fieldwork – GV Loewen

Tales of Goffman

Tales of Goffman (my nominal contributions to microsociology)

It was my surpassing good fortune to be trained in the human sciences by a student of both Erving Goffman and Talcott Parsons, one Elvi Whittaker, who herself went on to become a well-known feminist thinker who wrote in epistemology and institutional ethnography, among other areas. Goffman and Parsons remain two of the most important post-war social scientists, but though my theoretical work bears the imprint of both, my fieldwork is almost wholly Goffmanesque in style and in content. The first social scientist to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, Goffman was as impressively insightful about the human condition as he was notoriously retiring. He was impossibly shy about being photographed, for instance, and the one well-known shot of him, sitting somewhat bemusedly at his desk on campus, betrays a sense of both diffidence but also hurt feelings. Goffman’s ground-breaking studies in dramaturgy, stigma, the presentation of self, and the sensibilities governing our conceptions of public and private, among much else, provided our own time with invaluable introspection into the very soul of enacted modernity.

Goffman placed himself in the social contexts wherein how society defined its margins could come to light. His work in mental asylums, during the final phase of their systemic existence, generated the skeleton key to many puzzles within symbolic interactionism. The conflict among ideals in practice is arguably the most important. Persons must sacrifice one ideal in order to uphold another; no social context can contain all of society’s ideals. This single yet singular realization opens up our entire worldview. Goffman illustrated the hypocrisies of holding to ideals in spite of the glaring absence of practicing what we preached, but this was only the first step. His patently American pragmatism held sway over all of his diverse studies, coupled with a rather Durkheimian sense of form and function. Choosing amongst conflicting ideals presents the fully socialized member of this or that culture with one of life’s most difficult challenges. Second to this, the performance of a public selfhood, at times overextending one’s own sense of who one is, and at other times in full retreat from it, was the other major challenge to the modern person. This intimate disclosure of Dasein to itself through observing our behaviors along the boundaries of what keeps society itself cohesive, is at times disturbing, while also regularly amusing. Society is both a comedy and tragedy of errata, played out on a shifting stage, ‘each another’s audience’, if you will, and more than this, a display of who can best police themselves.

In my two decades of fieldwork, I rather unknowingly replicated not only Goffman’s methods, but also his focus on marginal arenas of day to day life. After an epistemologically oriented dissertation, I found myself in cultural regions wherein the entirety of the social fabric was in a strong sense itself a margin. In the rural American Southeast and Midwest I studied Civil War reenactors and UFO cult members, as well as the BDSM sexual theater. Back in Canada I studied artists and then medical practitioners who had presented their careers as iconoclastic to various applied science and clinical discourses. Throughout this time I had been compiling hundreds of interviews and vignettes of those who believed they had encountered, or had more intimate relationships, with the paranormal. Most recently, I authored a study of youth who make or had made illicit pornography. Each of these eight qualitative works were the first of their kind, but their combined force was not so novel. The resonance of Goffman was present throughout both their respective dynamics and the analyses which followed.

Why do people sometime flock to the very margins of their society? How does participating or yet believing in a set of contrasting ideals, often set up in knowing opposition to the ‘mainstream’, help make their lives more fulfilling? Time and again the responses ran along these lines: ‘What society does to me and expects of me is not the same thing as who I am. The what that society needs is not the who which I need.’ If this sounds like a position realizing Enlightenment sovereignty of selfhood, an authenticity of Dasein, such a sense is premature. Perhaps it is along the way to authenticity, but Goffman would be the first to note that all of these people, denizens of whatever sectarian segment, have merely traded one what for another what; they have cast aside, temporarily in most cases, their everyday selfhood for an alternative self-image as defined by like-minded others. And just as the wider society must contain all persons, however conflicting they may be in their private druthers, subcultures and sects, cults and associations, replicate both the means and methods of the very society that has given them a somewhat morganatic birth. Goffman was very clear in revealing that social margins are the very mirrors of the center of culture; they may diffract and refract it, but their generally only slightly skewed vision has no other basis.

This umbrella insight is of the greatest import for us today, cast as we are into an accelerating political culture that appears to seek out conflict rather than dissuade it. For we live in a time when the margins of the polis and its spectrum of ideals have once again come to the fore. What I myself found in the fields, as diverse as they were in their respective subcultural contents, was that in-group members felt they had a firmer grip on ‘the truth’ of things, and were so empowered only due to their full participation in their otherwise quite marginal interests. From the physicians who studied Wilhelm Reich and his ‘cosmic orgone’ apparatuses – some even had built replicas thereof – to the erotistes whose chief goal in recreative life was to make sure others felt as much ecstatic pain as possible, to the ghost-hunters who were actually looking for their own deceased relatives and instead finding everyone else’s, there was ever a palpable urgency that this deeper truth be revealed and to all.

This sensibility – that what society offers us as Erfahrung is both incomplete and even a sham when compared with the Erlebnis of personal venture and adventure the both – is also quite revealing. It suggests strongly that many persons feel that what they have been taught, either formally through institutional enrollment, or informally from family and friends or others, somehow exists to cover over a more germinal knowing. There is an official view of things, born of necessity and tradition, and one that is sourced in wisdom alone. But wisdom, in Goffman’s view, is but a hallmark of the hall of perspectivist mirrors which society can alone provide. However ironic this may be, it is this which is in fact the ‘deeper’ truth. There is no Gödelian third position, outside of the Saussurean strings and streams of signifiers, and from which one can justifiably say that I have eaten the apple of transcendental knowing, and by this I am become Eden’s Gnostic.

For some theoretically inclined social scientists and others, this remains Goffman’s most important contribution to modern discourse. There is a whimsical set of ‘sports’ collectors cards featuring well-known social theorists – I am not among them, needless to say – and the buy-line on the back of Goffman’s states that ‘he accidently invented postmodernism’. Between his version of dramaturgical analysis – Jung’s is the only other postwar effort that could be said to match it – his Pharmakon of conflicting ideals differing and deferring amongst one another, and his sense that ‘Gödel is Right!’, to borrow from Henze’s violin concerto tribute to the mathematician, it is not an unreasonable statement for all that. I prefer to leave the term ‘postmodern’ to the school of architects who in fact invented it, but either way, Goffman’s very public parallax of sociological insights remains second to none during the postwar period. It is astonishing today, when popular culture, not to mention that academic, almost appears afraid of any kind of critical analysis, that Goffman should have been so celebrated during his own time. As they saw Bertrand Russell, the baby boom youth also viewed Goffman as one of the enlightened elders and as such, an ally of revolution. A generational compatriot of Goffman, Henze’s own slogan, that ‘Man’s greatest work of art: world revolution’, does not, however, echo in the former’s own works. Social science is, after all, not art, nor is it a politics, as it has of late been compelled to lower itself into becoming.

When one compares the greatest of artist’s personal mottos, they define not only the person but the entire cultural demographic of which they are the highest representatives. The Romantic period saw Beethoven’s ‘From Adversity to the Stars’, the fin de siècle witnessed Mahler’s ‘To live, I shall die’, and of course, the postwar angst of revealed horror and authoritarian echo gave birth to Henze’s appropriate valediction. Goffman uttered no such concise and summative statement. Not an artist let alone a composer on the side of authenticity, and not a politician batting for the shallower side, Goffman discovered that a person’s most visionary dreams were the result of a complex web of social interactions, into which we are thrown from birth and within which we each must thence find our birthright. In this deeper sense, I found nothing whatsoever in my field studies which departed from Goffman’s major ideas. What I did find was that the proliferation of alternative culture-crafts was a response to the increasingly alienating quality of what was judged to be the mainstream of social life. That this ‘mainstream’ was not to be regarded as the mainspring of a human life was the motto of each community of esthetes I encountered and for a time, tried to understand.

But there is neither solace nor salvation in Goffman’s work. Without either chaliced chagrin or Cheshire smirk, his enduring corpus of the very best human science has to offer its own subjects and objects at once, allows us to take a close look at ourselves and our actions, our beliefs and acts, perhaps in an unprecedented manner. And if there is sometimes a lack of individual and ethical humanity in those works, there is never an absence in humaneness in their analyses. There is no point to the existence of the sciences as a whole if it is not to better both our self-understanding as well as our knowledge of the universe abroad. The two, vastly separated in age and scale, are nevertheless intimately linked in a mutual imbrication and implication. For the cosmogony of the one is the beginning of the cosmology of the other.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Quest of the Question

The Quest of the Question (Well, you asked)

Greater glory in the sun,

An evening chill upon the air,

Bid imagination run

Much on the Great Questioner;

What He can question, what if questioned I

Can with fitting confidence reply.

W.B. Yeats (1928)

The ability to question is the residuum of faith. It is a uniquely human attribute, unknown to us in any other known creature. One presumes, upon asking a question of any variety, that there will at least be some sort of response. Even the proverbial ‘rhetorical’ question, favored by those who actually desire an absence of response, know that the queried has in fact already responded, and perhaps in kind. This is the element of faith in the question itself; that you will respond. And even if there are a variety of ways to characterize such responses as there may be, from answer to explanation, from retort to explication and so on, the essence of dialogue has been initiated. We are ‘throwing words across’ to one another, and more importantly, contributing, even in some minute manner, to the human conversation which is us.

I have spent my life asking questions. I was fortunate to have no memorably authoritarian teachers nor suchlike mentors, no mockery the result of my childhood, no lasting censure the lot of my adolescence. The one downside to all of this encouragement was that youth, as a matter of course, does not always know how to frame a question, nor even to ask ‘the right’ questions, as long as that is taken in the sense of there being more perceptive means at our disposal than at first glance, and very much not in any narrow sense of what is ‘proper’. For questioning is an act radical to deportment of all kinds. In a life phase where the internalization of the generalized other is front and center most of the time, the ability to question must be honed almost in the shadows. Long live the mentor who can guide a young person through these spaces, at once so close to our beings and yet distant in their dreams.

When I think of the over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork I accomplished, the hundreds of interviews both formal and informal, the sense that within each about another hundred actual queries may have been made – that’s ten thousand questions right there – I am struck with the forbearance shown by so many ‘informants’, as they used to be called in traditional methods courses. Now that said, it is the case that most people enjoy, or are at least willing, to talk about themselves, and who better to do so, we naturally imagine. Even so, the human scientist, pending his tenure, is ever edging closer to aspects of existence which most people take to be ‘personal’. And so the usual etiquette must be observed: ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’, which is, perhaps fittingly, already a personal query. Never have I had the response ‘You already have’, which the Mark Twain or Groucho Marx like wit would engender. But other, much more expected responses do abound: ‘Well, it would depend on what it is.’, or ‘Sure, but don’t expect me to answer it, or give you the answer you want’ (meaning that one’s answer might be incomplete or irrelevant), or, very commonly ‘Of course, fire away’ or the like. The response to this personal prequel depends very much upon the depth of one’s relationship, and this is so for both professional and private circumstance. The ungrammatical quality that typically characterizes the open response – ‘do you mind? Of course (I mind) – is brushed aside by both parties. Sometimes, pending class background, one receives a grammatically correct ‘not at all’, instead of an ‘of course’, but this too is trivial. When I taught methods for many years at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, I called attention to the picayune minutiae of interview technique only because that was what was called for in training, as it were. In the field, much of this drops away, as it tends to do for all strictly academic professionalization, be it in teaching or researching. This is the first lesson of fieldwork, in a sense; that what you already know will only return to aid your quest after the intensive disillusion of you knowing anything at all has concluded. Sometimes, this process takes years.

At the same time, I myself was trained in the generation after the classic if also ludicrous ethnographic pith helmet perception that all one needed was a pencil and a pad of paper and off you go! Yes, there’s always something to be said for adventure, and my sense of my student peers in graduate school was that the desire for excitement, one of the prime motivators for even engaging in fieldwork of any kind, was certainly present. But there is a line between having an adventure and ‘going native’, just as there is a corresponding line between asking an open-ended question in good faith and asking a leading question, the latter occupying a good deal of time in class, explaining to students how not to do so. In general, however, fieldwork produces discussion, dialogues, conversations, interlocutions, and never interrogations. Only the most incompetent researcher or journalist, police officer, doctor or other health care worker – and I have taught numerous of all of the above in my classes – distinguishes himself by his ineptly procedural questioning. Throwing words across is something primordial, and, as stated, makes human existence something distinct from any other known form of life. And while it might take a little bit of cajoling, or even some good-natured chicanery, to bring such a process out in the other, once this has been accomplished, the fieldworker always gets far more than she ever needed or indeed ever bargained for.

But there are other kinds of questions than those professionals need ask. There are literary questions, historical questions, questions of conscience, questions about the nature of existence and the perhaps overdone ‘cosmic’ questions to boot. It would be bad form to simply move from one to another as if in the end they could be so distinctly descried and ahead of time as well, but what I can do is speak to them as if I were speaking to their source, thereby mimicking the ethnographic process but better realizing the De Profundis of its meaning. The literary question revolves round the idea that what is not real can simulate reality so closely that the reader feels like they are living another life. This is the same question that animates ‘immersive’ video game scripts, something I have come to as a writer quite recently. Literature is not living in the same way that art is not life, but the fact that we desire it to accomplish an ‘as if’ for us and time again, speaks in turn to how we perceive our own actual lives. Thus the literary question opens itself onto that existential, and that historical, and through both wider apertures repeats itself with some essential insistence. The question of the future of the world, and we in it, is very much the same question as that of the world’s history as it can be known. But at once we are made aware that we have only asked of this history a certain kind of question, and perhaps it is time to change tacks. Feminism, at its best, is a shining example of this kind of movement, and phenomenology bases its entire discursive presence upon this same perception.

By far the most personally pressing type of question is that of conscience. Conscience is the ethical aspect of consciousness, a kind of interactive compass which, quite aside from marking out moral directions in their ideal cast, responds to the ways of said world and points ad hoc toward directions anew. Just so, for all the adventures a literary cast of heroes may have, ultimately the quest undertaken tests their respective consciences, far more than it does their combined skill sets or slowly evolving knowledge and experience. The lesson in the quest is thus a moral one, or, perhaps, an amoral one, but either way, it is not the world which is finally at stake but rather one’s conscience. Mostly unspoken, questions of conscience require self-reflection, meditation, and a kind of musement which departs from that aesthetic. This ‘silent dialogue’ within each of us as human beings participatory in the wider aspect of species-essence in language and language use, employs anxiety as a catalyst toward concernful being. But because that being must always be ‘in’ the world and at once in itself it must eschew the easier response of simply residing as an ‘in-itself’ – ‘its your world, I’m only living in it’ – and confront the much more challenging sense that I am in-dwelling as a Dasein in that world and thus also the world is of the closest-to-me without quite becoming a ‘mine ownmost’. If this is too turgid, think of it as a way of ferreting oneself into the puzzle of living in a world which is not our own, but to which we must cleave our desires and dreams alike. We do make the worlding of the world kindred to our thrown projects, just as we, as historical beings, write some small part of that world into its holistic history.

Any question promotes a momentary Gestaltkreis. It asks the other to focus her attention on it alone. It invites her into its solemn circle, and commits itself to hearing whatever response there may be. Because the question itself does not shy away from this indefinite finitude, my reply can indeed be uttered with a fitting confidence.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.