A FAN LETTER ON ERVING GOFFMAN

...which results...

...how the restrictions on significant political choice in capitalist society induce people to play self-demeaning image games instead of projecting their more wholesome selves...

...Ceremonial observance governs...

...He and they are part of the humankind he describes, and he is never superior to his materials...

...Where he can be read politically, the evidence is in brief and edgy "remarks," and if, as Gertrude Stein is said to have said, "Remarks are not literature," then political remarks are not political positions...

...If he is judged crude or cruel for announcing that if he can't find anybody more important to talk with, he'll talk with you, the advocable response is that he is only articulating what people in fact do at conventions, and if the offended could but overcome their momentarily ruffled feelings, they might learn some3 In this respect Goffman is kin to other unique thinkers whose quirky incongruities put off some of those who otherwise admired them...

...For one thing, the study of ordinary people doing ordinary things is, among anthropologists, not radical, but the most traditional kind of ethnography...

...It sometimes seems, for example, that even Goffman's well-known "sympathy" for mental patients and the insane is based neither on their 1 Note, however, that he says "inconvenience" rather than "suffering...

...But instead of Gide, Goffman, who wants to be regarded as a social theorist, quotes Herbert Spencer to set the theme of his book...

...I have seen people become fidgety when Goffman walks into a room, suddenly self-conscious that their apparently effortless sociability might reveal something unintentional...

...The manic gives up everything a person can be, and gives up too the everything we make out of jointly guarded dealings...

...But note what we may learn from him about the social sources of authentic political feeling: the streets are ours...

...What a remarkable way to end a book...

...Goffman makes me feel less alone as a sociologist...

...An ambiguity thus results, but this does not derive from some lack of consensus, failure of communication, or breakdown in social organization, but from competent participation in the relationship game...

...He knows that some people profit more than others from a given set of rules for social order, and that some rules produce more inconvenience than they're worth,' and even that society can get along quite well with fairly high rates of rule-breaking...

...For whom is there political comfort in this analysis of crime in the streets...

...The Encounter movement, preaching openness 'n honesty and the appearance of intimacy among persons who are not intimates, turns out in Goffman's view to be little other than "social molestation...

...The danger here is that the rules of rigorous ethnographic practice can degenerate into one more set of barren methodological strictures interesting and original thinkers sometimes seem fated to bequeath to their less gifted heirs...

...I'm not even sure it would be useful to know them...

...A Dostoevskian like Goffman might reply that we reveal our gratitude to rule-breakers by punishing them ("for their own good...

...First of all, it means attention to the microstructure and meanings of small, routine actions that most people are unaware of most of the time...

...It is probably this constraint (the need to be interesting and fresh) which best accounts for the fact that the dominant tradition of urban ethnography among sociologists has been the study of exotics, either "deviants" such as criminals, prostitutes, and homosexuals, or else "inside jobs" on straight occupational milieus which are not directly visible to general observation from the outside...

...Second, it means ethnographic rigor in the exact description of such behavior, for the "insights" are presumably generated by faithfulness to phenomenological detail...

...360 BOOKS But to go still further out, and make interesting the study of really ordinary people doing really ordinary things requires a more daring exoticization of the familiar...

...Because he cannot always bestow his most important gift on his admirers, "Goffmanian" is not always an approbatory adjective...

...He doesn't much like institutional caretakers...

...take that, Immanuel Kant...

...His strength is not simply his fine ethnographic eye (there are lots of careful ethnographers) but the exquisite moral sensibility that goes with it...

...It requires the courting of anomie...

...If, after an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant, he is judged crass for asking a waiter in a voice for all to hear whether dessert will "cost extra," the advocable response is that it's all right to give his dinner companions the opportunity to think twice about whether they want to overpay for a sweet after having already eaten an overpriced dinner...

...Goffman's gifts are for describing how (not merely asserting that) "the individual stakes out a self, comments on his having done so, even while others are taking the whole process into consideration in coming to their assessment of him, which consideration he then takes into consideration in revising his view of himself...

...354 BOOKS 0 COMBINE THE BRILLIANCE with the disciplined detachment and the conviction about the governing character of interaction rituals, and comments are invited in these politicized times about where Goffman's political sympathies lie...

...the role distance which is obliged for the deviantly successful out of loyalty to all the beautiful losers who never made it...

...in pursuit of le mot juste, his brilliant excursions often end with a shrug, a twisting of the corners of the mouth through closed lips, an upturned palm of powerlessness...

...Being good at it means having defenses sufficient "to portray an advocable relationship to the negative judgment...

...As we were 2 Note how this constitutes a reversal of the Durkheimian principle in which punishment for crime is required in order to reaffirm collective values...

...Goffman has to be good at it because he is a rule-breaker, and rule-breakers invite the vultures to gather...

...the streets are his, and their unsafety produces in him a sense of personal loss...

...a glimpse of the Void...

...When a rule of conduct between two individuals is broken, "A bit of the definition of actor and recipient is threatened, as is to a lesser degree the community that contains both...

...Goffman can't establish a field all by himself...

...He won't pander...

...Score one against Grayson Kirk's naivete, but don't jump to the inference that Goffman's sympathy is with the trashers, even if he does use "conning" instead of "persuad= ing...

...Gifted thinkers are potentially valuable political properties, and Goffman has recently become the subject of considerable speculation among the realtors of the Left...

...perspective by incongruity...

...Not that they are all alike or all the same, but that their desperation reveals the nature of our serenity (or complacence...

...I remember asking Goffman many years ago whether he thought it was possible to do a nonquantitative sociology that was not functionalist or systematic...

...This kind of government...

...Thus, for example, we are treated to three kinds of offenses against the self, four sources of alarm, five types of accounts, six modes of violating personal territoriality, eight kinds of "preserves" of the self, ten differences between greetings and farewells (themselves subcategories of "access rituals"), 20 or so pages on the varieties of holding hands, and, in a glorious footnote, 24 conceivable defenses for running a red light...

...however temporarily, reading him replaces my usual sense of mild disaffection from most of my colleagues with an almost prideful sense of identification with the profession to which we both "belong...

...A jaunty terrorist with a diffident voice reminding us that in this world's bag full-to-bursting with banal sentiment, anybody who says something cruel and true can't be all bad...

...As you might expect, this generates a good bit of pressure—his moral feeling on his analytic efforts, his conspiratorial 353 sense-of-the-real on his cheerful disposition— which gives him that nice edge, the goodhumored, bad-boy outrageousness which, when it breaks a rule of conduct that others maybe "knew" but weren't sharply aware of, both instructs them in "the social construction of reality" and reminds them that there are still sociology teachers abroad in the land: passing by a group of old friends in a hotel lobby at a sociologists' convention, he was once heard saying loud and clear, "If I can't find anybody more important to talk with, I'll come back and talk with you...

...356 BOOKS sitting there at a large table with a group of women, I asked him if he was doing this out of principle or out of impulse...

...Goffman's political remarks are usually made not primarily for their political impact but in connection with some relatively abstract theoretical point which he is tempted to illustrate with a homely and cutting example...

...the earliest kind of government, the most general kind of government, and the government which is ever spontaneously recommencing, is the government of ceremonial observance...

...but personally, almost as if his own bailiwick were being affronted...

...They are the smartasses...

...And when a writer for the American Sociologist concludes his defense of Goffman with the assertion that he "should be read as a radical sociologist" he is inviting disappointment because live thinkers cannot be consistently depended upon to satisfy the claims of political constituencies...

...He need not even provide virtual accounts, apologies, and excuses for his deviations...

...Almost as if to ward off the Left, Goffman makes scattered references in Relations in Public to the problem of "crime in the streets," and it is clear that he is concerned about the high petty theft rates in big American cities which makes its streets and other public places unsafe to be in at certain times...

...the important thing about criminals—and other social desperadoes such as children, comics, saboteurs, and the certified insane—is not what they do or why they do it...

...But when a New York Times writer concludes his praise for Goffman with an all-together-now exhortation that Goffman join with him and others for the important political struggle ahead, he is simply not reading carefully...

...If resignation is ever beautiful, it is beautiful here: The most disruptive thing a well organism can do is to acquire a deadly contagious disease...

...They are the ones who wink, elbow you in the ribs, snicker disdainfully at the human comedy BOOKS 359 they earn their livings observing...

...That, I suppose, is why he doesn't much like teaching, particularly not undergraduates...

...He needs students and disciples and coworkers for that...

...he won't sloganize...

...I mean I like his taste: lean, spare, severe, contained...

...in the contrastive light their situation throws on what, in doing what we do, we are doing...

...comics and saboteurs...

...maybe a little more for the Right than the Left...

...The theoretical focus reduces the sizes of his potential popular audience, and insulates him against the current tendency for intellectual publics to demand political leadership from their teachers...

...The conservative Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution...

...He need not honor a rule of conduct that applies to him...

...At the 1972 meetings of the American Sociological Association Goffman and I were asked by a group of women to join them in a sit-in attempt to desegregate a hotel dining room that served only men at lunch...

...But Goffman talks about the unsafety of city streets not as a "social problem" to which one or another political solution can be brought to bear (more police, better lighting, welfare, methadone maintenance, etc...

...Not much for either...

...3 He is said to be a skilled negotiator for contractual advantages with his publishers, and when he left Berkeley some years ago to take an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania (in a city that W. C. Fields said was closed the day he tried to visit it), I asked him why he wanted to do that...

...Unlike many intellectuals whose heads are full of exquisite Ideas About Human Behavior, Goffman has always taken pride in his wordliness, in his canny regard for plain and practical self-interest—reminiscent in an odd way of socialist Bernard Shaw's wellknown respect for money (remember Major Barbara's father, the tycoon Undershaft, grown rich on liquor and munitions, replying to the mission derelict who tells him that he wouldn't have Undershaft's conscience for all the money in the world: "I wouldn't have your money for all the conscience in the world...

...Gratitude may not be enough...

...as if those who reveal our rules to us by breaking them (and thereby putting us uptight) deserve our gratitude for instructing us in what we believe in and depend upon...

...It requires nothing less than the risk of rendering strange and problematic the very assumptions and routines which make ordinary social life possible and worthwhile...

...I'm not sure I know the answers to these questions...

...Criminals and children...

...Except for his general obsession with orderliness and precision, it's not entirely clear why Goffman bothers with all this...

...This is a little more than idle speculation...

...But neither does he have much of the radical's fondness for moral indignation over the injustice of rules or their application...

...High rates of petty theft deny to the citizens of New York City one of the basic forms of public social organization: the marking of a space as one's own (a "stall") by leaving a piece of one's property there (a coat on a theater seat, a picnic basket in a park, a pair of sunglasses on a stretch of beach...

...III AS IF TO KEEP reminding us that it is sociology, not politics, which really interests him, Goffman's writings are usually replete with endless classifications, and Relations in Public continues his love affair with kinds, types, sorts, modes, and ways...

...What is it that makes me feel so tender and protective toward this man, whose abrasiveness in print and in person is by now legendary, and which makes him fair game for This essay is occasioned, in part, by Goffman's most recent book, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971...

...Thus when he implies that members of the Boy Scouts of America stash marijuana, he is less interested in "laying bare" the fact that these prides of the Lions Club smoke dope (and maybe commit others crimes), than in generalizing the fact that people suffer moments of alarm when in danger of being found out...

...Paul Goodman's patriotism angered and surprised some of his America-hating radical friends...

...And he probably doesn't care much for routinized inhumanity...

...They point to his implicit criticism of the degradation of human beings by established institutional routines, his exposure to analysis of the commercial exploitation of personal sentiments like love or sincerity, or his Kafka-like fascination for words such as machinations, chicaneries, contrivances, deceptions, disguises, collusions, plots, concealments, ploys, devices, simulations, ruses, stratagems, maneuvers, and cons (all of which recur throughout his text), and for the imagery of secret hiding places, slots in bedroom walls .. . trap doors, panels that open to reveal stairways into caves, permanently locked rooms, hidden entranceways, bars on the windows and doors, sudden failures of the light, eerie sounds, concealed machines of destruction...

...There is a problem...

...Goffman, of course, in the company of some others who call themselves ethnomethodologists or phenomenologists or existential sociologists, is doing precisely this, and he deserves our gratitude...

...it governs, too, the little supportive rituals without whose mercies "unsatisfactory persons would be left to bleed to death from the conversational savageries performed on them...

...reminds us what our everything is, and then reminds us that this everything is not very much...

...More than any social scientist I know who is constantly touching the subtlest and most intimate details of social life, Goffman's efforts to speak truly and precisely are least compromised by moral posturings, knowing leers, or other vulgar ego trips, and given the temptations of his material, that is itself a sort of moral triumph...

...Or, when Grayson Kirk looks at the shambles of his trashed presidential office at Columbia University after the 1968 trouble, and piously cries, "My God, how could human beings do a thing like this...

...But that sympathy seems based less on the political justice of the women's cause than on the fact that the movement is genuinely of sociological interest for much the same reason the insane are: it threatens the traditional assumptions that govern orderly interaction between categories of persons—in this case between the sexes...

...More recent rejoinders have attempted to claim Goffman as a resource for the Left by pointing out his sympathy for the afflicted and the stigmatized, for underdogs like mental patients...

...Thus is the categorical imperative disposed of...

...There is a little Nietzsche somewhere in Goffman, a moral adventurer 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...

...I don't mean to suggest that he is calculatedly cynical about this, but Goffman is as skilled a player of the sociology game as he is a student of the power of social organization (including the organizations of social science) to strip a person of almost everything he or she is...

...And our being deprived of their routine use can produce much the same feeling of threat to personal and social order (hence political anxiety) as any other rip-off of personal property, for example the way a burglary (regardless of the value of what is stolen) can threaten one's taken-for-granted sense of the sanctity of one's own home, then produce anxiety about the viability of elemental social order, and finally political fear and outrage...

...It is as if he were personally grateful to them for having taught him something about the rules of behavior normal people depend upon...

...Goffman's political remarks, then, are almost always cast in an abstruse theoretical frame from which no consistent political position can be inferred...

...358 BOOKS thing important...

...or Gothic...

...And then, as if he had thought about it for a moment, suggested that the interests of liberated men were tied to the liberation of women they regarded as peers...

...The initiator undertakes to be tentative enough and discourageable enough so that if he is to be rejected, this can be done delicately, by indirection, as it were, allowing him to maintain the line that no overture had been intended...

...What is there to say about Erving Goffman after uttering some helpless gasps about his brilliance...

...But I think they have something to do with grace and with blessedness, with roughness in the service of delicacy and delicacy in the service of truth...

...the aristocratic Ortega y Gasset, who hated and feared the rise of the masses, recommended the extension of higher education to them...

...BOOKS 357 And why he will travel long distances (and sometimes even pay his own way) to do a colloquium for his peers, but will not give a public lecture except for a high fee...

...Well, all right, Goffman's imagination is Kafkaesque...

...AT THE BEGINNING of Relations in Public, Goffman asserts his "seriousness" as a thinker by saying that his aim is to establish the study of interaction practice as a field in itself rather than as a grab bag of empirical illustrations for other fields...

...Of all the "remarks" one might make after observing the eyes of a luncher civilly inattentive to the tits of a topless waitress hovering over his plate, Goffman says only, "When bodies are naked, glances are clothed...

...Goffman can often be found there at the negotiations, bearing neither deodorant nor dry towels nor any other comfort for the clammy...

...His interests are involved, his sexual interests obviously, and his professional interests as well because to the extent that Women's Liberation successfully effects changes in the subtle definitions of female ascribed status, the movement will be affecting the rules of co-mingling, and it is Goffman's business to be aware of such changes...

...And he seems to derogate the antics of Yippies (apparently because they seem so smugly pleased with their status as mind-blowers) by reminding them that even "revolutionary decorum" must rely on "shared idiom"—telling them, in effect, that they're not so damned far-out as they are pleased to think...

...Goffman's "political" response is to say that the real question is, "how is it that human beings do this sort of thing so rarely...

...Certainly he knows that there are political meanings and consequences in such observance, and he has not ignored them...

...I think it is the old role distance working in him, telling us that however "important" a figure his works enable him to become, he will never lose the outsider's lurking knowledge that it is all some grisly game to which his gifts just happen to have been brought at the right time and in the right place...

...The Left...

...practitioners of the put-down for much the same reasons that movie hard-guys must occasionally contend with barroom toughs testing their macho...

...2 An exquisite morality: he respects the rule-breaking of the insane because he honors their deviance with the power to threaten meaningful existence...

...and also because his interests are involved...

...I think that Goffman's enamor of orderliness and precision may be his way of portraying an advocable relationship to the negative judgment of those social scientists who would derogate the kind of thing he does brilliantly as "soft," merely insightful, merely humanistic, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

...His answer was typical Goffman: "Yes, but you won't sell it...

...Goffman's prose is often melancholy, almost French...

...Goffman's gifts are more subtle...

...he is correct...

...BUT obsessed as he is with the microstructure of social order, Goffman has none of the conservative's piety about Rules...

...But the pedantic "A radical ethnography must take ordinary persons doing ordinary things...

...The quotation has both Goffmanian insight and rigor...

...A radical ethnography must take ordinary persons doing ordinary things as the central issue...

...Like everything else, rigor has its price, and in the marketplace of science the point is always not to pay too much for it...

...I had the impulse recently to say to a group of sociologists we were bantering with: be good to him, he's the only genius we've got, and we ought to cherish him while he's still here with us...

...His question, after all, is only a specification of "the Hobbesian question"—how is social order possible?—a favorite theoretical question that has consistently commanded not only Goffman's attention but the attention of the most conservative social scientists, for whom order itself is a fragile, precious, and mysterious achievement...

...Goffman has always been interested in acceptable reasons...

...Then there are the solemn ones who admire his ethnographic rigor but sometimes forget about the payoffs (i.e., fresh truth, new understanding) of such attention to detail...

...We went along...

...How come persons in authority have been so overwhelmingly successful in conning those beBOOKS 355 neath them into keeping the hell out of their offices...

...Goffman has never been less than candid about his interest in selling it, and in reaping the optimal profit from his work...

...he won't talk down...

...no single scholar can...

...the relevance of one of his analytic categories ("stalls") is weakened...

...The individual can mark his freedom and his alienation by demonstrating an unaccepting relation to...

...He is constantly putting his scientific discipline to the test of emotionally volatile facts that would reduce most other writers to orgies of hortatory indignance or sonorous affirmation...

...The solution is strategic tact...

...In addition to holding his political admirers at bay, it may be that his attempts at exhaustiveness with respect to the possible variations and conditions of the phenomena which get his attention express his desire to be regarded as a theorist—perhaps to avoid the reputational fate of Georg Simmel (with whose gift of insight his own is often compared) : brilliant and all that, of course, but not really a theorist, i.e., not really systematic...

...for, by taking these risks, he is helping to bring the image of sociological man (heretofore pretty dowdy) up-to-date, and to make him recognizably kin to the image of man that has Iong been prevalent in modern art...

...It is not for nothing that Goffman's favorite sources include Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt (for "manners," like art, religion, and symbols of nationality, are part of the expressive culture, and offenses to even the most apparently trivial of manners may evoke feelings—and sanctions —as strong as those evoked by offenses to those nobler institutions), or that he is sometimes compared to novelists of manners who are concerned with revealing how people struggle with these social forms to get their self-work done...

...Fashionably Zen-ish...

...But he says also that in many circumstances rule-breaking doesn't appreciably undermine the support that others give to the rules: in fact, pure self-interest should lead the individual to encourage others to guide their conduct by an image of what would happen were everyone to cease to support the rule, and while thus encouraging the others, he himself should quietly disregard the rule...

...But anthropologists, who do their field observations in faraway places with strange-sounding names, can rely on the unfamiliarity of ordinary Islanders doing ordinary things, in order to sustain the interest of Mainland readers...

...Public places are defamed, and it is as if their defamation were a personal insult to the delicate care he has devoted to studying them...

...as always, the attitude is clinical, detached, morally ambiguous...

...Back again on the "liberal" side, Goffman has shown much interest in and sympathy for the modern Feminist movement...

...Goffman asks his readers to accuse him of laconicity rather than morality, and he is usually at some pains to avoid being identified as a believer in this or that moral or political cause for the reasons usually espoused in behalf of it...

...An interesting and original thinker like Paul Lazarsfeld left to the survey research institutes of the world an intellectual style that C. Wright Mills characterized as "abstracted empiricism...

...status as victims of family collusion or institutional barbarism, nor on a Laingian appreciation of the superior reality of schizophrenic modes...

...Still, and however, it would be a mistake to infer from this sympathy for moral deviants any generally favorable predisposition on his part toward those groups who would make cultural or political capital out of such deviance...

...Goffman is interested in the history of the struggle to achieve that apparently easy order: To walk, to cross a road, to utter a complete sentence, to wear long pants, to tie one's own shoes, to add a column of figures—all these routines that allow the individual unthinking, competent performances were attained through an acquisition process whose early stages were negotiated in a cold sweat...

...His preoccupations are with what anyone can see, but usually doesn't unless he looks carefully and with fresh eyes...

...he is there appraising the quality of the perspiration, classifying its chemical composition, cataloguing the conditions of its secretion, sniffing the air to check the comparability of the aroma from one case to the next...

...As a maker of terse political remarks rather than a pleader of doctrinal causes, Goffman usually seems guarded against the possibility of being ideologically harvested by those political growers who for one reason or another think they have found in the words he has sown some ground for believing that he might be ripe for picking...

...With good reason...

...And the recipient, when desiring to encourage an overture does so in a manner that can be seen as mere friendliness should the need arise to fall back on that interpretation...

...that theory provides...

...as if the dutiful dullness of his typologies were somehow a credential for his seriousness as a thinker, the price he feels it necessary to pay to neutralize those who would derogate his achievement as mere brilliance...

...A phrase: "City streets, even in times that defame them...

...It began a few years ago with some devaluation by Alvin Gouldner, who criticized Goffman in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology for his failure to deal explicitly with the political conditions of social interaction: how the greater power and wealth of some people give them greater access to favorable self-presentation...

...Impulse," he said, then, "but once you do something, you've got to begin to think about it...

...not simply his "insight" (there are lots of keen observers around) but the delicacy of his management of it, his persistent abstention from the heavy hand...

...buys trouble...

...Marx and Trotsky, the communist revolutionaries, had bourgeois tastes in art, and the anarchist Paul Goodman described himself late as a "neolithic conservative...

...the recipient exposes herself to providing personal evidence of another's desirability without obtaining the relationship that is the usual safeguard of this admission...

...Goffman writing about the surfaces of human contact reminds one of Gide saying, "The deepest thing in man is his skin...

...Goffman's gift is a gift of grace, a blessing, and a burden that no teacher can be expected to transmit successfully to his students (although sometimes this happens), however severe he is in his demands on them (and Goffman, who is by reputation a notoriously severe grader, once said that he gave As only to students who taught him something —which is not a bad criterion...

...Goffman almost never winks at his readers or elbows them in the ribs...

...For $30,000 and one seminar a year," was his answer, which may not have been why he went but is surely an acceptable reason...

...Stendhal offended some of his bohemian heirs by believing that a creative artist's first responsibility was to have an adequate income...

...The facts he deals with in his most recent book, Relations in Public, are the ones he has always dealt with, the stuff of elementary sociology: the fundamental units of social structure, selves, norms, roles, interaction between face-to-face individuals, the rules of "co-mingling" in public places...

...And, like those "rigorous" quantitative sociologists who choose their studies in order to demonstrate the power of their research technologies, "rigorous" ethnographers may produce the most pedestrian accounts of "ordinary people doing ordinary things" with the smug satisfaction that they have been "phenomenologically true" to the data, content with the achievement of having not prematurely imposed any preconceptions of their own...

...It governs the accounts and the apologies offered and received by offenders and offended when the engine of interaction develops knocks and pings, and requires remedial attention...

...I think not...

...The Right...

...the costs he bears are very high...

...In Relations in Public, ceremonial observance governs individuals as "vehicular units" going to and fro in the world and up and down in it, and as "participation units" ("singles" and "withs") communicating evidence about who they are to unknown others...

...suggests that his interest is more in the violation done to public places than in the direct injury done to individual beings...

...There are those who admire Goffman for his sensitivity to nuance but who ape his style of "insight" for undignified reasons: to be arch, knowing, sophisticated, one-up...

...His doing so...

...The most disruptive thing a person can do is fail to keep the place that others feel can't be changed for him...

...he will not be banal...

...But Goffman is at a disadvantage here because his important gifts are not easily transmitted, not easily taught to others in the way, for example, that the gifts of sociologists like Lipset or Lazarsfeld are...

...a Faustian flirtation in which the Renaissance Devil is replaced by postmodern diagnosticians of madness...

...But at least he must be at pains to portray an advocable relationship to the negative judgment of him which results...

...They are the qualitative abstracted empiricists...

...and the robes of empirical rigor and logical exhaustiveness are sufficiently regal to induce the barons of social science to see that even underneath the purple this particular emperor has very fine clothes indeed...

...Social life (and that includes life as a sociologist) can be a dangerous game, and if one chooses to play riskily, as Goffman does, one might as well be good at it...

...not that it is "necessary to look into the darkness of their souls in order to learn about the darkness of our own," but in order to transform the sunny familiar country of ordinary persons doing ordinary things into a fluorescent stage on which Smiths and Joneses do very strange things indeed, like tip their hats and say "pleased to meet you...

...Goffman loves the streets and loves to think analytically about the organization of public places...

...It is as if Goffman needed the "distance" (dis-tance...

...Let's take Goffman at his word: ceremonial observance governs...

...A second-rate imitator of Lipset or Lazarsfeld can still do decent and useful work because they have technical skills to teach...

...Like Max Weber, Goffman, has a strong sense of decency and propriety, without any cognitive grounds for believing that his sense is any better than anyone else's...

...has ever had, and continues to have, the largest share in regulating men's lives...

...Nowhere a partridge in a pear tree...

...how greasy and creamy foods contaminate the hands but not the mouth, why elbows are the least "private parts" of the body, why "A person with carcinoma of the bladder can, if he wants, die with more social grace and propriety . . . than a man with a harelip can order a piece of pie...

...he won't draw morally comforting inferences...

...If Burke, Ortega y Gasset, Marx, Trotsky, and Goodman, all of whom were explicitly involved in politics, cannot be depended upon to fullfill the expectations of partisan interests, this can even less be expected of Goffman, who has never to my knowledge shown any sustained interest in movement politics...

...Goffman is a careful and discreet merchant, and he has enough confidence in the high quality of his goods that he can afford to be candid and modest in the methodological claims he makes for them...

...It tends to mean two things and describe two kinds of sociologists...

...But it is clearly mistaken to infer from his occasional political feints and jabs any strong desire to aim a knockout punch for doctrinal reasons on behalf of the oppressed at any heavyweight establishment...

...But without Goffman's own fine sensibility and disciplined taste, "Goffmanian" insight and rigor are each vulnerable to a peculiar form of vulgarization...

...The importance of these strays is...

...What a remarkable thing to say for a man who has devoted a whole career, an oeuvre, to this "not very much...

...Is he being piously modest...

...expectations regarding conduct .. . but however skittish he might be about behaving properly, he nonetheless takes care to have some behavioral reply ready in any situation where circumstances have called him into question...