The Goffman Lectures: Philosophical and Sociological Essays About the Writings of Erving Goffman

By Thomas Hood and Dwight Van de Vate

This book consists of essays presented as lectures to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The context was a special class during which students were reading the published work of Erving Goffman and writing about what they were reading. Some students enrolled as philosophy students and others as sociology students. Professor Hood and Professor Van De Vate often handed out printed versions to the students on the day they were presented. Dr. Hood took these printed versions to prepare the manuscript in a continuous form. The lectures themselves were presented some years apart, since the two departments agreed to offer the course only occasionally. The essays were designed to stimulate questions about what Goffman concludes, as well his techniques of observing and analyzing social life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524572662

Thomas Hood

About the Author Tom Hood, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Sociology joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1965. Current research and writing interests include social suffering and collective distress, the social psychology of appearance and the attribution of character, the work of Erving Goffman, environmental movements in America. His published research on the Billy Graham crusade in Knoxville and his works on the social psychology of experiments have been reprinted and widely cited. Professor Dwight Van de Vate Jr., PhD (deceased), a deeply respected member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, taught there for over thirty years. Dwight’s favorite technique was to ask a student to use a concept in a question. One of Dwight writings, which reached book length, is Romantic Love—A Philosophical Inquiry, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Tom Hood, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Sociology received his university education at Michigan State and Duke Universities. The Bachelor of Arts degree with high honors was awarded at M.S.U. in June 1960. In August of 1960 “Ginger” Johnson married Tom. She provided family support by teaching during his first years in graduate school in addition to his graduate research assistantship. Duke University awarded the A.M. degree in Sociology in 1964 and in August of that year their son, Christopher Charles was born. Ginger had by this time begun teaching at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. In September, 1965, Hood began teaching at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Their daughter Heather was born in September , 1969 not long after Duke University granted Hood the Ph.D. degree. During those years Ginger provided great family support and much assistance in completing drafts of the dissertation . Professor Hood is a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Gamma Mu, Phi Eta Sigma, and Alpha Kappa Delta and Alpha Zeta honor societies and FarmHouse Fraternity. Professor Hood joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1965 as an instructor He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1969, Associate Professor in 1973, Professor in 1985. He served as Head of the Department of Sociology from January 1983 until June 1991. Professor Hood has served on many Department, College and University committees. In 1991, he served as President of the University Senate. Active in outside organization, he has served as President of the Southern Sociological Society, as an officer and committee member in several sections of the American Sociological Association, President of the Popular Culture Association in the South, and Executive Officer of the international organization, The Society for the Study of Social Problems from 1991 .to 2009 Currently his research and writing interests include social suffering and collective distress, the social psychology of appearance and the attribution of character, the work of Erving Goffman, environmental movements in America. His published research on the Billy Graham crusade in Knoxville and his work on the social psychology of experiments has been reprinted and widely cited.

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Contents

Introduction To The Goffman Lectures

The Goffman Lectures Dwight Van de Vate

Part I The Genre Or Genus

Part II Society

Part III Human Being

Part IV Identity

Part V Hoofed Embroidery

Part VI Models And Metaphors

Part VII The Body

Conclusion To The First Series

The Goffman Lectures Thomas Hood

Part I Introduction

Part II Perspectives On Agreements About Social Behavior

Part III As Others See Us

Part IV Self Knowledge And The Generation Of Agreements, Part 2

Part V Identity Games: Some Practical Suggestions For Creating The Illusion Of Reality.

Part VI Identity Games And Breaking Through

Part VII Identity-Games: The Context Of Consensual Reality

Part VIII Identity Games And The Content Of Consensual Reality

Part IX Goffman’s Individual

Dwight Van deVate Lectures on Frame Analysis

Part I

Part II

Part III

Reflections On Proof

Part IV

Thomas Hood—Frame Analysis

Part I What Is A Frame?

Part II What Is A Frame? (Part Two)

Part III What Is A Frame? (Part Three)

Part IV Does Who Exist Outside A Frame?

Part V Do Individuals Make Frames Or Do Frames Create Individuals?

Part VI How Do Intentions Work In Organizing Behavior?

Part VII Where Do Frames Exist?

Part VIII When Does A Frame Begin And When Does It End?

Part IX My, How You Talk!

Afterword By Tom Hood

INTRODUCTION TO THE GOFFMAN LECTURES

D WIGHT VAN DE Vate and Thomas Hood wrote these essays to introduce any reader interested in philosophy or sociology to the writings of Erving Goffman. The essays select particular points of interest from the published writings of Goffman. These essays don’t summarize Goffman’s work. Instead essays comment by relating Goffman’s ideas and concepts to observations of other authors on similar topics. Often each essay illustrates Goffman’s work by citing or crafting examples. These essays were offered as lectures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxv ille.

Goffman’s work has inspired and continues to inspire people observing and writing about social life, particularly as it exists in the Western world. Many illustrations are drawn from American culture. The book, Asylums, draws upon Goffman’s observations in a mental hospital in America. Gender Advertisements draws upon clippings of advertisements appearing in magazines published in America. The long essay, Where the Action Is, uses observations made in American gambling establishments. To call Goffman an ethnographer of English and American culture would be close to accurate and in other ways quite inaccurate because of the interpretive analysis introduced. Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life inspired many to approach understanding social life using a dramaturgic perspective. Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk have drawn the interest of persons studying linguistics. Strategic Interaction represented a brief application of game theory in the analysis of face-to-face interaction.

The essays in this book should encourage the reader to read one or more of the seminal writings of Goffman. The authors believe that Goffman’s most complete work is Frame Analysis. The last two sections of the book are devoted to that book. Nevertheless, books such as Stigma, Encounters, Interaction Ritual, Relations in Public, Behavior in Public Places, and Strategic Interaction deserve attention. Goffman’s focus on individual behavior appears throughout his work such as his reflections on the management of spoiled identity in Stigma. The emphasis on the individual is most clear in the early essay, The Nature of Deference and Demeanor, which is reprinted¹ in Interaction Ritual.

Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself stubbornly remains as a deity of considerable importance. He walks with some dignity and is the recipient of many little offerings. He is jealous of the worship due him, yet, approached in the right spirit, he is ready to forgive those who may have offended him. Because of their status relative to his, some persons will find him contaminating while others will find they contaminate him, in either case finding that they must treat him with ritual care. Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest. (Interaction Ritual, p. 95)

The way in which an individual manages him or her self during face-to-face interaction with others is the consistent subject matter of Goffman’s writing. This emphasis has made him a favorite author of persons writing in the symbolic interactionist tradition, which seems appropriate given the fact that Goffman was trained at the University of Chicago. Both Van de Vate and Hood begin their consideration of Goffman with comments on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. All of these essays subscribe to the view found at the end of this first book of Goffman that the self is socially constructed and real only in so far as social constructions can be seen in their consequences. Goffman writes the following:

"A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern is whether it will be credited or discredited. In analyzing the self then we are drawn from its possessor, from the person who will profit or lose most by it, for he and his body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg; in fact these means are often bolted down in social establishments." (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, pp. 252–253)

The last part of the above quotation makes Goffman a true sociologist because social establishments refers clearly to the continuities in social order that sociologists study. Social institutions are the patterns of expectations and enduring organizations that provide the context within which human behavior takes place. As ethnomethologists like Harold Garfinkel point out, Familiar scenes of everyday activities, treated by members and the ‘natural facts of life,’ are massive facts of the members’ daily existence both as a real world and as the product of activities in a real world.² Although Goffman and Garfinkel were contemporaries their approach to studying this social order differed. Goffman through his accessible and winning style of describing the human social situation drew a larger audience both within and outside the discipline of sociology. Yet both were describing the way in which institutional patterns influenced the behavior of individual actors.

In other parts of Goffman’s work and particularly in Frame Analysis, the nature of social establishments is developed. Goffman develops and defines concepts for analyzing and understanding social establishments as well as individuals. Most of the essays in this book concentrate on one or the other of these themes in Goffman’s work.

Frame Analysis deserves the most attention because it represents a celebration and analysis of the particularly human ability to be chameleon-like in adapting to different social situations by modifying the appearance of the social self. Goffman states this at the end of the book

Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them. Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides for where and how we will show through, the culture itself prescribing what sort of entity we must believe ourselves to be in order to have something to show through in this manner.³

Frame Analysis describes and analyzes the techniques for managing what other people believe to be verifiable characteristics of an individual. Particular attention is given to the use of language or more particularly talk as a means of individual and social control.

We hope you enjoy the journey through Goffman as much as we have.

PART 1

The Genre or Genus

G OFFMAN COMES TO us identified as a sociologist, sociology in turn identified as the science of society. One of our problems will be to decide what these identifications mean. Sociology is said to be a social science. Science, as a that concept developed in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, came to mean an intellectual enterprise with a particular nature, method, and purpose. The nature of science, the what it is of it, is mathematical reasoning. Its method, the way it works, is by experiment, that is, the test of the truth of a specimen of scientific reasoning is its ability to predict the future course of our sense experiences. And the purpose of science is, simply, technology: better things for better living. Science then is the use of mathematical reasoning to predict sense experience in order to control sense experi ence.

Now whether or not the social sciences—which developed several centuries later—conform to this classical model, is, of course, one of our problems. We can see immediately that Goffman’s work does not: he employs no mathematics, neither experiments nor (in the standard controlled sense) observes, he makes no predictions, and his works have no technological outcome, no applications. Evidently, then, if we want to think of Goffman’s work as scientific, we shall have to develop another that the classical physical model I have indicated above.

Russell remarks in Mysticism and Logic:

The kernel of the scientific outlook is a thing so simple, so obvious, so seemingly trivial, that the mention of it may almost excite derision. The kernel of the scientific outlook is the refusal to regard our own desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the world. (p. 46)

Here we have the concept, so apparently self-evident, of objectivity and with it the distinction between the participant, whose grasp of the world is structured by the pressing practical concerns he looks to the world to frustrate or satisfy and the scientific theorist or observer, who adopts a method intended to give him knowledge of the world independent of and uninfected by whatever may be his practical concerns. Here we have a broader definition of science, where science is more or less synonymous with theory, and where we can look upon the hypothetical-deductive method of the physical sciences as one specific way of being theoretical or scientific and we can look for the social scientist to have another way, another method of achieving the same general objectivity definitive of theory.

That the world is however it is whether we like it or not is, of course, a truism. But it is the guiding principle of science in the generic sense of that term. This guiding principle will take on specific form where what we study is assumed to have an existence independent of our likes and dislikes. It will take a very different form; however, where those very likes and dislikes themselves are our subject matter, as they are in the social sciences. The scientist has sensations and reacts to them: some are pleasant, some painful—they define his interests, his likes and dislikes, hopes and fears. They form the foil against which he is aware of his scientific discipline, that is, his objectivity. In another way of saying it, they define his location, his attachment to a particular time and place, and he aims as a theorist to arrive at conclusions, which are general, in other words, independent of time and place. Hence we require that a scientific law be universally quantified with respect to times and places, that it contain time and space only as independent variables.

Now we know how to particularize these platitudes where we are dealing with well-defined physical sciences such as physics and chemistry. And we want to see now how to apply them to the social sciences, and to Goffman’s work in particular. In other words, we want to know what is his method, what is the particular ideal of objectivity or generality—I have argued that they are the same—that disciplines his work.

In one sense, this is very easy to say. As the name suggests, sociology is the science of society—not, in Goffman’s work at least, or society as a general term, but of our society, our urban, technological western society, very particularly in the United States. Society in this sense is a phenomenon, which transcends each of us individuals and with respect to which it is possible to generalize. So we can regard Goffman’s conclusion as prefixed by the antecedent In our society, at all times and places… and here we have the full generality, which is the scientific ideal. (I shall come to the difficulties with this later.)

As a first formulation of Goffman’s work, then, we say that he is trying to frame general laws about the behavior of human beings in our society. While this may seem again platitudinous, we have in fact uncovered three concepts, which Goffman assumes in defining his own work to himself. These three givens are society, human beings, and time. We can speak of them as the basic conceptual vocabulary of our readings. Somewhat nearer at hand and more on the surface is behavior. I shall take these up one at a time.

First, behavior, and with it a first look at human being. Our laws are to be laws of human behavior, which we shall assume to be situational, that is, to be the sort of thing that is supposed to be controlled by certain moral laws. Behavior, we assume is behavior in situation, or in other words, the behavior we will study is behavior of which the behaver himself can give an account. What it is, to borrow a remark from Hegel, can be said of it. Here conduct is probably a more apt word than behavior: animals behave, but there is no such thing as animal conduct. Our general laws about human behavior in our society, then, will be laws, which concern how persons ought to act in social situations.

How ought a person to act in a social situation? asks for the moral laws, which define that situation. These are not observable in the traditional empiricist’s sense. They are observable only to someone who has been trained to observe them, that is, to conduct himself by them. Each of us has been socialized, has been taught how to behave, and by reflecting upon this training, we ought to be able to retrieve the moral laws which we have internalized and be then in a position to observe human behavior with respect to those laws and to generalize about this topic. But there is a difficulty.

And I think the difficulty is a very deep difficulty indeed. Briefly moral training doesn’t equip otherwise full-formed human beings with certain additional attributes or skills, but it makes them human in the first place. When we examine the socialization process, then, we do so from the perspective of having been socialized: not to be so is not an open alternative for us. We are therefore required at once to certify our allegiance to moral laws and to observe them. Now note that certifying one’s allegiance to them—observing them in that other sense of observe—isn’t something which a human being might do or not do, but is that the doing of which makes him human. Accordingly in a general sense to obey them or not to obey them is not a choice, which he, as a human being, has and it will not therefore present itself to him as a conscious decision. The nature of a moral law is such that it obliges one to obey it automatically, unthinkingly, and spontaneously; that is the kind of allegiance the law demands, and almost always receives.

Our problem—Goffman’s problem—is to take behavior with respect to laws which are supposed to do their work unconsciously or preconsciously, laws which are supposed to be learned and forgotten, and to observe the behavior by remembering the laws. And the problem here is that this very act of remembering is one, which could only be undertaken by someone who had been properly trained to forget. And that brings me to an interlude.

Of course Goffman writes well, as you will have observed. We want to ask ourselves just how he writes well, and why he writes well that way, or in that style. I shall work with a paragraph from page 105 of The Presentationn of Self in Everyday Life (PSEL).

Since we all participate on teams we must all carry within ourselves something of the sweet guilt of conspirators. And since each team is engaged in maintaining the stability of some definitions of the situation, concealing or playing down certain facts in order to do this, we can expect the performer to live out his conspiratorial career in some furtiveness.

A restatement might go like this:

Presentational activity tends to involve the cooperative efforts of groups of persons. The members of such a group derive gratification from the experience of group solidarity, although certain moral laws prohibit this gratification. Such a group de-emphasizes certain facts in order to maintain the stability of some definition of the situation. For these two reasons, each member of such a group tends to conceal aspects of his thought and behavior.

In standard scientific writing, we anticipate a number of stylistic features. There will be an elaborate apparatus of footnotes and bibliography intended to place the author’s contribution within the larger structure of science. As a token of the author’s objectivity, the first-person will be studiously avoided and the author will tend to favor the passive voice. A specialist vocabulary will be employed; even where lay synonyms would do as well. Humor, irony, wit, sarcasm, in general any coloration of mood will be avoided, for the author’s purpose is to present the facts alone, to the quite rigorous exclusion of his own reactions to the facts. This, of course, is his objectivity, and we should look upon lab report prose as a presentational device for assuring the reader that the author has this morally prescribed quality. We find little of this in Goffman. The footnotes are relatively few and often to offbeat sources. The first-person—usually we—is employed, and Goffman doesn’t noticeably overwork the passive voice. He writes in English, not scientese. In short, Goffman’s prose doesn’t present the author as the white-coated, dispassionate, impersonally dedicated, machine-like member of the scientific team.

What is striking about Goffman’s writing is the mood or tone of wry irony, of sympathetic engagement coupled with detached disdain. Clearly the purpose of wring in this particular way, of giving off these signals in particular is not, as in standard lab-report prose, to assure the reader, whom the author already assumes scientifically objective, that the author too is objective and impersonal. Goffman’s purpose instead is to induce a certain moral distancing in the reader. The secret guilt of conspirators: the phrase is a little too piquant, a little too apt. The reader is caught up in this subtle overdramatization of the dramatization—and yet he finds the author holding the sentiments he thus evokes at arm’s length. The same could be said of to live out his conspiratorial career in some furtiveness. By being at once put on and put off, by providing thus a model reaction to reactions both Goffman and the reader know the reader possesses and cherishes, the reader is quietly told how to be quietly cued into the role of participant observer.

PART 2

Society

W E SAID THAT Goffman is trying to frame general laws about the behavior of human beings in our society, and we said that this formulation makes use of three basic terms, society, human being, and time. We now turn to the first of these, soc iety.

The fundamental methodological assumption of the natural sciences, as we know, is the principle of causation or of the uniformity of nature; we used one formulation of it to define science above. The fundamental methodological assumption of social science as Goffman practices it that society maintains itself through time. So far as I know, this functionalistic principle is nowhere clearly expressed in Goffman’s writings. The philosophical reader should examine Goffman’s essay, The Nature of Deference and Demeanor, in Interaction Ritual (IR) and, above all, he should familiarize himself with the first and last chapters of Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Synonyms for society are the the social order and the world of social interaction (PSEL, p. 3). Society is an organization or order of human beings—the philosophically preferred term is frequently person—which maintains itself through time by means of moral laws which persons are trained to observe. Through time—for how long? For the duration of the investigation, at least –the problem transcends the limits of social science. What is the time through which society maintains itself is another problem, which transcends the limits of social science. Here we enter the province of the philosopher, the other student of PSEL, page 66.

We are to suppose, then, as a methodological assumption, that beneath the apparent confusion and disorder of everyday life or of the social world, there must be a principle of order which controls the behavior of the human beings or persons who make up that world, and controls their behavior in such a manner as to insure that it will endure through time. When Goffman writes, Society is organized on the principle that (PSEL, p. 13), he explicitly expresses this assumption.

How, then, is society organized? It is the office of the social scientist to discover this. By what means is society organized? What are the tools or instruments through which society organizes itself? Society is composed of persons, human beings, and society organizes itself by organizing them. Society organizes them by training them to respond to one another in certain ways. This training is called socialization, or the socialization process. And human beings are trained in the manner appropriate to members of their species, that is, morally. In other words, society does not create itself ex nihilo as it were, but instead it makes human beings out of the unlikely materials that nature supplies, and the being which society finally manages to confer upon itself is a moral being, being in the form of ideals in action in the minds of men. Ideals, as we know, are always imperfectly realized. Society exists and maintains its existence through time in the form of human motivations, in the form of a felt tension between how men act and how they think, perhaps without realizing it, that they ought to act.

I have expressed myself so boldly and explicitly on this point because I wonder—no doubt unfairly—whether Goffman himself is quite candid about the methodological underpinnings of his own work. Whitehead remarks somewhere that the first section of a scientific textbook is typically the worst written and worst thought, for it is there that the author defines his topic and method, and his heart is elsewhere, viz. In applying the method to the topic, the business of the balance of the book. Here, however, with the methodological underpinnings, is where the philosopher’s work is, our task being not to ask how society is organized—we should leave this to experts such as Goffman—but what it means to bring these assumptions to bear on this topic. Not the solution of the problem, but the topic of it is our concern.

When we survey the social world—we may define it provisionally as the world of human beings in face-to-face interaction—we find an apparent disorder, confusion, and unintelligibility. The functionalistic sociologist assumes that beneath this apparent disorder there is a moral order, imperfectly realized, but nevertheless dominant and pervasive. What are ordered—and the point should be heavily emphasized—are human motivations.

The point should be emphasized because it determines the logic of the investigation. For example, one may observe:

On un-crowded evening airline flights, after their initial duties have been performed, stewardesses may settle down in the rearmost seat, change from regulation pumps into loafers, light up a cigarette, and there create a muted circle of non-service relaxation, even at times extending this to include the one of two closest passengers. (PSEL, 129)

Now what this by-no-means-invariable behavior means depends in an obvious way on who’s asking. If we imagine the pilot-captain thundering, What does this mean? we will envisage one response; if on the other hand one of the girls asks the other, Why do we do this? the answer will probably be—assuming the question isn’t thought out of order—something like, Well, it’s more comfortable. A well-developed theory of regions and region-behavior is of course, something we expect only the social scientist to be privy to. He finds himself, then, in an awkward position. All actions mean, and his function is to discover what they mean. The meanings he attributes to them, however, are meanings, which the actors themselves may not recognize and may even explicitly disavow as shameful. Persons claim to be morally autonomous, to know that they are doing, to know the meanings of their actions. The meanings which the social scientist attributes to those actions, then, become doubly suspect: first, because they are often meanings which the actors explicitly deny having meant, and second, because they depend upon laws which are no more than morally general. Thus on a late evening flight, if a variety of favorable conditions obtain, then if it suits their mood, the stewardesses ought to be permitted to take their shoes off, etc. Those who come to sociology with natural—scientific expectations will surely find this a disappointing excuse to a generalization.

Under the influences of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, some students of modern society have learned to look for the symbolic meaning of any given social practice and for the contribution of the practice to the integrity and solidarity of the group that employs it. (IR, p. 47)

This symbolic or ceremonial meaning will often be hidden, as we have seen, by an explicit rationale that the practice is useful or meaningless. When we look beyond this rather heavily guarded statement about groups to society itself—from which groups derive such integrity as they have—we shall have to say that socialization is moral training, the internalization of certain moral laws. Moral laws are laws of action, which is always concrete and particular. As they present themselves abstractly to the intellect, then, they are necessarily incomplete, and require to be supplemented by schemata—in the Kantian sense—or by imaginative guides