Exploring a Shadow World

Man as a social being divides his allegiance among a wide assortment of groups. The state, of course, is one, the family another. In between, there wheels a boundless galaxy of personal commitments and involvements, from the church committee to the golf club, all of which make rival membership claims on the individual and also serve to define who, what and where he is.

None may be more important to life than the type of event that Sociologist Erving Goffman calls "gatherings." These human groupings are often so fleeting and informal as to be unrecognizable as social functions--a ride in an elevator, two strangers passing on the street. They also include such emphatic events as the cocktail party. No less than the state and the family, the gathering has its own rules and laws. It is Goffman's contention that without the implicit obedience that these laws of behavior systematically command, the grander and more visible forms of human association would probably be unworkable. Society itself might fall apart.

Transgressing the Order. "More than to any family or club," writes Goffman in his book Behavior in Public Places, "more than to any class or sex, more than to any nation, the individual belongs to gatherings, and he had best show that he is a member in good standing. Just as we fill our jails with those who transgress the legal order, so we partly fill our asylums with those who act unsuitably--the first kind of institution being used to protect our lives and property; the second, to protect our gatherings and occasions."

Goffman has developed this proposition in six books.* They have cemented his reputation as one of the most illuminating--and disturbing--cartographers of that shadowy terrain where man plays at being a social animal without fully understanding exactly what he is doing. Some sense of the disquieting Goffman perspective can be gained from his elliptical revisions of prevailing human values, which are sown Like land mines through his books. Social man is not an entity but "a dramatic effect"; all social encounters are theatrical performances. In a marriage proposal, the suitor, who may think that he is swearing his love, "sums up his social attributes and suggests to a woman that hers are not so much better as to preclude a merger."

Tranquil Sleep. The same unsettling effect is produced by the Swiftian irony that Goffman brings to his appraisal of the human scene. To him, a hanging is a social event, circumscribed, just like a one-day sale or a picnic, by rules calculated to make the performance go smoothly. For this reason, he says, a "table of drops" based on body weight was worked out by long experience "so that the length of the free fall would neither leave the man to wriggle nor tear off his head." The true stagecraft of a funeral, says Goffman, is found "backstage," away from the flower-bedecked parlor. "If the bereaved are to be given the illusion that the dead one is really in a deep and tranquil sleep, then the undertaker must be able to keep the bereaved from the workroom where the corpses are drained, stuffed and painted for their final performance."

Goffman's thesis--he declines to call it a theory--rests on a fundamental assumption: all rational human beings share, without necessarily knowing that they do, a desire for public order. Society is founded on an unspoken mutual trust. The pedestrian assumes, without thinking, that the driver has no motive for running him down. Instead of fatally beating a fellow passenger who has borrowed his newspaper, the commuter can be expected to limit his objections to words or gestures directed at recovering his property.

As dissembled by Goffman, any social occasion takes on the convoluted determinism of a chess game, in which the moves vary widely but follow strict and unforgiving rules. For example, a man in an office answers his phone. While he is talking, what should his office visitor do? The rules forbid listening. They also forbid just sitting there doing nothing, which could support the suspicion that he is listening. So the visitor studiously exhibits what Goffman calls "civil inattention." Unable to avoid overhearing one side of the phone conversation, he feigns another activity--gazing out the window, ostentatiously lighting and puffing a cigarette--thus conveying or seeking to convey the impression that his attention is directed elsewhere.

Sympathetic Smile. Such behavior indicates a considerable dependence on the complicity of the audience, which is expected to accept the performance at its face rather than at its true value. In considerate society, the audience seldom lets the performer down--in part, as Goffman repeatedly notes, because the roles of performer and audience interlock. A man rushing for the bus dons a sheepish smile to indicate his awareness of how silly he looks. His observers reward his performance--that is, the smile--by smiling sympathetically back. With this response, they become performers, and the bus chaser becomes the audience.

The penalties for breaking the rules can be serious. Even minor infractions provoke them. Goffman has described the restrictions imposed on suitable behavior in the rain. A man in a trench-coat will naturally pass muster. So will one who is coatless, as long as he suggests by his deportment--hunched shoulders, an impromptu newspaper umbrella--that he is alive to his predicament. So will arm-locked young lovers, sublimely indifferent to their drenching. But someone who walks along unprotected and apparently unaware of the downpour is likely to evoke a startled and uneasy response.

The reason, says Goffman, is that he offends the hidden code of behavior to which all "normal" people subscribe. The man oblivious to the rain is guilty not just of a trivial impropriety, but of the greater sin of social unpredictability. No one can guess with any assurance what ceremony he will next profane. No one can be sure of his respect of public order, without which society would regress to the jungle. Goffman is still exploring the patterns of behavior at social gatherings, which he believes have all the systematic qualities of a language. He is also at work on another book that will apply his own experience as a Twenty-one dealer in Las Vegas to the social milieu of a gambling casino.

Broken Rules. Goffman's search for the key to this nonverbal language began at the University of Chicago. Born 46 years ago, in Mannville, Alberta, the son of a dry-goods merchant, he graduated from the University of Toronto and went to Chicago for dissertation work in sociology. There he came under the influence, which he fully acknowledges, of Charles Horton Cooley and G. H. Mead, whose theories on personal interaction, small groups and the social character of the self still inform sociology courses. An energetic and devoted scholar who avoids formal social gatherings, Goffman is currently a research professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1955, before joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Goffman spent a year of research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His experiences there, recorded in Asylums, strongly affected his developing theories on social behavior. Goffman's understanding of mental patients borrows more from the unwritten rules of social occasions than from psychiatric theory. In his opinion, many inmates are simply people who have so flagrantly broken the rules of seemly behavior that they have been dismissed from the game. "I know of no psychotic misconduct," Goffman has written, "that cannot be matched precisely in everyday life by the conduct of persons who are not psychologically ill nor considered to be so." Life in mental hospitals--"storage dumps" is one of his kindlier descriptions--also has its rituals. The patient who throws feces at an attendant, Goffman argues, is using a ceremonial idiom "that is as exquisite in its way as a bow from the waist. Whether he knows it or not, the patient speaks the same ritual language as his captors; he merely says what they do not wish to hear."

Eclectic Scholar. Such mordant views have made Goffman something of a maverick in his field. His work has been attacked as overspeculative, his scholarship as too eclectic; in illustrating a point, he is as likely to quote from a novel as from a sociological text. Goffman has also been accused of insulating his theories with purely supportive evidence. Then too, there may be some unexpressed envy on the part of his sociological peers about the fact that Goffman can write well; although his books have pages of jargon, they are enlightened with passages of dazzling clarity and wit.

Even his critics concede that Goffman has skillfully explored an area of life that has until now been both neglected and misunderstood. "The individual is known by the social bonds that hold him," writes Goffman in Behavior in Public Places. "And through these bonds he is held to something that is a social entity with a life substance of its own." However trivial social exchange may seem at the levels Goffman examines, "it is out of these unpromising materials that the gossamer reality of social occasions is built. We find that our little inhibitions are carefully tied into a network, that the waste products of our serious activities are worked into a pattern, and that this network and this pattern are made to carry important social functions. Surely this is a credit to the thoroughness with which our lives are pressed into the service of society."

*Besides Behavior, they include: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, Encounters, Stigma and Interaction Ritual.

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