social margins – GV Loewen

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.

My Encounter with Leni Riefenstahl

The deep contempt with which the still noble world of antiquity treated the Christian belongs just where the instinctual repugnance for the Jews belongs today: it is the hatred of the free and self-confident classes for those who make their way forward unobtrusively and combine shy, awkward gestures with an absurd sense of self-worth. (Nietzsche, notebook 10, Autumn, 1887, italics original).

In the spring of 1995 I shared some BC ferry seats with German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and her long time partner Horst Kettner. They were simply two unobtrusive members of a large tour bus filled with Germans visiting Vancouver Island. What little of the language I had at the time told me they were discussing local scuba diving and underwater marine film, which was then the vogue in her varied film making career. We stared at one another for a few moments when we debarked but I was far too shy to say anything, assuming her English was as poor as was my French. I had seen, a few months beforehand, the documentary ‘Power of the Image’ which was an awkward biography of her professional life, though it allowed me to immediately identify them aside from the conversation at hand. Knowing who she was imparted to her a presence that no one else in my experience has possessed. Of course, this was as much a projection as anything to do with a larger history. I was so taken aback at this encounter that I spoke of it with no one for many years, and it faded from memory.

But it ‘never goes away’, just as Sir Ian McKellen’s character in Stephen King’s ‘Apt Pupil’ reminded the young protagonist regarding fascist yearnings. That hour or so on the ferry was silently awkward and in the end, irrelevant to anything in my personal life at the time. Now, a quarter century later and some seventeen years after her death in 2003, I only find myself returning to it given my own recent work on the fascism of meanings in fantasy writing and in liberal humanistic philosophy. I never had agreed with Sontag, whom I use regularly as a source, that Riefenstahl’s directing somehow embodied the so-called ‘fascist aesthetic’. No, we do, as a whole, embody such a form. The sub-title to the 2-part ‘Olympia’, Riefenstahl’s film devoted to the 1936 Summer Games – the version that invented the torch run, amongst other ongoing things – is loosely given as ‘festival (or celebration) of peoples, festival of beauty’ which is essentially what the Olympics are and have always been. Riefenstahl nailed it because she herself as a youth had embodied these qualities, as judged by the esthetics of the time. Not, aesthetics, which is the more serious and formal term for the philosophical study of art forms. There is no fascist ‘aesthetic’, even as there remains an undeniable fascist esthetic – the look of beauty, its identity, its genders, its glamor and the ressentiment that attends to its every move. The supermodel of today is the Christian of the first century Levant, the fashion critic, the Jew.

Nietzsche’s texts were notoriously reconstituted by the Reich, but not all his work needed such over-writing. Hitler was both shy, awkward, and oddly unassuming, in both his sensibilities and in his gestures. They come across today as absurdities, and John Cleese makes a better ‘Mr. Hilter’ than did Hitler himself. Daily overcoming social anxiety, Hitler memorized his speeches, endlessly practicing his body language and facial expressions in front of the mirror, and one can only imagine resenting his inconsequential stature, provincial birthright and all the rest of it. It is a feeling that many of us must also overcome, for who is born at the center of things who then seeks to become the center of everything?

Man to woman, someone like Hitler could never have landed a date with someone like Riefenstahl, one of the dream-girls of her day. And yet history brought them together and sometimes in close quarters. Hitler, with just that ‘absurd sense of self worth’ imagined he understood art, and he certainly put much energy into what abilities he did have – his watercolor renderings were decent for an architectural student though very much out of fashion when in 1907, he was rejected in favor of Oskar Kokoschka in the entrance competition to the Vienna art academy – and ‘aesthetics’ dominated the Reich from its attempts at stolen nobility right down to its very uttermost depths of human evil. Yet this too, the ‘saving’ of the world by eliminating those who stain it, remains with us. In this current era of renewed naissance of nationalism and patriotism of party, are we not embodying something rather more than just the look of what is deemed to be beautiful?

It almost seems that none of the larger geopolitical lessons of the second World War have stuck with us, and we are approaching a biographical threshold over which an absence proclaims itself: that no one living will have lived through that now alien period. It is a limen that creates history out of what was until that point still memory. It is, from the perspective of human experience that can be personally and intimately shared, a most dangerous moment. The only response we have to confront this aleatory lacunae is by way of art. Riefenstahl’s service was more than regrettable, but her films themselves remain as relevant as ever. But not in that they in turn served to help convince many Germans of the time that their path had become one of super-destiny and that the ‘natural’ form of response to any ‘lower’ form was contempt, just as Nietzsche had suggested some half-century earlier.

Though in the intervening decades it was the German social scientist Max Weber who corrected Nietzsche’s perhaps metaphoric language regarding the origins of Christianity and its relationship with the ancient Hebrews – in the Roman Mediterranean, Christianity was actually sourced in the artisan classes and spread upwards from there, not downwards; it was not a ‘slave religion’ in any real sense – such an understanding could only direct further obloquy against the ‘pariah community’ of the nascent Jewish diaspora. With further irony, Hitler’s movement was limited to awkwardly skulking along politically for over a decade. Historically, one can as ever hope that the same may be said of it; a moment when human reason took a recess. But this is naïve.

What are the movements of the margins in our own time? Who is attracted to them and why? Where do they arise and how? And are they merely nostalgic retreads of lost historical causes or are they rather symptoms of a society and a world that continues to structure its life and consciousness too closely to that which allowed fascism to grasp the center of things to its paltry self before being superseded by the slightly more subtle neo-colonial ambitions of the victorious powers?

At once, we can do two things, each of us: one, the next time we are tempted to look with contempt at another human being, step back from doing so. No one person can be the lightning rod for historical ressentiment. Riefenstahl neither as an artist nor as a person can be accountable for the way that I might stare down my nose at the so-called ‘ignoble’ of humanity. And two, we must recognize that our shared contempt for those whose marginal existences has driven them to entertain the worst of our humanity can only aid their cause. Instead, we can yet take both core principles of Judaism and Christianity to be our guides; the one, that we as a species are and remain the ‘chosen people’, and the other, that we are thence placed in the existential position of having to choose one another through the act of the neighbor. It is only through this act, the ‘libertinage of compassion’, that our world will survive itself, let alone its lack of memory of the chance encounters through which historical consciousness is in majority made.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.