Goffman and Social Organisation: Studies in a Sociological Legacy (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol 17)

Goffman and Social Organization

Erving Goffman is considered by many to have been one of the most important sociologists of the post-war era. His close observation of everyday life and his concern with the ways in which people conduct themselves in face-to-face situations led to his pioneering exploration of a new sociological domain, the interaction order. Many of his works in this area are now considered sociological classics, including Asylums, Gender Advertisements, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life and Stigma. This collection brings together internationally known sociologists to pursue and build upon diverse aspects of Goffman’s legacy. The contributors present chapters on key issues in Goffman’s work, including: • • • • •

the bearing of Goffman’s life on his work his sociologies of self, public places and mental illness Goffman’s relationship to ethnomethodology the singularity of Goffman’s ethnography and the part played by critical social enquiry and creative literature in shaping Goffman’s highly distinctive sociological practice.

This collection reveals the richness of Goffman’s writings and his contribution to sociology today. It will be essential reading for a wide range of academics, researchers and students whose own work involves understanding and using Goffman’s ideas. Greg Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford.

Goffman and Social Organization Studies in a sociological legacy

Edited by Greg Smith

London and New York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 Selection and editorial material Greg Smith; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goffman and social organization: studies in a sociologcial legacy/edited by Greg Smith. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in social and political thought; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Goffman, Erving. 2. Social structure. 3. Social interaction. 4. Social groups. 5. Social role. I. Smith, Greg, M.A. II. Series. HM291.G57 1999 301–dc21 98–35792 CIP ISBN 0-203-01900-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-21298-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-11204-4 (Print Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors

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1 Introduction: interpreting Goffman’s sociological legacy GREG SMITH

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2 Erving Goffman: what is a life? The uneasy making of an intellectual biography YVES WINKIN

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3 Fine romances: two arrangements between the sexes in public places CAROL BROOKS GARDNER

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4 Role distance and the negational self JAMES J.CHRISS

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5 Sundered selves: mental illness and the interaction order in the work of Erving Goffman WILLIAM GRONFEIN

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6 Ethnographic coats and tents PHILIP MANNING

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vi Contents 7 The omnipotence of the actor: Erving Goffman on ‘the definition of the situation’ WES SHARROCK

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8 Reading Goffman on interaction ROD WATSON

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Non-person and Goffman: sociology under the influence of literature ANDREW TRAVERS

10 Claiming the text: parsing the sardonic visions of Erving Goffman and Thorstein Veblen GARY ALAN FINE

Bibliography Index

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177

198 216

Contributors

James J.Chriss is Associate Professor of Sociology and Head of the Social Sciences at Newman University, Wichita, USA. Gary Alan Fine is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. Carol Brooks Gardner is Associate Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies and American Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA. William Gronfein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA. Philip Manning is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, USA. Wes Sharrock is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. Greg Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford, UK. Andrew Travers is Research Fellow in the Department of Social Work, University of Exeter, UK. Rod Watson is Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. Yves Winkin is Professor and Director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie de la Communication at the Université de Liège, Belgium.

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Introduction Interpreting Goffman’s sociological legacy Greg Smith

The sociological project Few would doubt Erving Goffman’s right to a place in twentieth-century sociology’s pantheon. He was author of eleven books and some two dozen articles which, a decade and a half after his death in 1982, continue to fascinate readers both inside and outside the discipline of sociology. Always a controversial figure, it is not surprising that the many introductions, reviews and appreciations of his work do not tend towards consensus. Yet Goffman set out his project of exploring the social order of interaction clearly and unequivocally, and pursued it with singular resolve. Sometime between 1949–51, in the course of doctoral research in a small crofting community in the Shetland Isles, Goffman devised the sociological project that was to be extended and deepened over the remainder of his career. His objective, from which he never deviated, was to describe and explain aspects of face-to-face interaction in a consistently sociological manner. Christening his chosen field the ‘interaction order’ (in the final chapter of his University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation; see Goffman 1953) Goffman felt that he had discovered universal empirical material that might yield general rules and conventions (Manning 1992). Curiously, Goffman did not use the term ‘the interaction order’ for another thirty years, even though he had at least one occasion to comment upon the absence of a convenient label to describe his field of interest (see Goffman 1971:xi n.1). It is only in virtually the last paper which he knew would appear in print (the posthumously published Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association [Goffman 1983b]) that Goffman returns to the term and lends it his valedictory stamp of authority. The Address—because of illness not given in person—is a fully focused statement of what Goffman saw as the enduring themes of his sociological work.1

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The Presidential Address amplifies the central claim, progressively reformulated and refined (Kendon 1988), that runs through the prefatory comments to Goffman’s books and papers. The claim is a simple one, that face-to-face interaction is socially organized and thus warrants sustained sociological treatment. Interaction, Goffman says again and again, is a sui generis reality (cf. Rawls 1987). Even so searching a critic as Emanuel Schegloff (1988:90) gives Goffman his due in this regard, observing that Goffman did not so much ‘rehabilitate’ a field of inquiry as ‘habilitate’ it, materializing that field almost out of nothing, ‘registering certain events and aspects of events as worthy of notice and available to acute and penetrating interpretation’. Goffman discovered a new level of social organization and opened it to sociological investigation. In entitling this volume Goffman and Social Organization, the intention is first to underscore the consistently sociological drive of Goffman’s writings. They are sometimes—misleadingly—described as ‘social psychology’. Goffman’s chief topic, the forms and processes of the interaction order, may coincide with social psychology’s subject matter but his approach was always most decidedly sociological. The book’s title is also designed to counter the commonplace that Goffman was exclusively concerned with investigating the mechanics of face-toface interaction. The interaction order may well have provided a primary and enduring focus for his sociological endeavours and marked his unique gift to sociology, but this focus was not a myopic one. His various writings on total institutions, stigma, gender relations, role distance and frames testify to his interest in exploring the borders and the hinterlands of the interaction order and several of the chapters in the present volume (Chriss, Fine, Gardner, Gronfein, Travers) examine aspects of these wider concerns. The social organization of interaction constituted the field that became Goffman’s own but he was always sufficiently ecumenical as a sociologist to acknowledge the traffic between his chosen analytic domain and the preoccupations of traditional sociologies.2 Goffman’s discovery was powerfully aided by the utterly distinctive cast of his writing. Acknowledgement of Goffman’s sociological talent was not long in coming. Reviewing the 1956 Edinburgh edition of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Gregory P.Stone acclaimed the work as ‘one of the most trenchant contributions to social psychology in this generation’ (1957:105). Kaspar Naegele hailed it as ‘a brilliant piece, whose riches have to be directly encountered’ (1956:632). Even when the response was qualified, as in Miller’s description of Presentation as ‘one of the most creative, offbeat, and frustratingly incomplete volumes written in recent years by a competent social scientist’ (1961:432) the recognition, if not astonishment, at what Goffman had accomplished was unmistakable.

Introduction 3 The Presentation of Self of in Everyday Life is the one book of Goffman’s to appear in two editions.3 First published in 1956 as a specialized imprint by a Scottish university press, the book was taken up by a major New York publisher who issued the present, enlarged edition in 1959.4 The appearance the second edition of Presentation, which in 1961 won the prestigious MacIver Award of the American Sociological Association, brought Goffman fame as a sociologist. By 1980 Presentation had sold over half a million copies worldwide, and it remains the book for which Goffman is best known in sociology. The instant popularity of the books which followed, Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963b), signalled recognition from circles beyond sociology, especially from practitioner disciplines. Rapid occupational advancement accompanied the growing academic reputation. Goffman was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and, by 1962 (with a further two books published and two more imminent), secured a full professorship. With his own domain of inquiry and method of working broadly established by the early 1960s, Goffman settled into a steady phase of academic productivity which he successfully sustained through to his death, late in 1982. In 1968 he relocated to the East Coast, joining the University of Pennsylvania as the holder of a Benjamin Franklin chair in anthropology and sociology. A year later he was honoured with election to Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Around this time a discernible shift in Goffman’s approach becomes evident. The situational concerns of his earlier writings are deepened by the experiential considerations articulated in Frame Analysis (published in 1974 but the product of a decade-long gestation period). Also in the later work the topics of gender and of talk (always salient features of Goffman’s sociological analyses) receive more systematic attention. Goffman’s last two books, Gender Advertisements (1979) and Forms of Talk (1981a) examine the socially situated characteristics of gender displays and the ritual organization of conversation and utterance. By the time of his death Goffman’s early ideas featured in sociology syllabuses in American and British universities and found their way into chapters and sections of introductory textbooks as well as social science dictionaries and encyclopaedias. More significantly his ideas became incorporated into the work of such prominent general theorists as Giddens and Habermas. His thinking also impacted on the work of scholars outside sociology, for example in political science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. In addition the scholarly literatures of the caring and health-related professions bore testimony to the practical reach of his thought. A further, oblique indicator of Goffman’s influence was the adoption of his ideas about ‘impression management’ by journalists and writers of popular

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studies of interpersonal conduct and practical manuals that advise us how to do it better. As these diverse indicators suggest, Goffman’s writings can be appreciated at several different levels. Although his work is accessible to non-specialized audiences, it also persistently addresses perennial issues in the discipline of sociology. Goffman’s writings appeal to beginners and experts alike. In them a deceptively transparent exterior surrounds a complex core, access to which becomes a test of the reader’s own sociological sophistication. Attempts to frame Goffman’s sociology in terms of the major traditions and perspectives of sociology and the human sciences in part arise from the disturbance many readers experience when confronted with its evident singularity. Given this disturbance it is easy, at first blush, to imagine a congruence between the basic assumptions of Blumer’s (1969) symbolic interactionism and Goffman’s sociology of the interaction order. Similarities in analytic perspective can then be ascribed to the coincidence of formative intellectual context (both Blumer and Goffman were trained at Chicago) and biography (Blumer was on the faculty of the Chicago department when Goffman was a graduate student; later, they were to be colleagues for a decade at Berkeley). Symbolic interactionism, like Goffman’s sociology, accords a central role in understanding social life to the interactional mediation of symbolic resources of both verbal and nonverbal kinds. But there are striking differences between the two positions. Blumer (1972) himself pointed to and criticized Goffman’s theoretical elevation of self-regard, whilst Goffman rarely employed the term ‘symbolic interaction’ and, when he did, did so mainly to distinguish it from his own analytic interests.5 Categorizing Goffman as a symbolic interactionist is formulaic classification which obscures his distinctive strengths. The structuralist reading (Gonos 1977, 1980; Denzin and Keller 1981) arose in opposition to the symbolic interactionist interpretation. Structuralist readings applaud Goffman’s sociology for downgrading individual agency by insisting on the determinative role of occasions, frames, and associated semiotic codes. This is useful to a degree but unfortunately neglects Goffman’s compensatory awareness of interactants’ capacity to improvise creatively when faced with insults, duress, frame ambiguities and the like. Neither symbolic interactionist nor structuralist framings appealed to Goffman as a helpful guide or as a key to his own conception of his work. Goffman saw symbolic interactionism as a general perspective of social action and experience, useful as a general orientation but far too abstract and unbounded to provide further sociological substance—he thought it offered only vague specifications of the structure or organization of social life (Verhoeven 1993:334–5, 337). Goffman was similarly sceptical about the value of the structuralist interpretation, claiming, perhaps in irritation, to be mystified by some

Introduction 5 of the European variants of structuralism (Lévi-Strauss is singled out here) (Goffman 1981b:62). The purportedly structuralist elements in his thinking, he suggested, had more classically sociological roots in Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown. As Jaworski (1996) has shown, the Chicago tradition provided fertile ground for Goffman’s assimilation of diverse influences from European sociological thought. Further interpretations have addressed the phenomenological (Psathas and Waksler 1973; Lanigan 1990) and existentialist (Hall 1977; Lofland 1980) resonances detected in Goffman’s writings. MacCannell (1983:4) proposed that The Presentation of Self in Everday Life is ‘the first and perhaps the last serious sociological response to Sartre’ whilst Ashworth’s (1985) careful and accomplished Sartrean reading of Goffman concludes that the key commonality between the two is the recommendation that we renunciate the spirit of seriousness in the performance of our roles. The ethogenic (Harré and Secord 1972) or symbolic realist (Brown and Harré 1977) position seems less an interpretation of Goffman than an attempt to provide a theory for Goffman by filling out the philosophical, psychological and social structural dimensions felt to be missing from Goffman’s interaction sociology. In this reading Goffman is applauded for correctly abandoning Humean conceptions of causality in favour of emphasizing the powers and interaction competences of the human agent. To these interpretations must be added those of broader, cultural scope, where Goffman’s writings are read as symptomatic of wider historical shifts in entire ways of life and modes of thinking. The modernist readings popular two decades ago—Goffman’s sociology as the theoretical embodiment of the experiences and values of the appearance-conscious, other-directed new middle classes (Gouldner 1970; Young 1971; Sennett 1973)—have been updated by postmodernist proposals (Battershill 1990; Chayko 1993; Tseëlon 1992a; Dowd 1991; Vester 1989; Schwalbe 1993). In particular, Goffman’s stress on the role of information in fetishizing the idea of self in the simulative processes of everyday life is taken to supply the fine detail missing from the critical theory of postmodern writers such as Baudrillard (Travers 1991). To be sure, Goffman’s sociology is not wholly assimilable to any one of these interpretations and Goffman was certainly worried about the prospect of specious and flawed forms of ‘intellectual pigeonholing’6 (Goffman 1981b) that could easily ensue from too literal an acceptance of these characterizations. However, they do show that even from within the strict domain of the interaction order Goffman’s sociology has the power to connect with a wide range of traditions and positions in sociology and the human sciences. However, this unquestionably wide-ranging influence should not obscure the enduringly controversial character of his work. Goffman’s sociology attracted extremes of assessment from extravagant commendation to outright dismissal,

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and it is notable that hostile criticism originated more often from within his own discipline than from without (Manning 1976; Strong 1983). At one extreme there are those who describe Goffman in a language of paradigm-shift: ‘the Copernicus of the human sciences’ (Harré 1972:413), ‘the Kafka of our time’ (Berman 1972:1), the ‘messiah of rationalistic social psychology’ (Pettit 1978:63). In Randall Collins’ opinion Goffman ‘is the greatest sociologist of the latter half of the twentieth century’ (1988:41). But other commentators claim that Goffman states the obvious in a laboured and obfuscating terminology (Cioffi 1992), that he produces analyses that are lightweight and inconsequential, that there is ‘nothing there’ (Aronoff 1973:142) in his books. None of this controversy seemed much to trouble the public face of Goffman’s sociology. Goffman steadfastly refused to be drawn into protracted academic debate about the significance of his work. On the single occasion late in his career when he did reply to his critics, his reluctant engagement in the enterprise was plain (‘until now I have found insufficient reason to reply to the unfavorable reviews of my books that were well-informed, and to both kinds that weren’t’ [Goffman 1981b: 61]). The sociological trade, he firmly felt, had many better things to attend to than such ‘pronouncing and counter-pronouncing’. Certainly it was as a gifted practitioner of the trade rather than as a critic of its practices that Goffman made his reputation. Very early in Goffman’s career it became clear that his writings displayed an exceptional sociological attitude as well as sufficient coherence in their analytical procedures and view of the social world to warrant use of the phrase ‘Goffman’s sociology’ and the adjectives ‘Goffmanian’ and ‘Goffmanesque’7 Yet the basis of this coherence is more readily sensed than articulated, a consequence of his bringing to light many features of the ordinary experience of any person in a style hallmarked with his own astringent view of the world.8 Some of the critical and literary dimensions of the distinctive register of Goffman’s sociology are examined in several contributions to this volume (Fine, Manning, Travers, Watson). The manner in which Goffman prosecuted his sociological project was quite unusual and is altogether free of any dependence on the production of a fully fledged theory, the founding of a school of disciples, or the endorsement of a clearly identifiable methodological or theoretical doctrine. Goffman was unabashed when he recommended ‘a modest but persistent analyticity: frameworks of the lower range’ (1981c): concepts and frameworks that reorder our view of ordinary activities enabling us to make connections we would not otherwise figure. From the outset he emphasized the exploratory character of his work. His ideas were first approximations to be substantiated, modified or rejected in light of subsequent inquiries. But of course there is an inverse relationship between the modesty of his analytic ambitions and the impact of his ideas. Perhaps because his sociology

Introduction 7 aspired to nothing more sophisticated than the generation of concepts (and related generalizations) and was framed so tentatively, it could become grist to a wide variety of analytic mills and explanatory enterprises. Overall, the corpus of Goffman’s writings has a fragmentary character. Goffman gave the impression of always wanting to race on to the next issue or topic rather than consolidate what he had achieved. Understandably, this has frustated some readers, for it begs the question of how we are to conceive the relationship between the diverse frameworks presented in his work. As Wes Sharrock (1976) observes, Goffman goes on to set up new conceptual schemes as if none of his previous ones existed, which raises the question ‘why Goffman erects and abandons schemes with such astonishing regularity and seeming indifference?’ (1976:333). What is the analytic function of the production of diverse yet not explicitly interrelated conceptual frameworks? Perhaps the most convincing interpretation is provided by Robin Williams (1988) who maintains that the continual beginnings allow Goffman the opportunity to progressively restructure the basic analytic components of his sociology. In this view Goffman’s alacrity at devising fresh conceptual frameworks has a real theoretical function. Through it he could continuously cultivate and update his ideas in a principled manner aimed at maximizing the possibilities for sociological discovery. Philip Manning (1989; 1992) characterizes this process of adopting and adapting temporary analytic frames as a ‘spiral’ and regards it as a distinctive and creative methodological feature of Goffman’s analyses. Certainly Goffman’s paramount commitment (in the 1950s and 1960s) to sociologically explore the virgin terrain of the interaction order would seem to demand this kind of approach. At that early stage general theory would have been premature. In Goffman’s (1961a:xiv) apt image ‘better…different coats to clothe the children well than a single splendid tent in which they all shiver’. The sociological legacy Goffman’s sociology thus resists wholesale assimilation. Yet it has a expressly applicatory remit, to be read, thought about and applied by researchers and scholars as it fits the purpose of their own projects. At the end of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman (1959:254) describes his text as a ‘scaffolding’, to be discarded at a point of clear insight. Goffman regarded his ideas as provisional and exploratory in character, tools which might prove useful in the construction of more rigorous sociological descriptions and explanations. His ambition was always to provide the markers and signposts which might permit more detailed mappings of the new terrain. Some of his concepts, he readily admitted (1981a:1), might have no future at all. But very many have proved fruitful in sociological and cognate

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enquiries. Of course, a suspicion of much that passes as grand and middle-range theorizing was very much in keeping with the bottom-up Chicago empirical tradition in which Goffman was trained. The papers collected in this book pursue diverse aspects of what Goffman has bequeathed the discipline of sociology. As a whole this collection provides much support for Goffman’s achievements and his inspirational role, and even the deeply critical commentaries pay tribute to the enormous insightfulness of his oeuvre. The remainder of this introduction will preview the leading themes of this volume’s contributions and provide a backdrop for the lines of argument they develop. Goffman was renowned for his reticence about biographical matters. For example, he was reluctant to be interviewed or photographed for public purposes and did not relish the growing tendency (of which this book is a part) for his work itself to be treated as a discrete object of sociological attention. The clearest statement of his ideas, he felt, could be found in his publications and discussing them in interview was unlikely to add further illumination (David 1980). In gathering materials for his forthcoming biography, Yves Winkin has travelled widely in North America and Europe, interviewing those who knew Goffman and visiting the sites of his research. He begins by presenting a series of scenes from Goffman’s life. These fragments of a life are propaedeutic to Winkin’s principal concern, the methods biographers employ in writing intellectual biography. Winkin asks, how best can we conceptualize and investigate the relationship between Goffman’s life and work? Winkin traces the ground he has covered in search of a satisfactory method. Beginning with the examination of intellectual ‘influences’ and proceeding through the incorporation of Bourdieu’s ideas of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, Winkin develops the notion that biography can be a kind of ‘ethnographic history’. The task of meaningfully relating the manifold circumstances of Goffman’s life to his writings, Winkin shows, is one that is sometimes arbitrary, always complex and occasionally treacherous. However, principled help is at hand: Winkin ends by suggesting some of the ways anthropology and history may contribute to a theory of biography. For all their frequent incisiveness, Goffman’s analyses could also be partial in the extreme. The study of public places, of face-to-face conduct in public settings, is a striking example of a field of inquiry whose sociological existence has come about almost entirely through Goffman’s pioneering efforts in Behavior in Public Places (1963 a) and Relations in Public (1971). Yet the sociological eye Goffman opened here was curiously blinkered to the actual experiences of women, the disabled, beggars and other categories of person disadvantaged in public. For instance, Goffman’s customary sensitivity to the suffering of interactional underdogs deserts him in many of his observations about women’s position in public places.

Introduction 9 Above all, Goffman (or at least, the early Goffman) overlooks or minimizes the ‘public harassment’ women so routinely experience. Goffman overwhelmingly adopts what Gardner (Chapter 3) identifies as ‘heterosexually romanticized’ rhetoric which sees public harassment as normal, acceptable, to be regarded as a form of flattery, a confirmation of women’s attractiveness, even a courtship ritual. Missing from Goffman’s analyses, Gardner notes, is the alternative, politicized rhetoric expressed by a number of Gardner’s respondents. They situate public harassment on a continuum with wife-beating, sexual and racial discrimination, crimes against women and girls, child abuse and ‘sexual terrorism’ in general. The romanticized and politicized rhetorics represent contrasting ideal types. The views of individuals tend to approximate to one type or the other, although Gardner shows how some individuals may blend the two rhetorics in unexpected ways. Starting off from Goffman’s sociology of public places, Gardner broadens his empirical base by employing not just participant observation but also several hundred interviews with women and men who have been invited to disclose their experiences of street encounters. Gardner sees her study as concurring with what Goffman might well have come to had he widened the range of information he obtained about public life. What Gardner shows is that, even though aspects of Goffman’s stated position on gendered dimensions of public conduct may be flawed and mistaken, there are other conceptual resources in Goffman that provide useful leads for the analysis of gender-related public harassment, and other methods than those favoured by Goffman which nonetheless yield findings in keeping with the tenor of his sociology.9 Even when myopic, it seems, Goffman is a productive resource. The pursuit of a sociological decimation of conventional Western liberal notions of the individual is an analytic impulse animating much of Goffman’s sociology. Goffman (e.g. 1974:564) sought to devise analytic schemas in which self and interaction could be treated as a single problem for investigation. When he introduced the concept of role distance in the early 1960s, Goffman observed the ‘vulgar tendency’ of sociologists to attribute the obligatory part of the individual’s conduct to the ‘profane’ sphere of social roles whilst reserving ‘personal’ matters and the warmth, spontaneity and humour of the individual to a ‘sacred’ category beyond the remit of sociological analysis. One of Goffman’s reasons for introducing the notion of role distance was to combat the ‘touching tendency to keep a part of the world safe from sociology’ (1961b:152). Much role theory, Goffman complained, fails to capture not only our ordinary experience of the vitality of interpersonal dealings but also our sense of the improvised, spontaneous character of commonplace conduct. The idea of role distance is designed precisely to bring these features into sociological relief. Whilst Goffman was not alone at this time

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in formulating such a critique of role theory—for example, in an assessment influential in Germany, Dahrendorf (1973; German original 1962) expressed disquiet about the disparity between the ‘glass men’ of sociological role theory and the lively individuals we daily encounter—he presents a solution from a resolutely sociological perspective that (unlike Dahrendorf) does not require metaphysical justification from humanistic ethics. Role distance, then, is a term which aims to bring more realism into sociological analysis by capturing those manifestations of personal style traditionally reserved for the sacred sphere. Goffman proposes two kinds of involvement; ‘role embracement’, where the individual is attached to a role and spontaneously involved in it, and ‘role distance’, those often humorous or skittish behaviours that ‘constitute a wedge between the individual and his role’ (Goffman 1961b:108), effectively denying the self implied by the role. James J.Chriss in Chapter 4 of this volume reconsiders some of the theoretical context to Goffman’s notion, especially in relation to functionalism and phenomenology. Using two vignettes, Chriss shows the continuing relevance of the concept of role distance and how it offers a vehicle for the self to use parody, denial and so forth to make claims about self. Role distancing behaviours evidence what Chriss calls a ‘negational self’, a claim about what the self is not. There are significant connections between the negational self and Goffman’s abiding interest in forms of remedial work in interaction. The role distance concept is a neglected means of linking self to the remedial cycle, a central facet of the ritual order of interaction. Chriss thus lays foundations for a more ‘self’-based analysis of euphoric and dysphoric interactional moments. Mental illness held an abiding fascination for Goffman because, Gronfein (Chapter 5) suggests, consideration of how the mentally ill are treated highlights some of the most fundamental aspects of personhood. Goffman’s research into the mentally ill began in the mid-1950s with the one-year fieldwork study he carried out at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (1955–6). This inspired the immensely successful and widely influential Asylums (1961a)—his most extensively cited work, and the book that is best known to audiences outside academic sociology. Gronfein carefully surveys the central themes of this extraordinary book and reminds us that it is an instance (still too uncommon) of a social scientific study which has made a major impact on public policy. Within the corpus of Goffman’s writings Asylums is distinctive because interaction order concerns take a back seat to the analysis of how the organizational structure of the total institution and mental hospital’s dominant ideologies shape the self of the mental patient. A major accomplishment of Asylums is to show the reasonableness and normality of much of the conduct of the mental patient.

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The subject of mental illness continues to play an important part in Goffman’s subsequent thinking. In Behavior in Public Places (1963a) and in the neglected 1969 essay, ‘The insanity of place’, the locus of Goffman’s concerns shift, in Gronfein’s phrase, ‘from madhouse to Main Street’ as Goffman explores the ramifications of mental symptoms conceived as a form of interactional conduct, a special sub-set of situational proprieties that are repeated, undisguised, apparently wilful and ‘specifically and pointedly offensive’ (Goffman 1971:356). Mental symptoms in Goffman’s analysis are rather sensitive actions on the part of those who refuse to keep their social place as their significant others see them. Gronfein brings out the subtlety of Goffman’s thinking about the sources of the ‘havoc’ the mentally ill wreak in family, work and public contexts shows how it has not helped those ‘suffering from mental illness’ to have been stigmatized for apparently not knowing how to behave. Their trouble is that they know only too well how to disrupt everyday life in usually vain attempts to assert an unrecognized self. The conduct of the mentally ill is not well understood as an outcome of brain malfunctioning nor is it simply a result of the reactions of others, as some versions of labelling theory appear to hold. In Goffman’s view mental illness is best understood as founded in troubled relationships between people, as sited within the disruption of the webs and obligations that ordinarily serve to tie them together in a stable and routine manner, and it is in the syntax of these interactions and relationships that mental symptoms must be properly located. Gronfein shows how this later analysis advances and deepens the picture of mental illness presented in Asylums. Goffman was one of the outstanding members of the postwar cohort of graduate students that has come to be known as the ‘Second Chicago School of Sociology’ (Fine 1995). When pressed about his methodological orientation Goffman claimed to share the anthropological and ethnographic interests of his teachers, W.Lloyd Warner and Everett C.Hughes. Good sociology undoubtedly could be done by many methods but the gold standard was guaranteed by investigations based on participant observation of a setting (Goffman 1989). Despite championing the cause of ethnographic sociology his own work has more of the look than the substance of ethnography as it is usually conceived. Philip Manning (Chapter 6) takes up this contention and shows how Goffman is very far from providing the kind of dense factuality normally associated with the classics of anthropological and sociological ethnography. Although Goffman proffers something far removed from realist ethnography, it would be a mistake to construe Goffman postmodernistically as an advocate of ethnography as essentially a form of writing. A study like Asylums occupies a space between realist and postmodern conceptions of ethnography. Goffman’s analytic interest in the structures and processes of

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interaction at St Elizabeths also serves as a vehicle of moral concerns. He presents us with a vocabulary for seeing that the responses of the mental patient are not so very different from our own, for taking the step from sympathy for their situation to an empathetic recognition that they are similar to us. Manning shows how Goffman’s great capacity to use irony and other devices to co-opt the reader into seeing the world his way serves both analytic and persuasive functions. The relationship of Goffman and his sociology to ethnomethodology has been complex and often troubled. Goffman and Garfinkel were each early acquainted with the other’s work. While the foundations of Goffman’s sociological project were set by the mid-1950s, Garfinkel’s ideas were 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 was 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 practised throughout the world, and which can not only boast a very substantial corpus of empirical studies (Coulter 1990) but which has also impacted on a range of cognate disciplines. Goffman may have opened up the sociological investigation of interaction but it is the followers of Garfinkel who have developed it into a thriving empirical field. In a broad sense it could be suggested that by the late 1960s Goffman and Garfinkel were competing for the same territory. Through their work they had succeeded in reorienting sociology towards the local and the small-scale, the microscopic-molecular processes of social life which Simmel once described as making up our ordinary social experience. The ‘contested terrain’ metaphor is misleading however. Wes Sharrock (Chapter 7) 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 paid 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 enquiries. In consequence, Sharrock suggests, the theoretically and methodologically radical potential of Goffman’s sociology was lost. With particular reference to Frame Analysis—often regarded as Goffman’s answer to Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, Goffman’s endeavour to provide a kind of phenomenological regrounding of his project—Sharrock shows

Introduction

13

how Goffman trades on some quite conventional sociological assumptions that reproduce dualisms 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 s/he 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 on the actor’s point of view. Ethnomethodological enquiries place Schutz’s analytic position on an empirical footing. Sharrock shows how they illuminate aspects of the social orderliness of everyday activities which are less than fully explicated in Goffman’s frame analysis. The idea that there are yet more fundamental social realities underpinning Goffman’s analyses and awaiting sociological investigation is taken further in Watson’s (Chapter 8) 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 which 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 illustrations Watson argues. 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 which 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 analytic resources which demonstrate in detail just how Goffman succeeds in instructing his readers to read the illustrations cited his way. One implication of Watson’s investigation, reinforcing a point of Sharrock’s, is that Goffman’s discursive techniques leave certain foundational issues of sensemaking untouched. Whilst Watson’s chapter casts 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. Ethnomethodology has well-developed procedures to deal with this particular shortcoming of Goffman’s. Certainly some strands of ethnomethodology would not wish to draw such sharp contrasts between Goffman’s project and its own; some ethnomethodologists incorporate Goffman’s ideas into their own investigations (e.g. Maynard and Zimmerman 1984; Clayman 1992). Sociologists of other persuasions, meanwhile, tend to be more sanguine about the

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deployment of metaphor and the use of illustration in Goffman’s analyses, as chapters by Fine, Manning and Travers suggest. In the last two chapters, further literary features of Goffman’s sociology are considered. Goffman’s literary style has often been remarked upon, sometimes in ways that are less than approbatory. His way of working dispenses with the conventional protocols of social science and its clearly demarcated apparatus of ‘methods’, ‘data’ and ‘findings’. He has been described as a novelist manqué whose method and procedure is ‘socio-literary’: his writing does not just state true propositions but also ‘radiates versimilitude’ (Manning 1980:262). In this latter respect Goffman offers his readers some of the insights and satisfactions traditionally obtained from fictional literature (Bennett 1981). In the past decade or so the writing itself as a literary object has attracted sustained and systematic attention, in large part due to postmodernism’s problematization of the representation of the other in ethnographic inquiries. Several aspects of Goffman’s singular rhetoric (or poetics) and the distinctive voice that speaks to us through that text have been identified (Atkinson 1989; Cohen and Rogers 1994; Fine and Martin 1990; Hazelrigg 1992; Manning 1991). Andrew Travers (Chapter 9) tracks the evolution and fate of the ‘nonperson’ concept in Goffman’s work in order to explore farther dimensions of this literariness. ‘Non-person treatment’ is extended to someone who is physically present in an encounter but treated as not-there. Travers’ careful exegesis traces the concept’s history from the 1953 doctoral dissertation through The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to Behavior in Public Places (1963a) where, contrary to Goffman’s claim, Travers argues that the term is effectively assimilated by the notion of ‘civil inattention’. Travers suggests that this idea too becomes generalized a little later into the 1971 concept of ‘normal appearances’ and is closely coupled to the sociological decimation of the person pursued in Frame Analysis (1974). The non-person concept thus serves to index an analytic problem of enduring proportions for Goffman. By following the trajectory of this concept through the Goffman project, Travers is able to show how Goffman qua author and ‘son of Durkheim’ embodied non-personhood in a particularly unresolved manner in order to escape from and transcend the influence of his intellectual ‘father’. It may yet be possible, Travers surmises, to come to see Durkheim as Goffman in an earlier garb. In the meantime Goffman’s ‘inversion’ of key Durkheimian postulates both challenges the hegemony of non-interactionist sociology and helps explain why Goffman’s sociology has been so bitterly resented in some traditional quarters. Despite the absence of any direct mentions of Veblen in Goffman’s writings there are, as Fine’s (Chapter 10) comparison of these two ‘touchstone thinkers’ shows, many striking resemblances in their lives, work and in the reception of

Introduction

15

their ideas. Focusing on their ideas about status symbolism but ranging over biography, writing styles, reputations and the social bases of interpretation, Fine draws attention to the affinities between Veblen and Goffman, using each to illuminate the other. Both were children of immigrant parents and the marginality of their social origins, as well as the reputation each man had for being personally ‘difficult’, may have contributed to the long spells in which both were regarded as outsiders to the academic establishment. Veblen and Goffman attracted attention as stylists. The writing of each had a characteristic voice; their accomplished rhetorical skills as ironicists and satirists served as potent vehicles with which to advance their analytic and persuasive purposes. Yet both wrote in eras when social scientists seemed to want to efface style from academic work. It was the style of their writing as much as its content which conveyed their sardonic even mordant visions: style as well as substance made their work controversial. If scholarly works are to be conceived as ‘sites of contention’ as Fine suggests, then it ought to be possible to locate some of the variables which condition the differential interpretation of a text. Fine identifies a number of factors which may influence readers’ interpretations, from the congruence of the text’s attitudes with those of the reader to the communities of interest which endorse or champion the text. Any claims we might wish to make about the classic status of Veblen’s and Goffman’s texts thus need to be tempered by the recognition that extra-textual factors will ensure that these claims are never finally settled. Thus the standing of Goffman and Veblen as ‘touchstone thinkers’ is only currently so. Territorial metaphors abound in calls to continue the sociological exploration of the interaction order. But as the contributions to this volume show, Goffman’s relevance for sociology is wider still. Just as Goffman himself worked on specifying some of the borders of the interaction order and its relations to such traditional sociological notions as social role and relationship, so too must we be wary of restricting Goffman’s significance solely to studies of interaction. Even with regard to the interaction order, it may be misleading to think that a field is awaiting discovery ‘out there’. Rather, the field Goffman pointed to has to be constituted by the sociological inquiries of other researchers and scholars who may deploy methods and adopt and adapt his ideas in ways he could not have envisioned. In undertaking those enquiries, it may be necessary often to break with the letter of Goffman in order to keep faith with the spirit of Goffman. That spirit, as chapters in this volume testify,10 is still a lively force in contemporary sociology. The reader hoping to find in this collection a final balance of Goffman’s contribution will be disappointed. The Goffman oeuvre, in what follows, is not closed. Rather it is reopened at a variety of junctures and with a variety of exegetical keys as new issues surface and new debates are engaged. The one common belief

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contributors to this volume share is that sociology will be enriched by a thoughtful accommodation to Goffman’s theoretical and empirical adventures. Notes 1 Other possible reasons for Goffman’s post-doctoral reluctance to forthrightly characterize his work as a sociology of the interaction order might include: (1) at the beginning of his career it was not clear how far the claim to have uncovered a neglected domain of social life could be sustained. But confidence in the reality of the claim must have been assured by the early 1980s, by his own accumulated writings and the work of sociologists who had taken up his ideas. (2) Goffman’s own attempts to further disaggregate the indiscriminate notion of ‘interaction’ (e.g. the focused/unfocused distinction and the concepts of occasion, gathering and situation) suggest that he may have been initially uncertain about just how primitive the concept of interaction would turn out to be. 2 The term social organization figures in contemporary sociological discourse as a general sensitizing concept but carries further nuances which make it apt as a characterization of a key component of Goffman’s sociology. In the work of social anthropologists (whose influence Goffman was pleased to acknowledge [Goffman 1981b; Verhoeven 1993]) the notion of social organization is used to catch the actualities of social conduct and its processual dimensions, as against theoretical idealizations of social structure and culture. Recall Goffman’s (1971) opening statement in Relations in Public where he bemoans the ‘convenience’ that sociologists make of ‘interaction vignettes’ for illustrative purposes whilst neglecting ‘the explication of their own generic character’; or his remark that face-to-face interaction (1979:xx) is where most of the world’s work gets done. The notion of social organization also draws attention to the ‘assembled’ or ‘constructed’ character of social arrangements, whether this be the way a service encounter is built out of socially coordinated and regulated arrays of gestures, postures, facial expressions and talk, or the way in which gendered human nature is constructed through ideologies of difference and the everyday practices premised on these beliefs. 3 The 1956 edition was published by the Social Sciences Research Centre of the University of Edinburgh (Goffman was based in the Department of Social Anthropology between 1949–51 whilst conducting his Shetland Isle research). An enlarged edition appeared in 1959 by Anchor Books, an imprint of the New York publishers Doubleday and Company, Inc. No indication is given in this edition of the earlier Edinburgh publication and the 1959 edition is not described in the book’s publication details as a ‘second edition’. The Anchor edition was available on import only in the UK in the 1960s, which served to restrict its circulation. A British edition did not appear until 1969 (a hardback by Allen Lane) whilst the UK paperback edition by Penguin dates from 1971 (but it must be remembered that the Edinburgh edition was also available in the interim).

Introduction

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These publication details are important because they underscore the self-contained, essentially essayistic character of Goffman’s intellectual products: a framework is sketched and an analysis completed and published before going on to the development and completion of the next book or paper. Cumulative theory construction was never part of Goffman’s expressed agenda (which is not to deny that his ideas might contribute to general theory). The publication details also contribute to an understanding of the dissemination of Goffman’s ideas and an assessment of their impact in the UK (for example Manning [1992:40] incorrectly states that Presentation of Self was published simultaneously in the USA and the UK in 1959). It is true that Gender Advertisements first appeared as the entire issue of a specialist journal in 1976, but the 1979 edition is more a reprint than a new edition, differing only in respect of some very minor modifications to the text and a few changes of pictures in Chapter 3. 4 The main differences between the two editions are described in Smith (1989:447–55). They include the adding of new illustrative material, the transfer of footnoted examples to the main text and some minor rephrasings. In addition there are (1) three new paragraphs in the Introduction (on the ‘fundamental asymmetry’ of the communicative process); (2) six new pages at the end of Chapter 1, Performances (entitled ‘Reality and contrivance’); (3) three new pages at the end of the Conclusion (entitled ‘Staging and the self’). At first sight it would seem that the differences between the two editions are merely additive and cosmetic in character—the second edition contains more illustrations and has afforded its author the opportunity to correct minor infelicities. However Manning (1992:44–8) detects a subtle analytic shift: the new additions suggest that the Goffman of the second edition had reached clearer awareness of the primarily heuristic value of the dramaturgical metaphor. 5 In 1980, in separate interviews with Belgian sociologists, Goffman gives his own ‘against the grain’ genealogical analysis of the label. See Verhoeven (1993) and Winkin (1984). 6 Goffman’s justification was that sociology should be first and foremost a practitioner’s craft, not a library-based enterprise: sociology is something you do, not something you read about (Stanford Lyman, personal communication, 1992; Verhoeven 1993:333, 344). Goffman’s lived conviction was that intellectual traditions are best kept vital and developed by working with them and in them, not by subjecting them to idealtyping for use in academic applications of labelling theory. 7 The earliest use of this phrase in print may well be Helen Swick Perry’s 1956 description of Goffman’s invitation to readers to ‘skip’ the Introduction of Presentation of Self as ‘a charming Goffmanesque touch’ (Perry 1956:209).

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8 ‘Attitude’ is a term which well describes the broad character of Goffman’s sociology as well as a leading feature of his interactional analysis. Hartland (1994:252) maintains that a consistent thread running through Goffman’s analyses turns around the question: ‘what are the ways actors relate to what is going on around them?’. 9 Nor is this to deny the significant implications of Goffman’s sociological perspective for feminist thought: see West 1996. 10 For further recent testimony, see contributions to the special issue of Sociological Perspectives 39, 3, Fall 1996 and Lemert and Branaman (1997).

2

Erving Goffman What is a life? The uneasy making of an intellectual biography Yves Winkin

Uneasiness Erving Goffman never wrote about his own life. The only autobiographical lines that the reader can share are those in the preface to Asylums (Goffman 1961a) and two or three footnotes in Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967): these deal with the conditions of his fieldwork in mental hospitals and contain nothing personal. Goffman did not reveal very much about his life, his youth, his family or his past experiences to either his colleagues or friends. Many of them had vague notions about him, but these were usually associated with the multiplicity of anecdotes about Goffman as a personage rather than with his actual social and intellectual trajectory. Insights into the person behind the personage are hard to find, as only brief glimpses were ever obtained. Perhaps the sole reliable published comment about Goffman is his own remark to Dell Hymes, which was, ‘You forget that I grew up (with Yiddish) in a town where to speak another language was to be suspect of being homosexual’ (Hymes 1984:628). The first, perhaps the most predictable question which faced me when I decided to write an intellectual biography of Erving Goffman was: do I have the right to invade his privacy? The conventional wisdom is that when scholars (or people of some renown) contribute to their biographies through interviews and personal narratives, for example, one is less scrupulous about systematically collecting data and organizing it into a biography. In Goffman’s case, it was clear that his privacy was jealously guarded. He never gave interviews to the media, he never allowed his publishers to release pictures of him and he never appeared on television. In November 1983, when I approached Gillian Sankoff, his widow and literary executor, I was politely acknowledged but was given no overt help (such as access to the archives). But I did not receive an outright

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rejection either (for example, the family was not warned of the possibility of my visit). As Gillian Sankoff explained to me, Erving Goffman wanted to keep his life totally separate from his work. If anyone wanted to acquire a detailed understanding of his work, there was no necessity for them to know anything about his life. Goffman’s message, as conveyed by Gillian Sankoff, was that the answer was in his books and papers. I persisted for several reasons, the simplest of which was that I was becoming increasingly encouraged both by the data that I had collected and by colleagues who became aware of my project. A second and perhaps a more substantial reason was that although Goffman felt that his personal life was exclusively his, when he opted to become a scholar, to write and to publish, he attracted attention to himself and thus became public property. Furthermore, he must have known that his activities would throw him into the public sphere (i.e. into an arena of debate, à la Habermas). He chose themes, crafted a style of writing and selected publishing houses that guaranteed that he would inevitably go beyond the secluded world of academia, while maintaining a strict loyalty to his discipline and to scholarship. Goffman did not commercialize his art, he did not actively seek out fame; nevertheless, public recognition was no chance occurrence. Furthermore, his public strategies gave no inkling of any shyness. Once Goffman became a public figure he was, whether he chose to admit it or not, dispossessed of himself and of his privacy. Therefore, a biographical enquiry was almost a ‘natural’ progression. Any public figure is apt to generate the production of a ‘double’, either through the medium of an autobiography or a biography. The ‘private’ part, the individual in the flesh, only provides the framework for the ‘public’ persona in both discourse and image. When the physical support disappears, the double may continue with a life of its own for quite a few years. This is the logic of the kind of fame in which Goffman was enmeshed, despite his own will or the efforts of his literary executor. Any biography of Goffman should, I felt, be written by someone who knew him and who would be as well-intentioned as good literary standards permit. There should be no statue-crafting, but equally there should be no unnecessary unwrapping either. So I went ahead, initially a little uneasily but I became more and more emboldened as time progressed. The important periods of data collection for this project occurred in 1987 and 1991. In 1987, while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the same department that Goffman had known in the 1960s, I took the opportunity to interview many of his former colleagues and friends and to do some archival research. From that rich source of data I drew up a ninety page ‘Portrait of the sociologist as a young man’ which was published in a book of Goffman’s papers

What is a life? 21 which I edited (Winkin 1988b). Although the portrait received a favourable critical response, I was dissatisfied with the scope of the biography because my presentation had been limited to the early years, before Goffman had started to publish, and the portrait was too sketchy both empirically and interpretively. I wanted to resume my investigation and to produce a more sophisticated analysis of him. A new chance presented itself when in 1991 I was invited to the University of Pennsylvania. As in Berkeley, I met many informants both on the campus and in the neighbourhood. I also began to develop a sense for the sites Goffman got to know well for personal or professional reasons. I spent some time in Dauphin, Manitoba, where Goffman lived as a young boy, and in Winnipeg, where he spent his adolescent years. I met people who knew him at the time; I visited his high school and the public library that he used to visit regularly. I walked around the campus of the University of Chicago, and discovered to my horror how totally devastated the area around Woodlawn Avenue and 61st Street (where he used to live as a student) had become. I visited St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., with a former colleague of Goffman’s and I explored several wards, some of which were abandoned, while others were still in use. By visiting some of Goffman’s former haunts, I was trying to work ethnographically in order to develop a vision of what he was like ‘from within’. How could Goffman have seen his world? It is impossible to fully reconstruct such a subjective perspective in a similar way to that of an anthropologist, who is at best a ‘marginal native’ anyway—but at least I would not naïvely impose my point of view upon his. For the same reason, I went to Baltasound in 1988, in the Shetland Island of Unst, to find out about the conditions of his doctoral fieldwork in 1949–51 (Winkin 1988a). Such an approach led me to think that the next version of the biography should be based on such sites, as seen by Goffman, as lived by the ‘natives’ and as perceived by myself years later. I wrote a few preliminary chapters before I had to resume my full-time teaching duties at the University of Liège. Several years later, the project is still not completed, but it has matured. As time went by, my analytic attitude evolved in a twofold way. First, I took the position that it was definitely possible to say worthwhile things about Goffman’s life: not through anecdotes qua anecdotes but through ‘biographemes’, that is, meaningful fragments of a whole—a whole which may never be assembled in its entirety. Second, I became adamant about the necessity to ponder reflexively upon the biographical craft. While there is nothing new in this endeavour (cf. Nadel 1984; Novarr 1986), there is still surprisingly little thinking in the social sciences about the relationship between an intellectual and their biography. The reader is

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not supposed to be interested in the life per se but in the work as framed by a specific context of creation (let’s not say ‘production’ any more). What are the assumed links between texts and contexts? Are there any causal links? Does the life explain the work? Horresco referens! It must be more subtle than this old fashioned version of literary ‘external analysis’. But then what? I will try to answer that question in the second part of my chapter, the first part being devoted to ‘snapshots’: Goffman’s life in fifteen scenes.1

Snapshots Snapshot 1 Dauphin, Manitoba, around 1930, in the department store owned and run by Max Goffman. Max is a short, stocky man who loves to play cards and chat on the sidewalk with Eli Bay, his competitor and good friend and, within a few years, his son-in-law’s father. Max Goffman escaped from the pogroms in the Russian Army and arrived in Winnipeg around 1917. He was soon introduced to Ann Auerbach, a young compatriot who had arrived in Winnipeg in 1912. They married in 1915, then they moved to Mannville, Alberta, a settlement of 300 inhabitants. Their two children were born there: Frances in 1919 and Erving in 1922. They moved twice again, in search of a better market, before settling in 1926 in Dauphin, Manitoba, a busy ‘wheat and rail’ junction of 4,000 people, many of them fresh from the Ukraine, with whom Max could easily speak and deal. The business picked up, in spite of the fact that there were up to eight clothing stores in Dauphin in the early 1930s. Max Goffman was able to buy a house in the North End section of Winnipeg by the time Erving was ready for high school. So the family moved to Winnipeg in 1937 while Max commuted to and from Dauphin every weekend. By 1952, when he retired and sold the shop, he was a well-respected member of the Dauphin business community—certainly not the perpetually broke store owner of Raisins and Almonds (Maynard 1964).2

Snapshot 2 May 1939, prom night at St John’s Technical High School, largely open to the sons of Jewish immigrants (there are 17,000 Jewish households in Winnipeg in 1939). All of a sudden, there is a smell of

What is a life? 23 rotten egg. That’s ‘Pooky’s’ farewell to his classmates. So the story goes. Goffman is crazy about chemistry; he is a brilliant student but rather mischievous….

Snapshot 3 Summer 1943, on the lawn in front of the National Film Board Building in Ottawa. Goffman is eating a sandwich with his roommate Alan Adamson and unidentified buddies. He is spending his summer wrapping boxes of films which are dispatched throughout the country ‘to show Canada to Canadians’, as the motto of the National Film Board (NFB) says. It may well be that he ‘gets exposed to the team and part of the techniques of Grierson’s documentaries’, as Alan Adamson will later say. There are so many films produced at the NFB (320 by 1945) and so many young, bright people to discuss them (Dennis Wrong among them) that Goffman could not have been left untouched.

Snapshot 4 Fall 1944, University of Toronto, Department of Political Economy. A sociology class is slowly going through Durkheim’s Le Suicide, which has not yet been translated into English. Erving is there, with his friend Dennis Wrong and his confidante, Liz Bott. The professor is in full gown. His name is Charles William Morton Hart. He is an anthropologist, trained by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney in the late 1920s, a specialist in the culture of the Tiwi of North Australia. He keeps the fingernail on his right little finger long as a sign of his initiation. He loves to dramatize his teaching, which can be summarized as ‘everything is socially determined’. He walks up and down the aisles of the auditorium. All of sudden, he stops, puts the bottom of his gown over his head like an old photographer, and points his right little finger at the student who has to answer his question. Goffman loves that scene, and by the end of the year he knows Durkheim’s main work.

Snapshot 5 Spring 1945, in a local bar near the University of Toronto. There is a circle of students around a young instructor named Ray Birdwhistell. He comes from the University of Chicago’s Department of

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Yues Winkin Anthropology where he is completing his dissertation under Lloyd Warner’s supervision. He is training his students to define people socially on the basis of Warner’s stratification ladder.

RLB: Students: RLB:

What do you think of the young lady over there? No doubt, the clothes, the way she sips her drink—she is UMC (upper middle class), Come on, look at her shoes, look at the soles! She is definitely LMC (lower middle class).

Goffman is thrilled. How about going to Chicago and working with Warner? His friends are rather seduced by Parsons and Merton, who had come recruiting on campus that spring—but Liz likes Chicago too.

Snapshot 6 Sometime in 1947, around midnight, in a small ‘joint’ at the corner of 63rd Street and Woodlawn in Chicago. Erving Goffman is talking breathlessly with his friend Saul Mendlovitz. When he arrived in Chicago, in the fall of 1945, there were floods of ‘G.I.Bill’ students around—but still few professors. In Sociology, there were about 200 graduate students for about ten professors. So the best courses are the conversations that students have among themselves about their reading, their experiences and ideas. Goffman and Mendlovitz belong to a loose circle of students whose names will become wellknown later (including Howard Becker, Jerry Carlin, Fred Davis, Eliot Freidson, Joseph Gusfield, Robert Habenstein, Richard Jeffrey, William and Ruth Kornhauser, Kurt and Gladys Lang, Hans Mauksch, Bernard Meltzer, Greg Stone, William Westley). Saul and Erving very often eat together at night and ‘talk like rabbis’ as Saul will say to me later. On Freud, whose work Goffman handles quite well; on Proust, whom Goffman admires a lot; on Gustav Ichheiser, an Austrian phenomenologist, exiled in Chicago, lonely and angry, whose papers Mendlovitz passed on to Goffman; on Kenneth Burke, who offers a seminar that year at the University of Chicago and who keeps cracking jokes that Goffman likes very much. Chicago is bursting with ideas and brilliant visitors, not so much in Sociology, a department which is getting old and keeps feuding all the time, but all around, like in Social Sciences II, a big undergraduate course offered in the college by people like Daniel Bell, C.

What is a life? 25 Wright Mills, David Riesman, Bruno Bettelheim and others. Goffman is somewhere in there, swallowing it all up.

Snapshot 7 Sometime in the late 1940s, somewhere in Chicago. Erving Goffman is toiling over the data he collected in the fall of 1946 from administering the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to fifty uppermiddle-class women of the Hyde Park area. He has to submit a master’s thesis but the relationship Lloyd Warner wants him to see between socio-economic status and personality just does not show up. He is disgruntled with Murray’s TAT—he cannot accept the classic opposition between ‘objective response’ and ‘projective response’. So he decides to develop a contrast between ‘direct responses’ (the subject reacts to the image as if it represented reality) and ‘indirect responses’ (the subject avoids, in various ways, reacting to the depicted situation). He builds a relationship between the lifestyle of the subjects and their preferred responses. In the last chapter of his thesis, ‘Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience’ (Goffman 1949), he describes with evident ethnographic pleasure how the ‘direct response’ subjects behave. They sit up straight, all dressed up and tense, and the magazine on the coffee table is Better Homes and Gardens. They are very different from the ‘indirect response’ women who curl up on the sofa, dressed in men’s shirts; the New Yorker is on the table, next to a pair of pants they probably didn’t try to hide from their visitor. They are as disengaged in their responses as they are in their way of life. So he finally has his ‘thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Division of the Social Sciences in candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts’. It is not a diligent Warnerian exercise, neither is it a faithful ethnography à la Hughes. It is already quite a personal piece of work, although not of the kind that Goffman will offer later. In actual fact, he will never touch his MA thesis again.

Snapshot 8 It is March 1950. The ‘social’ is in full swing in the village hall of Baltasound, on the island of Unst, in the Shetland islands. Jean Andrews and Alice Simon, the ‘leading belles’ of the community, are swinging from one partner to the next. Goffman doesn’t dance. He

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Yues Winkin prefers to talk with the group of men with whom he plays billiards every Monday and Saturday. ‘Peerie’ Goffman—as they call him on the island—has come a long way. When he appeared ‘out of the blue’, as the hotel tenant said, in December 1949, nobody could figure out who he was and why a foreigner would want to come and stay in Unst, the last of the Shetland islands. How come he walked around the island in big boots all the time? Why did he always have a camera with him and a fancy camera at that: a Leica, from Germany? Maybe he was a spy… That myth was soon dispelled. He was a regular guy after all, even if he didn’t talk much. He first stayed at the hotel with Dr Wren and his wife, then he bought a little cottage behind the hotel. He kept going back to the hotel kitchen to have his meals with the cook and the two maids. One of the maids visited him regularly in his cottage— but she never thought he would ever do anything untoward to her. He asked her several times to ‘arrange funny little triangles together’ or to tell stories about ‘weird grey images’ he had. She never understood what he was after. His cottage was full of books; he would ask her to read pages aloud while he sat on his bed and laughed. In fact, Goffman had little chance to laugh or even to talk as the islanders were very taciturn. The only occasions when there was sociable talk were during the billiard games, at the ‘socials’ and at weddings. He always attended them but he never forced his way into a family. In a sense, he just lived near to the community, not within it.

Snapshot 9 Spring 1953, University of Chicago, Department of Sociology. Dissertation defence day: the whole department is there. It is Goffman’s jour de vérité. He is sweating—not only because it is a warm spring day but also because the questioning is rough. Lloyd Warner is not very happy with the work. He had sent Goffman to his old friend Ralph Piddington in October 1949 to help him get the new Department of Social Anthropology started. After only a few months, Goffman left for that tiny island in the Shetlands. Furthermore, what he now presents is not even a good study of the community. Goffman himself states this very bluntly on page 8 of his dissertation which is entitled ‘Communication Conduct in an Island Community’: ‘This is not the study of a community: it is a study that occurred in a community.’ Everett Hughes is not too pleased either. What is this new jargon

What is a life? 27 about ‘euphoria’ and ‘dysphoria’ in interaction? What is all this business about conversations? Moreover, he finds Goffman’s parallel between the ‘interaction order’ and Parson’s ‘social order’ in the opening chapter of the dissertation slightly irritating. Anselm Strauss, who happened to be the third examiner since Blumer had just left for Berkeley, mainly observed the two men. He was struck by Goffman’s capacity to allow a drop of sweat to roll down his nose while he focused intently on answering a question… Another person in the audience who must have noticed the drop of sweat was Goffman’s wife, Angelica Schuyler Choate, whom he married in July 1952. She was born in Boston on 1 January 1929, a pure Brahman. Her father was editor of the Boston Herald. She came to the University of Chicago to study psychology and human development. Goffman’s friends never got to know her well though she was rumoured to be shy, fragile—and very rich.

Snapshot 10 October 1956, Princeton. This is the third conference on ‘Group Processes’ being hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation. A highly select group of scholars is present. Goffman’s name was suggested by Ray Birdwhistell, who was suggested by Margaret Mead. Goffman has just completed a year of fieldwork at St Elizabeths Hospital which is a 7,000-bed psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. His presentation is based on the idea of the asylum as a ‘metabolic process’, an analogy which irritates many of the delegates, who constantly interrupt Goffman with their comments. The most aggressive critic is Margaret Mead:

Goffman: Mead: Goffman: Fremont-Smith: Barron: Mead:

Goffman:

Does the word still bother you? Yes, it does. Give me another one, and I shall use it. Intake? Outtake? Intake, output. The process is not cyclical. I don’t like a mechanical process very much either. Why don’t you describe the process as it occurs in a total institution? I shall try, but I want to stress that these are processes oriented to the taking in and disgorgement

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Mead: Bateson: Goffman:

of people. I want a word to cover that. I shall use metabolism in quotes from now on, if you wish. Disgorgement usually means vomit. Is that what you mean? How about ‘processing of people’? Is processing of people acceptable to everyone? There are some moral feelings cropping up in this discussion that I hope will not arise too often. (Schaffner 1957:121–2)

Throughout the four-day session, Goffman acts defensively. What the group probably does not understand is Goffman’s own feeling of suffocation in this group of distinguished social scientists, several of whom are psychiatrists. He is the only one who has spent a year ‘on the other side’, with the mental patients, in jeans and T-shirt, without a set of keys on his belt.

Snapshot 11 Sometime in late 1959. Erving Goffman’s post is up for tenure but he believes he won’t be re-appointed and is ready to quit academia. In 1957, he had been invited by Herbert Blumer to join the Department of Sociology of the University of California, Berkeley, to fill the Social Psychology post left vacant by the departure of Tamotsu Shibutani. On 1 January 1958 he was employed as ‘Visiting Assistant Professor’ with an annual salary of $6,840. In 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was an immediate success, and Goffman’s name was becoming increasingly well known in the field. Yet the review committee headed by Andreas Papandreou, then Chair of the Department of Economics, is in a quandary. At least two members of the panel are equivocal about the application. Bendix is unhappy with its content and Blumer is not impressed by Goffman’s personality. The work is thought to be too soft, too literary, while the person appears too abrasive, too difficult. But the letters (from Riesman, Hughes, Sarbin, Cottrell, Schneider) probably win the vote—Hughes even describes him as ‘our Simmel’. Goffman is promoted to ‘Associate Professor—Step I’ as of 1 January 1960, the salary is $7,920. He teaches for a semester and then takes six months unpaid leave. He will stay in academia—but he will avoid teaching whenever possible.

What is a life? 29

Snapshot 12 Spring 1962, Goffman’s graduate seminar is on ‘Social Contracts.’ He pushes the students hard, he probes and ruffles them. Only two older students have the temerity to answer back. He apparently approves of their behaviour. One day, he formulates an idea and—a few minutes later—he takes the opposite stance. One of the two older students raises her hand and tells him that he is contradicting himself. He pauses for a long time (he is well known for his long silences). Then says ‘Mrs Frederickson, don’t be so nostalgic.’

Snapshot 13 Sometime in 1965, a strange letter arrives in the office of the President of the University of California from the Las Vegas Police Department. Enquiries are being made about someone called ‘Goffman, Erving (height: 5’2?)’ who says he is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. The police have received protests from local casino managers who see this man Goffman as a ‘disturbing element’ in their establishments. For years Goffman has regularly visited casinos in Reno and Las Vegas. At first he is accompanied by his wife, they arrive in their Morgan car, once inside, they ‘counted cards’ together. They knew how to tabulate the figures quickly and win at blackjack. Later in the 1960s Goffman made these expeditions alone. He was dressed for the occasion, he always wore trousers with extra long pockets. He even attended the valet training school at some point. So he played not only for ‘fun’ but also for ethnographic reasons. He wanted to get a book and several papers out of his fieldwork. Goffman produced ‘Where the Action Is’ in 1967 (as the second part of Interaction Ritual) but the promised book never materialized. Somewhere, there may be a manuscript…

Snapshot 14 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, in the late 1970s. Erving Goffman visits the antique shop of Mr Mead. The two of them know a great deal when it comes to English oak furniture. They are both professionals. They sometimes meet at restricted furniture auctions. Goffman loves

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Yues Winkin people like Mr Mead who are real, not like so many two-dimensional academics who can’t talk back, who can’t enjoy life, a good meal, a nice bottle of wine.

Snapshot 15 May 1982, in Lyon, France. Goffman is addressing an audience of French sociologists on the topic of ‘Microsociology and History’. He has not prepared a paper because, he says, ‘of an event independent of my own will—the birth of my daughter’. As he speaks I am translating his address into French, a risky business, but everything goes well. Goffman and I chat briefly after the session ends. He says to me ‘All right, buddy, see you in Florence’. I will never get the chance to go to that conference in Florence. I will never get the chance to see Goffman again.

From the story board to the drawing board The presentation of such ‘scenes’ could go on for quite a while. Many biographies are made that way, even so-called ‘intellectual’ or academically legitimate biographies. Intellectual biographies are meant to illuminate an author’s literary work, to describe a particular period in history which has been experienced if not shaped by the character under study, or to explain the development of a science through an invention or a discovery by the scholar. They are ‘intellectual’ because they focus on the literary, political, or scientific contributions that the biographee left to his society. But such biographies seem to imply that people lived only to write books, to make history or to create disciplines. In other words, intellectual biographies are often naïve and uncritical; they lack the self-reflexiveness that is required as a basic premise of scholarship. These considerations led me to reconsider my project and explicate some of the assumptions that had hitherto guided it. I came to realize that it was essential that I make explicit the constructed character of this intellectual biography: that both the opus operation and modus operandi must be openly presented to the reader. First, let us look back at the snapshots. I acted as if Goffman’s whole life had had a single goal which was to produce scholarly books and papers. I selected events which may have had an explanatory value for, or at least serve as a source of enlightenment about, his intellectual work. The rest was discarded, not so much because it belonged to his private life but because it did not help the reader to develop, or I could not see how it might have helped the reader to develop, a

What is a life? 31 deeper understanding of Goffman’s intellectual work. It was definitely a biased, distorted perspective on someone’s life, although it had some modernistic allure. From the standpoint of a social scientist, to offer this kind of biography of Goffman is a false naïvety because the ‘scenes’ chosen as components of the narrative are a highly selective sample and each scene is itself made of highly selective elements. Although they may be presented as ‘anecdotes’, they implicitly allude to critical or pivotal moments in the ‘hero’s’ life. They imply cause-and-effect relationships, like images chosen to illustrate Kuleshov’s effect. From a theoretical perspective, the implied causal links need to be carefully scrutinized, from the less to the more satisfactory. I have used five such strategies to show how Goffman’s life ‘explained’ his work. A critical review of these strategies follows. 1 ‘Influences’ The first kind of ‘link’ is very common and is too often taken for granted. It has to do with ‘influences’ of a personal and/or intellectual nature. Traditional biographies and ‘external’ literary criticism heavily rely on such vague ‘causes’, often cast in a psychological, if not psychoanalytical, vein. There is never a way to definitely confirm or disconfirm such ‘influences’. This probably explains why it is so difficult to avoid them. They keep creeping back into the biographer’s way of thinking. They are discarded because they cannot be confirmed—and then retrieved and replaced because they cannot be refuted. From personal experience, I must admit to having used several kinds of ‘influences’ and probably every biographer does this. Indeed, literary critics make a living from this activity by using information based on the discovery of a hidden influence, denial of a well documented influence, and so forth. However, an extensive discussion of influences is not, in my view, very helpful, but one has to confront them, if only to exorcise them. So here is a table of ‘possible influences’ on Goffman’s life and work. Influences by individuals are opposed to influences by ‘milieux’. Impacts on Goffman are categorized at three ‘levels’: personal, intellectual and personal/intellectual. A temporal divide is made in 1953, before and after his Ph.D. To illustrate the point, Goffman’s Canadian friend Dennis Wrong may be seen as a personal influence on Goffman’s life course because he apparently suggested that he went to the University of Toronto in 1944 (Wrong 1990:9). He did not have a direct intellectual impact on Goffman but he may be seen as an ‘influence’ in an intellectual biography because ultimately he played a role in the shaping of Goffman’s later work. On the contrary, Freud, Durkheim, Sartre or Proust may be seen as ‘intellectual’ influences though Goffman never

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met them, of course.3 But he personally met and was encouraged by intellectuals like C.W.M.Hart and Ray Birdwhistell, who can be seen as ‘personal and/or intellectual influences’. The same line of reasoning can be taken for collective influences or ‘milieux’. (See table below.) As the table shows only too well, these ‘possible influences’ are either too precise or too vague. No matter how much time and care I could devote to their reshaping, they would stay inconclusive and frustrating, because they can only rest on a loose ‘stimulus-response’ model.

What is a life? 33 Influences’ are necessarily constituted in this way. The best way to deal with them is to spell them out and then to leave them there, in whatever shape they are. How, then, can we conceptualize the relationship between life and work in a more theoretically sound manner? I would suggest that steps toward a more adequate conceptualization can be made by creatively applying some of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas. 2 ‘Habitus’ When The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959) and Relations in Public (Goffman 1971) were jointly translated into French in 1973 under the title La Mise en Scène de la Vie Quotidienne, the Parisian sociologist Luc Boltanski wrote an introductory essay called ‘Erving Goffman et le temps du soupçon’ (Boltanski 1973). Directly employing Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, he suggested the following hypothesis: In order to understand the fundamental insight which underlies Goffman’s work and which defines its particular perception of the social world, according to which individual relationships are always (as relations between nationstates) power relations based on makebelieve, one should move upward, in the genesis of the work, beyond the rather arbitrary moment when the work is objectified in the written code and even beyond the time when, through a rational professional training, the author acquires the scientific habitus to reach the antecedent social experiences which constitute the class habitus: a scientific habitus is indeed never totally independent from the pre-existing class habitus upon which it is built, so that any scientific work always encapsulates, as any literary work, the trace of the social trajectory of its producer. (Boltanski 1973:128; my own translation) Boltanski himself does not reach for the ‘antecedent social experiences’ which formed Goffman’s class habitus, and only alludes to the formation of his scientific habitus. So I took the decision to respond empirically to his invitation. It may be worth tracing the origins of the concept of habitus, as used by Pierre Bourdieu in many writings. This French sociologist started to use that medieval Latin term after he translated Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1957) into French in 1967. Panofsky borrowed the term from St Thomas Aquinas (1225–

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74) who used it to define virtues. Habitus is the supine form of habere, which means both ‘to have’ and ‘to be’. A virtuous man is virtuous because he fully incorporates certain ways of being and whatever he does, he is virtuous. It has become his way of being. The same process is evident when a Gothic architect who was schooled through scholastic categories reproduces them spatially in the design of his churches. Such principles ad actum are not idiosyncratic. They belong to a given group or social class and thus contribute to the maintenance of the social order. This was the new accent provided by Bourdieu’s thinking. He defined habitus in various ways but the key term is ‘disposition’ which is an inclination or a propensity towards something. Habitus is a modus operandi, a ‘durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations’ (Bourdieu 1977:78). How, then, could we reconstitute Goffman’s ‘habitus’? His acquisition of a ‘scientific habitus’—that is his explicit professional training—is easy enough to locate at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. I would argue that it is not so much a matter of mastering authors like George Herbert Mead or Georg Simmel, not merely a matter of acquiring competence in ethnographic methods of datagathering which is essential for grasping Goffman’s scientific habitus. Goffman, and the whole group of Chicago sociologists who graduated at the turn of the mid-century with Ph.D.s, actually developed a certain disposition towards the world, a disposition which guided their perceptions, appreciations and actions throughout their later careers. This may be called the ‘Chicago habitus’. The Chicago habitus is made of three ‘generative principles’. The first principle for the Chicagoans is that they have got to see it to believe it. The world ‘out there’ is real and this takes precedence over the concepts and theories used in its sociological apprehension. Joseph Gusfield recalls a joke his peers used to circulate which goes like this: A thesis on the sociology of drinking at Harvard would be called: ‘Modes of cultural release in western social systems’; at Columbia: ‘Latent functions of alcohol use in a national sample’; and at Chicago: ‘Social interaction at Jimmy’s: A 55th Street bar’ (Gusfield 1982). In spite of the fact that Goffman never published full ethnographic accounts of his fieldwork experiences, his basic attitude was data-orientated. Remember his call for ‘lower range theories’ (Goffman 1981c). Or the often-quoted sentence from Asylums: ‘Better, perhaps, different coats to clothe the children well than a single splendid tent in which they all shiver’ (Goffman 1961a: xiv). Second, as Gusfield’s story illustrates, there is always an ironic twist in the Chicago way of looking at the world. That wry humour is very much present in Hughes’ writings—and constantly at work, of course, in Goffman’s own. Chicago

What is a life? 35 sociologists of that period seem to say to the group under study: ‘Theory won’t buy me, and you won’t buy me either—no matter how deeply I respect you’. As Hans Mauksch once put it: ‘No matter how much you care about it, how seriously you take it, you never get totally sold, you never get totally co-opted’ (McCartney 1983:457). Furthermore, this aspect of the Chicago habitus is not just a matter of critical acuity, it is an epistemological stance. It is a way to ‘break up the mirror of illusion’, as Bachelard would have put it, and it serves as a source of resistance to simple incorporation of actors’ definitions of their roles and world-views into sociological work. It is not merely a matter of cynicism either. This brings us to the third generative principle of Chicago sociologists of that genre. They are not ‘do-gooders’, not social workers—but they know on what side they are (to allude to a famous paper by Howard S.Becker). Their stance is ‘cool’. From Davis’ cabdrivers to Gusfield’s alcoholics, from Becker’s jazz musicians to Goffman’s mental patients, there is a continuity of attitude. It is Swiftian in inspiration—but certainly not disenchanted. At this point we may say we have a first idea of Goffman’s intellectual matrix, as shared by the members of his Chicago cohort. But we may add that a unique element in his preliminary intellectual training is his possible cinematic formation at the National Film Board. He may have learned in Ottawa what the making of a documentary film was all about—and he may be said to have produced documentary films all his life, in the written mode. He may even be said to have developed a theory of film making for ‘real’: Frame Analysis (1974). So one may suggest that the NFB experience offered him a first ‘habit-forming force’, as Panofsky used to put it. Of course much of this is entirely hypothetical, but many elements of Goffman’s life tend to support this interpretation. One example cited by one of my informants is that he only felt comfortable teaching when he had slides to show. Here we see some typical Goffmanian analytic techniques: the presentation of slices of life, the montage at will with its associated control over viewing and interpretation (see also Watson, Chapter 8 of this volume). Boltanski (1973:128) suggested that we go beyond this scientific habitus ‘to reach the antecedent social experiences which constitute the class habitus’. To take this recommendation seriously is a hazardous business. At Berkeley in 1987, as I was trying to find some patterning in the mass of data I had accumulated, I discovered John Cuddihy’s book The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx and LéviStrauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (1975). Although Cuddihy quotes Goffman extensively, he does not use his life and work as one of his case studies. What struck me were the parallels between Freud’s and Goffman’s trajectories. In

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both cases, the life seems to have informed the work and vice-versa, as if the work had programmed the life. This is the third ‘link’ I want to make between Goffman’s life and his intellectual output. It is best conceived as a loop rather than an arrow. 3 The work as an autobiography Freud was the son of a merchant who carried his goods across Moravia in a wagon. Freud himself had slowly made it through the Vienna upper bourgeoisie. Cuddihy (1975) sees the elaboration of psychoanalysis as the device that Freud used to control the last remnants of his past. Freud apparently used his work to conduct his life and used his social struggles in life to produce his work. In Goffman’s case, the process of gentrification appears to rely even more heavily upon the work in process. It is as if the work provided him with the keys he needed to progress socially. What he described for others, he prescribed for himself, from ‘Symbols of class status’ (1951) to ‘On face-work’ (1955), ‘The nature of deference and demeanor’ (1956b) or ‘Embarrassment and social organization’ (1956c). What is even more intriguing in Goffman’s early work is the constant, but veiled, dialogue with psychoanalysis. The title The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life immediately echoes Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. When Freud speaks of ‘symptoms’, Goffman speaks of ‘signs’, as if he were demedicalizing and re-socializing Freud’s carefully buried indices. Where Freud ‘peopled the mental stage with actors whose characters are drawn from real life’, as Lyman and Scott put it (1989:61), Goffman ‘moved the theatre of performance out of the head and into public places’ (Lyman and Scott 1989:65). So there are parallels between Freud and Goffman at both the individual and intellectual levels. This double parallelism, which is developed here for heuristic purposes, yields a better appreciation of Boltanski’s idea (1973) of the encapsulation of Goffman’s social trajectory in his scientific work. According to Boltanski everything happened as if his provincial background had set him on an upwardly mobile track, with the inevitable malaise and ambivalence that this trajectory develops. Throughout the 1950s, Goffman developed analytical works which helped him to master his socialactor-in-transit anxieties. He progressively calmed down to the point where he ultimately wrote Forms of Talk (Goffman 1981a), a highly technical book on language. Now there is a major flaw with the foregoing analysis of habitus. Since class habitus consists of socially shared cognitive patterns, how come there is only one Erving Goffman? After all, many sociologists graduated from the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. To say that he offers a unique combination of factors

What is a life? 37 is not enough. We need to move one step further and locate Goffman’s trajectory in the set of possibilities offered to him and other individuals of the same disposition (habitus) and same social position at the same time. This is the fourth level of ‘explanation’, which opens up a new and extremely painstaking method of biography construction in the social sciences. 4 From the ‘habitus’ to the ‘field’ When Bourdieu commented on the manuscript of the French version of my biography in September 1987, he said that I had focused too much on the ‘habitus’ and did not work enough on the ‘field’. In a 1986 paper called ‘The biographical illusion’ (published in English in 1987), Bourdieu very sharply criticized the ‘life history’ approach which had been revitalized in France by Daniel Bertaux and others. At the same time, he offered difficult challenges for any biographer who wanted to work as a social scientist rather than as a chronicler readily satisfied with easy notions of ‘influence’: Trying to understand a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of successive events (sufficient into itself), and without ties other than the association to a ‘subject’ whose constancy is probably just that of a proper name, is nearly as absurd as trying to make sense out of a subway route without taking into account the network structure, that is the matrix of objective relations between the different stations… In other words, one can understand a trajectory (that is the social which is independent of the biological ageing although it inevitably accompanies it) only on condition of having previously constructed the successive states of the field through which the trajectory has progressed. (Bourdieu 1987:8) It is true that in my work so far, Goffman has been left alone. He is still an individual, not a ‘social agent’ with a given disposition (or habitus) in a given position in social space. An agent ‘invests’ and then ‘moves’, as Bourdieu suggests in the same paper, on the basis of a realm of possibilities. This perspective not only requires a large amount of data on the different states of the social sciences from the 1940s to the 1980s (for example, number of undergraduate and graduate students in sociology in toto and at various universities, number of professors, and so forth) in order to build the ‘subway chart’. It also requires the parallel construction of several biographies, in order to see how

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Goffman’s trajectory differs from or resembles the routes taken by his Chicago companions. I have already collected a certain amount of data in that direction but, as I proceed, a strange thing happens. Although I recognize that the procedure is extremely pertinent theoretically, it also extremely disturbing psychologically, for I find I am taking too much power over Goffman. Seen as a social agent, as a set of dispositions, or as a position in the social space of a society at a certain time, Goffman ‘disappears’: my conceptual matrix absorbs him, so to speak.4 Although one does know that Goffman as ‘empirical individual’ cannot be confused with Goffman as ‘epistemic (or constructed) individual’ (to use Bourdieu’s 1988 distinction), another sort of uneasiness develops as the analysis unfolds and pushes Goffman into ‘virtual reality’. Thus, some backtracking appears to be necessary. The fifth step I am now going to suggest is not so much a step up as a step sideways. 5 Biography as ethnographic history It took me quite a few years of data collection on Goffman’s life to realize that I was doing exactly what I had been best trained to do as an ‘ethnographer of communication’. Under the supervision of Ray Birdwhistell and Dell Hymes at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s I had been instructed in how to conduct in-depth interviews with informants, how to gather data by participating in the life of the local communities, and how to sift and order that data into a narrative framed by a general hypothesis. The writing of ethnography has been much scrutinized in recent years by anthropologists (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988) and sociologists (e.g. Van Maanen 1988; Atkinson 1990). Often using literary methods and theories, these authors have stressed (without denying that ethnography relies first on the quality of the data collected in the field) the crucial importance of the writing strategies used by ethnographers in accounting for their fieldwork. As an example, several anthropologists have recently used the ‘cinematic metaphor of montage’ (Marcus 1990) to characterize ethnographic accounts, which they consider as highly constructed narratives making use of many ‘texts’. More acutely reflexive narrative ethnographies are presently being published as a response to these critical analyses. In a parallel fashion, the writing of history has been much debated in Europe and in the United States since the 1970s (cf. LaCapra and Kaplan 1980). Like anthropologists, historians have called for a ‘return to narrative representation’

What is a life? 39 (White 1987), that is, for a way of writing history which tell stories, with plots, scenes and heroes. Narrative discourse, it is argued, is a way of rehabilitating people, motives and chances in a field long left to structures, forces and ‘trends’. Most relevant to my own concerns is the work of a group of Italian historians led by Carlo Ginzburg who seek to elaborate a microhistorical approach based on biographical case studies. Arguing against serial quantitative history, they suggest a ‘nominative methodology’ focused on actual people whose lives are reconstructed through archival research using property registers, notarial records and so on. At the same time they propose to ‘investigate the invisible structures within which lived experience is articulated’ (Ginzburg and Poni 1991:8). Through biographies they endeavour to link micro and macro levels of social reality. The analogy with ethnography comes immediately to mind. Whether by means of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1988) or in other terms, ethnography intends to capture ‘real life’. It also attempts to unveil the ‘invisible structures’ of social life. In fact microhistory has often been called ‘ethnographic history’ (Muir and Ruggiero 1991:ix). Since I attempt to use biography as a way of illuminating history, the theoretical programme of the microhistorians is certainly worth taking into account. Of course there are serious differences between their targets (for example, the social history of sixteenth-century Italy) and mine (the intellectual history of mid-twentieth-century USA). Yet the notion of ‘biography as ethnographic history’ seems to be a creative way to respect Bourdieu’s warning about the ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu 1987) while at the same time respecting the individual under scrutiny (I cannot say ‘under investigation’). More needs be done to make the approach and reasoning of the Italian microhistorians more fully compatible with my own project. But the uneasiness that marked the beginning of my project has been replaced by an awareness of the significant general issues in the construction of intellectual biography that my case study raises. The individual and his society Goffman’s biography offers a very interesting case study of a history of American sociology in the decades following World War II. It is first the story of an ‘outsider’ (geographically and socially), of a ‘first-generation intellectual’, who ascended to the top of his discipline, both institutionally (prestigious universities, presidency of the American Sociological Association) and scientifically (for years Goffman was on the list of the ‘ten most quoted authors’ of the Social Sciences Citation Index). What are the social mechanisms that made such a trajectory possible?

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One key element is certainly the milieu of the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, which was bubbling with energy (of returning GIs) and enthusiasm for ideas and intellectual work. Several of the early giants in the field were still there (for example, Ogburn, Wirth, Blumer, Hughes, Warner) to shape the generation of sociologists who were to exercise their influence in the 1960s and 1970s. Another element is the expansion of the university system throughout the country in the 1960s to accommodate the waves of students born during and after World War II. There were not only many openings for young people with Ph.D.s but also vast readerships for their work. Goffman belongs to that generation of sociologists trained by senior scholars at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s who filled the new positions first opened up on the West Coast. His appointment at Berkeley in 1958 occurred just before the tremendous development of sociology in the 1960s. A third element, in many ways contingent upon the previous element, is the development of a new relationship between the media and academia. Academic books began to be published in pocket book editions without first being produced in hardback editions (Coser, Kadushin and Powell 1982). Scholars began to be interviewed and profiled in widely-circulated news magazines like Life or Time. Goffman’s early books were published by Doubleday Anchor Books and read by hundreds of thousands of undergraduates. His profile appeared in Time on 10 January 1969, with a picture that he very reluctantly agreed to see in print. Although he never played the role of a public intellectual, he became a cultural figure like Margaret Mead or Marshall McLuhan, whose work was widely quoted and intensively scrutinized. To grossly match a life and an era can be done fairly easily (as attested by the very many popular biographies published every year in the United States or in Europe). It is much more difficult to rationally construct an articulation between the individual and his or her society. I precisely want to use biography as a way to link micro and macro levels of reality. Thus what is called for is a ‘theory of biography’; I suggest here that anthropology and history may contribute to such a theory. Acknowledgements This essay was first presented at the Annenberg School of Communication Colloquium Series on 22 April 1991. One version or another was read carefully by Murray Davis, Michael Delaney, Renée Fox, Sam Kaplan, Erwin Linn, Steve Murray, Michele Richman, Dan Rose, Greg Smith and Sasha Weitman. I owe them a lot.

What is a life? 41 Notes 1

The snapshots are based on many interviews with Erving Goffman’s friends and colleagues. They can all be substantiated. I decided not to add precise footnotes for stylistic reasons. Moreover, a few sources are confidential.

2

Fredelle Brusar Maynard (1964), the daughter of a grocery owner who kept moving from one town to the next as his successive businesses collapsed, describes her youth as a young Jew in Manitoba.

3

In an interview with Sartre’s French biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, Goffman confirmed he never met Sartre (Cohen-Solal 1987:276–7). Surprisingly enough, the influence of Sartre’s kind of existentialism on Goffman’s work is one of the most often discussed topics in the critical literature on Goffman.

4

Another way to speak is Sapir’s, as Steve Murray, a most dedicated scholar, has kindly brought to my attention: individuals ‘dying in the meshes of the tapestry they are commanded to enliven’ (Sapir 1966:vii).

3

Fine romances Two arrangements between the sexes in public places Carol Brooks Gardner

A walker will fix [the blonde model] with an open gaze for as many moments as the passage will allow without his having to turn his head sharply. During this structured moment of staring he may well be alert in fantasy for any sign she makes interpretable as encouraging his attentions. Note that this helterskelter gallantry remains very well in check, no danger to the free flow of human traffic, for long ago the model will have learned her part in this ceremony, which is to conduct her eyes downward and unseeing, in silent sufferance of exposure. (Goffman 1971:376n.)

My main purpose in this chapter is to mine Goffman’s analysis of public places and of gender for certain relevances to the gender-based public harassment reported by women, speculating about ways in which Goffman’s work could be utilized more extensively in analyses of public places that include and pointedly consider women along with men.1 I examine how Goffman’s concern with explaining how even public behaviour—often discounted or not considered by social scientists—helps reflexively to maintain, reproduce, and perpetuate beliefs about the character of each gender. Goffman’s constant concern throughout his intellectual life with the crucial importance of social context in both determining and creating meaning was maintained in his later work on gender-based ‘institutional reflexivity’ in ‘The arrangement between the sexes’ (1977). Through this concept Goffman acknowledges the necessity of understanding native beliefs and social practices while retaining a sociological view that does not cede authority to their content. Specifically, Goffman opposes the argument that the differential treatment of women and men can be legitimated by a vernacular essentialism which presumes real, underlying biological differences that are determinative of gendered human nature. Such reductive biological notions simply cannot explain the variety of gender-differentiated beliefs and practices. Instead, Goffman suggests that many social beliefs and practices, usually presented as ‘natural’ consequences of the presumed underlying differences between the sexes, are actually produced

Fine romances 43 through their enactment and subsequent institutionalization. The student of gender difference thus need look no further than the socially-organized character of these ordinary beliefs and practices to appreciate something essential about relations between the sexes. Institutional reflexivity is Goffman’s analytic characterization of the logic of gender difference and inequality. The more taken-for-granted and out-of-awareness these gender inequalities are, the more mired individuals will become in defending their existence. These distortions in socially equal relationships between women and men will be compounded by any scheme or explanation that claims suchand-such a distortion is, in truth, for a woman’s (or a man’s) own good—as does the traditional courtesy system. Here the individual will have to seem to argue against her or his own best interests in order to present an alternate arrangement that appears to be to her or his disadvantage. Just such a context is the reality of public places, and just such a dilemma faces the woman who attempts to account for the existence of public harassment and her own attitudes towards it. To illustrate certain aspects of Goffman’s analysis of the institutional reflexivity of gender, I have used the currently popular term ‘rhetoric’, with its connotations of possibly baseless persuasive claimsmaking, as one that is consonant with Goffman’s own orientation towards societal arrangements that reinforce, magnify and dichotomize gender differences. I use ‘rhetoric’ with the knowledge that, at least presently, it better expresses actors’ accounts of experience and feeling than it would the sociologist’s direct observation of related action—a limit that Goffman would disparage in the long run. Here, however, I am only concerned with the short run of informants’ accounts and therefore argue that ‘rhetoric’ is particularly suited to the disparate gender norms my informants often vociferously express and the alternatives they seek to invoke. I examine two rhetorical types of interpretations (foreshadowed by Goffman) that women use to explain their ‘public harassment’ by men. I present relevant interviews drawn from a corpus of nearly 300 women’s interviews and relate them to Goffman’s conception of gender relations and to his interests in expanding the sociology of public places in the latter part of his intellectual life.2 I use my term ‘public harassment’ to build on Goffman’s conceptions of interaction in public, and I formally introduce and define it shortly. Thus, I have another and self-interested purpose: to set out my own incremental and general work on public harassment in order to present a fuller portrait of women, and some other social groups, in public.3 My stimulus for using public harassment in general draws partly on my own experience as Goffman’s student and dissertation advisee from 1972 to 1982; some of what I attribute to Goffman resulted from personal communications of that time (and I so note it). After I present my extensions of Goffman’s gender and public places work, I make some general remarks about Goffman, gender, and the public realm. The ‘arrangements between the sexes’, therefore, explicate what members’ reports about public harassment add to our understanding of the interaction order in private and public.

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As Goffman himself required preliminary definitions to lay forth his work, so preliminary definitions are required for the growing but still infant area of public harassment. Public harassment, gender, and social category I have defined public harassment as an array of abuses that one individual may give to another with whom she or he is unacquainted, the abuse being understood as dealt out because of social category membership (Gardner 1995). Among these abuses are incursions of touch (Gardner 1993), valuative or vulgar comments (Gardner 1980), and popular etiquette that pictures the group member as distinct in relation to the average citizen and expects her or him to be especially cautious or unnaturally and defensively courteous when in public (Gardner 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1995). Public harassment is an area that implicitly requires the sensitivity and fine ethnographic detail of Goffman’s vision of the public realm. At the same time, it attempts to amplify that vision in a way of which Goffman might well have approved, as in later years he might have approved of the related concept of situational disadvantage. A situationally disadvantaged group can suffer public harassment yet may experience myriad advantages in other than public contexts.4 This concept is built both on Goffman’s curiosity about the individual’s changing situations due to her or his shifting Umwelt, and on Goffman’s early general interest in people who were socially disadvantaged (as in Asylums [1961a] and Stigma [1963b]) and his later interest in gender (in Gender Advertisements [1979] and ‘The Arrangement Between the Sexes’ [1977]). Using the concept of situational disadvantage, one can note that the same person who is subject to gay-bashing (for example) can be the corporately authoritative ‘sleek white male’ Goffman mentioned as hegemonic epitome (Goffman 1977); here it is the public context—street, shop, or park versus workplace—that determines his possible disadvantage when bashed, baited, or otherwise insulted if perceived as gay (Gardner 1994b). In my usage, each situationally disadvantaged group can experience public places as a gender domain (Connell 1987), capable of strong and eloquent social control against the individual and an arena for the sustenance and perpetuation of gender distinctions. This concept of Connell’s is much the same as Goffman’s point in ‘The arrangement between the sexes’ that, through institutional reflexivity, genderdifferential behaviour is reinforced by its pervasiveness in all spheres of life. Public harassment can come to be finessed by various management strategies, an aspect that further justifies the entire area as a magnet for Goffmanian analysis. Among these negotiations and management strategies is the talk in which public

Fine romances 45 harassment targets report their experience.5 Within women’s talk about public harassment, I suggest, there are two basic and different reported interpretations of women’s experience. Women used two key rhetorics in describing their experience, one a romanticization and one a feminist politicization of public harassment. In the romanticized rhetoric, values of the traditional eroticized and heterosexually oriented courtship and courtesy systems (Goffman 1977) were reinforced. Yet that rhetoric was challenged by a politicized feminist rhetoric to explain public harassment. Among others, Goffman neatly anticipated both rhetorics in his own late work on gender (1977:329).6 Women’s interpretations of public harassment7 In the light of such suggestions as I have just made about the character and substance of Goffman’s explorations of gender and of public harassment, the examples I now set out at some length are exercises in examining just what meaning women report public harassment has for them, as well as the place of these interpretations in Goffman’s sociology of public places.8 Most women arrive eventually at strategies for accounting for public harassment. These strategies, often, are related to the type of accounts women employ. Broadly, these accounts may be divided into four types of claims-making activities by a romanticized vocabulary of events. Two interpretations of public harassment, the politicized feminist and the romanticized traditionalist, involved rhetorics. A rhetoric, for the purposes of analysing interaction, can be defined as a theme or stance noted consistently throughout a spate of interaction or with regard to a topic or subject. By the very language and through the morphology of tales of troubles or tales of triumph they present, politicized or traditional accounts embody certain social histories and scenarios. Rhetorics also imply certain assumptions about women, men, and the relation between them, as well as their potential for changing behaviour. Both romanticized and politicized accounts can be categorized according to the alleged causes for the harassment. I will typologize interpretations of public harassment into these causes. In making this typology, I mention women’s estimates of offenders’ intentions; issues that women saw beneath the offence that gave it more significance; and general philosophies of the sexes. First I explicate the romanticized articulation, then the politicized articulation, and end by linking Goffman’s explication of the presence (and absence) of the courtesy/courtship system within these two rhetorics.

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The rhetoric of traditional eroticized heterosexual romance Women who counted themselves ‘traditional’ might include reference to etiquette norms, but also might hark back to a woman’s understanding of Biblical or Koranic dictates that kept the sexes on an uneven keel. A white middle-aged workingclass clerk, who strongly identified as a traditionalist and explicitly rejected feminism and ‘Women’s Lib’, said of low-level public harassment incidents in general that an offending man ‘was not being respectful of me as Adam was of Eve, and that’s why things of that nature are morally wrong’; a young AfricanAmerican college student used the Koran as her reference; and neither had compunction about speaking frankly to and taking confident active measures towards men who had spokens or acted rudely towards them in public. Women’s romanticized interpretations did not stimulate plans for social changes, however, though a woman was sometimes left more comfortable—with the traditional courtesy system on which to draw—with immediate and vociferous retaliation. Unfortunately, too, whites and African-American women in particular were consistent in expecting traditionally ‘polite’ public behaviour only of men of their own race, thereby telling us something about how little each race feels it can expect from the other and demonstrating that the traditional relationship between the sexes goes only so far in supplying confidence and spurring action. Harassment as flattery I will first discuss women who claimed public harassment was essentially an innocuous bit of flattery. Assuming that our heterosexually romanticized etiquette operates in the same way in public places that it does in less public gatherings, many nonfeminist women argued that public place harassment was in fact ‘complimentary’. This account is, when examined, a particularly difficult one to sustain for all—there are probably few compliments between close friends that feature obscene slurs, threats, and slaps—yet it is an explanation that is customary for public harassment. ‘Flattering’ incidents could, at times, make them feel like ‘real women’, boost self-confidence, and socialize women in the skills of pleasing men. The exact way in which public harassment made women feel better about themselves was, of course, gender related and, within this, related to presumed heterosexual interest and judgement of appearance. Wisely, no informant was waiting for a strange man to enquire as to how she fared with regard to inner and spiritual beauty, or pinch her, then ask how her portfolio was doing.

Fine romances 47 Thus, a compliment, when considered such, was also taken as responding to a woman’s ability to appear heterosexually attractive and interested—and to nothing else about the individual. As such, even when women welcomed acts and words of public harassment, these events reinforced traditional gender divisions, powers, and rights, in particular, men’s right to judge women based on women’s appearance. When a woman went to what she felt was considerable trouble to maintain, alter, or modify her appearance in order to secure (she said) men’s attention, she might be all the more likely to feel that a wide range of public harassment was evidence this trouble had not been taken in vain and all the less likely to question the character of the attention. Women said they had made quite serious modifications—to have face or breast surgery, liposuction, leg recontouring, to name the most common surgical measures—at least in part, for the sake of peace in public places. Harassment as courtship move Second, women who supported the romanticized interpretation of public order sometimes argued that what seemed public harassment was in fact a legitimate effort to meet a woman whom one would date, perhaps marry. This was a troublesome interpretation to support, since women are traditionally counselled to withhold availability to men with whom the women are not acquainted and since some occurrences of public harassment—a pinch that later produces a bruise, a playful push that lands the woman sprawling on the sidewalk, or, in one case, in the gutter of a busy downtown street, for instance—carried little promise as bases for further courtship. Then too, customary public interaction, at least on streets and other transitways, is often too brief to support anything but what seems akin to an arranged marriage in which the bride had little say. When accounting for public harassment as courtship, women occasionally expressly commiserated with their public harassers. These, they might say, were burdened by the many difficulties of making friends in the city or perhaps had been rejected by a girlfriend or spouse (usually one with whom the woman was unsympathetic) and were casting for a replacement. Women harassed when they were already with an escort sometimes took their escort’s protective involvement as a love token. They saw themselves as sought after by a faithful defender (the escort) and a pawky rival (the harasser). These women—typically middle- or working-class white, typically young—concluded that they suffered an embarrassment of riches, a conceptualization that saved face for the woman and (incidentally) implicitly excused her harasser by placing him in an easily comprehensible and legitimate romantic role.

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If politicized accounts could suggest that public harassment was weighted with significance beyond the immediate situation, so too could romanticized accounts. Whether women cast public harassment incidents as opportunities for crucial proofs of affection from erstwhile boyfriends or as slights to very much larger social institutions such as marriage, the family, and womanhood, they elevated these typically brief, everyday encounters between the unacquainted to larger romantic and familial concerns. Moreover, it was interesting that a woman’s husband or boyfriend did not actually need to be with her for her to resent what she said was the attempt of a rival, which demonstrates how strong the presumed family tie was. Thus, women felt that wearing a wedding ring, being engaged in a family task (such as conspicuously purchasing fishing tackle for a man they specified to the clerk was a spouse), or being accompanied by a child were signs that their presence should be regarded as a protected one in no wise susceptible to romantic overtures. In such cases, women noted that their sense that they should be flattered warred with their sense that the offender had failed to regard a husband’s prior claims. Harassment as the result of men’s indelible natures Third, there were accounts that argued men’s nature—inescapably crude and governed by biological and bestial urges—was to blame and presented as proof a bleak portrait of men’s inherent ineluctable sexuality. The simplest version of this explanation held that ‘men just can’t help it’. Goffman (1977) cannily noted the essentialist view of the ‘opposite’ gender that can manifest itself in public places. Certainly my informants were often exemplars. Women who romanticized public harassment were likely to reject the idea that acts of public harassment might be controlled because of the allegedly unalterable character of the man who had harassed—in fact, the intransigence of men as a social category. Men, equipped with their nature, character, constitution, genes, brain, and hormones, really had no choice but to be constantly sexually appetent; complementarity, women were left with no recourse but to endure or to strategize in minor ways when public harassment occurred. Changing men’s behaviour towards women in public, one woman who identified herself as ‘firmly traditional’ said, was as likely as ‘changing a leopard’s spots, and a lot more dangerous’. Here African-American women were likely to allude to some vaguely biologically based rationale for men’s public harassment of women: in fact, about three-quarters of the African-American women who expressed a rhetorical allegiance did so. Said an African-American law student after ‘a brother [i.e., another African-American] had hit my butt and insulted me’: ‘They’ve got dicks. That’s what they think with. They got no choice. I got no choice either. That’s

Fine romances 49 why I forget about it. Else I stay home.’ Such words demonstrate at least a rhetorical alienation of women and men. Other women cited socially unavoidable ‘machismo’ as a spur for public harassment. Correctly, many women perceived the inherent heterosexualist romanticism of public places. Did a man yell, catcall, grab, pinch, follow, or leer at a woman about whom he knew nothing? Then that in itself demonstrated that he was an appropriately virile heterosexual biological specimen, and that she, by turn, was a fit object for the attentions of a virile heterosexual—and presumably heterosexual herself, since our rigid ideas of sexual preference assume neither heterosexuals nor homosexuals are attracted to those of the ‘opposite’ preference. Interestingly, this made presumed homosexuality a final cause of public harassment of women by men: implicitly, it is in order not to seem gay that straight men allegedly sometimes harass. Yet for the most part women perpetrated views of men as something of a biological, social, and genetic lost cause, as doomed to misbehaviour and crime by penis and male hormones. Ultimately, biologically based explanations in particular were more depressing and pessimistic than at first they seemed. Not only did these views sustain and enable a view of men as recalcitrant, obnoxious, and biologically determined creatures at the mercy of society and body, but holding such a view of men’s natures made it difficult for women to claim to strategize successfully or, considering the view of women as weaker, for women to claim to adopt any attitude but pity. Harassment as woman’s fault Fourth, those who used a romanticized rhetoric often claimed that, when men committed public harassment, women received deserved criticism. This claimsmaking style criticized women for dressing inappropriately, acting loosely available (by smiling or making eye contact with a man, for instance), or in other ways failing to act the traditional woman. A few women specifically mentioned that a particular instance of harassment was their own fault, and that public harassment would disappear if women dressed and acted with traditional modesty. (This was also an argument of some politicized feminists, who also believed that, if they moderated their attractiveness, they would escape notice in public and hence the harassment they saw little hope of erasing.) Moreover, many women who otherwise resented exploitations and roundly criticized the men who authored them, suggested that an element of attractiveness—their own—was at fault: several women suggested that they were catcalled, pinched, or followed because they were prettier, sexier, or more cheerful than most other women.

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When women presented a self-blaming view of these public incidents, it sounded very much like the traditional interpretation of stranger rape. Such an interpretation of public harassment thus sets a dangerous precedent by the interpretation it encourages for incursions more violent and more serious in nature. Less drastically, the constant threat of disappointing evaluations by men with whom she is unacquainted reifies the demanding standards that comprise US beauty. Harassment as equality measure Sometimes when using this argument women buttressed their claims by asserting that women too were among the authors (and therefore what was allowable for one gender should be allowed for the other), an ‘equality’ model built on the presumption that both genders have the right to flirt in the same way. Harassment as characterization of group Sometimes women noted that men who harassed could be reliably specified by categories of class, race, ‘appearance’ (often a gloss covering concerns of class and race), age, and sexual orientation (often under the guise of reference to a man’s ‘masculinity’, lack of same, or the use of a specific homophobic slur). Categorizations like these ruled some men out and others in: if flattery is a means to an end, then the former group would be uninterested in gaining further acquaintance and the latter group would take every opportunity to further acquaintance. Thus, in the traditional romanticized account of public harassment, the claim may be made that there is, in fact, no harassment at all or that, in fact, what seems like and sounds like harassment (a man who yells, as I have seen done, ‘Whoa! Slut! Whore! Gimme some! I like it!’ at a passing woman who has not even made eye contact with him) is actually doing nothing worthy of note at all. Or, it can be claimed, such a man actually is flattering a woman; or uncontrollably actuated by her choice of dress or her physical appearance; or responding to more deeply held obligations as a man, for example, to tease, play, or demonstrate devoted, even lavish heterosexual preference. In return for comprehending these men’s obligations as men, a woman can rely on other obligations she knows to be his, insisting that he has breached etiquette. As she herself acts as a ‘lady’, he too is to act as a ‘gentleman’. The politicization of the public order: a different way of accounting for harassment The hallmark of the politicized view of public harassment was to see it as comparable to school and workplace harassment, evidence of men’s power over

Fine romances 51 women in other areas of society. In turn, this politicized view gave women a particular view of men. In public as elsewhere, concluded a young Asian-American woman, ‘young white males have an advantage over everybody everywhere’. Thus, women said public harassment represented a form of harassment on a continuum with other types of harassment and discrimination, such as sexual harassment received by employees in workplaces and by instructors and students in college settings and menacing public behaviour that they feared would end in rape. Yet the same women might also romanticize these incursions, perhaps in order to save women from considering the need to retaliate in what might have been a dangerous situation. In politicized feminist accounts in general, the central problem of public harassment is seen as due to undeserved and longstanding inequalities between the sexes. Without remedy, women will continue to be disadvantaged, and discrimination and harassment continue to be reflected throughout women’s lives. The model politicized woman is she who takes a no-nonsense stance against discrimination and harassment whenever they occur, among the unacquainted too. Particulars varied according to a woman’s race: African- and Asian-American women and lesbians of all races themselves sometimes suggested that their experience with more extreme public harassment that, they believed, had race or sexual preference at its root had prepared them for what one young AfricanAmerican lesbian termed ‘being harassed “just” as a woman’. In short, like this young woman, they sometimes saw ‘being Black and being a dyke as a training ground for being a woman. I’m glad—I wouldn’t know how to handle a lot of things otherwise.’ Membership in other groups, then, might provide welcome, if regrettable, practice. The following three traits characterized the politicized feminist rhetoric: Grand claims When women politicized public harassment, they might give it a nobler cause, ratify the existence of other claims about the situation of women (or men, or African-Americans, or lesbigays), and stimulate a sense of justice undermined or, if the target takes action, justice upheld. Women found these metaphors for incidents of public harassment like ogling, following, pinching and grabbing, street remarks, and vitiations of expected aid: rape, prostitution, socialization to the ‘nice girl’ model, women as entertaining visual objects, wife-beating, sexual and racial discrimination, sexual and racial harassment in workplace and school; uncommonly—among other metaphors— pornography, child abuse, the revictimization of victims, the Holocaust, Balkan

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genocide and crimes against women and girls, and the Rodney King and Reginald Denny beatings in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Many women considered street remarks and exploitive touch on a continuum with rape, a possible ‘preamble to rape’, ‘verbal rape’, ‘a little rape’, or connected to ‘sexual terrorism’ in general. Fellow feelings When implicitly or explicitly making claims that one’s individual concerns are comparable to larger political issues or events, however modestly the claim is made, one also acquires something of the halo in which popular opinion for the moment sees the issues or events. Besides this, one acquires the right to claim that she understands something of the point of view, experience, or trauma of those who suffer from the other politicized issue. For the moment, then, being pinched on a bus or clapped through the gauntlet by a group of construction workers acquires the high gloss of a political cause—as does the woman who has suffered it. At the same time, indignation over the plight of more obviously injured others can fuel her own fear, anger, and resentment. Related a young white graduate student of her experience of being painfully hit on the breast: [M]y feminist consciousness dates from that incident…[I]t made me understand how a rape survivor feels. I don’t mean that I’m as bad off as a woman that’s been raped, but the mechanics of the thing are the same…I feel I understand more what Blacks suffer in the society, too. Harassment as men’s responsibility Women who politicized public harassment by and large mentioned that the man, not the woman, was at fault in public harassment. Women said or implied that they ‘accepted] no responsibility for being the victim of someone’s vulgar remarks or actions’, in the words of a lab technician in her forties. Yet even women who were deeply offended were also often at a loss to know what to do when public harassment occurred. Many women, especially those who took care to identify as feminists, made it a point to say how offensive men’s public harassment was. Public harassment constituted a social problem that, some regretted, had as yet no widely known name much less a satisfactory solution, and a social problem on a continuum with school and workplace harassment. Some women even made suggestions for more lasting changes. Without exception, these more far-reaching plans came from

Fine romances 53 women who took care, during interviews, strongly to identify as feminists. Feminists’ politicized rhetoric mainly claims that public harassment is comparable to workplace and school sexual harassment or to other discrimination, prejudice, and violence that women face, for the most part in our own society. Some women more than others were likely to use a politicized feminist rhetoric. Of the women who said they used measures more likely to have a lasting effect— making sure that they contacted an offender’s boss, for example, or phoning or writing to the company of which harassing workers worked, virtually all were women who identified as feminists, lesbians or bisexual women and, again, Asianand African-American women were prominent among these. Yet for other women who explicitly identified as feminists, their own knowledge or interpretation of feminism seemed to have raised their consciousness, but had not yet provided them with solutions or suitable strategies to deal with public harassment. Identifying themselves as using feminist tactics when in public often seemed to leave women more frightened, and with less idea of what to do about it, than their outspokenly traditionalist sisters. In part, this is undoubtedly due to feminist women who have increased their knowledge of the world of men’s violence towards women, and who have been left reasonably shocked and frightened. In part, I suspect, it is also because of the capacity of what we identify as ‘feminism’ to open women’s eyes to abuses by men but rob them of the capacity to employ what they will now think of as ‘traditionalist’ measures for coping with sexism. However, not all women who cast public harassment in politicized terms went much beyond that label: a few spoke of ‘public [or street, or sexual] harassment’, but only to trivialize offences on the name of feminism. These women either said that they were something a woman should herself learn to manage or ignore, or admitted they knew of only the mildest sort of offences—and then conclude that these minor, verbal offences were unremarkable. A college student in her twenties averred, Sure, women get sexually harassed in the street. Sure, they get terrified. But so what? Women just get yelled at, or they get goosed or grab-assed. Maybe sometimes hit like I was. But nothing worse. Nobody gets killed. Women can handle it…All the guys do it. Get real. Although most politicized feminist interpreters noted that a woman had no responsibility for public harassment, interpretations of this sort sought to put the responsibility back on a woman’s strong, feminist shoulders once again. This suggests, then, that women’s practical understanding of feminism, at least in this

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one Midwestern city, has failed to provide women with practical measures against public harassment. General context: women in public places For women, presence in public places has always carried with it the constant danger of injury, stalking, and rape. Public presence also carries with it what are regarded as more minor, less momentous events which can nevertheless be on a continuum with the horrors of rape and its related menaces and also add to the atmosphere of sexual terrorism in public. Women in public always experience the possibility of evaluation, compliments that are not really so complimentary after all and harsh or vulgar insults if the woman is found wanting, stranger stalking, attempts to gain access to women in the future. Occasionally men’s ‘street remarks’ are accompanied by tweaks, pinches, even blows; sometimes these forms of violence, minor or major, substitute for verbal remarks and render their latent hostility clear. Often women say they believe that it is only some men, usually working-class men or men of racial groups different from the group the women themselves happen to be in, who offer these comments; my observations have consistently shown that there was virtually no ‘type’ —class, race or ethnicity, sexual preference, disability status, or age group—of man who refrained from these gender-based insults and abuses. Knowledge of public harassment can make citizens devote far more of their time to the public realm than ever Goffman envisioned (aside from his treatise on stigma (1963b): see note 9). The confluence of potentials for abuse can produce an atmosphere where an individual experiences ill treatment in public places with a sense of predestination or déjà vu, which may be interpreted with wry, astute expectation or proof of unreasonable paranoia: A social worker said she felt as if she was ‘just waiting to get yelled at by those boys. I knew the minute I saw them there [lounging against a building] what they were up to.’ Or a woman might say she ‘paranoidly’ spent a good part of time in public waiting for the other shoe to drop with regards to public harassment. Speakers in these incidents offered an interpretation somewhere in an uneasy twilight between feeling offended and trying to be convinced one is imagining it all. In the same atmosphere, things will seem to be going well when there is no overt evidence that they are going badly. In other words, our normative belief about public places is that it should be a glass of water that is always half-full. Such an intrinsically depressing view of the possibilities of what may occur in public is basically Goffmanian, as is the explicit assumption (like that inherent in the remedial interchange [Goffman 1971]) that interaction in public presumes

Fine romances 55 that the interlocutor will be taken as guilty of the worst, not the best that might happen. Through his emphasis on the ‘half-full’ quality of public life—for example, in Goffman’s (1971) discussion of the notion of ‘virtual offence’ in remedial interchanges—Goffman pointed to the conclusion more fully spelt out in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory that avoidance of face-threatening acts is a key part of the (possibly culturally universal) syntax of politeness. This founding of public life on a reformulation of Durkheim’s negative rites is in fact a central plank of the fundamental realism of Goffman’s broad position. The possibilities that follow may well be depressing, but is there an alternative. (And this is also why, at least as an idealization, civil inattention is so fundamental to orderly and comfortable public life.) In Gardner (1989) I concentrated on three areas that might add to Goffman’s social interactionist view of public places. Each of these areas was one that pertained to women in particular: first, the normalized distaste for public places that has been encouraged in women by their fear of crime in public, by traditional etiquette, and by the measures they have been informed they must take as crime-conscious pedestrians and shoppers; second, the street remarks women received, which were often difficult to manage and impossible to resolve successfully; and, third, the access information the woman disclosed that might be used as a clue to her identity and whereabouts and, potentially at least, can serve as ammunition for further abuses. I used these areas to illustrate how gender-conscious appraisal is necessary in order to appreciate the character of public places. Therefore, my task in that paper was to critique the normative implications of Goffman’s seminal sociological work on public places. A public street, park, or thoroughfare might seem to be an innocuous setting where the unacquainted could be engaged in leaving one another politely alone. The basic conclusion of my paper, however, was that an analysis of interaction in public places, like an analysis of many other elements of social interaction, cannot be presumed to be gender neutral. In fact, the accurate description of public places from a feminist viewpoint changes how we must understand public places in the first place. As much as women could be seen to have a distinct character, so too, I suggested, was the nature of men’s participation in public places altered. We must consider public places from a feminist point of view not only to understand how women behave in public places, but more fundamentally to understand how the public realm can be an arena for the sustenance and perpetuation of traditional gender relations and expectations. However, in the same way that the often fleet and anonymous

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nature of public places facilitates men’s abuse of women with whom they are not acquainted, so too can it facilitate women’s retribution against men offenders. Goffman’s changing perspective on gender in public As far as the topic of gender and public places is concerned, it is probably accurate to say there are two Goffmans, the first who wrote somewhat blithely, if not slightingly, of women’s concerns in his books on behaviour in public (1963a and 1971), and the second who built a superstructure of gender concerns designed to express women’s differential treatment, most notably in his work on gender in interaction (Goffman 1977, 1979). The first Goffman’s analysis often played women’s concerns about public places down—as he often played down the concerns of any social category that was not the white middle-class ‘normal’ whose perspective was his baseline in those works. This early Goffman relates women’s concerns about public places: [I]n some Western communities there is the practice whereby a male communicates regard for the attractiveness of a passing female with whom he is unacquainted by whistling at her or greeting her with some other expressive sign. What follows is up to her. She can elect to act as if no relevant communication has occurred. Or she can elect to turn and ratify the comment by a friendly or hostile comment, in either case creating a momentary face engagement. (Apparently the more impersonally appreciative the whistle, that is, the more it can be construed not as a pickup, the more accepting the girl will be of it.) But in addition, she may smile visibly (so that the whistler knows his message has been appreciatively received), and at the same time look straight ahead so as not to allow for the collapse of separateness and the formation of an engagement. This latter tack represents, in effect, a collusion of both individuals against the rules of communication—an unratified breach of communication barriers. The breach is a slight one, however, since the person whistled at has been on the move away from the whistler and will soon be out of the range of engagement. (Goffman 1963a:144–5) Goffman’s analysis was typical of the times in which it was written, as well as of his priorities in writing about public places (and women in them) before 1975. First of all, his analysis placed the responsibility for the breach on the woman, though invariably the man was the initiator, as Goffman suggested by accurately noting that it was the man who whistled, greeted, or otherwise ‘expressed’. (Of

Fine romances 57 course, the man’s initiation of the interaction vitiated Goffman’s subsequent mention of a woman’s ‘choice’.) Goffman also failed to mention that, in this type of ‘expression’, it was men, not women, who felt they had the right to comment or whistle. That first Goffman, then, occasionally wrote as a chivalrous upholder of the traditionally eroticized and romanticized public order, leaving elaborations and contradictions to his students. One case of this was his early description of one of Goffman’s best-known concepts, civil inattention (Goffman 1963a:83–8). This powerfully significant interactional ‘dimming of lights’ consisted of the averted eyes and physical distance between the unacquainted whereby individual signalled to individual that no harm was meant (or was meant to be inferred). According to Goffman, it was a norm of public places of high moral and practical connotation. However, Goffman did not elaborate on the ways in which, for women in general, civil inattention did not seem to be a pattern, let alone a rule, at all, so interactionally regular and vivid were the lapses, nor did he elaborate on the ways in which they managed incursions—nor, by and large, did he do so for other groups regularly publicly harassed.9 Thus, the early Goffman’s analytic terminology promoted a sensitivity to the situation of women in public places, while many of his own illustrations—such as the one from Relations in Public’s ‘Tie-signs’ (1971) that serves as an epigraph here—remained plainly imbued with masculinist and heterosexist assumptions. However, even some of these assumptions, which are scattered sparsely through the pages of Behavior in Public Places (1963a) and Relations in Public, are reflectively drawn upon in ‘The arrangement between the sexes’ (1977)—the last being the work, I would say, of the second Goffman. Consider, for example, the argument in the closing pages of ‘The arrangement between the sexes’ where Goffman examined women’s ‘felt insecurity in public places’ and the differential vulnerability of women and men in public places (1977:327–30) and the other times Goffman noted the discrepancy between the rights and treatment of women and men in public places, mostly in the service of making a different point and therefore unelaborated. For instance, Goffman implicitly noted gendered variations in civil inattention patterns when discussing the evident accompaniment signalled by tie-signs that linked individuals when appearing in public. Goffman noted that a man in public could: exercise the right to look for a second or two at the female as she approaches, and the female will often drop her gaze or at least take care not to return the gaze or examine the male…(With this arrangement it is possible for males to

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Unsurprisingly, there is no word in this writing of the many sound reasons that women have to withhold their gaze, not to say justifiably to be terrified, when faced with men with whom the women are unacquainted, nor of the men who seem quite willing to play out any of several ‘games’, like hearing shouted ratings and muttered vulgarities or receiving breast-grabs and caresses, in which women are typically the foreordained losers. In addition to gamelike aspects for men, there is always the conditioning undercurrent of much worse to come that women’s rape-awareness provides. In general, then, Goffman’s tendency before 1975 was to gloss over the legitimate preoccupations of women in public places. Such an analysis underestimated the impact that common interaction in public places could have on the individual both in public and in private. For example, the frequent choice to avoid public places has a gendered character and interpretation (along with its pathological counterpart, agoraphobia); so too does the frequent felt need to elaborately prepare for public presence. The absence of a systematic examination of the situation of women and other groups disadvantaged in public in Goffman’s work is unfortunate mainly because he was the first and most inspired researcher on public places, and it has taken some time for others to examine the significance of public harassment in ways that he, and other sociologists of his generation, did not. The second Goffman, the later writer (and, perhaps, teacher), demonstrated more of a sensitivity to women’s concerns about the public realm. As his student at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 on, I would argue that a Goffman awake to gender inequality had been in chrysalis from that time onward: progressively he was more open to the perspectives and concerns of his women students. At least, he began to speak in classes of women’s disadvantages in the same breath as he did of the disadvantages of other social groups—for example, those with disabilities—that he had eloquently examined. There was also the constant feature of most every class one took with him, a slide show that was the nucleus of Gender Advertisements; and my impression was always that women students’ reactions to those slides intensified his own attention to differences in gender displays. Not only did this sensitivity dovetail with the changing times of post-1975 gender consciousness, but it allowed students like myself to expand their own view of the public realm and the interaction order therein to respond to gender and other harassments found there.

Fine romances 59 Discussion In this article, I have intended to supplement and expand Goffman’s work on public places and the interaction order of public places by adding and explicating ‘public harassment’. I have done so in a preliminary way, and certainly not meant to indicate that the full range of favours, aids, and courtesies that exists between the unacquainted has been outlined fully elsewhere either. In specifying the gender of persons in public places, we find that we have changed the categories of experience for those citizens, both women and men. Public harassment tells us that any view of public places must consider that at least half the population is going to be open to evaluation that, so etiquette tells them, they ought not to experience. More than any other set of phenomena, public harassment shows that strong negative sanctions are possible in public places and that, furthermore, they are a constant reality for women. Moreover, as negative sanctions, harassment ultimately speaks of power, not the sincere effort to help the target reform. Concerns about access and the existence of a normalized distaste for being in public places speak strongly about the situated self that the woman can use in public places. In general, if interaction in public places is more problematic for women than men, it is also problematic for other groups that experience discrimination, like racial and ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. This reworking of Goffman’s perspective and categories reminds us that public places are areas for the enactment and display of power and privilege. They speak accurately and fully about our private lives as well. For women especially, public problems coexist with private gains. There is a related point: if women are regularly required to deal with the imposition of power in public places, then they also can be expected to devise strategies for dealing with those impositions. Insofar as the sociology of everyday life has ignored women’s successful strategies for dealing with social control by men in public places, it has masked women’s interactional skills and strength; insofar as it has ignored women’s less successful strategies or men’s undermining of those strategies, it has presented a misleading and inaccurately pleasant picture of what public places are like for women, among other groups. Another point I have made: many of our expectations for the performance of etiquette imply a heterosexual romanticization, even eroticization, of public order. To examine this heterosexual romanticization is to discover how deeply the roots of our society’s preference for cross-sex liaisons goes; moreover, it is also to uncover the depths of our adherence as a society to the ideals of romance—ideals that we often cannot keep to in our private and dutifully married lives, but for which the public realm also provides support and constant reinforcement. It is not only

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churches and synagogues, state, workplace, and household that support these ideals, then; it is also the diffuse interaction one sees in and one experiences in public places. Many citizens assume, for instance, that a man’s valuative comments on the appearance of a woman with whom he is unacquainted, have something to do with his estimate of her as a potential romantic or sexual partner—as does Goffman implicitly when he discusses blending of courtship and courtesy system concerns (Goffman 1977). More accurately, in public, a man has the option to use his evaluation of a woman as potential partner as a club to express an opinion, and moreover to use his evaluation to express his right to express an opinion (as do women in much narrower cross-sex behaviour). This romanticization and eroticization are upheld by the delicts we see in public harassment, as well as by the performance of etiquette’s dictates. In fact, what the individual need support is the demonstration of the public norms of identifiably heterosexual society; what one does in other spheres, in private places, or in bed can then comfortably be peripheral to the case. Thus, it is not really one’s (heterosexual) romanceworthiness that is at issue. Romance-worthiness is just the approved standard that one must be willing to support, sustain, and represent. Finally, I contend that—for all living sociologists of public places—it is not enough to amend the sociology of public places by recognizing women and other groups situationally disadvantaged there. On the contrary, a revised analysis may alter not simply our view of the public and private spheres but may reflect on the character of the interaction order altogether, especially on the relationship between ‘minor social ritual’ and ‘structural arrangements’ and on the influence of the guiding spirits of equality and courtesy in public (Goffman 1983b). Much of the preparatory work has been done by Goffman and by other gifted sociologists; much remains. When speaking of low-level gender-based public harassment, Goffman alluded to the confluence of the courtesy and the courtship systems (Goffman 1977), suggesting that what men felt they owed women in private situations could also be carried forth into the what is usually thought of as the anonymous world of courtesy between the unacquainted. For every instance of man-to-woman public harassment, heterosexual eroticized romanticism is reinforced, no matter the preference of the participants. Although Goffman’s analyses of public behaviour do not focus on women or other situationally disadvantaged groups, there is much in Goffman’s work that could well stimulate attention to the experiences of the many and the diverse, not just the few and the relatively privileged, in the public realm. For if, as Hochschild suggests (1990:278), Goffman himself did not use ‘all

Fine romances 61 of “Goffman”’ when he examined gender in public places,10 he left his students genuinely promising tools for doing so in the future. Insofar as I use Goffman’s analysis to explain public harassment, of course, I reveal his basic assumptions about the public order as deeply significant to social order in general and potentially important for the individual’s creation and sustenance of a suitable public presentation. In this light, I hope Goffman would end by finding my approach harmonious with his own. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Greg Smith and William Gronfein for suggestions on and criticisms of this article. As Goffman might have noted, I wish that the errata were theirs as well. Notes 1 This chapter recasts material from the Indianapolis fieldwork for Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment (Gardner 1995) in an ‘as-if’ mode, i.e., it considers some behaviour of public places in the way that Goffman himself might have done, had he broadened his spectrum of observations in the public realm. At times, I refer to Passing By data summarily. For more detail, see Gardner 1995. 2 I did participant observation in Indianapolis, Indiana, from 1988 to 1993. Indianapolis is a Midwestern state capital of about 750,000 people. In 1997, the urban population was about 20 per cent African-American and less than 2 per cent for other people of colour. As in Passing By, women of colour and women willing to identify as lesbian or bisexual are over-represented here. With the help of assistants for Passing By, to whom I am deeply grateful, I interviewed 293 Indianapolis women (and 213 men, who are discussed in Gardner 1995). Interviews were freeform and in depth, lasting from about half an hour to 3 hours. About half the women informants were white. Half were people of colour (about one quarter were African-American or other Black Americans; fewer were AsianAmericans, Latinas, Native Americans, or identified as ‘mixed’). Informants were most often young or middle-aged; most were of middle- or working-class origin. Most identified as heterosexual; 29 women identified as lesbian or bisexual. Of these women, I did not include all interviews in my analysis of the rhetorics, since I could not identify all women informants as users of one or another of the two rhetorics and did not attempt to fit all into one or another identification, preferring self-identification to some preconceived sorting process. For the precise number of interviews included here, their demographic characteristics, and the identification process, see note 7.

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3 I want, however, to show the limits of ‘public harassment’ as well as its virtues: see, e.g., note 4. 4 Although I write as if the interests of all citizens in public are well covered by attention to the public harassment of certain social categories to whose interests we are currently sensitive (gender, race, class, health status, and sexual preference, for instance), in fact that is a crude statement of who is attacked and who needs protection when in public. Goffman’s work on public places has constantly reminded us of the strictures on the personal presentation of the individual that have little or nothing to do with Affirmative Action categories. Indeed, it is in public that such categories have the most shifting valence. As Goffman’s early use of ‘comportment’ (usually of children and the mentally ill) gave lessons to the rest of us about what expectations the public order holds, his late essay on the interaction order (Goffman 1983b:15) was careful to specify additional expectations that the public order holds for a service transaction (language ability, apparent solvency, apparent sobriety, and so on). Further, I have specified in Gardner (1995) the existence of individuals disadvantaged in public but for whom no banner has yet been raised: the red-haired man who cannot make it down the street without ‘hearing some version of “Ginger pig!” shouted at me’, the person with an idiosyncratically ‘funny’ walk, the merely nervous or shy individual whose discomfiture increases as it becomes a point of enjoyment for the unacquainted around her or him. Such persons are surely least politicized victims of public harassment—yet their reports are proof that they too suffer at the hands of what is evidently a severely demanding public standard of order. 5 Somewhat inconsistently, I often call harassers ‘offenders’, but I avoid calling those who receive public harassment ‘victims’. I avoid the term ‘victim’ since by no means all recipients count themselves victims and since their management strategies, when especially clever or vociferous, sometimes end by making the targets of harassment the victors after all. 6 The constituents of the themes I discuss, although not the rhetorics themselves, were also noted in Hochschild 1990, Houston and Kramarae 1991, Kissling and Kramarae 1991, and in general in the works of Stanko (see, e.g., Stanko 1985 and Stanko 1990). Eisenhart and Lawrence (1994) discuss heterosexual romanticization specifically as a simplifying tactic in a case of great import for US women, that of Anita Hill and thencandidate for the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. 7 Rather than eliciting from a set list of identificatory choices, I allowed women informants to mention their affiliation themselves, and they typically did so in much of the language I have repeated here, that is, styling themselves ‘feminists’ or ‘traditional’. At the same time, I counted many members into the ‘traditional’ grouping by their very denial that ‘I’m no [man-hating] feminist’ or some similar mark of rejected identification with the

Fine romances 63 general equity of feminist goals. Counting so left me with some 190 (out of 293) clearcut cases of women who identified as one of the two categories. Notably, all 29 women who identified as lesbian or bisexual took care to identify a rhetorical stance also. I have no sense that most of the remaining women would not have fit fairly comfortably into one or another of the two main rhetorics. I simply did not wish to force an affiliation by offering choices. 8 In terms of data-gathering and methodology, Goffman was overtly disdainful of interviews. On the one hand, he was explicitly leery of them, requiring that students carefully frame them as the potentially inaccurate partial pictures that they inevitably can be. On the other hand, he occasionally used scraps of conversational opinion (as he did in Asylums) or used his catholic reading in place of extended interviews (as he did in Stigma). Although Goffman forbade me to interview for my dissertation (Gardner 1983)—at least, any dissertation that he would agree to read—I nevertheless spoke to women and men about public places subsequently and at length. 9 One example of such groups is shown by the situation of some people with obvious physical disabilities, who have found themselves, not merely open persons, but spectacles to be circled, gawked at, even photographed by those without evident disabilities (Gardner 1991). Stigma, however, is an exception to this general rule. Here Goffman (1963b) demonstrated his usual acute discussion of the subject matter of public harassment when he examined the social psychology, including the public presentation work, of people with visible disabilities and the mixed-contact reactions they received from ‘normals’. 10 Nor did many other analysts use all of their public observational skill: as Morgan notes, it has been typical to write off women in public while expatiating on men in ‘the lower depths, the mean streets, areas traditionally “off limits” to women investigators’ (Morgan 1988:86–7).

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Role distance and the negational self James J.Chriss

Introduction Like Durkheim and Parsons before him, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of action grapples fundamentally with the problem of social order. Goffman’s sociology is spectacular in its unbridled optimism about the knowledge actors possess about how to conduct themselves in face-to-face gatherings. Years ago Dennis Wrong (1961) criticized Parsons for having an ‘oversocialized’ conception of human beings. A few years later Harold Garfinkel (1967) accused Talcott Parsons of viewing humans as ‘cultural dopes’, meaning that, from Parsons’ perspective, human beings are seen as little more than automatons programmed to carry out whatever roles their cultural heritage has delivered to them (via socialization), all in the service of the various social institutions within which these actors operate (economy, family, polity, education and religion). These criticisms share the spirit of the broader ‘postmodern turn’ which is occurring across the social sciences and humanities. Postmodernism has challenged traditional science’s Enlightenment-inspired certitude that, through systematic application of the scientific method and the continual refinement of theory, we are producing better, more accurate explanations of social reality. The postmodern loss of certitude, by contrast, suggests that social reality is ultimately indeterminable in that what passes for knowledge reflects merely the unique, idiosyncratic social characteristics and interests of researchers and theorists in the field. Because researchers interpret the world in manifold ways depending on their location in the social structure, family background, and myriad additional factors, foundationalism and the quest for general explanation should be abandoned in favour of contextualized knowledge which emphasizes localized, restricted narratives and stories (Chriss 1996; Seidman 1992). In my view Goffman’s work illustrates just how far off the mark the postmodern loss of certitude really is. Goffman’s dramaturgical actor brings enormous amounts of cultural competence to bear on his or her everyday life, whether the task is as

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simple as tying a shoe or navigating one’s way through pedestrian traffic, or as complex as conducting a symphony or commanding a naval vessel at sea. Goffman’s actor, then, is imbued with culture through and through, and everyday life is made possible through the tacit ground rules established in the contexts of early childhood socialization and beyond. As Goffman explains, In spite of the fact that there is much to suspect in an interest in order, the subject matter has a defense. It is possible to imagine a society without many of the ground rules sustained by Americans. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a society being the better off for this. But it is not possible to imagine a society that does not make extensive use of various sets of ground rules. (Goffman 1971:xii) In everyday communicative conduct, then, actors create, recreate, and interpret the conditions by which they are able to go about the business of living. Actors may not always agree on the best way to go about doing things, or about the definition of the situation, but there always exists a pre-reflective ground upon which actors are able to come together in the first place to agree or disagree on any number of issues. As alluded to above, the concentration by Goffman and others on the problem of social order does not mean that actors are viewed as never having difficulty negotiating the conditions of their existence. Actors indeed have cultural competence, but they are not infallible. Goffman’s research documents the way that actors work through and around the difficulties of everyday life. Role distance is one such element of an actors’ role repertoire that facilitates a wide range of social repairs. Goffman (1961b) ends his essay on role distance with a pregnant aside about social thinkers’ ‘vulgar’ tendency to divide the conduct of individuals into sacred and profane parts. He goes on to explain that: The profane part is attributed to the obligatory world of social roles; it is formal, stiff, and dead; it is exacted by society. The sacred part has to do with ‘personal’ matters and ‘personal’ relationships—with what an individual is ‘really’ like underneath it all when he relaxes and breaks through to those in his presence. (Goffman 1961b:152) Goffman’s point is that if this really were the case, if persons could really relax and show their ‘true’ selves in the presence of certain particular others or in particular social settings, then the practice of role distancing would never appear in these instances. But Goffman spent the previous seventy pages of his essay documenting

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the variety of ways role distance may be called forth, suggesting that the practice is widespread and touches all corners of social life, including not only the profane but also the sacred. Here I want to explore further some of the ideas sparked by this line of thinking. Goffman (1961b:152) argues that ‘role distance is almost as much subject to role analysis as are the core tasks of role themselves’. In this spirit I shall consider role distance’s relation to both conventional role theory and the phenomenological treatment of roles.1 This exercise brings us closer to an understanding of Goffman’s own construction of social reality—vis-à-vis his own construction of the dramaturgical theory of action and supporting concepts and lexicon—and illustrates that Goffman falls more to the side of functionalism than to phenomenology. I then introduce the idea of the negational self, which seems to be implied especially in those forms of role distance where persons experience some sort of dysphoric interplay between their ‘virtual’ self-in-role and their ‘authentic’ self. I illustrate this difficulty through two vignettes, one taken from real life (the film), and one taken from a fictional realm (the juice skit). With respect to the former, a few years ago while serving as a teaching assistant for a large lecture class in the sociology of popular culture, I witnessed what struck me as a large-scale instance of role distance. In recounting the specifics of the incident, I hope through this retelling to open an analytical space for the purposes of coming to a general understanding of the role of Goffman’s scheme in contributing to and informing contemporary sociological accounts of social life. The point to be made here is that certain forms of role distance seem to confirm Goffman’s (1974) assertion that persons spend most of their lives framing themselves from view, and that whatever glimpses we do offer of our ‘true’ selves, it is through the attempt to affirm or display what we are not. This then gives us the idea of a self by default, or the negational self. Authentic versus virtual selves The negational self arises largely out of the interplay between the authentic and the virtual self. What I mean by this is that although he is consistent throughout his writings in making a distinction between virtual and authentic selves, Goffman (1963b) never really specifies what an authentic self is, much less if it truly even exists. Collins (1988:50) goes so far as to say that The self in Goffman is not something that individuals negotiate out of social interactions: it is, rather, the archetypal modern myth.’ Turner (1988:94) sees Goffman’s unwillingness to conceptualize a ‘core’ self as one of the major weaknesses of his scheme, as it makes his actor appear too ‘interpersonally glib and facile’ (for similar critiques, see Ashley 1985; Gouldner 1970; Sharron 1985; Young 1990).

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This confusion over authentic versus inauthentic selves, and the question of whether a core self even exists in Goffman’s scheme, is perhaps understandable given Goffman’s concern with role distance. One might well ask, why did Goffman even bother? If there is no authentic self, as Goffman’s work implies, why would one go to all the trouble of making public displays of distancing oneself from particular roles? For a partial answer, I draw on Efrat Tsëelon’s (1992a, 1992b, 1995) work which grapples with an important question lying at the heart of my own conception of the negational self, namely, is the presented self sincere?2 Tseëlon argues that the tradition known as IM, or impression management (see, e.g., Arkin 1980; Schlenker 1980; Tedeschi 1981), although rooted in Goffman’s (1959) seminal work on the presented self, has veered away from Goffman’s original intent in a number of crucial ways. Most importantly, whereas Goffman’s idea of frontstage and backstage attempted merely to illustrate how selves can be partitioned in terms of self-presentations before a variety of audiences, IM’s interpretation of this partitioning is that individuals possess distinctively ‘true’ private selves and ‘false’ public selves. Goffman’s actor puts on a variety of faces in various settings and before particular audiences in an effort to comport him- or herself to the exigencies of the social gathering and to uphold the definition of the situation. IM’s social actor, on the other hand, has a hidden agenda as he or she goes about the business of presenting the self, insofar as there is always an overt attempt to keep a private reality from surfacing during the commissioning of any particular public presentation. Tseëlon (1992a) explains the disjunction between the Goffmanian tradition and IM as follows: the Goffmanesque approach views people’s presentational behaviour as a process of negotiation. It is a game of representation. In contrast, the position advanced by IM researchers views presentational behaviour as manipulative. According to this view people present various images of themselves as a strategic move. Unlike Goffman’s approach, this ‘game’ is not an end in itself but a means to an end of gaining benefits. It is a game of misrepresentation. (Tseëlon 1992a:116) The negational self is offered as an attempt to reinforce Goffman’s original intent and to deny IM’s overly strategic interpretation of the presented self. In contradistinction to reading Goffman’s actor as a savvy manipulator concerned with working the system for the enhancement of self at the expense of others, I emphasize Goffman’s documentation of the myriad interaction rituals, and the accommodative function of those rituals, which serve to make social life civil and bearable. Ultimately, then, Goffman’s attentiveness to the way these daily rituals

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serve to uphold and reaffirm civil society is the direct embodiment, in modern dress, of Emile Durkheim’s (1951) notion of the ‘cult of the individual’ (see Chriss 1993a, 1993b).3 As I suggested earlier, perhaps the best Goffman can do then is to note that the work of presenting oneself in everyday life means that persons always frame themselves from view. According to Goffman (1974:547), ‘To say that he [the speaker] assumes a role and presents himself through it is already a bias in the direction of wholeness and authenticity. What he does is to present a one-man show. He animates.’ This animation is the speaker’s or actor’s agency, his or her ‘doing of the moment’. One important dimension of this agency is of course the sorts of remedial work in role distance which are the subject of this essay, a realm of behaviour which points analytically to the negational self. Role theory, phenomenology, and standard sociology Personal experience of the social world (the experiential) and exposure to texts dealing with particular topics of sociological analysis (the textual) are the main conduits through which sociologists receive and formulate ideas about the study of society. All sociologists cope with this dialectic, with this balancing of direct experiential understandings of the social world with textual revelations about various aspects of that same social world. Before I ever read a single word of what Erving Goffman had to say about the presentation of self, about role distance, about body gloss or whatnot, I experienced as a lived conviction certain things about (and in) social life which invariably become objects of Goffman’s and others’ scrutiny and documentation, that is, which eventually become ‘textualized’ (Agger 1989). For example, as a college student I was expected to display a certain amount of sophistication about, or competence in, doing things for myself, even though most of my life had been spent under the close tutelage of significant others. A new range of normative expectations confronted me once I left home and entered the world of college life, and all of us in one way or another, to varying degrees, feel the weight of social judgment concerning how well we are performing or living up to the expectations of our roles. Standard sociological concepts like role, role-making, status, and reference groups develop then in parallel fashion to the truths, the realities, and the lived convictions of the everyday life (Gouldner 1975; Berger and Luckmann 1966). The unthematized horizons of the lifeworld provide the backdrop for the everyday life, and as a result social scientists’ tacit knowledge of the social world is inexorably intertwined with their attempts to thematize these background understandings, otherwise known as science. It is necessary therefore to contrast briefly the phenomenological versus the more traditional sociological formulations of the

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role concept. This is important because phenomenology, concerned as it is with the opening up of the subjective dimensions of the lifeworld or the everyday life, has some interesting things to say about the viability of role as formulated and understood in social science. It will be suggested that Goffman falls for the most part outside of the phenomenological tradition, and that this has important consequences for the status of role distance as an explanatory scheme.4 The phenomenological tradition suggests that in order to adequately explain the social world, sociologists should strive to suspend belief in the taken-for-granted, objective world which confronts each of us by virtue of our very existence. In this mode of inquiry, one’s experience or cognition of the everyday world is used as original data to which a proper method must be applied (Fish and Dorris 1975). The goal is to alert the sociologist to the aspects of unthematized existence inexorably bound up in the thematized objects of scientific inquiry, thereby allowing phenomenological understanding of the social world as it exists, in the here and now. Although Georg Simmel (1971) is not known as a phenomenologist per se (but cf. O’Neill 1972; Smith 1989), he was certainly influential in specifying the various regions of experience confronting social scientists as they go about their work. It is crucial here to review Simmel’s seminal contribution in this area, for it opens a pathway to understanding how and why the entire research tradition known as ‘role theory’ emerged and evolved as it has to the present day. What Simmel offers is a contrast between the phenomenology of roles, that is, as they are experienced and interpreted by actors in the everyday lifeworld, and the attempt by sociologists to explain, by whatever analytical tools are available, the seemingly obdurate reality of these roles, their constituent parts, and what they mean to social actors. Phenomenology then is in a position to help social researchers understand or explain certain pretheoretical phenomena which confront members of the everyday lifeworld as subjectively experienced aspects of their reality. In order to transcend tacit understandings of these phenomena as given to us via the unthematized horizons of the lifeworld, phenomenologically-trained sociologists, through the bracketing of the ‘natural attitude’.5 direct their attention to the primacy of experience, thereby returning ‘to the things themselves’ (Tiryakian 1973:208). In her critique of traditional sociological role theory, Gerhardt (1980:561) articulates the phenomenological challenge by asking, ‘What evidence is there that roles are part of experienced realities?’ In other words, what from the phenomenological perspective might constitute roles as ‘things in themselves’, as actual social phenomena after stripping away the natural attitude which otherwise serves to prop up in the minds of traditional social researchers the seemingly perduring social structures of roles?

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Simmel (1971), in his seminal excursus ‘How is society possible?’, confronts this problem by noting that roles constitute one of three sociological ‘apriorities’. As Gerhardt (1980:561) explains, for Simmel this means that roles ‘embody conditions of the existence of society as well as of knowledge about it’. Simmel (1971:8) comes to this understanding upon reflecting on the question, ‘What, quite generally and a priori, is the basis or presupposition of the fact that particular, concrete processes in the individual consciousness are actually processes of sociation?’ Simmel’s query illustrates the analytical space in which role resides, for if there is any substance to role as a ‘thing in itself,’ evidence of its existence is to be found not only in the minds of people, but also on a more concrete level, that is, among the substantive elements that work to order interaction between persons. For Simmel, the force of role within social interaction is evidenced by the way typifications permeate our everyday lives. Our perception of the social world is ordered insofar as the cultural stock of knowledge provides to us broad categories of persons, be they mothers, fathers, priests, teachers, policemen, beggars, and so on. In contrast to the phenomenological tradition, especially as handed down from Husserl on through to Gurwitsch (1979), Schutz (1967; Schutz and Luckmann 1973) and the ethnomethodologists (e.g., Garfinkel 1967), thinkers like Erving Goffman and Talcott Parsons fall more within the orthodox intellectual tradition of modern Western sociology.6 That is, neither Goffman nor Parsons are concerned with problematizing or bracketing their tacit understandings of general categories of persons which sociologists, since the appearance of Linton’s (1936) groundbreaking work, have referred to in the theoretical terminology of status and role.7 It is clear that in the majority of their writings both Goffman and Parsons accept role and role relations as a given, and this is no surprise when we consider the intellectual milieu within which both theorists operated.8 Parsons, who spent most of his career at Harvard, and Goffman, who trained at Chicago from the late 1940s through the early 1950s, were together exposed to and accepted much of the literature which happened to be in ascendancy in American sociology during this period and into the early 1960s. Connell explains that: The [role] metaphor became a formal social-scientific concept at a time and place that can be specified much more exactly than is usual in the history of ideas: the United States in the 1930s…[Later] as the functionalist perspective was absorbed from anthropology into American sociology and political science and became dominant there, the role concept also rose to prominence. The 1950s and early 1960s were indeed the golden age of role theory. It became

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the building block in several attempts to state a general framework for structural sociology… (Connell 1979:7–8) Connell goes on to list a few of these projects, some of the most important of which were Parsons (1951), Parsons and Shils (1951), Nadel (1957), Gross et al. (1958), and Goffman (1961b).9 This last-mentioned volume, which contains Goffman’s essay ‘Role distance’ (1961b:83–152), is of course the primary focus of this essay. Traditional role theorists like Merton and Parsons certainly realized the potentially overly restrictive or deterministic nature of role structure, and hence concepts like role strain and role conflict were introduced to explain some of the stresses and ambiguities actors are subject to in the actual performance of a role. These however provide explanations of only a limited number of situations traceable to disturbances in the structure and institutionalization of status-sets which almost always culminate in the dilemma of having to resolve contradictory or conflicting role expectations. There is very little sense however of the actual agency of actors as they negotiate and work through these roles dilemmas. Even so, Goffman (1961b:91) notes briefly that ‘The identification of this kind of trouble [role conflict] is not a limitation of role analysis but one of its main values, for we are led to consider mechanisms for avoiding such conflict or dealing with unavoidable conflict.’ Thus Goffman hints that role distance, which appears something akin to improvisational acting at the interactional level, may serve the function of tension management at the systems level.10 Role distance Role distance refers to those instances in which persons place distance between their self and their current self-in-role.11 As I stated above. although Goffman (1961b) began his essay situated firmly within traditional role theory, he slowly moved to a novel position—that of role distance proper—via the linking of the dramaturgical metaphor to the extant role literature. Goffman’s attempt was to make the concept of role more malleable, to explicate in concrete terms the agentic nature of roles and role performance under analytically certifiable conditions. If culture provides the script to actors performing in roles, Goffman was there to remind us that actors sometimes flub their lines, and that in the episodic, sometimes rapidly-shifting realm of face-to-face conduct, improvisation often makes more sense than merely following the script to the letter.12 Role distance may be considered then analogous to improvisation, freeing up the actor, as it were, to marshal his or her own cognitive and affective arsenals

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toward upholding, defining, or redefining the social situation.13 In particular, role distance is one of the mechanisms by which the individual in a so-called ‘situated activity system’ (Goffman 1961b:95) attempts to remedy, downplay, or deny what he or she perceives to be a faulty, ‘strange’ (Travers 1992b), or otherwise inappropriate self while in role before a particular audience. The film I shall now return to the film vignette alluded to above. The setting for the incident was a large lecture hall. That day the professor was showing a film, a film about a professor giving a lecture in a lecture hall about the size of our own, to a group of students about as large as the group assembled to watch the film that day. The film showed the professor to be a gifted lecturer who deftly incorporated the occasional witty or funny aside into what was otherwise a rather sombre piece of business, namely the reporting on and critiquing of the tobacco industry in general and cigarette advertising in particular. The camera’s eye would alternate regularly between the professor at the lectern and the reactions of his students. At other times the camera would catch a lone student rapt in deep, serious contemplation of a sobering point made by the professor. It is admittedly very difficult for students to take dated films, especially ones which are a number of years old, seriously as pedagogical tools. Antiquated fashions in clothing, hairstyle, or automobiles; ‘hip’ words spoken by students which are no longer hip; or perhaps even the shoddy production values or the grainy nature of the film itself, all conspire to transform hoped-for or once serious frames into comical, ironic, or unserious ones.14 This is pointed out merely to emphasize that the film being shown to our group of students that day was up-to-date, perhaps only a couple of years old if that. The reactions being elicited from students to the showing of the film can be traced back not to anything like the ironic, campy nature of the film itself, but rather to some general processes of social life at work in the live audience watching the film. What was the behaviour in question? Simply that the students viewing the film seemed to be making an overt, concerted attempt to resist doing what the students in the film were doing, namely laughing at the professor’s genuinely funny jokes. For example, perhaps two minutes into the film the professor’s first joke sent the filmed audience into a frenzy of laughter, and this induced a hearty, if only brief, burst of laughter in the live audience as well. In that odd moment one got the palpable sense that the laugh had come to a halt much sooner than it normally would or should have, that it in fact had been aborted. I would contend that the laugh got cut short because the students in the auditorium literally caught

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themselves in the act of playing roles which for some reason struck them as alien or undesirable, as something that was somehow not a true reflection of their collective station in life. It was a glorious illustration of role distance on a grand scale, insofar as members of the live audience were exhibiting to everyone present that they were certainly not overcommitted to their roles as students, and that they would not be identified with a group of overeager students buying too easily into the ingratiation strategies of a gifted but obvious and transparent professor.15 At one point, perhaps two-thirds of the way through the showing of this approximately one-hour film, the professor was commenting on Joe Camel, the cartoon character central to Camel cigarette’s current marketing and advertising campaign. In particular, the professor noted that certain facial features of the cartoon camel, such as the longish snout and the exaggerated, floppy jowl, were actually carefully calculated subliminal representations of male genitalia. The professor then made a comment which drew a huge—probably the biggest—laugh from his audience, something to the effect that Joe Camel must certainly have one of the best-hung faces of any cartoon character ever created. But even so, it hardly caused a ripple among the live audience. Over time, then, the work of resistance among the live student audience had reached such a level of unanimity and solidarity that nothing, not even grudging acknowledgment, was being offered to suggest that whatever was happening on the screen had anything to do with the everyday realities of the live audience’s life. This illustrates one of the important points of Goffman’s role distance and of his sociology more generally: oftentimes we resist being overtly identified by others as incumbents to a particular role, even if at that moment the role is not perceived by the incumbent or incumbent-to-be as particularly problematic or as somehow beneath him or her. No one, it seems, appreciates being reminded by nonintimate or nonfamiliar others just how much they are enjoying themselves in a particular public place or setting, no matter how committed they may in fact be to their current roles. The juice skit There is a range of activities contained within the frame of the service encounter which seems to elicit a good deal of role distancing behaviour on the part of service providers (see, e.g., Leidner 1993).16 For example, in having to gather information from patients with regard to the filling out of insurance claims and whatnot, nurses may attempt to distance themselves from the bureaucratic dimension of their job by apologizing to their patients for all the paperwork (Heritage and Sorjonen 1994:23; see also Moyer [1986] with regard to police work).

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The juice skit illustrates the flip side of the service encounter, namely the enactment of role distance on the part of customers. A recurring skit on the television show Saturday Night Live offers a useful illustration of the point made at the end of the previous section of this chapter.17 In this particular skit a couple is shown dining in a neighbourhood pizza/hoagie shop. Quite predictably, the proprietor of the shop is Greek and, because he and his staff apparently lack knowledge of the tacit norms of studied nonobservance or civil inattention prevalent in American society, are prone to violate these norms through openly commenting on or emphasizing certain aspects of their patrons’ dining experience which usually go unnoticed or, at the very least, uncommented on.18 The gag is that one of the diners thinks his gyro sandwich is just a bit too dry, and so he goes to the counter to request more juice. Once at the counter, the workers make a big deal out of the fact that the customer really seems to like the juice, saying things like ‘You like the juice, eh?’ and ‘The juice is good, no?’ After the counter help has spent way too much time commenting on the customer’s zest for the juice, and after gathering nearly the entire staff to witness the request— even calling in the cooks from the kitchen—the customer is left to stand by sheepishly at the counter waiting for the fuss to end. Upon finally receiving a small bowl of juice, the customer is left denying to everyone within earshot— customers and workers alike—the extent to which he really ‘likes the juice’. Similar to the auditorium vignette, the difficulty on display here is resolved through a form of role distance which signals to all present that he (the customer) is not obsessed with the juice; that he is not overly committed to the role of dining patron; that he is actually a rational, sane, ‘normal’ person, and that if anyone is crazy, it is certainly the proprietor and his counter help. In both instances, the role distancing behaviour is a direct reaction to having a mirror held up before a person (the customer) or group (the students) which identifies a putative or virtual self, a self which can be made sense of only with, reference to the currently enacted role in the particular activity system. This particular species of role distance illustrates how persons work at their own pace to forge senses of self before a group of others, and the fact that we tend to resist those virtual selves (Goffman 1963b) which we feel are foisted on us either by others or by the unique circumstances of the situated activity. The negational self in interaction The two vignettes, as well as the variety of examples offered throughout, illustrate ways in which a self goes about making claims about oneself through denial, parody, satire, that is, through role distance more generally. My argument has been that

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the negational self, or a self by default, is a naturally occurring product of interaction insofar as most public declarations of self amount to specifying what the self is not. This can be accomplished as we have seen through role distance, through self-effacement, or through modesty about the self. By exhibiting these characteristics, persons thereby attempt to live up to the ideals of a well-demeaned individual. However, one might argue that the juice skit is more an illustration of embarrassment than of role distance. It seems that at least some species of role distance shade off into embarrassment (or vice versa), although Goffman never acknowledged in his role distance essay the analytical linkages between the two, insofar as he never cited his paper on embarrassment (1956c, reprinted in Goffman 1967) there. In the juice skit the counter help can be said to lack ‘tact’, and usually ‘[s]ince the individual dislikes to feel or appear embarrassed, tactful persons will avoid placing him in this position’ (Goffman 1967:102). Embarrassed people tend to ‘flood out’, unable to sustain their ‘poise’, ‘sang-froid’, or ‘aplomb’ in the face of trying social circumstances. In short, the embarrassed person abdicates his or her role as someone who is able to sustain encounters (Goffman 1967:103). Further, Goffman (1967:100) suggests that embarrassment can be thought of as a ‘bad moment’ which ‘mars an otherwise euphoric situation’. I would contend that there are a range of specifiable encounters wherein embarrassment generates role distance. In essence, what we are faced with is the fact that although some episodes of role distance can be said to be dysphoric, certainly not all (or even most) are. For example, the adult on the merry-goround who makes a show of being ‘concerned’ for his safety by cinching up his safety belt and holding tightly to the pole, is certainly not suffering the sort of dysphoria which would characterize the embarrassed. But how about the fiveyear-old boy who minutes earlier was led by the hand into the ladies room by his mother and now, exiting that very same ladies room, feels compelled to approach a complete stranger witness to his exit to proclaim, ‘My mommy needed help with something, and my daddy wasn’t around.’ Both are forms of role distance; the former can be said to be ‘euphoric’, the latter, ‘dysphoric’.19 In general, Goffman’s idea of role distance, and the difficulties we might have with specifying analytically the shading off into embarrassment or other situations punctuated by some sort of dysphoric interplay, however mild it may be, reflects Goffman’s underlying concern with the sort of remedial work which constantly goes on in face-to-face interaction. Role distance—namely a separation of the person from his or her current self-in-role—can in a sense be seen as merely one species of remedial work whereby persons bring into question the legitimacy or the authenticity of their virtual self before a group of others.

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The distinction between euphoric and dysphoric role distance is important also insofar as the negational self is linked analytically primarily to the latter. One species of dysphoric role distancing involves playful self-parody of the self, and in these instances one appears to be acknowledging some aspect of the current selfin-role through overemphasis or exaggeration. The negational self is thus presented as a self which, through the self-parody of some visibly demonstrable feature of the current self-in-role, should not be taken seriously. For example, at the recent Oscar Awards ceremony an aged and infirm Deborah Kerr hobbled across the stage to receive her lifetime achievement award. When the award was handed to her, Kerr let the Oscar drop ever so slightly, feigning difficulty and indicating to all present that even the simple task of hoisting the Oscar statue was a trying proposition, as if to underscore or acknowledge—or perhaps overacknowledge— her deteriorated physical state. Kerr was obviously embarrassed by her age and infirmity as she presented herself on-stage, and this particular act of role distance afforded a momentary aside to those assembled which, through the very act of bringing attention to this discrediting feature of herself before that public, actually served to negate that aspect of her self. Goffman has reported on this same phenomenon of self-mockery as remedial work in his study of radio talk (Goffman 1981a). Disc jockeys develop a radio personality largely as a result of their possessing a distinctive voice and a glibness with or command over a lexicon peculiar to a particular radio or TV format (e.g., talk show, top forty, sports programming, etc.). A disc jockey’s usually glib on-air self can be disrupted through a variety of speech faults, be they flubs, gaffes, boners, faux pas, and so forth. (Goffman’s [1981a] study is richly illustrated with many examples of such on-air slip-ups.) Stumbling over words usually elicits a swift attempt at repair on the part of the speaker, as for example, through the employment of what Goffman calls ‘apology tags’. Interestingly enough, Goffman (1981a:278) refers to this distance that onair personalities place between their temporarily discrepant self and their normally glib self not as ‘role distance’ but as ‘event distance’. Perhaps due to the fact that radio personalities are merely disembodied voices carried over the airwaves in impersonal fashion to a mass audience, Goffman is reluctant here to speak in role terminology, choosing instead the more antiseptic idea of ‘event’. To conclude, I would suggest that the negational self, especially as displayed through the behaviour of role or event distancing, has evolved as an important dimension of self-presentation because most social situations simply do not allow for the provision of positive affirmations about the nature of the self before a group of others. There is an assumption of a level of propriety regarding the range of claims that persons may legitimately make for themselves. For example, in the realm of public speaking a well-demeaned individual is one who is able to display

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such attributes as discretion and sincerity, modesty in claims regarding self, and of course command of both speech and physical movements (Goffman 1981a: 162– 96; Bjorklund 1985).20 For the most part then it is agreed that persons ought not be too concerned with overt claims about one’s self, because such behaviour might make the person come off as somewhat faulty, as overly self-indulgent, perhaps even as narcissistic (Rogers 1984). Since most of us spend a good part of our lives busily framing ourselves from view, the negational self is a direct result of how we strive to comport our actions to align with the strictures of this perceived moral universe. Further investigations into the possibility of Goffman’s system evolving into a general theory of action might find fruition following the groundwork here laid out. Thinking about role distance brings us to the heart of what goes on in much of face-to-face interaction, because it is there, in those liminal moments of difficulty where one confronts a self which is somehow not quite what one envisioned for oneself in that moment or situation, that much of the work of the negational self is accomplished. Acknowledgements I thank Teresa Labov, Greg Smith and Andrew Travers for their helpful comments on and suggestions for revisions of earlier drafts of this essay. Notes 1 For purposes of brevity, I shall limit this discussion to an admittedly stark contrast between phenomenology and orthodox role theory. For example, I do not touch on the influence of Wittgenstein (1958) on ethnomethodology and other traditions of sociological thought regarding the relativity of rules and standards or the construction of scientific concepts. For recent and thorough discussions of this neglected area, see Bogen (1990) and Hilbert (1992). 2 My ideas on the divergence between Goffman and the ‘impression management’ (IM) tradition are explored further in Chriss (1995a). 3 Laura Bovone (1993) makes a similar point even while denying the importance of Durkheim to Goffman’s sociology. As Bovone (1993:32) states, ‘Goffman’s etiquette is a code which harnesses the formal behaviour of the social actor via its rules. It certainly has nothing to do with the liberation of man’s true essence; authenticity cannot be identified, nor can it be investigated’ (my emphasis). 4 This examination of role distance is somewhat overdue insofar as previous edited volumes (see, e.g., Ditton 1980; Drew and Wootton 1988; Riggins 1990) on Goffman’s sociology have given scant attention to the concept. General discussions of role distance or illustrations of its applicability in particular social settings or situations have accumulated

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in the journals. Some of the more noteworthy of these are Ahrne (1974); Coser (1966); Edgley and Turner (1975); Fine (1984); Ford et al. (1967); Greisman (1978); Harman (1985); Khleif (1976, 1985); Kleinman (1981); Marcus (1980); Marx (1984); Murray (1982); Nolan (1979); Rogers (1984); Salutin (1973); Stebbins (1967, 1969). 5 Schutz and Luckmann (1973:4) provide the following description of what is entailed in the ‘natural attitude’:

In the natural attitude, I always find myself in a world which is for me taken for granted and self-evidently ‘real’. I was born into it and I assume that it existed before me. It is the unexamined ground of everything given in my experience, as it were, the taken-for-granted frame in which all the problems which I must overcome are placed. 6 There are certainly a few thinkers who would dispute this characterization. Bauman (1978), for example, views Parsons as a phenomenologist in the best Husserlian tradition, insofar as Parsons’ utilizes a conceptual scheme which views society and culture as ‘objective necessities’ but which retains the essentially subjective character of experience lying behind and informing these concepts. The literature on Goffman’s relation to phenomenology is more complex, although many observers would probably agree with Lanigan (1990), Denzin and Keller (1981), and Gonos (1977) that because of his structuralist leanings, Goffman cannot be considered a phenomenologist in the strictest sense. Burns (1992), MacCannell (1983), and many other observers are correct however to point out that the Goffman of Frame Analysis does indeed have affinities with phenomenology. 7 Although Parsons’ and Goffman’s theories diverge widely from one another at the technical level—Parsons employing functional analysis and Goffman, dramaturgy and metaphor (Manning 1992)—they both are committed in important ways to the tenets of role theory (but cf. Manning 1976). Parsons used the idea of role primarily to help him develop links from individual action to social institutions. Goffman used the idea of role as well, largely with reference to the ways in which persons go about presenting images of self before a group of others, emphasizing the dramaturgical resources actors can bring to bear in these role performances. In addition, Parsons and Goffman were influenced by the work of Emile Durkheim—most notably his idea of the ‘cult of the individual’ (Chriss 1993a)—to such an extent that the infrastructural level of each author’s theories—both ontological and epistemological—are virtually identical. (There is of course at least one major exception at the ontological level: unlike Parsons, Goffman does not embrace Durkheim’s organicism. The implications of this divergence in the reception of Durkheim’s thought cannot be gone into here however.)

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8 Of course, as Greg Smith has pointed out to me in personal correspondence, while Parsons placed emphasis on the normative dimensions of role and role performance, Goffman emphasized the situational contingencies which shape or ‘frame’ understandings of these role relationships. Goffman’s work then goes beyond Parsons’ insofar as the very foundations of the normative order which Parsons was striving to articulate can be located in the exigencies of co-presence itself, as for example Goffman’s notion of ‘situational propriety’ (Manning 1992; Chriss 1995b). 9 For a nice summary of the many additional books and articles generated by Linton’s (1936) seminal role concept, see Hilbert (1981), especially note 3, p. 221. 10 In Parsonian terms, this would locate role distancing behaviour in the ‘expressive symbolization’ (G) cell of the cultural (L) subsystem of the general action system (Parsons and Platt 1973:17). 11 Much of the secondary literature on role distance has been concerned with documenting the situations and strategies by which status superiors attempt to distance themselves from their high status roles while in the presence of status subordinates (see, e.g., Ford et al. 1967; Khleif 1976; Marcus 1980; Moyer 1986). An example of this form of role distance would be the attempt by nobility to hold their nobility apart by engaging casually in ordinary conversation with commoners (Marcus 1980). This type of role distancing behaviour will not be my focus here. 12 This is not to suggest that social life is so fluid that there are no underlying structures supporting the dramas of everyday interaction. Goffman clearly is committed to the idea that although on a small scale persons have a hand in constructing their social reality, they each inherit a pre-existing, ready-made world which provides rules or frames for getting on with the business of living (see, e.g., Verhoeven 1993:324). In this sense Goffman is a structuralist in the tradition of Durkheim and Parsons (Gonos 1977). 13 This emphasis on the agentic and processual nature of role also has affinities with Ralph Turner’s notions of role-taking and role-making (see, e.g., Turner 1962, 1978). 14 Once sufficiently dated in fact these educational or documentary films often attain, unwittingly of course, the status of camp classics (e.g., Reefer Madness). As Travers (1993:128) explains, ‘camp is pure commodity whose “use value” has been replaced by intelligent “entertainment value”’. 15 Another typical role distancing strategy was for students to break into derisive laughter whenever the camera caught a student in serious contemplation of the lecture. These shots in fact got some of the biggest laughs. 16 An example would be a law school student working part time as a cashier at McDonald’s in order to make ends meet. Although usually attentive to her duties and outwardly respectful of her shift manager, her behaviour might very well change if a group of friends or acquaintances happens to walk in. She may in fact ‘cut up’ while behind the counter, make faces at the boss behind his back, or parody certain job routines before

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this particular audience (e.g., while standing in line for the change-of-shift inspection of personnel she may display an inappropriately zealous commitment to military decorum by making a show of standing up straight, sticking out her chest, pulling back her shoulders, or perhaps even saluting). Through this role distancing behaviour the service worker sends a clear message that the work is beneath her and certainly not worthy of her serious attention or effort. 17 Obviously, comedy skits, parodies, or satires make their point by exaggerating the difficulties persons sometimes experience in the routine, day-to-day living of a life. I defend however my use of the juice skit to illustrate this particular dimension of role distance because exaggerating to get a laugh in no way negates or denies the very real aspects of the cultural heritage which the parody or satire is attempting to illuminate. In fact, as writers like Boone (1984), MacCannell (1992:33), and Douglas (1991) have pointed out, satire and parody are at the base of every cultural formation. 18 Note also how this dovetails with the problem of relevance, that is, the horizons operating in the everyday lifeworld which work to filter out those things within perceptual range which don’t or shouldn’t count or matter at any particular moment in a social situation (Zerubavel 1993). Goffman’s (1974) idea of frames owes something to this phenomenological concept, although as Cicourel (1972) has argued and as I pointed out earlier, Goffman’s work as a whole is not phenomenological because, like Parsons, he lacks a theory of social meaning with regard to social theorists’ understanding, production, and use of concepts like role and status. Cicourel (1972:241) states however that:

while he fails to clarify whose point of view, and by what procedures, the observer is to infer the details of everyday life social encounters, Goffman gives the reader a very convincing impression of being on the spot and ‘knowing’ what takes place from the perspective of an ‘insider’. 19 Another good example of role distancing in response to embarrassment—dysphoric role distance—is the homeless person’s self-conscious attempt to foster the impression of a lack of commitment to the general role of street person while in the presence of representatives of help agencies (see, e.g., Snow and Anderson 1993:216–17). 20 For example, anyone who has had to come up with a list of one’s own accomplishments for purposes of supplying background information for a letter of recommendation has surely confronted the difficulties or contradictions associated with the business of selfpromotion.

5

Sundered selves Mental illness and the interaction order in the work of Erving Goffman William Gronfein

Mental illness has two distinctive claims on the sociological imagination. First, responses to, and the treatment of, mental illness are among the most significant expressions of medically-based social control. Second, those signs and symptoms pathognomonic for mental illness are distinctively social in character, often constituting breaches of the norms which guide face-to-face interaction. Historically, serious, chronic or persistent mental illness has been met with confinement in a segregative, purpose-built institution (Grob 1983; Rothman 1971; Scull 1982). The social control responses of institutional psychiatry to the mentally ill have been, arguably, both more extensive, in terms of the number of persons affected, and more intensive, in terms of rights abrogated and privileges forgone, than virtually any other type of medicalized social control.1 From 1950 to 1963, more than 500,000 patients were confined each year in public mental hospitals in the United States.2 It is estimated that 80 per cent of those patients were hospitalized under some form of involuntary commitment (Gronfein 1983). Patients involuntarily committed were often not able to marry, dispose of their property, settle their estates, make a will, or enter into contracts, and were barred from practising a number of professions, including the law, teaching and hairdressing (Council of State Governments 1950). A subcommittee of the California Assembly concluded in 1967 that in California, persons convicted of felonies retained more of their pre-conviction rights and privileges than did persons who were involuntarily committed to a California state mental hospital (California Assembly 1967). Many diseases change the biophysical capacities of affected persons such that their social behaviour is altered, often for the worse. Still others subject those afflicted in such a way to limitations in social opportunities and social standing. In most cases, however, such changes are epiphenomenal, best viewed as the

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consequences of particular diseases, rather than their essence. It is, however, precisely social behaviour of particular types which, under certain circumstances, we take to be evidence of an underlying mental pathology; note that the signs and symptoms of what we call mental disorder will remain social in nature even if their aetiology proves to be organic. The interaction order and mental illness In this chapter, I focus on Erving Goffman’s work on mental illness. I do so even though Goffman tells us clearly and often that his is not a sociology of any particular substantive area. At a number of points, he argues for the importance of what he came to call, in his 1982 Presidential address to the American Sociological Association, ‘the interaction order’ (Goffman 1983b). In so doing, he implicitly rejects being tied to any of the accepted disciplinary subdivisions within which most academic sociologists live and work.3 Goffman’s abiding interest in what he called variously ‘the norms regulating co-presence’, the ‘sociology of everyday life’, ‘face-to-face interaction’, ‘behaviour in public places’, or ‘the interaction order’ notwithstanding, it is nonetheless the case that mental illness, and the social institutions charged with responding to mental illness, were important topics throughout his career (Collins 1988). This chapter is primarily an exegesis, dedicated to the identification and analysis of the ways in which such constructs as ‘mental symptoms’, ‘mental patients’, ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental hospital’ are understood and deployed in Goffman’s work. The balance of the chapter is organized into four main sections, as follows. First, I discuss the use made by Goffman of themes involving mental symptoms, mental illness and mental patients in the development of his principal project, the analysis of face-to-face encounters. The second and longest section of the chapter provides a close reading of Goffman’s work on mental hospitals, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on Asylums (Goffman 1961a). The third section concerns Goffman’s presentation of mental symptoms as organizational and cognitive ‘havoc’, in the essay ‘The insanity of place’ (Goffman 1971:335–96). The fourth and final section details the significant criticisms that have been made of Goffman’s work on mental illness, and offers a general appreciation of what I take the significance of that work to be. I shall argue, more in the conclusion than in the body of the chapter, that for Goffman mental illness involved, at both the institutional and everyday level, the separation of selves from those contexts which enable persons to value, and make sense of, their own conduct and those of their important others. In both institutional and everyday contexts, mental illness results from, and is expressed in, what might be termed the problem of sundered selves.

Sundered selves 83 Mental illness as “exemplary” behaviour Goffman’s interest in mental illness reveals itself in a number of ways, both small and large.4 Out of the seventeen articles he published in scholarly journals, for instance, five appeared in the journal Psychiatry, while a sixth appeared in the ‘Research Publications of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease’ (Ditton 1980b:10).5 Since Goffman viewed psychiatrists with a disdain bordering on—and sometimes edging into—hostility,6 his preference for publishing in Psychiatry indicates just how important the topic of mental illness was for him. At some points, Goffman compares mental symptoms to ‘normal’ interaction; at others, he uses the violative character of mental disorder to illuminate the normative structures that guide face-to-face interaction. Even when they are not Goffman’s main involvement, mental illness and persons judged to be mentally ill are often pressed into service as examples which can illuminate particular aspects of face-to-face or everyday interaction. These references reveal something of Goffman’s perspective on mental illness as well. For instance, in a chapter of Frame Analysis (1974) entitled ‘The vulnerabilities of experience’ Goffman writes: The concern a fully paranoid person has about the merely apparent innocence of his surround is not something he invents…It also follows that we all have had a taste of what makes him ill. (Goffman 1974:487). The importance of sanity and mental illness in Goffman’s work generally is further evidenced in ‘Felicity’s condition’ (Goffman 1983a), Goffman’s last published article. Here, he argues for the necessity to demonstrate, via a display of interactional competence, that one is sane. Goffman argues here that to demonstrate one can be trusted as an interaction partner, is a requirement faced by interactants generally. Such a demonstration appears, interestingly enough, to be equivalent to a demonstration of sanity: Behind Felicity’s Condition is our sense of what it is to be sane…syntactic and pragmatic analyses are to be seen as describing in empirical detail how we are obliged to display that we are sane during spoken interaction, whether through the management of our own words or the display of our understanding of the words of others. (Goffman 1983a:27) For Goffman, ‘normal’ and ‘mentally ill’ behaviour lie on a continuum; they differ in

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degree rather than in kind. The idea that ‘symptomatic’ behaviour and ‘normal’ behaviour are closely related occurs at a number of points in Goffman’s writings. Thus, the behaviour of persons institutionalized as a result of their putative mental illness may be used to illustrate ‘normal’ interactional behaviour. The following discussion of rules of irrelevance, for instance, draws on observations made on a ward of a large public mental hospital, where the operation of such interactional rules can be observed: patients can be found immersed in a game of bridge (or affecting this immersion) while one or two of the players engage in occult manneristic movements, and the whole table is surrounded by the clamor of manic patients. (Goffman 1961b:25) Contrariwise, persons taken to be mentally ill can be used to illustrate the fragility of the micro-universe created by face-to-face engagements: To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly, is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds. As every psychotic and comic ought to know, any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality. (Goffman 1961b:80–1; emphasis added) The link between the psychotic and the comic transforms the significance of each— the psychotic’s interactional depredations now appear a little less frightening, the comic’s humour a little less lighthearted. This rhetorical device—perspective by incongruity—is used by Goffman throughout his work (Lofland 1980). In his work on mental illness, mental patients are often compared to characters viewed more positively; the net result is, as in the example above, to decrease the affective and cognitive distance between the reader and the mental patient, and thus once again emphasize their similarities rather than their differences. Goffman frequently analyses interactional rules by concentrating on their violation (Burns 1992; Giddens 1988; Manning 1992). The delicts of persons taken to be mentally ill can furnish useful examples in this regard: In general she [a patient on one of the wards studied by Goffman] could provide the student with a constant reminder of the vast number of different acts and objects that are employed as markers by which the borders of privacy are staked out, suggesting that in the case of some ‘mental disorders’ symptomatology is specifically and not merely incidentally an improper keeping of social distance. (Goffman 1967:69)

Sundered selves 85 In Goffman’s writings ‘normal’ and ‘mentally ill’ behaviours each figure in order to illuminate the other. From madhouse to main street: the changing locus of mental illness Mental illness is Goffman’s principal subject in a number of important works. They may be ordered into a progression of sorts in terms of their emphasis on either institution or community as the setting within which mental illness and the behaviour of those thought to be mentally ill are examined. In Asylums (1961a), Goffman’s overriding concern is to examine the effects of what he calls the ‘total institution’ on the self. In Behavior in Public Places (1963a) and in several of the papers contained in Interaction Ritual (1967), the instances of ‘mentally ill’ behaviour that Goffman deploys are drawn from hospital experiences, but they are used to illuminate extrahospital life. By the time Goffman published ‘The insanity of place’ in 1969, his focus had shifted from the expression and experience of madness within hospital precincts, to a concern with the interpersonal and organizational havoc wreaked by mental illness in the community. Mental health policy, and the fates of persons with serious and persistent mental illness, have followed a similar trajectory. While policy and patients were once centred on and in state hospitals, there has been a programmatic emphasis on community treatment rather than institutional treatment since the mid-1960s. The programmes, policies and philosophy of the past several decades have emphasized the desirability of the ‘deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill’, a policy orientation which recommends the ‘shunning, abandonment and eschewal’ of conventional state hospital treatment, favouring instead a regime of community care. Under deinstitutionalization, substantial, consistent and consequential changes in the care and treatment of the chronically mentally ill (CMI) have occurred over the past thirty-five years. These changes have literally transformed the worlds of such persons, and the worlds of their others. Most importantly for our purposes, the interactional problems created by persons with serious mental illness are no longer hidden in the relative darkness of the ‘back regions’ provided by publicly supported madhouses. Instead, they have taken centre stage in cities across the country, enacting for a succession of audiences dramas formerly hidden behind the walls of the asylum (Segal et al. 1977; Johnson 1992).

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Goffman’s analyses have thus followed the mentally ill as they have moved from asylum to community, a progression reproduced in the discussion that follows. I first discuss mental illness and mental patients in their institutional context, and move to an examination of Goffman’s analysis of mental illness in the community. Mental illness and the total institution The Ethnography of St Elizabeths The foundational text in Goffman’s institutionally based analysis of mental illness is Asylums (1961a). Goffman spent the year from 1955 to 1956 doing fieldwork at St Elizabeths, a large public mental hospital serving the District of Columbia.7 This fieldwork resulted, among other things, in the essays that constitute Asylums.8 Goffman’s fieldwork role was that of assistant to the athletic director. His day was spent in the company of patients, their subjective experiences being Goffman’s principal interest. Goffman tells us that he did not sleep in the hospital, that the hospital’s top management knew what his aims were, and that he was ‘not obliged to interfere in any way whatsoever with what I could observe going on’ (Goffman 1961a:xi). That is virtually all we learn from Goffman the analyst about Goffman the fieldworker. We gain very little systematic knowledge of St Elizabeths, and except for the prefatory remarks just cited, we learn virtually nothing about Goffman’s relationship to patients, line staff or top management. By modern standards, his presentation of his fieldwork methods is terse almost to the point of insufficiency, although it might be remembered that the reflexive self-consciousness of contemporary fieldworkers is a relatively modern development. While the actors who people Goffman’s sociological world are supremely reflexive, Goffman himself is extremely unself-conscious in discussing his own fieldwork practice. This creates a problem with regard to what Fairbrother calls the trustworthiness of his account: Goffman…produces an anonymous inmate world: a world populated by faceless people and studied by a faceless research worker. No clue is given to the reader whereby he or she can judge whether the report is credible, a report that should be trusted. (Fairbrother 1977:363) In addition, Goffman’s failure to discuss himself and his actions qua fieldworker leaves the reader, in at least one instance, with serious doubts as to the ethical

Sundered selves 87 nature of his conduct while in the field. Drawing on his St Elizabeths fieldnotes in Behavior in Public Places, Goffman reports the following observation: I have seen patients watch passively, from a few feet away, a young male psychotic rape an old, defenseless mute man, the event occurring in a part of the dayroom that was momentarily outside the view of the attendant. (Goffman 1963a:207) Did he, too, watch passively from a few feet away? Was this case of homosexual rape one of the observations with which he was not obliged to interfere? To fail to act in such a situation would seem to be a serious ethical lapse, but since Goffman does not mention any action of his own in response to the rape, we can only assume he did not take any. There are certainly contingencies that could take the ethical curse off such inaction (e.g. fear that the young psychotic would attack him if he intervened), but Goffman’s silence leaves us, again, with no way to determine if such circumstances obtained. Asylums occupies a singular place in Goffman’s oeuvre for several reasons. First, Asylums alone had a marked impact on social policy. It was cited in the congressionally mandated 1961 report of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health as indicating serious deficiencies in public care for the mentally ill, and has been widely acknowledged as an influential element in the social science critique of institutional practice mounted in the 1960s (Benson 1980; California Assembly 1967; Grob 1992; Johnson 1990; Mechanic 1989; Scull 1982; Weinstein 1994).9 Asylums was also a work in which Goffman’s usually distanced relationship to his subject matter, his hipster cool, is put aside. Thus, he writes in the introduction: ‘[T]o describe the patient’s situation faithfully is necessarily to present a partisan view’ (Goffman 1961a:x). The single most distinctive feature of Asylums, however, is that, alone among Goffman’s major works, it does not focus on the interaction order. Rather than concentrating on co-presence and its implications, Goffman is here concerned with how the physical, organizational and ideological characteristics of a certain type of institution impinge on the selves of those who are drawn into its orbit. The mechanisms of the total institution Goffman concentrates on the now famous ‘total institution’ in Asylums. Analytically, total institutions may be distinguished from other social establishments because they are ‘encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater

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than the ones next in line’ (Goffman 1961a:4). They break down those socially constructed barriers of time and place which normally serve to segregate the differentiated and discrete compartments within which individuals pursue their daily rounds. Sleep, play and work, activities usually carried out under the eyes of different audiences and judged by different arbiters, now take place under a single institutional aegis. Total institutions, then, are ‘greedy’ and their greediness has several important implications for the impact they have on those subject to their routines.10 Not only does a single authority oversee all phases of an individual’s daily life, but individuals carry out their daily routines in the company of a large number of likesituated others, all subject to the same demands and required to do the same thing at the same time, en bloc. Activities are rigidly scheduled under an institutional plan imposed from above which, in theory, embodies the official aims of the institution. Total institutions typically have formal goals regarding the transformation of the inmates they control; Goffman (1961a:12) calls them ‘forcing houses for changing persons’. The attainment of these institutional goals is dependent upon the work of line staff, work influenced more by the need to ensure local order than by a desire to attain the kinds of transformative outcomes embodied in the institution’s formal mandate. Institutional efficiency has, in Goffman’s view, been the traditional winner over humane treatment in mental hospitals (Goffman 1967:93). Staff interests in insuring that the lives of patients are easily bent to institutional routine give rise to an array of practices termed by Goffman the ‘mortification of the inmate self’ (Goffman 1961a:14–48). One important type of mortification takes place simply by virtue of entrance into the institution and is reinforced by the group character of the activities that the institution prescribes. Becoming an inmate in an institution such as a mental hospital guarantees that the ability to play important civilian roles (spouse, parent, employee, etc.) will be decisively undercut, at least for the time that one remains within the ambit of the establishment, subjecting the inmate to what might be termed ‘role dispossession’. Importantly, role dispossession will be more complete the longer one is resident within the institution; it appears to be the case, for instance, that many long-stay patients ceased after a period of time to play a significant role in their families’ lives (Pennington 1955). A type of ‘automatic’ mortification results simply from the fact that entrance into some types of total institutions (mental hospitals, prisons, old-age homes) signals a more or less spectacular failure in civilian life. Since intra-institutional organization is keyed to the management of like-situated groups of inmates rather than concentrating on the unique situation of any particular individual, the pressure

Sundered selves 89 to identify with those whom one might, in civilian life, wish most to keep at arm’s length is intensified. The inability to maintain a self-conception in any terms save those offered by the institution is strengthened by the defining structural characteristic of total institutions discussed above: the fact that within institutions of this type, all one’s actions are available for the scrutiny of staff, the normal boundaries that allow one to hide misconduct at home from one’s work associates, for instance, having been abolished. Nowhere to hide: the development of the self in the total institution This is of particular consequence should inmates attempt to define themselves in ways different from the official, discrediting line taken by the institution; a delict committed by a patient on one shift can easily be made available to staff reporting for the next shift, and used by them to undermine potentially disruptive claims made by the patient at that time (Goffman 1961a:154).11 The characteristics noted above (the abolition of divisions in the daily round, the consequent loss of audience segregation, the small and large ways in which the inmate’s self is remade along institutional lines dictated by staff) are, in important ways, common to all total institutions. The mental hospital, however, is in form a medical institution, staffed by nurses and attendants, organized into wards and administered by physicians. The medical gloss given to the daily round within a mental hospital converts what the inmate might reasonably see as control exercised for its own sake into what the staff can claim is therapy exercised for the inmates’ sake. Control practices within this particular type of total institution are aided by the availability of a medical vocabulary and psychiatric perspective admirably suited to the classification of all behaviour as symptomatic of the troubles deemed responsible for the patient’s being in the hospital in the first place. As Goffman notes, the behavioural territory deemed appropriate for institutional examination thus expands virtually without limit: ‘[N]one of a patient’s business, then, is none of the psychiatrist’s business; nothing ought to be held back from the psychiatrist as irrelevant to his job’ (1961a:358). Such a perspective serves both to justify an expansion of the extensive regime of monitoring and surveillance that we would normally expect within the walls of any total institution, and leads as well to the definition of troublesome or rebellious behaviour as pathological. To cast behaviour disturbing to the institution as proceeding inevitably from a disturbed and in some sense ‘defective’ actor gives the exercise of control on the part of institutional agents a therapeutic justification,

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and limits patients’ ability to see themselves in any terms save those relevant to health or illness. Strangers in a strange land: the inmate self The picture of the inmate self developed by Goffman is notable for its relative freedom from imputations of pathology. In discussing the ‘moral career’ of the mental patient, he writes that The category ‘mental patient’ itself will be understood in one strictly sociological sense. In this perspective, the psychiatric view of a person becomes significant only in so far as this view itself alters his social fate… (Goffman 1961a:128) It is not simply the profound changes wrought by hospitalization that motivate Goffman’s separation, in principle, of the ‘mental patient’ from the ‘mentally ill’. He also argues that while most hospitalized patients have committed some kind of offence against the interaction order, the connection between the commission of such an offence and being hospitalized is highly contingent, influenced by factors such as the socio-economic status of the potential patient, the visibility of the offence, the distance to a mental hospital, the availability of space in other social control facilities (jails, old-age homes, etc.), and the view of available mental health treatments held by members of the local community. While individual inmates are, in Goffman’s view, shaped by the social control practices of agents and agencies external to, and in important ways violative of, their integrity and self-determination, inmates are not presented by Goffman as either helpless or totally determined by these practices. Indeed, the longest of Asylums’ four essays, ‘The underlife of a public institution: a study of ways of making out in a mental hospital’, deals largely with what Goffman terms ‘secondary adjustments’, defined as any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization’s assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be. (Goffman 1961a:189) The secondary adjustments of mental hospital inmates are particularly important because they show that even under conditions explicitly designed to frustrate any

Sundered selves 91 self-expression or self-definition not in accord with institutional dictates, inmates manage to enact both. The concentration on inmates as mental patients rather than as necessarily mentally ill reflects Goffman’s general position that inmates are not qualitatively different from ‘normal’ persons. Thus, the activities engaged in by patients are described in terms recommending their commonality with the undertakings of ‘normal’ persons: I want to state…that in actual practice almost all of the secondary adjustments I have reported were carried on by the patient with an air of intelligent downto-earth determination, sufficient, once the full context was known, to make an outsider feel at home, in a community much more similar to others he has known than different from them. (Goffman 1961a:303) For Goffman, even the ‘sickest’ behaviours can be understood without invoking intrapsychic pathology, when the poverty of the institution’s physical and interpersonal environments is taken into account. Important parts of patients’ seeming ‘craziness’ derive from the bare stages on which their performances are enacted. Goffman’s analysis identifies total institutions generally, and mental hospitals particularly, as places inimical to the growth of the self. Deprived of identity-affirming devices of both a material and a symbolic kind, and subject to more or less continuous surveillance, patients are provided with precious little to nourish and support a self with which they might wish to identify. Thus, the inmate who wishes to express her or his alienation from the social order of the hospital has few resources with which to do so. The expression of estrangement from the establishment, through acts ranging from simple discourtesy to open rebellion, is neutralized by the institution’s ability to transform these acts from significant gestures to symptomatic ones. Patients may have to resort to the most primitive kinds of defiance in order to voice their discontent: When a patient finds himself in seclusion, naked and without visible means of expression, he may have to rely on tearing up his mattress, if he can, or writing with feces on the wall—actions management takes to be in keeping with the kind of person who warrants seclusion. (Goffman 1961a:306–7) Mental illness and everyday life: the insanity of place In his institutionally-based writings on mental illness, Goffman argues that mental

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symptoms and mental illness are usefully regarded as social delicts. Precisely how these delicts should be characterized is, however, problematic. In Behavior in Public Places (1963a) and in ‘Mental symptoms and public order’ (1967:138–48), Goffman asserted that behaviour considered to be mentally ill could be viewed as a type of ‘situational impropriety’, an infraction of the rules governing face-to-face interaction. Recognizing that ‘there are many situational improprieties apparently unconnected with mental disorder’ Goffman concluded, however, that ‘a sociological analysis of psychotic symptomatology must inevitably be a little unsatisfactory, including a range of conduct perceived to be normal as well as the range of conduct perceived to be psychotic’ (Goffman 1967:142). (Note that conduct is spoken of as being perceived as ‘normal’ or ‘psychotic’, not being ‘normal’ or ‘psychotic.’) A sustained examination of the nature of mental symptoms is presented in ‘The insanity of place’ (1971:335–89).12 Goffman begins the essay by noting that mental health policy has begun to emphasize the desirability of treating those thought to be mentally ill in the community, rather than in the hospital, a development known generally as the ‘deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill’, but termed ‘community containment’ by Goffman. To examine community containment, he argues, is to examine what community containment means for a mentally ill ego’s various alters, and to do so is to examine the meaning of ego’s symptoms for these alters. Having done this, ‘we will learn not only what containment implies, we will learn about mental disorder’ (Goffman 1971:337). Goffman deploys several conceptual frameworks to aid his analysis. The first considers the sociological nature of ‘persons’ and ‘selves’, the second provides a brief discussion of types of social control, and the third contrasts ‘medical’ and ‘mental’ symptoms. I take up persons and selves first. The particular ways in which individuals are treated by their others, and the types of scenes in which that treatment takes place may be read as an implicit, virtual set of assumptions held about that individual by those others; these assumptions constitute the individual’s ‘person.’ Similarly, individuals, through their own conduct, demonstrate (again, implicitly) a set of assumptions about their character, and the permissible ways in which they may be treated by others; these constitute their ‘selves’. Ideally, person and self complement each other; as Goffman says, ‘Person and self are portraits of the same individual, the first encoded in the actions of others, the second in the actions of the subject himself (Goffman 1971:341). It is the normatively supported assumptions about their relationship to other persons (expressed in the conceptions put forward by both ego and alter) that constitute what Goffman calls an individual’s ‘place’.

Sundered selves 93 Egos are bound to their alters here, as the possibility of successfully claiming the ‘self’ one wants is linked to the ‘person’ one permits others to be. For interaction to proceed smoothly (either within one particular episode of co-presence, as in a conversation, or over time, as in a relationship) the self that is implied by ego’s actions must be congruent with the type of person alter shows ego that they believe ego to be. Refusals on ego’s part to accept the place granted by alter, or ego’s denial of the place claimed by alter, can be profoundly disruptive, the offence offered by ego’s self constituting a threat to alter’s person.13 Violations of the norm of person—self reciprocity may be made good through a number of different remedies, including accounts, apologies and remedies and their attendant subspecies.14 These remedies typically involve the exercise of what Goffman calls ‘personal control’ or ‘informal social control’, the more formal sanctions of the criminal or civil code being of scant use in repairing interactional delicts. Importantly, failure to demonstrate a cognizance of the fact that one’s behaviour might be thought offensive, or the failure to respond to demands for an explanation of some type for an interactional offence leaves the person offended against without a way to repair the infraction. Hence, no way exists for the interaction (or the relationship in which the interaction may be embedded) to continue without disruption. Goffman argues that one of the crucial differences between medical symptoms and mental symptoms is the fact that, typically, persons with medical symptoms can and do disassociate their ‘selves’ from their symptoms. Mental symptoms are, if not actively embraced, then not disavowed. What is crucial here is that, according to Goffman, both ego and alter treat the social difficulties attendant on medical symptoms as something separable from the self. Thus the failure of a male amputee to rise when a female enters the room is evidence of disability, not offence; one might expect (and will often receive) an apology for not honouring the entrance, even though no question of fault is likely to arise (Goffman 1971:354). The case is quite different with regard to what are taken to be ‘mental symptoms’. Here the offensiveness is often quite pointed. Typically, no apologies are offered. At least at first, when the offensive conduct is not yet defined as arising from ‘mental illness’, there is often a sense that the offender has chosen to be offensive quite deliberately. Offences to which the term ‘mental illness’ may be applied are offences to which formal social control does not apply, which the offender makes little effort to conceal or ritually neutralize, which often occur under conditions where ‘leaving the field’ is not a realistic possibility for the symptomatic person’s alters, where the offender’s new self-conceptions cannot be contained within the organization, and where the norms being violated are norms that routinely and repeatedly come up for validation or affirmation (Goffman 1971:355–8).

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On this analysis, mental symptoms are forms of behaviour guaranteed to cause interactional difficulties and strained relationships, and must be seen as violations of the interactional rather than the biological order. As Goffman says, Mental symptoms, then are neither something in themselves nor whatever is so labeled; mental symptoms are acts by an individual which openly proclaim to others that he must have assumptions about himself which the relevant bit of social organization can neither allow him nor do much about. It follows that if the patient persists in his symptomatic behavior, then he must create organizational havoc and havoc in the minds of members. (Goffman 1971:356; emphasis added) This conception of mental symptoms emphasizes the degree to which mental symptoms disrupt ongoing social life—to entertain the assumptions about one’s place implied by one’s symptomatic conduct is to claim a self radically different from the person one’s alters are prepared to grant one. Goffman emphasizes that it is not the content of behaviour alone that determines whether it is considered symptomatic, but the significance of that behaviour as part of an established system of relationships. What is important is not so much whether one laughs or cries, but whether the setting in which one does one or the other are settings culturally recognized as appropriate for laughter or tears. Behavioural syntax, rather than semantics, is what matters. Goffman discusses the kinds of havoc created by the schizophrenic on the street, the paranoid in the workplace15 and the manic individual in his or her family, spending the greatest amount of time on the family situation; I present a brief description of his analysis of the family’s situation. The manic individual creates problems for the family on two fronts. The first is within the family itself. A central element of the family’s dilemma is that in making her- or himself incomprehensible to them, the patient simultaneously undermines those selves and persons to whose maintenance he or she has contributed in the past, thus creating a cognitive and existential crisis. Not only do the new selfassumptions strain the selves and persons of the family members (as argued above), but the family now finds itself charged with the exercise of what may seem to be an eternal vigilance, which buys them not liberty, but only a temporary and contingent escape from harm. As Goffman says, ‘Households then, can hardly be operated at all if the good will of the residents cannot be relied on’ (Goffman 1971:368), and since neither the good will nor the capacities of the manic member may be relied on, other family members must constitute themselves as a kind of

Sundered selves 95 police force within their own home. Once again, Goffman provides an apt description of the difficulties involved: Each time he holds a sharp heavy object, each time he answers the phone, each time he nears the window, each time he holds a cup of coffee above a rug, each time he handles the car keys, each time he begins to fill a sink or tub, each time he lights a match—on each of these occasions the family will have to be ready to jump. (Goffman 1971:377) The second front along which manic people typically cause havoc for the family is in their relationships with the outside world. Put briefly, the offenses here are varieties of overreaching: the attempted establishment of relationships with persons of too high or too low a status, the purchase of unsuitable goods or goods which cannot really be afforded, excessive and inappropriate telephone calls, the belief that one has a place in events of national or international import, and so on. Thus, the manic individual makes things ‘hot’ for the family by disrupting both its internal and external economies. Two points need to be emphasized here. The first is that the delicts of a manic ego proceed along what might be called the faultlines of ‘normal’ interactions and relationships. That is, their ability to turn their family members into jailers proceeds from the fact that the average American household is well equipped with a variety of destructive, even lethal instrumentalities, and the distress and burden felt by the family at having to exercise such oversight is mute testimony to how much we typically take for granted in terms of the good will of those with whom we live. The second concerns the nature of mental symptoms as put forward by Goffman. Behaviour is endowed with symptomatic significance not because of its ‘content’ so much as by its relationship to local norms specifying appropriateness—not so much what is said is at issue, as who said it, and where, when and to whom. Appropriateness is viewed quite differently, of course, by Goffman than it is by the psychiatric profession in general. He is likely to view what is deemed appropriate as being subject to local and arbitrary norms, whereas psychiatrists seem to view appropriateness as a kind of cultural universal betokening health. (One of the signs that supposedly justifies the judgement of patients with schizophrenia as being sick is that they display affect ‘inappropriate to the situation’). The views of mental symptoms and mental illness put forward in ‘The insanity of place’ share at least one important element with the views put forward in Asylums and the other institutionally-based writings. This is that mental symptoms are regarded in some important sense as political protests, arising not necessarily out of an individual malfunction, but from ‘disturbance or trouble in a relationship or

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organization’ (Goffman 1971:387). Thus Goffman writes that ‘[W]e can all largely agree that everything should be done to patch up bodies and keep them alive, but certainly not that social organizations of all kinds should be preserved’ (Goffman 1971:387). One of the interesting features of ‘The insanity of place’ is the evident sympathy extended to the family unfortunate enough to have a mentally ill member. Further, the reality of mental disorder is much more evident in this later work than was true in Asylums, where what appeared to be symptomatic behaviour was often transformed in character by reference to the ‘crazy’ environment within which it occurred. A sense that there is indeed something distinctive about mental disorder marks the entire essay; the sympathy which in Asylums seemed reserved for the patients is here extended to both the patient and her family.16 Caveats and conclusions To this point, I have presented a largely uncritical exegesis of Goffman’s work on mental illness. Before evaluating Goffman’s contributions to the study of mental illness, it may be valuable to consider some of the criticisms that have been directed at his efforts in this area. Even before the recent upsurge of critical attention paid to Goffman’s corpus in general (an upsurge represented in part, of course, by the present volume), his work on mental hospitals and mental illness excited a good deal of critical, one might almost say hostile, comment (e.g. Caudill 1962; Scull 1989; Sedgwick 1982; Siegler and Osmond 1971; Weinstein 1979). Critiques centre, first, on what critics have taken to be his unwarranted criticism of the mental hospital at the time he wrote Asylums; second, what they take to be the irrelevance of the total institution model in an era of deinstitutionalization; and third, the problems created by his fieldwork methods as deployed in the study of the mental hospital. Several observers feel that Goffman’s criticisms of the mental hospital were unjustified and his comparisons to other total institutions infelicitous (Weinstein 1994). Thus, Siegler and Osmond write: we believe that it [Goffman’s picture of the mental hospital] has been misleading and even harmful. Mental hospitals differ from prisons, concentration camps and religious retreats far more than they resemble them… (Siegler and Osmond 1971:420) And Caudill (1962:367) ‘disagree[s] with the strong implication…that an

Sundered selves 97 individual is unlikely to come through the experience of life in a total institution, and especially a mental hospital, somewhat the better…for it.’ These criticisms have some merit, if the authors mean to draw attention to the fact that the category ‘mental hospitals’ contained institutions which varied one from the other to a considerable extent. Certainly private, or university-operated hospitals (such as the one Caudill studied in his 1958 monograph), could be expected to differ substantially from the extremely large, publicly-funded hospitals (such as St Elizabeths) studied by Goffman. Similarly, Siegler and Osmond, whose experiences in New Jersey mental hospitals occurred in the 1960s, when deinstitutionalization was already under way, arguably had contact with quite a different institutional species than did Goffman. It should be remembered that hospitals such as St Elizabeths were a much more typical site in which to lodge patients than the smaller, better-endowed institutions written about by Caudill, and that the public mental hospitals of the 1950s—with an average size of over 2,500 patients, astronomical patient-staff ratios, a reliance on seclusion and restraint as modes of control, and chronic and severe underfunding (Council of State Governments 1950; Gronfein 1985a, 1985b)—were regarded as ‘houses of horror’ by then contemporary observers. If we take Goffman’s analysis to be directed at the large, public mental hospitals of the 1950s, his indictment of these institutions is, I think, supportable. Weinstein (1994) presents another series of arguments against Asylums which are, I think, more justified. He asserts that the changes wrought by deinstitutionalization have rendered the total institution model irrelevant. Implicit in Goffman’s analysis of the mental hospital as total institution were two conditions: its large size (necessitating the handling of inmates in groups), and the involuntary status of its patients. At the time Goffman was studying St Elizabeths, both conditions obtained; as mentioned above, the hospital contained more than 7,000 inmates, and most of them were confined involuntarily. Both conditions have changed substantially in the wake of deinstitutionalization. Most patients, even in state hospitals, are admitted voluntarily, and the average state hospital contains approximately 300 patients, rather than 2,000. It is possible, then, that while the total institution model was an appropriate one for the public mental hospital during the 1950s, it may be less applicable to the experience of mental hospital patients in an era of deinstitutionalization. There is another criticism that I think has some merit—that Goffman’s fieldwork methods put his analysis at risk at several points. A number of Goffman’s assertions regarding the behaviour of persons taken to be mentally ill use what might be called personal observables (facial expression, bodily posture, general demeanour)

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as indicators of internal states. Thus, in a passage concerning secondary adjustments quoted at greater length above, Goffman says: I want to state, therefore, that in actual practice almost all of the secondary adjustments I have reported were carried o n by the patient with an air of intelligent down-to-earth determination, sufficient, once the full context was known, to make an outsider feel at home, in a community much more similar to others he has known than different from them. (Goffman 1961a:303; emphasis added) The problem is that Goffman’s laconic approach to fieldwork, his presentation of ‘faceless patients’, does not give us especial confidence that his imputation would be ours, were we present to view the same persons in the same setting. This is in fact a fairly serious problem, since much of Goffman’s ‘reinterpretation’ of the behaviour of the inmates he observed in St Elizabeths rests on inferences regarding their internal states, attitudes and beliefs. If, as Fairbrother (1977) suggests, Goffman’s report does not inspire trust in the reader, then confidence in the empirical accuracy of his analyses is called into question. Although most of the criticism directed at Goffman’s work on mental illness centres on Asylums, there is one important critique of ‘The insanity of place’, put forward by Peter Sedgwick (1982). Put briefly, Sedgwick’s position is that in separating ‘medical’ from ‘mental’ symptoms, Goffman overstated the ‘objective’ status of the former and the ‘subjective’ status of the latter. Sedgwick (1982) argues eloquently for the position that diseases are interpretations of natural states rather than the states themselves: Outside the significances that we voluntarily attach to certain conditions, there are no illnesses or diseases in nature. What [it will be argued] are there no diseases in nature? Are there not infectious and contagious bacilli? Are there not definite and objective lesions in the cellular structures of the human body? Are there not fractures of bones, the fatal ruptures of tissues, the malignant multiplications of tumorous growths? Are not these, surely, events of nature? Yet these, as natural events, do not constitute illnesses, sicknesses, or diseases prior to the human social meanings we attach to them. (Sedgwick 1982:30–1; emphasis in original) Sedgwick’s argument vis-à-vis disease is, I think, a strong one, emphasizing that all diseases, not just ‘mental disease’ are the result of social judgements as to the nature, significance and implications of natural phenomena. I am not convinced,

Sundered selves 99 however, that Goffman’s analysis need be faulted on the grounds Sedgwick proposes. Goffman does not seek to separate mental illnesses from physical illnesses so much as he wishes to contrast the reaction (on the parts of both ego and alters) to the presence of physical or mental disease. To put the matter somewhat differently—for Goffman, physical and mental illnesses differ in terms of the implications they have for the selves of those who suffer from them, and therefore differ in terms of their implications for their persons, as communicated by their others. Thus, Goffman’s contrast of ‘medical’ and ‘mental’ does not require viewing physical illnesses as ‘natural facts’, the position argued cogently against by Sedgwick. Sundered selves: a coda As argued above, considerations of the types of behaviour regarded as symptomatic of mental illness, and analyses of the types of institutions charged with the care and treatment of those thought to be mentally ill are important elements of Goffman’s work, particularly during the earlier part of his career (i.e. from 1952 and the publication of ‘On cooling the mark out’ in Psychiatry, to the publication of Relations in Public in 1971). These analyses provided Goffman, above all, with examples of behaviour violative of the uncodified, normative rules which constitute his ‘interaction order’, allowing him to use their surface offensiveness to point to the deep structure of ritual and rule underlying everyday conduct. Further, the analysis of mental hospitals put forward in Asylums was the only sustained examination of concrete social institutions of which I am aware in Goffman’s oeuvre. Thus, even bearing in mind the generality of Goffman’s interest in interaction occurring between mutually available and monitoring persons, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the analysis of mental illness occupies a central place in Goffman’s work, and therefore must be considered in any assessment of that work. This assertion is further grounded in the fact that both Asylums and ‘The insanity of place’ were concerned in important ways with one of Goffman’s conceptual preoccupations—the nature of the self. In following ‘mental illness’ into both the institutional and community environment, Goffman presents us with depictions of what might be called ‘the sundered self’. Those whose putative mental illness eventuates in confinement in the mental hospital have a self sundered from the material and symbolic requisites for acceptable self-presentation, such that they find themselves dependent on just those vehicles for self-expression that are most likely to convince their keepers that they are indeed mad.

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Madness in the community also results in a sundering of selves. Here, self is separated from person—mentally ill egos arrogate to themselves rights and privileges which their alters are reluctant, perhaps unable, to grant. It is one of the ironies of deinstitutionalization that the freedom provided to patients in the community for the development of their own selves should so often result in the restriction of their others’ selves. The sundering of selves is particularly important given Goffman’s frequent treatment of the self as an entity constituted in, and dependent on, orderly interaction—the ties that bind self to person are the same ties that linked deference and demeanour in an earlier essay. The caveats noted above notwithstanding, Asylums and ‘The insanity of place’ are still important contributions to the sociology of mental illness. Although the hegemony of the state hospital in the care and treatment of the mentally ill has passed, the transfer of care to community agencies has often been referred to as a process of ‘transinstitutionalization’ rather than ‘deinstitutionalization’ (Lerman 1982; Warren 1981). It may be possible to see which features of present community placements, if any, reproduce aspects of the total institution as described by Goffman, and the conduct of those thought ‘mad’ in this post-deinstitutionalization era may be fruitfully investigated through the analytic strategies recommended by Goffman in ‘The insanity of place’. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Greg Smith and Carol Gardner for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Work on this paper was partially supported by NIMH grant MH51669. Neither Greg Smith, Carol Gardner, nor the NIMH bear any responsibility for errors of style or substance. Notes 1 Other diseases (such as AIDS and treatment-resistant tuberculosis) may prompt the use of coercive measures such as quarantines, and public health authorities, like psychiatrists, have used medical authority to underwrite the restriction of individual behaviours (Zola 1972). However, although the number of persons with HIV disease or AIDS is large, the number of persons with AIDS or tuberculosis who are under official quarantine is relatively small. The case with regard to mental illness has been quite different. 2 This statistic derives from a data set assembled by the author which provides state-level information on patient population and patient movement characteristics of state and county mental hospitals from 1946 to 1989. Further references to state and county mental hospitals are based on these data unless otherwise noted.

Sundered selves 101 3 Goffman made clear, both in his 1982 Presidential Address, and in the prefatory material to a number of his earlier works, what his overriding sociological concerns were. In the Presidential address he says,

My concern over the years has been to promote acceptance of this faceto-face domain as an analytically viable one—a domain which might be titled, for want of any happy name, the interaction order… (Goffman 1983a:2; emphasis in original) 4 It should be pointed out here that Goffman often discussed mental illness in such a way as to imply the use of quotation marks around the term, and commented directly on the problems involved in treating mental illness as an objective condition or a thing-initself (Goffman 1971:387) In what follows, I will mostly refrain from the use of quotation marks, although the discussion will frequently imply that we are concerned with analysing what is called mental illness, rather than accepting mental illness as a natural fact. 5 I have relied here, and throughout, on Jason Ditton’s excellent bibliographical essay (Ditton 1980b:1–23), and the bibliography which appears at the end of Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton’s edited volume of essays on Goffman (Drew and Wootton 1988:280– 1) for information on Goffman’s published work. 6 The following are among Goffman’s characterizations of psychiatry and the operation of psychiatry and psychiatrists in institutional settings:

They [mental hospitals and psychiatrists] have served to remove the patient from the scene of his symptomatic behaviour, which in itself can be constructive, but this function has been performed by fences, not doctors. And the price the patient has had to pay for this service has been considerable: dislocation from civil life, alienation from loved ones who arranged the commitment, mortification due to hospital regimentation and surveillance, permanent posthospital stigmatization. This has not been merely a bad deal; it has been a grotesque one. (Goffman 1971:335–6) The objective of psychiatry all along has been to interpose a technical perspective: understanding and treatment is to replace retribution; a concern for the interests of the offender is to replace a concern for the social circles he has offended. I refrain from enlarging here on how unfortunate it has been for many offenders to have been granted this medical good fortune. (Goffman 1967:137)

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7 Since the nineteenth century, St Elizabeths has been the federal mental hospital charged with serving the civilian population of the District of Columbia, as well as occasional celebrity patients, such as John Hinckley and Ezra Pound. Containing more than 7,000 inmates at the time that Goffman did his fieldwork, St Elizabeths was strikingly similar in most important respects to the state mental hospitals that contained more than 75 per cent of all hospitalized mental patients in the 1950s (Gronfein 1992). 8 A number of similar studies of mental hospitals were published at about the same time as Asylums, including Belknap (1956), Caudill (1958) and Dunham and Weinberg (1960). 9 Asylums is certainly the best known of Goffman’s analyses of mental illness, as well as being the most frequently cited. While Goffman’s works are heavily cited in general, Asylums leads them all, with an incredible 2,018 citations in the period from 1971 to 1985. In other words, in a period starting ten years after its publication, Asylums still averages close to 135 citations per year (based on figures given in Smith 1989:446). In addition to its frequent citation in the scholarly literature, Asylums has also been cited at least five times in federal court cases involving confinement in total institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals (Weinstein 1994). 10 As Coser points out, total institutions, while similar in some respects to the ‘greedy institutions’ he analyses, differ in essential respects:

There are evident overlaps between ‘total’ and ‘greedy’ institutions, yet these terms denote basically different social phenomena. (Coser 1974:6) 11 Goffman points out that the case record often contains mentions of actions not undertaken by patients, as well as actions which they did undertake. The former are presented using the rhetorical device called ‘preteritio’ (literally, ‘to pass over’). His field notes contain several such entries observed at St Elizabeths:

The patient denied any heterosexual experiences nor could one trick her into admitting that she had ever been pregnant or into any kind of sexual indulgence, denying masturbation as well. Even with considerable pressure she was unwilling to engage in any projection of paranoid mechanisms. No psychotic content could be elicited at this time. (Goffman 1961a:157) Note that masturbation denied, and paranoid mechanisms not engaged in, seem to

Sundered selves 103 further the rhetorical work of discrediting patients nearly as well as the recording of actual delicts might. 12 ‘The insanity of place’ was originally published in the journal Psychiatry in 1969. All citations in the present essay are to the slightly edited 1971 version, which appears as an appendix to Relations in Public (1971:335–90). 13 Goffman’s argument here is similar to arguments presented earlier, particularly in ‘On face-work’ and ‘The nature of deference and demeanor’, concerning the reciprocal nature of the demands placed on interactants. 14 Goffman devotes a long and important chapter of Relations in Public, which he entitles ‘Remedial interchanges’ (Goffman 1971:95–187), to a description of the various ways in which interactions gone wrong may be put right. This discussion covers more territory than the person-self relationship described above, but the person-self relationship may be subsumed under it. 15 The treatment of the paranoid borrows heavily from Lemert’s classic ‘Paranoia and the dynamics of exclusion’ (Lemert 1962). 16 Mechanic (1989:148) asserts that ‘Goffman had to live through an episode of mental illness involving someone close to him’; one wonders whether, and in what ways, that experience might have informed ‘The insanity of place’.

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Ethnographic coats and tents1 Philip Manning

Introduction One way of understanding the relationship between Goffman and ethnography is to let Goffman explain it himself, in his own words. Although there is nothing in his books that is even close to an account of his views about ethnographic research, there is a tape of a lecture Goffman gave in the 1970s about fieldwork. More accurately, there is a rumour of a bootlegged tape of Goffman’s talk. The story has a Dylanesque feel to it. In England in the 1980s there were also rumours about who might possess a copy, and how copies of copies might be obtained. A talk by Goffman on ethnography was something too good to miss: careers might be built on its insights. In 1989, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography finally published a transcript of Goffman’s talk, taken from what might be the most bootlegged tape by any sociologist. Rather like the answer to a zen koan, the secret was at last out. However, the talk, when seen in print rather than heard on a poorly recorded tape, was a little disappointing. Goffman turned out to have rather orthodox views about ethnography: he advised students to work hard at getting into places, to exploit research sites by staying at least a year and by keeping careful field notes, and to blend, even fall in love with, one’s informants. Goffman’s views were reasonable and somehow that was insufficient. He seemed to say nothing novel. The lesson I take from this incident is that it is better to look at what Goffman did in his work, rather that looking at what he says he did (advice Goffman sometimes gave himself). Thus, Goffman may not be the best guide to his own ethnographies, and we should instead look to the ethnographies themselves. However, here there is a further problem, because Goffman’s projects are for the most part not obviously ethnographic. If anything they resemble Simmel’s work, as Goffman himself implied in a fugitive remark prefacing The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959:xii; see also Smith 1994).

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Of course, in one sense, all of Goffman’s work is ethnographic, since it can be seen as a sustained attempt to make sense of everyday interaction. However, strictly speaking, Goffman’s work contains only two completed ethnographies, of which only one, Asylums, has been published. There are also ethnographic fragments, references to which are scattered throughout his work. At different points in his career he worked on an ethnography of casino life, a study of a radio station, a photographic study of the representation of gender and some other projects. When asked about his research methods in 1980, Goffman replied: ‘Well, I suppose it’s participant observation in the main, some sort of deduction from one’s data. But I haven’t done much participant observation over the last decade’ (Verhoeven 1993:338). So there is some justification (a point made by Giddens [1987:254] and others) for the claim that ethnography is marginal to Goffman’s scholarship. However, more disconcerting is the sense, often hard to express, that even Asylums is not ‘really’ an ethnography at all, that its mission and scope are too broad for ethnography’s often modest ambitions. In this essay I explore some of the underlying reasons why Goffman appears on the margins of ethnography. Part of the suspicion about Goffman’s ethnographic credentials derives not from anything he does but from what he does not do. Asylums, for example, contains little of the ‘baggage’ of a conventional ethnography: there are no detailed descriptions of the setting, almost no field notes, or even reference to them, and no interview data. There is certainly nothing in his work referring to any personal tribulations during the research process. Goffman cannot be accused of contributing to the ‘confessional ethnography’ that has recently been in vogue (see Rabinow 1977, Van Maanen 1988). Although Goffman’s work contains a distinctive ‘voice’, he remains conspicuously absent from his own ethnographic record. It is as if he had erased his own personality from the research process, becoming only a spectral entity. However, these omissions are not at the heart of the suspicion that Goffman’s work is not particularly ethnographic, since detail does not ensure good ethnography. Clifford Geertz makes this point in Works and Lives: In particular, it might be difficult to defend the view that ethnographic texts convince, insofar as they do convince, through the sheer power of their factual substantiality. The marshaling of a very large number of highly specific cultural details has been the major way in which the look of truth…has been sought in such texts…Yet the fact is that the degree of credence, whether high or low, or otherwise, actually given to Malinowski’s, Lévi-Strauss’s, or anybody else’s ethnography does not rest, at least not primarily, on such a basis. (Geertz 1988:3)

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Goffman’s arguments are not and cannot be sustained by the sheer quantity of detailed observations that support them. In this essay I suggest that their power derives instead from an interesting merger of substantive and methodological themes. Substantively, Goffman showed how the apparently incomprehensible behaviour of various outcast or ‘deviant’ (Goffman distrusted this term) groups can be made to seem compatible with the mundane behaviour of the wider community. The ‘neutral moral tone’ (Ignatieff 1983) of much of his work disguises his effort to build a sense of community between apparently incommensurable groups. Goffman wanted us to empathize rather than merely sympathize with his ‘informants’ so that we could begin to understand the horror of the banal indignities inflicted by institutional ‘forcing houses’. Methodologically, Goffman did not refine existing techniques of participant observation. In fact, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, he had quite familiar and mainstream opinions about field research methodology (see Goffman 1989). The novelty of Goffman’s approach is the insistence on the impermanence of ethnographic findings. His comparative, inductive approach is consistent with Weber’s wry observations (1949) about the inherent limitations of ideal-typical research, and involves what elsewhere I have called ‘Goffman’s spiral’ (Manning 1989, 1992). This refers to Goffman’s willingness first to proceed as if it might be possible to describe the social world with a neat set of classifications, only to ridicule this attempt later. Goffman’s approach is also similar to the grounded theory approach formalized by Glaser and Strauss in the 1960s (see Glaser and Strauss 1967). Recently, Glaser and Strauss have been involved in a public argument about the nature of grounded theory, in which Glaser has accused his former collaborator of abandoning the ‘emergent’ aspects of the theory in favour of a scientistic view of ethnography (Glaser 1992). Meanwhile, Strauss and Corbin (1990) have issued a textbook which is essentially a revisionist ‘how-to’ guide for qualitative grounded theory. Here I sidestep this controversy and simply note the broad outline of grounded theory. In Glaser and Strauss’s early formulation (1967), grounded theory is a general method of comparative analysis in which theory is discovered inductively from research findings. This is the ‘grounded’ element of the theory. Theory is a ‘strategy for handling data in research, providing modes of conceptualization for describing and explaining’ (1967:3). There is a dispute about whether or not grounded theory is or should be testable (see Hammersley 1992:21). Glaser and Strauss distinguish substantive theory from formal theory. The former applies to a substantive area, such as education; the latter refers to a ‘conceptual’ area of sociology, such as deviance (1967:32). Glaser and Strauss are uncertain as to

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whether Goffman is or is not a grounded theorist, because they suspect that his theory is insufficiently grounded in his data (1967:138–9). Goffman’s work also has to be considered in the context of the model of ethnography he inherited from the founding fathers of the Chicago School of Sociology. In the hands of the founders of American sociology, ethnography was moulded into a distinctive project. As the discipline of sociology developed at the University of Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a version of sociology was developed that matched the theoretical assumptions, situational needs and political goals of both the men chosen to foster the development of sociology and the wealthy capitalists who funded this adventure (Bulmer 1984). Sociology became a way of exploring Simmel’s observations about European urban life through the eyes of an investigative reporter. As is well known, Robert Park, one of the talented group gathered in the Chicago sociology department at that time, had been both a student of Simmel’s and a successful journalist. As Smith (1989, 1994) argues, it is possible to trace a lineage from Simmel, through Park and later Hughes, to Goffman. In part through Park’s efforts, early Chicago sociologists modelled themselves on investigative reporters. For Goffman, at least the early Goffman, the sociologist as investigative reporter was modelled on something taken (or obtainable) from Raymond Chandler. Several commentators have suggested this: for example, Marshall Berman (1972) described Goffman as ‘bleakly knowing’ and Gary Marx (1984:637) recollected that as a professor ‘Goffman presented himself as a detached, hardboiled cynic, the sociologist as 1940s private eye. His was a hip, existential, cool, personal style’. Bulmer (1984) has shown that in Chicago sociologists viewed ‘participant observation’ (the phrase was not invented until the early 1920s, and it was some time before it routinely figured in professional discourse) in very loose terms, and certainly not as a specific research practice. Further, Platt (1994) has revealed that much of the data employed by the Chicago School was either actually gathered by other agencies, such as social work departments or charities, or was gathered by such agencies prior to the Chicago School’s ‘discovery’ of this research technique. Situationally, the Americanization of sociology in Chicago focused on the city of Chicago itself, whose sprawling, rapidly expanding boundaries became a laboratory for America’s first generation of sociologists to explore. It was clear to the pioneering American sociologists that cultural difference could be studied at little cost in the neighbourhood adjoining the University of Chicago, and hence the need to explore (and also the interest in exploring) geographically distant cultures faded. Finally, as Denis Smith (1984) and others have suggested, Chicago

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sociology became a political instrument for the realization of liberal and often religious hopes for an embryonic capitalist system. Of course, Goffman himself was not part of this process: his dissertation (which was his first extensive ethnographic project) was completed about twenty years after Park retired, at which time the Chicago School fundamentally changed its sociological orientation in keeping with changes felt throughout the discipline in the United States. Nevertheless, Goffman’s approach to ethnography should be understood as both a dialogue with and reinterpretation of the legacy of the Chicago School. Goffman used ethnographic observations to develop a general vocabulary with which to discuss everyday interaction. For Goffman, the purposes of ethnography are to provoke our thinking about general issues that arise in disparate social settings and then to inspire conceptual development and refinement. I suggest that it is therefore a mistake to evaluate his ethnographic work in terms of the accuracy of his descriptions of a particular place at a particular time (for example, St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s); instead I suggest that he should be judged pragmatically in terms of the insights and theoretical developments that have been derived from his ethnographic work. Viewed in this way, Goffman emerges as an unwitting pioneer of grounded theory. Early ethnographic writings As an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba in Canada in the 1940s Goffman initially pursued a career in the natural sciences and had intended to graduate with a degree in chemistry. It was only towards the end of undergraduate studies that he was drawn to the social sciences, and sociology in particular. At this time he transferred to the University of Toronto, where he graduated in 1945 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. With this in mind it is not surprising that his graduate work in sociology initially involved experimental and statistical research. His Master’s thesis employs a quantitative measure, but not successfully. In many ways, this project was an inauspicious beginning for one of the most prominent sociologists of the twentieth century, and it contains little to indicate either the scope or quality of the work to come. For his dissertation, ‘Communication conduct in an island community’ (1953), Goffman chose to study everyday life on a small island off the coast of Scotland, which he called ‘Dixon’. This was an intriguing setting for a number of reasons. Perhaps nowhere could have been more antithetical to the Chicago of the 1940s, a maelstrom of crime, capitalism and ethnic diversity set against a rapidly expanding and already huge urban landscape. Dixon, by contrast, was little more than a rock

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jutting out of the Atlantic, struggling to support about four hundred inhabitants. Instead of ethnic diversity, Dixon possessed an exclusively white population, internally differentiated along class lines. Crime was rare and the island exhibited a strong sense of mechanical solidarity. The virtual absence of vegetation on the island further intensified the islanders’ sense that theirs was an almost exclusively public existence, since neighbours could almost always observe their behaviour. Dixon was hardly an obvious research site for an ambitious man, following in the footsteps of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, to study. Goffman must have seemed equally foreign to the local crofters. When he first arrived on the island the local children rushed to meet his boat, only to hide their faces when Goffman stepped on to the island. Alarmed, he asked one of the adults for an explanation, and was told that some of the children had never seen a stranger before. Dixon and downtown Chicago might as well have been on different planets. Goffman explained his presence on the island to them by saying that he was interested in ‘the economics of island farming’ (1953:2), an explanation which they may not have found very convincing, especially after he began work as assistant to the washer-up in the kitchen of the local hotel. Presumably, the Dixon study could have been written successfully in a conventional way, as a detailed ethnographic case study about an island community. Perhaps Goffman could have attempted to emulate Malinowski’s great study of the Trobriand islanders, with the added spin that Dixon is a lot closer to Western civilization. Perhaps in time Goffman could have written The Sexual Lives of Crofters or published his fieldnotes as historically interesting diaries (nowadays a growing industry). However, this was not to be, and Malinowski was certainly not the role model for the Dixon study. What emerges instead in this project is a concern for general theorizing that is rather closer to Radcliffe-Brown’s work than to anything by Malinowski. (In this regard it is worth noting that Relations in Public is dedicated to Radcliffe-Brown.) Of course the explicit functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown’s writings is not clearly in evidence, but the preference for general theory is there. Goffman’s dissertation seems to have adopted the form of Radcliffe-Brown’s work but with a substantive twist more in keeping with Freud or Sartre. There is some evidence for this: at the University of Chicago Goffman had been thought of as a Freudian, and his dissertation, written in Paris in 1952 at the height of existentialism, contains several references to Sartre’s work, particularly Being and Nothingness. It is possible to read both ‘Communication conduct in an island community’ and the fantastically popular The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as Goffman’s investigations into the conditions of authenticity in an inauthentic world. The explicit dramaturgy of The Presentation of Self is not evident in the dissertation, but both studies suggest that appearance and reality can be hard to

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distinguish, and genuine feeling can be an instrumental performance. Further support for this is provided by Dean MacCannell (1983) who has argued that Goffman’s work is the only serious sociological response to Sartre (see also Ashworth 1985; Rawls 1984). Asylums: analysing the total institution When Goffman began work in 1955 on the project that became Asylums, he was still struggling to establish an academic career. His first book, The Presentation of Self, was about to be published, not by a major publishing house but instead by the University of Edinburgh, and there was a significant risk that his dramaturgical analysis would sit unread and unnoticed in a handful of university libraries, forever undiscovered. The very positive reviews of The Presentation of Self were still a couple of years away, as were the publishing contracts with Anchor and Penguin for a revised edition of this book. In 1955 Goffman had no reason to anticipate the fame which would be his within a few years. His dissertation had been accepted at Chicago only after a heated debate among members of his Committee, who were divided about its merits. For some, ‘Communication conduct’ was a case study with insufficient empirical detail; for others it was a brilliant piece of general theory. It is true that Goffman was awarded his Ph.D. at the end of 1953, but he was hardly the victim of hero-worship at that time. Goffman did not obtain a tenure track appointment following the completion of his training at Chicago, and instead began work, perhaps incongruously, on a stratification project directed by Edward Shils. Goffman’s move to Washington, D.C., in 1955 to study everyday life in St Elizabeths Hospital was, in some senses, another job while he waited for a permanent academic position. The Asylums project was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which at that time supported ethnographic investigation. Goffman was therefore only one of a number of sociologists whose research was made possible by the NIMH. The intellectual climate has changed dramatically in the 1990s, and it is now rare for the NIMH to fund ethnographic studies. There are probably several unrelated reasons for this turnabout: partly the change is connected to the domination of grant review committees by physicians and bench scientists, who have little interest in participant observation; partly it reflects the quantification of social science, which often views sociological research as a label for project evaluation; partly ethnography has suffered because of the medicalization of social problems (see Conrad and Schneider 1980; Waitkzin 1991), in which ‘professional zoning’ or ‘turf allocation’ (Kirk and Kutchens 1992) takes place, usually in such a way as to ensure that the biomedical sciences do not have to compete with the

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social sciences but can instead replace them. When interviewed by Jef Verhoeven, Goffman stated explicitly that he considered the availability of large federally funded grants as a decisive redirection for professional sociology. In the interview Goffman commented: ‘I am an ethnographer of small entities, and I don’t work in terms of large grants employing anybody. I’ve never employed anybody in my life’ (Verhoeven 1993:323). However, in 1955 Goffman was able to pursue a federally funded project without the embrace of either hypotheses to test or a rigid programme of research to evaluate. Instead he was able to blend into the hospital by becoming the assistant to the athletics director. In this recreational capacity Goffman must have found that the position was perfect for his purposes, since it legitimated his presence within the institution without labelling him as either a medical professional or as a patient. In this capacity Goffman was merely a very small cog in the large bureaucratic machine of the hospital, and as such did not receive undue attention. Asylums has the same ‘feel’ as ‘Communication conduct’: both read as if the author were trying simultaneously to produce a case study and a general theoretical treatise. Goffman’s ethnographies resist easy categorization. In Asylums the merger of the case study and general theory is taken further and is presented more dramatically than in the dissertation, which began straightforwardly by describing the research site and presenting historical and demographic information. By contrast, Asylums begins immediately with a clarification of the central concept of the ‘total institution’, a phrase Goffman first heard when taking classes from Everett Hughes (Burns 1992:142–3). The decision to begin the book in this way effectively signposts his intention to produce an inductive, theory-driven comparative ethnography, rather than a reconstruction of St Elizabeths Hospital at a particular time and place. The first three essays of Asylums explore the everyday experiences of inmates in total institutions, where the emphasis but not the exclusive focus is the mental institution. The fourth essay is very different, and can be considered as a contribution to the sociology of the professions. In this paper Goffman analyses the various elements that differentiate psychiatrist-patient interaction from other professional-client relationships. The modesty of this essay is surprising after the boldness of intent and design of the first three, since it tries exclusively to unpack the unfortunate dynamics of the psychiatric relationship. By contrast, the first three essays try to persuade the reader that the total institution has a special organizational logic of its own. Asylums is Goffman’s attempt to describe the course and consequence of inmate life in any total institution. This is an audacious project because it suggests that there are many similarities between institutions that are traditionally thought to be very different. After reading Asylums, boarding schools,

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concentration camps, monasteries and homes for the blind can no longer be seen as different institutions but/become instead examples of the total institution. It follows from this that everyday life in boarding schools, monasteries and so on is also rather similar, which is a bold and counter-intuitive claim. It leads to the controversial claim that the behaviour of many of the patients at St Elizabeths, and by extension at any mental institution, is not symptomatic of mental illness but is instead exemplary of behaviour that could be encountered in any total institutional setting. Goffman’s claim, crudely put, is that the incomprehensible behaviour of the ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional schizophrenic’ at St Elizabeths becomes understandable once we see that essentially the same behaviour can be observed in a monastery or an army barracks. According to Goffman, the causal agent ‘behind’ mental illness has not been shown to be faulty synaptic wiring but might instead be oppressive institutional arrangements that subtly and not so subtly undermine a person’s sense of identity and self-worth. This kind of reasoning led Goffman to say on a number of occasions that, in effect, psychiatrists are unimpressive physicians but first-rate sociologists, because although their medical claims are poorly supported by biological evidence, their finely detailed observations of the behaviour of their patients are a model of sociological investigation. Asylums begins with a formal definition of the total institution and then outlines the three stages that all inmates pass through as they adjust to and are adjusted by their environment. Goffman paints a dismal picture of what he calls ‘batch living’. The three stages are: 1 2 3

mortification of self, instruction in the privilege system, and resistance—‘playing it cool’.

During the mortification of self inmates are stripped of their personal identities: personal names and titles are lost, institutional uniforms replace informal clothes, cosmetics are heavily restricted, personal space is frequently invaded or disregarded, damaging personal information is publicly discussed and humiliation is a constant possibility. The rights we enjoy as citizens are lost as inmates undergo ‘civil death’, and a new and presumably lower status is prepared for them. Once this process is complete the institution begins to offer ‘privileges’ to compliant individuals: extra cups of coffee at mealtimes, letters from home, reading material or some personal cosmetics. Privileges consist of the myriad of minor conveniences that are taken for granted outside the total institution but are scarce resources within it. Goffman argues that the process whereby the inmate learns to

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accept the institution’s right to restrict access to these goods is one which is very damaging to a person’s sense of self. The latent message of the privilege system is that the total institution dominates the individual, to such an extent that even coffee and cigarettes have become scarce and controlled substances. According to Goffman, the combination of the mortification of self and privilege poses a profound threat to a person’s identity, and maintaining or restoring that identity requires an active programme of resistance. Goffman referred to resistance by the phrase used by inmates at St Elizabeths, who spoke of ‘playing it cool’, which referred to a set of four strategies whereby they affirmed to themselves (if to nobody else) that they were autonomous beings who are more than the institution allowed them to be. The practice of playing it cool is therefore a defensive, adaptive response by inmates to the psychological onslaught of the institution. It is an attempt to stake out a defined jurisdiction of control (to the inmate at least) within which the inmate has control. Playing it cool involves a compromise: inmates relinquish control over many of the things they took for granted outside the total institution but affirm that they still have control over a small number of issues. The four strategies for playing it cool are the ways inmates resist the overwhelming power of the total institution. They are: 1 2 3 4

situational withdrawal, the intransigent line, colonization, and conversion.

These are general strategies used by inmates in a variety of total institutions. Situational withdrawal is an intense form of daydreaming; it is a way for inmates to play truant from the institution by imagining themselves to be elsewhere. At different times in our everyday lives we have all lost interest in the events unfolding around us and have instead let our minds wander to other topics, such as going out for dinner or a planned summer vacation. According to Goffman, inmates in total institutions have transformed this mundane activity into an art form, and are often able to spend an entire day imagining that they are somewhere else, doing something more interesting, over which they have at least a modicum of control. For example, inmates may read the box scores of a baseball game very carefully and then reconstruct the game ball-by-ball, perhaps even attempting play-by-play and colour commentary. This is an activity which the institution cannot control, and hence the inmate has ‘beaten’ the institution in some sense.

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In the second strategy, inmates establish an intransigent line, a point beyond which they decide that active rebellion will take place. We are all flexible to a degree, in the sense that we all understand that although we are likely to experience little indignities that challenge the selves we project for our different publics, these indignities are not so threatening that they are worth countering, and so instead we learn to be pragmatic and to ignore these events. This decision is often a good one, because it allows us to continue doing the things we want to do, rather than arguing with others about their ritual disdain for us. Goffman argues that the same process takes place in total institutions; the difference is merely of degree. In civil life we can choose to be relatively sensitive to personal attacks, but in institutional life it is necessary to be thicker-skinned. Nevertheless, Goffman argues, inmates establish for themselves a point beyond which they will no longer accept the indignities to which they are subjected and will instead rebel. Even though they may change their minds about where this point is, inmates preserve a sense of personal autonomy through the belief that they can only be ‘pushed so far’. Beyond that point inmates begin active non-cooperation, doing anything that will disrupt total institutional life: inmates may refuse to eat, may barricade themselves in their rooms, riot, or begin a ‘dirty campaign’ in which excrement is smeared over their bodies and living space. Unsurprisingly, both staff members and psychiatrists view such tactics as further evidence that their patients were really suffering from a severe mental illness. Ironically then, a strategy for resisting the power of the mental hospital unwittingly becomes a symptom of the illness the hospital will then try to treat. The third strategy is colonization, in which inmates adjust to the total institution by transforming it into an acceptable and habitable environment. Colonization is the accentuation of the common practice of relativizing failure. Early in his career, when writing about confidence tricks in his paper, ‘On cooling the mark out’ (1952), Goffman hinted that a sociology of failure was waiting to be written, and parts of Asylums can be read as notes about this project. We all experience disappointment and failure in one or more aspects of our lives and have to settle for something in keeping with our possibilities rather than our ambitions. Children learn that they probably will not become President of the United States, however hard they work towards this goal; they learn that professional basketball teams will manage without them; they learn that often a ‘B’ is the best grade they can attain in a test. Rather than succumb to consuming disappointment we all learn to accommodate failure by dwelling on positive aspects of our lives. Goffman’s account of colonization suggests that inmates act in the same way, adjusting to the reality of total institutional life by focusing on what it has to offer rather than collapsing in the face of the threats it poses to their autonomy. Instead of seeing

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the cloud in front of every silver lining, inmates play up the advantages of their new situation: the warmth, regular meals, recreational activities, comradeship and so on. However hollow this may seem to someone immersed in civil life, colonization allows inmates to make the compromises necessary for survival in a hostile environment. The fourth strategy, conversion, is an uncertain combination of pretence and reality, since Goffman uses it to mean that (1) inmates begin to believe the institution’s account of them and (2) they pretend to believe the institution’s account of them. According to Goffman, inmates become converts to the institution’s way of thinking as a coping device. However, they also realize that since this is what is expected of them, they are likely to be rewarded for this behaviour and hence there is an immediate reason to pretend to convert. In the midst of this, inmates partly believe, partly fake belief, partly refuse to think about the mould out of which the institution thinks they are cast. As is well known, Goffman’s argument is that these four strategies of resistance can be seen in any total institution. It is therefore a mistake to think that they can be used in some way to diagnose the cause or development of any type of mental illness. However, Goffman argues that this is precisely what happens: psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals interpret attempts to ‘play it cool’ as symptomatic of an underlying disorder. Goffman: reluctant postmodernist? Goffman’s status as an ethnographer is uncertain, as several commentators have suggested. Indeed, in their review of the rhetorical composition of Asylums, Gary Fine and Daniel Martin (1990) intimate that it is a strong book despite the ethnographic element, not because of it. Further, the relationship between Goffman’s explicitly ethnographic projects and his general work on the organization of face-to-face interaction is also unclear: should we consider Goffman’s ethnographies as part and parcel of his analysis of the interaction order or are they in some theoretical or methodological way a discrete enterprise? This leads back to two questions: (1) what is the empirical referent of Asylums?, and (2) what is the book trying to achieve? The answers to these questions connect Goffman to grounded theory. Throughout this essay I have suggested that Goffman did not equate ethnography with the case study, even assuming that a case study is understood in unproblematic terms (for a critical discussion of the case study, see Ragin and Becker 1991). His ambition, from the dissertation onwards, was to use naturalistic observation in the service of general theoretical understanding. In this sense

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Asylums is very similar to Relations in Public or Frame Analysis, since all three try to construct and then promote a general vocabulary with which to think and talk about the social world. However, Goffman’s commitment to the creation of a new vocabulary for sociology is not intentionally a ‘postmodern’, ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘deconstructive’ move designed to expose ethnography as (merely) a kind of writing (but see Clough 1992 for an interesting account of the relationship between Goffman and Derrida). Goffman is sceptical of a realist ethnography that privileges the interpretations of the observer, but he does not extend this scepticism to a denial of any link between the textual, ethnographic account and the world about which it claims to report. This is the tension between a reading of Asylums as a case study of St Elizabeths and a reading that suggests, as Fredric Jameson (1976) has of Frame Analysis, that Goffman’s work is at root self-referential, that it is designed to promote the applicability of a conceptual scheme rather than an understanding of or even a report about the social world itself. Although Asylums, and perhaps Goffman’s work generally, ironizes the possibility of ethnography, for the most part it veers away from the anti-empirical statement that the social world is unknowable. Goffman is closest to this position in his later work, particularly Forms of Talk (1981a). In the first essay in this collection he likens the analysis of conversational constraints to an illusionary Pandora’s box, constructed with the forlorn hope of categorizing the playfulness of everyday talk (1981a:70–4). In ‘The lecture’, in the same collection, he continues with the same thought, suggesting that the role of the lecturer is to convince us that there is a ‘real, structured, somewhat unitary world out there to comprehend’. He ends the essay by suggesting that sociological analysis cannot master the ‘flickering, cross-purposed, messy irresolution’ of our ‘unknowable circumstances’ (1981a:194–5). However, for the most part Goffman avoided these kinds of fundamental doubt, and tried instead to preserve a space between ethnography as realist case study and ethnography as a kind of writing. He hoped that his space could be filled with empirical work that generates heuristic models that allow us to think about and perhaps even test familiar issues in new ways. By forging a link between ethnography as theory construction, as a new vocabulary, and ethnography as a testable set of observations, Goffman implicitly embraced an inductive, comparative and theoretical view of ethnography that is compatible with grounded theory. Ethnography, then, is neither invention nor discovery but an inextricable combination of both: as Clifford (1988) has suggested, it is a ‘true fiction’. Ethnography is a surreal attempt to shuffle and reshuffle realities. For some commentators, most notably Stanley Fish (1989), the surrealism of ethnographic endeavours undermines their scientific aspirations and requires the removal of

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verification as a guiding tenet of research. This is because the ‘objective reality’ about which ethnographers report has been fatally and unavoidably infected by the introduction of theoretical, ideological, narratological and aesthetic elements. As a result, there is no external referent (such as St Elizabeths Hospital) that is capable of serving as arbiter of the putative truth claims of any ethnographic text. Stanley Fish and others sympathetic to his position (such as Rorty 1986), wish to see the verification requirement replaced by a fuzzier requirement that ethnography furnishes interesting rather than demonstrably true findings. Clearly, Goffman’s ethnographic work does not offer detailed, systematic observations of particular places at particular times, and it is for this reason that many people find his work disappointing. Nor does Goffman provide remedies— or even alternatives—to the general conditions that he describes. Instead he liked to note, often with deadpan irony, that what members of an institution say they do is often rather different from what they actually do. His inclination to work in this way reminds us that he was in many ways a faithful student of his former teacher, Everett Hughes. However, Goffman also used ethnography for other purposes: a central thrust of his work is to show that we are all, even the incarcerated mentally ill, much more alike than we often like to suppose, and that our surface peculiarities are just that—idiosyncratic variations on a common theme. Much of Goffman’s sociology is an attempt to disclose (in an almost Durkheimian way) the basic elements of the interaction order that bind us together by providing what Goffman called (1969a) the grammar and syntax of everyday conduct, without which there is only an anomic sense of despair and incomprehension. Perhaps, then, the central goal of Asylums is deeply humanitarian. Although the attempt to read this study as an informative guide to St Elizabeths Hospital is bound to fail, and is in any case at odds with Goffman’s intentions, Goffman can be understood differently. His hope is that we will realize that the sympathy which we feel for inmates of St Elizabeths is also a form of empathy, that their experiences are in an extreme way similar to our own experiences. The ‘antics’ of the institutionalized inmate then seem less the ravings of the deranged; they may even begin to resemble reasonable, strategic conduct, of the kind that we might, and perhaps have, practised ourselves. Goffman’s ethnography is therefore ultimately an ethnography of our own conduct: his embryonic grounded theory is a comparative sociology that shows us that the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the sane and the insane, is often quite unclear. Goffman reports that inmates at St Elizabeths resist the overwhelming forces of the institution by playing it cool, behaviour that is likely to be understood by the professional staff as symptomatic of an underlying illness. But, Goffman says, the inmates’ behaviour

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is also our own behaviour, only we lack the appropriate vocabulary to express this compassionate thought. In an interesting study of rhetoric and sociology, Ricca Edmondson (1984) makes a similar point about the narrative construction of Asylums. She points out that Goffman writes of the inmates’ experiences in total institutions in a way which incorporates the reader into his account (1984:153). Edmondson argues that the incorporation of the reader is usually attempted indirectly, often by the use of personal pronouns. Edmondson also suggests that Goffman’s remarkable gift for irony also serves a rhetorical purpose, since it sensitizes us to the conceptual reordering his text is trying to bring about. Thus, in addition to its substantive goals, Asylums (and Goffman’s work generally) also carries a methodological subtext. It is this subtext that has allowed Goffman to be considered as an apparently unwilling poststructuralist or deconstructionist. Despite his protestations and despite his frequent claims to be an old-fashioned empiricist, Goffman’s work carries the seed of doubt about the prospects for empirical sociology (Manning 1991). All of his books carry warnings to the effect that the empirical world will not succumb to the ‘patterning out effected by analysis’ and that both his and every sociological analysis is unavoidably provisional. In this sense, although Goffman’s substantive message may be Durkheimian, as Randall Collins (1988) and others have argued, his methodological position is neo-Kantian (Williams 1988), with much in common with Weber’s warnings about the limitations of sociology’s unavoidably ideal-typical account of the social world. Note 1

The title of this chapter adverts to Goffman’s search for ethnographically appropriate, experience-near sociological concepts:

…if sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back to where it best applies, followed from there wherever it seems to lead, and pressed to disclose the rest of its family. Better, perhaps, different coats to clothe the children well than a single splendid tent in which they all shiver. (Goffman 1961a:xiv)

7

The omnipotence of the actor Erving Goffman on ‘the definition of the situation’ Wes Sharrock

Introduction This chapter is strongly critical of some of the methodological comments and preconceptions which inform Goffman’s work. It involves invidious comparison of Goffman with the ethnomethodological tradition originating in the work of Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel. It is, therefore, important to stress that this does not reflect a comparably critical view of the work which was done under the auspices of, though perhaps in tension or even at odds with, those preconceptions. Goffman was a sociologist of the first rank, and in many respects his studies are simply unmatched. My critical comments refer to what is considered to be his weakest area: general methodology. They address that feature of Goffman’s work, which is (in the words of my colleague John Lee) that it has so many admirers but few actual followers. Though I think there was great potential for radicalizing sociological thought within Goffman’s studies, this was difficult to exploit because Goffman continued to place those studies within the setting of thoroughly conventional assumptions about how the analysis of social order was to be undertaken. Goffman was vastly more concerned with marking out a specialized domain of investigation within the established framework of sociological inquiry than he was with developing an alternative to that framework. On the other hand, it was plain that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology was engaged from the very beginning in a root and branch re-examination of the very concept of sociology. Despite Garfinkel’s critical comments on Goffman’s work (Garfinkel 1967:172– 5), I do not think it would have been impossible to have extrapolated from Goffman’s writings a similar stance to that which eventually became

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ethnomethodology. But as I shall show, such an extrapolation would run against the grain of much, if not all of Goffman’s explicit reflections on matters methodological. Erving Goffman certainly changed the course of my own sociological career. Feeling decidedly uneasy about the difficulty in closely connecting the abstract terminology and wide-ranging (but characteristically uninstantiated) generalities of the sociological theory in my undergraduate courses with ordinary affairs that I would witness within the world of my daily life, I kept a lookout for any sociological writings which offered the prospect of relating these two, which in any explicit and detailed sense talked about that everyday world. Towards the end of my final year course, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) was introduced. Here was at least one important part of what I had been looking for, an attempt to give some systematic account of the conduct of everyday affairs. The first thing I did as a postgraduate student was to read everything by Erving Goffman I could find. Shortly after I went to the University of Manchester in the mid-1960s to do postgraduate work, Goffman visited the department for several weeks. One of the papers he presented was an account of what was to become Frame Analysis (1974). In the course of those fascinating talks Goffman made complimentary mention of the work of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks. I had previously encountered Garfinkel’s work, but had never heard of Sacks. The latter sounded interesting because, according to Goffman, he was developing an account of interactional sequencing which involved the virtually mechanical alternation of action ‘slots’, making it sound like the sociological equivalent of Chomsky’s generative grammar. Goffman’s recommendations I felt had to be taken seriously. I had previously read one of Garfinkel’s papers and though I had not made much of it, in the light of Goffman’s remarks I was prepared to revisit it, and eagerly looked forward to the imminent publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. Whoever Sacks was, I was certainly going to find out what he was doing. Goffman’s writings seemed to me to have the potential for development in quite radical directions within the context of theory and method (in part, simply as an extension of the symbolic interactionist sources upon which they drew), but these were not possibilities that seemed to interest Goffman. Though his studies were fresh and utterly distinctive, Goffman seemed content to accommodate them within a rather conventional conception of sociology. He was seeking to form a new, specialist field, concerned to address ‘the neglected situation’ (Goffman 1964b) of the analytical disregard of interaction within sociology. The attempt to develop a new approach to sociology’s ‘foundational’ issues was not part of his remit. In this respect he was profoundly different to Garfinkel and Sacks, both of whom held deeply dissenting (and in many ways directly connected and closely

The omnipotence of the actor 121 related) views about root methodological problems. These views seemed to capitalize on the kinds of possibilities nascent in Goffman’s writings. It has been a misfortune for both ‘symbolic interactionism’ 1 and ethnomethodology that they have been subsequently identified as forms of ‘interactionist’2 sociology. This has provided a useful alibi for those for whom, otherwise, such work might be seen to have drastic implications, for they have been able to discount both these sociologies on the grounds that they do not and, more crucially, that they cannot address topics of ‘social structure’. It is fair, though not by any means entirely accurate, to characterize Goffman as concerned to analyse ‘interaction’, since his dominant preoccupation was with the analysis of situations of immediate co-presence, and to articulate a place for the systematic pursuit of such a task within the framework of an otherwise unreconstructed sociology. However, it never was appropriate to characterize ethnomethodology as an ‘interactionist’ sociology for though the materials examined were those which recorded instances of ‘interaction’, they were examined as providing the witnessable and analysable instantiations of social orders. They were, therefore, occasions for reflection upon and reconsideration of root problems in sociological concept formation. My own intellectual motivation had arisen from the wish to see a thorough working out of the idea of a verstehen sociology in relation to the analysis of materials that could be generated through fieldwork studies. The department at the University of Manchester was, at that time (the middle to late 1960s), a joint Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, and it was Goffman’s friendship with the senior professor, Max Gluckman, which explained his presence there. The anthropologist’s commitment to fieldwork ensured that the idea of ‘qualitative’ sociology was a respectable, and even dominant, conception within the Department, at a time when it was much more embattled in Anglo-American sociology than it is today. The problem, within the Manchester context, was not whether one should take the ‘actor’s point of view’ into account, but how one should do so. Goffman’s work provided initial inspiration. His writings spoke of a social world that anyone could recognize—not one that had been passed through unknown procedures of theoretical abstraction and/or unknown processes of methodological restructuring—and that was, in some sense, the world that was visible ‘from the actor’s point of view’. Though one could take leads from Goffman’s work in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and other writings from that period,3 Goffman provided little direct assistance in clarifying the (putative) relationship between the sociologist’s and the member’s respective standpoints. Goffman provided little guidance on the issue of how the sociologist’s concepts relate to

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the phenomena that they intend to conceptualize, namely the witnessable situations and occurrences of the world of daily life. By contrast, Garfinkel and Sacks showed intense awareness of these problems in clarifying the relationship between the world of daily life as encountered ‘from within’ and the conceptual apparatus constructed by the professional sociologist. Even where their work did not explicitly discuss these problems it could clearly be seen that it was shaped by the need to think them through.4 Indeed, ethnomethodology owed much to the prior efforts of Alfred Schutz. Since at least the time of Schutz’s rediscovery (in large part as a consequence of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality and Garfinkel’s going public with the idea of ethnomethodology with the publication in 1967 of Studies in Ethnomethodology), the notions of ‘the actor’s point of view’ and ‘the definition of the situation’ have provided pivotal nodes upon which the demarcation of sociological views can be focused. These two notions are crucially entangled with issues which are still prominent in sociological debate, which are often characterized as involving opposition of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, involving—it sometimes seems—a choice between an omnipotent social actor and an omniscient sociological observer. There is a conventional, though in my view, misguided interpretation of the meaning of the notion of ‘the definition of the situation’ and of the problems associated with it. Unfortunately, Goffman himself was prone to some of these conventional misconceptions. ‘The definition of the situation’ At the beginning of Frame Analysis Goffman recalls W.I.Thomas’ dictum that ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ and goes on to comment that ‘This statement is true as it reads and false as it is taken’ before elaborating in these words: Defining situations as real certainly has consequences, but these may contribute very marginally to the events in progress; in some cases only a slight embarrassment flits across the scene in mild concern for those who tried to define the situation wrongly. All the world is not a stage—certainly the theater isn’t entirely. (Whether you organize a theater 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.) Presumably, a ‘definition of the situation’ is almost always to be found, but those who are in the situation do not create this definition, even though their society can be said to do so; ordinarily, all they do is to assess correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly. True, we personally

The omnipotence of the actor 123 negotiate aspects of all these arrangements under which we live, but often once these are negotiated, we continue on mechanically, as though the matter had always been settled. So, too, there are occasions when we must wait until things are almost over before discovering what has been occurring, and occasions of our own activity when we can considerably put off deciding what to claim we have been doing. But surely these are not the only principles of organization. Social life is dubious enough and ludicrous enough without having to wish it further into unreality. (Goffman 1974:1–2) Goffman’s remarks are of importance because of the way in which they express sentiments which are widely held and which are largely hostile to the notion of ‘taking the actor’s point of view’ and investigating society primarily in terms of ‘the definition of the situation’, The faults which Goffman seeks to highlight are ones to which he himself—as an ‘interactionist’—might be alleged to be prone, of treating the present face-to-face situation as autonomous and hermetically sealed and, therefore, of being naïve with respect to the ‘broader’ or ‘larger’ realities of ‘social structures’. By these comments, Goffman makes plain that he is not deserving of any such criticism, but does so at the price of pitching his remarks against the idea of putting the investigation of ‘definition of the situation’ in primary place within a programme of sociological inquiry. Goffman’s remarks are apt to provide confirmation for the prejudice that deployment of ‘the definition of the situation’ unavoidably entails naïvety with respect to certain otherwise patently apparent matters. Goffman’s words here harmonize with those who, sharing his own (in important respects) ‘orthodox Durkheimian’ outlook, mutter about the ‘external and constraining’ nature of social reality as though the realization of these matters were the proprietary possession of certain kinds of sociological theory.5 Criticism of Goffman’s comments on this point therefore provide a strategic opportunity for explicitly countering the misconceptions which he apparently holds, and on which such words certainly feed. I do not suggest that the strictures made against Goffman’s methodological remarks would apply to his own work, insofar as this might be considered itself to employ the functional equivalent of ‘definition of the situation’ in the characterization of the actor’s point of view.6 I shall argue that the putative risks which Goffman associates with the idea of ‘definition of the situation’ are not necessarily associated with it but are, in fact, a product of a most impoverished conception of what ‘the actor’s point of view’ might be, and, therefore, specifying what ‘the definition of the situation’ in any actual case would involve. Ironically, the points which Goffman makes ostensibly against ‘the

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definition of the situation’ are, I shall argue, ones which could and should be made on its behalf. The risk which someone who seeks to work centrally in terms of ‘the definition of the situation’ allegedly runs is that of coming to regard the member of society as someone who is omnipotent, the sole, individual creator of social life, which this creature conjures up instantaneously, from nothing at all. The member is thus one who is putatively exempt from all constraint. For someone who can conjure up social reality de novo (and, presumably, by act of will), then there is surely nothing whatsoever to inhibit the way in which social reality can be defined, for this is merely a matter of individual will. The ‘orthodox Durkheimian’ asserts, as Goffman does, that giving primacy to ‘the definition of the situation’ divests social life of its reality, reducing it to a species of subjectivity. I take it that it is this risk of extreme ‘subjectivism’ to which Goffman alludes in his comment that Thomas’ dictum is ‘true as it reads, but false as it is taken’. Presumably Goffman is referring to a tendency to take Thomas’ motto without its last three words—thus: if people ‘define situations as real, they are real.’ The other aspect of the proposal to set ‘the definition of the situation’ at the centre of understanding of social reality to which Durkheimians take exception, is of course, the apparent implication that the actor’s standpoint will be incorrigible, will be epistemologically privileged, and that will preclude the possibility of a transcendent sociological standpoint—the standpoint of, so to speak, the total society, characterizing a social reality which is external to and transcendent of the actor’s standpoint.7 Against these two alleged tendencies, the orthodox Durkheimian will affirm that social reality is prior to any ‘definition of the situation’ and that it is, therefore, necessary for the sociologist to determine the nature of that reality, to view the situation of actors from a transcendent standpoint. The necessary corrective to the omnipotent member is, then, the omniscient sociologist. The trouble with such objections, and the alternatives to which they give rise, is that they depend upon the assumption that the idea of ‘definition of the situation’ is a simple—if not simple-minded and sociologically8 naïve—one, without raising the question of what an adequate characterization of ‘the definition of the situation’ might involve. An adequate characterization of ‘the definition of the situation’ The characteristic concern in sociological debates over ‘the definition of the situation’ is the part that this is ultimately to play within some envisaged overall sociological scheme, and whether it can, effectively, play that part. However, whilst

The omnipotence of the actor 125 the status and role of ‘the definition of the situation’ is much debated (and frequently, as with Goffman’s cited comments, derogated) comparatively little interest is taken in the question of what ‘the definition of the situation’ itself talks about, though, assuredly, the way in which that notion is to be applied in practice must be crucial to evaluating its import. There is no reason why any except a shallow and inept characterization of ‘the definition of the situation’ should stand in need of the correctives which Goffman and the Durkheimian tradition more generally attempt to provide. The essence of the Durkheimian objection seems to be that social realities must be extrinsic to the definition of the situation, that the situation will be defined as an immediate here-and-now, dissociated from all pasts and futures, and from connections to the lives, activities and arrangements which take place outside the instant purview of those in the situation under definition. The member of society will not, therefore, be aware of the ‘social realities’ which obtain outside the bounds of this constricted here-and-now, and by the same token a sociology which centrally depends upon ‘the definition of the situation’ will share an equally constricted awareness. The trouble with these Durkheimian arguments is that they involve the attempted proprietary appropriation of commonplaces. In other words, there is the assertion of matters with respect to which no one could, let alone does, disagree, as though their assertions were distinctly supportive of the framework being advocated—which is just as true of Durkheim’s initial exposition of ‘social facts’ as of Goffman’s more recent comments. Take Goffman’s warning not to literalize his own theatrical metaphor into a conviction that ‘all the world’s a stage’. He notes that even the stage involves more than just theatricals, adding that ‘whether you organize a theater 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’ (Goffman 1974:1). It would, indeed, be naïve and misguided in the extreme on the part of someone attending a theatrical performance to suppose that these theatricals had materialized from nothing, that the performance took place entirely without prior preparation, and on the basis of only the activities which visibly take place upon the stage. But who holds such naïve and misguided conceptions? Perhaps very small children, on their first visits to the theatre but not, assuredly, any grown-up, wide-awake theatregoer. The wide-awake theatregoer is, of course, aware of the necessity to leave for the performance in sufficient time to allow for finding as secure a parking space as one can locate, and of the need for an equally secure place in which to deposit their possessions, as practical preconditions for their untroubled concentration upon the performance they intend to witness.

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The theatregoer will also be aware of the night-after-night character of the performances they attend, that this performance is part of a series of performances, and that the overwhelming probability is that there will be have been some, perhaps extensive, rehearsals prior to the first public performance, just as they will acknowledge the fact that some number of (unseen but nonetheless present) individuals are working hard to facilitate the smooth performance to which they are witness. They will, too, take it for granted that there will be toilet facilities, not needing to trouble themselves to ascertain that these amenities will be available should they need them, but only to ascertain their whereabouts when they do need them. Thus, any decent account of the theatregoer’s definition of the situation would incorporate, not preclude, the matters for which Goffman demands awareness. They would be incorporated as matters to which the theatregoer is inexorably attentive as practical conditions and requirements of an evening at the theatre. Goffman alludes, then, to what are so many matters of common sense within the activity of going to the theatre. These common sense matters do not derive from, nor are they in any way specifically dependent upon, the adoption of any particular sociological standpoint or upon the undertaking of any specifically sociological investigations.9 That one’s current activities are embedded in a set of social realities, in complexes of social arrangements, is something which is oriented to in any properly portrayed ‘definition of the situation’ and not at all something extrinsic to it. Goffman’s accumulating objections to ‘the definition of the situation’ presuppose, then, that that notion’s adoption must attenuate the sense of social reality and his anxieties, as formulated, involve the following doubts: • that the definition of the situation involves naïveties with respect to the practical conditions and consequences of actions; • that the definition of the situation entirely originates with the individual action, and that, therefore, the ‘content’ of that definition might be the idiosyncratic coinage of the individual; • that ‘the definition of the situation’ involves the literal and explicit negotiation of each feature of the situation, as though these were, in the vernacular, entirely up for grabs, and as though, therefore, no one ever ‘continued on mechanically’. Alas, rather than telling against the notion of ‘definition of the situation’, these doubts could be taken as contributions to a proper construal of it, as the work of Alfred Schutz (1962, 1964) might be used to argue.

The omnipotence of the actor 127 Schutz shows a rare—effectively unique—concern for systematic attention to the problem of characterizing ‘the actor’s point of view’ and thus to the structural (so to speak) characterization of ‘the definition of the situation’. His strategy is significantly different from Goffman’s, with significantly different consequences. Schutz’s account originates in the ascription of ‘the natural attitude’ which, though there is more to it, is designed to highlight the extent to which ‘the world out there’ is presupposed—is taken for granted and at face value by members of the society.10 The external world, as encountered under the auspices of the natural attitude is, it is to be noted, a world known in common—it is the operational assumption of the natural attitude that ‘the world out there’ is the same for you as it is for me (modulo, of course, the indispensable requirement on the ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ and the ‘interchangeability of standpoints’11—which together constitute the ‘world known in common’—that their applicability requires that biographical differences are irrelevant, consideration which is not by any means invariant).12 The ‘world in common’ is irreducibly a social world because it is known by way of socially distributed knowledge. The ‘world in common’ is encountered in the form of the ‘world of daily life’ and thus the member’s situation displays the following properties: 1 It is given. As the slogan goes, a world ‘always already there’, one which antedates the member’s entry into it, so that any setting of activity is already under way prior to the member’s participation in it. 2 It transcends the here-and-now, is horizonally related in time and space, was inhabited by predecessors, and is now populated by multitudes of contemporaries. First, the member is not naïve with respect to the existence of a current world of social affairs outside current awareness, and the notion of a ‘horizonal’ relation indicates the possibility of bringing currently remote contemporary situations into awareness. Second, it is not the case that the member’s awareness is confined to those co-members who are (in Goffman’s sense) co-present, for of course the order of the world of daily life is known to its inhabitants by way of the socially provided apparatus of social types. Through the grasp upon that apparatus of ‘common sense understandings’ the member in a here-and-now may, though unable to witness them, nonetheless ‘know’ how affairs are going beyond the boundaries of current awareness. The member is aware of how that here-and-now is embedded in a ‘transcending’ order of everyday affairs—though I cannot now see the street outside. I know that if I look out of the window I will see pedestrians and traffic, my neighbours setting out to work, the paperboy delivering the newspapers and so on.

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3 It does not originate with the member, but is created by predecessors and prior social activity. The features of the setting are socially organized and socially standardized and the member’s own conduct within the situation is not something entirely up to that individual. Rather, that conduct is (in many important respects) legitimately somebody else’s business, something upon which normative requirements and others’ expectations make moral demands. In turn, these moral demands represent practical constraints upon what the individual actor can do. It is a characteristic feature of social action that members of the society conduct their actions not as idiosyncratic innovations but as recognizably standard courses of actions, ones which they perform not by virtue of their individuality but, rather, under the anonymous typification of ‘anyone’— often, they are doing what ‘anyone’ would do, what ‘anyone’ is entitled to do (Sacks 1992). 4 It is not solipsistic, nor does it suggest any possibility of omnipotence, for the member is aware of possessing only one consciousness amongst others,13 one mortal being within the multitude, who was for many matters a belated arrival upon the scene, inheritor of a world passed down from others, shaped by multifarious unknown predecessors, transiently shared with numerous, selectively known contemporaries, eventually to be left to successors, a world over which any member possesses only limited and localized control. In Egon Bittner’s concise summary: I, the perceiving subject who faces the world knowingly, know that as an object among objects I enjoy no special privilege. I come into being, endure, and perish as a thing among things and even if I have it within me to look forward to redemption, it will not be in this world. However much I may have taken charge of my own life, the bare fact of my existence is just that, a fact over which I have no control. Moreover, a great many of the features of my existence are given in just the same way as the fact of existence itself. And all of this is prior to either stoic calm or angst about it. (Bittner 1973:120) In the preceding contentions there is no suggestion whatsoever that the social world is entirely ‘up for grabs’ with each social encounter being the origin of social order, for, let it be recalled, the environment of conduct is the world of daily life, a world which is characterized in terms of the mundane, routine, commonplace, over-and-over-again nature of the affairs that take place within it, and those affairs are commonly undertaken, in a taken-for-granted way, as the reproduction of standard situations, 14 carried out through matter-of-course and ‘normally thoughtless’ conduct (Garfinkel and Sudnow 1975). The notion of ‘negotiation’ does not, therefore, provide a potentially foundational concept for any approach

The omnipotence of the actor 129 departing from the above characterization of conduct-in-the-world-of-daily-life, for of course ‘negotiation’ is something which takes place only within the world of daily life, and its deployment as a concept in a putatively fundamental account of the organization of the world of daily life would be at best metaphoric and would, if taken in the direction which animates Goffman’s hostility, would misrepresent the sense that members of society have of their own conduct.15 Thus there is no disagreement between the sketch derived from Schutz and the standard Durkheimian line on the character of ‘social facts’, vis-à-vis their ‘objectivity’, i.e. their given and intractable character from the point of view of the member of society. The difference is, in the first instance, over the status to be attributed to such characterization. The Durkheimian assertion of ‘the objectivity of social facts’ is asserted as the distinctive premise of a sociological theory, whereas from the point of view enunciated here, it appears more like the reiteration of the natural attitude. The objectivity of social facts does not reside in the specialist, professional competence of the sociologist reciting them, but in their derivation from the bona fide socially sanctioned facts of life which make up the lay sociological understanding to which they, sociologists along with the other members of society, subscribe. Schutz does not advance these same assertions as premises to a distinctive sociological standpoint of his own, to be contrasted with the epistemologically naïve standpoint of society’s members, but articulates them descriptively as a characterization of the very standpoint of members of society, a standpoint which is, if the description is correct, one which intrinsically orients to the ‘reality of social facts.’ This difference from the Durkheimian standpoint is not a small one. It involves the reorientation of the question about the relation between the theorist’s and the member’s standpoint from being one which concerns the relation of how the theorist’s perception relates to that of other persons under study to one founded in re-examination of the relationship of the standpoints of ‘theorists’ and ‘members’ within the theorist’s own practices. Professional sociological theorizing involves the juggling of the relationship between what the theorist knows on the basis of explicit theoretical work and what is known, characteristically in an implicit, taken-for-granted way, by virtue of socially provided ‘common sense understandings’.16 Social order as theorists’ and members’ problems It is the continuing assumption of Goffman’s work that it is the theorist’s task to adjudicate the reality of social phenomena. It is impossible, for a book of nearly 600 pages, to document the comment in detail; I shall make the point with brief

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quotation and illustration. According to Goffman ‘any more or less protracted strip of everyday, literal activity seen as such by all its participants is likely to contain differently framed episodes, these having different realm statuses’ (1974:561). Thus, a man finishes giving instructions to his postman, greets a passing couple, gets into his car, and drives off. Certainly this strip is the sort of thing that writers from James on have had in mind as everyday reality. But plainly, the traffic system is a relatively narrow role domain, impersonal yet closely geared into the ongoing world; greetings are part of the ritual order in which the individual can figure as a representative of himself, a realm of action that is geared into the world but in a special and restricted way. Instruction giving belongs to the realm of occupational roles… (Goffman 1974:561) Social situations are thus portrayed as ‘stratified strips of overlapped framings’. Even these few short remarks seek to show that Goffman’s concern is with ‘the social order’ as a composite of sub-orders, such as those of the ‘ritual order’, ‘the interaction order’, ‘the system of occupational roles’, and so forth, and ‘ordinary, literal activity’ is the occasion for the location and differentiation of the numerous elements which are ‘laminated’ into any single such episode. The ‘social order’ is a topic which may, in that sense, be apportioned amongst different sociologists, with Goffman largely concerning himself with ‘the interaction order’. The ‘world of daily life’ itself is not a matter of interest as such for Goffman, and contemplation of it is merely a means of investigating social order, but ‘social order’ (in the sense in which Goffman and other sociological theorists concern themselves with it— the theoretically specified structure which underpins the world of daily life) is not a phenomenon of interest for ethnomethodology, because it is the world of daily life, as such and for its own sake, that is the phenomenon of interest, and ‘social order’ is therefore of concern only insofar as and because the world of daily life is a socially organized, socially ordered world. This disparity might seem small enough, but it is considerable in terms of the investigative interests which it initiates. For Goffman’s analyses the availability of the everyday world of activity—in which, for example, someone finishes giving instruction to the postman, greets a passing couple, gets into his car and drives off—is a taken-for-granted presence, which may now be analytically decomposed into constituent orders and realms. Thus, the routinely recognizable, matter of course saying something to the postman, greeting the passing neighbours and subsequent driving off is to be treated as something already accomplished, without

The omnipotence of the actor 131 enquiry into how such commonplace affairs are accomplished, of how they are, as successions of constituent activities, built up into the accomplished sequence. For Goffman’s purposes it is enough that some things are said which are ‘giving instructions to the postman’, are said and/or done which comprise ‘giving a greeting’ and which effect ‘driving away’, but it is immaterial to his enterprise just what is said and done, just how these things are said and done. It is, however, the accomplishment of the ordinary, everyday events and arrangements of daily life that is the business of ethnomethodological enquiries, and the ways in which members put together the sayings and doings which make up ‘giving specific and unequivocal instructions’ or ‘signalling recognition of one’s neighbours via a wave’ that are the matters for investigation. The business of ‘defining the situation’ is, therefore, an essentially and irreducibly embedded matter, something which is done in and as part of the carrying out of everyday affairs, and is to be understood as an integral part of those activities. Thus, to take a leading example, it is a matter of attending to the ways in which jurors determine ‘what happened’ in and through their jury deliberations, how by discussion and argument they talk their way to an agreed conclusion ‘that is what happened’, discussion and argument which is constituent of the business of the jury and which is, itself, articulated under the requirements and practical realities of ‘coming together as a jury’. Deciding ‘what is happening’ (what is real) may indeed involve sorting fact from fantasy, truthful statement from lie, fake from original, and so forth, but to depict this as a matter of articulating diverse realms (as Goffman does) seems—from the point of view of studying the accomplishment of practical matters—an attenuated way of talking about such diverse affairs as making psychiatric diagnosis, cross-questioning witnesses, authenticating paintings, reading the daily newspaper and making due allowance for bias, sensationalism, poor reporting and the like. Nor is this just a matter of the diversity of techniques involved in such differentiations, but of the concatenation of circumstances under which such techniques are applied—the workload of the psychiatrist, the adversary situation of the lawyer, the risk to wealth and reputation at stake with a potentially invaluable painting and so on;17 ‘defining the situation’ is socially situated, done within and to identify what is, for those doing the defining, their real worldly situation. To talk about ‘reality’ in an ethnomethodological context is simply to provide a characterization of the way in which some persons go about detecting errors, authenticating phenomena, establishing the facts of deception and so on. It is nothing other than—neither more nor less than—the depiction of the working practices of inter alia accountants, radiologists, laboratory scientists, biblical scholars, investigators of the paranormal, investigative journalists, air traffic controllers and so on and, endlessly, on.

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Thus, for ethnomethodology, the posing of the question ‘what is it that’s going on here’ is an endogenous one, a question to be asked and answered within the scene of social action, one which is, indeed, occasioned by the scene. Goffman says that: the question ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ is considerably suspect. Any event can be described in terms of a focus that includes a wide swathe or a narrow one—and as a related but not identical matter—in terms of a focus that is close up or distant. And no one has a theory as to what particular span and level will come to be the ones employed. To begin with, I must be allowed to proceed by picking my span and level arbitrarily, without special justification. A similar issue is found in connection with perspective. When participants’ roles in an activity are differentiated—a common circumstance—the view that one person has of what is going on is likely to be different from that of another. There is a sense in which what is play for the golfer is work for the caddy. (Goffman 1974:8) These are, presumably, words intended to advise wariness upon the analyst, advising against identifying ‘the situation’ with any one point of view upon it. Such remarks would be more cogent (to my ears at least) if recast as comments upon the ‘normal, natural features and troubles’ of everyday affairs, pertaining to such matters as the visibility, consequentiality and practical management of, for example, discrepant positions, and associated variations in perception and feeling, within any given social scene. The extent to which one participant can count upon shared understandings with co-participants, and the extent to which it is necessary to do so, are variable features of situations, and, of course, the degree to which participants are entitled to count upon them, required to be sensitive to variations in them and can respond to problems which they pose are normatively and organizationally regulated matters. There is no unique judgement to be made as to the degree of affinity and compatibility between the work of Goffman, on the one hand, and that of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, on the other. One can play the resemblances up or down. Anne Rawls, for example, is inclined to take a more ecumenical view than that taken here, and to emphasize the complementary conceptions of forms of social order which can be found in the two sets of writings. She argues from a conception of social order which holds that it can be ‘understood as two distinct forms of order, one of these corresponding with the constitutive nature of face-toface interaction and the other with the accountable and rule-“governed” nature

The omnipotence of the actor 133 of institutions’ (Rawls 1989:147). Rawls has in mind the persistent problem of the relationship between ‘structure’ and ‘interaction’ in sociological theory, and seeks to re-read and re-combine the (in her view, partial) contributions of Goffman, Garfinkel and Sacks to achieve ‘a general theoretical view of social order in which meaning, self and institutional order are interactional achievements via locally produced orders constrained by, but not ordered by, institutional frameworks’ (Rawls 1989:147). From the more methodological slant being taken here, the two kinds of work seem more distant. The notion of ‘interaction order’ is valuable, perhaps indispensable, to Goffman’s enterprise, but I do not find it helpful in connection with Garfinkel’s work. The notion of an analytically autonomous ‘interaction order’18 was one which allowed Goffman to retain the general methodological quiescence which, I remarked at the outset, made him less attractive to me that Garfinkel and Sacks. The investigation of ‘the interaction order’ served to demarcate a distinct, specialist field of study which could be independent of, and therefore compatible with, other schemes of sociological analysis, particularly those which purported to depict society as an ‘institutional order’ or ‘structural arrangement’. Goffman’s work can, therefore, be incorporated, without undue distortion, into the standard framework of sociological theorizing, but Garfinkel’s work places itself altogether outside the presuppositions which frame the business of theory-constructing. It is not Garfinkel’s part to resolve the problem of ‘social order’, for it is not a problem which is resolved by or through theory in any shape or form. The remark that ‘formulations are no solution to the problem of order’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970) is for me an ominous reference to the prospects for social theory. It portends not a new contribution to theory but a programme of descriptive expositions of the way in which ‘the problem’ of social order is practically resolved, is a problem which is internal to social order itself, with both the standards for the specification of order and the means for achieving it being internal to the activities being ordered. It portends, also, the displacement of sociology’s methodological preoccupations, for the problem of locating and describing the properties of social settings and scenes is not to be resolved on an abstract and principled basis, but is one which is organizationally confronted and resolved through the concerted ways of those self-same settings and scenes.19 The notion of ‘interaction order’ when applied to Garfinkel invites, I fear, a reading which is commonplace but unproductive. It invites a reading which attends to the detail and minutiae of social interaction rather than the complexities of institutions and large-scale phenomena. For me, Garfinkel’s break with sociological tradition is more drastic than that.20 He invites us to attend not to ‘social interaction’ but, rather, to the affairs of daily life, and to appreciate that the

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‘interactions’ of society’s members, i.e. the affairs of daily life, are the witnessable occurrences of the phenomena that sociologists purport to talk about as ‘structures’, ‘cultures’, ‘institutions’, ‘organizations’ and so forth, and that members are, therefore, through the medium of and in the course of their ‘interactions’, actually ‘doing’ the social order of structures, cultures and so on. The ‘problem’ of the relationship between the members’ actions and the ‘institutional’ arrangements of society is not, then, one which requires us to propose a theoretical relationship between two distinct orders or levels of phenomena, but calls, rather, for the noting of the ways in which the actions and interactions of those members (practically) instantiates, embodies and accomplishes the affairs of the social order, for those members are plainly about the business of some social unit or other and the organization of ‘transcendent’ social arrangements—businesses, bureaucracies, international organizations, systems of coordination such as traffic, are all discernible within those activities. Thus, in terminology borrowed by Garfinkel from Mannheim, the relationship between members’ actions and social structures is ‘documentary’. In Garfinkel’s view members’ actions and social structures are inextricably wedded in a ‘mutually elaborative’ relationship, such that the presence of the structure is testified to and manifested in the actions of the members (appropriately construed) and the identity of the members’ actions is articulated on the basis of the structure, whose presence is presupposed. Interwoven in the connection of pattern-and-elements, the two cannot be separately identified, any more can the parts-and-whole of a mosaic, and hence the temptation to talk of the two as analytically separable is inappropriate. Conclusion I have noted that Goffman’s views upon the inadequacies of ‘the definition of the situation’ are hardly distinctive, and I have not been trying to argue that the application of that notion is never subject to the faults he condemns. However, I have argued that these shortcomings are by no means intrinsic to the notion of ‘the definition of the situation’. Avoiding these shortcomings requires a much more explicit and a very different approach to the issue of the relationship between the standpoints of members and sociological analysts than Goffman provided. Of course, to argue this is not to write off Goffman’s studies (even the later and in my opinion, less successful works), for Goffman did have a distinct, imaginative and powerful way of practising sociology, regardless of his programmatic views. If, however, one could detect in the earlier studies the potential for a profound methodological rethink, this was not an option Goffman himself was keen to develop, perhaps because his main project, as he conceived it, could be conducted

The omnipotence of the actor 135 independently of, and therefore, nominally within, the received theoretical and methodological frameworks of his time. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to John Lee, Greg Smith and Rod Watson for helpful comments. Notes 1 I put ‘symbolic interactionism’ in inverted commas in recognition that many of the sociologists who are conventionally included under that heading are not particularly eager to be affiliated to it. 2 Nor, I should add, was it accurate so to characterize the ‘symbolic interactionist’ tradition from which Goffman drew materials, problems and conceptions. 3 I would include everything from the mid-1950s papers on face and embarrassment through to the 1967 publication of the collection Interaction Ritual as making up Goffman’s first and major phase of productivity. 4 The extent to which sociology is overwhelmingly a ‘natural language’ activity, characteristically conducted in language drawn from the world of daily life and shared with those being investigated is something which is incidental to Goffman’s work but absolutely central to that of Garfinkel and Sacks. The recognition of the methodically crucial role that ‘natural language’ plays in sociology meant that the sociological description itself became profoundly and centrally problematic for Garfinkel and Sacks, in a way that it did not and, I venture to suggest, could not for Goffman. Cf. Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) and Sacks (1963) for explicit articulation of these points. I take it that the thorough comparison of ethnomethodology’s project with Goffman’s would not begin with, or centre upon, Garfinkel’s in-so-many-words comments on Goffman’s treatment of interaction as an episodic structure (as found in the exposition of the case of Agnes; see Garfinkel 1967:172–5). Rather, it would attend to ethnomethodology’s dissociation from the ideals of sociological analysis implicit in Goffman’s approach. 5 The notion of ‘orthodox Durkheimian’ is here employed not to identify those who assert the ‘external constraining’ nature of so-called ‘social facts’, but rather those who assert this as if it were something they distinctively affirm, and something which those who do not share their sociological convictions must effectively deny. The difference between the Durkheimian tradition and that within which ethnomethodology is placed is not between those who affirm and those who deny ‘the reality of social facts’ but over the status of such assertions. For the former the assertion is made as the premise of a sociological theory, whilst the latter regard it as a reiteration of the ‘natural attitude’ which the sociological theorist shares with the members of society. The former hold it as an assertion which holds out the prospect of pointing to phenomena which transcend

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the awareness of members of society, whilst the latter regard it as pointing in actuality to matters which are entirely and practically familiar to members of society. Orthodox Durkheimians assume that it is the professional sociologist who will adjudicate what is real. 6 In my opinion, it might be considered extensively in practice to draw upon this notion and to provide important demonstration of its viability. 7 For very many sociologists the transcendental standpoint permits them to correct the misconceptions of their fellow members of society, something that cannot be done if those members are conceived as ‘incorrigible’. 8 It is no insignificant feature of ethnomethodology that it talks about sociological enquiry, lay and professional, to formulate explicitly its assumption that the members of society are practical sociological reasoners, and not, therefore, naïve with respect to the socially organized character of their everyday affairs or of the world of daily life within which they carry out those affairs. 9 As already noted, Durkheim’s initial exposition of the idea of ‘social facts’ also employs unremarkable and undisputed commonplaces, such as that individuals do not make up the language that they speak or the currency that they use. 10 Including, it should be noted, those members of the society who operate within the orientation of scientific theorizing. Cf. Schutz’s ‘Common-sense and scientific interpretations of human action’ (1962). 11 For those unfamiliar with Schutz, the ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ is the expectation that your perception of the situation reciprocates mine, something that, were we to interchange standpoints, would be manifest—that in (for example) the face-to-face situation your field of vision would include me, as my field of vision includes you, and that were we to change positions you then would see what I do now and vice-versa (Schutz 1962:10–12). 12 These assumptions of ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ and the ‘interchangeability of standpoints’ are explicitly identified as ‘idealisations’ (Schutz 1962:11–12). 13 The recognition of the world-of-the-known-in-common is, intrinsically, the recognition of a multiplicity of consciousnesses. 14 Compare Sacks’ ‘Doing being ordinary’ (1992), where the members’ entitlement to encounter typical situations and to undergo typical experiences is discussed. Also compare Garfinkel, Livingston and Lynch (1981) where the relatively rare occurrence of a course of action ‘first time through’ is described. 15 These comments are not objections to the notion of negotiation as an analytic metaphor—as developed by (for example) Anselm Strauss et al. (1964), though that employment is as part of a very different venture than ethnomethodology has in mind— and are made here solely to underscore the point that an adequate characterization of ‘the definition of the situation’ would calm, not exacerbate, Goffman’s anxieties.

The omnipotence of the actor 137 16 Inviting such a reformulation is, I take it, what some of the early work in ethnomethodology sought to do, though the invitation was one which sociologists generally declined. 17 With, it should be added, whatever prospects that there might be for agreement. There is no naïve ‘consensualism’ in what I say, for it is, of course, a matter of members’ orientation that agreement may not be assured—jury members seek to find out, through their deliberations, whether there is agreement amongst them and, perhaps, whether there can be agreement. 18 Analytically autonomous does not equate with causally or empirically autonomous. Goffman’s strategy was often to focus upon features of interaction insofar as they were purely the product of the requirements imposed by situations of co-presence and the necessity to regulate the flow of interpersonal communication—which does not by any means equate with a denial that ‘cultural’ or ‘structural’ considerations occasion and provide the stuff of the relevant transactions. 19 This last I take to be the force of Garfinkel’s deployment of that troubled term ‘reflexivity’. The organizational resolution is effected by a vast and heterogeneous range of practices, amongst which would be included charts, diagrams, statistical tables, reports, audio and video recordings, drawings, memoranda files, and so on, and so on. I should add that ‘conversation analysis’, certainly in its foundational writings, respects these lines of argument, treating the order of turn taking in conversation as something that is ordered from within the conversation, the ‘social order’ of conversation being achieved through conversational devices and activities. 20 I remarked above that neither symbolic interaction nor ethnomethodology are deserving of the title ‘interactionist sociology’ in the sense in which it is commonly applied to them, though Goffman’s own distinctive relationship to the ‘interactionist’ tradition did make such a designation somewhat more appropriate, given his lifelong (though not exclusive) concentration upon the ‘interaction order’. However, insofar as ‘interactionist’ sociologies are imagined to be ones which propose to substitute the study of face-to-face interaction for the study of ‘the institutional order’ then neither the broad stream of ‘symbolic interactionist’ researches nor the programme of ethnomethodology are appropriately so characterized, for, of course, both treat the local interaction situation as one from within which ‘institutional’ phenomena are findable, witnessable and, therefore, investigable.

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Reading Goffman on interaction Rod Watson

Prefatory observations: Goffman and sociological description My interest in Goffman’s analysis derives in part from a more generic interest in how sociologists describe the phenomena they observe and how these descriptions at the analytic level are related to society-members’ common-sense description of those ‘selfsame’ phenomena. Consequently, I intend in this chapter to examine the stylistic devices Goffman uses in the linguistic—textual presentation of his work and through which he attempts to render visible the mundane objects of everyday life. The observation that the commonplace phenomena of ordinary life unremittingly resist any attempt to render them visible is often made but seldom dealt with. Garfinkel usually refers to this difficulty as ‘getting the goldfish to become aware of the water’; that is, it is difficult to strip away the taken-forgrantedness which is an integral feature of such a phenomena and which all but buries them from view in the natural attitude—an attitude all too pervasively employed by very many sociologists. These phenomena are, to be sure, taken into account by lay society-members but are taken into account in a routine way, as part of the background of manifest action rather than as explicit matters. It is no secret that Goffman uses—particularly in his early work—a variety of metaphors and similes in order to illuminate what is usually left in the penumbra. Such analogies include terms derived from what one might call a variety of ‘language games’—the theatre, team games, confidence tricks, espionage etc., and also from sources that do not derive from conventional social domains, such as his reference to ethology in defining ritual (Goffman 1971:62), as Yves Winkin (1983:111) has reminded us; hence Goffman regales us with ersatz ethological terms like ‘family flock’ (1971:20). I hope in this chapter to indicate how an examination of Goffman’s textual devices enables us to address two distinct analytical tasks with regard to his work. Each of these tasks, in its own way, involves our paying attention to the foundational

Reading Goffman on interaction 139 issue of the descriptive apparatus used by sociologists. The first, analytically prior, task is to turn Goffman’s textual devices into objects of analytic attention on their own behalf, and I shall indicate some approaches and analytic resources that might be mobilized in the pursuit of this I propose this approach largely because I believe that the treatment of Goffman’s family of stylistic or textual devices as topics for analytic examination in their own right hits one of the few analytic standpoints from which it is possible to characterize and assess his work. One cannot, I feel, find the right analytic level if one is wedded, for instance, to the notion of a sociological ‘perspective’. We can agree with Bourdieu (1983:112) that one cannot conceive of Goffman as having had a ‘technique’, though I shall hope to show that when it comes down to the level of specific discursive practices, Goffman can be seen as having an identifiable technique, and without properly characterizing this technique an appropriate analytic appreciation cannot be established. It is my argument that a proper characterization cannot be undertaken without a systematic consideration of the mundane linguistic resources Goffman deploys in this work.1 An additional attraction of a critical appreciation premised upon a linguistic examination of Goffman’s stylistic devices is that it bypasses the pitfalls inherent in the kind of approach which conceives of Goffman’s analysis in terms of some ad hoc aspect or other of his biography or biographical epoch or situation, as, for instance, Boltanski (1973:127–47) has attempted in France. I tend to agree with Jeff Coulter (1979:164–6), in his comments on this stock sociological move, when he says that such an approach runs the risk of working as an ad hominem discrediting device (as it also and generically does in its lay uses), and as such disattends the reasoning which informs the analysis under scrutiny. In that an analysis of the textual devices necessarily involves an examination of such reasoning procedures, I feel that not only will it find the right level but that it also potentiates a critique which addresses, rather than arbitrarily downgrades or undercuts, that reasoning. My central argument, namely that Goffman’s work comprises a major exercise in sociological re-description, will, I hope, allow us to preserve Goffman’s practical reasoning. As Louch (1966:213–16) points out, Goffman’s analysis involves the establishing of a (loose) ‘frame of reference’ rather than a ‘theory’ in the explanatory-validatory sense. In other words, Goffman brings together a variety of observations under the aegis of some internally coherent pattern. The particular frame of reference Goffman mobilizes in much of his work belongs to a class which the analyst of style and rhetoric Kenneth Burke (1965: Part II) has termed a ‘perspective by incongruity’; indeed, Goffman himself acknowledges his general

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indebtedness to Burke’s dramaturgical analysis. I think it can be shown that elements of a perspective by incongruity can be found throughout Goffman’s work and not just in the early pieces where similes and metaphors are most densely found (see my comments below, and Helm 1982). Goffman’s extension of a dramaturgical metaphor/simile is a classic example of the mobilizing of a perspective by incongruity, where a set of terms from one form of life, the theatre, is extended to what members, in the natural attitude, might well see as a very different form of life. Thus, Goffman capitalizes greatly on what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would term a ‘category mistake’. This is not to say that members in the natural attitude never use dramaturgical terms in metaphorical ways. Indeed, Goffman unrelievedly relies upon his readers’ common-sense linguistic ability to do this: however, he extrapolates such metaphoric uses well beyond their conventional locations in ordinary usage. Thus, for instance, Goffman’s notions of ‘dramaturgical loyalty’, ‘dramaturgical discipline’ and ‘dramaturgical circumspection’ (1959:212–28) focus attention upon the displayed and exhibited features of adherence to norms, whether these norms pertain to family life, household-servant relations, management of stores and filling stations, streetwise hustlers, professional life and so on, and is designed to highlight what Goffman takes to be formal similarities in such features. We might, then, say that Goffman’s employment of a ‘perspective by incongruity’ comprises a production procedure for formal analysis—or, as we shall see, an array of such procedures. In a strong sense, perspective by incongruity is a device for ‘figuring up’ what are held to be formal similarities and, simultaneously, for relegating to the background matters of ‘content’. However, the fact that content is so relegated does not mean that it is still not counted upon for ‘recognition’ or ‘face validity’ purposes. Goffman’s work involves, then, a secondary transformation in the ordinary apparatus for describing social scenes or actions; this transformation comprises the replacement of primordial terms given in the natural attitude by terms derived from (the proliferation of) a family of terms from a given conventional domain— terms which, in terms of familiarity for lay members, might not prima facie be integral to those original scenes or actions. A ‘perspective by incongruity’, then, involves what Burke (1965: Part II) terms ‘planned misnomers’ or ‘methodical misnaming’ of objects that have more familiar or conventional names. Parenthetically, we might observe that Goffman’s use of misnomers is not restricted to the deployment of a perspective by incongruity; he also has a less than endearing habit of renaming and otherwise encoding accepted analytic terms for no apparent reason other than analytic appropriation. Helm (1982:156)—to whose analysis

Reading Goffman on interaction 141 the present paper is greatly indebted—gives the example of his rewording of the phenomenon that conversation analysts call ‘repairables’ by ‘faultables’. Goffman’s use of a ‘perspective by incongruity’, as its title indicates, establishes incongruous applications of terms in that it violates the conventional uses of those terms. The use of such a perspective produces ‘new alignments with the alignments flowing from other modes of classification’ (Burke 1965:102), predominantly those modes rooted in the natural attitude. Necessarily, this involves a decontextualization and a recontextualization of actions and/or settings. We might also add that the use of planned misnomers, plus incongruous or even contradictory predicates and the rest as exposited by Burke, relies unrelievedly on the primitive common-sense recognizability and identifiability of the phenomena to be redescribed. The planful violation of the proper conventional uses or applicability of a term may involve a variety of practices concerning subjects and predicates, such as his attaching of the predicate ‘cooling out’ to the subject ‘educational (etc.) failures’ rather than restricting it to its usual subject ‘marks’ (victims of confidence tricks). Moreover, Goffman’s approach goes way beyond these relatively straightforward descriptive transformations, as he uses more than one metaphor in parallel. In Strategic Interaction (1969a), for instance, Goffman uses terms derived from espionage in combination with terms derived from team games: indeed, I suspect that although Goffman is commonly noted for his use of dramatistic imagery, the term that does most of the ‘underlabourer’ work is that of the team. Hence: Perhaps the key problem in maintaining the loyalty of team members…is to prevent performers from becoming so sympathetically attached to the audience that the performers disclose to them the consequences for them of the impression they have been given… (Goffman 1959:214) All these techniques assist in the development of what is by and large a culturally indigenous anthropology, and I should argue that incongruous metaphors work by occasioning a ‘look-again’ technique in order to see unremarked objects anew, to render them ‘anthropologically strange’, by getting us to see them (or selected features of them) at one remove from the standpoint of the natural attitude. The composite uses of metaphor, particularly, add multiple layers of incongruity, where terms from different metaphors are welded together to occasion a variety of perspectival shifts that are pressed into the service of Goffman’s ‘dart-like style’ (to use Burke’s term). This style, pace critics, is more allusive than elusive in that Goffman’s approach is entirely planful in Burke’s sense.

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In Burke’s notion of a ‘perspective by incongruity’, we have a first step in turning Goffman’s analysis into a topic in its own right; in Burke’s notion of ‘planned misnomers’, we have a further clue to the linguistic nature of the exercise. However, the next step takes ‘the linguistic turn’, namely a specification of the ordinary textual devices, the textually sited ‘production procedures’ as it were, through which the perspective by incongruity is linguistically generated and sustained. It is also to be hoped that we can thereby indicate the generic properties of these procedures, i.e. their properties at ‘bedrock’ common-sense level, that of ordinary linguistic usage. Stylistic analysis: the linguistic turn in sociology My argument here is that the stylistic analysis of Goffman’s work must be founded upon an analysis of linguistic usage, namely the consideration of the linguistic resources or procedures Goffman employs in his work. This argument applies a fortiori to the use of simile and metaphor, and the following section of this chapter gives a signpost to one (and only one)2 of the ways which the linguistic turn may take us. The basic point to acknowledge is that professional sociologists inhabit a social world which has already been described or linguistically preconstituted. As Edward Rose put it in a pioneering study (Rose 1960), we already have a natural sociology, a common-sense semantic order, a set of collective representations in society. Rose submitted the English semantic record to a diachronic analysis, and his observations on the conventional usage of the terms employed in an analytical way by professional sociologists—terms such as ‘group’, ‘interaction’, ‘role’, ‘function’— point to a generic issue. This issue is that whatever its claims to an analytic vocabulary, sociology is, au fond, a natural language pursuit, an undertaking which perforce employs the ordinary resources of some natural language or other, be it English, Japanese or whatever. These languages furnish a variety of resources, e.g. descriptions of social organization (see Rose 1960:194–7) and the vehicles whereby activities such as making claims, glossing, formulating, refuting, etc., are performed; indeed, describing is itself such an activity, whether it be effected orally or textually. Typically, these resources and vehicles are not explicated in ‘mainstream’ professional sociology: they remain tacit but nonetheless are unrelievedly and utterly relied upon.

Reading Goffman on interaction 143 The unrecognized and unacknowledged nature of professional sociologists’ dependence upon lay linguistic usage cannot easily be overstated, even when analyses, particularly those by sociologists, in the sphere of stylistics and rhetoric are involved. Just one case in point is Philip Manning’s analysis (1991) of metaphor in Goffman’s work. In this paper a variety of angles are discussed concerning how Goffman employs metaphor in his analyses. Manning understandably presents an unavoidably very selective set of studies, but in this selection edits out the sine qua non of such an analysis, namely the systematic linguistic analysis of metaphor, the analysis of such ‘imagery’ as necessarily involving the use of a range of natural language resources and language-based procedures. All the angles on metaphor that Manning sets out are derivative, necessarily having their anchorage in such lay usage. Their form and character are actively shaped by the features and properties of such usage—features and properties which Manning relies upon but does not explicate. Thus, Manning’s analysis employs as a tacit resource that which in fact should be treated as an explicit topic on its own behalf and which has analytically prior status. Manning’s analysis—as are others of its kind—is thus fashioned in largely unknown ways by common-sense usage. Such an analysis cannot but be idle, cannot but beg the question. In Garfinkel’s terms, it is characterized by ‘the missing whatness’, telling us everything except that which we really need to know. Instead, an analysis which turns lay usage into an object for inspection in its own right will strike the right analytic level. It is at this generic level that the focus here will be upon membership categories but the analysis could equally well have focused on other procedural aspects of ordinary linguistic/textual usage. An indispensable corollary of this shift from the epiphenomenal to that which has primacy is the discipline it imposes on the analysts in their use of language in their analysis. Manning, for instance, tells us that: The overall view in The Presentation of Self is that of a world in which people, whether individually or in groups, pursue their own ends with a cynical disregard for others. On the rare occasions when audience and performer co-operate, both endeavour to return hastily to the shelter of their various masks and disguises and to avoid disclosing their inner selves. Here Goffman views the individual as a set of performance masks hiding a manipulative and cynical self… (Manning 1991:76)

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‘Cynicism’ and ‘manipulativeness’ are, in ordinary usage, predicates that apply to individuals: such predicates serve to impute psychological predispositions. There are several reasons why Manning’s use of such terms is injudicious. First, if we wish to play Manning’s game, we might equally say that Goffman’s work indicates the credulity and artlessness of people in that they are presented as being taken in by these performances: one needs only to consider the situation from the standpoint of the recipient of these performances in order to recognize that. However, such considerations do not take us to the core issue, which is the psychologistic cast in much of Manning’s interpretation of Goffman’s argument. Throughout his early work, and in later avowals too (see Verhoeven 1993:321– 6), Goffman cites his indebtedness to Durkheim and his latterday interpreters (Radcliffe-Brown, Warner, Parsons and others) and his comments on impression management can equally—and far more productively—be seen as comments on the active operation of a normative social order, on the features of social, not psychological, organization. Characterizations in terms of ‘cynicism’, ‘manipulativeness’, ‘deceptiveness’ and the like, because of their common-sense implications in ordinary language turn our analytic attention away from what is clearly a major theme in Goffman’s work. This realization helps us reprise and rework our comments on the characterization of social actors as credulous and artless. Instead of conceiving these predicates in psychological terms, we might instead treat them again in terms of the workings of a social organization. This is perhaps most explicitly and perspicuously illustrated in Harvey Sacks’ Goffman-derived study (1972b) of police officers’ assessment of moral appearances and character. He points out the moral enforceability of ‘naïvely’ presenting oneself as ‘who one is’, but also of others taking those presented appearances at face value. The inferential work involved in such presentation and monitoring comprises cultural methods for the assessment of persons, these methods being constituents of the production of a social order. Of course, such a social order can be exploited by those ‘concealing’ criminal activities and the like. Indeed, the occasioned detectability of such concealments gives Sacks his analytic theme. However, the theme of the observability of criminal identities is also, of course, part of the methodic production of social order. Thus, to present either Goffman or his objects of study as ‘cynical’ or, for that matter, ‘naïve’, runs the strong risk of misdescribing the analytic character and significance of Goffman’s project. It is not just that analysts such as Manning hit the wrong level of analysis but rather that they miscast the very auspices of the analysis.

Reading Goffman on interaction 145 The next move, then, is to give an example of the ordinary linguistic resources used by Goffman and to indicate how they might be analysed so as to cast light on the ‘production procedures’ for Goffman’s analyses. Linguistic resources and stylistic analysis: an illustration One major, and in other respects well-documented, set of common-sense linguistic procedures is that of membership categorization. Membership categories are ordinary language equivalence classes which make reference to at least one member of a given population—‘mother’, ‘American’, ‘tennis player’, and so on. (The emphasis on naming is not a bad place to begin, since it is a foundational—though questionable—aspect of Burke’s approach that the operation of naming is prior to and formative of just about any other operation we perform on the world.) A first observation, then, is that Goffman’s metaphorical transformations involve substituting one set of membership categories for another; this is primarily what the effecting of planned misnomers involves. As we shall see, a characteristic technique that Goffman uses is to present a first-part categorial ‘misnomer’ and then to present one or more ‘real world’ examples, with categories named in what are prima facie more immediately recognizable ways. We are, in other words, given the misnomers and then we are given the categories they misname and encouraged to see the latter, individually and as an ensemble, in terms of the former. A vivid example can be found in Goffman’s writing about dramaturgical loyalty of a team where he refers to strategies for forestalling the forming of sympathetic attachments between the performing team and the audience: A second technique for counteracting the development of affective ties between performers and audience is to change audiences periodically. Thus filling station managers used to be shifted periodically to prevent the formation of strong personal ties with particular clients. It was found that when such ties were allowed to form, the manager sometimes placed the interests of a friend who needed credit before the interests of the social establishment. Bank managers and ministers have been routinely shifted for similar reasons, as have certain colonial administrators. Some female professionals provide another illustration, as the following reference to organized prostitution suggests… (Goffman 1959:215)

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Most basically, we can readily see that this passage contains a dense concentration of membership categories: ‘performers’ and ‘audience’, ‘filling station managers’, ‘clients’, ‘friend’, ‘bank managers’, ‘ministers’, ‘colonial administrators’, ‘professionals’ (and, by implication, ‘prostitutes’). Both the serial organization and co-selection of the categories are introduced first, as a prospective rubric for the subsequent array of categories. This rubric works not so much through the finding of substantive similarities in the selected categories as through the procedural or formal similarities. We are invited to consider the relations between filling station managers and (their) clients, bank managers (and, by projection, their customers), etc., in terms of the performers/audience analogy, such that the former are recognizable in terms of the latter. This recognizability seems to be provided for largely at the procedural level, and I shall now hope to be able to illustrate this. Membership categories are, in the conventions of each culture, grouped together into what Sacks (1972a:31–84; 1974:218–20) has termed ‘membership categorization devices’ (MCDs) where, e.g. ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘daughter’, etc., may be treated as a co-categorization of the MCD ‘family’. One of the major procedural rules for the combinatorial use of membership categories is the ‘consistency rule’ which, broadly paraphrased, runs: ‘if two or more categories are introduced proximately, and if these categories can be heard as coming from the same MCD, then treat them that way’. This rule, then, comprises a sense-assembly procedure, a cultural method for making sense of co-selected categories. Consequently ‘performers’ and ‘audience’ may be seen as co-members of an MCD with a title such as ‘parties to a dramatic performance’, just as ‘bank manager’ and ‘customer’, ‘prostitute’ and ‘client’, etc., may all be seen as ‘standardized relational pairs’ of categories (as Sacks 1972a:37–8 put it), each pair respectively being derived from more inclusive devices, and therefore as relevantly co-occurring. The consistency rule, then, provides for our making sense of the coselection and proximate placement of categories such as ‘performer’ and ‘audience’. However, a notable feature of the passage I cited from Goffman’s early work is that the entire list of categories—‘performer’, ‘audience’, ‘filling station manager’, ‘bank manager’, ‘friend’, ‘minister’, ‘colonial administrator’, ‘(female) professional’, ‘prostitute’—cannot be seen, through the application of the consistency rule, as categorizations from the same device (the MCD ‘occupations’ comes about as close as one can get, though the categories ‘client’ and ‘friend’ would remain anomalous). Observe, also, how the category ‘friend’ appears disjunctive with those of ‘filling station manager’ and ‘client’, since it cannot prima facie be seen as deriving from the same device as (say) ‘parties to a garage transaction’. Through such a disjunctive construction, and often through the addition of another category, e.g.

Reading Goffman on interaction 147 using ‘friend’, Goffman renders visible an (improper) ‘affective tie’. At the substantive level, the categories seem quite diverse and incommensurate. However, the diversity of the general collection also comprises a considerable resource for Goffman, because it allows him to make the next move of finding and showing an apparently powerful unity in this diversity. In effect, what Goffman does is set up the first categorizations ‘performer(s)’ and ‘audience’ as a metaschema or master transcoding device, a set of instructions for reading the other categories as being relevantly and plausibly introduced, as being cases in point. For instance, the order of his listing predisposes the reader towards performing ‘category-mapping’ activities, e.g. mapping the ‘performer’/ ‘audience’ relational pair on to the subsequent categories and their supplied or projected paired counterparts, such that we can find a homologous pattern in the collection. We are then led to read these subsequent categories as heir to the same predicates as the master device (e.g. see the supplied or projected paired categories as not being members of the same team, just like ‘performer’ and ‘audience’). Here, of course, we also encounter the ‘Chinese box’ structure of MCDs, where lower-order devices fit into higher order ones, e.g. the category ‘bank manager’ is one of a set of categories which may be drawn together under the MCD ‘bank staff’, where the ‘manager’ and ‘client’ categories might be drawn together under the MCD ‘parties to a bank transaction’ (and where, again, ‘performers’ and ‘audience’ comprise a master device). It is our lay knowledge of these formal, standardized tools upon which Goffman relies. He uses the lower-order device, for example, to render the undesirability (for the team) of developing affectional ties with incumbents of categories which—although they have a proper place in the higher-order MCD—do not derive from the lower-order device. It is to be noted that the same lower-order and higher-order device organization, with parallel consistency rules, also applies to almost all the categories and their supplied or projected counterpart categories introduced by Goffman in this paragraph, e.g. ‘religious minister’ and ‘member of the congregation/parish’.3 Observe also that this cultural apparatus for sense-making is brought to, and indeed elaborated in, a reading of the illustrations Goffman provides, as in the exemplification of his reference to organized prostitution which follows on from the extract I have cited above. Speaking of the development of affective ties between prostitutes and their clients, a pimp who is a member of an organized team declares: The Syndicate handles that these days. The girls don’t stay in one place long enough to really get on speaking terms with anybody. There’s not so much chance of a girl falling in love with some guy—you know, and causing a squawk.

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Anyway, the hustler who’s in Chicago this week’s in St Louis next, or moving around to half a dozen places before being sent somewhere else. And they never know where they’re going until they’re told. (Goffman 1959:215) There is a strong sense in which Goffman gives us an instructed reading of this illustration, such that we read it in terms of the sense-making apparatus which his previous example, and above all his master transcoding device, have activated. Never is this apparatus made explicit by Goffman himself, although his analysis relies upon it in a tacit manner so that the reader can apprehend the organization of the text. Insofar as he is able to potentiate the application of this cultural apparatus on the reader’s part, he allows readers to ‘see for themselves’, to detect on their own behalf the patternings which Goffman wishes to render noticeable and salient. Such persuasive or predispositional techniques make it easy for readers (especially a ‘first-time-through’ reader) to ‘arrive at their own conclusions’— conclusions entirely consonant with those required by Goffman. Such is the seductive quality of Goffman’s prose; it is all too easy to read things his way. Similarly, in the collection of categories furnished by Goffman in the paragraph on page 145 we can see the way in which given predicates are conventionally tied to given categories—predicates such as typical rights, obligations or activities. Indeed, as I have pointed out above, he imputes the predicate ‘strong personal ties’ to the category ‘friend’ in order to render accountable the manager’s actions. Elsewhere, he shows how these predicates may apply to all the categories of what Sacks terms a ‘duplicatively organized device’ (1974:220–4), i.e. a collection of categories which, as with the device ‘families’, divide into team-like units. For instance, the predicate of ‘in-group loyalty’ may be seen as ‘travelling across’ all the categories of a performing group. Thus: One basic technique the team can employ to defend itself against [such] disloyalty is to develop high in-group solidarity within the team, while creating a backstage image of the audience which makes the audience sufficiently inhuman to allow the performers to cozen them with emotional and moral impunity. (Goffman 1959:214) Likewise, the metaphors of game teams, confidence tricks, co-conspirators in espionage, etc., can all be seen as mapping on to each other at the procedural/ organizational level, since they are all duplicatively organized. This mapping

Reading Goffman on interaction 149 provides, especially, for their combinatorial use. This empirical issue is worthy of far more extensive pursuit than can be afforded here. To be sure, Goffman artfully uses the predicates attributable to dramaturgical categories as part of the application of a perspective by incongruity (as indeed we might expect in a text which has a section titled ‘Dramaturgical loyalty’). We can see, for instance, how the phrase ‘cozen [the audience] with emotional and moral impunity’ can come to stand as a gloss of an array of deceptive activities or practices. Also, as Helm insists (1982) with reference to Goffman’s analysis of ‘response cries’ (1981a:78–123), Goffman remains in the dramaturgical or impressionmanagement framework when describing actions and their motivated character. Even the actions themselves are represented dramaturgically (e.g. utterances such as ‘Good God!’ which Goffman terms ‘floor cues’) or are treated as bound to dramaturgical categories (e.g. ‘audience’). Through these techniques, Goffman redescribes courses of action. As John Heritage has reminded me (personal communication, 1987), Goffman’s use of a perspective by incongruity is by no means merely stylistic affectation or rhetorical flourish, but a praxiological shift— it moves from one descriptive rubric for action to another. Dramaturgical metaphors often comprise action-descriptions (or redescription) or are action-implicative (via category-bound activities, etc.). I hope now to have specified to some extent the ways in which Goffman establishes a perspective by incongruity, and how he works his transformations on lay descriptions of phenomena whilst remaining utterly reliant on our ordinary knowledge of those descriptions, of how to use them and how to map them on to one another. Not only does Goffman quite clearly count on the primitive recognizability for the reader of the phenomena he redescribes, but also he counts heavily upon a very precise fit at the procedural level between the common-sense descriptive apparatus we mobilize and the descriptive apparatus he utilizes at a (putatively) analytic level. Of course, a perspective by incongruity must be relevantly used if it is to be at all effective, and for it to be relevantly used it has to show procedural affinities with that which it redescribes. The redescription outlined above only comprises incongruities at the level of content or substance, where again for these redescriptions to work at all they must possess a very precise consonance at the procedural level with the lay descriptions they replace. An apparent paradox which Burke does not note, then, is that for a perspective by incongruity to operate recognizably and relevantly at all, it must show a finely adjusted congruity at the procedural or formal level with that which it transforms. To be sure, my argument is that the substantive transformations necessarily partake of the selfsame descriptive apparatus in terms of which the first-order descriptions

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are organized. Whilst, of course, these transformations/redescriptions rely upon our common-sense understanding of their substantively incongruous nature in contrast to the familiar description, they also rely without relief upon our lay procedural knowledge, our ‘vulgar competence’. Of course, one should in passing at least mention that the procedural apparatus of membership categorization, consistency rules, etc., is not the only set of lay procedural concerns to be found in Goffman’s textual work. Chief among the others is the family of common-sense interpretive procedures referred to at one stage by Garfinkel (1967: Chapter 3)—following but reworking Karl Mannheim— as ‘the documentary method of interpretation’, which basically refers to the mutual, back-and-forth hermeneutic determination between a given set of particulars and an underlying homologous pattern.4 The particulars are taken as ‘pointing to’ or projecting the pattern, whereas in turn the pattern reflexively gives coherence to the particulars both separately and collectively. This mutual determination and redetermination works in much the same way as do the mutual determination of ‘part’ and ‘whole’ which characterize gestalt phenomena, and operates flexibly and revisably through time. An excellent example of Goffman’s reliance on this set of commonsense methods for analytic (and textual) purposes and, centrally, on the serial organization of the text is given in the extract (Goffman 1959:215) discussed on pages 145–7 above. McHoul has argued (1982:11–36) most cogently the importance of considering the documentary method in terms of temporal considerations in a ‘course of reading’, and Goffman’s text shows the aptness of McHoul’s observations. Instead of initially giving a set of particulars which potentiate the identification of a homologous pattern, Goffman characteristically first provides the pattern, thereby also providing a set of instructions predisposing the reading of the subsequent list of particulars as a proliferation of pattern elements. Owing to its first-place positioning, it is the pattern rather than the particulars which gains salience. The pattern is maintained and manifested throughout the corpus of particulars in the paragraph. The solution, as it were, is provided before the puzzle and, indeed, defines the puzzle. We consult the solution to establish what the puzzle is. The use of the documentary method (and of course the procedural apparatus built into categorization activities) establishes and maintains what, adapting the application of one of Bittner’s phrases, we might term a ‘stylistic unity’. That is to say, the documentary method provides a set of procedures for generating what Bittner terms a ‘reproducible theme’ (1974:78), where ‘many specific instances can be compared with each other as variations of a single pattern’, which in turn

Reading Goffman on interaction 151 ‘works against centrifugal tendencies and heterogeneity’. In this respect, we can see that the organization of stylistic unity into the text has a practical rather than merely aesthetic or rhetorical quality for readers, allowing them to inspect a diverse array of instances for their transformability into the general and unifying theme of impression-management conceived through dramaturgical and associated concepts. It does so through making available a set of ‘generative guidelines’ which permits the maintenance of such a single focus in what, at the level of the natural attitude, comprise a diverse (indeed divergent) set of haecceities (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992). Readers can, then, embark upon the practical task of finding those features which stand as homologous instances of the theme established in the paragraph, such that the theme is thereby reproduced, instantiated ‘for another first time’, in Garfinkel’s immortal phrase (1967). In this respect, the conception of readers as active ‘pattern detectors’ is particularly manifest, though Goffman, through careful and persuasive editing and purpose-building of his examples, certainly facilitates the ‘successful’ accomplishment of the task. Using Anderson and Sharrock’s term (1982), we might scrutinize Goffman’s text for its ‘order-enhancing procedures’, where a given description is produced in ways which make available its symmetry, continuity or commonality with other proximal descriptions in the text. To find these is to find the text’s ‘coherent maps’, where individual instances can be treated as formal versions of each other. To cannibalize Karl Marx’s phrase, we actively produce our readings of Goffman but not entirely in conditions of our own making. Let us move on to consider, all too briefly, some of the criticisms which the above focus on description and redescription makes available, though it must be added that I have some sympathy with the argument that the suppositions of this form of explication do not straightforwardly permit critical assessment (at least of certain kinds). Perhaps the most elementary set of concerns surrounds what Howard Schwartz (n.d.) calls the ‘phenomenological intactness’ of the social world, i.e. does Goffman’s establishing of stylistic unity through misnomers falsify or otherwise destroy the authenticity or phenomenological intactness of each of the diverse examples and instances he provides? After using Goffman’s approach, are we left with the same world we started out with? By and large, this question derives (certainly in Schwartz’ case) from traditional phenomenological concerns but is also to be found amongst the more methodologically radical symbolic interactionists, such as Herbert Blumer (1972). Blumer castigates Goffman for disattending the specific point (for the social actors involved) of the examples he gives, and for disattending the distinctive content of the scenes of action he itemizes.

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In a general sense, at least, Blumer is providing a symbolic interactionist’s equivalent to what Garfinkel terms issues of ‘haecceity’. In his December 1985 visit to Paris, and in his 1992 paper with Wieder, he urged the audience to examine what are for members the uniquely distinguishing local aspects of given courses of action and the particular settings they produce. It might be held that Goffman’s devices for establishing stylistic/thematic unities across such actions and settings forestall such analytic moves by conflating such haecceities. At least, we should consider Burke’s warning (1965:97) not to mistake similarity for identity. In a way, though, it should come as no surprise to anyone that if the social world is describable it is also redescribable (and not just to sociologists). Some derivative issues may, however, prove recalcitrant. One of these concerns the extraordinary extension of a metaphor such as ‘game’ so that it forms a basis of a ‘frame of reference’. Louch (1966:213–16) points out that in ordinary discourse, metaphors, similes and the like are conventionally tied to particular contexts, where conduct in other contexts may be pointedly characterized as not describable in terms of such a metaphor. Thus, the characterizing of some setting or instance of conduct as ‘it’s only a game’ relies for its pointedness on the understanding that there are some cases in which conduct is most assuredly not a game. In this sense, Goffman may stand accused of using a metaphor that is over-extended or even torn loose from the occasioning contexts which give it its ordinary relevance and impact. Goffman here might be suspected of the equivalent of Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘fallacy of unwarranted extrapolation’: the effect, though, is ‘the Goffmanizing of the world’, as Edward Rose has put it to me (personal communication, 19 October 1994). This point finds some sort of equivalent at the level of membership (or should we state it the other way round?) in Messinger et al.’s empirical observation (1962) that in mental hospitals patients felt they had to ‘perform’ for an ‘audience’ (doctors, nurses, visitors, etc.) all the time, and that the constant requirement to ‘perform’ is experienced as unduly onerous, ‘unnatural’, alienating, or an interruption of their usual orientation to the social world. It seems that they too see ‘play acting’ as a locally-occasioned matter rather than a pervasive feature of conduct in general. Perhaps these issues, considered at the analytic level, derive from what Burke regards as a basic feature of approaches which consider human conduct dramatistically, namely that they incorporate a theory of agency rather than a theory of knowledge. One might, instead, wish for a theory which treats agency as informed by knowledge, as indeed does ethnomethodology. There is also the difficult issue of what Burke calls ‘downward conversion’, i.e. to metaphorically present all actions as moves in a game or as play-acting, or whatever, is—in

Reading Goffman on interaction 153 members’ common-sense knowledge—to downgrade or ironicize them in important ways—treating such actions as less than fully seriously meant or consequential in their own terms (hence, perhaps, Goffman’s reputation for cynicism and the like). Anderson and Sharrock (1983) treat such ‘ironies’ as major methodological devices in orthodox sociologies. A related matter derives from my earlier comment about Goffman’s dramaturgical redescription of actions and settings involving a praxiological shift. That is, he often creates dramaturgically-given scenarios of action rather than preserving what conversation analysts call ‘naturally-occurring’ and ‘naturallyorganized’ courses of action or action-sequences. The virtues of recorded and meticulously transcribed action-sequences have been too devoutly intoned elsewhere for me to risk a travesty, but Helm’s example (1982:152–3) from what Goffman terms ‘response cries’ is a significant one. Goffman treats response cries as, by and large, examples of licensed ‘self-talk’, talking to oneself. Helm, however, points out that such cries are all potentially available for interactive work and might more profitably be treated as public matters rather than ‘self-talk’. Furthermore, if one were to inspect recorded and transcribed instances of such cries, one would find that such items as ‘floor cues’ (see above) can be seen as minimal pre-announcement sequences, the formal properties of which are necessarily tied into the intricacies of the turn-taking system for speech exchange rather than merely being contingently related to that system, as Goffman tries to insist. The term ‘self-talk’ in no way renders the organized communicative work done by such a verbal action: it is only by dint of Goffman’s presentation of a dramaturgical characterization of such verbal actions and of the dramaturgically reconstructed scenario within which they occur that we can see these utterances as ‘soliloquizing’. In this way, the use of a dramaturgical metaphor has obvious pitfalls in rendering the sense of given verbal actions, given that the sense is typically only to be established in situ (in its specific sequential location), and at the level of members’ orientations to these. I feel that in Goffman’s approach, we have no way of modelling members’ orientations (as opposed to stipulating them in advance). These criticisms notwithstanding, I hope to have charted some of the contours of a treatment of Goffman’s ‘dart-like style’, which is, I feel, a good deal less unique, elusive and idiosyncratic than is commonly supposed. These reservations about Goffman’s approach do not simply amount to a complaint that he is not specifically doing ethnomethodology or conversation analysis (although Goffman himself on occasion set up in specific competition against those twin approaches). The intent informing these reservations is merely

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to raise some generic concerns about the ‘empirical’ character of various interactional analyses—concerns such as what counts as data, how much data might be analysed and what might be the constraints on any empirical interactional analysis. The comments in the second section of this paper on the way in which the resources of the natural language figure in the shaping of sociological description and analysis in the first place comprise part of the essential backdrop to such considerations. To be sure, this concern with the typically unexplicated use of and alignment to natural language by sociological analysis leads us to what is, perhaps, the most fruitful of all the moves in analysing Goffman’s work—a move whose utility I have, at least provisionally, attempted to indicate above. This move derives from the observation that (for instance) the categorial work done by Goffman in his analytic enterprise—including the categorial substitutions or redescriptions of persons, as outlined above—is all of a common-sensical kind, found at the level of the natural attitude.5 The corollary of this observation is that Goffman’s analyses may be treated as itself a datum, an object of analysis. His work may be treated as a textually sited ensemble of common-sense procedures to be analysed as a topic in its own right. This is what the present analysis has attempted to begin. Acknowledgements I should like to thank Eric Livingston for discussions on matters pertaining to this analysis, which has profited greatly from them. An earlier, shorter and less developed version of this analysis was published as ‘Le travail de l’incongruité’ in I.Joseph (ed.) (1989) Le Parler Frais d’Erving Goffman, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, pp. 83–99. Notes 1

Another, seemingly unrecognized, aspect of the linguistic/textual constitution of Goffman’s analyses is the way in which he adopts and appropriates local, and often subterranean, ‘lingoes’ in order to characterize a phenomenon. Indeed, the very title of one of his papers, ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’, is a prime instance of this. Again we see how what in this case is the argot of a particular criminal group, confidence tricksters, is taken out of its local context of appropriate use and transposed to another context where it can serve to highlight an otherwise dimly discernible phenomenon—in this case, procedures for adapting persons to the identity threats attendant on failure. Of course, Goffman is not the first to do this: his teacher Everett C.Hughes devised the technique and some elements of it can be found in the work of Robert Ezra Park.

Reading Goffman on interaction 155 Goffman’s own analytic and textual appropriation of local ‘lingoes’ spawned many spinoffs, notably Ned Polsky’s study (1969:31–108) of pool hustlers. 2

This, perhaps, accounts for the extraordinary diversity of theoretical positions amongst those analysts who seek to pursue or criticize Goffman’s work; as, for instance, the range of contributions to the Ditton (1980a) collection illustrates.

3

Note that the procedure supplying the implied or projected counterpart category is also provided by the category-mapping procedure given by the ‘performer’-audience master transcoding device.

4

Garfinkel later rescinded his earlier analytic formulation of sense-making procedures in terms of the documentary method of interpretation (see Garfinkel 1996), but that formulation nevertheless helps us, at least initially, to sketch out the pattern-detection activities in the texts here under consideration.

5

For example I have examined instances in reports of Black American speech where ‘friends’ are recategorized or redescribed as ‘brothers’ (see Watson 1978).

9

Non-person and Goffman Sociology under the influence of literature Andrew Travers When Alkan said, ‘How are you?’ the question had total nuance: he really wanted to know how you were, although at the same time he was asking the question for the sake of social form. Yet he managed simultaneously to acknowledge both of these conflicting messages and still reformulated the question so that it incorporated them and yet was devoid of all assumptions. Furthermore none of the above seemed to be implied. (Self 1994:100)

Introduction I claim that from the start to the finish of his writing about face-to-face interaction Goffman anxiously usurps the influence of Emile Durkheim, and I argue that the displacement of Durkheim by Goffman is Goffman’s nihilistic patrimony to sociological studies. Goffman’s usurping of Durkheim’s influence is anxious because—in the literary-theoretical frame (Bloom 1973) that influences my reading of Goffman in this essay—an original writer stands in relation to a precursor as a child does to a father. Bloom says that the career of an original writer is devoted to reversing the flow of influences upon them so that the most influential precursor is eventually only read backwards in the light cast by the successor. Influence is thus a matter of high anxiety if originality is at stake, which in Goffman’s case it is in his extremity of inventing the new sociological topos of face-to-face interaction. Goffman’s patrimony to his successors is nihilistic, in Bloom’s frame, because the displacement by Goffman of Durkheim, through the condensation of sociology to the study of face-to-face interaction, leaves no hints for a further condensation. Goffman (1983b) of course would disagree with this, but my hermeneutic purpose is to read Goffman so as to retrospectively construct what will appear to be his present intentions. This way of reading is like Goffman’s way of reading selves in interaction as after-the-fact attributions (Travers 1991, 1995). But selves in Goffman do influence the course of interactions (Travers 1992a), and I suggest

Non-person and Goffman 157 that similarly this essay, representing a new Goffman, could influence future readings of his work. Bloom’s literary theory of the anxiety of influence (1973) reveals much about Goffman’s hidden relationship to his precursor Durkheim, whom I believe Goffman regarded as his sociological father (for support of this view see Chriss 1993a; Cahill 1994). In addition, through Bloom’s theory we can read Goffman’s condensation of his sociological research field as ruthless. Where Goffman (1983) himself would have readers feel that the formal isolation of face-to-face phenomena is a modest scholarly choice, Goffman in a Bloomian reading is an immodest iconoclast of all sociological pretensions to be empirical beyond intercorporeality. So I am going to say that Goffman works sociologically to overcome his anxiety of Durkheimian influence, nullifying that and at the same time, if we grant that Goffman does overcome his anxiety of Durkheimian influence, nullifying a ‘beyond Goffman’ sociology. I shall also show that Goffman’s sociology secretly flows from a political—literary intertext (Worton and Still 1990). That is the gist of my argument. But its exposition is knotty, since it ravels three divergent lines of thought: (1) Goffman’s treatment of his ‘non-person’ category, (2) the literary origins of this category in Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, and (3) Goffman’s literary struggle to appear non-literary, that is, sociological. Some expansion of these lines of thought is necessary before I go on to decode the sociological suicide note that Goffman’s oeuvre becomes in my reading. The cunning category with which Goffman, I say, defeats Durkheim is the category ‘non-person’. Non-person is a conceptual hinge for Goffman. The door which opens and shuts about this hinge pushes one way into the very category of ‘self’ and pushes the other way into ‘Goffman-as-an-interactional-self-who-isstudying-self. (The implications of this are brought out towards the end of the essay.) An important quality of Goffman’s non-person category is its derivation from and development by literary illustrations. But Goffman masks this. He is methodologically creative the better to be sociologically true to his vision of human interaction as a theatre of rough justice and barbarous psychological punishments. The recourse to literature in tandem with Goffman’s occasionally self-parodic sociology (Travers 1993:138), I shall be implying, comprises Goffman’s own nonpersonhood within society and within sociology. First I trace the trajectory of the non-person category. Then I show that the category is most at home in a literary intertext that, to those including Goffman (1974:14) who regard Goffman as politically conservative, is surprisingly nostalgic for anarchism and socialism. Finally, with Bloom’s theory of poetic influence (1973),

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I sketch a crude caricature of how Goffman in his role as sociologist (whose ironically literary bent should now be plain) acts out a textual coup d’état in which he slays Durkheim as if to seize control of methodologically bureaucratized sociology. The moral career of Goffman’s non-person category By Chapter XVI of his dissertation, Goffman (1953:217–30) has defined his sui generis interaction order and ordained that face-to-face interaction has necessary ‘system’ and ‘ritual’ conventions which ensure orderly communication and which are not tied to the personalities or psychological characteristics of particular interactants. Chapter XVI, ‘On kinds of exclusion from participation’, stops probing the inner syntax of interaction and looks at persons who can be present in the face-to-face field of an interaction and yet be treated as non-interactants. The exclusion of these non-interactants, however, seems to be subtly ratified by those who do recognize one another as fully participating interactants. So ratified exclusion turns out to be participation of a kind, and it is a kind of participation that further points up the bounded nature of face-to-face interaction. Chapter XVI’s examples of how odd (by ‘our’ cultural standards) it is to be ignored when inside an interactional engagement, therefore strengthen Goffman’s pathbreaking thesis that face-to-face interaction is a discrete reality domain. At the beginning of the chapter Goffman gropes around, and the it-soundslike-sociology of his ‘effective closure’ category (‘An arrangement by which accredited participants in an interplay can act as if they were not being overheard’ [Goffman 1953:219]) generates little refinement of social vision. But then Goffman recalls that in Unst (the site of the Shetland fieldwork) foreign sailors stare through windows into islanders’ cottage interiors while islanders, by contrast, tap on windows before presuming to peer in. Foreign sailors are a clear case of persons who improperly enter interactions. So, after all, there may be fertile prospect in the prior declaration: It should be noted that effective closure is apparently very difficult to arrange and maintain when the accredited participants enclose among them, ecologically speaking, a person who is not an accredited participant. (Goffman 1953:221) The ‘participant who is not accredited’ is a mouthful, though, and that might be one reason why Goffman shortens it to non-person: ‘[They] may be treated as a

Non-person and Goffman 159 non-person, that is, as someone for whom no consideration need be taken’ (1953:222). Without further ado, ‘non-person treatment’ is now assumed by Goffman to be a widely recognized phenomenon. Long quotations (forty-two lines) from George Orwell’s experiences ([1946] 1980; dated 1929) in a French charity hospital back this up. Orwell’s evocations of non-personhood are chilling, and haunted by bewildered outrage against those who handle humans as objects. Then, as though sociologically justified by the Orwell quotations, Goffman generalizes: ‘We are familiar with treatment of a person as virtually absent in many situations’ (1953:223). This blatant appeal to common-sense cultural knowledge is nervous of itself, however. As if to stop the appeal drifting off into mere opinion, Goffman anchors it with a twenty-eight-line footnote to Doyle’s The Etiquette of Race Relations (1937) and Frances M. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832: Vol. II, 56–7). The footnote contains a total of four examples in which slaves are treated as interactionally absent by white Americans. (One could argue that the slaves are treated as absent by rich whites because they are slaves, but that would not impede the point being made, that persons can be treated as absent even when present.) The generalizations continue. Both the very young and the very old ‘may be discussed “to their faces” in the tone we would ordinarily use only if he [or she] were not present’ (1953:224). And, while being directed to a further footnote (which references Schwartz 1951), we are informed that ‘mental patients are often given similar non-person treatment’ (Goffman 1953:224). But Goffman has not forgotten his saying earlier that non-personhood may not only be given but also taken. So he notes that many new occupational roles (stenographers, cameramen, reporters, plainclothes guards and technicians [1953:224]) require their incumbents to take a ‘non-person alignment’ (1953:224). Now follow four examples from the fieldwork. The first example is from the billiards room of the village hall. The island rule of the village hall is that anybody may attend a gathering there provided they behave correctly. This rule is observed when foreign fishermen wander in to watch the billiard players: On these occasions, the islanders present in the billiard room would continue with their game and conversation as if the intruders who were present were not present at all. The foreign-speaking visitors would not be nodded to, or spoken to, or even closely looked at. An attempt would be made by the islanders

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to act as if no constraint or influence had been caused by the presence of strangers. (Goffman 1953:225) But just here Goffman footnotes a twenty-six-line quotation from Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London ([1933] 1980). The import of this new chunk of Orwell is that a large number (‘a hundred men, perhaps’) of down-and-outs, despite having no other ties than co-presence and shared low status, can jointly convey— without giving offence—utter contempt of intruders. This is a preparation for the dénouement of the billiards example: In fact, of course, players became a little self-conscious and demonstrated that they were concerned about intruders by cursing them when they were sighted coming towards the hall or leaving the hall. (Goffman 1953:225–6) That ‘finding’ suggests ‘that there are two types of non-person treatment’ (1953:225). One can exclude a person ‘from consideration in an automatic, unthinking way because of his [or her] low ceremonial status’ or one can use nonperson treatment as ‘the “silent treatment”…[that] in some situations constitutes an extremely brutal sanction’ (1953:225). The second Shetland example is not so much a description of interplay as a chain of comments about a predicament. Crofter girls habituated to ‘relatively convivial and equalitarian’ (1953:226) interactions in the community may be employed as maids and waitresses in the island’s one hotel. Mostly, while they are waiting at table, their non-personhood is tactfully managed but sometimes diners speak offensively about the maids’ social origins. The point of that, Goffman says, is not the overt rudeness but to ‘symbolize for the server and for the served that the server is not someone whose feelings, as a person who is present, need to be taken into consideration’ (1953:228). The chapter concludes with more fieldwork examples. One pair of examples shows low-status islanders ignoring high-status islanders and the other example is taken from Unst community socials. The low-status islanders give the non-person treatment to the island doctor if he calls on them during their mealtimes, and workers (at the mill, the quarry and the loading dock), if approached by their boss during a teabreak, carry on self-consciously with teabreak conduct until the break is over. The issue in the doctor and the boss interactions is that islanders expect a form of interaction to be respected by whomever come who may, and will not

Non-person and Goffman 161 abandon it on the advent of a social superior (to be consistent, Goffman would have to say that these superiors now have lower ceremonial status than their inferiors, which promises an analytic awkwardness solved here by dropping the issue). Further, the superior defers to his inferiors’ interactions by taking the nonperson role therein. With reference to the community socials, Goffman says no more than that they are synchronous interactions of superiors and inferiors (adults’ get-togethers and children’s get-togethers). Two sets of persons mutually respect each other since the children ‘play out the role of non-person’ (Goffman 1953:230). The chapter peters out with those final examples from Unst, and no further points are made (not even as a summary). This has been a lengthy recapitulation of Goffman caught in the act of intellectual creation. But, before leaving that behind, I want to look more deeply into the narrative genesis of the non-person category. This will provide underlining of the innovative and unconventional sociological status of non-person. Goffman (1953:1–10) is sensitive to the criticism that his dissertation fieldnotes usually follow the introduction of concepts. The reader might or might not be convinced by Goffman’s two main disclaimers here: (1) ‘I should like to make it quite clear that the terms and concepts employed in this study came after and not before the facts’ (1953:9), and (2) the narrative method of beginning each chapter with ‘a general discussion of particular communication concepts, and only later’ introducing field data is a ‘stylistic device’ that aids ‘the development of a general communication framework’ (1953:9). The reader is not told that the literary illustrations influenced the research nor told that those illustrations could have influenced the interpretation of data in the writing. Indeed, the possibility that the literary illustrations could have exerted influence of any kind on the sociological thinking of the dissertation is not entertained. But, whether discovered before or after the field data, the literary quotations certainly do give life to latent concepts in a ramifying intertext of data reports and literature. But the twist is this, that those of the concepts which interest Goffman will be detached in subsequent publications from their literary intertext while the ‘legitimate’ data reportage will be cited (in the future works) on behalf of those concepts so as to support a claim of sociological field empiricism. Thus the (later) implicit claim of ethnographic purity is dubious. For the time being, however, I only wish to show how compromised is Goffman’s category of non-person, if a truly sociological concept should emerge unmediated from data (and that is Goffman’s official 1953 view, anticipating ‘grounded theory’ [Glaser and Strauss 1967]). I am not quarrelling here with the possibility of sociology

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being written under the influence of literature. My purpose is simply to extract from Goffman’s use of literary materials his masking of them. By looking hard at Goffman’s sociological mask I simultaneously reveal non-person as principally a literary finding and reveal Goffman as a non-person who affects the sociological propriety of impersonality towards his data and his theories. This is how I get to Goffman’s Bloomian displacement and condensation of Durkheim. First I pin down non-person as a new sociological category influenced by literature and then I pin down Goffman as a ‘non-person sociologist’ who is not the impersonal sociologist he fronts himself as but, instead, a deep critic of Durkheimian impersonality. In the 1953 development of non-person, one can see Goffman’s mind working on the page. It looks as though he hopes, at first, to stick non-personhood right up the noses of those who perpetrate that interactional role for others to take. And then he is brought up short by examples and reflections that show how such a role is indispensable to the good order and politeness of very many interactive situations. But Goffman does not go on to work out a formal analytic sociology of nonpersonhood and ritual consideration. He appears content just to have isolated a paradoxical interaction role (the role of non-person can be ritually degrading or ritually tactful) that some people give to others and that some people take by choice. What he does not abandon, however, is the idea that ritual delicacy can be exercised towards some interactants who are seemingly invisible to others. In due course, social invisibility will loom large in Goffman’s sociology as the visible evidence that, no matter the tenor of interaction and no matter how lighthearted it is, people really do have to take one another seriously as beings with moral obligations and human rights. Though the non-person discussion as such is dropped, the ideas it contains flow onwards. They will be advanced in Behavior in Public Places (1963a) and again in ‘Normal appearances’ (in Goffman 1971). Meanwhile there is a brief encounter with non-person in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Because the sociological currency of non-person mostly derives from that text, I turn to it now. It is an unfortunate economy on Goffman’s part that in his most famous work he chooses to wholly assimilate the non-person category to interaction roles. Disappointingly, he avoids non-person’s entailment of ritual considerateness (though this is retrieved in the later formulations that I shall soon arrive at). Non-person appears in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) for three pages (151–3) of Chapter 4 (‘Discrepant roles’) and is said to be just one possible ‘discrepant [interaction] role’. Goffman here juggles a triadic structure of performer(s)-audience-outsider(s), each element of which is said to be a basic

Non-person and Goffman 163 interactional role. The normative ideal of interaction, Goffman says, is the congruence of (1) interaction role, (2) requisite possession of appropriate social information, and (3) prescribed accessibility to backstage areas. But, because that structure is far too tight for its source materials, Goffman also says that some other ‘vantages’ than that of performer(s), audience and outsider(s) are taken so often that they too can be called interaction roles (‘discrepant roles’). Illustrated from variegated texts, discrepant roles include ‘informer’, ‘shill’, ‘spotter’, ‘shopper’, ‘go-between’, ‘service specialist’, ‘confidant’ and ‘colleague’ (1959:160). Then suddenly non-person too is said to be a discrepant role. It is a distinct discrepant role because non-persons ‘do not take the role either of performer or of audience’ (1959:151). But Goffman gives only a précis of the dissertation non-person, and makes no radical departure except, as I have said, to disconnect it from Durkheimian ritual consideration (in Footnote 9 of Presentation the reader is referred to Chapter XVI of the dissertation ‘for a fuller treatment’). That is non-person as it appears in Presentation, which work tends not only to slight the disjunction between small face-to-face interaction systems and broader social systems but also to confuse specifically interactional roles with clear social structural roles and identities. (Though Goffman’s studies of asylum inmates and stigmatized persons contain remarks that allude to the experience of the ‘extremely brutal’ [1953:225] version of non-person treatment, the concept of non-person is neither dwelt on nor extended in those studies.) Non-person is next mentioned (and for the last time under that descriptive term) in Chapter 6 (‘Face engagements’) of Behavior in Public Places (1963a:83– 111). At the beginning of the chapter Goffman notes that in unfocused interactions people can stare openly at others only if they wish to express hate. But he adds: ‘It is also possible for one person to treat others as if they were not there at all, as objects not worthy of a glance, let alone close scrutiny’ (1963a:83–4). Further, while so treating others, the said person may ‘alter his own appearance hardly at all in consequence of the presence of the others’ (1963a:84). This is non-person treatment, and a footnote refers readers back to pages 151–3 of Presentation (where they will be referred back to Chapter XVI of the dissertation). Now comes a complication, because Goffman explicitly contrasts non-person treatment with civil inattention: Currently, in our society, this kind of treatment [non-person treatment] is to be contrasted with the kind generally felt to be more proper in most situations, which will here be called ‘civil inattention’. What seems to be involved is

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that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design. (Goffman 1963a:84) This is Goffman extricating ‘non-person’ from ‘civil inattention’. But he is unconvincing. I have five arguments, now, for claiming—contra Goffman—that non-person treatment is a species of civil inattention. If only two or three of these arguments carry the day, my reading of Goffman as a sociologically strategic nonperson will later become cogent. (Then it will follow that Goffman the non-person is such on account of his relation to Durkheim, but the explanation of that needs to wait until we have caught up with Bloom on the anxiety of influence.) 1 Goffman (1963a:84) writes that while the eyes pass over the eyes of the other during civil inattention ‘no “recognition” is typically allowed’, though it is hard to see that the ‘hardly at all’ (1963a:84) alteration of appearance is not really an alteration, a slight recognition therefore. But whether by their alteration of appearance or by their not altering it, people not showing any recognition when looking at an other while they are looking back is in either case precisely Goffman’s definition of non-person treatment. 2 Civil inattention, ‘so delicate an adjustment’ (1963a:85), is ‘the slightest of interpersonal rituals’ (1963a:84). But, if Goffman wishes to contrast the delicacy of looking-but-not-looking in civil inattention to looking-but-not-looking when giving non-person treatment, he makes non-person treatment impossible. The reasons for that impossibility are these. To give someone non-person treatment one has to see the other so as not to see them, or else the interest in one’s face that is being accorded to the ratified persons in one’s interaction would still be there for the non-person. Similarly, the interactant taking the non-person role must be sure not-to-look if and when they need to look at ratified persons (as, for example, when serving soup). So non-person treatment must depend on exactly the same looking-but-not-looking that sustains mutual civil inattention. 3 Goffman defines civil inattention as ‘a courtesy that tends to treat those present merely as participants in the [unfocused] gathering and not in terms of other social characteristics…’ (1963a:86). But the deliberate ignoring of all social characteristics save that of the other’s presence as someone who for whatever

Non-person and Goffman 165 reason is to be treated as absent is perfectly in line with Goffman’s definition of non-person treatment (both benign and not-so benign). (One wants to say to Goffman here that non-person treatment and civil inattention are premised in specific discrepant interactional roles that are courteously ignored just because they are those roles.) 4 Goffman says that ‘to behave properly and have the right to civil inattention are related’ (1963a:87). This is tantamount to restating the billiards situation in Unst. If foreign sailors behave themselves, they have the right to watch billiards as non-persons. Their proper behaviour earns them a civil inattention that could become uncivil if their behaviour became improper. Here again non-person treatment and civil inattention are identical. 5 Remarking that often people get away with failing to extend civil inattention to others (because sanctioning improprietous people would also confer upon those people the personhood that their impropriety denies the sanctioner), Goffman declares that appropriate sanctions (actual formal punishments) only exist in despotic societies. But this is to say no more than that non-persons who begin to treat as persons those who are treating them as non-persons are either kept in the non-person role by being ignored in their importunity or formally punished when the differential between non-person and person matches a formal social distance (the transgression then being of the formal social distance and not of the interactional distance per se). Civil inattention and non-person treatment, then, are the same because, unless they are backed by explicit social powers, each commits the ‘invisible’ interactant who would police the non-conformer to a personhood that is demeaned if it emerges from acting as if it is invisible. I believe that Goffman dropped the term non-person so that he could retain within civil inattention the considerateness that is built into non-personhood, and at the same time exclude the occasional possibility (of non-person treatment) that civil inattention may not be a courtesy but a mistreatment. But if one looks again at Goffman’s contemporary list of non-persons in his dissertation (stenographers, cameramen, reporters, plainclothes guards and technicians [1953:224]) one can see that very little impropriety need be involved in opening up an engagement with any of those non-persons, or with their opening it up with ratified interactants if the need arose. In other words, those dissertational and Presentation of Self nonpersons are merely individuals accorded Behavior in Public Places civil inattention in the course of their work, to facilitate that work. Civil inattention, therefore, is

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well nigh impossible to distinguish from mutual non-person treatment. Therefore one might as well say that those who are civilly disattended are non-persons. In ‘Normal appearances’ (1971), Goffman again starts with gaze, but this time in an ethological frame. That which receives overlong attention is alarming, and the overlong glance is a warning, often directed to a human object, to indicate that it is the cause of alarm. The routine human act of scanning is thereby ritualized ‘and thrust into the adjustments that those who are mutually present make to one another’ (Goffman 1971:247). With that, Goffman fails to follow the route of Behavior in Public Places from the discreet glances of unfocused civil inattention to the open eye-contact of focused interaction (see Travers 1998 for the inherent over-focused fascism of brilliant eyes). The distinction focused/unfocused is effectively dropped. An increasing narrative pressure is applied to the normal appearances category, as if normal appearances must become a feature of unfocused and focused interactions alike. And gradually Goffman comes to the conclusion that both without and within focused interactions the interactant’s moral duty is to appear safe enough to be disattended. Any abrupt claim upon attention in social life generally is an alarm signal, not the (hitherto unalarming) sign of someone breaking into personhood from non-personhood (Goffman 1971:279–80). The consequence of a generalized social imperative to appear normal enough to be disregarded after having been scanned is—in Goffman’s analysis (1971:282)— paranoia within both public places and private interactions. It follows that: [I]t is the inevitable nature of appearing as if nothing is up that one is appearing exactly as one would were one trying to conceal a source of threat or a fear of it. And it is the inevitable consequence of purposely trying to act natural for the gentlest of reasons that one will produce just the kind of deception cues that would be produced were one’s intentions evil and demonic. (1971:327) In Goffman’s late analyses this applies not only between strangers in public places but between intimate partners in their face-to-face engagements. Wherever people interact and under whatever analytical rubric of relationship and scene, they try not to be alarming under conditions that are alarming insofar as they can easily appear to have been perfectly designed to conceal hidden threats. When ‘do normal appearances’ is the rule of human interaction, civil inattention must be shown towards any signs that the situation merits closer scrutiny on account of possible

Non-person and Goffman 167 hidden and hostile motives. That is, non-personhood must be assumed by both those who see and those who are seen. However, this non-personhood is on a scale unimagined by the Goffman of his dissertation. Into it has fallen the very concept of a ratified person and, with that, all the scrupulously dovetailed conduct of face engagements. Mutual nonpersonhood, universalized by its having gulped down the possibility that any human appearances can be established as matching a real state of social affairs, blithely assumes the faces of empty personhood which may never disclose authentic selfhood, for authentic selfhood too is caught in the same unverifiability as any other appearances. The same point is made later still in Frame Analysis: ‘To be “natural,” then, is not merely to seem at ease, but to be acting in such a way as to convince others that the apparent frame is in fact the actual one. That is what is meant, functionally speaking, by sincerity and spontaneity’ (1974:487). As it were, the background to person-to-person interaction becomes the foreground in which persons as such cannot be discerned. The only way to emerge from the background is to breach the rules and create legally and medically sanctionable havoc. The very idea of a person finally becomes an aberration in Goffman’s sociology, just as Goffman the frame-analyst is not there for the reader except in his capacity to tell the reader that there is no point in looking for the real Goffman or the real anybody else. But of course there is point to it. Identifying an interactant as this or that real person prompts the sociology of interaction itself, with the questions: ‘Why are there selves? What are they?’ And the self that asks those questions is one of a particular stamp for asking it and is one of an elaborate oeuvre, in the case of Goffman, for radically discounting determinative interiority with regard to the self’s interactive moments. So there is a real Goffman, after the fact of his writing, and the most real Goffman—in my Bloomian reading—is the postgraduate in Shetland reacting to non-person treatment as this is shown to him (in literature and in life) and as this is dictated to him by Durkheim’s sovereignty over a discipline that obliges impersonality in its authors. It takes Goffman more than thirty years but eventually he acquires the curious personhood of non-personhood through his paradoxical sociological destruction of persons, a destruction that, as we shall see, necessarily involves dethroning Durkheim. A final note about Goffman in the Shetland island of Unst will consolidate the message of this section. In the field, Goffman (1953:2) passed as an American graduate student interested in the economics of crofting. He seems not to have been rumbled. From the outset, however, such a role must have put him beyond the shared concerns of islanders. Other differences between the islanders and

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Goffman would have set him apart. For example, he would have been new to the deprivations of food rationing (still in force for many items such as chocolate in 1949) and detached from a history of defence against invasion by German troops. More importantly, Goffman did not converse in the Unst dialect (a mixture of Norse and Scottish). Then, though purportedly interested in crofting, Goffman had no crofting skills to share with fellow islanders. But worst of all for Goffman must have been his secret mission of indiscriminately recording as much of the conduct of the islanders as he could witness, while taking great care to appear to be someone who does not ponder those matters.1 Little wonder, then, if Goffman’s sense of being a person was severely tested in the field. The Goffman known as such by the Shetland islanders was not the sociologist he was aspiring to be. Yet the more Goffman was accepted for what he was not, the more he may have felt that he was on his way to becoming a successful sociologist. Drawn into the island life and thereby, on the face of it, drawn away from sociology, Goffman is drawn yet further into sociology. This is a paradoxical position, only resolved by the adoption of a poker face pointed in two directions at once, on the one side to the islanders (concealing the sociologist) and on the other side to sociology (concealing the honorary islander). Quite appropriately, as though in the interests of his sanity, Goffman the non-person concomitantly develops the category of non-person to stay in a face that is perfectly sociological by being perfectly hypocritical to those co-interactants who are its sociological source. Goffman’s non-personhood in Unst during 1949–51 may be likened, then, to a pyramid-point foundation of his sense of what fully interactional people must be, a continuous balancing act,2 irremediably insecure in themselves. The literary intertext of non-person I have shown that Goffman’s mature theory has deep roots in the dissertational quotations from George Orwell that inspire a persistent non-person category which survives translation via ‘civil inattention’ to the normal appearances that shore up Frame Analysis (1974). By now going into the content of the Orwell materials that Goffman quotes and also those that, significantly, he does not quote, I can push this case further. The passages that introduce Goffman’s non-person (1953:222–3) are taken from Orwell’s essay about his experiences of a Parisian charity hospital. Orwell writes that up to a dozen medical students would queue to listen to his chest. These students had a ‘seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human

Non-person and Goffman 169 beings’. So far as the doctors and students were concerned ‘you were primarily a specimen’ (Orwell [1946] 1980:783). The next passage that Goffman quotes (1953:225) from Orwell is taken from Down and Out in Paris and London ([1933] 1980). It lengthily annotates the non-person treatment given by a large number of tramps to some missionary slummers. Orwell ([1933] 1980:104) observes: ‘There they [the slummers] stood patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was taken of them than if they had been earwigs’. But just as seminal as the dissertationally-quoted Orwell passages is an idea from Orwell nowhere alluded to by Goffman. This comes from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 1984), a novel Goffman never cited. Yet, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which depicts an imagined future, the English language, already halfconverted to ‘Newspeak’, has a new word, ‘unperson’ ([1949] 1984:35). The resemblance between Goffman’s non-person term and Orwell’s Newspeak unperson is as astonishing as Goffman’s non-mention of it. (One must note, though, that an Orwellian unperson is not quite a Goffmanian non-person, since an unperson is a citizen without any civil status while a non-person is an interactant lacking ratified interactional status. Nonetheless, the two terms register the same sense of noappeal-possible exclusion from full participation in everyday life.) It is a reasonable surmise that, since Goffman liked Orwell well enough in 1953 to quote from two of his books, he would have been aware of Nineteen EightyFour (the novel was newsworthy in the year of its first publication in 1949, at the end of which year, coincidentally, Goffman began in his fieldwork in Unst). So I suggest that the word unperson could have been in Goffman’s mind when, happening on perfect non-person illustrations in other works by the author who had coined unperson, he introduced non-person into sociology. I also suggest that Goffman in his role of fieldworker resembles an Orwellian unperson (Goffman had disappeared into the field and might or might not write up, as is the way with first-time ethnographers). And, like Orwell (whose observational participations were covert), Goffman is in disguise exploring a social milieu with the intention of writing about it for an audience other than the members of the milieu. Candidly on this point, in the introduction to his dissertation, Goffman says that Shetlanders would have found him unacceptable if they had known he was studying their interactions (1953:5). And, of course, the person who spies on others for an undisclosed objective is interactionally in one of the discrepant interaction roles—where non-person can be found—that Goffman will list in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).

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So Goffman draws on Orwell in three ways. He adapts an Orwellian category (unperson) to describe an interactional role (non-person) new to sociology; he lives out, as a prospective unperson, an Orwellian field experience of a strange and threatening culture; and he takes to the heart of his sociology Orwell’s annotations of people who are treated as ‘specimens’. This gives us an outline portrait of Goffman in Shetland that now has literary features invisible to the sociological eye. By looking now at the intertext of two of the most important writers feeding Orwell, this literary portrait of Goffman is sharpened further. Orwell possessed an unusually fervent consciousness of the political role of the ‘serious’ writer. But he never had the moment of socialist hope that had been experienced by the Russian anarchist, Victor Serge, whom Orwell admired and used as an example of an honest writer in a dishonest social system (Murray 1975:229; Steiner 1975:367). Indeed, by the time he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell was despairing of a good revolution even if he was still industriously bequeathing a personal testament that would contribute to the utopia of a just socialism. In the Orwell-Serge frame, Goffman becomes a young sociologist surrounded by massive and pressing social themes that demand a responsive political attitude. It is as though, coming to sociological consciousness at the height of the Cold War between the capitalist west and the Soviet empire, Goffman—as a writer indebted to Orwell’s struggles of political conscience—knew that he had no easy social role to play in the liberation of oppressed peoples. At the same time that Goffman was working to earn a place in the ranks of professional sociologists within a discipline that—some still genuinely feel—is morally committed to social reform, he (Goffman) was already acquainted with the hubris of theoretical social engineering and the political ineffectuality of thinkers dedicated to human emancipation. Most striking in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the equation between the productions of a populist culture industry and the stifling of unhappy critique. Orwell himself feared that even the tactic of writing towards social reform is likely to be used against itself (a regular contributor to current affairs programmes of the BBC, Orwell described that then high-minded organization as a ‘moral quagmire’). So Goffman’s scepticism towards American sociology’s automatic assumption of its ameliorative social function looks far more reasoned, in this perspective, than it can have looked to the orthodox American sociology of his day. The Victorian novelist George Gissing, best known for his harrowing autobiographical account of literary poverty, New Grub Street (1892), is—like Victor Serge—a functional part of the Orwell intertext3 from which Goffman

Non-person and Goffman 171 derives non-person. Gissing eerily conceives the idea of the novel-writing machines that in Nineteen Eighty-Four churn out trash to quiet the masses. Thus a woman musing in the British Library upon the futility of going on writing pages that ‘no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market’ cries out to herself: Oh, to go forth and labour with one’s hands, to do any poorest, commonest work of which the world had truly need! It was ignoble to sit here and support the paltry pretence of intellectual dignity. A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed ‘Literary Machine’; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today’s consumption. (Gissing 1892:95) This excerpt, which finely captures the feelings of those who will labour in future culture and education industries, is clearly inspirational to Orwell and thus, albeit at one remove, must inform Goffman’s perception of writing. But Goffman has a tactic that never occurred to Gissing, Serge and Orwell. He chooses to write in a language that deliberately does not accord priority to emotion, sensibility, imagination and style. This language is the abstract, formal language of academic sociology. So, in effect, we can see from the perspective of the literary intertext that Goffman speaks not exactly a satirical improvement on Orwell’s Newspeak but a sociology that can mimic the totalizing authority of Newspeak yet include the possibility of intelligent moral dissent from societies that depend for their stability on interactional hypocrisy. When considered alongside the importance of the non-person category to Goffman’s social theory, Goffman’s writing mode thus gives us a Goffman who, as if consciously, strives to write as influentially as sociology’s Big Brother, Durkheim. Goffman’s tactic, then, is like a coup d’état within the figure of one of sociology’s founding fathers. How Goffman succeeds in acquiring the authority of a

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contemporary Durkheim I shall now show, with the help of Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Big Brother, Durkheim and parodic revolt Bloom’s argument4 is that strong poets become strong because they are so painfully influenced by precursors that they eventually reverse the flow of influence. The precursor of one who has greatly suffered the anxiety of influence is made to seem— by the successor—indebted to the strong successor for the achievement the precursor is known for. (Anxiety of influence in Bloom’s quasi-Freudian terms is partly a castration anxiety, but less Freudianistically it is the anxiety an author has of having nothing new to say. This anxiety is acute to the point of suffering when the author also feels that everything thus far said is feeble compared with what he or she desires to say.) Paradoxically, strong successors create precursors. For instance, a strong successor poet such as T.S.Eliot in The Waste Land makes a precursor work like Tennyson’s The Holy Grail read like pallid Eliot. Bloom lists six ways of turning the tables on a precursor, and each of these elaborates a true successor’s move made by Goffman against the precursor Durkheim. 1 Clinamen. The successor ‘swerves’ from the line of the precursor as if to show that the precursor was accurate to a point but then hit a dead end that the successor bypasses. Thus Goffman swerves into interaction as a sui generis study and shows Durkheim in hindsight to be rather unpromising in his direct confrontation with ‘society’, ‘religious rituals’, ‘suicide’ and ‘division of labour’. Durkheim’s long-shot, panoramic sociology, after Goffman, sadly lacks closeup on vital ritual detail. 2 Tessera (completion and antithesis). The precursor has failed to go far enough. When Goffman at every point in his oeuvre asserts the ubiquity of ritual constraints, he goes farther than Durkheim who reserves ritual effervescence for special occasions. Thus, after Goffman, Durkheim can be read not only as having failed to take ritual seriously enough but also as having failed to get to grips with ritual where it most commonly takes place in face-to-face interaction. 3 Kenosis (defence against repetition). The successor does not want to seem to have balked at the precursor’s project when swerving from it. So he empties the precursor’s project. Goffman’s technique for emptying Durkheim is to accept that Durkheim’s project legitimately exists outside the interaction order. But Goffman’s acceptance reads as if it is ironic and disingenuous. Professing no

Non-person and Goffman 173 interest in continuing Durkheim’s project and not allowing it to have any impact on his analysis, Goffman cannot make us feel that the content of extrainteractional sociology is real to him. If it was real in his eyes, Goffman could not exclude it so thoroughly from interaction analysis, since in his analysis individuals are absolutely social beings. To be sure, the oft-quoted Goffman metaphors of ‘loose coupling’, ‘membrane’ and ‘gearing…of various [social] structures into interactional cogs’ (Goffman 1983b:11) appear to acknowledge social structure outside interaction. But, examined closely, those metaphors represent social structures as dream-like and distorted projections of more empirical interactional phenomena, upon which, however, Goffman is careful to say such structures have consequences, but consequences that, in his analyses of stigma, gender and mental illness, appear to be generated in the interaction order after all. Goffman’s acceptance of Durkheim’s society is therefore empty, and so Durkheim is emptied. 4 Daemonization. This is the successor stealing the inspiration of the precursor as if to say that the precursor did not invent that, but only had it on loan. The move here is to imply that the precursor failed to keep faith with the truth of his vision, while the successor does. Durkheim (1951:336) wants human beings to be sacred to themselves but much more successfully shows them egotistically, anomically and fatalistically bereft of ritual interactional values towards even their own lives. Goffman, however, sticks to those ritual values through thick and thin, even when he says that they are empty (Travers 1994). Thus Goffman in his ‘student of society’ role constantly conveys the impression that others are not really students of society but something a little less honest, that is, sociologists in the image of Durkheim, who was not highly sensitized to the interactional society that Goffman writes as if it is our most real social experience. 5 Askesis. This is a movement into solitude that condenses the successor, who then emerges to define the precursor as no less solitary and small. At first glance, Goffman seems but a shadow of Durkheim. However, from within Goffman’s secession from Durkheimian and mainstream sociology, one can see that Durkheim’s vast ambitions for the discipline are no bigger than Goffman’s. The scale of the field is different, but the drive to find order in social behaviour is the same. Only, if social behaviour is narrowed down to interaction, there is more chance of grasping its inner workings. 6 Apophrades (return of the dead). The successor, having overcome the anxiety of influence, tests his or her work by exposing it to the precursor. If the successor is

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truly a strong poet the effect is the reversal whereby the precursor now seems to have written a halting, imperfect and diluted rehearsal of the successor’s denser performance. In the text of his 1982 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, Goffman recites Durkheim’s litany only to brush it aside by simply contrasting it to his own seemingly smaller preoccupations (Goffman 1983b:9–10). (This of course is the end moment of a process that had been under way in Goffman since the 1956 American Anthropologist publication of ‘The nature of deference and demeanor’, in which Goffman states [wrongly, I feel, see Travers 1994] that Durkheim’s view of sacrality is outmoded in the secular American pre-1960s culture of totally administered, other-directed [Riesman 1953] citizens.) In 1982 Goffman’s claim to originality and contemporary eminence rests on his effectively challenging an audience of sociologists to read Durkheim as an immature and wrongheaded Goffman. All the above Goffman condensations of sociological scope, together with (1) Goffman’s field method of restricting his research to the personal observations of the fieldworker and (2) Goffman’s textual preference for fragmentary exposition in fragmentary essays, revolve around non-person, both the interactant as a nonperson and the sociologist non-person as Goffman. Ironically speaking sociology as a sophisticated Newspeak, Goffman appears to be mocking sociological authority while surreptitiously restoring sociological access to the richness of a broad cultural intertext. So doing, Goffman can be read as levelling a criticism of that kind of sociology which goes over to and collaborates with the society it should be studying. In this respect Goffman’s approach to society is close to the conversational approach of Adorno (1974). But, where Adorno is racked by what he cannot bear to be read as (a bourgeois), Goffman is fully camouflaged as somebody he is not, a non-person. Bloom’s typology of influence-reversal, coupled to Goffman’s fate as a knowing subject of Durkheim (seen through non-person as sociology’s Nineteen Eighty’Four-style Big Brother), here allows us to understand Goffman’s way of usurping authority. Goffman becomes as-if-faceless in an idiosyncratic style that adheres to an attitude of revolt while presenting itself as serene conformity. In this essay I have described how Goffman progressively extended his formulation of the human being as a non-person, and I have shown that the nonperson category is in large part derived from an anarchist/socialist literary intertext. Through non-person, Goffman emerges as a despairing diagnostician of a society that is sick with hypocrisy. But Goffman’s diagnosis is not performed by a sociologist

Non-person and Goffman 175 whose seriousness in the first place consists in his taking himself more seriously than other people. Rather, the sociologist Goffman is a dual being, Goffman and also non-person, that is, a person who is not faceless even though he pretends to be faceless the better to write sociology that often owes its sharp sociological insights to its unique literary devices. However, in sharpening his sociological vision this way, Goffman stages a bid for the soul of sociology. He challenges his chief precursor Durkheim—who gave him his fundamental and perduring donné of ritual in interaction—by parodying the productions of a merely routinized successor figure who—as if accident-prone like Jerry Lewis—studiously vitiates the precursor’s methods and uses the vitiated methods against the father, the Big Brother figure, the totemic Durkheim. In this reading, Goffman emerges both as a non-person bursting with singular literary personhood and as a person constantly retreating into sociologically impeccable non-personhood. Whatever the ultimate sociological judgement on Durkheim there is no escaping the fact that Durkheim is a canonical figure within the institution of sociology. He is integral to the discipline that constitutes Goffman in his oppositional writing. I have shown that Goffman’s opposition to Durkheim is on two fronts. On one front Goffman voids Durkheim’s central idea that when people interact they ceremonially recreate collective representations (1983b:9–10). And on the other front Goffman empties the self (including the sociologist self) so that there is nothing that can be agonized either by society or by authorized social analysts such as Durkheim (see Travers 1992a; 1992b). My argument has been that, first coined in Goffman’s dissertation (1953:217– 30), non-person is the key to Goffman’s anxiety of Durkheimian influence. Though non-person appears only briefly in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959:150–2) before, in Behavior in Public Places (1963a:84), mutating into a differently focused sociology of ‘civil inattention’, civil inattention evolves into the ethological analysis of ‘Normal appearances’ (1971) wherein non-personhood becomes the paranoid sinecure of social order. From this wobbling platform, at the close of his career, Goffman (1983:9–10) frankly states severe objections to Durkheim. The objections are grounded in Goffman’s depiction of an interaction order whose orderliness is only guaranteed by the normal appearances of situated behaviours. Such behaviours, Goffman claims, evince nothing but the lie that they signify more substantial human relationships: ‘[E]ncountering itself is borrowed whole cloth from the interaction order and defined as one of the goods mutually provided for in relationships’ (1983b:13). In exposing this lie Goffman comes full circle from his dissertation (where the non-person is exceptional) to a view of

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human beings as mutual non-persons even in their deepest intimacies. So the category of non-person, like a deadly antithesis to the jargon-of-authenticity thesis that interactive people can fulfil one another’s ever-latent selfhood, finally eats the heart out of and topples Durkheim’s totemic authority. The stage is left to Goffman for his own public bowing-out performances (Goffman 1981a; 1983b), whose self-indulgent self-denial burlesques the expectation of dignified pronunciamento. Goffman’s will be a hard act to follow. Notes 1 More than twenty years later in a taped seminar, Goffman (1989) speaks of fieldwork as a bitter and rigorous discipline of isolated and largely covert spying on people with whom one would not choose to mix except for the purpose of studying them. Since Goffman’s most completely anthropological fieldwork was performed in Unst, one must assume that Goffman’s dour view of fieldwork was formed between 1949 and 1951. 2 Goffman was an accomplished gymnast in his youth. This fact supplies an intriguing subtext to his native sense of how much face can be lost by falling flat on it in conditions of great expressive responsibility. 3 The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge recalled his friend George Orwell’s affinity to George Gissing in diary entries dated 18–19 February 1949 and 21 January 1950, writing: ‘He [Orwell] spoke a lot about Gissing, for whom he has a particular fondness, I think because he rather sees himself in Gissing’s position…’ (Muggeridge 1983:10). Orwell’s relation to Gissing is also noted in Crick (1992:213, 264). 4 I use Bloom as a disposable structuration of general tendencies in Goffman’s thought, through which Goffman assumes the mantle of Durkheim’s authority so that he can develop a critique that bites into sociology as well as society. But it would be inadvisable to read my narrative as anything other than one interpretation among others. To start with, Bloom himself evaluates the knowledge status of his own argument (about the anxiety of influence) as ‘a theory of poetry that presents itself as a severe poem, reliant upon aphorism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly traditional) mythic pattern’ (1973:13). Secondly, Bloom is talking about the influence of poet upon poet. To accept that I can adapt Bloom’s schema to the influence of sociologist upon sociologist, one has to feel—as do many sociologists, e.g. Brown (1977)—that language is so metaphorical that the very idea of an unproblem-atically-transcriptive code of given objective realities is also an emotional dream. Thirdly, I cannot say that I am revealing Goffman’s hitherto secret sociological intentions. All I am doing is reading Goffman backwards, against his grain too, and if this is ‘presentism’ it is so for the sake of being protohermeneutic for future backwards-readings of this essay.

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Claiming the text Parsing the sardonic visions of Erving Goffman and Thorstein Veblen Gary Alan Fine

Discovering linkages among the great thinkers of a former era is a game that intellectuals play. This game becomes particularly perilous when examining those brilliant writers whose creations are distinctive, drawn from novel combinations of many others. In the case of Erving Goffman, for instance, an analyst can find traces of Durkheim, Simmel, Tarde, Mead, Weber, Husserl and James. To derive these influences is, in some measure, fruitless. Great theorists are great because of their own innovative combinations of extant ideas. When two individuals touch upon the same themes we commonly surmise that one must have influenced the other—or if the two are roughly contemporaneous, to inquire whether cross-pollination occurred. Such a view is both true and false; any sentient being—much less a widely-read intellectual—is continually shaped by ideas and images. The absence of influence is impossible; all writers are inspired by those who preceded them or who are active simultaneously. Everyone can, with a minimum of intellectual honesty, compile a list of those who have changed them. Theorists engage in the same exercise, the basis for much literary criticism and intellectual history. Of course, at times we are too willing to ascribe influence merely on the basis of a perceived similarity, even when this perceived similarity was merely the outcome of two individuals confronting comparable problems. The claim that a previous writer affected those who came later or intended to address subsequent concerns has come to be labelled ‘presentism’ (Jones 1977; Skinner 1969): a danger of intellectual hero-worship. Writers rarely speak directly to the future, although often enough the future hears them. This chapter compares the lives, writings and reputations of two prominent social scientists of the twentieth century: Thorstein Veblen and Erving Goffman. I do not attempt to assay the entirety of the writings of the two men for purposes

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of comparison, but focus on their treatment of élites and of status symbols, attempting to suggest how their biographies, discursive practices, substantive ideas and reputations are comparable. I suggest that it is useful to read Goffman’s writings in light of the writings of Veblen. Further, I explore the conditions on which their reputations are based. Of Veblen, Bernard Rosenberg (1963:3) wrote that he was: ‘the greatest social scientist America has produced’ and, in similar language, C.Wright Mills (1953:vi) described Veblen as ‘the best critic of America that America has produced’. Goffman has received his share of accolades too. Marshall Berman (1972:1) described Goffman as ‘one of the greatest writers alive today’ and John Lofland (1984:33; see Marx 1984:661) speaks of him as a ‘preeminent and central figure’. The examination of the writings of Thorstein Veblen and Erving Goffman— two social scientists who wrote on the power of class symbols in defining the privilege claims of social and cultural élites—seems readymade for a comparison. Surprisingly that claim has not been widely made. Neither of the two major recent monographs on Goffman (Burns 1992; Manning 1992) refers to Veblen. The only specific linkage I have unearthed is embedded in a review by the novelist Philip Rosenberg, who writes of Goffman’s Frame Analysis: Not since Veblen laid bare the socio-economic significance of walking sticks and Pekingese dogs has there been an author capable, as Goffman is, of explaining why there are mirrors facing the counters in lunchrooms, why a man mutters an oath when he stumbles over a crack in the pavement, or why loitering, the simple act of standing still on a public sidewalk, constitutes a breach of civil order. (Rosenberg 1975:21) While the two thinkers are not identical, their parallel arguments, interests and topics are so dramatic that this oversight is particularly noticeable. Specifically I address four areas of similarity (and some difference): 1 The biographies and personalities of these two men, both born outsiders from mainstream American culture. This marginal stance affected their analysis. 2 Their writing styles. Both men developed distinctive styles of presentation, often commented upon and considered a central defining feature of their work. Both employ sardonic humour and metaphoric tropes and were frequently labelled ‘satiric’ or ‘ironic’. Their styles contribute to their arguments. 3 The content of their writings on status symbols.

Claming the text 179 4 The development of their reputations. Both Goffman and Veblen are deeply suspicious of the aesthetic standards of social élites. Both are fundamentally ironists and debunkers. Perhaps their most dramatic difference relates to their politics. Goffman is typically seen as a conservative (e.g. Hall 1977) or an apolitical liberal (e.g. Gouldner 1970), whereas Veblen has a reputation as a radical (e.g. Tilman 1992; Edgell 1987). Despite their similar interests and stances, Goffman rarely made reference to the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’, and never, so far as I have determined, to the writings of Veblen. In his often overlooked article, ‘Symbols of class status’ (Goffman 1951), an article that seems ripe for reference to Veblen, he only refers in passing to conspicuous consumption. This is particularly curious in that Goffman was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago at the same time that David Riesman was on the faculty, researching his volume on the life and theories of Thorstein Veblen. Veblen, as a Chicago man, should have had a more prominent place in Goffman’s writing, and his absence is striking, even admitting that citations in Goffman’s writings are not always an adequate gauge of influences on his thought. This absence, of course, makes difficult the evaluation of the direct effects of the older writer on the younger; we must rely on claims about similarities of backgrounds, interests and stylistic practices. Biography matters Both Thorstein Veblen and Erving Goffman were outsiders to mainstream American culture—outsiders eventually embraced by intellectual élites. Veblen was born to Norwegian immigrant parents in 1857 on a small rural Wisconsin farm, a child of the middle border: the growing American Midwest. His parents were industrious and eventually prosperous; Thorstein was the sixth of twelve children. When Veblen was eight his family relocated to southern Minnesota where he was raised. In 1880 he graduated from Carleton College. After a term at Johns Hopkins studying with Charles S.Peirce, Veblen settled at Yale, receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy for a dissertation on Kant’s Critique of Judgement. He then returned to his family’s homestead for seven years, before appearing at Cornell to study with the noted economist J.Laurence Laughlin. When Laughlin joined the newly founded Rockefeller-financed University of Chicago, he brought along his protégé. Veblen joined the faculty, and remained on staff until 1906, when, because of his extra-marital relations and indifferent teaching, he was asked to resign. Veblen subsequently had teaching stints at Stanford, Missouri and the New School for Social Research. Veblen also worked in the US

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Food Administration and served for a year as an editor of the radical magazine, The Dial. Veblen died on 3 August 1929 at his rundown shack in the northern California woods. During his life Veblen published nine books—notably The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation (1917) and The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918); two collections of essays; and a translation of the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga (1925). However, biographies are more than just the collections of facts treated in isolation, depicting a person’s life: biographies are narratives, lives made sense of. Facts become social constructions through the process of organization and interpretation. The standard social construction of Veblen’s biography depicts him as a marginal man through his background, preferences and his career (Rosenberg 1955; Kazin 1942). He combined shy diffidence with a bitter dyspepsia; he mixed a talent for alienating potential supporters with the presence of a coterie of devotees; and, according to some, such as David Riesman (1953), he revealed contradictory desires to be accepted and rejected. Veblen was likened to a ‘Martian professor’ (Mumford 1931; Johnson 1941): the outsider looking in. Much the same might be said of the life of Erving Goffman. While not all the facts of the two lives are parallel, enough are to suggest the plausibility of the claim that their similar theories derive in part from similar life histories. Unfortunately no full biography of Goffman’s life has been published in English (but see Winkin 1988b and Chapter 2 in this volume). Goffman was born in 1922 in Manville, Alberta, Canada, the child of Ukrainian Jewish parents, who had migrated to Canada shortly before the turn of the century. His family subsequently moved to Dauphin, Manitoba, where his father operated a tailor’s shop. Tom Burns (1992:9)—who enjoyed a lifelong correspondence with Goffman—writes that Goffman claimed that being a Ukrainian Jew explained a lot of about him; whether or not this is true is a matter for biographical debate, but it does indicate that he conceived of himself as an outsider. He received his BA degree from the University of Toronto in 1945, and subsequently his MA (1949) and Ph.D. degrees (1953) in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Goffman’s doctoral dissertation in sociology was directed by an anthropologist, W.Lloyd Warner, and was originally designed to be an examination of social structure on one of the Shetland Islands. Ultimately, Goffman examined systems of interpersonal deference and demeanour in this isolated Scottish community. From this early research Goffman was interested in the patterns of personal fronts that individuals enact to convince others of their moral rectitude. During the middle 1950s (autumn 1954 to the end

Claming the text 181 of 1957) Goffman was a visiting member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he conducted participant observation at St Elizabeths Hospital, eventually resulting in his classic volume, Asylums (1961a). He subsequently taught at Berkeley and at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1982. During his career Goffman published eleven books, including such influential works as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961a), Stigma (1963b), Relations in Public (1971), Frame Analysis (1974) and Gender Advertisements (1979). As a Canadian and a Jew (in rural Western Canada), as well as through his combination of hard-boiled cynicism and diffidence, Goffman, like Veblen, was an academic outsider (Posner 1978:67; MacIntyre 1969). For many years he ignored his disciplinary organization, only regaining some interest at the end of his life, eventually being elected President of the American Sociological Association. Like Veblen, some acquaintances allege that Goffman was an emotionally distant man; he was described by some as ‘sour or sardonic…who seemed to fear that to be splattered with joy would be lethal’ (Erwin 1992:339). It is a noteworthy tragic coincidence that Veblen’s first wife went mad and Goffman’s committed suicide. Both men are generally recognized to be brilliant, but both had reputations as being ‘difficult’ (Dorfman 1934; Riesman 1953; Hymes 1984; Lofland 1984; Marx 1984)—with a host of stories—true or apocryphal—circulating about each. Each was scornful of the educational institutions that gave them esteem, succour and salary—biting the hand that fed them (Veblen 1918; Goffman 1961a). These depictions may be overly dramatic, failing to capture the more sociable side of the figures, but they do capture a sense that these men frequently rejected convention. Matters of style While writing style in the social sciences has traditionally been seen as peripheral to the content of argument, the enshrinement of discursive strategies as central to understanding an argument has gained power in the past two decades (Gusfield 1976; Overington 1977; Bazerman 1981; McCloskey 1990). Literary critic Stanley Fish (1980) argues in his Is There a Text in This Class? that we must be concerned with how a text accomplishes its end, and not only the what that is being ostensibly argued: the illocutionary force of a text (Austin 1975). Bryan Green (1988:vii) persuasively argues that ‘sociological theory is a form of literary activity which belongs to a ubiquitous social practice: the simultaneous representation and construction of social life in determinate ways of word use’.

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Likely no two social scientists writing in English have been discussed more in terms of the significance of their style than Thorstein Veblen and Erving Goffman. In an age in which most social scientists seemed to want to avoid style (Mills 1953:vii), these men embraced it. Both are said to write with a corrosive pen. It is alleged that social scientists write with a dull intensity, aiming for precision through the creation of a subcultural jargon. Such cannot be said of Goffman and Veblen. While not all readers are entranced with their style, which, in places, can seem turgid and overwritten, the pair shattered conventions of academic writing. Both adopt a pose of being dispassionate, while addressing highly charged topics. If we accept the biographical view of Goffman and Veblen as detached outsiders, their style flows from their perspective on society. Irony is the footman/handmaiden of detachment. Irony belongs to the outsider’s dialectic between the incongruous is and ought (Brown 1987, 1983). The ironic stance withholds consensus (Burns 1953) until one’s audience adapts. Beyond irony lies satire—a trope that demands morality, exposing sham by extending it and taking it too seriously, arguing for ought claims held up, but not held to. In addition, humourous writing—irony and satire—is designed to persuade an audience. As a rhetorical trope humour gains its power from the challenge that the author puts forth in a taken-for-granted world. By virtue of their subversive indirection, detachment, irony and satire demand the creation of a mysterious author. In humourous tropes, locating the author within the text is problematic: the author and authorial persona need not be identical, in contrast to the transparent writer found in much social scientific writing. The themes of Goffman and Veblen are particularly likely to produce such stylistic devices. We expect to find detachment and irony when the authors gaze upward in the social structure, confronting the limits of their own status claims (Fine 1994). Examining the élites is particularly liable to produce this type of reading. Significantly neither Goffman nor Veblen often look downward in the status structure, confronting inferiors, where pathos or direct injustice claims might be more appropriate. Even Asylums, seemingly about mental patients, is really about their keepers. While there is much to be said about the range of the writing styles of these two scholars, I focus on the role of humour and irony in the texts— the tropes that make them most distinctive. Veblen In 1953 C.Wright Mills claimed that Veblen is ‘the only comic writer among modern social scientists’ and Conroy (1968:607) claims that ‘only a person utterly lacking a sense of humour could possibly miss the ironical outlook which pervades every page’.

Claming the text 183 For many readers, particularly those with a liberal or radical slant, Veblen’s account of the upper ‘leisure’ class is a form of ridicule. Miller (1954:xlix) speaks of Veblen as the ‘Bard of Savagery’. Kenneth Burke (1950:129) describes his style as ‘deadpan satire’. Veblen was particularly adept in using the technique known as ‘the Swiftian miscellaneous catalogue’ (Conroy 1968:612–13; Toulouse 1985:263– 4). For instance, Veblen writes of conspicuous consumption: The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols of divinities. (Veblen [1899] 1934:73) To describe narcotics, weapons and gods as aspects of the ‘quasi-peaceable’ is satiric. Veblen also poses words in deliberately perverse ways, relying upon pejorative and loaded phrases, while claiming that he disregards their moral moorings. For instance, Veblen ([1899] 1934:26) speaks of the accumulation of wealth as an ‘invidious distinction’, but then adds in characteristically faux naïf style: In making use of the term ‘invidious’, it may perhaps be unnecessary to remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterize. (Veblen [1899] 1934:34) Just as Goffman (1961a) later refers to the ‘campus’ of a mental hospital, so does Veblen refer to university students as ‘inmates’ of their colleges (cited in Conroy 1968:611). Goffman As with Veblen, Goffman’s writing highlights a palpable sense of style and poetics, to the point where some suggest that there is a close connection between Goffman’s substance and style (Atkinson 1989). Just as it would be hard not to recognize a passage of Veblen, so it is true of Goffman’s discourse. Manning (1976:9; also see Travers 1992b), for instance, speaks of Goffman’s ‘socio-literary method’, emphasizing the role of metaphor in his writing. Just as Veblen’s humour has been noted, so has Goffman’s. Rosenberg (1975:21) speaks of ‘the characteristically Goffmanian punch line’ and Dawe (1973:248; also see Hazelrigg

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1992:40) refers to Goffman as a ‘sociological jester’. Erwin (1992:341) suggests that through his style, Goffman made his readers ‘sweat a little and give a little’. Although Goffman’s most Veblenian paper, ‘Symbols of class status’ (his first published paper, in the British Journal of Sociology in 1951) is less satiric than most of his later work, Goffman shows evidence of the ironic juxtaposition that is so characteristic of most of his writing. For instance, Goffman (1951:302) links Chicago’s twenty-six charm schools to the British public school system as ‘a machine for systematically re-creating middle-class people in the image of the aristocracy’. I have previously detailed the role of sarcasm, satire and irony in Goffman’s Asylums (Fine and Martin 1990; see Burns 1992:13–14), drawing upon my own readings and those of other critics. Here Goffman has a worthy target—psychiatrists and their accomplices—to play off, suggesting that many professional claims serve purposes of social control, rather than ‘therapy’. The title, relying on the alternative meanings of asylum as madhouse and as sanctuary, captures this contradiction. Or consider the following Goffmanesque (Goffmaniacal?) passages: [D]ue to medical ethics, a physician cannot advise a patient to junk the badly damaged or very worn object his body may have become (as can those who service other types of objects), although the physician may tacitly give such advice to other interested parties. (Goffman 1961a:342)

Psychiatric staff share with policemen the peculiar occupational task of hectoring and moralizing adults; the necessity of submitting to these lectures is one of the consequences of committing acts against the community’s social order. (Goffman 1961a:366) As any good satirist, Goffman aims at the falsity and hypocrisy of social institutions and élites. Humour at the expense of status claims characterizes both writers, but this does not limit their stylistic repertoire. Both writers are known for the literary features of their texts—the creation of memorable figures and subversive images. As ‘literary’ men, Veblen was likened to Twain (Riesman 1953) and Goffman to Kafka (Berman 1972)—each captured through his scholarship the spirit of their

Claming the text 185 age (Nisbet 1976): the late Gilded Age (Mumford 1931; Diggins 1978) and the fragmenting of modernity (Dawe 1973; Sennett 1973; MacIntyre 1969). Further, both Veblen and Goffman are known to some critics, focusing on the more arcane, prolix, wearying and dense ‘academic’ passages, as turgid writers, too dense for most readers. Veblen, less prone to use dramatic examples culled from the popular media, has been criticized for his ‘opaque, convoluted style, marked by polysyllabic neologisms and esoteric terminology’ (Diggins 1978:37). In turn, not everyone admires all of Goffman’s writing. Burns (1992:5) speaks of Goffman’s ‘rather awful passages of sententious moralising’ and Sharrock (1976:332) finds Goffman’s Frame Analysis ‘wearying to read…far, far longer than it need be’. One should not claim, of course, that style, panache and humour exhausts the writings of Veblen and Goffman. While their analyses are given power, depth and resonance by the style in which they are put forward, the arguments are not only stylistic, but substantive. I now turn to the substance of their arguments. The domain of status symbols The corpus of the writings of Goffman and Veblen is broad and deep. It is impossible to cover the range of topics that each covers. Rather than providing a superficial review, I examine that area in which Goffman and Veblen have the greatest and most profound overlap: that of the presentation of status systems. Today the analysis of objects as imbuing status to an individual is a legitimate domain of research (e.g. Halle 1993; Bourdieu 1984; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981), thanks to the pioneering efforts of Veblen and Goffman in delineating the significance of the seemingly trivial objects consumed in our everyday life. In the words of Bennett Berger (1986:xi), describing Goffman, but equally applicable to Veblen, he was a ‘metaphysician of the banal’. Goffman and Veblen were particularly concerned in their early writings with the power of status symbols, and this remained a theme throughout their academic lives. The significance of status symbols is, of course, the topic for which Veblen is best known and the one in which he made his most searing contribution, particularly in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and the articles that preceded it. Veblen’s concern with status symbols reverberates through other writings, notably The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and The Higher Learning in America (1918). In the case of Goffman, the display of public status was particularly characteristic of his writings early in his career, notably his 1951 article, ‘Symbols of class status’ and his books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963b). Goffman’s later volume, Gender Advertisements (1979), touches on similar questions as related to the presentation

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of ‘sex roles’ in the mass media. The concern with how strangers are ‘interpreted’ and ‘processed’ in public situations is fundamental for Goffman. While Goffman’s writing is not as linked to the presentation of class symbols, his emphasis on the symbolization of normality in Stigma and Asylums is part of the same theoretical domain (see Gardner 1991). Although in some regards status adheres to individuals, as a result of their achievements, leading to a position within a social order, this position may not be known to all those who interact with them. In order to communicate one’s place to those outside of one’s acquaintanceship, members of a community create a system of status symbolism. As Goffman (1951:294) notes, ‘status symbols visibly divide the social world into categories of persons, thereby helping to maintain solidarity within a category and hostility between different categories’. This need for communication derives both from individual interests and from the demands of ‘society’ for predictability and order. Saying that a status system is necessary from the standpoint of those who wish to emphasize their placement at the top of a social order and for those who want a guide to the social system, does not mean that it is desirable for all actors or that the social system is a just order. Such symbols are often felt to serve no instrumental purpose in themselves, and, given their cost and diverting of resources from other activities, can be defined as a burden on the resources of the system as a whole. Surely those resources could be better used for other purposes, say critics. Yet, the system of symbols, while on the surface irrelevant to the organization of society, seems so embedded and so important to participants that it could hardly be ignored. From this social psychological perspective, they become important for a social system in providing a map to individual placement. Symbols, by virtue of their non-instrumentality, are social constructions par excellence—they belong to culture, and reveal fundamental truths about human character. Both writers embrace six assumptions that define the role of status symbols in social order. First, they claim that actions are motivated by status concerns. That is, status matters to individuals. Second, objects have status symbolism, and this status symbolism is broadly recognized within a community. Third, objects transfer status to their possessor. Owning or controlling an object is equivalent to deserving the status of the object. One is what one drives, wears, eats, and so forth. Fourth, people make consequential judgements of others based upon their status, and this affects how others are treated—their rewards and forms of social control imposed upon them. Fifth, status claims apply not only to individuals, but in some cases to the groups of which the individuals are a part. Sixth, women serve not only as social actors in their own right, but as adornment for men. They are objects that

Claming the text 187 provide status to the men who control them (a similar charge can be made of children, although the status differentiation of children seems considerably less dramatic than for women). An attractive or accomplished woman adds to the prestige of her man. This applies in a smaller, but evident degree, to men, who can impart status to the women who associate with them. These similarities do not assume that the two theorists have an identical orientation toward status systems. Veblen is much more global and general in his explanations. He operates out of an evolutionary framework—a perspective that often lacks systematic evidence. Veblen speaks of society operating in a general fashion, rather than understanding status symbols through interactions and local circumstances. Goffman, for his part, is more oriented towards the dynamics of status symbolization. In ‘Symbols of class status’ (1951), Goffman demonstrates both the on-going circulation of status symbols among social classes and the means by which symbols are controlled by techniques that prevent them from being misused by those who are not entitled to them. Symbols have a strategic quality in directing social interaction. Throughout his writing, Goffman focused on the ways that the symbol affects identities and relations, rather than the Veblenian concern with the role of symbol as an organizer of class and power relations in the society writ large. Goffman and Veblen place a heavy emphasis on the desire that individuals (for Goffman) or social groups (for Veblen) have to appear to others and to place others. The person becomes a social construction—a mannikin on which symbols can be hung—rather than a solid core that provides a basis for action. In industrial societies, individuals in their social surroundings become adjuncts to consumption behaviour. Admittedly the central metaphors differ for the two men: Goffman draws from the theatre, suggesting that human beings are ultimately actors, strangers to themselves (Travers 1992), whereas Veblen, at least in his early work, draws heavily on evolutionary metaphors, implying that human beings are sophisticated Neanderthals. Texts and social claims Goffman and Veblen agree that texts, like all symbolic objects, are judged in light of their social placement. We do not read books as ideas, floating freely in logical space, but as status objects, situated in a socio-political environment. This argument is both subversive and obvious. It is subversive in that it removes from intellectuals their most profound claim—that of being honest brokers of the ‘truth’. This transforms thought into a site of contention. Yet, from a sociological perspective,

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particularly from the cultural tradition of Veblen and Goffman, it should be apparent that every object is more than its ostensible meaning. The position of a scholarly work as a site for dispute is evident in the reactions to the classic ‘quasi-literary’ works of Veblen and Goffman. Ultimately the specifics of the dispute are less important than what the existence of the dispute tells us about the evaluation of status-linked objects. On what grounds do readers judge works—in the social sciences and, implicitly, elsewhere? As is now readily recognized by cultural theorists, the question cannot be answered by reference to the text alone, although only the most extreme would claim that the text has little to do with its own evaluation. Yet evaluation radiates beyond the object, since one cannot read without being a subject of the text: we read as self-involved actors. Judgements, particularly those that are publicly expressed, are socially situated; they belong to a community of discourse. This line of argument is congruent with the writings of Goffman and Veblen. In making a claim for the power of external forces to channel interpretations I describe five external features that affect how readers judge a text: (1) perspective, or evaluation of the subject matter or stance of the text; (2) genre, or analysis of this text in light of the conventional models available for understanding a particular class of discourse; (3) authorial reputation, or critical standing of the author; (4) authorial identity, or understandings of the way that the biography of an author affects the understanding of their texts; and (5) community standards, or the effects of the social structure of the critical establishment on interpretation. Stance Knowledge of a text’s stance predisposes the reader to expectations and evaluations. Authors perceived as allies of a reader receive, as a result, a halo around their work. Veblen was, in most readings, a political writer, presenting critical claims about the social order (Adorno 1967). As Tilman (1992) notes, the evaluation of his writing is connected to Veblen’s politics and one’s orientation to it. In contrast, Goffman is often seen as fundamentally apolitical or supportive of the status quo, a view that provokes criticism (Gouldner 1970; Dawe 1973; Erwin 1992). If one endorses the judgements of a writer, one is inclined to puff that author’s reputation by esteeming the work as a whole. In addressing audiences, one writes for interested parties. Radicals prefer radical writers; conservatives dislike them. It is rare (though not impossible) that any work is likely to change minds in broad and dramatic ways. Teresa Toulouse suggests that: Veblen has used his readers’ assumptions about progress and development to entice them into reading a text which suddenly perverts their expectations about the origin and continuance of their own institution. What they believed

Claming the text 189 was inevitable is shown up as the product of human choices and human manipulation. What seemed benevolent becomes despotic, open-selective, natural-diseased. (Toulouse 1985:255) Goffman in turn transforms the expectations of his readers: there is a germ of truth in all this, or we should not experience that uncomfortable recognition of our own public behaviours and displays when reading Goffman. But we smile at the recognition, albeit ruefully…It renders the tribute due to the sociological jester, whose jokes always contain a shrewd observation of social life—but also a caricature and a denial of the real substance of that life. (Dawe 1973:248–9) While these claims may (or may not) reflect the author’s intent, they sidestep questions of selection of reading material, assuming that readers will be continually surprised by materials they happen upon. Outside of the educational system, readers have broad choices and rarely select a work of whose basic perspective they are ignorant. To imagine that Veblen and Goffman (or another writer) can routinely change hearts and minds (perverting their expectations) transforms the Writer into a Promethean hero, a claim for which there is little warrant. More plausible is the recognition that contemporary attitudes toward a writer’s orientation affects the dimensions of their reputation. Writers write for communities, and these readers (and, subsequently, later generations) set the reputation of a work through their responses. Commenting in the 1960s, Bernard Rosenberg suggests that Veblen is now accessible because of his cynicism and dim view of the universe: How strange for its day—and how right for ours—is Veblen’s observation that ‘Human culture in all ages presents too many imbecile usages and principles of conduct to let anyone overlook the fact that disserviceable institutions easily arise and continue to hold their place in spite of the disapproval of native common sense.’ Almost everyone was able to overlook that fact. (Rosenberg 1963:4)

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Veblen’s apparent disparagement of capitalism was congruent with the outlook of many in his intellectual audience (Diggins 1978:227). Lewis Mumford (1931:314) claimed that the Depression, which Veblen had allegedly predicted, helped his reputation. The world has a way of catching up to (and sometimes bypassing) authors. Mencken (1919:71), in blasting Veblen, emphasizes that he learned about Veblen from socialist contacts, and considered The Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘simply Socialism and water’. One wonders what Mencken’s reaction would have been to a similarly written analysis recommended by a conservative. Veblen and Mencken, in fact, shared targets of their contempt. Brander Matthews, a fierce critic of Veblen, was a contact of Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, who apparently instigated the harsh review (Tilman 1992:104). This relationship surely contributed to the venom of the attack on Veblen’s criticism of university administrators. Matthews tied style to content, noting ‘It is evident enough that Mr Veblen does not write cleanly because he does not think clearly.’ He discloses ‘absolute ignorance of the institution he has taken for his topic’, and the book ‘is unusual in its bad manners and perhaps, I should say, in its bad morals’ (quoted in Dorfman 1934:409). Goffman, too, in his stance is seen as a man of his age, and those who accept Goffman’s alienated cynicism tend to admire his work. Peter Manning (1976), for instance, sees Goffman as making an important statement about a crumbling society: Stylistically and metaphorically, his writing captures the changing tone of American life. His conceptual approach, his use of metaphor as a literary method, all contribute to the resonance of his work and to its essential ambiguity. Goffman’s changing view of everyday life indicates that his abiding concern is with problems of justice, power and civility. His work, anything but a trivial or cynical exercise, shows just how fragile any social order is, and reveals the potential horror in a society where the appearance of civility is just that. (Manning 1976:13) Manning’s rendering of Goffman’s themes justifies his (positive) evaluation, just as Gouldner (1970) uses his evaluation of Goffman as enshrining bureaucratic consumer capitalism to condemn his writing.

Claming the text 191 A diversity of opinions can be found in any age, and total agreement on textual questions is rare. My point is simply that the attitude that one brings to the work (and the expectation of the work as filtered through gatekeepers) affects one’s evaluation. Genre We often judge what we read according to the genre to which we are told that it belongs. If a text is said to be satire, we treat it as we believe that satire should be treated. If a text is ‘propaganda’, it is read suspiciously. For both writer and reader, context connects to rhetorical strategy. Toulouse (1985:251) announces, ‘the what of the Theory then must become subject to its how’. This is nearly the obverse of the previous argument, suggesting that content can only be known through rhetorical choices. The discursive strategies selected produce the dimensions on which an argument will be evaluated. Further, genre affects evaluation. If a work is defined as satire, it will be compared against other satires; if considered a serious academic treatise, it will be contrasted with other treatises. The choice is consequential for evaluation. Without the proper definition, the genre may not be seen. That some did not hear the irony and satire of Goffman and Veblen suggests that this is not the only possible reading. Introductions often serve as guides for the unwary reader, setting forth a claim as to what is to follow. A book without a foreword plays a dangerous game; the more important the book, the more likely one will find a foreword: the less that the book can speak for itself. Even Goffman’s Frame Analysis, when reprinted by Northwestern University Press was felt in need of a foreword—provided by a sympathetic Bennett Berger (1986). The publisher felt that such a foreword would contextualize the volume. The genre has consequences for how a text is read. For instance, one can deflect an attack without condemning the whole by claiming that it is only humour. Rick Tilman proposes this is a standard technique by which liberals vitiate Veblen’s radical critique, suggesting they: view him primarily as a social satirist whose wit made him perhaps the most important comic writer of the day. But those who portrayed Veblen in this fashion tended not to take him very seriously as a social scientist, since they found him amusing rather than enlightening. (Tilman 1992:262–3) Placing his remarks in a comic register, makes style the content, masking the ‘real’ content from examination. A similar comment might be made about Goffman’s treatment by radicals, as they treat his ostensible lack of interest in political matters

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as a smokescreen, deflecting readers from what they consider the essentially political discourse presented (Craib 1978:85). Authorial reputation Sociologists increasingly recognize that an artist’s reputation has significant effects on how audiences view their achievements. Writers who are famous have a literary edge over those who do not (the Matthew Effect, applied to the arts). This view is abhorrent to literary critics and one rarely, if ever, finds a critic suggesting that Veblen wrote well because he was famous, although from a sociological standpoint his fame affects how his work is seen (Kapsis 1992). The famed author, particularly one with a cult following, becomes the source of all inspiration, and is gaily referred to by those who have not taken the opportunity to read the work, but have only a second- or third-hand acquaintance with it. John Kenneth Galbraith remarks: There is, in fact, a tradition in American social thought which attributes all contemporary comment and criticism of American institutions to Veblen…It is possible, indeed, that nothing more clearly marks an intellectual fraud in our time than a penchant for glib references to Veblen, particularly for assured and lofty reminders, whenever something of seeming interest is said, that Veblen said it better and first…When, as with Veblen, the man is enlarged by a nimbus, the latter should be brightened, not dissolved. (Galbraith 1973:v–vi) Similarly with Goffman. While The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life has a large readership, Goffman’s denser Frame Analysis is more likely to be known by reputation. The fact that Goffman was such a figure, such an eminence, meant that many could get by with a cursory knowledge of his core slogans and phrases. Goffman served for many young qualitative and interactionist sociologists as a figure whose fame and presence legitimated their analysis and methodological choices (Marx 1984). The enormous number of citations of Goffman’s work, while partly a reflection of his intellectual patrimony, is also a function of his role as an intellectual touchstone. The sedimentation of a writer’s ideas into commonplace notions provides opportunities for later theorists to advance new readings. Authorial identity From his biography will ye know him. A close connection exists between our construction of a writer’s life and the techniques by which we understand texts. Readers use their understandings of the biographical background of Veblen and Goffman as marginal men to understand that their style must be satiric, tongue-in-cheek and debunking. The facts that suggest that they are outsiders validate our critical analysis. A symbiotic relation exists between their

Claming the text 193 writings as understood and their constructed biography. Did their outsider status create their lack of interest in the possibility of effective, positive reform, their suspicions, their negativity, or did their texts allow us to define their background? When we propose a biographical or psychological interpretation of a writer’s style, we utilize self to understand writing. Through uncertain answers to our cloudy questions, we select assumptions that become a lens for the author’s text. Of course, only some authors have reached the level of esteem at which we feel that it is worth plumbing their biographies. Generally we prefer to wait for the target to achieve deceased status, so one does not have to cope with nettlesome objections from one who might be presumed to know better (see Denzin and Keller 1981; Goffman 1981b), but, according to theory, may not. Veblen’s background, coupled with his lifestyle, proves irresistible. David Riesman (1953) wrote in a section entitled ‘The style and the man’: It is remarkable, as with so many other creative and neurotic men, that the work got done at all, that there is a Veblen shelf to outlive its author’s agonies. The agonies, to be sure, reveal themselves in the formlessness of Veblen’s books. What is striking about Veblen’s style, both early and late, is that…chapters and the books not only lack organization…but take two steps back for every one forward. It is as if Veblen hit and ran, and then, finding himself unhurt—perhaps thinking it was because no one heard him—hit again, only harder, then ran again, only further…even his long articles, taken as a whole, convey an obsessive quality, as of a man who fears that he will not be heard—but also that he will be heard, and therefore committed. (Riesman 1953:37–8) Through his self shall ye know his shelf. Goffman must be grateful that—so far—he has been less subject to such psychologizing, an approach that would seem to be anathema to his whole approach. Yet we can find some attempts to connect the person and the work, as when Jason Ditton writes: Frame Analysis is vintage Goffman. A bit crotchety, perhaps, middleaged theorizing inevitably—long, unedited, rambling, but between ponderous chapters this mighty work occasionally sparkles with brief snatches of the old puppeteer deftly bringing familiar puppets…back to ephemeral life. (Ditton 1976:311)

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Gary Marx, an early student of Goffman’s, writes in a more admiring, but equally biographical vein: Goffman’s verbal and writing styles were very powerful. In class he played them beautifully—subtle wit, sarcasm, poker-faced delivery, and understatement had one on the edge of the seat. The class was entertaining. Goffman’s humour and sharpness were without parallel. But this was always a means to revealing some hidden and poignant truth. He offered a searing moral message regarding individual dignity. (Marx 1984:655) These perspectives depend on biographical claims—the last refuge of the reader who believes that the text is a mirror of the writer’s soul. Community Great communities develop great writers. The process operates in two ways. First, great writers can be said to create a group of followers around them by virtue of the message preached. Second, a group can enshrine a writer to validate their own importance and that of their beliefs. Both Goffman and Veblen captured and helped create a community. By the end of Great War, Veblen had become a celebrity. His works were becoming noticed and his ideas were having some effect in progressive and radical circles. He was invited to speak at intellectual gatherings, and in 1919 was persuaded to settle in New York and write for The Dial, a prominent liberal magazine. H.L.Mencken noted the suddenness of Veblen’s rise to prominence: [I]n a few months—almost it seemed a few days—he was all over the Nation, the Dial, the New Republic and the rest of them, and his books and pamphlets began to pour from the presses, and the newspapers reported his every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began gabbling about him…All the reviews were full of his ideas. A hundred lesser sages reflected them. Every one of intellectual pretensions read his books. Veblenism was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world. There were even, in Chicago, Veblen Girls—perhaps Gibson Girls grown middle-aged and despairing. (Mencken 1919:64, 79) While Mencken goes to excess, he has sociological insight. Writers can become fads, used by intellectual communities that the writers validate and that leave in their wake reputations for wit and brilliance.

Claming the text 195 Goffman’s career is inextricably tied to his training at the University of Chicago in the post-World War II era (the Second Chicago School [Fine and Ducharme 1995]). Goffman’s reputation is a function of the large and prestigious generation of graduate students with whom he trained—and by whom he was esteemed and named most likely to succeed. This community provided a base of support for establishing his brilliance within the profession. Simultaneously that generation of sociologists that came after provided an enthusiastic audience for using Goffman’s scepticism to critique the academy and other social institutions. Goffman himself did not need to be radical. The radical community was able to incorporate his insights, even if they did not make him one of them and mistrusted his politics (Marx 1984). He could serve as an older, established eminence to justify his own radicalization at the hands of others. It is not only through the reputation of an author that we judge writing, but through the social infrastructure that puffs the writer. To disparage Veblen or Goffman distances one’s allegiance from some players, while bringing it closer to others. For one to be part of a social and intellectual grouping, one must be prepared to admire those they admire, both the content of the ideas and the style, as filtered through the interpretation of the group. When one selects consorts, one gains their friends, and those monuments of the culture to which they bow. Sceptics together Symbolic interactionist theory (Fine and Kleinman 1986) and postmodern literary analysis (Fish 1980) agree that a text acquires meanings from its audience(s). These meanings involve all facets of the text—‘style’ and ‘substance’, taken apart and together. The whole of interpretation is situated. Beyond this, the text helps inform us about the life behind the text, just as the life behind informs us about the text in front. In analysing the writings of Thorstein Veblen (notably his The Theory of the Leisure Class) and Erving Goffman (notably his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) I have argued that interpretations of texts depend in part on a set of variables, capable of being specified, that are external to the text itself. Specifically I have suggested that readers consider: (1) the stance of the text and the ways that this stance is congruent with readers’ attitudes; (2) how the text compares with other works in the genre in which the work is placed; (3) the effects of authorial reputation; (4) extrapolations from the assumed biographical and psychological features of the author; and (5) the effects of communities of interest that accept or reject the author and the work. In cases in which the text is ambiguous or particularly likely to be subject to multiple divergent interpretations, these issues are central in accounting for the disciplinary position

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of the writing. The text leaves room for interpretation, which analysts rush to fill. In such cases, the objective, denotative reading of a text is not sufficient. The reader must contribute to the meaning of the text—to recontextualize it, in light of knowledge gleaned from other sources. Like the proverbial need for museum labels to permit viewers to appreciate works of art, the standing of the work and the narrator infuses the reading with meaning. The presentation of narrative in everyday life can only partly be controlled by the presenter. The analysis of social science texts as discursive productions has only begun to be explored, but before it goes too far, we should be wary of perspectives that focus on the text as a discrete object, rather than as an interactive nexus. The examination of the works of Veblen and Goffman, and, as important, the responses to these works, reveal the diversity of reactions to social scientific texts. One cannot say—objectively—that The Theory of the Leisure Class or The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life are well or poorly written, that they are sound or unsound analysis, that they are satire or serious, that they are liberal or conservative, that they are right or wrong; rather, audiences make these decisions in the light of external knowledge and expectations, as well as from the texts themselves. Even the most scrupulous social scientist is ultimately at the mercy of those who choose to digest the text, who in turn are at the mercy of those who have set the conditions under which the text will be digested. The processes described above have continuing effects on the evaluations of the works of Veblen and Goffman. Intellectual fashions are dynamic, and, as fashions change, classic works acquire new meanings. The increased attention to interpretivist and constructivist paradigms have surely had positive effects in the evaluation of both Goffman and Veblen. Our increased attention to an economic system dependent on consumerism make both men seem very modern, even postmodern. Today Veblen and Goffman are touchstone thinkers; whether this will continue is a function of present-day concerns within communities of readers. By comparing and contrasting the works of Veblen and Goffman, we are able to recognize that although intellectual fashions have altered during the twentieth century, some core themes—status, consumption, public identity, selfpresentation—have remained central to an understanding of the structure, culture and interaction nexus. Both men recognized that appearance provides a means by which social orders come to recognize themselves and challenge behaviours. In this, understanding the works of Veblen and Goffman teaches us not only about the empirical world ‘out there’, but about how we can come to understand texts and reputations.

Claming the text 197 It is clear that both Goffman and Veblen would acknowledge that intellectual objects are ultimately the basis for status claims and political dialogue for those with axes to grind. As scholars, we must transcend the commonplace perception that the biographies, personalities, styles and arguments of Goffman and Veblen are similar, realizing that both men would likely be suspicious of any claim that invested their work with genius, without a recognition that such a claim ultimately is a means by which audiences comfort and congratulate themselves in the toasty glow of ‘classic’ texts.

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Index

access information 55–6 action ‘slots’ 120 actor’s point of view 121–2, 127–8, 129–32 Adamson, A. 23 Adorno, T. 174, 188 agency 68, 71–2, 122, 152 Agger, B. 68 agoraphobia 58 air traffic controllers 132 American Academy of Arts and Sciences 3 American Anthropologist 174 American Sociological Association 1–2, 3, 82, 173, 181 anarchism 157, 170 Anchor Books 110 Anderson, R.J. 151, 153 ‘anthropologically strange’ 141 Anxiety of Influence, The 171 apophrades 173–4 apriorities, sociological 70 Aquinas, St Thomas 33 Aronoff, J. 6 ‘arrangement between the sexes, The’ 42–4, 57–8 Ashley, D. 67 Ashworth, P.D. 5, 110 askesis 173 Asylums 3, 11, 12, 19, 34, 44, 82, 85, 86, 87, 96, 99, 100, 105, 110–12, 114, 115–16, 118, 181, 182, 184, 186 Atkinson, P. 14, 38, 183 audience 72–4, 141, 146–7, 149, 152, 191–2, 195 Auerbach, A. 22

authorial identity/persona 182, 188, 192–4 authorial reputation 188, 191–2 Austin, J.L. 181 Bachelard, G. 35 back region 67, 85 Baltasound 21, 25–6, 158–61 Barker, R. 32 batch living 112 Bateson, G. 32 Battershill, C. 5 Baumohl, J. 85 Bay, E. 22 Bay (née Goffman), F. 22, 32 Bazerman, C. 181 BBC 170 Becker, H.S. 24, 32, 35, 116 Behavior in Public Places 9, 11, 15, 56–8, 85, 87, 92, 163, 165, 166 Being and Nothingness 110 Bell, D. 24 Bendix, R. 28 Benjamin Franklin chair 3 Benson, P.R. 87 Berger, B. 185, 191 Berger, P.L. 69 Berkeley, University of California at 3, 4, 20, 27–9, 35, 40, 181 Berman, M. 6, 107, 178, 185 Bertaux, D. 37 Bettelheim, B. 25 Better Homes and Gardens 25 biblical scholars 132 Big Brother 174–5

Index billiards 159–60, 165 biographemes 21 ‘biographical illusion, The’ 37 Birdwhistell, R. 23, 27, 32, 38 Bjorklund, D. 77 Bloom, H. 156–8, 162, 164, 167, Blumer, H. 4, 27, 28, 40, 151 body gloss 68 Boltanski, L. 33, 35, 36, 139 Boston Herald 27 Bott, Elizabeth 23, 24, 32 Bourdieu, P. 8, 33–4, 37–8, 139, 185 Branaman, A. 18 British Library 170 Brown, P. 55 Brown, R.H. 5, 182 Bulmer, M. 107 Burke, K. 140–2, 152, 153, 183 Burns, T. 84, 111, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185 Butler, N.M. 190 Cahill, S.E. 157 California Assembly 81, 87 Camel cigarettes 73 Carleton College 179 Carlin, J. 24 category mistake 140 Caudill, W. 96, 97 causality 5 Chandler, R. 107 Chayko, M. 5 Chicago 109 Chicago habitus 34–5 Chicago school of sociology 5, 8, 34, 107–8; second Chicago school 12, 195 Chicago, University of 1, 4, 21, 23–7, 32, 34, 36, 39–40, 70–1, 107–8, 109, 179, 180, 195 Choate, A.S. 27, 32 Chomsky, N. 120 Chriss, J.J. 2, 10–11, 64–80, 157 Cioffi, F. 6 civil inattention 15, 55, 57–8, 64, 163–6 civility 190 claimsmaking 43, 45 Clayman, S.C. 15 Clifford, J. 38, 117 clinamen 172 Clough, P.T. 116 Cohen, I.J. 15

217

Collins, R. 6, 66, 82, 118 colonization 113–15 Columbia University 34, 190 common-sense knowledge/ understandings 126, 127–9, 140–1, 153, 159 ‘Communication conduct in an island community’ 26–7, 108, 110, 111, 157–62 (see also doctoral dissertation) community care 85 (see also community containment) community containment 92 community standards 188, 194–5 conceptual frameworks 7 confessional ethnography 105 Connell, R.W. 45, 71 Conrad, P. 111 consistency rule 146 conspicuous consumption 179 conversation analysis 137, 141, 153, 155 conversion 113, 115 Cooley, C.H. 32 ‘cooling the mark out, On’ 99, 114 Copernicus 6 Corbin, J. 106 Cornell University 179 Coser, L. 40 Cottrell, L. 28 Coulter, J. 12, 139 Council of State Governments 81, 97 courtesy system 43, 61 courtship system 61 ‘crack in the mirror’ mood 32 Craib, I. 191 criticism of Goffman’s sociology 6 Critique of Judgement 179 crofting 167–8 (see also ‘Communication conduct in an island community’) Csikszentmihalyi, M. 185 Cuddihy, J.M. 35–6 cult of the individual 68 cultural competence 65 cultural dopes 64 culture industries 171 cynicism 143–4, 189–91 daemonization 173 Dahrendorf, R. 10 ‘dart-like style’ 141–2, 153 Dauphin (Manitoba) 21, 22, 32, 180

218

Index

David, P. 8 Davis, F. 24, 35 Dawe, A. 184, 188–9 deconstruction 116, 118 deference 100 definition of the situation 13, 67, 119–37 deinstitutionalization 85–6, 92, 97 (see also community care) demeanour 100 Denzin, N.K. 4, 193 Depression, the 190 Derrida, J. 116 description 142, 149 despotic societies 165 Dial, The 180, 194 Diggins, J.P. 185, 190 direct response 25 discrepant role 162–3 Ditton, J. 83, 193 Dixon 108 doctoral dissertation (Goffman) 1, 15, 31, 175 (see also ‘Communication conduct in an island community’) documentary 34 documentary method of interpretation 14, 134, 150 Domestic Manners of the Americans 159 Dorfman, J. 181, 190 Dorris, J.M. 69 Down and Out in Paris and London 160, 168–9 downward conversion 153 Doyle, B. 159 dramaturgical circumspection 140 dramaturgical discipline 140 dramaturgical loyalty 140, 145, 149 dramaturgy 64, 66, 110, 140, 143–4, 149, 153 Ducharme, L. 195 duplicatively organized device 148 Durkheim, E. 5, 15, 23, 32, 55, 68, 144, 156–8, 162, 163, 164, 167, 171, 172–5, 177 Durkheimian arguments 117, 118, 125, 129 (see also orthodox Durkheimianism) Dylanesque 104 dysphoria, interaction 27, 66, 76 Edgell, S.R. 179 Edinburgh, University of 26, 110 Edinburgh edition (of The Presentation of Self) 2

Edmondson, R. 118 effective closure 158 Eliot, T.S. 172 élites 177, 178, 182 ‘Embarrassment and social organization’ 36, 75 epistemic individual 38 Erwin, R. 181, 188 ethnographic history 8, 38 ethnographic narrative 38 ethnography 12, 104–18 (see also confessional ethnography) ethnography of communication 38 ethnomethodology 12–14, 70, 119, 121, 130, 132, 153 ethogeny 5 ethology 138, 166 Etiquette of Race Relations, The 159 euphoria, interaction 27, 76 existentialism 5, 41 face-to-face interaction 115, 133, 159–66, 172 (see also interaction order) ‘face-work, On’ 36 Fairbrother, P. 86, 98 fallacy of unwarranted extrapolation 152 family flock 138 family members and relationships 94–5 faultables 141 ‘Felicity’s condition’ 83 feminist viewpoints 18, 56 fiction 14 field 8, 37–8 fieldwork 11, 21, 29, 34, 38, 104, 121 (see also Goffman as fieldworker; participant observation) Fine, G.A. 2, 6, 14, 15–16, 115, 177–97 Fish, S. 117, 181, 195 Fish, S.L. 69 floor cues 153 Florence 30 focused interaction 166 (see also unfocused interaction) Forms of Talk 3, 36, 116 foundationalism 64 Frame Analysis 3, 13, 35, 83, 116, 120, 167, 168, 181, 185, 191, 192, 193 frame of reference 139–40 Freud, S. 24, 32, 35–6, 109, 172 Friedson, E. 24

Index front, personal 180; front region 67 functionalism 66, 71 Galbraith, J.K. 192 games 138, 152, 153 Gardner, C.B. 2, 9, 42–63, 100, 186 Garfinkel, H. 12–14, 32, 64, 70, 119, 120, 129, 133, 138, 143, 150, 151, 152 Geertz, C. 38, 105 Gender Advertisements 3, 44, 56, 181, 186 gender domain 45, 173 generative grammar 120 genre 188, 191 gentrification 36 Gerhardt, U. 70 G.I.Bill 24, 39–40 Giddens, A. 3, 84, 105 Ginzburg, C. 39 Gissing, G. 170–1 Glaser, B. 106–7 Glassie, H. 32 Gluckman, M. 121 Goffman, A. 22 Goffman, E.: authorial voice 104 (see also authorial identity/persona); biography of 1– 3, 8–9, 19–41, 139, 180–1; citations of 102, 192; and feminist concerns 18, 56–9; as fieldworker 21, 25–9, 86–7, 97–8, 104–5, 108–11, 158–61, 167–8, 169, 174, 176; impact of ideas 3–4; influenced on 31–3, 156–76, 177–9; methodological conventionality of 119–20, 135; patrimony 156, 192; politics of 157, 179, 188–9, 191, 195, 196–7; reluctant postmodernist 115– 17; student of society role 173; textual devices 138–55; at University of Manchester 120–1 Goffman, F. 22, 32 Goffman, M. 22 Goffman’s spiral 7, 106 Goffmanesque 6, 18, 184 Goffmaniacal 184 Goffmanizing of the world 152 Gonos, G. 4 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism 33 Gouldner, A.W. 5, 67, 69, 179, 188, 190 greedy institutions 88 Green, B. 181–2

219

Grierson, J. 23 Grob, G.N. 81, 87 Gronfein, W. 2, 11–12, 61, 81–103 Gross, N. 71 grounded theory 106–7, 108, 116–18, 161 Group Processes Conference 27 Gurwitsch, A. 70 Gusfield, J. 24, 34, 35, 181 Habenstein, R. 24 Habermas, J. 3, 19 habitus 8, 33–4, 36–7 haecceity 152 Hall, J.A. 5, 179 Halle, D. 185 Hammersley, M. 106 Harré, R. 5, 6 Hart, C.W.M. 23, 32 Harvard University 34, 70 Hazelrigg, L. 15, 184 Helm, D.T. 140–1, 149, 153 Heritage, J. 74, 149 heterosexually romanticized rhetoric 9, 45–51 (see also rhetoric) Higher Learning in America, The 180, 185 history 38–9 Hochschild, A.R. 61 Holy Grail, The 172 horizon 127 Hughes, E.C. 12, 25, 26, 28, 32, 40, 109, 111 humour 34, 72–3, 182–5 Husserl, E. 177 Hyde Park (Chicago) 25 Hymes, D. 19, 32, 38, 181 Ichheiser, G. 24 identity 112, 152 Ignatieff, M. 106 impression management 67, 151 (see also dramaturgy) indirect response 25 Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, An 180 ‘insanity of place, The’ 11, 82, 85, 91–6, 98, 99 institutional efficiency 88 institutional reflexivity 42–3 instructed reading 14, 148 interaction order, the 1, 27, 70, 82, 83–4, 87, 90, 94, 99, 130, 133–4, 156–7, 158, 173

220

Index

Interaction Ritual 19, 85 interactional analysis 154, 172 interactional rules 84, 159–66 interactional sequencing 120 interactionist sociologists 192 (see also symbolic interactionism) interchangeability of standpoints 127 intertextuality 157, 161 interviews as a research method 63 intransigent line 113–14 investigative journalists 132 invidious distinction 183 irony 12, 15, 34, 72–3, 116, 117, 118, 153, 178, 183, 184, 191 James, W. 32, 130, 177 Jameson, F. 116 Jaworski, G.D. 5 Jeffrey, R. 24, 32 Johns Hopkins University 179 Johnson, A. 85, 87 Johnson, E.(Edgar) 180 Johnson, E.(Elsie) 85 Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health 87 Jones, R.A. 177 Joseph, I. 154 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 104 jury deliberations 131 Kadushin, C. 40 Kafka, F. 6, 185 Kant, I. 179 Kaplan, S.L. 38 Kapsis, R. 192 Kazin, A. 180 Keller, C.M. 4, 193 Kendon, A. 2 kenosis 172 Kerr, D. 76 Kirk, S. 111 Kleinman, S. 195 Kornhauser, R. 24 Kornhauser, W. 24 Kuleshov’s effect 31 Kutchens, H. 111 La Capra, D. 38 La Mise en Scène de la Vie Quotidienne 33

labelling theory 11 Labov, T. 77 Labov, W. 32 Lang, G. 24 Lang, K. 24 language games 138 Lanigan, R.L. 5 Las Vegas 29, 32 Laughlin, J.L. 179 Laxdaela Saga 180 Le Parler Frais d’Erving Goffman 154 ‘lecture, The’ 116 lecturing 72–3 Lee, J.R.E. 119, 135 Leidner, R. 74 Lemert, C. 18 Lemert, E. 32 Lévi-Strauss, C. 35, 105 Levinson, S. 55 Life 40 lifeworld 68–70 linguistic turn 142–4 Linton, R. 70 literal activity 130 literary style 14 Livingston, E. 154 Lofland, J. 5, 84, 178, 181 London 160 loose coupling 172 Louch, A.R. 139, 152 Luckmann, T. 69, 70 Lyman, S. 18, 36 Lyon 30 MacCannell, D. 5, 110 MacIntyre, A. 181, 185 MacIver Award 3 Macy, J., Jr Foundation 27 Malinowski, B. 105, 109 Manchester, University of 120–1 manic individuals 84 manipulativeness 143–4 Manitoba, University of 108 Mannheim, K. 133, 150 Manning, P. 1, 6, 7, 12, 14, 18, 84, 104–18, 143–4, 178, 184 Manning, P.K. 6, 14, 190 Mannville (Alberta) 22, 180 Marcus, G.E. 38

Index Martian professor, Veblen as 180 Martin, D. 15, 115, 184 Marx, G.T. 107, 178, 181, 192, 194, 195 Marx, K. 35, 151 Master’s thesis (Goffman) 25 Matthew Effect 192 Matthews, B. 190 Mauksch, H. 24, 35 Maynard, D.W. 14 Maynard, F.B. 22 McCartney, J.L. 35 McCloskey, D.N. 181 McHoul, A.W. 150 McLuhan, M. 40 Mead, G.H. 32, 34, 177 Mead, M. 27–8, 40 Mechanic, D. 87 mechanical solidarity 109 medicalization of social problems 111 Meltzer, B. 24 membership categories 143, 145 membership categorization devices 14, 146–9 membrane, interaction 172 Mencken, H.L. 190, 194 Mendlovitz, S. 24 mental hospitals 81, 152, 183 (see also Orwell); criticisms of Goffman’s views 96–7 mental illness 11–12, 81–103, 173; medical model of 81–2, 98–9 mental patients 35, 84, 90–1, 159, 182 mental symptoms 81, 82–5, 91–4, 98–9 ‘Mental symptoms and public order’ 92 Merton, R.K. 71 Messinger, S. 32, 152 metaphor 14, 15, 16, 138, 141, 142, 152, 153, 184, 190 methodical misnaming 140 methodology 119–20 micro-macro levels 39, 40 microsociology 30 Miller, D. 2 Miller, P. 183 Mills, C.W. 25, 178, 182, 183 Minnesota 179 mirror of illusion 35 Missouri, University of 180 moral career 158 mortification processes 88–9, 112–13 Moyer, I.L. 74

221

Muir, E. 39 Mumford, L. 180, 185, 190 Nadel, S. 71 Naegele, Kaspar 2 narrative 30–1, 38–9 Nation, The 194 National Film Board 23, 32, 35 National Institute of Mental Health 110, 181 natural attitude 70, 78, 127, 141, 151, 154 natural language 142–3, 154 naturalistic observation 116 (see also participant observation) ‘nature of deference and demeanor, The’ 36 negational self 10, 66–8, 75–7 negative rites 55 ‘neglected situation, The’ 120 neo-Kantianism 118 New Grub Street 170 New Republic, The 194 New School for Social Research 180 New York 194 New Yorker, The 25 Newspeak 171, 174 Nineteen Eighth-Four 169–70, 174 nominative methodology 39 non-person 15, 156–76 normal appearances 15, 167 normalized distaste of public places 55 Northwestern University Press 191 objective response 25 offence and offensiveness 93 Ogburn, W.G. 40 omnipotent actor 122 O’Neill, J. 69 Ordeal of Civility, The 35 order-enhancing procedures 151 orthodox Durkheimianism 122, 136 Orwell, G. 159, 160, 168–71 Oscar Awards 76 Osmond, H. 96 Ottawa 23, 32, 35 Overington, M. 181 Panofsky, E. 33, 35 Papandreou, A. 28 Paris 33, 109, 152, 160, 168 Park, R.E. 107, 109

222

Index

Parsons, T. 27, 32, 64, 70, 71, 144 participant observation 9, 12, 62, 105, 107 Peirce, C.S. 179 Penguin Books 110 Pennsylvania, University of 3, 21, 32, 38, 181 performances 36, 146–7 Perry, H.S. 18 persons 92–3, 187 (see also non-person; self) perspective 132, 188–90 perspective by incongruity 14, 84, 140–2, 149 Pettit, P. 6 phenomenological intactness 151 phenomenology 5, 13, 24, 66, 68–71 Philadelphia 29, 32 Piddington, R. 26 planned misnomers 140–1, 145 Platt, J. 107 ‘playing it cool’ 113–15 poetics 183–4 politeness 55 (see also civil inattention) politicized rhetoric 9 (see also rhetoric) Poni, C. 39 popular culture 66 Posner, J. 181 postmodern ethnography 12, 14, 115–17 postmodernism 5, 64, 196 poststructuralism 116, 118 Powell, W. 40 power 47, 51–2, 59–61, 190 praxiological shift 149, 153 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The 2–3, 5, 8, 15, 33, 36, 104, 109, 120, 121, 143, 162– 3, 165, 181, 186, 192, 195, 196 presentism 176, 177 President of the United States 114 Presidential Address 1, 82, 173 (see also ‘interaction order, the’) privacy 19–20 privilege system 112–13 production procedures 142, 144 professional zoning 111 projective response 25 projective testing 25, 26 (see also Thematic Apperception Test) Proust, M. 24, 32 Psathas, G. 5 psychiatrist-patient interaction 111–12 Psychiatry 83, 99 psychoanalysis 36

psychotic conduct 92 public places 9, 36, 43–4, 56–9; normalized distaste for 55, 59 public harassment 9, 42–63; as characterization of group 50–1; as courtship move 47–8; defined 44; as equality measure 50; fellow feelings 52; as flattery 46–7; grand claims 52; as men’s responsibility 53–4; as result of men’s nature 48–9; as women’s fault 50 puzzle-solution 150 qualitative sociology 121, 192 Rabinow, P. 105 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 5, 23, 109, 144 ‘Radio talk’ 76–7 radiologists 132 Ragin, C. 116 Raisins and Almonds 22 Rawls, A.W. 2, 110, 133 realism 116–18 reflexivity 86, 137 Relations in Public 9, 17, 33, 42, 56–8, 99, 116, 181 remedial interchange 55; remedial work 76–7 Reno 32 repairables 141 reproducible theme 150 resistance 73 response cries 149, 153 rhetoric 43, 45–6; politicized 45–6, 51–4, 60–1; romanticized 45–51, 47–8, 60–1 rhetorical devices 15, 84 rhetorical strategy 191 Riesman, D. 25, 28, 179, 180, 181, 185, 193 ritual order 130, 172–3 Rochberg-Halton, E. 185 Rogers, M.F. 15, 77 role dispossession 88 role distance 9–10, 65–6, 68, 69, 71–7 role embracement 10 role theory 10, 16, 65–6, 68–72 Rorty, R. 117 Rose, E. 142, 152 Rosenberg, B. 178, 180, 189 Rosenberg, P. 178, 184 Rothman, D. 81 routines 88 Ruggiero, G. 39

Index rules of irrelevance 84 Ryle, G. 140 Sacks, H. 14, 32, 120, 133, 144, 146 sacred/profane 10, 65–6, 173 St Elizabeths Hospital 11, 12, 21, 27–8, 32, 86– 7, 97–8, 108, 111, 112, 113, 117–18, 181 St John’s High School 22 Sankoff, G. 19–20, 32 Sapir, E. 41 Sarbin, T. 28 Sartre, J-P. 5, 32, 41, 109–10 satire 182, 191, 192, 196 Saturday Night Live 74 Schaffner, B. 27–8 Schegloff, E. 2 Schelling, T. 32 Schneider, D. 28 Schneider, J. 111 Schutz, A. 13, 70, 119, 127–9 Schwartz, H. 151 Schwartz, M. 159 Scott, M. 36 Scull, A. 81, 87, 96 secondary adjustments 90–1 Secord, P.F. 5 Sedgwick, P. 96, 98–9 Segal, S. 85 Seidman, S. 64 self 66–8, 87–9, 92–3, 99, 157, 167; inmate 88, 90–1; mortification of 112–13 (see also negational self, sundered self, virtual self) Self, W. 156 self-presentation 67, 77 self-referential 116 self-talk 153 Sennett, R. 5, 185 sense—assembly procedure 146–7 Serge, V. 170–1 serial organization 145 server-served relationship 160 Sharrock, W.W. 7, 13, 119–37, 151, 153, 185 Sharron, A. 67 Sherzer, J. 32 Shetland Hotel 26, 109 Shetland Isles 1, 17, 21, 158–61, 167–8, 170, 180 (see also Baltasound; Unst) Shibutani, T. 28

223

Shils, E. 71, 110 Siegler, M. 96 simile 138, 142, 152 Simmel, G. 13, 28, 32, 34, 69–70, 104, 107, 177 sincerity 167 situated activity system 72, 75 situational withdrawal 113–14 situationally disadvantaged group 44 Skinner, Q. 177 slaves 159 Smith, D. 108 Smith, G.W.H. 1–18, 69, 77, 104, 107 social action 128 social agent 37–8 Social Construction of Reality, The 122 social control 81, 89, 90 social deviance 106 social facts 129 social gathering 67 social order 119, 130, 137, 144, 186, 188, 190; alienation from 91; problem of 64, 128, 133–4 social organization 2, 17, 85, 88, 96, 142, 144, 186 social reform 170 social rules 133 (see also interactional rules) Social Sciences Citation Index 39 social situation 132 social structure 121, 172–3 socialism 157, 170, 190 socials, community 25–6, 160 society, capitalist 190; industrial 187; interactional 173 sociological description 138–42 sociological project 1–7 sociologist’s standpoint 121–2, 126, 129–32 sociology, American 170; linguistic turn in 142–4; mainstream 173 soliloquizing 153 Sorjonen, M. 74 spontaneity 167 standardized relational pairs 146 Stanford University 180 status claims 197 status symbols 177, 178, 185–7 (see also ‘Symbols of class status’) Stigma 3, 44, 63, 181, 186 Still, J. 157

224

Index

stock of knowledge 70 (see also common-sense knowledge) Stone, G.P. 2, 24 Strategic Interaction 141 Strauss, A. 27, 106–7 street remarks 54–5, 59 Strong, P. 6 structure 122, 133 (see also agency) structuralism 4–5 Studies in Ethnomethodology 12, 13, 120, 122 style, writing 181–2, 183–5 (see also textuality) stylistic analysis 142–4 stylistic unity 150–2 subjectivism 122 Sudnow, D. 129 Suicide 23 sundered self 82, 99–100 symbolic interactionism 4–5, 120–1, 151 symbolic realism 5 ‘Symbols of class status’ 36, 179, 184, 186–7 symptomatic behaviour 84, 95–6 tape on fieldwork 104 Tarde, G. 177 team 141 Tennyson, A., Lord 172 tessera 172 textuality 14–16, 138–76, 187–95 theatrical performance 125–6, 187 (see also dramaturgy) Thematic Apperception Test 25 theory 106–7; formal 107 (see also Simmel); general 109, 111; substantive 107 Theory of Business Enterprise, The 180, 185 Theory of the Leisure Class, The 180, 185, 190, 195, 196 tie-signs 57–8 Tilman, R. 179, 188, 190, 191 Time 40 Tiryakian, E. 70 Toronto, University of 23, 31, 108, 180 total institution 86–91, 100, 110–15 Toulouse, T. 183, 188–9, 191 transinstitutionalization 100 (see also deinstitutionalization) Travers, A. 2, 5, 6, 14, 15, 72, 77, 156–76, 184, 187 Trobriand islanders 109 Trollope, F.M. 159 Tseëlon, E. 5, 67

Turner, J.H. 67 Twain, M. 184 underlife 90 unfocused interaction 166 (see also civil inattention) United States Food Administration 180 university administrators 190 unperson 169–70 (see also non-person) Unst 21, 158, 160, 165, 167–8, 169 Van Maanen, J. 38 Veblen, T. 15–16, 177–97 Verhoeven, J.C. 5, 17, 18, 105, 111, 144 verstehen sociology 121 virtual offence 55 virtual reality 38 virtual self 75, 76 vulgar competence 150 Waitkzin, H. 111 Waksler, F.C. 5 Warner, W.L. 12, 24, 25, 26, 32, 40, 144, 180 Washington, D.C. 11, 21, 27, 108, 110 Waste Land, The 172 Watson, D.R. 13–14, 35, 135, 138–55 Weber, M. 106, 118, 177 Weinstein, R.A. 87, 96, 97 West, C. 18 Westley, W. 24 White, H. 38 Whitehead, A.N. 152 Wieder, D.L. 151, 152 Wilensky, H. 32 Williams, R. 7, 118 Winkin, Y. 8–9, 19–41, 138, 180 Winnipeg 21 Wirth, L. 40 Wisconsin 179 Works and Lives 105 world of daily life 121–2, 127, 129, 130–1 Worton, M. 157 Wrong, D. 23, 31–2, 64 Yale University 179 Yiddish 19 Young, T.R. 5, 67 Zimmerman, D.H. 14