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THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE
Essays in CRITICAL DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER TWO
THE POLITICS OF
SOCIOLOGY
GOULDNER, GOFFMAN AND GARFINKEL
What rough beast, Its time come round at last Marches toward Bethlehem to be born?
...Yeats
In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner (1970)
analyzes the contributions of Goffman and Garfinkel and exposes
their technical and political meanings to professional scrutiny.
This exercise in the politics of sociology has as its objective the
extrication of the liberative potential from contemporary
sociology. Gouldner insists that judgment of theorists in
sociology should not be limited to "autonomous" technical criteria
inasmuch as this limitation requires us to be "moral cretins" in
our technical roles.
Gouldner is very perceptive in his technical analysis of Garfinkel and Goffman and extremely helpful to our understanding of their political meaning. However, Goffman and Garfinkel have more to offer to conflict theory and to reflexive sociology than Gouldner's analysis permits; both men embody perspectives that supplement and complement those of Gouldner.
Gouldner makes several telling points in his judgment of Goffman; I shall summarize and respond to each of the more important ones. By and large, I agree with Gouldner in his interpretation of Goffman's technical points of meaning but disagree with his interpretation of some of the political points of meaning of Goffman. Later in this paper, I shall provide an analysis of the meaning of Garfinkel to the politics of methodology.
THE POLITICAL MEANING OF GOFFMAN The first technical point Gouldner (p. 379) makes about Goffman is that Goffman's approach to sociology is taken without a "metaphysics of hierarchy." By that he means that the points of view of psychiatrists, salesmen, professors, and police have no prior claim on the loyalty of the sociologist than do the points of view of the patient, the customer, the student, or the criminal. This is a valid technical judgment. Goffman neither celebrates the priest nor castigates the prostitute.
However, the question of the political meaning of this new perspective is unanswered because of two ambiguities that are intrinsic to it. One aspect of the ambiguity is its avoidance of the question of whether the existing stratification system is therapeutic, economic, educative, redemptive, or whatever--or whether another stratification or none at all is preferable. A second aspect of the ambiguity derives from the fact that by failing to sustain the point of view of the official hierarchy, Goffman appears to be "against those advantaged by it."
The ambiguity can be resolved by any one of at least three political acts by radical sociologists: (a) interpreting Goffman as being against the stratification system, (b) using Goffman as a point of departure to raise and to settle the question "should the stratification system in these social arenas be dismantled or some other policy preferred in the matter of the psychiatrist and the patient?" or (c) searching in Goffman's work for specific instances where he condemns stratification mechanisms in implicit terms.
The second point raised by Gouldner (p. 379) regarding Goffman's technical meanings is that Goffman's focus on copresence dwells on the immediate and the episodic. This is a valid statement. Gouldner's political analysis is that such a focus ignores the permanent and hostile features of society--that such a focus places the onus on individuals as "gamesmen" rather than upon society as fostering gamesmanship. Goffman's model of the human being is a person who accepts and "works" this dehumanized system rather than rebels against it or rises above it in Rousseauian modes.
But it is Goffmanian analysis that permits Gouldner and others to understand the world as it has come to be and to begin to take political action to transform it. By making the analysis, Goffman provides sociologists with the basic ingredient for that reflexivity that Gouldner urges upon us with such fervor (p. 488- 500).
The political danger of Goffman on this point is that his analysis will be helpful to gamesmen. However, the writing of Gouldner now preempts Goffman from being helpful to gamesmen. New sociologists, having read Gouldner and understanding Goffman, are not likely to celebrate the human model as an ideal. More importantly, they now have the insight, from Gouldner, to focus on the social conditions that underwrite the management of team front as well as the episodic merchandising of self to anonymous others.
McGinniss's work, The Selling of the President (1968), for instance, is a condemnation of the politics of "impression management." Student protest can be understood as a demand on the part of students that society and the university live up to the earlier moral codes that were lately traded off for tact and image. The typical university has more people assigned to managing and packaging students than to teaching them.
While students are attacking the impression management norms of faculty, counselors, deans, dormitory cadres, placement officers, alumni, and trustees by presenting nonnegotiable demands backed by moral claims, second-generation dramaturgists in the 60's used tactics of a living theater of the absurd to attack the court system, the political system, the draft system, the university, and the military. Both groups have accepted the idea of a different script for reality from that engineered by academic and political functionaries.
As in these cases, the Goffmanian perspective can be put to use in ways not discussed by Gouldner to sustain a radical relation between the sociologist and the social forms in which he deals.
The third technical observation of Goffman by Gouldner (p. 379) is that in Goffman's social world, "tact" replaces moral codes as the major constraint of behavior between anonymous others. Because individuals in a mass society must deal with unknown others, they must deal in safe supplies and must project acceptable and dehumanizing images. One must not make one's moral code visible for fear of losing a customer, offending a voter or getting a 'bad' grade. In academia as in business, one must not challenge the morality of another for fear of losing support when one's own morality is called into question.
The political consequence of this reading of Goffman is that we have, taking Goffman and Gouldner together, lost our innocence on the point about tact versus morality. We now must face the question of the place of morality in mass society. Gouldner has stressed the importance of morality as a source of tensions as well as a barrier to the location of alternative and, perhaps, more important sources of adaptation, innovation, and rebellion in society.
We now must examine questions centering around the conditions that tact imposes on social behavior; for example, tact may be dangerous because it avoids conflict. In the research setting realms of data and realms of meanings may be lost to the researcher who, constrained by tact, avoids pressing the demand for information. I shall return to this point later.
Rather than to castigate Goffman for his view of life-as- theater, Gouldner should praise him for the political act of legitimating the view that all social reality is staged. Shakespeare said it earlier and better than Goffman did, but Shakespeare was "only" a playwright while Goffman is "really" a sociologist and, therefore, to be taken seriously.
The political payoff is that we understand that all social
reality requires, in part, a script, actors, front, front-stage,
impressions given off, audiences, rehearsals, editing, body idiom,
ethos, involvement norms, clearance norms, relevance rules,
conventions for boundary closure, disengagement moves, and so on.
We understand that the script for reality can be changed, and new,
more human forms of reality may take the stage given adequate
political means for choosing between scripts.
Dramaturgical activities are supportive of the sociology of fraud when they are used to abort a creative dialectic. In the ordinary run of social events, images and visions are crucial to the self fulfilling cycle of prophecy and performance. Fraud exists when performance bears no correspondence to the implied prophecy.
In the political struggle for control over the education of black children, a dramaturgical sociology may be helpful. . There are bits of evidence that black children in the ghetto, being less uncontaminated by the eye-thinking and linearity of middle-class educators have adopted a dramaturgical world and can function best in such a world. Marcella Saunders, a teacher at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, has had some success in teaching history and math to black students by having them deal in studio scripts rather than listen to straight lectures.
Mark Rudd, when a student activist at Columbia, made the transition from old-style agitation--pamphlets, meetings, and issues--to guerrilla theater, and he has consolidated this means of activism among the first generation to be reared in a fully developed dramaturgical society.
Jacob Moreno has experimented with psychodrama as a therapeutic tool, and sociodrama has begun to move into areas other than medicine as a mode of experience. Abbie Hoffman has been identified as a New World Shakespeare by virtue of his applications of dramaturgy to the political arena.
The point is to understand and to use Goffman as a starting
point; he is too valuable to the liberation of sociology to be used
merely as a horrible example of the apolitical sociologist.
Gouldner's point (p. 380) about the type of theater Goffman
chooses to focus upon is important. Goffman focuses on neoclassic
theater, wherein the actors deal in images, rather than on living
theater or guerrilla theater, where actors deal in politics,
authenticity, and passion. But we cannot fault Goffman too much on
that score; these are recent developments; had living theater or
guerrilla theater been available as grist to Goffman's analytic
mill, his book might well have been entitled The Generation of
Passion in Everyday Life. Had Goffman been black, he might well
have written a treatise about the Black Muslims or the Black
Panthers entitled The Repair of Damaged Identities.
If it is possible to fault the credentials of Goffman in political terms, the best place to start is with the point made by Gouldner that Goffman has failed to explain why some selves (the flimsiest ones) are presented and some (the most authentic ones) are held in abeyance. Still less does Goffman clarify the manner in which power and wealth affect the capacity to project self in terms of variety and adequacy.
It is Gouldner (p. 381) who provides the answers to these questions in the same section where he discusses the political value of Goffman. In a society where people have few real choices, they often mobilize their resources in order to support images, pets and sports. Goffman and Gouldner together provide us with some real choices. As sociologists, we can accept the responsibility for analyzing and constructing a social world based on values that transcend impression management.
We have the choice to reject a sociology that is handmaiden to a managerial ethic. In class, in university life, in the community, we can speak as citizen-scientists rather than as merely citizens. We need not protect the fraudulent image of the scientist as value-free and uninvolved in creating the conditions of repression where on every hand scientists are the paid mercenaries of a managed society.
Every piece of foreign policy, every bit of fraudulent advertising, every piece of military weaponry, every bit of testing, every act of consultation made by us as scientist is also made by us as citizen even as we deny it. We should not pretend to be apart from so much sorrow. We polish our image and protect our budget by such fraud. We have a choice in part because Goffman obliterated the false boundaries between worlds of pretend and words of reality.
When Gouldner (p. 384) treats Goffman as a partisan of the sociology of fraud, I must protest. I have always read Goffman as a Puck in the camp of the sociology of fraud rather than as an apostle for it. I think Gouldner permits himself the luxury of unreflexive naivete when he implies that loyalty, sincerity, gratitude, friendship, and love are destroyed when a sociologist examines the handlings of another in the attempt to display these sentiments. The fact is that Goffman exposes the commercial uses of these sentiments, which, I agree, are vital to a sense of community and should not be used for Gesellschaft purposes.
When I read Goffman's (1959:4) treatment of Purdy, I read it with pain and sympathy on Purdy's behalf because Purdy lives in a world where devious handlings of self are necessary, and he is seldom called to account for this pathetic behavior. I read Goffman's Presentation of Self as an indictment of the sociology of fraud rather than an apology and encouragement to play the game. I read his Asylums as a savage and profound assault on the official image of total institutions.
I think we should assume that those who read Goffman have a sociological perspective, and it is somewhat redundant to point out that conning behavior is symptomatic of a poorly organized social world.
There is evidence that Goffman takes this poorly organized world as a tacit assumption, because in Behavior in Public Places (chap. 14 dealing with the significance of situational improprieties) he places the onus upon the community, upon social establishments, upon social relations, and upon the structure of face engagements for the incapacity of persons to sustain involvement. Goffman instructs us in graphic terms that "symptoms" are acts of silent rhetoric by which a person communicates the anguish, hostility, alienation, and rage that the social situation elicits from him.
The response of sociologists to Goffman should focus on the political significance of his works at the time they were published. As a radical political activist in the late fifties and through the sixties, Goffman liberated a generation of sociologists from their naive partisanship on behalf of the establishments they examined. Goffman gave us a perspective from which we could become disenchanted with the images of society projected by administrators, managers, politicians...and by those alienated from such a world.
That Gouldner is the more important sociologist to radical sociology at this stage there can be little doubt, but we need both Goffman and Gouldner for technical and political reasons. I reject any part of an analysis that interprets the political meaning of Goffman as hostile to radical endeavor. He is vital to it.
If a person has reservations about Goffman's purity as a practicing radical sociologist, s/he should read the last sentence in Chapter 14 of Goffman's Behavior in Public Places (1963b, p. 24) where he says there are more psychologically sound reasons for walking away from social encounters than are dreamt of by those who are always loyal to society. Also worth reading is Goffman's introduction to Asylums in which he openly presents himself as a partisan of the patient's situation and offers to repair the imbalance caused by a one-sided literature.
If a person doubts Goffman's essential morality, s/he might do well to read the conclusion to Presentation of Self (1959, p. 251) in which he states that we:
"...come now to the basic dialectic: that individuals qua
performers are not concerned with the moral issue of realizing
standards of life but with the amoral issue of engineering a
convincing impression that these standards are realized."
By all means, however, Goffman should be read as a radical
sociologist; he will open radical vistas that are impossible to
come by when reading him as apolitical. No event, no word, no
person, including Goffman, has meaning apart from the context in
which they appear. We construct the meaning of Goffman when we
adopt a perspective with which to view his work; it is both valid
and essential to the radical perspective to read Goffman's works as
a producing mine of radical insights.
FROM CONFLICT THEORY TO CONFLICT METHODOLOGY Gouldner (1970:50) makes it clear that one political result of survey methodology is that it provides the technical basis for a police state. The dynamics of the greater part of contemporary methodology, based as that methodology is on tact, consensus, cooperation, persuasion, and establishment sponsorship, are compatible with a managed society; managed on behalf of the large- scale organizations of business, government, military, industry, finance, and education.
With reference to ethnomethodology and the political meaning of Garfinkel, Gouldner's analysis is incomplete. It can be completed by understanding that:
(1) ethnomethodology is a special case of conflict
methodology,
(2) a conflict methodology is vital to a conflict theoretical
approach, and
(3) a methodology that stands in overt hostile contrast to
its subject produces dimensions of scientific enterprise
closed off by traditional methodologies.
This paper serves as a starting point from which a person can understand the epistemological advantages accruing from a conflict methodology. In the pursuit of insight, understanding, validity, and other ways of "knowing," these epistemological advantages include additional dimensions of meaning, additional sources of data, as well as dimensions of dedication lost to the "impartial" researcher.
It is important to note that conflict methodology restores the political dimension to an engaged sociology...one which has be reduced to the production of technical knowledge and separated from the use of human reason to use the apt language of Horkheimer.
Conflict methodology may be defined as comprising
those techniques by which information is obtained
from and introduced into systems under conditions
of hostile contrast.
In the everyday language of social events, hostile contrast means that some companies, unions, banks, businesses, and schools withhold information from other sectors of the general public which, if available, would advance the interests of the general public. Hostile contrast also means that sometimes business, government, military, mass media, and educational organizations introduce information into the general public that leads to behavior inimical to the good health and welfare of the general public.
There are a variety of modes in which one may be in overt hostile contrast to the subject of study. They range from the gentle and small-gauge activities of ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel to the bestial and brutal experiments in prisons, asylums, and concentration camps--experiments in human degradation, sensory deprivation, physical pain, and inquisition by means of electroshock therapy, chemotherapy, or rehabilitation--all of which provide valid scientific data: all of which are hostile to the human project.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that by studying a field the field is changed. In its sociological expression the principle is known as the Hawthorne Effect. The dominant schools of research methodology in American sociology view it as a cardinal sin of science to deliberately provoke the operation of the Heisenberg principle. With the aim of research neutrality, unobtrusive measures, open questions, non-intrusive participation, and one way observation are greatly valued.
To achieve neutrality in research, contemporary methodologies advocate the appearance of consensus. Hostility and disgust toward a respondent, subject, or client are suppressed if such human responses arise in the breast of the "objective" consensus methodologist. If attitudes of distrust, animosity, or anger arise as a result of the researcher's activities, s/he disguises these feelings and puts quite another face of meaning on the research, as in the case of studies of fascist attitudes in South Carolina or studies of homosexual space in the Tea Room Trade.
If the findings of the study are inimical to the interest of the subject, consensual methodology requires the implication of hostile contrast to be hidden. If the findings are available only to those who are in hostile contrast to the subject, the canons of "objectivity," "value neutrality," and "freedom of speech" become disclaimers behind which a researcher can fashion the image of innocence. At the same time, the hostility and partiality of the use of the findings produce a covert conflict relation between researchers and researched as was the case in many studies of "minority problems."
Ethnomethodology, as Garfinkel practiced it, requires one to poke, probe, provoke, and puncture the social system in order to make visible its chief characteristics. The principle of consensus, under an ethnomethodological view, is a political obstacle to a more complete understanding of the nature of the social system. Thus, an ethnomethodologist might assign students the task of testing the trust of a relationship in order to obtain a full understanding of the importance of naive trust in sustaining social relations. That importance is never visible in research procedures available to consensus methodologists.
Trust is a highly important social-psychological component of
a wide range of social systems and is a part of that which is taken
for granted. The taken-for-granted aspects of trust mean that it
is seldom visible. An unobtrusive observer with a limited
repertoire of research techniques would scarcely notice a crucial
element of these social systems. Unless one were the subject of
the response to a breach of trust, one could not know the meaning
of that response. Both parties to the conflict arising from a
challenge to trust know the meaning of the response far better than
a neutral observer could possibly know it. In point of fact, the
more we stand in hostile contrast to naive trust, the more we
understand its vital role in the construction of social systems.
Halfway between the trivial things that Garfinkelians do and the horrible things that Nazis or the C.I.A. do that comprise the content of conflict methodology is the law suit. As Sax (1971:53- 62) has demonstrated, the law suit produces information and clarifies positions that would otherwise be hidden from public view by what he calls the "Insider Perspective."
The insider perspective produces a surrender of the public trust on the part of public agencies in that decisions must balance off all constraints, pressures, and influences among conflicting constituencies and thus the insider cannot make decisions hostile to the interests of the most powerful of the agencies' constituents. One must never put the budget of the bureau in jeopardy by one's rulings.
In the concrete cases discussed by Sax, administrative officers in the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Public Roads, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Fish and Wildlife Service practiced the decision-making strategy of "suboptimization.'
This practice resulted in the abrogation of the United States policy on matters of conservation by the very agencies established to oversee conservation and guard the environment.
A law suit supervised by a competent attorney is an adversary procedure by virtue of which suboptimization need not obtain. The point is crucial. It is through conflict in the adversary procedure that information otherwise unavailable is obtained. The adversary position also permits a person to insist that policy be implemented in spite of the interests of some constituents to the contrary.
Sax (1971:108-124) outlines the advantages accruing from adoption of an adversary procedure. He provides insight on the advantage of a trained researcher's acting as adversary in ferreting out information on behalf of his client through such legal instruments as the hearing, the rules of discovery, the interrogatory, the injunction, the court order, and public record laws. He emphasizes that a request for information by a private person can be ignored by administrators of governmental or private organizations but a court order for documents cannot readily be discounted.
As a methodology for the acquisition of relevant, timely, accurate information on the operations of a business or a state agency, the law suit is often superior to questionnaires, interviews, content analysis, and other tactics of consensus and cooperation. As a methodology, the law suit has conflict, partisanship, subjectivity, and hostile intent to damage the interest of the object of one's research.
It is an essential tool in the epistemological
arsenal of the morally informed social scientist.
The canons of consensual methodology are as fully compatible with conservative politics as are the canons of structural functionalism. Consensus methodology respects the false peace of a well institutionalized system of class exploitation, gender oppression, racial privilege and bureaucratic power. Conflict methodology takes direct aim at these when used to advance the human interest for praxis and for a praxis society.
The canons of conflict methodology may be put to a variety of political uses, one of which is radical, emancipatory social change. Radical sociology cannot limit itself to the research procedures of conservative scientists; to limit itself would be unscientific as well as self-defeating. The experience of the liberal camp in sociology well demonstrates the last point. Liberal sociologists are far too concerned with tact and consensus to be effective in dealing with the establishment on any terms save those permitted by sponsors.
We must understand that a conflict theoretical approach requires a conflict methodology and that a conflict methodology produces more accurate, continuing, relevant, and reliable information under some conditions of social organization than tactful, safe, consensual, and contemporary methodology does. We must understand that Garfinkel and, to a lesser extent, Goffman embody the tactics of conflict methodology. These two are unimportant to emancipatory science except that they have, in their own small way, challenged the basic assumptions of American social science:
Goffman challenges the assumptions of Symbolic Interactional Theory that the social life world created by intending human beings is a shared, transparent symbolic universe. Garfinkel serves to challenge the assumptions of research methodology that the best data are generated under conditions of consensus and honest disclosure. To tell the truth in a circle of liars does not produce good data; good theory requires good data.
Western sociology has been stripped of its radical potential by several generations of conservative and liberal practitioners of the art. The works of Marx, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Gramsci, and E. P. Thompson did not make the journey from Europe to the United States as did the works of Spencer, Durkheim, Comte; only part of Weber's work did. The lack tells. In such a depoliticized sociology, Goffman has helped us to sustain an underlife of radical consciousness in Western sociology.
In the 21st Century, American sociology will have to accommodate itself to the limitations it has imposed upon itself in the effort to establish and to fund itself in the American economic and political context. When sociology...social science...comes of age, it will not look past the dramaturgical distortions of the knowledge process in every day life. It will not limit its arsenal of research rules to those practices which respect the existing structures of domination...and thereby reproduce them all the while claiming to be a true science...a way of knowing. I can scarcely imagine a more distorted knowledge process nor imagine a more distorted knowledge product than the one we presently call American sociology.
A version of this article appeared in the American Sociologist, Nov., 1971. Reprinted by permission.
Decalogue for the Successful Sociologist
Thou shalt live above thy means
with credit cards of golds and greens.
And pay these off, if in time,
you learn to live and love this Rhyme:
Thou shalt be on friendly terms
with the Gods of corporate firms.
Nor will thou speak with such
who write their articles for its prose:
Nor, above all, make love with those
Who think too much.
Thou shalt not have Gods, you see
unless they help get publicity free,
To the poor give time and thought
preferably for a handsome fee.
Thou shalt not do questionnaires
or quizzes upon world affairs:
if they offend a powerful audience,
nor give any talks. Thou shalt lie and sit
with statisticians, but not commit
a social science.
Thou shalt do as Business pleases;
thou shalt write thy master's thesis
upon Japanese Economies.
Thou shalt find some sex that teases
all to want to to peruse,
all who find it good to use
functional criminologies.
Thou shalt worship those researches which
tend to make the richer rich
or pacify truculent minorities.
At Christmas time, you can't be rude
so send out cards by all means;
but edit first your mailing list to include
Chairs and Heads and college Deans.
If thou must choose between the classes,
don't take chances; chose the one which best
advances
your career and your finances.
When you send off compositions
send them off to new Transactions
or if you try the old newspapers
check them first for circulations
Join all the best Associations
infiltrate the most viable professions;
Thou shalt entertain, of course,
those who head Committees first.
If, from this list of skills promotive,
You work hard and are assertive,
I guarantee that you play the game
or have, at least, a famous name.
And splash your name around the bog
when you are a famous frog;
and strut around the day livelong
to croak your name among the throng!
One would suppose that Albert, Emily and old Auden
might most strenuously object to the fraud in
this most helpful of verse;
but they, God Knows, have done far worse
to keep their fame from the public purse.
Now who knows or even cares what they wrote in.
Fame, friends, Fame is the stuff to drink
for sociologists whom it hurts to think:
and fame does more than Reagan can
to bend the truth and ruin the land.
Inspired by W.H. Auden Dedicated to Bernie Meltzer. This day, January 19, 1989
