Little naked pangs of the self: the real performance of the self and the function of trust in Goffman's action theory

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss some of the leading features of Erving Goffman's action theory as an alternative to the ‘orthodox’ paradigms of sociology, viewed as a structuralist and functionalist science that defines social constructs by their shared rules and values, and as a drifting of action, in the sense of intention, toward an individualistic version. The author examines Goffman's shift of the focus of attention from the boundaries of a social sense of action to the social dialectic of ‘defining a situation’ (W. Thomas) as conducted by the social actors in a renewal of Simmel's ‘empowering covenants’ (wechselwirkung) in the multiple casual social connections that make up the ‘social buzz’ in a society. The author moreover discusses Goffman's action as a kind of playacting regulating cognitive and expressive face-to-face ‘traffic’ between the social actors. This relational dynamic creates an interactive play based on encounters – in which one's opening to another is fraught with risks of deception – regulated by trust as a central resource for social interactions. Trust, in its interpersonal and systemic variants, constitutes a universal social datum and an elementary precondition for social exchanges and the cooperation between individuals. Trust, thus, functions as comparer between reciprocal expectations and a regulator of freedom tending to the stability of the social system.

Keywords:

• interpersonal and social trust
• shared sense of interaction
• action's ‘qualifying conventions’
• deal in moral principles
• dynamics of self
• detachment from the role

Notes

1. On Goffman's theoretical influences see Giglioli (1990a, pp. 26–32).

2. Weber (1922 [1974], p. 4), translated into Italian by T. Bagiotti, F. Casabianca, P. Chiodi, E. Fubini, G. Giordano, P. Rossi.

3. The use of an ecological perspective in his argument, which Goffman translated into face-to-face interaction, comes from his association with the theorists of urban space Burgess, Park, Wirth. On the other hand, spatial perspective is present in his work from the beginning; on the modality of public relations in a metropolis, see Goffmann 1971 and 1981.

4. Goffman (1983). The status of sociology as an ‘infirm science’ is confirmed by a refined social analyst who, like Hume, remembers that the causal attribution constitutes the ‘cement of the universe’ in the few basic ideas in physics to which not even chemistry can give answers, because it lacks simple predictive principles, while ‘social sciences today cannot aspire to be more than a social chemistry: inductive generalisations that keep strictly to phenomena. The time of social physics has not yet come and may never come’ (Elster 1995, p. 11, emphasis mine). One can wonder at the reference to a physique sociale à la Comte in the understanding of the reality of a social object that, not being a physics one, cannot but orient itself in other directions. The question is serious. The physical object has clearly defined properties and reacts causally to stimuli; its cornerstones are ‘predictability’, ‘regularity’ and ‘generalisation’ regarding the known world of reality. To expect that the ‘human’ social object would also react in terms of cause and effect means to confine the movement of ‘variability’ and ‘contingency’ of reciprocal action and situational interaction that cannot be constricted into the standardised models of physics: this is sociology's richness, not its analytical difficulty. There are two other questions, impossible to examine in this paper: how to try and overcome, in the analysis of social reality, the traditional dichotomy ‘nature–spirit’ in relation with other sciences; and how to overcome the dichotomy of the approach person–society, or the level of understanding of a macro–micro reality in sociology's internal debate. There is a perspective of overcoming such polarities in Goffman for which I will endeavour to account.

5. Goffman's frequent use of oxymoron has been perceptively noted by P.P. Giglioli (1990b, p. 29, note 6).

6. Both theories have given birth to ‘the theory (that) was central for the development of separate sociology during the twentieth century’ by A. Comte, E. Durkheim, K. Marx and M. Weber who ‘developed very elaborate constructs on the mechanisms of the social world’, according to Baert (1998, p. 8). ‘Separate’ means autonomous regarding the elaboration of its disciplinary statute (emphasis mine).

7. A relevant perspective that formulates a different approach to structures that ‘shouldn't be exclusively seen as limiting, but also as empowering. Rather that to be seen as an obstacle to action, structures should be seen as a sine qua non for the possibility of action’ is in Giddens (1976). Quote from Baert (1998, p. 136). Goffman's echoes are evident. The English author admits Goffman's influence on his theories, on the dynamics of social structures regarding the mutability of interactive practices in the fluent and complex modern societies, see Gili (1999, p. 192). For the ‘theory of structuralism’ and the concept of ‘structure dualism’, see A. Giddens (1990).

8. G. Simmel (1889 [1998], pp. 6–7, translated into Italian by A. Maranini, emphasis mine).

9. Other influential theoretic views of contemporary sociology are: the Social Exchange Paradigm by Blau and Coleman; Transactional Organisations Analysis by Ouchi, Butler and Crozier; the Rational Choice view by Deutsch and Gambetta and the Paradigm of the Game Theory, Collective Action and Conflict Strategies from the seminal work by Von Neuman and Morgenstern to Axelrod, Elster and particularly Schelling to whom the Nobel Prize in 2005 has conferred full ratification.

10. For a recent review of schools and approaches to the self, see T. Mancini (2001). For a theoretical multiple approach to the self, see Martinot et al. (2004, pp. 105–116) in the monographic issue of Current psychology of cognition.

11. For the function of the trust agreement resource in social relationships and the development of social dynamic in cooperative forms, see M. Conte (2002, 2004).

12. For the relevance of the trust agreement theme in Goffman's theoretical constructs, the reception of which appears not to be fully evaluated on the social science scene, see the following paragraph.

13. About the determination of the sum of regulations as constitutive and regulative rules for the way social reality works, see the classic Rawls (1967).

14. Gili (1999, pp. 198–199, emphasis mine).

15. Maranini (2003, p. 10).

16. For the quality of the senses in which, in our urban and secular world, a certain holiness, expressed by symbolic actions aiming at confirming the rules for personal good behaviour, is granted to the individual, see Goffman (1967, pp. 51–104, emphasis mine).

17. Giglioli (1988, p. xxii).

18. As for the use of ‘performance’, Goffman later states: ‘I have been using the term “performance” to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers’ (1959, p. 22). The usage of the famous category of performance was conceived by Durkheim and made systematic by the important works of Serge Moscovici on social performances (see 1988, 2005).