Beyond Goffman

Beyond Goffman
Approaches to Semiotics
96
Editorial Committee
Thomas A. Sebeok
Roland Posner
Alain Rey
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Beyond Goffman
Studies on Communication,
Institution, and Social Interaction
Edited by
Stephen Harold Riggins
M out on de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1990
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Beyond Goffman : studies on communication, institution, and

social interaction / edited by Stephen Harold Riggins.
p. cm. — (Approaches to semiotics ; 96)
Based on a conference held Dec. 1987 at the Central
Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89925-613-9 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Goffman, Erving — Congresses. 2. Social inter-
action — Congresses. 3. Communication — Social aspects —
Congresses. I. Riggins, Stephen Harold, 1964- , II. Se-
ries.
HM291.B44 1990
302.2-dc20 90-45500
Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication Data
Beyond Goffman: studies on communication, institution, and

social interaction / ed. by Stephen Harold Riggins. — Berlin ;
New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1990
(Approaches to semiotics ; 96)
ISBN 3-11-012208-1
NE: Riggins, Stephen Harold [Hrsg.]; GT
© Copyright 1990 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30

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Contents

Introduction 1
I. Probing the theory

Dean MacCannell
The descent of the ego 19
Eric Schwimmer
The anthropology of the interaction order 41
Joshua Meyrowitz
Redefining the situation: Extending dramaturgy into a theory of
social change and media effects 65
Richard Lanigan
Is Erving Goffman a phenomenologist? 99
Hans Dua
The phenomenology of miscommunication 113
Nirmala Srinivasan
The cross-cultural relevance of Goffman's concept of
individual agency 141
Charles Battershill
Erving Goffman as a precursor to post-modern sociology 163
Patricia Ticineto Clough
Reading Goffman: Toward the deconstruction of sociology . . . . 1 8 7
II. Expanding the Scope: Forms of institutions, forms of language

Peter K. Manning, Keith Hawkins
Legal decisions: A frame analytic perspective 203
George Park
Making sense of religion by direct observation: An application
of frame analysis 235
vi Contents
Arlie Russell Hochschild

Gender codes in women's advice books 277
Juliet Flower MacCannell
Forms of talk/figures of speech 295
III. Expanding the Scope: Objects, events and communication

R.S. Perinbanayagam
How to do self with things 315
The power of things: The role of domestic objects in the
presentation of self 341
Promode Kumar Misra
The mediating role of objects in the functioning of social structure:
A case study of kwai 369
T. K. Oommen
Erving Goffman and the study of everyday protest 389
Paul Bouissac
Incidents, accidents, failures: The representation of negative
experience in public entertainment 409
Subject Index 445
Name Index 449
References to works by Erving Goffman 455

List of Contributors
Charles Battershill
Teaches Sociology at York University, Toronto.
Paul Bouissac
Professor of French and Linguistics at the University of Toronto.
Professor of Sociology at Fordham University, New York.
Hans Dua
Reader cum Research Officer at the Central Institute of Indian
Languages, Mysore.
Keith Hawkins
Professor at the Center for Socio-legal Studies at Wolfson College,
Oxford.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard Lanigan
Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the Speech Communication
Department at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Dean MacCannell
Professor of Applied Behavioral Sciences at the University of Cali-
fornia, Davis.
Juliet Flower MacCannell
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine.
Peter K. Manning
Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at Michigan State University,
East Lansing.
Joshua Meyrowitz
Professor of Communication in the Department of Theater and
Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham.
Promode Kumar Misra
Professor of Anthropology at North-eastern Hill University, Shillong,
India.
viii List of contributors
T.K. Oommen
Professor of Sociology at the Center for the Study of Social Systems,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
George Park
Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John's.
R. S. Perinbanayagam
Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New
York.
Stephen Riggins
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfound-
land, St. John's.
Eric Schwimmer
Professor of Anthropology at Laval University, Quebec.
Nirmala Srinivasan
Consultant for the HRD Systems/Organizational Analysis in
Bangalore, India.
Introduction
Long before the untimely death of Erving Goffman in 1982 his early
publications had achieved the status of classics in American sociology.
Although he did not form a school in the proper sense of the word,
his influence nonetheless quickly permeated many sectors of socio-
logical and anthropological research. His books are still among the
most frequently quoted publications in the social sciences. Goffman
has also been fortunate in another respect: few other modern
sociologists have attracted so many theorists of stature whose critical
interpretations have kept their ideas fresh and alive (e.g., Collins 1986,
1988; Ditton 1980; Drew - Wootton 1988; MacCannell 1983; Rawls
1987;Schudson 1984).
Goffman seems to have understood (perhaps from modern art?)
that in the long-run nothing succeeds quite like a style which combines
a lucid surface and an inner core which resists unambiguous inter-
pretation. His style obliges readers to be creators in their own right
and fashion their personal version of his multi-layered theory. Several
of his books are apparently simple enough that they are assigned as
required reading for introductory sociology courses, but so complex
at the level of their theoretical assumptions that scholars still puzzle
over whether he should most accurately be defined as a deviant
symbolic interactionist (Fontana 1980), a latter-day Durkheimian
(Collins 1988), a structuralist (Gonos 1977), a post-modernist 'avant
la lettre' (see Clough and Battershill, this volume), or a semiotician
(McCannell 1983). This variety of interpretation bears witness to the
originality and profoundity of his probing into the complexity of
social processes.
This book is a collection of original articles which endeavors to
expand the scope of the theoretical views and empirical research
Erving Goffman contributed to the social sciences. Most chapters take
a critical stand toward his ideas while still recognizing his fundamental
contribution to the field. Hence, the title Beyond Goffman. From
this critical and multi-disciplinary examination, Goffman emerges
2 Stephen Harold Riggins
as a provocative, protean figure, whose relevance to contemporary

issues in the social sciences is more evident than ever. The book is
divided into two parts. The first concentrates upon theory and
explores Goffman's intellectual heritage (symbolic interactionism,
phenomenology, the notion of social situation, the relation between
micro and macro levels of analysis) and also examines the way his
work relates to contemporary theoretical movements (semiotics, post-
modernism, deconstructionism, and feminism). The second part of the
book probes the insights found in his diverse empirical studies and
expands the domain of their applications.
The project of publishing this book originated at an international
conference titled 'Institution, Communication and Social Interaction:
The Legacy of Erving Goffman,' which was held in December 1987
at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India. It
brought together Western and Indian scholars, for whom Goffman's
work had played a significant part in their own research, and who
had confronted some of the seemingly intractable issues raised by
his theoretical stands. Goffman had himself little interest in being
an ethnographer of the developing world, but many of his insights
into the self-society relation and symbolic communication should
in principle apply everywhere (Giddens 1988:253, 273-74). Self-
presentation and social interaction are problematic processes in all
societies, although the social context in which they occur may be
quite varied (see, e.g., Asante and Gudykunst 1989). Several of the
contributors to this volume expand the scope of Goffman's ideas by
applying them to India, which is more rural, more diverse, and perhaps
more traditional than the 'Anglo-American society' with which
Goffman felt most at home as a professional sociologist.
The personal relationships which the contributors to this volume
have had with Goffman are diverse. Some were his colleague, neighbor,
friend; one was a fellow graduate student at the University of Chicago;
another took one of his introductory sociology classes. One contributor
was afraid to enroll in his graduate courses because of his reputation
for being so critical. It is also worth noting, since it was a sign of
the times, that another contributor missed in the early 1970s his only
chance to hear Goffman deliver a public lecture out of a mistaken
belief that his ideas were narrow and dated.
The opening section of this book includes eight papers whose
focus is more theoretical than empirical. The division is, of course,
somewhat arbitrary since all of the other papers discuss theoretical
Introduction 3
issues to a degree. This first part probes aspects of Goffman's

theoretical significance either by investigating his intellectual roots or
by developing some of its theoretical potential. In so doing, well known
Goffmanian concepts are assessed, refined, and in some cases re framed
in novel perspectives.
Goffman's debt to Durkheim is well documented in the secondary
literature on his work. Why Durkheim exerted such influence on
Goffman and on American sociology in general does require some
explanation, however, because Durkheim's perspective seems so
different from popular American values which one would assume to
be part of the intellectual infrastructure of any major American social
theory. This is the question raised by Dean MacCannell in the first
paper of this volume. As he writes: 'How can a new discipline which
is founded upon, and insists in no uncertain terms upon, the principle
of social determinism, take root and flourish in a society which thinks
of itself as based on the opposing principle of individual liberty?'
In MacCannell's view the ideological similarity between Durkheim and
American values begins to become apparent if one tries to rewrite
some of Durkheim's most famous passages substituting 'ego' for
'society'. Thus, Durkheim can be seen as depicting society in a manner
familiar to Americans as it fits their ideal of ultimate independence
and power for the individual. Since Durkheim the prevailing theoretical
perspectives in American sociology have also narcissistically identified
the self with society, turning it into a giant unified ego. A belief in
social determinism and individual freedom should seem incompatible.
However, if society and the individual are assumed to have common
interests, this can be avoided. In Goffman's formative years the popular
view was that the individual was highly socialized and thus upheld
the dominant values.
In many respects Goffman is the exception in American sociology.
In his writings neither society nor the individual is thought to be a
unified whole. MacCannell believes that Goffman was one of the first
people to 'describe social life as it is lived as marked by ambiguity and
uncertainty, fragmentation . . . and discontinuity . . . .' Goffman did
this by combining dramatism and Durkheimian sociology. For
Goffman, even the individual is a 'team' because it consists of a
performer and an audience (although united in one person) and the
unity of society is simply fictional. What holds society together is just
a 'veneer of consensus'. MacCannell concludes his essay by defining
sociology as a branch of semiotics. He argues, as do several contributors
to this volume, that symbolic interactionism and semiotics are com-

plementary although integrating them requires a notion of social
situation which is at odds with Goffman.
In the second chapter, Eric Schwimmer surveys some of the
anthropologial literature on southern Asia and comes to the conclusion
that its treatment of the interaction order is similar to Goffman's.
Both insist on the autonomy of the interaction order; neither is willing
to grant causal priority to interactions or to structures. Schwimmer
describes sociologists and anthropologists as rival clans trying to
establish a claim to a theory of micro-events. He writes:
For let us recognize that the setting up of a concept such as the interaction order'
is equivalent to what a chief (in, for instance, New Guinea) would do if he
wished to set up his own family as a new lineage in the village. He would build
his own patio, give feasts and claim his own emblem. More particularly, he
would restructure the story of his ancestry, emphasizing some prestigious local
lines and devaluing some more dubious foreign ones. It is because of this aspect
of Goffman's operation that his handling of anthropology becomes interesting.
The term Goffman invented for the relation between the micro and
macro level was 'loose coupling'. For Schwimmer, this is one of
Goffman's most profound concepts and he explores how it is implied
in the empirical details of Goffman's books Gender Advertisements
and Strategic Interaction. These books illustrate loose coupling in
the sense that a 'mythic text' is only loosely transformed into a
'performance text'. Behaviour is always something more and something
other than what is theorized. Loose coupling also applies to the
difference between Goffman the ethnographer and Goffman the
theoretician. The ethnography appears to be organized around the
idea of status differences while the theoretically more important
concept seems to be the way social statuses are diffuse and overlapping.
Schwimmer has interestingly structured his paper in the oral mode in
order to illustrate how the circumstances of a paper's production
influence its content, an idea which is inherent in Goffman's theory
of the interaction order.
The notion of a social situation is central to Goffman's work. Joshua
Meyrowitz assumes that although Goffman usually wrote about social
situations as bounded by physical places, his analysis also shows that
he was working with a less explicit concept of situations as 'information
systems'. The advantage of this second definition is that it does not
limit the theorist to the interaction of people who are literally face
to face. It allows one to take into consideration the impact people
Introduction 5
exert indirectly via electronic and broadcast media. 'Increasingly, our

interpersonal interactions are interrupted by, or interwoven with,
encounters with or through media. Such recontextualizing of behaviour
also demands attention. In fact, it suggests that Goffman's analytically
neat view of "naturally-bounded" face-to-face interactions is losing
much of its experiential primacy'. Similar criticisms of situations as
bounded social systems can be found in the chapters of this volume
by Perinbanayagam, and Riggins.
Meyrowitz examines, unlike Goffman, the long-term changes in
the boundaries of situations. He points out that new media create new
social situations. For example, the informality which has become so
characteristic of daily life since the 1960s is due to a merging of the
informality of traditional backstage behaviour with the more conscious
impression management of the frontstage. Drawing upon such media
theorists as Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, he argues that the
main reason for this change is the way electronic media, primarily
television, integrate social situations and audiences previously
segregated when reading was the major form of mass entertainment.
Literacy segregates audiences because of differing levels of reading
skills while television (like oral cultures) integrates them since it is
more comprehensible to everyone. Dividing the backstage into two
parts, Meyrowitz makes a very useful distinction between the forefront
of the backstage (the less personal or less discrediting information)
and the deep backstage (the more damaging information). Electronic
media have made the forefront of the backstage more public.
Richard Lanigan writes about the influence of phenomenology on
Goffman as it is reflected in the book Frame Analysis. Goffman's own
discussion of phenomenology seems to show that he borrowed some
of the methodology (bracketing, for example), but ignored much of
the theory. Thus, Lanigan argues that while Goffman sought
'ideological guidance' in phenomenology, his work is inconsistent in
this respect. 'Goffman is a methodological "phenomenologist," but
at the price of being a-theoretical. . . . To adopt the theory of
phenomenology would require a focus on the human conscious
experience of the person'. On the contrary, Goffman presented himself
in Frame Analysis as a structuralist but was still committed to recording
'the lived-world context of experience' that would be expected of a
phenomenologist. Lanigan relates Goffman's work to that of Foucault
because of their similar interests but finds in Foucault a more explicit
use of semiotic phenomenology.
The tension between structuralism and phenomenology in Goffman

is explored by Lanigan through an analysis of radio drama which
focuses upon the topics of how the medium presents places, the move-
ment from one place to another, and simultaneous events. People
direct their attention while listening, not only in terms of the details
within a broadcast, but they are also listening to the radio in the
context of the general soundscape occurring within their own home.
The radio is only one of many objects emitting noise. 'We understand
in the way that we as persons desire to understand. We are choosing
the context of our meaning as we live it.' Goffman was only partly
aware of the multiple reality aspect of radio listening. He did not
write about listening from the point of view of a personal lived reality,
as if he were an audience of one, but speculated about a general
audience reaction and even this was done from the vantage point of
a naive realist. Lanigan concludes his essay by rewriting one of
Goffman's most famous passages. To Lanigan it should read: Ί
personally hold the person to be first in every way and any of society's
current involvements to be second; this essay deals only with matters
that are first'.
Hans Dua reviews the literature on miscommunication and com-
municative non-success, a topic highly relevant to Goffman but which
was not systematically addressed in his work. If social actors are
manipulative, or manage the impressions others form of them, or if
they are players of ritual games, there is bound to be a certain level
of miscommunication because such activities forbid complete truthful-
ness. At least five aspects are involved in the miscommunication which
is inevitable under these circumstances. First, miscommunication may
be due to problems in the speaker's formation and expression of his/
her personal intentions. Speakers may have only partial awareness
of their intentions or they may be unable to articulate them fully.
Tact, also, does not encourage a full articulation of intentions. Secondly,
the hearer may misinterpret or mishear statements. As Goffman
pointed out, the hearer can be defined in several ways. The fact that it
is not necessarily the person addressed but a bystander may result in
some misperceptions. In addition, selectivity in listening may create
confusion and there may also be some intentional misunderstanding.
Thirdly, problems are posed by failures in sustaining intersubjectivity.
For communication to be successful, the speaker and hearer must
share a mutual orientation toward each other's capacities and demands.
They must be willing to fulfill their obligations as interactants. But
Introduction 1
this is not always possible. Fourth, there may be discrepancies in

shared knowledge and context. Exactly what is shared in terms of
knowledge has been defined in a bewildering variety of ways, but
shared knowledge is certainly both a constraint and a resource. Dua
suggests that two levels of context be defined, one which includes
the institutionalized framing of activities and another more narrow
context consisting of the negotiated interaction which constantly
changes. Fifth, the speaker or hearer may not abide by the commonly
accepted conversational principles, such as 'be relevant', 'avoid
obscurity', etc. Dua observes.
In whatever way we characterize the phenomena of miscommunication it

should be considered in the form of a continuum on the dimension of normality
and abnormality. However, it is most difficult to draw a line between the normal
and the abnormal with respect to each kind of miscommunication. Furthermore,
we know very little about how different forms of miscommunication may be
related to each other. . . .
Nirmala Srinivasan examines the concept of self in Goffman's

writings, dealing with the theme of how Goffman implies both
determinism and free will when he discusses the self. Some of his
statements are based on the assumption that the self should be defined
from the vantage point of the intentions of an individual agent. This
is historically an important element in Goffman's early works because
it came at a time when many American sociologists tended to assume
a high level of determinism. But, on the other hand, Goffman himself
seems to share this attitude when he concentrated upon the way the
individual is a passive object who accommodates to structures.
Srinivasan writes that in India where Western-style individualism
is no longer a remote possibility:
. . . the common man is literally plagued by extreme fragmentation and muti-

lation of the core official identity and wears diverse masks depending on his/
her immediate kith and kin. Organized militancy as a way of citi/enship protest
for distributive justice (has led) to greater and greater fragmentation of personal
identities and the masking capabilities of individuals.
In the second part of her essay, she reviews the potential of Goffman's
dramaturgical analysis for explaining various aspects of contemporary
Indian society. One of her examples is from her research on the
minority identity of Muslims and Christians in India; she discusses
conflicts between what Goffman called the Official self and the
'performing self. The quota system or the reservation policy in

India resembles affirmative action programs in North America.
These are policies meant to compensate for past discrimination and
socio-economic disadvantages by reserving occupational positions
and admission to institutions of higher education. However, in India
as in North America, these policies have resulted in unintended tensions
and the strengthening of class or caste identity. Her theme is not the
successes or failures of the quotas but the way individuals and groups
cope with the dynamics of novel social situations.
Goffman's writings might be seen as a very personal combination
of intellectual sources only tangentially related to discussions of post-
modernism. However, Charles Battershill presents Goffman as a
precursor of post-modernism and argues that Goffman anticipated
several of the ideas which are presently associated most with such
scholars as Michel Foucault and Jean-Franpois Lyotard. Although
Goffman did not write about the post-modern theme of capitalism
evolving into an information society, he did nonetheless conceptualize
the self as an effect of knowledge and placed great stress on the
management of information in one's private life. Post-modern aesthetics
have been explained as an effect of consumer capitalism (Buerger
1986). Here, also, there is an overlap since some of Goffman's critics
have argued very convincingly that the significance he attached to im-
pression management was a reflection of consumerism (Gouldner 1970).
Post-modern ideas are perhaps most obvious in Goffman's writings
about total institutions. Both Goffman and Foucault questioned the
humaneness of therapeutic institutions. To Goffman, knowledge
developed at mental asylums did not serve the interests of patients;
instead, the institution itself created deviant behaviour in the inmates
and then used this to control them. Efficiency in handling people
in institutionalized settings was also thought to conflict with and
undermine therapeutic goals. Foucault and Goffman both examined
the complex relation between rationality and irrationality and for
neither was reason a neutral tool. Both preferred to explore more
subtle forms of domination than class oppression. Both detected an
implicit will to power in the development of psychiatric knowledge.
Thus, Battershill concludes that 'the pervasiveness of such people-
processing forced Goffman to equate totalitarianism, the total institu-
tion, and "free society". Except for the terminology and the research
methods, Foucault's findings are similar regarding the "political
anatomy" of the disciplinary society'. Since neither Foucault nor
Introduction 9
Goffman was willing to state his theoretical position in any easily

accessible manner (another quality of post-modernism), one of the
results is that readers can be confused about the extent to which
they saw themselves as part of the anti-psychiatry movement (Riggins
1988) or even to what extent they were social critics. While Manning
does present Goffman in this volume as a social critic, as do many
commentators (e.g., Gamson 1985); a few have stressed the messages
of passivity and inaction which can be inferred from his publications
(e.g., Richard 1986; Gonos 1980). The same can be said of Foucault.
Concentrating upon Goffman's textual strategies, Patricia Clough
also relates Goffman to post-modernism. The aim of her paper is to
uncover some of the tacit presuppositions in his writings. This includes
explaining what he might have found appealing in the works of Jacques
Derrida. Although Goffman is often referred to as an ethnographer,
he did not produce the kind of narratives typical of classical positivistic
ethnography but compiled much of his texts out of episodic quotations
from mass-mediated discourses. His departure from the standard
participant observation of symbolic interactionism has disturbed some
critics. As Michel Richard (1986:322) amusingly asked: 'What kind of
symbolic interactionist is he who does not interact with anybody?'
Clough believes that Goffman in his later works brought the
sociological tradition of ethnography to a crisis of representation but
stopped short of deconstructionism. The physical body and the natural
world, a primary frame in Goffman's early works, are later replaced
by an imagined body, which is a social construct. Truth is no longer
grounded in the physical world of bodies and even primary frames
are merely arbitrary ideas.
. . . Goffman's writing strategy evokes and is dependent on the reader's
precritical working of primary frames and at the site of the body. Goffman,
then, can take the reader by surprise. Never being where the last example left
the reader, Goffman out-frames the reader, again and again turning nature into
culture and culture into a series of displays.
Goffman's style and subject matter have the effect of so engrossing
readers that they are discouraged from reflecting about the validity
of what he writes. This reaction to Goffman is also found in the
concluding paper of this volume by Paul Bouissac. Clough applies
feminist ideas about narratives to the representation of gender in
advertising since Goffman remarked that viewers are likely to invent
narratives for the still photographs in advertisements. She argues
that an understanding of narrative practices and discourse analysis

is essential for an understanding of Goffman, especially his stylistic
techniques of establishing his authority.
The second group of papers follows in the footsteps of Goffman
in the sense that they are a tribute to the way he relished presenting
himself in public, not as a social theorist but as a humble practitioner
of empirical research. The papers attempt to exceed his work by
assessing the insights found throughout his eclectic empirical research
and by expanding its scope both within Western societies and beyond.
This part of the volume is subdivided into two sets of chapters: one
mostly concerned with institutionally staged activities and language,
the other focusing on objects and events.
Peter Manning and Keith Hawkins use Goffman's concept of frame
to help establish an analytical perspective for studying decision-making
within the Anglo-American legal system. Framing events as 'legal'
rather than 'political' and dramatizing and ritualizing this in court is
part of a cognitive infrastructure that maintains authority. It is a
screen or a boundary separating everyday events from legally relevant
ones. The authors do not assume that this defining process is simply
the discovery of truth since they stress relativity. Nor is it politically
neutral: '. . . arbitrary framing of facts serves the purposes of the
framers, and of the institution'. While a court case will have to be
resolved in that a decision has to be made concerning guilt or awards
of money, the adversarial nature of the law and the difference in
the understanding of the law between lawyers and clients can result
in a wide range of ideas concerning what is taking place, why things
are being done as they are, etc. Thus, the law must be seen as
something broader than a collection of rules and enforcement
procedures:
It also includes the cognitive and social underpinnings which are necessary,
if not sufficient, to sustaining that differentiated social world. Understanding
the experiential basis of the social organization of legal life is fundamental to
naturalistic studies of decision-making because they link the phenomenological
world, outlined in many of its facets by Goffman, and the formal legal world.
Manning and Hawkins methodically set forth the basic assumptions
of frame analysis, redefining Goffman's concepts in the process. The
authors discuss how the law stabilizes meaning (the very term 'frame'
suggests stability), and the dynamic process taking place when legal
subframes are assembled to establish a legal case. Some facts and
Introduction 11
interpretations must be perceived as relevant to the case, that is

'framed in', while others must be ignored or 'framed out'. Exactly
what falls in each category changes as the case is redefined, something
that is a common occurrence. In the conclusion of the paper the
authors direct their attention to the frames concerning legal con-
troversies which are produced by the mass media and by the highest
levels of government. Although media attention may highlight court
cases and result in the public redefining events, it is not known with
certainty what effect this has on actual decisions. In 'high polities'
legal and political frames are mingled. This can have far-reaching
consequences in terms of future definitions of what properly belongs
within legal frames as opposed to political ones.
George Park applies the notion of lamination, the way frames exist
within frames, to the comparative study of religion. This article and
the preceding one represent a departure from Goffman in that the
authors apply frame analysis to institutionally staged activities rather
than Goffman's preferred ahistorical, non-institutional episodes. Park
justifies the use of frame analysis in describing religion in this way:
Ά religion . . . is never a single institution — surely never simply a
church in the narrow sense — but a structure of frames, a plurality of
socially constructed realities linked by containment'. Frame analysis
gives one a vocabulary and a perspective for discussing how personal
experiences are transformed into moral categories and religiously
meaningful actions. Park categorizes the evolution of religion in terms
of three supernatural frames: proto-religion, animism, and deism. The
newer frames are not seen as replacing the older ones; instead, all
three are assumed to co-exist, along with secularism, in many con-
temporary religious institutions. For example, the average church goer
in North America may hope for miracle cures and may retain some
belief in spirits and superstition, while still believing in the omnipotent
god of Christianity. Furthermore, the average church goer tends to
be committed basically to a 'lay frame', in which the primary reality
is the physical commonsense world, and judges what religion has to
offer (psychological security, meeting the right people, occupational
success) from this perspective. Nonetheless, he or she still gives
lip service to a 'religious frame' in which the primary reality is an
unseen world. The inconsistencies of these beliefs are partially hidden
by the lamination. Such frames can also be 'mutually contained' in
the sense that they restrain each other and that it is not always clear
which is the more basic perspective. In other words, who is the deceiver
and who is the victim can be ambiguous. There may be a genuine

confusion of frames, or possibly just that case of mutual containment
which had eluded Goffman's efficient clipping service. . . . Mutual
containment is arguably the most important mechanism of religion
in the developed world'.
Arlie Hochschild continues Goffman's examination of public dis-
course on gender. However, she examines this topic as it is documented
in popular advice books for women rather than in advertising and
looks at a whole spectrum of advice books from the conventional
to the rebellious. She believes that when Goffman wrote about gender
he deviated from some of his usual notions about the active self.
He appears to assume a much more passive self in his book Gender
Advertisements than in his other publications. For Goffman, the
presentation of gender was simple and straight-forward; the models
in the advertising photographs he studied intuitively knew how to
behave. But gender is much more complicated now and there is no
longer, if there ever was, one standard way of presenting oneself as
male or female. Conflicts occur between the surface aspects of gender
presentation and how men and women inwardly feel about their
own 'performances'. She writes that Goffman does not 'suggest how
the actor might feel estranged from a code. But actors in Goffman's
other works often do face choices, feel doubt and become estranged.
The rules of interaction are always unbudgeably there in Goffman's
works as in life, but the actor continually works at deciding how to
get around them, or counter with other rules'.
Hochschild assumes that women combine elements of two codes
(the 'parlor-traditional' female and the 'egalitarian-modern' female).
The exact gender strategy a woman adopts for mixing these codes
is a product of her past and her expectations about the kinds of
rewards she can realistically expect in the future. The recommendations
of advice books cover both 'surface acting' and 'deep acting'. The
first applies to such recommendations as those concerning appearance
and the frame (irony, cynicism, etc.) which should be placed around
gender rules. The latter applies to what Hochschild calls the emotional
'work' or the personal feelings associated with enacting the rules. When
advice books suggest how gender rules should be framed, they are also
suggesting what relationship should exist between self and rule.
Goffman proposed abandoning the conventional dyadic model
of talk which consists of two interacting conversationalists (the speaker
and the listener), and the restriction of analysis to verbal statements.
Introduction 13
His alternative included taking into consideration the influence of

everyone within hearing range, such as bystanders and eavesdroppers;
and developing greater sensitivity to the structural instability of group
conversations when the roles of speaker, listener, addressee, non-ratified
participant, etc. are constantly shifting. Although these ideas from
Forms of Talk do not explicitly touch upon politics, some of the
chapters in that book might be read as an extended commentary
on politics because many ideas are applicable to studying power in
conversations. This is the interpretation made by Juliet Flower-
MacCannell in her paper: 'Implicit is a critique, that is, of the rules
of access to participation: who is allowed to speak is, in the long
run and in a democracy, the most political of all issues'. She applies
Goffman's ideas to an obscure short story by Heinrich von Kleist titled
The Marquise von Ο . . .' Through Goffman she interprets this story
as being about ritual small talk and the micropolitics of the family
and face-to-face interaction. What she appreciates about Goffman is
his 'attention to form as the form of a social relation or social tie
that is recognizable, if not by those participating in the "footing",
then at least by the analyst or observer. A formal social tie is one
that is discernible as a ritual spacing, which can be both masked by
speech and its figures and yet also readable through them, by means
of a structural reduction . . . .' Gender is one of these forms. Flower-
MacCannell considers Kleist's gender politics to be more radical than
Goffman's and regrets that while Goffman generally viewed the rituals
of everyday life in terms of how one freely managed self-presentation,
he tended to overlook the extent to which males determine gender
rituals for women. 'It is the dark, compulsive side of ritual that
Goffman has missed here, and he has in some sense consistently done
so, in terms of one particular social relation, the sexual one'.
Although very few instances of human interaction are devoid of
verbalization, many aspects of social processes are focused on, or
articulated by artifacts and actions. Robert Perinbanayagam's chapter
'How to do Self with Things' is one of the few recent papers by a
symbolic interactionist which systematically examines how clothing,
hair styles, and body ornaments convey messages about the self.
Goffman made many passing comments on the topic but did not
pursue it in any systematic way. Perinbanayagam suggests that a close
analysis of objects brings into question the notion of the situated self
which is such a prominent element of Goffman's perspective. Goffman
proposed a version of the self in which memory, recollection and habit
are relatively unimportant compared to situational factors. In contrast,

Perinbanayagam advocates a concept of a more permanent self, one
which lacks the flexibility and autonomy generally seen as part of
Goffman's symbolic interactionist heritage. Thus, Perinbanayagam
defines the self, not as a changeable formula, but as a 'semiotically
learned habit constructed by the mind over the years . . . .' Styles of
clothing and hair have little intrinsic meaning. To become meaningful
these signs about the self must be assembled like linguistic texts in
that they are organized according to similar principles; objects are
'made to function metaphorically, metonymically, ironically and
synecdochically'. In this sense things 'do words'. Hair, for example,
can be cut and fashioned in many ways, and grows back so quickly
that it can easily be used to convey many messages about the status
of one's self, especially messages related to sexuality. This variety of
messages is conceptualized in terms of such categories as 'self-fulness'
and 'self-lessness'. Perinbanayagam applies these ideas to a variety
of religious and ethnic groups in Indian civilization.
A categorization of domestic artifacts, based in part on the work
of Goffman, is developed in my own paper. Isolated insights about
material objects as mediators of interaction and relationships are found
throughout the work of Goffman and symbolic interactionists.
Even though Goffman specialized in studying what is commonly referred to
as face-to-face interaction, he certainly realized that the term "face-to-face" is
misleading. Personal interaction is never limited to the faces of the participants.
Not only does interaction generally involve the whole body, but people are
practically always perceived among objects and in various degrees of association
with them. In that sense we are never alone.
Goffman tended to include objects and human actions within each
of his categories of symbols, resulting in some insensitivity to the
physical reality of material artifacts. In this paper, Goffman's categories
of symbols are redefined and several dimensions of objects are added
to develop a systematic approach. Goffman neglected several concepts
essential to theorizing about the relationship between the self and
objects found in domestic environments. These include: the display
syntax of objects, terms that summarize the general character of a
whole environment, and the way objects serve as comment elicitors.
It is assumed that Goffman did not focus more explicitly on objects
because this would have drawn his attention beyond the immediate
present to the influence of people absent in intimate situations, to
Introduction 15
the past, and to signs which are more than self-referential. This would
have undermined his idea that encounters constituted a bounded
system. For illustrative purposes the categorization is applied to an
artist's living room.
Promode Misra traces everyday rituals related to the consumption
of kwai among the Khasi, a matrilineal society in north-eastern India.
Kwai is a mixture of betel nut, betel leaf and lime. The consumption
of kwai is a time of relaxation, when people 'step out of ordinary
time', gossip and exchange information. It can be prepared in a variety
of ways, each of which is associated with certain rituals and statuses.
Kwai is also in itself a communication device because it is typically
a gift from the more powerful to the less powerful and thus helps
to resolve structural incongruities in the extended family and between
males and females. In the Khasi extended family property is inherited
by the youngest daughter; however, authority passes from one of
the mother's brothers to one of the sons of the youngest daughter.
The degree of disadvantage felt by family members depends in part
on whether a man marries an elder daughter, who is a non-heiress,
or the youngest daughter, who is the heiress. In general, those placed
at a disadvantage include: males in relation to females, the elder
daughters in relation to the youngest daughter, and fathers in relation
to brothers-in-law or maternal uncles. Thus, kwai generally circulates
in the opposite direction. 'It is not that offering kwai resolves the
structural incongruity in concrete terms, but sentimentally and
symbolically it means a lot in the temporary suspension of the rules
of the structure'. This article illustrates Goffman's remark in Inter-
action Ritual that ceremonial activities carry messages themselves
rather than being simply 'concrete empirical actions'.
T.K. Oommen applies Goffman's ideas to everyday forms of political
protest among the rural poor in India. He writes about a context very
different from that of the fragmented self-presentation typical of
anonymous impersonal settings usually associated with Goffman.
In rural India personal identities are often assigned and permanent
and there is a stable audience which already knows most of the
discrediting information about everyone in the community. But
impression management is, nonetheless, a part of everyday life and
is a vital political resource in situations of social inequality. Recent
research on social movements has shifted the study of protests in a
Goffmanian direction, toward the study of unorganized individual
protests seen in the context of daily encounters. Much of this kind
of protest must be very subtle to be effective and because of the

poor's dependence on the wealthy, it rarely involves open rebellion.
It may be nothing more outwardly disturbing than gossiping; absentee-
ism, especially at harvest time; pilferage; and adopting the lifestyle
of upper castes. Still, it has important long-term consequences.
Public deference shown by the poor to the rich is a device to extract and ensure
a livelihood in the precarious conditions of the latter's existence. But this
publicly expressed deference needs to be kept "false" lest one should get
demeaned in one's own class. Therefore, the real challenge the poor face is how
the deference should be presented as authentic to the rich and as false to the
fellow poor.
The wealthy are to some extent dependent upon the poor (although
the reverse is of course much greater). However, agricultural mechanisa-
tion because it reduces the need for workers also shifts the balance
of power even more in favor of the wealthy.
In his book Frame Analysis Goffman devoted a chapter to what
he termed the manufacture of negative experience, exploring through
various dramatic genres the public presentation of incidents involving
the loss of control, failure, or a breakdown in character. This is a
very popular theme in public performances, especially in the circus
where it appears in at least one act in practically every show. Paul
Bouissac analyzes two circus acts, a clown act and a trapeze act, in
which the staging of negative experiences is a prominent part of
breaking the performance frame. Bouissac suggests that Goffman
tended to take for granted the technical skills required to publicly
stage performances of negative experience. Some of Goffman's inter-
pretations may be incorrect because he did not focus on precisely
contextualized performances, something which can only be done for
the circus after one writes detailed ethnographic descriptions of acts
and then analyzes them, taking into consideration both the immediate
and the general social context in which they appear.
Bouissac discusses three types of negative experience (incidents,
accidents, and failures) which are defined on the basis of how much
disruption they introduce into a social situation and the effect this has
in implementing plans. A clown act by George Carl is described in
which Carl apparently breaks all of the rules of a good performance.
Rather than calling this the breaking of a frame, Bouissac suggests
that the more accurate term might be 'framing the frames' because
Carl publicly illustrates the rules of good and bad performance.
Introduction 17
. . . "negative experiences" of the sort described by Goffman cannot be taken

at face value when they are parts of larger "texts" in which they effectuate some
semiotic operations; in other words, the negative experiences which Goffman
described are not ends in themselves but means to other, more general ends.
Thus, the messages conveyed to the audience by a trapezist, who

appears to lose muscular control momentarily, should not be separated
from the fact that the performers appear in the guise of an ideal nuclear
family who are space travelers. Bouissac is also concerned about de-
veloping an objective, third-person definition of a social situation.
Taking Goffman to task for not setting forth such a definition, Bouissac
draws upon ethology and semiotics in establishing the parameters of
social situations.
This book is obviously not the last attempt at engaging in a critical
and constructive dialogue with Erving Goffman's provocative work.
The lively discussions which took place at the Mysore conference
demonstrated Goffman's enduring power of eliciting intellectual debate
beyond his lifetime. As is the case for this book, practically everybody
took him to task for having blurred a distinction, skipped an issue,
straddled conflicting theories and the like; no one was prepared to
blindly accept his words as a dogma. But no one questioned his
capacity to challenge and inspire whoever was engaged in the study of
micro social processes.
References
Asante, Molefi Kete - William B. Gudykunst

1989 Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication. New-
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1986 The Disappearance of Art: The Postmodernism Debate in the U.S.',
Telos 68:93-106.
Collins, Randall
1986 'The Passing of Intellectual Generations: Reflections on the Death of
of Erving Goffman', Sociological Theory 4:106-113.
1988 Theoretical Sociology. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ditton, Jason
1980 The View from Goffman. London: MacMillan.
Drew, Paul - Anthony Wootton (eds.)
1988 Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
18 Stephen Harold R iggins
Fontana, Andrea
1980 The Mask and Beyond: The Enigmatic Sociology of Erving Goffman',
in: Jack Douglas et al. Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday
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Gamson> William
1985 'Goffman's Legacy to Political Sociology', Theory and Society 14:
551-604.
Giddens, Anthony
1988 'Goffman as a Systematic Theorist', in: Paul Drew—Anthony Wootton
(eds.) Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, 250-279.
Gonos, George
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American Structuralism', in: The View From Goffman, Jason Ditton
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Gouldner, Alvin
1970 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Equinox.
MacCannell, Dean
1983 'Erving Goffman (1922-1982)', Semiotica 45:1-33.
Rawls, Anne
1987 The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman's Contribution to Social
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Richard, Michel
1986 'Goffman Revisited: Relatives vs. Administrators in Nursing Homes',
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1988 The Minimalist Self, in: Lawrence Kritzman (ed.). Michel Foucault:
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Schudson, Michael
1984 'Embarrassment and Erving Goffman's Idea of Human Nature', Theory
and Society, 13(5):633-648.
I. Probing the theory
The descent of the ego
Dean MacCannell
In his teaching and writing, Erving Goffman was not much given
to effusive expressions of intellectual indebtedness to sociological
classics, but once he referred to Durkheim as "God."1 This seems a
good place to begin.
First, it is helpful to position sociology. Social life is constituted
in such a way as to require partial knowledge of ordering principles
which regulate it. No social knowledge would lead to random arrange-
ments accommodating differences in strength, intellect, and biological
needs. Full knowledge would transform life into a double series of
dead or empty social forms on the one hand, and strange and
potentially dangerous experiments with new relationships on the
other. The position of the field of sociology is compromised in much
the same way as that of an ordinarily intelligent human being born
into society — it must always be on the cutting edge of partial under-
standing. Modern institutions are organized simultaneously to support
sociological knowledge and to restrict its development beyond the
point of practical necessity. If sociology becomes too smart, its
approach and insight are divided among other disciplines (history,
psychology, political science, and new fields, women's studies, ethnic
studies, community studies, etc.) so understanding does not accumulate
in one place. In short, the working conditions of serious sociologists
are never good.
Goffman's application of Durkheim

Emile Durkheim attempted to secure sociology against fragmentation
by arguing for a unique domain, society, which he sought to show
exists independent of other domains, and the individual, subject to
its own internal laws.
20 Dean MacCannell
When I fulfil my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute

my contracts, I perform duties that are defined externally to myself and my
acts, in law and in custom. Even if they conform to my own sentiments and
I feel their reality subjectively, such reality is still objective, for I did not create
them; I merely inherited them. . . . These types of conduct or thought are not
only external to the individual but are, moreover endowed with coercive power,
by virtue of which they impose themselves upon him, independent of his
individual will (1964 1-2).
Society constitutes itself. The specific form of this self-constituting
act is the social norm: regulatory agreements, like spelling conventions,
often arbitrary, among the members of society. Moreover, there is an
empirical basis for the development of sociology as an independent
discipline which engages in the description and classification of social
norms and their concrete effects.
Durkheim's societal-level norms (e.g., marriage rules) generate visible
organizational differences between groups. In a complex division of
labor, such as characterizes modern societies, there are task and role
specific norms. An important formal feature of Erving Goffman's
sociology is its application of Durkheimian principles at the level of
face-to-face interaction, a move already suggested in the writings of
his teacher, Everett C. Hughes.2 According to Goffman (1961b:87),
'a judge is supposed to be deliberate and sober; a pilot, in a cockpit,
to be cool; a bookkeeper to be accurate and neat in doing his work.'
When individuals among us live up to their socially prescribed role
requirements, or utterly fail to do so, we think of them as having
personalities which feature these characteristics or failings, personalities
fully given by society.
Norms are violated, so the first logical sub-field of sociology is the
study of deviance. Durkheim himself studied Suicide, and his approach
remains influential to this day. Erving Goffman would eventually
look at deviance from within and report on it in Stigma.
There are, in addition to task specific norms, place or situation rules
which fall under the heading of decorum. Minor or seemingly harmless
violations of rules of decorum, such as loudly singing along at a
chamber music concert, can result in a person being classified as insane.
Goffman made an important contribution, demonstrating the range of
application of Durkheimian insight to behaviors previously ceded to
psychoanalysis.3 There are also norms associated with different statuses
and ranks in society and organizations, and ritual forms which must
be carefully adhered to in moments of passage or movement between
77ze descen t of the ego 21
situations, statuses, and jobs. Here again, Goffman contributed

analytical models, driving the sociological frame into the fine details
of everyday life. 4
The ego-form of society

Perhaps all Durkheim wanted was to secure a separate place for
sociology at the Sorbonne, alongside psychology, biology, the law,
etc., and he certainly succeeded. But there is also a fierceness in his
founding gesture which is still producing effects. Durkheim did say
that 'Society is a reality sui generis,' that society stands in relation
to the individual as an inescapable force, external and coercive. In
fact, Durkheim said many interesting things about society which
modern day social scientists would prefer to forget:
Society is a reality sui generis; it has its own peculiar characteristics, which are
not found elsewhere and which are not met with again in the same form in all
the rest of the universe. . . . There are two beings in (man): an individual being
which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is
therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality
in the social and moral order that we can know by observation — I mean society
(1915:28-29).
(S)ociety cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in
action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act
in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and
realizes its position . .. (1915:465).
(A) society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it,
the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements
they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself. .. . For a society
to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity
the sentiments which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself.
. . . The list thus brought into being even enjoys so great an independence that
it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort,
for the mere pleasure of affirming itself (1915:470-471).
Durkheim's theory, its well-developed empirical arm, the focus on

regulatory norms, his apparent acceptance of the general framework
of positivism, his insistence on the independence and clear demarca-
tion of the domain 'society', all this formidable intellectual apparatus
simultaneously launched, with historically unprecedented force,
academic sociology and a doctrine of social determinism. Formalistical-
22 Dean MacCannell
ly, this is to be expected. What is unexpected is the acceptance of

Durkheim's sociology in Anglo-American institutional circles. Goffman
was not the only · Anglo-American sociologist to be influenced by
Durkheim. In fact, since he did not trumpet it, Goffman's debt to
Durkheim goes mainly unnoticed. It is the institutional leaders of
Anglo-American sociology who have openly embraced Durkheim's
work: Parsons, Blau, Coleman, Lipset, Merton. How can a new
discipline which is founded upon, and insists in no uncertain terms
upon, the principle of social determinism, take root and flourish in
a society which thinks of itself as based on the opposing principle
of individual liberty?
The paradox resolves itself if we re-read all positivistic statements
about 'society' as expressions of desire for the ultimate situation or
condition of the individual, in an individualistic society. 'Society is
a phenomenon in- and of-itself, independent, self-actuating, self-
realizing, willful, and capable of coercion to achieve its aims.'
Durkheim's society is a familiar figure, displaced, but immediately
recognizable as the 'person' dreamed of in Western bourgeois
individualism.
Durkheim's 'Society' has all the characteristics which after Freud
(Sigmund but especially Anna) and Lacan we have come to associate
with the Ego. Apparently, nothing is scarier, no terror of the forest
worse, than the discovery, upon reflection, of the insubstantiality
and disorganization of internal impressions, the utter weightlessness
of the human self. The response to this is the erection of numerous
defenses, the emptier the soul, the stronger the defense. Logic of
all types, and especially symbolic logic, is perhaps the most developed
form of self-defense of the ego, but there are other forms and figures
including systems of religious belief. Over and against the insubstantiality
of the self, the ego claims an identity for itself and forces others to
honor that claim. While the ego is always inhibited by its origins in
nothingness, it makes of itself the principle of willed, independent,
decisive, forceful action. Recently, feminists have argued that ego is
a male thing, but it would be better to say that some males are ego-
things. Language would cut across the ego. Grammatically, the T
is subject, not object, but there is something pre-linguistic about the
ego, so that even the distance on the self which language might
otherwise provide is blocked by the ego already armed against this
contingency. The domain of the ego is not merely consciousness, but
also the body in its totality, and words can only build it up or tear
it down. Everything, even language itself, is reduced by the centralizing,

unifying tendency toward ego self-exaltation, to be either for it or
against it. Its only drive is to keep itself whole, and its greatest fear is
dissolution or dismemberment. The ego, even in its most normal,
peaceful state, is always just a little bit paranoid, just a little jealous,
a little aggressive in its affairs. Its rages are what give ultimate meaning
to paranoia, jealousy, and aggression. It is the One; there can be no
Other. It protects itself by hardening its outer shell, but always
furtively, knowing that the shell is proof positive of the soft interior.
The ego cannot enter into real relationships with anything other than
itself. It sustains itself with fantasies of its own superior dignity and
power. Even when the ego knows that it must join with others for
survival, or for cultural and biological reproduction, its every impulse
in this direction is blocked by a sense of danger. It dreads its reproduc-
tive responsibilities because they always involve a risk of loss of its own
unique integrity and independence. The aggressivity of the ego will
always have an element of sexuality, aggression being its only means
of sexual expression. And, correlatively, in its dealings with others,
the ego always insists that it monopolize feelings, that the other may
approach only on condition of absolute restraint of passion.
Durkheim's formulation is acceptable as the central sociological
figure in a society predisposed to egoistic individualism, to the extent
that it is an invitation to ego identification with ultimate power,
independence and 'freedom'. It is usable as theory, in the place
occupied by Anglo-American sociology, i.e., the form of partial self-
knowledge in an individualistic society. To the extent that the
individual is identified with the social, that the individual is a truly
socialized character who can be counted upon to uphold social norms,
such persons are legitimately aligned with the enormous power of the
Social.5 The linkage of social determinism and individual freedom is
a contradiction or a paradox only if the opposition (society -
individual) on which it is based is real.
If, in fact, we have a tautology, or only one term (ego) pretending
to be two (individual and society), it is a tautology which is on the
way to revealing itself as such. In Anglo-American sociology, both
society and the individual are always represented as one form or
another of a selfish ego which attempts to bend everything to its own
will. Everywhere in Goffman's writings, without commenting directly
on the matter, he leaves clues and hints that he is operating on the
other side of this tautology, in full awareness of it. On the individual,
for example, he remarked:
24 Dean MacCannell
this secular world is not so irreligious as we might think. Many gods have been
done away with, but the individual himself remains 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 have offended him (1967:95 opd, 1956).
This is Goffman's early intimation that he has witnessed the descent

of the ego. These 'little gods' have egos, to be certain, but ones we
can smile about.
Every other variant of sociology which has succeeded in establishing
itself in Anglo-American society represents society or the individual,
or both, as unified and capable in-and-of-itself of independent action.
Talcott Parsons sought to construct a unified sociological theory by
demonstrating organizational congruence and linkage between culture,
society and the psyche. For a person who wants to live as a willful
being in a powerful society, belief in the tightness of fit between mind,
act and community is necessarily taken as a given. Socio-biology,
briefly influential at Harvard in the years following the decline of
Parsonian sociology, added genetic constitution and species survival
to the orderly layering of positively interlinked systems. Sociological
phenomenologists following Schutz, proceed from the assumption
of a unification at the level of consciousness which they term 'inter-
subjectivity'. Even Marx, whose writings are now more influential
in England and America than they have ever been outside the Soviet
Union, developed a unified theory of commodity production and
social relations, although the implications of such a unification
evidently distressed him:
There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find
an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist enveloped regions of the religious
world. In that world, the productions of the human brain appear as independent
beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another
and with the human race [Capital, 1965:72].
And further on:
In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as com-
modities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another,
as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way
that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his
own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent [1965:84].
In sum, all of sociology, before and after Durkheim is marked

absolutely by a primary narcissism, a drive to unify Mind, Self, and
Society. The American pragmatist philosopher, George Herbert Mead,
went farthest in developing a model in which group, individual, and
social communication are incapable of independent existence, or
inseparable from a singular unity. 6 Durkheim was only the first to
make this principle of societal unity which contains the individual
explicit in his discourse and to apply it in an intellectually rigorous
fashion. I am about to argue that Goffman was first to go beyond
Durkheim, an intellectual move that is made possible only by taking
Durkheim absolutely seriously. Goffman's selves have egos, which
make them distinct in sociological discourse and suggests that
Goffman's sociology is operational beyond ego concerns. Silence
on the ego in the larger Anglo-American sociological framework,
even expressions of opposition to ego concepts, is the first line of
defense of the ego by sociological half-knowledge. Goffman exposed
ego-expressions in everyday social interactions and teased us about
them, in much the same way that a gentle mother uses humor to
loosen up her adolescent child's self-centeredness.
Beyond the ego-form

Historically, Goffman's sociology flourished at the moment when geo-
political western self-centeredness cracked. His descriptions of the
self, which were at once clear and true, but also strange somehow,
appeared just when Europe and America first realized that they could
not indefinitely conceive of themselves as absolute powers. His writings
appeared at the exact moment when Freud's insight that the drive
for unity is a death drive became terrible historical reality. We are
still living in this era when there is no more important intellectual
task than that of de-valorizing unity. For sociology, this means
rewriting theory in such a way as to establish the realm of the social,
or society, on an entirely different base, as in an unbreakable but
radically heterogeneous relationship with something other. This is
less of an empirical question than a matter of living intellectual history,
having to do with the form of collective self-understanding determining
the conditions of existence. Simply put, we might now try to learn
to live with otherness other than as something which must be overcome
26 Dean MacCannett
and incorporated as in e pluribus unum. We might now try to look

upon otherness as something other than an invitation to dominance
or submission. The test of the present is to determine whether or not
human kind is sophisticated enough to learn to live in a 'society' in
which the connection of self-to-self or self to society is not linear
and deterministic, exhibiting the characteristics of a single system.7
It should be theoretically, and eventually practically, feasible to
constitute human society and relationships as existing between
principles, fully dependent on two or more orders which are not
otherwise related, as, for example, language exists between, and is
fully dependent upon, grammar and rhetoric which are otherwise
unrelated. Such a conception requires a re-valuation of dis-unity. So
long as society is conceived as a giant ego, 'dis-unity' can only convey
a sense of dread and anxiety associated with threat of loss of an
essential 'member', the term aptly used in the old social science
paradigms to mean both an individual within a group, and the penis,
or 'male member'. It is important not to reject the term 'disunity',
which would only have the effect of burying its problematic deeper
still. The term should be kept alive while a different value is urged
upon it. To the extent that human affairs are socially situated and
socially determined within the ego-form, there has never been such
a thing as human interaction, i.e., discourse not predetermined to
result in the dominance of one interactant over the other. Interaction,
in what we .might attempt to frame as a 'meaningful' sense of the
term, requires that we are able to recognize the other as other, and
it requires an understanding of interaction that operates outside the
realm of cause and effect, outside of the ego. Goffman's understanding.
Goffman's solution
Goffman called the other perspective which he brought to sociology,
'dramatism', or the 'dramaturgical frame of reference', an idea which
he borrowed from the maverick American literary critic, Kenneth
Burke. It it not so much the originality of his adaptation of Burke,
which gives Goffman's work its distinctive caste. The modification
of Burke's concepts and their adaptation to an expanded sociological
discourse, is careful and orderly (see below), certainly, but the radical
move here is the introjection into the realm of the social of concern
for expression as something different from social organization, but

equally important in everyday affairs. Suddenly we have not a layering
of units or domains (e.g., self and society), but an intersection of
heterogeneous principles and the first opportunity to describe social
life as it is lived as marked by ambiguity and uncertainty, fragmenta-
tion, happy and sad accidents, discontinuity and resolution.
Goffman's theoretical resource for his development of 'dramaturgical
sociology' is the 'Introduction' to Burke's giant A Grammar of Motives
and a Rhetoric of Motives. The key to understanding this 'Introduction'
is Burke's approach to human motivation. By 'motive' Burke never
means inner or ego feelings of desire, fear, reason, which lead to
decisive actions. Rather, motive is the organization of evidence which
gives meaning to action: Burke's 'motive' is closely aligned to that
which the police detective seeks or the actor and the playwright
conveys. In the following passage, Burke makes clear that he
specifically intended sociological application of his dramatism, and
he counters the idea that human feelings emanate from an individual
center to become motives for social action.
Any reduction of social motives to terms of sheer 'nature' would now seem to
me a major error. Naturalism has served as deceptively in the modern world
as supernaturalism ever did in the past, to misrepresent motives that are intrinsic
to the social order. In recent decades, this deception has been all the greater,
since it borrows persuasiveness from the prestige of the natural sciences and
their pragmatic sanction. For the whole story, we would add this extra co-
ordinate, for which we have chosen the unwieldy name of the 'socio-anagogic'.
The word is intended to sum up the ways in which things of the senses are
secretly emblematic of motives in the social order, so that all visible, tangible
entities become an enigma, and materials become pageantry (1962:xv).
Burke (1965:31) provides an illustration which he handles much as
Goffman would. When a man hears footsteps behind him in an
unlighted alley at night, and he walks ahead a little faster, the Motive
is the footsteps in the dark. Any feelings of 'fear' or 'suspicion'
experienced by the man are effects, the same as his hurrying forward.
Only the drive to center everything on the ego causes us to bracket
the situation and ascribe motivational status to the inner feeling.8
Five concepts form the base of interpretation of motives: Act,
Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. Burke (1962:xvii) writes:
28 Dean MacCannell
In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names
the act (names what took place in thought or deed), and another that names
the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also,
you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent} performed the act,
what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose.
Beyond this basic framework there are dramaturgical principles of
coherence which assure normally meaningful appearances and ex-
pressions. For example, the principle of coherence binding act to
scene suggests that ordinary, or normal, expressive behavior in church
would differ from that at a baseball game: church-goers speak in hushed
tones while the sports fan may be raucous. Dramatists manipulate the
'act-scene ratio' (i.e., script ball-park behavior into a church setting,
or vice versa) to produce comic and other effects.
In the quote above, Burke states that the Agent is a person who
performs the Act. At other points, however, he suggests that Objects
may be agents, especially in industrial or technological scenes: the
'means of production', Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. Agent can
be further differentiated into human and non-human helpful co-
agents who support the act and counter-agents who attempt to frustrate
the act. Erving Goffman (1969) would eventually add Secret-agent
by demonstrating that the acts of spies are essentially similar to those
of persons in everyday life who are compelled to conceal certain
kinds of information, while revealing others, in their dealings with
others which may be routine, but none the less strategic even if they
are habitual.
Burke uses the example of the human body to illustrate the ways
in which the dramaturgical terms are keyed within different analytical
frames. In aesthetics, the body is an extension of the Agent. A portrait
photographer, writer, or an actor can treat a particular gesture or
facial expression, not merely as reflecting a passing thought or feeling,
but as conveying with unique force the total character of the
represented person. The body is the Scene of the action in the medical
model. In psychotherapy, the body functions as an Agency, a
medium which, in its minor failings, reports on the mental states of
its owner. In other words, Burke is suggesting that his dramatism serve
a double function as tool for interpreting expression, and as a meta-
language for sorting out the differences between competing frameworks:
A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency

(as with the terministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical positivism). But we
have a different purpose in view, one that probably retains traces of its comic
origin. . . . (W)hat we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that
clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise [1962:
xx].
Without parallel, the 'strategic spot at which ambiguities necessarily

arise', the area of life that could not exist in an unambiguous mode
is everyday face-to-face interaction.
Before proceeding to Goffman's use of Burke, it is important to
note that Burke's dramatism is as rigorous in its own way as Durkheim's
sociology. His dramatism is a closely held operation of principles which
allow the production and conveyance of values and meanings, which
sustain narrative lines, and focus and unfocus interpretations. He keeps
this work within the domain of signifying materials. At no point does
he yield causality to social forces, history, or to individual psychology.
Goffman's Presentation
In 1959, Goffman published his first book, The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life, loosely based on his 1953 Chicago Ph.D. disserta-
tion on communication conduct in the Shetland Isles. The book
proffers a perspective for dealing with social life that occurs in modern
institutional and domestic settings. Methodologically, it does not much
depart from the Chicago school of sociological ethnography, excepting
perhaps the quality of the work. 9 Conceptually, however, Goffman's
explicit combination of dramatism and Durkheimian sociology
represents a move that is still unassimilated in Anglo-American
sociology. He claims to put the dramaturgical before the sociological
(although he will later claim to dismantle the stage apparatus, leaving
only the sociological):
The specific content of any activity presented by the individual participant, or
the role it plays in the interdependent activities of an on-going social system, will
not be at issue; I shall be concerned only with the participant's dramaturgical
problems of presenting the problems before others. The issues dealt with by
stagecraft and stage management are sometimes trivial but they are quite general;
they seem to occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension
for formal sociological analysis (1959:15).
30 Dean MacCannell
But this emphasis on expressive matters is motivated by an original

assessment that society is a fictional unity, albeit a necessary fiction,
so necessary that its fictional status cannot be admitted:
(H)armony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth
working of society. Rather, each participant is expected to suppress his
immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels
the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance
of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each
participant concealing his own wants behind statements which assert values
to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is
usually a kind of division of definitional labor (1959:9).
Goffman's handling of the expressive aspects of everyday life, that

which produces the fiction of a social consensus, is carefully derived
from Burke's pentad of dramaturgical terms. The Scene of the action
in Goffman's study is what he calls a region in a social establishment
that is 'bounded to some degree by barriers to perception' [1959:
105]. Region is further subdivided by Goffman into front and back
with different accessibility rules and requirements for decorum.
Goffman notes, for example, that it is the back regions of social
establishments (family rooms, executive wash rooms, store rooms,
etc.) where co-workers and other intimates may gather to relax or to
prepare for their performances out front. Back regions are the settings
for covering mistakes, practical joking, cursing, unbuttoning, etc.
Moreover, the loosening of standards in back regions is not merely
an expression of human nature, it is a social requirement: anyone
who is always on guard, even in a back region, is automatically suspect
as a loyal team player.
Agencies are defined by Goffman as the collection of devices that
facilitate the effective staging of commercial and domestic acts. These
would include such mundane items as the sign taped to the cash
register telling the clerk to smile at the customer, or the peep holes
in front doors which permit the person who answers the door to have
the right facial expression for the person who rings the bell, even
before the door is opened. On a larger scale, agencies facilitating social
appearances include such things as the otherwise pointless meandering
of suburban residential streets intended to produce the impression
that this is something other than a neighborhood that might have
been laid out on a repetitious geometric grid.
Goffman re-defines Burke's term Agent into team, preferring to
deal with the problem of one person 'teams' rather than the problem
of the immanence of the ego within the text that always accompanies
the use of a term ('agent', e.g.) which can be read as representing the
individual. Goffman further subdivides his term team into performer
and audience, and drives this division into the heart of the ego. There
are multi-person teams, one person teams, and finally the hyper-
socialized person who is able to be on two sides at once while
maintaining the fiction of personal integrity:
a performer can be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the
impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases,
the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and
observer of the same show. Presumably he intracepts or incorporates the
standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that his con-
science requires him to act in a socially proper way. It will have been necessary
for the individual in his performing capacity to conceal from himself in his
audience capacity the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the
performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known,
that he will not be able to tell himself. This intricate maneuver of self-delusion
constantly occurs. . . (1959:80-81).
It should be noted that Goffman makes only one direct reference to

Burke as he sets up his revised version of dramatism.10 But this does
not undermine the connection which I am seeking to demonstrate
here. The main difference between Goffman and Burke is that Goffman
has radicalized Burke's dramatism in its own terms. He has changed
Burke's Act into performance, a more precisely dramaturgical term.
The move from Agent to the more sociological sounding team, is
immediately seized upon for refinement into the opposition performer-
audience, which, at once, makes it more precise and re-inscribes it
into dramatism. Goffman's redefinition of Scene into region and sub-
division of region into front and back (stage) is an analogous set of
definitional moves. Goffman's reworking of Burke's terms is not so
precise as to be susceptible to description by a transformation rule,
but almost. Such a rule might be written as follows: Step 1.
Operationalize the Burkian term for use in sociology. Step 2. Divide
the operational term into a dialectically opposed pair of new dra-
maturgical concepts. For example:
32 Dean MacCannell
Dramatism
Scene Agent
1. Region Team
2. Front Back Performer Audience
Sociology separates conduct into moral division: normal-abnormal,

conformist-deviant, functional-dysfunctional. Dramatism provides a
second code, operating on the same material in terms of expressivity,
an analytic of the quality of appearances and performances. Not
only are the two orders not reducible one to the other, the absence
of a common base is the only possible foundation for a society that
is not perfectly pre-programmed to reproduce the ego form. Some
socially deviant acts are, in fact, abnormal appearing. The conservative
aesthetics of violence in contemporary mass entertainment provide
examples. Other deviant acts are carefully scripted to appear normal.
To pass a bad check, the passer must successfully imbed the act in a
normal-seeming routine. The behavior is socially deviant but ex-
pressively conformist. The other possibility is for a socially normal
act to be expressively incongruous as when several individuals crawling
around on their hands and knees in the middle of a busy street inter-
section may feel the need to explain to passersby that they are looking
for a lost contact lens. When a person is called upon to give an excuse
for a minor social infraction, he or she will soon discover that moral
adherence to the truth may lead to flawed expression. It is better
to say 'My car broke down,' than Ί forgot our appointment,' even,
or especially, when the latter is the truth.
The descent of the ego 3 3
Excuses
Good Bad
True
False
It was Goffman's great contribution to our understanding of social life

to show that it can be lived at the intersection of social and dramatic
codes which may or may not have anything to do with each other:
Expressive Code
Normal Abnormal
appearances appearances
Social Code
Normal
behavior
Abnormal
behavior
Except for Goffman's work (can we continue to call it sociology?),

the intersection of expressive and social codes is unexplored territory.
One can see at first glance, that it is also a gap between cause and
effect and a territory that cannot be entered by the ego form, whether
this is the Durkheimian-societal, or psychoanalytic-individual variants.
It is a gap between cause and effect because the same 'facts'
simultaneously inhabit both frames which are at least orthogonal, if
not absolutely heterogeneous to one another. There may be positive
linkages (cause-effect) in either the social or in the expressive frames,
but not between the two. 11 Facts cannot reside in this gap, nor can
egos. This is the domain of signs. The sign which expresses 'something
34 Dean MacCannell
to someone' is the only passport through this uncharted space and, of

course, the ego is dumb when it comes to semiotics. It can only ask
defensively, 'What is semiotics?', but never stay for an answer.
There are numerous uses of the sign concept and semiotic principles
in sociology before Goffman, including Durkheim's (1965:264)
prophetic statement, 'Social life, in all its aspects and in every period
of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism.' But there
is no real need for semiotics or the sign concept in a unified system of
social relations, except as a mask for the fact that no interaction
properly so-called is actually taking place. 'Symbolic Interaction'
may suggest that something along these lines is occurring, when all
that is actually happening is reproduction of the ego-form, here called
the 'individual' and there called 'society'. But if we follow Goffman
into the gap between expression and social forms, between cause and
effect, into a space where we have to leave our egos behind and discover
otherness without the crutch of determinism, sociology becomes a
branch of semiotics.
As necessary as this move may be from geo-political and ecological
standpoints, to reduce the level of violence against nature and other
peoples, we cannot expect to follow Goffman into paradise.
Ego and sign

Imagine a person, a face in the crowd, someone walking down the
street or engrossed in labor. There is still the possibility of a purely
social, non-ideological person, a factual person, doing and thinking
positivistically. But alongside of this material, de-signified being, there
now exists a second possibility: namely, that person is transformed
into a sign. Now he or she means something to someone. A muscle
bulges, a curve appears, the outline of the mouth is seen through
the veil. The person becomes for the other a living representation
of power, beauty, or modesty. When such souls embrace they may
believe they are cleaving to beauty or power itself. And alongside of
this second possibility grows a third, still more radically free form:
the person can serve as a vehicle for signs. This is the door through
which Goffman passed. Beyond it, the person no longer retains the
small patrimony of ontological status derived from being an ideological
product, now one is a messenger, a carrier. The person is transformed
from ideological product to ideological instrument, possessing nothing

but the capability of moving minds.
There are lines of practical action, tools, consumer goods, persons
and natural objects all written upon in the sense of both written on
and written about, and thereby transformed into objects of desire
and revulsion, i.e., made to signify or made significant. This is the
most salient characteristic of the modern world, but by no means
restricted to it. Durkheim's primitive Australians 'wrote' upon their
churinga boards, transforming them into sacred objects, achieving
the same effects although in a limited way. Every human being, action
and object in the modern world is eventually pressed into compulsory
service as ideological instruments, each damaged ego dutifully carrying
its sign, of protest, of status, of the zodiac, without real possibility
of cause or effect, and for the most part not having the slightest notion
why? This is the form of post-structural alienation which bears no
resemblance whatever to the alienation of the ego.
Conclusion
I have argued here for a semiotic sociology in the place of positivistic
sociology, and I have also tried to suggest some reasons why such a
sociology is resisted. Positivism restricted itself to the study of only
the materiality, not the significance of social facts. Within positivism,
signification is relegated to the status of a beautiful or otherwise
distorted (i.e., incorrect) reflection of underlying social reality, either
a useless or dangerous supplement to reality. In either case, the sign
is something to be opposed. It should go without saying that positivism
still poses questions and provides answers which are useful in the
administration and governance of complex societies.
The theoretical error in the positivistic opposition to semiotics
is as follows: The sign-character of the representation of a person,
group, community, natural object, etc., cannot arise entirely from
the material base of that which it signifies. Nor can the signification
be ultimately controlled by an ego, whether this is an individual or
all of society. The sign always occurs between its referential object
and something or someone other, and its meaning is always a product
of both the material, referential base and the other which gains the
faculty of intelligence by being an other in a sign exchange. Thus
36 Dean MacCannell
we may have, e.g. (1) a material here-and-now woman, (2) a woman

who, by virtue of her physical and other make-up, can be called
'feminine', or 'masculine', i.e., given significance, and (3) this
representation which has found a host body can reflect male ideals
of 'femininity' as much as any observable characteristics of the woman
that might figure in positivistic accounts of femininity. It is precisely
the inevitable operation of these male ideals, or other ideological forms,
that are suppressed by positivism. In the same way, our understanding
of rural community life as decent, intimate, and slow-paced is as much
an urban projection as an accurate reflection of rural existence. There
can be no such thing as a pure representation of the meaning of the
facts, the positivistic ideal of 'data', in a differentiated society. Only
an ego can transform a sign into a fact.
The sign can never be a simple ideological product of a singular
consciousness. The sign represents something to someone; it does
not represent consciousness to itself. This is not to say there will
always be disagreement on the meaning of signs. Goffman's 'veneer
of consensus' is often thick, resembling armor. In the case of a
'feminine' woman, the value of a gesture may be agreed upon by
the (re)presenting woman and both her male and female admirers.
Even her detractors may admit that it worked to produce certain
expressive effects. On the other hand, the gesture may be a distortion
for one but not for others. A dewy gaze can be interpreted as an
expression of overwhelming feeling or a crude manipulation. Garish
make-up suggests the possibility of distortion all around. Every sign
that is located in the gap between the social and expressive codes
occupies the territory of several truths which it may bring into perfect
correspondence according to the ideals of scientific concept formation.
Or, it may subordinate one truth to another, or reveal the multiplica-
tion and opposition of truths.
Human beings are perfectly adapted to society and to expression,
perfectly adapted to convey truths and equally perfectly adapted
to falsification. Science cannot resolve this, at least science as we now
know it. It has lived for too long on the side of 'truth' to be able to
understand life as it is actually lived. Religion won't help. Socio-
historical matters have advanced to the point that even the rather
supple moral formulations of Christianity no longer provide answers.
The church does not know what to do when good and bad and true
and false fall out of alignment. No moral leader will counsel that
we must tell a petty truth (Ί forgot your birthday') when we know
it will break a loved one's heart, but where do we draw the line?
And democracy won't help. A pitchman president who is thought

by some to be better than perfect, while others, basing their opinion
on the same set of 'facts', revile him as the epitome of evil, is
emblematic. There can be no democratic solution to this kind of meta-
contradiction as when a majority says, in effect, 'the truth must lay
somewhere between these two extremes.' There is absolutely nothing
between these two extremes. We desire to continue to bind our political
images to the rules of logical consistency which governed the unified
conscience of scientists, Christians and primitives. But as a carrier
of ideological signs, the image of the 'leader' can only exist between
consciousnesses. To the extent that we demand consistency from
these images, our leaders will continue to be seen as perfectly perfect
and perfectly evil. Absolute contradiction is the realization of the
full potential of a political instrument. The democratic principle
has already been transformed into the myth of representativeness,
into universalistic or universalish representation by the Presidents
of Modernity.
Modernity is uglier than it need be because the social sciences and
the humanities have been slow to express what they already know.
Human kind is better adapted to be instruments of meaning than
products of meaning. Signs exist between consciousnesses and the
world, and are material and objective, and at the same time ideological.
Or, as Saussure said, they are composed of an objective sound or
gesture or other image, which is bound to an idea or concept. The
only thing which stands in the way of dismantling the ego-form of
violent interpersonal and international relations is half-knowledge
of the sign and its operations. The working out of modern systems of
belief and values is not impossible. It is occurring all the time in
practical everyday exchanges of ideological materials, the use of body
shape, nuclear weapons, perfume, landscaping, etc., as well as words
in communication. At no point does this concatenation of socio-
cultural (or societal-expressive) meanings disappear into the psyche
or consciousness, never to return to the material world. It is always
before us and between us. The Marxists, who have wanted to go further
than anyone else in deciphering these arrangements, and who should
be thanked for their perseverance, have not been able to make much
progress so long as they cling to the idea of the separation of 'super-
structure' from 'base'. The sign, conceived as an ideological product
embodied in material things between consciousnesses, may help us
to understand class relations not merely in their theoretically ideal
38 Dean MacCannell
oppositions, but also in terms of the mechanism by which they

maintain their form and the form of their historical relations with
other classes and groups.
Notes
1. In a graduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, when pressed

by a student on a theoretical point, Goffman asserted 'Society is a phenomenon
'SMI generis' as God used to say.' The same phrase appears somewhere in the
writing: 'Society is a phenomenon sui generis as He used to say.'
2. See, e.g., 'Institutional Office and the Person' in his Sociological Eye (1971:
132 ff.).
3. 'Mental Symptoms and the Public Order', pp. 137-148 in his Interaction Ritual
(1967); The Insanity of Place', pp. 335-390 in Relations in Public (1971)
ana Asylums (1961).
4. The theme of ritual in face-to-face interaction recurs throughout the work
from the first to the last published pieces. See, e.g., On the Nature of
Deference and Demeanor', first published in 1956 and reprinted by Goffman
in his Interaction Ritual (1967).
5. Calling it 'egomimesis', Juliet Flower-MacCannell has traced the problematic
of identification with 'unified society' from Lacan and Goffman to Durkheim
back to Rousseau. See her book The Regime of the Brother, forthcoming,
Routledge.
6. For a sympathetic and detailed account of Mead's influence on sociology,
see R.S. Perinbanayagam,S'z£rt//>>M£y4cfs (1985).
7. This was the openly stated dream of 1950s sociology and lingers as a fond
memory of the field.
8. This example is treated in detail in D. MacCannell (1976).
9. Goffman is acknowledged by both his followers and detractors alike to be the
best ethnographic observer of modern social life.
10. On page 25 of The Presentation of Self, 'Cf. Kenneth Burke's comments on
the 'scene-act-agent ratio', A Grammar of Motives . . . .' There are several other
notes to Burke in Goffman's chapter on 'Discrepant Roles', which have nothing
to do with the general framework.
11. There are, of course, strong historical reasons to bet that at least 1000 scientist
man years will be spent 'proving' this statement Vrong'.
References
Burke, Kenneth
1957 The Philosophy of Literary Form, New York: Vintage.
1961 Attitudes Toward History, Boston: Beacon. (Originally published in
1937)
1962 A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, New York: World.
(Originally published in 1945 and 1950)
1965 Permanence and Change, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Durkheim, Emile
1951 Suicide, Glencoe: The Free Press. (Originally published, 1897)
1964 The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: The Free Press.
(Originally published in 1895)
1965 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York: The Free
Press. (Originally published, 1915)
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City: Doubleday/
Anchor.
196la Asylums, Garden City: Anchor.
196Ib Encounters, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
1963 Stigma, Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
1967 Interaction Ritual. Chicago: Aldine.
1969 Strategic Interaction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1971 R elations in Public, New York: Basic.
1974 Frame Analysis, New York: Harper.
1976 Gender Advertisements, New York: Harper.
1983 Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hughes, Everett C.
1971 The Sociological Eye, Chicago: Aldine.
MacCannell, Dean
1976 'The Past and Future of Symbolic Interactionism'. Semiotica 16(2):
99-114.
Marx, Karl
1965 Capital, Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Originally published, 1887)
Perinbanayagam, Robert
1985 Signifying Acts, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press.
The anthropology of the interaction order
Eric Schwimmer
I
Our starting point will be Goffman's professional 'last will and testa-
ment', his presidential address to the ASA meeting of 1982 ('The
Interaction Order', 1983). The term and the concept were present
from the outset of Goffman's career — the concept in chapter two of
his doctoral dissertation (1953; published in Winkin 1988) and the
term as title of the concluding chapter of that thesis. It was only in
the presidential address, however, that Goffman fully worked out
the theme with which the present paper is concerned: the interface
between the interaction order and macro-structures on various levels.
I am writing my paper from the perspective of what is sometimes
called the anthropology of events, a rather marginal subdiscipline until
recently, but more respectable lately, thanks to Sahlins (1985). From
that perspective, the paper I write becomes itself a sort of anthro-
pological event. Hence, whatever one may wish to say about Goffman's
concept of the interaction order may legitimately be applied to my
paper as well.
Thus, the present text is inevitably influenced by three strategic
interactional facts:
1) It is addressed to a multi-disciplinary audience;
2) it is delivered as part of a conference sponsored by Indian scholars
in Mysore, India;
3) the text is to be published ultimately as part of a series of books
addressed to semioticians.
On a different level, this paper is part of a series of papers and
books I have produced and am producing in structural and semiotic
anthropology, in particular culture areas, and often dealing with
ceremonial and other events (Schwimmer 1965, 1978, 1985) perceived
from a socio-cultural as well as from an historical and an aesthetic
42 Eric Schwimmer
perspective. This scientific commitment is as relevant as the strictly

interactional aspect as I suppose it explains my invitation to participate.
At the same time, the content of the present paper is obviously
not determined by the kind of facts cited above, for if it were, I could
stop writing at this point, the rest of my paper being already implied
by the information just given.
The traditional view of scientific papers has been, in fact, that only
the substantive content counts and that the circumstances of their
production are strictly irrelevant. But if they were, then Goffman's
theory of the interaction order would collapse at the outset, for if
that theory does not apply to the present event — the paper I am
writing — then it cannot be legitimately applied to any others.
Furthermore, all practising scholars know that a good part of their
production, perhaps most of it or even all of it, is the direct result
of some event sequence: an invitation, a competition, the require-
ments of a particular editor, publisher, sponsor, etc., and that such
conditions even apply when we have the feeling we are writing sub
specie eternitatis. Normally, one may leave such delicate considerations
unspoken, but if our theme is to be the 'interaction order', it would
be fatal to do so.
Let us therefore start with the semiotic constraints. Not only do
Goffman's ethnographic works constitute a notable contribution
to the semiotics of culture — each work being in effect the analysis
of a semiotic domain - but his text 'The Interaction Order' is also
of great semiotic interest as Goffman uses, as he says (1983:1), a
'model of analysis for which ceremonies are data as well as duty',
i.e., he treated his own presidential address as a text for the semiotics
of performance. One may therefore ask: just what are the 'data'
provided by the text from that perspective?
Thus, when I turn to the nexus of inter-disciplinarity and of Indian
involvement, my starting point is again in Goffman's own writings.
Thus, he did not hold inter-disciplinary conferences in great esteem.
He said in an interview with Winkin (1988:231-8) that people who
go to events such as the Macy conferences (1954-8) or the noted
semiotic conference of 1962 are 'stray dogs who have legitimacy
problems in their own discipline'. The ostensible purpose of that
interview was to provide Winkin with data on Birdwhistell (Winkin
1981). Speaking in 1980, he said that not only Birdwhistell but also
Mead and Bateson occupied marginal positions in the social sciences,
and supported his argument by saying that references to these authors
in learned publications were even then relatively sparse, though he

noted a recent change.
In contrast, Goffman stated to Winkin that he had always occupied
posts in departments situated in the central current of his discipline
(Winkin 1981:234). Thus, his first job (with Blumer at Berkeley,
Winkin 1981:87) was in 'a prestigious department bringing together
all theoretical and methodological tendencies of sociology at that
time'(1957-8).
Goffman admitted, however, that though the department was
prestigious, his own position in it was marginal - 'like appointing
a black or a woman today' (1980; Winkin 1988:237). At that time,
the central power of the U.S. profession, situated notably at Harvard,
Columbia and Chicago, supported only the 'hard' (quantitative)
tendencies. One theme of Goffman's paper on the interaction order
was precisely to congratulate himself (satyrically) on finding himself
at last really at the center of the discipline, at least for the duration
of his presidential address (1983:1-2). The question of Goffman's
relation to the 'mainstream' was even raised in various ways in connec-
tion with the Mysore conference: contributors were asked in
preparatory circulars to refer to it in their papers, and MacCannell's
paper actually raised the question whether Goffman might be marginal
in sociology but central in semiotics.
The fact that Goffman was a Jew from Mannville, Alberta, Canada,
is largely irrelevant to this kind of debate though it provides a useful
'frame' to the analyst of Goffman's personal strategies of interaction.
At the centre of the debate was rather Goffman's position as member
of the school of 'symbolic interactionism'. When Winkin raised this
question during the interview, Goffman insisted that 'symbolic inter-
actionism' had never existed except in the view of outsiders who
had imposed the label. Students trained by Hughes, Warner, and Blumer
regarded themselves rather as sociologists of the professions, of
industrial relations, etc. Labels like 'symbolic interactionism' are not
part of intellectual history but of intellectual pigeonholing. Such
phrases, he said, do not describe movements, but may be self-fulfilling
prophesies setting up a movement, a school, a journal that may later
grow out of them.
Now the question arises whether such statements by Goffman
should be taken at their face value. From the perspective I have chosen,
I need to consider only whether there is a logically necessary and
sufficient internal relation between Goffman's theory of the interaction
44 Eric Schwimmer
order and his theory of intellectual movements (summarized in our

last paragraph). Now it is clear that the conventional way of describing
intellectual movements, i.e., that they are concepts invented by a
'founding' scholar and then mechanically reproduced through students,
schools, journals, denies a priori that the interaction order can influence
them in any way. If the interaction order is posited as an autonomous
field of social action, one is bound to believe that people like Hughes,
Warner, and Blumer may each have followed their individual paths
and that the interaction between these paths was an unpredictable
strategically motivated event sequence leading to the historic accident
of the movement called 'symbolic interactionism'. By the same
token, it is open to Goffman to form his own strategy and wash his
hands of such a movement. Moreover, such a move gains plausibility
from the very fact that the principles of 'symbolic interactionism'
reject as heretical the sort of determination of events Goffman is
proposing here.
My whole discussion up to now is still stuck somewhere inside the
interaction order. At the same time, though my substantive argument
has not even begun, I am trying to sketch, in a spirit of pure empiric-
ism, the kind of innovations Goffman's theory of the interaction order
appears to force upon us and the kind of conceptual system it appears
to set up. As part of this enterprise, I also need to consider the Indian
input into the conference event. For if we are to travel to India in
order to talk about the 'interaction order' and related topics, it is
assumed that a dialogue with Indian scholars about this is intended,
and part of our task is therefore to reflect upon the possible nature
of such a dialogue.
Though I have no special knowledge of the South Asian culture
area and no access at present to adequate library resources, I therefore
have to form some personal image of this Indian input, just enough
to enable me to engage in such a dialogue. This is not science but
rather the sort of background information that might be gathered
by a diplomat preparing himself for a foreign mission. Yet such
preparation is a standard part of the present event, viewed from the
standpoint of the 'interaction order'.
Two questions seem relevant here: do South Asian thought systems,
developed over the centuries, contain ideas that might predispose
Indian scholars to have any particular views of Goffman's theories? Is
there recent evidence that those views have been expressed theoretically
or translated into research practice among South Asian scholars?
On the first question, a superficial search revealed at least one

document that promises well for a South Asian input into Goffman
studies. In an exploration of the ethnosociology of South Indian
caste systems, Marriott and Inden (1977) argue that South Asian
thought systems do not recognize dualities such as are posited in the
West between the structural order and the order of interaction:
There is in the South Asian view of generic order no Linnaean assumption of
an exclusively differentiating, branching, taxonomic pattern; instead, sex genera,
language genera, occupational genera and kinship genera may and typically
do intersect and interact in complex ways. Such intersections of generic
substances can be conceived of by means of the South Asian theory of particles:
particles may be shared and interchanged with other genera across the
boundaries of any given generic category (Marriott and Inden 1977:230).
These genera are 'natural' and 'moral' at the same time. Their non-
dualism, say the authors, cannot 'easily accommodate Dumont's (1966)
interpretation of Hindu society which holds that a polarity of ultimate
moral values regarding purity/impurity "encompasses" an inner sphere
of amoral politico-economic action' (1977:231).
This approach is helpful here not for its inconclusive challenge to
Dumont, but because it illustrates the affinity between South Asian
ethnosociology and Goffman's theory of the interaction order. First,
it rejects as 'cognitively incomplete' (1977:229) the pure transactional-
ism of the earlier writings of Marriott himself (1968, etc.), in which
he accorded priority of transactions over structure. Secondly, it insists
on the autonomy of the interaction order.
My very limited knowledge of South Asian social science vindicates
Marriott and Inden (1977). I found their model of 'South Asian
thought' in all the sources I consulted (i.e., Mahadev Apte 1977; R.S.
Khare 1975, 1977; L.K. Mahapatra 1977; Sitakant Mahapatra 1977;
Gananath Obeyesekere 1981; M.S.A. Rao 1970, 1972, 1977; Manisha
Roy 1975; Surajit Sinha 1962; M.N. Srinivas 1952, 1987; Stanley J.
Tambiah 1985). The most explicit vindication came from Sinha who
commented: Ί find that Professor Marriott has converted himself
from the interactional Western approach to anthropology to almost
fall in line with, as he defines it, Hindu ethnoscience (David 1977:
434). The most explicit alignment of such views with Goffman came
from Rao who applied the methods of The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life and Encounters to various types of identity and role
constructs in a village on the metropolitan fringe of Delhi. Some of
these roles are based on 'modern norms', others on traditional caste
46 Eric Schwimmer
constraints 'with some modifications'. He analyzes a mass of data

bearing on the situational contexts of role playing and role taking.
Without mentioning Goffman specifically, the same concept of
role and identity is expressed by S.K. Mahapatra and Manisha Roy.
The latter points out that the Bengali woman, unlike her American
counterpart, believes that her nature changes as, in the course of life,
she fills different roles and relates to different alters. Her mind and
body, her roles and self-concepts are felt to change as one. The
interpretation of such data, says Roy (David 1977:429), needs 'some-
thing in between Dumont (1970) and Bailey (1959)' though Ί admire
them both on their own ground'.
Srinivas (1987) and Apte (1977) develop a Goffman-like approach
in dealing with caste. Whatever the particular problem, in India, such
an approach implies discomfort with both 'Anglo-American empiricism'
and 'French intellectualists (or structuralists)'. Srinivas' critique of
Western approaches to social distance (1952:106-7) was along
Goffman's lines and explicitly complimented by Goffman (1967:
70). Khare's paper likewise analyzes social contributions and religious
prayers as related to an essentially homologous set of rules of exchange,
thus combining symbolic and transactional analyses.
Again in the sphere of religious caste obligations, L.K. Mahapatra
elucidates the relation between God and King in India (1977). While
retaining Hocart's (1950) analysis of village caste functioning, he
rejects his model of religion encompassing power in real life. Arguing
that religion and temple organization were used by political power
to gain political ends, he effectively presents the interaction order
as autonomous without trying to suggest it determines the religious
order. Obeyesekere (1981:14-18) carries the same implication.
Perhaps the fullest statement of this perspective by a South Asian
scholar is Tambiah's discussion of the region's systems of philosophical
and social classification, in the sense of 'some kind of structured system
of categories, most of them verbalised, constructing and labeling some
universe of things, beings, events, or actions' (Tambiah 1985:3). Actors
in these societies accept these systems as given in 'nature' and translate
them into practices, 'designs for living', but they act 'in situational
contexts'. Tambiah suggests that human beings everywhere are
'simultaneously in their actions involved in two modalities, the
modality of causality and the modality of performative acts' (1985:4).
Now this is not quite what Goffman has said, though there is a great
deal of convergence.
This random selection of clues, dating from a period well before

the Mysore conference on Goffman was proposed, suggests not only
that Goffman was far from being an unknown figure there but also,
more importantly, that his theoretical position comes closer to
traditional Indian thought than the great majority of other Western
positions. Moreover, far from confining themselves 'to faithfully
following where Goffman led, the sources quoted adapted the notion
of the 'interaction order' in certain ways to local problems in data
analysis, thus changing certain emphases.
This discovery was helpful to my own analysis of the text The
Interaction Order'. It so happens that the Indian scholars referred to
above are all anthropologists, so that their biases are in some ways
similar to my own, but also, agreeably enough, that most of them
do not perceive any great difference between anthropology and
sociology, and favour a multi-disciplinary approach (see, for instance,
Sinha in David 1977:435).
The above reflections illustrate some principles in the study of
events. The event in question has three basic components: participants,
venue, dialogue. The structural order is represented in the defined
end: to further Goffman's inheritance. In preparing himself for the
dialogue, the participant may reflect hermeneutically upon the
positions of the others, thus upon a possible point of convergence
at which the diverse concerns of the participants might meet. One
always hopes, in effect, that the event may transform the Goffman
inheritance as a result of such novel convergence, or, to put this in
more general terms, that there may be a straight dialectic between
the interaction order and the structural order, the structure creating
the event and the event creating a new structure. Yet, as we shall see,
this is not how Goffman would have projected the outcome.
II
The text 'The Interaction Order' begins with a prefatory note, followed
by an introduction and ten sections marked by Roman numerals.
Space forbids my giving more than a somewhat intuitive idea of the
structure. The substantive discourse is encapsulated between the two
prefatory pieces and section X. In the introduction, as we saw above,
Goffman projects himself as guardian — very temporary - of the
48 Eric Schwimmer
discipline of sociology, the guardianship limiting itself to the duration

of his speech. His peroration advocated, with obviously malicious
intent, that sociology should occupy itself above all with unsponsored
analyses of 'institutional authority', thus — one might say 'symbolical-
ly' — re-identifying himself with the periphery. Sections I-IX are
different in tone and present Goffman in his role of guardian-of-the-
discipline.
In that capacity, he sets himself two tasks. The first part (sections
I-IV) deals with the 'interaction order as a domain in its own right'
while the second part (sections V-IX) deals with the interface between
the interaction order and various other orders. Before dealing with
this arrangement or the content of the parts, it is appropriate - as
Goffman himself insists (p. v. ante}, to look at this entire construction
as ritual performance.
He sets himself five ritual duties: 'to set the record straight', to
represent 'what the intellectual community wants represented', to
talk about 'the public issues of the day', to proffer''asides and other
medallions of belief and - last but not least - personal 'dramaturgy'.
Now the last three of these ritual duties were disposed of fairly eco-
nomically in the prefatory note, the introduction and the ultimate
section. Far from being superfluous flourishes, then, they have a well-
defined ritual function. The two other duties, though less distasteful
to Goffman, may actually have been a heavy burden. As for the
polemics involved in 'setting the record straight', Goffman's earlier
work never went much beyond a few ironic asides. He rarely takes
up a position clearly situated in relation to other sociological positions
and almost systematically avoids debate. The polemical nature of
the text 'The Interaction Order' is therefore unusual. Without
mentioning any names, section II criticizes the structural-functionalist
school's treatment of social interaction, the failure of the same school
to analyze speech in social interaction, the error of treating territoriality
'merely in terms of constraints', the error of situationalism, the failure
of the 'interactionalists' to study adequate time spans. Section III is
even more openly pugnacious, for it turns simultaneously upon social
contract and social consensus theory. As for Goffman's reticence
in mentioning names, it may perhaps be explained by interactional
strategy: he says that individual identification 'locks' the person named
to 'an uniquely distinguishing identity'. This would amount to a stigma
if the person named is criticized publicly in a ceremony performed
by the president of the association. 'Categoric identification', on the
other hand, stigmatizes nobody.
In Section IV, Goffman continues to 'set the record straight' but

this time by turning upon himself. If the 'interaction order' is indeed
autonomous, it ought to have 'basic substantive units', he argues,
but he concludes after a detailed classifying discussion that these
are 'difficult to identify' and the same applies to 'interaction roles'.
This negative result, however, does not harm Goffman's theory.
Quite to the contrary, it would be hard to justify the effort Goffman
puts into analyzing the 'interface' between the different orders if in fact
the basic concepts of each order could be determined independently,
without reference to the others. But this is evidently impossible: no
adequate classification of face-to-face groups, for instance, is possible
without introducing concepts like institutions and community values.
It is for this reason that, in fact, all of Goffman's studies have focused
on the interface between the interaction order and other orders.
Moreover, he always seems to have been conscious of this, as the brief
prefaces of all his monographs testify. What is new in the text now
under consideration is the author's 'stance' — his ritual position. In
the past, he was very reticent, very reluctant to paint himself into
a corner by questioning axioms like determinacy. He has chosen the
present occasion for opening up, not quite for confessing his heresy,
but he is willing to express his skepticism, and thus provide a focus
for those seeking to break the shackles restraining free observation.
Secondly, Goffman's ambivalence towards anthropology pervades
the text under study. Speaking of sociology in general, he quips in
section I that 'we do not have the esprit that anthropologists have,
but our subject matter at least has not been obliterated by the spread
of the world economy'. In section V, he begins the discussion of his
main theme, 'the interface between the interaction order and the
more traditionally considered elements of social organization'. He knew
well that this is one of the main methodological foci of anthropology;
our discussion of the Indian literature has shown a random sample
of this. The Indian works quoted above all illustrate, in fact, Goffman's
dictum (1983) that structural attributes of participants in social
situations 'do not mesh fully with personal ones'. Moreover, the Indians
were as reluctant as Goffman to give priority to either the structural
or the personal factors.
We find the same theme in his earlier works, especially Relations in
Public, but the theory remains undeveloped. That book ends in a covert
manoeuvre that effectively hands the problem over to anthropology.
Speaking of the structure of man's relation to his surrounds, Goffman
50 Eric Schwimmer
points out it oscillates between tranquility and mobilization. He studies

in great detail how a person reacts when he believes the tranquility of
his habitat is threatened. The best data on such 'disorder imagery',
Goffman suggests, are to be found in urban civilizations. He continues:
'Here no better guide can presently be found than Claude Levi-Strauss,
who describes one of the things that can go wrong with surrounds . . .'
(1971:332). He then excerpts at length that author's description of
Calcutta (Tristes Tropiques, 1955. Ch. xv).
As far as I know this is Goffman's only reference to Levi-Strauss
and French structuralism. If we assume Goffman to be in earnest,
certain iconoclastic insights seem to be distillable from the extended
Levi-Strauss quote, considering the way it was 'framed' by Goffman:
1) Unlike most of his American colleagues, he does not perceive Levi-
Strauss as a structuralist-intellectualist, but acknowledges that
scholar's vivid interest in the 'interaction order'.
2) When Levi-Strauss describes his interaction with Calcutta beggars,
his purpose is nonetheless to point at certain structural implica-
tions, notably concerning social inequalities and religious projections.
3) If Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques must be summed up in one phrase,
perhaps the best would be Goffman's: that book describes 'the
things that can go wrong with surrounds' among savages, especially
in urban civilizations.
4) Although Levi-Strauss sees many cultural orders reflected in the
interaction order, he perceives no order as encompassing any other.
For instance, he does not see the human order as encompassing
the order of the surrounds, but both are on an equal level, each
dependent on the other.
Goffman's encounter with anthropology is discussed explicitly in
section VI of our text. Characteristically, it is introduced by a
deprecating disclaimer ('you all know the litany') and confines itself
throughout to 'categorical identification'. After describing the
Durkheim-Mauss method of analyzing ceremonies — as total social
facts, a term he avoids but for which he substitutes a brilliant catalogue
of items — he points out that 'social anthropology claims these various
ceremonies as its province', that they are micro-events with con-
sequences for macro-structures and he cites some sociological con-
tributions to this field. But he then takes issue with some unnamed
anthropologists (Victor Turner?) who appear to believe that 'in general
anything macroscopically significant results from ceremony'. Perhaps
it would have been fairer, at this point, to admit that even symbolic
anthropologists rarely say that the ceremonies determine social
interaction, but rather that they claim correspondences between the
orders. Moreover, with respect to these correspondences, the situation
may in fact be different as between complex and tribal societies. I
make these points here as it is the first phase of a caricature of
anthropology Goffman is drawing in this paper. Quite apart from this,
the rest of his argument hangs on what is said here about ceremonies.
Most importantly, he returns (end of section VI) to the ritual he
is himself enacting at that moment: giving a presidential address. What
could anthropological analysis do with that kind of data? This is what
I must answer now. Let us suppose sociologists and anthropologists
are two rival clans and that each has its own macro-structure and its
own order of interaction, made up of micro-events. As for macro-
structure, we may note common ancestors, notably Durkheim (1912)
and Mauss (1966) whose ideas on ceremonies have deeply influenced
anthropology. Each clan has, of course, several lineages or 'schools'.
I think many anthropologists would be willing to accept what Goffman
said (see above) about 'schools', for it is the same that they have for
some years been saying about lineages (at least in Melanesia). Their
genesis is interactional but the fact of their existence pertains to deep
structure.
If we look at Goffman's presidential address as a typical ceremonial
micro-event, we note it has reached a critical moment, as the author
is right now engaged in the ritual of establishing a new lineage. For
let us recognize that the setting up of a concept such as the 'interaction
order' is equivalent to what a chief (in, for instance, New Guinea)
would do if he wished to set up his own family as a new lineage in the
village. He would build his own patio, give feasts and claim his own
emblem. More particularly, he would restructure the story of his
ancestry, emphasizing some prestigious local lines and devaluing some
more dubious foreign ones. It is because of this aspect of Goffman's
operation that his handling of anthropology becomes interesting.
These considerations are not offered in a polemical vein, because
I consider Goffman's procedure to be reasonable and necessary. The
concept of the interaction order represents a profound restructuring of
sociological procedure, and at the time Goffman wrote, anthropology
had certainly not evolved a valid analogous concept. He founded,
indubitably, a new lineage, and as academic society is strictly unilineal,
it had to be affiliated to one particular clan, which happened to be
52 Eric Schwimmer
sociology. But there is an anthropological strain in the ancestry, i.e.,

its dependence on the concept of ritual systems and of correspondence
between these and structure. This now became a bar sinister, a blot
on the escutcheon that had to be gently attended to. Far from
criticizing this, I am merely pointing out that this is a necessary implica-
tion of the very act of becoming an 'ancestor' in academia. Nor do I
question that the reproduction of academic knowledge requires that
people are set up as ancestors.
Section VII lists some primary objects in the study of 'contact
rituals': individual nomenclature, marriage ritual, determining who,
on certain occasions, has the right to speak, dependence behaviour,
the praxis (and not only the code) of who does what to whom,
etiquette rules, rules and praxis as to permitted dress according to
status and context, political interference with behavioural habits,
ideological interference with such habits. I do not know how much
attention these themes have had in sociology, but any anthropologist
can give many recent references to books and articles on each of the
above themes. I gave some examples above when talking about the
social sciences in Southern Asia. Anthropological contributions to
these themes typically give full micro-descriptions, make a point of
linking these to codes, explain apparent violations of the codes, often
by quoting economic, political, historical and interactional
circumstances as well as symbolic aspects.
Goffman suggests somewhere that such studies subordinate the
interaction order to the structures, codes and so on, but this needs
qualifying. To begin with, we have seen that the Indians refuse to
subordinate, also when they are anthropologists. Secondly, even in
tribal types of societies, where there was for a long time a tendency to
subordinate in the way Goffman suggests, this is no longer always
characteristic of, for instance, recent work in Melanesia, dealing with
gender relations, inequality, forms of leadership, political oratory and
so on. Increasingly, analysis focuses on historical micro-events.
(Godelier and Strathern 1989; Herdt 1982, 1984; Leach 1983; Myers
1984; Sahlins 1985; A. Strathern 1982; M. Strathern 1987b.) Certainly,
the investigators wish to discover the structure operating in the event,
but they also wish to show how the event operates creatively on the
structure. This approach was theorized by Sahlins (1985) but it was
prevalent well before he wrote. His information, in some ways
similar to Goffman's, offered a badly needed paradigm for the
integration of structural and interactional/historical approaches.
Yet, even if these anthropologists treat structure and history

dialectically on the same level, they do not necessarily adopt Goffman's
notion of 'loose coupling', introduced in section VIII of his paper
and clearly his most innovative concept. For it would seem that 'loose
coupling' goes a little further than just the belief that none of the
orders (interaction, religious and so on) determines the others. That
notion of the uncertainty of determination is widely accepted by more
or less symbolically oriented anthropologists. But 'loose coupling'
also implies that the connections between the orders — i.e. their
symbolic correspondences as well as their functional relations — are
often untraceable. It seems likely that cultural variability plays as much
of a role here as the theoretical diversity of scholars. It is still just
as pertinent in Papua New Guinea villages today as in the time of
Malinowski to look out for connections between orders. In many
contexts, these connections are not just present in field-workers'
minds, but arise readily in interaction contexts. This is certainly the
case even in the complex Asian societies studied by, for instance,
Tambiah. Goffman recognizes this possibility when he suggests that
Ίη modern societies at least (there) is a nonexclusive linkage - a 'loose
coupling' — between interactional practices and social structures'
(1983:11).
Nonetheless, as Marilyn Strathern has recently pointed out (1987a,
1988), anthropologists face the same phenomenon of 'loose coupling'
(she says, more decorously, 'partial connections') arising as soon as
they wish to compare New Guinea tribal cultures to one another so
that the problem posed by Goffman still applies to many anthropological
contexts. It appears that conceptual systems are not uniform even
in the micro-regions where scholars attempted to do 'controlled com-
parisons', though there is a great deal of communication, borrowing
and transcoding between neighbouring groups and idioms.
The notion of 'loose coupling' raised difficulties for anthropology
as well as sociology. Goffman himself showed that no study of the
interaction order can identify 'basic substantive units', for these can
be found only by coupling the orders. So if this coupling cannot
be relied upon, neither can the 'basic substantive units'.
Sections VIII and IX of Goffman's essay do not provide a full
answer. They classify social relationships, diffuse social statuses and,
to finish off, service relations. His text does not quite show just how
the diffuse social statuses are basic concepts in the study of service
relations. It may be best to treat that section of the text as somewhat
54 Eric Schwimmer
provisional (as the author never saw the paper through the press).
We need to turn to some of his earlier works for further clues on
how the coupling of orders can be analyzed. These clues show that
the concept of 'diffuse social statuses' offers some interesting prospects.
I shall discuss also the possibility of adapting that concept to the
anthropological context.
Ill
Goffman's standard device for establishing 'loose coupling' has always
been to state codes in various orders of structures and to show just
in what manner theses codes are violated in practice. A less playful
spirit than his, when seeking to theorize 'loose coupling', would no
doubt have described in the present essay the established practice
of his own published works. His methodological use of violations
could be illustrated from almost any of Goffman's studies, but I
confine myself here to Gender Advertisements where the procedure
is very obvious, and Strategic Interaction where Goffman characteris-
tically hides his cards even from close observers like Winkin (cf. 1988:
90).
In the former text, he deals with one of the 'diffuse social statuses',
gender. He coins the term 'gender display' to mean 'conventionalized
portrayals' of the 'culturally established correlates of sex'. The first
analytical sections of this study uses photographs to set up the
categories of correlates (relative size, the feminine touch, function
ranking, the family, the ritualization of subordination). Once this is
attended to, Goffman starts his characteristic 'loose coupling'
procedure by purporting to show how, in the photographs, women
deal with the unpleasant situations they are in. He then demonstrates
the operation of what he calls 'licensed withdrawal', a long section
(239 photographs; 47% of the corpus) broken down into many
categories of theatrical moves: remorse, fear, shyness, withdrawal
masked as laughter, minor gestures with the fingers, eyes, head, 'middle
distance looks', 'anchored drifts', twisting male clothing and so on.
This time, Goffman's brief introductory remarks (1979:1) bring out
his intention perfectly: 'The divisions and hierarchies of social structure
are depicted microecologically. . . . Mythic historic events are played
through in a condensed and idealized version'.
A distinction is thus made between a mythic text underlying a

'diffuse social status' and its transformation into a performance text
(made up here by the photographs).
Coupling between the two kinds of texts is 'loose' in the sense
that there are aspects of the performance text that the mythic text
can never fully specify. One of these aspects is what Fischer-Lichte,
in her book on semiotics of the theatre (1983, part III) calls 'body
texts', constituted by each actor from his own personal experience
and his own interpretation of the mythic text. 'Licensed withdrawal'
is a kind of symbolic resistance, practised in many situations by women
largely to express vague discomfort. Now these situations are, in part,
consequences of the mythic script, but the vague discomfort is
expressed only in the body text of the actress. In other words, loose
coupling requires what Lotman (1977) called a transcoding operation
as between the script (structural orders) and the performance text
(interaction order). Lotman rightly points out that this transcoding
produces a new text, only partly embodied in the original. Each photo-
graph, in effect, is an original interpretation of the female dilemma.
Such a view gives full play to the recognition that though there
is coupling, this is necessarily loose. Goffman presents many photo-
graphs as evidence that gender difference is correlated with status
difference and even with age difference, women playing roles with
men analogous to those played by children with adults. Now this
coupling is certainly part of the socio-economic realia of our culture,
but also of our collective sign systems. Thus the photographs project
what Eco (1979, 1984) calls 'possible worlds', i.e., representations of
a total situation that may be from a script whose content is ambiguous
or possibly false. The construction of such 'possible worlds' evidently
involves 'coupling' but we may call it loose because there is often
a plurality of such 'possible worlds'. One might say that in Gender
Advertisements photos 1-269 show a single possible world, representing
the direct implications of western gender relations as experienced by
everyone. In photos 270-508, on the other hand, showing 'licensed
withdrawal', each picture represents at least two possible worlds,
one in which the male gender is dominant and another, existing in
the mind of the woman, where the male is simply blotted out.
Strategic Interaction is a difficult book because it is not only the
subjects studied who are constantly hiding their game, but the author
hides his game as well. He pretends to derive his method of analysis
from 'game theory', thus keeping up 'normal appearances' in the social
56 Eric Schwimmer
sciences of 1969. These normal appearances, however, turn out to be

a kind of cover-up, as it soon appears that Goffman introduces a view
of the acting subject that is normally kept out of game theory. In
the gaming situation, as he points out, the individual may have not
only the function of player or party but also of pawn, of token, of
informant (1969:87-8). Each of these functions invokes values that
extend, of course, beyond the interaction order, at its interface with
moral, cognitive and cathectic systems. In fact, Goffman's efforts
in that book are devoted less to the practice of game theory than to
the exploration of 'coupling' between the different orders and, in
particular, to the multiplicity of 'possible worlds' constructed in the
process of interaction. We are shown, in remarkable detail, how
difficult it is for the subject to construct for himself a second 'possible
world', proof against detection, where detection would lead to death
or indelible stigma. This certainly tells us a great deal about our con-
temporary world, and about the complexities of the position of the
subject desirous of tampering with his diffuse social statuses, always
on the understanding that the other players stay hidden in their own
counterfeit worlds unless unmasked. As Goffman says: Once Harry
sees the need to assess an opponent's view of the situation, game
theory gives him a way of being systematic' (1969:99). But alas, the
mutual faking of possible worlds turns any message into a potentially
infinite number of scenarios among which Harry finds it difficult
to choose. Nor can an observer ever predict which 'possible world'
Harry will opt for, as flawed communications systems are not analyz-
able by game theory (1969:140).
But then, if any code or any structure invites violations, cannot this
apply likewise to the propositions of Goffman's presidential address?
Can we be sure that in his own work he is really making partial (rather
than whole) connections? I am not sure about this at all. I am not
even sure whether the author is the ultimate judge of this or whether
the judgement must be left to the reader and to posterity. Personally,
I have always read Goffman as an ethnographer. Any of his books
could demonstrate what I mean, even Gender Advertisements which
managed, by just commenting on some photographs, to evoke a rather
holistic image of western gender relations. How was it done? The
author appeared to rely mostly on a very intuitive but efficacious
method of subdividing his theme into sub-themes. His classification
scheme was perhaps somewhat ad hoc but he seemed to have a flawless
sense of form, a capacity to produce in the end a convincing balanced
image that creates the illusion of completeness. Strategic Interaction

may be a little more rugged, but it is among the works in which
Goffman identifies contemporary man with the gambler, the secret
agent, the possessor of a false identity. Though talking just about
those particular aspects of modern life, he seemed to have the gift
of evoking a much broader image, of making in fact a portrait of the
age. And the same is even more obviously true for books like Stigma
and Asylums (stigmatized man, institutionalized man) both of which
seem to evoke an entire civilization by a highly organized selection
of images.
In the preceding pages, I have followed Goffman's essay along in
much detail, just to show it does make serious points. But I am sure
his ethnographic writings should be taken at least as seriously. There
he seems to have no difficulty in setting up very large syntheses of our
complex society and to overcome with ease the obstacles to such
syntheses suggested by Strathern (1987b). She argued such holistic
constructions are possible only in New Guinean villages, but Goffman's
village is at least the whole of Anglo-America. If the text 'The Inter-
action Order' and its model of 'loose coupling' mean something, it
is not quite what one imagines at a first reading.
At least two kinds of scholarly activity appear to be involved, one
holistic, ethnographic, ceaselessly forcing the reader to connect social
facts nobody had troubled to connect before; while the other is
rigorously methodological and prudent about the legitimacy of
coupling. There is no contradiction between the two, as Goffman's
descriptive work is extremely controlled, impressively systematic while
the methodological work (as in the text under discussion) is a
theoretical justification of the author's descriptive praxis. On the
other hand, one wonders whether there is much connection between
Goffman the ethnographer and Goffman the theoretician.
Marilyn Strathern has argued, in an analogous situation, that the
same person may have a number of positions none of them wholly
encompassing the others though they are partly connected and extend
into one another (1987b). Returning to the text I am analyzing, I would
note that Goffman himself sees that text as an extension not of his
ethnographic works but of their prefaces. Secondly, the text is not
stylistically uniform but (apart from the ritual jokes at the beginning
and end) alternates somewhat between the professorial and the ethno-
graphic, starting off in the professorial mode but sections IV and V
are more in the style of the monographs. This style is broken off
58 Eric Schwimmer
abruptly at section VI to return again in sections VII-IX, ending in

the relaxed vintage Goffman reporting on service transactions. There
are two positions but many extensions and intensions between them.
As for the content, the author's concept of 'diffuse social statuses'
seems to mediate between his two positions. It is certainly part of
his theory while, in his ethnography, the ubiquitous organizing concept
appears to be status differences, due to class or to gender or to race,
more rarely to age. Goffman likes the concept as it permits relevant
categorial identification of each individual on a cross-cutting grid.
The signs may be complex but every member of the society learns
without fail to make these distinctions. Such sign-reading is obviously
universal but the grid is more problematic than it superficially appears.
Seeing that information about individual identity is highly deceptive
not only in western culture but also in many others (see the recent
literature on Melanesia), grids are certainly needed. Moreover, they
are 'diffuse' as even the most basic classifications are complicated by
ambiguity and concealment, and cultural codes do not always fully
incorporate biological distinctions.
In section IX, Goffman thus hands us a professorial key — a really
good conceptual distinction to be taken with a cold beer, he says —
but because the categories are in practice diffuse and tricky, the key
is not very easy to handle. Goffman demonstrates, shows a few
acrobatic tricks with the concepts and these are inspiring to other
addicts of ethnographic detective work.
Perhaps the best way of understanding how the 'diffuse social
statuses' fit into Goffman's system is by recalling that the interaction
order is governed by what Goffman calls 'ceremonial rules' (1967:54).
Those who break the rules are deviants. Thus, like Parsons (1955),
he defines the sick (including the mentally sick) as 'deviants', as unable
to obey the ceremonial rules. Yet conformists and deviants share
what Goffman calls 'ritual language'. The patient:
merely says what they do not want to hear, for patient behavior which does
not carry ritual meaning in terms of the daily ceremonial discourse of the staff
will not be perceived by the staff at all (1967:89).
The patient is, says Goffman, in an environment where it is difficult
'to play the ritual game of having a self except by self-profanation.
This is because 'the self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object
which must be treated with proper ceremonial care'. Note, however,
that this is only part of the situation. Even where ceremonial per-
formance is spontaneous and agreeable, life may be full of problems

due to the facts of 'diffuse social status'. Coupling between these
orders is loose, imperfect. The order of events normally does not
change anything in the order of diffuse social status. There is no simple
dialectic relation between them.
IV
The paper I have been discussing may well be important scientific work.
It is certainly also a performance for an occasion. What is loosely
coupled here, above all, is the ethnographer and the professor, extended
into each other but always inevitably in different positions. Certainly
they come together, in occupying the same pages of a literary text.
The author may well succeed in fusing them, but this success lies then
on an essentially literary level. One of his voices says: 'look only at
the interaction order' and the other, like Rilke, says Only connect'.
And then he invites his public to study the interface between these
two. At the interface stands the two-headed statue of Janus.
This position is precarious. We have seen that it was occupied by
Levi-Strauss as well as by Goffman, by Bateson and Mead. The great
majority of western social scientists, however, appear to be caught
either in a broadly materialist or a broadly idealist viewpoint. Marxist
analysis is committed, on the whole, to giving priority to materialism
whereas Dumont, Victor Turner and more lately Roy Wagner (to limit
myself for the moment to anthropology) give priority to the structural
orders, however sensitive they are professionally to those details of
the interaction order that are relevant to their overall design.
Social scientists are not always aware of the profound influence
exerted even today by the Kantian antinomies and by the metaphysical
implications of the hierarchization of the different orders. When Levi-
Strauss constructed, in La pem£e sauvage, a new model for cultural
classifications — a model that placed itself firmly at the interface of
the two kinds of orders — Paul Ricoeur perspicaciously complained
that Levi-Strauss was setting up a Kantian system without the meta-
physics. To which Levi-Strauss (1964) cheerfully replied that this
was precisely his purpose. He recognized that such a position was
aberrant in the traditions of western philosophy but, as he said, there
were other philosophies that accepted it.
60 Eric Schwimmer
I am informed that an image of the Buddha was prominently dis-

played in the office in which Levi-Strauss developed these theories.
He never, of course, quoted the Buddha as his authority. Yet, in the
particular situation of a colloquium held in India, it is easier to
relativize between western and eastern philosophical underpinnings.
Goffman was a great classifier, not only in his monographs but even
in the essay under discussion. Several sections contain lists and
classifications. Perhaps he, too, was trying to reconstruct Kant without
the metaphysics. A symposium in India may be a good place in which
to explore the implications of such a move.
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Redefining the situation: Extending dramaturgy
into a theory of social change and media effects
Joshua Meyrowitz
Erving Goffman's examinations of social behavior are developed with

a wealth of minute detail, textured description, and insightful analysis.
They excite - and they ring true.
Yet although Goffman's work is widely appreciated and widely
assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses, there have been
surprisingly few extended adaptations or applications of his principles.
The reason for this, perhaps, is that in presenting a rich source of
behavioral data, Goffman has presented countless observations and
few integrating theories.
One finds it difficult to abstract general theoretical propositions
from Goffman's writings, which some consider a stylistic merger
of the scholarly monograph with the novel or with journalistic accounts
(Psathas 1980:53; Douglas 1970:28-29). George Psathas observes in
Goffman 'relatively little development of concepts which can be used
transsituationally' (1980:54), and he contends that a reader is 'unable
to assess critically Goffman's method or his epistemological assump-
tions since these are never discussed or presented' (1980:73-74). The
reader's impression that he has gained an understanding of previously
perceived but un-understandable complex events', says Psathas, 'serves
merely to keep him ignorant of the basis of his "understanding" and
to keep him dependent on Goffman to provide further "illumination"'
(1980:73).
Psathas may overstate this point (he has the specific agenda of noting
the absence of a phenomenologically-grounded investigation in the
work of all field researchers in the symbolic interactionist tradition),
but his critique does correctly suggest that Goffman's work is more
thoroughly interesting than it is thoroughly theoretical. As Jason
Ditton notes, in Goffman's writing 'style regularly suppresses structure'
(1980:2).
66 Joshua Meyrowitz
Goffman's most important principles are often left implicit or are

slipped in surreptitiously at the end of paragraphs. To complicate
matters further, Goffman rarely integrates a new work with his earlier
works, he abandons his own sets of terminology as quickly as he
creates them, and most of his books have no subject indexes. When
he died in 1982, Goffman was in the process of exploring new social
terrains rather than mapping the unifying features of his life work.
Even strong admirers of Goffman's scholarship are, at times, troubled
by his approach toward his own theorizing. Randall Collins, for
example, views Goffman's works as 'unyieldingly theoretical . . . in
the grand tradition: they always concern the central questions of the
conditions of social order' (1980:173). At the same time, Collins is
frustrated by Goffman's tendency to obscure his interest in such
deep questions in favor of the 'surface of immediate relevance' (1980:
175). Collins also describes Goffman's 'theory-deprecating manner'
(1980:205) and 'his failure to push on through to full possession of
the theoretical territories he has reconnoitered' (1980:206).
John Lofland (1980) suggests that Goffman, at least in his early
works, is more of a taxonomist than a theorist. Goffman, notes
Lofland, is more concerned with labeling, defining, and categorizing
types of behaviors, roles, events, and rules than with showing the
logical connections among the types. And, most significant, while
Goffman describes many of things that may happen in certain
situations, he 'rarely offers reasons (propositions) for the appearance
of an outcome' (1980:31). That is, Goffman rarely frames his work
in terms of statements that have a conditional ('if x, then y') structure.
Goffman's emphasis on description and the lack of conditional
statements leave his followers partially helpless in the face of social
change. While Goffman focuses on what is expected or typical in given
settings, he offers no explanation of the process through which changes
in 'expected' or 'typical' behavior might occur. I say only 'partially
helpless' because although Goffman explicitly ignores change, his rich,
descriptive frameworks may offer implicit clues to various predictive
mechanisms through which social change might be explained.
One concept that runs through most of Goffman's writings, and
that offers the possibility of adaptation to a theory of social change,
is the notion of 'the situation'. It is central to his early works, such
as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), and it endures
in his later works such as Frame Analysis (1974) and Forms of Talk
(1981). Additionally, in 1964, Goffman published an article, The
Theory of social change and media effects 67
Neglected Situation', explicitly pleading for more attention to be paid

to the social situation as a key social variable.
This essay will explore some of the strengths and weaknesses of
Goffman's use of the concept of 'situation'. I will suggest, in particular,
that Goffman's insistence on defining situations only in terms of
places — though quite legitimate within Goffman's stated goals -
limited the concept, making it difficult for Goffman to see its relevance
to the study of social change and mediated communications.
Situations, performance, and social reality

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (1959)
suggests that when we enter a social setting, we need to know some-
thing about the situation and the other participants. We need to know
whether the situation is formal or informal, happy or sad. We need to
know the various roles of the other people, whom we should speak
to and whom to avoid, and whether or not we are welcome. Conversely,
people in the situation need to know something about us. What is our
reason for being there? What role will we play in this situation?
In short, to know how to behave in any interaction, we need to
know 'what is going on here?' Following W.I. Thomas (1925:42),
Goffman calls this the 'definition of the situation.'
As Goffman suggests in Frame Analysis (1974), the variations in
situational definitions can be quite convoluted. A situation can have
a 'primary framework' (such as 'doing business') and yet be overlaid
with various 'keyings' ('playing at doing business' or even 'an actor
portraying a play business interaction'). Yet while analytically complex,
the perception of the definition on the part of native adult members
of a society or group is apparently relatively intuitive and direct.
Indeed, it is often much more difficult for researchers to identify,
define, and study situational definitions than it is for the average
citizen to navigate them.
How is it that most of us in most situations grasp the definitions
so quickly? Goffman notes that much of the necessary information
is not 'naturally' available. It may take years to know a person fully,
to understand the true complexities of a particular social situation
or the sets of situations that comprise a particular institution. Yet
most social interactions demand instant judgments, alignments, and
actions.
68 Joshua Meyrowitz
To meet the social need of recognizing situational definitions

quickly, suggests Goffman, people are constantly mobilizing their
energies to create socially meaningful 'impressions'. Through dress,
gesture, muscle tonus, and arrangement of furniture and other props,
we set the stages of our lives and define general roles for ourselves
and for other people. Thus, when we walk into a store or office or
school, we are usually able to acquire an immediate sense of the overall
structure of the situation and who is in what role. Even when a person
appears to be 'doing nothing', he or she is usually subtly conveying
'who' they are in that setting and what the general definition of the
situation is.
For Goffman, social roles are literally performances: selected
displays of behavior that must, to some extent, consciously or un-
consciously, be planned and rehearsed. In front of each of our
audiences, we highlight certain aspects of ourselves and mute others.
And, just as in a play, the stage must be properly set, the actors must
carefully control their actions, and the scripts for one drama must
not be confused with scripts from other dramas.
Goffman suggests that such selective displays are necessary for the
ordinary and smooth flow of social life. We do not want a therapist
to tell us that she does not feel like listening to our problems today,
nor do we want the waiter in a restaurant to join us for dinner or
to ask for help in serving people at the next table. Even as we
sometimes complain about the constraints on our own behavior, we
continue to expect others to follow the definitions of situations and
their roles within them. Whenever we are annoyed with someone
for acting 'inappropriately', we are paying homage to a set of unwritten
rules of a situation.
The impressions of ourselves that we foster in each situation, suggests
Goffman, act like 'promissory notes' that convey a commitment on
our part to behave in the same way in the future. There is little that
an individual can say or do that does not lead to expectations in others.
Available information serves as the tip of a social iceberg; others try to
glean from what they see some sense of the unseen whole. Even with
our friends and lovers, we expect some general consistency and
reliability, though we often claim to desire more novelty.
Yet each person must exhibit very different behaviors in different
settings. Psychiatrists would be considered 'unprofessional' if they
spoke in detail to their clients about their own emotional problems,
yet they would anger their spouses and friends if they did not share
their own problems and feelings. And so the stages and audiences
for different roles must be kept segregated.
Consistent with the metaphor of drama, Goffman argues that any
individual's behavior in a given setting can be thought of as falling
into two broad categories: 'back region,' or backstage behavior, and
'front region', or onstage behavior.
In front regions, the performers are in the presence of their audience
for a particular role, and they therefore project a relatively idealized
image of the role. Waitpersons, for example, are in a front region when
they serve people in a restaurant dining room. While onstage, wait-
persons are usually polite and respectful. Their appearance and manner
convey the essence of cleanliness and efficiency. They do not typically
enter the dinner conversations of restaurant patrons. They do not
comment on their customers' eating habits or table manners. In many
restaurants, they will not allow patrons to see them eating.
When waitpersons step from the dining room into the kitchen,
however, they cross a line into the backstage area, a space hidden from
the audience and shared with others who perform the same and similar
roles in relation to the audience.
While backstage, waitpersons may make remarks to each other about
the behavior and appearance of customers, they may imitate a
customer, or give advice to a 'rookie' on how to maximize tips. Back-
stage, food often is handled and discussed with much less respect than
in the dining room, and waitpersons may sit, stand, or gesture in ways
that would be inappropriate in the front region.
While waiting tables is a low status activity in our society, the same
distinction in behaviors is characteristic of higher status positions
such as doctor. When Onstage', doctors tend to hide doubts, ignorance,
feelings of depression, and sexual reactions to nudity. When backstage,
however, doctors may joke with each other or with nurses about the
personality or physical appearance of a patient, they may ask a
colleague never to correct them within earshot of patients (a 'stage
direction'), or they may telephone another doctor to get advice on
an unusual set of symptoms.
Virtually any role can be analyzed using a similar framework. Most
of us have onstage arenas in which we must perform before some
audience. Most of us have what Goffman refers to as 'teammates',
those who share the same role or work to foster the same impression.
And most of us have a back region where we relax, rehearse, develop
strategies for future performances, and joke with teammates about
behaviors in front regions.
70 Joshua Meyro wit z
Backstage behavior may, at first, seem more 'real' or honest than

front region behavior. But the issue is not quite that simple. An in-
dividual may 'really be' a dedicated, compassionate doctor, even
though in back regions she complains to colleagues about stress, and
wonders aloud if she should not have been a lawyer instead, or jokes
about an occasional urge to poison a particular patient. Nearly everyone
exhibits behaviors in one setting that contradict the behaviors they
exhibit in other settings. Indeed, even back region behavior may be
thought of as a kind of role, where teammates will not tolerate formal,
front region style.
Although we often believe that it is dishonest or immoral to 'put
on' a character or to 'play a role', Goffman suggests that this is a
naive belief. Some people, it is true, may purposely give misleading
impressions (spies, con artists, undercover agents), but all individuals
must give some impression. Thus, while a dishonest judge must pretend
to be an honest judge, even an honest judge must play the role of
'honest judge'. All judges — honest and dishonest alike — must avoid
being seen in questionable places with questionable characters even
if there is nothing inappropriate 'actually' going on. Even honest
judges must dress and behave properly when Onstage', by wearing
black, not pink robes and by sitting behind the bench rather than cross-
legged on the floor at the feet of the jury.
What distinguishes honest from dishonest performers, suggests
Goffman, is not the need for rehearsal and performance, but rather:
a) whether the performers are socially authorized to play the roles,
and b) the attitude of the performers toward their own roles. In one
sense, honest people are those who have some formal social 'permission'
to play the role and are at least partially taken in by their own per-
formances — and thereby come to think of themselves as the characters
they portray.
Although we often imagine that the discovery of inconsistent back
region behavior is the means of 'unmasking' deceit, Goffman suggests
that the exposure of back region information can destroy sincere
performances as well. The notion of a 'sincere performance' may
sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is consistent with Goffman's
view that we do not have 'true selves' apart from our interaction
with other people.
The self . . . can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing
in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the
person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control
that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him.
This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the
self as constitute it (1961:168).
The performer's social 'face', as Goffman sometimes refers to an
internally consistent situational self, is not something which is simply
put on for social gain. The individual 'cathects his face'; the performer's
'feelings' become attached to it (1967:6). This attachment to face is
the result of the inherent paradox of self, as presented by Goffman.
On the one hand the individual's self is something that is located in
a complex of social relations and is therefore impersonal; yet the
very same social composition of self forces the individual to rely
with all his or her being on the group and on the face he or she projects
to it.
Social truth, then, is an elusive entity. One might say that it is a
region-relative concept. Goffman suggest that behavior in front regions,
even though it is 'staged', represents a kind of Objective' social reality.
The manner in which people behave and respond is, after all, the way
they really behave and respond. And individuals come to define
themselves and others in relation to the way in which role performances
'come off. As Goffman puts it, 'The world, in truth, is a wedding'
(1959:36).
Surface dynamism, structural stability

The general picture of social interaction that Goffman presents is
one of people actively involved in many different dramas: As social
actors, we are constantly changing costumes and roles, learning and
adhering to a complex matrix of conventional behavior, and working
hard to maintain a performance in each ongoing situation without
undermining or threatening our different behaviors in other social
situations.
Goffman's social scenario is very dynamic on the surface. But the
dynamism usually rests in the kind of activity needed to adjust to
a relatively stable social order with largely fixed rules, roles, social
occasions, and institutions. People must absorb the social conventions,
72 Joshua Meyrowitz
must rehearse and monitor their performances, but the scripts and
stages are relatively unchanging.
In Goffman's social world, the dynamism is mostly in the projection
of figures against a static ground. Behavior may change from place
to place, but the ways in which it changes, as well as the situations
for which it changes, are usually constant.
Indeed, Goffman sees performers and audiences colluding, in a
sense, to preserve existing definitions. Performers attempt to manage
their impressions; audiences use 'tact' in disregarding minor flaws
or small bits of inconsistent information. When Goffman discusses
major disruptions, he focuses on how they are repaired or avoided in
the first place (see, for example, 1959:12-14; 167-237). The process
through which permanent changes in roles and rules may take place
is not discussed.
Ironically, Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life in 1959, on the threshold of one of the most turbulent decades
of American life. While people in the 1960s continued to 'play roles',
they were not the same roles that had been played in the past. In
Goffman's terms, the performers were combining previously distinct
performances and styles of interaction. Behaviors that were once kept
in the 'backstage' area of life — such as sex and drugs and foul
language - were now being thrust into the public arena. People were
dressing and speaking in public as if they were at home. Indeed,
Goffman's 1950s description of appropriate back region behavior
could serve as a description of many of the 'shocking' front region
behaviors of the protest marches and sit-ins of the late 1960s.
The backstage language consists of reciprocal first-naming, co-operative decision-
making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough
informal dress, 'sloppy' sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or sub-
standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and 'kidding',
inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic acts, minor
physical self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling,
belching, and flatulence (1959:128).
The 1960s also brought demands to break down old segregations
of behaviors and audiences and to treat people of different sexes,
ages, races, and professions more alike. Nuns were shedding their
habits and moving from convents to the community. Female secretaries
were refusing to make coffee for their male employers. A 'youth
culture' arose across class, race, religious, and even national lines.
Many journalists and scholars were abandoning the public ideal of
Objectivity' and were incorporating their personal experiences and

subjective feelings into their work. Children were calling parents and
teachers by their first names as if they were peers. Men and women
were abandoning old forms of courtship and marriage. The President
of the United States revealed his operation scars to the nation as if
all the people in the country were his intimate friends.
Amidst these and many other behavioral changes, Goffman's 1967
stated quest for 'a minimal model of the actor' that would allow us
to 'wind him up, stick him in amongst his fellows, and have an orderly
traffic of behavior emerge' (1967:3) seemed anachronistic and illusory.
Yet although Goffman tends to ignore social change, he provides
some implicit clues to understanding how and why behavioral changes
may take place. If social reality exists in distinct sets of behaviors,
if 'truth' is enmeshed in the pattern of situation segregation, if the
more we know about individuals from other situations, then the less
clearly we may be able to see who they 'are' as they stand before
us, then what a profound change in selves, society, and social reality
we would witness when the situations in which people behave are
somehow rearranged.
The next section offers some preliminary propositions on how
behavior may change when the structure of situations changes.
Principles for a dramaturgical theory of social change
Shifting situational patterns

For certain behaviors to take place and for people to 'be' and 'become'
certain types of people, the appropriate settings and audiences must
exist. Boxers, teachers, and judges depend on the existence of boxing
rings, classrooms, and courtrooms, respectively.
Further, although we often tend to think of situations in terms
of what and who is in them, situational definitions depend as strongly
on what and who is outside them. For example, to develop and
maintain a professional identity, many people feel they must remove
themselves from contexts in which their parents and/or their children
are present. For us to behave very differently in different situations
and with different audiences, we have to keep our performances and
audiences segregated.
74 Joshua Meyrowitz
The reality of 'who we are' as individuals and as a society, then,

does not reside in the sum of all our behaviors, but in the existing
pattern of segregated situations.
I propose that, contrary to what much of Goffman's analyses seem
to suggest, the pattern of situation segregation is a variable rather
than a static aspect of an individual's and society's existence. Patterns
of situational segregation and integration can be modified by individual
life decisions (moving out of the house of one's parents, deciding to
work at home, etc.), by chance (one's new neighbor turns out to
be one's boss), and by other forces, including a society's media use
(which will be discussed further below).
The definitional gestalt

How can we describe what happens to behavior when the pattern of
situations changes? When situations begin to overlap or become even
more segregated, do we get completely new behaviors or simply a sum
or fraction of old ones? Perhaps we get no significant change at all.
Because Goffman explores only temporary changes in the boundary
lines between situations, his work does not inform us as to what would
happen when a change in boundaries is relatively permanent.
The basis for understanding what happens to behavior when
situations combine or divide may lie in the fact that it is virtually
impossible to display two separate roles at the same time. We cannot
dress, speak, and behave in two or more different ways at the same
moment. We can't be simultaneously sullen and animated, flirtatious
and cooly authoritative, carefree and agitated. As a result, there seems
to be a need and a demand for a single primary definition of each
social situation. Situational definitions tend to be perceived in an
organized whole that allows for broadly predicting what the situation
will entail. Hence the great discomfort we usually feel when we are
invited to an undefined event.
When two situations merge, we rarely get a simple combination
of situations. Instead, a new single definitional gestalt arises with a
single new set of rules and roles. When two couples double-date, for
example, the situation that emerges is not the sum of the two separate
dates, but a new, third situation. Similarly, when a romantic couple
move in together, they do not get their romantic interactions plus the
day-to-day necessities of life. Instead, they get a new unified system;
both their lovemaking and their billpaying habits are transformed.
There is a certain 'logic' to the nature of the merger of situations

that no doubt grows out of other situational definitions and inter-
subjective cultural attitudes. Indeed, the new, single definition usually
makes so much 'sense' that we do not see that the former situations
no longer exist and that a third situation has arisen. Yet the newness
of the situation is identifiable by the fact that the merged situation
is one where many behaviors can take place that could not have taken
place in the two distinct situations and vice versa. A worker who
marries his or her boss, for example, will find that just as there are
newly permissible behaviors, so are there many requests that can no
longer be made and behaviors that are no longer appropriate. The new
relationship is neither simply 'husband and wife' nor 'employer and
employee'.
There is a big difference between the effects of short-term and
long-term combinations of situations. A sudden, temporary merger
of very distinct situations causes a disruption in behavior. Without
a clear definition of the situation, everyone may be embarrassed,
confused, and/or angry. If, for example, someone at a party opens the
door of a bathroom to find someone already there who has forgotten
to lock the door, there is likely to be a moment of great embarrassment
for both people. But the door will be quickly shut in an attempt to
repair the damage and restore the old definition. Structurally, this is the
sort of unexpected disruption and quick repair that concerns Goffman.
Yet while temporary breakdowns lead only to confusion and disrup-
tion, permanent or long-term breakdowns lead to the birth of new
behavior patterns. In the face of an unrepairable definition, people
cannot stand around confused and embarrassed forever. Some new
accepted pattern of behavior must emerge. When people routinely
perform bodily functions in the same physical space, for example,
a new stable definition of the situation will usually arise. This is what
happened to the Peruvian soccer team whose plane crashed in the
Andes. As described in the book, Alive, they had many conversations
concerning each other's bowel movements (Read 1974). Similar
situations evolve among longtime roommates or couples who live
together for many years.
Behavior that in a temporary situation may appear deviant and
disruptive may, in more permanent situations, be quickly renegotiated
as normal. Even the most unusual situations can be defined as if
'nothing unusual is happening' (Emerson 1970).
76 Joshua Meyrowitz
I suggest that in general: 1) behavior patterns divide into as many

single definitions as there are distinct settings, and 2) when two or
more settings merge, their distinct definitions merge into one new
definition.
These principles suggest that the dynamics of social systems are,
in one sense at least, very similar to the dynamics of physical systems.
Two adjacent rooms that are separated by a physical barrier can be
kept at vastly different temperatures, seventy-five degrees and five
degrees, for example. But if the wall between the two rooms is
removed, then the entire joined space will, after a short while, reach
a relatively consistent temperature. The temperature, however, will
not be eighty degrees (the sum of the two distinct temperatures),
but some temperature in between. In the same way, people can develop
distinct behavior patterns in two distinct situations, but if the two
situations merge, then they usually develop one new, synthesized
definition.
The analogy to temperature, however, does not convey the psy-
chological complexity of the shift that occurs when social situations
combine, such as when a couple adds 'parenthood' to the situation
of 'newlyweds'.
Because mergers of situations destroy old definitions, there are
many implicit and explicit rules about keeping situations separate.
Psychiatrists are not supposed to become emotionally or sexually
involved with their patients. The military strongly condemns 'fraterni-
zation' — a friendly or romantic relationship among superiors and
subordinates. Similarly, teachers are not supposed to date their
students. There are many vulgar expressions for describing how unwise
it is to add sexual dimensions to business interactions. For whether
the personal relationships prosper or end poorly, it usually becomes
difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the old patterns of business
interaction. In addition to the moral and ethical problems with such
blending of roles, the motives of the participants are often ambiguous.
Indeed, one explanation for the incest taboo is that it allows for a
very special type of unambiguous relationship — a loving, caring, and
nurturing bond that is not sexual (Malinowski 1931:629-630).
Of course, given human nature, people often break the implicit
and explicit rules. As a result of past and present personal relation-
ships, many workplaces are teaming with animosities, and there often
exists a whole network of unwritten rules and behavior patterns that
do not appear on organizational charts.
Middle, deep back, and forefront region behavior

Pursuing the notion that situational definitions divide and combine
in relation to the number of relatively distinct situations, how might
one describe the general relationship between the new and old
behaviors? Goffman's model of -back and front region behavior —
though designed to describe a static set of stages — hints at a possible
answer.
Implicit in Goffman's region model is the interdependence of back
and front regions. The onstage performance depends on the existence
of the backstage area. If performers lose the ability to keep their back
region behavior separate from their front region behavior, they
lose not only aspects of their privacy, but also the ability to play
certain parts of their front region roles. When actors have no place
to rehearse in private, they cannot build to a performance that excites
and moves the audience. When audiences show up at the rehearsal,
actors may gamely try to produce as good a show as they can muster,
but it will lack the finesse of a show that had more private backstage
time. People who live together, for example, often have relatively
little private space and time to rehearse for and impress each other —
even though they often help their partners rehearse for onstage roles
on other social stages. While not part of the romantic ideal, one of
the functional components of intimacy is tolerance for seeing each
other expressionless and silent.
This either/or conception of the dramatic aspects of social per-
formance — having a backstage or not having one — can be extended
into a continuous and variable model of the interplay of onstage and
backstage styles. In general, whatever aspects of the rehearsal become
visible to the audience must be integrated into the show itself; whatever
backstage time and space remain hidden can still be used to perfect
the performance.
When the dividing line between onstage and backstage behaviors
moves in either direction, the nature of the drama changes accordingly.
The more rehearsal space is lost, the more the onstage drama comes
to resemble an extemporaneous backstage rehearsal; when the back-
stage area is increased in size, then the onstage behavior can become
even more formal.
Adapting the concepts of back and front region, one could say that
the combination of situations leads to 'middle region' behavior. Con-
versely, the division of situations leads to two new sets of behavior:
'deep back region' and 'forefront' region.
78 Joshua Meyrowitz
Middle region behavior often develops when audience members

gain a 'sidestage' view. The audience sees parts of the former back-
stage area along with parts of the traditional onstage area. This view
may undermine the traditional performance. To adapt to the new
exposure, the competent performer adjusts his or her social role so
that it is consistent with the new information available to the audience.
When a politician's advisors are invisible to the politician's con-
stituency, for example, the politician may never publicly admit a need
for advice. But if a television camera frequently captures advisors
whispering in the politician's ear, the politician may find him/herself
publicly commenting on how he or she has sought out the advice of
the finest experts.
A middle region behavior pattern contains elements of both the
former onstage and offstage behaviors, but lacks their extremes. If
children come to an adult party, for example, conversations about
death, sex, and money may stop until the children leave. If the children
stay for a long time, however, some new compromise style of behavior
is likely to arise where 'adult' topics are discussed in front of the
children, but with neither the explicitness characteristic of an all-
adult party nor the innocence once deemed appropriate for an adult-
children party. Indeed, the longer the adults and children stay together,
the more the children will see the childish side of adulthood, and
the more children will be exposed to and talk about adult topics.
We see some evidence of this dynamic on family vacations and during
natural disasters or war-caused emergencies. In such situations, adults
and children are often confined to one space together, and adults
can no longer easily hide their backstage behaviors. Anne Frank, for
example, recorded evidence of a middle region process in her diary.
While hiding from the Nazis, Anne was thrust into a confined and
not very private space with her parents, sister, and another family.
One of Anne's greatest shocks was over the poor behavior exhibited
by the adults. Anne wrote: 'Why do grownups quarrel so easily, so
much, and over the most idiotic things? Up till now I thought that
only children squabbled and that that wore off as you grew up ...
I'm simply amazed again and again over their awful manners' (1953:29).
Deep back and forefront region behavior develop when performers
gain increased isolation from their audience. The new separation of
situations allows for both a coarser backstage style and a more pristine
onstage performance. When children move out of their parents' home,
for example, the privacy of their own residence offers both the parents
and the children the possibility of developing more idiosyncratic

private styles of behavior, as well as revised, cleaner fronts for each
other. Similarly, the more privacy political leaders can maintain, the
sharper the potential contrast between an informal backstage style
and a front of 'distinguished leader'.
In middle region behaviors, the extremes of the former front region
are lost because performers no longer have the necessary backstage
time and space. The new behaviors also lack the extremes of the former
backstage behavior because the new middle region dramas are
performed before an audience. In one sense, then, middle region
behaviors are simply new front region behaviors. But to think of
them merely as front region behaviors removes the historical dimension;
we lose the ability to see the nature and direction of the behavioral
change. Further, the concepts of middle, deep back, and forefront
region behaviors highlight the process through which new public and
private styles evolve: a shift in the dividing line between traditional
back and front region behaviors.
The interaction of an individual's behavioral regions

As developed by Goffman, the back/front region model is best suited
to the study of behavior in a single setting, such as an office or hospital.
Once we go beyond the single setting, it becomes difficult to apply
the model directly. What, for example, is the relationship among
several different front region performances on the part of the same
individual? This question becomes especially significant when con-
trasting different social structures (such as small towns and large
cities) or in studying social change. Yet Goffman rarely touches on
this issue.
Goffman's dramaturgical model can be adapted even further,
however, to consider the interdependency of all an individual's per-
formances and behavioral settings. An individual's front region behavior
in one role is, after all, an indirect back region to other roles. Each
front region performance depends on a multiplicity of other front
and back regions. The ability of a person to perform well as a teacher,
for example, depends not only on good classroom performance and
a back region area to prepare lectures and discuss strategies with
colleagues, but also on the past and present ability to perform relatively
well (and inconspicuously) in other roles such as student, taxpayer,
parent, spouse, and so on. None of these roles may be as clearly and
80 Joshua Meyrowitz
directly related to classroom style as a strategy meeting with a more

experienced colleague, but performance as a teacher still depends
on these other roles, and also on the performance of them in
segregation from the role of teacher. A teacher's credibility in the
eyes of students, parents, principal, and school board may be under-
mined by information about the teacher's driving record, drinking
habits, marital relationship, and parenting style.
Because most of us attempt to present ourselves as relatively con-
sistent personalities for each one of our audiences, any information
that an audience has about our behavior from other situations has
to be taken into account when we execute a given performance. The
concept of 'middle region' behavior, therefore, can be extended beyond
the merger of the backstage and onstage behaviors for a single role.
Middle region behavior can refer to the behavior that results from the
merger of any two or more previously distinct situations. Conversely,
deep back region and forefront region behaviors develop whenever
any situation divides into two or more distinct settings, or whenever
there is an increase in the distance between situations.
In general, the more distance there is between two or more
situations, the more an individual's behavior can vary from one
situation to the next. Conversely, the less distance there is between
situations, the more similar the behaviors in them will tend to be.
A person cannot simultaneously project the image of 'docile student'
and 'strict teacher'. Yet often the same person is asked to perform
both these roles sequentially. And the distance between the role-
settings will shape how the roles can be played. If, for example, a
college student, Susan, is asked by Ms. Jones, the teacher, to lead
a class discussion while the teacher presents a paper at a conference,
Susan will probably strive toward a new, synthesis role of 'teacher-
student', which is neither that of student among her peers nor of a
'real' teacher. For if Susan played only her own student role while
the teacher was away, she would have little or no effect on the class,
and if she played a typical 'real' teacher, she would probably be
mocked or resented by her classmates who know too much about
her to accept her in that role. (Ironically, then, her onstage role of
'good student' becomes potentially damaging backstage behavior
when she tries to play 'teacher'.)
However, if Ms. Jones were to ask Susan to take over a different
class in the same school, Susan could play the role of teacher somewhat
more fully. And if Ms. Jones herself is a doctoral student at a different
university, then the distinctions between Ms. Jones' teacher role and
her student role can be very great. The distance between situations,
then, contributes to the degree of separation in behavioral style. Such
distance is determined by both time and space. All teachers, for
example, were once students, but temporal insulation allows for these
roles to be very different.
One of the reasons, perhaps, that many schools have explicit or
implicit rules against hiring their own graduates is that such hirings
often create role difficulties for all involved. A new colleague's former
teachers, for example, may always look upon the new colleague less
as an equal than as a former student who 'made good'. At the same
time, they may feel that their new colleague/old student has too much
information about them from observing them in the classroom (for
ironically, teachers' front region classroom behavior often serves as
a back region to their colleagial role, in that colleagues rarely have
extensive knowledge of each other's teaching styles). At the same
time, the old student/new colleague may feel that his/her former
teachers have too much information about him/her as a student (a
poor grade on an exam, a stupid question once asked, that time he
or she fell asleep in class) to be able to accept him/her as a full
colleague. The solution is often that professors write very positive
job recommendations for their best students and try to hire someone
else's best students.
Region dynamics and macro-level role change

People of the same status in society generally have access to the same
or similar situations; people of different social status usually have
access to different situations. Children, for example, have traditionally
been restricted from access to certain types of situations and the
information available in them. Similarly, men and women have
traditionally been segregated into different social spheres. The
conglomerate of situations that people of a certain status or role
generally have access to might be called the status' 'meta-situation'.
An examination of situational patterns offers a link between
behavior on the micro-level — particular individuals in particular
settings — and behavior on the macro-level — broad categories of social
roles. Just as situation segregation supports different behaviors for
the same individual in different contexts, so will situation segregation
support more social differentiation in behavior in general.
82 Joshua Meyrowitz
When situational patterns allow for adults to be separated frequently

from children, for example, very distinct notions of childhood and
adulthood may develop. Further, when children of different ages
can be separated from each other, childhood may be divided into
year-by-year slices of different status. Similarly, the more men and
women are isolated from each other, the more different their roles
and statuses can become. And the more leaders can remove themselves
from followers, the more mystified and impressive their leadership
will seem.
Situation segregation supports differences among people of different
status by exposing different people to different experiences, by
isolating the stages for one social role from those of another, and by
allowing for increased access to backstage areas for preparing for
performances in front of 'the other'. Thus, the more adults can distance
themselves from children, the more adult experience differs from
child experience: the more adults can play adult roles in arenas that
contain no children, and the more adults can manipulate and control
their onstage impressions when in front of children. Situation
segregation supports similar differences between the experiences,
settings, and stagings for gender roles and for authority roles.
This analysis is consistent with the anthropological literature, which
suggests that nomadic hunters and gatherers — who rarely get away
from each other — have relatively few status distinctions. Compared
to other forms of social organization, nomads have few gender distin-
ctions, little sense of discrete socialization stages for children, and
minimal notions of hierarchy. All this changes, however, when hunters
and gatherers settle down. Once they begin to use different places for
different activities, then distinctions between children and adults,
men and women, and leaders and followers start to become more
apparent (Meyrowitz 1985:315-317).
In general, then, the more situations and participants overlap, the
less social differentiation in status and behavior, and, conversely, the
more situations and participants are segregated, the greater differentia-
tion in status and behavior.
The different degrees of overlapping of social spheres in small towns
and in large cities, for example, may be one of the reasons why there
often seems to be less variation in small town residents' behaviors
from one situation to the next.
In a large city, one can separate one's relatives from one's neighbors,
one's co-workers and friends need never meet. As a result, one can
77z eory of social change and m edia effects 83
dress, act, and speak very differently in different situations. Lawyers,

for example, can wear three-piece suits and ooze conservatism in their
offices, and then go jogging in cut-off shorts on the weekend, or smoke
marijuana in a large crowd at a rock festival.
In small towns, however, almost anyone you see is someone you
know or someone who knows someone you know. In small towns,
therefore, almost any action one takes in any given setting is likely
to have repercussions within most other spheres of one's life. The
overlapping of situations acts as an implicit constraint on the range
of behaviors in small towns. A fight at work, or a screaming match
with another driver are likely to affect, at least indirectly, one's
relationships with friends and family and local storekeepers. Teachers'
problems with their own children are likely to 'feed back' into their
teaching performances, affecting the degree to which they may feel
comfortable projecting total competence and authority. At the same
time, because everyone knows so much about everyone else, there
is likely to be a higher level of mutual tolerance for exposed in-
consistencies than one finds in more 'private' large cities.
Such principles of overlapping spheres may explain the oftenheard
complaint among small town folk that city people seem crazy, erratic,
distant, and arrogant as well as the oftenheard comment among city
people that small town people are meek or dull, but also slightly
eccentric.
The smaller the town, and the longer one lives there, the more the
situations and behaviors overlap. For those born in small towns, the
overlapping of spheres can be both comforting and oppressive.
Wherever one goes in town there are friends and family. But one's
past easily merges with one's present. The authority of the police
officer who grew up in the town, for example, may be muted by the
citizens' knowledge of the officer's minor acts of vandalism as a youth.
It is perhaps because of such overlappings of spheres that many
people who want to make their mark in the world (i.e., create a very
different definition of themselves) feel they must flee to the relatively
anonymous city. Just as distinguished professionals are sometimes
treated like silly children in their own parents' homes, so is it difficult
for artists, writers, and others to redefine themselves sharply among
the people who knew them when.
84 Joshua Meyrowitz
The invisibility of region dynamics

One of the reasons that the dynamics of region behavior are largely
invisible in everyday interactions is that people very quickly adapt to
the new definitions of situations. Generally, role performers control
whatever backstage information can be controlled. But if damaging
backstage information escapes into a front region, it is often integrated
into the performance. If a dinner guest arrives earlier than expected,
for example, and the guest witnesses an argument between the hosts
as well as the last-minute attempts to clean the house and prepare
the food for dinner, the hosts will find it impossible to play the same
front region role they would have played if the guest had come on
time. As a result, middle region comments may be made about the
stress of a dual-career lifestyle and the impossibility of finding time
to clean. Since the idea that there is no calculated 'performance'
is itself part of many social performances, it is important that audience
members (and even performers) not become too conscious of attempts
to hide back region information.
The process through which 'deeper' back region and more 'forward'
front region behaviors develop is even more invisible than the develop-
ment of middle region behavior. For, by definition, that which can
no longer be seen is not there for scrutiny. When newly private
situations develop, people usually give little thought to the effects
of the structural change. Instead, the new behaviors are often attributed
to changes in personality or motivation. When young adults go away
to college, for example, their family members and neighbors may
begin to see them as more mature.
In similar ways, significant and widespread changes may occur in
patterns of social interaction without people being fully aware of
the degree or nature of the changes. In each given interaction,
individuals will feel that they are merely adapting realistically 10 the
demands of the particular situation they find themselves in, or,
perhaps, that they are actively recreating themselves. A society that
is in the process of enhancing its 'deep back' and 'forefront' region
behaviors may think of itself as advancing civility and social order
(though some might see it as increasing stuffiness and pomposity).
The development of 'middle region' behavior may be viewed merely
as a new spirit of 'honesty' or 'realism' — or as a decline in standards,
etiquette, and morals. But generally, the relationship between the
behavioral changes and a shift between backstage and onstage settings
remains largely invisible.
While it is understandable that the average member of society may

be unaware of such dynamics, it is surprising that Goffman — the
consummate observer of the unobserved - also seems oblivious to
them. Perhaps Goffman has difficulty seeing and accounting for such
social changes because of his exclusive focus on physical settings
and his related lack of attention to media of communication.
Goffman's place-bound dramas

In examining regions, situations, gatherings, and occasions, Goffman
explicitly focuses on behaviors in physical locations. He describes
a 'behavioral region' as 'any place that is bounded to some degree by
barriers to perception' (1959:106, emphasis added). The title of his
book, Behavior in Public Places, also demonstrates his interest in
location. In that volume, he emphasizes that his interest is on
information received through the 'naked senses', not through sensory
augmenters (see, for example, 1963:14-15), that he is interested only
in 'embodied' messages 'that a sender conveys by means of his own
current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the
time that his body is present to sustain this activity' (1963:14). He
explicitly states that he is not interested in studying mediated inter-
actions, as when people correspond with each other (1963:14, 89n).
Two of Goffman's key phrases for defining interactions are
'copresence' and 'mutual monitoring'. 'Persons must sense that they
are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including
their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this
sensing of being perceived' (1963:17). Goffman defines a 'gathering'
as 'any set of two or more individuals whose members include all and
only those who are at the moment in one another's immediate
presence" (1963:18, emphasis added), and he defines a 'situation'
as 'the full spatial environment anywhere within which an entering
person becomes a member of the gathering that is (or does then
become) present' (1963:18, emphasis added). 'Situations begin when
mutual monitoring occurs, and lapse when the second-last person has
left'(1963:18).
A 'social occasion' for Goffman is a 'wider social affair, . . . bounded
in regard to place and time," that 'provides the structuring social
context in which many situations and their gatherings are likely to
form, dissolve, and re-form' (1963:18, emphasis added).
86 Joshua Meyrowitz
Such place-bound definitions explicitly exclude interactions through

media. Indeed, after defining situations in terms of 'immediate physical
presence', Goffman divides the universe of social activity into two
mutually exclusive categories: 'By definition, an individual's activities
must occur either in social situations or solitarily' (1967:167).
Of course, Goffman is too astute äs an observer of social interaction
to be completely unaware of the existence and use of media. But even
when Goffman mentions electronic and other media (often as literal
footnotes to his work), he seems to view their effects as unusual or
amusing, and, in most cases, as peripheral to the core of social action
he hopes to elucidate (see, for example, 1959:119; 1963:49; 1963:
102n;1971:286;1974:169n). 1
Goffman's concern with immediate physical presence and the naked
senses grows out of his interest in defining a new sub-area of sociology.
As he states in the first sentence of Strategic interaction, 'My ultimate
interest is to develop the study of face-to-face interaction as a naturally
bounded, analytically coherent field' (1969:ix). His purpose is clear
and logical. But in so tightly limiting his purview to location-indexed
settings, he not only obscures the conceptual continuities with
mediated communications, he also cuts off the immediate possibility
of seeing how media may impinge on and rework behavioral settings
and social structure.
It is not entirely surprising that Goffman - and indeed virtually
all those who have studied situations and behavior (see, for example,
Argyle, Furnham, and Graham 1981; Barker 1968; Forgas 1979;
Scheflen 1972) - have focused primarily on immediate physical
presence. Face-to-face communication is the most intense form of
communication. Every face-to-face encounter holds the possibility
of embrace or attack. Only in each other's immediate presence can
another person occupy one's full sensorium, including smell, touch,
and taste. Goffman's desire to call attention to this often taken-for-
granted realm of human experience is quite legitimate.
In addition, place-bound, face-to-face interaction was, until recently,
the only means of experiencing the sights and sounds of others'
behaviors. Physical barriers and passageways once defined the
boundaries and patterns of communication.
But this is no longer always the case. Through electronic media -
such as the telephone, radio, television, and computer - we have
access to others and others have access to us in ways that defy
traditional laws of time and space. Electronic communications pass
through walls and leap across vast distances, thereby demoting the
status of place as one determinant of social context. One can now
be an audience to a social performance without being physically
present; one can communicate 'directly' with others without meeting
in the same place. Increasingly, our interpersonal interactions are
interrupted by, or interwoven with, encounters with or through media.
Such recontextualizing of behavior also demands attention. In fact,
it suggests that Goffman's analytically neat view of 'naturally-bounded'
face-to-face interactions is losing much of its experiential primacy.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Goffman began his work on face-
to-face communication at the very time of the spread of television —
a technology whose focus is usually the face, but without copresence.
Television allows us to watch the face-work of others, without being
concerned with our own impressions. It allows us to ignore what
Goffman refers to as rules of 'eye discipline' (1971:45-46), that is,
we can stare unremittingly at others' behavioral displays without
social consequence. Television breaks the spell of copresence, even
as it makes us aware of its special magic.
Perhaps one of the reasons that Goffman tends to see situations
and roles as relatively stable is that it is extremely rare for there to
be a sudden, widespread change in walls, doors, the layout of a city,
or in other architectural and geographical structures. But the change
in situations and behaviors that occurs when doors are opened or closed
and when walls are constructed or removed is paralleled in our times
by the flick of a microphone switch, the turning on of a television set,
or the answering of a telephone.
The next section suggests that while Goffman explicitly ignores
such changes, his frameworks can be adapted to exploring them.
Situations as behavioral information-systems

Although Goffman focuses explicitly on place-defined situations, the
question arises as to whether place is, in reality, the key variable in
his analyses. That is, is it actually place that is the large determinant
of social behavior, or is it something else that has traditionally been
linked to place and therefore confused with it?
Goffman himself provides a possible answer. For there is another
key factor, besides place, that is mentioned in his definition of be-
88 Joshua Meyrowitz
havioral regions: 'barriers to perception'. I suggest that a close

examination of the dynamics of situations and behavior as described
by Goffman indicates that place itself is a subcategory of the more
inclusive notion of a perceptual field. For while situations are usually
defined in terms of who is in what location, the implicit issue is actually
the types of behaviors that are available for other people's scrutiny.
The relationship between back and front regions in Goffman's work,
for example, is often tied directly to physical location. Waitpersons
are in a front region when they are in the dining room and in a back
region when they are in the kitchen. Yet place is not the real issue.
If there are no patrons in the dining room, then the dining room
could clearly serve as a back region area of preparation, rehearsal, and
relaxation (as it does before and after serving times). Conversely, if a
customer walks into the kitchen, the kitchen would be transformed,
for a time (and to the extent possible), into a front region. Similarly,
if two waitpersons in the dining room surreptitiously exchange glances
that mock the patrons they are serving, or if they whisper 'stage
directions' to each other, in passing, then they have had a back region
interaction, even though they are physically Onstage'.
The physical location, then, is not what shapes the nature of the
interaction, but the patterns of information flow. Indeed, the analysis
of situational definitions can be completely removed from the issue
of direct physical presence by focusing only on information access.
If an intercom is mistakenly left on in the kitchen and a few patrons
overhear two waitpersons insulting them offstage, then the situational
definition will be affected even though no change in the physical
place or in the physical locations of the participants has occurred. In
the same way, social situations and social performances in society,
in general, may be changed by the introduction of new media of
communication. When literacy empowers parents to spell words to
each other to prevent their young, pre-literate children from under-
standing what is being said, the parents have established a backstage
area even while they are in the presence of their children. Similarly,
when two teenagers speak to each other on the telephone, they override
physical distance and create a backstage area apart from the adults
with whom they live.
The inclusion of mediated encounters in the study of situations,
however, requires us to abandon the notion that social situations are
only encounters that occur face-to-face in set times and places. We
need to look at the larger, more inclusive notion of 'patterns of access
to information'.
'Information' is used here in a special sense to mean social infor-

mation, all that people are capable of knowing about the behavior
and actions of themselves and others. The term refers to that nebulous
'stuff we learn about each other in acts of communication. This
type of information is the heart of news, gossip, political campaigns,
courtships, as well as all personal and professional relationships and
encounters. It is also the subtext of most primary education. Such
information comes in many forms including words, gestures, vocaliza-
tions, posture, dress, and pace of activity. At base, the information
of concern here deals with social behavior — our access to each other's
social performances.
This definition of information differs from some of the common
uses of the term to refer to 'facts', in general, or to quiz show type
trivia such as 'What is the capital of Albania?' or 'Who was the first
person to walk on the moon?' Similarly, it does not refer primarily
to objective statements about the workings of the universe that exist
prior to, and apart from humanity. In this analysis, information relates
to the social, not the natural order. The concern is more with 'social
experience' than general 'knowledge'. (Though social information
patterns often influence who gains access to various types of knowledge
and who is authorized to use it.)
Another way to think about a social situation is as an 'information-
system', that is, as a given pattern of access to social information,
a given pattern of access to the behavior of other people. This
definition is quite consistent with Goffman's place-bound analyses,
but the concept of information-systems is broader and suggests that
physical settings and media 'settings' are part of a continuum rather
than a dichotomy. Places and media both foster set patterns of
interaction among people, set patterns of social information flow.
Thus, while places create one type of information-system — the
live encounter — there are many other types of situations created by
other channels of communication. This wider view of situations is
especially relevant to the study of electronic media because such
media have tended to diminish the differences between live and
mediated interaction. The speech and appearance of others are now
accessible without being in the same physical location. The widespread
use of electronic media leads to many new social situations.
90 Joshua Meyrowitz
New media, new situations

We all know from everyday experience that electronic media override
the boundaries and definitions of situations supported by physical
settings. When two friends speak on the telephone, for example, the
situation they are 'in' is only marginally related to their respective
physical locations. Indeed, the telephone tends to bring two people
closer to each other, in some respects, than they are to other people
in their physical environments. This explains the almost jealous
response on the part of some people who are in the same room with
someone speaking on the phone. They may ask 'Who is it?' 'What's
she saying?' 'What's so funny?' or 'Come on, get off the phone already!'
Or they may try to participate by shouting comments from the back-
ground and by attempting to elicit a response from one of the people
on the phone. Ironically, to participate fully in the phone conversation
of someone you are 'with', you often have to leave that person and
go to another room to pick up an extension phone.
There are many rough parallels between the flow of information
through media and the flow of information in physical settings. A
phone conversation, for example, is roughly analogous to the situation
that occurs when four people go to a lecture or a play together and
sit side by side in one row of seats. In this situation, the people on
the two ends often feel isolated from each other and from conversa-
tions that take place between the two people seated in the middle.
Conversely, the two people in the center may feel that they share
a small conspiracy and can say things to each other that are not fully
accessible to the other two people.
In the same sense, when we ring a doorbell and then quickly check
the neatness of our hair or clothing, we are in a situation roughly
analogous to when we dial a telephone number and then clear our
throats before the other person lifts the receiver. Before the door
is opened and before the phone is answered, we remain backstage.
The dividing line between backstage and onstage is informational,
not necessarily physical.
Most interactions through media can be described using an inter-
personal analogue (Meyrowitz 1974, 1979; Levinson 1979, 1988).
Watching television is somewhat like watching people through a one-
way mirror in a situation where the people know they are being
watched by millions of people in isolated cubicles; radio listening is
like listening to people through a door or wall with a similar awareness
on the part of participants; and so on. The point is that although

mediated and live encounters are obviously very different in many
ways, they can be analyzed using similar principles. The patterns of
information-flow, whether direct or mediated, help to define the
situation and the notions of appropriate style and action.
When we find ourselves in a given setting we often unconsciously
ask, 'Who can see me, who can hear me?' 'Whom can I see, whom can
I hear?' The answers to these questions help us decide how to behave.
And although these questions were once answered fully by an assess-
ment of the physical environment, they now require an evaluation of
the media environment as well.
As 'information-systems' rather than physical settings, a society's
set of social situations can be modified without building or removing
walls and corridors and without changing customs and laws concerning
access to places. Such media-induced changes occur on both the micro
and macro levels.
If on the individual situation level, for example, a teacher agrees
to the videotaping of his or her class, then the teacher is no longer
speaking only to his or her students. The teacher is now in a new social
context that extends beyond the 'unchanged' classroom. Behavior
that was appropriate in the classroom without the television camera
may be inappropriate in the new context and vice versa. Similarly,
if a government official tells a joke to a journalist on an airplane he or
she must be aware not only of those physically present, but also of
what, if any, media are recording the joke and thereby widening
the situation within which the joke will be heard and interpreted.
Lack of attention to this basic structural principle was Richard Nixon's
fatal error; he failed to realize that a tape recorder in the Oval Office
established the potential for his coarse back region strategy sessions
to be evaluated as public pronouncements.
On the higher level of social structure, the introduction and wide-
spread use of a new medium of communication may restructure a
broad range of situations and foster new sets of social performances.
The spread of literacy, for example, worked to segregate the informa-
tional worlds of children and adults and supported the development
of highly segregated conceptions of 'childhood' and 'adulthood'
(Eisenstein 1979:432-433; Meyrowitz 1984, 1985). Among other
things, books created a backstage forum in which adults could privately
discuss 'what to do with the children'. Conversely, the spread of
television has functioned to integrate the informational worlds of
92 Joshua Meyro witz
children and adults and supported the development of blurred, 'middle

region' age roles (Meyrowitz 1984, 1985).
Similarly, the spread of literacy allowed leaders to remain distant
from citizens and to impress followers with their words, stripped of
all elements of the leader as flesh-and-bones person. Television, in
contrast, brings leaders close enough for us to see their peculiarities
of appearance, gesture, and vocal expression. Electronic media also
recontextualize politicians' speeches. In the past, public speeches
in one location were often backstage rehearsals for public speeches
to be made in other locations. And the isolation of audiences once
allowed for addressing the particular interests of those present.
Wherever national politicians speak today, however, they often find
themselves addressing a national rather than a local audience. Hence
the current near impossibility of honing a speech to dramatic perfection
and the difficulty of speaking in detail about issues that are of
particular concern to the live audiences being addressed. When we
ask 'Where have all the great leaders gone?', we may be speaking less
about a change in the essence of potential leaders than about the
rise of'middle region' politics (Meyrowitz 1977, 1985).
The characteristics of media, then, have behavioral implications
parallel to the structural differences between large cities and small
towns and between nomads and sedentary tribes discussed above.
The widespread use of a new medium will generally lead to a shift in
the pattern of social information-systems. The ease or difficulty of
learning to use the medium, the form of information it conveys, its
patterns of dissemination, and so forth, will all work to foster different
structures of 'who knows what about whom' and 'who knows what
compared to whom'.
In general, it can be argued that media which tend to divide existing
social information-systems will lead to both 'deeper' back region and
more 'forward' front region behavior styles; new media which tend
to merge existing information-systems will lead to more 'middle region'
behaviors.
Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter has been to explore Erving Goffman's
dramaturgical analysis of social interaction, with an eye toward
adapting his static, place-bound model into a theory of social change
and media effects. While Goffman rarely presents predictive pro-
positions, this essay has outlined the following principles as a pre-
liminary set of interrelated predictive statements.
1) The pattern of situation segregation and of region behavior is a
variable rather than a static aspect of an individual's and a society's
existence.
2) Behavior patterns divide into as many single definitions as there
are distinct settings, and when two or more settings merge, their
formerly distinct definitions merge into one new definition.
3) The merger of situations leads to 'middle region' behavior patterns
that lack the extremes of the former back and front region behaviors;
the division of situations leads to two new sets of behavior: 'deep
back region' and 'forefront region', which involve both a coarser
backstage style and a more pristine onstage performance, respectively.
4) The concepts of middle, deep back, and forefront region behavior
can be extended beyond behaviors in a single setting to all an in-
dividual's roles and behavioral spheres. In general, the more distance
there is (both spatially and temporally) between two or more situa-
tions, the more an individual's behavior can vary from one situation
to the next. Conversely, the less distance there is between situations,
the more similar the behaviors in them.
5) The above principles linking situation segregation and integration
with merging and dividing patterns of behavior can be extended beyond
the individual level to the broader role category level. In general, the
more the set of situations (or 'meta-situation') associated with one
social status overlaps with the set of situations associated with another
status, the more the behaviors of those two statuses will blur. Con-
versely, the more the set of situations associated with one social status
becomes distinct from the set of situations associated with another
status, the more the behavior of those two statuses will grow different.
6) As information-systems, rather than places, situational boundaries
are affected not only by physical barriers but also by media of
commmunication.
94 Joshua Meyrowitz
7) Media that segregate situations will foster segregated behavioral

patterns. Media that integrate situations will foster integrated
behavioral patterns. New media that tend to divide existing social
information-systems will encourage the development of both 'deeper'
back region and more 'forward' front region behavior styles; new
media that tend to merge existing information-systems will encourage
more 'middle region' behaviors.
The study of media effects has generally focused on the persuasive
or imitative impact of media messages. The model described here,
however, suggests that media may also influence us tremendously
through a different process: by altering the boundaries of social
settings.
Although my description here has followed Goffman in highlighting
how settings influence us, it is also possible to pull back one notch
and look at the ways in which we, individually and collectively,
construct and use social settings, including those fostered by media
use. On the individual level, it is clear that we often choose to use
one medium over another for a particular communication (phone
call vs. letter, for example) in order to support one definition of a
situation as opposed to another (informal vs. formal, for example),
just as we often choose to work or live or vacation in certain areas
because of the situational definitions they afford. (For a fuller
discussion of individual choices and media use, see Meyrowitz 1990.)
On the societal level, behavioral settings, including those fostered
by media, are constructed and destroyed for various economic,
political, and social purposes. These purposes are often those of
powerful elites. But as the discussion above implicitly suggests, there
are probably many unintended behavioral consequences of such
restructurings of social situations.
It is also conceivable that our situational creations work to fulfill
collective unconscious desires. For example, we may, on the conscious
level, use television to observe the greatness of our leaders more
closely — only to claim to despair over discovering instead so many
signs of ordinariness. But for all we know, our intent may actually
be driven by Freud's notions of 'skoptophilia' (a gazing impulse) and a
desire to slay father figures (Freud 1952), or other unconscious forces.
In the final analysis, situations and selves co-construct each other.
Each is both cause and effect. We, structured through social situations,
structure the situations that restructure us. Ultimately, both place-
situations and broader social information-systems are the prime

'media' through which we mold and display our humanness.
Notes
1. Perhaps the closest Goffman comes to studying a media environment is in the
last book published before his death Forms of Talk, in which the final (and
last to be written) essay is on 'Radio Talk'. But even there he focuses primarily
on a sociolinguistic analysis of talk — talk that happens to be on the radio.
He opens by suggesting that: 'For the student of talk, the broadcast kind has
much to recommend it. It is everywhere available, particularly easy to record,
and, because publicly transmitted words are involved, no prior permission for
scholarly use seems necessary' (1981:197). And he closes by suggesting that
'something so trivial as the close analysis of radio talk' is justified by the fact
that studying 'what broadcasters do, and do not do, before a microphone
catches at what we do, and do not do, before our friends' (1981:326-327).
Nevertheless, in closely studying what radio announcers say, Goffman strays
frequently into comments on the peculiar staging contingencies of broadcast
studios, and one wonders whether he might, had he lived longer, shifted his
footing and examined media environments in and of themselves.
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Is Erving Goffman a phenomenologist?
Richard L. Lanigan
The question 'Is Erving Goffman a phenomenologists?' is more

than a rhetorical device for which an implied answer of 'yes, no,
or maybe' is appropriate. In the tradition of Gregory Bateson's
(1987) theory of human communication according to which persons
constitute cultures of meaning, Goffman's (1974:10) own conditions
for the analysis of discourse fall within the category of human
conscious experience that he calls frame analysis. In short and in
part, my question is a frame. The exploration of this theoretical
frame, first, leads to Bateson's specification of communication as a
human practice. That is, Bateson offers us the phenomenological
notion of a frame of discourse as a unique practice of hysteresis or
learning, the record of which is culture as embodied in the lexicon
of human speech. As Bourdieu (1977:78, 83) also confirms, hysteresis
is the uniquely human condition of communication as practice in
which a meaning is created by a message whether or not that message
is understood as intended or not, i.e., a differentiated conjunction
of meaning functions that Michel Foucault (1980:196-97) respectively
calls 'desire' and 'power'. The effect of each message is information
theoretic as understood in terms of the 1949 historical reference
that Shannon and Weaver (1964) give to Information Theory as a
mathematical, digital system of choice. 'Communication'(i.e., informa-
tion per se) in this information theoretic view is a choice made in a
given context and is susceptible to an either/or logic of digital selection.
Here, the process of signification as the 'reduction of uncertainty'
provides a referential practice (i.e., probability as a signifier), but no
referent (i.e., signified). In fact, we should realize that the formal
and operational procedures of Information Theory require a symbolic
equivocation of the signifier and signified in the conception of the
sign!
Second, my question asks us to entertain the epistemological
problem of analysis as a phenomenological procedure in the human
sciences, i.e., the Goffman (1974:10) notion of the strip that is 'any
arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of activity'. Here, according
to Bourdieu (1977:82, 87, 93), the methodological problem of analysis
100 Richard L. Lanigan
is the theoretical problem of hexis [L. habitus}, i.e., the problematic

of habit in which the choice made (consciousness) demands that
its own context (experience) be taken as thematic. This way of
formulating the issue of analysis is strictly phenomenological. That
is, a 'problematic' is a description of a phenomenon from which
essential characteristics are abstracted as the criteria for defining
that concrete example of the phenomenon. Where such criteria for
the example (a token with a tone, in Charles Saunders Peirce's sense)
are used to define a typology, a 'thematic' is constituted or realized.
The validity of the eidetic realization can be checked by locating the
original phenomenon or one like it as an empirical actualization in
experience (Husserl 1969; Merleau-Ponty 1981). Thus with the eidetic
notion of hexis, the empirical practice of habit becomes a message
that is communication theoretic. The meaning of the message is com-
munication theoretic in the Communication Theory sense of an
embodied choice of context that is manifest in an analogue logic
of both/and selections (Lanigan 1988; Wilden 1980, 1987). Here,
the process of meaning as the 'constitution of intentionality' (conscious
experience) provides a referential practice (i.e., possibility) as its
own reflexive referent (i.e., the sign as signifier and signified). We
discover the hierarchy of human meaning precisely in this ideological
function of discourse by which both frame and strip are linked, i.e.,
the communicative boundaries of hysteresis and hexis, desire and
power that Husserl (1970:23) calls a factum.
As I proceed to explore these two notions of frame and strip, the
methodological similarity of Goffman's research orientation to
phenomenology will become increasingly clear. At the same time,
the explication allows us to understand that, unlike the rich
phenomenological tradition of theory upon which he depends for
ideological guidance, Goffman's 'ethnomethodological' work is per
se largely a-theoretical.
Goffman's a-theoretical approach to methodology ignores the
fact that meaning, as the embodied performance of speech, exemplifies
the distribution of human desire and social power. Such desire begins
as a message within social interaction, sustains its force in communica-
tion, and legitimizes itself as power in such practical institutions as
cultural demand and social preference. Recall, each message is com-
munication theoretic; it is a choice of context. These epistemological
concepts are insightfully illustrated, for example, in the many works
of Michel Foucault (1973, 1979) that provide a theoretically informed
7s Erving Goffman a phenomenologist? 101
diagnosis of institutions such as the hospital and the prison, what

Goffman (1961) has characterized as the 'total institution'. These
institutions are, of course, discovered in the practices of social com-
munication and in the contributing discourse of the person. This is
to say with Foucault (1973; Lanigan 1984) that (1) communication
actualizes the cultural demands of human interation which display
human choice in the form of desire, and, (2) communication
concretizes social preference as the context of power. I suggest the
theme of Foucault's work in order to designate another researcher
whose interests are the same as those of Goffman, but whose work is
theoretically informed by an explicit view of semiotic phenomenology
(Lanigan 1986).
The question of method and theory

Following the theory and application of human science research by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1981; Lanigan 1972, 1988), phenomenological
method consists of a three step procedure, respectively, phenome-
nological description, reduction, and interpretation. Phenomenology
has as a necessary theoretical condition the fact that each step of
method is entailed in every other step, i.e., the theoretical condition
of validity called reflexivity.
Thus in the frame of theory [Step One], a description is an initial
account of (1) the description per se that accounts for a human aware-
ness of what a phenomenon is, (2) the reduction of that description
to an essence (a fundamental account of how the description has
meaning), and (3) the interpretation that is implicit practically in the
description or why a meaning is manifest by the analysis of the
description. In turn [Step Two], the reduction entails a second
reflection and analysis repeating each step of description, reduction,
and interpretation. While the most difficult part of theory, the
reduction step is also the most insightful stage of understanding. The
reduction amounts to a precise definition of the necessary condition
(e.g., a typology) of the subject matter that is merely a sufficient
condition under description (e.g., a token). Last [Step Three], the
interpretation is the concrete application to which the combined
description and reduction point (e.g., a tone or contextual style of
awareness in which the realization of a phenomenon as belonging to
a particular typology is constituted by our awareness of this particular,

concrete phenomenon as a token per se). Once again, the interpretive or
hermeneutic step consists of a phenomenological description,
reduction, and interpretation. A simple and familiar example in
language of the overall three-step theory is the eidetic model of the
linguistic meaning of words in which connotation (a description) is
linked to denotation (a reduction) and is the basis of all meanings
(an interpretation) for the given word (type) as used in a certain
situation (token) by a specific person (tone). The reflexivity of
analytical categories in phenomenological theory has the following
structure.
1. phenomenological description:
a. description;
b. reduction;
c. interpretation.
2. phenomenological reduction:
a. description;
b. reduction;
c. interpretation.
3. phenomenological interpretation:
a. description;
b. reduction;
c. interpretation.
In other words, every category is entailed by every other category.
The procedure by which these theoretical conditions are implemented
in methodological terms will be discussed momentarily because the
methodological arrangement of categories represents a variation of
sequence from that of the theory outlined in the schema above. But
before considering the methodological perspective, a brief comment
needs to be made about research perspective.
In the rhetoric of 'normal science' in which 'scientific method'
is assumed to be its own theoretical explanation, researchers assume
that the order of analysis (OA) is identical to the order of experience
(OE). This view allows the so-called Objective' condition in which
the researcher is assumed not to be present, i.e., not to be an influence
on the research act (Figure 1). By comparison, the phenomenologist
is directly concerned to account for the researcher in the activity
of doing research. As Ihde (1977) demonstrates, the phenomenologist
approaches the situation with true objectivity (by accounting
practically for subjectivity!) by carefully following out the sequence

of experience being examined in contrast to the experience of doing
the research per se. In short, the phenomenologist reverses the order
of experience and the order of analysis to make the experience of
research practice match the practical order of the lived through
experience under investigation. Thus in the phenomenological pro-
cedure, the positivist's preconceived 'logical' sequence of experience
is backtracked (Husserl's epoche or 'bracketing') in analysis (Figure 1).
Positivist's Paradigm
(experience = that which is given prior to analysis: Data)
OE >
(experiencer > experiencing > experienced)
OA >
Phenomenologist's Paradigm
(experience = that which is taken in analysis: Capta)
OE >
< OA
(experiencer < experiencing < experienced)

Figure 1. Comparative research procedures involving the order of experience (OE)
and the order of analysis (OA).
In a strictly methodological sense that incorporates the theoretical

conditions just explained, we can make three procedural statements.
These methodological criteria state the semiotic (communicative)
conditions for the phenomenology of the situation as lived by a person.
The phenomenology quite literally becomes the logic of a governing
phenomena found in the meaning of the situation under study. Meaning
or the signs composed of signifiers and signifieds constitute the subject/
object matter under analysis. Signifiers are simply the expressions
or expressive elements in communication that contain the symbols,
indexes, or icons of the context, message, contact, and code com-
municated by one person (addresser) to another (addressee). By
contrast, signifieds are the perceptions or perspective functions in
communication that contain the referents or interpretants of the
context, message, contact, and code communicated by one person
to someone else. Roman Jakobson's (Holenstein 1976:154) well
known model of human communication and its semiotic grounding

in Peirce and Hjelmslev (Eco 1976:68, 268) is usually assumed as
definitional in such analyses (Figure 2).
CONTEXT
(referential)
MESSAGE
(poetic)
ADDRESSER ADDRESSEE
(emotive) (conative)
CONTACT
(phatic)
CODE
(metalinguistic)
Figure 2. Jakobson's semiotic phenomenological model of human communication
theory indicating ELEMENTS and (functions) respectively.
In this communication theory context (Lanigan 1988), therefore,

phenomenological methodology has the following structure:
1. Description (Thematizing the)
2. interpretation (of the)
3. reduction (of the)
4. description (of the Sign[s]).
5. Reduction (Abstracting the)
8. description (of the Signifier[s]).
9. Interpretation (Explicating the)
12. description (of the Signified[s]).
Within this schema, we can correctly surmise that Goffman follows
the first fours steps, what is know as 'descriptive phenomenology'.
The Goffman schema of frame, strip, and analysis (as presented in his
book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience)
have a rough correspondence to the phenomenological description,
reduction, and interpretation. Making the correlation between Goffman
and the phenomenological schemata, there is an emergent taxonomy

in which a research project Description consist of (a) the FRAME or
method steps 1 and 2 - 'thematizing of the interpretation', (b) the
STRIP or method steps 2 and 3 — 'interpretation of the reduction',
and (c) the ANALYSIS or method steps 3 and 4 - 'reduction of the
description [of the Sign]'.
By way of historical comparison, Goffman does not use the phe-
nomenological method steps 5 through 8. Adding these steps to the
first four steps would constitute a theoretical base for the descriptive
phenomenology and would come to constitute what is called an 'eidetic
phenomenology' in the tradition of Edmund Husserl and William
James. Nor does Goffman use steps 9 through 12 which would be
to adopt a 'semiotic phenomenology' illustrated by the work of Alfred
Schutz (1967:97-136) and Michel Foucault (Lanigan 1984, 1986).
We should note that in the quasi-theoretical discussion that con-
stitutes the Introduction to Goffman's book Frame Analysis, he does
provide a pointed discussion of his debt to the phenomenological
tradition mentioning specifically the chronological heritage of Franz
Brentano, Edmund Husserl, William James, and Alfred Schutz. He
suggests that he follows the phenomenological concepts of 'bracketing'
(description), 'typicality' (reduction), and 'code' (interpretation).
Yet, all these affirmations of the primacy of phenomenological method
are clearly not a theoretical priority. As Goffman (1974:13) says of
his book, Ί personally hold society to be first in every way and any
individual's current involvements to be second; this report deals only
with matters that are second.' In the context of contemporary thought,
such a statement accords with a structuralist position that champions
the analysis of langue or the speech community of individuals over
the study of parole or the speaking action, Husserl's factum, of the
person that constitutes culture. Goffman merely generalizes the
theoretical distinction of Saussure's linguistics to the broad realm of
social action. But the structuralist distinction is still quite operative
in Goffman's (1981:197-327) applications, a particular example of
which is the inductive generalization of 'radio talk' to the processes
of everyday interpersonal communication as Forms of Talk.
The methodological judgment that we can render is this: Goffman
is a methodological 'phenomenologist', but at the price of being a-
theoretical. The reason is quite clear. To adopt the theory of
phenomenology would require a focus on the human conscious
experience of the person — a person who cannot be conceived as an
isolated sociological 'individual' merely interacting with other isolated

individuals, an 'addresser' only among other 'addressers'. On the other
hand, Goffman cannot adopt the structuralist theory that would be
compatible with his claim to privilege methodologically the action
of society and its members as a collective constraint on the individual,
an 'addressee' only among other 'addressees'. Such a stance would
require that he abandon the lived-world context of experience in
which he conducts all his field research. As even Goffman's admirers
concede, this tension of theory versus method is ever present. For
example, Christopher Ricks (1981:43) notes in the Forms of Talk
chapter entitled 'Radio Talk: A Study of the Ways of Our Errors' that
'after all, his witicism "the ways of our errors" depends upon our
momentarily blinking at what might itself be an error'. No matter
how rhetorically appealing the imputed claim, method is not theory.
An example of application
In order to illustrate the consequences of Goffman's a-theoretical
approach to research, I am selecting a brief section of the Frame
Analysis book (1974:144-49) in which he analyzes the 'radio drama
frame' as a particular case of the more general idea of 'the theatrical
frame'. Goffman begins with the suggestion that radio is a special
frame inasmuch as we are concerned with sound perception while
attending to the mechanical aspects of radio transmission. We are
apparently listening under a very special condition or strip. As he says,
'a basic feature of radio as the source of a strip of dramatic interaction
is that transmitted sounds cannot be selectively disattended' (1974:
145). In other words, the dramatic frame only permits the listener
to have a diachronic notion of time in which one event follows another
in the sense of a linear historical series of events. This is true of all
basic sound expressions in the phenomenology of a message, whether
they be the sound expression of an objective situation (the sense of
action; a description), the expression of human speech (actors as
characters in the story; a reduction of description) or in that of music
(the mood for affective meaning; the interpretation of the reduction
of the description).
First, it seems true that in the dramatic presentation of the radio
program, the 'multiple channel effect' of ordinary everyday life sound
perception is destroyed. This is to say, in the multiple reality of

everyday life (to borrow a phrase from Schutz), we are simultaneously
listening to the sounds of many different sources - other people
talking at once, the noise of machines and activities, the sounds of
animals and nature, and so on. Yet, in all of this a human being has
both (1) a focus on sound - one thing or person is listened to and
has our attention as a source of expression — as* an addresser, and
(2) a locus of sound - one thing or person is the referent of our
perception — as an addressee. A radio transmission cannot duplicate
this human conscious experience as a multichannel transmission
(although stereo or quadriphonic audio transmissions gives this 'magic
act' illusion by dividing the apparent directional source of sound). The
radio must convert the embodied awareness (focus and locus) of human
sound expression/perception into a complex, but linear progression of
sound that moves our focus (what we pay attention to) from place
to place in order to create the illusion of one locus (how we attend,
i.e., listen, see, touch, etc.).
As a quick illustration, let me recall Goffman's discussion of the
combination of the human voice and music. In a radio drama, a story
is being told through the voices of characters in a play or radio drama.
The 'sound effects' person creates the noise of nature and social activity
as a background for the actor's voice. A character in a scene emerges
in these sounds to create a sense of focus and locus — we know who is
talking and where they are. But the problem of time remains, i.e.,
the problematic of consciousness per se as an experience.
How can the radio drama create a sense of time that is not bound
to the expected linear progression of temporal history that moves
from past to present to future? The production answer is music.
Musical sound can play the symbolic role of time and move the
required referential scene of action and people from place to place
in any time order. As Goffman (1974:147) notes, there is the 'realm
status of an event'. The realm is the basic notion of a foreground and
background combination of speech versus music. For example, an
impression of 'actual' experience is signalled by foreground loudness
of music (quiet background of human voices) that is slowly muted
in order to reverse the situation. Human voices are now loud as a
foreground perception and music quiets into the background. The
radio program staff has thereby created an 'actualization' of conscious
experience.
A 'bridge' occurs in radio program production when music is

suddenly foregrounded and we all know thereby that the scene of
action is changing; we expect new characters saying new things. We
are willing, therefore, to accept any time change using the basic
elements of present or past or future. Music can also be a message
that 'foretells' or codes events. In this case where we see the com-
munication element of contact at work, music is used as a signature
to any event, i.e., every time we hear the same music the process of
locus and focus are reversed. Music causes a locus, we know the same
thing is about to happen again (how is not in question!). Yet, we
still do not know what will happen to whom this time — we have no
focus.
If the radio program director wishes to reverse our understanding
of these instrumental musical cues for time in the drama, the human
voice can simultaneously become the music. This is to say, in a
'musical' performance the characters break into song at various points
in the dramatic action. With this technique, the character is an
immediate focus and we lose locus. We have a brief moment where
we are suspending the space of the situation in order to engage a
moment of pure time. While the character sings, we are involved with
them in the social understanding of affective meaning: we are
concerned with emotion as a function of communication. We forget
the aspects of space and location; we suspend cognitive meaning and
its imperative demand for a sense of 'reality'.
Given this analysis by Goffman of the radio frame, we immediately
can see that the analysis is phenomenological in method, but a-
theoretical. The radio frame is an accurate description of the experience
people have when they, as addressees, listen to radio dramas. It is
phenomenological description. But, there is no reduction and inter-
pretation because that would lead to individual interpretation of a
given radio frame and Goffman wants to avoid that possibility. Indeed,
Goffman wishes to avoid any consideration of the embodied
audience — the people, individual persons, who experience the radio
frame as a lived-experience which is, of course, a personal and not
public experience. It is important at this juncture in the analysis to
point out that even in the 'microsociology' of the radio audience
that Goffman (1981:242-43) gives us in his other book, Forms of
Talk, the audience is given as a holistic collective entity and at the very
least is preconceived to be an aggregate displaying group typicalities
in society. Indeed, 'radio and television audiences are not only large
but also heterogeneous in regard to "sensitivities": ethnicity, race,

religion, political belief, gender, regional loyalties, and all the physical
and mental stigmata.'
It is* unfortunate for us to realize that Goffman's radio frame
description, while it accords with the possibility of personal experience,
is in no way reduced and interpreted as the 'typicality' that you or I
can experience. To be specific, I mean the typicality of my experience
(or yours) as a person which is the consistency of my process of aware-
ness as I repeatedly live through similar listening experiences with
the radio. I do not mean the typicality of social experience as a
collective category that we all can agree fits the conception of what
is typical in a speculative sense. Rather and on reflection of the phe-
nomenological reduction and interpretation type, it becomes obvious
to each of us as a person in the audience (not audience members!)
that the 'multiple channel effect' dismissed by Goffman is still with
each of us, personally considered, compared, and constituted!
When you and I listen to a particular radio drama and experience
it as a frame, it is in the real world of other 'channel' and 'media'
influences. We are hearing other sound messages in our personal
listening situation and that is precisely why the radio sounds can have
foreground focus and locus. Indeed, our sensations and intellections
are a synergism of perception in which our embodied experience
is always that of explicit synesthesia. As persons in the audience
listening to the radio program, we are bringing a theory to the situation.
From our social and cultural background experience we perform
a phenomenological reduction on the radio frame. We select it as the
signifier in the situation. We accept the radio message (the radio drama
frame) as the expression of meaning that is the essence of the
description of human life, i.e., our life, our conscious experience of
the meaning that these radio sound typifications express. When we
accept the 'code' of the radio drama frame, we go along with the
narrative structure of the story and accept it as drama. We allow our
interpretation of the message to be the one with our meaning. We
understand in the way that we as persons desire to understand. We
are choosing the context of our meaning as we live it. For example,
one of the best relevant illustrations of this phenomenological pro-
cedure is Radio Days, the 1987 film by Woody Allen.
To make such an analysis as I describe it, Goffman would have
to accept a theory of the person and the primacy of Alfred Schutz's
multiple reality as lived by the person and not as a structural artifact
(the 'individual' or 'member') of society. Goffman rejects such a view

except insofar as he looks upon it from afar with assumed objectivity
and imputed generalization. How Goffman would theoretically justify
the validity of his methodological description, in the radio drama frame
for example, is an open question - by choice! Hisa-theoretical research
leaves us without an answer. At best, we might conclude that method
alone is a sufficient theory. In following such a view we cannot fault
Goffman, for this argument is, indeed, the a-theoretical sophism by
which much of positive science also justifies its claim to objectivity!
Yet and with an ironic turn, Ricks (1981) uses just such as explanation
to justify Goffman's work as belonging to literary criticism, not to
social science.
So, just as I began my analysis in this essay with a question (Is
Erving Goffman a Phenomenologist?), I could end with the question
unresolved. In that case, I should be following Goffman's 'phenome-
nological' methodology in a very precise manner as a sufficient theory.
Systematic description would have occurred, but our desire to
understand cultural meaning, and, to recognize the exercise of social
power in communication would remain undisclosed. Instead, I have
taken Goffman's frame analysis into the theoretical arena of phe-
nomenology proper by providing both reduction and interpretation
steps to his description step of method. In so doing, I illustrate how
the phenomenological theorist can improve on the legacy of Erving
Goffman. Yet, I am also forced to conclude on theoretical grounds
that Goffman is not a phenomenologist in the traditional and usually
accepted meaning of that name because I insist on cross-checking his
research conclusion with persons in their lived-world, not that world
formed (even at the micro-level) by the naive realism of the researcher!
Thus to reverse Goffman's parapahase of his own perspective and,
thereby, state the phenomenologist's perspective, I am suggesting that
as a phenomenologist Ί personally hold the person to be first in every
way and any of society's current involvements to be second; this
essay deals only with matters that are first.' In this reversal, we are
motivated to keep the theoretical applications of desire and power
straight. Communicated messages are evidence of a subjectivity (desire)
that is coded as intersubjectivity (power) which is, of course, the
provocative original thesis of the founder of the reflexive theory and
method of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl.
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The phenomenology of miscommunication
Hans R. Dua
Introduction
We find in the case of both normal and abnormal speakers a wide
range of phenomena which could be subsumed under the rubric of
'miscommunication' in the broad sense of the term. Thus Grimshaw
(1982) refers to failures in communication or varieties of com-
municative non-success, such as partial or nonunderstanding, mis-
hearing, misunderstanding and nonhearing. Marcus (1984) postulates
noise as one of the components of human communication and
considers one of the most interesting forms of noise in the context
of international communication under a generic term 'imprecision',
which includes such phenomena as generality, ambiguity, fuzziness,
randomness, variability, ignorance, mystery, openness, etc. The
disturbances of communication or disorders of thought and com-
munication are commonly discussed phenomena in the context of
abnormal speakers. Watzlawick et al. (1967:76) refer to disqualifica-
tions of communication which 'cover a wide range of communication
phenomena such as self-contradiction, inconsistencies, subject switches,
tangentializations, incomplete sentences, misunderstandings, obscure
style or manner of speech, the literal interpretation of metaphor
and the metaphorical interpretation of literal remarks, etc.' However,
there is no systematic framework in terms of which the different
types of miscommunication phenomena can be distinguished and
characterized, how these differ with respect to normal and abnormal
speakers and what consequences they have for social interaction and
behavior. An attempt has been made in this paper to provide such a
framework and raise certain issues which are crucial to the under-
standing not only of the nature and types of miscommunication
phenomena but also the phenomenology of communication in general.
Erving Goffman's insights into these matters will serve as a basis for a
more systematic inquiry in the phenomenology of miscommunication.
It is not the purpose of this paper to present a comprehensive review
114 HansR.Dua
of the notion of communication in all its conceptual diversity and

discuss in detail the theoretical and methodological issues involved
in the characterization of the conceptual framework. It aims at showing
how certain components of communication have been conceived
and characterized and how they can be modified and elaborated further
to provide a systematic and coherent account of miscommunication
phenomena. The first section of the paper examines the notion of
speaker and considers how the notions of intention, cognition and
coding are relevant for understanding miscommunication from the
standpoint of the speaker. The second section considers the issues
of mishearing, misunderstanding and misinterpretation from the point
of view of the hearer. Both the speaker and hearer constitute the
dyadic form of interaction and communication and enact certain
roles, identities and relationships through speech. This can be captured
through the interlinking notions of self/other and intersubjectivity.
which provide the basis for the consideration of issues of miscommuni-
cation in the third section. The fourth section deals with the issues of
miscommunication related to context and discrepancy in shared
knowledge, which are essential to the accomplishment of inter-
subjectivity. The final section examines the question of interaction
principles and shows how their violation results in miscommunication
or communicative non-success in the case of both normal and
abnormal speakers. It is hoped that the discussion of the various issues
in these sections will not only help in characterizing and understanding
the nature and kinds of miscommunication but also provide insights in
the accomplishment of communication in the case of both normal
and abnormal speakers.
Intention, cognition and coding

Grimshaw (1982) recognizes that it is not possible to fully disentangle
the speaker's and hearer's contribution to communicative non-
successes. Nevertheless, the understanding of interaction, according
to him, requires that we distinguish among speaker-based, hearer-
based, mutually based and nonparticipant-based communicative non-
successes. However, in discussing the varieties of communicative non-
success, his orientation is predominantly hearer-based as it is evident
from the taxonomy discussed by him in terms of partial or non-
understanding, mishearing, misunderstanding and nonhearing.

In considering miscommunication from the standpoint of the speaker
it is necessary to understand the ramifications of the notion of
intention. The significance of human intentions in communication
has been recognized by several scholars, though it would be difficult
to point out how precisely they are related to the issue of miscommuni-
cation. The difficulty lies in the fact that the notion of intention
cannot be disentangled from the other related notions such as linguistic
convention and reference to things (Apel 1981) or conventions and
context (Marcondes de Souza Filho 1984). According to Apel, the
key notions of subjective intention, linguistic convention and reference
to things are of equal importance for the understanding of meaning.
They complement each other and restrict each other as regulative
principles of inquiry within the context of the so-called 'hermeneutic
circle of meaning-disclosure' (Apel 1981:110).
The linguistic conventions, reference to things or context, are not
only regulative but also constitutive in the formation of intentions.
It is therefore necessary to recognize the significance of the processes
involved in the formation and expression of intentions which may
be considered as internal to the speaker. In this respect it would be
useful to consider the following possibilities:
(i) The speaker is not able to cognize or conceive of his intentions
precisely;
(ii) The speaker is able to conceive of his intentions precisely but
he is not able to express them properly;
(iii) The speaker is able, both in terms of cognition and expression,
but he does not express his intentions either because he does
not want to or because the rules of politeness, face-work, inter-
action, etc., force him not to.
It may be extremely difficult to draw a boundary line between the
first two possibilities, but the distinction seems to be significant for
analytical purposes and for considering the issues of miscognition or
misexpression from the points of view of both normal and abnormal
speakers. Both the notions of misexpression and miscognition have
been characterized in broad overlapping terms. For instance, Werner
and Kaplan (1963) discuss three aspects of written descriptions,
explicitness of expression, communicability of expression and linguistic
organization of the expression, which provide a sound basis for the
characterization of differences between normal and schizophrenic
116 HansR.Dua
speakers with respect to two conditions of communication: the change

from inner to external speech, on the one hand; and change
in stimulus material from olfactory to visual, on the other. These
differences may indicate the range of misexpression in the speech of
normal and abnormal speakers.
The third possibility takes care of deception or distortion in com-
munication in the case of both normal and abnormal speakers, though
the reasons for deception in communication are different in the two
cases. However, it would be comparatively easier to recognize and
identify deception in communication due to rules of politeness or
interaction in the case of normal speakers. On the other hand,
abnormal speakers may systematically disguise or misrepresent their
intentions in some predictable ways, but it would be extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to detect deception or misrepresentation.
It is in this context that insight, intuition, empathic listening and
understanding become relevant and useful in psychotherapy (Troemel-
Plotz 1981;Stanton 1984).
The notions of cognition and expression of intentions are relevant
at the level of intrapersonal communication. In a sense this level of
communication may be considered basic in that it is at this level that
an individual 'talks to himself and formulates his perceptions and
makes sense of his experiences of events and persons. As Applebaum
et al. (1975:19) point out, 'this process is concerned with how the
person perceives things, how information is processed inside the
individual, how meaning is attached to the information that has been
processed, how this meaning and information (are) added into the
already existing patterns and processes that have been established by
the individual inside his own head and how the person behaves and/
or communicates as a result of the information perceived and
processed'. Such a view of the level of intrapersonal communication
entails that its proper characterization would be extremely relevant
for understanding the range of miscommunication phenomena from
the standpoint of the speaker. Furthermore, it could be useful to
explore the degree of dissonance between the levels of intra- and
inter-personal communication in the case of both normal and
abnormal speakers.
The disorders of cognition and their impact on language use are
particularly relevant in studying the problems of communication
among schizophrenics. Sass (1984:49) has revised and elaborated the
concept of 'communication deviance' which is defined by Singer and
Wynne (1966) as a failure on the part of the speaker to 'establish

and maintain a shared focus of attention' with one's listener. He
distinguishes between two types of communication deviance. The
first type shows a high degree of cognitive primitiveness which is
reflected in forms of speech such as 'lack of specificity with regard
to the referent, unexplained contradictions, peculiar reasoning which
has the appearance of nonsequitur inference, inappropriate responses
suggestive of a failure to grasp the intent of a question by the inter-
locutor, a tendency to jump about confusingly among different topics,
idiosyncratic and consensually inappropriate word choice, a tendency
to associate more to the sound than the sense of one's own language,
syntax which is odd and disconcerting to the listener' (1966:62).
These forms of speech are characteristic of communication by non-
paranoid schizophrenics who show a higher degree of cognitive
primitiveness. The second type of communication deviance does not
seem to be likely to stem primarily from an egocentric/primitive
cognitive style. This is reflected in such forms of speech as 'disqualifica-
tions of what one has said, retractions and denials, responses in negative
form, responses in subjunctive form, and vacillations' (1966:62).
Such forms of speech are characteristic of paranoid schizophrenics
who are more defensive rather than cognitively primitive in their
communication.
In short, the speaker may fail to establish and maintain a shared,
cognitive focus of attention and/or suffer from disorders of cognition.
These deficiencies are related to the dimension of normality-abnormality
and distort both the intrapsychic orientation and interpersonal
attitudes. This results in various kinds of communication because
the speakers either cannot or do not appropriately express their
intentions and experiences about events, persons and situations. It
would require a great deal of comparative study of the speech of both
normal and abnormal speakers in order to be able to characterize
the communication disorders in terms of such categories as mis-
conception, misapprehension, misrepresentation or mistaken reasoning.
At this stage it is not possible to give any definite categorization of
the communication disorders from the point of view of the speaker.
118 HansR.Dua
Hearing, understanding and interpretation

In order to understand the issues related to miscommunication from
the perspective of the hearer it is necessary first of all to consider
the notion of speaker-hearer. The notion is extremely complex and
perhaps defies any precise characterization. Hymes (1974:54) points
out that 'the common dyadic model of speaker-hearer specifies
sometimes too many, sometimes too few, sometimes the wrong
participants.' He sees a need to distinguish between four kinds of
participants: speaker, hearer, addresser and addressee. Goffman (1981)
has further elaborated the notion of the participant. As regards the
notion of hearer he distinguishes between the addressed recipients,
unaddressed recipients and bystanders who constitute the 'participa-
tion framework'. The notion of speaker is characterized in terms of
the notions of animator, author and principal who constitute the
'production format' of an utterance. He states that we can enact any
participation framework and production format in our conversation.
Its relevance to the issue of miscommunication phenomena is an
unexplored question.
The complexity of the notion of participant becomes enormous
when we consider the attributes of speaker-hearers which might be
relevant to explain language use and communication behavior. Preston
(1986) has divided the characteristics of participants into two major
categories: ascribed and acquired. The ascribed subcategory includes
the characteristics of age, sex, nativity, ethnicity and areas of origin.
The category of acquired attributes includes roles, specialization,
status, fluency and individuality. It seems to be an extremely open
issue as to how far these or some other attributes would be significant
for understanding the problems of miscommunication.
Besides the status and attributes of the hearer it is necessary to
understand two important assumptions that greatly influence the
issue of miscommunication. The first assumption is made by the
hearer about the normality of the speaker. When the hearer knows
or assumes the speaker to be abnormal, he is likely to ignore what
the speaker says or fail to understand it unless he makes an extra
effort. This is quite evident in the context of psychotherapy. The
therapist, by his receptivity, sensitivity and training makes use of
several therapeutic techniques in understanding the communicative
behavior of the patients and diagnosing the nature of their illness.
Being adept in the psychology of the human mind, he can understand
the ways of deception and self-deception among humans, and know

not only how to recognize and avoid them but also to study their
implications. Any ordinary person is likely to lack all these attributes
and thus fail to understand abnormal speakers.
The second assumption concerns the hearer himself. It is assumed
that the hearer is not deliberately trying to misinterpret or misunder-
stand the message produced by the speaker. In other words the hearer
does not suffer from incapacities which include shortcomings in the
competence for attention or intention (Grimshaw 1982; Feinberg
1970).
Having clarified the basic issues, we may now consider the ways
in which the hearer may contribute to communicative non-successes.
In this respect it is necessary to make a point about the taxonomy
provided by Grimshaw (1982). The taxonomy includes: (1) non or
partial understanding; (2) mishearing; (3) misunderstanding; (4) non-
hearing and; (5) spurious nonhearing (a subvariety of misunderstanding).
It is quite evident that these distinctions are made in terms of two
dimensions: reception of signals and their decoding from the point
of view of meaning. However, these dimensions have not been specified
by Grimshaw. Furthermore, the number of distinctions at each
dimension does not seem to be adequate. It is not quite clear why
nonunderstanding and partial understanding are grouped together.
Similarly there is no provision for partial hearing. If we make the
distinctions systematically, they include the following:
1 2 3 4
nonhearing partial hearing mishearing hearing
nonunderstanding partial under- misunderstanding under-
standing standing
For the dimension of reception, Grimshaw has not considered
the implications of hearing for communicative non-success. However,
this can not be ignored in view of the fact that human beings are
selective in listening. They tend to listen to what they think is relevant
and significant to them. The selectivity in listening, even other behavior
such as perception and understanding, seems to be governed by
individual predispositions, experiences and frames within which are
encountered new phenomena. The selectivity in listening as well as
other behavior has the potential for creating confusion in communica-
tion and may lead to misjudgment and misunderstanding.
The principle of selectivity finds support from auditory halluci-
120 HansR.Dua
nations of bilingual schizophrenics. Herbert (1984) presents a

longitudinal study (20 months) of the auditory hallucinations of twelve
bilingual patients. Following the distinction between the persecutory
and accusatory voices and positive and supportive voices he finds that
'good' voices are heard in the language of the community associated
with support and shelter and 'bad' voices with the community rejecting,
constraining, or otherwise perceived as hostile by the patient. His
findings support the similar earlier research by Lukianowicz (1962). He
therefore concludes that whatever the physiological and psychological
mechanisms of hallucination, the sociocultural associations of language
variety in the bilingual must be considered in explaining hallucinatory
structures.
The principle of selectivity may also operate in partial hearing
or mishearing though in these two cases there would be additional
constraints on the reception of the signals. In the case of partial hearing
the signals are not completely available, whereas in mishearing the
signals are perceived as different because of noise or other constraining
conditions of the channel. Grimshaw emphasizes that mishearing
appears to be a result of some combination of problems with signal and
defeasibilities. However, it needs to be said that hearer defeasibilities
are not necessarily the cause of mishearing, though they may not be
completely absent in all cases of mishearing.
In the case of both partial hearing and mishearing the redundancy
in language structure helps to resolve their constraining impact and
its consequences. Furthermore, the additional information becoming
available in continuing discourse and the initiation of 'remedial work'
(Goffman 1971:27) may help in controlling communicative confusion
that may arise from partial hearing or mishearing. However, as
Grimshaw points out, some mishearings may still remain misheard with
consequences ranging from transient confusion to long-lasting hostility.
He correctly observes: 'whether or not, and how, the (mishearings) are
corrected depends upon the availability of social and discourse
contexts, and upon whether the hearer either intendedly or unintend-
edly acts in ways that reveal the mishearing, thereby providing oppor-
tunities for correction' (1971:27). This could be applicable to partial
hearing or selective hearing as well.
The concept of understanding presents an altogether different
dimension than that of hearing which constitutes one of the elements
that contribute to understanding. It is the most difficult concept to
characterize adequately not only because of the complexity or fuzzy
nature of the concept but also because it depends upon several factors
such as 'intention', 'meaning', 'knowledge', 'context', etc, and needs
to be distinguished from other related concepts such as Observation',
'interpretation', 'explanation', etc. Though it is crucial to social inter-
action and communicative behavior, it is difficult to characterize
how interactants achieve understanding, how this understanding can
be measured and how it controls and influences human relationships.
It is not the purpose of this paper to review the different theories
of understanding. However, it may be pointed out that the two theories
of understanding, ascriptivist and cognitive, are complementary in
explaining human behavior. According to the ascriptivist theory we
ascribe understanding (or withhold such ascription) to someone who
understands and thereby assign a normative role to him, and
accordingly allocate rights and responsibilities within a social, cultural
or communal context (Rosenberg 1981). The ways in which under-
standing is ascribed to each other by the participants and the signals
through which it is confirmed that whatever was achieved was
normatively good enough are crucial to interactive and communicative
behavior. However, understanding is a cognitive process at the same
time and 'is invariably a matter of grasping a communication, of taking
in. That is what expressions — of which linguistic ones are a paradigm
case — mean' (Rickman 1987:180). It is because of the cognitive
structure of understanding that it is intimately related to other
cognitive phenomena such as observation, interpretation and ex-
planation and it is because of this that understanding can fail to be
achieved and we can, as Rickman puts is, 'deceive ourselves or be
deceived' (1987:181). Nonunderstanding, partial understanding,
misunderstanding and misinterpretation may be considered as special
cases of the failure of achievement of understanding as a cognitive state.
The difference between nonunderstanding and partial understanding
is not a matter of degree but it is qualitative. While partial under-
standing can be characterized in terms of various degrees in relation
to several factors, nonunderstanding seems to be amorphous and
global in nature. In both cases there would be different consequences
for the communicative behavior and social interaction. The movement
from nonunderstanding to understanding or from partial understanding
to fuller understanding would involve the use of different strategies by
the interactants, whether they are interpretative procedures (Cicourel
1980) or conversational implicature (Grice 1975). However, Grimshaw
(1982:26) does not make any distinction between nonunderstanding
122 HansR.Dua
and partial understanding. His characterization of misunderstanding

also does not seem to be satisfactory. He considers misunderstanding
as involving 'a two-stage process in which the hearer experiences under-
standing but acts as if she/he did not' (1982:27). This implies that
misunderstanding is always deliberate and rules out the possibility
that one may misunderstand without having experienced understanding
because of wrong assumptions, analysis, interpretation or lack of
shared knowledge.
As regards the characteristic nature of 'misunderstandings',
Grimshaw (1982:27-8) makes a significant point when he claims that
they can 'vary along at least three continua: (1) overtness-covertness;
they may be blatant and obviously intended, recoverable but
ambiguous . . . or well-concealed and these variations may themselves
be intended or not [by the hearer] ; (2) friendliness-unfriendliness;
they may be whimsical, teasing, or punitive or altruistic, self-protective,
embarrassing or outright malicious; (3) excusability-justifiability;
if [the hearer] is "caught in the act", or accused of willful misinterpre-
tation he/she will be able to justify, excuse, mitigate, apologize for (or
not) the violation.' He makes a further distinction between linguistic
and pragmatic (functional or social) misunderstandings. The
linguistically characterizable misunderstandings involve 'assignment
of different lexical meanings to words with multiple dictionary entries
or of reinterpretation of phonological reproduction' (1982:28). The
pragmatically definable misunderstandings 'include responding to
indirect requests as if they were, indeed, interrogatives or statements,
or taking hyperbole literally' (1982:28).
While misunderstanding as a failure of cognitive achievement may
be characterized as passive in nature, misinterpretation may be
considered as an active counterpart to it. Misinterpretation may not
only be due to misunderstanding but also a result of deliberate
distortion of understanding for achieving certain purposes, or it may
be due to inadequate understanding.
In short, it is necessary to recognize the significance of the status
and attributes of the hearer and the assumptions he makes about
the speaker's normality as well as about his intentions and selectivity
of perception for understanding the issue of miscommunication from
the perspective of the hearer. The hearer may be constrained in com-
munication and successful interaction at the level of reception of
signals and their decoding from the point of view of meaning. It is
necessary for him to constantly monitor the failures that may arise
at the level of hearing and understanding and employ appropriate

strategies to mitigate the failures and undesirable consequences of
communicative non-success. According to Grimshaw (1982:30),
'monitoring and concommitant awareness of non-success and response
to the latter are ... affected by participants' assessments of conversa-
tional goals and by their interpersonal relationships of power and
affect'.
Self, other and intersubjectivity

Though the notions of speaker and hearer and the kinds of mis-
communication associated with each have been considered separately
for analysis, it is through the dyadic relationship that miscommuni-
cation phenomena are realized in talk and social interaction. The
joint focus of speaker and hearer is emphasized by G off man (1981:
70-71) when he asks what talk is when viewed interactionally and
then provides the answer:
What, then, is talk viewed interactionally? It is an example of that arrange-
ment by which individuals come together and sustain matters having a ratified,
joint, current and running claim upon attention, a claim which lodges them
together in some sort of intersubjective. mental world.
The dyadic relationship of the speaker and hearer and 'a single
visual and cognitive focus of attention' that they claim upon each
other in interaction can be characterized in terms of the notions of
self/other and intersubjectivity. These notions not only provide a
characterization of the speaker-hearer at a different level of abstraction
but also a different perspective for considering talk and its relation
with social interaction and for analyzing a different order of
pathological communication.
Before considering the notion of self/other and its implications
for the organization of talk, it is necessary to remember that both
the speaker and hearer must orient themselves to each other's capacities
and demands for any interaction to take place. Goffman shows the
significance of mutual orientation of the speaker and hearer at several
places. For instance, he points out that an 'individual must project
through expressive events a proper image of himself, an appropriate
respect for the others present, and a suitable regard for the setting'
(1972b:348). Again he remarks that the speaker and hearer can meet
124 HansR.Dua
for a moment of talk in a 'communion of reciprocally sustained involve-

ment 1 , when they fulfill their mutual obligations as interactants. This
implies that the participants neither make 'too many demands for the
floor nor too few, neither extolling their own virtues, nor too directly
questioning those of the others' (1981:19). Thus the preservation of
everyone's face is necessary for Orderly communication.' Keeping
this in view it seems that Psathas (1980:58) is rather too critical of
Goffman when he remarks that the latter 'does not make conceptual
and analytical distinctions between the orientation of the actors, the
relation of each actor to the other, and social interaction.' This is
further supported by the fact that Goffman (1972a:343) refers to
certain inherent 'pathologies' in the organization of talk which arise
when 'a delicate balance' of the ritual code is not maintained and when
the interactants fail in sustaining an adequate level of involvement.
He refers to such interactants as faulty interactants or refractory
participants because they either show certain physical defects or lack
of spontaneous involvement.
The issue of spontaneous involvement in interaction and 'pathologies'
arising from lack of it impinges upon the notions of self and other.
For instance, Goffman (1972b:355) writes that 'disenchantment
with an interaction may take the form of preoccupation, self-conscious-
ness, other-consciousness and interaction consciousness'. In order
to overcome the different kinds of disenchantment or forms of
alienation in interaction the individual must have a sufficient degree
of self-control and 'not only maintain proper involvement himself
but also act so as to ensure that others will maintain theirs' (1972b:
349). 'The individual will have approved and unapproved reasons for
fulfilling his obligation qua interactant but in all cases to do so he
must be able rapidly and delicately to take the role of the others and
sense the qualifications their situation ought to bring to his conduct
if they are not to be brought up short by it.'
The notions of self and other are extremely complex and have
been considered from different perspectives depending upon the
disciplinary orientation. It is not the purpose of this paper to present
an overview of the research bearing on these notions. The main purpose
is to show how these notions have been characterized by Goffman,
how they are related to spoken interaction and how certain forms of
pathological communication are related to them.
Lofland (1980) discusses three ways in which the notion of self
has been characterized in the early works of Goffman: the official
self, the self as performer and self-hood or personal identity. The first
two notions of self have been clearly stated in Goffman's writings on
'face-work' (1972a:336): 'So far I have implicitly been using a double
definition of self: the self as an image pieced together from the
expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking;
and the self as a kind of player in a ritual game who copes honorably
or dishonorably, diplomatically or undiplomatically, with the judge-
mental contingencies of the situation'. As an official self the individual
is expected during an interaction 'to possess certain attributes,
capacities and information which, taken together, fit together into
a self that is at once coherently unified and appropriate for the
occasion' (1956:268). This is referred to as 'the value of a hand drawn
at cards', whereas the performing self refers to 'the person who plays it'.
One of the questions which Lofland (1980) has considered in
relation to the official self concerns the factors that disrupt the
maintenance of a given official self. In this respect Goffman's work
on mental hospitals or 'total institutions' is particularly significant.
In the total institution the recruit comes with a self which is syste-
matically, if often unintentionally, mortified. He is 'led into a series
of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self.
To cope with these assaults the inmate employs different lines of
adaptation. One of the forms of adaptation concerns the process
of situational withdrawal and this is achieved through drastic curtail-
ment of the involvement in interactional events. In fact, the inability
of the individual to control an adequately rich repertoire of face-
saving practices and manage proper involvement or withdrawal in
spoken interaction may be manifest early in life and may be aggravated
in later life by individual experiences in social encounters leading to
interactional and social alienation and mental illness. According to
Sullivan (1940), the manifestations of most mental derangements
are the results of the way in which individuals construct or reconstruct
social reality so that at least a part, if not all of it, is protected from
intersubjective confirmation.
The use of self in the sense of personal identity has not been studied
much by Goffman. Lofland (1980) simply mentions that the sense
of personal identity is the result of role distance, that Goffman seems
to be an existentialist in this respect, and that the idea of the human
as a 'stance-taking entity' provides Goffman with a critical perspective
on the treatment of psychiatry, mental hospitals and stigma. The
inmates in mental hospitals have a low image of their self-representation
and lack a definite sense of personal identity.
126 HansR.Dua
Goffman is fully aware of the role of 'inner dialogue' in the con-

stitution of self, though he does not consider it in detail in discussing
the question of 'self-talk'. He accepts the fact that self-talk may be
characterized as a form of egocentricity and may have self-guidance
functions in task performance by children as has been shown by Piaget
and Vygotsky. However, he is not interested in this kind of self-talk.
For him, talking to oneself in public is a prescriptive rule of communi-
cation. When a person fails to conceal his self-talk or to stop at the
appearance of another person, his failure in decorum is attributed
to 'mental illness' under the label verbal hallucination (1981:82).
As regards verbal hallucinations Goffman makes a significant point
in a footnote. He considers it an open question 'whether the individual
who engages in verbal hallucination does so in order to create an
impression of derangement or for other reasons, and is merely
indifferent to how he appears, or carries on in spite of some concern
for the proprieties'. He also considers it an open question whether
we have any good grounds in treating unabashed self-talk as a natural
index of alienation. Thus while self-talk is developmentally appropriate
in childhood years, in the case of adults it presents a 'threat to inter-
subjectivity' and raises the issues of alienation and mental illness
from the point of view of prescriptive norms.
Goffman does not consider the prescriptive rule of communication
as sufficient for characterizing self-talk. He also considers the
descriptive rule or the practice and shows the need for 'uncovering,
collecting, collating, and interpreting all possible exceptions to the
stated rule' (1981:88). He then provides a description of the places
which allow self-talk as a mode of response excusable in certain cir-
cumstance. In this respect it would appear that Goffman, like Peirce,
does not confine personal identity to the consciousness of one's body,
'the box of flesh and blood', but extends it as well to 'social conscious-
ness', the consciousness of living others with whom one is in com-
munication. Personal identity in this sense is an Outreaching identity'
depending upon the social occasions of talk (See Singer 1978 for
Peirce's notion of self)·
In short, the speaker-hearer relationship can be characterized in
terms of the notions of self, other and intersubjectivity. These notions
provide an interactional perspective on the organization of talk and
help in analyzing pathological communication at a different level of
abstraction. The interactional perspective on the organization of talk
implies that the speaker and hearer must orient themselves to each
other's capacities and demands and must fulfill the mutual obligations
of spontaneous involvement in interaction. They must employ
appropriate face-saving practices to maintain 'a functional relationship
between the structure of self and the structure of spoken inter-
action'. Failures to control face-saving practices, management of
involvement in interaction, and in the situational appropriateness
of self-talk result in several forms of pathological communication in
the case of both normal and abnormal speakers-hearers. Some forms
of communication such as verbal hallucination may be clearly
pathological. The other forms including alienation from interaction
and improprieties of conversational encounters pose a serious threat
to orderly communication and the accomplishment of inter-subjectivity
necessary for the organization of talk and social interactions.
Context and shared knowledge

The interaction between speaker and hearer is possible because they
share a common code and social reality. The characterization of the
nature of the sharedness of the common code and social reality is
an extremely complex task. The way it affects social interaction and
communicative behavior is a much less understood phenomenon. A
few remarks will be made on the issue of shared knowledge and beliefs
in so far as they bear on the question of interaction and communication.
There does not seem to be any common understanding about the
issue of shared knowledge. As Clark and Marshall (1981) argue, the
concept of shared knowledge is treated under as many names as there
are investigators: conversational context, common ground, common
set of presuppositions, shared sets, contextual domains, tacit
assumptions, pragmatic presuppositions, normal and mutual beliefs.
They discuss three varieties of mutual knowledge: (i) lasting and
temporary kinds of mutual knowledge, (ii) several kinds of temporary
knowledge, and (iii) generic and particular knowledge. Kjolseth (1972)
presents a different view of knowledge and discusses four categories
of knowledge: background, foreground, emergent and transcumbent
grounds of knowledge. He considers three essential features of shared
knowledge which are variables: (1) it is possessed and sanctioned by a
more or less inclusive population of members, (2) it is known in a
particular mode of relevance, and (3) it has a social-temporal locus
128 HansR.Dua
of relevance. The differences between the nature and types of shared

knowledge indicate both its complexity and evanescent quality.
However, it is generally accepted that shared knowledge is essential
for the accomplishment of inter-subjectivity and that it can be both
a constraint and resource in communication and a meaningful con-
stitution of social realities.
A distinction can be made between 'shared knowledge' and 'common
knowledge'. According to Kreckel (1981) common knowledge is the
result of being brought up under similar socio-cultural conditions
and educational environment. Shared knowledge, on the other hand,
refers to the negotiated common knowledge, and the ways in which
it is manipulated in establishing the character of shared knowledge
will determine not only the nature and scope of interaction but also
the kinds of ambiguities, vagueness or misinterpretations that might
arise in communication. For instance, Hinds (1985) identifies two
general types of misinterpretations in Japanese which are caused by
the fact that the speaker misjudges the addressee's ability to com-
prehend the intended message based on the kinds of information he
provides him for interpretation. Kess and Hoppe (1985) distinguish
between two types of shared knowledge: the knowledge of the world
and the metalinguistic shared knowledge. They discuss their role in the
disambiguation of structurally and lexically ambiguous sentences.
The ways in which shared knowledge is negotiated between the
participants in interaction depends upon how it is related to specific
linguistic forms and how the participants assume or retrieve it from
the ongoing conversation.
Shared knowledge plays a critical role in psychotherapy and
therapeutic discourse. Labov and Fanshel (1977:351) have developed
the expansion model of therapeutic discourse. One of the steps in this
model is concerned with making explicit some of the shared knowledge
between participants. However, they point out that 'in principle the
problem of correct interpretation cannot be solved entirely. We can
never hope to have all the knowledge that the participants shared
among themselves; but we can approximate a solution to this problem
by various strategies'.
Coulter (1979:179) makes a distinction between shared knowledge
and mutual beliefs and comments on the possibility of a communi-
cation fracture between a paranoid person and a psychiatrist due to
asymmetry in ascription in that what the patient claims in terms of
knowledge is characterized as merely belief by the therapist. He
emphasizes that our beliefs may be generative of divergences among

us. Our belief-commitments may not only provide for the appropriate-
ness of our selection from the categories of "beliefs" and "knowledge"
in characterizing the claims of others, but they provide also for further
(often unnoticed) features of account production'. Like the disjunctive
category pair of 'beliefs' and 'knowledge', Coulter refers to some other
pairs including vision/hallucination; telepathy/trickery; ghost/illusion;
flying saucer/UFO; and ideology/science. These disjunctive category
pairs bring out not only the significance of beliefs but also how dis-
course, interaction and communication may be managed in terms
of the relevance of these relationships.
The constitution of beliefs, knowledge, understanding and inter-
subjectivity involved in interaction and communication takes place
in the social context of conversational encounters. Although it is
generally accepted that meaning depends on context, context itself
is left, as Goffman (1981:67) points out, 'as a residual category,
something undifferentiated and global that is to be called in whenever,
and only whenever, an account is needed for any noticeable deviation
between what is said and what is meant'. However, Goffman himself
has treated context since the beginning of his work as a reality sui
generis. As early as 1957 he claimed that involvement obligations
relevant for orderly communication and interaction must be defined
in terms of the total context in which the individual finds himself.
The participants would be expected to show differential involvement
obligations depending upon the nature of the context. In his 1964
paper on the neglected topic of the situation he refers to two per-
spectives: the correlational perspective in which speech behavior is
correlated with such variables as age, sex, class, cultural cognitive
assumptions, etc., and the indicative, which concerns the uncovering
of new properties or indicators in speech behavior. In both kinds of
research the social situations are crucial and 'need and warrant analysis
in their own right, much like that accorded other basic forms of social
organization' (1964:134). In his paper 'Replies & Responses' (Goffman
1981:70) he insists that we must seek out some framework of
frameworks or some metaschema in order to accumulate systematic
understanding about contexts.
It would be useful to distinguish between two notions of
context as characterized by Cicourel (1987). One sense of the term
'context' includes institutionalized framing of activities. Within
this broad context the emergent processes of talk create, according
130 HansR.Dua
to Cicourel, a more narrow view of 'context' in the sense of locally

organized and negotiated interaction. The local context incorporates
the messages exchanged between the participants, their contingent
understandings and interpretations that characterize the interpersonal
context and the gradual unfoldings of the cultural and organizational
constraints and normative expectations bearing on the immediate
conditions of talk. It is this sense of the context which is constantly
negotiated by the participants and which keeps on changing depending
upon the ongoing interaction.
In therapeutic communication the possibility of negotiation and
mutual modifications of the interactional context may be obstructed
as the therapists may not negotiate with their patients about their
contexts. Both the therapist and the patient may enter, as Maseide
(1987:84) shows, 'different communicative spheres through the
production of divergent social contexts. Thus they are deprived of
the chances to comprehend each other's activities and to interact'.
This does not necessarily lead to a collapse of communication. The
barriers created by different definitions of contexts do not necessarily
lead to the termination of interaction. But the interaction generates
'disinformation' and the consensual basis of understanding in communi-
cation fails to resolve communicative inconsistencies, contradictions,
ambiguities, etc., which are constantly monitored and resolved in
normal situations.
The isolation of local context does not imply that the broad
institutional context has no impact on it. In fact the local and the
broad contexts represent two extreme ends of the continuum of
context. This implies that the context may be considered as structured
in terms of concentric frames, each frame embedded within another.
The embeddedness of each frame of context is characterized in terms
of the 'cognitive' schemata and epistemic frames of the interactants,
the current status of interaction, what is being said, what has preceded
and what will follow it. Within this conception of context the under-
standing and interpretation of an utterance cannot be accomplished in
isolation. It is necessary to bring together all the relevant information,
the understandings, assumptions and implications whether associated
with the local or broad context which have bearing on the interpreta-
tion of an utterance. The expansion model of discourse analysis
developed by Labov and Fanshel (1977) is based on such a view of
interpretation and supports the hierarchically structured nature of
the concept of context.
The phenomenology ofmiscommunication 131
In short, the lack of shared knowledge, mutual belief and such

other phenomena lead to different cognitive schemata and epistemic
frames among the interactants. This may result in obstacles to
communication as the interactants may not be able to negotiate the
contexts of talk on the basis of equal rights and status. It is necessary
to make a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the context in
order to understand how interactants organize their talk and negotiate
their meaning, how 'what is said' is related to 'what is done' in the
process of communication, and how the modes of talk and interaction
may contribute to different forms of miscommunication.
Conversational principles
The current focus on discourse analysis highlights not only the
relevance of discourse studies from both the linguistic and socio-
linguistic perspectives but also their utility for understanding human
behavior in communication and interaction. This has made it possible
to arrive at abstract general principles of conversation or rules of
discourse, and the structural properties of conversation which might
eventually help in writing the grammar of discourse. Grice (1975)
has formulated some requirements of normal communication under
the cooperative principle which has the following four aspects:
1) Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is
required.
2) Quality: 2a. Try to make your contribution one that is true;
2b. Do not say what you believe to be false;
2c. Do not say that for which you lack evidence.
3) Relatedness: 3. Be relevant.
4) Modality: 4a. Avoid obscurity of expression;
4b. Avoid ambiguity;
4c. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity);
4d. Be orderly.
Lakoff (1980) points out that in a normal discourse participants
make two over-riding assumptions: 1) the participants are rational;
2) all contributions benefit the participants. The principles of
rationality and benefit rest upon two sets of lower-level rules. One of
these, the rules of clarity, entails maximally informative communi-
132 HansR.Dua
cation and is characterized in terms of the maxims of quantity, quality,

relevance and manner as formulated by Grice (1975). The other, rules
of rapport, concerns meeting the emotional needs of the participants
and making them comfortable in the discourse. The rules of rapport
consist of: (i) distance - remain aloof; (ii) deference - give the other
options; (iii) camaraderie — make the other feel comfortable. He also
states that while the rules of clarity express the relationship between
the speaker and his message, the rules of rapport concern the relation
between speaker and addressee. Furthermore, the rules of clarity are
all applicable at once, whereas the rules of rapport are in part mutually
incompatible.
Labov and Fanshel (1977) present a different approach to discourse
analysis. They identify two planes of conversational behavior, the
plane of 'what is said' and the plane of 'what is done'. These planes
are connected by a series of rules of interpretation and production
which they characterize as rules of discourse. In establishing these
rules they build upon the theory of speech acts by Austin (1962)
and Searle (1969) and also draw upon the investigation of conversa-
tional constraints by Gordan and Lakoff (1971), Fräser (1975), and
Sadock (1974). These rules are based on the study of therapeutic
discourse.
The co-operative principle can be criticized on several grounds.
Sperber and Wilson (1986) have argued that the Gricean maxims
can be reformulated in terms of a single principle, which they call
the standard of maximal relevance. For Hymes (1986) this principle
is not universally valid for all cultures; it is an empirical question
as to which situations, events, activities, and relationships are
conducted on the basis of such a principle. It does not allow for
conflict and contradiction which the parties to conversation con-
sider true, sufficient, relevant and clear, and the maxims of the prin-
ciple should be restated and reinterpreted in terms of dimensions
whose interpretation and significance will vary within or across groups
in relation to situations, events, activities and relationships. Thus
Hymes (1986:73) remarks: 'Truth and deception; reticence, precision
and prolixity; relevance and divagation; clarity, ambiguity, allusive
obscurity; all become optional bases of a personal, situational or
cultural style'.
Several kinds of research support criticisms of Hymes' co-operative
principle. Hymes (1986) himself discusses the study of Keenan (1976)
which shows how the norms of Malagasy conversation cannot be
easily understood in terms of the maxims of the co-operative principle.

Marcus (1984) points out that ambiguity, generality and repetition
are basic presuppositions of diplomatic talk, though it is not certain
to what extent and in what form these could be present without
damaging other requirements of diplomatic communication.
The violation of the maxims of the co-operative principle is obvious
in the case of psychoanalytic discourse and schizophrenic speech.
In the case of psychoanalytic discourse patient and analyst, as
Lakoff notes, suspend the rules of normal discourse with mutual
agreement. The benefit of the discourse lies outside of the immediate
context of the conversation. The violation of both the rules of clarity
and rapport as manifest in the discourse provides the analyst the basis
for making interpretations of the patient's behavior and for under-
standing his mental processes. However, it is difficult to say how far
the analyst can succeed in understanding the violations of the co-
operative principle as well as the mental processes of the patient.
The schizophrenic discourse presents a much more difficult task.
Schizophrenics may be unwilling to co-operate for various reasons.
Watzlawick et al. (1967) remark that both the normals and the patients
may find themselves in an untenable communicative context in which
they feel obliged to communicate but at the same time they avoid the
commitment inherent in all communication. They point out that the
'crazy' communication (behavior) at the clinical end of the behavioral
spectrum is not necessarily the manifestation of a sick mind, but may
be the only possible reaction to an absurd or untenable communication
context. It is also possible that schizophrenics lose trust in others,
and when the trust is lost, they find that the safest strategy is not to
tell the truth to the other but to tell everything except the truth or tell
the truth in such a way that it can not be understood as truth. Under
such conditions it is very difficult to conclude from the incoherent
discourse of the schizophrenics whether they have lost their com-
petence of the rules of discourse or whether the violation of the rules
of discourse, in the sense of Labov and Fanshel or the Gricean maxims
of the co-operative principle, is intentional or indicative of the
disturbed mental process of cognition and reasoning. However, if
it is accepted that the schizophrenics may have valid reasons to flout
the co-operative principle or rules of discourse, it would be necessary
not only to develop patience, understanding and insight in decoding
or interpreting the schizophrenic discourse, but also to study the
ways in which they violate the maxims to convey specific meanings.
134 HansR.Dua
Conclusion
We have argued the need for characterizing and understanding the
nature, scope and kinds of miscommunication phenomena not only
for their own sake but also for the insights they provide in the
accomplishment of communication in the case of both normal and
abnormal speakers. Though the miscommunication phenomena can
be considered from the perspectives of the speaker and hearer
separately, we have also considered the need for the relevance of
such other notions as self/other, intersubjectivity, shared knowledge,
context and conversational principles. From the perspective of the
speaker the miscommunication phenomena may be related to the
notions of intention, cognition and coding and characterized in terms
of such categories as misconception, cognitive primitiveness, mis-
expression or misrepresentation. The communicative disorders
characterized from the perspective of the speaker distort both his
intrapsychic orientation and interpersonal attitudes and constitute
the dimension of 'normality' and 'abnormality'.
The issues of miscommunication from the perspective of the hearer
can be understood only when we recognize the status and attributes
of the hearer and the assumptions he makes about the normality of
the speaker as well as about his own intentions and selectivity of
perception and understanding. They can be considered at the level
of the reception of signals and their decoding from the point of view
of meaning. At the level of reception it is necessary to understand
the implications of non-hearing, partial hearing, mishearing and hearing
for communication failures or distortions in decoding. The decoding
of signals from the point of view of meaning can be considered in
terms of nonunderstanding, partial understanding, misunderstanding
and understanding. Both the reception of signals and their decoding
from the point of view of meaning may form the basis, consciously
or unconsciously, for misinterpretation.
Both speaker and hearer must orient themselves to each other's
capacities and demands and must fulfill certain obligations to sustain
talk and interaction. The mutual orientation, relationships and
identities that the speaker and hearer construct in talk can be captured
in terms of the notions of self, other and intersubjectivity. These
notions provide an interactional perspective on the organization of
talk and reveal the functional relationship between the structure of
self and the structure of spoken interaction. This functional relation-
ship can be maintained by face-saving practices, management of involve-

ment obligations in interaction and the situational appropriateness
of self-talk. Failures in these interactional strategies not only result
in several forms of pathological communication but also contribute
to the miscommunication phenomena considered from the perspec-
tives of the speaker and hearer. The various forms of withdrawal,
alienation in communication, distortions of self or face, verbal hal-
lucination, etc., can be understood as miscommunication phenomena
in terms of the notions of self, other and intersubjectivity.
The notions of self, other and intersubjectivity are constituted,
realized and accomplished through context and shared knowledge,
on the one hand, and conversational principles on the other. The lack
of shared knowledge, mutual beliefs and other such phenomena lead
to different cognitive schemata and epistemic frames among the
participants. Such phenomena are intimately related to the notion
of context. A systematic and comprehensive analysis of context is
necessary for understanding how interactants organize their talk and
negotiate their meanings. The discrepancies in knowledge, beliefs
and understandings of the speaker and hearer and their inability to
negotiate the context of talk to mutual benefit lead to breakdowns
in communication and the blocking of intersubjectivity. The principles
of conversation can not be claimed to be universal as formulated
currently as they may be violated in specific situations, events, activities,
and relationships for specific purposes (as in psychoanalytic discourse)
or they may not be applicable (as in diplomatic talk or in some
cultures). The violation of these principles by schizophrenics is really
problematic as it is difficult to say whether it is intentional or due to
loss of communicative competence or indicative of the disturbed
mental processes of cognition and reasoning. Whatever the reasons or
motivations in the violation of the principles of conversation, it results
in several forms of pathological communication and poses the challenge
of understanding incoherent discourse produced by their violation.
In whatever form we characterize the phenomena of miscommuni-
cation it should be considered in the form of a continuum on the
dimension of normality and abnormality. However, it is most difficult
to draw a line between the normal and the abnormal with respect to
each kind of miscommunication. Furthermore, we know very little
about how different forms of miscommunication may be related
to each other, what kinds of miscommunication are monitored, and
controlled and the ways in which it is achieved, and what kinds of
136 HansR.Dua
miscommunication are natural due to inherent inabilities of the inter-

actants, or socially prescribed or intentional. For these reasons,
schizophrenic communication and therapeutic discourse present
challenging problems of understanding and interpretation. The
characterization of the nature, scope and kinds of miscommunication
phenomena would therefore be relevant for understanding both the
phenomenology of miscommunication as well as communication.
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The cross-cultural relevance of Goffman's
concept of individual agency
Nirmala Srinivasan
Much of Goffman's seminal contribution to sociology has either gone

unnoticed or been distorted as a result of it being labeled as symbolic
interactionism. However, recent developments in the structuration
theory of Giddens and the critical theory of Habermas have prompted
a fresh interest in the works of Goffman that has helped to unearth
some novel dimensions of his theoretical analysis. One of these
dimensions is the self/society problematic envisaged in his theory
of interaction order. Spawned by keen interest in the problems of
ontological guarantees for the individual's sense of autonomy and
security, Goffman's focus was eventually drawn to the rhythms of
encounters regulated by the involvement of individuals. The question
of symbolism therefore assumes secondary importance to that of
the stability of the encounter and the sociality of the self. In any
interaction, he believed, 'the individual is expected to possess certain
attributes, capacities, and information which, taken together, fit
together into a self that is at once coherently unified and appropriate
for the occasion' (Goffman 1956:268). It would therefore be absurd
to delink his theory of individual agency from that of the interaction
order.
The purpose of this essay is twofold. Firstly, I shall examine the
concept of self which permeates the diverse writings of Goffman
with special reference to the phenomenological critique mounted
against Schutz and its implications for his theory of subjective agency.
Secondly, I shall review the potential for expanding Goffmanianism
beyond its familiar cultural milieu of Anglo-American society.
142 Nirmala Srinivasan
The self/society problematic in Goffman

The concept of the individual as a 'stance-taking entity' is a product
of the Chicago tradition characterizing the intellectual antecedents
of Goffman. 1 At a time when American sociology was under the
theoretical hegemony of Parsonian functionalism, Goffman skillfully
used romanticism 'as a lever to pry open the deterministic framework
of modern science and to restate the problem of autonomy, freedom
and innovation' (Gouldner 1973:349). Despite its positioning in the
space of the Chicago School, Goffmanian sociology cannot be described
as the American prototype of incorrigible romanticism.2 On the
contrary, the intensity of his observational capacity that annoyed
even his teacher Everett C. Hughes reflected his 'primary loyalty'
to existentialism as rightly observed by one of his leading critics
(MacCannell 1983).
Goffman's notion of self has been the subject of intense debate
primarily because of the 'perspective of incongruity' that he introduced
as the hallmark of the 'Goffmanesque touch'.3 His outstanding con-
tributions to the theory of self rest upon the fact that it is not dis-
connected and abstracted from the everyday-life situations of face-
to-face encounters; on the contrary, his approach to the core of
individual identity is from the network of the interaction order.
Therefore, it is not surprising for critics like Lofland (1980) and Gonos
(1977) to express the view that Goffman was a diehard formalist.
Far from grounding his analysis in the existence of individual selves, as is
gathered by many commentators from a reading of the Presentation of Self
(1959), Goffman has almost single-handedly among American micro-
sociologists worked to undermine this possible grounding (Gonos 1977:865).
On the other hand, being staunch advocates of the agency thesis

in Goffman, Giddens (1979,1987) and MacCannell (1983) believe
that Goffman did not assume the conventional micro/macro, subject/
object, self/society dichotomies. The notion of face-to-face encounter
as sacrosanct stems from the belief that the security of the individual
is always in jeopardy due to the restrictions placed on the interactional
situation by the social needs of the individual rather than any macro-
structural factors such as class relations, etc. Thus, by shifting the
focus from the external order to internal constraints, Goffman projects
the interaction order as a vehicle facilitating mutual identification of
the obligations through which the individuals recognize their selfhood
as much as that of others.
Goffman 's concept of individual agency 143
Contingency theorists (see, Rawls 1987:147) obviously fail to see

Goffman as a proponent of subjectivity: 'Goffman does not deny the
existence of the self as performer (1959:252; 1967:31-2), but both
in its capacity as performer and performed, the self ultimately depends
upon interaction. The social self is the product of a scene . . .' (Rawls
1987:139). While MacCannell (1983) emphasizes the existentialist
overtones of Goffman in his conceptualization of the here-and-now
consciousness of the self, Habermas dismisses him as a cynic focusing
on the strategic self-interests of individual actors: 'the dramaturgical
qualities of action are in a certain way parasitic; they rest on a structure
of goal-directed action' (Habermas 1984:90). The moot point is that
the multiple interpretations do not crystallize into a consensus but
an enigma; it shows that culling out, composing and conceptualizing
the theory of human agency is a challenging task. The confusion is
worse, when one is confounded by the style of Goffman's writings -
the Goffmanesque touch — that excels in deceptive juggling of words
with occasional overtones of monotony.
My focus on the concept of self in Goffman leads me to view it as
a package of rationality, motives, identity and consciousness within
the objective domain of the face-to-face encounter as an inescapable
reality. As an analytical tool, I will choose to let Goffman speak for
himself. To begin with he admits,
I make no claim whatsoever to be talking about the core matters of sociology —
social organization and social structure. Those matters have been and can
continue to be quite nicely studied without reference to frame at all . . . . I
personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual's current
involvement to be second; this report deals with matters that are second
(Goffman 1974:13).4
While dealing with 'matters that are second', he does not make them
secondary matters. In other words, the space-time locale of current
involvements of the individual is of paramount significance for under-
standing the conceptualization of human agency, and more specifically
the formulation of theory in sociology. Goffman is not a micro-
behavioralist as he is normally thought to be. To recall his own words,
'My concern over the years has been to promote acceptance of this
face-to-face domain as an analytically viable one - a domain which
may be titled, for want of any happy name, as the interaction order
...'(Goffman 1983:2).
As pointed out by Rawls (1987), the interaction order is a sui generis
phenomenon because the individuals who enter it have no a priori
144 Nirmala Snnivasan
knowledge or guarantees of its successful outcome. However, the

process of organizing social experiences is done by the sense-making
and meaning-grasping potential intrinsic to all human beings for which
the knowledge of 'frames' as codes of conduct in diverse situations
provides the background knowledge or schemata. Given the discursive
logic of perceptions, the subjective capability lies in its capacity to
project 'fronts', that is to dramatize its personality so as to project
an image appropriate for the approval of others and acceptable to one's
own personality. The active involvement of the self as a performer-
actor provides the cornerstone of the dramaturgical model through
which Goffman's notion of self is conceptualized. In this manner, the
tensions embedded in the subject-to-subject encounters are resolved
through the objectivation of the human capability to dramatize role
playing. The skillful display of stagecraft ensures the smooth flow
of the interactional process, besides allowing the self to develop its
own identity moorings. In Goffman's view, 'meaning is an interactional
achievement and not an institutional artifact or residue. However,
meaning is not a product of contingent situational factors either, but,
rather the product of a working consensus; a commitment to the
interaction order (Rawls 1987:142).
Thus, the logical culmination of the interaction order is a two-
way process from the self to the ensemble of the stage effects; and
from the latter back to the individual. The whole process is not to
be viewed as a cyclical chain of occurrences; on the contrary, for
Goffman, the reciprocal feedback between the agency and the structure
provided dynamic undercurrents for identity formations and emergent
selfhoods. In this way, everyday life was conceived to be naturally
dramatized.5 The metaphor of the theatre - be it quaint or queer -
marked a major breakthrough in the sociological traditions of the 1960s;
the concept of the individual as an active agent capable of orchestrating
the flow of social discourse in a manner protecting the image and
personality needs of the self and others was a decisive shift in the
ontology and epistemology of the discipline. Goffman does not treat
the individual subject as a programed puppet nor does he believe
in either of the 'isms' (i.e., voluntarism, determinism) that created
a major divide in the subject matter of sociology.6 By upholding
the interaction situation as analytically viable, he contends that human
agency is unfolded by the manner in which individuals manipulate
others and control their own subjectivity through impression manage-
ment, thus indicating the contextuality of consciousness and the
enclosure of self-identity. However, what gives the theatrical twist

to interactions is the ability of the agency as the manager/performer
to project public images of itself that others approve and vice versa.
The actor-audience analogy that Goffman conceptualized as co-
presence and focused interaction is universally applicable to all inter-
actional situations.7 On the social stage, individuals extemporize their
roles rather than enact a script.
We submit no script exists for this role and therefore that the individuals
involved must somehow improvise their roles within very broad limits. To the
role theorists, the archetypical role is that seen in ritual or classic drama, in
which every line and gesture of every actor is rigidly specified in the sacred
script. In our view, the archetypical role is more nearly that seen in improvised
theatre, such as is provided by the Second City Troupe, which performs ex-
temporaneously with only the broad outlines of the sketches and of characters
assumed (McCall and Simmons 1966:6-7).
Hence, the practical penetration of wider societal institutions is
manipulated through the 'control of the setting' which Goffman has
vividly portrayed with a set of binary descriptive concepts: back/
front region, control/repair, presence/absence, presentational/avoidance
rituals.8 The regional and time/space dimensions of interaction dis-
played in the agency's dramatic performance indicate the knowledge-
ability and capability of the discursive subject.9 We cannot therefore
dismiss Goffman's agent as totally non-discursive as it is partially
claimed in the arguments of Giddens (1984, 1987) and unequivocally
inBrittan's(1973).
The context of interactional situations ranging from focused
encounters to situations of co-presence accounts for the ubiquity
of the dramatic essence in family meals, weddings, chaired meetings,
forced marches, service encounters, queues, crowds and couples
(Goffman 1971) for which the ultimate tools of control management
are the glances, gestures, positioning and verbal statements that people
feed into situations almost as a natural effort. The stage analogy
therefore suggests that behavior is not an explicit application of rules;
it is rather a routinization of communication that is not purely
symbolic interaction, but is also dramatic symbolic interaction (Brittan
1973:120). The reflexivity of the monitoring agency also suggests
that 'there is, in other words, an element of consciousness in all
behaviour directed towards others. The commitment to speech is
self-conscious in that it is framed in such a way that the other's point
of view is taken into account' (Brittan 1973:116).
Goffman's concern for the individual that spawned the genesis

of the stage metaphor is often misinterpreted as the outcome of
structuralist pressures, as a result of institutional hegemony over
the individual agency. The categorical and uncompromising stand
that he takes points to the fact that the vulnerability of the individual
is primarily an offshoot of subjective (personality) needs and not
objectively imposed on the individuals entering an encounter. True
enough, the sociability of the subject places an initial constraint on
the interactional dyad. Goffman therefore takes a view diametrically
opposed to symbolic interactionism by projecting the individual not
as a mere looking- glass self but a victim of his own needs; it is a self-
constituting self, if we can put it rather glibly; and the process is a
painful exercise in his view.
. . . The individual who performs the character will be seen for what he largely
is, a solitary player involved in a harried concern for his production. Behind
many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look,
a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is
privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task (Goffman 1959:235).
Thus, as suggested by Lofland (1980), the entity called selfhood

is a product of the antithetical relation between the official self (based
on positions, roles or titles) and the performing self. In this way,
individuals play a variety of fronts by masking the core identity on
the backstage. Selfhood constituted by the interactional order is
therefore only a shadow of the substance; the core within is never
displayed as part of the performance. Hence, the authentic self is
estranged from the social transactions and negotiations between
individuals due to the fragmentation of the core identity into dual
selves and multiple maskings. The individual portrayed by Goffman
is almost similar to Rousseau's character 'born free to obey'. By
conceding the practical consciousness of the agency to devise stage-
management, controls, planning and production of performances,
Goffman reflected his existentialist notion of subjective rationality
or rational choice, which, at the objective level, remains an order-
sustaining process exclusively on account of fragmentation of the
core identity and truncation of the self. Thus, possibly the rational
choice of the agency entails behavior contrary to its consciousness;
in other words, social Order' makes a mockery of the authentic self
by creating a contradiction between the objective self and the sub-
jective self.
Goffman 's concep t of individual agency 147
In addition to rationality and subjective identity, the question of

motives in the Goffmanian schema is yet another area of endless
dispute among scholars. The Frankfurt spokesman (Habermas 1984),
as already mentioned, is vehemently opposed to the concept of self-
seeking egocentric actors in the Goffman Theatre Workshop, a view
shared by some others as well. 'The implication here is that if the self
is present, is consistently successful, that is, it is validated by others,
the actor will become convinced by his own performance, his inter-
pretation will become or be perceived to be r e a l . . . . Thus, what starts
off as a trading gambit, ends up as value capital for the actor' (Brittan
1973:148-9).
The agency's manipulative skills of impression management have a
dual connotation in a conceptual sense. They testify to the sovereignty
of the self because it is individuals and not institutions that guarantee
ontological security, resulting in the orderliness of encounters and
the social integration of the self without robbing him/her of the novelty
and uniqueness of the individual qua performer. At the same time,
to the extent that individuals are constrained to dramatize their
behavior, the impact of the fragmentation of private/public identity
discourses gradually culminates in a situation where the trading of
masks becomes 'real' and the real 'identity' acquires overtones of
falsity ending in false consciousness. 'This, in essence, is an aspect
of the Marxist critique of society, which sees the fragmentation of man
proceeding in such a way that the theatre of the trivial is substituted
for the theatre of social significance' (Brittan 1973:121). To level
charges of an antihuman perspective against Goffman is to read too
much into him. In his sincere efforts to project and promote the
image of the individual as someone with social intelligence amid the
overwhelming presence of formidable institutions, Goffman however
was misled because of his ahistorical approach to the human
situation.10 At the same time, it seems impossible not to recognize
the simple and elementary insights underlying Goffman's emphasis
on the orderliness of the micro-behavior encounters.
Any discussion of the controversial themes regarding the Goffmanian
concept of self cannot ignore the charges of inconsistencies leveled
against him by many critics. Lofland (1980), for instance, maintains
that the early Goffman (i.e., the author of The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life) was overwhelmingly a subjective sociologist who
is believed to have undergone a radical change under the impact of
the Vietnam crisis of the 1960s, thus accounting for the structuralist
formalism of Frame Analysis (1974). Such a proposition is untenable

on the grounds that Goffman never propounded a dualistic theory of
subjectivity; so Frame Analysis does not mark a conceptual watershed
in his theory of human agency.
Even as early as 1959, it was clear that he did not share the ex-
istentialist dogmas of absolute freedom a la Sartre; at the same time,
he did not dismiss it as a total myth either. The doctrine of dramaturgy
is in essence a demystification of subjectivity and its potential to
subvert objective forces. Such a view persisted after 1959 as can be
seen from his statement below.
In analysing 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 (Goffman
1959:253).
In Frame Analysis, Goffman openly voiced his opposition to the

intersubjective definitions and constructions of reality found in
Schutzian sociology. The phenomenological dictum of intersubjectivity
that Schutz formulated is that'. . . the common-sense world is from the
outset a sociocultural world, and the many questions connected with
the intersubjectivity of the symbolic relations originate within it, are
determined by it, and find their solution within it' (Schutz 1962:294).
Firstly, 'to Goffman, it is unthinkable that social reality might
undergo a construction or reconstruction at every encounter' (Gonos
1977:859). Moreover, for him 'working consensus' is a collective
outcome of the histrionic abilities of the individual self and not inter-
subjective reciprocity. To Schutz's (1962) claim that definitions of
reality are social and collective Goffman retorts, 'Presumably a "de
finition of the situation" is almost always to be found, but those
who are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even
though their society often 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' (Goffman 1974:1-2).
He is even more scathing in his critique of the Schutzian concept
of 'worlds' or provinces of meaning. As he puts it, James and Schutz:
. . . are quite unconvincing in providing any kind of account as to how many
different "worlds" there are and whether everyday, wide-awake life can actually
be seen as but one rule-produced plane of being, if so seen at all . . . . One is
faced with the embarrassing methodological fact that the announcement of
constitutive rules seems an open-ended game that any number can play forever
(Goffman 1974:5-6).
In a way, his critical observations on Schutz clarifies his own position.

Therefore, Frame Analysis is more than a mere polemical dismissal.
Goffman's existentialism, as much as that of Schutz, is deep rooted
in the subjectivity philosophy of the human agency. The similarity of
their thinking reflects an implicit unity in the concept of self as a
meaning-grasping entity actively involved in interpretative dimensions
of interaction. The phenotypical developments of personal identity,
however, differ in a crucial respect in the fact that, The difference
between the junior and senior lines centers on the placement of the
division in the self: specifically, for the phenomenological sociologist
the division occurs outside the intersubjective units of the we-relation;
for Goffman and the existentialists, the division is found at a pre-
personal level in the self itself (MacCannell 1983:13).
Actually, the differences between Goffman and Schutz are not
as irreconcilable as Goffman pretended because ultimately the notion
of subjectivity par excellence is diluted in both. For example,
Goffman's conceptualization of 'frames' as laws and codes or of
'experience frames', to be more specific, recalls the concept of 'shared
meaning' a la Schutz (1962) and 'typifications' in the formulations
of Berger and Luckmann (1966). Central to this debate is the
phenomenological thrust on 'intentionality'; as a concept it brings
into sharper focus consciousness bound by the concrete world of
everyday experience and hence offers immense analytical scope for
the elaboration of the dramaturgical model. Unfortunately, the
polemical stand that Goffman took may have cost him heavily in terms
of intellectual scholarship (Denzin — Keller 1981).
Consequently, if Goffman is reproached for being ambiguous about
the theory of agency (Giddens 1987:118), then the problematics of
straddling the subject-object, micro-macro dualisms that were left
unresolved in Schutz credits him with the myth of subjectivity
(Gorman 1977). As an interesting question from the perspective of the
sociology of knowledge, one wonders whether commonsense
knowledge is anchored in the we-relationships of Schutz or the T
orientations of Goffman; perhaps both are equally true or false
depending on the demands of the interaction order that cannot be
visualized and conceptualized in a structural vacuum devoid of concrete
positions of power, prestige and prosperity. However, the reification
of private identities is more realistically brought out in Goffman than
in Schutz, given the central thrust on the monadic self.
Universalizing Goffman: cross-cultural scope and

relevance
The dramaturgical model and the stagecraft theory of action were
the intellectual offshoot of an era when Anglo-American society
was undergoing rapid changes due to the impact of industrialization,
urbanization, social mobility, the growing impersonalization of
community life and the consequent atomization of the individual.
In a rather apprehensive tone, Goffman admits that 'in our Anglo-
American society, at least, there seems to be no social encounter
which cannot be embarrassing to one or more of its participants'
(Goffman 1967:99).
From the observation cited, it is not clear whether Goffman is
paying a compliment to the non-Anglo-American societies for pro-
tecting the self from 'bad faith'11 or whether there is an implicit
Eurocentric bias in Goffman, the 'visionary', vis-a-vis the immutability
of non-Anglo-American social systems. Nevertheless, the fact that the
'stagecraft' notion of human agency and the 'frame analysis'
methodology have some scope for the study of non-Anglo-American
societies demonstrates the outstanding legacy of Goffman to the
growth of sociology.
Theoretically speaking, Goffman relies on structuralism as the
mainstay of his analytical formulations on the everyday behavioral
patterns as condensations of the situational encounters. As Gonos
(1980:136) puts it, The object of this sociology is governed by
structures that govern these relations'. Moreover, Goffman mastered
the skill of Americanizing structuralism so that it did not antagonize
the 'white mythology and Anglo-American commonsense' (MacCannell
1983:20) of self-autonomy and self-realization. Therefore, it is a
matter of deep academic interest to examine the cross-cultural scope
of the Goffmanian formulae for self outside the Anglo-American model
of atomistic, self-seeking, ambitious individuals.
Firstly, it is clear that the categories underlying the stagecraft theory
are not culture-bound, but are based on the structure of inter-relation-
ships between the core self and the multiplicity of the 'masks' devised
to manage its performance without any ruptures. In terms of its
capabilities to dramatize, the individual agency in the context of
Anglo-American society had to develop those skills as a matter of
self-protection against the pressure of rapid social change in the wake
of industrialization. In other words, contrary to what is popularly
believed, Goffmanian 'selfhood' does not seem to be based on any

myth of the whiteman's love for freedom and authentic selfhood,
but spawned by the structural forces that were in the last analysis
determined by the economy. By using culturally identifiable and
observable social relations, he showed the direction for the develop-
ment of sociological theory as a universal discourse.
However, even if one considers it legitimate that his choice of
'situations' were those that involved homogeneous relationships,
it is still puzzling that he avoided, for instance, to elaborate on an
encounter between whites and blacks in a public park with segregated
seating facilities. Further, one may also wonder why Goffman was
so elusive about the ideological issues of racism, an attitude that also
boosted the whiteman's myth of superiority? The motivations are
undoubtedly complex; Goffman's analytical focus was drawn to the
independent variable of the human agency (its capacity for discrepancy,
disruption and generation for defense mechanisms) rather than the
dependent variable (the maintenance and termination of a face-to-
face encounter). As he mentioned, 'by listening for this dissonance
(embarrassment), the sociologist can generalize about the ways in which
interaction can go awry, and by implication, the condition necessary
for interaction to be right' (Goffman 1956:265).
From Goffman's viewpoint, the discriminatory institutions of racism
are not to be taken as the 'core matter' of sociology; on the contrary,
it is the dramatization of situations, the performer per se, not just
the performance that underlines the business of sociology because
a performance is a product of the performer's skills and imagination
that varies from individual to individual. The essence of drama is
not in any preconceived plot but in the unfolding of the roles, each
with its unique brand of selfhood. The phenomenological portrayal
of self-identity lies in the manner in which the agency brings about
the compatibility between 'frames' (objective institutions) and 'sit-
uations' (subjective encounters). The structural dissonance between
the two that results in 'embarrassment', an implicit idea in Goffman's
thesis, is germane to the cross-cultural relevance of his work. We realize
that the task of importing Goffman lies in the structuralist inter-
pretations and not in the culture-specific interpretations of his thesis.
Viewed thus, the conceptual linkage between 'frames' and 'situations'
offers an extensive scope for understanding the subjective dimensions
of individual agency even in a tradition-bound country like India,
currently undergoing rapid changes under state orchestration.
In my phenomenological study of the patterns of minority identity

among Indian Muslims and Christians, I realized the significance of
dramaturgy in the micro-pluralist situations articulating the selfhood
of the individual minority member.12 For a closer appreciation of
Goffman, let us scan through a case history from my field data and
conceptualize it within the framework of the categories used by
Goffman in his dramaturgical model. For instance, the types of
occurrences that can happen in any situation according to Goffman
are exhaustively listed by Lofland (1980). Of these, the ones appearing
in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as cited by Lofland (1980:
29) are relevant for the context at hand.
At a broad level, disruption/discord as against prevention/precaution
or repair/defense are the main types of dramatic actions within the
stage repertoire for individual enactment. All these in combination
are found in the following case history.13 This is the statement of
a Christian priest, whom I interviewed in order to elicit his world-
views as a member of the Christian minority community in India.
The reconstructed interview reads as follows:
Professing Christianity from the pulpit is different from practising it in the
community (discrepant roles, Goffman 1959:144 and 161). Nearly 99 per
cent of the Church members are educated and employed in good jobs. At least
about 2 per cent are affluent and to that extent, there is no question of many
feeling as minorities . . . . As the sheperd of the flock, I have to comfort them
and guide them (parts of the front, 1959:22-25). What afflicts most Christians
are the special reservation for the scheduled castes. Some of them have been
superseded in jobs. So I tell them to believe in Jesus and his mercy (parts of
the front, '1959:22-25). But I know in my conscience, I am misleading them
(discrepancies between appearances and reality, 1959:43-48). I preach that
every non-Christian is a potential Christian and hence to be alert to c o n v e r t . . . .
But I do not personally believe in it. Here again, I face a dilemma but don't
do anything that will spoil the confidence of the people in me as a priest (kinds
of avoidance processes, 1959:217-19).
Another interesting way for Goffman's entry into the arena of

Indian pluralism is in public gatherings. For instance, I have always
been interested in cricket or hockey matches played between India
and Pakistan. The backdrop of Partition continues to dominate the
'frames' governing Hindu-Muslim relations in various aspects of day-
to-day life, including a game of hockey or a cricket match.14 On one
such occasion, when I was a co-present spectator along with a Muslim
friend of mine, the latter displayed a lot of discomfort while other
Muslim spectators cheered the visiting team. While I was wondering
Goffman 's concept of individual agency 15 3
whether it was my presence (as a non-Muslim) that was the reason

for his embarrassment, he turned to me abruptly and asked me whether
I was familiar with a popular saying directed against Muslims in India:
'You eat the salt of India but sing the praise of Pakistan'.
If proverbs can be taken as social indicators of Goffmanian 'frames',
there are a variety of micro-behavioral situations in the context of
social change in India in which the fragility of the individual selfhood
surfaces. The typical Goffmanian conclusion would be not merely to
highlight the fragility of selfhood; the fact that once the self is
projected (as in the case of the highly individualistic priest, or the
crystallization of the Muslim minority identity of the hockey
spectator), it is more interesting to see the diverse ways in which it
is accommodated with co-operative and/or preventive practices
vis-a-vis others in order to maintain the system of interaction.
Yet another fascinating area for the use of Goffmanian techniques
is the entire gamut of operations carried out by the administrative
apparatus (the Indian bureaucracy) to evolve new prototypes of
secular, democratic citizenship over the primordial ethnic loyalties
based on caste, religion, language and region. The institutional,
novelties introduced by the Republic of India to break down old
identities, or renew and reconstruct old ones are envisaged in the social
policies directed towards the uplift of the poor, downtrodden and
weaker sections, especially the low-caste untouchables. One such
mammoth effort is made through the quota system or the reservation
policy, whereby positions in educational institutions and administrative
jobs are reserved for the low-caste Hindus. In this manner, social
inequalities are supposed to be redressed by using economic instru-
ments as levelling mechanisms. However, at present the impact of
the nationwide reservation policy has had the unintended consequence
of causing backlash effects. Reverse discrimination is assuming serious
proportions in terms of its ramifications on inter-caste conflict,
especially in rural India. True to Goffmanian traditions, our focus
is not on the merits and demerits of either casteism or reservations
per se; but on the capacity of the individual agency to cope with
it and accommodate self-identities within the range of emerging
institutions. The plethora of public policies is operating at cross-
purposes to the secular aspirations of the state and its efforts to evolve
nation-building outside ethnic enclaves. It is in this context that
Goffman's distinction between the official self and the performing
self is sociologically relevant for understanding the dynamics of social
processes both at the objective and subjective levels. On the one hand,
the outburst of reverse discrimination is seen in the reinforcement of
caste identities among the Hindu upper caste so as to give a collective
image of solidarity. Thus, although the official self of an individual
Brahmin (as an upper-caste Hindu) does not endorse reservations
for Brahmins on a par with low castes, the performing self has ceased
to pay only lip-service to the practice of reservations in public services.
Similarly, all over India, innumerable cases of overnight transformations
of occupational castes to the status of low castes have been reported
as a way of benefiting from the bureaucratic quotas for the ameliora-
tion of the oppressed caste minorities. Currently, the militant social
protest under the banner of the Vanniyar Movement in Tamil Nadu
(one of the states in the Indian Union) can be best described as
conscious efforts of a group of individuals to stage a performance
that can benefit the community as a whole by trading off 'masks'
to gain economic advantages through ethnic discourses. Thus, the
common man is literally plagued by extreme fragmentation and
mutilation of the core official identity and wears diverse masks
depending on the bandwagon that is most beneficial to the individual
and his/her immediate kith and kin. Organized militancy as a way
of citizenship protest for distributive justice has brought about an
ever widening gap between the official and performing selves of the
individuals, leading to greater and greater fragmentation of personal
identities and the masking capabilities of individuals. Hence Goffman's
(1957:49) claim: 'conjoint involvement appears to be a fragile thing . . .
that is likely at any time to lead the individual into some form of
alienation.' Gonos' (1977:861) observation that the concept of frame
allows 'a much different picture of culture and its consistency' is
equally valid in other cultures where the dominant Anglo-American
ethos is non-existent.
In my opinion, Goffman did not have an adequate realization of the
full potential of his intellectual tools, particularly the methodological
relevance of 'frame' as against 'situation' for the study of heterogeneous
social arrangements outside the purview of face-to-face encounters.
Given his staunch commitment to the interactional situation, he was
unequivocal in his view: Ί can only suggest that he who would combat
false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much
to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to
provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people
snore' (Goffman 1974:14).
Goffman 's concep t of individual agency 15 5
With this statement, he dismisses all pretentious claims to the

liberating praxis of theory. Yet, the enigmatic role of the agency vis-
a-vis intentionality (of consciousness) is not overcome by a rather
simplistic conceptualization of the linkage between frame and situation.
For example, using Goffmanian structuralism in the analysis of the
case history and interviews presented above, it is possible for us
to gain access only to the self-identity as it is unfolded by a situation. It
is not possible for us to define the frame of communalism or pluralism
at a macro-institutional level guiding the fate of the country and its
teeming millions as a whole. It is still baffling as to which of the
communal frames (political, economic, cultural, secular or religious)
determine the situations. In other words, are there any dominant
frames organizing the pluralist encounters in India universally and if
so, what is the criterion of dominance? How does one determine what
are the primary frames and what are the subframes? And finally, are
individuals knowledgeable about all frames before reflecting on
dramatic technique?
Social encounters everywhere are not symmetrical situations. The
gender situations that Goffman has brilliantly portrayed in Gender
Advertisements (1979) may be viewed as indicative of his own world-
view, namely, the natural behavior of normal persons. For him, the
encounter is a monolithic situation, where individuals have consciously
come to define themselves. So, whether it is an interplay of multiple
frames or not is relegated to the footnotes of his analysis as in the
case of a hockey match. It involves not only epistemological doubts
but also questions concerning the ontological state of the individual's
consciousness, and also the assumptions of the theoretician as to how
frame should be defined.
Such questions are Beyond Goffman. Nevertheless, they do not in
any way inhibit cross-cultural application of the dramaturgical model
or frame analysis as an investigative method. On the contrary, the
Goffmanian perspective introduces a new dimension into the theory
and method of sociology of newly developing countries like India,
where the burgeoning phenomenon of individualism is no longer a
remote possibility. Apart from this, ideological and political issues
were of relatively little concern to Goffman even in the restricted
domain of Anglo-American society (with the possible exception of
Asylums and Stigma). By recognizing such limitations in his theory,
one is able to identify the prevailing gaps in the over-socialized concept
of man, be it Black nationalism or Indian communalism. 'As an
explorer of uncharted areas, [he was] preoccupied with opening up

of the territory but content to leave its precise mapping to others'
(Giddens 1987:133) and this is precisely where our responsibility
begins. The dramaturgical analysis of micro-situations can enrich
the interpretative/descriptive aspects of research aided by frame
analysis provided the researcher reinforces his methodology with
insights from Marxist phenomenology as a sociology of knowledge
orientation.
Conclusion and critique

Self-presentation and impression management create an inner duality
of identity crisis, which Brittan (1973:147-148) feels 'entails a com-
mitment to fragmented experience and a fragmented self. Still more
significant is Goffman's own analysis of the consequences of
dramaturgy for motivation. 'And to the degree that the individual
maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe he
can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a
special kind of wariness for others' (Goffman 1959:229).
In other words, belief estranged from behavior at the micro-level
somehow paradoxically produces order at the macro-level — a
mystification that questions the 'rationality' of one's subjective choice
to dramatize. The metaphor of the theater depicting social actions
as performances demystifies the human capability to transform the
existing order. It is not so much a denial of praxis. In this respect,
perhaps it is not incorrect to conclude that the myth of subjectivity
in Schutz is analytically resolved in the dramaturgical model of
Goffman, who 'projects a concept of man which is totally demystifying
and marks the end of an illusion' (Singh 1983:82). In his scathing
attack on Goffman's treatment of identity as masks Brittan (1973:
151) observes that 'naturalism' is only a veneer for the hypocritical
self of which 'Goffman has unwillingly become its most eloquent
spokesman in sociology'. In a similar vein, Gouldner (1970:378-386)
decries the dramaturgical model as uprooting the 'transformative
potential of self and hence of his praxis in the world'. Goffman does
not assign an exalted position to agency in terms of a transformative
praxis similar to what Giddens (1984) envisages in his concept of the
dialectics of control. Nevertheless, the dramaturgical model is a
Goffman 's concep t of individual agency 15 7
forerunner of the structuration thesis formulated by Giddens, besides

providing strong impetus for novel developments in semiotics, communi-
cation theory, game and exchange theories. In addition, recent
attempts to assess the contribution of Goffman as an American
structuralist make cross-cultural comparisons feasible from which one
can abstract a 'framework of frames' to highlight the ubiquitous
struggle of the agency as a whole. The essence of American
structuralism being its existentialist moorings has assigned a unique
place for Goffman in view of his pioneering efforts to highlight the
sociological nuances entailed in the analysis of everyday life and natural
language.
One is so baffled by the interpretation and reinterpretation of
Goffman that we are left with a zero-sum perspective on the self.
Nevertheless, it is indisputable that his actor-audience metaphor of
the theater to delineate the characteristics of agency-structure relations
filled a major vacuum in sociological theory, namely, the dimension
of individual agency. His systematic denial of the 'coupling effects'
(Giddens - Turner 1987; Goffman 1983) by dovetailing the agency
with structure has been criticized as mystification of subjective reality
and rightly so. Yet his attempt to introduce the subjective dimension
into sociological inquiry is admirable for the novelty and ingenuity
of the model. Viewed in this manner, Goffman has undoubtedly lef:
a lasting legacy whose value is still to be fully established.
Notes
1. The behavioralist traditions of the Chicago School differentiated it from the
functionalist orientations of the Harvard School in sociology. Though Goffman
was influenced strongly by the romanticism and aesthetic vision of sociology
as a discipline integrating the individual within society, he was torn between
the existentialism of Sartre, and the romanticism of the Chicago School in
delineating the concept of self as a sociological category. The resultant effect,
as Gouldner puts it, is the 'Americanization of the grotesque' (1973:347) as
reflected in the spirit and style of Goffman and the ambiguity of the 'self
concept.
2. The essential difference between American and Continental romanticism is
the problematic of self-integration. In Goffman's view, it is the desire for
honesty, equality and openness in social encounters; for the European
romanticist, the impact of war played a decisive role in developing a search
for the authentic self with a radical outlook. (For details see MacCannell 1983).
3. As mentioned by Lofland (1980:25), how the 'Goffmanesque touch' was
achieved was explained to him by M.B. Scott. It is achieved through playing
with words (or the perspective of incongruity). Lofland provides innumerable
examples. What is important here is the possible distortions stemming from

the misinterpretation of Goffman's writings due to the problems of pinning
down the meaning of a concept. Also see Gouldner (1973:347).
4. 'Frame' as explained in Frame Analysis (1974) refers to the codes of conduct
by which various social experiences are organized. Frames are not norms of
behavior but are laws to be decoded or interpreted by the agency in the
context of the experience at hand.
5. To carry out involvement obligations by manipulating the encounters ensured
the sense of morality for individuals and Goffman believed that it was natural
for all individuals except the inmates of total institutions to meet these
obligations (1961 and 1967) in the interest of the sociality of the self. So
the term 'naturally' acquires a different meaning in Goffman. Naturalness
of behavior is repeated in Frame Analysis (1974:284).
6. Goffman does not conceive the logic of human telos to be bound by either
of the two isms: voluntarism, or determinism.
7. Examples of co-presence are social occasions, gatherings, forced marches, etc.,
where there is no face-to-face contact through conversations but through
symbolic manipulation of gestures. (For further details see Giddens 1987).
8. For presence/absence, see Goffman (1983:4); other terminologies are from
Goffman (1959). Back/front and control/repair are part of the metaphor of
the theatre used in the presentation of self; whereas presence/absence and
presentation/avoidance rituals are the information codes guiding the agency
in the choice of behavioral conduct.
9. Knowledgeability/capability are the twin concepts that Giddens has devised
to explicate the role of an active agency in his theory of structuration (Giddens
1987).
10. This is the thrust of the Marxist critique levelled against Goffman by Brittan
(1973) and also Habermas (1984). The concept of dramaturgical action as
power similar to the one expounded by Giddens (1984) is completely over-
looked by Goffman. Similarly, the argument of Foucault that 'Fear appears
as an essential presence in the asylum' (1967:245) would appeal to Goffman
more as a tragic drama than a concern for human praxis. Once again, Foucault's
cryptic observation that 'In a society like that of the seventeenth century,
the king's body was not a metaphor, but a political reality' (Foucault 1980:
55) brings into striking contrast Goffman's use of body as a cultural metaphor.
11. Goffman owes a strong intellectual debt to Sartre that is explicitly displayed
in Presentation of Self (1959) and Relations in Public (1971) notwithstanding
the major differences between their existentialist perspectives (as mentioned
in note 2 above). The term 'bad faith' is used by Goffman (1971:208) in the
Sartrean sense of demands placed on the self to perform and display a social
relationship.
12. For a detailed reference to my study on patterns of minority identity, see
Prisoners of Faith: Views From Within (Srinivasan 1989, Sage India).
13. The case history is reconstructed from memory from my dialogue with the
priest. In turn, the priest's narration of his face-to-face encounters and
experiences are reported by him and not built from the first-hand observation
of the researcher.
Goffman's concept of individual agency 159
14. India's birth as a republic was characterized by the trauma of the partition
of the country by carving out a separate state for Muslims, namely
Pakistan. The division of the country and the subsequent communal violence
between Hindus and Muslims are not matters of mere academic interest.
Indian Muslims admit that they suffer from the stigma of history, which has
not spared them in spite of their bold choice to live in India. The term 'com-
munalism' has now come to be a pejorative reference to religious bigotry
and fanaticism culminating in violent outbursts of riots. By and large, the
reference to Indian pluralism cannot be isolated conceptually from the under-
currents of Hindu-Muslim hostilities and caste warfare.
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Erving Goffman as a precursor to post-modern
sociology
Charles D. Batter skill
In The Post-Modern Condition Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) footnoted

Erving Goffman as one of his sources for likening institutions and
society to rule-bound language games. How could Goffman be an
integral resource for a 'post-modern' perspective on society? What
does Lyotard's appreciation of Goffman amount to? To answer these
questions the present essay interprets Goffman in a manner opposed
to the mainstream contemporary reassessment of his work, much of
which deals with the structuralist aspects of his thought. In this
paper we choose to draw out the sociological parallels between
Goffman and two major theorists of post-modernism, Michel Foucault
and Jean-Frangois Lyotard.
Since his death, Goffman's presidential address for the American
Sociological Association on The Interaction Order' (1983a) has
become a focal point of our efforts to understand and categorize his
work. It may well become sociology's final appraisal and encomium
(Drew - Wootton 1988; Rawls 1987). Amidst the contemporary
discussion of Goffman's heritage, Randall Collins believes that 'there
is a major theory of literary form contained in Goffman's works,
waiting for exegesis' (Collins 1986:110). It is best to leave a literary
analysis of Goffman's works to others, perhaps to textual analysts
or deconstructionists who mostly comprise that family of thought
known as 'post-modernism'. Collins (1988) himself declined writing
such an essay, perhaps out of an appreciation of the limits of North-
American sociology.
In the 1970s, Goffman's connection with contemporary French
literary criticism and linguistics-oriented social theory was noticed
(Jameson 1976; Frank 1979). At that time Frame Analysis (1974)
unconventionally combined Wittgenstein, Bateson and semiotics to
examine the organization of experience. Later, Goffman acknowledged
the similarity of this rrfethod to post-modernism:
164 Charles D. Battershill
My belief is that the way to study something is to start by taking a shot at

treating the matter as a system in its own right, at its own level, and, although
this bias is also found in contemporary literary structuralism, there is an un-
related source, the one I drew on, in the functionalism of Durkheim and
Radcliffe-Brown, It is that bias which led me to try to treat face-to-face inter-
action as a domain in its own right (Goffman 1981:62).
Post-modernism was generated by an explicit repudiation of the

epistemological foundation of modernist thought. Goffman's method,
however, is more a result of a unique recombination of sociologically
'classic' modernist sources. The consequences of Goffman's episte-
mology, of looking at social phenomena as having underlying
structures, reach far beyond the current relegation of his contributions
to the 'interaction domain'.
The conceptual development from Goffman to Lyotard and
Foucault is a replacement of concretized sociological entities, such as
'persons' and 'institutions', with relational concepts. More particularly,
the person is seen as an effect of knowledge. Macro structures, in-
cluding 'society', are understood as shifting islands of meaning based
on subtly changing symbolic and interactive conventions. The con-
ventional perception of reality as capturable in descriptive statements
has been replaced with a view of social reality as sets of pragmatic
meanings and discourses producing limited and overlapping senses
of reality. Goffman's writings on personhood and social organization
bear evidence of the post-modern relational epistemology.
We will first sketch out the typical features of post-modernist
sociological theory. Then we will show the confluences and disjunctures
between Goffman and the post-modernism of Foucault and Lyotard.
Space limitations necessitate focussing on Goffman's central concepts
and presuppose earlier sociological discussions of post-modernist
theory (Denzin 1986; O'Neill 1986a, 1986b; Armstrong 1985; Offe
1985:276-9;Kroker 1984).
The nature and significance of post-modern sociology

Post-modern theory marks society's transition from the industrial
era to the 'post-industrial', 'information' era. As Max Weber foretold,
rationalization marches inexorably on — into what we now term post-
industrial conditions. The terms 'post-industrial' and 'information
Goffinan as a precursor to post-modem sociology 165
society' denote the salience of communication and knowledge in

post-industrial society, as opposed to the industrial mode of production
characteristic of modernist society (Kumar 1978).
Capitalism has evolved into a form of monopoly concentration
whose search for markets has formed the 'consciousness industries'
notable in contemporary life (Lasch 1979; Luke — White 1985) against
the backdrop of greater bureaucratization and centralized organization
(Presthus 1965; Drucker 1968; Hummel 1987). Since Philip Rieff's
pioneering work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1958), it is
increasingly common to analyze society as a therapeutic, welfare state,
founded on improving the quality of life (Donzelot 1979; Lasch 1980;
O'Neill 1986b, 1986c).
Foucault and Lyotard are central authors of this new theory and
method in the social sciences and humanities. The central concerns
of post-modernism deal with: (1) social organization and culture as
epiphenomena of the production and consumption of knowledge in
an information society, (2) personhood or 'the socially constructed
subject', and (3) the putative humane and progressive nature of science.
Institutions have created an environment of information which creates
public communicative property and networks out of private lives.
This information maps out the lifecourses or careers of persons today
by establishing norms that are desirable and socially acceptable. Hence,
knowledge in a post-industrial society is the vehicle of both personhood
and progress.
The industrial era promised the diffusion of enlightenment and
the scientific spirit throughout society while fostering the rise of
'the new middle class' of educated professionals and technocrats
(Gouldner 1979). Lyotard rather sees the rise of pragmatic, reductive
and self-referential knowledge, which only appears to uphold the
modernist claims to an objective, indisputable truth value. The
personal service ethos of a society organized around 'narcissistic' self-
actualization (Lasch 1979, 1980) exemplifies the post-modern view of
expertise. Bureaucracy itself is a self-contained, self-interested, self-
referential meaning and interaction system (Hummel 1987). Science
can no longer guide secularized society. It 'proceeds' by turning over
its previous knowledge. Because science constantly refutes its past
findings it is merely a type of discourse production (Lyotard 1984:
26) which cannot provide absolute truths for people's present and
future self-reflection.
166 Charles D. Battershitt
Modernist social theories presuppose science, art or religion as

forming society into an identifiable 'system or totality'. Lyotard's
main purpose is debunking this myth. His attack presents this belief
as one of the dead 'metanarratives' of modernism, imputed conditions
which made possible the study of man in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Values held in common by society members were assumed
to be the basis for observing the 'social' nature of experience and
conceiving of society as an entity, however conflicted or harmonious.
Society, for Lyotard, is neither some functional whole nor some
divided entity. Against the permutations in modelling society using
these two variables, as represented in the works of Comte, Marx,
Durkheim, Parsons and the Frankfurt School, society is viewed as
overlapping networks of meaning and activity.
The dominant figures in this society are technocrats and other
experts generating information - a pluralistic group whose efforts
nonetheless converge on the imperative of increasing efficiency. As
Lyotard put it, 'scientific knowledge' is a component of the wider
agonistic organization because 'in modern societies language games con-
solidate themselves in the form of institutions run by qualified partners
(the professional class)' (1984:25). Culture is composed of'pragmatic',
control-oriented discourses.
Information surrounds and forms consciousness in a segmented
collage of discourse types. Culture is the knowledge propagated by
different institutions. Without meaningful exception, people belong
to or are involved with organizations and the services and information
provided. These institutions are the government's administrative and
welfare agencies, business corporations, and life-improvement personal
services. Rather than conceiving of society as lacking value integration,
the modernist 'anomie', Lyotard sees that people are forced into a
state of privatized, cognitive relativism by the permuting truth-values
of the surrounding discourses.
Faith in the humane progress of science is therefore naive. This
represents the second of Lyotard's 'dead metanarratives'. For
knowledge serves to improve efficiency within an organization, improve
control over members, and increase power over the external, operating
environment. Being self-referential, expertise does not serve clients.
This counters the modernist conceptions of an altruistic foundation
for a scientifically and morally progressing society.1
The third dead metanarrative outlined by Lyotard is the status
of the person or 'the subject'. The subject's unitary nature was the
Goffman as a precursor to post-modem sociology 167
modernist metanarrative for social science. It was conceived as distinct

from society. Lyotard's 'subject' is not the concrete, modernist unit,
but a relation: Ά self does not amount to much, but no self is an
island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex
and mobile than ever before . . . one is always located at a post through
which various kinds of messages pass' (Lyotard 1984:15). The post-
modern self is an interactive terminal, its unitariness an illusory effect
of communicative process.
The post-modern critique of these metanarratives reveals the inter-
connection between knowledge, the subject and social control. The
post-modern concept of the 'de-centered subject' promotes the con-
ceiving of social organization as an inherent feature of 'humane'
knowledge. The 'subject' is an effect of knowledge. Information is
the verbal and written talk within the institutional practices generated
for mass consumption. The 'subject' therefore denotes that people
are products of particular specifications in culture formed by different
agents at different times. If the person is a subject of and subject to
information networks, then information is a form of social organization.
The 'de-centered subject' highlights the persistent myth of modernist
society: the idea of potentially liberating self-understanding from social
impositions. In modernism, social order was explained as the subject
being penetrated by external forces, from socialization to false con-
sciousness. It was also the basis for conceiving of organization and
control as forces external to the person. Sociology was founded on
the conception of subjects being members of society. That it could
be seen as a cybernetic system or a stratified order, or any other sense
of a finite, total entity, is due to the presumed existence of integrating
mechanisms such as beliefs and values.
Post-modern 'social order' is the result of member's apprehending
various semiological codes in the public culture pertaining to situations
and one's self. Post-modernism warns of a de-politicized social order
based on understanding human nature and social reality through
information and images (O'Neill 1983). By dispensing information
regarding norms and lifestyles, society produces a narrow range of
attenuated forms of conformity and deviance. These have historically
developed as the social control mechanisms specific to a highly
individualistic age, coincident with class domination, whereby labour
was rationalized under the ethos of personal fulfillment and freedom
(Foucault 1979:209-24). Hence 'human nature' and potential are
continually contested by the claims of experts and the mass media
regarding essence, experiences and capacities. Medicine is the primary

institution developed by society to control the historical emergence
of the individual and personal freedom, through medical practices
themselves and through the propagation of science-based norms which
enter culture (Conrad 1979; Stoeckle 1984; Young 1987).
Foucault thus downplayed the role of class domination in social
control. He argued that knowledge-based struggle for consciousness
is the central control mechanism of Western societies organized to
'deliver' individuality and freedom (Foucault 1982:212). Hence, he
defines 'the state' not in the modernist tradition as the caretaker of
upper-class interests. The state is a cultural process 'in which individuals
can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would
be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific
patterns. In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of in-
dividualization' (Foucault 1982:214-5). Post-modern society is a
system of systems rationalizing the organization of their human
components. Lyotard acknowledges that present social conditions
are part of the 'redeployment of liberal capitalism' (Lyotard 1984:
38). Yet the production of consciousness toward increasing societal
rationalization is given precedence over class domination by post-
modern sociology. Culture is the barrage of messages regarding identity
and worldview. Receiving these messages and reacting to them fix
or 'center' individuals inside preconstituted forms of individuality.
Hence, society is seen as a patchwork of institutions where experts
manage social life through:
input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are
commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for
the growth of power. In matters of social justice and truth alike, the legitimation
of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance-efficiency
(Lyotard 1984:xxiv).
Social control occurs through the performative function of communi-
cation, rather than the informative, narrative function of communi-
cation. Knowledge rationalizes social control by organizing the ex-
periencing subject.
In summation, then, the categories of 'subject', 'consciousness'
and 'knowledge' are the quintessential elements of this new theory.
Sensitivity to these same elements in sociological theory and in reality
is evident in Goffman's works, prefiguring contemporary post-modern
theory.
We address three aspects of this relationship. Our first discussion

reveals how Goffman's trademark, dramaturgy, and its central concept,
the 'definition of the situation', anticipated Foucault and Lyotard's
model of knowledge-based social dynamics, termed 'agonism'. The
second part of this essay illustrates how the post-modern focus on
consciousness and the 'de-centered' subject was anticipated by
Goffman. His equating of the person with 'team', his concepts of 'role
distance', the 'career', and mental illness reveal Goffman's anticipation
of Foucault and Lyotard's position. The third discussion addresses
the post-modernist lessons of Goffman's famous 'total institution',
and his associated critique of professional service and expert authority.
The conclusion of this essay discusses Goffman's critique of sociological
practice and theory. His celebrated cynicism and elusiveness are under-
stood as the character traits of the post-modern sociologist.
Dramaturgy as a precursor of post-modernism

Goffman's Presentation of Self was one resource Lyotard used in
conceiving of society as overlapping sets of game-like behaviours
and meanings. The Observable social bond is composed of language
'moves'" wrote Lyotard (1984:11). From Wittgenstein, Lyotard
derives the notion of the rule-bound nature of speech acts and meaning.
Lyotard is thus equipped to appreciate the 'agonistic' (agon is ancient
Greek for combat) nature of post-modern society. Modernist societal
membership is reconceived as taking part in different meaning-language
games:
Each language partner, when a 'move' pertaining to him is made, undergoes a
'displacement', an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his
capacity as addressee and referent, but also as sender. These 'moves' necessarily
provoke 'countermoves' — and everyone knows that a countermove that is
merely reactional is not a 'good' move (Lyotard 1984:16).
Lyotard then argues that interpersonal moves occur on a larger 'scale',

characterizing 'the social' as 'flexible networks of language games'.
Organizations are entities whose boundaries 'are themselves the stakes
and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution
and without' (Lyotard 1984:17).
In this theory people occupy places in organizations and culture,

receiving and transmitting information in interlocking communication
channels. Since institutions represent different discourses or 'language
games', citizens become 'language partners' following the rules of
communication. Lyotard terms this buffeting inherent within informa-
tion channels 'agonism'. By perceiving interchanges of speech as moves
and counter-moves within a game, agonism acquires sociological
relevance as a perpetual contest or an interactive social process.
Goffman's view of man as inherently strategic is an obvious pro-
totype of Lyotard's view of game-like behavior. In dramaturgy man is
a manager, managing the evaluation of himself in other's eyes by
intentionally 'giving' and unintentionally 'giving off certain informa-
tion. The Presentation of Self illustrated processes of experiencing and
affecting the social world, used by members in interpreting normal
and abnormal situations and making inferences about the people found
there. For Goffman, social life is a process of consciously and un-
intentionally generating information to influence others. Those others
receive this information and its meaning for them, and react in turn
by transmitting information for immediate and long term benefit.
Goffman wrote:
Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of
his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the
conduct of others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control
is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the
others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing
himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them
to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan (Goffman 1959:3-4).
That people define situations with impression management is consistent

with Lyotard and Foucault's idea that social organization is the
agonistic action-reaction of information reception and transmission.
Goffman's view of man as an information manager in Strategic
Interaction (1969) is consistent with his earlier discussion of strategy
in The Presentation of Self, and, germane to Lyotard's ideas about
social organization. Goffman used 'game theory' to isolate the com-
plicated interdependencies of individuals coexisting in organizations. He
recognized that people most often play for the organization under the
official banner and common purpose, while exploiting opportunities
to play for themselves. These are strategic moves in the self and/or
collective interest game of an organizational society. Goffman describes
the 'move' as a structured course of action available to a player, which,
Goffman as a precursor to post-modern sociology 171
'when taken, objectively alters the situation of the participants. Some

of the moves are concealed, some visible . . .' (Goffman 1969:145).
Making moves selfishly and altruistically (strategically if the former
appear as the latter) is, of course, a normal feature in the 'give and
take' of life.
Lyotard's concept of bureaucracy is consistent with what Goffman,
in The Presentation of Self, termed 'role enterprise'. Lyotard's
bureaucracy is a state of relatively stable situational definitions,
meanings, and interaction patterns. With 'role enterprise' Goffman
denoted the development of new institutions from new definitions
of situations. Altering the situational definition in a bureaucracy
exemplifies the agonistic 'social order' for Lyotard. Goffman's
equivalent is the process whereby nascent professionalism introduces
new meanings and situations to an industrializing society. Accordingly,
the medical profession is a central example in The Presentation of Self
and the example, par excellence, of strategic self-presentation.
We see that Lyotard's thought approximates the key concept of
Goffman's entire sociology, the 'definition of the situation', otherwise
known as the W.I. Thomas theorem. This theorem was memorably
explicated in Goffman's Frame Analysis. That the prevailing definition
of the situation is social reality, Goffman warned, was 'true as it reads
but false as it is taken' (1974:1). Goffman argued against the prevailing
views of the symbolic interactionists that meaning is embedded in
situations, not created anew in each interaction:
Presumably, a 'definition of the situation' is almost always to be found, but
those who are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even
though their society often 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
(Goffman 1974:1-2).
Orienting to the situation rather than negotiating meaning is, we
argue, a post-modern stance predicated upon the perception of persons
as subjects in and of various knowledge fields. The primacy of a socially
derived knowledge structure over individual consciousness de-centers
the modernist subject (Jameson 1976).
The rise of science and industrialism permitted the middle classes
to use their education as credential-based resources for the modernist
view of the society-wide struggle known as stratification (Bledstein
1976; Larson 1977). Goffman effectively understood that the
scientific, pseudo- and quasi- science scripts for these definitions of
personal service resulted from broader social processes of rationaliza-

tion and differentiation.
For Lyotard and Goffman the prevailing definition of the situation
has precedence over the individual's putative meaning construction
activities. Yet on the wider structural canvas sociology has well
documented how bureaucracies and professions are involved in
agonistic behavior. Change is managed in ways least threatening to
organizational definitions of situations, to their 'pragmatic' knowledge
which rationalizes control internally over members and externally
over clients. Lyotard utilizes Goffman to illuminate 'social types';
both as institutions and as the cognitive assessment of the prevailing
definition of a situation.
We must note that Goffman's bureaucracy is a modernist conception
relative to Lyotard's. Goffman's fieldwork deals with concrete institu-
tions. Lyotard's bureaucracy is a changing pattern of interaction based
on changing game rules. To Lyotard, institutional definitions of
situations 'filter discursive potentials' and 'privilege' other types of
statements (1984:17). Yet Goffman also discusses bureaucracy in
terms of historical changes in consciousness. In addition, his equation
of bureaucracy with encounters as dependent upon certain attentions
and disattentions (1961b:17-25) supports Lyotard's idea regarding
the nature of society as agonistic communication. The organizational
scale of social settings varies with the filtering of discursive potentials.
Strategy, the definition of the situation and role enterprise are
important aspects of dramaturgy consistent with Lyotard's work.
These concepts constitute the process of agonism.
Goffman's anticipation of the post-modern 'subject'

Goffman illuminates the agonistic organization of a society where
strangers coexist in organizations dedicated to achieving a common
goal. Social organization has many orbits, from intrapersonal to
bureaucratized organization; all presuppose the individual's capacity
for maintaining one definition of the situation. Such maintenance
is known as 'team' playing. Team playing is based on specific rational
action and generic control over the information by which strangers, the
acquainted, peers, family and bosses judge one's instrumental action,
appearances and one's moral composure.
Goffinan as a precursor to post-modem sociology 173
Goffman identifies the central interpersonal teams as the family

and the work-place team. We have already characterized work-place
team activity as essentially agonistic. Disturbances in the family team
are the basis for Goffman's explanation of the de-centered self as a
product of a social network. Beneath interpersonal team organization
is intrapersonal team organization. To Goffman, although the person
is built up of social experience, it does not become a thing in and of
itself. Rather, it is a one-member team whose audience and performer
components constantly interact in any situation. Indeed. The Presenta-
tion of Self emphasizes that self-control of persons is necessary in
order to be optimally involved in their own performance and not
detract from the impression they seek to make on others.
The origin of the team concept is rooted in Goffman's adaptation
of G.H. Mead and Sigmund Freud. The Freudian metapsychology
of id, ego and superego provided a model of the self as a communica-
tion team. These structures constitute an audience and actor structure
of extra-personal teams. Psychoanalytic symptoms (Goffman 1959:
80-1; 1961b:24) disclose the unequal ability of one internal actor-
audience to live with another. Psychoanalytic views of contested
intrapsychic communication were examples of extra-personal strategy,
guile, deceit and irony for Goffman.
It is therefore interesting that Randall Collins (1986) laments the
absence of a Goffman treatise on Freud. Although Goffman brought
an expertise in Freud from the University of Toronto, where he did his
bachelor's degree, to graduate school in Chicago, it seemed to have
had no major impact on his work. We suggest that Goffman
transformed the Freudian idea of intrapsychic communicative relations
into a post-modern view of subjects as embedded in communicative
networks.
Mead's concept of the person socialized in accordance with broad
demands of the 'generalized other' was and remains a crucial insight
about the genesis of self. Yet Goffman's revision reflected the fact
of multiple relationships in a society which was faster and more
complex than in Mead's day. The following passage is evidence that
Goffman presupposed the agonistic model of society in understanding
the person as a product of various social situations. Regarding the
universal nature of deference and demeanor as micro-level social norms,
he wrote in 1956 that:
The Meadian notion that the individual takes toward himself the attitude
others take to him seems very much an oversimplification. Rather the
individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he

himself is allowed to paint only certain parts . . . . While it may be true that the
individual has a unique self all his own, evidence of this possession is thoroughly
a product of joint ceremonial labor (Goffman 1967:84-5).
Goffman's person is built up by meeting time and person-specific

responsibilities, at a pace beyond Mead's specification. Moreover, the
social conditions generating the person become the agonistic society.
For the person is generated by many, often conflicting, specific roles,
both impersonal and personal.
Goffman's utilization of the post-modern conception of society
is evident in his description of the fragmented nature of consciousness
and culture. He argued that Ά snap-shot view is part of what informs
my approach because indeed there is in part a snap-shot character to
the way we are lodged in life' (Goffman 1981:68). This realization
made his work on the person, neo-Meadian and hence, post-modern.
Goffman accepted the self as a reflection and product of social
experience. But, updated for the information era, the crucial experience
is the agonism of communication networks.
Thus The Presentation of Self re worked Mead's notion of'generalized
other', given its underestimation of the number and exaggeration of
the depth of many relationships. Not only are there as many others
as role relations, but they are transitory and even more impersonal
when mediated by communication technology and formal organization.
This organization of social experience is known by Goffman as the
'career'.
Goffman's concept of career is an extension of the 'team' concept.
In normal and abnormal lives, the career was the social network
producing Goffman's person:
Each moral career, and behind this, each self, occurs within the confines of an
institutional system, whether a social establishment such as a mental hospital
or a complex of personal and professional relationships. The self, then, can
be seen as something that resides in ... the pattern of social control that is
exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him (196la:
168).
A person's life career has many organizational settings. Because culture
is a patchwork of different discourse sites, the career is the record
of various institutional-specific information transmissions and recep-
tions. The self-exerted control noted by Goffman refers, in the post-
modern interpretation, to the acquired pattern of self-communication.
Goffinan as a precursor to post-modern sociology 175
In his career the person becomes a processed, typified object of

administrative design. Foucault is famous for advancing the perspective
of the historical transformation of power from external coercion to
the subtle, insinuative structuring of the individual through on-site
communication and general cultural influence.2 Particularly in
Discipline and Punish he showed this knowledge to be the disciplines
of education, psychiatry and medicine. The sciences of man which
began to develop in the eighteenth century refounded social organiza-
tion and power. Since that time, 'an increasingly better invigilated
process of adjustment has been sought after — more and more rational
and economic — between productive activities, resources of communi-
cation, and the play of power relations' (Foucault 1982:219).
Foucault's position on knowledge and social relationships in today's
personal service and information society overlays Goffman's neo-
Meadian agonistic processes of self and interaction.
Displaying internal consistency, Goffman's concept of 'role distance'
had, by the early 1960s, generated a prototype of post-modernism's
'de-centered subject'. Indeed, 'role distance' shows the social construc-
tion of the self as a web of relationships. This was rather dramatically
illustrated when Goffman argued that even at the height of an
operation, a surgeon expresses himself as a social creature other than
arbiter of life or death: 'identificatory demands are not created by the
individual but are drawn from what society allots him. He frees himself
from one group, not to be free, but because there is another hold on
him' (Goffman 1961b: 139). Goffman explains that we are so enmeshed
that no obligation can be privileged more than another: 'the lightness
with which the individual handles a situated role is forced upon him
by the weight of his manifold attachments and commitments to multi-
situated social entities' (1961b:142). For Goffman, then, role trans-
gression is a fundamental social requirement. Distance from the role
is less an issue of motivation than an agonistic property of society.
To Goffman the modernist assumptions of traditional role theory
reify personal organization as the taken-for-granted person. His critique
emphasizes the self as cross-over points between communication
networks: 'When seen up close, the individual, bringing together in
various ways all the connections that he has in life, becomes a blur'
(Goffman 1961 b: 143). Hence, he appreciates that individuality is a
personal style in role scheduling, a 'great theme of social organization'
(1961b:151). The individual in Goffman's theory is a prototype of the
post-modern subject for it is not the commonsense object of realist
epistemology. Those experiences which generate the personal sense

of uniqueness Goffman reveals to be properties of communicative
processes. Individuality, then, is a characteristic pattern of informa-
tional processing in receiving and sending modes.
In Relations in Public Goffman further refined his view of the
subject as an information transmitter-receptor. As a 'person' the subject
is a public object, encoded in the actions of others toward it. The
'self is a patterned series of actions towards others (Goffman 1971:
341). Others 'read off the 'self forming the 'person': 'The self is what
can be read about the individual by interpreting the place he takes
in an organization of social activity, as confirmed by his expressive
behavior' (1971:366). Failure to stay to one code of 'self threatens
others' 'reciprocal' codings of that 'person'. Such a radical revision of
communicational pattern is Goffman's post-modern position (Goffman
1971:366). Goffman's later discussion of 'back-channel communica-
tion' (1981) was consistent. The earlier 'definition of the situation' had
been translated, in the 1970s, into the semiological terms of decoding
encoded information. When not faulty, that is, 'ill', the self is the
medium which separates internal or external noise from the message.
Goffman's writing on mental illness expanded on the organizational
nature of the 'subject'. Insanity inhibits the individual's ability and
willingness to give respect to others due them as members of a society
where interactional respect is an important component of social
organization. Breaking these rules is organizationally problematic for
society as a moral entity. Here, however, Goffman employed a unified
society metanarrative. Interactive respect is the main mechanism
integrating society. This modernist device is, of course, one aspect
of Goffman's Durkheimian heritage (Goffman 1959:69; 1971:65).
However, Goffman's study of mental illness further explicates the
embedded nature of selves in the interaction networks of family and
other teams.
Goffman's writing on stigma concisely illustrates a relational
conception of social organization. Persons are less 'concrete' entities
than temporary positions in an interaction network. Normality and
stigma are:
a pervasive two-role social process in which every individual participates in both
roles, at least in some connections and in some phases of life. The normal and
the stigmatized are not persons but rather perspectives . . . since interaction
roles are involved, not concrete individuals, it should come as no surprise that
in many cases he who is stigmatized in one regard nicely exhibits all the normal
prejudices held toward those who are stigmatized in another regard(1963b:138).
Thus stigma further illustrates the post-modern perspective on identity

as constituted by communicative patterns.
In modernist terms, the stigmatized exemplify an extreme of self-
awareness, a hyper-attentiveness to the situation which is disrupted
by their presence. In public the stigmatized usually work hard to avoid
disrupting the situation with their physical presence (1963b: 75-82).
In private, they relax this self-management to live among their own
kind, the sympathetic and others marginal to the mainstream. They
learn not to demand symmetrical communication with 'normals'.
This self-awareness is a fact of life and interaction because all people
bear the collective moral abhorrences of the Durkheimian social entity.
Additionally, the team-nature of personhood is the origin of the dra-
maturgical abilities necessary to maintain stable interactions. Normal
tact is the result of persons being both actors and audiences for their
own and for others' performances (Goffman 1959:229-36). The
extreme social situation of the stigmatized requires no more than the
normal organizational techniques to manage.
However, beyond the modernist grounding in the body and the
conscience collective, acquiring 'tact' is a product of an agonistic
communication system. The post-modern interest in stigma is drawn
to the relational nature of apparently concrete entities. Goffman
presents the normal and the abnormal as binary modes of agonistic
social organization. Stigma is not a concrete 'thing in itself: 'it should
be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes is really needed.
An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the
usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discredit-
able as a thing in itself (1963b:3). Therefore, it is not mock-significant
or eccentric that Goffman described the joint presence of stigmatized
and normals as one of the 'primal scenes of sociology' (1963b: 13).
The total institution and the 'bureaucratization of

the spirit'
Examining extreme careers, such as mental illness, the stigmatized,
and the asylum inmate, put into sharp relief the organizational features
of the life careers of 'normal' subjects. Goffman was led to understand
social control as the normal pitch or state of organizational techniques.
The comparison between Goffman's total institution and Foucault's

idea of the 'disciplinary society' is too extensive to pursue in detail
here. We will restrict ourselves to the nature of bureaucratic people-
processing and helping, humane personal service in our society.
Selections from (or consideration of) Goffman's Asylums commonly
appear in organizational theory textbooks (Hall 1982; Grussky —
Miller 1981; Haas - Drabek 1973; Etzioni 1969). These management-
oriented textbooks extrapolate membership in ä goal-seeking organiza-
tion from his writing on the mental hospital inmate. It is no
coincidence that this fact adumbrates the managerial imperative to
control, or rationalize, its internal environments.
Total institutions control the work, sleep, eating and play of their
inmates to affect an overall change in their behavior and beliefs.
Goffman's fieldwork revealed the psychiatric front as screened-over
layman's thinking about insanity: 'psychiatry embodies and rationalizes
lay attitudes toward this aspect of conduct, instead of carrying us
beyond those conceptions' (Goffman 1963a:232). He is famous for
arguing that medical-psychiatric service does not serve the patient's
interests but creates their deviance to justify its existence.
Goffman observed how the undesirable changes forced on inmates
were taken as evidence of the necessity of corrective service. The
continued presence of symptoms proves not the reality of mental
illness but the medical control over the definition of mental illness
(1961a:386). Goffman's critique of professionalism and expert
knowledge, the last essay in the collection of essays entitled Asylums,
shows an awareness that knowledge about the subject was created for
control purposes. Goffman's discussion of this reductionism in which
persons are reduced to serviceable objects is entirely consistent with
Foucault's uncovering of the perpetual operation of public, managerial-
oriented knowledge to control the disorganizing forces of sexuality
(1980) and inefficiency at work, learning or punishment (1979).
Goffman undercuts the functionalistic and altruistic ideology of
the organizing and helping knowledge. The detection of deviance in
the total institution is a perpetual endeavor in the same way that
the inmate's visibility in the Panopticon-style prison efficiently brings
out compliance. Moreover, deviance is also detected in the work of
Foucault's professionals who control the various forms of social
involvements. The systemic bias contradicting the modernist
assumption of service becomes evident in Goffman's research: 'the staff
problem is to find a crime that will fit the punishment' (1961a:85).
Goffman exposed the conflict between humane action and efficiency

(1961a:78) as upholding managerial prerogatives for order (1961a:
124,383,361).
Moreover, Goffman is aware of the systemic imperatives of medicine
as manager or overseer of the productive capacities of individuals and
populations (1961a:349), applying therapies so that 'inmates must be
caused to self-direct themselves in a manageable way' (1961a:87).
The pervasiveness of such people-processing forced Goffman to equate
totalitarianism, the total institution, and 'free society' (1961a:320).
Except for the terminology and the research methods, Foucault's
findings are similar regarding the 'political anatomy' of the disciplinary
society.
Our contemporary 'disciplinary society' began as the widespread
bureaucratic technique first generated in specific locales for disease
control, army discipline or poorhouse efficiency. According to
Foucault, these organizational techniques today frame, construct, and
rationalize life by Optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general
without making them [individuals] more difficult to govern' (Foucault
1980:141). The self-discipline required for a successful lifecourse and
occupation internalizes what mental hospitals and reform schools
provide through regimentation and constant supervision. What was
punishment prior to the industrial revolution is self-improvement in
the post-industrial world. Punishment, Foucault wrote, is 'not
essentially different from . . . curing or educating' because it is
generically the same social control, receiving the 'sanction of technique
and rationality' (1979:303).
In the historical march of rationalization, various forms of people-
organization produced 'disciplined' members. The generic pervasiveness
of Goffman's total institution is tantamount to Foucault's 'disciplinary
society'.3 The 'bureaucratization of the spirit' (Goffman 1959:57)
betokens a disciplined society. The phrase belies the subtle organiza-
tional forces of today's world operating through both the formal
knowledge of an information society and the informal knowledge
constituting the person's interactive competence.
The normal membership restraints of dramaturgy are not far from
a 'persistent conscious effort' required to stay within the boundaries
allowed inmates (Goffman 1961a:43) or from the citizen's inculcated
aptitudes. Hence, Goffman's writing on the 'interaction order' is the
foundation of the subtle organizational techniques outlined to different
degrees by both Goffman and Foucault which operate in present
society. We therefore perceive a double-edged meaning of 'member-

ship', as that of inmate and citizen. This is the post-modern contribu-
tion of Goffman's writing on the total institution.
Conclusion: Goffman on sociological practice and

theory
Goffman considered sociological practice in his time to presume the
existence of the commonsense unit known as society: 'the reference
unit, "American society" . . . is something of a conceptual scandal,
very nearly a contradiction in terms' (1971:xv). Given Lyotard's
terminology, Goffman would criticize the sociological codings of
society as one set of truth-claiming discourses, and see meaning and
truth as relative to discourse production. Goffman's insight on 'post-
modern' social order (very nearly a contradiction in terms) is predicated
upon the subject's orientation to delimited frames of meaning, without
the modernist society-integrating device of common values.
Goffman locates social order not in shared values, class domination,
or macro-level cybernetic processes but in 'remedial interchanges'.
They are invariant features of Western societies. These interpersonal
rituals, 'accounts, apologies and requests' (Goffman 1971:330) are
forms of talk inserted into the situation when the actor realizes that
explanation is needed to clarify his position. While interactions almost
always presuppose the consensus of what the definition of situation
is, Goffman and the post-modernists do not presume this condition
to obtain at the macro level.
We suggest that Goffman largely transcended the conventions of a
sociology which either claims him for its own or which finds him
wanting. He is criticized as a bourgeois micro-sociological apologist
by conflict oriented macro-sociological theorists (Gouldner 1970;
Dawe 1973; McNall - Johnson 1975; Munch 1986) or understood
as underpinning functionalism with symbolic interactionist research
(Burrell - Morgan 1979).
Alvin Gouldner argued that Goffman advocates and indexes the
middle-class retreat from a world of frustrations into superficial
aesthetics (Gouldner 1970). A more recent criticism claims Goffman
is a conservative in the 'typically American' ideological mold because
dramaturgy underestimates the 'conflict which is ever-present as a
latent relationship between pure individuality and binding social order

. . . in a view of a smoothly functioning mutual accommodation in
a permanent process of staging and negotiation' (Munch 1986:54).
According to Munch, Goffman's conservative theory is devoid of
real persons who, if present, would righteously criticize our stratified
society's invidious classifications and lack of social justice.
However, Goffman does not share the modernist presuppositions
of these critics. Thus Goffman would question the conventional
sociological versions of persons coming to sublime self and social
knowledge where they achieve Munch's Kantian 'inner freedom of
universal morality'. The conventional sociological version of the
enlightened, self-interested person as justice seeking is a modernist
concept which Goffman eschewed.
Goffman's work neither ignored the historical nature of a class
society nor underestimated the structural limits on meaning negotia-
tion. Goffman examined deeper levels of social organization than
social class. Approached through the subject's consciousness, Goffman's
view of society is agonistic: his writings depict subjects struggling with
typifications, strategizing and maintaining definitions of situations.
For this reason his work by-passes Marxian categories and looks at
more fundamental bases of social order. This approach was justified
in what we understand as post-modern terms in Frame Analysis:
The analysis developed does not catch at the differences between the advantaged
and disadvantaged classes and can be said to direct attention away from such
matters. I think that is true. I can only suggest that he who would combat
false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do,
because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend to provide a lullaby, but
merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore (Goffman 1974:14).
Goffman seemed committed at least to liberal if not radical views
of social order and justice. But he approached class society in terms
of its cognitive and behavioral quiescence. 'The great sociological
question', he noted, is 'How come persons in authority have been
so overwhelmingly successful in conning those beneath them into
keeping the hell out of their offices?' (1971:288n). By the end of
his career, Goffman claimed that the critical purpose served by his
whole corpus is the questioning of official, normal versions of reality
(1983a:17). Goffman's critique was consistent with the post-modern
concern with consciousness and rationalization.
Dramaturgy does not, as Dawe argued, reduce life to the trivialities
of 'public styles and manners' (1973:248). Nor is it fair to say that
Goffman's sociology is more about himself than society, that the

'style becomes the medium and the message' (Manning 1976:21).
And the message is not that life is 'mercenary' (Posner 1978:36).
To the extent that the aesthetics of appearance is self-managed
comportment then the social organization maintained by appearance
is social control. Goffman's dramaturgy, capturing the present bureau-
cratization of the spirit, reveals that he has largely transcended the
conventions of the modernist sociology by which he is found wanting.
Hence Randall Collins' (1986) claim that The Presentation of Self is
an anthropological study of class culture is acceptable only within
the parameters of modernism.
Goffman's revamping of the 'subject' is here understood as a
response to the dangers inherent in the modernist conception of self.
The unitary self of realist epistemology is the precondition for the
antinomy of public and private. This permits theorizing about social
control as imposed from without. In post-modernist society order is
less an imposing structure of domination than a personal disposition.
Thus, Goffman's phrase, the 'bureaucratization of spirit', represents
social order as the struggle against one's place as subject and object
in communicational networks.4
Goffman anticipated Foucault's post-modern political criticism.
Foucault specified that the 'analysis, elaboration, and bringing into
question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations
and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent
in all social existence' (Foucault 1982:223). Such criticism entails
exposing struggles for and of subjection, of understanding processes
whereby personal experience is generated. Goffman did this.
Goffman is the theorist of the total institution writ large as the
corporate-welfare-personal service society. Goffman views societal
membership as a combat-like game with the principles and proponents
of these knowledge bodies. The bulk of his work portrays members
inextricably engaged in a struggle to be more or less than their official
identities. Even when expert knowledge does not come into play,
persons remain subject to the coded information about meaning and
interactions.
Goffman's work proceeded without the modernist assumptions
of: (1) humane science as progressive, benevolent and altruistic and
(2) the unitary subject. To a lesser extent his writings have overcome
the modernist assumption (3) that societies are some sort of totality
or entity.
Notes
1. This rationalization molds the conscious orientation to the world: *we are under
continual and subtle social pressures to be rationally critical' (Parsons 1954:
37). These rational forces have become normal, laudable and politically neutral
aspects of collective consciousness in the information society (Lane 1966).
These modernist sociologists have unwittingly described aspects of the role
of knowledge in the post-modern society.
2. The best expression of the social system's functional imperatives was achieved
by Talcott Parsons. Parsons wrote that with the development of industrializa-
tion, urbanism, high technology, mass communications '. . . there has been a
general upgrading to higher levels of responsibility. Life has necessarily become
more complex and has made greater demands on the typical individual, though
different ones at different levels' (1964:281).
3. The pervasiveness of self-control which Foucault determined was experienced
not as imposition but as responsibility and personal growth is magnified in
Goffman's view of the 'depressed patient'. In this state, the spirit does not
sustain its own bureaucratization, a 'constantly exercised option' for normals:
depressed persons come to appreciate consciously how much social effort
is in fact required in the normal course of keeping one's usual place . .. the
plight of finding everything just too much of a drag is not to be attributed
solely to an intrapsychic factor, but also to the fact that social place is
organized so that some special effort is always required to maintain it (1971:
388-9).
Post-modernist exegesis would not make the manic-depressive the anti-hero of
bureaucratic domination. But it would recognize Goffman's sensitivity to post-
modern social conditions.
4. Today we may thus understand Goffman's celebrated cynicism as scorn for the
modernist humanitarian self, Foucault's subjected knowledge object. On
individual uniqueness, Goffman writes that the 'term unique is subject to
pressure by maiden social scientists who would make something warm and
creative out of it, a something not to be broken down, at least not by
sociologists' (Goffman 1963b:56).
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Reading Goffman: toward the deconstruction of
sociology
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or

written . . ., as small or large unity, can be cited, put
between quotation marks; thereby it can break with
every context, and engender infinitely new contexts
in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not
suppose that the mark is valid outside its context,
but on the contrary that there are only contexts
without any center of absolute anchoring (Derrida
1977:320).
As if a key to a meaning of 'Felicity's Condition' (1983b) which had

yet escaped even its author, Erving Goffman begins that essay with
an apparently self-congratulatory description which nonetheless
becomes something of a professional challenge to the devoted readers
of his writings: 'An imaginative analyst ought to be able to show
the significance of presuppositions that no one else had ever thought
would signify . . .' (1983b:2). To that bit of the sentence, Goffman
adds this footnote: Ά wonderfully hilarious (and sound) example is
provided by Jacques Derrida's 92-page analysis of the presuppositions
employed by John Searle in the latter's 10-page reply to Derrida's
25-page critique of speech act theory' (1983b:2). Making something
of this juxtaposition of challenge and footnote, my reading of
Goffman's writings reworks their presuppositions in order to show how
it might be that near the end of his writing career, Goffman found
Derrida's critique of speech act theory hilarious and sound.
Seemingly unlike Goffman, whose criticism of the distinction of
langue and parole constitutes the meaning of much of his writing,
focused as it is on the relevance of context for speech, Derrida's
critique means rather to deconstruct that very opposition. His analysis
shows how the struggle of the opposed terms for primacy is itself
productive of the concept of centered structure, a presupposition that
grounds social scientific methodology.
188 Patricia Ticineto Clough
By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a

structure permits the play of its elements inside the total f o r m . . . . Nevertheless,
the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. . . .
At the center, the permutation or transformation of elements (which may of
course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. . . . Thus it has
always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted
that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes
structurality (Derrida 1978:278-279).
The center is (at) a stipulation of an origin, a contradictory construc-

tion which thus 'expresses the force of a desire' (1978:279).
While the emphasis on the relevance of context for speech is meant
to socialize a pre-critical, psychologistic structural linguistics, it does
so nonetheless, to better adjust meaning to the speaking subject by
making it an effect of his intentional expression, albeit modified for
a specific context. Opposing speech to the structure of language,
Derrida argues, only reasserts the subject as the origin of meaning
upon which the structuralization of language itself depends. That
structure is a formalization that temporarily excludes speech and
thus preserves, rather than perverts, the 'natural bond' of speech
(voice) and sense (Derrida 1982:27-73). Derrida points to what is
absented in the opposition of speech and language which he alterna-
tively refers to as the 'trace', 'differance' and 'Writing'. Although
generalized 'beyond semiolinguistic communication, for the entire
field of what philosophy would call experience . . .,' 'Writing' borrows
from the narrower, conventional sense of the term, the troublesomeness
that it brings to the opposition of language and speech: writing presents
itself 'unnaturally' as speech (Derrida 1977:317). It 'is the dis-
simulation of the natural primary and immediate presence of sense
to the soul within the logos. Its violence befalls the soul as unconscious-
ness' (Derrida 1982:37). Writing dissimulates an origin.
While Goffman's career has been focused mainly on the contexts
of speech and interaction, it is his writing which has often been taken
to be problematic as an excess which supersedes the substance of
his findings, as a stylish substitute for the 'subjectivity' lacking in
his cool treatment of everyday speech and interaction. (For a discussion
of such criticisms, see Manning 1980). Goffman's writing style feels
to be just on the edge of revealing sociology as a system of references
with no way beyond its discourse — an interiorization of its exteriority
which indefinitely displaces 'reality' as the origin of sociological
description.
Reading Goffinan: toward the deconstruction of sociology 189
With the little examples, symptomatic of his presentations,

Goffman's writing seduces the reader less into the forward movement
of a text and more into a submission to a detailed behavioral protocol.
The protocol prescribes all at once, a set of alternative behaviors
that serve functionally defined roles in its operation. Just as in the
'dictionary' or 'grammar book' to which Jameson likens Goffman's
texts, the examples 'furnish a range of different but acceptable
syntactical exercises for the beginner to practice on' (1976:128).
More like the programed displays of a computer, Goffman's examples,
rather than fix a reality, self-referentially validate a terminology, an
entailment structure which appears in the displays as interactions
or dialogues. While Goffman always seems finally to resist becoming
fully engaged in the post-structural deconstruction of the subject,
at least, in his latter works, examples, from the 'urn' in 'Response
Cries' (1983a) to 'the anaphor' in 'Felicity's Condition' (1983b),
nonetheless, move sociology closer to the crisis of representation
which already has motivated anthropologists to critically reconsider
their textual practices (Clifford 1988).
Seducing examples
The 'urn' which we constantly utter, seemingly without awareness,
is, nonetheless, used to manage talk. It allows speakers 'to make evident
that although they do not now have the word or phrase they want,
they are giving their attention to the matter and have not cut
themselves adrift from the effort at hand' (1983a:109). Response
cries bring 'information through a message', not an 'expression', yet
they are employed just in order to give a desired impression as if
an expression (1983a:100). One has here, Goffman argues:
What is ostensibly a bit of pure expression, that is, a transmission providing
direct evidence (not relayed through a semantic reference) of the state of the
transmitter, but now an expression that has been cut and polished into a
standard shape to serve the reputational contingencies of its emitter (1983a:
110).
Like the little examples of Goffman's texts, a response cry exhausts
itself quoting expression, staging it — an indefinite displacement of
expression that questions the very relationship of experience to the
individual. After all, the individual speaker is an effect of the
possibilities offered by a 'production format' (author, principal,

animator, figure); the hearer, the effect of the possibilities offered
by a 'participation framework' (any participant in a social situation)
(1983a:137, 145). By way of these deconstructions in the field of
experience, talk becomes a 'display', a 'communication in the
ethological, not the linguistic' or conversational sense (1983a:89).
The 'urn' takes on sociological weight, then, in relation to the
syntactical determination of the '(in)sanity of place' - a notion with
which Goffman converts mental symptoms into something like a
first or surface reading of behavior as syntactically in or out of sync
with the situation (1971:367). Because utterances like the 'urn', such
as grunts sounded in public, are themselves usually considered mentally
discrediting, they serve the situation precisely by lending a credible
'naturalness' to the standardized expression, to the artifice of its
performance.
The 'um' looks back to Goffman's earlier works which figure the
human body linked to a real place and to the transgressions of the
proprieties of a specified situation. But in naturalizing talk, the 'urn'
points as well to a figuring of the human body in Goffman's latter
works, as an element of a semiotic space. This tendency in Goffman's
works to move from a dramaturgy to a semiotics of experience with
its corresponding figural adjustment from the physical to the imaged
(or imagined) body is often dismissed or denied. Collins, for example,
has argued:
Goffman never succeeded in integrating his earlier theories of interaction rituals
in everyday life with his later analysis of frames and talk. But the outline of how
they fit together is clear enough. The bedrock of social interaction, the outmost
frame around all the laminations of social situation and self-reflexive conversa-
tion, is always the physical copresence of people warily attending to each
other(1985:227).
Thus, Collins further suggests that against Schutz and Garfinkel,

Goffman shows that practically speaking, people carry on reflexively
without infinite regress, precisely because they can always 'drop back
to the core', to the 'primary frame', to 'the real physical world and
the real social presence of human bodies within it' (1985:218).
But while primary frames do the work of distinguishing the social
from the natural or physical, they are themselves social productions,
constituting a 'central element' of a particular social group's culture
(Goffman 1974:27). Although displaced onto what people do, Collins'
emphasis on the real physical world and the bodies within it as the
Reading Goffman: toward the deconstruction of sociology 191
core or the basis of 'the social working of mind' seems a pre-critical

use of primary frames. True, for Goffman, empirical analysis is not
to be placed in the service of epistemological certainty only to be
shown again and again to fail — a provocation of empiricism at the
heart of Schutz and Garfinkel's phenomenologies which ironically
claim to be criticisms of empiricism. Rather than grounding truth in
the physical world of bodies, Goffman seemingly has joined the
subjects of his descriptions in dismissing or trivializing the very project.
Goffman's examples better reflect the 'commercial realism' which
he attributes to contemporary ads:
in which the scene is conceivable in all detail as one that could in theory have
occurred as pictured, providing us with a simulated slice of life; but although
the advertiser does not seem intent on passing the picture off as a caught one,
the understanding seems to be that we will not press him too far to account
for just what sort of reality the scene has (1976:15).
There are no primary frames as such, at least, not in critical self-
reflection which is simultaneously aroused with the very proposition
of primary frames. Primary frames like expression must be naturalized,
a matter to which I will return.
Nevertheless, Collins' misplaced emphasis on the physical body
seems to be an effect of his being a well behaved reader of Goffman's
writings. Goffman's reader is made to attend his reading by being
moved first to the physical body that merely 'gives off natural ex-
pression but which when sighted, always turns out to be the performing
actor. There is no natural expression that is not already staged or
recited: 'What comes to be made of a particular individual's show of
"natural emotional expression" on any occasion is a considerably
awesome thing not dependent on the existence anywhere of natural
emotional expressions' (1983a:108).
By floating nature and artifice in relationship to each other even
while preserving their opposition, Goffman's writing strategy evokes
and is dependent on the reader's pre-critical working of primary frames
and at the site of the body. Goffman, then, can take the reader by
surprise. Never being where the last example left the reader, Goffman
out-frames the reader, again and again turning nature into culture
and culture into a series of displays. It is for the surprise of these
transformations that the reader is kept from too often relaxing or
shifting his attention, skipping some of the numerous examples out
of boredom. As with computational displays, the fascination is not
with a content but with the control of/the submission to the process
itself. What is at issue, then, is neither epistemology nor ontology

as we have known these but what Turkle has called 'the computer's
holding power' (1984:14); what Goffman calls engrossment. A fasci-
nation that displaces questions of epistemology and ontology,
engrossment does not concern:
. . . an individual's sense of what is real, but rather what it is he can get caught
up in, engrossed in, carried away by; and this can be something he can claim
is really going on and yet claim is not real. One is left, then, with the structural
similarity between everyday life . . . and the various 'worlds' of make-believe
but no way of knowing how this relationship should modify our view of
everyday life (1974:6).
Dependent on a framing rather than on the real, engrossment takes

up with, but does not ground itself in bodies in the real physical world;
in relationship to the body, engrossment is perhaps better characterized
as a dissemination (of grounds) across the material surface of a
simulated body — a body in performance, the body for display. And
since a display is not a 'portrait' but rather, 'a passing exhortative
guide to perception' (Goffman 1976:6), the body in display is a
simulation that points to yet another simulation of mind, the program,
which at the surface appears as examples of a syntactical arrangement.
Put this way, a display is a disembodiment productive of a rhetorical/
mechanical embodiment of mind, a writing/computing technology.
If in engrossment, the body is image, figure or simulation, the notion
of engrossment might very well undermine any understanding of the
'sanity of place' in terms of a spatial experience, the co-presence
of physically bounded situation. Engrossment puts the presuppositions
of Goffman's early works into play, displacing them onto a semiotic
space.
To return then to Goffman's discussion of presuppositions in
'Felicity's Condition', I will begin with the example with which he
begins that discussion, the anaphoric expression in Ί went to the
movie last night but I didn't like it' (1983b:4). The anaphoric 'it'
is assumed to refer to the movie, many linguists arguing that the
anaphoric expression 'is a substitute . . . for something mentioned in
the immediately prior text . . .' (1983b:15). But to follow Goffman's
suggestion; we might look at an anaphoric expression and its
antecedent phrase, when distributed over turns of talk:
John: Did you like the movie last night?
Marsha: Stop avoiding talking about it.
John: Why. there was plenty of it in the movie.

Marsha: John, stop it; we have to talk.
Whatever 'it' is, it is unlikely the movie. Goffman offers an explanation:
the notion of an anaphor 'substituting' for its antecedent confuses one
possibility with a whole function; for what the antecedent does is to allow
the hearer to pick out and identify what it is the speaker is making reference
to, and what an antecedent provides is a guide to this determination, not
necessarily the identification itself (1983b:6).
Not only is the notion of the prior phrasing for an anaphor con-
tradicted, a broader implication is drawn by Goffman. In interchanges
or conversation, One passes by degree from what can be taken to be
in immediate consciousness to what can be more or less readily
recalled thereto, the given changing gradually to the recallable'' (1983b:
13). What is important here is that the allusive or laconic phrasing of
which anaphoric expressions give example, rather than merely
representing a state of shared presuppositions, instead seeks that state
out. Goffman is arguing that in talk, the speakers seem to be norma-
tively required to choose just those topics that allow them to speak
effectively in minimal terms, in allusive phrasings that only they would
immediately understand (1983b:18). For Goffman, the (one) Felicity's
Condition of a speech act is met in being able to demand of another
and to respond to another's demand to bring to consciousness. This
is what keeps us from judging each other as strange or insane; 'behind
Felicity's Condition is our sense of what it is to be sane' (1983b:27).
But then meeting Felicity's Condition does not refer to a syntax
of the situation as a sanity of place, a matter of appropriate placing.
Rather, it points to a spacing, a timing of breaches - breaches of
the context of speech, of its situatedness. Not only can there be no
complete list of felicitous conditions for speech acts as Austin, Searle
and Grice have proposed, but the seeming obligation to breach these
conditions suggests that any voicing, like the written sign, carries
with it, the force of breaking with its context. Presuppositions are
necessarily breached in displaying the desire for sharing presuppositions.
But this is not to say that only what the speakers bring with them,
their personal histories, determines meaning. If the 'it' Marsha wanted
to talk about was 'sex', in order for John to know this might very
well involve Marsha and John's personal histories, but also the world
of movies and how it is that it is in the movies. And if the reader knew,
at first sight of my example of Marsha and John's interaction that
the 'it' was 'sex', then the reader and writer, Marsha and John were
presupposing something about 'it', that is, that 'it', when too loosely
tied to a referent, can and will easily be taken to mean sex. Speaking,
then, is no mere expression of what is in a person's consciousness or
personal history. It is rather a languaging which calls forth context,
that makes personal history possible. Cryptic reference does not so
much point to something beneath, but to the situation as a materiali-
zation of its breaches. The situation is both a simple potential and
always as well a fractured, discontinuous tracing of its breaches -
'a paradoxical consequence', Derrida suggests, 'the radical destruction
. . . of every context as a protocol of a code' (1977:316).
The situation, then, is structured as a function of memory,
structured to make memory function and the spacing or timing of
breaches, like the spacing of writing, admits notions like repression
and the unconscious as if to register deferrals, intervals and
discontinuities. It is the timing of breaches, the differences in breaches
which makes the difference, a 'differance', a deferring and a differing
of meaning. 'An equality of resistance to breaching, or an equivalence
of the breaching forces would eliminate any preference in the choice
of itinerary. Memory would be paralyzed' (Derrida 1978:201).
If the situation is always breached, that is, if it is a space, both
registering and erasing, then its forms are those of dreams and the
psyche: displacement (the transfer of psychic intensity from one
element to another) and condensation (the formation of a new signifier
from a cluster of previous signifying materials). Derrida connects
displacement and condensation to the emphasis Freud increasingly
placed on the 'scenic capacity' of words. Drawing on Freud's inter-
pretation of the appearance of words in dreams, Derrida argues that
'every sign — verbal or otherwise may be used at different levels, in
configurations and functions which are never prescribed by its
"essence", but emerge from a play of differences' (1978:220). For
Freud, the unconscious, in the end, is best likened to a 'system of
writing', as the interpretation of the dream is analogous to the decipher-
ment of 'an ancient script such as Egyptian hieroglyphics'; for both,
'there are certain elements which are not intended to be interpreted
(or read, as the case may be) but are only designed to serve as "deter-
minatives", that is to establish the meaning of some other element'
(Freud 1913:177). The scenic capacity of words points to the spacing
of writing and to a formal repression or erasure so that in the analogies
between displacement and metaphor, condensation and metonomy,
the force of repression is transferred from the former terms to the

latter. Never completely successful, repression underwrites that
readiness to be called to consciousness which metaphor and metonomy
example and which Goffman, by way of another example, that of
the anaphor, claims to be the Felicity's Condition of all speech acts.
Genderism and the narration of seeing

If Freud's descriptions of the unconscious and Goffman's of the
situation can be opened to deconstruction even when both, at times,
seem to presume a natural bond between sense and embodied voice,
it is because, for both, the body offers a double surface upon which
to register elements of opposing discourses. The body is both nature
and masquerade and this is because the physiological body also presents
itself as sexual difference. In the psyche, psychoanalytic theory
suggests, the body is always imagined in that difference, so that a fixed
sexual identity based on a one to one correspondence of anatomy
and subjectivity always fails. This imaging is, of course central to
Freud's notion of the drive which is a sexualization of the instinct
of self-preservation. For example, when the breast is taken as the
object of the oral drive, it is the fantasmatic breast. As Laplanche
puts it, The object to be rediscovered is not the lost object, but its
substitute by displacement; the lost object is the object of self-
preservation, of hunger, and the object one seeks to refind is an
object displaced in relation to that first object' (1976:20). Formed
in the dissociation of subjectivity from bodily function, sexuality is
an interpretation always opened to reframing, to becoming a frame
of nature.
Masculine and female are crudely opposed when the anatomical
differences are made to figure sexual difference, are made to be the
only representative of what that difference is allowed to be. These
crude oppositions in what Gallop calls 'a theatrical representation
of difference' (1982:93) assert 'nature', refuse the complexities of
sexual identity. The oedipal narrative employed in psychoanalytic
interpretation is meant to dramatize the imposition of these
oppositions in the development of self-identity. But, even while
recognizing the inherent bisexuality of the subject, the oedipal theory
is, itself, 'caught up in the "ideological assignations of discourse,"
the structures of representation, narrative, vision, and meaning it

seeks to analyze, reveal, or bring to light' (De Lauretis 1984:164).
When Freud made the oedipal narrative the locus of his theories,
he drew on a logic that had dominated narrative structure since the
rise of the patriarchal state, when stories became focused on the son's
direct inheritance of wealth from his father (De Lauretis 1984:103-
157). Indeed, the oedipal logic came to epitomize the very movement
of narrative: an envisioning of the future through a self-realization of
a lost past. The oedipal logic allows us to see the subject's action at
once backwards and forwards, a making visible of the inner states
of the subject, as if through his own eyes. The oedipal narrative,
therefore, organizes a 'subject(ive) vision' which by the end of the
nineteenth century was technically exploited to generalize embodied
perception by formally stitching a subject's vision in the image or
representation itself (Doane 1987:1 -37).
It becomes apparent, especially in narrative cinema, that the formal
construction of a spectator's point of view depends on a narration of
sexual oppositions which neutralizes the implications of a subjectivity
of vision by visually marking the subject and object of the gaze, as
male and female. Assuming the devaluation of the woman, the classic
cinematic gaze splits the complex of voyeurism/exhibitionism into
male and female. The male is made to figure the mobile character
and the bearer of the gaze. He acts upon the woman who figures
the fetishized object of his look. Always already devalued in her
castration, she thus neutralizes or naturalizes the devaluation of the
subject in its objectivization in the gaze. Narrative movement permits
an illicit looking at the woman whose figure, therefore, carries a threat
of punishment displayed on her body as castration. By displacing the
threat of being punished for looking onto her for 'showing' an excessive
sexuality, the plot is moved forward by the need to punish or transform
her. The oedipal logic of the narrative allows the (male) subject
voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasures while supporting a disavowal of
castration. The (male) subject's identity is thus established on the
distinction of observer and observed. The oedipal narrative negotiates
a kind of seeing that ideologically reconnects subjectivity to fixed
sexual identities (De Lauretis 1984; Mulvey 1975; Rose 1988).
In Goffman's writings as well, the body has a double surface. While
it is always the site of a performance, it is also read as the physical
or natural grounding of truth. In the latter sense, the body appears
to be a first frame of mind, naturalizing or de-historizing the social
Reading Goffinan: toward the deconstruction of sociology 197
production of framing. But if the body effects a natural history for

frames, it does so through a narrative construction which locates at
the body, a way of seeing that I have been arguing is organized by
an oedipal logic and which Goffman ties to 'genderism', a construction
of vision he analyzes in domains seemingly outside sociology or his
own writings.
In Gender Advertisements (1976), Goffman treats the commer-
cialized displays of gender in ads and the displays of everyday life,
both as belonging to the 'glimpsed world' of scenes (1976:22). What
we find out about these everyday displays from advertisements is
that we learn how to see scenes in a way that renders '. . . the eyeing
of live scenes, and of pictures of scenes, efficacious and more or less
equivalent' (1976:12). In scenes, there is something that channels
engrossment, socially contains its dissemination, fixes it in relationship
to the body, as Goffman's definition of scenes suggests. Scenes are:
. . . representations, whether candid, faked, or frankly simulated, of 'events'
happening. Narrative-like action is to be read from what is seen, a before and
after are to be inferred, and this location in the ongoing stream of activity
provides the context as much as do the models and props per se (1976:16).
What Goffman is arguing is that scenes offer a viewpoint to the

viewer. The viewer identifies with the narrative figure who is in the
plot space of movement and action, thus, fixing locations in the on-
going stream of activity. If, as I have already suggested, the very
possibility of situatedness is the breaching of the situation, scenes
are representations, which reconstitute the situation's continuity and
identity through an engendering narrativization. And if displays,
as I have also already suggested, collapse the opposition of nature
and culture by staging natural expression, they nonetheless carry
with them a pre-critical reassertion of that opposition through an
operation of genderism. Thus, the drama of scenes yields to the
narrative 'inevitability' of a theatrical representation of difference
in the crude oppositions of male and female. Precisely because gender
is not about the nature of the sexes but will often be taken to be
so, gender displays offer themselves as a template for all other displays.
As exhortative guides to perception, displays borrow from gender
displays a narrative strategy for embodying a way of seeing.
While gender displays do not represent nature, they do have a source,
which Goffman calls, 'the parent-child complex — taken in its ideal
middle class version' (1976:4). While for Goffman, the organization
of this relationship only offers something like a first lesson in the

deference and demeanor patterns of interactional rituals and also
a first expression of the ironic freedom that subordinates can have
at the expense of their autonomy (1976:4-5), enough has been argued
to also connect that relationship to the oedipal narrative that organizes
seeing. If, as Goffman argues, individuals are socialized '. . . to be
objects that have a character, that express this character, and for
whom this characterological expressing is only natural' (1976:7),
the parent-child complex must offer a staging for a misinterpretation,
a traumatic interpretation, called sexuality, that is repeated as an
interpretation of an event which never as such took place. The
functioning of such an interpretation within the constraints of an
oedipal logic permits the (re)assertion of the opposition of nature
and culture while naturalizing a culturally determined development
of character as the embodiment of self.
Writing sociology after Goffman

On the break up of colonial power, Clifford has observed (1988),
anthropologists are deconstructing those texts of their observations
in which the 'West' presents itself 'as the unique purveyor of
anthropological knowledge about others' (1988:22). In this context,
the ethnographical stance is understood as 'a subjective position and
a historical site of narrative authority that truthfully juxtaposes
different truths' (1988:99). Ethnographic discourse works in a 'double
manner', then: 'Though it portrays other selves as culturally con-
stituted, it also fashions an identity, authorized to represent, to inter-
pret, even to believe - but always with some irony — the truths of
discrepant worlds . . . (1988:94).
Engaged in a criticism that will affect all the social sciences, anthro-
pologists have begun to trace the rhetorical techniques of a realist
or naturalist narration in which descriptions make 'reality' visible
in a textual promotion and evidencing of scientific authority (Cra-
panzano 1977; Dwyer 1977; Clifford — Marcus 1986). If anthropologists
now wonder if the Order found' in these 'primitive worlds' of their
analyses was narratively imposed, a self-fashioning, even narcissistic,
envisioning of an exotic fetishized other, sociologists whose Own
society' is the object of an ethnographic stance have yet to take on
a criticism of textual practices, intimately related to the method

of participant observation, especially employed in the discrepant
worlds of 'deviants'.
Erving Goffman, perhaps the most widely known sociologist for
his ethnographic studies of contemporary society, nonetheless, brings
the sociological tradition of ethnography to the brink of the crisis
of representation and the epistemological trembling characteristic
of post-modernity which threatens disciplinarity itself. In Frame
Analysis, what is essential to the method of participant observation -
a dialectic of experience and interpretation — is generalized to the
organization of all human experience, only to uncover 'recastings:
keyings and fabrications'. 'Whatever the "actual" is, it is something
that is subject to these two modes of recasting' (1974:156). And if
Goffman yet insists that 'the innermost part of a framed activity
must be something that does or could have status as untransformed
reality' (1974:156), still frame analysis, leaves the sociologist 'with
the structural similarity between everyday life . . . and the various
"worlds" of make believe but no way of knowing how this relation-
ship should modify our view of everyday life' (1974:6).
If that structural similarity, as I have suggested, turns on the oedi-
pal(izing) narrative that organizes the gaze of the observer with crude
oppositions of male and female by stitching these into the scene as
exhortative guides to seeing, then, Our view', that is the sociological
view of everyday life is opened up to a radical historizing of its
rhetorical and textual practices: to reconsider the development of
sociology in relationship to the sociology of biography, autobio-
graphy, the novel, history, film, television or computation; to find
sociology again, disseminated across disciplining boundaries. Since
there is no other method but participant observation which, as part
of its protocol of behaviors, authorizes the identity of the sociologist,
the post-Goffmanian shift in this methodology transforms the
sociological stance toward reality, distancing it from any analysis
which insistently disavows unconscious processes. 'For Goffman,
the unconscious cannot be exorcised, even in principle, because it
is not an individual substratum at all, but consists of the structural
underpinnings of society itself (Collins 1986:110). As to the social
construction of reality, what might be studied is 'the types of iteration
or citations', what Derrida calls, 'the sociality of writing as drama'
(1978:227), in which citational statements are not opposed to original
statement-events. '. . . (T)he category of intention will not disappear;
it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to
govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances' (Derrida
1977:326).
If Goffman only brings sociology to the brink of a crisis of re-
presentation, the daring and hesitancy of that gesture is an effect
of his writing. With texts formed by examples piled one upon another,
Goffman dismisses the narrative construction of traditional ethno-
graphy. But this dismissal is not a partiality for textuality which
foregrounds the constructedness of a text by staging its own resistance
to the inevitability of narrative closure as modernist texts, for the
example, do (Barthes 1977; 1970). More like computational displays,
as I have argued, Goffman's examples push narrative to the level of
program, unaddressable by the reader but which for that, demand and
offer, like face-to-face encounters, immediate, instantaneous response
(Nichols 1988; Schwab 1987).
The display taken as real becomes the simulation for the reader's
attention with no antecedent reality necessary to his engrossment.
Staged as conversation or interaction, Goffman's texts are in the end,
examples of his own terminology; it is no surprise that many of the
examples are, as Jameson points out for Frame Analysis, 'drawn from
the realm . . . of the fait divers and the media pseudo-event . . . not an
experience at all (but) a type of discourse and one peculiarly sympto-
matic of the superstructure of present-day neo-consumerism . . .'
(1976:130). Whether it be from a perspective that combines marxism
and post-structuralism to stress the fragmentation of publics by
economic forces or from a perspective that combines feminism and
a psychoanalytic semiotic to challenge the oedipal narrative of cultural
texts, it becomes increasingly apparent that the 'society' of sociological
descriptions has been displaced onto the very frames of experience.
Those descriptions assume that sociological reality has become
intractable to the realist techniques of the traditional ethnographic
narrative. Goffman treats sociologists to his peculiar glimpse of this
hyper-reality of mass media and cybernetic systems.
Goffman, then, is at the end of a sociological tradition; his writing
is a recent last relay between the opposed registers of nature and
culture. Of that tradition, Goffman nonetheless exhausts it as his
writings overexpose the discourse of embodiment which has
characterized that tradition, initially made to reconcile the physi-
ological body of the empirical sciences and the autonomous self-
identified actor of the romantic imagination in the construction of
the techniques and methods of observation (Crary 1988). And if

as that tradition comes to an end, the conservatism of Goffman's
writings is especially noted for his reconstitution of social order in
the proposed a-historical structures that organize experience (Jameson
1976:122) and more specifically for defending 'the traditional,
functionally-justified, male dominant sex roles' of this society (Collins
1986:108), we might feel in this differing among male theorists, other
than their valid complaints, a kind of conservatism, a nostalgia for
what no longer can stand uncontested, the grand historical narrative
and the semiosis of the woman, putting to use her supposed devalua-
tion in the construction of the discourse of man.
But yet another reading, a mis-behaved reading might make the
presuppositions of Goffman's writings signify a new start for sociology,
when sociology might establish itself and reflect itself in the domain
of writing. And then, one might imagine that what Goffman found
hilarious about Derrida's sound critique of Searle is that it showed
Goffman to himself, at the verge of deconstructing the very notions
he had made so central to sociological ethnography, situatedness,
physical co-presence, interactional ritual. Until the last, his writings
ironically returned him to the peculiar materiality of the psyche. That
realization, I hope, tickled Goffman until he roared with laughter.
References
Barthes, Roland
1970 S/Z. Paris: SeuU.
1977 Image, Music, Text, trans, by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and
Wang.
Clifford, James
1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James — Marcus, George
1986 Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Collins, Randall
1985 The Sociological Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press.
1986 'The Passing of Intellectual Generations: Reflections on the Death of
Erving Goffman', Sociological Theory Spring (4):106-113.
Crapanzano, Vincent
1977 'The Writing of Ethnography', Dialectic Anthropology 2(l):69-73.
Crary, Jonathan
1988 'Techniques of the Observer', October, Spring (45):3-35.
De Lauretis, Teresa
1984 Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Derrida, Jacques
1977 'Signature Event Context', trans, by Samuel Weber — Jeffrey Mehlman,
Glyph 7:309-330.
1978 Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1982 Of'Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Doane,Mary Ann
1987 The Desire to Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dwyer, Kevin
1977 On the Dialogic of Fieldwork: Dialectical Anthropology 2(2): 143-151.
Freud, Sigmund
1913 The Claim of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest', in: The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
XIII. London: Hogarth Press.
Gallop, Jane
1982 The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Goffman, Erving
1971 Relations in Public. New York: Harper and Row.
1974 Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row.
1976 Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row.
1983a Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1983b 'Felicity's Condition', American Journal of Sociology 89( 1): 1 -5 3.
Jameson, Frederic
1976 On Goffman's Frame Analysis', Theory and Society 3(1):119-133.
Laplanche, Jean
1976 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.
Manning, Peter
1980 'Goffman's Framing Order: Style as Structure', in: James Ditton (ed.),
The View from Goffman, 252-284.
Mulvey, Laura
1975 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 16(3):6-l 8.
Nichols, Bill
1988 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems', Screen
(29)1:22-46.
Rose, Jacqueline
1988 Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso.
Schwab, Gabriele
1987 'Cyborgs, Postmodern Phantasms of Body and Mind', Discourse Spring/
Summer (9) :64-84.
Turkic, Sherry
1984 The Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
II. Expanding the Scope: Forms of institutions, forms
of language
Legal decisions: a frame analytic perspective1
Peter K. Manning, Keith Hawkins
Introduction
Knowledge makes a difference, and the more refined and subtle the
knowledge, the more powerful its potential. The linguistic metaphor,
manifested in structuralist semiotics, and creeping into social science,
insinuated itself into the work of the finest social critic of our times,
Erving Goffman. Although Goffman's contribution to understanding
modern life and modernity is unparalleled, he stood alone, detached,
and his theoretical framework well-hidden behind his skull. Although
Goffman was involved, almost beyond his own choice, in current
affairs — he was featured in an article in Time, as a major figure in
the New York Times Book Review, and was often written about in
the elite publications of the Anglo-American world — his was an angry
and uneasy commitment. He urged involvement but reproached directly
and sometimes subtly the involved. Some might say his sociology was
insidiously powerful as a result. In death, his voice echoed and painfully
penetrated our consciousness. Concluding his bitter and sometimes
biting posthumously published presidential address to the American
Sociological Association, he observed that the role of sociology was
unseemly, almost devious in itself, to investigate naturalistically social
life, what he termed '. . . a small irregular scab on the face of nature
. . .'. His memorable final paragraph, from which I shall adopt, with
apologies, a theme for this chapter, lasers straight to the center of
the pretensions of the arrogant, self-serving professionals who eschew
the serious moral quest to which he pointed.
If one must have warrant addressed to social needs, let it be for unsponsored
analysis of the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authority
— priests, psychiatrists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders,
parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all other well-placed
persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality
(1983:17).
204 Peter K. Manning, Keith Hawkins
His last brilliant paper not only displayed cutting wit and penetrating
insight, it showed how surface features of human interaction, some-
times ritualized like queuing, conceal ordering that was assumed to
be democratic and fair yet is anything but. In order to investigate
naturalistically the background for much of what Erving Goffman
delineated as foreground, we require tools, in this case an analytic
framework for studying decisions, as shabby as he might have found
them, and an institutional locus, law, so better to explore the taken-
for-granted wisdom that passes there for truth.
Truth, as Goffman reminded us in his first major work, The Presenta-
tion of Self in Everyday Life (1959), is a matter of what an audience
will credit, and is thus a social construction. The production of truth
is never simply a matter of pure everyday or primary experience
(reality), but a matter of experiencing a reproduced version of reality,
a copy of some kind produced by talk. To speak of 'copies' is to echo
the idea that arbitrary framing of facts serves the purposes of the
framers, and of the institution. Law is a superlative 'xerox machine'
in which, as Luhmann (1981) has written, counterfactuals are con-
sistently affirmed. Legal truths are on the one hand translucent and
on the other hand repeatedly opaque.
The nature of the copy and of the copying process is addressed
here using examples from Anglo-American law, drawing on Goffman's
ideas of frame, framing, key and keying. In many respects, we treat
these as matters of what Eco would call a 'common frame', 'data
structures for representing stereotyped situations' (Eco, 1986:199-
200ff.). Common examples are cases going before judges; welfare
claimants queuing up to be processed; telephone calls received at
a communications center in a large urban police department; events
of pollution. These are used in what follows to explore some facets
of an infrastructure that maintains authority — legal decision-making,
especially decisions that demonstrate how the dramatization and
marking of facts as 'legal', has consequentiality, concealing and
revealing other aspects of order and conflict. This question, the
relationship between ordering and equality, is implicit in much of
his work and lies behind any close analysis of the distribution of
power and authority which results from legal decisions. Although this
is in part a function of decisions made by those with legal authority,
it is also a consequence of the ideological blinders that elevate the
significance of governmental social control above other forms of
control.
A frame analytic perspective 205
Decisions in legal context

The centrality of law and of legal decisions in modern life is un-
questioned, and it appears that the degree of control exercised by
law in American society, at least, exceeds that in other industrialized
nations (Hawkins 1987; Friedman 1987). Such decisions are not simply
taken by judges, lawyers, and police, but by others in large bureaux
that distribute welfare, medicare, social security, and other entitle-
ments in industrialized nations. Legally sanctioned outcomes are
growing not only in number and kind, but in social and political
significance. Legal decision-making, or an account or justification
provided for an outcome produced by someone with legal powers,
is the primary arena within which we examine framing. To study
legal decisions best is to study them fully and in detail, rather than
by means of hypothecated models; this requires an exploration of
the social organization of legal life. The social organization of legal
life includes more than the rules and institutional mechanisms
constituting the formal legal institution; it also includes the cognitive
and social underpinnings which are necessary, if not sufficient, to
sustaining that differentiated social world. Understanding the ex-
periential basis of the social organization of legal life is fundamental
to naturalistic studies of decision-making because they link the
phenomenological world, outlined in many of its facets by Goffman,
and the formal legal world.
The formal legal structure

The formal institutional structure of law is superimposed upon the
world of everyday life; law exists as a differentiated and bounded
subsystem contrasted with non-legal disputation. Ihe institutional
structure of law includes patterns of guided interaction, a structure
of statuses and roles, and information distribution functions (Luhmann
1985). The institutional structure is itself supported by the grand norm
of violence (Kelsen 1949, 1967), and is highly ritualized by sequences,
settings, costumes, props and behaviour. These are in turn integrated by
ideological beliefs as well as a sense of purpose rendered in ideological
terms as a mandate, or the reciprocal pattern of trust between the
institution and the publics it serves (Hughes 1971). The idea of a
mandate implies the authority to decide and to project forward binding
legal decisions. Central to the mandate is the notion that the work
206 Peter K. Manning, Keith Hawkins
of law is making and taking binding and authoritative decisions, or

dramatizing and marking, thus stabilizing collective expectations.
This social world must maintain a screen or boundary to filter and
shape the nature of the facts it processes.
Cognitive correlates of the social world of the law

Institutional structures of law provide a sanctioned basis for screening,
framing and re-reframing social and culture realities, as well as precisely
delimiting the internal cognitive forms of knowledge that will be
used to transact informational exchanges within a legal setting. In-
stitutionalized cognitive foci serve to direct attention away from
extraneous and non-juridical facts standing outside the institutional
boundary. The institutional focus will be on the facts of the case,
interpolated into legal decisions and dogma, as initially presented
by legal actors. 'Institutionalized misrecognition' (Bourdieu 1977:
100) operates to stabilize facts and to sustain and protect them
from change, erosion, or extinction. Rules, said to be the heart of
the legal institution, are embedded within institutional assumptions
about the context within which these rules will be seen as relevant
(Dworkin 1977), and are both indices of patterns and pattern-setting
devices within legal institutions. The internal structure of the social
world of the law is also maintained by characteristic patterns of legal
reasoning. Conceptual fictions stabilize the internal relations (Scheppele
1988), as do ponderous legal discourse, and interpretations of rules,
intepretations about interpretations (Hart 1961).
The transformational/transducing function of law

In a sense, moral actions with legal consequences are glossed by the
label, 'legal'. The legal institution, as Luhmann points out, screens
and controls 'case-input' and the validity of the invocation of the
law. This work of reasserting the precarious legal template takes place
in spite of miscellaneous delicts, crimes, torts, violations of contracts,
and human failures to observe the ordering rules embedded in law.
A world of sustained and reified good and evil and identifiable legal
consequences are seen to cohere within the institutional structure.
This moral world is itself sustained by the context of deciding. Legal
decision making is the core of the institution, but to 'see' the nature
of that core, one must explore the context within which a decision
A frame analytic perspective 207
is taken. By (legal) context is meant all that is brought to a decision

by the relevant parties, including all those expectations, rights and
duties, and some conception of the nature of the process for the
negotiation of claims amongst parties in instances where tacit agree-
ment is not acknowledged by at least one of the parties. In other words,
the legal context sets 'expectations about expectations' (Luhmann
1981) that participants must adopt in order to operate within that
institution. They must be prepared to accept a decision as either
'yes' or 'no', accept defeat in those terms, and live with the conversion
of morally messy matters into decisions. Legal cases must be carried
across the line or boundary between everyday life and the legal system,
and crossing this analytic boundary redefines a matter as something
about which the participants are prepared to accept only a binary
outcome.
Framing, keying and the case

The process of framing and the nature of the resultant frame is central
to the argument, insofar as they work to 'juridify' social life (Luhmann
1982:131). Framing links or stands between the everyday world
and the legal world. A frame, according to Goffman (1974: chapter 2),
provides the rules and principles which guide an understanding of
the meaning of experienced events. Perception is organized, he claims,
into primary social or natural (rules of physical causality govern
interpretations) frameworks. This provides a kind of model for or-
ganizing experience which is fundamental in the sense that humans
do not long tolerate 'meaninglessness' in social events. A frame addresses
the question: 'what is going on here?' Frames are keyed, or indicated by
cues or signs which stand in a part-whole relationship to the matter(s)
framed. About the concept key Goffman writes, '. . . a set of conven-
tions by which a given activity, already meaningful in terms of some
primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this
activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else' (1974:
43^44). The exercise of gathering, assessing and interpolating facts
is a kind of framing operation, a creative process maintaining the
cultural authority of the law as well as refining its inner cognitive
structure. Once a matter, event, person, or conflict is framed, the
frame can be used as an analogue for mapping other activities. The
frame, then, is something like a code which shapes, typifies, informs
and even confirms the nature of the choice. It determines, for example,

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Beyond Goffman : studies on communication, institution, and

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication Data

Beyond Goffman: studies on communication, institution, and

© Copyright 1990 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30

Stephen Harold Riggins

I. Probing the theory

II. Expanding the Scope: Forms of institutions, forms of language

Arlie Russell Hochschild

III. Expanding the Scope: Objects, events and communication

Subject Index 445

Name Index 449

References to works by Erving Goffman 455

as a provocative, protean figure, whose relevance to contemporary

issues to a degree. This first part probes aspects of Goffman's

to this volume, that symbolic interactionism and semiotics are com-

exert indirectly via electronic and broadcast media. 'Increasingly, our

The tension between structuralism and phenomenology in Goffman

this is not always possible. Fourth, there may be discrepancies in

In whatever way we characterize the phenomena of miscommunication it

Nirmala Srinivasan examines the concept of self in Goffman's

. . . the common man is literally plagued by extreme fragmentation and muti-

'performing self. The quota system or the reservation policy in

Goffman was willing to state his theoretical position in any easily

that an understanding of narrative practices and discourse analysis

interpretations must be perceived as relevant to the case, that is

and who is the victim can be ambiguous. There may be a genuine

His alternative included taking into consideration the influence of

are relatively unimportant compared to situational factors. In contrast,

of protest must be very subtle to be effective and because of the

. . . "negative experiences" of the sort described by Goffman cannot be taken

Thus, the messages conveyed to the audience by a trapezist, who

Asante, Molefi Kete - William B. Gudykunst

Goffman's application of Durkheim

When I fulfil my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute

situations, statuses, and jobs. Here again, Goffman contributed

The ego-form of society

Durkheim's theory, its well-developed empirical arm, the focus on

ly, this is to be expected. What is unexpected is the acceptance of

it down. Everything, even language itself, is reduced by the centralizing,

This is Goffman's early intimation that he has witnessed the descent

In sum, all of sociology, before and after Durkheim is marked

Beyond the ego-form

and incorporated as in e pluribus unum. We might now try to look

for expression as something different from social organization, but

A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency

Without parallel, the 'strategic spot at which ambiguities necessarily

But this emphasis on expressive matters is motivated by an original

Goffman's handling of the expressive aspects of everyday life, that

It should be noted that Goffman makes only one direct reference to

2. Front Back Performer Audience

Sociology separates conduct into moral division: normal-abnormal,

It was Goffman's great contribution to our understanding of social life

Except for Goffman's work (can we continue to call it sociology?),

to someone' is the only passport through this uncharted space and, of

Ego and sign

from ideological product to ideological instrument, possessing nothing

we may have, e.g. (1) a material here-and-now woman, (2) a woman

And democracy won't help. A pitchman president who is thought

oppositions, but also in terms of the mechanism by which they

1. In a graduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, when pressed