Goffman as an individualist

Book review:

Interaction Ritual is a collection of essays where Erving Goffman looks at so-called facework. Facework means, that if you are in the wrong face or out of face, you destabilize the equilibrium of the social situation. Each person lives in a world of social encounters, and in these he acts out a line, i.e. a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts to express how he feels about the situation and evaluates of the participants, especially himself. The purpose of social encounters is to build and subsequently upholding face, defined as the positive social value a person claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken. To lose one’s face means to break the established rules of the encounter and the other actors must thence decide whether to try and save the face for you or stigmatize you and eject you from the group.

Goffman is interested in how identity and the concept of self is maintained and works in the interactions of modern society. Contrary to many other theorists, Goffman is an empiricist, and always grounds his terms in actual observations. He suggests that human beings use a wide variety of tools to maintain their face towards others – e.g. by saying ‘whoops’ when falling on a staircase, thereby diffusing the tension of the situation and communicating that one actually knows how to walk on stairs.

So what is the self really? To Goffman, studying face saving is to “study the traffic rules of social interaction”. You can read Goffman in two ways. Some would say he predates the postmodern movement by suggesting that all imaginations of an essential being are pure fiction, and much like an onion, the self is nothing when we peel off the social layers sorrounding it. On the other hand Goffman can also be seen as an ardent individualist – this is how I see him. As highly respectful of the individual’s ability to be himself in very different surroundings and role playing games. In his perhaps most famous work Asylums, on the life of mental patients he writes that our self arises against something, stating that “status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.”

One of the notable criticisms of Goffman comes from grand theorists. Habermas has criticized him for being too narrow to be a sociologist, and finds weakness in his inclination to look only at the immediate context, which makes it difficult for his theories to predict macrophenomena. However, I personally find it remarkable that in spite of this critique, it is the very analysis of human interaction and the norms and meanings they create which plays a central part in Habermas’ theory of communicative action.

One has to be careful to read Goffman as a regular sociologist, and the more nescient sociologists will see him as obvious. But he is far from obvious – Goffman is one of a kind. I once read someone state that there is a little Nietzsche hidden in Goffman; a moral adventurer who is less interested in the justice or injustice of the rules themselves than in what breaking them or abiding by them reveals about the risks to one’s sense of self and personal order. So far as I know, that is a unique perspective in sociology.

What impresses me most about Goffman is his ability to show how little insignificant parts of our daily routine and lives are all part of the whole, and creates an extensive network of signs and meanings. We can uncover comprehensive social changes by studying social interactions among individuals, and we can understand the power relations between different layers in society by looking at the tiny changes in our everyday norms.

• David Pontoppidan