughes, would have received some tacit or explicit instruction on Simmel. 3. In a rare interview Goffman admitted, “When I was younger I thought Tne Elementary Forms. . . was really a very, very central book (as cited in Verhoeven 1993: 343). 4. Goffman (1969: 136, n.51) notes that the phrase “symbolic interaction” was first used by Blumer in 1937. Blumer (1972) later criticized Goffman for giving a “onesided treatment of the self” and “an inadequate and inaccurate picture of how the human being handles himself in face-to-face interaction.” Blumer accuses Goffman of being overly concerned with the actor’s “self-regard and thus straying from Mead’s notion that human interaction “consists fundamentally of efforts of the participants to grasp what each other is doing or plans to do and then to direct one’s own act in the light of this knowledge.” To treat face-to-face behavior as though it consists only of efforts to create and sustain personal impressions, as Goffman does, is to misrepresent Mead (Blumer 1972: 52). 5 . About Parsons’s influence on him, Goffman says the following: “He provided something of an epistemology that I’ve always found congenial and reasonable. I’m

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a positivist basically, I guess. The epistemological realism espoused in [The Structure of Social Action] I found congenial and it provided the best statement of Weber and Durkheim available in the English language” (as cited in Verhoeven 1993: 325). 6. Alvin W. Gouldner’s salvo against Goffman’s “microfunctionalism”in 7;be Coming Crisis of Western Sociology is well known. Here Gouldner condemns Goffman for being unconcerned with political and social issues (1970: 378-90). Similarly, Sedgwick contends that Goffman’s work “seemed radical only by contrast with the conformist consensus which reigned in American sociology over the fifties” (1982: 57). 7. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Joan Emerson, Lyn H. Lofland, and Dorothy Smith are some feminist scholars who were Goffman’s doctoral students (West 1996: 366, n. 3). 8. Interestingly, in Asylums, Goffman claimed to be using “a symbolic-interaction framework“ (Goffman 1961a: 47). 9. See note 5. 10. For a detailed discussion on mutual respect, see Goffman (1963a: 193-215). In Western civilization, respect for the other as a virtue stems in part from Christian doctrine (Goffman 1971: 184). 11. Goffman deplored the tendency of sociologists to separate the structural from the personal. This “touching tendency” to hold the personal as something special, he derisively proclaimed, is an effort ‘‘tokeep a part of the world safe from sociology” (1961b: 152). 12. Colomy and Brown refer to this qui pro quo as they posit that Goffman’s commentary in the essay “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (1967: 47-95) “intimates that individuals presume and are typically accorded a complex of interactional rights and are simultaneously compelled to honor a complementary set of obligations” (Colomy and Brown 1996: 371). To wit: “Each individual is responsible for the demeanor image of himself and the deference image of others” (Goffman 1967: 84). 13. For a good example of how Goffman jumbles the terms pemon and selfin Asylums, see Manning (1976: 17). 14. Concomitant with these different views of the self, Goffman provides various definitions. “The self. . . is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented” (Goffman 1959: 252-53). “The self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object which must be treated with proper ritual care” (Goffman 1967: 91). “Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them” (Goffman 1974: 573). 15. Anthony Giddens is one of the few who argues that “[tlhere is a system of social theory to be derived from Goffman’s writings.” However, Giddens quickly qualifies his remark by cautioning that “some effort has to be made to unearth [a sy-stematic theory] and we cannot necessarily accept Goffman’s own interpretations of his works in elucidating its nature” (1988: 250). 16. If by “theory”we mean (1) a deliberate effort to link concepts together in a logically meaningful way-that is, form propositions-in order to (2) describe and (3) explain social phenomena, then Goffman’s effort is most certainly not a theory. While Goffman’s sociology excelled at (21, it is relatively weak on (3) and almost completely lacking in (1). As Peter Manning states: “Even if one can tease out propositions, they alone do not necessarily lead to or constitute a theolcy. Nor will a set of categories (taxonomy) or a frame of reference alone provide the basis for eqlanation. The task of testing, verifying, or establishing these notions (even if it were possible) would re-

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quire a different sort of enterprise than that in which Goffman is engaged” (1976: 23, emphasis added). 17. Goffman’s metaphors are not contradictory, nor did he apply them in a mutually exclusive manner. Branaman notes that Goffman demonstrates an interpenetration of ritualistic and game-like qualities of social life, an interplay of manipulation and morality, in “On Face-work,’’“Fun in Games” (in Encountem), “Where the Action Is” (in Interaction RituaO, and Strategic Interaction” (Branaman 1997: lxx, lxiv). Furthermore, the dramaturgical, game, and ritual metaphors can, in tandem, adequately describe the complexities of social interaction when “[wle strategically chart our performances and courses of action and interaction, often with an aim of being a viable member of a morally cohesive social order” (Branaman 1997: k i i i , emphasis added). 18. Interestingly, Goffman mixes metaphors when he introduces the term key, “a rough musical analogy” (1974: 44), into his frame analysis. 19. The termpempective by incongruity, as Lofland notes, was coined by Kenneth Burke, who explains its application in Permanence and Change (1936: ll8fj. 20. The following statement shows Goffman’s attempt (conscious or not) to link the dramaturgical metaphor with Simmelian formal sociology: “The issues dealt with by stagecraft and stage management . . . seem to occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension for formal sociological analysis” (Goffman 1959: 15). 21. Another type of disclaimer, with similar objectives, that Goffman is quite candid about using in his sociological assertions is the “occurrence qualifier.” Instead of making absolute generalizations or ones in statistical form, I will assert that a given practice occurs among a set of individuals “routinely”or “often”or “on occasion,” thereby admitting to a want of organized evidence even while pretending carefulness. Statements qualified in this way are hard to prove false, which is nice, but the same qualification weakens the sense in which they might be true, which isn’t. (Goffman 1971: xiv)

22. Here we should also include Goffman’s numerous analogies, especially those ethological ones likening animal behavior to human behavior, as in his analysis of territorial conduct. See Goffman (1971). 23. From the beginning of his career to the end, Goffman seemed to always favor participation observation. When, in 1981, Jef C. Verhoeven asked him what main method he would employ in his own sociology, Goffman replied, “Well, I suppose it’s participant observation in the main, some sort of deduction from one’s data” (Verhoeven 1993: 38). 24. The bulk of the information for this section is taken from Yves Wilkin’s insightful paper on Goffman’s fieldwork experiences at “Dixon” (Baltasound). See Winkin (2000). Other sources include Goffman (1953) and Schudson (1984). 25. Aside from a smattering of references to Simmel, Radcliffe-Brown, and Sartre, the only social thinker to which Goffman made repeated reference, particularly in his early works, was Durkheim. Indeed, Goffman once obliquely assigned to Durkheim the status of a sociological deity when he used the pronoun He (capital H, in referring to him: “It can be argued that social situations . . . constitute a reality suigeneris as He used to say” (Goffman 1964b: 134). Carol Brooks Gardner tells me that Goffman’s use of the phrase “He used to say,” in this way, is actually a play on words. According to her, Goffman uses the form of the (repetitive) Talmudic introduction to the

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opinion of yet another authority when he writes “He used to say,”which is Hu tomar in Hebrew. But it seems to me that there is also a subtle irony of ambivalent homage at play here. On the one hand, Goffman seems to show reverence to Durkheim, his rav (teacher), by singling him out and treating seriously his teachings; on the other hand, Goffman seems rather irreverent in referring to him as a god. An added ironic twist, which Goffman may or may not have been aware that he was making, pointed out to me by Horst J. Helle, is that Durkheim, as indicated in The Elementap Forms, is the only one who knows who (what) god is.

REFERENCES Atkinson, Paul. 1989. “Goffman’sPoetics.” Human Studies 12, nos. 1-2: 5976. Bennett, Alan. 1994. “Cold Sweat.” Pp. 302-12 in Writing Home by A. Bennett. London: Faber & Faber. Berger, Bennett M. 1973. “A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman.”Dissent 20, no. 3: 35H;l. Berman, Marshall. 1972. “Weird but Brilliant Light on the Way We Live Now.” Pp. 1, 2, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 in New York Times Review of Books, February 27. Blumer, Herbert. 1972. “Action vs. Interaction.” Society 9: 5C-53. Branaman, AM. 1997. “Goffman’s Social Theory.” Pp. x l v - k i i in The Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Oxford: Bkdckwell. Burke, Kenneth. 1936. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. New York: New Republic. Burns, Tom. 1992. Eruing Goffman. London: Routledge. Collins, Randall. 1980. “Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory.” Pp. 170-209 in The View From Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Colomy, Paul, and J. David Brown. 1996. “Goffman and Interactional Citizenship.” Sociological Perspectives 39, no. 3: 371-81. Davis, Murray S. 1997. “Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience.” Qualitative Sociology 20, no. 3: 369-88. Dawe, Alan. 1973. “The Underworld-view of Erving Goffman.” BritishJournal of Sociology 24, no. 2: 24653. Durkheim, Emile. [19121 1995. 713e Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Fine, Gary Alan, and Daniel D. Martin. 1990. “A Partisan View: Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman’s Asylums.”Journal of Contemporaly Ethnography 19, no. 1: 89-115. Fine, Gary Alan, Philip Manning, and Gregory W. H. Smith. 2000. “Introduction.” Pp. ix-xliv in Eruing Goffman, vols. 1-4, ed. G. A. Fine and G.W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Giddens, Anthony. 1988. “Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist.” Pp. 250-79 in Eruing Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P.Drew and A. Wootton. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1949. “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Chicago.

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-. -. -. -. -. -.

-. ..-

..-

-. .-.

-. -. -. -. -.

-. , ,

.,

.,

-.

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1952. “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.“Psychiatry 15, no. 4: 451-63. 1953. ‘Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. 1955. “On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 18, no. 3: 213-31. 1956a. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3: 26471. 1956b. “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor.” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3: 473-502. 1956~.7he Presentation of Selfin Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. 1957a. “Alienation from Interaction.” Human Relations 10, no. 1: 47-59. 1957b. “Review of D. R. Cressey, Other People’s Money.” Psychiatry 20, no. 3: 321-36. 1959. 7he Presentation of Self in Evevday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates. New York: Doubleday, Anchor. 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1963~.Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. 1963b. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. 1964a. “Mental Symptoms and Public Order.” Disorders of Communication. Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, Research Publications 42: 262-69. 1964b. “The Neglected Situation.”American Anthropologist 66, no. 6: 133-36. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. 1974. Frame Analysis: A n Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. 1976a. “The Lecture.” Paper presented as the Katz-Newcomb Memorial Lecture, University of Michigan. 1976b. “Replies and Responses.” Language and Society 5, no. 3: 257-313. 1977b. “Genderisms.” Psychology Today 11, no. 3: 6 M 3 . 1977a. “The Arrangement between the Sexes.” Tbeory and Society 4, no. 3: 301-32. 1978. “Response Cries.” Language 54, no. 4: 787-815. 1979a. “Footing.”Semiotica 25, nos. 1/2: 1-29. 1979b. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row. 1981a. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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1981b. “Program Committee Encourages Papers on a Range of Methodologies.” ASA Footnotes 9, no. 6: 4. , 1981c. “Radio Talk: A Study of the Ways of Our Errors.” Pp. 197-330 in Forms of Talk, by E. Goffman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. , 1981d. “Reply to Denzin and Keller.” ContemporarySociology 10, no. 1: 60-68. , 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American SociologicalReview 48: 1-17. , 1989. “On Fieldwork.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18, no. 2: 123-32. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Jameson, Fredric. 1976. “On Goffman’s Frame Analysis.” 7heoly and Society 3, no 1: 119-33. Lemert, Charles. 1997. “Goffman.”Pp. ix-xl n The Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Oxford: Blackwell. Lofland, John. 1980. “Early Goffman: Style, Structure, Substance, Soul.” Pp. 24-51 in The Viewfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. , 1984. “Erving Goffman’s Sociological Legacies.” Urban Life 13, no. 1: 7-34. Manning, Peter K. 1976. “The Decline of Civility: A Comment on Erving Goffman’sSociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 13, no. 1: 13-25. Manning, Philip. 1992. Eruing Goffman and Modern Sociology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Max, Gary T. 1984. “Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman.” Theory and Society 13, no. 5: 64942. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, SeK and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merton, Robert K. 1971. “Foreword.” Pp. vii-viii in Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, ed. L. A. Coser. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1987. “The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 5, no. 2: 13649. hggins, Stephen Harold, ed. 1990. Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rigney, Daniel. 2001. The Metaphorical Society: An Invitation to Social 7beoy . Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Schudson, Michael. 1984. “Embarrassment and Erving Goffman’s Idea of Human Nature.” Theory and Society 13, no. 5: 633-48. Sedgwick, Peter. 1982. Psycho Politics: Laing, Foucault, Gofman, Szasz, and the Future of Mass Psychiatry. New York: Harper & Row. Simmel, Georg. [19181 1923. “Aus Dem Nachgelassenen Tagebuche.” Pp. 1-20 in Fragmente und AufssLitze, ed. G. Simmel. Munich: Drei Masken. Smith, Gregory W. H. 1994. “Snapshots Sub Specie Aeternitatis: Simmel, Goffman, and Formal Sociology.’’Pp. 354-83 in Georg Simmel: Critical Assessments,Vol. 111, ed. D. Frisby. London: Routledge. Strong, P. M. 1983. “The Importance of Being Erving: Erving Goffman, 1922-1982.’’ Sociology of Health and Illness 5, no. 3: 345-55. ,

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Taylor, Laurie. 1968. “Erving Goffman.” New Society 5: 835-37. Time. 1969. “Exploring a Shadow World.”January 10, 1969, pp. 5C-51. Trevino, A. Javier. 2001. “Introduction: The Theory and Legacy of Talcott Parsons.” Pp. xv-lviii in Talcott Parsons Today: His 7%eoy and Legacy in Contemporay Sociology, ed. A. J. Treviiio. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Verhoeven, Jef C. 1993. “An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980.”Research on Language and Social Interaction 26, no. 3: 317-48. Weinstein, Raymond M. 1994. “Goffman’sAsylums and the Total Institution Model of Mental Hospitals.” Psychiaty: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 57, no. 4: 348-67. West, Candace. 1996. “Goffman in Feminist Perspective.” Sociological Perspectiues 39, no. 3: 353-69. Williams, Robin. 1983. “An Appreciation of Sociological Tropes: A Tribute to Erving Goffman.” n e o l y , Culture, and Society 2, no. 1: 99-102. -. 1988. “Understanding Goffman’s Methods.” Pp. 64-88 in Eruing Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Williams, Simon. 1987. “Goffman, Interactionism, and the Management of Stigma in Everyday Life.” Pp. 134-64 in Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology, ed. G. Scambler. London: Tavistock. Winkin, Yves. 1999. “Erving Goffman: What Is a Life? The Uneasy Making of an Intellectual Biography.” Pp. 19-41 in Goffman on Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy, ed. G. Smith. London: Routledge. -. 2000. “Baltasound as the Symbolic Capital of Social Interaction.” Pp. 193-212 in Eruing Goffman, vol. 1, ed. G. A. Fine and G.W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Wrong, Dennis H. 1998. The Modern Condition: Essays at Century’s End. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

The Goffman Legacy Deconstructing/Reconstruct ing Social Science Thomas /. Scheff

. . . You sloughed Methodologies, set out to tell what oft Is done, but ne’er quite well expressed. And until Well expressed, well christened, ill seen. Gentle GOFFMAN, so much of such seeing we owe, we know, To thy quick quirky quizzing of our status quo. -Dell

Hymes, “On First Looking into a Manuscript by Goffman” (1984)

The last line of this witty poem by Hymes nicely outlines what is to be said, at, alas, great length, in this chapter. However, for the sake of argument, I will quibble with one of Hymes’s three 4s: that Goffman’s work is quirky. The idea that his approach is at least odd or weird is shared by a virtual army of commentators. At its most extreme, the nearly universal critique says that Goffman’s approach is “cold-eyed’ and “sour” (Scheibe 2000). This chapter proposes that Goffman’s work is not quirky, once we understand the direction it takes. That is, if one were to set out to reach what I think is the main goal of Goffman’s work, one would be advised to follow an approach quite similar to his. Erving Goffman is probably the most widely read sociologist in the history of the discipline. Perhaps almost as widely cited, his work has been noted throughout the social sciences. But the meaning of his work and therefore his legacy is by no means clear. In the twenty or so years since his death at the age of sixty, eight valuable monographs and edited volumes (including the present one) interpreting his work have been published in English.’ Many further citations, some of chapter length, can be found in other vol50

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umes. But even a quick reading suggests that there is no consensus. As a reviewer (Toiskallio 2000) of a recent edited volume (Smith 1999) suggests, the contributors to the volume find in Goffman’s writings “simultaneous irritation and fascination.” One can go further if one compares the offerings in these books. The authors agree about Goffman’s felicitous style and stimulation. But they also express grave doubts and ambiguities about the nature of his legacy. Within each author’s perspective, especially the most appreciative, there is also ambivalence. Although they find much to praise, there are also many irritations and even some confusion about what Goffman had to say to them. Goffman’s critics are not ambivalent. Even though they find positive features, critics such as Gouldner (1970), Psathas (1980), and Schegloff (1988) are dismissive. Gouldner is repelled by Goffman’s miniature scale of sociological analysis and by what Gouldner thinks is his disinterest in power and hierarchy. Psathas and Schegloff, like many of the commentators, critics and admirers alike, find Goffman to be unsystematic to the point of chaos. Goffman’s approach to the three main elements in social science-theory, method, and data-is, to say the least, not clear. Since this theme is common to virtually all of the comments, I provide an example. Two of the most detailed and appreciative commentators are Lofland (1980), reviewing Goffman’s work up to and including Stigma (1963), and Manning (1980), reviewing the whole oeuvre, with special attention to a later work, Frame Analysis (1974). The overall tone of both Lofland and Manning is strongly appreciative. Yet their systematic reviews unearth features that give them pause. One such feature also noted by most of the essayists is that Goffman started afresh in each book, not only not relating his new ideas to his old ones, but not even taking note of the old ones. This practice gives rise to some confusion as to Goffman’s intent. Lofland notes that the first three pages of Goffman’s article “On Facework” (1955) contains: 3 Types of face (pp. 21514). 4 Consequences of being out of or in the wrong face (p. 214). 2 Basic kinds of face-work (pp. 217-21). 5 Kinds of avoidance processes (pp. 217-19). 3 Phases of the Corrective Process (pp. 219-22). 5 Ways an offering can be accepted (p. 221). (Lofland 1980: 29)

Peter K. Manning points out that later, in Frame Analysis, the following concepts are found in a nineteen-page span:

4 Kinds of playful deceit

6 Types of benign fabrications 3 Kinds of exploitative fabrications 5 Sorts of self-deception (Manning 1980: 270)

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Could Lofland and Manning be implying that so many partridges and pear trees suggest a Christmas carol as much as a sociological theory? Manning goes on to complain explicitly: Such lists of items do not always fall out so neatly in a text, they may accrue in an almost shadowy fashion. The purpose of these lists is unstated and often elusive. [Goffman] does not infer or deduce from them, does not claim that these types are exhaustive, explicate the degree of kinds of possible logical interconnections between them, nor does he always relate his current efforts to previous ideas of himself or others. (1980: 270)

It is clear from such observations that Goffman’s work does not make much, if any, contribution to theory, method, or empirical evidence as these categories have come to be understood in social science. It is conceivable, however, that we might be dealing with something more primitive, preliminary to theory, method, and evidence. Reading Goffman, as Lemert (1997: ix) puts it, “made something happen . . . a shudder of recognition.’’Lemert goes on to describe this quality of Goffman’s work: The experience Goffman effects is that of colonizing a new social place into which the reader enters, from which to exit never quite the same. To have once, even if only once, seen the social world from within such a place is never after to see it otherwise, ever after to read the world anew. In thus seeing differently, we are other than we were. (1997: xiii)

This is a strong claim: Our vision of the world, and even of ourselves, is transformed by reading Goffman. How did Goffman do it? I propose that his work had three qualities that arouse readers out of their slumber: He provided a vocabulary for describing the microworld; his portrayals of human beings usually included emotions, as well as thoughts and actions; and his method of investigation was to undercut the assumptive reality of our society, with his deconstruction of conception of the self as an isolated individual being the most prominent example.

A VOCABULARY FOR THE MICROWORLD The first of Goffman’s glfts, widely agreed on by commentators, is his incredible perception of the microworld of social interaction. He saw and called to our attention a world that surrounds us, but one that we usually do not notice. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker slyly refers to this situation. A male client, lying on the couch, is saying to the analyst, “Look, call it denial it you like, but I think what goes on in my personal life is none of my own damn business!” Like much of the best humor, this caption contains a core of truth. In daily life, and in most social science, the details of the microworld of interaction are unmarked and usually disregarded.

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Goffman, however, noticed the riches of activity in the microworld, and he invented a great panoply of terms and phrases to describe them. Certainly the idea of impression management is one such invention. Also frequently quoted are situational improprieties,face-work, the interaction order, cooling the mark,frames (in the special sense in which Goffman used the term), role distance, alienation from interaction, footing, and many others. These terms have come to be irreplaceable for those who want to understand mundane experience in everyday life. Since there is almost unanimous consensus on this point among his commentators, I will not elaborate on it further.

EMOTIONS IN THE MICROWORLD A second feature of Goffman’s work is less obvious: Unlike most social scientists, he often included emotions, as well as thoughts and action, in descriptions of his actors. However, this feature is more difficult to establish than his remarkable perception of social interaction. An immediate sticking point is that most of Goffman’s explicit treatment of emotions concerns only one emotion: embarrassment. This emotion plays an important part in most of his studies, especially the earlier ones, both explicitly and in much larger scope, by implication. But why only embarrassment? What about other primary emotions, such as love, fear, anger, grief, and so on? To the average reader, the exclusive focus on embarrassment might seem arbitrary. Schudson (1984) devotes an entire article to Goffman’s concern with embarrassment, arguing that it is, in part, misleading. Explicitly, Goffman gave only one justification. He argued that embarrassment had universal, pancultural importance in social interaction: “Face-toface interaction in any culture seems to require just those capacities that flustering seems guaranteed to destroy. Therefore, events which lead to embarrassment and the methods for avoiding and dispelling it may provide a cross-cultural framework of sociological analysis” (Goffman 1956: 266). Heath further justifies Goffman’s focus: Embarrassment lies at the heart of the social organization of day-to-day conduct. It provides a personal constraint on the behavior of the individual in society and a public response to actions and activities considered problematic or untoward. Embarrassment and its potential plays an important part in sustaining the individual’s commitment to social organization, values, and convention. It permeates everyday life and our dealings with others. It informs ordinary conduct and bounds the individual’s behavior in areas of social life that formal and institutionalized constraints do not reach. (1988: 137)

Beyond these considerations, there is another, broader one that is implied in Goffman’s ideas, particularly the idea of impression management. Most of his work implies that every actor is extraordinarily sensitive to the exact

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amount of deference being received by others. Even a slight difference between what is expected and what is received, whether the difference be too little or too much, can cause embarrassment and other painful emotions. In an earlier article (Scheff 2001), I followed Goffman’s lead by proposing that embarrassment and shame are primarily social emotions, because they usually arise from a threat to the bond, no matter bow slight. In my view, the degree of social connectedness, of accurately taking the viewpoint of the other, is the key component of social bonds. A discrepancy in the amount of deference conveys judgment, and so is experienced as a threat to the bond. Since even a slight discrepancy in deference is sensed, embarrassment or the anticipation of embarrassment would be a virtually continuous presence in interaction. In most of his writing, Goffman’s Everyperson was constantly aware of her own standing in the eyes of others, implying almost continuous states of selfconscious emotions: embarrassment, shame, humiliation, and in rare instances, pride, or anticipation of these states. Their sensitivity to the eyes of others make Goffman’s actors seem three-dimensional, since they embody not only thought and behavior, but also feeling (“hand, mind, and heart,” in Phillips’s [ZOO01 phrase). This is probably one of the aspects of Goffman’s writings that makes them fascinating to readers, as suggested by Lofland’s appreciative comment: I suspect I am not alone in knowing people who have been deeply moved upon reading Stigma (1963) and other of his works. These people recognized themselves and others and saw that Goffman was articulating some of the most fundamental and painful of human social experiences. He showed them suddenly that they were not alone, that someone else understood what they know and felt. He knew and expressed it beautifully, producing in them joy over pain understood and appreciated, an inextricable mixture of happiness and sadness, expressed in tears. (1980: 47)

Although Lofland doesn’t name specific emotions, his reference to “the most fundamental and painful of human social experiences” might be taken to imply the emotions of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation. Goffman’s inclusion of embarrassment as a key component of his writing could lead to the type of empathic identification described by Lofland, since most social science writing is unemotional.

DECONSTRUCTINC THE SELF Goffman’s basic method was to deconstruct the assumptive reality of our society, as will be described in the next section. The most prominent example of this method was his attack on the social institution of the self-contained

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individual. This institution was also repeatedly challenged by Elias throughout his writings but especially in his 1998 essay on “homo clausus” (the myth of the closed, self-contained individual). Sociological social psychology, insofar as it is derived from the work of G. H. Mead (1934), also challenges this conception. Blumer (1986) was particularly forceful in this regard. Goffman challenged any perspective that isolates individuals from the social matrix in which they are embedded. This challenge was not limited to psychiatry and medicine, its most obvious targets, it pervades virtually all of his writing. Although Goffman allowed some freedom to the individual through role-distance, his basic theme was that the self was more or less an image cast by social arrangements: The self . . . is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature and die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented. (Goffman 1959: 252-53) The self. . . can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him. This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it. (Goffman 1961a: 168) [Tlhe proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among acts of different persons mutually present to one another. . . . Not, then, men [sic] and their moments. Rather, moments and their men. (Goffman 1967: 2, 3)2

Smith comes close to the view that Goffman’s main target was Western individualism: “The pursuit of a sociological decimation of conventional Western liberal notions of the individual is an analytic impulse animating much of Goffman’s sociology” (Smith 1999: 10). However, the implication that Goffman was challenging only liberal notions of the individual misses the mark. His attack ranges over the entire political, psychological, and philosophical spectrum: radical, liberal, conservative, and reactionary. Although political conservatives may occasionally sound the note of community, they are easily as adamant as liberals in their insistence on rugged individualism. Goffman was an affirmative action deconstructionist; he didn’t discriminate according to political persuasion.

DECONSTR U CTI NG SOCI AL REALI TY There is another, broader dimension to Goffman’s legacy, one at the most elemental level. I propose that the central thrust of Goffman’s method was toward creating free-floating intelligence in social science. Although Goffman

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himself made no such claim, it seems to me that his work sought to demonstrate, each time anew, the possibility of overthrowing cultural assumptions about the nature of reality. I begin with a comment by an author of a chapter in a recent volume. Gronfein (1999: 85-103) reminds us, early in his review of Goffman’s many articles and chapters on mental illness, that Goffman clearly indicated that he was not a sociologist of any particularly substantive area. This is an important point with reference to mental illness not only because of the large number of his essays on this topic, but also because of the extraordinary vehemence of his attack. As Peter K. Manning suggests: Goffman reserves his most cutting ironies and examples for the most legitimate of social institutions, medicine. Psychiatrists and psychiatry merit even more severe condemnation through incongruity. Goffman, in a series of [seven] papers . . , has ridiculed and indignantly criticized the assumptions and operation of conventional medicine and psychiatry. (1980: 265)

Goffman referred to psychiatrists as “tinkers” and to psychiatry as “the tinkering trade” and in many other ways, heaped ridicule on the profession. Manning goes on to note the effect: Such harshness, when combined with the brilliant satiric metaphor work that accompanies it, has the intended effect of producing a sense of shocked disbelief in the reader. More significantly, it acts to corrode the authoritative hegemony of meanings wrapped around their conduct by members of powerful institutions. (1980: 267)

This comment, in passing, proposes that Goffman’s purpose was to adack powerful institutions. But first we must deal with a seeming inconsistency. Both Gronstein and Manning make the point that the institution of psychiatry and mental illness was one of Goffman’s main targets. How can this point be reconciled with Goffman’s assertions that he was not a sociologist of any particular area? I want to second the proposition, made by several commentators, that although mental illness was important for Goffman, it was nothing but the telling topic or case for him. I think that the idea that Goffman was not interested in any of the phenomena he studied for its own sake, but only as a topic for his particular mode of investigation, makes a first step into the Goffman enigma. But what was his mode of investigation? Goffman’s primary goal may have been the development of a reflexive social science. Most of the appreciative reviews of Goffman’s work invoke the idea of reflexiveness, but only in passing. These commentators do little to explain what they mean by the term, or its implications for current social science. Those who do explain what they mean by reflexiveness usually ignore or even dismiss Goffman. Alvin Gouldner provides an example. He proposed reflexivity, self-awareness, as a sine qua non of social science. He ar-

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gues for the need “to transform the sociologist, to penetrate deeply into his daily life and work, enriching them with new sensitivities, and so raise the sociologist’s self-awareness to a new historical level” (1970: 489). In a later comment, Gouldner explains that current social science was deeply mired in everyday language and understanding: The pursuit of hermeneutic understanding, however, cannot promise that men [sic] as we now find them, with their everyday language and understanding, will always be capable of further understanding and of liberating themselves. At decisive points the ordinary language and conventional understandings fail and must be transcended. It is essentially the task of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary”languages, to help men [sic] learn to speak them, and to mediate between the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory. . . . To say social theorists are concept-creators means that they are not merely in the knowledge-creating business, but also in the language-reform and language-creating business. In other words, they are from the beginning involved in creating a new culture. (1972: 161

Was Goffman attempting a reflexive sociology, one that would create a new culture for social science? Unfortunately, Goffman never clearly explained the overall point of his studies. His descriptions of the meaning of his work were almost comically laconic. He and others have clearly made the point that he was trying to achieve “perspective by incongruity.” To find more substantial ground, one needs to look at some of Goffman’s statements about actors in general. In one of his early statements, he noted that, “any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality” (Goffman 196lb: 81). Although this passage is not self-referential, it could be applied to Goffman’s own basic method, if we can understand what he meant by an “accurately improper move” and “the thin sleeve of immediate reality.” The meaning of an improper move is easy: one that violates the assumptions of one’s audience. The idea of improper moves that are accurate is harder to pin down. To explain this idea, I draw upon the philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead, who states that “[a] clash of doctrines is not a disaster-it is an opportunity. . . . In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory” (1962: 266-67). Goffman’s method of investigation was to engineer a continuing clash between the taken-for-granted assumptions in our society and his incongruous metaphors and propositions. Most improper moves merely embarrass the actor and/or those near her. But by framing a viewpoint that exactly contradicts commonly held assumptions, Goffman was developing what Koestler (1967) calls bisociution: seeing phenomena simultaneously from two contradictory

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viewpoints. Like Whitehead, Koestler thought that all creativity arose from the collision of contradictory viewpoints. Devising a phrase or sentence that is “accurately improper” in this sense would seem to be a formidable task. One must first seek out an important commonly held assumption, then exactly counter it with an equally plausible assumption. It would depend, like writing poetry, on deep intuition rather than logical analysis. Goffman’s idea of “alienation from interaction” similarly helps explain what he meant by an improper move. Once again, he did little to apply this idea to his own work. What he meant was that those actors who behave improperly, breaking the rules, not only become alienated from whatever transaction they are involved in, but also might catch an enlightening glimpse of the nature of that transaction, that is, a glimpse of another reality behind the conventional one. Manning, in passing, makes a similar point: “[Goffman’stechnique] is not simply a matter of convenience or artifice. It would appear to be a deliberate choice of weapons by which to assail the fictional facades that constitute the assumptive reality of conventional society” (1980: 263). Goffman seems to have been trying to free himself and his readers from the culturally induced reality in which he and they were entrapped, by making “accurately improper” moves. In this chapter, I will adopt Manning’s usage “assumptive reality” for the total perspective on what is real that is held in common in each society. Actually, there is no generally agreed-on term for this perspective. Durkheim’s usage, collective consciousness, comes close, but it seems to leave out the collective unconscious, and it does not give enough emphasis to the substantive content. Similarly, the term used by mystics, “the great cloud of unknowing,” is evocative, but it is also partial. It leaves out the “knowing”part of assumptive realities. As Geertz (1983) points out in his description 3f the different cultural versions of common sense, it is a great repository both of wisdom and error. Of course, pace postmodernity, one can never be completely free of cultural perspectives. There is no place to stand that does not require linguistic and cultural assumptions. Mannheim’s (1951) point about free-floating intellectuals was that they were not completely free, but free relative to the attitude of everyday life, which is completely entrapped, like the great majority of the members of any society. Being able to see any phenomena from more than one perspective is a great advantage for innovators of any kind, but it is also fairly rare.

REFLEXIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE As already indicated, Gouldner (1970) issues a forceful call for a reflexive social science, one that would free social scientists from the trap of “everyday

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language and understanding.” But it doesn’t occur to him that Goffman might be actually doing what Gouldner is calling for. Instead, Gouldner is repelled by what he thinks of as Goffman’s lack of attention to power, and to his lack of a strong political stance. In a very detailed rebuttal, Rogers (1980) clears Goffman of the charge of ignoring power. She shows how Goffman did indeed analyze power and went further than Gouldner, into the corollary spheres of influence and control. Rogers goes o n to characterize Gouldner’s critique of Goffman’s work as inappropriate and even careless. In what may be another, but less direct, rebuttal to Gouldner, she writes that Goffman was interested in power, but not obsessed with it. This statement may be Rogers’s delicate way of implying that whereas Goffman was not obsessed with powerGouldner was. Her comment may help us understand not only Gouldner’s dismissal of Goffman but also the resistance of most social scientists to his work. The reason why Goffman was not obsessed with power is that he seemed to treat power, hierarchy, and authority as only one of two key dimensions of social organization. The other key dimension was what might be called social integration (alienatiodsolidarity; see Scheff 1997). Goffman’s analysis of power, influence, and control was integral to his examination of the extent to which actors were alienated or in solidarity with each other. Classical sociology was formulated around this former dimension: the way in which urbanization and industrialization lead to increasing alienation. Marx was the first theorist who gave more emphasis to power than to alienation. In his early writing, both dimensions were represented: Balancing his attention to economic and political power were his writings on alienation. However, Marx went on from this balance point to develop and elaborate his analysis of power, but he left the complementary analysis of social integration behind. Modern social science has taken the same path, concentrating, for the most part, on power in politics and economies at the macrolevel, with less concern for social integration, especially at the microlevel. Rogers’s reply to Gouldner has hit on one reason why Goffman irritates his commentators. But the basic source of irritation, it seems, does not concern topic or level of analysis but Goffman’s basic method, making improper moves so as to poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality. All of his work, virtually every sentence, is an attack on what Gouldner refers to as “ordinary language and conventional understandings.” Goffman’s main target of attack, moreover, was not only the language and understandings that obtain in our society as a whole. Perhaps the primary source of irritation for academics is that Goffman was also attacking their own language and assumptions. His method of investigation pointed toward a radically new social science.

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DECONSTRUCTING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS To appreciate the savage force of Goffman’s method, it will be necessary to digress for a moment into the nature of social institutions. G. H. Mead (1934) defines institution as a system of beliefs and practices in which each participant incorporates not only her own attitude and role but also the attitudes and roles of all the other participants. Mead used the example of the institution of private property. The pickpocket knows what to expect not only from the victim and the onlookers but also from the police, judges, jailers, and so forth. Private property is an institution in a society in which all members know and expect their own role, the roles of others, and the accompanying attitudes, but all also know that virtually everyone else knows the roles and expects them to act accordingly. One crucial element that is not developed in Meads account is what has come to be called the greediness of institutions. Manning (1980: 267) refers in passing to this quality with his comment that Goffman attacked hegemonic institutions. The attitudes and expectations that make u p an institution are held in common with fervor; any violation is apt to be experienced as a shockingly personal attack because it shatters participants’ sense of possibility, decency, and reality. The god of all major institutions, not only religious ones, is a jealous god: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Although there may be individuals and even segments in a society that do not participate in a basic institution, the overwhelming majority does. Because of the vehemence with which the majority upholds an institution, and the large size of the majority, the institution’s demands are experienced by most persons as imperative. In Durkheim’s phrase, they are felt to be external and constraining. But Durkheim’s phrase doesn’t do justice to the greediness of institutions, since it leaves out the fervor of attachment to them. Durkheim’s language, of external and constraining, is too genteel to catch the violence of our attachments to institutions. The dominant reality in any society is socially constructed, to use postmodern language. But this formulation has become a cliche because it is usually stated only abstractly. Considering the dominant reality as a system of interlocking social institutions may help flesh out the abstract idea. Geertz’s (1983) “common sense” can be taken as an illustration of a particular dominant institution. He makes the point that what is considered common sense in any particular society is culturally constructed, giving many examples showing how the common sense of one society contradicts that of another (Scheff 1990: 137-42). A crucial point implied by Geertz’s consideration of common sense is that it is always antireflexive, no matter what culture it occurs in: “Common sense represents matters . . . as being what they are by the simple nature of the case. An air of ‘of-courseness,’ a sense of ‘it figures’ is cast over things. . . .

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They are depicted as being inherent in the situation, intrinsic aspects of the situation, the way things go” (1983: 139). The idea that common sense is antireflexive is a crucial point for understanding not only this particular instance, but also all other social institutions. What gives institutions their enormous power is that they are seen as self-evident and therefore not available for questioning. If one does not even have that option, conformity is more or less automatic. Geertz’s comments on common sense can be applied intact to any dominant social institution. The attitude of the simpleness of reality that he says is characteristic of cultural systems of common sense applies equally well to all hegemonic institutions: “The world is what the wide-awake, uncomplicated person takes it to be . . . the really important facts of life lie scattered openly along its surface” (1983: 139). To give an example, it is my experience that the attitude of simpleness described by Geertz is that taken by the large majority of persons in Western societies toward psychotherapy. Their attitude is not necessarily contemptuous, although it often is. But it is dismissive. A relative of mine, a very intelligent person, recently told me that what goes on in psychotherapy is mostly navel gazing. Except for a fairly small psychologically minded middle-class group in the United States, this attitude is nearly universal in modern societies. It is a spin-off from a more formidable institution in Western societies, the myth of the self-contained individual. If, as I have suggested, everyday reality is made up of a system of interlocking institutions, then a reflexive social science would challenge all of them. As Schutz (1962) points out, the smooth functioning of the status quo of a society requires in its members a virtually identical set of presuppositions, “the attitude of daily life.” This attitude is accepted totally and without question. Those that accept it are seen as normal, sane, regular persons. They are thought of as “fitting in,” as “our soTt.” They are gleigeschalten (meshing smoothly like the gears of a perfectly engineered machine). Not only do their thoughts, actions, and feelings mesh with those of others, but the enmeshment is perfectly aligned: there is no friction. But Goffman’s writing shatters the calm surface of everyday life; it notices and comments on what is to be taken for granted by members in good standing. It therefore challenges the sanctity of daily life by implying that it, like any other social institution, is constructed. Goffman’s writing is radical, but not in a political sense; it is more primitive than that. It proposes not a political/economic revolution but a revolution in culture. It was Goffman’s challenge to all dominant institutions that confused Gouldner and other reviewers who criticized Goffman’s politics or lack of politics. His method of investigation was more fundamental than the politics of left and right, which is highly conventional compared to Goffman’s incursions.

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BEFORE SCIENCE The grip that established institutions have even on science has been nicely caught by the philosopher William Quine: “The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing tropes [metaphors] away” (1979: 160). That is, it often happens that before scientific procedures are applicable, an obstructive metaphor has to be overthrown. Philip Manning (1992) applies Quine’s dictum to Goffman’s metaphors (drama, games, ritual, etc.), suggesting that in the course of his career, Goffman made progress toward clearing away or at least quallfying his own metaphors. But Manning doesn’t give full weight to what to me is the more significant point: the importance of Goffman’s metaphors in clearing a way for social science itself. The history of the physical sciences is full of examples of the clearing away of obstructive tropes. Progress in the astronomy of planetary motion was delayed for over a century because of the trope that the Earth was the center of the universe. This idea is a correlate of a social institution that might be called universal ethnocentrism: we human beings are the center and purpose of the cosmos. Astronomers, like everyone else, took for granted that the planets circled around the earth. In the sixteenth century, Brahe had made a very accurate charting of the transit of Venus.3But he could not plot the shape of the orbit because he assumed Venus orbited around the Earth. Kepler, who obtained the data after Brahe’s death, was equally puzzled for many years. The idea of a logocentric universe was so ingrained that Kepler hit upon the solution only inadvertently. In an attempt to get past whatever it was that was obscuring the solution, he devised a geometric model of the planetary orbits based on solid figures representing polyhedrons. The model was ridiculous except for one feature: Kepler had inadvertently placed the sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. Similarly, Einstein began work on the theory of relativity with a joke concerning persons passing each other on trains, trying to determine their speed relative to each other. He realized intuitively that this situation challenged the ruling trope that time and motion were absolute. Although he had a doctorate in physics, Einstein knew little mathematics. He had to get help to put his antitrope into mathematical form. Quine’s formulation captures the primitive, intuitive element necessary for scientific advance. Goffman’s work seems to have made the deconstruction of ruling tropes its main goal. This goal would explain why he seemed to start afresh with each work. He was not trying to establish a theory, method, or evidence. “Look,”he might have said, “it’seasy to construct an alternative universe. It’s so easy I can start anew with each book, ignoring even my own earlier work.”

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FREUD AND GOFFMAN’S CHALLENGE TO INSTITUTIONS Freud also seemed to have an instinct for challenging dominant institutions. Like Goffman, his principal attack was on the myth of the self-contained individual. However, his attack concerned a different component than Goffman’s, the idea of rational self-control. Freud sought to show that most human behavior is compulsive, determined not by rational self-control but by one’s past. Freud’s early studies challenged another dominant institution of his era, male superiority. When he reported a case of male hysteria to his local medical society, he was surprised by the vehemence and disgust of the response. A much wider shock was caused by his study that suggested that neurosis was caused by child molestation, usually in the form of father-daughter incest. Freud quickly recanted from this thesis, perhaps because of the hostility of his colleagues. The institution of male superiority was so powerful that Freud’s challenge led his colleagues to threaten expulsion. Toward the end of his life, Freud took on organized religion, which in his time was still one of the dominant institutions. In 7%eFuture of an Illusion (1927), he had the temerity to argue that religion acted as a mechanism of defense, warding off not only pain and suffering but also reality. Like Goffman, Freud’s main substantive challenge was to the core social institution of Western societies: the belief in the self-contained individual. The basic premise of Freud’s work was that unconscious thoughts, motives, and feelings formed the core of the self, from which he never recanted. Not only has the idea of the unconscious not been accepted in Western societies; it is usually not even seriously considered. The average layperson, and perhaps even the average academic, simply dismisses this idea out of hand, as in one of Geertz’s examples of the attitude of common sense. Certainly the premise of rational choice is far more prevalent in current social science and is accepted with little critical evaluation. The idea that psychotherapy involves little more than navel gazing, mentioned earlier, is one of many corollaries of the institution of individualism. Unlike Goffman, Freud was emotionally committed to the substantive areas he investigated, since they were closely connected to his work as a practitioner. Goffman, on the other hand, was free to enter and leave substantive areas at will. Perhaps that is one reason why he was better able than Freud to maintain a reflexive stance with respect to his own work. Goffman’s primary interest was not in deconstructing the institution of the self-contained individual. Rather, his focus was always on deconstmcting all taken-for-granted conventions in social science, of “unmasking vested orthodoxies wherever they were encountered (Travers 1997). A clear example is Goffman’s attack on the social institution of gender (Goffman 1976, 1977). Long before it was stylish for men to do so, he discovered the subordination

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of women implied in advertisements about women. West (1!996> has shown how correct, by current feminist standards, his analysis was. But he wasn’t a feminist, just a hell-raising social scientist. His legacy is one of intellectual revolution, undermining the status quo-that is, the dominant social institutions in Western societies.

WAS GOFFMAN A FREE-FLOATING INTELLECTUAL? 1 think it was Goffman’s challenge to the assumptive grounds, the overall footing, of social science that was most irritating to those who have commented on his work, even the most appreciative of them. In one of the broadest of reviews, Collins appreciates and criticizes simultaneously: “Goffman seems hyper-reflexive; he himself manifests an extreme form of roledistance, separating himself from any clear, straightforward position, be it theoretical or popular. In this sense, he appears as the epitome of the 1950’s intellectual; hip to the point of unwillingness to take any strong stance, even the stance of his own hipness” (1980: 206). On the one hand, Collins alludes to what I take to be the central feature of all of Goffman’s writing: it is “hyper-reflexive.” On the other hand, to accuse him of a pose (hipness) seems not only misguided, but also suggests irritation. Lemert, perhaps the most appreciative of all of the commentators, suggested that as with his contemporaries-David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, William H. Whyte Jr., and others-a critique of contemporary society could be found in Goffman: “[Clontrary to the impression that he lacked a social consciousness, [Goffman] actually worked out his own, admittedly perverse and muted, social critique of America in the 1950’s” (1997: xxiv). As in the Collins passage, there is a slap mixed in with the praise, in “perverse and muted.” The idea that Goffman’s social critique was “muted” is similar to Collins’s complaint that Goffman “separated himself from any clear, straightforward position.” As already indicated, there is some justice to the charge that Goffman’s position is muted or not clear, because he didn’t adequately explain his intent. But another reason might have more to do with us, his readers, than with Goffman himself-that his work is so advanced that we haven’t yet understood it. The surprising part of Lemert’s passage is the choice of the wordperverse. It seems to me that a more appropriate word would have been subversive. As suggested, Goffman’swork cuts the ground out from everyone, including his most insightful and appreciative commentators. The implication I draw is that none of us, not even his fans, are yet as free of the assumptive world as Goffman. We haven’t caught up with him yet. Does that mean that I thmk that Goffman was indeed a free-floating intellectual in all areas? By no means. I believe he went further than anyone in

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social science, but he himself had at least one area in which he was as entrapped as anyone else. Giddens (1988) points out that Goffman’s interaction order, his arena of supreme competence, can be seen as a link between two other crucial arenas: the psychology of the individual, and the macrosystems of the larger society-political, economic, linguistic, and so on. Giddens goes on to say that Goffman did little in exploring such links, largely because he ignored both macrosystems and individual psychology. Goffman, however, wasn’t prejudiced against studying macrosystems. In his early work he was too busy charting the interaction order. But even in that initial work, some of his ideas pointed toward larger systems, for example, the concept of the total institution. Later, he was clearly moving toward such systems, the institutions of gender and of language (Goffman 1979, 1981). One of the concepts from his later work, “footing”(the presuppositions held in common by persons engaged in dialogue), can be extended from the microworld setting he intended for the macroworld. In this world, the footing becomes the set of presuppositions held in common by all persons in dialogue in a given society. Goffman’suse of the termfooting seems to be an application of Schutz’s idea of the attitude of everyday life applied to specific interactions. But I think that he was prejudiced toward individual psychology, entrapped in a way that was quite similar to everyone else. One early indication is his omission of the experiential side of embarrassment in the article (Goffman 1956)*in which he sought to provide an explicit definition of that emotion. Goffman also seemed ready to make remarks critical of psychology as a discipline, as in this comment: “[Wle [sociologistsl haven’t managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it” (Goffman 1983: 2). In my own contact with Goffman, he often expressed reservations about my interest in connecting individual and social psychology with societal process. It was not the societal part he objected to; he never complained about my interest in large-scale process. It was only the psychology part. One example will suffice. I told him, in the late 1970s, that I was writing a book on catharsis (Scheff 1979); he responded that I should leave that topic to psychologists. I said that they are not studying catharsis and seemed to have no intention of doing so. His response was an exasperated sigh and curt dismissal: “You [Tom] can always find a wall to be off of.” Since he hadn’t seen the manuscript, his irritation suggests prejudice. 1 dwell on Goffman’s prejudice against individual psychology because I think it illustrates an important general point. An intellectual can be freefloating in some arenas, as Goffman was with respect to the interaction order, but entrapped in others. Mannheim (1936) distinguishes between two kinds of rigid assumptive worlds, ideology and utopia. He uses the word

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ideology in a much broader sense than it is ordinarily used: he means the entire assumptive world that underlies the status quo in a given society. In Mannheim’s sense, a utopia is a reaction against the prevailing ideology, a counterculture. Initially it may liberate creative forces in the rebels, when they are still capable of seeing the world in both the old and the new ways. But over time, as the utopians lose touch with the old ideology, the utopia degenerates into an institution restrictive as the status quo that was rejected. The utopians reject the holders of ideology as much as those holders reject them. Psychoanalytic theory, offering a binocular vision in its early days, now has its own cultural status quo. On a grander scale, Western individualism stands as a rigid utopia toward the rigid social enmeshment of traditional and Asian societies. Goffman rebelled against most of the dominant institutions, but not against the bias in social science and society toward the psychology of individuals.

CONCLUSION Is there any remedy for social science? Mainstream social science, for the most part, continues to ignore the basic implications of Goffman’s substantive work. One example is the methodological individualism o n which most social science research is based. Sample surveys, for the most part, still use individuals as their basic sources. Those parts of the self that Goffman suggested are reflections of social arrangements and automatically ignored. Most psychological scales have the same limitation. Even that research that seeks only to explore the psychology of individuals seems unaware of Goffman’s approach to interaction, particularly on the large and subtle effects of the subject’s relationship with the interviewer or test administrator, and the larger social context in which the data are gathered. Since there don’t seem to be any new Goffmans on the horizon, perhaps we all need to practice his art of deconstructing taken-for-granted assumptions in social science, not just the Western fascination with the individual. To be as effective as Goffman, we all need to be marginal persons, llke him. Any exposure to new perspectives can open the door: partaking of a culture new to us, as in participant observation; learning a new language; reading fiction that serves as an entrance to new and different worlds. Living in a new town or country, or undertaking psychotherapy, can also serve as gateways to bisociation, of having binocular vision. In terms of substantive issues, I think that linking the macroworld, interaction order, and individual psychology is the most pressing need in social science, as Giddens (1988) suggests. An example is provided by the extraordinary book Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious (19991, by Michael Billig. He arranges a collision between discourse analysis

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and psychoanalytic theory, by using dialogue from Freud’s cases and from his life. As a result, Billig is able to modlfy the theory in a way that grounds it in actual data. The way he gets to institutional anti-Semitism in turn-of-the century Vienna from the dialogue between Freud and Dora (Freud’s famous patient) is nothing less than inspired. In my own work, I made a halting step toward connecting the three arenas in my analysis of emotional bases of the origins of the two world wars (Scheff 1994). It is little more than a sketch, but I show how various texts suggest that during the period 1871-1914, France and Germany were entangled in a collective spiral of shame/rage and how Hitler’s appeal to the German people was also based on shame/rage. If anyone knows of other attempts, I would like to hear about them. In the meantime, since Goffman went further in freeing himself from the restrictions of our assumptive reality, perhaps we should hew to the lines that he was establishing. Several of Goffman’s reviewers have suggested directions that could systematize his work as a tool for further research.j Until we have a new Goffman, perhaps we still have to make the most of the old one. I propose that Goffman’s method of the development of concepts based on making “accurately improper moves” should be applied not only to his own field, the interaction order, but to the two other fields to which it is linked: the study of individual psychology and of social institutions. That is to say, that Goffman’s approach could be the model for the development of a new social science.

NOTES 1. See Ditton (19801, Drew and Wooton (19881, Riggins (1990), Manning (19921, Burns (19921, Smith (19991, and Fine and Smith (2001). This latter publication is virtually a monument. In four volumes, it contains most of the chapters from the earlier six books as well as a very large sampling of every other evaluation of Goffman’s work. There are also several volumes in other languages devoted to Goffman. 2. This last passage, because of its inclusion of the idea that the social scene involves persons mutually present for one another, invokes the kind of social sharing of consciousness central to Goffman’s focus on embarrassment, described earlier. The idea of selves arising out of the social sharing of consciousness has been presaged by literary masters, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, whose “basic assumption [was] that the individual’s identity is gained only through participation in a complex field of other individuals’ consciousnesses” (Oats 1974: 33). 3. My discussion of the discovery of the orbit of Venus follows Koestler (1959). 4. An expanded version can be found in Goffman (1967). 5. See Williams (1988), particularly on Goffman’smethods, and Manning (1992) on combining many of Goffman’s ideas to construct a viable theory.

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REFERENCES Billig, Michael. 1999. Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1986. Symbolic Interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burns, Tom. 1992. Eruing Goffman. London: Routledge. Ditton, Jason, ed. 1980. The Viewfrom Goffman. New York: St. Martin’s. Collins, Randall. 1980. “Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory,” Pp. 170-209 in The Viewfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Drew, Paul, and Anthony Wootton, eds. 1988. Eruing Gofman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Cambridge: Polity. Elias, Norbert. 1998. On Civilization, Power, and Knowledge. Chicago: University‘ of Chicago Press. Fine, Gary Alan, and Gregory W. Smith, eds. 2001. Erving Goffman, vols. 1 4 . Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Freud, Sigmund. 1927. The Future of an Illusion. London: Hogarth. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. in ErvGiddens, Anthony. 1988. “Goffman as Systematic Social Theorist.” Pp. 2%7-9 ing Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wooton. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, Erving. 1955. “On Face-work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiaty 18, no. 3: 213-31. -. 1956. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociol0 0 6 2 , no. 3: 264-74. , 1959. The Presentation of Selfin Eveyday Lfe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 196la. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation ofMental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor. -. 1961b. Encounters. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. -. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. -. 1967. Interaction Ritual. Chicago: Aldine. -. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1976. “Gender Advertisements.”Studies in the Anthropology of W u a l Communication. Society for the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3, no. 2: 69-1 j4. -. 1977. “Genderisms.”Psycholoy Today 11, no. 3: 60-63. -. 1979. Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan. -. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. -. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1-17. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. -. 1972. “The Politics of the Mind: Reflections on Flacks’ Review of 7he Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.” Social Policy 5: 13-21, 5458. Gronfein, William. 1999. “Mental Illness and the Interaction Order in the Work of Eming Goffman.” Pp. 81-103 in Goffman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy, ed. G. Smith. London: Routledge.

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Heath, Christian. 1988. “Embarrassment and Interactional Order.” Pp. 13660 in Erving Gofman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton. Cambridge: Polity. Hymes, Dell. 1984. “On Erving Goffman.” 7beory and Society 13, no. 5: 621-31. Koestler, Arthur. 1959. The Sleepwalkers. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. -. 1967. The Act of Creation. New York: Dell. Lemert, Charles. 1997. ”Goffman.” Pp. ix-xliii in 7be Gofman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Oxford: Blackwell. Lofland, John. 1980. “Early Goffman: Style, Structure, Substance, Soul.” Pp. 24-51 in 7be Vieulfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. -. 1951.Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Manning, Peter K. 1980. “Goffman’sFraming Order: Style as Structure.” Pp. 252-84 in The Viewfrom Gofman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Manning, Philip. 1992. Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Polity. Mead, George Herbert 1934. Mind, Self; and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1974. New Heaven, New Earth. New York: Vanguard. Phillips, Bernard S. 2001. Beyond Sociology’s Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the Scientific Method. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter. Psathas, George. 1980. “Early Goffman and the Analysis of Face-to-Face Interaction in Strategic Interaction.”Pp. 52-79 in 7be Viewfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Quine, William J. 1979. “A Postscript on Metaphor.” Pp. 159-64 in On Metaphor, ed. S. Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. hggins, Stephen, ed. 1990. Beyond Goffman. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rogers, Mary F. 1980. “Goffman on Power, Hierarchy, and Status.” Pp. 100-33 in 7be Viewfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. New York: St. Martin’s. Scheff, Thomas J. 1979. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama. New York: iUniverse. -. 19%).Microsociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -. 1994. Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War. New York: iUniverse. .1997. Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ,2000. “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory.” Sociological The0y3/ 18: 84-99. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1988. “Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation.” Pp. 89-135 in Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton. Cambridge: Polity. Scheibe, Karl. 2000. 7be Drama of Everyday Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schudson, Michael. 1984. “Embarrassment and Erving Goffman’s Idea of Human Nature.” 7beoy and Society 13, no. 5: 63348. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Nijhoff. Smith, Craig, ed. 1999. Goffman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy. London: Routledge.

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Toiskallio, Kalle. 2000. “Review of Goffman a n d Social Organization.” Acta Sociologica 43, no. 2: 1 7 M 0 . Travers, Andrew. 1997. “Goffman.”Reviewing Sociology 10, no. 1: 1-2. West, Candace. 1996. “Goffman in Feminist Perspective.” Sociological Perspectives 39: 353-69. Whitehead, Alfred North.1962. Science a n d the Modern World. New York: Macmillan. Williams, Robin. 1988. “Understanding Goffman’s Methods.” Pp. 64-88 in Eruing Gofman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wooton. Cambridge: Polity.

2 The Personal Is Dramaturgical (and Political) The Legacy of Erving Goffman Mary F. Rogers

Seven excerpts from Erving Goffman’s 1974 remarks on fieldwork can serve as his virtual preface to this narrative about his legacy. I begin with Goffman’s definition of participant observation: “By participant observation,” he said, “I mean a technique . . . of getting data . . . by subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their . . . situation” (1989: 125). For Goffman, fieldwork is a thoroughly embodied struggle to grasp other people’s point of view as best one can. Good fieldwork “tunes your body up” and with your “tuned-up” body and with the ecological right to be close to them (which you’ve obtained by one sneaky means or another), you are in a position to note their gestural, visual, bodily responses to what’s going on around them and you’re empathetic enough-because you’ve been through the same crap they’ve been taking-to sense what it is they’re responding to. To me, that’s the core of observation. (Goffman 1989: 125)

Also at the core of observation, Goffman implies, is taking the role of the other. As struggle, fieldwork requires no less: “The standard technique is to try to subject yourself, hopefully, to [your subjects’]life circumstances, which means that although in fact you can leave at any time, you act as if you can’t and you try to accept all the desirable and undesirable things that are a feature of their life” (Goffman 1989: 125). Fieldwork thus amounts to coconstituting a world with the people whose point of view one hopes to grasp. In this vein, Goffman says that, “[tlhe way to make a world is to be naked to the bone, to have as few resources as you 71

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can get by with. . . . the way to get it is to need it” (1989: 127). Goffman thus offers a microlevel, situation-specific variant of what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967: 47) call “world openness”: “You have to open yourself up in ways you’re not in ordinary life.” Often one also has to grapple with hierarchy in the field: “If you’ve got to be with a range of people, be with the lowest people first” (Goffman 1989: 130). Finally, Goffman talked about writing field notes and field-based narratives: “Write [your field notes] as lushly as you can, as loosely as you can, as long as you put yourself into it, where you say, ‘I felt that.’ . . . To be scientific in this area, you’ve got to start by trusting yourself and writing as fully and lushly as you can” (Goffman 1989: 131). More concisely than most, Thomas J. Scheff affirms Goffman’s adherence to these criteria, at least with reference to Asylums. Scheff observes that Goffman “wandered the halls of St. Elizabeth‘s hospital. Dressed shabbily, he was usually taken to be a patient. . . . In his analysis he identifies with the patients; most of his narrative is from their point of view. Readers of Asylums report some of the reactions that occur when an axis that is assumed to be absolute is reversed: fear, fury, and awe” (Scheff 1984: 158). Context established, I want to explore Goffman’s legacy using three distinct channels. First, I say a little about his explicit impact on disability studies. Then in greater detail I explore his diffuse, often implicit, impact on qualitative inquiry, especially qualitative data analysis. Then I say what his legacy is for me personally, since I now find his ideas creeping into my work in ways I did not foresee until recently. Broadly, some of my work now centers on Goffman’s legacy in connection with the burgeoning interest not only in human bodies but also in the places they inhabit as, hopefully, what Mitchell Duneier (1999) calls “sustaining habitats.” Less broadly, I am interested in Goffman’s legacy as a source of insights into what I call “public caring.”

DISABILITY STUDIES Lennard J. Davis observes that “the work of many scholars who have investigated aspects of the body is now being reassembled into the field of disability studies” (1997: 4). Among the scholars Davis cites-Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Susan Bordc-is Goffman, specifically his work on stigma. Goffman’s analyses of stigmatizing processes and responses to stigmatization have by now grown into what Catherine Riessman (2000) calls stigma theoy . Such theory represents an important niche within contemporary theorizing about disabilities and about the people seen as ‘.having” them. To say the very least, stigma theory has proven to be far-reaching. As early as 1980, fewer than twenty years after the publication of Stigma, “a consid-

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erdble body of empirical evidence had been amassed” about stigmatization and its ramifications (Scott and Miller 1986: ix). During academic year 1980-1981, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences sponsored the Special Project on Stigma, which gathered together scholars interested in consolidating extant research and theory on stigma. During the summer of 1982, the center sponsored a Summer Institute on Stigma and Interpersonal Relations, which included scholars studying gender and ethnicity as well as diverse disabilities (Scott and Miller 1986: x). Some two decades later, it strikes me that “stigma theory” makes less crucial contributions to understanding gender, sexuality, race, social class, ethnicity, and age (especially preadult and “over-the-hill” people). Feminist studies, queer theory, Afrocentric scholarship, multiculturalism, gerontology, and scholarship on childhood, preadolescence, and adolescence have all, in effect, overshadowed stigma theory. In its stead, identity politics vocabularies and concerns prevail; in-group boundaries-whether based on gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, or other bases-hold theoretical sway. Only in disability studies, it seems, does Goffman’s masterpiece on the practical politics of “difference”or Otherness get the attention it continues to merit. Yet within as well as beyond disability studies Goffman’s grounded theorizing about stigma is unevenly applied and sometimes misapplied. Lerita Coleman, for example, is one of the editors of a 1986 anthology about stigma, wherein Goffman’s work figures prominently (see Ainlay, Becker, and Coleman 1986). Her chapter in that volume comprises marked departures from Goffman’s framework, even though she nowhere quibbles with his formulations. Coleman (1986: 224) appears to have no problem seeing stigmas as “personal difficulties” involving “volition or personal choice.” She insists: Each stigmatized or non-stigmatized individual can choose to feel superior or inferior, and each individual can make choices about social control and about fear. . . . Each individual can choose to ignore social norms regarding stigma. Personal beliefs . . . often differ from norms, but people usually follow the social norms anyway, fearing to step beyond conformity to exercise their own personal beliefs about stigma. (Coleman 1986: 229-30)

Here-in a volume centered on Goffman’s work on stigma-is an example of the good-adjustment ideology that he criticized in no uncertain terms. Coleman implies that if members of stigmatized groups were less weak willed and more nonconformist, they would choose not to feel inferior. They would, in a phrase, exhibit “good adjustment.” In my view, this sort of paradox crops up fairly often among scholars seemingly helping to construct Goffman’s legacy. While they appear to be extending, refining, or at least applying Goffman’s ideas, they often compromise them by tailoring them to fit their own professional (and other) convictions

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and commitments. Thus, as central to disability studies as Goffman’s work appears to be, my prognosis about his legacy there is decidedly guarded. Professionals in what Joseph Gusfield (1989) calls the “troubled-persons industries” will ltkely veer toward good-adjustment applications of Goffman’s thinking, while people with disabilities as well as their advocates may veer toward applications that valorize those whom Goffman (1963b) called “the own and the wise” while exaggerating the ineptitude of so-called normals, sometimes even including “the wise.” All the while, Goffman’s complex rendering of the experiences and situations commonplace among stigmatized people is a resource that remains fully renewable. For starters, it seems noteworthy that for all the attention that Stigma gets in disability studies, Asylums gets precious little. The two are companion volumes, and the disability studies literature itself implies as much. Harlan Lane (1997) offers one example. He talks in powerful terms about the impact of troubled-persons industries on people with disabilities. Yet he makes no mention of Goffman’s analysis of the good-adjustment ideology, never mind the people staffing those high-surveillance systems Goffman called “total institutions.” Another example is Coleman (1986: 223), who makes central use of Stigma but makes no mention of Asylums despite her concern with “social quarantines” and such. As social structures and cultures shift, as material conditions change and diverse technologies continue coming into play, Goffman’s Stigma and Asylums (never mind the others) have much to say about how and to what ends people’s identities get spoiled. Yet recently Riessman (2000: 131, 122) saw fit to emphasize the “historically and culturally” conditioned character of Goffman’s stigma theory, suggesting that his framework is incapable of depicting people’s “complex and contradictory” responses to their stigmatization. Part of Goffman’s legacy, then, is to be misunderstood. Another part of his legacy is to have his ideas taken for granted, as we will soon see. As recently as 2001, for instance, a sociological book review of an anthology on stigma failed to make any mention of Goffman’s centrality to that area of inquiry (Hanlon 2001). When I e-mailed the reviewer to ask why, she responded that Goffman was in fact widely acknowledged in the aforementioned volume and that its contents would have been all the more worthwhile had his ideas been given greater play. The reviewer perhaps took for granted that her sociological audience would take such judgments for granted.

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY Another part of Goffman’s legacy is to be marginalized when his ideas should hold center stage (metaphor intended). Often this condition is dra-

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matically observable in qualitative inquiry, including data analysis, within the social sciences. Let me illustrate this claim by looking at a recent ethnography and then at several additional field-based studies. I begin on a few blocks in Greenwich Village. The sociologist-ethnographer is of course Mitchell Duneier, and his fieldwork on and around those several blocks resulted in the masterpiece entitled simply Sidewalk. In h study, Duneier’s focus is on the entrepreneurial and survival activities of unhoused men who made those blocks in Greenwich Village their habitat. As far as I have been able to determine, Duneier (199: 378) only cites Goffman once, after having quoted h s Pacific Sociological Association remarks on fieldwork as an epigraph for Duneier’s appendix on method. Yet Duneier’s ethnography is replete with concerns and themes that Goffman illuminates as no one else ever has. To wit, a great deal of Sidewalk concerns deference and demeanor. In great detail Duneier shows how these unhoused men-whether as panhandlers, street vendors, customers in McDonald’s and elsewhere, or as nephews, grandfathers, and lovers-typically exhibit distinctive forms of deference toward police, passersby, their own customers, acquaintances, family members, and one another. Similarly, Duneier’s book delineates the diverse and sometimes colorful demeanors observable among these menfrom the polished yet street-savvy demeanor of Hakim to the sometimes entangling and bothersome demeanor of Mudrick. All the while, Duneier’s study centers on behavior in public places. Whatever his intellectual and methodological indebtedness to Howard S. Becker, Gerald Suttles, Harvey Moltoch, and others, Duneier seems beholden to Erving Goffman. In his text, though, Goffman is but an illuminating shadow, a bright underside. Another place where one would expect Goffman’s concepts and ideas to show up with some prominence is Shulamit Reinharz’s Feminist Methods in Social Research. This first-rate book includes chapters on ethnography, case studies, and content analysis where Goffman’s ideas not only about fieldwork but also about strategic interaction, teamwork, face-work, interpersonal rituals, “action,” and frame analysis are invaluable. Yet Reinharz’s volume of nearly three hundred pages cites Goffman only once-and then only in connection with someone (Mary Jo Deegan) else’s application of his ideas (Reinharz 1992: 152). What makes Goffman’s absence from this text all the more remarkable, I think, is its feminism. Written by an author likely herself to have been stigmatized in more ways than one-as a woman, a feminist, a Jewish person-and written about research done about and on behalf of girls and women as stigmatized groupings, Feminist Methods in Social Research nevertheless lacks a dramaturgical voice. Two of Arlie Hochschild’s studies, one an older and the other a newer classic, also illustrate the marginalization of Goffman’s ideas. Hochschilds work explicitly bespeaks its indebtedness to Goffman while also refracting

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the enigma of his legacy. Her later works are widely cited. I begin, though, with her first book, 7&eUneqected Community, based on her 1969 doctoral dissertation entitled “A Community of Grandmothers.” This study is an ethnography of a community of senior citizens (mostly widows) inhabiting Merrill Court, a San Francisco housing project where Hochschild had worked as an assistant recreation director (not unlike Goffman in Asylums) and as a writer for the building’s monthly newsletter. From the outset, Hochschild acknowledges Goffman’s influence. “One’s debt to all the old Columbuses in sociology goes without saying,” she states, “but Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman have been especially important to me” (1973: x). From the outset, too, Hochschild expresses the sensibility of a dramaturgical participant-observer. Much as Goffman himself might have written, she writes that her book tells about [this] community as a mutual aid society, as a source of jobs, as an audience, as a pool of models for growing old, as a sanctuary and as a subculture. . . . It tells about friendships and rivalries within the community as well as relations with daughters, store clerks, nurses, and purse snatchers outside. It goes into a good deal of homey detail about such things as the insides of people’s living rooms, their refrigerators and photo albums, what they watch on television, whom they visit, and what they think of other old people. Through the book theoretical speculation pops up from the data in a not altogether systematic way. (Hochschild 1973: ix)

Before long, Hochschild describes her efforts “bringing [her] definition of the situation closer to theirs or being clear about just how the two differed” (5). She also mentions the “meanings they attached to gestures and words” (5). In the end, Hochschild came to see most of the residents as “social siblings” (65). Despite the dramaturgical richness of her study as well as her invocation of Goffman as one of sociology’s “Columbuses,” Goffman’s key concepts play no explicit role in Hochschild’s report (including its footnotes and endnotes). Indeed, Goffman himself is missing except from Hochschild’s references where she cites his five books published between 1959 and 1964. Yet Hochschild’s text does mention Howard S. Becker, Herbert J. Gans, Arnold Rose, and, yes, Georg Simmel. Her footnotes and endnotes include sources as wildly diverse as George C. Homans and Thorstein Veblen (Hochschild 1973: 1 4 6 4 7 ) . Where is Goffman? Despite Hochschilds explicit expression of indebtedness to his ideas Goffman serves here, as in Duneier’s text, as no more than an illuminating shadow. Yet, as with Duneier’s study, Hochschild is exploring matters at the heart of Goffman’s first five books-the presentation of self, teams and teamwork, secondary gains, moral careers, identities, encounters in public, and stigmatization based on gender, age, and social class, including welfare dependence.

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I turn now to the book that first acquainted many of us with Hochschild’s work, namely, Tbe Managed Heart. Subtitled Commercialization of Human Feeling, this work is also right up Goffman’s alley-front and back regions, impression management, being “on” and being “off,”interaction rituals, and so forth. In this work Goffman does play an explicit role, but he still remains mostly a shadowy presence, a colleague who is marginal as well as virtual. Again, Hochschild mentions Goffman in her preface, this time in terms of her “indebted[nessl for his keen sense of how we try to control our appearance even as we unconsciously observe rules about how we ought to appear to others” (1983: x). Before long, Goffman shows up in Hochschild’s text with reference to the “minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction” (10). There she notes how Goffman “prevents us from dismissing the small as trivial by showing how small rules, transgressions, and punishments add u p to form the longer strips of experience we call ‘work.”’ Soon again Hochschild mentions Goffman for having shown “the action is in the body language, the put-on sneer, the posed shrug, the controlled sigh” (35). Then for the third time in the book Hochschild mentions Goffman, this time only in passing along with “other sociologists” who emphasize “advantage seeking in the social arena” (62). Thereafter Goffman recedes from Hochschild’s volume, not resurfacing for 140 or so pages where he gets a passing mention in the company of John Dewey, Hans H. Gerth, and C. Wright Mills (Hochschild 1983: 205). That mention is significant, however, because it foreshadows Goffman’s centrality to the pages that follow. Indeed, this late-perhaps belated-mention of Goffman appears in appendix A to Hochschild’s book, entitled “Models of Emotion: From Darwin to Goffman” (1983: 201-22). Before long, then, Goffman becomes a major presence in this first of four add-ons to the main text. Released from the shadows and taking center stage, Goffman’s ideas now seem likely to get the positive, indeed enthusiastic, recognition foreshadowed in Hochschild’s preface. That fails to materialize, though. Instead, Hochschild briefly cites Goffman’s superiority to Gerth and Mills in portraying “the evanescent situations that make up what we call institutions” (1983: 214). She goes on to note that Goffman showed “how the social solidarity we take for granted must be continually recreated in daily life. . . . The nature of the work varies marvelously, but the fact of it remains quietly constant.” Thereafter Hochschild’s expression of appreciation for Goffman’s ideas goes downhill. She concludes that his actor “has little inner voice” and worse (in my judgment). By now, Hochschild seems to go beyond taking Goffman’s insights more or less, albeit appreciatively, for granted. At least vaguely, she joins the company of scholars who both acclaim and distort (or at least shortchange) Goffman’s work. I now take a swift look at one final study. Barrie Thorne’s (1993) Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School is a more recent instance of qualitative work

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focused on dramaturgical processes. Thorne’s bibliography cites two of Goffman’s books and one of his papers; she mentions him only twice in her text and cites his work only six times in her endnotes. Like Hochschdd’s work, Thorne’s enthnography focuses on Goffmanian matters-interpersonal rituals, deference and demeanor, stigma (“pollution rituals”), framing, identity, and interaction. Thorne herself underscores her theoretical kinship with Goffman at quite a few junctures, albeit implicitly. She notes, for instance, how “the frames of ‘play’ and ‘ritual’set the various forms of borderwork a bit apart from ongoing ‘ordinary’ life”; how “the framing of ritualized play” provides leeway; and how “[pllay and ritual can comment on and challenge, as well as sustain, a given ordering of reality” (87). This last observation has a footnote, but Goffman has no place there. Similarly, Thorne devotes a section of her opening chapter to “The Metaphor of Play,” where she mentions ritual, performance, and “scripted action” (5). Here, too, she theoretically aligns with Goffman. Yet his ideas remain a bright underside in her book. Since I am about to say how I myself have made textual moves and set theoretical limits much as Duneier, Hochschild, and Thorne have, I am meaning not to criticize their texts. Rather, I seek to enlarge their context so as to unpack the mystery of Goffman’s near-absence there. This case of the virtually missing sociologist is likeliest to be solved by considering how all the clues point to Goffman’s extraordinarily diffuse influence. His influence has been great enough that many of us find it easy to take his dramaturgical principles for granted as signposts on the sociological terrain. His ideas have become, in effect, common elements of the frames used among sociologists doing qualitative data analysis, whether the data at hand are field-based or not. As James Traub puts it, “A public figure leaves a ‘legacy’ only if his principles or policies alter the chemistry of his world, so that they come to be repeated unconsciously” (2001: 100). Such is Goffman’s legacy. He altered the chemistry of the worlds of social science and social theory (and beyond), and many of us fall back on his work without even knowing it.

BODY, PLACE, A N D PUBLIC CARING Even when we believe ourselves to be appreciative of and indebted to Goffman’s corpus, we still fail sometimes to see how far it can carry us along ever widening pathways. I turn now to how Goffmdn’s ideas might be further and powerfully diffused, to how his legacy might take twenty-first century-even postmodernist-shape. Specifically, I look to Goffman for a compendium of ideas about body, place, and public caring. At the same time I disclose my own lapses that parallel the ones I sense in Duneier’s, Hochschild’s, and Thorne’s books.

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I begin with a paper I presented several years ago at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. In that work“Homeplaces,Grieving, and Environmental Degradation”-[ examined how embodiment in familiar places gives way to grief as “developers” continue paving their way into our backyards and byways. I discussed the need to counteract “the notion of a pure and featureless ‘space”’with insights into “the earthly places in which we remain corporeally embedded” (Abram 1997: 185). As David Abram emphasizes, “place” is above all a “qualitative matrix“ quite unlike “infinite and homogeneous ’space”’(see Massey 1994: 167). People’s experiences occur in places, not in space as such. To those places we need to pay a great deal more respect and attention, I argued. Did I turn then to Goffman’s insights into regions, public places, and such? No. Instead, I turned tentatively to Toni Sachs Pfeiffer, whose observational technique is called “becoming a space” (Hiss 1991: 88). It involves “getting to know a place as well as it could know itself,” not unlike what conservationist Aldo Leopold meant by “thinking like a mountain.” Belatedly, I think it also means attuning one’s body and immersing oneself in the field just as intensely as Goffman described in his 1974 remarks. It means recognizing that “creating the world is involved in our every act” (Jackson 1995: 22). It means seeing public as well as private places as social regions where identity, interaction, rituals, and world making coalesce as surely as we breathe air and take care. A year and a half later, I presented another paper with ecological themes-this one entitled “Ecological Identity, Emotion Work, and the Caring Self.” In that work I considered Mitchell Thomashow’s ideas, in particular how ecological identity work likely eventuates in a more caring self a s well as a heightened ecological identity. Thomashow describes ecological identity work in terms of observational awareness, widening circles of identification, an ecological worldview, and a politics of place. For Thomashow, environmentalism is a process, namely, “the unfolding, evolving, active development of an ecological worldview, a perspective that is at once dynamic, diverse, and radical” (1996: 5, emphasis added). In that paper, I argued that environmentalism in the North is radical because it broadly implies the myriad, practical possibilities of anticonsumerism, on the one side, and public caring, on the other side. The anticonsumerist side of environmentalism belongs in yet another paper. Here I explore how Goffman’s ideas illuminate the radicality of the caring self who undertakes what Joanna Macy (1991) calls the “greening of the self.” Thomashow first hints at the green self as a caring self when he surveys the commonplace features of ecofeminism. In that type of environmentalism he sees “the cultivation of interdependence, relational ability, belonging, nurturing, sensitivity, and intuitive ability” (1996: 57). In that type of environmentalism, then, he sees femininity writ large. Yet caring as a public project can

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be neither feminine nor masculine; public caring must transcend gender. Above all, such caring means behaving well in publicplaces. Goffman’s ideas are capable of anchoring a social psychology of public caring. Put differently, such a social psychology has rich dramaturgical veins. In my paper, I had turned to the work of Harry G. Frankfurt, a philosopher who implies close connections between care and emotion work. Caring, he says, entails not so much doing “something to” oneself but doing “something with” oneself. As Frankfurt continues, he implies the generic sorts of things that people d o with themselves as caring creatures. He says, for instance, that the caring person is “identifie[dl with what he [or she1 cares about,” becoming “vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he [or she3 cares about is diminished or enhanced” (Frankfurt 1988: 83). Frankfurt’s caring person is, I believe, Goffman’s expressive, impression-managing individual negotiating his or her way in public places. At root that negotiation consists of face-saving, selfexpressive interpersonal rituals that express one’s respect for or deference toward those who are copresent. Before I revisited Goffman of late, I had failed to see these connections. By now, though, I look to Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places (and beyond) for insights into what “public caring” might mean in practical terms within the mundane world we take for granted. In the process, of course, I join some disability scholars as well as Duneier, Hochschild, and Thorne in not having seen the dramaturgical boat even as it carries me to new shores. I end, then, with more excerpts from Goffman, this time from that 1963 volume subtitled Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. I begin with Goffman’s reference to “the privilege and duty of participating in face engagements,” which leads into his conceptualization of social recognition (1963a: 112). For Goffman, such recognition is “the process of openly welcoming or at least accepting the initiation of engagement, as when a greeting or smile is returned (1963a: 113). Social recognition expresses our fundamental openness to other people as well as our acknowledgment of the embodied fact of their copresence. It signals our awareness of sharing space, of coinhabiting for a while the same place or habitat. Social recognition thus expresses our awareness of those individuals with whom we constitute our immediate social world, those other actors whom Alfred Schutz ([19321 1967) called our consociutes. Put differently, social recognition affirms consociation.

Clifford Geertz’s depiction of Balinese culture illustrates the powerindeed, the social beauty-af such affirmation. Geertz portrays the Balinese people as artists of social recognition. As consociates who “share, however briefly or superficially not only community of time but also of space,” they pervasively recognize one another as collaborators in a common enterprise

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(Geertz 1973: 365). Geertz puts it this way: “Etiquette is a kind of dance, dance a kind of ritual, and worship a form of etiquette” (400). Balinese life pivots around ceremonialization, which amounts to pervasive social recognition. He concludes that “in Bali manners are not a mere matter of practical convenience or incidental decoration but are a deep spiritual concern” (399). For Goffman, too, social recognition is ceremonial and, perhaps, spiritual in the most prosaic yet vital sense. His is, after all, a “possibilitariansociology” (O’Neill 1972: 217). For Goffman, social recognition often involves no more than “a glance specifically functioning as a ceremonial gesture of contact with someone.” Such ritualistic recognition lies at the core of anything we might call “public caring.” With social recognition in mind as the sine qua non of public caring, I reflect on some additional excerpts from Behavior in Public Places: “public places” refer [sic] to any regions in a community freely accessible to members of that community. (Goffman 1963a: 9)

Publicplaces thus has to do not only with copresence in space but also with social boundaries porous enough to allow every member of a community more or less easy access. But access, though essential, is insufficient for constituting public places. John O’Neill pinpoints its insufficiency in modern societies: “All the spaces of the modern world are absorbed into a single economy whose rhythms are linear and mechanical” rather than multidmensional and ceremonial (1972: 23). Modernity, says O’Neill,creates “a wasteland between the boundaries of the heart and the public presentation of the self (25). In that wasteland, “public life is reduced to shopping expeditions, church attendance, and movie-going’’ (36) Worse, “individual interests are so privatized that people fear and denigrate public activities” so that “common effort is likely to be viewed only as a substitute for private effort” (35-36). Besides access, then, certain kinds of codes have to govern public space so that it gives way to lively, enrichingpublicplaces. Such codes are, at root, “form[s]of regulation of social interaction in public” (Anderson 1999: 23). In Goffman’s possibilitarian vision the core codes concern communication. In a community’s public places, he argued, “the communication rules of the community tend to cut through particular interests of the moment” (Goffman 1963a: 116). Whatever plans and projects bring its diverse participants there, public places invite transcendence of those particularities in the interest of temporarily sustaining a habitat together. Essentially intertwined with the particularism of its participants’ distinctive relevances (Schutz 1970), then, is the for-all-practical-purposes universalism characteristic of public places. In Goffman’s terms, sharers of public places can and do develop together a “working consensus,” involving a degree of mutual consideration,

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sympathy, and a muting of opinion differences (1963a: 96). Participants’ mutuality may be slight but remains nonetheless consequential: “Except for the ritual of civil inattention, the mere exchange of friendly glances is perhaps the most frequent of our interpersonal rituals” (Goffman 1963a: 101). What may be culturally constructed as “casual” or “passing” attention to others serves in any dramaturgical framework worth its analytical stage as precious, generic (albeit taken-for-granted) rituals quietly enacting and routinely affirming public life. All the while, body idiom, a “conventionalized discourse” of “embodied expressive signs” (Goffman 1963a: 33-34), provides for many variations on and extensions of our interpersonal rituals. In public places and elsewhere, “There is, then, a body symbolism, an idiom of individual appearances and gestures that tends to call forth in the actor what it calls forth in the others, the others drawn from those, and only those, who are immediately present” (Goffman 1963a: 33-34). One hallmark of good behavior in public places, says Goffman, is that “potential initiators are under obligation to stay their own desires”; that is, ,‘the welfare of the individual ought not to be put in jeopardy through his capacity to open himself u p for encounters” (Goffman 1963a: 106, 124). With dramaturgical principles such as these in hand, w e might see our way to theorizing public caring so that public places come to offer the same existential opportunities as social establishments. Every public place, like “every social establishment,” might be theorized as “hav[ingl some crevices that provide . . . shelter” in and through the enactment of social recognition as the predominant mode of behaving in public places (Goffman 1963a: 39). As Maxine Greene puts it: Thinking about our thinking, imagining things for ourselves, seeking a community of concern in a public place: These may be the phases of our striving for social justice, our striving for collectivity, our striving for what is always in the making. . . . These may be our ways of reaching toward each other in safe and unsafe spaces, seeking equality, seeking decency, seeking for a common world. (Greene 2000: 303) How might community members apply these dramaturgical principles and enrich their public places by “reaching toward one another”? In Pensacola, Florida, where I live, some routine strategies are in fairly widespread use in some parts of town. Downtown, for instance, is a promising terrain of public places where making eye contact and briefly uttering some greeting are normative and enjoyable. The eye contact is less than swdt, and the typical greeting is “Hey,” “Mornin’,”or “How ya doin’?”In this area of town, now consisting mostly of retail shops, eateries, and galleries as well as nightspots and professional offices, pockets of well-established and widely known social recognition exist.

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One such pocket of social recognition is the downtown U.S. Post Office. Staffed by four clerks and catering to a clientele that includes office workers, homeless people, and tourists (among others), this postal haven routinely offers good will, good humor, and good treatment. The price to be paid for all these significant expressions of social recognition is a slow-moving line that evokes all the historical stereotypes of the Deep South. Not long ago, for instance, I found myself at the end of a line of about fifteen people when I arrived to send several packages. The length of the line did nothing d~scernible, however, to speed up the service. We all got the same service we would have gotten on a languorous spring morning or a sleepy winter afternoon. In practical terms, what this meant was a fair amount of interaction among those of us waiting in line. The man behind me and I agreed, for instance, that the slow-moving line somehow felt like the Soup Nazi’s line might have felt in that infamous episode of Seinfeld. The woman in front of me talked with me several times as the line inched forward. She and I compared notes on the various postal stations around town and agreed that this one was well worth whatever wait was necessary before reaching the counter. Also, we compared the joys of postal services with the less pristine experiences of e-mail services. All the while, various members of the line made eye contact with one another or otherwise paid their dues of social recognition. After ten minutes or so, I made it to the counter. I got my favorite clerk, Xeno (a pseudonym). After weighing my packages and processing the two different credit cards involved in my transaction, he asked whether I needed anything else. As he began listing the menu of postal commodities, I remembered that indeed I did need some postcard stamps. When Xeno handed me my change from that transaction, I noticed that it held two quarters. Quickly checking to see whether either was a Rhode Island quarter, I explained that I had hoped to get at least one more of those for my twin nephews. Before I knew it, Xeno was emptying his drawer of all its quarters and handing me not one but two Rhode Island quarters. But still the ritual-rich exchange was incomplete. Xeno asked me whether I thought the Alabama quarter was prettier than Rhode Island’s. When I said that I hadn’t yet seen our neighboring state’s twenty-five-cent piece, he hollered down the counter to Chuck, “Hey, toss that Alabama quarter over here.” What came sailing through the air was no quarter, but until Xeno put it in my hand I was unable to tell just what it was-a nickel with two dimes taped to it! The whole audience of this exchange burst out in laughter. Indeed, several former victims of this nonsense had foreseen what was coming. Such public places that are appealing and lively cannot be bastions of efficiency or even facsimiles of subdued orderliness. Instead, as Goffman’swork implies, they are ceremonially rich and replete with interactional possibilities

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that routinely go undeveloped, if only because they are unnoticed in the absence of codes mandating that we “go there.” I want us to reach toward one another in public in ways that defeat the commercialization of public places (Kohn 2001) and overcome their linear, mechanical character. I see in Goffman’s legacy a possibilitarian stance that lets us dare to think of public caring without becoming falsely nostalgic or naively sentimental. After all, Goffman’s possibilitarian sociology does imply a possibilitarian. This social type “is potentially a crackbrain, a dreamer, a fool, and a god who llke Musil’s man without qualities risks the possibilities of reality in the reality of possibility” (O’Neill 1972: 217). Whether Goffman exemplifies or even illustrates that social type, his legacy strikes me as an invitation to reach toward it in our theorizing, our educating, and our public comings and goings. In Goffman’s work, then, I see a more dazzling dramaturgy than I sensed not so long ago. His reach was ecodramaturgical, I believe. As I seek the possibilitarian in myself, I find it instructive to look at his work that way. Some of his work is fundamentally, even poignantly, habitat centered; some of it centers on embodied selfhood and social interaction. With that dual focus in mind, we might further seize the possibilitarian promise of his work. Goffman’s legacy is thus a work in progress. His legacy is, in a word, possibilitarian.

REFERENCES Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More7ban-Human World. New York: Vintage. Ainlay, Stephen C., Gaylene Becker, and Lerita M. Coleman, eds. 1986. The Dilemma of Difference:A Multidisczplinay View of Stigma. New York: Plenum. Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Lzfe of the Inner City. New York: Norton. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. m e Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor. Coleman, Lerita M. 1986. “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified.” Pp. 211-34 in m e Dilemma of Difference: A Multidisciplinay Vieu of Stigma, ed. S . C. Ainlay, G. Becker, and L. M. Coleman. New York: Plenum. Davis, Lennard J., ed. 1997. m e Disability Studies Reader, ed. L. J. Davis. New York: Routledge. Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1988. 7be Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. 7be Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving. 196321. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. .1963b. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

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1989. “On Fieldwork.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18, no. 2: 123-32. Transcribed and ed. L. H. Lofland. Greene, Maxine. 2000. “Lived Spaces, Shared Spaces, Public Spaces.” Pp. 293-303 in Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class, and Gender among Urban Youth, ed. L. Weis and M. Fine. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Gusfield, Joseph R. 1989. “Constructing the Ownership of Social Problems: Fun and Profit in the Welfare State.” Social Problems 36: 431-41. Halnon, Karen Bettez. 2001. “Review of The Social Psychology of Stigma.” Contempora y Sociology 30, no. 5 : 484-86. Hiss, Tony. 1991. The Experience of Place. New York: Vintage. Hochschild, A r k Russell. 1973. The Uneqbected Community. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. -. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, Michael. 1995. At Home in the World. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Kohn, Margaret. 2001. “The Mauling of Public Space.” Dissent (Spring): 71-77. Lane, Harlan. 1997. “Construction of Deafness.” Pp. 15571 in 7be Disability Studies Reader, ed. L. J. Davis. New York: Routledge. Macy, Joanna R. 1991. World as Lover, World as Self: Berkeley, Calif.: Parallax. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Neill,John. 1972. Sociology as a Skin Trade: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 2000. “Stigma and Everyday Resistance Practices: Childless Women in South India.” Gender & Society 14, no. 1: 111-35. Scheff, Thomas J. [19661 1984. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological 7beoy . 2d ed. New York: Aldine. Schutz, Alfred. [19321 1967. 7be Phenomenology of the Social World.Trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. .1970. Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. R. M. Zaner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Scott, Robert A,, and Dale T. Miller. 1986. “Foreword.” Pp. k-xiii in The Dilemma of Difference:A Multidisciplinay View of Stigma, ed. S. C. Ainlay, G. Becker, and L. M. Coleman. New York: Plenum. Thomashow, Mitchell. 1996. Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Thorne, Bame. 1993. Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Trdub, James. 2001, “Giuliani Internalized.” New York Times Magazine (February 11): 62-67, 91, 100, 104.

3 Interaction and Hierarchy in Everyday Life Goffman and Beyond Ann Branaman

Erving Goffman’s influence has been enormous, not only within the interactionist tradition in sociology with which his work has been most closely linked, but also within a much broader array of perspectives and research traditions in sociological social psychology and related fields. As indicated in Cook, Fine, and House’s Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (1995), the most recent authoritative review of the field, Goffman has had a notable impact on sociological thinking about the self and identity, affect and emotion, social interaction, sex and gender, and status structures (Gecas and Burke 1995; Smith-Lovin 1995; Lofland 1995; Maynard and Whalen 1995; Wiley 1995; Ridgeway and Walker 1995). Goffman’s work has been viewed as particularly pivotal to the study of interaction and inequality. Anderson and Snow argue that Goffman’s is the “most sustained work by a single interactionist scholar in this arena” and that he has “served as a model and inspiration for much of the work that has followed” (2001: 397). Similarly, Lofland posits that “Goffman must be seen as forging the pivotal link between interaction and stratification” (1995: 183). Although hierarchy was never Goffman’s explicit concern, as Collins (1981) points out, it is a theme that persistently shows u p in the examples Goffman chooses in illustrating more general concepts. Despite his lack of explicit focus on hierarchy, Goffman’s analyses of face-to-face interaction provide useful tools for understanding how hierarchy is dramatized in everyday life and especially for understanding the interactional constraints that tend to favor the maintenance of hierarchies once they are established. As Rogers (1980) argues, Goffman’s attention to the mundane offers insights into the ways that power and hierarchy work in people’s everyday lives. 86

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Goffman’s contributions to understanding interaction and inequality intersect with work in each of the subareas of sociological social psychology mentioned earlier. One of the key contributions that he offers to interaction and inequality studies, I believe, is that his perspective integrates analyses of self, emotion, interaction, and hierarchy in a way that has not been achieved to the same extent since. Subsequent research provides systematic empirical evidence about interaction and inequality, of which Goffman’s work was only suggestive. Theoretical advances have been made as well. Yet, likely because Goffman was not constrained by methodological standards that seem to prevail in sociology and social psychology today, he was able to cast his net more widely so that he could provide a more multifaceted, albeit largely implicit, account of interaction and inequality. Thus, I would argue that an integration of the advances in empirical knowledge and theoretical specificity offered by subsequent studies of interaction and inequality, coupled with Goffman’s more multifaceted perspective, can serve to advance considerably our understanding of interaction and inequality. In a sense, such a project is already at least implicitly under way in the work of a number of scholars who have been influenced by Goffman. Due to Goffman’s far-reaching influence and the diversity of the bodies of theory and research that address pertinent issues, such an integration is well beyond the scope of this chapter. My more modest objective is to make some preliminary contributions to such a project by presenting Goffman’s contributions to interaction and inequality studies and showing the connections of these ideas to some of the most notable theory and research in the field. The themes in Goffman’s work that are most important to the study of interaction and inequality are (1) his view of the self as a product of performance in everyday social interaction; ( 2 ) his analysis of the conservative tendencies of everyday interaction norms and his related analysis of the relationship between emotion and social order; (3) his investigation of the interactional advantages and disadvantages associated with social rank; ( 4 ) his examination of the tactics used by individuals in resisting, challenging, or at least maintaining respectability in the face of status hierarchies that demean them. Each of these themes is developed in this chapter, with a consideration of how they have influenced and been developed by subsequent scholars.

THE SELF AS A PRODUCT OF PERFORMANCE IN EVERYDAY SOCIAL INTERACTION Goffman’s provocative idea that the self is a product of performances in social situations, developed most fully in The Presentation of Selfin Everyday Life (1956c/1959), has crucial implications for understanding the relationship

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between interaction and inequality. In The Presentation of Self; Goffman analyzes the various dramatic techniques used by individuals and “teams” to sustain desired definitions of reality. Chief among the definitions of reality being sustained are the definitions of the identities of the participants in any social interaction. Goffman notes the conventionality of the idea that people attempt to control the images of themselves that they project in social situations. The more novel point that he makes, however, is one that has become far more commonplace since he proposed it: that the identities of the participants in social situations are constituted through such performances. This idea has had a wide influence, and is especially compatible with postmodern perspectives on the self (see Tseelon 1992; Dowd 1996; Battershill 1990). Here, however, I want to focus on the relevance of this idea to two lines of analysis that are particularly pertinent to interaction and inequality studies: (1) Philip Blumstein’s (1991) investigation of the production of selves in relationships; and ( 2 ) the notion of “doing gender” developed by West and Zimmerman (1987). Goffman’s view of the self as a product of performance in everyday social life is pivotal in Blumstein’s (1991) study of the production of selves in intimate relationships. Blumstein analytically distinguishes between self and identity, defining the self as a personal intrapsychic structure knowable only by the person to whom it belongs, and identity as the face that is publicly displayed. Blumstein’s distinction reflects similar ones made by Goffman, in particular his distinction between self-as-performer and self-as-character in The Presentation of Selfas well as his distinctions between ego identity, personal identity, and social identity in Stigma (1963). Despite terminological differences, Blumstein’s basic argument, that identities shape selves, follows from Goffman. In making this argument, Blumstein, much the same as Goffman had before him, challenges the common sense notion that enacted identities express an individual’s fundamental sense of self but do not significantly shape selves. Blumstein argues that frequently projected identities may come to shape the individual’s sense of self, particularly when such projections occur in the context of significant relationships in which individuals are motivated to identify with the parts that they play. Blumstein uses the term ossijcation, the hardening of identities into selves, to describe this process. Because individuals are inclined to expect congruence between their projected identities and their inward sense of self, particularly in intimate relationships, Blumstein focuses on these types of relationships as a domain where identities are most likely to shape selves. In describing the processes by which identities shape selves in intimate relationships, Blumstein shows how hierarchy may affect not only the identities enacted but also the selves attributed to partners. Intimate partners, he suggests, tend to have various motives for defining one another in particular ways. If one wants to maximize the commitment of one’s partner to the re-

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lationship, for example, one might be motivated to define the partner as being inept in a number of ways and hence dependent on the relationship to balance one’s deficiencies. In some cases, both partners mutually participate in attributing to one another complementary proficiencies and deficiencies, creating an equal relationship of interdependence. In other cases, however, hierarchy is produced by attributing a disproportionate amount of crucial deficiencies to one partner and hence creating a sense of asymmetrical dependence. The more interpersonally competent partner in a relationship tends to control the identity negotiations in that relationship, exercising authority over definitions of reality in the couple’s everyday experience as well as over the identities and selves of both self and other. Such interpersonal competence is clearly a source of power in the relationship yet one that is enacted in such a way as to mask the overt power imbalance. Although the process of ossification is likely to occur just as frequently (albeit more symmetrically) in equal relationships, in the case of unequal relationships the ossification of identities into selves is most likely to occur in the experience of the less powerful partner. Blumstein makes explicit the implications of Goffman’s view of the self as a product of performance in social life for understanding interaction hierarchies. Although less directly, other research on inequality in marriage and intimate relationships also demonstrates the importance of the control of definitions of reality and the definitions of self as a fundamental basis whereby inequalities are maintained. Komter’s (1989) research, for example, shows that one of the key sources of “hidden power” in marriage was the tendency on the part of both husbands and wives to define the wife as less competent than the husband. In making such judgments, the couples could be shown to have relied on classic gender stereotypes rather than careful assessments of their partners’ actual attributes. The tendency to use cultural scripts as a basis for assigning identities and attributing selves to individuals is something that Blumstein discusses explicitly and Goffman more implicitly. Blumstein points out that intimate relationships are both personal relationships and role relationships. As role relationships, they provide cultural scripts that shape expectations for behavior in relationships. In turn, the persistent enactment of expected behavior comes to shape selves. This idea reflects the central premise of the microstructural perspective in sociology-that consistent patterns of behavior on the part of actors do not reflect stable personality traits of individuals as much as they reflect consistent situational expectations (Risman 1987; Risman and Schwartz 1989). Goffman, too, suggests quite clearly that the projections of self in everyday life are made up in large part by culturally prescribed enactments of basic social attributes such as class, gender, and age. In a passage that illustrates why Goffman would have an influence in the development of the social constructionist perspective on gender, particularly

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West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of “doing gender,” Goffman points out that the enactment of social attributes such as age, sex, territory, and class status are a crucial component of the projected definitions of selves in social situations: And when we observe a young American middle-class girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boy friend, we are ready to point to items of guile and contrivance in her behavior. But like herself and her boy friend, we accept as an unperformed fact that this performer is a young American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the greater part of the performance. (1959: 74-75) Goffman’s most explicit and most recognized contributions to theorizing about sex and gender are found in “The Arrangement between the Sexes” (1977) and Gender Advertisements (1979). In these works, Goffman challenges the idea that gender is based on nature and argues instead that it is constituted by a variety of practices and modes of social organization that function to give it significance. For example, he points to the sex segregation of public bathrooms as a practice that affirms the notion of sex differences. Gender, in Goffman’s view, is constituted through its “display” in social situations. Although gender displays may be thought to represent the basic natures of men and women, Goffman argues that they are instead fashioned out of cultural resources and have little to do with any essential male or female nature. Instead, the idea that gender is rooted in human nature is based on the seemingly universal capacity of men and women to “learn to provide and read depictions of masculinity and femininity and a willingness to adhere to a schedule for presenting these pictures” (Goffman 1979: 8). For Goffman, a major part of gender socialization involves learning how to use situations to express gender. The importance of Goffman’s ideas for theorizing sex and gender have been noted explicitly by Candace West (1996), whose work on “doing gender,” “doing difference,” and “doing power” with Don Zimmerman and Sarah Fenstermaker has played a leading role in contemporary gender studies (West and Zimmerman 1987; Fenstermaker, West, and Zimmerman 1991; West and Fenstermaker 1993, 1995). The basic idea behind the now wellknown concept of doing gender is essentially what Goffman had already proposed: that gender is not something that w e are but something that we do continually in everyday social interaction. We “do gender” by organizing our various activities in ways that reflect or express gender. Furthermore, even when we do not act in ways that depart from cultural scripts for persons of our sex, gender is nonetheless “done” to us when others judge our behavior in gender. These ideas are deeply indebted not only to Goffman’s comments on gender but more generally to his idea that the self is a product of performance in social life and that social attributes such as gender, age, and class form a crucial part of the performed self. Furthermore, West and

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Zimmerman’s contention that gender is done even when we do not act out culturally prescribed scripts is one that can easily be derived from Goffman. To be “out of face,” in Goffman’s analysis, basically means to be taking a line in social interaction that others regard as improper for a person with his social attributes. The judgment that a person is out of face when he fails to act as it is believed persons with his social attributes should, is a way of reaffirming the link between social attributes and behavior. In the same way that gender comes to be seen as an immutable aspect of human nature because of its continual and convincing “doings,”selves seem to be “authentic”when they are successfully performed and when both performer and audience are taken in by them. Goffman’s (1959) comments on authenticity are particularly relevant here. He notes the general human inclination to see some performances as authentic and others as quite contrived and even deceptive. The only real difference between the two, however, is that the authentic performances are the ones we believe while the contrived ones are not. Furthermore, Goffman suggests that what often determines whether a performance is considered to be authentic has little to do with an assessment of the performer’s character or abilities but rather much more to do with whether or not that person was authorized to give the performance. The biological female who enacts the cultural scripts for persons of her sex is said to be authentic, while the biological male who also enacts the cultural scripts for persons of the female sex is said to be inauthentic. Goffman suggests that the more successfully an unauthorized person enacts a performance he or she is not authorized to give, the greater the threat that person becomes to the social order. By judging that person’s performance to be out of line in accordance with prescribed notions concerning which performances are proper for what kind of people, the person’s disruptiveness is minimized and the order is maintained. To say that the self is a product of performance in social life, then, is not to say that a given performance will be seen as reflective of the self. Quite the contrary. In some cases, as Goffman notes, individuals or teams consciously give performances in which they do not believe, for purposes of personal gain or any number of other reasons. While their audience may be taken in by the performance, they themselves are not. The ability to reap rewards from deceiving an audience about such things as the value of one’s product or worth of one’s work is, presumably, a privilege of the powerful. At the other end of the social status spectrum, however, inauthenticity is more likely to be attributed to an “unauthorized”performance. In Goffman’s view, the self is a product of performance in social life, but the identity implications of a given performance are not ultimately controlled by the performer. As Goffman puts it, the self is “a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is

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whether it will be credited or discredited’ (1959: 253). Whether or not an image of self presented in social interaction is credited or discredited depends on the handling of it by others in the social situation. Any definition of reality or image of self, Goffman argues, is subject to discrediting. Definitional disruptions would occur frequently were it not for the constant precautions taken and the tact that others exert in their reception of received definitions of realities and selves (Goffman 1959: 13-14). To sustain a desired image of self in social situations, in other words, depends fundamentally on the acceptance and tactful support of this image by others. Selves, social identities, and social hierarchies, all achieve their coherence and sense of reality from the dramatic support achieved in everyday social situations. The crucial point is that not only does such dramatic support tend to be contingent upon the enactment of “appropriate” performances, it is also highly stratified.

THE INTERACTION ORDER, EMOTION, AND THE CONSERVATIVE TENDENCIES OF EVERYDAY SOCIAL INTERACTION The processes by which prevailing social hierarchies are maintained have long been a major focus of study in sociology, generating a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Characteristic of most perspectives on social hierarchy is a concern with the play of interests, the motivations of competing or complicit actors, the social functions served, and/or the structural advantages associated with the control of power, prestige, and resources that enable the perpetuation of advantage. By focusing on the interaction order, Goffman avoids questions of interest, motivation, or structural advantage or disadvantage. It is not that he denies their importance, but his concern is instead with the basic norms of everyday interaction and how these tend to stabilize established social orders. Regardless of the interests or motivations that actors bring to social interaction, he argues, some basic norms operate that constrain how actors go about seeking their fulfillment. These basic constraints, furthermore, typically operate in such a way as to favor the maintenance of established social hierarchies. For the most part, Goffman’s work suggests, projections of identities tend to receive support in everyday social interaction. Goffman argues that there is a basic inclination in social interaction for people to “maintain face” or, in other words, to have their projected image of self accepted and supported by others and by the situation. This tendency, however, is not so much a reflection of a proclivity towards honesty or realistic modesty; it is rather a result of basic interactional constraints that appear to favor mutual face maintenance. Respectful treatment of individuals in everyday interaction, Goffman states, is a basic interaction norm regardless of the relative status of the par-

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ticipants. Two basic rules of social interaction-the rule of self-respect and the rule of considerateness (Goffman 1955, 1 9 6 7 t a c t together to favor mutual face maintenance. The rule of self-respect calls for individuals to maintain the face they have been given, typically on the basis of various social attributes ascribed to the person by others in the situation and by the wider society. The rule of considerateness calls for individuals to exercise tact with respect to the feelings and faces of others in social situations. The combined effect, as Goffman puts it, is that everyone tends to maintain face in social situations. Where social hierarchies are at issue, of course, these basic rules favor the maintenance of the established hierarchy by limiting the claims that can appropriately be made by the lower-in-status and by protecting the higher-in-status from challenge. As many of Goffman’s examples illustrate, one’s place in a social hierarchy is largely determined by the image one is able to sustain not only through one’s own communicative efforts but also through the support one receives or fails to receive from others in social situations (Goffman 1959: 75). Reciprocally, the image that one is able to sustain in social interaction is a product of the place in a social hierarchy that persons with one’s social characteristics tend to hold. Attached to social attributes such as class, race, and occupation are moral expectations concerning the appropriate treatment of the person to whom such attributes are ascribed as well as moral expectations about the appropriate lines that the person may legitimately take in social interaction (Goffman 1955; 1967: 7). To avoid the embarrassment or humiliation of having one’s projection of self rejected by others, or to “maintain face,” individuals are advised to present themselves in a way that others will be prepared to accept. Typically, this means that individuals are compelled to present themselves as persons of a level of worthiness compatible with the visible or discoverable status characteristics they are said to possess. Although respect and tactfulness may be general norms, Goffman maintains that the common expectation of respect and tactfulness with regard to the handling of another’s projected self-image applies more strongly to the faces of those higher in status than it does to those lower in status. Making a point quite similar to one that Hochschild (1983) later makes, Goffman contends that a much greater consideration is accorded the feelings of highstatus persons with respect to potential loss of face than to low-status persons (Goffman 1955; 1967: lo). Even the tendency to experience embarrassment or humiliation as a result of others’ failure to provide support for one’s projected image seems to vary according to status. As Goffman suggests, the poise commonly attributed to the upper classes is likely a result of the fact that upper-class persons tend to find themselves in encounters with social subordinates. “The ranking participant is often somewhat independent of the good opinion of the others and finds it practical to be arrogant, sticking to a face regardless of whether the

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encounter supports it” (Goffman 1955; 1967: 26). Lower-status persons, by contrast, are more dependent on the acceptance of their social superiors, and hence are much more likely to be concerned that others will accept their projected images of self, and will become embarrassed and apologetic when others do not (1955; 1967: 26). While not given extensive consideration, emotion does plays a central role in Goffman’s thinking about how the interaction order reinforces established social hierarchies. His most explicit discussion of the relationship between emotion and social order is in the essay “Embarrassment and Social Organization” (1956a, 1967). The key cause of embarrassment, or at least the cause of embarrassment that preoccupies Goffman, is the discrediting of the self in social situations (19j6a; 1967: 106). The threat of embarrassment is constantly at play in social situations and motivates individuals to be modest in their claims about self, careful in avoiding situations in which threats to face would likely occur, and tactful and considerate in their handling of the faces of others. Embarrassment results when information that discredits a valued status becomes apparent-particularly when a person who has made a strong claim to be a highly valued type of person can be shown to be another, lesser type of person. Interestingly, even though we tend to think of embarrassment as likely to result from a person’s failure to be who she claims to be, Goffman suggests that bona fide upward movements in social status may also prove embarrassing. This is the case because others may have grown accustomed to and/or attached to a person’s lesser self and may experience difficulty in providing interactional support for the new self. Thus, others’ inability to provide support proves embarrassing for the upwardly mobile person and may presumably undermine the person’s full claim to the status, even though the person could not be found to be assuming an unwarranted social status (Goffman 1956a; 1967: 106-7). Goffman points out that the show of embarrassment is considered in our society “evidence of weakness, inferiority, low status, moral guilt, defeat, and other unenviable attributes” (1956a; 1967: 102). The ability to maintain poise, by contrast, is viewed as a sign of strength, moral worthiness, and high status. Yet, it is not always the case that ability to avoid a show of embarrassment or flustering in interaction will be taken as indicative of high status. Although Goffman does not make this explicit, it seems a reasonable inference to suggest that the reaction to a person’s apparent show of poise in social interaction will depend on the person’s status relative to others in the situation. The low-status person who fails to react with shame or embarrassment when overstepping what others see as his proper place will be seen as failing to recognize the limits of others’ tactful support of him. In a sense, a show of embarrassment functions as an apology on the part of a low-status person and confirms for others that the person has come to recognize her place in spite of the earlier failure. By such a show of embarrassment, Goff-

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man emphasizes, the situation is saved and the social order is maintained. A good part of what it means to say that embarrassment is a sign of weakness or inferiority in a social situation, arguably, is that it is the more typical response of the lower-in-status when denied confirmation of their identity claims in contrast to the poise shown by the higher-in-status. The low-status person who shows no embarrassment is called shameless, but we reserve the term “poise” to refer to the unwavering stance taken by the high-status person when others in a situation fail to accord him what he believes to be his deferential due. Goffman’s analysis of the interplay of interaction norms, emotion, and social order has served as an inspiration for theory and research in the sociology of emotions, a relatively recent sociological subfield that emerged in the mid-1970s. Goffman’s influence seems to be particularly important with respect to the work of the early pioneers in the development of this subfield: Thomas J. Scheff, Randall Collins, and Arlie Hochschild. Scheffs work has, more than any other, emphasized the role of emotion in promoting conformity to social order (Scheff 1988, 1990a, 1990b). He proposes that the maintenance of social bonds is the most crucial human motive (1990a: 5), a point of view not explicitly taken by Goffman but one that helps to make sense of the primacy given to the “savingof situations” in Goffman’s work. Scheff defines a “normal social bond” as involving the basic tendency toward “reciprocal ratification” of the faces of participants in social interaction described by Goffman (1990a: 6). The maintenance of social bonds depends on mutual ratification, in Scheff s view, because intense feelings of rejection or exclusion that would llkely be felt were one’s legitimacy not ratified by the other, would likely lead to the breakdown of the social bond (1990a: 7). Following Goffman, and Cooley before him, Scheff views embarrassment and shame (and their inverse, pride) as primary social emotions that motivate our conformity to the informal norms in social situations. Pride and shame in social situations, in his view, operate as informal sanctions on our behavior, motivating us to behave in ways that promote the duration of the social bond (Scheff 1990a, 1990b). According to Scheff, emotion plays a very powerful role in maintaining the status quo in dominant-subordinate relationships. He argues that “domination in modern societies is usually a joint action involving the unwitting collaboration between the dominated and the dominant” (1990a: 181). He posits that courtesy and the common tendency to try to avoid “makmg a scene” in social situations often prohibit commenting on relationships, the effect of which is to make social structure invisible. Scheff states that, “[tlo the extent that participants discuss topics, and suppress discussion of their relationship, social structure becomes invisible to them” (1990a: 186). For example, the tendency on the part of a subordinate person to maintain focus on the topic of conversation initiated by a dominant person, avoiding comment on the fact

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that the subordinate has been repeatedly interrupted when trying to bring up her own topics, has the effect of making the inequality between them invisible. To the extent that the “mutual acceptance of lines” is called for in social interaction, however, the subordinate is more likely to maintain the topical discussion and not call attention to the relational dynamics. To “make a scene,” as commenting on a relationship can be construed, is to risk rejection and hence embarrassment. “The status quo in the microworld seems to be based on the avoidance of the risk of embarrassment, a shame dynamic” (Scheff 1990a: 186). The status quo in relations of domination are maintained, Scheff suggests, because a basic part of our socialization involves learning that it is “impolite and offensive to discuss the microworld of relationships” (1990a: 186). Relatedly, Scheff argues that the repression of emotion is a core process that maintains the status quo (1990a: 187). He emphasizes the human tendency to feel ashamed of being ashamed or embarrassed and to try to hide such feelings. In hiding painful feelings associated with being viewed negatively by or being dominated by another, the nature of the relationship becomes hidden from view and thus the status quo is more easily maintained. As Scheff puts i t “Domination can hardly be ended if its manifestations receive no notice or comment” (1990a: 188). Goffman suggests that the basic norms of everyday social interaction-supported by the threat of embarrassment-tend to mitigate against the llkelihood of comment. In addition to Scheff, Randall Collins is another important figure in the sociology of emotions who has been significantly d u e n c e d by Goffman and who has drawn on Goffman’s ideas to develop a theory of the relationship between interaction, emotion, and social stratification (Collins 1975, 1981, 1990, 2000). Although struggles for power did not occupy a central place in Goffman’s thinking, Collins believes that Goffman’s use of empirical studies of occupational and organizational literatures in his early work promoted an inadvertent analysis of “how power struggles are carried out through the manipulation of ritual encounters” (Collins 1975: 43-44). In developing his conflict sociology, Collins seems to have gained significant ground by putting a conflict spin on Goffman’s ideas. The debt to Goffman in Collins’s statement of the core of his argument is particularly clear: The basic argument, then, has three strands: that men live in self-constructed subjective worlds; that others pull many of the strings that control one’s subjective experience; and that there are frequent conflicts over control. Life is basically a struggle for status in which no one can afford to be oblivious to the power of others around him. If we assume that everyone uses what resources are available to have others aid him in putting on the best possible face under the circumstances, we have a guiding principle to make sense out of the myriad variations of stratification. (1975: 60)

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While Goffman did not much consider conflicts over control, the analysis of the effects of stratified access to the various resources needed to sustain the “best possible face” is nonetheless evident in his work. Collins argues that the sociology of emotions is crucial for addressing central sociological questions about social stratification. Emotions, he says, underlie the legitimacy of stable power and form the substrate for the status group rankings that permeate everyday life (1990: 27). “What holds a society together-the ‘glue’of solidarity-and what mobilizes conflict-the energy of mobilized groups-are emotions; so is what operates to uphold stratification-hierarchical feelings, whether dominant, subservient, or resentful” (27-28). According to Collins, Goffman does not give sustained theoretical attention to emotions, even though emotions are apparent in Goffman’s examination of feelings about self. The experiences of maintaining face, losing face, being out of face, or gaining face in social situations, as depicted by Goffman, are clearly emotional experiences. To the extent that face maintenance is most common in social interaction, as Goffman had suggested it is, Collins argues that most people’s daily emotional experience may be expected to be a rather undramatic feeling of confidence. Emotional experience tends toward more of an “up”or “down”tone depending on the relative power and status a person experiences in social situations. In general, those who give orders gain more emotional energy from social interaction than those who take orders (the power dimension), as do those who are more central participants in social situations compared to those who are more marginal (the status dimension). The weight of situational order giving and group participation on emotional energy, in turn, depends on the status and power of group members in the larger society (Collins 1990: 39). At the low end of power hierarchies, Collins hypothesizes, order takers are more likely to experience depression. This varies, however, depending on the extent to which such persons experience uncontrollability over their situation. When order takers experience only moderate loss of control over their situation, he argues, they will be more likely to respond with anger, hence increasing emotional energy, and less likely to become depressed in the face of the controlling situation. On the status dimension, Collins (1990: 41) suggests that loss of one’s place in a social group may provoke anger when it represents a short-term change in expected membership feelings, but over the long term it tends to produce depression. Anger, Collins contends, is an emotion rarely expressed by the weak. It is only “when they have enough resources to be able to mount some resistance (or at least some social privacy, a separate social circle in which they can utter symbolic threats) that weak persons, order-takers, have anger” (1990: 43). Prior stores of emotional energy derived from other social situations represent a vital resource in protecting the order taker from a depressive reaction

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to a controlling situation. By way of illustration, Collins points out that those who experience traumatic situations are likely to store such experiences as “traumas”only when their overall “market position” in social interaction is low-that is, when they have had little experience of power or status in any social situations (1990: 47). Collins’s theory of the relationship between emotional energy and social stratification helps to make sense of the varied responses to affronts to face described by Goffman. Goffman states that we have feelings attached to face and that these largely motivate our conformity to the social order. Goffman did not say much, however, about the differences in the kinds of feelings that persons differently located in various stratification orders are likely to have. And, without understanding such differences, Goffman cannot really account for how feelings about face motivate conformity to social order. Collins’s analysis of emotional energy fills this gap in Goffman’s work. Based on Collins’s theory, we would expect a person who brings high emotional energy into a social situation, as a result of repeated experiences of power and status in other situations, when confronted with face-threatening treatment, to be more likely to express anger or indignation and to thereby separate herself from the negative identity implications of the status affront. As a result of this person’s high emotional energy, perceived as an indication of power and status, others in the situation would be more likely to lend support and affirm the righteousness of this person’s anger or indignation. By contrast, a person who brings low emotional energy to a situation, also as a result of repeated experiences of low power and status in other situations, would be less likely to act defensively when confronted with demeaning treatment. Indeed, such treatment may seem fitting, given the low emotional energy. Prior experiences of subordination and exclusion, furthermore, would contribute to the person’s belief that others in the situation would not provide support for a defensive reaction but would instead view it as inappropriate. It is not only this person’s depressive and often quite realistic sense of futility that motivates such acquiescence, but also his attempt to maximize emotional energy in the situation. Collins’s theory holds that people attempt to maximize their emotional energy. One way of gaining emotional energy is through power or order giving, an avenue presumably blocked to those at the bottom of various stratification orders. The other means of gaining emotional energy is through group membership. This avenue, by contrast, promotes wider access, particularly for the person who “knows her place.” The advantage of such a strategy is that the bond, and hence a source of emotional energy, is maintained. Collins’s theory therefore helps to make sense of the tendency, depicted in Goffman’swork, of actors to respect interactional hierarchies, even when they must accept an inferior status in doing so.

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Building on Goffman in yet another direction, &lie Hochschild’s (1979, 1983, 1990) work on emotion management is most clearly indebted to his analysis of expression rules and their role in demonstrating deference in everyday interaction (Goffman 1956a, 1957, 1961b, 1967). Making the important distinction between “surface acting” and “deep acting,” Hochschild goes beyond Goffman in arguing that social settings call not only for control of emotional expression, but also for control of feelings themselves. Hochschild attributes to Goffman a limited concern with surface acting and a neglect of the implications of deep acting, a critique that is more or less warranted given Goffman’s analytical focus on social interaction. Particularly on the basis of Goffman’s study of authenticity in me Presentation of Self; however, I would argue that a conception of deep acting is, at minimum, implicit in his work. The more important point for the present purposes, however, is Hochschild’s and Goffman’s common focus on the ways in whch various aspects of emotional experience are shaped by social status. In particular, Goffman and Hochschild both show how social status shapes: (1) expectations for emotional expression, including, specifically, the degree to which a person is expected to control emotional expression; ( 2 ) the degree to which a person is expected to provide emotional deference to others; and (3) the extent to which one’s feelings are viewed as worthy of concern by others. Arguably, Hochschild provides this analysis more explicitly than Goffman. Hochschild points out that feeling rules frequently take the form of claims, as when others react to what they think we are feeling or summon us to feel what they believe to be appropriate (1983: 58-59). In equal relationships, such claims tend to be made symmetrically,as when one friend elicits an empathic response from another with the shared expectation that a reciprocal empathic response will be returned at a later time. A show of feeling is a way of demonstrating deference to and appreciation of another, as when we respond with a display of enthusiasm at the arrival of a close friend. In unequal relationships, however, feeling rules tend to operate asymmetrically.To have higher status, Hochschild points out, is also to have greater claim to emotional rewards (1983: 84). Hochschild’s analysis of the economy of gratitude (1988, 1990) is particularly relevant here. A powerful source of tension in otherwise egalitarian couples, according to Hochschild’s findings, is the struggle over gratitude. Operating within a larger societal context that subordinates women to men, Hochschild argues that the balance in the economy of gratitude tips toward the husband: For example, a woman lawyer who earns as much money and respect as her husband, and whose husband accepts these facts about her, may still find that she owes him gratitude for his liberal views and his equal participation in housework. Her claims are seen as unusually high, his as unusually low. The

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larger market in alternate partners offers him free household labor, which it does not offer her. In light of the larger social context, she is lucky to have him. And it is usually more her burden to manage indignation at having to feel grateful. (1983: 85)

In the context of unequal relationships of any kind, indignation seems to be the prerogative of the privileged, and appreciation and understanding the duty of the subordinate. The subordinate who feels hurt or angry when a superior fails to show or is late for a planned lunch meeting, for example, will likely receive some form of negative sanction for having unreasonable expectations and for failing to be understanding of the many competing demands on the superior’s time. Hochschild contends that many unequal marriages and friendships “die of inequality,” as when the wife tires of suppressing her indignation at having to feel grateful to her husband or when the friend tires of suppressing hurt and anger at another’s perpetual cancellations, latecomings, unreturned phone calls, and general inattentiveness. In the public world of work, however, such asymmetries are often part of the job (Hochschild 1983: 85-86>. Flight attendants, for example, are expected to absorb abusive remarks, excessive demands, and open expression of anger and irritation on the part of “irate” passengers. They are to maintain an empathic orientation to the passengers and to avoid retaliation at all costs. When the “customer is king,” as in this case and many other commercialized relationships, the job of emotion management falls on the server (1983: 110). In examining the relationship between social class and emotion management, Hochschild points out that emotion management tends to occur to a greater extent in the families and jobs of the upper classes. This is primarily because jobs performed in the higher classes frequently involve more personal contact with the public, engagement of personality, more use of sociability, and more emotion work. Yet, the extent to which emotion management is experienced as externally imposed and/or as involving self-effacing displays of deference to others varies according to one’s relative status and authority within these classes. The middle-class worker learns to manage emotions in order to please clients, please the boss, and ultimately keep a job. In the higher classes, however, the general message about managing emotions is accompanied by another message, one not received by members of the middle or lower classes: “Your feelings are important” (1983: 159). At the very top of occupational hierarchies, feeling rules are set for subordinates and often in such a way as to suit the superior’s own personal dispositions (155). As a general rule, as Goffman had already pointed out, the higher the social status the more consideration is given to one’s own feelings; the lower the social status, the less consideration is given to one’s own feelings and the more likely one is to manage emotions in the service of something or someone higher.

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This basic insight is perhaps best illustrated in Hochschild’s analysis of the relationship between gender, status, and feeling. In contrast to the class system in which emotion management occurs more at the top, Hochschild points out that in the gender system it occurs mostly at the bottom. The asymmetries in the emotion work performed by women and men-and by extension, between lower- and higher-status persons-contribute to the perpetuation of inequality. While men are more likely to be called on to do emotion work that enhances their power (e.g., mastering fear and vulnerability and learning to utilize aggression and anger as power resources), women are typically expected to contain anger and aggression and to specialize in “being nice” (Hochschild 1983: 163). Women tend to do supportive emotion work-that is, the emotion work that “affirms,enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others” (165). While a woman may be appreciated for performing such work, the very nature of the work prevents her from gaining parity with those she affirms, enhances, and celebrates. “As a woman she may be praised for out-enhancing the best enhancer, but as a person in comparison with comics, teachers, and argument-builders, she usually lives outside the climate of enhancement that men tend to inhabit” (169). Both inside and outside the workplace, Hochschild argues, women’s feelings are given less weight and easily go unnoticed, particularly when women are successfully engaged in supportive emotion work aimed at affirming others. When expressed, however, women’s feelings are viewed as unimportant or as irrational and hence more likely to be dismissed (Hochschild 1983: 172). While men’s anger is typically received as rational and understandable, women’s is more likely viewed as evidence of personal instability. Restating what Goffman had previously suggested, Hochschild writes, “A person of lower status has a weaker claim to the right to define what is going on; less trust is placed in her judgements, and less respect is accorded to what she feels” (173). Persons of lower status are further disadvantaged in the realm of emotional exchange, Hochschild argues, in that they have weaker “status shields” to protect them against the displaced anger and aggression of others (163). Goffman’s analysis in Asylums (1961a), of the ways in which inmates are by virtue of their subordinate and stigmatized status constrained in their ability to separate themselves from degrading treatment by staff, is a clear parallel. Building on Hochschild’s work, Jennifer L. Peirce’s (1995) study of gender in the legal profession focuses even more sharply on the relationship between feeling rules and social inequality. Peirce acknowledges her debt to Goffman’s (1956b) ideas on deference and demeanor in pointing out how deference behavior between superordinates and subordinates “reproduces the hierarchical nature of the relationship by confirming each person’s position within it” (Peirce 1995: 90). However, she faults Goffman for failing to

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consider the extent to which deference behaviors are shaped by race and gender, and underscores West and Zimmerman’s (1987) point that “doing gender” typically means doing deference as well (Peirce 1995: 91). In her research on the relations between paralegals and attorneys, Peirce shows how subordinates express deference to their superiors through emotion management. Paralegals whom Peirce studied often received adversarial treatment from the attorneys for whom they work, being grilled on cases as if they were opposing counsel. They were expected to endure the humiliation of such treatment without responding in kind. Although such adversarial treatment was likely to provoke the paralegal’s anger and often involved outbursts of anger on the part of the attorney, paralegals were expected to manage both their own anger and that of the attorney. When attorneys got angry, for whatever reason, the paralegals frequently suffered the consequences. Those who challenged such treatment or responded with anger were censured; the expectation was to absorb and internalize the anger of their superior (Peirce 1995: 91-92). In a number of different ways, paralegals were required to manage their emotions in a manner that served to reinforce inequality. They were expected to maintain an uncritical stance toward the attorney’s professional habits, even when the price of the boss’s negligence and disorganization fell on their shoulders. Paralegals learned to manage their feelings about being treated as if they were stupid, and they became accustomed to downplaying their credentials. They showed deference through accepting asymmetrical “interruptibility.”Even when paralegals were racing against the clock to meet a deadline, they expressed deference by “dropping everything” when the attorney stopped by to talk. At the same time, the paralegals had to manage their own feelings about being treated as if they were invisible, as attorneys rarely spoke to or even acknowledged them in passing and often gave them nonperson treatment in various settings (Peirce 1995: 95-97). In addition, paralegals (particularly female ones) were expected to provide caretaking to their bosses, doing the types of supportive emotion work described by Hochschild. Peirce found that gender status affected the degree of emotional labor demanded of paralegals. Being male inflated the status of the paralegal, while being female deflated it. As a result, the higher status of the male paralegal served as a status shield against the demands for emotional labor more frequently placed on female paralegals. Because they were more often mistaken for attorneys, or at least viewed as attorneys in training, male paralegals were less likely to be treated as either invisible or stupid. While they, too, expressed deference to attorneys by being polite and reserved, they were not expected to perform caretaking and were shielded from the more emotionally degrading aspects of the job (1995: 149-50, 154).

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At the higher end of the legal hierarchy, emotion management was a core part of the attorney’s job as well. To be effective litigators, according to Peirce, attorneys had to learn to use the tactics of intimidation and strategic friendliness. Although these tactics were frequently experienced as offensive and alienating to those who performed them, and thus costly in terms of emotional labor, their purpose was to manipulate, dominate, and control. In contrast to the self-effacing nature of the emotion work of the female paralegal, the successful control of emotions exercised by the litigator elevates his status. The use of the male pronoun here is intentional, as Peirce shows that female litigators face a double bind due to competing expectations of emotional labor associated with their occupation and their gender (1995: 104). Female litigators were often criticized for being “toonice” or “not forceful enough” in the courtroom, but they were also seen as “too brash” or “obnoxious” when they emulated the behavior of male attorneys. Hocshchild’s and Peirce’s work demonstrates how feeling rules differentially apply to persons of unequal status and how emotion management can be both a way of showing deference to another as well as a way of creating an image of dominance and control. These contributions are natural extensions of Goffman’s ideas. Other literature in the sociology of emotions builds on another aspect of Goffman’s thinking, in particular his suggestions concerning how emotional reactions may mark a person‘s social standing in a situation. Candace Clark’s (1990) work on emotional micropolitics focuses on the role of emotions as “place-markers” and as “place-claims.”Emotions serve to inform a person of his or her social place, serving intrapersonally as place-markers. That a person feels hurt or ashamed when ridiculed by another, for example, indicates the person has been lowered by the ridiculing remarks. A feeling of anger o r indignation, by contrast, indicates that the person has not accepted the demeaning implications of the message (1990: 310). A person who basks in the praise of another, while in some sense elevated, also marks a sense of inferiority by being so powerfully affected. The experience of emotional numbness in the face of abuse or degradation, common among battered women, marks inferior standing. Not only does emotional numbness allow the hierarchical situation to persist, it implies an asymmetrical entitlement to feelings on the part of abuser and abused (312). Emotions can also mark social place by producing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Negative self-emotions such as selfdoubt or anxiety, for instance, can incapacitate a person’s performance in a particular role, leading to objective inferiority. Conversely, feelings of confidence can enhance a person’s performance, leading to objective superiority (312). Emotions serve as interpersonal place claims when they are used to shape definitions of the situation and of self. Expressions of both positive and negative feelings toward others may convey claims of superiority, inferiority, or

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equality. An expression of disdain for another tends to convey one’s own feelings of superiority, for example. Positive feelings toward another may also convey one’s feelings of superiority, as when a person who compliments another may be implicitly claiming an elevated status as a vantage point from which to make such a judgment. Clark suggests that, in everyday interaction, we often express emotions or attempt to elicit them in others as a means of negotiating social place, particularly in situations where people do not agree on their relative social standing (1990: 317). Clark identifies five interaction strategies that involve the use of emotion in the negotiation of social place. First, expression of negative other-emotions is usually the most obvious strategy of lowering another’s standing. This may involve direct displays of negative emotion toward another in a way that comments on that person’s negative attributes, or it may involve a refusal to honor the other person’s claims to respect and admiration (1990: 317). Negative strategies do not “work,”however, if the target of the negative emotions does not in some way exhibit signs of being reduced (318). Drawing on Hochschild’s examination of “status shields,” Clark points out that some categories of people are structurally more likely to inflict degradation while others are more apt to receive it (319). Second, expressions of positive otheremotions indicating one’s own inferiority or equality may be used to gain another’s acceptance, as when a person expresses admiration or withholds criticism of another (320). A third strategy, controlling the balance of emotional energy, involves trying to elevate one’s own status at the expense of another by eliciting an emotional reaction from this other while keeping one’s own in check (321-22). Successfully employed, this strategy leads to the “backfiring”of the other’s negative other-emotions. The fourth and fifth strategies involve eliciting feelings of obligation and expressing positive otheremotions indicating one’s own superiority (323-25). Although Clark does not draw heavily on Goffman, the “place-claiming’’ tactics she describes do figure prominently in his work. In fact, Goffman’s investigation of the social function of embarrassment provides one example of the role of this emotion in claiming the respective places of interactants. Furthermore, Clark‘s analysis of the strategic use of emotional expression resonates with the emphasis on interactional strategy that runs throughout Goffman’s sociology. The studies discussed here are only a small portion of the substantial body of literature that has in recent years addressed the relationship between emotions and social hierarchy. A range of theoretical perspectives in sociological social psychology-including identity theory, affect control theory, expectation states theory, and exchange theory-have provided contributions to understanding the relationship between emotions and social hierarchy (see Smith-Lovin 1990, 1995; Heise 1989; Scher and Heise 1993; Ridgeway 1982, 1994; Ridgeway and Johnson 1990; Shelly 1993; Foschi 1997; Lovaglia and

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Houser 1996; Lovaglia 1997; Lawler and Thye 1999). Although Goffman is rarely cited and does not seem to have had a direct d u e n c e on much of this literature, continuities between his ideas and the findings contributed by recent research are nonetheless apparent.

INTERACTIONAL ADVANTAGES A N D DISADVANTAGES ASSOCIATED WITH SOCIAL RANK Taken as a whole, Goffman’s work draws attention not only to the ways in which social interaction is shaped and constrained by the prevailing standards of worth assigned to the social characteristics of participants, but also to the various ways in which social hierarchies are built, maintained, and given legitimacy through the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. The reciprocal nature of the relationship between interaction and inequality is a guiding assumption of contemporary research on interaction and inequality, both within and outside the interactionist tradition. Goffman, however, must be given some credit for demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between interaction and inequality, even if he did not explicitly formulate the idea. Even though Goffman’s level of analysis was never macrostructural, he nonetheless provided a basis for bridging the traditional sociological focus on inequality with more microsociological work on self-processes and everyday interaction. Symbolic interactionism, with which Goffman has often been associated despite his own disidentification with the label, has been criticized for its inattentiveness to the inequalities of power and status in the larger society and for failing to analyze how such inequalities constrain what individuals do in everyday social interaction. Such a criticism could not, however, be accurately leveled against Goffman, even if‘ he could be said to have failed to explicitly spell out the connections. Given his attentiveness to interaction dynamics between social unequals, Goffman has inspired a number of studies in the interactionist tradition that endeavor to understand the various ways in which inequality is expressed, reinforced, or sometimes resisted in everyday social interaction. Anderson and Snow (2001) provide a useful review of this research. One of Goffman’s most straightforward statements concerning the relationship between social stratification and social interaction occurs in his brief analysis of the “territories of the self’ in Relations in Public (1971). Supporting his contention that deferential treatment in everyday interaction is something owed to all human beings simply on the basis of their humanity (19671, Goffman identifies eight types of “territories of the self’ that individuals routinely claim and that others routinely respect in everyday life (Goffman 1971: 2940). Control of these territories, however, is stratified. “In general,” Goffman states,

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“the higher the rank,the greater the size of all territories of the self and the greater the control across the boundaries” (4C-41). Goffman’s statement here of the link between rank and territories of the self seems to have had a great mfluence, both direct and indirect, on numerous studies of interaction and inequality that examine such matters as how social status shapes the personal space that one may command and have respected by others, the amount of time one spends waiting on some desired good relative to others (Schwartz 1975), the degree to which a person is able to control mformation about themselves, and the degree to which one dominates conversations or is conversationally dominated. An enormous body of literature examining the connections between gender, inequality, and various aspects of both verbal and nonverbal communication has proliferated since the 1970s (see Henley 1973, 1977, 1995; Henley and LaFrance 1984; West and Zimmerman 1977, 1983, 1987; West and Fenstermaker 1993; West and Garcia 1988;West 1992; Fishman 1978; McConnellGinet 1978; Thorne and Henley 1975; Thorne, Kramarae, and Henley 1983; Aries 1996; Kalbfleisch and Cody 1995; Ridgeway 1992; Tannen 1993a, 199%; Sagrestano 1992a, 1992b). The use of Goffman as a tool in developing analyses of gender, interaction, and inequality is particularly evident in the work of the early pioneers in the field, namely, Nancy Henley and West and Zimmerman. Goffman is clearly a pivotal influence on Henley’s (1977) Body Politics. More explicitly than anyone else, Henley spells out the micropolitical significance of the interaction dynamics studied by Goffman: The ‘trivia” of everyday life-touching others, moving closer or farther away, dropping the eyes, smiling, interrupting-are commonly interpreted as facilitating social intercourse, but not recognized in their position as micropolitical gestures, defenders of the status quo. In front of, and defending, the political-economic structure that determines our lives and defines the context of human relationships, there is the micropolitical structure that helps maintain it. This micropolitical structure is the substance of our everyday lives. (3)

Henley examines various aspects of nonverbal communication, looking at how nonverbal communication not only reflects existing inequalities in society but also plays a crucial role in demonstrating, legitimating, and perpetuating them. Following Goffman’s lead, Henley focuses on gender, power, and status-based asymmetries in a variety of forms of nonverbal communication. Several of Goffman’s “territories of the self turn u p as objects of Henley’s analysis, including personal space, use space, the “turn,” and information preserve. She also looks at gender, power, and status-based asymmetries in nonverbal sensitivity, readability, facial expression, eye contact, posture

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and body movement, touch patterns, and various aspects of personal demeanor. Goffman’s distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical forms of deference serves as an important tool for Henley’s analysis, as it does for West and Zimmerman. Noting that most all forms of nonverbal communication can be used either symmetrically to express closeness, distance, like or disllke in equal relationships, she argues that the very same nonverbal gestures when used asymmetrically tend to indicate hierarchy. Henley’s work has played a central role in inspiring the proliferation of subsequent research that more systematically assesses empirical relationships between gender, power, and various aspects of nonverbal and verbal communication (Kalbfleisch and Cody 1995; Henley 1995). Goffman’s d u e n c e on the work of West and Zimmerman is acknowledged in West’s 1996 article, “Goffman in Feminist Perspective.” She notes that Goffman’s (1956b) principle of “symmetrical relations among equals” formed the basis for the studies on conversational asymmetries between men and women that she conducted in collaboration with Zimmerman, Fenstermaker, and Garcia. Their research found that (1) men interrupted significantly more than women in cross-sex conversations (Zimmerman and West 1975); (2) that women and children received similar treatment in conversations with men and adults (West and Zimmerman 1977); ( 3 ) that gender asymmetries in interruptions persisted even in encounters between strangers (West and Zimmerman 1983); and (4) that men initiated nearly all unilateral topic changes when conversing with women, often in ways that allowed them to cut off women’s potential “tellables” and to avoid “unmanly” topics (West and Garcia 1988). Noting that men’s use of silence, interruptions, and unilateral topic changes violates Goffman’s (1955) description of the ground rules of spoken interaction, West points out that Goffman had recognized not only that such violations would routinely occur, but also that they would be instrumental in conveying evaluations of social worth in social encounters. She quotes Goffman: “The human tendency to use signs and symbols means that evidence of social worth and of mutual evaluations will be conveyed by very minor things, and these things will be witnessed, as will the fact that they have been witnessed (Goffman 1955: 225-26). West attributes to Goffman “an appreciation of how power works in spoken interaction between women and men, and an appreciation of mundane conversation as the means of discovering this” (West 1996: 299). A specific theme emphasized by Henley, West and Zimmerman, and others who have studied gender, power, and status-based asymmetries in communication is that communication merely does not reflect social inequalities but actually plays a vital role in creating, maintaining, and defending inequality. This idea is, of course, very consistent with Goffman’s view of the

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relationship between social interaction and social inequality. According to him, the mundane aspects of face-to-face interaction play a dual role in not only bringing to bear societal standards of worth in everyday social situations but also in consolidating and/or giving legitimacy to more precariously established hierarchies. In fact, he suggests that the interactional affirmation of inequality is all the more important the more precariously established the hierarchy. In societies in which inequality is relatively unstable (as he believed contemporary American society to be), he suggests that impression management is likely to be a major preoccupation. In societies with stable systems of inequality, he argues, one sees less concern with impression management (Goffman 1959: 241). Other notable work in the area of interaction and inequality that demonstrates a direct debt to Goffman includes Carol Brooks Gardner’s (1995) study of public harassment and Charles Derber’s (1979) analysis of the stratified distribution of attention in everyday interaction. Gardner takes Goffman’s notion of the basic “traffic rules” of everyday social interaction and shows how the asymmetrical application of these both reflects and reinforces gender inequality. She shows how civil inattention, a basic form of interactional deference viewed by Goffman as the norm of interaction in public places, is routinely violated when women traverse public space alone. Derber similarly looks at attention as an unequally distributed form of interactional deference. In particular, he focuses on gender and social class as determinants of the amount of deferential attention a person receives relative to the amount one gives. Although less emphasized by subsequent work in the area of interaction and inequality, I would argue that one of Goffmdn’s most important contributions is his analysis of the constraints and difficulties experienced by stigmatized, marginalized, and disempowered members of society in sustaining respectability in the eyes of others. This point is most developed in Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963), but is also a consistent theme throughout his earlier work. In me Presentation of SelfT for example, Goffman discusses the process of idealization whereby individuals or teams act to project an idealized image of self or definition of a situation, attempting to conceal realities that might discredit the idealized image. The nature of these projected idealizations, however, seems to vary widely according to the relative social rank of the person making them. While we typically think of idealization as involving a concealment of negative attributes or discrediting behaviors so as to enhance one’s image in the eyes of others, Goffman gives a number of examples of classes of persons who have had to “idealize” themselves downward. In particular, he refers to blacks in southern states playing u p their “ignorant, shiftless, happy-go-lucky manner,” American college girls playing down their “intelligence, skills, and determinativeness when in the pres-

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ence of datable boys,” or poor families playing up their poverty for a visiting welfare agent (Goffman 1959: 38-40). In some cases, an instrumental purpose may motivate such performances. More often, perhaps, these downward idealizations of self may occur as a response to the expectations of others’ in social situations and can best be understood as an effort to “maintain face” or, in other words, to avoid presenting oneself as more worthy than others are prepared to admit. In some instances, downward ideaization may be called for on the part of one individual to bolster the image of another, as when a wife plays u p her subordination to her husband in the presence of others or when a subordinate withholds open expression of disagreement with a superordinate. Judith Rollins’s (1985) study of relationships between domestic workers and their employers provides one compelling analysis of negative idealization and its role in maintaining the dominant-subordinate relationship. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of deference, Rollins identifies a number of ways in which domestics were called on to express asymmetrical deference to their employers. In her own attempt to gain employment as a domestic, Rollins discovered firsthand the power of the employer’s expectation for deferential treatment and the necessity of negative idealization as a means of providing the expected deference. On her first interview, speaking in her normal and relaxed manner, Rollins had led the employer to question her appropriateness for the job. In fact, the employer expressed hesitancy about hiring her, saying that she seemed so “well educated.” Engaging in conscious negative self-idealization, Rollins gained the employer’s confidence the next day when she dressed shabbily and demonstrated an exaggerated subservient demeanor (162). Rollins found that domestics routinely engaged in another form of negative self-idealization when they appreciatively accepted their employer’s “glfts”of leftover food and other household discards. Even though the implicit message in such offerings was often a demeaning one, domestics felt that they must accept such glfts and appear grateful for them as a way of showing the expected deference (190-91). The constraints placed on and experienced by actors to avoid overreaching their bounds (i.e., to avoid presenting themselves as more worthy than others are prepared to accept) is a consistent theme in Goffman’s work. In Stigma (1963), Goffman examines the dynamics that occur in face-to-face contact between “normals” and the “stigmatized,”an encounter which Goffman characterizes as “one of the primal scenes of sociology” (13). Particularly relevant for understanding the interactional constraints placed on lowstatus actors is his concept of the “good adjustment line.” In essence, the stigmatized are expected by normals not to make too much of any disadvantage caused by their stigmatizing condition and should not show bitterness or self-pity, appreciating that “normals have their troubles too” (116). They are advised to see themselves as human beings as much as anyone else

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and should work hard to fulfill ordinary standards as best they can, but only to a point. Although the stigmatized are expected to avoid foregrounding the social significance of their stigma, they are also expected to avoid acting in ways that suggest that they do not recognize their differentness (i.e., inferiority) (115). Slights, snubs, and untactful remarks from normals are to be taken in stride and not answered in kind. If answered at all, the task of the stigmatized is to gently and sympathetically reeducate the normal, “showing him, point for point, quietly, and with delicacy, that in spite of appearances the stigmatized individual is, underneath it all, a fully-human being” (Goffman 1963: 116). The stigmatized person is also advised to be gracious toward any efforts of the normal to “ease matters for him,” even if such efforts contain elements of condescension, personal violation, or presumption (118). Furthermore, the stigmatized person is advised not to take too seriously the courtesy that normals may show toward him. In other words, even though normals may politely act as if the stigmatizing condition were of no relevance, the stigmatized are advised to recognize that this is merely an interactional courtesy and not one to be taken wholeheartedly. Stigmatized individuals are expected “not to press their luck; they should not test the limits of the acceptance shown them, nor make it the basis for still further demands. Tolerance, of course, is usually part of a bargain” (120-21). The bargain, of course, is the exchange of tacit acceptance from normals for the tacit agreement of the stigmatized to “withhold himself from situations in which normals would find it difficult to give lip service to their similar acceptance of him” (Goffman 1963: 121). As Goffman points out, the good-adjustment line of the stigmatized serves to protect the normals, shielding them from recognizing the limits of their tolerance as well as from intimate contact with the stigmatized (121). Although not a position typically proposed by political advocates of stigmatized groups, Goffman suggests that the good-adjustment line may often be “the shrewdest position” for the stigmatized to take (123). In taking this line, the stigmatized tends to be viewed by the normal as a superior instance of his kind, is able to interact with normals with relative comfort for both, and is more likely than those who do not take such a line to be viewed by normals as, underneath the stigma, an ordinary human being. Much of Goffman’s description of the constraints faced by the stigmatized in relation to normals can be applied to understanding the dynamics of hierarchical interactions more generally. Goffman, I believe, invites such an extension in a number of places in this essay. He does so most pointedly, however, in his discussion of “the normal deviant.” Here he states that nearly all people have some failing that, at least in some contexts, will discredit their claims to worthiness. In fact, prefiguring the critique of hegemonic masculinity that will later become prominent in gender studies, Goffman points

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out that “the general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet then can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living” (1963: 128-29). The inference can easily be made that any social characteristic that serves as a marker of status in social situationcsuch as gender, occupation, or rank withtn an organization-can be a source of stigma in particular situations. Hence, Goffman’s analysis of the interactional dynamics between normal and stigmatized may be easily extended to apply more generally to understanding the dynamics of interaction occurring between individuals who differ in status characteristics that differentiate people in many contexts in everyday life (e.g., race, class, gender, age, occupation, and education). Asylums identifies still other disadvantages that low-status persons in society may face in interaction with their imputed social superiors. Many of the indignities suffered by inmates of total institutions described in this set of essays are probably more or less specific to such contexts, but at least some of the interactional dynamics depicted apply in hierarchical contexts outside of the confines of total institutions. And certainly Goffman’s stated purpose was to demonstrate the extent to which “ordinary” selves depend on supportive arrangements to preserve their sense of self (196la: 14). The inference that persons outside total institutions vary in the degree to which they enjoy the supports for selfhood lacking in the experience of the institutionalized is therefore not a stretch. For instance, the freedom to schedule one’s own life such that no single role prohibits performing other roles is certainly a privilege that is unequally distributed and tends to vary according to age, gender, and social class. And as inmates are coerced into degrading postures and verbal stances, so, too, are subordinates with their bosses, children with their parents, and sometimes wives with husbands. Asymmetrical access to an individual’s information preserve is characteristic of many service relationships, often involving lower-status recipients of welfare benefits or social service programs. Self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action clearly varies by social class, at least during the course of the work day. Nearly all the forms of self-mortification described by Goffman are potentially suffered by children, whose structural position shares some fundamental characteristics with that of the inmate of the total institution. The “looping effect,” a term Goffman uses to describe the tendency of the staff to degrade an inmate and then to take the inmate’s defensive response as a target of further attack, is a common dynamic in all sorts of unequal relationships. This dynamic is one that illustrates that defensive face-work tends to be unequally successful for persons of varying levels of social status. In general, the higher the social status, the more likely the efforts to place oneself above or to distance oneself from disrespectful treatment in social situations will be read by others as effectively having done so.

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A particularly detrimental aspect of the various mortifications of self suffered by inmates of total institutions, according to Goffman, is that these are rationalized in the institution as a necessary and appropriate response to the needs of the inmate and hence a reflection of the inmate’s self: Once lodged on a given ward, the patient is firmly instructed that the restrictions and deprivations he encounters are not due to such blind forces as tradition or economy-and hence dissociable from self-but are intentional parts of his treatment, part of his need at the time, and therefore an expression of the state that his self has fallen to. (1961a: 149)

When the individual does not fully accept identification with the degrading circumstances and treatments he must suffer, an arguably significant part of the treatment may be aimed toward disabusing the individual of “false” notions of self and providing various incentives for him to accept the institutional view of himself. Outside total institutions, albeit in a less dramatic fashion, hierarchical relationships of various kinds may often be characterized by a similar dynamic where persons with greater power and status seemingly have more power to define the selves of their subordinates and hence the appropriate interactional treatment of them. The right to be offended is seemingly stratified, with those on the bottom of social hierarchies being expected to absorb the identity implications of any affronts they experience in everyday life. Goffman’s insights about the ways in which social status shapes an individual’s chances of sustaining a favorable “face” in social interaction have had some influence on interactionist research, generating a number of studies that look at the interactional disadvantages suffered by members of stigmatized groups and categories (Anderson and Snow 2001). Outside the interactionist tradition, however, a huge body of research on interaction and inequality provides, in some ways, a parallel to this aspect of Goffman’s thought. Arguably the dominant approach to the study of interaction and inequality in sociology today, the status characteristics and expectation states (SCES) theoretical research tradition has been responsible for generating numerous studies that seek to understand the ways in which interactional processes are shaped by the respective statuses of interactants and how these processes in turn produce interactional outcomes that confirm prevailing beliefs about actors’ worth. The parallel between this research tradition and Goffman can likely be explained by the fact that the SCES tradition was heavily influenced in its formulation of research questions by the ideas of Robert E. Park and Everett C. Hughes (Berger et al. 1977). Goffman figures insignificantly, if at all, as a direct influence on the SCES tradition, due in part to the extreme discrepancy between their own experimental methodology and their formality in coniparison to Goffman’s informal style. Despite the discontinuities, however,

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this research tradition seems to have contributed a systematic account of the self-fulfilling tendencies of power and prestige orders that in many ways parallels Goffman’s ideas about how social interaction tends to preserve the status quo. In a sense, it could be argued that the SCES approach has formalized and provided empirical substantiation for many of the suggestive remarks offered by Goffman. The primary aim of the SCES theoretical research tradition has been to provide a detailed account of the processes by which status characteristics (e.g., as race, sex, age, occupation, physical attractiveness, skills, and abilities) shape social interaction in collectively oriented task-based groups. At the foundation of the theory is the idea that groups form eqbectutions for the performance of each group member and that these performance expectations shape group behavior (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1966). Once performance expectations are formulated, however, an obseruable power and prestige order results. This order consists of four components: (1) opportunities to contribute to the group’s task; (2) attempts to contribute to the group’s task; (3) communicated evaluation of one’s contributions; and (4) changes of opinion after exposure to disagreement (Berger, Wagner, and Zelditch 1985: 6). The research in this program found that the following factors affect performance expectations: task-related behaviors, nonverbal behaviors, diffuse and specific status characteristics, evaluations from outside sources, and rewards (Ridgeway and Walker 1995: 289). The status characteristics branch of this theoretical research tradition focused particularly on the impact of diffuse status characteristics such as age, gender, race, educational background, and occupational status. Although they found the effects of diffuse status characteristics to be mitigated in prolonged interaction, their research also demonstrated that initial expectations affect interaction patterns in such a way that they may become self-fulfilling and endure even in sustained interactions (Berger et al. 1977:10, Ridgeway and Walker 1995; Ridgeway 1991; Connor 1985; Johnston 1985). Performance expectations may become self-fulfilling for a variety of reasons having to do with how power and prestige orders work. First, higherstatus group members are given an advantage in maintaining their privileged place in that they are looked to and given more opportunities to contribute to the group’s task. Second, due to the lack of encouragement, low-status members do in fact contribute less. Since research demonstrates a strong correlation between performance output and perceived competence (Ridgeway and Walker 1995: 291), lower contributions serve to reinforce preexisting perceptions of lesser competence. Third, the contributions of low-status members are less likely to be positively evaluated, further contributing to the assumption of their lesser competence (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1972: 253-54; Berger and Connor 1974; Berger, Conner, and McKeown

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1974). Research on double standards shows that higher-status group members are evaluated according to more lenient standards of success and failure, while lower-status group members are evaluated according to more stringent standards for success and failure (Foschi and Foddy 1988; Foschi 1989, 1991, 1996). Fourth, other group members tend to be more influenced by the contributions of higher-status group members, again providing further support for the assumption of their superior competence (Berger and Conner 1974; Berger et al. 1974). Although research in the SCES tradition demonstrates that the effects of devalued status characteristics on performance expectations may be offset by demonstrations of competence, the problem of legitimacy poses still another barrier for the low-status actor. Research shows that the contributions and resulting status gains of high-status members are viewed as legitimate and beneficial to the achievement of the group’s goals. The contributions of low-status members, on the other hand, are more likely to be perceived as self-interested and illegitimate attempts to gain status in the group (Meeker and Weitzel-O’Neill1977; Ridgeway and Walker 1995). If a power and prestige order has not been legitimated-that is, has not become transformed from a set of merely cognitive expectations about how actors will likely perform to a system of normative and moral expectations about how much each actor should contribute-deviations from initial performance expectations by a low-status actor will alter expectations and lead to a change in the distribution of power and prestige within the group (Wagner, Ford, and Ford 1986; Lockheed and Hall 1976; Pugh and Warhman 1985). Yet, if a power and prestige order is legitimated, a deviation from expectations will be perceived as a “status violation” and will be subject to group social control (Wagner 1988). A legitimated hierarchy rests not merely on beliefs about competence but on moral norms. “Legitimation transforms differences in status, influence, or power into systems of rights and obligations” (Ridgeway and Walker 1995: 282). Group members come to believe, in other words, that higher-status members have the right to contribute more and to receive more deference from others. Research in the status characteristics tradition suggests that contributions exceeding expectations or attempts at leadership on the part of lower-status members are experienced as morally offensive. As a result, the status of the low-status contributor tends to decline rather than increase (Ridgeway 1989: 142). Low-status actors are similarly constrained in their use of “task cues” to enhance their standing in the group. Research in the expectation states program has shown that nonverbal demeanor (e.g., confident tone of voice, relaxed posture, maintenance of direct eye contact) affects the perception of a person’s competence (Dovidio and Ellyson 1985; Ridgeway 1987; Ridgeway, Berger, and Smith 1985). Because of their effects on perceptions of task competence, these nonverbal demeanors have been called “task cues” (Berger et

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al. 1986). Low-status actors are limited, however, in their ability to employ task cues as a way of signaling competence. Tuzlak uses the term boomerang eflect to refer to the “loss of influence experienced by those who possess a low state of status but appear confident” (1988: 273). Research demonstrates that the boomerang effect occurs when actors low in status with respect to race and gender exhibit confident nonverbal demeanor (Henry and Ginzberg 1985; Ridgeway 1982). While there are some basic differences between Goffman’s thinking and the theoretical assumptions that underlie the SCES approach, as I have argued elsewhere (Branaman 2001b), both have provided complementary analyses of the processes by which social hierarchies tend to persist. In my opinion, Goffman provides a richer theory of the role of the interaction order itself in perpetuating established social hierarchies. The advance offered by the SCES tradition, however, is greater empirical knowledge about what status characteristics are most duential in the formation of hierarchies, the effects of multiple status characteristics, and a greater specificity in identifying ways in which expectations constrain low-status actors from attaining power and prestige in group interaction.

STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE For the most part, Goffman’s work tends to present a rather conservative image of social interaction, where most people conform to what is expected of them even if this means they must enact identities they feel to be beneath themselves. In Stigma, Goffman suggests that those who are stigmatized according to the standards of the larger society tend, on the whole, to share the identity beliefs of the larger society, and to thereby see themselves as less worthy. The desires to avoid embarrassment and discomfort in social situations, furthermore, seem to function as powerful motivators in keeping individuals away from situations where they would not be accepted. In these ways, hierarchies seem to be maintained with little resistance from those who are disadvantaged by them. Yet, on the other side, an equally consistent theme in Goffman’s work is the analysis of the various ways in which individuals manage to maintain dignity and self-respect in the face of potentially demeaning circumstances, disrespectful treatment by others, and societal standards that devalue the worth of a person’s imputed attributes. This analysis is most thoroughly developed in Stigma and Asylums. In Stigma, Goffman examines the various strategies individuals take in response to possession of a stigmatizing attribute. Although Goffman is rarely cited in contemporary debates over identity politics, clearly his remarks about these various strategies indicate that he wrestled with some of the very

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issues that would preoccupy later scholars and activists. One common way that individuals attempt to avoid the negative identity implications of a stigmatizing attribute is to identfy with one’s “in-group,”or with others who share the stigmatizing attribute, and to withdraw identification with the wider society and its standards. Communities and politicized views develop around most forms of stigma, typically encouraging the stigmatized individual to develop a positive view of self in spite of (and often because of) the stigmatizing attribute. In some cases, bearers of stigma are encouraged in the belief that they are superior human beings due to their ability to triumph in the face of adverse conditions. Spokespersons for various stigmatizing conditions persuasively appeal to the common humanity of the stigma sufferers and point to their significant achievements, challenge the wider society to expand its acceptance, but also frequently advocate in-group identification in the face of the limited acceptance of “normals.”The perspective offered by such politicized accounts discourage the stigmatized from accepting societal views of themselves as inferior. While the adoption of an in-group alignment may offer important identity benefits, Goffman suggests that there are severe limitations in this strategy. He maintains that the stigmatized individual who organizes his life around the stigma “must resign himself to a half-world to do so” (1963: 21). Focusing on the stigma that typically characterizes groups organized around it, he further suggests, can come to seem to the stigmatized person as “one of the large penalties for having one” (21). In-group alignments, moreover, seem to encourage the view that the stigma is indeed an important basis of differentness, reinforcing the societal tendency to take the stigmatizing condition to be an essential basis of identity (113-14). Goffman therefore suggests a fundamental contradiction in the politicized view that, on the one hand, the stigmatized should view themselves as human beings like everyone else but, on the other hand, should not attempt to pass or let down “his” group (124). Thus, while the in-group alignment is clearly a strategy aimed at enhancing the selves of the stigmatized, Goffman contends that it is a relatively weak, or at least contradictory, one. Other strategies that the stigmatized may employ to distance themselves from the negative identity implications of their stigma, obviously less laudable from the politicized perspective, include disidentification with others who share the stigma, or drawing favorable comparisons between themselves and others whose lives seem to be absorbed or overwhelmed by the stigma. Although its role in preserving the status quo has already been noted, the good-adjustment line is one of the primary ways in which stigmatized individuals act to minimize the significance of their stigma and to gain a positive reception in interaction with normals. Even though it has its costs, Goffman states that this strategy is often the most successful.

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In Asylums, Goffman’s view that selves are never completely defined by social situations and that individuals actively resist identification with the defiled and devalued selves that others would attribute to them receives its most sustained development. Here, Goffman discusses various strategies taken by individuals in response to the mortification of self endured in total institutions. As mentioned previously, the efforts on the part of inmates to establish distance from degrading circumstances often fail, as their face-saving reactions of sullenness, contempt, or irony are themselves viewed (at least by the staff) as evidence of personal failure and are often regarded as grounds for further punishment. Nonetheless, Goffman suggests that such institutions typically fail to capture the inmate’s sense of self. One way that inmates resist capture in this sense is through what Goffman calls “moral loosening.” In the face of constant efforts on the part of staff to deflate one’s self claims, inmates often distance themselves from the usual attachment to self common on the outside. Realizing that “it is not very practicable to sustain solid claims about oneself,” the inmate simply withdraws attachment to self (Goffman 1961a: 165). While this strategy involves no claim to possession of an alternative and superior self to the one attributed within the total institution, it does effectively protect the inmate from the pain and humdiation of having one’s self conquered. By, in a sense, evacuating the self before it is attacked, the inmate deprives the conqueror of a sought-after victory. However, behind the strategy of detaching from self or of accepting the official definition of self offered by the institution, Goffman proposes that covert commitments to alternative and more worthy conceptions of self may be maintained. Managers of every social establishment, Goffman points out, make certain claims on individuals within them. Behind these claims are implicit notions of the individual’s character so that these claims are considered appropriate. Yet, Goffman says that in every social establishment one commonly finds that individuals decline to fully accept such claims and their implicit characterizations of self. While individuals may act in ways that do not openly challenge the claims, he notes that some part of the self is typically always held apart (1961a: 304-5). Goffman uses the term secondary adjustments to refer to the various ways in which individuals distance themselves from the clutches of an institution (315-16). Acts of ritual insubordination, such as griping, bitching, or making fun,are examples of secondary adjustments. A particularly effective strategy of resistance, Goffman suggests, is a “special stance that can be taken to alien authority; it combines stiffness, dignity, and coolness in a particular mixture that conveys insufficient insolence to call forth immediate punishment and yet expresses that one is entirely one’s own man” (318). While these stances may not directly challenge existing authority, they do express detachment and implicitly affirm the dignity and value of the self (317).

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Goffman’s ideas about the various ways in which low-status actors resist the negative identity implications of devalued statuses has contributed to the development of subsequent research focusing on the strategies used by the stigmatized to sustain a positive sense of self. Snow and Anderson (1987) argue that homeless people frequently engage in “identity w o r k to ward off the demeaning implications of their stigmatized status so that they may be able to salvage a positive sense of self. Snow and Anderson (1993) identfy a number of ways in which the homeless attempt to “salvage a self,” many of which are suggested by Goffman. Various forms of distancing (i.e., associational distancing, role distancing, and institutional distancing) were frequently used by the homeless to separate themselves from the demeaning implications of their status. On the other side, other homeless attempted to maintain a positive image of self by embracing their status, emphasizing their connections with other homeless, and often casting a critical eye at the wider society. Many of the strategies employed by homeless persons often seemed to involve a more widespread tactic identified by Goffman: “Whatever his position in society, the person insulates himself by blindnesses, half-truths, illusions, and rationalizations. He makes an ‘adjustment’ by convincing himself, with the tactful support of his intimate circle, that he is what he wants to be and that he would not do to gain his ends what the others have done to gain theirs” (Goffman 1967: 43). In addition to Snow and Anderson’s work, Elijah Anderson’s (1981) ethnographic study of black street-corner men provides another notable analysis of the various ways in which low-status persons in society manage to sustain positive images of self. Anderson’s debt to Goffman is quite apparent. Goffman’s potential contributions to theorizing about resistance and agency has, in addition, been emphasized in several secondary treatments of his work. Friedson (1983), Creelan (1984), and Lofland (1980) attribute to Goffman a portrayal of the self as a “stance-taking entity” who struggles to maintain integrity in the face of dehumanizing social constraints (Branaman 2001a). It is certainly the case that Goffman depicts the self as a stance-taking entity that routinely employs identity work to sustain a positive sense of self, regardless of social location. Yet, I would argue that Goffman’s implicit theory of resistance and agency is relatively weak compared to his analysis of the conservative tendencies of social hierarchies. The acts of resistance and agency that Goffman attributes to the stigmatized and subordinated may be more or less effective in providing insulation from the status affronts they routinely experience in everyday life. However, the sorts of resistance and agency Goffman attributes to low-status actors do not seem to have any appreciable disruptive effect on prevailing social hierarchies. James Scott (1990) examines the varied tactics used by the powerless to maintain their dignity and to resist the identity implications of the persistent

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insults they endure. Paralleling Goffman’s front stage-back stage metaphor, Scott distinguishes between the “public transcript” and the “hidden transcript.” The public transcript refers to the open interaction between dominants and subordinates, while the bidden transcript refers to the messages conveyed behind the scenes. Scott shows that the hidden transcripts of subservient groups have tended to be rich in their expressions of anger, defiance, desire for revenge, and even feelings of group superiority. Rarely, however, do such expressions spill over into the public transcript. Drawing on Goffman, Scott notes that the stability of social hierarchies does not depend on authentic support by subordinates, it can just as easily be maintained through public expressions of support: Patterns of domination can, in fact, accommodate a reasonably high level of practical resistance so long as that resistance is not publicly and unambiguously acknowledged. Once it is, however, it requires a public reply if the symbolic status quo is to be restored. The symbolic restoration of power relations may be seen in the importance accorded to public apologies. Erving Goffman, in his careful analysis of the social micro-order, has examined the purposes of public apologies. The subordinate, who has publicly violated the norms of domination, announced by way of a public apology that he dissociates himself from the offense and reaffirms the rule in question. . . . The point has little to do with the sincerity of the retraction and disavowal, since what the apology repairs is the public transcript of apparent compliance. (1990: 57)

Many of the forms of resistance adopted by members of subordinate groups, Scott maintains, fall short of insubordination. He quotes Goffman in saying that subordinates are “free to insinuate all kinds of disregard as long as they maintain the public etiquette of deference (Goffman 1956b, 1967). While the alienation and resistance of subordinates may be known, this knowledge fails to have an official effect if it does not become part of the public transcript. For the most part, I would argue, Goffman’s portrayals of resistance and agency are acts that do not ultimately represent an “official” challenge to prevailing social hierarchies.

CONCLUSION As I have shown in this chapter, Goffman has had a significant influence

on subsequent sociological analyses of self, emotions, status structures, and resistance and agency. A key contribution of his work, in my view, is that he provides an integrative framework for considering the interrelationship of self, emotions, status structures, and resistance and agency. For this reason, I argue that Goffman gives us a useful edifice upon which

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to integrate a diverse body of theory and research pertinent to the study of

interaction and inequality. In the process of building on Goffman, many of his theoretical conceptions have been and will continue to be refined, and greater empirical specificity has been and will continue to be achieved. Until another scholar emerges that equals Goffman’s ability to provide the sustained and multifaceted analysis of interaction and inequality implicit in his work, I think much can be gained by returning to Goffman to “compare notes” on theoretical conceptions and empirical research findings. In rendering insight into the interactional “tools” whereby hierarchies are built, maintained, and legitimated, Goffman provides a basis for the demystification of established social hierarchies. As a first step in challenging established social hierarchies, demystification, of course, is crucial. Yet, Goffman’s analysis of the interaction order does much better at explaining why established social hierarchies are so invulnerable than it does in saying how they might be altered. Goffman does depict a great deal of resistance and “self-salvaging” on the part of individuals. Furthermore, demystlfying insights into the construction of selves and social hierarchies provides a useful resource with which the disgruntled and socially marginalized may “grumble” in their backstage areas about the flimsy basis on which their social superiors dominate. In the frontstages where official realities are created, however, Goffman suggests that the interaction order favors the maintenance of the status quo. Although Goffman does not offer a vision of how established hierarchies might be “officially”upset, I suspect that the tools for formulating such a vision might be found in Goffman and the theory and research that have been inspired by him.

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McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1978. “Intonation in a Man’s World.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3: 541-59. Meeker, Barbara F., and Patricia A. Weitzel 0-Neill. 1977. “Sex Roles and Interpersonal Behavior in Task-Oriented Groups.” American Sociological Review 42: 91-105. Peirce, Jennifer L. 1995. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in ContemporaryLaui Firms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pugh, Meredith D., and Ralph Wahrman. 1985. “Inequality of Influence in Mixed-Sex Groups.” Pp. 142-62 in Status, Rewards, and Influence, ed. J. Berger and M. Zelditch. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 1982. “Status in Groups: The Importance of Motivation.” American Sociological Review 47: 76-88, 1987. “Nonverbal Behavior, Dominance, and the Basis of Status in Task -. Groups.” American Sociological Review 52: 683-94. , 1989. “Understanding Legitimation in Informal Status Orders.” Pp. 131-59 in Sociological fieories in Progress: New Formulations, ed. J. B. Berger, M. Zelditch, and B. Anderson. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. -. 1991. “The Social Construction of Status Value: Gender and Other Nominal Characteristics.”Social Forces 70: 367-86. -. 1994. “Affect Processes.” Pp. 54-83 in Group Processes, ed. M. Foschi and E. Lawler. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. -. ed. 1992. Gender, Interaction, and Inequality. New York: Springer. Ridgeway, Cecilia L., J. Berger, and L. Smith. 1985. “Nonverbal Cues and Status: An Expectation States Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 90: 955-78, Ridgeway, Cecilia L., and Cathryn Johnson. 1990. “What Is the Relationship between Socioemotional Behavior and Status in Task Groups?” American Sociological Review 54: 79-93. Ridgeway, Cecilia L., and Henry A. Walker. 1995. “Status Structures.” Pp. 281-310 in Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology, ed. K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon. Rsman, Barbara J. 1987. “Intimate Relationships from a Microstructural Perspective: Men Who Mother.” Gender and Society 1, no. I: 6-32. Risman, Barbara J., and Pepper Schwartz. 1989. “Being Gendered: A Microstructural View of Intimate Relationships.”Pp. 1-9 in Gender in Intimate Relationshps:A MicrostructuralApproach,ed. B. J. Risman and P. Schwartz. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth. Rogers, Mary F. 1980. “Goffman on Power, Hierarchy, and Status.”Pp. 10&33 in ?be Viewfrom Goffman, ed. J. Ditton. London: Macmillan. Rollins, Judith. 1985. Between Women: Domestics and their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sagrestano, Lynda. 1992a. “Power Strategies in Interpersonal Relationships: The Effects of Expertise and Gender.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 16: 481-9 5. -. 1992b. “The Use of Power and Influence in a Gendered World.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 16: 439-47. Scheff, Thomas J. 1988. “Shame and Conformity: The Deference-Emotion System.” American SociologicalReview 53: 395-406. -. 199Oa. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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1990b. “Socialization of Emotions: Pride and Shame as Causal Agents.” Pp. 281-304 in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, ed. T. D. Kemper. Albany: State University of New York Press. Scher, Steven J., and David R. Heise. 1993. “Affect and the Perception of Injustice.” Advances in Group Processes 10. Schwartz, Barry. 1975. Queuing and Waiting: Studies in the Organization of Access and Delay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Shelly, R. K. 1993. “How Sentiments Organize Interaction.” Advances in Group Processes 10: 113-32. Smith-Lovin, Lynn. 1990. “Emotion as Confirmation and Disconfirmation of Identity: An Affect Control Model.” Pp. 23S70 in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, ed. T. D. Kemper. Albany: State University of New York Press. -. 1995. “The Sociology of Affect and Emotion.” Pp. 1 1 W 8 in Sociological Perspectives in Social Psychology, ed. K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon. Snow, David A,, and Leon Anderson. 1987. “Identity Work Among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities.” American Journal of Sociology 92: 133671. -. 1993. Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tannen, Deborah, ed. 1993a. Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press. -. 1993b. “The Relativity of Linguistic Strategies: Rethinking Power and Solidarity in Gender and Dominance.” Pp. 165-88 in Gender and Conversational Interaction, ed. Deborah Tannen. New York: Oxford university Press. Thorne, Barrie, and Nancy Henley, eds. 1975. Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds. 1983. Language, Gender, and Society. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Tseelon, Efrat. 1992. “Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman, Impression Management, and the Postmodern Self.” Theory, Culture, and Society 9: 115-28. Tuzlak, Aysan. 1988. “Boomerang Effects: Status and Demeanor over Time.” Pp. 261-74 in Status Generalization: New Theory and Research, ed. M. Webster and M. Foschi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Wagner, David G. 1988. “Gender Inequalities in Groups: A Situational Approach.” Pp. 55-68 in Status Generalization: New Theory and Research, ed. M. Webster and M. Foschi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. -. 1988. “Status Violations: Toward an Expectations States Theory of the Social Control of Deviance.” Pp. 11&22 in Status Generalization: New Theory and Research, ed. M. Webster and M. Foschi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Wagner, David G., R. S. Ford, and T. W. Ford. 1986. “Can Gender Inequalities Be Reduced?”American SociologicalReview 51: 47-61. West, Candace. 1992. “Rethinking ‘Sex Differences’ in Conversational Topics.” Advances in Group Processes 9: 13162.

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353-69.

West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1993. “Power, Inequality, and the Accomplishment of Gender: An Ethnomethodological View.” Pp. 151-74 in neory on Gender, Feminism on meory, ed. P. England. New York: Aldine. -. 1995. ”Doing Difference.” Gender G Society 9: S 3 7 . West, Candace, and Angela Garcia. 1988. ‘Conversational Shifts Work: A Study of Topical Transitions between Women and Men.” Social Problems 35: 551-75. West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1977. “Women’sPlace in Everyday Talk: Reflections on Parent-Child Interaction.” Social Problems 24: 521-29. .1983. “Small Insults: A Study of Interruptions in Cross-Sex Conversations between Unacquainted Persons.” Pp. 102-17 in Language, Gender and Society, ed. B. Thorne, N. Henley, and C. Kramarae. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. -. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender G Society 1: 125-51. Wiley, Mary Glenn. 1995. “Sex Category and Gender in Social Psychology.” Pp. 362-86 in SociologicalPerspectives in Social Psychology, ed. K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon. Zimmerman, Don H., and Candace West. 1975. “Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversation.” Pp. 105-29 in Language, Gender, and Society, ed. B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

4 “Much Ado about Goffman” Norman K. Denzin

The claim that all the worlds a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to b e familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation. (Goffman 1959: 254) Given that the logic of privatization . . . now odiously shapes archetypes of citizenship, [andl manages our perceptions of what constitute the “good society”. . . it stands to reason that new ethnographic research approaches must take global capitalism not as an end point of analysis, but as a starting point. (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000: 304) My abhorrence of neoliberalism helps to explain my legitimate anger when I speak of the injustices to which the ragpickers among humanity are condemned. It also explains my total lack of interest in any pretension of impartiality. I am not impartial, or objective . . . [this] does not prevent me from holding always a rigorously ethical position. (Freire 1998: 22)

In this chapter, I interrogate the myth and legacy of Erving Goffman, about whom much is currently being made (see Lemert 1997; Branaman 1997). I want to locate Goffman in his historical moment, while assessing his contributions to a critical, performative sociology. I will suggest that American sociology has reached an impasse that it seems unable to get beyond. Goffman’s legacy is part of that impasse. My argument unfolds in four parts. I begin by turning Goffman back on himself. I then examine a performance text and apply Goffrnan’s dramaturgical framework to that text. I next read Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life against two other 1959 publications, C. Wright Mills’s 7;be Sociological Imagination and Anselm L. Strauss’sMirrors and Mash. I conclude with observations on critical pedagogy, performance theory, and a sociology for this new century. 127

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UNIVERSAL H U M A N NATURE Goffman’s place in mid-twentieth-century American sociology can be partially assessed through an inversion of the following assertion. In his 1955 essay on “Face-work” (reprinted in Goffman 1967), he argues: If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the fact that societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. . . . [Individuals are] taught to be perceptive, . . . to have pride, honor, and dignity . . . to have tact and a certain amount of poise. These [things] . . . must be build into the person if practical use is to be made of him as interactant. . . . [Ilt is these elements that are referred to in part when one speaks of universal human nature . . . And if a particvlar person, or group, or society seems to have a unique character all its own, it is because its standard set of human-nature elements is pitched and combined in a particular way. (Goffman

1967: 44-45

At the end of these lines, he might have added, societies everywhere get the

kinds of persons they deserve. Turning Goffman on his head, it is clear that mid-twentieth-century American sociology required a sociologist like Goffman. Perhaps we got what we deserved when we started taking him seriously. He put a human face on the sociological subject. He gave life, meaning, and purpose to the faceless human being that functionalists and exchange theorists wrote about. He brought nuance and moral meaning to the interaction order. His use of British and French structural anthropology lent an international tone to American social theory. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturigcal framework gave sociologists a new language, a new set of terms emphasizing ritual, dramaturigcal skills, performances, teams, teamwork, regions, frontand backstages, discrepant roles, communication out of character, the art of impression management, the performative character of social life. His relentless interrogation of face-work, forms of talk, and interaction ritual helped create a microapproach to social theory (196lb, 1963, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1974, 1981a, 1981b, 1983). Goffman’s move from “an ethnography of experience to a semiotics of speech” (Clough 1998:102) produced penetrating structural discourses on the organization of everyday experience (Denzin and Kellner 1981). His approach to field methods underwrote a new version of urban ethnography (Goffman 1974). His studies of mental illness and stigma (1961a, 1964) created the illusion that he cared for the insane, the underclass, and the disabled. His biting observations of gender advertisements (1976) undercut a feminist sociology. Over a short publishing career, a mere quarter-century, Goffman produced ten major books and a score of classic essays. He was everywhere at

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once, two new books every two years. All at once everyone was a Goffman fan, or so it seemed. We believed, since he was a Chicago Ph.D., that he was keeping interactionist Chicago-style sociology alive. This was important for those who saw sociology fighting against Eastern establishment functionalism. And so the good battle was being fought on a somewhat unified front: dramaturgy with Erving Goffman, labeling theory guided by Howard S. Becker, and ethnomethodology inspired by Harold Garfinkel. Then he died, but the mythology and the legacy live on. It is the Goffman myth and the legacy that I interrogate here, for there is much ado about him that I think needs to be undone. Goffman’s emphasis on performance would anticipate the performative formulations of Austin (19621, Searle (19701, and Butler (1990) and be seen as part of the performance turn in anthropology (Turner 1986a, 1986bj. He brought a literary sensibility to sociology. He drew on literary sources, and his was a glfted prose that was at once nuanced, ironic, and literary. And. he offered a timeless, naturaliztic, taxonomic sociology, a sociology that seemed to turn human beings into Kafkaesque insects to be studied under a glass. He was the objective observer of human folly. He gave mid-twentieth-century academic sociology exactly what it wanted, and what it needed: men and women in gray flannel suits performing the rites and rituals of a postwar white-collar society, a society on the move, Riesman’s (1953) lonely crowd. Goffman’s actors did not resist; they conformed to the requirements of a local and global capitalism that erased class, race, and gender in the name of a universal, circumspect human nature. Goffman’s moral selves knew their place in the order of things. Capital was a missing term, not even an end point in Goffman’s dramaturgy. His was a universal sociology, part of a pandisciplinary project, that moved from linguistics to psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. In turning Goffman upside down, I want to suggest that his framework was misleading in three critical ways. First, the emphasis on ritual, performances, face-work, and frames gave the illusion of humanistic, interpretive, subjective inquiry. But this was not his project. He was the naturalistic observer, as rigorously structural and aloof as Claude Lkvi-Strauss or George C. Homans. Second, and more deeply, his was an apolitical social psychology. It did not take sides (Becker 1967); it seemed to serve the welfare state (Gouldner 19681, and it did not address issues of social injustice, war, or violence under capitalism. But then neither did any of the other versions of mainstream American sociology. Third, this sociology was only superficially performative. Goffman’s actors (and actresses> performed reasonably well-defined roles, thereby demonstrating the utility of a functional model of role behavior. His actors kept front- and backstages separate, managed role distance, and hewed to well-defined scripts as they engaged in their performances. While his

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actors occasionally slipped and stumbled, and experienced embarrassment, in the main their performances sustained ritually organized systems of social activity. He would remind his readers that the dramaturgical framework was a scaffold, built to be taken down (1959: 254), that he was really only interested in studying the “structure of social encounters” (1959: 254; 196lb: 7; 1967: 1; 1971: ix,1974: 8; 1981a: 1).Then he would contradict himself, saying that the framework could be employed as “the end-point of analysis, as a final wdy of ordering facts” (1959: 240; also 1974: 53). So underneath, the dramaturgical framework had to be always taken seriously. Goffman, it seems, was always looking for how “aspects of the theater creep into everyday life” (1959: 254). Preoccupied with illusion and reality, he worked from a realist stance that presumed that staged versions of reality somehow corresponded to the real world. After all, dramatic scriptings of behavior are everywhere present in our media-drenched society, and these scriptings guide and organize real experience (Goffman 1974: 53). Furthermore, actors in the theater have to conduct themselves in ways that meet the requirements of real situations, which are theatrical-like in their construction (1959: 255). Indeed, whenever they come into one another’s presence, persons-as-performers manage impressions, contrive illusions, keep front- and backstages separate, deploy various dramaturgical skills, thereby turning each interactional episode into a tiny moment of staged, dramatic theater. Disclaimers aside, for Goffman “all the world’s a stage” (1959: 254). Perhaps it is time to bury dramaturgy and its preoccupations with reality and illusion. Presume, for starts, that everyday life is organized by real people doing the work of interaction, that there are no originals against which illusions are measured, no imitations, only new experience, no hyperreality. If this is granted, then the scaffolding of dramaturgy should never have been constructed. A performative sociology does not have to be dramaturgical. Consider now the following staged, theatrical performance.

MONTANA SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARKS: A COMEDY OF ERRORS July 16, 2002, 7 P.M. It is a clear-blue, wind-swept Montana night, a red sun setting over the Beartooth Mountains. It’s hot inside the crowded Red Lodge Civic Auditorium. Over eight hundred people are crowded together on hardwood bleacher seats, waiting for the Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (MSIP) acting troupe to perform Shakespeare’s play, 7%eComedy of Errors.’ The simple set for the play consists only of a proscenium which sits in the middle of the basketball court. The backside of the stage is visible to everyone. When not on stage, actors rest in lawn chairs, and move about, chatting with one another.

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The plot of the play, a Roman comedy about a set of twins separated at birth and another set of twin servants, is of little concern, except to note that anyone you meet in the play seems to be someone else. My interest is in the troupe, whose names and biographies are made available in the program notes. The troupe is composed of eleven members, five of whom are veterans from past tours: Tim Hyland, Susan Miller, Will Dickerson, Mark Kuntz, and Todd Phillips. Tim lives in Seattle, performs in the Seattle Children’s Theatre, was a member of the Bathhouse Theatre for eight years, has performed in the title role in Hamlet, and holds a B.F.S. degree from the University of British Columbia. He dedicates his performances to the memory of his friend Michael Fels (Montana Shakespeare in the Parks 2002: 9). Tim plays Dromio of Syracuse in the play. Susan Miller and Will Dickerson met during the 2001 season and recently returned to Bozeman to get married, prior to honeymooning on the 2002 tour (Stillwater County News 2002). Susan is cast as Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus; Will, in turn, plays Antipholus of Syracuse. The six new members of the troupe include Chicago actors Kevin Asselin, Tracy Repep, Timothy Klein; Lydia Berger, David Chrzanowski from Milwaukee; and Nick O’Donnell from Seattle. The three Chicago actors recently performed in 7?x Comedy of Errors in Chicago, directed by Shakespeare in the Parks artistic director Joel Jahnke (Montana Shakespeare in the Parks 2002: 9). In typical Shakespeare fashion, at least some of the actors have multiple roles to play: David has two parts, Solinus and Doctor Pinch; Nick is Egeon and an officer; Kevin is Balthasar and a messenger; Timothy Klein is Angeleo and a merchant; Lydia plays a courtesan, Emilia, and Abbess of Ephesus. As the performance unfolds, I begin to identlfy the actors by real-life name, connecting their biographies to the parts they are playing. I become immersed in their mini-life stories. Kevin Asselin has his M.F.A. degree from my university and performed in the Armory Free Theatre. His face seems familiar. Will Dickerson thanks his beautiful new wife Susan (Adriana) for her continued support and patience. Susan says that her favorite production, to date, “is her recent marriage to Will, fellow company member and handsome devil” (Montana Shakespeare in the Parks 2002: 9). Lydia, who met Joel Jahnke in Chicago, thanks him for the opportunity to perform in Montana. Nick O’Donnell’s biggest fan is his wife Sidney, who is getting her Ph.D. in theater at the University of Washington. Mark Kuntz sends his love to his one Octavia, thanking Ian Malcolm. Tracy Repep teaches performance to kids in Illinois and thanks the kind folks in Montana for “welcoming this city girl out west. These personal narratives become tangled up in my mind in the hopelessly complex plot of the play. Gender and sexual identity criss-cross, as seemingly gay actors play straight males. I confuse husbands and wives in ”

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the play with husbands and wives in real life. And this is as it should be, for theater is all about make-believe and illusion, the willing suspension of disbelief. Goffman’s framework does not help me make sense of this performance on this night in Red Lodge, Montana. This troupe is surely a group of performers. These performers surely believe in the roles they are playing, and they ask the audience to do the same thing. But there is little collusion here, that 1 can see, nor is there an attempt to hide backstage behavior from the audience; indeed, everything is out in the open! Of course everyone cooperates. Members of the audience give the performers some degree of full attention, even as they chat with one another and help each other get up and get down from the bleachers. Little children are quiet as they sneak in late and crawl on hands and knees along the front row, finally finding a spot where they can lay on the gym floor and prop their chins up on their elbows. A female performer winks at an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair, and three older women chuckle, as the man blushes. Everyone, it seems, is doing a version of performing Shakespeare in the Park. In this complex performance space, multiple versions of reality are being performed. Everywhere I look I find the development and performance of discrepant roles: audience members acting like performers; performers joining with the audience to applaud a fellow troupe member; laughter from backstage spilling over the proscenium to effect actors waiting to perform; multiple liminal spaces; improvised performances shared by audience and performer alike; performance experienced as liminality (Turner 1986b: 41). The audience-performer division, which aligns persons into collusive teams, disappears. It is not that individuals are competing with one another to maintain particular impressions or definitions of the situation. Rather, there are only people using their performances as vehicles for representing their ongoing definitions of experience. Since the meaning of experience is constantly changing, the performance of experience is constantly changing. There are only performances and stories about performances. The program for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks is filled with performance stories, tiny narrative tidbits about who is related to whom, stories about who just got married, about who acted with whom, when, and where, and so forth. These stories are filtered through the performance biographies of each actor. They become part of this evening’s experience, each actor has allowed a little bit of her- or himself to become part of this public experience. This night with Shakespeare, this evening with David, Nick, Todd, Will, Susan, Mark, Tim, Timothy, Tracy, Kevin, and Lydia, is now remembered as the night we saw i%e Comedy of Errors in Red Lodge. On this night, Shakespearean culture came alive in Montana. This was a pedagogical event, a political accomplishment, a performance of cultural politics, a slice of cultural

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pedagogy, gendered Shakespearian politics, being educated on how to experience Shakespeare in a public arena like the Civic Auditorium.* Shakespeare in the Montana Parks brings high culture to tiny Montana communities. It democratizes culture, producing for just one evening an egalitarian experience where everybody can participate in the same populai cultural event, doing Shakespeare together. In bringing this version of the popular to Red Lodge, Montana State University stakes out its place in the cultural politics that define one version of dramatic entertainment in the New West.3

REREADING G O F F M A N The year 1959 was a good one for pragmatist, interpretive sociology. In that year, American sociology saw the publication of Goffman’s Zbe Presentation of Self in Evey d a y Life, C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination, and Anselm L. Strauss’sMirrors and Masks. These three books went in three different directions at the same time; Mills on politics, Strauss on symbolic interaction, and Goffman, as noted, o n a new framework called dramaturgy. Of the three books, Mills’s was the most political. He challenged sociologists to develop a critical, political imagination, to think of the world and its arrangements in terms of power, politics, and people. Read alongside his other works, T ? x Sociological Imagination took up pragmatism, Parsons, Merton, Lazarsfeld, Marx, the white collar, the New Left, conservatives, the new middle class, the media, and the culture industries. Mills (and Dewey) inspired the 1961 Port Huron statement of Students for a Democratic Society (Hayden and Flacks 2002: 20). Strauss, in contrast, would offer a philosophical analysis of language, meaning, and identity in everyday life. His matter-of-fact, down-to-earth social psychology talked about naming, self-appraisals, and the course of action, motivation, fantasy, status forcing, structured interaction processes, transformations in identity, turning points, coaching, generational relations, history, memory, and personal identity. Mirrors and Mash builds a bridge between sociology and social psychology, just as Goffman’s Zbe Presentation of Self in Everyday Life did. Strauss, like Goffman, and Mills, sought a fusion of theoretical perspectives. Yet like Goffman, Strauss’s concerns were turned inward, to the social science disciplines and their relations with one another. Mills was looking outward, aiming after Marx, perhaps, to help people change the histories they lived. But Strauss too wanted to help people understand themselves, and their identities. The legacies of each man continues to the present day. Goffman remains center stage for one brand of mainstream sociology (see Fine, Manning, and Smith 2000; Lemert 1997; Branaman 1997). Strauss is a central focus in the interaction and qualitative inquiry communities. Mills is still an inspiration for

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the Old and New Left. Each theorist’s legacy is different. Goffman shows sociologists how to build a wall around their discipline, how to be scientific, and rigorous and seemingly humanistic (see Rossel and Collins 2000: 527). He offers a counter-social psychology to exchange and rational choice theories. His dramaturgical framework is still popular (Dunn 1998). Strauss extends an open-ended invitation to anyone who wants to join him in an indeterminate, never-ending grounded theory, interpretive project, making sense of self, identity, and interaction in daily life. Mills, of course, imagined a version of sociology that was at once interpretive, critical, historical, and somewhat left-leaning. Enmeshed in his version of Weber and Marx, he wanted a scientific, empirical sociology that escaped the pitfalls of abstracted empiricism and grand theory. His scientific sociology offered history and society a vocabulary of terms: anomie, alienation, bureaucracy, conflict, control, power, institution, symbol, public opinion, and values. Mills believed that people were dupes of the media and could not be counted on to make their own histories. They needed sociology to do this for them; this was the calling of classical sociology. Mills’s criticisms speak to us today. Our discipline is still fragmented, still seduced by abstracted empiricisms and faddish middle-range theories. Our scientific method has not produced cumulative knowledge. We are not addressing society’s underlying problems, including the problems of racism, fascism, and violence. Sadly, recent writings on Mills reveal complexities in his character, complexities that tarnish the radical myth. He did have feet of clay (Oakes and Vidich 2000; Denzin 2001). But Mills the author remains a rallying point for all those sociologists who value participatory democracy, democratic populism, pedagogies of freedom (Freire 19981, grassroots movements, fights against corporate globalization, peace with justice, justice without violence, and societies responsive to the needs of the vast majority (Hayden and Flacks 2002: 21). Mills and Strauss offer the foundations of a critical social science, a social science that seeks to help people make the histories that a democracy under capitalism demands. They offer insights for a progressive social theory, theory that criticizes, cajoles, satirizes, and mocks social formations and nation-states that reproduce violence, repression, and inequality. This is social theory that anticipates, in some forms, liberation movements based on identity politics, race, class, and gender. This is not social theory that aimed for causal principles and unified models. It is progressive, critical social theory, theory that incessantly criticizes the workings of democracy under global capitalism. Goffman does not lead us in these directions. Those who are preoccupied with turning his theory into another micromodel perhaps do the discipline a disservice. Their efforts perpetuate the illusion that such models will move

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the field forward. I turn now to alternative ways of conceptualizing performance, drawing on the work of Conquergood (19981, KirshenblattGimblett (20011, and Butler (1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1997).

RETHINKING PERFORMANCE A N D PERFORMATIVITY Following Conquergood (19981, performance can be understood in multiple ways, including as imitation, or mimesis; as poiesis, or construction; as kinesis, motion, or movement (Conquergood 1998: 31). These distinctions suggest that it is necessary to move from a view of performance as imitation, or dramaturgical staging (Goffman 19591, to an emphasis on performance as liminality and construction (Turner 1986a, 1986b), to a view of performance as struggle, as an intervention, as breaking and remaking, as kinesis, as a sociopolitical act (Conquergood 1998: 32). Viewed as struggles and interventions, performances and performance events become transgressive achievements, political accomplishments that break through “sedimented meanings and normative traditions” (Conquergood 1998: 32). By performances, in the plural, I mean, following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2001: 217), “‘events’that are usefully understood as performances,” interpretive events, involving actors, purposes, scripts, stories, stages, and interactions (Burke 1969). I mean performance in the singular, again following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to be used “as an organizing concept for examining phenomena that may or may not be a performance in the conventional sense of the word . . . [including] museum exhibitions, tourist environments, and the aesthetics of everyday life” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2001: 218). The act of performing “intervenes between experience, and the story told” (Langellier 1999: 128). Performances are embedded in language. That is, certain words do or perform things, and what they do performatively refers back to meanings embedded in language and culture (Austin 1962;4Derrida 1973, 1988; Butler 1993a, 1993b, 1997). For Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2001: 218) performativity describes “agency-what performance and display do.” For Butler performativity refers to the “power of discourse to reproduce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (1993a: 2). Schechner elaborates. We inhabit a world where cultures, texts, and performances collide. Such collisions require a distinction between ‘as’and ‘is”’ (Schechner 1998: 361). Performances as fluid ongoing events “mark and bend identities, remake time and adorn and reshape the body, tell stories and allow people to play with behavior that is restored, or ‘twice-behaved’” (361). The way a performance is done describes performative behavior, “how people play gender, heightening their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different selves in different situations” (361).5This view “

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of the performative makes it “increasingly difficult to sustain any distinction between appearances and facts, surfaces and depths, illusions and substances. Appearances are actualities” (362). Performance and performativity intersect in a speaking subject, a subject with a gendered and racialized body. Performativity “situates performance narrative within the forces of discourse” (Langellier 1999: 1 2 9 , for example, the discourses of race and gender. In transgressive performances, performing bodies contest gendered identities, creating spaces for a queer politics of resistance (Butler 1993a: 12; Pollock 1998: 42; also Garoian 1999: 5). Butler reminds us that there are no original performances, or identities, no “preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured” (1993a: 141). Every performance is an imitation, a form of mimesis, “if heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of ‘heterosexuality’. . . is always and only an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original” (Butler 1993b: 644). Every performance is an original and an imitation. If there is no original, then Goffman’s concept of performance as mimesis is challenged. But Taussig (1993) and Haraway (1991: 201) show that imitdtion can be subversive, like the Coyote, “witty actor and agent . . . [thel coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse” (Haraway 1991: 201; Taussig 1993: 255). So even the imitation is an original, a transgression. Furthermore, every performance becomes a form of kinesis, of motion, a decentering of agency and person through movement, disruption, action, a way of questioning the status quo. Thus is Goffman’s model extended. If performances are actualities that matter, then gender reality, “as in other ritual social dramas . . . is only sustained through social performances” (Butler 1993a: 140-41), through performances that are repeated. And here, as Schechner argues, performance is best seen as ‘“restored’ or ‘twice-behaved behavior.”’ As cultural practices, performances reaffirm, resist, transgress, “re-inscribe or passionately reinvent” (Diamond 1996: 2) repressive understandings that circulate in daily life. Clearly performativity and performance exist in a tension with one another, in a tension between doing, or performing, and the done, the text, the performance. Performance is sensuous and contingent. Performativity “becomes the everyday practice of doing what’s done” (Pollock 1998: 43, italics in original). Performativity is “whathappens when historyhextuality sees itself in the mirror-and suddenly sees double; it is the disorienting, [thel disruptive” (Pollock 1998: 43). Performativity derives its power and perogative in the breaking and remaking of the very textual frameworks that give it meaning in the first place (Pollock 1998: 44). An improvisatory politics of resistance is anchored in the spaces where the doing and the done collide. Viewed thusly, performances become a critical site of power, and politics. A radical pedagogy underlies this notion of performative cultural politics.

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Foucault reminds us that where there is power, there is always resistance. The performative becomes an act of doing, an act of resistance, a way of connecting the biographical, the pedagogical, and the political (Giroux 2000a: 134-35; also 2001a, 2001b). The concepts of militant utopianism and educated hope are realized in the moment of resistance (Giroux 2001b: 109). This is a utopianism and a vision of hope that moves from the private to the public, the biographical to the institutional, linking personal troubles with public issues. This utopianism tells and performs stories of resistance, compassion, justice, joy, community, and love (Hardt and Negri 2000: 413). Performances as pedagogical practices make sites of oppression visible, affirming, in the process, an oppositional politics that reasserts the value of self-determination and mutual solidarity. This pedagogy of hope rescues radical democracy from the conservative politics of neoliberalism (Giroux 2001b: 115). A militant utopianism offers a new language of resistance in the public and private spheres. Thus does performance pedagogy energize a radical participatory democratic vision for this new century.

PERFORMANCE, PEDAGOGY, A N D POLITICS The current historical moment requires morally informed performance disciplines that will help people recover meaning in the face of senseless, brutal violence, violence that produces voiceless screams of terror and insanity.6 Cynicism and despair reign (Giroux 2000a: 110). There has never been a greater need for a militant utopianism that would help us imagine a world free of conflict, terror, and death. We need an oppositional performative social science, performance disciplines that will show us how to create oppositional utopian spaces, discourses, and experiences within our public institutions. In these spaces and places, in neighborhoods, in experimental community theatres, in independent coffee shops and bookstores, in local and national parks, on playing fields, in wilderness areas, in experiences with nature, critical democratic culture is nurtured (see Giroux 2001b: 125; Stegner 1980: 146). Conquergood (1998: 26) and Diawara (1996) are correct. We must find a space for a cultural studies that moves from textual ethnography to a performative autoethnography. “Performance-sensitive ways of knowing” (Conquergood 1998: 26) contribute to an epistemological and political pluralism that challenges existing ways of knowing and representing the world. Such formations are more inclusionary and better suited for thinking about postcolonial or “subalteran cultural practices” (Conquergood 1998: 26). This is so because performance approaches to knowing insist on immediacy and involvement, on partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings

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not analytic distance or detachment, the hallmarks of the textual and positivistic paradigms (Conquergood 1998: 26; Pelias 1999: ix,xi). Building on Diawara (1996: 304), this will be a multiracial cultural studies. Consistent with the interactionist tradition, performance ethnography studies the ways in which people, “through communicative action, create and continue to create themselves with the American experience” (Diawara 1996: 304). This performative approach puts culture into motion. It examines, narrates, and performs the complex ways in which persons experience themselves within the shlfting ethnoscapes of today’s global world economy (McCall 2001: 50).

CONCLUSION Reading between the lines, in this chapter I have argued that critical, interpretive sociology is at a crossroads. Ethnographers, pragmatists, symbolic interactionists, and critical theorists face a challenge, namely how to reclaim Mills’s progressive discourse, while building on the social-psychological foundations offered by Goffman and Strauss. I have suggested that we need to craft an emancipatory discourse that speaks to the forms of life under neoliberal forms of democracy and capitalism. This discourse requires a turn to a performance-based approach to fieldwork, to writing, to culture, politics, and pedagogy. We need to explore performance autoethnography as a vehicle for enacting a performative cultural politics of hope, we need a performative cultural studies. Goffman’s performance model does not take us to these places, although his framework challenges us always to look to the dramatic, enacted features of daily life. But today we require more of our sociological theories and theorists. Using a critical imagination, there is a commitment to connect critical sociology to issues surrounding justice, and equity, participatory cultural policies, radical, democratic cultural politics (Willis and Trondman 2000: 10-11; also McLaren 1997, 2001). These are the doors that Mills and Strauss, but not Goffman, opened. It is these doors that we must pass through if sociology is to make a difference in this new century.

NOTES 1. The MSIP performances have been going on for over thirty years. Every summer during an eight-week tour, the Montana Shakespeare in the Parks acting troupe visits f&ty communities, performing a total of sixtyeight performances to over thirty thousand people throughout Montana, northern Wyoming, and eastern Idaho (Stillwater County News 2002; Montana Shakespeare in the Parks 2002: 1). MSIP in an outreach program of Montana State University-Bozeman.

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2. Kincheloe and McLaren (2000: 285) observe that culturalpedagogy refers to the ways that cultural production functions as a form of education, as a way of seeing, as a way of producing cultural knowledge. 3. Shakespeare was also present in the popular culture of the Old West, both in popular novels, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (19021, and in the performances of touring nineteenth- and early twentieth-century professional actors (see Watermeier 1992: 885). 4. In Austin’s theory, “the term performative designated the kind of utterance that actually does something in the world, e.g., promising, forgiving. . . . as opposed to ‘constative’utterances that merely report on a state of affairs independent of the act of enunciation” (Conquergood 1998: 32, see also Garoian 1999: 4; Austin 1962: 5, 14-15, 108; and Perinbanayagam 1991: 113 for criticisms). Derrida “reworks Austin’s performativity as citationality . . . dissolving constative into performative speech” (Pollock 1998: 39). 5. Schechner (1998: 361) observes that this is the “performative Austin introduced and Butler and queer theorists discuss.” 6. An earlier version of these words was written on September 14, 2001, three days after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

REFERENCES Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Becker, Howard S. 1967. “Whose Side Are We On?” Social Problems 14: 239-47. Branaman, Ann. 1997. “Goffman’s Social Theory.” Pp. xlv-hxii in m e Goffman Reader, ed. C . Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. -. 1993a. Bodies m a t Matter. New York: Routledge. .1993b. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” [Extract.]Pp. 637-48 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. C. Lemert. Boulder, Cola.: Westview. -. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 1998. The End(s) of Ethnography. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Conquergood, Dwight. 1998. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.” Pp. 2 5 3 6 in The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. S. J. Dailey. Annandale, Va.: National Communication Association. Denzin, Norman K. 2001. “Remembering Mills.” [Review of Guy Oakes and Arthur Vidich, Collaboration,Reputation and Ethics in American Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.] International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 12: 321-33. Denzin, Norman K., and Charles Keller. 1981. “FrameAnalysis Reconsidered.” Contemporay Sociology 10, no. 1: 52-60. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press.

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l788. Limited, Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Diamond, Elin. 1996. “Introduction.”Pp. 1-12 in Performances and Cultural Politics, ed. E. Diamond. New York: Routledge. Diawara, Mantha. 1996. “Black Studies, Cultural Studies: Performative Acts.” Pp. 3OM in What Is Cultural Studies? ed. J. Storey. London: Arnold. Dunn, Robert G. 1998. Identity Crises. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fine, Gary Alan, Philip Manning, and Gregory W. H. Smith. 2000. “Introduction.”Pp. ix-xliv in Em’ng Goffman, vols. 1 4 , ed. G. A. Fine and G. W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Freire, Paulo. 1998. Pedagogy of Freedom. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Garoian, Charles R. 1999. Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Afl of Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Giroux, Henry. 2000a. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. -. 2000b. Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culturek War on Children. New York: Palgrave. , 2001a. “Cultural Studies as Performative Politics.” Cultural StudieeCritical Methodologies 1: 5-23. , 2001b. Public Spaces, Private Lives. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Goffman, Erving. 1955. “On Face-work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 18, no. 3: 213-31. -. 1959. 7’he Presentation of Self in Evey d a y Life. New York: Anchor. -. 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday. , 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. , 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. .1964. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. , 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor. -. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. .1971. Relations in Public: Micro-Studies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. -. 1974. Frame Analysis: Essays on the Organization of Werience. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1976. “Gender Advertisements.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3, no. 2: 69-154. -. 1981a. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. .1981b. “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1: 60-68.

1983. “Felicity’sCondition.”AmericanJournal of Sociology 89, no. 1: 1-53. Gouldner, Alvin. W. 1968. “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State.”American Sociologist 4: 103-16. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: 7’he Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University Press.

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Hayden, Tom, and Dick Flacks. 2002,“The Port Huron Statement at 40.” 7he Nation 275 (August 5-12): 18-21. Kincheloe, Joe L., and Peter McLaren. 2000. “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research.” Pp. 279-314 in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2001. “Performing Live: An Interview with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.” Tourist Studies 1: 21 1-32. Langellier, Kristin M. 1999.“Personal Narrative, Performance, Performativity: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19: 12544. Lemert, Charles. 1997. “Goffman.” Pp. ix-xliii in 7be Gofman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. McCall, Michael. 2001. “Three Stories of Loss and Return.” Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies 1: 50-61. McLaren, Peter. 1997. “The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flaneur: Critical Reflexivity and Posthybridity as Narrative Engagement.” Pp. 143-77 in Representation and the Text:Re-Framing the Narrative Voice,ed. W. G. Tierney and Y. S. Lincoln. Albany: State University of New York Press. -. 2001.“Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies 1: 108-31. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. 7be Sociological Zmagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Montana Shakespeare in the Park. 2002. Bozeman: Montana State University Theatre Department. Oakes, Guy, and Arthur Vidich. 2000. Collaboration,Reputation and Ethics in American Lfe: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Pelias, Ronald. 1999. Writing Performance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. S. 1991. Discursive Acts. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Pollock, Della. 1998. “A Response to Dwight Conquergood’s Essay: ‘Beyond the Text: Towards a Performative Cultural Politics.”’Pp. 3 7 4 6 in 7be Future of Performance Studies; Visions and Revisions, ed. S . J. Dailey. Annandale, Va.: National Communication Association. Riesman, David (with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney). 1953. 7be Lonely Crowd. New York: Doubleday. Rossel, Jorg, and Randall Collins. 2001. “Conflict Theory and Interaction Rituals: The Microfoundations of Conflict Theory.” Pp. 509-31 in Handbook of Sociological Theory, ed. J. H. Turner. New York: Kluwer Acedemic/Plenum. Schechner, Richard. 1998. “What Is Performance Studies Anyway?”Pp. 357-62 in 7be Ends of Performance, ed. P. Phelan and J. Lane. New York: New York University Press. Searle, J. L. 1970. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stegner, Wallace. 1980. 7%e Sound of Mountain Water, me Changing American West. New York: Doubleday. Stillwater County News. 2002. “Shakespeare in the Parks Set to Perform in Fishtail on July 15.”July 11, p. B7. Straws, Anselm L. 1959. Mirrors and Mash. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.

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Turner, Victor. 1986a. 7be Anthropology of Performance. N.p.: Performing Arts Journal Publications. -. 1986b. “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience.” Pp. 33-44 in me Anthropology of Experience, ed. V. M. Turner and E. M. Bsuner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Watermeier, Daniel J. 1992. “Shakespearian Festivals in the United States.” P. 885 in 7be Cambridge Guide to meatre, ed. M. Banham. New York: Cambridge Univessity Press. Willis, Paul, and Mat Trondman. 2000. “Manifesto for Ethnography.” Ethnograph-v 1:

5-16. Wister, Owen. 1902. m e Virginian. New York: Scribner’s.

5 Of Kindred Spirit Erving Goffman’s Oeuvre and Its Relationship to Georg Simmel Uta Gerhardt

In 1973, a German friend of mine went to study with Erving Goffman at the University of Pennsylvania and came away utterly disappointed. “He mumbles,” my friend said of his impression of Goffman as a lecturer. “He stands at the lectern reading from newspaper clippings in a barely audible voice.” My friends experience, however, reflects less on Goffman’s proficiency as a lecturer than it does on his playfulness in taking a lecture as an occasion to engage in a “presentation of self,” so to speak. Indeed, Goffman was an excellent speaker as evidenced in his brilliant essay “The Lecture” (1981a), which itself was a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan three years after my friend had heard him mumbling at the lectern. Lecturing, an artful presentation of self, was what Georg Simmel was fiimous for during his lifetime. When Simmel taught philosophy, of which sociology was a part, at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin between 1885 and 1914, his lectures were rallying occasions for the academic youth of his day, including the young Max Weber and his bride-to-be, Marianne. Aside from making lecturing less a professor’s unavoidable obligation and more of a situational accomplishment in communicating ideas to an audience, Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman, at first sight, appear to have had little in common that would be worth mentioning in a book celebrating Goffman’s legacy. For one, they lived in completely different social worlds and were not even near-contemporaries. Simmel was born in 1858, the son of an industrialist in affluent Berlin, and he died only weeks before the end of World War I. Having been a professor of philosophy at the University of Strassbourg since 1914, Simmel felt very much a stranger in that bulwark of German imperialism. Goffman, by contrast, was born in rural Alberta in 1922, the son of impoverished Russian refugees. He died 143

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a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, his chosen refuge from the turmoil of Berkeley, where he had taught during most of the 1960s. Intellectually, Simmel was a philosopher whose roots lay in the epistemology of Imnianuel Kant, an epistemology that had structured Wilhelm Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Sociology, for Simmel, was philosophy, if only with an unequivocally modern mission at the turn of the twentieth century. Goffman, by contrast, was a cultural anthropologist whose training was in an American ethnography that guided the work of, among others, W. Lloyd Warner at the University of Chicago during the late 1940s. For Goffman, sociology was an offshoot of anthropology, if only in its attempt to study the basic structures of civil society in general. Despite these obvious dissimilarities between the two theorists-who differed in their countries and cultures, their backgrounds in German idealist philosophy as against American and British cultural anthropology, and their life spans, thus rendering Simmel a master of the nineteenth century while Goffman was a theorist of the twentieth-they had more in common than most people realize. In my view, as I shall argue, their contributions to the theory of modern society may be seen as belonging to the same type of approach in sociological thought. My hypothesis, as I elaborate it in this chapter, is that Simmel and Goffman were of kindred spirit. That is, that their respective sociologies address similar problems from a similar analytical perspective, eventually arriving at similar solutions. My argument is divided into three parts. The first section examines briefly those places in which Goffman, particularly in his early work, cites Simniel, thus substantiating not only that he was familiar with Simmel’s writings but also that he made deliberate connections to Simmel’sthought. The next section addresses two issues on which Goffman and Simmel assumed similar standpoints. These are the issues of “reciprocity” and of the “forms of sociation” as analyzed through the logic of empirical findings. In this regard, both (albeit Goffman to a greater extent) analyzed face-to-face interaction. Finally, the last part of the chapter discusses an “early” and a “late” oeuvre for the two theorists. Juxtaposing an “early” Simmel and an “early” Goffman (and also a “late” Simmel and Goffman) reveals amazing similarities not only in how they handled key problems but regarding their themes and insights as well. My conclusion, substantiated through a textual analysis of some of their original works (and to a lesser degree taking into account the “secondary” literature), is that Simmel and Goffman represented one and the same approach in sociology. Their contribution to sociological theory was in their analysis of the basic forms of social order, while methodologically they were oriented toward a systematic, empirically grounded Verstehen.

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TRACES OF GOFFMAN READING SIMMEL In 1951, Goffman left Chicago for Scotland where he took a job as lecturer in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His fieldwork for the Ph.D. dissertation, submitted in 1953, involved the observation of rural life in the Shetland Islands. There Goffman discovered a structure of interaction that characterized practically every culture on earth. He began his classic 7be Presentation of Self in Everyday Life-published twice, in 1956 and then again in 1959, and a best-seller and classic in its second publishing-with a reference to Simmel. Without previously having mentioned Simmel, whom he referred to by last name only as if an already self-evident source, Goffman, in the preface, says the following about his own approach: “The justification for this approach (as I take to be the justification for Simmel’s also) is that the illustrations together fit into a coherent framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had and provides the student with a guide worth testing in case-studies of institutional social life” (Goffman 1959b: xii). Goffman had previously made a reference to Simmel in “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” the version of the 7be Presentation of Self he had submitted as his Ph.D. dissertation to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. There, on the very first page, Goffman reproduced a lengthy quote from Simmel in the manner of a maxim (from which I quote only the beginning and end here): Mhere exists an immeasurable number of less conspicuous forms of relationships and kinds of interaction. . . . But since in actuality they are inserted into the comprehensive and, as it were, official social formations, they alone produce society as we know it. . . . the whole gaunt of relations that play from one person to another and that may be momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or of grave consequence . . , all these incessantly tie men together. Here are the interactions among the atoms of society. They account for all the toughness and elasticity, all the color and consistency of social life, that is so striking and yet so mysterious. (Goffman 1953: iv)’

This quotation was taken from the introductory chapter entitled “The Problem of Sociology” (Simmel 1965b) in Simmel’ssecond major opus, published in 1908 as Sociology: Inquiries into the Forms of Sociation.2Goffman quoted Simmel, apparently not from the original German but from Kurt H. Wolffs 7be Sociology of Georg Simmel, a translation of some of Simmel’s writings published in 1950. The latter translation, however, was altered considerably in a retranslation, also by Wolff, which appeared in another volume containing essays by (and about) Simmel (Simmel 1965b).3Wolff altered his translation and made it more accurate in reproducing the original German, but the retranslation, which again was far from perfect, presumably would

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go unnoticed by Goffman. Indeed, he seems to have taken the short excerpt from Wolffs unsatisfactory translation of 1950 as an accurate rendition of Simmel’s sociological message. The interesting thing is that Goffman was able to grasp Simmel’s main ideas, despite the fact that he was working from a poor translation that did not indicate where the original text had been edited, and that had converted Simmel’s fluent prose into short, matter-of-fact statements. Thus, despite his reliance on what can only be regarded as highly problematic translations, Goffman’s understanding of Simmel’s sociological perspective appears to have been nearly perfect. It is unclear whether Goffman encountered Simmel’s work when he was a graduate student at Chicago or came across Wolff s collection when he analyzed the data collected for his dissertation. Goffman does not mention Simme1 in his M.A. thesis, “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience,” completed in 1949. In fact, this study, which wages a cogent criticism against the qualitative psychological measurement approach of Henry A. Murray, mentions no sociologist with the sole exception of W. Lloyd Warner, who was later to be Goffman’s adviser for his Ph.D. work. During the 1950s, there were two further references to Simmel’s work. One was in Goffman’s first published article, “Symbols of Class Status” (1951), which deals with status that comprises position and role. Here he cites Simmel in a dated translation of the essay entitled, “Fashion.”*The sentence on which Goffman affixes his reference to Simmel is: “An individual may be rated on a scale of esteem, depending on how closely his performance approaches the ideal established for that particular status” (Goffman

1951: 294).

The other occasion in which Goffman mentions Simmel in the early work is in “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (1956a), his first account, based on participant observation, of behavior in a mental asylum. Goffman mentions Simmel as describing an “ideal sphere” of territorial as well as societal distance vis-2-vis others’ destruction of self that results in stripping away from the afflicted the honor which establishes “the person with whom one entertains relations” (Goffman 1957: 481). The quote, again, is from Wolffs translation of essays and excerpts from Simmel. During Goffman’s middle phase in the 1960s (which marks the mature stage of his early oeuvre), Simmel did not figure prominently as a reference, although I shall argue later that Simmel’s idea of societal forms was exceedingly relevant for Goffman from the 1950s onward. In his late oeuvre, however, Goffman makes one reference, in Frame Analysis (1974), to Simmel. He again relies on a translation by Wolff and gives a long quotation from an essay by Simmel, “The Handle” ([19111 19961, which was originally included in a collection entitled Philosophical Culture. Here, Simmel had maintained that a handle broken off a jar that no longer comes with it nevertheless dis-

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plays beauty as an artifact, a beauty that may potentially make the handle a work of art itself. Goffman, in Frame Analysis, points to the “intermeshing of framed activity in the everyday world” (Goffman 1974: 248). He demonstrates this point by stating that playing a game like chess or checkers involves, among other things, certain organizational premises that need to come together: It involves having prior knowledge of the game and access to the game set, and it also involves the willingness, even desire, of the players to enter into play. Borrowing Simmel’s conceptualization about a sphere of reality in art in “The Handle,” Goffman states, “It should be repeated: a similar argument [to that of playing a game1 can be advanced in regard to any self-absorbing, fanclful activity. A cup can be filled from any realm, but the handle belongs to the realm that qualifies as reality” (Goffman 1974: 249). To summarize, Goffman undoubtedly took notice of Simmel’s work throughout his career, if only through translations available on the Englishlanguage market. Although these translations leave much to be desired, Goffman nonetheless grasped exceedingly well the meaning and scope of Simmel’s sociology of sociation.

RECIPROCITY AND THE FORMS OF SOCIATION The common ground between Simmel’s and Goffman’s work becomes obvious when two themes are examined more closely. They are, first, reciprocity as a basic principle governing interaction and, second, the forms of sociation that characterize society and that are present in all social interaction irrespective of cultural or historical setting. The two themes, each in their own way, dominate the work of both Goffman and Simmel and define the ground which they share. Reciprocity

Simmel’s “The Problem of Sociology,” first published in 1894 (and whose rewritten version became the first chapter of Soziologie in 19081, delineated the new field of philosophy called sociology that was to replace the thenfashionable positivist sociology. In particular, Simmel criticized Herbert Spencer whose work had been highly influential in Europe and the United States in the 1880s. Spencer’s definition of social action within the framework of the “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” was to be replaced, Simmel urged, by understanding social action within the frarnework of reciprocity. Against Spencer’s all-encompassing sociology Simmel proposed a newly delineated “sociology in the narrower sense” that was to take seriously Dilthey’s criticism of Spencer and also Auguste Comte. Their positivism, Dilthey had charged, neglected the fact that meaning structures

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define reciprocal social relationships, which in turn belong to cultural systems (Dilthey [1883]1990:86-109). Following Dilthey, Simmel introduced his “entirely new”6sociology as follows: ‘‘If there is ever to be a science of sociology, instead of merely a research tendency falsely hypostasized into one, the total realm of an all-encompassing social science has to be subdivided into its working parts. Sociology in a narrower sense has to be separated out” (Simmel “941 1992a: 531.’ In this context, Simmel defines as a basic unit of sociation any relationship in which reciprocity in interpersonal orientations prevail. He uses the term Wechselwirkung to describe such reciprocity. The term was translated into English by Albion W. Small in 1896 (Small translated seven major texts of Simmel that were published in the American Journal of Sociology until 1910). It is in Small’s translation that Simmel’s Wechselwirkung (literally in German meaning interdependence or mutual relatedness) becomes interaction. Reciprocity, which makes interaction possible, according to Simmel, characterizes social relations between members of society. Social life in empirical society-which he termed “in the wider sense” to differentiate it from the society relevant for sociology, as he stated initially in “The Problem of Sociology”and from then on maintained repeatedly throughout his oeuvreconsists of interaction: “Society in the wider sense obviously exists where individuals enter into interaction” ([18941 1992a: 54).8To be sure, such interaction is, as he phrased it, “the material of the social process,” which in due course becomes structured according to the forms of sociation. It was the latter which, “through scientific abstraction,” became the subject matter of “a special social science,” namely, sociology as he (re)conceptualized it (Simme1 (118941 1992a: 54). Goffman’s sociology depends equally on the notion of reciprocity as basic to the social fabric. Goffman, in effect, re-creates the approach outlined by Simmel when he sees reciprocity as hinging on the social order of interaction. In his 1950s essays, including “On Face-work” (1955) and “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (1956a), as well as in his first major opus, IlJe Presentation of Self in Evey d a y Life (1959b), Goffman underscores the importance of reciprocity structures. “On Face-work” deals with the kind of work required in one’s presentation of self to others when one’s aim is to create or maintain a certain image compatible with what in Chinese culture is called “face.”Evidently, such face can be gained or lost, restored or undermined. Goffman, however, warns that the problem lies with the fact that the gap between expression and impression can never be closed. This implies that face, which is sought by an actor through a certain behavior, can be attained not through his or her action but rather the reaction of another who can bestow face on him or her. (Face-work, to be sure, is only a prop based on the hope that mutuality applies.) The beauty of Goffman’s argument is that reciprocity is seen to pre-

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vail in ordinary interaction, but with a vengeance. It is only the face of others that an actor can save, and he or she has to rely on those others to see his or her own face saved. Goffman observes that “[iln trying to save the face of others, the person must choose a tack that will not lead to loss of his own; in trying to save his own face, he must consider the loss of face that his action may entail for others” (Goffman 1955: 217). In “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” Goffman’s point is that reciprocity structures apply even to the patients in a mental asylum deemed unfit for everyday interaction in the world of normals. Deference, he explains, ensures appreciation in social intercourse when it becomes “a symbolic means by which appreciation is regularly conveyed to a recipient of this recipient, or of something of which this recipient is taken as a symbol, extension, or agent” (Goffman 1956a: 477). Demeanor, in contradistinction, is “that element of the individual’s ceremonial behavior typically conveyed through deportment, dress, and bearing, which serves to express to those in his immediate presence that he is a person of certain desirable or undesirable qualities” (489). In other words, while deference expresses the appreciation that a person bestows on another, demeanor expresses what he himself wants to be in the eyes of the other. Both are, Goffman states, “elements of activity” that belong together because they are two sides of the same coin, namely, reciprocity in behaviorally enacted social order. Reciprocity also characterizes Goffmdn’s conception of the social order in The Presentation of SeF Whereas the first chapter discusses performances that might be staged individually, the second chapter makes it clear that performances are always embedded in the work of teams. These, in turn, play to audiences. In the interaction between team and audience, which again is embedded in the interaction between the team-audience ensemble and the wider society, Goffman explains that subtle structures of reciprocity prevail. For instance, for the team he emphasizes that “a bond of reciprocal dependence” exists “linking teammates to one another” (Goffman 1959b: 82) while, at the same time, “they are forced to define one another as persons ’in the know,’ as persons before whom a particular front cannot be maintained” (83) (which, of course, strengthens rather then weakens their mutual bonds). Against this background, he goes on to distinguish between territorial contexts of the rules of reciprocity (frontstage, backstage), double identities that transgress taken-for-granted team loyalties (discrepant roles), and other qualifying features, introducing evermore subtle refinements that vary the original form of reciprocity in concatenated social worlds. In this, to be sure, the theater metaphor resembles the nature of real-life situated reciprocity, as Goffman states in the concluding paragraph of the book: “Those who conduct face to face interaction on a theater’s stage must meet the key requirement of real situations; they must expressively sustain a definition of the situation: but this they do in circumstances that have facilitated

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their developing an apt terminology for the interactional tasks that all of us share” (Goffman 195913: 255). In sum, then, Simmel’s and Goffman’semphasis on reciprocity, in comparative perspective, reveals their serendipitously similar understanding of the social order. Both see that reciprocity between actors in interaction functions in more or less standardized, though situationally individually variable, relational systems; accordingly, for both theorists, reciprocity is the rock-bottom principle of social structure and process.

The Forms of Sociation In “The Problem of Sociology”([18941 1992a) and all his subsequent writings, Simmel distinguishes between society as consisting of interaction and society as the subject matter of sociology. The latter, he explains, abstracts from the former inasmuch as the forms of interaction can be determined. He explains: The particular causes and purposes, without which no sociation would ever evolve, make up the body, so to speak, the raw material of the social process. That the consequence of these causes [andl the pursuit of these purposes produce an interaction, a sociation among the participants, that is the form in which these contents are manifest. The very existence of a special social science depends upon the separation of the former [the form] from the latter [the contents] by means of analytical abstraction. (Simmel [18941 1992a: 54)’

Soziologie, Simmel’ssecond major opus, is mainly a collection of essays explicating nine forms of sociation. They are, among others, superordinationsubordination, social conflict, territoriality, and secrecy-secret society. In his 1894 “The Problem of Sociology,”he has the following to say about the ubiquity of the forms of sociation as they are independent of the special cultural contexts in everyday social life: Not only sociation as such may be found equally in a religious congregation and a criminal gang, an economic association and an art school, a mass meeting and a family-but formal similarities also apply to the special configurations and developments of such communities. In social groups that are undeniably different in their aims and moral character, we find, e.g., the same forms of super- and subordination, competition, imitation, opposition, division of labor, , . , the embodiment of the group building principle in symbols, the separation between parties, . . . certain forms of reaction against external influences. (Simmel([1894] 1992a: 54-55)’O

Simmel explained what from then on, for him, became a theme for extensive study-namely, “These forms [of sociation] develop when individuals meet, relatively independent of the purposes of their dealing with each

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other, and the sum total thereof concretely is what is meant in the abstractum society” (Simmel [18941 1992a: 55).11 He thus proposes a twofold perspective for modern sociology. He recognizes the forms of sociation as being distinct from the interaction which they structure. As such, he distinguishes between society as lived experience, on the one hand, and what he refers to in quotes as “society,”on the other hand. He says about “sociologyas a specialized discipline” (denouncing Spencer’s sociology that endeavors to explain the totality of observable empirical facts): “Sociologyas a specialized discipline . . . separates the particular societal aspect from the totality of human history, i.e., the events in society, for special study; or, in somewhat paradoxical shortness, it investigates what in society is ‘society”’ (Simmel [18941 1992a: 57).12 When Simmel explores in abundant detail the forms of sociation that span the gamut of history as they transcend as well as define cultural contexts, in his long essays written between 1896 and 1907 and eventually consolidated in Soziologie (19081, he chooses a characteristic style of presentation. The chapters in Soziologie explicating, say, the relevance of numbers in social intercourse, superordination-subordination (authority), or self-preservation in groups and entire societies follow a characteristic sequence of steps in the way Simmel lays out his argument. First, he looks at a pure form of sociation in which he emphasizes that reciprocity makes for the special quality of the relationship that defines that form. For instance, authority (super- and subordination), he states, is characterized by reciprocity even in an extremely autocratic regime where relationships appear utterly one-sided; the dominant side, if only slightly, depends on the submissive side for acceptance (legitimation) of authority. From the baseline of such a pure form-a typified idealized pattern of reciprocity-Simmel proceeds to explain further the dynamics of the respective form of sociation. Through cascades of argumentative complications, he eventually arrives at a concatenated network of concrete appearances that epitomize that form of sociation. He employs this style of presentation in all his writings dealing with the forms of sociation.13 Interestingly, Goffman was a true disciple of Simmel’s as he systematically analyzed the forms of interaction that constitute the social order. To be sure, in his early oeuvre, Goffman speaks of rituals when he addresses the forms of interchange in structured interaction. In some of his late oeuvre, particularly his presidential address for the American Sociological Association written in 1981 (Goffman 19831, he speaks of the forms of interaction that constitute the social order. In both phases of his work, albeit possibly unknowingly, he emulates Simmel. In the remaining part of this section, I shall argue this point for the “early”work that spans from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. 1 turn to rituals of interaction as a forum for discussing forms of sociation, and systematic methodology, as an agenda of analytic presentation in Goffman’s early work emulating Simmel’s sociology of sociation.

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A distinction between society enacted in everyday life and “society” consisting of the forms structuring interaction shaped Goffman’s early oeuvre in two ways. To begin with, rituals denoting forms of standardized interchange are his topic in, for instance, “On Face-work.” There, he elaborates on the full complement of four phases of corrective processes that aim at reestablishing situational patterns breached by a participant. Goffman also examines the pattern in two stages of avoidance processes capable of saving a person from having to make excuses or amends. These patterns, in their full-fledged (idealizedtypified, “pure”) form, belong to “society,”but they are also frameworks for society enacted in interaction. To be sure, rituals of interaction are the key theme for Goffman when, in 1967, he edited under the title of Interaction Ritual, a collection of essays, most of which were written during the previous decade. In the introduction to this collection, Goffman hints at a doublelayered structure of reality. He suggests that situational interchanges as well as normative forms are relevant. Both represent rituals, one as behaviors that are also the data of research, the other as patterns made visible through methodical analysis. The data for his investigations in the various essays, he suggests, consist of “small behaviors” whose “systematic examination” is necessary. Thus sociology can fulfill two knowledge aims: “One objective in dealing with these data is to describe the natural units of interaction built up from them, beginning with the littlest. . . . A second objective is to uncover the normative order prevailing within and between these units. . . . A normatively stabilized structure is at issue” (Goffman 1967a: 1-2). Rituals of interaction modeled after the forms of sociation are only one area in which Goffman in his early work emulates Simmel. The other concerns his analysis of cleavages as they shape the organization of social reality. Two examples may suffice to show what he means. To begin with, in “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions” (1957), he documents that the “staff-inmate split is one major implication of the central features of total institutions” (Goffman 1957: 47). Four years later, in the opening chapter of Asylums (1961a) entitled “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions” (196lb), he concretizes further that the world of the staff-followed rules is notably different from that of the inmate world when the two are linked through an intermediate, namely institutional ceremonies.’* Additionally, first in “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient” (1959b) and then in Stigma (19631, Goffman envisages a social world split between the normal and the stigmatized, linked uneasily through the virtual status of the stigmatizable. His theme in these studies is that forms of interaction are organized into either compatible or antagonistic patterns. This organization, he shows, orders status categories in terms of what interactants experience as a scale of moral, differently valued, social identities. Thus, Goffman finds that the forms of interaction that emulate the forms of sociation produce both order and conflict. The outcome of interaction involves

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not only the security of belonging but also the angst of being excludedvarying according to the actor’s experience, from situationally changeable to structurally unalterable. Goffman follows Simmel not only in postulating such a double-structured reality but also in developing his systematic style of presentation. Two of Goffman’s essays spring to mind that illustrate similar presentational styles. One example of a pattern of interaction analyzed by Goffman that resembles a form of sociation examined by Simmel is found in “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952). Here, Goffman argues that the interactional pattern of, for example, cheating a player out of his money and making him accept his loss is composed of three actors: the perpetrator, the victim, and a fake friend who has the victim’s trust and who, after the confidence game has stripped the victim of his assets, then offers himself as a confidante, only to disappear immediately after the “mark” (i.e., the victim) has been consoled, or “cooled out.” Goffman’s idea of such a triadic structure closely resembles Simmel’s, who in chapter 2 of Soziologie, explains how social forms involving three actors-triads-exhibit interactional patterns that far exceed in complexity those that obtain in what he calls dyads. In listing those options available to the three players in their involvement in “cooling the mark out,” Goffman employs a technique of analytical exposition similar to that of Simmel. That is, both analyze the impact that the number of actors has on the course(s> of interaction. In “Where the Action Is,” first published in 1967, Goffman again employs a style of presentation that Simmel had previously favored. Goffman begins by depicting the basic act of flipping a coin, a pure game of chance. He then distinguishes between three types of patterns in social life that could be either problematic and inconsequential, unproblematic and consequential, or-and this is the theme of the essay-problematic and consequential. He writes, “Such activity I call fateful, although the term eventful would do as well, and it is this kind of chanciness that will concern us here” (Goffman 1967b: 164). From this vantage point, Goffman unravels the logic of “action” inherent in gambling and other risk-taking activities that, in the increasingly complicated structure of a spiral-like reality, eventually engulfs the individual. The upshot in this experience of obsessive risk taking is that the gambler thus acquires “character,”which, in the world of ruinous risks, denotes the highest level of challenge to the self. At the end of his analytical tour de force over a cascade of complications elaborating the social form of gambling (seeking “action”), Goffman reverts to the individual, the one who takes risks as he seeks what is commonly deemed “action.” Goffman states: The ability to maintain self-command under trying circumstances is important, as is therefore the coolness and moral resoluteness needed if this is to be done. If society is to make use of the individual, he must be intelligent enough

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to appreciate the serious chances he is taking and yet not become disorganized or demoralized by this appreciation. Only then will he bring to moments of society’sactivity the stability and continuity they require if social organization is to be maintained. Society supports this capacity by moral payments, imputing strong character to those who show self-command and weak character to those who are easily diverted and overwhelmed. (Goffman 1967b: 259, emphasis added) In summary, Simmel’s and Goffman’s emphasis on the forms of sociation, or rituals of interaction, is evidence of how similar their understanding of social life was. Both saw in forms, as they encompass individuals in their situational activities, a comprehensive framework for interactional reciprocity. Similarly, both analyzed cleavages in the organization of society. Goffman and Sirnmel realized that forms guide social life; and this is made evident when the forms are abstracted from the observable multitude of patterned actions in the empirical world.

DISTINGUISHING AN “EARLY” AND “LATE” OEUVRE In the early 1970s, Goffman dramatically changed the direction of his analytic interest. In Frame Analysis (19741, his last major work, his goal is to understand the construction of experience. The book is a stroke of genius in a couple of respects. For one, Goffman arrives at an original insight: that experience is socially constructed in a way different from phenomenological thought. Disregarding the accomplishments of ethnomethodology that had begun to spread beyond California, Goffman came u p with an entirely new idea. He explained how experience of the world emulates forms that convey the “realness” of the world. Their reality, he explains, lies in their compatibility with conventions for narratively constructing real-life experiences. That these forms are cast as credible frameworks of presentation makes activities meaningful to both the actors as well as their audiences. Now the theater metaphor previously utilized in i’be Presentation of Selfcomes into its own when it is completely revised. The narrative organization of experience, Goffman holds, structures not only the play on the stage but also the minds of the audience members enjoying it. The other respect in which Frame Analysis shows ingenuity is in its method. In supporting his conceptual points, Goffman takes much of his data from newspaper clippings, a methodological technique not previously utilized in sociological theory. The rationale for this method is part of the book’s argument. Newspaper clippings come from newspapers, which constitute a mass communication media whose function is to report accurately events that happen in real life. Consequently, unless newspapers are charged with falslfying evidence, the reality claim in the news stories Goff-

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man uses for illustration cannot be questioned. The structure of experience whose constructedness is to be demonstrated itself becomes a matter of documentation. Because the press makes a claim to veracity of information, the news stories are presented as proof that experience depends on interpersonally shared frames, if mediated through keyings and laminations. In this way, Goffman shows that reality construction mirrors the experience conveyed by the news story whose constructedness cannot be denied. (Little wonder, then, that Goffman was so fascinated by the analytically fruitful function of newspaper clippings that he read from them in his lectures, if sotto uoce. They convey a message about reality construction that cannot be ignored.) When Goffman answers his critics, Norman K. Denzin and Charles M. Keller, in a rejoinder to a lengthy book review on Frame Analysis, he clarifies his theory of the organization of experience (Goffman 1981~).Defending his use of the works of William James and Gregory Bateson (and deliberately choosing not to respond to Denzin and Keller’s unwarranted reproach that he clumsily emulated symbolic interactionism), Goffman explains what he had attempted to do: My stated theme [in Frame Analysis1 was the general cognitive issue that, moment to moment, individuals are (or can easily be made to be) concerned to identlfy what it is that is going on; that this involves a question as to what sort of activity is in progress, and whether deception is involved or open simulation; further, that activities of any kind, whether involving fabrication or keying or both or neither, are geared as such into the ongoing world, so that a characterization of how these activities are framed is not merely a participant’s cognition. (Goffman 1981b: 68)

Linking this theme with his previous oeuvre, a continuation that Denzin and Keller had seen in Frame Analysis, Goffman has the following to say about the frames responsible for the organization of experience in social actors: We face the moment-to-moment possibility (warranted in particular cases or not) that our settled sense of what is going on beyond the current social situation or within it may have to begin to be questioned or changed. Certainly individuals bring something of what they are and know to each of their social encounters, but there are rules of etiquette and reference for guiding this importation, and when these norms are threatened or breached it is in some moment’s interaction that this will occur and have to be managed. (Goffman 1981~:68)

As he points out in this reply to his critics, his other work of the 1970s, such as his essay entitled “Footing”(1979), was an offshoot of his new interest in the structure of experience during the last decade of his life. Many

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“secondary” accounts, including critiques of Frame Analysis, seem to subsume Goffman’swork under one comprehensive theme governing his entire oeuvre. I maintain that he made a fresh start around 1970 when he took up a line of thought intended to supersede (but also preserve) his previous theory. Illustrating his new interest at the beginning of the 1980s, and elucidating this “late”focus on social experience through a “linguisticturn,” is his last book, Forms of Talk (l9Sla). Interestingly, Simmel had an equally dramatic renewed start in his career, at about the age of fifty. He had already established himself as a respected philosopher and sociologist when he revised the entire focus of his work. The turning point was that, in 1908, he was refused appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. He had hoped to at last be able to leave Berlin, where he had been an associate professor (without salary) since 1900. The experience of being denied the Heidelberg chair shattered his entire outlook and essentially undermined his commitment to sociology. The official reason given to Simmel for his being refused the Heidelberg chair (and also Max Weber, who had supported his candidacy) was that Simmel’s interest in sociology (as a subsection of philosophy) was much too modern for a department where traditional Kantian epistemology reigned supreme. The real reason, however, was anti-Semitic slander. A Berlin historian who had previously taught at Heidelberg vilified Simmel in a scathing letter, which should have been a recommendation, addressed to the Karlsruhe Ministry of Culture for the Grand Duke of Baden.I5Simmel was heartbroken. He decided to return to a more traditional epistemology but, at the same time, venture into a philosophical analysis of cultural experience. He abandoned his interest in sociological theory and returned to philosophical themes for the remainder of his life. After 1908 (with the exception of a lecture addressing the First German Sociology Congress in 1910 and a short book that he published 1917), Simmel never again embarked on sociological analysis. His new field was a philosophy that endeavored to explain the experience that made for sociality as an a priori phenomenon. Simmel anticipated the new theme of his “late”oeuvre in a short text entitled “Exkurs uber das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft moglich?” which has been translated under the abbreviated title “How Is Society Possible?”lG He inserted the “Exkurs”in chapter 1 of Soziologie just before it was published in the summer of 1908 (at a time when he was still hoping, but had begun to doubt, that he might be appointed to the chair at Heidelberg). This short text, which preceded Simmel’s major essays on culture and ideation during 1911-1916, was a precursor to his late work. In the essays written during the latter time period (e.g., “Der Begriff und die Tragodie der Kultur [19111 [“The Concept and Tragedy of Culture”] and “Vorformen der Idee” [1916/19171 [“PreliminaryForms of Ideation”I),l’ he explores how culture requires subjective experience at a time when modernity is making subjectiv”

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ity nearly impossible, and he explains how perception comes into its own only through ideas creating phenomena in a person’s experience. These essays followed Simmel’s return to more genuinely philosophical themes consolidated in his 1910 best-seller, Main Problems of Philosophy (Haupprobleme der Philosophie).18 As it happened, both Goffman and Simmel made a fresh start in their oeuvres when they turned away (though with occasional “lapses”) from the themes, the areas of investigation, of their early works. For Goffman, the change in focus seems to have occurred in tandem with his leaving Berkeley and stopping for a short sojourn at Harvard, where he worked with Thomas C. Schelling, eventually taking a chair at the University of Pennsylvania. For Simmel, the focal change happened after he was refused a full professorship at Heidelberg, a most deserved honor that would have capped off nearly three decades of groundbreaking work in the tradition of Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Distinguishing between Goffman and Simmel’s “early” and “late” oeuvre reveals striking parallels between their sociological theories. The early Simme1 oeuvre-xtending from O n Social Differentiation (1890) to Soziologie (1908) and comprising book-length treatises such as the essays on authority (superordination-subordination) of 1896/1907,19on the self-preservation of groups or societies of 1898,20but also the epistemological study, m e Problems of the Philosophy of Histoy ([1892/19051 197712’and the work m e Philosophy ofMoney ([1900/19071 1990)22-focus on two distinctions. One is that empirical society, which means interaction (“society in the wider sense”) is different from “society” as conceptualized in sociology (“society in the narrower sense”). To be sure, it is only the latter that defines a realm of social science where it determines sociology’s analytical perspective. As such, sociology becomes equal to all sciences as it conceives its subject matter through unique concepts such as the forms of sociation. Society, as it appears in sociology, represents the forms of sociation that transcend time and place and whose dynamics Simmel investigates in his sociological works. The other distinction that Simmel makes is that reciprocity characterizes everyday life and thus combines experience and action in units of mutual relatedness. Accordingly, individual actors are analyzed in the context of various networks of social relations where they take the part of interactants. Institutions lay out roles for participants that, in turn, make individuals combine their social ties in their person, thus making for an intersection of societal circles. Max Weber, who was familiar with Simmel’s notion on reciprocity, in his definition of social action acknowledged interaction by making social relations the basic unit of social organization. The early Goffman oeuvre ranges from essays written prior to his Ph.D. dissertation to Relations in Public (1971).23These works include world bestsellers such as m e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959b), Asylums

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(1961a), and Stigma (1963), dealing with, as Goffman himself phrased it, “the realm of face-to-face interaction”(1971: x). In these works he makes two important distinctions. One is that sociology analyzes the organization of faceto-face interaction in terms of forms, interpersonal rituals that govern situational behavior. These forms or rituals can be, and frequently are, varied by participants in a situation. Through others’ (re)actions, participants establish an attribute of their own self, one that is acceptable to themselves and their significant others. Thus emerges society enacted in everyday life as seen by the sociologist. The sociologist’s image of the processes of interaction, however, is at best a faint echo of the immensely complicated communicative reality. The network of interpersonal options, orientations, and responses actually experienced in face-to-face interactions can be understood by the sociologist only in the most tentative and simplistic terms. The second distinction that Goffman makes in his early oeuvre is between, on the one hand, the actor managing, even manipulating, his self in conjunction with teams and their audiences and, on the other hand, the nature of such management in the eyes of others who naturally are the ultimate jurors, indeed ratifiers, of a person’s conduct. As such, the stigmatizable by careful self-presentation can pass for normal, while a mental prepatient caught in a whirlwind of humiliation may be denied the right to define even the worth of his own person. In this way, Goffman distinguishes between the individual as a human being-the quality of being human having to be ratified socially, this being the “materialof the social process,” to use a Simmelian phrase-and the individual as participant in face-to-face interaction. In his early oeuvre, Goffman explains that while it is the latter who enact rituals that make for the social order, it is the former whose dignity is the covert purpose of reciprocity in the “ideal sphere” of civil society. In their early periods of sociological endeavor, both Simmel and Goffman attempted to explain society through reciprocity in the forms of sociation. When their sociology focused on the forms of sociation, they saw society as interactionally lived reality. However, in their late works, Simmel as well as Goffman put other aspects of society at the forefront of their theories. When they focused on sociability as a condition as well as corollary of interpersonally valid experience, they proceeded to conceptualize anew (differently from their early oeuvres) the individual caught in the web of concatenated social worlds. The late Simmel dealt with the structure of the mind as being basic to experience. Experience, he ventured, constitutes the world conceived of as well as enacted by the individual. Members’ participation in social activities and also scientists’ (sociologists’, philosophers’, artists’, etc.) insights into phenomena thus take on a new quality. The point is that ideas constitute experience inasmuch as ideation merges with perception in the constitution of the world relevant to the mind of the actor. Simmel realized that categories

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make “society”possible. These categories, which he conceptualized through a reformulation of Kant’s epistemology, address not only the constitution of society but also the knowledge about society used in everyday interaction as well as in sociology. In the “Exkurs uber das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft moglich?” Simmel posits that society is in the mind, so to speak. Society is given to the individual geared toward reciprocity prior to the experience of interaction. This means that interaction that is constitutive for societal experience prior to individuality is the realm of the self. In his essays written from 1911 onward, Simmel pursues this idea further, venturing that experience converts the material impression into an image through ideation. Thus, the experienced world equals a universe of ideas that in turn pervade interaction. In this way, society is an outcome of the spirit of life that constitutes, but also transgresses, forms. Together, life and forms constitute the human experience. In his last work, Lebensanschauung (1918) (Life Perspective), another collection of essays previously published and reassembled under a common theme, Simmel argues that life and form, individuality and system, among other such apparent opposites, are juxtaposed. They make for eventual reconciliation in an overarching oneness of omnipresent experiential reaIi~y.~* The late Goffman, in comparison, began with an examination of the organization of experience as a dynamic structure in frames, keys, and laminations. In the course of this analysis, Goffman encountered narrative forms that fill the mind of the individual who is a member of a society and that represent the cultural tradition that anchors activities in myths and whatever else gives meaning to everyday action. One insight Goffman emphasizes throughout Frame Analysis is that reality is experienced as constructed when its patterns are organized in frames. This opens up language use as a field deserving of attention. In his late oeuvre, Goffman turned to language as talk framed in contexts of situational meanings plotted against linguistic forms. His last book, Forms of Talk (1981a), in which he assembled essays from this late sociological interest, explains the vicissitudes of conversation when situations are being constructed that yield an interpersonally acceptable social order. To summarize, both Goffman and Simmel had an early phase of their work when they endeavored to explain social life through societal forms (or rituals, for that matter). Their work presupposes a distinction between society as lived experience and society as conceptualized by the sociologist-the latter meant to explain the structure and process of the former. Some two decades into their careers, both theorists made a fresh start and attempted to reach deeper into the structure of the individual’s sociability. Both ventured into philosophical problems as they addressed the issues of phenomenological experience (though both refrained from using phenomenological philosophy). For the remainder of their careers, both embarked in relatively abstract

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explanations of how experience constitutes society. They analyzed sociability in terms of the mind of the individual embedded in relational structures predating individualization. In this vein, Simmel analyzed ideational forces in experience (as illustrated in the chapter of Lebensanschauung with the title “The Turn to Ideation”), and Goffman analyzed narrative forces in experience (his Forms of Talk capping his Frame Analysis).

CONCLUSION This chapter, which is only a rough sketch, draws a comparison between Goffman and Simmel. In considering what their works had in common, I have ventured three points. First, I have documented when and where Goffman apparently took notice of Simmel’s sociological thinking. Although only sparse references to Simmel can be found in Goffman’s oeuvre, two things emerge. For one, above all, the “early” Goffman, most notably in the Ph.D. dissertation (which later became the classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Lijie), recognized the importance of Simmel. Nevertheless, in the “early” and “late” Goffman, references to Simmel may also be found. My second point relates to two systematic assumptions in Simmel’s as well as Goffman’s theories. They are, as I have tried to argue, first, the idea that reciprocity is constitutive of the social order and, in due course, social life. Second, the forms of sociation (Simmel) or rituals of interaction (Goffman) make the social world possible. They are different concepts for the same phenomenon, idealizable structures of intercourse between actors in their situational settings. The two systematic assumptions that I have mentioned are only examples. They document that Simmel and Goffman attended to the same kind of societal reality when they constructed their conceptual approaches. Third, I argue that in Simmel’s as well as Goffman’s work, an “early” oeuvre may be distinguished from a “late” one. Interestingly, both theorists proceeded from an analysis of the forms of sociation (rituals of interaction) to an in-depth understanding of experience as it constitutes the enactment of the forms of sociation (rituals of interaction). It may be another similarity between their oeuvres that their late theories were widely ignored or blatantly misunderstood during their lifetimes. Indeed, Goffman today is well known primarily for his theory of his early oeuvre, whereas his late works still await serious consideration. Thus far, Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk have not becomes models of emulation in research, as they deserve to be. Goffman shares with Simmel the fate of recognition mainly from the early oeuvre. Only in the last decade and a half have Simmel’s collected works been reissued in German, and recognition of his late works in American so-

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ciology is not likely in the near future. Full recognition of these two theorists’ breathtaking courage has yet to occur. They made the mind of the civilized actor the constitutive element of a humane social order. Erving Goffman and Georg Simmel both deserve to be taken seriously in the full range of their lives’ work. This endeavor has only just begun in sociology on both sides of the Atlantic.

I have every reason to thank Harold L. Orbach and A. Javier TreviAo for their comments on my essay, which helped to make it not only better but also more readable. 1. The quotation is from Georg Simmel (1950), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9-10. 2. Simmel (1908). In the twenty-four-volume Collected Works, which have been published consecutively since 1988, Soziologie is Volume XI (see Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe; Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1992). The quotation used in translation by Goffman as the maxim of his Ph.D. dissertation is on pp. 32-33 of the latter edition. Since the book in its entirety has not been published in English, I shall refer to it using its German title, Soziologie. 3. The translation of what was the maxim in Goffman’s dissertation is on pp. 32627. 4.The translation is from International Quarterly 10 (1904): 13CL55. It was republished in the American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541-58. The German original had the more elaborate title “Psychology of Fashion: A Sociological Study,” published in 1895; see Simmel ([18951 1992b). 5. For more elaborate treatment of the topic of anti-Darwinism in the sociology of Simmel and also Max Weber, who rejected positivism as they criticized the then widely influential Spencerian sociology, see Gerhardt (1999, 2001a). 6. In a letter addressed to French sociologist CdCstin Bougli. in 1899, Simmel wrote about his own approach, which he deemed different from any other, as it had no connections to existing approaches in sociology in Germany (or elsewhere, for that matter, with the possible exception of some of Durkheim’s work). The letter is quoted in the editorial report accompanying Volume XI of Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, which is the eighth edition of Soziologie; see there, p. 892. 7. The translation is my own; it follows the original German as literally as possible in order to bring out Simmel’s tone of argument, embedded in a contemporaneous context frequently glossed over in the English translations. The 1894 version of “The Problem of Sociology” is not typically used in English texts on Simmel. The more commonly used is the 1908 rewritten version. Moreover, most translations are incomplete as they omit occasional sentences in the text and, conspicuously, also omit a section that Simmel later inserted entitled “Exkurs uber das Problem: W k ist Gesellschaft moglich?” An early translation of the 1908 version, by Albion W. Small published in 1909, also without the “Exkurs”(which was published separately a year later), is practically unknown. The passage quoted is in German: ‘‘Sol1 es nun statt einer blossen Forschungstendenz, die falschlich zu einer Wissenschaft der Sociologie

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hypostasiert worden ist, wirklich eine solche geben, so muss das Gesamtgebiet der allumfassenden socialen Wissenschaft in sich arbeitsteilig gegliedert, es muss eine Sociologie in engerer Bedeutung ausgeschieden werden.” 8. The original German is “Gesellschaftim weiteren Sinne ist offenbar da vorhanden, wo mehrere Individuen in Wechselwirkung treten.” 9. My translation. The original German states: Die besonderen Ursachen und Zwecke, ohne die naturlich nie eine Vergesellschaftung erfolgt, bilden gewissermassen den Korper, das Muterial des socialen Prozesses; dass der Erfolg dieser Ursachen, die Forderung dieser Zwecke gerade eine Wechselwirkung, eine Vergesellschaftung unter ihren Tragern hervonuft, das ist die Form, in die jene Inhalte sich kleiden und auf deren Abtrennung von den letzteren vermoge wissenschaftlicher Abstraktion die ganze Existenz einer speciellen Gesel~schuf~issenschaft beruht.

10. My translation. The original German states: Nicht nur Vergesellschaftung uberhaupt findet sich ebenso an einer Religionsgemeinde wie an einer Verschworerbande, an einer Wirtschaftsgenossenschaft wie an einer Kunstschule, an einer Volksversammlung wie an einer Familie-sondern es erstrecken sich formale Gleichheiten auch auf die speciellen Konfigurationen und Entwickelungen solcher Vereinigungen. An gesellschaftlichen Gruppen, die ihren Zwecken und ihrem sittlichen Charakter nach die denkbar verschiedensten sind, finden wir z.B. die gleichen Formen der Uber- und Unterordnung, der Konkurrenz, der Nachahmung, der Opposition, der Arbeitsteilung, . . . die Verkorperung des gruppenbildenden Princips in Symbolen, die Scheidung in Parteien, . . . bestimmte Reaktionsformen derselben gegen aussere Einflusse.

11. The original German states, “Diese Formen [der Vergesellschaftung] entwickeln sich bei der Beriihrung von Individuen, relativ unabhangig von dem Grunde dieser Beriihrung, und die Summe macht dasjenige konkret aus, was man mit dem Abstraktum Gesellschaft benennt.” 12. The original German states, “Die Sociologie als Einzelwissenschaft . . . lost eben das gesellschaftliche Moment aus der Totalit5t der Menschengeschichte, d.h. des Geschehens in der Gesellschdft, zu gesonderter Betrachtung aus; oder, mit etwas paradoxer Kiirze ausgedriickt, sie erforscht dasjenige, was an der Gesellschaft ‘Gesellschaft’ist.” 13. For a more detailed account of Simmel’s systematic approach to his theory of the forms of sociation, see Gerhardt (2001b: 135-52, 177-2221, 14. Interestingly, the 1957 text on total institutions (Goffman 1957) contains an analysis of the inmate worlds and staff worlds combined (with emphasis on the former) and institutional ceremonies. The tripartite symmetrical, albeit compartmentalized, organization of the total institution is the central tenet of the argument; only in the rewritten text (Goffman 196lb) is the argument presented in three separate parts. 15. The letter contained judgments such as this: “Whether Prof. Simmel has been baptized or not, I do not know, would rather not ask. But he is an Israel-man (“Israelit”) through and through, in his appearance, his manners, and his thinking. . . . His academic and literary merits are few and questionable indeed. . . . [In hls lecturesl, ladies are a strong contingent, even for Berlin. Besides, the oriental world, the one having settled down or streaming in from the East every semester, is highly visible. . . . I believe that there would be more desirable and efficient professors of Philosophy for Heidel-

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berg than Simmel could be.” Cited in Gerhardt (2001b: 184-85).The letter was first published in Gassen and Landmdnn (1958: 26-27). 16. For translations of “How Is Society Possible?” see AmericanJournal of Sociology 16: 372-91 (1910b), and Simmel (1965a: 31&36; 1971: 622). 17. A shortened translation of “Der Begriff und die Tragodie der Kultur” is in Simme1 (1971: 3 4 U 8 ) . 18. The book sold thousands of copies in a matter of months and had to be reprinted twice in the year of publication. It is reprinted in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, Volume XIV. 19. The essay was first published in its English translation (Simmel 1896). It has been reprinted in abbreviated form in Gerhardt (1998: 1-23). Only in 1907 was it published in German in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, one of whose editors was Max Weber. 20. Both the English translation and the German essay appeared in 1898. 21. In light of new developments in Kantian thought in Germany, Simmel revised the book, which was first published in 1892; the second edition appeared in 1905. 22. First edition, 1900; second revised edition, 1907. 23. Goffman dedicated the book “to the memory of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown whom on his visit to the University of Edinburgh in 1950 I almost met.” Goffman, still a devoted student of cultural anthropology, so admitted. 24. It is reprinted in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe,Vol. XVI. An excerpt from the first chapter, entitled “The Transcendence of Life,” is translated in Simmel (1971: 353-74).

REFERENCES Dilthey, Wilhelm. [18831 1990. Einleitung in die Geisteswissmchaften: Vmuch einer Grundlegungf u r das Studium der Gesellschaj und der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Teubner. Gassen, Kurt, and Michael Landmann, eds. 1958. Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Gerhardt, Uta. 1998. German Sociology: T W. Adomo, M. Horkheimer, G. Simmel, M . Weber, and Others. New York: Continuum. , 1999. “National Socialism and the Politics of me Structure of Social Action.” Pp. 87-164 in Agenda for Sociologyc Classic Sources and Current Uses of Talcott Parsons’s Work, ed. B. Barber and U. Gerhardt. Baden-Baden: Nomos. -. 2001a. “Darwinismus und Soziologie: Zur Friihgeschichte eines langen Abschieds .” HeidelbergerJab rbucher 45 : 1 8 5 214. -. 2001b. Idealt@us: Zur methodologischen Beg riindung der modernen Soziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Goffman, Erving. 1949. “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Chicago. , 1951. “Symbols of Class Status.” British.Journa1of Sociology 11: 296304. -. 1952. “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.”Psychiaty 15, no. 4: 451-63. -. 1953. “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.

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l 9 j j . “On Face-work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 18. no. 3: 213-31. .1956a. “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor.” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3: 473-502. , 19j6b. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. .19j7. “The Characteristics of Total Institutions.” Pp. 43-84 in Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry [April 15-17, 19571. Washington, D.C.: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. , 19592. “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient.” Psychiatry 22, no. 2: 12-2. -. 19j9b. Tbe Presentation of Self in Eueyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. , 1961b. “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions.” Pp. $124 in Asylums: Essa-ys on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, by E. Goffman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. .1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. -. 1967a. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 1967b. “Where the Action Is.“ Pp. 149-270 in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-FaceBehavior, by E. Goffman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor. .1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. -. 1974. Frame Analysis: A n Essay on the Organization of Expel-lcnce. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1979. “Footing.”Semiotica 25, nos. 1/2: 1-29. .1981a. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. -. 1981b. “The Lecture.” Pp. 162-96 in Forms of Talk by E. Goffman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. -. 1981~. “Reply to Denzin and Keller.” ContemporarySociology 10, no. 1: 6 M 8 . -. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1-17. Simmel, Georg. 1890. Uber Sociale Differenziemng: Sociologische und Psychologische Untersuchungen. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. .1896. “Superiority and Subordination as Subject Matter of Sociology.”Amencan Journal of Sociology 2: 167-89, 392-415. .1898a. “The Persistence of Social Groups.” American Journal of Sociology 3: 662-98, 829-36, and 4: 35-50. -. 1898b. “Die Selbsterhaltung der socialen Gruppe: Sociologische Studie.” Jahrbuch f u r Gesetzgebung: Verwaltung und Volkswiflschaftim Deutschen Reich 22, no. 2: 589-640. -. 1904. ”Fashion.”International Quarterly 10: 13&55. .1907. “Soziologie der Uber- und Unterordnung.” Archiv f u r Sozialwissenschafi und Sozialpolitik 24 (Neue Folge): 477-5 56. .1908. Soziologie: Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. ,

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-. -. .,

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1910a. Haupprobleme der Philosophic. Berlin: Goschen. 19lOb. “How Is Society Possible?”AmericanJournal of Sociology 16:372-91. 1911.“Der Begriff und die Trdgodie der Kultur.”Logos 2: 1-25. 1916i1917. “Vorformen der Idee: Aus den Studien zu einer Metaphysik.” Logos 4: 10341. 1918. Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. 1950. me Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. K. H. Wolff. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. 1965a. Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics by Georg Simmel et ul.. ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: Harper & Row [republished from 19j91. 196jb. “The Problem of Sociology.” Pp. 310-36 in Essa-ys on Sociology. Philosophy, and Aesthetics by Georg Simmel et al., ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: Harper & Row. 1971. Georg Simmel O n Individualicy and Social Forms: Selected Writings,ed. D. N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [1892/19051 1977. The Problems of the Philosophy of Histoy: An Epistemological Essay. New York: Free Press. [1900i19071 1990. The Philosophy OfMoney, ed. D. Frisby; trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby. New York: Routledge. [18941 1992a. “Das Problem der Sociologie.” Pp. 52-61 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe,Vol. V. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. [1895] 1992b. “Zur Psychologie der Mode: Sociologische Studie.” Pp. 105-14 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe,Vol. V. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. [1911] 1996. “Der Henkel” in PhilosophischeKultur. Pp. 27-6 in Georg Simme1 Gesamtausgabe,Vol. X V . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Blumer, Goffman, and PsychoanaI ys i s Philip Manning

In this chapter, I use both Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer’s opposition to psychiatry and psychoanalysis as a way of understanding their quite different contributions to symbolic interactionism. With regard to Blumer, I want to show that, despite his criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis, his own understanding of symbolic interactionism is quite close to, and easily compatible with, a contemporary version of object relations theory in psychoanalysis. This opens the door to a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas out of which a compelling account of the self and the production of meaning can emerge. With regard to Goffman, I want to suggest that a fault line runs through his work, distinguishing his analysis of the interaction order from his sociological study of mental illness. For all its richness, his investigations of the world of face-to-face interaction-the interaction o r d e r - d o not by design contain a view of identity and meaning. The many commentators who have in different ways identified this weakness are therefore correct. However, Goffman’s analysis of the world of the mentally ill does contain a valuable view of the self. Therefore, although Blumer and Goffman are very different analysts of the everyday world, their work is complementary if we consider only Goffman’s sociology of mental illness. Ironically, then, Blumer’s work on symbolic interactionism turns out to be closer to at least some versions of psychoanalysis than he would like, and Goffman’s work is at least partially consistent with Blumer’s, and hence more nuanced than it has appeared to many commentators.

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BLUMER’S SPEC IFICAT 1 0N OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTlONISM: OPPOSING FREUD A N D PARSONS The traditional reading of Blumer judges him by the standard of faithfulness to his mentor, George Herbert Mead. Thus, a major concern for many commentators has been to assess the degree of similarity between Mead’s initial description of social behaviorism and Blumer’s later, reconstructive symbolic interactionism. Although this question continues to be interesting, I want to consider Blumer’s contribution quite differently, as a theory composed in opposition both to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Talcott Parsons and action theory. Blumer’s own specification of symbolic interactionism is, roughly, that Mead lay the conceptual foundation in his formulation of social behaviorism and two generations of Chicago sociologists developed the methodological tools with which to build the house (Blumer 1969: chap. 1). Thus, metaphorically, Mead was the architect, Chicago sociologists were the builders, and Blumer himself was the general contractor who brought everything together. Presented thus, Blumer really claims little for himself, other than the capacity to see the overall project clearly and, perhaps, to facilitate its completion. Probably there is truth to this view. However, I want to propose a second way of understanding Blumer’s explication of symbolic interactionism. This involves thinking of Blumer’s contributions as being inherently oppositional. Clearly, this is evident in his methodological work in which qualitative sociology emerges from the ashes of experimental and quantitative sociology. However, theoretically Blumer characterizes symbolic interactionism not only as a continuation of Mead but also in opposition to both the Freudian psychoanalysis and Parsonsian action theory of his day (see Blumer 1969: 61-77). Moreover, Blumer’s symbolic interactionism is “silently oppositional” in the sense that his (and its) adversaries are rarely named. Rather, their existence is just hinted at, described only vaguely or mentioned elliptically through code words (e.g., Blumer 1969: 62-63). Blumer’s decision to proceed by silent opposition is unfortunate because the overlaps between at least some of his ideas and concerns and those of Parsons and Freud is revealing, as Jonathan H. Turner (1974), among others, has demonstrated. Here I want only to highlight three fertile areas of overlap. However, it is first necessary to comment on the connections between Parsons and Freud. At least one generation of sociologists has grown up believing that Parsons has no account of human agency and hence his work is fatally flawed. Giddens (1979: 115-16; 1982: 112-14, 199; 1984: 84), among others, has argued that Parsons does not have a viable explanation of agency in his work. Along with other factors, this perceived knockout blow has shifted interest away from the close scrutiny of Parsons’s life and work.

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Parsons did not ignore the problem of agency, although it may be true that he failed to solve the problem satisfactorily. In the 1940s, he was heavily involved, first, in a qualitative, largely ethnographic investigation of hospital life at Massachusetts General Hospital and then in the study and practice of psychoanalysis. This led to his acceptance into formal psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in 1946 (see Parsons 1977: 39). Thinking of Parsons as not only a sociologist but also a psychoanalyst puts his work on the theory of action in a very different light. This and his later empirical work-a 1950s study of social mobility among Boston-area high school boys, and a 1970s national study of the faculty members of American colleges and universities (see Fox 1997: 399bsuggest that Parsons was likely to have been very sensitive to issues of human agency, particularly in publications that postdate me Structure of Social Action (1937) and that focus, especially during the 1950s, on the “personality system” and psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Parsons 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1958; Parsons and Shils 1951: 18-20, 110-58). In outlining the key concerns of symbolic interactionism, Blumer emphasizes three issues that suggest an overlap to both Parsons and Freud. They concern (1) the nature of the self, ( 2 ) the role of interpretation, and ( 3 ) the use of objects. Blumer often downplays Mead’s (1934) designation of the self as a conversation between the “I” and the “Me,” perhaps because the primacy of the Me for Mead gave a constitutive role to the attitude of the generalized other. Blumer may have reacted against this because the resulting analysis is rather static: the generalized other is, in a sense, imposed on the self. Instead, Blumer favors Mead’s alternative definition of the self as “that which can be an object to itself” (1934: 140). This definition, also from Mead’s Mind, Self and Society, highlights the reflexive, continuing, self-constituting aspects of identity. Second, Blumer emphasizes that symbolic interactionism is centrally concerned with interpretation and definition, that is, with “ascertaining the meaning of the actions or remarks of the other person” and with “conveying indications to another person as to how he is to act’’ (1969: 66). Third, Blumer stresses that symbolic interactionism involves the study of objects-that is, the study of the meanings, even fantasies, people have about “anything that can be designated or referred to” (1969: 68). Objects are social products that we respond to subjectively (often in accordance with a general plan of action). Blumer intended this portrait of symbolic interactionism to represent the state of sociological theory after Mead and, in conjunction with the qualitative practices of Chicago sociologists, to characterize the core of the most viable version of sociology. Ironically, Blumer is close to characterizing not only symbolic interactionism but also a contemporary version of object relations theory in psychoanalysis. Reading Blumer and then reading, for example, Adam Phillips (19931, Christopher Bollas (1987, 19951, or Thomas H.

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Ogden (19941 is a giddy experience, since they are all presenting complementary ideas-although these prominent analysts appear to have no knowledge of symbolic interactionism at all. More surprising is that two important sociologists, Nancy J. Chodorow (1999) and Jeffrey Prager (19981, both of whom have-like Parson-ompleted formal training in psychoanalysis, present versions of symbolic interactionism that foreground the general, nondevelopmental, intersubjective aspects of psychoanalytic theory. These object relations-minded analysts understand their work to be centrally about transference and to this extent at arm’s length from sociology. However, once transference is understood as more than either an emotionally charged reaction to an analyst and a residue of Oedipal conflicts, then it can be integrated into sociological thinking. More controversially, I also think that a more Kleinian version of object relations, as seen in the work of either Elizabeth Bott-Spillius’ (see 1988: introduction) or Betty Joseph (19851, is also compatible with symbolic interactionism. So, the upshot of the discussion so far is as follows. First, in addition to the standard view of Blumer, there is a second way of reading Blumer, as both an oppositional methodologist and as an oppositional theorist. Second, not only is Blumer’s opposition to Parsons questionable, as Turner (1974) has indicated, but his distance from at least some versions of psychoanalysis is also in doubt. I anticipate that researchers will make a thorough examination of the Venn diagram that contains a contemporary version of object relations and symbolic interactionism. Given the present difficulties (if not crises) facing both approaches, both may benefit. In fact, it has already begun: The British analyst Roger Kennedy is in a sense teaching symbolic interactionism to psychoanalysts (see Kennedy 19981, and the British-trained sociologist, Anthony Elliott, following the lead of Anthony Giddens, is helping other sociologists see the profound connections between symbolic interactionism, feminism, and this new clinical, analytical practice (see Elliott 1996, 2001). This amounts to a respecification (by way of a narrowing down) of the project attempted by Parsons and his colleagues fifty years ago. Blumer was quietly critical of Freud, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. By contrast, Goffman was widely recognized as an informal, non-dues-paying member of the antipsychiatry alliance associated with the iconoclastic work of Thomas Szasz. Goffman’s most explicit assault on psychiatry, as a scientific pursuit and as a medical practice, is in the concluding essay of Asylums, “The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization.” This antipathy led him to claim that psychiatric knowledge is, at least sometimes, less credible than his own ethnographic observations of the behavior of the mentally ill. Later in this chapter 1 suggest that this as an example of “ontological gerrymandering” (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985). It is interesting to note that many of Goffman’s various sociological investigations-the ethnographic, the ethological, the taxonomic, the

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strategic, and, later, the conversation analytic-all share an indifference to speculation about subjective states, preferring instead to use observable interaction. The advantage of his approach is that his findings remain open to further empirical investigation. The disadvantage, as many of his critics point out in one form or another (e.g., Sennett 1970: 36), is that there are no “plot lines” in Goffman’s account of the social world. Instead, people are portrayed as individuals with highly developed “generalized others.” As this vocabulary suggests, the final irony may therefore be that it is the Goffman as analyst of the interaction order, rather than Blumer, who is a more obvious choice as successor to Mead.

GOFFMAN’S SPECIFICATION OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM: TAXONOMIC ZOOLOGY A N D THE CRITIQUE OF PSYCHIATRY A standard reading of Goffman and Blumer sees them both as leading practitioners of symbolic interactionism, the main difference between them being that Goffman produced better empirical work (although see Blumer 2000 for an important collection of Blumer’s empirical papers). This standard reading hides important differences. Goffman refused to support or criticize symbolic interactionism (in print, at least). However, he did make a pitch for the label “strategic interaction” in preference to symbolic interactionism (see Goffman 1972). Goffman’s work on game theory was carried out while on a sabbatical spent at Harvard at the invitation of the well-known rational choice theorist, Thomas C. Schelling. So, a reasonable, researchable question is whether Goffman’s analysis of strategic interaction is an extension of his earlier work on impression management or a new departure for him (for a partial answer, see Manning 1991: 7M6). Independent of this, there is a useful division in Goffman’s work between his analysis of mental illness and psychiatry, on the one side, and his study of public life-the interaction order-in which “norms of co-mingling” regulate face-to-face interaction, on the other side (see Goffman 1971: ix). It is tempting, but wrong, to describe the former as his version of abnormal psychology and the latter as regular social psychology. Whatever else it accomplished, Goffman’s investigations of mental illness reveal his comparative approach. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere (Manning 1992: 17; 1999b: lll), Asylums is best understood not as an ethnography of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s but as an ethnography of the concept of the total institution. In this and other writings about mental illness and psychiatry, Goffman also reveals his apolitical preference for the underdog and his understated but heartfelt moral criticisms of what since Foucault we think of as relations of power.

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Goffman’s most controversial argument in Asylums is that most of the situational improprieties exhibited by mental patients in the hospital were nonsymptomatic. In so doing, he adopts a more-or-less clinical perspective, in which he claims that the apparently strange actions of patients were often understandable “secondary adjustments” to an oppressive and threatening environment. Goffman defines a secondary adjustment as anything people learn to do to get around what the institution thinks they should do, and hence what they should be (1961: 172). If patients are making secondary adjustments, their behavior makes sense and therefore isn’t symptomatic of mental illness. And, as he posits in the first essay of Asylums, “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” many examples of these secondary adjustments can be found in other kinds of total institution as well. In the third essay, “The Underlife of a Public Institution,” Goffman is quite explicit about this, arguing that it is “presumptuous” to assume either that the mentally ill are “ill” or that they are even at one end of a continuum of normal behavior (1961: 303). Rather, he suggests, “a community is a community” and the actions of patients are simply examples of “human association” (Goffman 1961: 303). As will be discussed shortly, Goffman implicitly claims in these passages to have a better understanding of mental illness than that of psychiatrists. This claim places a special burden on ethnographic observation to prove that its understanding of mental illness is superior to that of psychiatry. As supportive evidence, Goffman also claims that nearly all the behavior exhibited by patients at St. Elizabeth’s (except that on the disturbing “back wards”) can also be observed in other total institutions, such as military barracks, prisons, monasteries, and boarding schools. In settings other than the mental hospital, inmate behavior is rarely interpreted-that is, diagnosedas mental illness. This theme recurs throughout Goffman’s work on total institutions: Acts of hostility against the institution have to rely on limited, ill-designed devices, such as banging a chair against the floor or striking a sheet of newspaper sharply so as to make an annoying explosive sound. And the more inadequate this equipment is to convey rejection of the hospital, the more the act appears as a psychotic symptom, and the more likely management feels justified in assigning the patient to a bad ward. (Goffman 1961: 269)

The same argument is also stated clearly in the third essay of Asylums: From the point of view of psychiatric doctrine, apparently, there are no secondary adjustments possible for inmates: everything a patient is caused to do can be described as a part of his treatment or of custodial management; everything a patient does on his own can be defined as symptomatic of his disorder. (Goffman 1961: 186)

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In a sense, Goffman threw down the gauntlet to psychiatrists, challenging them to present scientific evidence for their biomedical view of functional mental illness. Without this evidence, psychiatrists are only sociologists with pretences, in that their contribution is to identify and stigmatize situational improprieties. These psychiatrists are comparable to Goffman’s positivistic colleagues whose view of science has more in common with the Gilbert chemistry sets given to children than with stringent scientific standards (see Goffman 1971: mi). The psychiatrists’ problem is this: Since it is obvious that not all situational improprieties are indicative of mental illness, psychiatrists must at least claim to have a way of knowing which improprieties are symptomatic and which aren’t. In the absence of what Goffman calls a “technical mapping” (1967: 1 3 8 t t h a t is, in the absence of a protocol for distinguishing symptomatic from nonsymptomatic situational improprieties-psychiatrists are often doing little more than applying a technical vocabulary to lay ideas and opinions. As Goffman puts it in Interaction Ritual, “Psychiatrists have failed to provide us with a systematic framework for identifying and describing the type of delict represented by psychotic behavior” (1967: 138). He makes a similar point in Behavior in Public Places: At present, the psychiatrist . . . give[sl weight to his own spontaneous response to the conduct of the individual to whom he is giving a diagnostic interview, and it is largely in term of this response that the psychiatrist decides whether the behavior of the subject is appropriate or inappropriate in the situation. If the behavior is inappropriate, he decides whether it is to be placed in one of the non-symptomatic classes of situational impropriety, or whether it betokens mental illness. In this, of

course, he is acting somewhat like a layman. (Goffman 1963: 232)

The same argument is made in Interaction Ritual, where he claims that “psychiatristshave failed to provide us with a systematic framework for identifying and describing the type of delict presented by psychotic behavior” (1967: 138). According to Goffman, the absence of a formal way of distinguishing symptomatic and nonsymptomatic situational improprieties has produced three problems: (1) the codation of custodial and therapeutic roles, (2) the invisibility of secondary adjustments, and (3) the decontextualization of the meaning of the patients’ actions. Goffman describes the conflation of therapeutic and custodial roles by drawing a distinction bemeen “people-work”and “object-work”-the former being a situation in which the psychiatric staffs work and world have uniquely to do with people; the latter being a situation in which the patients the staff work on take on some of the same characteristics as inanimate objects (Goffman 1961: 73). In Asylums he writes, “Many total institutions, most of the time, seem to function merely as storage dumps for inmates, but . . . they usually present themselves to the public as rational organizations designed unconsciously, through and

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through, as effective machines for producing a few officially avowed and officially approved ends” (Goffman 1961: 73). A decade later, Goffman reaffirms this thought, suggesting in “The Insanity of Place” that the mental patient’s “deal” is “grotesque” (1971: 3361, an adjective that he had earlier used in Asylums (1961: 321) when analyzing the psychiatrist-patient relationship. Asylums contains a barely hidden tone of moral outrage. For example, in discussing the impossibility of presenting solitary confinement as a medical treatment, Goffman notes that psychiatrists have renamed this punishment, making it instead “constructive meditation” (1961: 82). He also points out that, in the interests of administrative efficiency, some mental hospitals “have found it useful to extract the teeth of ‘biters,’give hysterectomies to promiscuous female patients, and perform lobotomies on chronic fighters” (1961: 77). Goffman’s outrage is controlled, but it is nonetheless evident. He understood total institutions as “forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self’ (1961: 22). The experiment reveals what can be done “tothe self,”as a form of control, and not “for the self,” as a form of treatment. Since Goffman claims that psychiatrists have little more than a lay understanding of the difference between symptomatic and nonsymptomatic situational improprieties, any effort by a patient to make a secondary adjustment to St. Elizabeth’s is likely to be understood symptomatically. As Goffman notes, from “the point of view of psychiatric doctrine, apparently, there are no secondary adjustments possible for inmates . . . everything a patient does on his own can be defined as symptomatic of his disorder” (1961: 186). From Goffman’s sociological point of view, many secondary adjustments are nonsymptomatic situational improprieties, since they can be understood as rational attempts to protect oneself from a threatening and humiliating environment, and hence they are not properly the concern of the psychiatrist at all. However, Goffman’s willingness to interpret patients’ actions nonsymptomatically sometimes leads him either to stretch credibility or to claim special access to a patient’s intentions. For example, in Asylums Goffman makes the very general claim that “the craziness or ‘sick behavior’ claimed for the mental patient is by and large a product of the claimant’s social distance from the situation that the patient is in, and is not primarily a product of mental illness” (1961: 121). It is reasonable to ask how Goffman knew that this behavior was not the product of mental illness, unless he has the knowledge that he claimed psychiatry lacked. Consider the following: [Alt Central Hospital I have observed an otherwise well-demeaned (albeit mute) youth walking down the ward halls with a reasonably thoughtful look on his face and two pipes in his mouth . , , another, with a ball of paper screwed into his right eye as a monocle. . . . As already suggested, this situational self-sabotage often seems to represent one statement in an equation of defense. It seems that the

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patient sometimes feels that life on the ward is so degrading, so unjust, and so inhuman that the only self-respecting response is to treat ward life as if it were contemptibly beyond reality and beyond seriousness. . . . In short, the patient may pointedly act crazy in the hospital to make it clear to all decent people that he is obviously sane. (Goffman 1963: 224-25)

Also: “The aim, then, of some of these bizarre acts is, no doubt, to demonstrate some kind of distance and insulation from the setting, and behind this, alienation from the establishment” (Goffman 1963: 225). There is a significant problem with Goffman’s claims in these passages, because he clearly did not and could not have a way of knowing what these “bizarre acts” mean without having the knowledge that elsewhere he claimed no one has. In these passages he implies that he possesses a special and superior understanding of mental illness. What is this special understanding of mental illness? Perhaps more significantly, how was Goffman able to access it? In an earlier paper (Manning 1999a: 98), I suggest that if Goffman does not have a credible answer to these questions, he is guilty of what Woolgar and Pawluch (1985) refer to as “ontological gerrymandering.” That is, he is guilty of employing a selective relativism with respect to the explanation of mental illness. At various points, Goffman claims-albeit often implicitly-to speak from a privileged space from which he could see the “truth about mental illness. But at no point does he, or could he, justify this claim. The irony of Goffman’s mistake can be explicated by exploring one of Wittgenstein’s observations in Philosophical Investigations, where he makes the following comparison: We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between-so to speak-super-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words “language,”“experience,” “world,”have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table,““lamp,”“door.”(Wittgenstein 1958: para. 97)

Combining Woolgar and Pawluch’s critique of ontological gerrymandering by sociologists with Wittgenstein’s critique of the use of superconcepts by philosophers produces an instructive reading of Goffman. As an investigator of the interaction order, Goffman used an appropriately “humble”sociology that is both useful and subject to revision (a characteristic I have previously [Manning 1992: 551 called “Goffman’s spiral”). However, whenever Goffrrian tried to explain the meaning of the behavior of patients at St. Elizabeth’s, he unintentionally produced an impossible “supersociology” that implicitly claimed access to the “incomparable essence” of mental illness. Since he had already been so successful in pointing out that psychiatrists had only a valuable, experiential base in dealing with the “delicts” of the mentally ill, and

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not the “superpsychiatry”that revealed the essential “symptoms” of underlying order, Goffman could not claim to have what he had persuasively shown that nobody had-namely, the “real,”“true”understanding of mental illness. The justification for Goffman’s claim to understand what motivates mental patients when they perform “bizarre acts” can therefore only be the “humble” one used by psychiatrists themselves-namely, observation and experience. Goffman obtained these through ethnography; psychiatrists, through clinical practice. Goffman’s analysis of psychiatry and mental illness in Asylums makes several broad contributions to his overall sociology. First, it is his major published work that uses comparative ethnography. Second, it presents “plot lines” (in his vocabulary, it outlines the patient’s “moral career”). Third, it is his most moral-political research. Fourth, it draws Goffman into an account of the self that is compatible with both Blumer and the contemporary object relations view discussed earlier. However, this view of the self is not obviously compatible with a classificatory, ethological analysis-a taxonomic zoology2--of the interaction order, as Goffman himself realized (see Smith 1999 for a different understanding of this issue). In analyzing the interaction order, Goffman provides us with a model of the structure of social interaction (see Goffman 1983). This model does not contain an account of the people who produce this interaction. Thus, for example, Z9e Presentation of Selfin Everyday Life (1959) teaches us a lot about the presentation-and misrepresentation-of self, but remarkably little about the self. As Dennis Wrong (1998: 22-23) argues, Goffman and most symbolic interactionists fail to offer a convincing account of what motivates people to do what they do. Several commentators have recognized that Goffman often avoids analyzing the “ h e r world or mental life of people in favor of the structure of social interaction. Among the first to make this point were Lyman and Scott, who put it well when they suggested that, in m e Presentation of SeK Goffman “moved the theater of performances out of the ‘head’ and into public places” (1975: 107). Williams has argued that Goffman “treated as irrelevant the large variety of ways that people think about their own or other people’s ‘inner lives”’ (1998: 154). However, Williams also recognizes the tension in Goffman’s work between “subjective matters” and “objective traces” (2000: 96). Margaret S. Archer has made this point very well, arguing that because Goffman’s descriptions of people are so rich, he “owes us a theory of his feisty self as a social subject and this . . . goes unpaid . . . Goffman’s subject has too much autonomy” (Archer 2000: 78). She later expands on this idea, arguing that: The presentation of self was all about presentational acts in everyday life and the account was confined to these public outworkings, for the shutters came down on the self whose inner deliberations generated these performances. Goffman left us with two questions. How could subjects perform socially with

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such virtuosity if society were merely a stage-setting for the conduct of their private business, and who was the mysterious self who could set up and impose this private agenda. His origins, properties, and powers remained immured behind the brick wall. Goffman owed us an account of the self, but left the bills unpaid, for the sources of the self remained completely shrouded. (Archer 2000: 317, emphasis in original)

As will become clear, I believe that Archer is only partially correct, because Goffman’s writings on mental illness contain an at least implicit account of the self. He therefore paid his bills but did not collect a receipt. What coniplicates this account is Goffman’s occasional comments that deny the need for a theory of the self. In effect, he ripped u p the bill. For example, in an interview with Jef C. Verhoeven, he acknowledges the parameters of his analysis of the self: What I’m doing is the structural Social Psychology that is required, or is natw ral for, Sociology. That is, given Sociology is a central thrust, what can we say about the individual?Not that the individual is the central unit that permits us to study society; but if you take society as the basic and substantive unit . . . what is it we have to assume about individuals, so that they can be used or be usable socially? . . . I am an ethnographer of small entities. (Goffman in Verhoeven 1993: 322-23) He adds later, “[Slociologists in some ways have always believed in the social construction of reality. The issue is, at what level is the reality socially constructed? . . . But where I differ from social constructionists is that I don’t think the individual himself or herself does much of the constructing” (Goffman in Verhoeven 1993: 324). The same idea can be found in the frequently cited introduction to Inter-

action Ritual: I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another. . . . What minimal model of the actor is needed if we are to wind him up, stick him in amongst his fellows, and have an orderly traffic of behavior emerge? Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men. (Goffman 1967: 2-3)

My view is that Goffman’s concern to classlfy the ethological material he collected on the interaction order precluded an adequate theory of selfhood. He made tremendous progress in understanding the resources used by people to preserve or manipulate a shared sense of what is taking place, but he did so at the expense of a viable account of the people themselves who use these resources. This is what I take Archer to mean when she claims that Goffman liniiLs his analysis to “presentational acts.” In Goffman’s role-analytic account, the

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self is in danger of collapsing into its roles; it becomes, in an infamous phrase, a “peg” on whch something can be put for a while (see Goffman 1959: 253). In this sense, Goffman offers us something quite different from and lnferior to either Blumer’s version of symbolic interactionism or contemporary object relations accounts of psychoanalysis. Despite the significant problems with some of Goffman’s arguments concerning mental illness, it is important to recognize that they contain an implicit theory of selfhood that is much richer than the one embedded in his analysis of the interaction order. This is particularly evident in his analysis of “secondary adjustments.” In order to theorize the role of secondary adjustments in all total institutions, Goffman had to incorporate an elaborate theory of the self that could show how inmates draw on inner resources to withstand oppressive institutional conditions. The third essay of Asylums, “The Underlife of a Public Institution,” is a long and often poignant tribute to the many ways through which inmates preserve their sense of worth. Ironically, then, in order to criticize what he saw as the paucity of orthodox psychiatry’s account of the self, Goffman had to develop a theory that was more sophisticated than his own analysis of the interaction order could accommodate. In so doing, Goffman had to align himself with Blumer. Asylums and related works (in 1963, 1967, 1971) are theoretically different from his general analyses of face-to-face interaction, in that they contain a potentially viable theory of the self. Goffman needed this theory so that he could investigate what might be called the inmates’ “strategiesof resistance” throughout their “moral careers” as mental patients. For this, Goffman had to draw on what he often rejected-namely, a theory of an “inner core” to the self that is expressed in various performances and that stretches between them. Goffman’s analysis in Asylums is so compelling because there are finally both “scenes” and a “plot,” to replay Sennett’s (1970: 35-36) comment on Goffman. Perhaps, then, Goffman’s social theory can be further developed by linking his analysis of the interaction order to the tacit theory of the self used in his investigation of mental illness.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have tried to show that Goffman both needed to be more like Blumer than he wanted to be and, in his work on mental illness, often was rather like Blumer. I have also tried to show that Blumer was far closer to at least a version of psychoanalysis than he wanted to be. These observations are important because combining an analysis of the interaction order and a theory of the self that is based on both Blumer’s symbolic interactionism and contemporary object relations is a promising theoretical platform. It will provide something that we often wrongly assume that we

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already have-namely, a way of understanding Goffman and Blumer as complementary rather than opposing figures. It also reopens the door to a dialogue between sociology and psychoanalysis that Parsons and others initiated fifty years ago. Ultimately, it promises to provide a way of both classifying and analyzing the enabling conventions of face-to-face interaction and then narrating the inner stories of the people whose actions and meanings constitute the interaction order.

NOTES This essay was first presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in Chicago, August 2002. It draws on and develops arguments that have been published earlier, particularly Manning (1999a, 1999b, 2000). 1. Elizabeth Bott-Spillius was a close friend of Goffman’s at the University of Chicago fifty or so years ago, and so it is likely that she has been familiar with sociological ideas since then. 2. This term, taxonomic zoology, emerged from my discussions with James J. Chriss, my colleague at Cleveland State University.

REFERENCES Archer, Margaret S. 2000. Being Human: 7he Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. -. 2000. Selected Works of Herbert Blumert A Public PhilosophyforMass Society, ed. S. M. Lyman and A. J. Vidich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bollas, Christopher. 1987. Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom. London: Free Association Books. -. 1795. Cracking Up: 7he Work of Unconscious,Experience. London: Routledge. Bott-Spillius, Elizabeth, ed. 1988. Melanie Klein Today: Developments in 7%eoy and Practice, vols. 1 & 2. London: Routledge. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1999. 7he Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Elliott, Anthony. 1996. Subject to Ourselves: Social 7heoy, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Polity. -. 2001. Concepts of the Seg Cambridge: Polity. Fox, Renee C. 1997. “Talcott Parsons, My Teacher.” American Scholar 66, no. 3: 395-410. Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social 7heoy. London: Macmillan. -. 1982. Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. -. 1984. ?he Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, Erving. 1959. ?he Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, Anchor.

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1961. Asylums. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. -. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor. -. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. -. 1972. Strategic Interaction. New York: Ballantine. -. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1-17. Joseph, Betty. 1985. “Transference: The Total Situation.” Pp. 15667 in Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of BettyJosqh, ed. M. Feldman and E. Bott-Spillius. London: Routledge. Kennedy, Roger.1998. The Elusive Human Subject: A Psychoanalytic 7’beoly of Subject Relations. London: Free Association Books. Lyman, Stanford M., and Marvin B. Scott. 1975. 7’be Drama of Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Manning, Philip. 1991. “Drama as Life: The Significance of Goffman’s Changing Use of the Dramaturgical Metaphor.” Sociological 7’beoy 9, no. 1: 71-86. -. 1992. Ewing Goffman and Modern Sociology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. .1999a. “The Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally 111: Lessons from Goffman.” Pp. 89-104 in Counseling and the Therapeutic State, ed. J. J. Chriss. New York: Adine de Gruyter. .199913. “Ethnographic Coats and Tents.” Pp. 104-18 in Gofman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy, ed. G. Smith. London: Routledge. -. 2000. “Credibility,Agency, and the Interaction Order.” Symbolic Interaction 23, no. 3: 283-97. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self; and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ogden, Thomas H. 1994. Subjects of Analysis. London: Karnac. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. , 1950. “Psychoanalysis and the Social Structure.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 19: 371-84. , 1951. 7’be Social System. New York: Free Press. -. 1952. “The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems.”Psychiatly 15: 15-25. -. 1953. “Psychoanalysis and Social Science with Special Reference to the Oedipus Complex.” Pp. 196215 in Twenty Years of Psychoanalysis, ed. F. Alexander and H. Ross. New York: Norton. -. 1954. “The Father Symbol: An Appraisal in the Light of Psychoanalytic and Sociological Theory.” Pp. 523-44 in Symbols and Values: A n Initial Study, ed. L. Bryson. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1958. “Social Structure and the Development of Personality.“ Psychiatry (November): 32140. -. 1977. “On Building Social System Theory: A Personal History.” Pp. 22-76 in Social Systems and the Evolution of Action n e o l y , ed. T. Parsons. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils, eds. 1951. Toward a General 7’beoly ofdction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Phillips, Adam. 1993. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Prager, Jeffrey. 1998. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Remembering. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sennett, Richard. 1970. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Free Press. Smith, Greg. 1999. “‘TheProprieties of Persondom’: The Individual in the Writings of Erving Goffman.” Unpublished paper. Turner, Jonathan H. 1974. “Parsons as a Symbolic Interactionist: A Comparison of Action and Interaction Theory.” Sociological l n q u i y 44, no. 4: 283-94. Verhoeven,Jef C. 1993. “An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980.”Research on Language and Social Interaction 26, no. 3: 317-48. Williams, Robin. 1998. “Erving Goffman.” Pp. 151-62 in Key Sociological i’hinkers, ed. R. Stones. New York: New York University Press. -. 2000. Making Identity Matter. Durham, England: Sociologypress. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Woolgar, Steve, and Dorothy Pawluch. 1985. “Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations.” Social Problems 32, no. 3: 214-27. Wrong, Dennis H. 1998. The Modern Condition: Essays at Centuy’sEnd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

7 Goffman as Microfunctionalist James J. Chriss

All theorists hold working assumptions about reality (ontology), about knowledge (epistemology), and about values (axiology), whether they explicitly acknowledge these or not (Gouldner 1970). I begin this chapter by assuming that Erving Goffman’s characterization of the social world-specifically his writings on the nature of face-to-face interaction and the realities of impression management and self-presentation in everyday life (Goffman 1959, 1963, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1 9 8 1 h i s basically “correct.” In other words, I assume that Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of human social action and interaction provides a fair and honest depiction of what actually goes on in the empirical social world of face-to-face interaction. However, there is also the possibility of filling in some of the lucanae in Goffman’s schema that he was unwilling or unable to address during his lifetime. For example, although Goffman argued that face-to-face interaction represents a domain of activity that deserves to be studied in its own right (Goffman [19641 1997c), and that this domain of activity appears to be wellbounded and predictable enough to give it its own name-the “interaction order” (Goffman [19831 1997b)-he nevertheless was unwilling to trace out linkages between the microlevel interaction order and meso- and macrolevel social structures. Indeed, Goffman ([1983] 1997b: 252) once stated that at best there exists only a “loose coupling” between interactional practices and social structures and that “human social life is only a small irregular scab on the face of nature, not particularly amenable to deep systematic analysis” ([19831 1997b: 261). However, positing the existence of a loose coupling between the interaction order and the broader social order, however weak be this assertion, concedes that there is some type of connection between the two levels of reality, 181

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between the micro and the macro. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which elements of Goffman’s thought are linked to, o r at least could he said to be compatible on some level with, functionalist systems theory. Since Talcott Parsons’s version of functionalism has been the leading theoretical orientation within sociology for conceptualizing and attempting to explain social systems in their entirety (Holton 2000; Lidz 2000; Trevifio 20011, I examine to what extent Goffman’s work on the micro realm of face-to-face interaction meshes with the macro or systems orientation of Parsons. Although I am unable to work out the details here, ongoing and future research should clearly illustrate how Talcott Parsons’s analytical arsenal (specifically his AGIL schema and cybernetic hierarchy of control; see Parsons 1982) can be brought to bear to help order the “messy” world of faceto-face interaction that Goffman charts so well. Kingsley Davis (1959) once proclaimed that all sociological analysis is functional analysis. Although I am somewhat sympathetic to Davis’s argument, in the case of Goffman, rather than a full-blown commitment to functionalist theory, I would suggest that there are functionalist elements present within his work. In this chapter, I aim to make more explicit the functionalist elements in Goffman’s thinking. Before we move on to this discussion, however, I shall first summarize the ways previous authors have categorized Goffman theoretically.

WHAT IS COFFMAN? Goffman is not easily pinned down as belonging to this or that particular theoretical camp (Strong 1983). This is because Goffman’s intellectual lineage is diverse, as he drew upon insights from Durkheim and functionalism, Simmel’s formal sociology, Burke’s dramatism, structural social psychology, phenomenology, proxemics and semiotics, linguistics, animal ethology, as well as from popular sources such as newspapers, novels, and etiquette manuals (Berger 1986; Branaman 1997; Burns 1992; Chriss 1993b, 1995b, 1996; Fine and Manning 2000; Gillespie and Leffler 1983; Jaworski 2000; Kendon 1988; Lemert 1997; Levine 1995; MacCannell 1990; Manning 1992; Vester 1989). Within sociology the ritual invocation is that Goffman is the leading representative of the “dramaturgical” school of sociology, but who else is in this school? No one really, save for Carol Brooks Gardner (1995) and perhaps a few others. Typically dramaturgy is said to fall under the broader heading of “interpretive” theory that includes symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and phenomenology. The interpretive paradigm is held to be one of the “big three” paradigms in sociology, the others being the “macro”orientations of functionalism and conflict theory. In addition to being “micro,”the theo-

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ries grouped under the interpretive paradigm are said to take the “social construction of reality” approach in emphasizing that human beings construct and reconstruct their world through interaction and symbolic exchange with others. However, in reality Goffman’s connection to symbolic interactionism or the interpretive paradigm more generally is extremely tenuous (Gonos 1977). For example, throughout his writings Goffman generally ignores George H. Mead, and the few times he does cite him he is more apt to point out problems with his theory of self (see, e.g., Goffman 1963: 34-35; 1969; 1971). Interestingly enough, one of Goffman’s most positive citations to Mead appears in Gender Advertisements-interesting because rather than praising him for his social psychology, Goffman is lauding Mead’s social behaviorism, which fits in with the heavily ethological orientation of this work. In contrasting Durkheim’s notion of ritual with the ethological notion of ritualization. Goffman states: Instead of having to play out an act, the animal, in effect, provides a readily readable expression of his situation, specifically his intent, this taking the form of a “ritualization”of some portion of the act itself, and this indication (whether promise or threat) presumably allows for the negotiation of an efficient response from, and to, witnesses of the display. (If Darwin leads here, John Dewey and G. H. Mead are not far behind.) (Goffman [19761 1997a: 209)

One often strains to find in Goffman’s writings sympathy with or allegiance to the social construction of reality. Note, for example, what Goffman had to say about this very same issue in an interview conducted back in 1980: [Wlhere I differ from social constructionists is that I don’t think the individual himself or herself does much of the constructing. He rather comes to a world. already in some sense or other, established. So there I would differ from persons who use in their writings the notion of the social construction of reality. I am therefore on that side, closer to the structural functionalists, like Parsons or [Robert] Merton. (Verhoeven 1993: 324)

It is this connection between Goffman and Parsons that I wish to explore more fully in this chapter.

GOFFMAN AND FUNCTIONALISM Over the years, several observers have suggested that in some respects Goffman can be considered a functionalist. Oftentimes this assertion has been made with the aim of casting aspersions on Goffman, making him out to be an apolitical and even conservative social scientist who, instead of being

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concerned with rousing persons from their deep slumber of false consciousness, would rather tiptoe into the bedroom to watch them snore (Goffman 1974: 14). For example, Gouldner (1970: 380) suggests that Goffman’s work is a kind of microfunctionalism in that it is concerned with identifying the mechanisms that sustain social interaction. However, whereas Parsons emphasized social structure and the importance of shared values in the maintenance of social order, Goffman rejects conventionalized notions of pattern and hierarchy in favor of a more episodic and dramaturgical view of social reality. This, according to Gouldner, leads Goffman into an inappropriate view of social life as episodic where appearances are more important than authenticity and underlying realities and where, ultimately, actors are disengaged from social structure and thus cut off from a sociohistorical understanding of their place in society. Goffman’s ahistoricism combines with a view of the actor that is disengaged from social structure, thereby freeing the actor to take on whatever roles are deemed appropriate in a given situation for achieving desired ends. In Goffman’s world, according to Gouldner, human actors “are seen less as products ofthe system than as individuals ‘working the system’ for the enhancement of self’ (1970: 379). Here Gouldner shares with Habermas (1984) the view that Goffman’s actor is overly manipulative and cynical, with dramaturgical theory amounting to a “con man” view of social life (see also Chriss 1999a; Young 1971). Similar concerns have been raised by Ortega (1975), who criticizes Goffman because, in establishing appearances as a fundamental sociological category, his theory is bereft of ethical values. In Goffman’s world, it is not important to be or to have, but above all else to pretend: to be merchants of morality. For Ortega, Goffman is an obvious functionalist, insofar as there is no class struggle, no domination, no alienation, just a superficial consumerism in which everyone is working the system for the enhancement of self at the expense of others (see also Hochschild 1983; Leidner 1993; Langman 1991). Likewise, Brown (1977) views Goffman as a microfunctionalist insofar as he simply picked up the Hobbesian problem of social order from his predecessors Durkheim and Parsons, shifting the focus from society in the abstract to the interactional level (Chriss 1993a, 1993b, 1995a, 1995b). In essence, Goffman is concerned with explicating the things persons do in the presence of others to maintain normal appearances so that the routines of everyday life can be carried out. To stress the amorality and politically conservative nature of Goffman’s vision, Brown (1977: 198) chose the following quote from The Presentation of Self in Eveyday Life: We now come to the basic dialectic. In their capacity as performers, individuals will be concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by which they and their products are judged. , . . But, qua per-

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formers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized. (Goffman 1959: 251)

For Brown, this passage as well as other aspects of his work reveal Goffman as a subtle, conservative Durkheimian: Beyond unmasking personal and institutional falsity (e.g., the underlife of organizations and total institutions, the artificiality of therapy, the hiding of “true” expressions and desires backstage), Goffman reveals the functional necessity of formalisms in everyday life (Brown 1977: 205).

ROLE THEORY Additionally, Goffman’s frequent use of role terminology-for example, his concept of “role distance,” the process whereby one places distance between one’s virtual self-in-role and one’s true or authentic self (Chriss 1999b, Goffman 1961)-is grounded in a functionalist tradition. As Jaworski (1997: 39) argues, in his role distance essay Goffman is engaging in a sort of “interactionist functionalism” insofar as Goffman merged Everett C. Hughes’s notion of role release with Robert K. Merton’s notion of latent function. Goffman (1961: 119) notes that role distancing can function to relieve tensions in the workplace, such as when status superiors sometimes engage in self-deprecation when in the presence of status subordinates (Chriss 1999b: 79, n. 10). Weekend retreats function in the same manner: Low-status members of the organization are invited to “rub elbows” with ownership and upper management so as to demonstrate that the upper crust are, after all, just “regular folk,” thereby reducing distance between the organizationally imposed statuses that usually prevail in interactions between superordinates and subordinates. As we have seen, although Goffman’s intellectual influences are diverse, his work can be placed largely within the tradition of structural social psychology (see Gonos 1977; Jaworski 1997: 31). Here the influences of Park, Doyle, Hughes, Simmel, and of course Durkheim and Parsons converge on the concept of role. In this regard, Stryker’s description of the main features of structural role theory is especially useful: The theater is the major metaphor of structural role theory: the vision is of actors playing parts in scripts written by culture and shaped by evolutionary adaptation. The parts are written to restore the play to its original form should improvisation threaten its fundamentals. Analysis of a part is in terms of how its relationship to other parts meets survival needs of the larger system. Society is a system with functional substructures having their own substructures; the group is the structural context of most social interaction. (Stryker 2001: 217)

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Here we see how elements of dramatism, ethology, evolutionism, and functionalism converge in Goffman’s work, all of which find entree via the role concept. It should be stressed at this point, however, that when Goffman was coming u p though the ranks of academia during the early 1950s, even though there were divisions within sociology with regard to allegiances to various schools or theoretical traditions, overt and open hostilities between or within theoretical camps were rare. For example, although Merton’s middle-range theory program was aimed at correcting some of the excesses of Parsons’s grand theoretical version of functionalism, Merton himself never engaged in public polemical attacks on Parsons personally, or against functionalists generally. Lemert takes note of this nonaggression pact within 1950s sociology and offers evidence of it by way of a question: “Did Goffman ever openly attack a functionalist of whatever city or school? On the contrary, as time went by after me Presentation of Self; Durkheim remained a significant resource” (1992: 661. Goffman’s functionalism, especially as evident earlier in his career beginning with his dissertation and early 1950s publications, reflects the realities of the ascendancy of functionalism generally within sociology (Bailey 2001; Wiley 1979) as well as the nonaggression pact that was in place between competing theoretical traditions. (Of course, by the mid- to late 1950s, Gouldner, Lockwood, Mills, Dahrendorf, and others did much to challenge and disestablish this pact.) With this in mind, we now turn to a brief summary of systems theory within functionalism with an eye toward ascertaining to what extent, if any, Goffman employs such concepts.

SYSTEMS AND FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY Given these attempts to link Goffman to functionalists via the negative qualities (viz., ahistoricism, political and ideological conservatism, an overweening emphasis on the question of social order) that their work allegedly shares, we must also seek to find positive convergences-whether substantive, analytical, or both-between Goffman and the functionalists. One place to start is with the functionalist tendency to conceive of society as an organism or system consisting of interdependent parts that serve specific, vital functions for the system more broadly (Baert 1998: 37-48). The two key elements of such a systems approach are the “interdependence”of the parts of the system as so conceived, as well as the tendency of the system toward “equilibrium” or self-maintenance (Bailey 2001; Gouldner

1967: 155).

This is made explicit in Zelditchs general propositions for systems analysis. Here, a system is defined as follows:

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[Tlwo or more units, xl, x2,. . . xn,related such that a change in state of any x, will be followed by a change of state in the remaining 3,. . . xn which is in turn followed by a change in the state of xi, etc. Two or more units in the relation specified in [the system] are said to be interdependent. (Zelditch 1955: 402)

This definition is stated in such a way that a system could oscillate indefinitely, hence Parsons (1967; Parsons and Bales 1955) took it as axiomatic that systems seek equilibrium. According to Zelditch, equilibrium is defined as “a state of a system such that there is zero change of state of the units of the system relative to each other.” Additionally, a system seeks equilibrium to the extent that “a change of state of x,is followed by a change of state xI,. . . x, such that no further change of state occurs in the system” (Zelditch 1955: 402). Moreover, systems as conceived for social analysis are “boundarymaintaining,” meaning that societies (or subunits within social systems) are not indefinitely extendable or malleable. There is a rather narrow range of possibilities with regard to the forms that societies may take and the nature of the relations of units relative to one another within these systems. As Zelditch explains, to say that a system has a boundary means that “the state of the system is limited in extension and the state-description of the system may be discriminated from the state-description of that which is non-system” (403). Finally, a system is boundary maintaining to the extent that “the reaction to initial change of state is such that the system retains its boundaries relative to its environment” (403). Gouldner (1967: 155) rightly notes, however, that the functionalist emphasis on the interdependence of parts and their equilibrium within a system obscures the fact that the extent of interdependence between parts can vary by degree. Parsons and other functionalists fell into this trap because overwhelmingly they couched explanation at the level of the system itself rather than being concerned with a closer examination and explication of the parts of the system. There may have also been an explicit attempt on Parsons’s part to counter the tendency within structuralism and Marxism to elevate certain parts of the system to causal prominence, as, for example, the Marxist notion that the economic “base” gives rise to the cultural “superstructure” (Gouldner 1970: 213). What Gouldner hit upon was the notion of “functional autonomy”namely, the fact that units within a social system will vary to the extent to which they are dependent on other parts of the system. As Gouldner explains: [Tlhere are varying degrees of interdependence which may be postulated to exist among the parts of a system. At one extreme, each element may be involved in a mutual interchange with all others; at the opposite extreme, each element

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may be involved in mutual interchanges with only one other. The former may be regarded as defining maximal interdependence and “systemness,”the latter as defining minimal interdependence or “systemness.”(Gouldner 1967: 156) It is an empirical issue, then, to conduct research to ascertain the extent to which parts of interest within social systems possess either high or low levels of functional autonomy relative to other parts. To counterbalance somewhat the functionalist assumption of system interdependence, Gouldner points to Goffman’s work as an illustration of how the concept of functional autonomy is assumed or utilized in sociological theory. Specifically, Gouldner finds the notion of functional autonomy tacitly invoked by Goffman (1967) in his writings on deference and demeanor. This is seen in the distinction Goffman makes between two types of deference behavior, namely avoidance rituals and presentational rituals. Avoidance rituals are forms of deference whereby actors keep a distance from other actors so as not to violate their assumed personal space, or what Simmel (1950: 321) called the “ideal sphere” (Goffman 1967: 62). On the other hand, presentational rituals are forms of deference whereby actors provide information to other actorswhether through verbal or nonverbal means-regarding how they will be treated in an anticipated or forthcoming interaction (Goffman 1967: 71). Whereas avoidance rituals speclfy what is not to be done, presentational rituals speclfy what is to be done. Furthermore, Goffman (1967: 73) is explicit in stating that this distinction is borrowed from Durkheim’s (119121 1954) classification of ritual into positive and negative rites. In making this distinction between avoidance and presentational rituals, Goffman is also making the important point that there is an inherent dialectic or tension between the two forms of deference. On the one hand, system norms require that persons make a show of desiring to include others in their plans of action (presentational rituals); on the other hand, persons are also expected not to get carried away and to show respect for the privacy and autonomy of fellow interactants (avoidance rituals). This brings us back to Gouldner’s point: A functionalist orientation that concentrates overwhelmingly on the system as a whole and the mechanisms of integration, equilibrium, and interdependence between its parts would likely not be alive to the subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) tensions within social systems as certain parts strain toward functional autonomy. As Gouldner explains: From the standpoint of the kind of system model which Parsons favors, the emphasis on interdependence would conduce to a one-sided focu-in Goffman’s term.wn the “presentationalrituals.”That is, it conduces to a preoccupation with the mechanisms of social integration, and to a neglect of the avoidance rituals which constitute proper ways in which socialized individuals are enabled to resist total inclusion in a social system and total loss of their functional autonomy. (Gouldner 1967: 159)

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Gouldner’s assessment that Goffman’s work contains notions of functional autonomy suggests that if Goffman is a functionalist, his functionalism is not so one-sided as Parsons’s focus on system integration, equilibrium, and value consensus as the engines of social order. Goffman does indeed hold to the notion of system with regard to a particular subunit within the social system, namely the interaction order. However, the notion of system that Goffman describes with regard to face-to-face interaction-specifically with regard to verbal forms of self-presentation (Goffman 1974, 1981)-is somewhat less well bounded, more fluid and dynamic, and not as easily discernable through formalizations (such as the specification of functions 2 la Parsons’s AGIL schema).

GOFFMAN A N D SYSTEMS ANALYSIS The basic model for sociological analysis that Goffman (1953) describes in his dissertation is basically functionalist. For example, Goffman states. “In the present study, I assume that conversational interaction between concrete persons who are in each other’s immediate presence is a species of social order and can be studied by applying the model of social order to it” (Goffman 1953: 33). In the footnote placed at the end of this passage, Goffman cites favorably two of the most prominent functionalists of his era: Talcott Parsons (1951) and Chester Barnard (1947). Notice, however, the peculiar phrase “concrete persons” from the prior quote. Here Goffman seems to be saying, “Yes, the study of social order is basically one that functionalists have favored, and in this sense I will be following them. However, in emphasizing systems and functional requisites, human beings tend to drop out of the picture entirely and are ‘framed out’ in favor of such clinical terminology as ‘Ego,’ ‘Alter,’ ‘role relationships,’ ‘pattern variables,’ ‘motivational complexes,’ and the like.” Here seemingly Goffman felt obliged to “bring men back in” (Homans 1964) by emphasizing that he will be dealing with “concrete” persons as a counterbalance to the high levels of abstraction toward which functionalists, and especially Parsons, tended. Later in the dissertation the concept of the “interaction order” is introduced, and it is here that Goffman (1953: 343-60) modifies the systems model initially developed from within the functionalist tradition. Based on his field research in “Dixon,” Goffman venfies that, indeed, actors seem to be oriented toward norms specdying expectations and even obligations for behavior, and in this sense there is a high degree of patterned regularity and predictability whenever persons come into each other’s immediate presence. Here, however, Goffman is resisting a full-blown commitment to functionalism. Goffman does admit, “It is possible to consider any particular social order in a crudely functional way and say that it serves to ensure that a particular set of

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human needs or objectives will be fulfilled in an orderly, habitual, and cooperative way” (1953: 345). Although functionalists had typically been interested in applying this mode of social order to the macrorealm of institutions, Goffman suggests that the systems model can also be applied to understanding how communication itself is organized, notwithstanding how “crude” functionalism tends to be in the main. Goffman (1953: 345) suggests that there are typically three elements within this type of functionalist analysis: (1) a particular set of needs or objectives; (2) a set of practices, conventions, and arrangements through which these ends are fulfilled; and (3) the particular set of norms which supports and bolsters these arrangements. This is very close to Parsons’s (1937) notion of the “unit act,” which is in effect the building block of social systems. The unit act consists of an actor (or actors) in a situation seeking goals and deciding from an array of available means. Based on the situation and the prevailing value system, the actor is provided information as to which means are most efficient, or normatively appropriate, or perhaps even psychologically satisfying, for achieving the desired ends. Goffman (1953: 348) goes on to suggest that although this model of social order seems to do a good job of explaining the communication requirements in work situations or, more generally, those situations in which actors are oriented toward a means-ends or instrumental rationality, the connection between the three elements of the model as specified earlier-needs, communication systems, and moral norms-become much more tenuous and uncertain when dealing with the “daily social life of an entire community.” Beyond the contexts of organizational life or the limiting case of instrumental rationality whereby persons choose means for accomplishing goals in the most efficient manner possible, analysis or explanation of the realm of everyday life is not so easily accomplished using this model. Given the deficiencies of the traditional model of social order, then, where does Goffman turn in explaining the everyday life of Dixon? For Goffman, given his initial, albeit tentative, commitments to functionalism, the only place to turn is Durkheim’s notion of ritual. Face-to-face verbal interaction is held together largely by a “set of significant gestures” whereby potential interactants size up situations literally “on the fly,” as they determine collectively the initiating and terminating of rounds of conversation, as well as who is included and who is excluded from the interplay (Goffman 1953: 349). From Goffman’s perspective, this is a remarkable achievement in and of everyday life, and the only way it happens is for actors to be privy to the interaction rituals-the appropriate gestures-facilitating verbal interplay within face-to-face gatherings. There exists, then, communicative conventions maintaining the social order of face-to-face interaction. The lay terminology for these communicative conventions is etiquette. Etiquette simply amounts to a set of social norms

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designating the proper forms of conduct expected of persons within faceto-face settings. Furthermore, Goffman suggests that these norms can be placed into two broad groupings: “There are norms obliging persons to inhibit their immediate response to a situation and to convey a calculated one; and there are norms that oblige the individual to act in just the opposite way, to express himself spontaneously, candidly, and without consideration of the likely response of others to him” (Goffman 1953: 351). These two broad groupings of the social norms involved in communication etiquette“inhibitory” and “participatory,” according to Goffman’s (1953: 352-54) usage here-are basically the same ones Goffman (1967) would later develop in the guise of, as we have seen, avoidance rituals, on the one hand, and presentational rituals, on the other.

FORMS OF TALK In summary, Goffman (1983) developed the notion of the interaction order to characterize the web of norms, rules, and beliefs that facilitate communication in face-to-face settings. Although Fine and Manning (2000: 474) argue that Goffman did not set out to develop functionalist theory per se, the notion that the interaction order represents a well-bounded system-with turn taking in talk being seen as perhaps the most important foundational element of the system (see Schegloff 2001)-tells us that Goffman nevertheless found several premises of functionalist systems theory useful for his purposes. This is quite evident in Goffman’s (1981: 5-77) essay “Replies and Responses” republished in his Forms of Talk. Thinking about the transmission requirements for talk in face-to-face settings-covering such mundane, routine matters as how the next speaker is selected, how transitions occur from speaker to speaker, the functions of a speaker’s pauses and restarts, and audience attentiveness or inattentiveness-lends itself to a sort of “communications engineering” approach whereby one could speak of system requirements and system constraints. Indeed, Goffman lists the system requirements for talk, a few of which are as follows: A two-way capability for transceiving acoustically adequate and readily in-

terpretable messages; Back-channel feedback capabilities for informing on reception while it is occurring; Framing capabilities: cues distinguishing special readings to apply across strips of bracketed communication in the case of, for example. ironic asides and joking; Norms obliging respondents to reply honestly with whatever they know that is relevant and no more;

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Goffman (1981: 15) goes on to suggest that such a systems approach, whereby the theorist/engineer catalogues the sheer physical requirements and constraints of any communications system, is compatible with and indeed leads to “a sort of microfunctional analysis of various interaction signals and practices.” But so as not to appear overly beholden to this technical approach to explaining the social order of talk, Goffman insists that beyond the sheer physical requirements of the system, there are also socalled “ritual” constraints that provide additional information to interactants. In other words, even though most rounds of talk take a particular form and for the most part are predictable, subtle things occur within most of these “dialogic units” that cannot so easily be captured within the systems or engineering framework. Consider the following example provided by Goffman: A: “Do you have the time?” B: “Sure. It’s five o’clock.” A: “Thanks.”

B: [Gesture] “‘Tsokay.” (Goffman 1981: 6)

When A asks the time of B, B says, “Sure,”before giving the time to reassure A that his query was not overly intrusive. A shows his gratitude for B’s overt display of politeness with a “Thanks.” Then B reciprocates by letting A know, through a nonverbal gesture and an accompanying “It’sokay” that he (A) displayed sufficient gratitude in the previous turn at talk to be acknowledged as a well-demeaned individual who is deserving of B’s respect. As Goffman explains, beyond the sheer physical requirements of the interaction system, there are often additional sets of constraints that apply-namely, “constraints regarding how each individual ought to handle himself with respect to each of the others, so that he not discredit his own tacit claim to good character or the tacit claim of the others that they are persons of social worth whose various forms of territoriality are to be respected” (Goffman 1981: 16). In making a distinction between ritual constraints and system constraints, Goffman nevertheless concedes that the former merely reinforce the latter (1981: 25). In this sense, forms of talk are more or less pancultural, showing up everywhere in more or less the same basic form, insofar as there are just so many combinations of and possibilities for action regarding the transmission of information between persons in talk. What is more apt to vary, then, are the ritual constraints that are perhaps peculiar to particular cultures or situations. Just as Parsons suggested, the system itself is a rather stable and more or less self-sustaining unit that exhibits local or surface variability.

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CONCLUSION From our discussion, it appears clear that on many important levels Goffman employs functionalist reasoning, albeit in a subdued form that is more a h to the type of neofunctionalist theorizing Jeffrey C. Alexander (1998) attempted to establish, but has now more or less abandoned, over the last two decades. Just as Gouldner argued that the notion of functional autonomy was an important corrective to Parsons’s one-sided commitment to system integration and equilibrium, so, too, neofunctionalists had identified s d a r flaws in Parsons’s approach. Indeed, neofunctionalism has been concerned with shoring up elements of human agency, action, ritual, and culture that tended to be neglected in orthodox functionalism’s overweening emphasis on structure and system constraints. In this sense, we see how Goffman’s work, without explicitly acknowledging itself as such, was engaged in the same sort of corrective against functionalism whde still clinging to many of functionalism’s major tenets. What we are led to conclude, then, is that Goffman was a neofunctionalist before the neofunctionalists developed their own overt program and that the recent abandonment of neofunctionalism by Alexander (1998) and others is as much as anything an admission that it was never really needed in the frst place.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1998. Neofunctionalism and After. Malden, Mass.: Bkackwek Baert, Patrick. 1998. Social 7beoy in the Twentieth Centuy . New York: New York University Press. Bailey, Kenneth D. 2001. “Systems Theory.” Pp. 379401 in Handbook of Sociobgical Tbeoy, ed. J. H. Turner. New York: Kluwer. Barnard, Chester I. 1947. 7be Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Berger, Bennett. 1986. “Foreword.” Pp. xi-xviii in Frame Analysis, by Erving Goffman. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Branaman, Ann. 1997. “Goffman’s Social Theory.” Pp. xlv-lxxxii in The Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Brown, Richard Harvey. 1977. A Poeticfor Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discoveyfor the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burns, Tom. 1992. Eruing Goffman. New York: Routledge. Chriss, James J. 1993a. “Durkheim’s Cult of the Individual as Civil Religion: Its Appropriation by Erving Goffman.” Sociological Spectrum 13: 251-75. ,l993b. “LookingBack on Goffman: The Excavation Continues.” Human Studies 16: 46943. -. 1995a. “Habermas, Goffman, and Communicative Action: Implications for Professional Practice.” American Sociological Review 60: 545-65. -. 1995b. “Some Thoughts on Recent Efforts to Further Systematize Goffman.” Sociological Forum 10, no. 1: 17746.

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1996. Toward an Interparadigmatic Dialogue on Goffman.” Sociological Perspectives 39, no. 3: 33539. , 1999a. Alvin W Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate. , 1999b. “Role Distance and the Negational Self.”Pp. 64-80 in Goffman and Social Organization, ed. G. Smith. London: Routledge. Davis, Kingsley. 1959. “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology.” American Sociological Review 24, no. 6: 757-72. Durkheim, Emile. [19121 1954. 7be Elementay Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. J. W. Swain. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Fine, Gary Alan, and Philip Manning. 2000. ”Erving Goffman.” Pp. 457-85 in Blackwell Companion to Major Social neorists, ed. G. Ritzer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Gardner, Carol Brooks. 1995. Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gillespie, Dair L., and Ann Leffler. 1983. “Theories of Nonverbal Behavior: A Critical Review of Proxemics Research.” Sociological 7beoy 1: 12G54. Goffman, Erving. 1953. “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. , 1959.7be Presentation of Self in Evey d q Life. New York: Anchor. .1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. -. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press. -. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine. -. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. -. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. -. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization ofExperience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. .1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. -. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1-17. -. [19761 1997a. “Gender Display.” Pp. 20€&27 in 7be Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. .[19831 1997b. “The Interaction Order.” Pp. 233-61 in 7be Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. -. [19641 1997~.“The Neglected Situation.” Pp. 229-33 in 7be Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Gonos, George. 1977. “‘Situation’versus ‘Frame’:The ‘Interactionist’and the ‘Structuralist’ Analyses of Everyday Life.”American Sociological Review 42: 854-67. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1967. “Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory.” Pp. 14169 in System, Change, and Conflict:A Reader on Contemporary Sociological 7beoy and the Debate Over Functionalism, ed. N. J. Demerath I11 and R. A. Peterson. New York: Free Press. .1970. 7be Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Habermas, Jiirgen. 1984. The n e o y of Communicative Action. Vol. 1, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1983. me Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feelings. Berkeley: University of California Press. ,

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Framing and Cognition Luiz Carlos Baptista

Stop making sense, stop making sense, stop making sense, making sense.

-Talking

Heads

The concept of “frame” is proposed by Goffman (1974) to account for what he regards as the processes of the “organization of experience,” based on an analysis of social interaction. Simply put, the framing of a situation is the answer to the question “What is it that is going on here?” A “proper” answer allows the participants to orient themselves and monitor their (and others’) displays of hehavior-procedures that, on their part, are essential to maintain and/or reproduce a given frame. A frame doesn’t have to be identified explicitly. Indeed, in the majority of cases it probably is not. In various circumstances, explicit characterization of frames is offered when there is a failure on the part of certain individual(s), to maintain the “proper”behavior in a situation. Although his work is sometimes considered as part of the symbolic interactionist approach, Goffman makes clear the differences between his analyses and those associated with that tradition of social thought. Specifically concerning the concept of frame, Goffman (1974: 1-2, 10-11) remarks that it can’t be identified with the definition of a situation (a hallmark of symbolic interactionism). In Frame Analysis (19741, his purpose is to investigate the ways in which individuals frame their activities (and those with whom they interact), in order to make sense of a variety of situations-the definition of which is, in the most, a predefinition (i.e., it is not usually created by the agents). 197

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It is important to note that “making sense” is a constitutive trait of a situation, seen as a “strip” of behavior treated as meaningful, in a given context, by human beings in interaction. People orient themselves according to a working consensus concerning what is going on. What makes sense in what occasion may vary according to a multitude of factors, from fortuitous circumstances to “structural”-socia1 and cultural-constraints. And making sense is so fundamental a basis for maintaining the background assumptions of social reality that, even when a “breakdown” does occur, individuals must rely on remedial interchanges (Goffman 1971: 75-187twhich can be closely linked to a process of “reframing.” As we will see later, this latter process points to an essential aspect of the framing process, its recursice character. In short, you can’t stop making sense-or, better, interaction always makes sense. The worst that can happen to an individual is being in a situation in which his’ attitudes are interpreted by others in a way that is totally different from the framing he projected.2 It becomes clear, then, that Goffman rejects two opposite kinds of determinism. In the article “The Interaction Order” (1983), he criticizes both those who approach interaction as a simple expression of aspects of social structure (whatever the meaning given to this expression) and those who argue that the social structure is nothing more than the aggregation of the various forms of interaction. Refusing to follow these paths, Goffman presents the hypothesis of an “interaction order” that, in principle, could be identified in a finite number of forms common to all societies. And he presses the point that, much like the social order, the interaction order is also an object of investigation in its own right.3 The two aforementioned orders can be said to be autonomous, though interdependent-the key for their interdependence being the concept of “situation” (Goffman 1963a: 18 and especially 1981a: 84). The interaction order can be actualized by an indefinite number of situations that pass through all the domains of the social order. The relationship between these two orders would be mediated bv these very situations, in what Goffman (1783: 11) calls a “loose coupling.” If we assume the autonomy of the interaction order, and the possibility of reducing it to a determinate number of basic-and probably universalforms (from a fleeting contact between two individuals to collective celebrations extended in space and time), we can explore two hypotheses to account for it: 1. The basic features of the interaction order are consequences of formal

constraints from the nature of interaction. Here, the study of complex adaptive systems and, particularly, the game-theoretic approach to co-

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operation developed by Robert Axelrod (1990, 1997), are extremely relevant .4 2 . The basic features of the interaction order are a consequence of the specifically human ‘.mental architecture” that has evolved in order to ensure a sort of innate sociability (triggered, as it were, by interaction with the environment, especially the social one). This is the domain of the cognitive sciences, particularly cognitive psychology and (if we adopt an evolutionary perspective) human ethology. These two hypotheses do not exclude each other. On the contrary, I think they are complementary: If there are formal constraints to all forms of interaction, it would be a matter of course for human beings to be psychologically attuned to a particular subset-namely, human interaction. The exquisitely subtle processes of attributing intentions, beliefs, desires, motivations, and so forth, and behaving according to these expected attributions by others, must have a biological fundament-biological in the sense of an evolved configuration of the organism, particularly the mind/brain. It is worth noting that Goffman, in various parts of his work, “tinkered” with some of the aforementioned disciplines, particularly the theory of games (Goffman 1969) and ethology (see especially Goffman 1971, 1979). He could be criticized for not being too rigorous in his approach (game theory being a striking example), but as far as I understand, his strategy was one of using a variety of concepts as a kind of “toolbox” from which his own arguments would be developed. Indeed, there is a pattern in Goffman’s appropriation of theoretical frameworks: He usually states the intention of working with some set of concepts, adapts them to his purposes, and always, long after that, offers a cautionary tale about their 1imits.j There is, however, a notable exception: psychology, for which Goffrnan always showed a low regard. The harshest statement of his position is found at the end of the essay he wrote shortly before his death, “The Interaction Order”: We [sociologists] can’t get graduate students who score as high as those who go into Psychology, and at its best the training the latter get seems more professional and more thorough than what we provide. So we haven’t yet managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it. (Goffman 1983: 2)

So, it would appear that the cognitive sciences, and cognitive psychology in particular, wouldn’t have a place in a research study based on Goffman’s work. But here we can turn Goffman against himself. If he was able to use

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concepts from a variety of disciplines and adapt them in a very peculiar way without failing to provide sound arguments, why shouldn’t one try to do the same with his own conceptions about the domains of sociology and psychology? To put it bluntly, if a cognitive (and psychological) approach to Goffman’s work turns up to be feasible, who cares?6 In what follows, I elaborate on one of the two aforementioned hypotheses: the “cognitive”view of the framing processes-that is, in terms of properties of the mental architecture of human beings. A qualification, however, is in order: Cognition must be understood in a broad sense-as a kind of interface between the organism and the environment (especially its social environment)-and must take into account aspects usually neglected in orthodox cognitivism, such as the crucial role played by emotions and sensorymotor coordination. It is my contention that Goffman’s work seems well suited for such a task. In his early work, he has emphasized a sort of cognitive approach for interaction, in which attention, memory, and beliefs play a central role. An explicit formulation is found in Encounters (196lb): I limit myself to one type of social arrangement that occurs when persons are in one another3 immediate physical presence, to be called here an encounter or a ,focused gathering. For the participants, this involves: a single visual and cognitive focus of attention; a mutual and preferential openness to verbal communication; a heightened mutual relevance of acts; an eye-to-eye ecological huddle that maximizes each participant’s opportunity to perceive the other participants’ monitoring of him. (17-18)

At the Same time, his studies on interaction show an increasing interest in ethological aspects of human behavior, helping to situate human interaction in the broader context of animal social behavior. This allows him not only to

support a common base (one that is biologically developed), but also to identdy what is specific to human beings. More than just a dramaturgical perspective, I see Goffman’s work as proposing a tight link between the biological, cognitive, and social spheres.’ In this respect, it would be appropriate to draw on its resources and contribute to a “naturalistic” study of communication, society, and culture. As Goffman himself put it, “[Hluman social life is ours to study naturalistically, sub specie aeternitatis. From the perspective of the physical and biological sciences, human Sockdl life is only a small irregular scab on the face of nature, not particularly amenable to deep systematic analysis. And so it is. But it’s ours” (Goffman 1983: 17). In what follows, I spell out my hypotheses, linking frame analysis with Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) relevance theory. This, however, is only a preliminary and exploratory discussion.

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F R A M I N G A N D RELEVANCE Framing, as the “organization of experience,” can be seen as an exploitation of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance, as developed by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 26G79). According to the first principle, human cognitive processes are “tuned”to maximize the relevance of the stimuli perceived in the environment or information retrieved from memory. The second principle states that every act of communication brings, on the part of the communicator, a presumption of relevance concerning the information he intends to provide. The concept of relevance, in Sperber and Wilson’s interpretation of the term, came from their critical assessment of Herbert Paul Grice’s pragmatics. especially his lectures on conversation (see Grice 1989: 22-40). Basically, and after a thorough analysis of Grice’s “conversational maxims,” Sperber and Wilson proposed that only one of these maxims, that of relation (“Be relevant”), would suffice to account not only for conversation but also for all human communication and even cognition in general. A bold proposal, to be sure, but my concern is not to scrutinize its foundations; it is rather to look for what can be useful to a study of interaction, following the outline previously mentioned in this chapter. Relevance to an individual, according to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 265-66), is a function of the “processing effort” needed to contextualize information received from the environment, and the “cognitive effects” resulting from this process. The cognitive effects will be related to the amount of new (i.e., previously unknown) information that can be inferred from the combination of that received in a given moment and that already accessible to the organism (and retrieved from memory.)* The cognitive principle of relevance can thus be characterized as exhibiting a cost-benefit relation: Ceteris paribus, information will be maximally relevant when it involves the least processing effort for obtaining the bigger cognitive effects. Obviously, the vast majority of cases will stand somewhere in the middle of a continuum. But the point to be made here is the claim by Sperber and Wilson that, at any given moment, our attention will be focused on the most relevant stimulus. Given the myriad of stimuli received by our sensory apparatus, what we have here is a selective mechanism of allocation of attention, considered as a scarce resource. The same goes for memory and reasoning “in real time.” Now, regarding the communicative principle of relevance, Sperber and Wilson’s (1995: 5C-64) main interest is in what they call “ostensive-inferential’’ communication. They arrive at it by reformulating Grice’s (1989: 213-23) conceptions about meaning and intention. Ostensive-inferential communication comprises, on the part of the communicator, the necessity of calling the

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addressee’s attention to the information he intends to communicate. This is called his “informative intention.” At the same time, this must be done “openly,” in such a way that the addressee recognizes the informative intention. In this case, we have a “communicative intention”-that is, the intention to share information and that the informative intention be recognized as such-this recognition being enough to guarantee communication. As the authors speclfy in their definition, in the ostensive-inferential communication “the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions ( I ) ”(Sperber and Wilson 1995: 63). Attention being a scarce resource, and processing efforts being timeconsuming, the communicator must act in a manner that the information he wants to share, and the recognition of his intention to communicate, be sufficiently relevant for the addressee to mobilize his cognitive resources in the intended direction. That is why every act of communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. Obviously, this is not a guarantee that communication will occur according to the communicator’s intentions; or, even if it occurs, that the addressee will interpret “correctly” the information received (if any; I can be aware that someone is communicating with me without understanding what the information is). It is very important to make it clear that, in this view, the communicative principle of relevance is not a normative notion; it applies automatically whenever someone intends to communicate with someone else. As a matter of course, this principle can sometimes (or even most of the time) be applied in a less than effective way, because it involves assumptions the communicator has about the addressee’s assumptions. It is no surprise, then, that a lot of guesswork is involved in this process. In principle, communication could even be seen as almost impossible. But it occurs, more or less successfully, every day. The key here is the fact that, according to Sperber and Wilson, every communicator expects that the addressee will produce the appropriate context, which the authors view as a psychological construct: a set of assumptions that integrates the information received-the information and its context being the premises to a nondemonstrative inferential process (see note 8). So, to trigger the intended context, the communicator must have some idea of what kind of assumptions the addressee is most likely to activate, given the information provided. We can now depart from the strictly psychological perspective of relevance theory and assume that at least some assumptions will be shared by all human beings-much more if they live in the same society, are part of the same institution or group, and, what is probably the limit case, when they are interacting face-to-face. Here, Goffman enters the scene.

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The framing of experience, in Goffman’s sense, involves cognitive processes that relate to the interaction order-a domain that is not coincident with that of communication.9 Suffice it to say that, even when successfully communicating, any individual is always unintentionally expressing information (including information that contradicts what is being communicated). This is a recurrent theme in Goffman’swork, as in, for instance, the distinction between information given and information “given off (Goffman 1959: 2-6). We could say that action and experience occur only in interaction with the environment-in the case of us humans, with particular salience to the behavior of our conspecifics. In this sense, frame analysis and the study of the interaction order could be seen as having a very general reach. For instance, the concept of frame can be interpreted in connection with the cognitive principle of relevance (and not only the communicative principle). Framing, as a process of “making sense” of the varied situations in which human beings find themselves, would be a mechanism for obtaining an acceptable balance between processing efforts and cognitive effects. In this sense, it would fulfill the same function of the notion of categorization as found in Eleanor Rosch’s (1978) early studies. Actually, we could conceive of framing as a more encompassing strategy for categorization-especially if we follow Rosch’s remarks about how our categorization of objects and events are dependent partly on their so-called natural attributes, partly on their role in social and cultural contexts.

PRIMARY A N D SECONDARY FRAMEWORKS We can better understand this point if we consider the crucial distinction made by Goffman (1974: 21-23) between “primary” and “secondary” frameworks. He sees the former (at least in Western societies) as dividing our experience into “natural” and “social” frame-r, in another perspective, “mere events” and “guided doings.” Obviously, what is at stake in the social primary frameworks is the attribution of beliefs, desires, and intentions-in sum, “intelligence” and “purpose”-to the participants in any “strip”of behavior (a meaningful sequence of actions). We can consider the natural primary frameworks as “purely physical” (Goffman’s expression) and the social primary frameworks as “mental,” since we will interpret social action in terms of the intentions, beliefs, desires, and so forth, of the agents; but at the same time the social character of their actions, properly framed, provides a context for making sense of the relations between their mental states and their behavior. It is important to emphasize, then, that social frameworks are not a simple product of the mind/brain but result from the way in which cognitive processes deal with interaction with other human beings.

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If we generalize this characterization beyond Western societies, we can envisage a rich source of hypotheses. For instance, from this point of view we can understand the attribution of intentionality to “merely physical” systems, without committing ourselves to a pure instrumentalist notion of attribution.1° In other words, the attribution of “mental states” (whatever they might be) is not a simple question of offering explanations that work (i.e., that are instrumental). It is perfectly possible, and in a way that makes sense socially, to attribute those states to purely physical systems, objects, or events. There is no lack of illustrations here, from magic to superstitions, not limited to so-called primitive societies. But this does not mean that mental states (at least, of human beings) do not exist.l’

THE FRAGILITY OF EXPERIENCE In Goffman’s work (not only in Frame Analysis), the constant management of attention is the most important factor in human interaction. The displays of behavior in order to, for example, conform to the expectations regarding a given frame, and the continuous monitoring (including self-monitoring) of this behavior, are always present in situations of interaction and probably, in the vast majority of cases, not consciously. “Order” being a fragile achievement, every effort is worthwhile to maintain the sense of what is going on in a situation-that is, to keep the current frame with its corresponding focalization of attention and rough “delimitation” of what will be considered relevant (see Goffman 1961a, 1963a, 1971, 1974, 1979). it is, indeed, Of course, from the very nature of human cognition-if geared to the maximization of the principle of relevance-we can understand why human experience inasmuch as it is framed (i.e., structured) is fragile. Suffice it to say that, at any moment, an “out-of-frame”event can disrupt the whole structure of a given situation, even if this structure is carefully tailored so as to previously exclude a vast domain of events as “irrelevant,” or not deserving the focus of attention (an idea originally formulated in the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz [1964:229431 and widely utilized by Goffman in notions such as “unfocused interaction” [1963a: 33flI and “civil inattention” [1963a: 83-88]). And relevance theory predicts that, at any moment, events totally unrelated to a situation can disrupt it by suddenly attracting attention, given the characteristics of human cognition. From these considerations about the possibility of relevant out-of-frame events, we can suggest that, the more “formally” organized an activity, the more its framing is threatened by disruptions. This would be a consequence of such an inflexibility to deal with significant “breakdowns.” Of course, this same inflexibility would make the occurrence of significant breakdowns less likely than in “informal,”more flexible, situations.”

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The point here is that “formalization”should not be taken as a maximum degree of institutionalization; they may go together in some cases, but not in all. Much of informal behavior is heavily institutionalized, in such a way that many researchers try to identify their supposed “tacit rules.”13I don’t believe that such rules exist, at least in the sense that they must be somewhat represented and processed in the mind.’4 An argument against the necessity of these rules could follow the same line developed by Wilson and Sperber (1989) and Sperber and Wilson (1995), which rejects the necessity of “pragmatic rules” of communication beyond the relevance principle.

REFRAMING S Goffman (1974: 42) speaks of the two kinds of primary frameworks as being interpreted as literal sequences of activities. Beyond that, there is an indefinite number of secondary frames. This notion is crucial in Goffman’s analysis: All frames have a recursive nature (1974: 249-50). This is made evident by the fact that every frame can be “reframed,” so to speak, and reframed frames can be embedded in other (more complex) frames. Resides the two basic primary frameworks, Goffman identifies two main ways of reframing: keyings (1974: 4-6) and fabrications (“benign” o r “exploitive” reframings in which some individuals or groups aim to “contain” others in frames they are not aware of [1974: 83-86]), These two ways of reframing can be combined in many different forms (Goffman 1974: 156-63). In fact, the concept of frame in Goffman’s work can be interpreted as an answer to the conundrums involved in the notion of the “definition of a situation” (or, at least, a certain reading of this notion), a common currency in the province of so-called interpretive s o c i ~ l o g y .Basically, ’~ frames are not stipulated at will by the participants in interactions; usually we adopt a more or less institutionalized frame and try to behave properly-but in so doing, we actively reproduce the frames, always with minor modifications, from a (somewhat idealized) “template.”16 This flexible nature of our framing ability has the advantage of making it possible to understand not only how and why human beings enter into certain behavioral routines but also how changes in frames and the social creation of frames are possible. In any event, this is a long-term process, involving as much of necessity as of contingency (see Goffman 1974, 1981b, 1983).” Here, the concept of cognitive causal chains (CCC), tentatively presented by Sperber ([1999] 2001), may prove useful as a means of explaining the “fiizzy” nature of changes in framing. These chains involve patterns of distributions and transformations of representations, and the representations produced in any given “lmk” of the chain are only s d a r (to a certain degree) to those from which they are an effect (perfect copies being an extreme and rare case).18

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Sperber (1996: 147-55) goes one step further and puts forward the outline of a theory of “cultural attractors,” which, incidentally, could be a very interesting way of adapting the studies in the dynamics of complex systems to huif we conceive these patterns as “strange attracman cognition-specially tors in representation space.” Nevertheless, there is a lot of work to be done in this specific area that relates closely to the hypotheses about general constraints of interaction and could, once properly developed, provide an explanation of the complementary nature of points 1 and 2 mentioned earlier. For the time being, suffice it to say that, if we follow this view, frames could be understood as more or less stabilized CCC, according to their institutionalization. They would fall under the label of “Cultural CCC” (stabilization of coordinated activities), the “Social CCC” being the situations in which a coordination of activities is achieved. Again, these are only exploratory remarks, in need of thorough di~cussion.’~

THE EVOLUTION OF FRAMING Another important aspect of Goffman’s conception of frame relates to the possibility of establishing a link, in evolutionary terms, between our framing capacity and the (inflexible, or less flexible) capacities of the same kind exhibited in the behavior of other species. This can be clearly implied by Goffman’s (1974: 7) statement that his concept of frame is “roughly” the same as that applied by Gregory Bateson ([19551 2000a), who identifies signs of framing in the playful behavior of monkeys. Bateson notes that the monkeys are “transforming” an activity primarily related with fights into play, and from here goes on to his classic formulation: I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat. . . . Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message “this is play.” (Bateson [I9551 2000d: 179)

It is clear from this passage that Bateson’s frame theory has as its starting point what he considers to be essentially the metacommunicative nature of every act of communication-that is, when we communicate, we also communicate that we are communicating. Regarding the monkeys and other species observed by Bateson, this characteristic, and the framing capacity, clearly indicates that those animals are able to distinguish between literal and transformed activities. But obviously we can’t assume that they “know,” in whatever sense of this word, this difference; rather, they could be said to “instinctively” feel the difference and coordinate their behaviors accordingly.

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This is shown by the highly ritualized way in which such animals behave (“ritualized”here, in the ethological sense).20But the fact remains that, without a proper triggering from the environment-specially their social environment-they couldn’t perform even stereotyped sequences of behavior. We humans, then, are not the only ones able to frame and reframe events. But if it can be argued that we are the only species capable of “making sense” of any situation, it is undeniable that we can perhaps offer (at least) external representations of frames.*IIn the simplest cases, we can talk about what is going on (besides writing, depicting, filming, etc.). Language allows metacommunication to be explicitly represented; indeed, it offers the means for the reframing of its own use, inasmuch as it is its own metalanguage. This brief consideration about the peculiarities of language use is enough to recognize that the “language faculty” (here in the sense of Chomsky 1995, 2000) is crucial in the organization of human cognitive processes. Language can be seen as a kind of pinnacle, so to speak, of the rich cognitive endowment of human beings. And here there is a point to retain: Even if we don’t buy the arguments about a “language of thought” or any of the versions of a system of “mental representations,” there is no way to deny that humans, when asked, can give an account of what is going on in a given situationan external linguistic representation, as indicated earlier (and if we buy the mental representations package, we can even say that linguistic assessments of a situation are themselves metarepresentations of their mental counterparts; but this is not the place to elaborate on the theme). Language also allows us to relate different frames and detach them from concrete situations in given times and places. Returning to Bateson’s concept of frame, another important consequence is the always-present possibility of paradoxes. From his observation of the playful behavior of monkeys, he noticed that the message “This is play”. , . contains those elements which necessarily generate a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type-a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement. Extended, the statement “This is play” looks something like this: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” (Bateson (19551 2000a: 179-80)

Here serious problems may arise, especially when an individual is not able to distinguish between a frame and its reframing. The most extreme cases of these paradoxes can be seen in the “no-way-out”situations, characterized by Bateson ([19561 2000b) with the notion of double bind.22This can be seen as another proof of the fragility of experience. More important, the sometimes-unbearable condition of double bind can elicit strong emotional responses, usually very difficult to verbali~e.’~ Here again, we can hypothesize about an evolutionary continuity with other species: Our

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knowledge of frames when “in practice” is a sort of embodied knowledge; we feel what is going on in a given situation, even before explicitly representing it-what, most of the time, is not needed, being taken for granted. This applied knowledge is, in fact, a skill, a point made by Goffman when he says that our ability to orient ourselves in situations is the result of mastering the ways in which the organism copes with its environment (see Goffman 1971). And it also helps us to understand why the management of involvement in a situation is as much a fundamental feature of framing as is its cognitive c o ~ n t e r p a r t . ~ ~

CONCLUSION To account for the complexity of human framing, Goffman (1974: 82) proposes a multilayered schema: the original frame, so to speak, is called the core frame. The reframings of this core are the layers, and the last framing forms the rim. The core of a complex frame may be, itself, the result of previous transformations, embedded in another sequence. There is, in fact, an illuminating analogy, proposed by Goffman (1974: 211, n. 16; 254-55), between this aspect of framing and mathematicalAogica1 notations and what was known at the time about language (generative grammar). Elaborating on that analogy, we could characterize a complex frame as follows:

[I, [I, . . . [l,[I, [loI11 . . . I1 where lo is the core frame, I, to 1, are the layers, and 1, we could label this complex frame as +

+

is the rim.Surely,

F = [I, + [I, . . . [l,[l,[loI11 . . . I1 embedding it as a core frame in a more complex frame: G = [l,

+

,[I,.

. . [l,[I, [Flll . . .I1

and so on. The analogy suggested by Goffman helps us to understand how, in framing as well as in the language faculty, a finite set of elements can generate an infinite set of combinations. But, then, we have a problem: Is it legitimate to suppose that human beings are endowed with an innate (and finite) set of basic or, in Goffman’s terms, primary frameworks (from which an infinite set of transformations and retransformations, from second to nth order, would arise)? A possible hypothesis would characterize this finite set as composed of “empty slots,” which would be “filled’ according to the exposure of a child to the settings of a specific society or culture. We could even devise

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some kind of “principles and parameters” explanation, as Chomsky (1995) has proposed for the development of language. In any event, it wouldn’t be advisable, for the moment, to pursue this analogy any further, because, as is well known, language is generative (in the sense that it specifies an infinite number of “structural descriptions” of sentences), and the framing abilities might not possess this feature.25 Be that as it may, by postulating a finite set of primary frameworks-in a purely formal sense-we could make sense of a lot of behaviors that, at first glance seem irrational, like magic, superstitions, and such. That is, the boundaries between physical and social (or mental) primary frameworks are porous; indeed, in our everyday life, we attribute “mental”properties to devices, living beings, and even natural phenomena that, clearly, don’t have such attributes. Here again we can explain the efficacy of an “intentional stance” without committing to a pure instrumentalist position concerning mental states and processes. Putting aside these speculations, one thing is certain: The complexity of human (re)framing abilities and their comprehension constitutes a powerful argument in Goffman’s critique of two kinds of determinism-one that tries to reduce everyday interactions to situated “implementations”of a wider social structure, and another that envisions this social structure as nothing more than the aggregation of interactions. It also sets the stage for understanding what is meant by a broad notion of cognitive processes, as is made clear by Goffman in the following passage: [Flrameworks are not merely a matter of mind but correspond in some sense to the way in which an aspect of the activity is organized-especially activity directly involving social agents. Organizational premises are involved, and these are something cognition somehow arrives at, not something cognition creates or generates. Given their understanding of what it is that is going on, individuals fit their actions to this understanding and ordinarily find that the ongoing world supports this fitting. These organizational premises-sustained both in the mind a n d in a c t i v i t y 1 call the frame of the activity. (Goffman 1974: 247, emphasis added)

A cognitive approach, then, must not be confined to the inner workings of

the mindhain, and these do not simply “reflect”what happens in the environment. In this preliminary essay, I have explored some of the possible bridges between Goffman’swork and recent developments in the cognitive sciencessuggesting, by the way, that his perspectives can provide rich and unexpected connections. If there is something like a “Goffman’s legacy” (an expression that he might think ludicrous), it is the blatant refusal of committing oneself to a bureaucratic and compartmentalized view of knowledge. Like blondes. outsiders have more fun.

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I’d like to thank A. Javier Trevino for helping in editing the original version of this chapter, as well as for his extremely valuable suggestions. I also thank Gary Alan Fine for his comments and support. This essay was written while preparing my Ph.D. dissertation in communications at Universidade Nova, Lisbon. 1. The choice of the male gender is simply a matter of style. So, he (unless specifically referring to a person) might be read as he or she, he/she, (slhe, or other politically correct formulations. 2 . In regard to this discussion, it is interesting to notice that “non-sense” is itself a label. That is, when the elements in a situation don’t fit in at all with what would be properly expected we make sense of this situation by framing it as “non-sense.” And there are very competent professionals of non-sense, the English comedy troupe, Monty Python, being a particularly successful example. 3. This concern can be traced back to Goffman’s Ph.D. dissertation (1953: 33-41). 4. The classic reference for complex adaptive systems is found in Holland (1992). The basic framework for a game-theoretic approach to cooperation is found in Axelrod (1990). The main conclusion, derived from a series of computer simulations based on an iteration of the prisoner’s dilemma, was that in a “population” of egotistic agents, a cooperative strategy would be the most successful in the long run. The cooperative strategy in question was TIT-FOR-TAT, a simple program written by Anato1 Rapoport (who, incidentally, is the coauthor of an essential book on the prisoner’s dilemma; see Rapoport and Chammah 1965). Even in the rarefied world of simulated agents, its resemblance with Goffman’s analysis of the individual in interaction is striking. Basically, TIT-FOR-TAT always cooperates, but it defects as soon as the other agent defects, turning back to cooperation if the other changes its moves accordingly. In sum, we have here a model of a cooperative agent in state of alert to any improper move and, more important, making this state of alert manifest through its behavior in a long series of moves. 5. This is true not only of game theory and ethology but also of themes intimately related to the sociological tradition that Goffman relied on. To mention just a few, take G. H. Meads notion of the social construction of the self, Emile Durkheim’s idea of social behavior as ritualized, and Talcott Parsons’s functionalist conceptions of social action. 6. In fact, Goffman’s failure to take psychology into account has already been pointed out by various scholars-for instance, Giddens (1987). 7. The dramaturgical approach has proven to be little else than a handy label that does not do justice to Goffman’s work. This is evident even in 7be Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (19591, the book in which he expounds the dramaturgical model of human interaction but is always ready to point out its limitations. And in Frame Analysis (1974: 11, Goffman is explicit in his rejection of the “drama” label and the criticism of the corresponding approach (recognizing both its qualities and drawbacks). It is also worth noting that this reduction to dramaturgy obscures the fact that, in Goffman, this perspective is strongly interwoven with ritual and game models (see Branaman 1997). 8. Sperber and Wilson envision these inferential processes as largely, if not always, nondemonstrative. Although they develop a lengthy explanation of a kind of non-

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demonstrative process (1995: 65-1171, it seems clear that Peirce’s notion of abductive inference could handle that (see, e.g., Peirce [19031 1998). Note, also, that the inferential processes are automatic and, for the most part, unconscious or simply not conscious (as is supposed in the literature about inferences in cognitive psychology). 9. For a clear and detailed statement of the distinction between “expressing” and “communicating information” and a critique of an all-embracing notion of “communication,” see Goffman (1969: ix-x; 3-14) and also the comments by Winkin (1988: 90). 10. See Daniel Dennett, “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works,” in Haugeland (1997: 57-79), for a good resume of his instrumentalist notion of an “intentional stance.” 11. Fodor (1975) offers the best argument for this view, and it can be sustained independently of his “language of thought” hypothesis. An updated version is found in Chomsky (2000>,with special emphasis to the case of language. There is a vast liwrature on this topic. For a useful introduction, see the essays published in Haugeland (1997). 12. Here I advance the hypothesis that “formal”activities are constructed in such a way as to deal with expected “out-of-frameoutbursts,” the unexpected being treated not as misdemeanors but as something akin to the manifestation of physical (or physiological) frameworks. In these situations, the allocation and distribution of roles and tasks is carefully planned and the activities may be subjected to extensive training. Discipline obviously is of utmost importance here, as well as a system of rewards and punishments. For the expected outbursts, the notion of “role-distance’’ (Goffman 1961b: 85-152) can prove very useful. As regards extreme cases of “discipline-andpunishment” patterns and the convoluted processes of identification and rejection on the part of inmates in total institutions, see Goffman (1961a). 13. In the field of artificial intelligence, Schank and Abelson (1977) offer a suggestive and important attempt to explicitly program rules of interpretation for informal everyday situations. For a criticism of the adaptation of this project to psychology, see John Searle’s essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs” in Haugeland (1997: 183-2041, As in the case of attribution of mental states, there is an ongoing discussion here. 14. Goffman (1974: 24) points out some of the complications involving rules, comparing those that organize a game of checkers with those that only indicate restraints, like the rules of traffic. And if we move to increasingly “informal”situations, the matters can get really messy. That is why he usually talks only cursorily about “rules or premises” but refrains from developing the topic (1974: 193-94, 247). Later, in “The Interaction Order” (1983: 71, he questions the very possibility of elaborating an exhaustive taxonomy of situations and their correspondent “rules of conduct.” 15. Goffman’s response to a critique of Frame Analysis by Norman K. Denzin and Charles M. Keller is the only explicit confrontation of the two positions. The harsh interchange was published in the same issue of Contempora?y Sociology (Denzin and Keller 1981; Goffman 198lb). For an enlightening account of the differences between Goffman’s approach and that of interpretive sociology, see Gonos (1977). 16. Here, it may be useful to elaborate on the notion of “variations on a theme,” as proposed by Hofstadter (19861, to account for our ability to deal with the most diverse situations, real or imaginary, and find a way out of unpredictable circumstances.

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17. Contrary to some interpretations, especially that of Meyrowitz (19851, I don’t see Goffman’sapproach as a static one. Examples of historical changes in patterns of activity and interpretation abound in all of his works. One can criticize Goffman for only providing anecdotal evidence, but maybe this is intentional; in other words, I don’t think Goffman believes in the feasibility of a mechanism in explaining historical changes in those patterns. Meyrowitz’s proposal of relating changes in the media of communication to changes in behavioral patterns and social perceptions of situations is extremely valuable. But we must be very careful not to characterize media as agents of change, invoking a simple causal relation. After all, bizarre phenomena such as “self-splitting”(Goffman 1971: 117, 160-60, the multiplicity of identities and their management in the social construction of biographies (Goffman 1961b: 13243; 1963b: 51-72), the vicarious experience of action (Goffman 1967: 143-2701, and the “territories of the self” (or Urnwelten)not bounded by the immediate vicinity of the individual (Goffman 1971: 28-41) can be found in everyday face-to-face interaction. It would be a serious mistake to treat them as consequences of the spread of some media, especially the electronic ones (a theme that has gained some acceptance with the pervasive use of the Internet; see, e.g., Turkle 1995). 18. The notion of “representation,” and especially “mental representation,” is the object of a long and heated dispute in the field of cognitive science (for an introduction, see the essays in Haugeland 1997). Here, notice that Sperber’s emphasis on the similarity, against the idea of simple copy of the supposed mental representations, is coherent with the ostensive-inferential approach of human communication in relevance theory. This approach results from a critique of what Sperber and Wilson (1995: 3-91 call the “code model,” according to which communication consists in the coding and decoding of messages (and if all goes well, they are reproduced as “copies”in their receiver). The ostensive-inferential model, inspired by the works of Grice, is presented as complementary to (and more fundamental than) the code model: Even when codes are used, the best the communicator can aspire to is that the addressee will entertain representations very similar to those intended to be communicated. Communication, then, is always a less than perfect heuristics based on hypotheses (or even guesses) about what is “meant,” both on the part of the communicator and of the addressee (see also note 8). 19. Here, an interesting line of inquiry would concern the possible connections between this approach and a sociological one-for instance, Collins’s (1981) notion of “interaction ritual chains.” 20. This use of Bateson’s concept hints at a very fruitful hypothesis concerning Goffman’swork: a common basis to the nature of play, emotions, and displays of behavior in social interaction; or, as Branaman (1997) puts it, the coherence between his metaphors of dramaturgy, game, and ritual in human social life. 21. This does not necessarily imply the notion of mental (“internal”) representations. I will not deal here with it but intend to tackle this issue in the future. 22. Bateson’s works on double-bind situations, and the correlated notion of frame, are a heterodox application, so to speak, of Russell’s ([19081 1971) theory of logical types. 23. We could interpret in this manner the paradoxes involved in the relationship between mental patients and psychiatric institutions (Goffman 1961a), or the complex ways in which stigmatized persons try to assert a kind of group identity (Goffman 1963b).

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24. Involvement is discussed throughout Goffman’s work and seems to be the basis for an account of the role of emotions in action/interaction-even more, I suggest, than the notion of embarrassment. Note also that the notions akin to that of involvement, such as engrossment and especially enthrallment, are essential even for a cognitive account of a situation. An individual cannot behave properly without any involvement in a situation-even if he “knows” how to behave in purely cognitive terms. The link between emotions, reasoning, and consciousness has been proposed in the works of Damasio (1995, 1999). And we mustn’t forget the connection of involvement with playfulness and games, when individuals almost literally dive into frames of activity (see Goffman l96lb: 17-81, and especially 37-45). Here we can put forward the hypothesis that the capacity to play is a crucial element in social life and even human cognition, especially as regards the framing ability (see, e.g., Caillois [19671, who elaborates from a critical assessment of the classical idea of play as an essential element of culture, as proposed by Huizinga [19501). 25. Especially if it involves skills. Recall that Goffman rejected the idea of a “body language,” basically because the body lacks the generative power of the language faculty (see interview in Winkin 1988: 231-38).

REFERENCES Axelrod, Robert. 1990. 7be Evolution of Cooperation. London: Penguin. 1997. 7be Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Bateson, Gregory. [19551 2000a. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” A. P. A. Psychiatric Research Reports 11, American Psychological Association. Pp. 177-93 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by G. Bateson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -. [I9561 2000b. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science l(4). Pp. 20G227 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind by G. Bateson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Branaman, Ann. 1997. “Goffman’s Social Theory.” Pp. xlv-lxxxii in me Goffman Reader, ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Oxford: Blackwell. Caillois, Roger. 1967. Les Jeux et les hommes: Le Masque et le vertige, rev. ed. Paris: Gallimard. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. “Language and Nature.” Mind 104, no. 413: 1-61. .2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Randall. 1981. “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” American Journal of Sociology 86: 9841014. Damasio, Antonio. 1995. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Picador. -. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt. Denzin, Norman K., and Charles M. Keller. 1981. “Frame Analysis Reconsidered.” Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1: 52-60. Fodor, Jerry. 1975. 7be Language of Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. -.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1987. “Erving Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist.” Pp. 109-39 in Social Theoly and Modern Sociology, by A. Giddens. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, Erving. 1953. “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. -. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Evey d a y Life. New York: Doubleday. , 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday. , 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. -. 1963a. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. , 196313. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. -. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon. , 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. , 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. , 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. -. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1981a. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. -. 1981b. “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1:

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1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1-17. Gonos, George. 1977. “‘Situation’versus ‘Frame’:The ‘Interactionist’and the ‘Stnicturalist’Analyses of Everyday Life.”American Sociological Review 42, no. 6: 854-67. Grice, Herbert Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Haugeland, John, ed. 1997. Mind Design IZ., Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Zntelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hofstadter, Douglas. 1986. Metamagical Tnemas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. London: Penguin. Holland, John. 1992. Adaptation in Nutural and Artficial Systems, rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Huizinga, Johann. 1950. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. New York: Roy. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. [19031 1998. “Pragmatismas the Logic of Abduction.” VII Harvard Lecture on Pragmatism. Pp. 2 2 6 4 1 in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-19131, ed. the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rapoport, Anatol, and Albert M. Chammah. 1965. Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Study in Conflict and Cooperation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. “Principlesof Categorization.”Pp. 2 7 4 8 in Cognition and Categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B. Lloyd. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

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Russell, Bertrand. [19081 1971. “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” American Journal of Mathematics. Pp 59-102 in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950, by B. Russell. New York: Capricorn. Schank, Roger, and Robert Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: A n Inquily into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Schutz, Alfred. 1964. Collected Papers IL Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Nijhoff. Sperber, Dan. 1996. La Contagion des idkes: Thkorie naturaliste de la culture. Paris: Odile Jacob. -. [19991 2001. “Conceptual Tools for a Natural Science of Society and Culture.” Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. Pp 297-317 in Proceedings of the British Academy 111. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Turkle, Sherry. 3995. Lzfe on the Screen: Identi@ in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 1989. “Pragmatics and Modularity.” Pp. 139-57 in Language and Cognition, ed. J. Montangero and A. Tryphon. Geneva: Cahiers de la Fondation Archives Jean Piaget. Winkin, Yves, ed. 1988. Ewing Goffman: Les Moments et leurs hommes. Paris: Seuil.

Orders of Interaction and I n te IIi g ibiIity Intersections between Goffman and Garfinkel by Way of Durkheim Anne Warfield Rawls

Erving Goffman was one of the two most important social thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century, an honor he shares with Harold Garfinkel. Broadly critical of mainstream social thought, his efforts to establish a research program that treated situations as central to social order parallel those of Garfinkel. While Goffman worked to establish the situated self, Garfinkel argued for intelligibility as a situated accomplishment. Initially, Goffman was widely read, and for a time it seemed as if sociology would never be the same again. Yet, five decades after the publication of Goffman’s first book, me Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), and three decades after the publication of Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), sociology is still dominated by the same conceptually formalized institutional view of social order that Goffman and Garfinkel challenged. Evaluating Goffman’s legacy, therefore, involves confronting an irony: Goffman’s impact on social thought has been much greater than generally recognized. But, and at the same time, his influence has also been much less. Some of his ideas, particularly with regard to the sociological conception of self, have become part of the taken-for-granted foundations of the discipline. It is hard to be a sociologist today without thinking in some distinctly Goffmanian ways. However, in spite of the broad incorporation of many of Goffman’s ideas into disciplinary thinking, his overall influence on social thought has generally been much less than either he had hoped for or sociologists generally imagine. Goffman’s overall aim, to initiate a theoretically coherent and sustained focus on interaction as a source of social order and morality in its own right, has not materialized. Instead, his insights have been incorporated into disciplinary thinking in terms that tend to neutralize their implications for a general theory of interaction order. 216

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There are several reasons for the general lack of success in this regard. First, the discipline of sociology is heavily invested in a conceptual view of social practices. As a consequence, it is not only Goffman and Garfinkel who are misrepresented. Earlier arguments by Durkheim share the same fate. Second, no single interactionist has articulated an entire picture of a sociology of situations, or interaction orders. At the very least, a coherent sociology of situations requires both Goffman’s situated self and Garfinkel’s situated intelligibility. Until this is accomplished each will continue to be separately taken up into more traditional perspectives that they are not compatible with. Third, in challenging conceptual models that treat social order as formal and institutional, Goffman himself got caught up, to some extent, in assumptions about the conceptual nature of social order that contradict his emphasis on interaction orders. Fourth, efforts, like those of Giddens (1984), to combine the two have failed, in spite of the importance of their vision, largely because they build from Goffman’s conceptualized view, not from Garfinkel’s emphasis on concrete practice and, consequently, continue to treat practice in familiar conceptual terms. A coherent theory of situated practice requires that the details of practices be treated as social orders in their own right. These issues have contributed to Goffman’s general failure to establish a sociology of situations, or even to have the idea taken seriously in any general way. In spite of the obvious influence of his writings on self, stigma, deviance, and total institutions on almost every subdiscipline in sociology, and while few sociologists are unfamiliar with Goffman’s work, very little has really changed. Instead of pushing the discipline toward a new theoretical view, as he intended, Goffman’s arguments have generally been reinterpreted to fit within the same theoretical frameworks that he and Garfinkel challenged. Instead of the social theory of situations they argued for, we have a micro-macro distinction that treats situations as local “color”with which to fill out the contours of allegedly “larger,”more formal institutions. Interactionism is generally portrayed as a focus on individual “micro”issues, rather than the study of inherently social phenomena, and is often characterized as a preoccupation with trivial matters of little social import that a world confronting pressing social problems can ill afford to waste resources on. While the discipline generally treats interactionism as a turn away from important so-called large-scale social issues and toward the individual, the reality is quite the reverse. It is the so-called macrosociologists who, throughout the twentieth century, focused on the beliefs and values of the individual, treating them as conceptual representations of society in microcosm and representing them statistically. The way that large-scale organizations actually work to constrain accountable action has been almost entirely ignored. Institutional accounts, in the form of statistics, produced by individual members of organizations, through highly politicized and self-interested accounting

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procedures, are accepted as scientific evidence of “macro” structures, without question, by the discipline at large. This is like treating the year-end accounts of upper-level executives at Enron and WorldCom as unbiased scientific records of the financial transactions within their corresponding institutions. Financial statements are motivated accounts, not “facts.” The same is true of institutional records. When sociological researchers accept statistical accounts produced by workers, who are accountable to an organization, as evidence of the “facts” of organizational behavior, they make the same mistake-treating motivated individual behavior as if it represented the “facts” about the formal organizational structure. This practice, which still passes for “pure” science, is as socially irresponsible as the bookkeeping practices of Enron executives. Interactionists, on the other hand, who have been accused of ignoring organizations, have in fact produced many studies of the ways in which organizational accountability makes organizations work very differently from the way that macrotheorists suppose. In particular, they have shown that institutional accountability renders institutional records entirely invalid as measures of anything except internal organizational behavior. Goffman’s Asylums (1961) is one of the first and best known of such studies. Garfinkel’s “‘Good’ Reasons for ‘Bad Clinic Records” (1967: 186-207) and “Research Notes on Inter- and Intra-racial Homicides” (194913) are groundbreaking studies of organizational accountability. In study after study, interactionists have demonstrated the impact of organizational accountability on practices concretely. By contrast with so-called macrosociologists, interactionists have, from the first, albeit to varying degrees, tried to rescue the discipline from the exclusive focus on conceptual structures that has prevented a clear view of social practices, and to return the focus to concrete social structures. But, because their work continues to be judged from within an overall theoretical context in which concepts are considered to be primary and practices are understood as concepts, a coherent theory of situations has appeared to be impossible. Consequently, these studies have been dismissed as constituting no serious challenge to the prevailing formal institutional view of social order. Erving Goffman gave sociology the situated, or presentational self, and situated face-to-face interaction. He argued that interaction orders are basic to social organization, an idea that challenged existing theoretical assumptions in sociology that treat social order as the result of institutional constraints on individual action. The discipline responded by incorporating situated selves and situated action into existing theoretical paradigms. Goffman, the social theorist of interaction, was turned into Goffman the interactionist who studies individuals and micro phenomena, while the rest of sociology continues to study the allegedly “more important” and “larger” phenomena of social life. This is the irony that needs to be rectified.

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DURKHEIM’S THEORY OF PRACTICE A N D M O D E R N I T Y The scholarly interpretation of Durkheim’s work constitutes a similar irony. As early as 1893, Durkheim argued in 7l3e Division of Labor in Society ([18931 1933a) that one of the most important defining characteristics of modem society is a form of practice shared by people at work together, that was spontaneous, self-regulating, and free from beliefs to a degree that made possible a completely different form of regulation for the society as a whole. He called this new form of society “organic solidarity” and equated it with an advanced division of labor society2under conditions of justice. Durkheim argued that modern society had taken a distinctly different form from traditional tribal societies and that to understand this new social form, and provide political and legal regulation suitable for it, its distinctiveness must be understood and respected. He expressed concern that proposals for social reform did not recognize the special needs of either those persons or institutions that had emerged in the context of freely regulated practice characterizing an advanced division of labor society. In criticizing reformers, Durkheim had in mind socialism in particular. In a manuscript on socialism given as a series of lectures at Bordeaux in 1895-1896 and published as Socialism and Saint-Simon C1895-18961 19581, Durkheim argued that socialism was problematic because it attempted to return society to older social forms of solidarity. He did not disagree with the socialists about the problems in modern society; what he disagreed about was the reason for those problems. The socialists, he believed, generally attributed the problems to a failure of society to maintain collective consciousness, which they believed resulted in anomie and inequality. It was Durkheim‘s belief that collective consciousness had no place in an advanced division of labor society and, in fact, that reforms that aimed to restore it would do great harm. Durkheim argued that anomie was the result of a lack of justice resulting in the failure to maintain self-regulated practice, not a failure to maintain collective consciousness.3 Durkheim’s conception of modern practice as requiring justice to maintain its self-regulated character explains his belief that the division of labor has the potential to create new forms of freedom and individualism in spite of obvious current inequalities. But, that possibility depended on the ability of practices to self-regulate,free from external constraint, under conditions of justice. In other words, he expects justice at the level of practices to result eventually in justice at all levels. The resulting organic solidarity, as Durkheim refers to it, could never have resulted from unregulated so-called free-market capitalism, in hts view. Neither could it have resulted from practices undertaken on behalf of beliefs, as in traditional rituals. Because of the need for justice to support self-regulated practice free from belief, it was Durkheim’s great fear that a continued reliance on general theory, or what Garfinkel (2002) came to

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refer to as “theorized accounts,” would obscure the growing importance of practice in modern life and as a consequence leave justice looking like an ideal rather than the functional necessity he believed it to be. The consequence, Durkheim worried, would be the continuation of a form of social and political order that contradicted itself in serious ways, resulting in continued feelings of alienation and anomie. That is, I believe, the order we now confront in both politics and academia. Durkheim argues that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of solidarity in modern society. Social solidarity, he maintains, is too often equated with a shared community of belief; too often reduced to conceptual systems. In Z5e Division of Labor, he tries to explain why generalized belief systems are disruptive in a context of modern practices. Because they did not make a distinction between beliefs and practices, Durkheim argues, Comte and other social thinkers believed that both science and society must remain organized according to general principles. This, as Durkheim realizes, would prevent the necessary attention to practices as “it is said there is no need for going into detail” ([18931 1933a: 360). According to Durkheim, this led to the further belief that “detailedstudies make us lose sight of the whole vista of human knowledge” ([18931 1933a: 361, emphasis added). It is this focus on the general as an attempt to organize both science and society that Durkheim challenges. Society is not disorganized, he argues, just because practices are now comprised of self-regulating detail. The entire social system has become highly differentiated, and in such a context each practice must develop its own independent and detailed organization. In explaining what he means by modern practices that cannot be reduced to general theory, Durkheim focuses on science. It was essential, he argues, to engage concretely in a practice in order to know it: It is certain, however, that to gain an exact idea of a science one must practice it, and, so to speak, live with it. That is because it does not entirely consist of some propositions that have been definitively proved. Along side of this actual, realized science, there is another, concrete and living, which is in part ignorant of itself, and yet seeks itself; besides acquired results, there are hopes, habits, instincts, needs, presentiments so obscure that they cannot be expressed in words, yet so powerful that they sometimes dominate the whole life of the scholar. ([18931 1933a: 362, emphasis added)

It is this ability of science to operate to a significant extent free from beliefs, in terms of self-regulated situated practices, that explains the essence of modernity for Durkheim. “All this,” he says, “is still science; it is even its best and largest part, for the discovered truths are a little thing in comparison with those which remain to be discovered U18931 1933a: 362, emphasis added). What concerns Durkheim is that in theface of the increasing complexity of modern life scholars keep tying to analyze and.fix modern social

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problems by returning to a form of collective consciousness in which eueything is explained in terms of beliefs and concepts. He fears that this older belief-driven form of social order and the constraints that it placed on knowledge and freedom would destroy whatever progress toward freedom and equality had been achieved in modern life. What philosophers and social theorists needed to understand, Durkheim argues, is that the essence of modern life, and of modern science, lies in the details. Allied with this problematic attempt to undy theory was an equally problematic attempt to unfy method. Durkheim complains, “According to Comte, to assure the unity of science, it would be enough to have methods reduced to unity” ([lS931 1933a: 363). Durkheim disagrees, arguing instead that “it is just the methods which are most difficult to unlfy, for as they are immanent in the very sciences . . . we can know them only if we have ourselvespracticed them . . . all is personal and must be acquired through personal experience. To take part in [modern scientific practice] one mustput onesevto work andplace oneself before thefacts” (363, emphasis added). Attempts to organize this wealth of detail through general theory are problematic, Durkheim says, because “the dissonances of detail disappear in the total harmony” (363). As each science consists in its detail, modern science itself is lost through generalization. Durkheim offers the discipline of sociology a theory of practice that has much in common with the attempts by Goffman and Garfinkel to establish a sociology of situations, or local orders. The fact that Durkheim’s own arguments, like those of Goffman and Garfinkel, have been incorporated into just the sort of general theoretical accounts he felt were so damaging has not helped contemporary sociology to appreciate the importance of practices. His insistence on empirical details has been misinterpreted as positivist, and the discipline of sociology, which Durkheim was so instrumental in founding, now proceeds on the basis of just the sort of generalized methodological hegemony that Durkheim argued so forcefully against. The details of practices have not only been lost, but those who have sought them, Goffman and Garfinkel in particular, have often been treated as if they were not doing sociology at all.

THE FALLACY O F MISPLACED ABSTRACTION In considering Goffman’s legacy, then, it will be important to see that the general judgment regarding the trivial nature of interactionism, and the need to establish a context of conceptual consistency before the possibility of a sociology of situations can be taken seriously, is based on a false view of society as composed of formal social institutions and corresponding beliefs and values represented in microcosm in social individuals. This overly

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formalized, rule-governed, and norm- (or concept-) driven approach to the problem of social order has been a major problem for a sociology of modern society and social problems. The problem of modern society is the problem of justice and inequality and their relationship to concrete lived practices in their self-regulated details, not the traditional problem of group unity and normative agreement. The focus needs to change from shared beliefs to enacted practices because the social achievement of order and intelligible meaning in modern highly differentiated division of labor societies is based on an entirely new principle: the liberation of practices from beliefs, coupled with a need for an equal distribution of rights and guarantees to participants in those practices. This focus on practices, rather than on membership groups cemented by rituals and shared beliefs, means that the details of how things are done comprises their intelligibility: Meaning is no longer primarily put in the context of belief.4It was this increasing predominance of practice over belief in modern society that Durkheim urged his followers to study. Unfortunately, in Parsons’s (1937) hands, Durkheim’s focus on practices was turned back into a focus on beliefs. Practices were treated as conceptual orders of affairs, and studied as if they were beliefs and values. Since the mid-twentieth century, “scientific”sociology has systematically engaged in replacing reality with concepts. The process for performing this substitution “scientifically”is the subject of an endless number of methods textbooks. The process, while always claiming to be empirical, has demonstrated no real respect for concrete social orders. In the hands of scientific sociology, social orders are respecified with conceptual typifications that are then treated as if they were the empirical and real objects of research: an exercise in Enron bookkeeping. In respecdying social order conceptually, sociology was responding to Alfred North Whitehead’s (1925) argument that mistaking the concept for reality constitutes a “fallacyof misplaced concreteness.”It is in a profound sense true that conceptual representations play a large role in human thought. Therefore, it is important to be up front about the role of concepts in human understanding. In response, however, sociologists attempted to construct a careful conceptual map not only of thought, but also of reality. The problem with this approach is that the social world is not composed of concepts but of people doing things, and there is a concreteness in social life that must be respected if any understanding of social phenomena is to be achieved.6People do not interact with typifications. 7hey do things. They must be able to create and recognize actions as practices of a sort before typifications can be invoked. The question is how they do that: how social phenomena are made and recognized as witnessable enterprises. That is an empirical and not a conceptual question.’ It is my argument that sociologists have, in responding to Whitehead’s dictum, committed what I call a “fallacy of misplaced abstraction.”*They have

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done this in two ways. Mainstream sociologists have attempted to respecify social reality with a conceptual mapping. Interpretive and pragmatist sociologists have focused almost entirely on the conceptual, giving u p any correspondence with an underlying reality. In rejecting the confusion of concept and reality that concerned Whitehead, the enacted social practices that are the basis for typification and meaningful social life have also been rejected. Those practices are real and, as Garfinkel would say, “not imagined.” Unlike natural reality, which must be rendered in terms foreign to it, social practices, when enacted by persons, actively create the social meanings that are associated with them. Leaving enacted practices out because they are real also leaves out the essential social processes through which meaning is achieved. Somehow this has been overlooked. It is clear that social experience has a coherence for participants at a level of detail that challenges conceptual explanations of social order. Goffman and Garfinkel both focused on the empirical specification of such coherences, Goffman with regard to issues of self, Garfinkel primady with regard to issues of intelligibility. Because the discipline failed to take up Durkheim’s argument with regard to practice, today we continue to face problems caused by a conceptual view of social reality that he warned about. Shortcomings in our theoretical approach to social order may have made things worse in the meanwhile. In attempting to come to terms with contemporary social problems, modes of analysis are used that not only ignore local orders of practice but render them invisible. Modern institutional orders, as Durkheim argued, are accomplished through distinct forms of practice. They work as what C. Wright Mills (1940) called “contexts of accountability” and “contexts of justification,” within which situated orders of practice make demands o n participants. Situated orders in modern society bear a different relationship to institutional contexts than situated action in a traditional society. The forms of morality and sanction governing these arrangements are also different, a fact that we seem increasingly to bump u p against in dealing with the expansion of “global capitalism.” It is in not understanding these differences that we primarily err. What is required in a modern Western social context, populated by situated orders, enacted within the boundaries of institutional contexts of accountability, is an emphasis on understanding the self-regulated and selfsanctioned character of situated orders. These so-called micro-orders constitute essential constraints on what we typically think of as formal institutional orders. Therefore, it is impossible to articulate a comprehensive theory of modern society that does not have an appreciation of the situated character of modern practice at its core. When Goffman and Garfinkel attempted to introduce ways of examining and speaking about social action that would allow the discipline to finally connect with social orders directly in terms of social practices, as Durkheim

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had urged, they were attacked as if they were Galileo challenging the medieval Roman Catholic Church. In a way they were. The sociological treatment of practices as ideas, motives, goals, values, beliefs, and the reduction of all those to concepts in the individual mind have become a basic sociological creed. In Parsons’s (1937) hands, it became the basis of a sophisticated, mathematically driven, conceptual representation of social relations of enormous power. Dealing with practices directly, as Goffman and Garfinkel insisted, meant abandoning this conceptual machinery and returning to the alleged “messiness” of interactional contingencies. Of course, it needs to be pointed out that the assumption that contingencies are messy and disorderly is itself part of the conceptual reduction. Sociologists take it on faith that contingency cannot be the basis for stable, concerted, and intelligible action. Goffman, unfortunately, vacillated between conceptual reduction and a focus on the concreteness of practice. His argument in m e Presentation of Self in Evey d u y Life demonstrated ways in which persons not only do but must somehow make something of these contingencies, or they would not be able to accomplish presentational selves. But, in spite of this insight Goffman nevertheless continued to ground this process in concepts and typifications to a significant extent. His later attempt to establish a systematic sociology of situations, in Frame Analysis (1974) and Forms of Talk (19Sl), became even more conceptual in orientation (which may, ironically, explain both its popularity and its failure). Goffman tended to look for only those details in roles and actions that could be reduced to conceptual types. It is a weakness in Goffman’s position that he tended not to look for social order in the details of practices in their own right. Thus, ironically, Goffman’s attempt to deal with situational types conceptually replicates the central problem faced by the discipline: an inability to see social order in the details themselves. In so doing, Goffman himself contributed to the demise of his own argument. Garfinkel, on the other hand, argued that even the smallest bits of practice must be recognizable in and through their details. It is his position that intelligibility is a process that cannot be accomplished through conceptual typification or theorized accounts. What is required to deal satisfactorily with interaction orders is a notion of practice as concrete and not conceptual. Garfinkel’s treatment of intelligibility, in addition to self, as a fragile interactional achievement composed of concrete details fulfills this requirement. Garfinkel supplies a focus on local order production that overcomes Goffman’s tendency to focus on conceptual reduction, while Goffman’s focus on self offers an understanding of why involvement obligations related to self are critical to the achievement of understanding. Because they each articulate an essential aspect of the issue, the failure to put the two bodies of work together has been problematic for the discipline. Garfinkel without Goffman is missing some of the

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implications with regard to self that give local orders, or interaction orders, their fragility and moral tone.9 But, without Garfinkel, Goffman’s view of self is cast within a framework of conceptual reduction that trivializes his most profound insights.

PUTTING G O F F M A N A N D GARFINKEL TOGETHER A number of attempts have been made to synthesize the work of Goffman and Garfinkel.’O However, when Goffman’s ideas about the interactional construction of self in social situations are used as a framework for understanding and incorporating what Garfinkel, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis have found in the detailed structure of practices, a problem arises. Goffman’s reliance on conceptual typifications does not provide an adequate context for understanding Garfinkel. Consequently, such attempts lead inevitably to glossing ethnomethodology’s findings in conceptual terms. In other words, ethnomethodology has to be changed into something else, more traditional and conceptual, to make it fit into Goffman as a theoretical context. Thereby the promise of a new theoretical approach is lost. This problem does not occur if Garfinkel is used as a theoretical context for Goffman’s work. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Goffman did not consistently take the conceptual approach that his interpreters generally attribute to him. He sometimes, particularly in his early and last work (1956 and 1983), treated face-work as practices-in-details in an interaction order.” He certainly did not see interaction orders in the same conceptual and institutionalized terms as Sartre, as Giddens (1984) claims.12Second, intelligibility, Garfinkel’s focus, while a more difficult and illusive interactional production, is compatible with the argument of presentation of self, while providing a firmer foundation for a theory of interaction order than the production of self alone. Third, Goffman and Garfinkel had read and discussed one another’s work by 1954. Goffman had read an early manuscript by Garfinkel (1949a), at least by 1952,13and Garfinkel had read an early draft, in 1953, of m e Presentation of Selfin Eveyday Life. Face-to-face discussions occurred after Garfinkel arrived at UCLA in 1954. In an important sense, Goffman was writing in a context already shaped by Garfinkel’s manuscript, while Garfinkel attempted repeatedly to specify their differences over the course of his career. Goffman approached the social world as essentially chaotic, requiring a veneer of consensus, a surface appearance of organization, to keep things going. This veneer, however, was for Goffman always thin. For Garfinkel, by contrast, the intelligible social world was essentially orderly, and was only intelligible to the extent that it was orderly. For Garfinkel, Goffman’s thin veneer of consensus at the level of self took for granted an underlying layer of

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carefully and continually constructed real orders of practice that Goffman never fully appreciated. Putting Goffman in the context of Garfinkel, rather than the reverse, allows for a direct approach to intelligibility and practice. I believe that Goffman was trying to find a way of putting interaction orders first. His mistake was in not trusting the details of interaction orders sufficiently, attempting to meet disciplinary standards of argument, and, as a consequence, allowing the heart of his position to remain conceptual. Giddens (1984) points out that Goffman’s argument, as it stands, does not provide a sufficient explanation of the actor’s motivation. When Giddens puts Garfinkel in the context of Goffman, it also appears that Garfinkel has an insufficient account of motivation, a shortcoming that Giddens attempts to address through an analysis of the valued effects of routines and habits. However, what Giddens overlooks is that Garfinkel’s focus on intelligibility, properly understood, provides a far stronger motivation for compliance than conceptual, or value, orientations toward practice. The need for intelligibility and its failure when concrete coherences are not achieved is a very strong, self-sanctioning, motivation. Giddens’s Z3e Constitution of Society (1984) is the best-known attempt to combine Goffman and Garfinkel.’* The problem is that Giddens treats practices, like turn taking, as if they were interactional norms that act as value constraints on action. This treats expectations with regard to practice as if they act as normative constraints in a Parsonian and conceptual way that requires a corresponding theory of motivation; as if persons can choose to conform, or not, although reasons must be given for the choice. This interpretation does not recognize that in Garfinkel’sview practices cannot even register as values, or have meanings, unless they are produced in ways that are expected and recognizable. Insofar as communication that does not achieve recognizability does not achieve meaning, practices for Garfinkel, as for Durkheim, are self-regulating. For Garfinkel this constitutes a fundamental motivation to produce practices carefully and in recognizable ways. It is what Durkheim means by referring to modern practice as self-regulating. The motivation does not come from outside the practice, in the form of beliefs or results; it is internal to the perceived coherence of practice. Giddens, by contrast, treats interactional practices as if they were formal structures of constraint, which operate in a rather vague way. Practices, in Giddens view, are not self-regulating, as both Durkheim and Garfinkel require. That is one of the reasons Giddens believes that a sociology of interactional practice requires a theory of motivation. In his view, motivations to comply with interaction orders are not expected to act like formal institutional constraints in a Parsonian sense. But neither are they internal to the practices as the interaction order requires. In any case, formal institutional constraints never did act the way they were supposed to, so the intended dif-

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ference amounts to little. According to Mills (19401, institutional constraints function retrospectively via a vocabulary of motive, not prospectively by following rules. One would imagine that Giddens’s interactional motivations would work in much the same way and thus constitute either an institutional or an individual level of motivation within interaction, rather than a selfsanctioning interaction order. From Garfinkel’s perspective, interactional practices do not constrain action, or practice, in any case. They order it, make it recognizable and thereby intelligible. Institutions function as contexts of accountability which place constraints on practice, as Garfinkel (1967: 186207) demonstrated in “‘Good Reasons for ‘Bad Clinic Records.” However, the dimension of accountability is separate from the problem of prospectively constructing recognizable practices as ongoing orders of affairs. Practices must first be intelligible before they can be accountable. There is a huge difference between Garfinkel’s position and Giddens’s interpretation of it on this score. The conceptual view attributed to Garfinkel assumes that action would have meaning in any case and that actors only conform because routines are somehow valued, comforting, and sanctioned, giving them a motive to comply, according to Giddens. Whereas, for Garfinkel, practices are only intelligible if they are orderly. Calling them routines doesn’t help, either, because it suggests that they take a set form, when in fact they are infinitely variable (within a recognizable pattern of expectations)-what Garfinkel refers to as “contingencies. Actors who want to be understood must construct their social sounds and movements in such a way that they recognizably reproduce courses of practice that are seen by, and expected by, others to mean something particular in the situational context and sequence of events in which they are produced. This is not done by being constrained by values or orienting toward concepts. It is not done by reproducing routines or habits of action. It is also not done by orienting toward institutional contexts. What Garfinkel has consistently shown is that it is done through methods. There are ways of producing recognizable practice. Aspects of recognizability have to do with what is expected in a particular situation, with sequencing, with the identity of the actor, institutional accountability, and so on. Ultimately, however, there must be a recognition of certain sounds and movements themselves as constituting an immediate ordering of parts, a perceived coherence, in order for the relation between practice and context, which is secondary, to have relevance. The proposal that this is accomplished through “habitus”(Bourdieu 1990) or “routine” (Giddens 1984) does not take into account the enormous contingencies involved. Arguing that meaning is achieved through the recognition of routines is essentially the same as arguing that it is achieved through the application of typifications. In both cases the details and variations must ”

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be ignored in favor of an archetype of the “routine,”or “habit,”in which case the details of practices once again have nothing to do with their meanings. It is Garfinkel’s position that recognizability cannot be accomplished through routine any more than it can be accomplished by definition. Both amount to the same thing. Furthermore, recognizability is not a free construction within external or conceptual constraints. Techniques or methods that can be specified, taught, and learned are used to build something that is recognizable to others as having a very particular meaning in just this time, in just this place, in just this sequence of affairs. In speaking of practices in the context of the question of intelligibility, the issue is not what motivates actors to conform to expectations, as Giddens assumes, but rather how they can so construct their sounds and movements that others will recognize them as “conforming” to some set of expectations about the shape that action can take. The question of recognizability necessarily comes before the question of conformity-that is, the question of how sounds and movements are made meaningful to others, by reproducing them in ways that will for those others have recognizable meanings, is primary. The motivation for conformity is simple, one cannot be understood otherwise. Of course, expectations constrain the form interaction orders of practice can take. The relevant question is how action is so constructed that it can be seen by others that it is conforming with those expectations. In other words, what requires explaining is how action can be situated such that what comes before or after it allows a particular action to be seen as occurring in a sequential context. This cannot be explained by saying that expectations constrain action. According to Goffman, practices like “oops”are used as symbolic gestures by actors to signal to others a responsibility or lack of responsibility for action. Certainly “oops” might be used in this way. But this use would require a background of recognizable practice against which “oops” could operate as a symbol. To comprise part of an interaction order, a practice must be constitutive of intelligibility. To qualify in this regard, “oops” would not only have to signlfy information about the actor but also have to function as part of a sequence in such a way that it was constitutive of the meaning of the sequence as a whole, as well as symbolizing something about its parts. Furthermore, it would have to be constitutive in this respect with regard to its observable and hearable qualities, and not merely as a symbolic gesture calling up a concept of something like responsibility. In other words, the essential question is what sounds placed in what order ofpractice could even be heard as an “oops.”To pose the question any other way is to treat “oops”as a conceptual given. As soon as concepts make their way back into interaction orders, the project of a sociology of situations is nullified. For Garfinkel sequentiality is a social production. In interpreting Goffman and Garfinkel, however, Giddens (1984: 77) treats sequentiality as mere se-

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riality, a fact of nature, an inevitable time series. On Garfinkel’s view, constructing sequences of practice involves a lot of detailed work that can go wrong. When they are initially unrecognizable, sequences can be repaired, recycled. Instead of marching inevitably forward in a natural time series, sequences frequently cycle back on themselves, creating loops that are themselves constitutive meaning as well as conveying things like mutual responsibility and t h o ~ g h t f u l n e s sSequentiality .~~ has been an important aspect of practice for both Goffman and Garfinkel. But, as a property of interaction order, time indicates a series of produced sounds and movements whose placement before or after one another has significance.lb It is a created and not a natural series. Ultimately, and in the final analysis, Goffman did not hold the view that what was important about situations was conceptual. In his last essay, “The Interaction Order” (19831, he returned to an earlier focus on interactional detail. Unfortunately, the two books in which he tried most explicitly to lay out a sociology of situations, Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk, treated interaction orders mainly in terms of concepts and typifications. This dovetailed nicely with accepted disciplinary criteria for a coherent theory of situations, but it also made the articulation of such a theory impossible. Given that interaction orders are accomplished through practices, things people do, and not through conceptual orders of affairs, attempts to explain them as conceptual orders would have to ignore entirely the actual work of accomplishing intelligible practice. Goffman did not hold with the view that most things of sociological importance happened at a macrolevel of social order and that what he studied was merely micro. Nor did he make the conventional distinction between individual and society. For Goffman, the individual was an inherently social production. In fact, he did not accept the macro/micro distinction in any of its conventional senses. What Goffman had hoped to establish as his legacy was a comprehensive and coherent sociology of situations, or interaction orders. These, he argued, held the key to understanding social order in general, not just a small subset of interaction. He certainly did not intend for this and other aspects of his work to be co-opted by a sociology that in its overall assumptions remained unchanged.

INTELLIGIBILITY AS THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE: GOFFMAN‘S PARADOX In his articulation of the idea of a sociology of situations, intended to present a fundamental challenge to disciplinary assumptions, Goffman continued to rely on traditional assumptions that weakened his own position. Thus, the proposed sociology of situations is ignored by the discipline both

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because it presents an unwelcome challenge and because it remains too weak and self-contradictory to present a sufficient challenge to the discipline. Attempts to improve Goffman’s position, by combining it with Garfinkel’s, have not yet resulted in serious consideration of a sociology of situations, either, for reasons discussed earlier. Goffman was not unaware of this problem. But he seems to have misunderstood its cause. I believe that he contributed to the paradoxical reception of his ideas by trying to make his sociology of situations fit conventional criteria of consistency. 1 don’t think he did this to make it palatable but rather because he himself continued to accept these criteria in spite of his developing position. Therefore, he would interpret weakness in his position in these conventional terms. According to conventional criteria, a coherent general sociology of situations required recognizable types of situation. It also required that social actors have mastered a set of typifications corresponding to these types. The typifications would then be used by actors to identlfy the requirements of each new situation that they encountered, to identify the relevant interpretive frame and performance requirements. All of this would need to be packaged into the individual actor and their performance as a sort of cognitive mapping of social situations. Types of situation could then be articulated, and cognitive mappings of situations onto individuals, and vice versa, would be possible. Thus, Goffman believed that a consistent general sociology of situations was possible. However, he cast it within the general sociological view of the relationship between the individual actor, his beliefs and ideas, and the types of situations in which the actor finds himself. In assuming a social world composed of concepts, traditional social thinkers do not worry sufficiently about the problem of intelligibility-that is, how those concepts were to be made intersubjectively available to others in physical space and time. Locating and refining concepts has generally been treated as an answer to questions about meaning and social order. The problem is that the intersubjective availability of concepts poses questions in its own right. The problem with Goffman’s approach to the idea of a general sociolobv of situations is that, in spite of his quite revolutionary views on the fragile nature of the presentational self, and the importance of a moral commitment to involvement obligations because of its fragile nature, his conception of situations remained quite static and conventional. In his later work, Goffman presented situations as if they had none of the fragility of selves. Situations were just there; they were conceptual frames for meaning. Within them other things that were primarily conceptual, words and actions, took on meanings that were particular to the situation. Thus, a typology of frames, coupled with an analysis of persons oriented toward frames to interpret meaning, became imperative.

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Goffman’s attempt to articulate a sociology of situations through a detailed study of the presentational self promised to move sociology beyond Parsons, restoring to sociological understanding the detailed emphasis on practice that Durkheim had introduced to the discipline. Goffman meant to restore the study of practices to the center of the discipline. However, by focusing even partially on concepts, Goffman invited the individual versus society, micro/macro, and concept/reality problems, generated by a conceptual focus, back into his thesis. Goffman’s paradox is that he turned social theory and practice in a direction that was even more conceptual than it had been, when in fact, his early work had the potential to restore the importance of concrete practice. Combining Garfinkel’s focus on intelligibility and concrete practice with Goffman’s treatment of self solves this problem, by moving away from a conceptual view of interactionism and offering a general approach to interaction that recognizes the foundational character of concrete practice. Another characteristic of Goffman’s paradox is that while his view was contradictory, and ultimately prevented him from achieving his goal of articulating a sociology of situations, his emphasis on conceptual typifications may, in the short run, have served to increase Goffman’s popularity. At just that point in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Parsonian structuralism was breaking down and social thinkers the world over were turning from a focus on the behavior and organization of complex institutions and government to the effects of bureaucracy and inequality on the individual person, and particularly on oppressed groups and classes, Goffman offered a way of interpreting the experience of the individual sociologically. Goffman suggested a focus on narrative accounts as a clue to how individuals interpret and manage not only situations but also institutional orders. In doing so, he built on Mills’s (1940) argument that the key to institutional orders lay in accounts produced in institutional settings. After the publication of Frame Analysis, sociologists took up the cause of accounts in earnest. The idea of a sociology of narrative, rumor, and account-an interpretive sociologycame into being. The study of accounts, narrative, and the negotiation of statuses in institutional orders, sparked the formation of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) and the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), two groups that have grown steadily both within and outside the American Sociological Association (ASA) and whose members have risen to positions of prominence. 1 am not arguing that the missions of the SSSI and SSSP are wrong or that there is no merit to studying narratives and accounts. On the contrary, I believe that such research is essential, and I participate in and support both groups. What I do argue, however, is that it is a mistake to frame a general sociology, especially a sociology of situations, in conceptual or interpretive terms. The consequence has been an increasing distance between those who

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follow Goffman and those who follow Garfinkel, scholars who should find much in common. The problem with framing a general sociology of situations in terms of narratives and accounts is that they play a special role in interaction. They are invoked in situations of institutional accountability and at points when ordinary interactions do not go as expected (Rawls 1989, 1993, 2000; David 2002). They depend, however, on a background of intelligibility that itself requires constant work and do not themselves provide the background of intelligible social order against which they and everything else are played out. The work of constructing that background of intelligibility is the essential subject for a sociology of situations. An approach based on concepts ignores the problem of how the intelligibility, or recognizability, of practices is achieved. It treats the problem as one of conveying an idea that is in one head to another head (in whch case the question of whether the so-called initial idea exists as thoughts or words then becomes interesting) or as a problem of negotiating the meaning of symbols in contexts of power relations. The conception of frames then produces complications: As a person moves from one frame to another, the things they do are interpreted differently, makmg it more difficult to get the idea from the one head to the other, unless frame contexts can be specified conceptually with precision. Power differentials also need to be considered in the analysis of frames. It is assumed in all of this that the idea to be conveyed is in the head (or in the symbol, which is essentially the same thing) and that the problem is to figure out how in any given situation the idea can be transferred to the other’s head. Scholars who approach the problem this way describe an individual person walking from one situation to the next who simply needs to know what kind of a situation she has walked up to so as to know how to interpret what is going on and also to know how her own actions will be interpreted. She needs a set of conceptual typifications for situations.” Notice that the focus remains on the individual. Goffman himself was not, in the end, satisfied with this interpretation of his position. In spite of his focus on concepts, he knew that situations required detailed work if they were to be made intelligible. To the last he wrote brilliantly about simple social orders like queues (Goffman 1983), in which the very intelligibility of the line as a line, and also consequently of the persons in it as trustworthy, depended not on the beliefs and ideas of the participants, on their interpretation of symbols, or power relations, but rather on their ability and willingness to display a commitment to the queue as a joint endeavor by making a public display ofpractices associated with queuing.]# Even in cases like this, however, where Goffman does focus on practices, he tends to treat their purpose as symbolic, rather than as a display of competence in detail that is essential to building trust. Goffman’s all-important focus on the public aspects of individual performances ironically led many scholars to interpret him as a cynic, writing

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about the manipulation of the public appearance by the true private individual. However, Goffman’s point is that the private individual is in some very basic sense irrelevant. The social self only exists as a residual effect of public display. What Goffman realized with regard to queues was that unless and until participants made a witnessable and joint display of practice that was recognizable to others, no interpretive frame for a situation could properly be invoked. He also realized that the failure to achieve recognizability would itself provide a narrative frame. Somehow he never managed to square this realization with his conceptual focus. It was left to Garfinkel to work this issue out in detail. Goffman insisted that his argument meet certain conceptual criteria even though his last work (1983) reaffirms his awareness that his descriptions of practices did not square with what he could state theoretically. The problem of intelligibility was, for the most part, left out of Goffman’s sociology of situations. Instead of studying the practices in which people must be recognizably engaged in order for situations to remain orderly and intelligible, Goffman leaves us with the impression that the ability to make sense of such situations requires an underlying set of conceptual typifications, a cognitive mapping, that allows people to do it.

DETAILS, PRACTICES, A N D TYPIFICATIONS Believing that detail would only have to be distilled into its underlying conceptual structure, anyway, raises the question, Why collect all that detail? Why not go for the conceptual structure, the typifications, straight away? The problem is this: A true sociology of situations would have to assume that situations are ordered in their own right. Otherwise, why make their study the central premise of a sociology? If we assume that situations are institutionally ordered or ordered via a cognitive map carried around by individuals, or any combination or interaction between the two, then we are really not interested in situations themselves but only secondarily in situations as they reveal individuals and institutions in intersection with one another. This is how Goffman is often interpreted.I9 But this is not a sociology of situations. Put another way, an interaction order sui generis would of necessity place demands of its own on both institutions and individuals. The assumption is that each piece of interaction displays an order and that this order is the key to its coherence. One might say that the coherence of such situations is composed of pieces put together in an orderly and recognizable way. For instance, a game of craps, or a queue, cannot be just anything that some individuals believe it to be. Nor can they be given an institutional definition that entirely obscures their commonplace character. Among other things, craps

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has to be a place to throw dice, and a queue has to have some way of marking places. But, more important, how these practices are achieved must be recognizable to participants on the spot for the practice to have any intelligibility. Furthermore, individuals have to be able to recognize the practices others are using to do these things. A newcomer may be told, “We throw them [dice] in this box,” or in the case of a queue behaving strangely, “The sun was too hot so we moved over here.”’O The accounts are occasioned by the unfamiliarity of the practice in its details. For members, who produced recognizable practice, accounts would not be given and therefore would not be available.21 Individuals undoubtedly bring their prior knowledge of queues and craps to situations, but their immediate problem on reaching any next situation is to figure out what is required of them in the situation they are entering. Goffman treats this as a problem of typifications. In his view, the person must carry with him a set of conceptual typifications adequate for figuring out in any next situation what type of situation it is. While Goffman treats this as a matter of conceptual adequacy, in fact, the person’s competence will be judged on the basis of what he does. The first utterance or movement by a person can often tell others whether he knows where he is and what practices are expected of him. Similarly, utterances or movements by others provide essential clues to what will be acceptable next moves. This is accomplished through a concrete assessment of enacted practice, not through typifications. Situations as locations for the enactment of particular orders of practice constitute a different way of looking at things than a perspective based on typifications. Persons walking up to situations are not envisioned as searching for an interpretive frame with which to rather vaguely and somewhat ambiguously interpret what goes on there. Rather, they walk u p looking for what their first move is going to be. First moves are located with respect to the looks of immediately prior moves. Goffman is right that there is a need to look competent, both to create coherent meaning and to preserve face. However, competence must be achieved concretely by making recognizable moves. Persons may start their assessment of what the first move should be as they arrive at a situation (but will probably only be aware of this if the situation is unfamiliar). They don’t think, “What frame am I going to use to interpret?” Seeing what the others are doing gives possible clues to first moves. It reveals the practices that inhabit the situation. An understanding of the situation as a “type” would be an emergent property of this process. A person may indeed search for typifications. For instance, a first move might be a question: “What’sthis, a party?”The answer might be yes. But the identification of “party” as a frame doesn’t give any information about what the first or next move should be. Yet, the person must still make a next move that is acceptable to others. The answer to the question “What’sthis, a party?”

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might be “No, it’s a rehearsal.” However, once again, while being told that it is a rehearsal might allow the person to interpret some things, it doesn’t tell him what to do next or what the others are expecting to do next. What the person needs to identlfy is a local order of practice in all of its local detail. It is essential to see that a person cannot successfully use frames or typifications to locate orders of practice but that a person can use orders of practice to locate frames. This way of looking at it solves what Goffman and others seem to have considered to be the big obstacle to a general sociology of situations: how persons could carry sufficient frames around in their heads to recognize all situations, and the even bigger question of how they would recognize any of them if all are necessarily slightly different. This is the philosopher’s problem of identity, and there is no way of solving it. The answer to the question of how persons can be equipped with sufficient typifications to know what to do, or how to identlfy any new situation, is simply that they don’t. This is the wrong way to approach the sociology of situations. Social order lies in the mastery of practices for reproducing situations, not in conceptual typifications for recognizing them. Because practices vary greatly from one situation to the next, persons who have never been in a particular situation usually do not know what to do, are not able to figure it out by locating a conceptual typification, and others will immediately tell or show them. They may then watch a bit to get the hang of the practice before they try. This is what Garfinkel (2002) means by “instructable”and “instructed action,” rather than rule following and formally ordered action. Practices are instructable in their details, and people can be taught by watching or being shown concretely. Practices are not taught through typifications, or generalized rules, but rather by concrete example. I suspect that people do not enter into unfamiliar situations anywhere near as often as Goffman seems to suppose and that when they do they do not have instant conceptual recognition of what is going on. They are not able to reach into a store of typifications and figure out what people are doing, or what they themselves should do next. Knowledge comes not from the application of conceptshypifications that we carry around with us, to situations, but rather from careful attention to witnessable aspects of ongoing performance, or practice. It is the learned details of practice that, over time, allow persons a sufficient understanding of practice in details to master new sets of practices so efficiently that it looks as if they had done so through the application of typifications to new situations. There are sequential aspects of practice that hold to some degree across situations and help people learn to make sense of and through new sets of practices. Conversation analysis (CA) has attempted to identify such practices with regard to talk. However, there is nothing constant across all situations. Even sequential aspects of practice, and the basic preference orders

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that shape them, may vary across situations and/or types of social solidarity.22What is necessary is a study of practices in detail and of how recognizability is produced as an embodied practice.

EARLY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN COFFMAN AND CARFINKEL While Goffman argued in 7%ePresentation of self(1956) and again in “The Interaction Order” (1983) that it is the fragility of interaction itself that necessitates moral commitment and makes interaction a moral enterprise, his tendency to posit interactional intelligibility in terms of concepts instead of practices masks that fragility. A focus on concepts leads to the assumption that if interaction is disrupted it is still meaningful, although the consequences may be negative and/or ambiguous. This leaves persons, as Giddens points out, with insufficient motivation to comply with interaction orders. Garfinkel’s focus on situations as concrete embodied local orders has from the beginning addressed this shortcoming in Goffman’s position. For Garfinkel, interaction is only meaningful insofar as it achieves recognizability. In light of the relationship between the two arguments, it is important to note that Goffman and Garfinkel were not just coincidentally working on parallel, albeit somewhat conflicting, lines of thought. The two were engaged in a mutual debate that began, at least on paper, while they were still in graduate school. Goffman had read Garfinkel’s (19494 manuscript on the self and communication while he was at Chicago. This manuscript, “Prospects for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship” (hereafter, “1949 manuscript”) bore many surface similarities to Goffman’s own project. When Saul Mendlovitz told Goffman, in 1952, that Garfinkel had been hired for the jury project, Goffman told Mendlovitz that he had read this early manuscript.23 Mendlovitz in turn reported his conversation with Goffman to Garfinkel. Shortly after this, Goffman gave Garfinkel a draft manuscript of 7%ePresentation of Self: The two first got together to discuss each other’s work after Garfinkel went to California in 1954. This early connection is important, because while there was mutual influence, more important, the two thinkers were engaged in a struggle to clardy the differences between one another’s approaches to interaction. In particular, Goffman seems to have treated Garfinkel’s focus on practice as a matter of conceptual framing. Garfinkel responded by continually upping the ante on what it is that details could be, thus increasing h s resistance to conceptual reduction in the face of Goffman’s increasing reliance on it. Much of what is otherwise hard to figure out about their work, who they are arguing with, and why certain obscure points are so important, becomes clearer when the two approaches to self and practice are juxtaposed. Together, as

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mutual antagonists, they pushed the discipline toward an important confrontation with the problem of intelligibility and situated practice. A few illustrations may clarify this point. In the 1949 manuscript, Garfinkel uses the term performance for practices related to what he called the “public work” involved in the production of self. In fact, performance, as a term for such work, appears throughout the text. Garfinkel also speaks of the actor’s principles of reification (of themselves and social objects). The argument makes it clear that Garfinkel considers both the actor and his perceptions of the external social world to be a consequence of “performance” and “effort.”Meaning and self, he says, are a consequence of “public work” by the self, in concert with others. According to Garfinkel, “[wlhat the actor’s principles of reification consist of is the gist of the observer’s concern. Given the fact that the ‘face’of the world looks the same for many actors, the observer’s problem is to account for the conditions under which this will or will not be the case” (1949a: 10). Furthermore, Garfrnkel explains that he considers his focus to be on interaction. However, because of meanings already associated with the term, meanings that he considered to be unfortunate, he chose not to use it. This practice of avoiding meanings with prior associations, which Garfmkel followed throughout hs career, is one of the things that people have found hard to understand about his work. It is interesting to see it appearing as early as 1949: Except that the term “interaction” seems to set men off to the task of tracing stimulus-response patterns in the vain hope of giving that term practical meaning, we would use it in place of communication. And excepting entirely the meaning of S-R patterns, the two terms will be used synonymously. Communication (or interaction) can take place between an actor and a chair, between the actor and himself, or between two or more actors. (1949a: 97)

Goffman, through the publication of m e Presentation of Seg came to be associated with the ideas of interaction and the performance of self, while Garfinkel chose to abandon his early use of the term performative and search for other terms with which to describe his own interest in the performative self and communicative interaction. In 1949, however, performance was, for Garfinkel, a key term: Any overt action in the sense just proposed is a performance within the meaning of the definition proposed above. Covert performances will be referred to as thinking; those performances requiring bodily movements will be called working. By the term “working” is meant action in the outer world, based upon a project and characterized by the intention to bring about the projected state of affairs by bodily movements. (1949a: 5 , emphasis added)

Garfinkel’slater work moved away from referring to such local order work as “performance,”and one imagines that Goffman’suse of the term to center

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his argument with regard to self posed a particular problem for Garfinkel. He had based his early articulation of a sociology of concrete situated practice upon it. Yet, Goffman’suse of the term was so different that to continue to use it ran the danger of confusing the two arguments in ways that Garfinkel sought to avoid. In the 1949 manuscript, Garfinkel also uses language about “symbolic expression” that was intended to refer to the public use of practice, but which, after the publication of Goffman’s work, came to indicate conceptual interpretation, rather than the “effort”involved in the public display and recognition of practice that Garfinkel intended. According to Garfinkel, “Ourdata will consist then of symbolic expressions and the transformations of these expressions. It is these expressions that we are seeking to set up, and it is in accounting for their sequences and changes in time that we come to grips with the ‘motivation’problem” (Garfinkel 1949a: 5, emphasis in original). While he speaks of “symbolic expression” here, Garfinkel also embeds the discussion in a consideration of the sequences and changes in time that he argues are constitutive of the meaning of such expressions. His analysis of symbolic expressions is thus concrete and not conceptual. Garfinkel also connects his position on self with both “symbolic expression” and “cognitive style”: So far we have provided that the statements we make about the person are based on the premise of the actor as a symbol treater. This has been done with the concept of the animal symbolicum. Now we need a set of conceptions that will speclfy the conditions of treatment. . . . So we shall talk of a thing called role, by which we do not mean playing a part, nor do we mean expectancies of behavior, or “systems”of rights, duties, and obligations, etc. We shall say that a role or “cognitive style” has been defined when the empirical specifications of the following concepts have been provided: (1) epoche bracketingl; (2) a specific form of sociality; (3) a specific mode of attention to life; (4) a specific form of spontaneity; ( 5 ) a specific form of time consciousness; and (6) a specific way of experiencing the self. There are at least these six features of cognitive style. Further experience may reveal more. (194%: 12)

This use of the term cognitive style also caused problems for Garfinkel. While, even in this early manuscript it is clear that Garfinkel’s emphasis is on sequences of experience, both public and private, the potential for such language to be interpreted in conceptual terms is clear. As a reaction to such misinterpretations, by the summer of 1954, Garfinkel had begun to develop an entirely new way of speaking about local orders that was much more clearly focused on practice and that carefully avoided misleading conceptual references. It is important to realize, however, that in this early document, in which he appears to share a common language with Goffman, Garfinkel was, in fact, careful throughout to stress his emphasis on practice, on “effort” and what he called “work,”rather than the interpretation of symbols, or cognitive frames.

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There is an important sense in which Garfinkel’s approach to the self and meaning addresses the philosophical debate with regard to self on more dimensions than Goffman. For instance, while Goffman addressed issues regarding the social construction of the ability to be self-reflective, Garfinkel embedded his discussion of these issues in a public versus individual construction of time that allowed for the examination of reflexivity at more levels and resulted eventually in the idea of conversational sequencing.24According to Garfinkel: Living in the vivid present in its ongoing working acts, directed toward the objects and ends to be brought about, the working self experiences itself as the originator of the ongoing acts, and thus as an undivided total self. It experiences its bodily movements from within; it lives in the correlated, essentially actual experiences which are inaccessible to recollection and reflection. It is the world of open anticipations. It is the working self and only the working self that realizes itself as a unity. When the self in a reflective attitude turns back to the working acts performed, this unity disappears, and is replaced by a form of experiencing in which the self which performed the past act is brought into view. It is the self that refers to the system of acts to which it belonged as a role taker, a “me,”an identified self. (1949a: 21) This treatment of time combines important insights from Alfred Schutz and Aaron Gurwitsch with Garfinkel’s own emphasis on the “working self’ and on practice as “effort” rather than on conceptual m a n i p u l a t i ~ n The . ~ ~ result is a sense of time, as sequenced bits of conversational and interactional “effort,” or “work,”that depend for their sense on the ordering of parts into sequences. What is mere “seriality” in Giddens’s (1984) interpretation, is, for Garfinkel, a carefully constructed sequence of “work,”the ordering of which is both intentional and constitutive of its recognizability as meaningful and social. For Garfinkel, there is a careful process of adjusting the sequential streams of inner and outer worlds that is needed to bring actors into conjunction with one another: The actor may attend in simultaneity to the communicating actions as they proceed, found, for example, in two persons engrossed in conversation. In this latter type the signs are conveyed piece-meal, portion by portion and within a framework of space and time. While the one actor conveys his thought through this sequential order of actions, the interpreter follows with interpreting actions. Now the communicator does not experience only what he actually utters. A complicated mechanism of retentions and anticipations serve to connect one element of his speech with whatever preceded and what will follow until the unity of what he wants to convey has been grasped. All these experiences belong to the communicator’sinner time dur&.26On the other hand there are the occurrences of his speaking brought about by him in the space and time of the outer world: he witnesses his own gestures, his own sounds as events occurring within the space-time framework of the outer world. (1949a: 98-99)

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Garfinkel refers to “interpretation” in this outer world. One can see how this formulation might lend itself to the idea that concepts are being interpreted. But, even in the 1949 manuscript Garfinkel is careful on this point. This “outer world is constituted in and through the mutual construction of time sequences that are detailed and require careful mutual work. Garfinkel is not talking about mere seriality. While interpretation is an inner act, and in that sense not strictly speaking “working,”as Garfinkel has defined it, it is not a mere assessment of concepts, either. Mutually present actors are working to bring their vivid presents into conjunction through a sequencing of external actions. The “interpretation” involved has as its objective figuring out which next communicative act in the external world will best bring their two vivid presents into c o n j u n c t i ~ nAccording .~~ to Garfinkel: The communicator experiences the ongoing process of communicating as a working in his vivid present. The listener experiences his interpreting actions in his own vivid present, although this interpreting is not working; it ispurposive, project oriented, through overt action. Like a working action it is a performance for it embodies an intention to realization. A new time dimension is therefore, established, namely, that of a common vivid present. (1949a: 9%99, emphasis added)

Two communicators, both embedded in the experience of their own vivid present, bring those two experiences into conjunction in an outer world of sequential interaction. In the 1949 manuscript, Garfinkel continually contrasts the point of view of an actor, who is embedded in the mutual construction of such sequences, with the scientists’ point of view, a distinction that characterizes ethnomethodology from first to last. Unfortunately, a lack of public familiarity with this early manuscript, and the tendency of those who have seen it to read it in terms consistent with Goffman’s treatment of the central terms, has obscured Garfinkel’s potential contribution to this debate.

DEMOGRAPHIC POPULATIONS (AND IND l V lDUALS) VERSUS POPULATIONAL COHORTS The question of intelligibility is the question of what invests objects, or actions (sounds and movements), with a recognizable coherence that allows persons to act with regard to them in ways that other people can make sense of. It is an issue that both the presentation of self and the use of “concepts” assumes. Furthermore, when the objects in question are themselves socially constructed, “oriented objects,” in Garfinkel’s (2002) terminology, the problem is different from the recognition of natural objects. Therefore, problems of positivism and misplaced concreteness d o not arise in the same way.28

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Analyzing the concepts that are the result of practices cannot explain how practices achieve an initial coherence. With the idea of language games Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) introduced the possibility that particular linguistic practices or social contexts might be constitutive of the meanings of words, rather than the reverse. If something can be recognized as a “pain account,” for instance, then the meaning of “pain words” in that account will be different from their meaning in a complaint about a motherin-law, although in both cases the words may be “Gives me such a pain” or “What a pain.” However, Wittgenstein’s version, even though it allows that practices are constitutive of the meaning of words, still involves typifications. In this regard, it stands in much the same position as Goffman’s.A “pain account” is treated as a conceptual type of situation. However, the way “pain accounts” actually work in conversation is too complex to be covered by anything like typifications, a point Wittgenstein acknowledged when he argued that language games could be specified no further than their “family resemblances” to one another. Ordinary language use requires a mastery of specific situated language games or practices, one at a time, a problem that Wittgenstein recognized but did not resolve. A focus on situated orders, whether they are language games or more concrete orders such as queues, not only requires abandoning a conceptual approach to practice but also involves letting go of the traditional idea of populations and making a transition to what Garfinkel (2002) calls “populational cohorts.” With regard to populations, we have traditionally assumed a mass within which there are individual variations based on group affiliations. Because there are so many different groups and sets of values and beliefs within the whole, no two individuals are expected to be the same. With regard to populational cohorts, however, it is assumed that in spite of individual variations, participation in situations requires all individuals to master the same practices. In place of the model of an individual wandering from situation to situation with a set of typifications for interpretation, one must assume a social world inhabited by situations and the specific populational cohorts that enact them. Each situation is enacted in and through practices that produce its recognizability as a situation of a particular sort. These situations exist only and insofar as those persons who inhabit them produce the expected practices recognizably. They are all fragile. Each could be destroyed at any next moment, like Goffman’s presentational self. These situations and their populational cohorts need to be able to convey to each next individual who arrives what the expected practices are. The practices must therefore be instructable. Individuals do not know what to do before they arrive at a situation for the first time. Their situated competence is an instructed competence, and competent action is instructed action.29

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Situations do not just exist (conceptually); like the self, they must be continually made and remade. Instead of imagining a transcendent ego possessing demographic characteristics who walks between existing situations, imagine someone who has performed many different selves in different situations coming upon others who are reproducing themselves in and through the production of a particular situation. The populational cohort engaged together in reproducing any given situation is for that moment composed of just those selves who perform just these practices, and while they are reproducing just this situation, they are not reproducing other situations or other aspects of self. The person who walks up, watches, and listens attempts to recognize an order to the practices, the “What are they doing?”-not in conceptual terms, as, for instance, “Is it a science lab or a family?”but rather what exactly are they doing, as Garfinkel (2002) says, ‘‘justhere, just now” because the person has a practical problem; she needs to know what to do next. A newcomer coming on a scene will often be told “stand here” or “go this way” before she has figured out (so to speak) what is happening. A friend may say, “Do what I do,” or “Follow me.” A person may find that she is in the wrong line or wrong classroom. But she will often have been able, before locating the difficulty (that it is the wrong one) to nevertheless produce the required practices in such a way that she looks as though she were in the right place. Students, for instance, often discover only after an hour that they are in the wrong class, but they have not looked or felt out of place before this discovery. Before one can see the wrong line, one must see a line. Sometimes a person figures out that it is the wrong line because of some expected detail of practice that does not occur. Sometimes the practices are recognized and mastered, and the realization comes only later. Conceptual typifications and practices may be related to one another, but they are not the same. We make up names, or accounts, to gloss practices. But these accounts come only either after practices have been recognized and meaning has been achieved, or after they have not been recognized and meaning has been lost. Goffman’soversight in this regard echoes the general sociological oversight: the confusion of concepts with practices. Practices are what we can see and hear one another doing. As such, they can be studied directly. Concepts can only be inferred. This is not only a research limitation; it is a real limitation on practical action. This limitation should lead us to understand that ordinary human beings cannot be communicating primarily in terms of concepts or inferences. The seeable and hearable must play a larger role in intelligibility and social order than concepts. What would have led people to the first inferences about concepts if not practices? In challenging the essential need for practices, philosophers sometimes use sign language as an example of meaningful interaction that can occur in

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the absence of established practice. However, in their examples the things that people sign about are themselves social practices like “using a spear to catch fish and “trading a spear for a rock.” Such practices require two conditions to work. First, both interactants must be familiar with the practice that is being signed about, or they will not recognize a relationship between the sign and a practice; second, both must trust that the other intends to carry out the practice they have indicated with signs. In other words, communication requires some degree of trust that both persons are morally committed to a practice.30Thus, these examples, designed to prove that a commitment to practice is not necessary, actually prove the reverse. The idea that strangers either can or will agree to trade with one another when both of these conditions are not fulfilled is wrong. Most practices in everyday life are much more complex than such examples suggest, but even these simple philosophical examples have insurmountable problems.

CONCLUSION Durkheim worked throughout his career to distinguish beliefs from practices, treating concepts and beliefs as derivative of practices. It was his position that a failure to make this distinction was preventing an understanding of contemporary social order. He argued in 7he Division of Labor that in contemporary society, practices no longer depended on a context of shared concepts and beliefs for their efficacy, as they had in traditional society. As a consequence, many people felt that something was lacking in modern society. We still hear this as a complaint about a lack of community and an erosion of values. Durkheim thought this appraisal was a mistake and that attempts to solve the problem of weak solidarity in modern society by reinventing traditional community values only made the problem worse because such values were antithetical to the form of social order we inhabit.31 In modern society, instead of engaging in practices because of beliefs that dictate the details of daily life (and the outcome of practices), as happens in traditional religiodsociety, we engage in practices because they work and allow us accomplish new and ever-changing ends3* This position bears some similarity to pragmatism, and Durkheim himself pointed out some similarities between himself and William James in his lectures on pragmatism (Durkheim [1913-1914] 1933b). However, there are fundamental differences.33 Pragmatism begins with assumptions about individual utility. Durkheim assumes that the use-value of practices is primarily determined by social functiodneeds and only secondarily by the individual. Science is not an individual matter for Durkheim, nor is truth. For Durkheim, the underlying purpose of all practices is to create and maintain a meaningful and orderly world in common. To maintain the required

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level of social solidarity in the absence of a developed division of labor, Durkheim argues, a strong set of beliefs and rituals creating boundaries between sacred and profane must be maintained to keep the group together and convince people that the ways of the group are right. As the division of labor progresses, however, and people develop an economic and political dependence on one another, the need for beliefs in common is reduced. In fact, as practices begin to adapt to and support the new economic forms, Durkheim argues that any remaining shared beliefs begin to hold back the free development of practice. Thus, Durkheim sees the possibility that practices in modern society could become free of covering beliefs and, therefore, free to drive themselves, to change in the direction of increasing truth, function (which he identifies with justice), and social utility. This view of practices creating new ideas-that is, practices as the primary agent for social change-is Durkheim’s glft to sociology. The Durkheim who is remembered as if he said that the status quo must be reproduced in order to maintain social solidarity in fact argued that the pursuit of practice, particularly scientific practice, for its own sake, in a modern context, under conditions of justice, is the only thing that can free us from the status quo. Practices, on this view, should be seen as a free tool in the pursuit of truth Durkheim had essentially posed himself the postmodern problem of humans in a conceptual box and offered concrete enacted practice as the solution. As Goffman and others at mid-twentieth century tried to climb out of the even bigger conceptual box that was the legacy of Parsonian sociology, Durkheim’s position offered the outline of a potential solution. While Goffman and Garfinkel both took u p Durkheim’s challenge, however, they ultimately came down on different sides of the issue. Garfinkel took seriously Durkheim’s argument for the objectivity of social facts and tried hard to bring the details of practices back into the sociological equation. According to Garfinkel, social facts-that is, socially constructed, or achieved, social phenomena, and in particular an understanding of the way in which they are achieved as social constructions-provide the key to answering the essential sociological questions regarding the character and origin of social order and human knowledge. In i’he Elementa y Forms of Religious Life ([1912-19131 19951, Durkheim had argued that human knowledge-that is, questions of epistemology-can only be studied through the details of ritual interaction. Knowledge, he argued, even the possibility of mutual intelligibility, is not possible if it is only a function of concepts or beliefs. It is only possible to locate a valid origin for human knowledge, Durkheim believed, if it can be established as the result of the concrete details of social practices.34Garfinkel, of course, takes the argument to a higher level of detail. This not only makes the argument more empiri-

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cally complex but also reveals levels of theoretical possibility that could not have been apparent to D ~ r k h e i m . ~ ~ Conceptual generalizations are, for Garfinkel, a result of the social production of order. Therefore, they cannot be used to represent the ongoing details of that process. Difficult words like haecceity, autochthonous order, phenomenalfields, populational cohort, and detail*refer to aspects of locally produced orders that are original to Garfinkel’s account. The continual emphasis in his work on “just-thisness,” “haecceities,” “details,” “order*,”and “contingencies” is an attempt not to lose the phenomena through generalization. His work is about the creation of local social orders, on the spot, out of the materials at hand, in recognizable ways.36For Garfinkel, this is indeed what social order is all about. Therefore, as far as Garfinkel is concerned, any way of speaking that leaves out these details, or reifies them, leaves out social order it~e@’~ The fact that Garfinkel’s insistence on detail stands at odds with the discipline’s attempt to unlfy theory and methods in general conceptual terms goes a long way toward explaining why Garfinkel’s work is so hard for those with disciplinary training in sociology to understand. Goffman, on the other hand, built on Durkheim’s analysis of the effects of social processes on personhood and the moral effects of ritual (Collins 1989). In his early work, there is some analysis of empirical detail, although critics have complained repeatedly that those details were more literary than empirical. In his later work, in Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk, however, Goffman began to treat empirical aspects of interaction as secondary to interpretation. In doing so, he climbed from one conceptual box into another. Whatever concepts are, they are not the same as practices.38Practices are things people do that other people can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch them doing. Without at least one of these characteristics, they are simply not publicly available to others. Spoken words can be both seen (lip-reading, gestures) and heard. Treated as such, as practices, they can be, and are, analyzed very differently from words in the abstra~t.3~ Concepts can only come into play after there are recognizable coherences in perception or as a narrative account after a failure to achieve recognizability. A focus on the taken-for-granted aspects of social intelligibility and the coherence of social scenes is not the same thing as a focus on the conceptual mediation of reality. If one accepts conceptual mediation, an infinite regress of interpretation results. The perception and production of coherences must precede any intelligible use of concepts. But denying the primacy of concepts in the process does not at all mean that one is able to perceive reality in an unmediated way. There is no unmediated natural or social reality. The primary coherences have concrete detailed embodied aspects without which their status as social facts cannot be understood.

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Rendering practices empirically rather than conceptually does not mean that concepts are not used. It means two things: (1) that concepts are not used to replace empirically witnessable practices and (2) that social order is not created through the interpretive acts of actors. That is, social actors are not making social order by using concepts to interpret action. Goffman’s turn toward frames and typifications, in his later work, was doubly unfortunate, because not only did it give the discipline a way of incorporating Goffman that neutralized the revolutionary importance of his early work, but it also gave the discipline a way of neutralizing interactionists in general and making their work less threatening. Thus, not only did Goffman’s later work undo some of his own earlier insights, but it had a profound influence on the interpretation of Garfinkel, who could now be seen as a proponent of cognitive mapping (Cicourel 1967) who is interested in the interpretation of interaction. Phenomena llke the “et cetera clause” were treated as exercises in interpretation, when they were intended, in fact, as demonstrations that interpretation could not explain mutual understanding (intelligibility). The constant refrain “What is all the detail for?” that every ethnomethodologist hears continually is based on this conceptual shortsightedness. You might as well ask a chemist why she bothers measuring the volume, temperature, and so forth, of liquids and keep records of her experiments. Of course, if one thinks of social order, and particularly interaction order, as composed of concepts, then details would only get in the way. However, if one follows Durkheim in thinking that social order must be real and witnessable; Goffman, that it is a fragile and constant achievement; and Garfinkel, that it can’t be achieved through interpretation but only through a recognition of the concrete details of practice, then social order is only available in its details. The study of social order is the study of those details. It is nothing else. The discipline that reduces everything to mathematicized orders of concepts is not studying social order. In his last article (Goffman 19831, the publication of the address he was to have given as the president of the ASA, in 1982, the last year of his life, Goffman attempted to come to terms with this. There he returned to his earlier emphasis on the fragility of interaction and to empirically detailed examples of fragile orders, like queues, that he appeared to have abandoned during his quest to establish a general sociology of situations. Goffman was not wrong in that quest. But in attempting to articulate a conceptual sociology of situations in his later work, he had gotten off track. In returning to the earlier work Goffman, at the last, indicated the substance of a true sociology of situations. It is in treating interactions as fragile material events that must be constantly maintained and performed, like selves, that the key to a general theory of interaction orders lies. For the completion of this task, however, we must ultimately turn from Goffman to Garfinkel,

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treating Garfinkel as the originator of the idea of fragile interaction orders of local practice, and coupling that insight with Goffman’s presentational self. Developing a theory of interaction orders, and a corresponding ethics of practice, is for me the essence of the sociological mission from Durkheim forward. Evaluating Goffman’s legacy involves evaluating his contribution to this effort. The problems of modern corporations, the crisis of community, value, terrorism, and inequality are all problems that can only be properly understood when there is a clearer understanding of what practice as opposed to belief is in a modern context. Sociology was founded on Durkheim’s argument that what distinguished modern society from traditional society, and made individual freedom and justice possible and even necessary, was the fact that practices in modern society have, to a significant extent, become freed from beliefs. Unfortunately, we as a discipline tend to assume an older belief- and concept-driven model of practice, which, as Durkheim argued, does not properly belong to modern society. Our ethical crisis-the unintended consequences of legislation, false results from research that inevitably supports the status quo, and so on-can, I believe, all be shown to result from a failure to come to terms with local orders of interactional practice.

NOTES 1. This argument, initiated in Garfinkel’s “‘Good’Reasons for ‘Bad’Clinic Records”

(1967: 186207) was further explored and extended by Wieder (19741, Meehan (19861, and Meehan and Ponder (20021 in a series of police record-keeping practices. 2. Durkheim refers to advanced division of labor society, society under conditions of differentiated labor, and society under conditions of an advanced division of labor. The shorter phrase “advanced division of labor society” has been used here. 3. It is ironic that many interpretations of Durkheim attribute to him the view that he criticized: that anomie in modern society is caused by a lack of shared norms. 4.This also means that where groups whose solidarity and intelligibility is b a x d on beliefs still exist, they provide a way of making sense that interferes with the need for justice. The implications of this, if true, are substantial. 5. While conceptual representations play a large role in Western thought, they may have played an even larger role in much older tribal societies. As Durkheim points out ([1912-19131 19951, what he called ”primitive” religions were organized around conceptual representations of clans and clan relationships. This, he argued, was the origin of human reason. 6. For an extended elaboration of the contrast between doing and meaning, see Rawls (1985). 7. It has been my experience in writing about Garfinkel, or ethnomethodology, that editors often complain about the word witnessable. Why use it? They believe they understand the argument and yet complain that the word witnessable is merely a nuisance. My advice to those attempting to understand the argument with regard to

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the concreteness of practices is that “witnessable” along with its companion “recognizable” are everything. That actions must be seen and heard (and felt and smelled, etc.&that is, have the property of witnessably recognizable coherence-is the key to how they can have meaning. Actions are not thoughts. Ethnomethodology cannot be understood without grasping this point. In fact, no coherent sociology of situations can be articulated without it. 8. An earlier version of this argument was presented at the 1986 Stone Symposium in Nottingham, England. For a much earlier version, see Rawls (1985). The finished version exists as an unpublished manuscript “The Fallacy of Misplaced Abstraction,’’parts of which can be found in the conclusion of my book, Durkbeims Epistemology (2000a) and in my introduction to Garfinkel’s Etbnometbodolo,g ’s Program: Working Out Durkbeim’s Aphorism (2002b). 9. As with much of what is said about Garfinkel, this is not entirely correct. Garfinkel in several articles, including the trust article (1963) and an article on degradation ceremonies (1956), advanced a position on self that is as sophisticated as Goffman’s, although somewhat different and more complex in its details. In his unpublished manuscript (1949a) discussed in a later section, he worked out a rather complete argument for a performative self and sequential communication. Nevertheless, it was Goffman who introduced the world to the presentational self. It was also Goffman’s students, Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, and their students, Anita Pomerantz and Gail Jefferson, who introduced involvement obligations into early conversation analysis (Sacks 1975; Pomerantz 1984; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The effect is to credit Goffman with issues regarding self and Garfinkel with articulating the problem of intelligibility. 10. The best known of these is Anthony Giddens’s 7’be Constitution of Society (1984). But many authors have combined the approaches of the two,including Goffman himself in Forms of Talk and Goffman’s students Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff. The work of Anita Pomerantz (1984) on assessments is one of the best examples of a hybrid of the two approaches. 11. See Rawls (1987) for an extended discussion of this issue. It is interesting to note that this article, which makes a case for the concreteness of interaction orders, is most often cited as an argument about the interaction order as a conceptual order, not at all what was intended. 12. See Rawls (1984) for an extended discussion of the contrast between Goffman and Sartre. Their arguments appear at first to be the same. But, in fact, Sartre argues that interaction, or what he refers to as “seriality,”is ordered strictly through its relationship to institutional structures and purposes. Goffman, on the other hand, argues that interaction places demands on institutional orders that come from needs of interaction orders, independent of the institutional contexts in which those interactions happen to occur. 13. The Garfinkel manuscript, titled “Prospects for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship,” focuses on what he calls “Communicative Effort.”Garfinkel explains in the section titled “communication” in the 1949 manuscript that “except that the term ‘interaction’ seems to set men off to the task of tracing stimulus-response patterns in the vain hope of giving the term practical meaning, we would use it in place of communication” (1949a: 97). The 1949 manuscript represents much more of an attempt to

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lay out the parameters of a comprehensive sociology of interaction than his later studies, which each provide a piece of a larger picture. 14. I have generally found Giddens’s reading of classical social theory to be unmatched for its depth of insight. While I criticize his interpretation of Garfinkel here, I would like to note that the project of attempting to combine the two bodies of work is exactly what I believe needs to occur, and Giddens was once again ahead of almost everyone in his understanding of the issues. 15. See, for instance, Schegloffs (1979) work on repair. 16. Giddens’s approach to the idea of time series in this regard bears a resemblance to Garfinkel’s arguments in his unpublished 1949 manuscript (3949a) about phenomenological aspects of time series. However, there Garfinkel described time series as a phenomenological construction, not a natural phenomenon. 17. I need especially to thank Peter K. Manning, who made himself available for extensive discussion of this point, for this insight. 18. See Rawls (1984) for an extended discussion of this aspect of Goffman’s argument and its significance when contrasted with the treatment of queues by Jean Paul Sartre. 19. In fact, my own (1987) argument with regard to Goffman is often interpreted in this way-obviously not what was intended. 20. A point about the relevance of history to the analysis of situations: Scholars often complain that those who study interaction ignore history. What is ignored is the history of demographic populations. The biographies of persons who inhabit situations is not in itself relevant. However, situations themselves do have histories. Poker, for instance, has an interesting history in this country as a context in which white southern gentlemen displayed and reaffirmed their exclusive social status. This history of the situation may be relevant to the analysis of situated practice. The interest is in persons insofar as they are competent (or incompetent) producers of situations and in history only as it is related to the production practices of particular situated orders. That women are said not to be as good at poker as men might be said to have been historically part of the ground rules of the game. It need not in any sense be true in fact. 21. This is why situated orders are often easier to locate in the breach, although they must then be studied in their “normal” form. 22. For an extended discussion of how orders of interaction order vary according to the type of social solidarity identified with, see Rawls (2000a). For variations between types of situation, see Button (1987). 23. The jury project became quite well known among ethnomethodologists. It involved Saul Mendlovitz, Fred Strodbeck, and Garfinkel. The three videotaped jury deliberations in an attempt to understand what it was about the jury deliberations that makes it a jury. It was when the three were ready to present their findings to the ASA in the summer of 1954 that Garfinkel came up with the idea of calling their study of jury deliberations a study of the ethnomethods of the jury deliberation process. 24. The idea of conversational sequencing became the backbone of conversational analysis. See Sacks (1992) and Sacks et al. (1974). 25. See Schutz (1962) and Gurwitsch (119571 1964). 26. The notion of durke appears again in the work of Deidre Boden (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1984). While its use in their work often appears to be similar to

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Garfinkel’s use, and Boden in particular explicitly identifies her use of the term as an ethnomethodological use, it is in fact used very differently in Garfinkel’s text. 27. One can see here an early precursor of what Harvey Sacks would refer to as conversational preference orders (Sacks et al. 1974). If one cannot hear an utterance in the expected way, there turns out to be an order of preference for ways in which to try to hear it. Mishearing and joke, for instance, Sacks found are preferred in that order, and both go before deciding that the speaker is stupid or incompetent. This is quite different from the idea of a conceptual interpretation. 28. It is a failing of misplaced concreteness to treat a conceptualized object like an “institution”or “type” of social action as if it exists concretely. It is not a problem of misplaced concreteness to treat concrete witnessable aspects of situations in their details as if they exist concretely. They do exist concretely. Insofar as their details consist of parts that are socially constructed to be recognizable to competent practitioners, no positivism is involved. The social world as witnessably enacted is, on this view, actively structured to be a meaningful world. Treating it in any other way is to superimpose another structure on it. In this case, treating the recognizable character of enacted practices as if its meaningful character were the result of the application of concepts and interpretive frames is positivism. Treating it as ordered in its enacted concreteness is not-the reverse of what is usually assumed. 29. Garfinkel (2002: chap. 6) refers to this as “the praxeological validity of instructed action.” 30. In philosophical examples, “natives” sometimes encounter one another in the woods, and in the complete absence of shared practice they manage to effect exchanges of goods that are advantageous to both. See, for example, Scanlon (1990). I would argue that in the absence of a mutual trust relationship, which can only be established by demonstrating to the other through the fulfillment of situated expectations of practice that one is trustworthy, that the so-called natives would not get close enough to one another to effect such exchanges. The assumption that they would is based on taking for granted a background of trust in modern society, which has its origin in shared practice and which makes even imagining such exchanges possible. 31. Durkheim makes this argument in Book I11 of 7be Division of Labor in Society. See also Rawls (2002a) for an extended discussion the argument of Book 111. Durkheim is not arguing that practices no longer create shared beliefs; in fact, they may. The important argument he makes in Book I11 is that the efficacy, recognizability, or what Garfinkel would call the “praxeological validity” of practices no longer depends on a context of shared belief in modern society. 32. To avoid the appearance of a contradiction here, it is necessary to spell out this process in some detail. While in fact it is practices that originally generate beliefs, and Durkheim argues that the sole purpose of those beliefs is to commit people to the practices that in turn re-create the beliefs, nevertheless it becomes the case over time that people in traditional societies come to feel that they observe practices solely because of their beliefs. The idea that their beliefs had a utility in re-creating the practices that constituted their primary purpose would appear greatly offensive to them. See Rawls (2001) for an extended discussion of the relationship between belief and practice in Durkheim. 33. See Rawls (1997) for an extended discussion of the relationship between Durkheim and the pragmatism of William James.

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34. See Rawls (1996, 2001) for an extended discussion of this issue. 35. Durkheim did not have access to tape recorders and video machines, so he could only have been advocating the sorts of details available to ethnography. He could not have imagined the level of detail involved in the constitution of the recognizable coherence of practices or the detailed sequential aspects of interaction. Nevertheless, recognizing the emphasis of his aphorism on the observation of concrete social events completely changes the interpretation of not only his later work ([1912-19131 1995) but also his earlier arguments with regard to sociology as a positive and empirical science ([18951 1982). Durkheim ceases to be a positivist if we understand that the “objectivity of social facts” was always understood by him as a social construction. Similarly, Garfinkel could not be a positivist because the study of the process of constructing social reality simply contradicts all of the assumptions made by positivism. 36. This is not a spontaneous creation, however; local orders must be made to a standard of recognizability. They are made out of the materials at hand, but not in just any old way. They must be made just so, such that their “just-thisness”is apparent to competent members. 37. Garfinkel’s problem is similar to the one faced by Marx ([184411972, [185718581 1973) in insisting that classical economics had reified what were in fact only parts of relationships, instead treating them as independent factors. Production and consumption, for instance, were for Marx reifications of a more fundamental relationship that created the appearance of production and consumption as independent forces. Similarly, in ordinary talk the results of relationships are generally treated as the “real”foundation of things, while the relationships themselves are overlooked. In this way, ordinary language renders relationships invisible. The consequences of attempting to create a new way of speaking in order to avoid this problem of reification has a similar effect on the readability of the texts of both Garfinkel and Marx. 38. It might follow from Wittgenstein’sposition that concept is a word for nothing at all, or for something, but a something quite different from what is generally assumed. 39. Saussure’s (1916) distinction between written and spoken language is drawn from Durkheim. Similarly, conversation analysis focuses on sequential issues in speaking and not on words or grammar. The assumption is that words themselves have less to do with meaning than issues of sequencing and turn taking. This is essential to understanding the claim that using words is not a primarily conceptual enterprise.

REFERENCES Boden, Deidre. 1992. The Business of Talk: Organization in Action. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 190. 176e Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Button, Graham. 1987. “Answers as Interactional Products: Two Sequential Practices Used in Interviews.” Social Psychology Quarterly 50, no. 2: 160-71. Cicourel, Aaron. 1967. The Social Organization of JuvenileJustice. New York: Wiley. Collins, Randall. 1989. “Toward a Neo-Median Sociology of Mind.” Symbolic Znnteraction 12, no. 1: 1-33.

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David, Gary, 2002. “They Don’t Pay Taxes: An Interactional Analysis of Inter-group Rumor.” Unpublished manuscript, Bentley College. Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1933a. 7be Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. .[1913-1914] 193313. Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , [1895-18961 1958. Socialism and Saint-Simon. Ed. A. Gouldner. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch. -. [18951 1982. 7be Rules of The Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. -. [1912-1913] 1995. 7be Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. K. Fields. New York: Free Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1949a. “Prospects for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship.” Unpublished manuscript. , 1949b. “Research Note on Inter- and Intra-racial Homicides.” Social Forces 27, no. 4: 369-81. -. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5: 420-24. -. 1963. “A Conception of and Experiments with ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions.” Pp. 187-238 in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. 0. J. Harvey. New York: Ronald. -. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. , 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim ’s Aphorism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, Erving. [19561 1959. 7be Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. -. 1961. Asylum: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday. -. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. -. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. -. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American SociologicalReview 48, no. I: 1-17. Gurwitsch, Aaron. [19571 1964. Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press. Marx, Karl. “441 1972. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” Pp. 52-103 in 7be Mam-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker. New York: Norton. -. [1857-1858] 1973. Grundrisse. London: Harmondsworth. Meehan, Albert J. 1986. “Record-Keeping Practices in the Policing of Juveniles.” Urban Life 15, no. 1: 70-102. Meehan, Albert J., and Michael Ponder. 2002. “Race and Place: The Ecology of Racial Profiling African American Motorists.”Justice Quarterly 9, no. 3: 14-55. Mills, C. Wright. 1940. “Situated Action and Vocabularies of Motive.” American Sociological Review 5, no. 6: 904-13. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. 7be Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. “Agreeingand Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” Pp. 57-101 in Structures of Social Action;

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Studies in ConversationAnalysis, ed. J. M. Atkinson and J. C. Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1984. “Interaction as a Resource for Epistemological Critique: A Comparison of Goffman and Sartre.” Sociological n e oy 2: 222-52. .1985. “Reply to Gallant and Kleinman.” Symbolic Znteraction 8, no. 1: 12140. -. 1987. “The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory.” Sociological n e o y 5, no. 2: 13649. .1989. “Emergent Sociality: Dialectic of Commitment and Order.” Symbolic Znteraction 13, no. 1: 63-82, .1993. “Narrative as Context of Accountability.”Paper presented at the Midwest Sociological Association meetings. -. 1996. “Durkheim’s Epistemology: The Neglected Argument.” AmericanJournu1 of Sociology 102, no. 2: 430-82. -. 1997. “Durkheim and Pragmatism: An Old Twist on a New Problem.” Sociological Tbeoy 15, no. 1: 5-29. .2000a. Durkheim ’s Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press. -. 2000b. “Race as an Interaction Order Phenomena: W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Double Consciousness’ Thesis Revisited.” Sociological 7beoy 18, no. 2: 23p72. -. 2001. “Durkheim’sTreatment of Practice: Concrete Practice vs. Representation as the Foundation of Reason.” ClassicalJournal of Sociology 1, no. 1: 33-68. -. 2002a. “Conflict as a Foundation for Consensus: Contradictions of Industrial Capitalism in Book I11 of Durkheim’s Division of Labor.”Unpublished manuscript. -. 2002b. “Editor’s Introduction.” Pp. 1-64 in Ethnomethodology‘s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism, by H. Garfinkel. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Sacks, Harvey. 1975. “Everyone Has to Lie.” Pp. 5-79 in Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, ed. M. Sdnches and B. G. Blount. New York: Academic Press. , 1992. Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation.” Language 50, no. 4: 696735. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. De Cours de linguistique generale. Paris: Payot. Scanlon, Thomas. 1990. “Promises and Practices.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19, no. 3: 199-226. Schegloff, Emmanuel. 1979. “The Relevance of Repair to Syntax-for-Conversation.” Pp. 261-88 in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 12, ed. T. Givon. New York: Academic Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected Papers. Ed. M. Natanson. The Hague: Nijhoff. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press. Wieder, D. Lawrence. 1974. Language and Social Reality: n e Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

I0 Ethnomethodological Readings of Goffman Gregory W. H. Smith

SOME DIFFICULTIES IN INTERPRETING THE “DEBATE” Perhaps the most significant source of critical commentary of Erving Goffman derives from ethnomethodology (EM). Sociology textbooks and other sociologists outside the field commonly bracket EM and Goffman together because of their shared concern with the analysis of interactional minutiae. In particular, ethnomethodology has taken very seriously Goffman’s attempts to found the sociology of “the interaction order” (Goffman 1953, 1983b) and has provided close evaluative commentary on that project. Sustained and detailed ethnomethodological criticism of Goffman’s work began in his own lifetime in the writings of Harold Garfinkel (1967) and Aaron V. Cicourel (1972) and extended beyond his death in 1982, notably in Emanuel A. Schegloffs (1988: 89) “fight” with his deceased adversary. The first international conference to consider Goffman’s contribution to sociology was convened by two noted conversation analysts in 1986 and resulted in an edited collection in which ethnomethodological preoccupations were prominent (Drew and Wootton 1988a). Goffman plainly mattered to ethnomethodology, and, in a way that is less easy to detect, ethnomethodology also mattered very much to Goffman, especially over the last decade and a half of his life. This chapter seeks to chart the issues at stake, for they are central to understanding Goffman’s sociological legacy. The primary purpose of this chapter is to review some key components of the debate between Goffman and ethnomethodology. The very t e r m in which I have just stated the chapter’s problem require immediate qualification. I speak of a “debate,”yet the conflict of positions the term implies has often been subterranean, more evident in the oral cultures of ethnomethod254

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ology (and to a much lesser extent, symbolic interactionism) than in published work. The comparison the chapter pursues is decidedly lopsided: on the one hand, an author now two decades’ deceased; on the other, a worldwide intellectual movement embracing substantial numbers of practitioners. Even using the words Goffman and ethnomethodology (as I shall continue to do) glosses varied complexes of ideas, so that to consider them as two distinct positions can frequently prove risky and misleading. Goffman appears to have been loath to regard his intellectual output as a single, internally consistent body of work that constructed a system in linear fashion. All he wished to acknowledge was a biographical unity: He was the author of those eleven books and two dozen articles, and any one individual, he suggested, was only going to have just so many ideas (David 1980). As a writer (and he was certady that, not merely a sociologist), Goffman was much more at home in the essay mode than in constructing systematic treatises. Not surprisingly, then, the barbed comment or offhand jibe seemed more in keeping with his sociological outlook than more sustained evaluation and criticism. In print, Goffman was a reluctant critic and a terse one, prizing sociological observation and the one-liner over carefully constructed academic disputation.’ Ethnomethodology for its part embraces a range of theoretical emphases and research foci. The divergence between the phenomenological impulses that continue to animate Garfinkel’s project and the more behavioristic concerns of conversation analysis (CA) is perhaps only the most conspicuous cleavage that could be named (see Hester and Francis 2000 for a recent manifestation of this tension). The relationship of Goffman and his sociology to ethnomethodology has been complex and often troubled. While the foundations of Goffman’s sociological project were set by the mid-l950s, Garfinkel’s project (Goffman and Garfinkel were each early acquainted with the other’s work) was still evolving, and it was only with the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology that the immensely productive and influential tradition of sociological work associated with Garfinkel’s name became firmly established. Garfinkel initiated what Goffman, for all the singularity of his analytic attitude (or perhaps because of it), apparently could not: a distinctive form of sociological practice with closely interlinked theoretical presuppositions and preferred methods of inquiry, a sociology that is now practiced throughout the world and that not only can boast a very substantial corpus of empirical studies (Coulter 1990; ten Have’s ETHNOKA NEWS website) but also has impacted on a range of cognate fields. The established sociological wisdom suggests that while Goffman may have opened u p the sociological investigation of social interaction, we must look to the work of Garfinkel’s followers to discover how it has been developed into a thriving empirical field. On one reading of the history, the acrimonious aspect of the relationship of Goffman to EM was initiated by Goffman himself and subsequently

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became a tale of occasional misreading and misunderstanding o n both sides.2The principal slight was Goffman’s refusal to participate in the examination of Harvey Sacks’s doctoral dissertation in 1966, a decision exacerbated by Goffman’s reluctance to withdraw from the examining committee once his misgivings had been made obvious. The manner of Goffman’s refusal was probably as offensive as its fact was disruptive. This story, recycled and elaborated in informal contexts, accounts for some of the vituperation that seems close to breaking surface in portions of the critical literature. The history and nature of Goffman’s relationship to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are not easy to e ~ c a v a t eGoffman .~ was certainly familiar with Garfinkel’s developing ideas from the mid-1950s on, and he encouraged Sacks and David Sudnow (see Sudnow 2001) while they were graduate students at Berkeley in the early 1960s.* The incident that gave Goffman everlasting notoriety in EM circles, his refusal to participate in the examination of Sacks’s doctoral dissertation, seems to have stemmed from Goffman’s strong skepticism about one element of Sacks’ssociological work. The initial statement of membership categorization analysis in the dissertation was regarded by Goffman as “circular” (Schegloff 1992: xxiv, n. 18) and just too textual for his liking (D. Sudnow, personal communication, 1999). Goffman’s own self-deprecating judgment about Frame Analysis-that it was “too bookish, too general, too removed from fieldwork to have a good chance of being anything more than another mentalistic adumbration” (1974: 13)-might well also sum u p his view of membership categorization analysis at this time. On the other hand, Sacks’s development of CA, which Goffman considered much more empirical and observational in character, attracted Goffman’s close interest, although he continued to develop an approach to “conversational interaction” or “spoken interaction” (Goffman’s preferred terms, deriving respectively from his 1953 dissertation and the face-work paper of 1955) at variance with CAs central preoccupation with turn taking and sequential organization. This chapter is primarily a mapping exercise: I shall try to chart the principal contributions to the debate between ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman in order to identlfy the relevance of each for the other. As a debate, it has been distinctly one-sided, and not just because Goffman is no longer with us while the tradition of EM continues to prosper. Goffman often appeared indifferent to his critics. He was generally averse to interviews, notoriously camera-shy, routinely refused permission for his voice to be recorded, and openly despised the growing tendency for his writings to become a discrete object of sociological attention. Goffman’s responses-his published responses, at any rate-tend to be embedded in the examination of particular topics of analytical interest. So it could be argued that Frame Analysis is Goffman’s reply to Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology,5

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while Forms of Talk seems to pursue a critical engagement with CA as the main (but not always clearly or openly acknowledged) target. In these books, EM and CA seem to be the foils against which Goffman develops his own views, although that is never plainly stated. Goffman seems to present a covert critique in which the reader must be alert to the cues to make the necessary inferences. In a rare interview, in 1980 with the Belgian sociologist Jef C. Verhoeven, Goffman’s misgivings became more apparent. He protested at the “touchstone” status of Alfred Schutz and Ludwig Wittgenstein for EM. Goffman disapproved of the way the ideas of Schutz and Wittgenstein were taken as being somehow definitive for analysis. He objected to their treatment as canonical texts that should be returned to, rather than (as Goffman saw them) as providers of sources of leads and research possibilities. As he put it, “it changes the nature of Sociology into some sort of ritualistic, cabalistic, literary undertaking”6 (Verhoeven [19931 2000, vol. 1 : 2321, something quite foreign to Goffman’s anthropologically empirical convictions (though perhaps closer to his own practice than he was wont to admit). Goffman respected the craft of sociology as an empirical discipline and detested scholasticism (Drew and Wootton 1988b: 1). As he pointed out in his only full response to his critics, “Pronouncing and counter-pronouncing are not the study of society; I can’t recommend either . . . as worth attention” ([1981bl 2000, vol. 4: SO). For Goffman, sociology was something that you did, not something that you read (Stanford Lyman, personal communication, 1992; Verhoeven [19931 2000, vol. 1: 233). Goffman’s perception of ethnomethodology’s cabalism was another source of tension (or perhaps envy). This comes across clearly in Dell Hymes’s ([19831 2000) discussion of Goffman as reviewer of submissions to the journal Language in Society, on whose editorial board they both sat. According to Hymes, Goffman had a fine sense of what constituted a contribution to the field. He was offended by work that seemed to d o no more than announce an affiliation. In correspondence with fellow editor Hymes, some of Goffman’s bitterest comments were directed at papers that seemed more concerned with proclaiming an EM affiliation than generating new insights: And so another eth-meth piece. A relatively bright student, sealed in a small fun house of mirrored readings, gets ahold of something interesting to treat as data, worries it a little, tugs at it some, and stops his inquiry as soon as he has uncovered enough illustrations to use as support for the notion that eth-meth has the answers, that this radically separates the men from the boys, and that the current writer is now to be recognized by the other men as one of them. . . . In fact, of course, although the footnotes torture out an eth-meth affiliation, the findings are those of any student of a political document. (Goffman, letter of January 18, 1977, quoted in Hymes [19831 2000, vol. 1 54)

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Commenting on another CA-influenced paper, Goffman states, “I’m getting very tired of slogans and flags and kinship acknowledgements and membership badges, no doubt because I have employed so many myself (Goffman, letter of April 6, 1977, quoted in Hymes [19831 2000, vol. 1: 54). These remarks suggest that certain of EM’s inward-looking tendencies disturbed Goffman: Its secessionism was at odds with his own sense of contributing to the sociological tradition, broadly conceived. On the other hand, complaints about cabalism are all very well coming from a sociologist whose writings are marked by a signature style that proclaims the idiosyncrasy of his vision of the world. We can’t all be Goffmans, and few would doubt that there is a useful and productive role for specialisms and theory groups in the pursuit of normal science. So this, then, is the broad shape of the debate: in the EM corner, reasoned and well-documented responses articulating the difficulties Goffman gives those who take the EM program seriously; in the Goffman corner, elliptically formulated criticisms whose targets have to be inferred substitutes for direct and open confrontations. Why would anyone seek to take a debate with the ghost of Goffman seriously? It matters to Goffman sympathizers because CA especially looks like a very successful sociology of the interaction order. It matters to EM because Goffman offers an EMlike sociology that is thoroughly consonant with most of the major assumptions of the discipline. In this chapter, I identlfy four groups of arguments about Goffman’s relevance for ethnomethodology, four registers in which the critical literature has been keyed. These can be paired into broadly incommensurable and commensurable positions. The early interventions of Garfinkel and Cicourel on the nature, merits, and pitfalls of Goffman’s work offer critical readings of Goffman that pave the way for the more openly oppositional readings that do not disguise their conviction that there is something fundamentally mistaken or in error in Goffman’s work. These readings differ in tenor from readings of Goffman that posit a degree of complementarity with EM, or that propose that Goffman can serve as a resource offering a (usually qualified) utility for EM inquiries. The four themes--critical, oppositional, complementary, and utility-are used to organize the salient aspects of EM’s response to Goffman.

INITIAL CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS Starting with an initially appreciative take on Goffman in the 1950s, both Garfinkel and Cicourel began to develop a critical line on Goffman’s work. This becomes clear if their relevant writings are examined in chronological order.

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Carfinkel on Coffman

Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Goffman’s sociology of the interaction order emerged from very different intellectual milieus.’ Garfinkel (1956) was probably the first sociologist to comment on Goffman’s sociology in an academic article. From the beginning, Garfinkel was sympathetic and appreciative while holding Goffman’s developing project at arm’s length. In distinguishing Goffman’s method and approach from his own, Garfinkel marked himself out as an early, informed, and insightful commentator on the strengths and weaknesses of Goffman’s enterprise. The mutual acquaintance of Garfinkel and Goffman with each other’s work goes back to the 1 9 5 0 ~In. ~“Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists” (19561, Garfinkel approvingly cites Goffman’s early paper “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952). He sees Goffman’s method as a variant of Karl Mannheim’s “free variation” technique (or mental experiment). Garfinkel considers that Goffman employs a “natural metaphor” (the confidence game) in order to identlfy formal similarities in the situation of diversely situated persons. Interestingly, Garfinkel notes that the metaphor is “natural” in character-that is, already used by participants in society (in this case, confidence garners), not one that derives from scientific theorizing (e.g., the homeostatic system). This natural metaphor is used, Garfinkel believes, to illuminate how people deal with disappointment. We almost expect him to say (remember this was 1956) that in “On Cooling the Mark Out,” Goffman outlines the conditions of successful consolation ceremonies. Garfinkel commends “the cogency of Goffman’s particular application of this method,” and, in the way the phenomenon of adaptation to failure is treated as a “technical” matter, Goffman also provides an instance of the application of “the praxeological rule” (1956: 191). In other words, Goffman articulates the methods and circumstances in which successful adaptation to failure can be accomplished (and, by extension, indicates how it might be unsuccessful). Garfinkel’s most extended and critical discussion of Goffman appears in his analysis of the case of Agnes in chapter 5 of Studies in Etbnornethodology, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part 1.”The peculiarities of how Garfinkel became aware of the origins of Agnes’s intersexual status make it easy to overlook the fact that the primary analytical focus of his study is the phenomenon of “passing” in a status that is normally ascribed. To obtain the rights “normally” attached to a sex status is, for persons of intersexed status, an “enduring practical task” and “achievement” (Garfinkel 1967: 118). For intersexed persons such as Agnes, passing refers to the “socially structured conditions” within which “the work of achieving and making secure her rights to live as a normal, natural female” occurs. A characteristic feature of this work is the need to continually guard against “the possibility of detection and ruin” (Garfinkel 1967: 118, 137).

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To shed light on the complexities of Agnes’s passing, Garfinkel considers her actions first in game-theoretic terms, noting the respects in which this model can and cannot adequately characterize the interactional work of passing. He then draws on Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Evey d a y L.ife (citing the 1956 Edinburgh edition of that work, not the more widely ckculated 1959 Anchor edition) to consider how “the phenomena of Agnes’ passing are amenable to Goffman’s descriptions of the work of managing impressions in social establishments” (1967: 165). Goffman on impression management, Garfinkel is quick to note, is only superficially amenable to Agnes’s practices. Before examining Garfinkel’s reasons for this lack of fit, it is worth noting that a more obvious Goffman source might have been provided by Stigma, published some four years earlier. That book’s long second chapter, “Information Control and Personal Identity,” sets out a wealth of concepts and considerations precisely attuned to the analysis of someone in the situation of Agnes and includes a section entitled “Passing” (Goffman 1963: 73-91).9 Garfinkel’s use of normals, as a contrast term to distinguish a social type working with a different interpretive schema than that employed by Agnes, also seems to be presaged by Goffman in this book (those with a stigma have “an undesired difference from what we had anticipated,” whereas normals are “we and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue” (Goffman 1963: 5). For Garfinkel, Goffman’s impression management thesis yields an incomplete analysis of Agnes’s passing as a woman. While impression management is helpful in identlfying the “devices”Agnes employs to pass, it also obscures their proper place in her attempts to master her practical circumstances. Goffman’s analyses abstract out the dimension of inner time (subjective senses of remembrance, anticipation, etc.) and only effectively work in those situations that have a formal episodic structure. In other types of situations, Goffman’s analyses are kept on the road by “the exercise of theoretical ingenuity,” arbitrary theoretical choices and “the frantic use of metaphor” (Garfinkel 1967: 167). Garfinkel summarizes these sociological sleights of the hand by noting that, in Goffmanesque terms, Agnes passed. But Garfinkel asserts that Agnes did more: “The active mode is needed: she is passing” (1967: 167). Agnes’s passing devices included the use of euphemisms, withholding information, the use of prospective mental maps of the alternatives open to her, a detailed awareness of the expectancies of a wide range of everyday situations and the contingencies to which they are vulnerable, a fastidiousness about Garfinkel’s note-taking practices, and the deployment of procedures to cope with the possibility of being misunderstood. These devices are very much part of Agnes’s practical circumstances, mobilized as the occasion required. The nature of these practical circumstances is that they are encountered as a “texture of relevances.”

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It might seem that Agnes is a true Goffmanian manipulator of impressions, Garfinkel suggests, but this is so only if her passing devices are conceived apart from the practical circumstances in which they are embedded and mobilized. If Agnes acts in the manner of a calculating Goffmanian actor, it is because trust cannot be routinized in her everyday dealings in the way that trust is a routine condition of the dealings of normals. As with game theory, impression management is a sociological notion that for Garfinkel does not adequately cover the details of Agnes’s passing practices. Garfinkel introduces, first, game theory, then Goffman on impression management in order to explore what they might illuminate about Agnes’s practices. His analytical strategy is then to show that there is a kind of phenomenological residue that cannot be accommodated by these conceptualizations, that aspects of Agnes’s passing cannot be well understood if game theory and impression management are our only interpretive guides. While the language of refutation might seem appropriate to describe this strategy (a debunking or rebuttal of Goffman), Garfinkel’s overall aim is to show that there is much in Agnes’s coming to terms with her practical circumstances that is open, indeterminate, improvised, and lacking in a clearly formulated goal (Garfinkel 1967: 184-85). The actions of Agnes cannot be accommodated by theoretical notions of “bounded episodes or stable ‘games”’(Lynch and Bogen 1991: 275). In this respect, the function of Goffman in Garfinkel’s study of Agnes is akin to that of the breaching experiments described earlier in his book, namely to indicate the existence of a domain of members’ methods (unseen even by a sociologist such as Goffman) that must be present for orderly interaction (in this case, instances of Agnes’s passing as a woman) to occur. In showing that impression management cannot do justice to the ways that Agnes mobilizes morally freighted situational particulars in the difficult and unrelenting task she faces of accomplishing and displaying her status as a “normal, natural female,” Garfinkel provides yet another demonstration of the need for an ethnomethodological perspective to address those experiential matters apparently overlooked by conventional sociologies such as Goffman’s. Summarizing Garfinkel’s interpretation of Goffman in the study of Agnes, Maynard (1991) argues that there are great differences between games (including impression management) and everyday life. Goffman is found to be remiss on two counts. First, his theory overrationalizes Agnes’s situation, almost assuming that she rehearses interactional episodes in her imagination, anticipating the problems that might arise and how they might be dealt with. Garfinkel’s point is that many of Agnes’s passing devices do not have this character but are rather improvised on the spot with no time out. How practical actions such as Agnes’s passing unfold in real time is not well captured by impression management: Goffman’s “episodic” analyses neglect the temporal dimension of social experience. Second, Goffman adopts a gamelike

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notion of rules when accounting for social actions. Maynard does not go so far as to label the Goffmanian actor as a rule-governed judgmental dope, but insists that the rules of the game are fundamental to how Goffman conceives of social action. Maynard’s gloss of Garfinkel’s study exposes two significant limitations in Goffman’s impression management thesis but does need qualification to talk to each point in turn. First, impression management is a metaphor, not a theory of actor’s consciousness (Messinger, Sampson, and Towne 1962). Impression management is a sufficiently elastic notion that can be read in calculative/manipulative or semiotic ways (Tseelon 1992). For the most part, Garfinkel literally applies impression management to Agnes as a calculative psychological model, whereas Goffman himself seems more concerned with interactional semiotics. The neglect of temporality is a weakness that Goffman owned up to (Verhoeven [19931 2000; see also Sharron 1981), but he also maintained that there is a snapshot quality to how we are lodged in life. Second, Goffman’sviews on rules were not settled and unambiguous. They changed over time, and this is one place where a possible impact of EM on his thinking is evident. Maynard acknowledges Goffman doesn’t have a simple conformity/deviation view of rules. Goffman’s later ideas on rules look strikingly similar to EM’S rule on user conception (see Zimmerman 1971). For example, Garfinkel’s notion that rules do not regulate conduct but rather reflexively constitute that conduct as it unfolds in time (Heritage 1984: 109) is echoed, albeit in atemporal terms, by Goffman’sobservation that “a rule tends to make possible a meaningful set of non-adherences, only one of which is an mfraction, the others being functions made possible by our capacity to discriminate (and trust others to discriminate) among types of non-adherence” (Goffman 1971: 61, n. 54, see also Manning 1992: 72-93). While this understanding of rule use may not have been explicitly present in Goffman’s earlier work, its later appearance points to a possible influence of ethnomethodological reasoning on his basic analytic conceptions. Cicourel on Goffman

Aside from Garfinkel, the other early ethnomethodological critic of Goffman was Aaron V. Cicourel, whose acquaintance with Goffman’s work also goes back to the 1950s. Reading Cicourel’s relevant work over the course of a decade and a half, we find a progressive disenchantment with Goffman’s analyses. In 1958, Cicourel published a paper applying Goffman on regions and region behavior to the phenomenon of organizational leadership. In it Cicourel proposes that Goffman’s notions of front and back region can be used to refine conventional conceptions of formal and informal organization. Cicourel’s paper must be one of the very first attempts to apply and test Goffmanian concepts in the way outlined in the preface to 7%ePresentation

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of Self(where Goffman refers to the framework he provides as “a guide worth testing in case-studies of institutional social life” [1959: xiil). The paper is based on Cicourel’s Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation of 1957, a study of the Finger Lake Senior Citizens, a pseudonym for a recreational organization for older persons in upstate New York. Foreshadowing the later tone of his criticism of Goffman, Cicourel dryly notes that he does not “indicate the necessary methodological rules for implementing his framework” (1958: 55). Goffman next figures in Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964). There is a passing favorable comparison of Goffman with Schutz (Cicourel 1964: 60). In general, the Cicourel of 1964 sees Goffman, along with Schutz and Garfinkel, as providing some of the resources needed to remedy the faults in the practice of sociological method described in his book. In 1968, in The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice, Cicourel provided a general EM-informed critique of how sociological data are obtained and propositions verified. Goffman does not figure in this book, but Cicourel’s discussion of theorizing that is categorized as microtheories using impressionistic data (“processual theorists”) comes close to Goffman’s position (1968: 12-13). The principal problem with this category of work is the fusion of actor’s and observer’s perspectives that makes it difficult to disentangle “the actor’s point of view, his vocabulary, how he assigns meaning to his environment, and the observer’s procedural rules for accomplishing his research and analysis of these matters” (1968:12). Cicourel’s alternative seeks the ethnographic explication of the tacit knowledge and background expectancies that figure in the sociological rendering of the situations under investigation. By 1972, Cicourel was prepared to direct this order of criticism to Goffman by name. Some of the arguments first advanced in Method and Measurement in Sociology are brought to bear on Goffman in Cicourel’s 1972 paper on status and role. Once again there is a puzzling choice of Goffman text as target. Just as Garfinkel overlooked the more obvious choice of Stigma in his analysis of Agnes, so, too, Cicourel draws on The Presentation of Selfrather than the more pertinent essay, “Role Distance” (1961b: 83-152), to interrogate Goffman’s notions of status and role. In fact, Cicourel makes only selected reference to three quotations from the Introduction of 7he Presentation of SeE his real target is something more general: “Goffman’swork,” “Goffman’s perspective”-that is, Goffman’s entire sociological approach. Cicourel acknowledges the substantive appeal of Goffman’s approach and his considerable capacity to convey the impression of knowing how things seem to the insider on the spot (“Goffman’s descriptions . . . convey the idea of a fully informed third party who has intimate knowledge of social exchanges” [1972: 2411). But this observational and analytical virtuosity disguises the differences between the actor’s and the observer’s perspectives by conflating them in Goffman’s conceptual scheme. It follows that “all of Goffman‘s descriptive

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statements are prematurely coded-that is, interpreted by the observer, infused with substance that must be taken for granted, and subsumed under abstract categories without telling the reader how all of this was recognized and accomplished (1972: 241). Since Goffman does not make his own methodological strategies an object of inquiry, the reader is left to “fill in” that which is unsaid from the reader’s own stock of commonsense knowledge of AngloAmerican society. For Cicourel, Goffman’s silence about his own and his actors’ interpretive and inferential procedures confuse (in Kaplan’s 1964 distinction) the actor’s “logic-in-use”and the analyst’s “reconstructed logic.” Cicourel’s critique, then, is primarily methodological in the sense of querying the evidential basis for Goffman’s claims. Indeed, on the subject of social role, the topic of his paper, Cicourel ends rather positively: More than most sociologists, he says, Goffman identifies “its construction by the actor over the course of interaction” (1972: 243). Methodology was never a strong point of Goffman’s sociology, and he did have occasion to warn about the risks of “methodological self-consciousness that is full, immediate, and persistent” in blocking rather than contributing to sociological inquiry (Goffman 1974: 12). Nevertheless, Cicourel’s arguments seem to boil down to two.First is the identification of an area of sense-making activity that Goffman’s formulations overlook. In a phrase, Goffman’s methods emphasize the socially symbolic rather than the subjectively meaningful aspects of interaction. There is something “underneath” the level of social reality at which Goffmanian analysis is pitched that is amenable to ethnomethodological investigation. Cicourel’s argument works as a critique of The Presentation of Self but looks altogether less convincing as criticism of Goffman’s later work such as Frame Analysis. One moral for commentators we might derive from this is to exercise care in the use of the category “Goffman’s Sociology”-it’s not all of a piece. The second argument concerns the questionable grounding of Goffman’s assertions in reliable data. While acknowledging Goffman as a gifted observer, Cicourel shows how his observations and analyses are not straightforwardly secured by the excerpts from novels, reminiscences, and magazine and newspaper clippings that are so readily run together with more conventional social scientific sources. Goffman’s questionable use of evidence, a common criticism from sociologists of positivist orientation, was also to figure as a complaint from EM quarters. Yet, Cicourel does seem unduly optimistic about the prospects for making visible background expectancies, especially in an ethnographic work such as The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. This is not to say that the effort at exposing background expectancies is not worthwhile, just simply to make the Goffmanian point that listing constitutive rules (Goffman 1974: 6 ) is an “openended game” (see Goffman’s comments on presuppositions in “Felicity’s Condition” [1983a]).

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The shortcomings of Goffman’s approach that Garfinkel and Cicourel identlfy were to become the basis of more sustained and refined criticism from ethnomethodology. From Garfinkel’s misgivings about the distortions of the participant’s point of view by Goffman’s dramaturgy, ethnomethodologists developed a critique of Goffman’s use of metaphor and irony that seemed to threaten the phenomenological intactness of the social world, and in particular its temporal and improvisational qualities. Cicourel’s writings inspired a more detailed appraisal of issues of data and method in Goffman’s analyses. Subsequent EM critiques of Goffman-which intensified following his death in 1782-were built on the foundational appraisals of Garfinkel and Cicourel.

OPPOSITIONAL READINGS Oppositional readings of Goffman have tended to emanate from EM’S most successful empirical field, conversation analysis. It is not difficult to understand why: CA represents a successful interaction sociology built on very different premises to Goffman’s own approach. In particular, it has capitalized on the ease and availability of tape-recording technology to develop its thoroughly data-driven analyses of interactional conduct. The founder of CA, Harvey Sacks (1735-1975), expressed no interest in critical engagement with Goffman. More than a decade after Sacks’s premature death, Schegloff (1988) presented a critique of Goffman in which he claimed to speak in part in Sacks’s name. These more openly adversarial and oppositional readings sought to “correct”Goffman, even as they (almost uniformly) acknowledged his brilliance as an observer, analyst, and “habilitator” (1788: 70) of the interaction order as a field of study. Irony, Phenomenological Intactness, and the Participant’s Point of View

Wes Sharrock (1777) argues that there are deep and irreconcilable differences between the projects of Goffman and ethnomethodology. Acknowledging that in a number of respects Goffman was without equal, Sharrock goes on to pinpoint his Achilles heel: the scant attention that Goffman pays to fundamental questions concerning the procedural bases of his own investigations. Goffman was always a better practitioner of his art than a reflective contemplator of his methodology and analytic presuppositions. The price apparently paid by Goffman for his extraordinarily perspicuous analyses of interaction was insufficient self-reflection on the conduct of his own inquiries. In consequence, Sharrock suggests, the theoretically and methodologically radical potential of Goffman’s sociology was lost. With particular

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reference to Frame Analysis-Goffman’s endeavor to provide a kind of phenomenological regrounding of his project-Sharrock shows how Goffman trades on some quite conventional sociological assumptions that reproduce dualisms (individual/society, social interaction/social structure) that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology sought to escape. Sharrock makes good his argument by means of an examination of Goffman’s reasoning about “the definition of the situation,” showing how it leads to an unproductive choice between an omnipotent actor who can act as he or she pleases or an omniscient observer who always knows better than the member of society. A more realistic portrait of the definition of the situation, Sharrock contends, is to be found in Schutz’s remarks about the “world known of daily life” as apprehended from within the “natural attitude.” Ethnomethodological inquiries are designed to place Schutz’s analytical position on an empirical footing. Sharrock shows how they illuminate aspects of the world of daily life that are less than fully explicated in Goffman’s frame analysis. Ethnomethodological inquiries show in detail how “commonplace affairs are accomplished, how they are, as successions of constituent activities, built up into the accomplished sequence” (Sharrock 1999: 131). Goffman’s preoccupation with seeing the world of daily life as instantiating features of the interaction order precludes appropriate attention being given “just what is said and done, just how these things are said and done” (1999: 31). For Sharrock, Goffman’s work is a “microsociology” thoroughly consonant with conventional sociological assumptions, a specialist field compatible with existing theoretical and methodological orthodoxies. The idea that there are yet more fundamental social realities underpinning Goffman’s analyses and awaiting sociological investigation is taken further in Rod Watson’s (1999) ethnomethodological deconstruction of Goffman’s use of illustrative materials. Watson draws attention to two characteristic features of Goffman’s discursive technique: the procedure of first presenting concepts that are then illustrated by selected examples, and the deployment of metaphor to render visible the mundane objects of daily life by means of Burkean “perspective by incongruity.” By this means, Goffman provides his readers with an “instructed reading” of his illustrations. But this violates society members’ endogenous understandings of the phenomena so redescribed. Goffman’s discursive technique is powerfully assisted by his artful use of metaphorical devices that prompt a “look again” response from readers. Watson shows how Goffman’s discursive practices are themselves amenable to sociological analysis. Garfinkel (the documentary method of interpretation) and Sacks (membership categorization devices) provide apt analytical resources that demonstrate in detail just how Goffman succeeds in instructing his readers to read the illustrations cited his way, to accomplish not sociological description so much as sociological redescription.

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One implication of Watson’s position, reinforcing a point of Sharrocks, is that Goffman’s discursive techniques leave certain foundational issues of sense makmg untouched. The ordinary methods persons use to make sense of the world of daily life are made ironic (Watson 1998) and downgraded when compared to Goffman’s analytic characterization (exposing its dramaturgical function, etc.). While Watson’s papers cast new light on the sometimes-competitive character of relations between ethnomethodology and Goffman’s sociology, his analysis can be seen not so much as a complaint about what Goffman is not as an interrogation about what is to count as “data” and “empirical analysis” in interaction studies.1°

Issues of Data and Method As noted, Goffman’s Achilles’ heel concerns issues of data and method, and sociologists of varied persuasions have criticized his apparent absence of explicit method. In interaction studies, CA has very fully described this line of criticism of Goffman. David T. Helm (1982) gives a cogent analysis of these shortcomings of Goffman in his review of Forms of Talk. Nowhere does Goffman present transcriptions of taped conversational data, preferring instead to rely on ethnographic observations or invented examples. This practice allows Goffman to substantiate his analytical points but goes no further: Without transcribed data of actual conversational fragments, he cannot offer his readers the opportunity to corroborate or disconfirm his analytic claims. While Goffman’s method may generate further empirical research, such research would have to test the possibilities he sketches with reference to conversational actualities found in transcribed data. It would also need to formalize the “preliminary or intuitive comments” made about his observations (Helm 1982: 156). Lacking reference to actual conversational data, Goffman’s illustrations have a “just so” quality. As Rod Watson puts it, Goffman’s empirical materials “seem to be designed to deliver just the analytic point Goffman wishes to make: no more and no less” (1983: 105). For Helm and Watson, the most successful essay in Forms of Talk is “Radio Talk” (1981a: 197-330), practically Goffman’s last piece of substantive analysis. Based on transcriptions of radio ‘‘bloopers,’’it offers readers the chance to see how Goffman’s analytic points relate to faults in DJ talk. While Goffman was a strong advocate of naturalistic observation (e.g., preface to Goffman 1971; Goffman 1989), in practice his work looks little like the factually detailed accounts we expect from ethnographers. Schegloff elaborates this line of criticism, also finding Goffman’s analysis of talk to be insufficiently data driven. Schegloff (1988: 101) shows how Goffman’s “sociology by epitome” creates the illusion of a densely empirical approach without actually providing its substance. It works by mobilizing the reader’s

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experience and mind to supply the missing detail in the scene that Goffman has artfully sketched in a sentence or two. Real empirical detail is found only in the reader’s imagination, not on the pages of Goffman’s books and articles. Schegloff powerfully presents CA’s insistence on the transcribed record of talk-in-interaction as a significant advance over Goffman’s use of “domesticated” intuitions and recollections. In general, these arguments are difficult to dissent from. Schegloff (1988: 104) notes that Goffman was reputed to have, in private, “endorsed recording as now the way to work.” In public, however, Goffman had considered the utility of tape recording in his 1953 dissertation, only dismissing it on grounds of practicality; this was well before the age of the cassette recorder. The observational rhetoric of CA should not be overplayed, however. All observations rest on presuppositions of some kind (Manning 1989: 375), and the system of transcription employed in CA is devised precisely to highlight aspects of sequential organization (see Edwards and Lampert 1993). Transcribed data on their own will not lead the sociologist to a CA type of analysis; these data can support a range of approaches to talk and discourse. Furthermore, Goffman advanced his claims tentatively and was always keenly aware of the descriptive inadequacies (asking, at one point, “tobe accused of laconicity, not morality” [1971: mid) of his accounts of other people’s points of view. These considerations underline the very different ways in which Goffman and EM chose to prosecute their projects. Goffman’s was always a conceptdriven, not data-driven, enterprise. To complain that Goffman is somehow descriptively inadequate is to miss his point that one way of building a sociological subfield is by conceptually charting its landmarks.l 1 For example, Goffman states at the beginning of Forms of Talk that “none of the concepts elaborated [herel may have a future” (1981a: l), recognizing that his primary role was as a tentative conceptual provisioner (see Smith 1994: 370-77 for a discussion of concept formation and the knowledge claims that can be advanced for Goffman’s concepts and conceptual frameworks). In the role of conceptual provisioner, even invented or fictitious examples have a valid role to play. Simmel understood this (see Simmel 1950: 88-89, n. l), and so did Goffman. To exemplfy a sociological concept, an illustration needs to be possible and plausible, and the reader’s own common sense knowledge will figure in the achievement of this possibility and plausibility. (Equally, the reader may not find the example a telling illustration of a concept: a situation that Cioffi [1971: 1301 describes as “I lose if you say I have lost.”) However, the adequacy of fictitious examples is strictly limited to the exploratory context of identfying the concept’s properties, staking out new social objects for sociological inquiry. Beyond that initial exploratory context (i.e., in any systematic and empirically oriented sociology of talk), invented and fictitious examples have serious limitations, as CA critics rightly contend. Fictitious examples are “responsive to our demands-which are not for facts but for typ-

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ifications” (Goffman 1974: 14). Goffman is generally careful in his writings not to step beyond the exploratory context into a context of justification where a demand for actualities and not possibilities would become imperative. This perhaps represents another sense in which Goffman was rare in understanding how humility could be used as a weapon of attack (Collins 1988: 41). When he ventured beyond that threshold, as when he dissented from what he took to be CA precepts in the analysis of talk, he attracted sustained criticism. CA, System, and Ritual Constraints

These criticisms were most extensively stated by Schegloff (1988). They focus o n “Replies and Responses” (Goffman 1981a: 5-77), the essay in which Goffman’s misgivings about conversation analysis come closest to the surface. It is a frustrating work to read; frequently one is left with the sense that Goffman never quite spells out the real source of his unease. Goffman’s misgivings include the following: Talk’s “natural home” (Williams 1988) is the encounter-there’s nothing primordial about “conversation” as such. Talk is just one thing that goes on in focused interaction; it is the conjoint conduct that lodges participants into a shared, intersubjective world. Talk is coordinated with other forms of conduct in many instances of focused interaction (think of dancing a pas de deux, showing someone how to change an engine’s oil, or putting one’s goods through a supermarket checkout). CA presents too deterministic a view of talks possibilities, failing to do justice, in Goffman’s view, to the openness and flexibility of conversationit’s a fire that “can burn anythmg” and “the box that conversation stuffs us into is Pandora’s”(Goffman 1981a: 38, 74). CA neglects the significance of the ritual dimension of the interaction order-the way talks organization is unremittingly responsive to the necessity for interactants to be alive to the feelings of others, the way interaction is shaped by these “social acceptability”concerns. Goffman claims, contentiously, that system requirements approximate to the sequential considerations that CA holds to be determinative of talks patterning. Goffman says this view is remiss in failing to allow analytical space for the ritual requirements of interactants who are not just conversationalists but moral agents capable of orienting to norms of proper conduct (including, importantly, norms of self-respect and regard for others). So talk is a key interactional element out of w h c h selves are constructed. CA makes much of turns at talk; Goffman suggests that moves (which can occur within turns at talk or across two or more turns) are more precise analytical units for the analysis of conversational interaction.

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Schegloffs (1988) monumental reply takes extended issue with many of these claims. He shows how Goffman misconstrues the detail and scope of CA claims about turn taking (e.g., over their determinativeness) and the adjacency relationship. He argues that Goffman’s valorization of ritual over sequential consideration represents a retreat from the properly sociological study of the syntax of interaction (“moments and their men”) into a psychology of the self. In Goffman, the expressive is given more attention than the instrumental. Schegloff makes good his claims by counterposing his own analysis of a real example that bears close resemblance to an invented one of Goffman’s. In this way Schegloff seeks to show that Goffman was analytically muddled and empirically mistaken. In short, he presents powerful arguments showing why Goffman is a poor conversation analyst. Whether Goffman’s interest in talk’s forms might be motivated by other considerations effectively becomes a matter for more ecumenical approaches to interaction analysis.

Finding Complementarity There is a common perception by many sociologists, especially those outside the traditions of EM and symbolic interactionism (SI), that Goffman and ethnomethodology share very many fundamental views and presuppositions about the nature of social life and its investigation. In this section, I wish to consider those readings that identlfy points of confluence and complementarity between Goffman and EM. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, points of convergence have been identified by Martin Malone (1997). For Malone, it is Goffman and CA that provide the most promising leads for the adequate theorization and empirical investigation of the matters that most concerned G. H. Mead: language and self. Malone’s studies show how CA methods can be linked to Goffman’s concepts, providing a basis for tracing the interactional complexity of the work through which identity is accomplished. Malone has no difficulty in demonstrating how such Goffmanian concerns as self-presentation, character contests, and footing are evident in features of the sequential organization of talk. Perhaps the most cogent proponent of affinity and complementarity from an EM direction is Anne Warfield Rawls (1987, 1989a, 1989b). Rawls (1987) argues that Goffman’s principal contribution to sociological theory is to have developed “the idea of an interaction order suigeneris which derives its order from constraints imposed by the needs of the presentational self rather than the social structure” (Rawls 1987: 136). She claims that Goffman is not merely a shrewd sociological observer of interaction. His notion of the interaction order offers a general understanding of social organization that has important implications for current conceptions of the relations between agency and structure and micro- and macrolevels of analysis. Rawls locates

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the Goffmanian source of “primary moral constraint on the organization of action” (Rawls 1987: 139) in the ritual character of the self as a deity figure worthy of respect that is also bound to interaction through involvement obligations. Rawls (1987: 137, 148) proposes that there are many similarities between Goffman’s notion of the interaction order and the conception of a local production order found in Garfinkel and Sacks. Out of this complementarity, Rawls fashions new solutions to how best to conceive the relations of micro and macro, the interactional and the institutional. However, Rawls sometimes finds Goffman to be in need of ethnomethodological remedy. Garfinkel and Sacks offer a more consistent view of language and meaning than does Goffman. But she also recognizes the irreducibility of self to Goffman’s formulations. In her view, interaction rituals preserve selves, not encounters (1987: 144-45). Rawls insists throughout that there is much common ground and compatibility between the basic positions of Goffman and Garfinkel and Sacks (see also Rawls 1989a, 1989b). On this last point, it is interesting to contrast Schegloffs outlawing of concerns with self as nonsociological with Goffman’s own less sectarian position. Goffman’s many analyses of the self are driven by a consistent social constructionism that is far from psychological in intent. As he says at the end of Frame Analysis, “strips of activity, including the figures which people them, must be treated as a single problem for analysis” (1974: 564). Goffman does not wish to banish the self to another discipline; rather, he endeavors to show how it can be accommodated within sociological analysis. The point is that the concept of the ritual self allows self to be inserted into an analysis of talk (Manning 1989: 369, 374; Rawls 1987). For Goffman, though apparently not for Schegloff s version of CA, the self is a significant sociological object. The notion that Goffman’s interaction analysis has now been eclipsed by EMKA has been challenged by Manning (19891, who makes a case for dialogue between the two positions. Manning suggests that Schegloff takes points of difference as points of error. It is true that Goffman always found the analysis of ritual aspects of interaction more interesting (1989: 374) than system constraints, but that doesn’t mean CA is better than Goffman or that Goffman is somehow flawed. Rather than dismiss the ritual and assert that the sequential is somehow always primordial, it is possible to show how ritual and sequential considerations interpenetrate each other (e.g., Lerner 1996). Again, we come back to an appreciation that Goffman may have been able to depend on his sharp eye and evocative prose to make sociological discoveries, but the further analysis of the interaction order requires the use of more systematic investigative procedures, including those advocated by CA. That conclusion is not necessarily a shortcoming of Goffman’s own project but is a caution to those who seek to apply Goffman. Any attempt to make a judicious comparison of CA and Goffman is bound to run into difficulties for.

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as Silverman notes, “CA offers us rigor and order,” while “Goffman provides metaphor and compelling example” (1985: 133). Whether the analysis of talk can ever be fully purged of ritual considerations remains an open question, but the evidence from another branch of sociolinguistics suggest otherwise (Brown and Levinson 1987; Holtgraves 1992).

MERGERS OF GOFFMAN WITH EM: FACE-WORK AND FOOTING In the previous section, some theoretical arguments for peaceful coexistence between EM and Goffman’s sociology were made. This section reviews a selection of studies that demonstrate the empirical utility of working with EM and Goffman, rather than insisting that they are incommensurable positions. The use of transcribed excerpts of recorded instances of naturally occurring conversation is a feature of the methods of many styles of social scientific investigation (not just CA) that take talk as their data. But within sociology, the adoption of CA methods of investigation often goes hand-in-hand with an analytical concern with sequential organization. EM has been attracted to two areas of Goffman’s sociology: face-work and footing. Linell and Bredmar (1996) and Bredmar and Linell (1999) examine a corpus of data featuring the talk of expectant mothers and midwives. While these studies show concern for the sequential properties of the talk (e.g., considering the properties of symptom-exploring sequences; Bredmar and Linell 1999: 241-48), they do not confine their attention to these properties. Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to the content of their data, they examine the methods whereby sensitive topics get dealt with, and the procedures through which normality is “reconfirmed” in these encounters. The moral dimension of Goffman’s (e.g., 1967) sociology, and in particular his analysis of face-work that shows how norms are acquired and sustained in interaction, is an acknowledged resource. Topical sensitivity and the reconfirmation of normality are shown to be significant aspects of face-work in midwifeexpectant mother talk. Face has also been proposed as a significant feature of preference organization (e.g., Brown and Levinson 1987: 38-41). In a fascinating study of how a next speaker completes the current speaker’s turn at talk, Lerner (1996) uses transcribed data to show the ways in which face can be found in the preference structures of conversation. Such “anticipatory completions” succeed in shaping an emerging dispreferred action into a preferred one. Lerner’s detailed analysis shows how the organization of talk-in-interaction furnishes the resources for understanding the ways in which face-threats and face-work are grounded in ordinary interactional practices. Rather than dismissing concerns with face as social psychological and related to individual desires, Lerner demonstrates how CA’s concern with action sequences can provide thoroughly social analyses of

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face-work that are consistent with Goffman’s original formulation (see especially Goffman 1967: 44-45). Goffman’s (1981a: 124-59) late concept of “footing”develops some of his earlier concerns with the nature of involvement and participation (notably in “Role Distance” [Goffman 196lb: 83-1521) and the varying stances or alignments that people can take to what it is they are saying and doing. For Goffman, it is a mistake to conceive of interaction in a simple speaker-hearer dyadic model. Speakers may take varying footings in regard to their own talk. They may employ one or more “production formats” (animator, author, principal). Goffman’s own studies of lecturing (1981a: 173-86) and radio announcing (1981a: 280-314) concentrate on the management of shifts in footing by soliloquizing speakers. Clayman (1992), in his study of news interview discourse, considers footing changes in the more interactive situation of the televised news interview. He reviews a range of techniques that interviewers use to shlft their footing in order to offer controversial points of view that will ensure that a “lively” debate results, while their own neutral position is preserved. Clayman turns attention away from Goffman’s delineation of specific footings toward how these footings are achieved. So, for example, news interviewers go out of their way to avoid affiliating with or disaffiliating from the statements they report by carefully nominating a “principal” (e.g., “Some people might think or “The president stated . . . ”) who is consistently referred to across a turn. In this way, any implication of “authorship” by the interviewer is disavowed. Goffman’s ideas are used to provide a conceptual infrastructure that is extended by CA methods and focused around an EM problematic (how interviewers secure their “neutrality”). A similar general argument is offered by Zimmerman (1989): Goffman alerts us to the phenomenon of changes in footing but fails to indicate how it is interactionally accomplished. Zimmerman draws attention to the other side of Goffman’s concept of footing, “participation framework,” which Goffman divides into addressed or unaddressed hearership and a ratified o r unratified hearership. Using calls to an emergency services department, Zimmerman argues that transcribed data are required if we are to understand how any particular footing is established or altered interactionally. West (1996) and West and Zimmerman (1977) make effective use of Goffman’s (1979: 4-5) suggestions about the “parent-child complex” in their studies of the gendered basis of interruptions in conversation. Once again, what is offered is an interactional instantiation and analysis of some general comments from Goffman who West (1996: 359) acknowledges provided the “conceptual grounding” for this and related work on the initiation of conversational topic shlft. What these and other studies (e.g., Halkowski 1990; Rodriguez and Ryave 1995) amply show is that while Goffman is helpful in identlfying a phenomenon of interest, his work can be profitably developed by CA techniques in

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order to highlight its processual, accomplished, interactional character. In a way, these studies particularize the general criticism that Goffman neglects social process and presents a static, snapshot picture of social life (Blumer 1972; Sharron 1981). They also highlight Goffman’s inattention to questions of how his ideas can be applied empirically even as they underscore his conceptual virtuosity. At the same time, these studies show just how readily Goffmanian concepts sit with CA’s investigative stance. There may be principled CA objections to Goffman’s own work, but allying it to CA methods often yields useful empirical findings. CA looks very much like a very successful sociology of the interaction order.I2

ASSESSING T H E DEBATE Trying to compare EM and Goffman involves two moving targets. EM is still a growing and diversifying enterprise. While there is a relatively stable core to Goffman’s sociology, his thought evolved over the three decades of his academic productivity. This does not make the comparison futile (because instructive things can be learned from the attempt) though it does make it difficult and in some respects an always-unfinished business. I have tried to avoid some of these difficulties by inspecting the terms of the debate rather than concentrating on programmatic statements or comparing “perspectives.” While it remains hazardous to offer any overall characterization, an attempt to summarize the principal themes and critical points of contention follows. In seeking to extract the leading features of the debate, my discussion has tended to overlook the way in which Goffman-hostile and Goffmansympathetic responses are often present in the same reading. Ethnomethodologists have been among Goffman’s sharpest critics but they can also be counted among his most appreciative commentators. For example, Schegloff (1988: 90) has noted that Goffman did not so much rehabilitate the interaction order as a field of study as “habilitate” it. Sharrock (1999: 118) states that “Goffman was a sociologist of the first rank, and in many respects his studies are simply unmatched.” An important task for critical commentary, as Watson (1983, 1999) has argued, is to weave a path between valediction and dismissive criticism to try to identify the “right analytic level” to address Goffman’s sociology properly. A common view within ethnomethodology is to regard Goffman as a “forerunner”(Attewell 1974) of ethnomethodology, staking out topics for investigation that could be more adequately and thoroughly addressed by ethnomethodological means. In this frame, Goffman is often seen as the author of a body of work that is now superceded by developments in EM and CA. This certainly seems to be a clear implication of the oppositional reading

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presented earlier. The arguments and studies reviewed in subsequent sections, however, suggest that while the oppositional reading sits well with some well-developed secessionist tendencies in EM, other conceptions of the relationship between the two can be offered. There is a degree of arbitrariness in the selection of interpretive strategy. On the question of affinities and convergences between EM and Goffman, it is plain that “one can play the resemblances up or down” (Sharrock 1999: 133). In the adversarial cultures of academia, disagreements (not agreements, as in everyday conversation) are the type of assessments that are preferred. Thus, what attracts attention are remarks like “Goffmanville is a ghost town: only tourists go there” (Watson 1992: 13). This severe comment points to the paucity of unambiguously Goffman-influenced interaction studies. The comment tends to read Goffman’s legacy in the empirical terms favored by EM and CA. As noted earlier, Goffman’s legacy is primarily conceptual. He was not (to continue with the gold-mining imagery Watson adverts to) seeking to found a township as much as to d u e n c e the ways prospectors might look. This helps to explain his attractiveness to readers and the popularity of his sociology in fields like organizations, deviance, and medical sociology, and it also sheds light on the difficulty of developing his ideas in interaction studies. Goffman rarely takes us very far beyond conceptual prologues and statements of exploratory intent.13 He does not tell us how to pan for gold. For features of the interaction order to come to be uncovered in a systematic way, methodological guidance is needed, and Goffman had little to say beyond recommendations about standing close to one’s data and a general endorsement of “naturalistic inquiry” (Goffman 196la, 1971, 1989). Goffman did not need them because of his extraordinary observational capabilities (he was, as John Lofland [19841 notes, an incessant observation machine) and also because of the avowedly modest scope of his sociology, which sought little more than a few conceptual distinctions (Goffman 198lb). Thus, the source of a major difficulty that EM revealed was that it was possible to do more than just chart the virgin territory and provide persuasive sketches of some portions of it. It is more than a matter of intuitive cartographer and lodestone being superseded by the theodolite and precise compass. Beyond recommending close observation and conceptual care in the assembly of sociological descriptions, Goffman has precious little to say in methodological terms. Goffman seemed quite unclear about how we might go beyond Goffman. Being Goffman was very different than doing Goffman. Like Simmel, he offered us a cash legacy (Williams 1988; Smith 1994) that could be realized howsoever the recipient chose, which like all legacies of this kind carries risks as well as opportunities. Thus, EM exposes a major shortcoming in Goffman’s sociology: the general absence of adequate methodological guidelines for the empirical

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development of his overall project, the sociology of the interaction order. On many scores, CA in particular nicely complements Goffman’s programmatic statements about the interaction order, filling out its neglect of instrumental activity’* in a cumulative, empirically corroborated manner. EM successfully shows that Goffman’s own practice-which depended so much on his remarkable observational talent-is probably not the most productive way forward for the empirical development of interaction studies. The use of transcribed data has exactly the benefits CA so often states: a record of actual interaction that is reproducible and shareable among a community of interested investigators and which can be subjected to repeated scrutiny. Transcribed data are not just a crutch for a lame imagination; they offer a secure basis for making nonintuitive discoveries about the social patterning of human interaction. But while they may offer the royal road for such discoveries, transcribed data are not the sole method at the disposal of the interaction sociologist: traditional observational methods (e.g., Strong 1979) and collections of fictional instances (e.g., Travers 1998) continue to offer instructive analyses of social interaction. The cautions about the use of irony as a methodological device also need heeding, although here one should distinguish Goffman’s use of irony as a logic of discovery from the uses of Goffman’s concepts in contexts of justification. In the latter, pragmatic, rather than philosophical, considerations seem paramount. Simply to disqualify Goffmanian concepts because of their metaphorical provenance while allowing concepts such as “turn allocation techniques” or “membership categories” seems to underplay the role of metaphorical imagery in natural and social-scientific language use; the difference is one of degree only. There is, as Giddens and others have emphasized, no clear blue water between lay and technical concepts. The relations between the two are subject to slippage. Rather than attempt to distinguish ironic and nonironic stances, it might be better to work with Geertz’s (1983: 57-58) continuum notion of experiencedistant and experience-near concepts. What might EM learn from Goffman? The role of ritual or “face” considerations in social interaction seems indubitable. But Schegloff‘s (1988) elevation of the sequential analysis over ritual (itself an exaggerated inversion of Goffman’s own valorization of ritual over system constraints) is only one possibility. Studies using CA techniques have shown the complex interrelations of the face and sequential elements in interaction (Brown and Levinson 1987; Lerner 1996). What we have here are two extremely important dimensions of interaction, not single factors in which one has to be downplayed at the expense of the other. In any concluding assessment of the debate between Goffman and EM, it is difficult to avoid the singularity of that body of work associated with his name. If we were very broadly to sketch their respective merits, we might

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say that we read Goffman to become directly acquainted with the ideas of a sociologist legendary for his insightfulness. On the other hand, we read Garfinkel to discover more about the ology he invented and the new directions in which EM reorients sociological inquiry. Randall Collins similarly comments that Goffman “is deep,” a writer whose work can be appreciated on various levels, whereas Garfinkel is “difficult”but a “writer whose meanings are on the surface” (1988: 41). The textual Goffman continues to be an arresting sociological object. Goffman’s great gift was to combine an extraordinary observational talent with an unmatched literacy as a sociological writer. His texts have complex qualities that yield fresh understandings upon rereading. These understandings themselves help sharpen his readers’ perceptions of face-to-face dealings. As Dorothy Smith once noted, the “revolutionary character of Goffman’s work” can be appreciated when we consider what went before it: Parsons, Bales, “and the symbolic interactionists who themselves did not know how to ‘look’ as Goffman taught us” (West 1996: 366, n. 13). It is difficult to surmise what ethnomethodology would have been like without Goffman (and like all good counterfactual questions, we can only speculate in answer), but it seems likely that ethnomethodologists will continue to read Goffman for just the same reasons as everyone else.

NOTES 1. This is not to suggest that Goffmdn was incapable of such standard academic formats. In “A Reply to Denzin and Keller” ([1981bl 2000, vol. 4: 79-90), Goffman gives us the single published example of his eristic skills. 2. To a degree, it was compounded by intellectual ambition and a notoriously difficult personality acting in unsympathetic ways. I hesitate to say this, but it does seem to explain some of the passion that continues to animate EM discussions of Goffman’swork 3. In part, this is an aspect of broader academic difficulties in situating Goffman created by the current unavailability to scholars of Goffman’s papers that arises from his wish to keep his life separate from his work (Winkin 1999: 20). This has led scholars to employ more indirect techniques, such as interviewing Goffman’s friends and colleagues (Winkin 1999) or recovering letters from the archives of his correspondents (Jaworski 2000). 4. Harvey Sacks makes his first appearance in a Goffman text, Encounters, in 1961, in a footnote (see Goffman 1961b: 68, n. 68). It is also in Encounters that Garfinkel first appears. Garfinkel’sthen unpublished paper on trust also appears in Encounters (footnoted on page 19 and quoted on page 26). However, Garfinkel’s first mention in a Goffmdn paper, was in 1955, with an untitled, unpublished paper in note 9 of “On Face-work.” 5. Rawls (2002: j9, n. 70) argues that such an interpretation traduces the radical character of Garfinkel’s approach to intelligibility-in contrast to Goffman’s in Frame Analysis that she says remains fundamentally Parsonian.

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6. Granting canonical status to writers like Schutz, Wittgenstein, or even Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gregory Bateson, or William James, is for Goffman “plain bad hero worship” (though Goffman admits to treating Durkheim’s 7he Elementu y Form of Religious Life in just such a way). He despises the tendency to treat the ideas of distinguished theorists as end points rather than as sources of stimulation-to be disagreed with, modified, and developed. Goffman registers his disagreement with styles of analysis that consist “of showing how a current writing departs and falls short of what, say Schutz said, well I don’t think Schutz said enough to inform any particular study sufficiently. That is, it’s just a set of leads, of possibilities . . . [it’s]plain bad hero worship” (Verhoeven [19931 2000, vol. 1: 232). Similarly, Wittgenstein’s writings get “held up as the touchstone for what ought to be done. It seems to me that there is no way that Wittgenstein could know anything about the organization of an occupation, or things like that” (Verhoeven [19931 2000, vol. 1: 232). Here Goffman’s response is a little peremptory; it is almost as if he is suggesting that, because Schutz and Wittgenstein are not sociologists, they cannot offer anything of sociological value. What is missing is any conception of the potential methodological and theoretical import of the ideas of Schutz and Wittgenstein for sociological inquiries where notions of understanding, meaning, social action, and interaction are central. In short, Goffman gives a narrowly empiricist response to the central queries of verstehen sociology. 7. As a student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard in the late 1940s, Garfinkel creatively respecified the problem of order that his mentor made central to analytical sociology by drawing on the phenomenologically inspired work of Alfred Schutz (Heritage 1984). Subsequently, Garfinkel would develop his thinking in Los Angeles, in the burgeoning University of California system from the mid-1950s on. First-generation ethnomethodology can trace its roots to that place and those times. The contrasting “scientific habitus” (Winkin 1999) that Goffman acquired centered on the traditions of the midwestern home of modern academic sociology, the University of Chicago. The interactionist heritage of Chicago sociology was fed by pragmatism, America’s only indigenous philosophical tradition. Goffman was a leading member of the postwar influx of graduate students who helped to define a distinctive approach that was detached but not disenchanted, whose sociological eye was complementary to that of the anthropologist, and which understood the critical function of an ironic sociological stance (Fine 1995; Fine, Manning, and Smith 2000). Goffman also obtained a position at the University of California, a few years after Garfinkel, and at Berkeley, in 1958. The “linguistic turn” in Goffman seems to have developed later, after he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. Goffman was fully cognizant of the early work of Sacks and Schegloff, but now relocated on the East Coast, he chose to graft the sociological approaches of Dell Hymes and William Labov on to his own developing analysis of conversational interaction (see Schiffrin 1994). These features of the biographies of Garfinkel and Goffman are well-enough known. While they do not determine their intellectual output, they nevertheless help to define it. 8. Garfinkel and Goffman may have corresponded as early as 1952 according to James J. Chriss (personal communication, June 2001). My conjecture is that Garfinkel may have been first alerted to Goffman’s ideas by the publication, in 1952, of “On Cooling the Mark Out” that is appreciatively quoted in Garfinkel’s 1956 paper. An indication of face-to-face acquaintanceship is suggested by Garfinkel’s misspelling of

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Goffman’s first name (“Irving”). Garfinkel was also aware of Goffman’s affiliation in 1956 with the “Laboratory for Socioenvirnomental Studies” [sic]of the National Institute of Mental Health. In the Introduction to Studies in Ethnomethodology, Goffman is listed among the “old friends” to whom “debts are o w e d (Garfinkel 1967: xi). 9. Denzin suggests that Garfinkel’s account of passing “surpasses Goffman’s, to which it compares itself implicitly” (Denzin 1990: 207). Travers (1994) observes that the incongruity may be more apparent than real, drawing attention to Goffman’s remark in Stigma that passing and covering involve “a special application of the arts of impression management, the arts, basic in social life, through which the individual exerts strategic control over the image of himself and his products that others glean from him” (Goffman 1963: 130). 10. Lest this be thought too sanitized a version of Watson’s views, it should be noted that a clear incommensurability argument is being run here. Watson (1992) proposes that there is no easy rapprochement possible between ethnomethodological and dramaturgical language games, no appealing reconciliation, no common ground-to suggest otherwise is to be guilty of a “category mistake.” 11. In this respect Goffman seems to share with Parsons and Shils (1951) a belief that a first step toward a scientific sociology is the construction of a categorical system. Running through Goffman’s publications is an often-piecemeal process of development of his concepts (Williams 1988). Unlike Parsons, however, Goffman did not entertain the prospect of sociologists uniting behind his categories as a condition of progress. Rather, progress would be achieved by the sifting and sorting process involved in the empirical testing of his concepts. The test of their utility would be in the field. 12. Of course, CA is not the only way to develop a sociology of the interaction order. Consider the different orientations and contributions of researchers primarily concerned with the close ethnographic examination of face-work (e.g., Katriel 1986; Muntigl and Turnbull 1998; Penman 1990, to mention a tiny fraction of an enormous literature) or remedial interchanges (Owen 1983). 13. The utility for EM of Goffman’s conceptual frameworks is as a link to the concerns of conventional sociology, a link it rarely seeks. Goffman was a conceptual provisioner and maker of frameworks that connect to standard sociological concerns: social relationships, social occasions, careers, and definition of the situation 14. The emphasis on talk as the medium for getting things done socially helps to remedy Goffman’s preoccupation with the expressive at the expense of the instrumental (this is much the same point that Blumer [19721 makes in his critique of Goffman).

REFERENCES Attewell, Paul. 1974. “Ethnomethodology after Garfinkel.” 7heouy and Society 1, no. 2 : 179-210. Blumer, Herbert. 1972. “Action vs. Interaction.” Society 9: 50-53. Bredmar, Margareta, and Per Linell.1999. “Reconfirming Normality: The Constitution of Reassurance in Talks between Midwives and Expectant Mothers.” Pp. 237-70 in Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, ed. S. Sarangi and C. Roberts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cicourel, Aaron V. 1958. “Front and Back of Organizational Leadership: A Case Study.”Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 2: 5458. , 1964. Method and Measurement in Sociology. New York: Free Press. -. 1968. 7he Social Organization of,JuvenileJustice. New York: Wiley. , 1972. “Basic and Normative Rules in the Negotiation of Status and Role.” Pp. 229-58 in Studies in Social Interaction, ed. D. Sudnow. New York: Free Press. Cioffi, Frank. 1971. “Information, Contemplation, and Social Life.” Pp. 105-31 in The Proper Study, vol. 4, by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. London: MacmilIan. Clayman, Steven. 1992. “Achieving Neutrality.” Pp. 16598 in Talk at Work:Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. P. Drew and J. Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Randall. 1988. “Theoretical Continuities in Goffman’s Work.” Pp. 41-63 in Erving Goffman: Ejcploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton. Cambridge: Polity. Coulter, Jeff, ed. 1990. Ethnomethodological Sociology. Cheltenham: Elgar. David, Peter. 1980. “The Reluctant Self-presentation of Erving Goffman.” Times Higher Education Supplement (September 19): 7 . Denzin, Norman K. 1990. “Harold and Agnes: A Feminist Narrative Undoing.” Sociological 8, no. 2: 19S216. Drew, Paul, and Anthony Wootton, eds. 1988a. Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Cambridge: Polity. -. 1988b. “Introduction.” Pp. 1-13 in Erving Gofman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton. Cambridge: Polity. Edwards, Jane A,, and Martin D. Lampert. 1993. Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Fine, Gary Alan, ed. 1995. A Second Chicago School? 7he Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fine, Gary Alan, Philip Manning, and Gregory W.H. Smith. 2000. “Introduction.”Pp. ix-xliv in Erving Goffman vols. 1-4, ed. G. A. Fine and G. W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. “Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists.” Psychiatric Research Reports of the American Psychiatric Association 6: 181-95. -. 1963. “A Conception of and Experiments with ‘Trust’as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions.” Pp. 187-238 in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. 0. J. Harvey. New York: Ronald. -. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving. 1952. “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 15, no. 4: 451-63. _- . 1953. “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. -. 1955. “On Face-work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiatry:Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 18, no. 3: 21531.

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1956. 7be Presentation of Self in Eveyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre. -. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Eveyday Life. New York: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 196lb. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. -. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. -. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Doubleday, Anchor. -. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. .1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. -. 1979. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. .1981a. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. .1981b. “Program Committee Encourages Papers on a Range of Methodole gies.” ASA Footnotes 9, no. 6: 4. -. 1983a. “Felicity’sCondition.” American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 1: 1-53. -. 1983b. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1: 1-17. -. 1989. “On Fieldwork.” Transcribed and ed. L. H. Lofland. Journal of Contempora y Ethnography 18, no. 2: 12532. -. [198ll 2000. “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Pp. 79-90 in Eruing Goffman, vols. 1-4, ed. G. A. Fine and G. W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Halkowski, Timothy. 1990. “Role as an Interactional Device.” Social Problems 37, no. 4: 56477. Have, Paul ten. N.d. ETHNO/CA NEWS website: www.pscw.uva.nl/emca/index.htm. Helm, David T. 1982. “Talks Form: Comments on Goffman’sForms of Talk..”Human Studies 5: 147-57. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity. Hester, Stephen, and David Francis. 2000. “Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and ‘InstitutionalTalk.”’ Text 20, no. 3: 391413. Holtgraves, Thomas. 1992. “The Linguistic Realization of Face Management: Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and CrossCultural Communication.” Social Psychology Quarterly 55, no. 2: 141-59. Hymes, Dell. [19831 2000. “On Erving Goffman.” Pp. 48-59 in Eruing Goffman, vols. 1 4 ,ed. G. A. Fine and G. W. H. Smith. London: Sage. Jaworski, Gary D. 2000. “Erving Goffman: The Reluctant Apprentice.” Symbolic Interaction 23, no. 3: 299308. Kaplan, Abraham. 1964. The Conduct of Znquiy . San Francisco: Chandler. Katriel, Tamar. 1986. Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lerner, Gene. 1996. “Finding ‘Face’in the Preference Structures of Talk-in-Interaction.” Social Psychology Quarterly 59, no. 4: 30521.

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Index

Abelson, Robert, 211n13 Abram, David, 79 action, 31, 38-39, 75, 153, 212n17 action theory, 8, 167 Agnes, 259-63 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 193 alienation, 4, 53, 58-59, 103, 119, 134, 220 “Alienation from Interaction” (Goffman), 20-21, 37 American Journal of Sociology, 43n2, 148, 161n4, 163116 American Sociological Association (ASA), xii, 6, 35, 42, 151, 178, 231, 246, 2491123 American SociologicalReview, xii-xiii, 42 Anderson, Elijah, 118 Anderson, Leon, 86, 105, 118 Archer, Margaret S., 175-76 Archiv f u r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 163119 “TheArrangement between the Sexes” (Goffman), 20, 90 Asylums (Goffman), xv, 5, 9, 18, 23, 30, 44118, 44n13, 72, 74, 76, 101, 108, 111, 115, 117, 152, 157, 169-73, 175, 177, 218

audience segregation, 15 Austin, J. L., 129, 139n4, 139n5 Axelrod, Robert, 199, 210n4 backstage, 2, 36, 119-20, 128-30, 132, 149 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 72 Bales, Robert F., 277 Barnard, Chester I., 189 Bateson, Gregory, 8, 155, 2067, 212n20, 212n22, 278n6 Becker, Howard S., 4, 9, 75-76, 129 Behavior in Public Places (Goffman), 5, 9, 20, 30, 80-81, 172 Bendix, Reinhard, 4 Bennett, Alan, 23 Berger, Bennett M., 6 Berger, Peter L., 72 Berman, Marshall, 8, 35 Big Sister (radio show), 4 Billig, Michael, 66 Birdwhistell, Ray L., 3, 8, 10 Blumer, Herbert, 4, 7, 9, 43n4, 55, 166-67, 169-70, 175, 177-78, 2791114 Blumstein, Philip, 8-9 Boden, Deidre, 2491126 Body Politics (Henley), 106 284

Index Bollas, Christopher, 168 Bordo, Susan, 72 Bott-Spillius, Elizabeth, 169, 178 Bougli., Celestin, 161116 Bourdieu, Pierre, xvii Brahe, Tycho, 62 Branaman, Ann, 17, 45n17, 212n20 Bredmar, Margareta, 272 Brown, J. David, 44n12 Brown, Richard Harvey, 184-85 Burgess, Ernest W., 43n2 Burke, Kenneth, 451117, 182 Burns, Tom, 7, 67111 Butler, Judith, 72, 127, 135-36, 139115 Button, Graham, 247n22 Caillois, Roger, 2131124 Chammah, Albert M., 210n4 Chodorow, Nancy J., 167 Chomsky, Noam, 207, 209, 211nll Chriss, James J., 178112, 278118 Cicourel, Aaron V., 254, 258, 262-65 Cioffi, Frank, 268 Clark, Candace, 103-4 Clayman, Steven, 273 cognitive causal chains (CCC), 205-6 Coleman, Lerita M., 7 F 7 4 Collected Works (Simmel), 161n2 Collins, Randall, 7, 12, 23, 64, 86, 95-98, 212n19, 277 Colomy, Paul, 44n12 7Be Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 130-32 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner), 44n6 “Communication Conduct in an Island Community” (Goffman), 4, 27, 145, 157, 160, 161n2, 189, 210n3, 256 “A Community of Grandmothers” (Hochschild), 76 Comte, Auguste, 147, 220-21 “A Conception of and Experiments with ‘Trust’as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions” (Garfinkel), 277n4 “The Concept of Tragedy and Culture” (Simmel), 156

285

concepts, 12, 1&-17, 22-23, 25, 30-31, 76, 86, 199, 217, 221-25, 228-36, 2 4 M 3 , 24547, 250n28, 2511138, 260, 266, 268, 276, 279n11 Conquergood, Dwight, 135, 137 7%eConstitution of Society (Giddens), 226, 2481110 Contemporay Sociology, 211n15 conversational interaction, 2S29, 32, 256, 269, 278n7 conversation analysis (CA), 1, 170, 225, 235, 248117, 2491124, 255-58, 265, 267-76, 2791112 Cook, Karen S., 86 Cooley, Charles Horton, 75 cooling out, 16, 21, 53, 153 Creelan, Paul, 118 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 186 Damasio, Antonio, 2131124 Daniels, Arlene Kaplan, 44117 Darwin, Charles, 183 Davis, Fred, 4 Davis, Kingsley, 4, 182 Davis, Lennard J., 72 Dawe, Alan, 9 Deegan, Mary Jo, 75 deference, 4, 13, 44n12, 54, 75, 78, 80, 77, 101-3, 107-7, 117, 147, 188 definition of the situation, 76, 103, 108, 132, 147, 177, 205, 266, 279n13 demeanor, 4, 441112, 75, 78, 101, 109, 115, 149, 188 Dennett, Daniel, 211n10 Denzin, Norman K., 155, 2111115, 277n7 Derber, Charles, 108 Derrida, Jacques, xvii, 72, 139114 deviance, w-xvi, 35, 110, 114, 217, 262, 275 Dewey, John, 77, 133, 183 Diawara, Mantha, 137-38 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 144, 147-48, 157 disclaimers, 2, 17, 22, 33, 45-121.See also rhetorical devices Ditton, Jason, 67nl Dixon, 27-28, 451124, 189-70

286

Index

i%e Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim), 219-20, 243, 2501131 division of labor society, 219, 222, 247n2 dramaturgy, 2, 18-19, 45n17, 45n20, 62, 78, 82, 86, 92, 127-30, 133-35, 181-82, 184, 186, 200, 210n7, 212n20, 265 Drew, Paul, 67nl Duneier, Mitchell, 72, 75-76, 78, 80 Durkheim, Emile, xv,xvii, 6-7, 13, 19, 38, 44n5, 45n25, 58, 60, 161116, 1 8 2 4 6 , 188, 190, 210n5, 216-17, 219-23, 226, 231, 24347, 247n2, 247n3, 247n5, 250n31, 250n32, 250n33, 2511135, 251n39, 278n6 Durkheim’s Epistemology (Rawls), 248n8 “Ecological Identity, Emotion Work, and the Caring Self’ (Rogers), 79 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey), 157 Einstein, Albert, 62 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim), 7, 19, 43n3, 46n25, 244, 278n6 Elias, Norbert, 55 Elliott, Anthony, 169 embarrassment, 2, 4, 8, 14, 18, 36-38, 53-54, 57, 65, 67n2, 93-96, 104, 115, 130, 213124 “Embarrassment and Social Organization” (Goffman), 20, 37, 94 Emerson, Joan, 44n7 encounter, 13-16, 18, 36-39, 82, 96, 111, 130, 200, 269, 271-72 Encounters (Goffman), 5, 19, 30-31, 45n17, 200, 277n4 enigma, xii-xvii, 56 epistemological realism, 11-12, 44n5 ethnography, 2, 15, 25-27, 23-31, 75, 118, 128, 137-38, 144, 169-71, 175, 251n35, 263, 267, 272 ethnomethodology (EM), 1, 8, 11, 129, 154, 182, 225, 246, 247n7, 254-59, 261-68, 270, 271-77, 277n2, 278n7, 279n10, 279n13

Eth no methodology’s Progru m (Garfinkel), 248n8 ethology, 2, 8, 23, 45n22, 169. 175-76, 182-83, 186, 199-200, 207 “Exkurs uber das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft moglich?”(Simmel), 156, 159, 161117 face, mi, 13, 20-21, 37-38, 51, 80, 91-94, 97-98, 109, 112, 117, 148-49, 272, 276 face-work, 4,16, 37-38, 53, 75, 111, 128-29, 225, 272, 279n12 fallacy of misplaced abstraction, 221 “The Fallacy of Misplaced Abstraction” (Rawls), 248n8 “Fashion”(Simmel), 146, 161n4 “Felicity’sCondition” (Goffman), xv, 5, 10, 20, 264 feminism, 10, 44n7, 64, 73, 75, 128, 169 Feminist Methods in Social Research (Reinharz), 75 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 90, 107 Fine, Gary Alan, 30, 67n1, 86, 191, 210 flooding out, 2, 16 footing, 53, 65, 270, 272-73 “Footing”(Goffman), 41, 155 Fordor, Jerry, 211nll formal sociology, 16, 45n20. See also forms of sociation forms of sociation, 144, 14647, 150-54, 158-60 Forms of Talk (Goffman), 5, 10, 20, 24, 32, 41-42, 156, 159-60, 191, 224, 229, 245, 2481110, 257, 267-268 Foucault, Michel, xvii, 137, 170 frame, 2, 8, 13-16, 18, 20, 23, 39-40, 53, 78, 129, 155, 159, 197, 203-9, 212n22, 230, 232-35, 246, 250n28 frame analysis, 10, 20, 39, 41, 45n18, 75, 191, 200-202, 205-9, 232, 266 Frame Anu4ysis (Goffman), 5, 10, 20, 22-23, 39-40, 51, 14647, 154-56, 159-60, 197, 204, 210n7, 211n15, 224, 229, 231, 245, 256, 264, 266, 271, 277n5 Frankfurt, Harry G., 80 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 63, 67, 166-69

Index Freudian Repression: Converution Creating the Unconscious (Billig), 66 Friedson, Eliot, 118 frontstage, 2, 36, 119, 128-30, 149 functionalism, 8-9, 22, 44n6, 129, 182-93, 210n5 “Fun in Games” (Goffman), 19, 45117 7he Future of an Illusion (Freud), 63 Galileo, 224 game (theory), 2, 5, 18-20, 38, 45n17, 62, 170, 199, 210n4, 210n7, 212n20, 260-62 Gans, Herbert J., 76 Garcia, Angela, 107 Gardner, Carol Brooks, 10, 45n25, 108, 182 Garfinkel, Harold, xiv, 8-9, 129, 216-18, 221, 223-33, 23542, 244-47, 247111, 247n7, 248118, 248x19, 248n13, 249n14, 2491116, 249n23, 250n26, 250n29, 250n31, 2511135, 251n37, 254-56, 259-63, 265, 271, 277, 277n4, 277n5, 278n7, 278n8 Gassen, Kurt, 163n15 Geertz, Clifford, 58, 6C41, 63, 8M1, 276 gender, 10, 32-33, 63, 65, 73, 80, 86, 88-91, 101-3, 1064, 110-11, 115, 128, 135-36, 273 Gender Advertisements (Goffman), 5, 10, 20, 32, 90, 183 Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (Thorne), 77 Georg Simmel Gesamtuusgube (Simmel), 161112, 161n6, 163n18, 163n24 Gerhardt, Uta, 161n5, 162n13, 163n15, 163n19 Gerth, Hans H., 77 Giddens, Anthony, xvii, 44n15, 65-66, 167, 169, 210n6, 217, 225-28, 236, 239, 2481110, 249n14, 249n16, 2491126, 276 Glazer, Nathan, 4 “Goffman in Feminist Perspective” (West), 107 Goffman’s spiral, 174

287

Gonos, George, 211n15 “‘Good Reasons for ‘Bad Clinic Records” (Garfinkel), 218, 227, 247n1 Gouldner, Alvin W., xiv, m i , 22, 44n6, 51, 5 6 5 9 , 61, 184, 187-89, 193 Greene, Maxine, 82 Grice, Herbert Paul, 201, 212n18 Gronfein, William, 56 Gurwitsch, Aaron, 239, 249n25 Gusfield, Joseph R., 4, 74 Habermas, Jurgen, 184 “The Handle” (Simmel), 1 4 6 4 7 Haraway, Donna, 136 Hart, C. W. M., 3 Haugeland, John, 211n10, 211n11, 211n13, 212n18 Helle, Horst J., 46n25 Helm, David T., 267 Henley, Nancy M., 106-7 Herrick Memorial Hospital, 31 hierarchy, 51, 72, 86, 89, 92-94, 97-98, 101, 1034, 108, 110-12, 115, 118-20 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 75-78, 80, 93, 95, 99-104 Hofstadter, Douglas, 2111116 Holland, John, 210n4 Homans, George C., 76, 129 “Homeplaces, Grieving, and Environmental Degradation” (Rogers), 79 House, James S., 86 “How Is Society Possible?” (Simmel), 163n16 Hughes, Everett C., 3-4, 7 , 21, 43n2, 112, 185 Huizinga, Johann, 2131124 Hymes, Dell, 10, 50, 257, 278n7 impression management, 1, 14, 18, 28, 35-36, 53, 77, 80, 108, 128, 170, 181, 260-62, 279n9 “The Insanity of Place” (Goffman), 173 intelligibility, 21617, 222-24, 226-34, 236-37, 240, 242, 246, 247n4, 248n9 interaction order, xiv, mi-xvii, 1, 4, 7, 12, 15-19, 27, 35, 42-43, 53, 65, 67, 92, 94, 128, 166, 170, 174-78, 181,

288

Index

189, 191, 198-99, 203, 21G18, 225-29, 236, 24647, 2481111, 2481112, 2491122, 254, 259, 266, 269-71, 274-76 “The Interaction Order” (Goffman), xii-xiii, 42, 198-99, 211n14, 229, 236, 246 Interaction Ritual (Goffman), 5, 19-20, 29, 31, 37, 39, 45n17, 152, 172, 176 International Quarterly, 161n4 Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park and Burgess), 43n2 involvement obligations, 2, 21, 230, 248119, 271 irony, xiv, 2, 17, 20-22, 33, 129, 265. See also perspective by incongruity James, Henry, 67n2 James, William, 155, 243, 250n33, 278n6 Jaworski, Gary D., 185 Jefferson, Gail, 248n9 Joseph, Betty, 169 justice, 219, 222, 244, 247, 247n4 Kant, Immanuel, 144, 159 Keller, Charles M., 155, 211n15 Kennedy, Roger, 169 Kepler, Johannes, 62 keying, 23, 40, 45n18, 155, 159, 205 Kincheloe, Joe L., 139n2 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 135 Koestler, Arthur, 57-58, 67113 Komter, Aafie, 89 Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies, 4, 29, 37, 279118 Labov, William, 278117 king, R. D., 9 Landmann, Michael, 163n15 Lane, Harlan, 74 language, 10, 65, 135 Language in Society, 257 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 133 Lebensamchauung (Simmel), 159-60 Lebensphilosophie (Dilthey), 144 “The Lecture” (Goffman), 41, 143 Lemert, Charles, 8, 35, 52, 64, 186

Lemert, Edwin, 9 Leopold, Aldo, 79 Lerner, Gene, 272 Le Suicide (Durkheim), 3 L&vi-Strauss,Claude, 129 Linell, Per, 272 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 4 Lockwood, David, 186 Lofland, John, 5, 7, 20-21, 451119, 51-52, 54, 86, 118, 275 Lofland, Lyn H., 44n7 Luckmann, Thomas, 72 Lyman, Stanford M., 175 Macy, Joanna R., 79 Main Problems of Philosophy (Simmel), 157 Malone, Martin J., 270 7he Managed Heart (Hochschild), 77 Mannheim, Karl, 58, 65-66, 259 Manning, Peter K., 17, 44n16, 51-52, 56, 58, 60, 249n17 Manning, Philip, 19, 22, 27, 62, 67n1, 67115, 178, 191, 271 Martin, Daniel D., 30 Marx, Gary T., 6 Marx, Karl, xvii, 59, 13534, 251n37 Marxism, 187 Maynard, Douglas W., 261-62 McLaren, Peter, 139n2 Mead, George Herbert, 7, 15, 4314, 55, 60, 167-68, 170, 183, 210x15, 270 “The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization” (Goffman), 169 Meehan, Albert J., 247n1 Mendlovitz, Saul, 236, 249n23 “Mental Symptoms and Public Order” (Goffman), 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 278x16 Merton, Robert K., xii, 133, 183, 185-86 metaphor, 2, 15, 17-24, 33, 38-39, 451117, 45n18, 451120, 57, 62, 119, 212n20, 259, 262, 265-66, 272 i’be Metaphorical Society (Rigney), 17 Method and Measurement in Sociology (Cicourel), 263 Meyrowitz, Joshua, 212n17

Index ”Minds, Brains, and Programs” (Searle), 211n13 Mind, Se& and Society (Mead), 7, 168 Mills, C. Wright, xvii, 64, 77, 127, 133-34, 138, 186, 223, 227, 231 Mirrors and Mask (Strauss), 127, 133 Miss Lonelyhearts (West), 34 Moltoch, Harvey, 75 Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (MSIP), 130-33, 138nl Monty Python, 210n2 “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient” (Goffman), 152 morality, 2, 12-13, 19, 37-38, 45n17, 117, 129, 223, 245, 272 Murray, Henry A., 146 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 4, 27, 37, 279n8 naturalistic observation, 2, 26-27, 29, 32-33, 267, 275 “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (Goffman), 20, 29, 37, 44x112, 146, 148-49 “Normal Appearances” (Goffman), 7, 23 object relations theory, 166, 16869, 175, 177 Ogden, Thomas H., 169“ On Cooling the Mark Out” (Goffman), xv, 18, 21, 153, 259, 278n8 O‘Neill,John, 81 “On Face-work (Goffman), xv,20-21, 37, 45n17, 51, 128, 148, 152, 256 “On First Looking into a Manuscript by Goffman” (Hymes), 50 On Social Dfferentiation (Simmel), 157 “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions” (Goffman), 152, 171 Orbach, Harold L., 161 Ortega, Felix, 184 Oxford English Dictiona y , xii-xiii Park, Robert E., 4312, 112, 185 Parsons, Talcott, xiv, 7-8, 13, 16, 33, 43n5, 133, 167-69, 178, 182-90,

2a9

192-93, 210n5, 222, 224, 226, 231, 244, 277, 277n5, 278n7, 279n11 participant observation, 25-27, 29, 32, 45n23, 71, 146 passing, 259-61 “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part 1”(Garfinkel), 259 Pawluch, Dorothy, 174 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 211n8 Peirce, Jennifer L., 101-3 performance, 18, 36, 45n17, 87-88, 9G92, 113-14, 128-30, 132, 135-38, 139n4, 149, 175, 235, 237 Permanence and Change (Burke), 45n19 perspective by incongruity, 7, 20-21, 451119, 57, 266 Pfeiffer, Toni Sachs, 79 phenomenology, 1, 8, 10, 40-41, 154, 159, 182, 2491116, 255, 278117 Phillips, Adam, 168 Philosophical Culture (Simmel), 146 7%ePhilosophy of Money (Simmel), 157 Pomerantz, Anita, 248n9 Ponder, Michael, 241nl positivism, 12, 240, 250n28, 251n35, 264 practices, 28-29, 217-47, 247n1, 250n30, 2501131, 2501132, 251n35, 260 Prager, Jeffrey, 169 pragmatism, xvii, 133, 138, 223, 243, 278117 “Preliminary Forms of Ideation” (Simmel), 156 Tbe Presentation of Self in Everyday Lzfe (Goffman), xiv-xv, 4-6, 9, 18, 25, 35-36, 87-88, 99, 108, 127, 133, 145, 148-49, 154, 157, 160, 175, 184, 186, 210n7, 216, 224-25, 23637, 260, 262-64 problem of order, 13, 184, 222, 278117 “The Problem of Sociology” (Simmel), 145, 14748, 150, 161117 The Problems of the Philosophy of Histoy (Simmel), 157 “Prospects for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the

290

Index

Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship” (Garfinkel), 236-38, 240, 2481113, 249n16 Psathas, George, 51 psychiatry, 30, 55-56, 166, 169-75, 177 psychoanalysis, 7, 6 6 6 7 , 129, 16669, 177-78 psychology, xy, 3637, 55, 65-67, 176, 199, 210n6, 211n13, 270

Rogers, Mary F., 59, 86 role, xiv, 13-15, 18, 31, 60, 111, 129, 146, 185-86 role distance, 14, 16, 31, 53, 55, 118, 129, 185, 2111112 “Role Distance” (Goffman), 30-31, 263, 273 Rollins, Judith, 109 Rosch, Eleanor, 203 Rose, Arnold, 76 Russell, Bertrand, 212n22

Quine, William J., 62 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 8, 45n25, 163123 “Radio Talk: A Study of the Ways of Our Errors” (Goffman), 32, 41, 267 Rapoport, Anatol, 210n4 Rawls, Anne Warfield, 12, 247n6, 248118, 2481111, 2481112, 2491118, 249n19, 249n22, 250n31, 2501132, 2501133, 251n34, 270-71, 277n5 reciprocity, 144, 147-51, 154, 157-58, 160 Reinharz, Shulamit, 75 Relations in Public (Goffman), 5, 9, 12, 20, 23, 105, 157 relevance theory, 20CL205 remedial interchanges, 2, 198 “Remedial Interchanges” (Goffman), 20 “Replies and Responses” (Goffman), 24, 41, 191, 269 “A Reply to Denzin and Keller” (Goffman), 277n1 “Research Notes on Inter- and Intraracial Homicides” (Garfinkel), 218 “Response Cries” (Goffman), 32, 41 rhetorical devices, 2, 12, 16-17, 22, 33, 26667. See also disclaimers; irony; metaphor Riesman, David, 64, 129 Riessman, Catherine Kohler, 72, 74 Riggins, Stephen, 67nl Rigney, Daniel, 17 ritual, xiv, 2, 7, 13, 15, 18-21, 38, 41, 441114, 451117, 62, 75, 77-78, 80, 82, 128-29, 151-52, 154, 158-60, 183, 188, 190-92, 210n7, 212n20, 24445, 263-71, 276

Sacks, Harvey, 248119, 2481110, 249n24, 250n27, 256, 265-66, 271, 277n4, 278117 sacred, 7, 19-20, 38 Sartre, Jean Paul, 45n25, 225, 248n12, 249n18 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2511139 Scanlon, Thomas, 2501130 Schafer, Kermit, 32 Schank, Roger, 211n13 Schechner, Richard, 135-36, 139n5 Scheff, Thomas J., 72, 95-96 Schegloff, Emanuel A., 51, 248n9, 248n10, 2491115, 254, 265, 267-71, 274, 276, 278n7 Schelling, Thomas C., 5, 19, 157, 170 Schudson, Michael, 451124, 53 Schutz, Alfred, 8, 61, 65, 80, 204, 239, 249n25, 257, 263, 266, 278n6, 278n7 Scott, James C., 118-19 Scott, Marvin B., 175 Searle, John L., 129, 211n13 secondary adjustments, 14, 117, 171, 173, 177 Sedgwick, Peter, 44n6 Seinfeld (TV show), 83 self, xii, xiv, xvi, 7, 1415, 17, 37, 43n4, 441113, 44114, 54-55, 67n2, 86-89, 91-92, 94, 97, 103, 108, 111-12, 11620, 153, 158, 166, 168, 173, 175-77, 181, 183, 185, 210, 216-17, 224-25, 231, 233, 237-39, 271: mortification of, 13, 21, 111-12, 117; presentation of, 1, 8, 15, 18-19, 36, 76, 81, 88, 91-93, 143, 148, 175, 189, 218, 224-25, 230,

Index 237, 241, 270; sacred, 13, 15, 20, 38, 441112; territories of, 105-6, 2121117 Selznick, Philip, 4 Sennett, Richard, 177 Shakespeare, William, 130, 139n3 shame, 54, 67, 95-96 Sharrock, Wes, 265-67, 274 Shils, Edward A., 4, 279n11 Sidewalk (Duneier), 75 Silverman, David J., 272 Simmel, Georg, 1-2, 6-7, 16, 21, 24, 43n2, 45n20, 45n25, 76, 143-61, 161n1, 161n2, 161n4, 161n5, 16ln6, 161n7, 162n13, 161n15, 163n16, 163117, 163n21, 163n24, 185, 188, 268, 275 situational proprieties and improprieties, 2, 15, 53, 171-73 Small, Albion W., 43n2, 148, 161n7 Smelser, Neil J., 4 Smith, Dorothy, 44n7, 277 Smith, Gregory W. H., 6, 67nl Snow, David, 86, 105, 118 social constructionism, 11, 87, 176, 183, 27 1 Socialism and Saint-Simon (Durkheim), 219 social order, 13, 17-20, 39, 45n17, 95, 149-50, 184, 189-90, 216-18, 221, 224, 229-30, 245-46 The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (Cicourel), 26564 Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), 231 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI), 231 7he Sociological Imagination (Mills), xvii, 127, 133 Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (Cook, Fine, and House), 86 Sociology: Inquiries into the Forms of Sociation (Simmel), 145 The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Wolff), 145, l 6 l n l “Some Characteristics of Responses to Depicted Experience” (Goffman), 4, 146

27 1

“Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists” (Garfinkel), 259 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 16 Soziologie (Simmel), 147, 150-51, 153, 156-57, 161n2, l6ln6 Spencer, Herbert, 147, 151 Sperber, Dan, 2OC-202, 205-6, 210n8, 2111118 Station Plaza Casino, 31 status characteristics and expectation states (SCES), 112-15 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, 4, 29-30, 72, 170-71, 173-74 stigma, 1, 5, 72-74, 76, 78, 101, 107-11, 115-16, 118, 128, 152, 217 Stigma (Goffman), xiv-mi, 18, 34, 51, 54, 72, 74, 88, 108-9, 115, 152, 158, 260, 263, 279n9 Stone, Gregory P., 4 strategic interaction, 14, 75, 170 Strategic Interaction (Goffman), 5, 9, 19, 45n17 Strauss, Anselm L., 4, 127, 133-34, 138 strips, 40, 198, 203 Strodbeck, Fred, 249n23 The Structure of Social Action (Parsons), 3, 44n5, 168 Stryker, Sheldon, 185 Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), 216, 255-56, 259, 277118 Sudnow, David, 256 “Supportive Interchanges” (Goffman), 20 Sutcles, Gerald, 75 symbolic interactionism (SI), I, 7, 11, 43n4, 44n8, 105, 112, 133, 138, 155, 166-70, 175, 177, 182-83, 197, 218, 221, 255, 270, 277 “Symbols of Class Status” (Goffman), 146 systems theory, 8, 186-93 Szasz, Thomas S., 7, 167 talk, 4142, 128, 159, 19-92, 235, 267, 267-73, 279n14 Taussig, Michael, 136

292

Index

Taylor, Laurie, 26 taxonomy, 2, 12, 16, 22-24, 44n16, 129, 169-70, 175, 178n2, 211n14 Thomashow, Mitchell, 79 Thorne, Barrie, 77-78, 80 TIT-FOR-TAT, 210n4 total institution, 1, 7, 21-23, 31, 65, 74, 111-12, 117, 162n14, 170-73, 177, 185, 211n12, 217 Traub, James, 78 Treviiio, A. Javier, 161, 210 “True Believers” (Dennett), 21 lnlO trust, 9, 14, 19, 250n30, 261 Turner, Jonathan H., 167, 169 Tuzlak, Aysan, 115 typifications, 2, 24, 32, 222-25, 227, 229-32, 234-35, 241-42, 246

Umwelt, 23, 212n17 “The Underlife of a Public Institution” (Goffman), 171, 177 Z5e Uneqected Community (Hochschild), 76 University of California, Berkeley, 4-6, 10, 31, 256, 278117 University of Chicago, M , G 7 , 43n2, 14446, 178n1, 278117 University of Edinburgh, 145, 163n23 University of Heidelberg, 15657 University of Pennsylvania, 5, 10, 1 4 H 4 , 157, 278n7 Veblen, Thorstein, 76 Verhoeven, Jef C., 45n23, 176, 257

Ventehen, 144, 278n6 Z5e Virginian (Wister), 139n3 Warner, W. Lloyd, 4, 144, 146 Watson, Rodney, 26667, 274-75, 279n10 Weber, Marianne, 143 Weber, Max, xvii, 44n5, 134, 143, 15657, 161n5, 163119 Weinstein, Raymond M., 30 West, Candace, 88, 90, 102, 106-7, 273 West, Nathanael, 34 “Where the Action Is” (Goffman), 19, 31, 37-38, 45n17, 153 Whitehead, Alfred North, 57-58, 222-23 Whyte, William H., Jr., 64 Wieder, D. Lawrence, 247n1 Williams, Robin, 67n5, 175 Wilson, Deirdre, 200-202, 205, 210118, 212n18 Winkin, Yves, 3, 45n24, 211n9 Wirth, Louis, 4 Wister, Owen, 139n3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 174, 241, 251n38, 257, 278116 Wolff, Kurt H., 14546 Woolf, Virginia, 67n2 Woolgar, Steve, 174 Wooton, Anthony, 67nl Wrong, Dennis, 3, 43n1, 175 Zelditch, Morris, Jr., 18687 Zimmerman, Don H., 88, 90-91, 102, 1 0 6 7 , 273

About the Contributors

Luiz Carlos Baptista is a doctoral student in communications at the University of Nova in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ann Branaman is an assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University. James J. Chriss is an assistant professor of sociology at Cleveland State University. Norman K. Denzin is a professor of sociology and communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Uta Gerhardt is a professor of sociology at the University of Heidelberg. Charles Lemert is a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. Philip Manning is an associate professor of sociology at Cleveland State University.

Anne Warfield Rawls is an associate professor of sociology at Bentley College.

Mary F. Rogers is a professor of diversity studies and applied research at the University of West Florida.

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294

About the Contributors

ThomasJ. Scheff is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Gregory W. H. Smith is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Salford. A. Javier Treviiio is an associate professor of sociology at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.