HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

Expanding the Realm of the Perspective

At the peak of his fame in 1982, Erving Goffman died. By this time, he had emerged as an important theorist in the realm of social science. Although many sociologists refer to Goffman as a Symbolic Interactionist, he rarely cited S.I. himself, but rather he cited social anthropology. His impact stretched from S.I. to structuralism and on to ethnomethodology. One of his influences was his work in expanding Mead's concept of the I and the Me. Here, he discussed the tensions that confront the social actor in trying to live up to the expectations of society when enacting the various roles expected of him or her. Much of this appears in his work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) in which he describes the theme of Self.

For Goffman, we have a Self to the extent that we present some sort of role to others. In most of his work, he concentrates on the social construction of the self through drama and performances, and the games and rituals that we engage in order to maintain the stability of social interaction and the self. In his work on Asylums, however, Goffman illustrates how this Self could become a constraining force and imprison its keeper in the context of an environment that imposes a degraded status. Through confinement in a total institution, the self becomes mortified. This occurs through a multi-phase process, firstly through alienation from society and forced obedience, then loss of the identity kit, (i.e. personal possessions), followed by the forced deference and adoption of postures incompatible with the Self, and then the invasion of space and privacy. At the end of this process, the individual is able to adopt certain face saving techniques to establish distance between the degrading situation and the self, but the freedom and self-determination required to sustain a normal Self has been lost.

Unlike Mead, Goffman sees the self as located within the social act and did not emphasize what the interaction might have meant to the social actor - how it might have altered his sense of significant symbols. Instead, Goffman was concerned with how convincing the performance was to one's audience. In the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman draws on the dramaturgical perspective to illustrate how social reality is formed through interactions and performances. Our ability to carry off a convincing performance, to make people believe that we are who we say we are, we mean what we intend, and that the definition of the situation is what we have claimed by implication, is the means to our impressing ourselves and others (Lemert 1997). These performances are vulnerable to interruption although most of us give convincing performances. The success of our performance depends on the tactful interaction between us and our co-actors or audience. To prevent embarrassment and the disruption of the social process, we often engage in what Goffman referred to as impression management. This refers to the way that we supervise our own performances to avoid being interrupted. If we say or do something unsuitable to our performance, we may seek to redeem ourselves quickly by saying or doing something to re-harmonize it.

Another one of Goffman's concepts, role distance, refers to the actions that someone takes to convey the detachment from a role that the person is performing. This may be related to a certain status, such that the actor believes the certain task is beneath them and may seek to renew their sense of dignity through the display of disinterest. For example, a student in a class may roll her eyes to a classmate, indicating disinterest and detachment from the lecture being given. The performances that we give in most contexts exist on two planes, the front stage and back stage. The front stage is where the performance we are giving is taking place. Performances take place in the setting of their nature: a classroom for a lecture, a doctor's office for a check-up. In the front stage with us is our personal arsenal of props or tools that we may need in order for our performance to be successful. This is also where we keep secret from our audience the length of time it may have taken us to prepare for the performance and the worries or pleasures involved. The back stage is where we keep the information that we have suppressed in the front stage. Our audience is not supposed to be privy to this information. In the case that our professor overhears a secret conversation with a friend on our disdain for the lecture given, the back stage has been breached and impression management is challenged.

Goffman believed that some performances exist within recognizable frames. These frames help us answer the question, "What is it that is going on here?" Through frame analysis, we are able to distinguish under which circumstances things are real. Here, Goffman emphasizes the importance of ritual and its role in the maintenance of social reality. We may frame an activity as a hobby or an occupation. How we relate to others depends on how we frame things. Our primary frames are social or natural activities. For example, any forms of talk can be keyed as sarcasm or taken literally. What matters more in frame analysis is how our audience interprets the interaction. Each of us must be equipped with the information needed to unlock the key frame in order to understand what is going on in the performance we are involved in. We do this by referring back to the primary frame, our frame of reference, and using it as a mechanism of comparison. For example, we may key certain animals as pets, family, or food, each compared against the other (Lemert 1997).