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Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour ••:••
DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12062
Erving Goffman: Theorizing the Self in the Age
of Advanced Consumer Capitalism
BLACK HAWK HANCOCK AND
ROBERTA GARNER
ABSTRACT
The authors argue that Erving Goffman developed concepts that contribute to an
understanding of historical changes in the construction of the self and enable us to
see the new forms that self-construction is taking in a society driven by consumption, marketing, and media. These concepts include: commercial realism; dramatic scripting; hyper-ritualization; the glimpse; and the dissolution or
undermining of the real, the authentic, and the autonomous. By placing
Goffman’s under-discussed work, Gender Advertisements, in rapprochement with the
work of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, we draw out shared
concerns over the ways that the self becomes externally defined and incoherent in
advanced consumer capitalism. We then turn to Goffman’s “Territories of the
Self ” (in which Goffman discusses the self in terms of the spatial concepts of
“preserves” and “markers”) in order to show that Goffman balances his historicist
analysis with a theory of a self that can maintain its coherence amidst the
fragmenting forces of the media and the consumer society. Thus we document the
continuing relevance of Goffman’s thought for cultural and media analysis in
contemporary consumer society.
Keywords: advanced consumer capitalism, Goffman, Gender Advertisements, mass
media, self
The authors argue that Erving Goffman developed concepts that contribute to an
understanding of historical changes in the construction of the self and enable us to
see the new forms that self-construction is taking in a society driven by consumption, marketing, and media. These concepts include: commercial realism; dramatic scripting; hyper-ritualization; the glimpse; and the dissolution or
undermining of the real, the authentic, and the autonomous. Goffman’s analysis
converges with the work of Marxist-influenced theorists, especially Guy Debord,
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Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, who all charted new processes of selfconstruction in advanced-capitalist society and culture. For example, Debord’s
concepts of separation, commodification, and the spectacle overlap Goffman’s
analysis of commercial realism and dramatic scripting. Baudrillard’s concepts of
simulation, the simulacrum, and hyper-reality closely match Goffman’s emphasis
on hyper-ritualization and the undermining of the real. Jameson’s interest in
hyper-crowds, surface intensities, and the waning of affect correspond to
Goffman’s notion of the glimpse and the life-like scene.
We argue that Goffman (especially in his Gender Advertisements) was a pioneer in
the historicist analysis of the self in the new culture of media and consumption, the
emerging condition that was eventually called “postmodern culture.” We prefer to
use terms such as “advanced capitalism” or “the era of commercial realism”
rather than “postmodern” for several reasons. First of all, the term postmodern
was not in circulation at the time that Debord and Goffman were writing, and so
it would be inappropriate to apply to their work. We certainly do not want to
argue that Goffman was a proto-postmodernist. Secondly, we emphasize that
postmodern theorists must be distinguished from Marxist-influenced theorists
analyzing postmodern culture or the culture of advanced capitalist societies; this
distinction is fundamental but often lost in the use of the term “postmodern” (Best
& Kellner, 1991, 1997).
To place Goffman in dialogue with these theorists is to draw out shared
concerns over the ways that the self has become externally defined and incoherent
in advanced consumer capitalism and to emphasize their common interest in the
historical transformation of the self.
However, unlike the Marxist-influenced theorists of a historical transformation
of the self, Goffman (especially in his essay “Territories of the Self ”) identifies a
larger number of stable characteristics of the self, processes that are not so easily
malleable by social contexts and in fact buffer the self against the fragmentation
and media-scripting tendencies of advanced capitalism. Goffman provides us with
the dialectic between the protean, media-scripted, dis-integrated, hyper-ritualized
self of contemporary societies and the grounded, embodied, territorially-coherent
self that exists in some form in all societies. The grounded, spatially-coherent self
potentially provides a foundation of agency and resistance to commercial realism.
Goffman’s two-fold view of the self helps us chart both continuity and change in
self-construction. Goffman argues that there are empirical limits to the corrosive,
demoralizing, delirious, and strangely exhilarating fragmentation of the coherent,
autonomous self that takes place in contemporary culture.
Scholars have previously drawn on Erving Goffman’s theoretical concepts to
explore how mass media and consumer society regulate patterns of social interaction and conceptualize constructions of the self. In this article we move beyond
the application of his ideas and argue that Goffman was a theorist of the historical
transition from high modernity to a new type of society and culture—still capitalist but distinctly different from early and “high modern” capitalism of the 19th
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and early 20th century. (The new type of society and culture is one that we now call
“the postmodern.”) He explicitly addressed new forms of normative regulation
and self-construction. To trace Goffman’s contributions to an understanding of
historical change, we first provide an overview of scholars who have employed
Goffman’s ideas in discussing mass media and consumer society.
Second, we place Goffman’s under-discussed work Gender Advertisements and his
analysis of hyper-ritualization, commercial realism and dramatic scriptings in
conversations with the work of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric
Jameson. To place Goffman in dialogue with these Marxist-influenced theorists is
to emphasize their convergent interests and concepts for understanding the social
and cultural shifts that took place in the late 20th century. We are not labeling
Goffman a proto-postmodernist, and indeed, the historicist approach that all four
theorists share is explicitly in contrast to postmodern perspectives. In addition, we
examine his attention to new forms of socialization and the “injection” of culture
into the individual, an emphasis that both contrasts with and complements the
Marxist approaches of the other three theorists.
Third, we turn to Goffman’s essay “Territories of the Self,” in which Goffman
discusses the self in terms of embodiment and spatial concepts that point to
possible forms of agency and resistance that persist despite the emergence of
commercial realism and hyper-ritualization. We juxtapose the theorizations of the
self in Gender Advertisements to those presented in “Territories of the Self ” in order
to show how a careful reading of Goffman provides a nuanced and dialectical
account that overcomes an either-or dualism of pessimistic determinism or heroic
resistance, because his concept of the self encompasses both determination and
autonomy. He recognizes the pressure of new external forces that dissolve and
colonize the self, but also points to the constant presence of an embodied, coherent and material self that survives dissolution and colonization . . . Examining the
dialectic of these approaches within his oeuvre, we draw out Goffman’s primary
concern with the contemporary mechanisms of socialization that enable individuals to construct and negotiate the self within the regulatory mechanisms of the
commodified mediascape in which we now live. The self that Goffman conceptualizes dialectically is neither heroically autonomous nor hopelessly crushed and
dissolved by contemporary capitalism.
PART ONE: THE SELF IN HISTORY—WHERE DID GOFFMAN STAND?
How are we to understand the self and the process of self-construction? At one end
of a spectrum of approaches, self-construction and the structure of the self are seen
as largely trans-historical and universal processes. The theoretical emphasis is on
similarities in self-construction and socialization across cultures and time periods,
possibly even bio-socially anchored (Schwalbe, 1998). In Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life Goffman appears to be charting universal and trans-historical
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processes of self-construction and presentation, and it is not a coincidence that his
“data” appear to be charming vignettes eclectically and even haphazardly drawn
from the streets of Manhattan, the cottages of the Shetland Islands, sorority rush,
works of fiction, and the annals of crime as if he were saying that impression
management can be found everywhere and in any epoch.
At the other end of the spectrum, theorists focus on historical difference, on
historical contexts and markedly different types of selves in different types of
societies. This perspective provides an analysis of how “character” and society as
a whole change historically, and it is clearly the conceptualization of self that
guided the classical theorists—Marx and Engels, Weber, and Simmel. Durkheim
as an analyst of the effects of anomie and “egoism” in modern societies was in
their company as well. A historical concept of the self is foundational in the work
of Goffman’s contemporaries David Riesman and C. Wright Mills. Mills as a
neo-Weberian posed the question most clearly: “What kinds of ‘human nature’
are revealed in the conduct and character that we observe in this society and in
this period? (Mills, 1959, p. 7)”
Although Goffman’s early work seems to posit a trans-historical self that in all
eras is manipulative and endowed with agency, by the writing of Gender Advertisements he moves towards a historically-based conception of the self, whose formation he analyzes in terms of hyper-ritualization and exemplifies by the
construction of a subaltern femininity through contemporary advertising.
Goffman, like Durkheim whom he acknowledges as an intellectual ancestor
(Verhoeven, 1980), was able to see both trans-historical continuities and new
forces that impinge on self-construction.
We provide a brief review of the literature to show the range of interpretations
of Goffman’s view of the self.
The most prevalent interpretation of Goffman is to see him as a theorist of
universal processes of interaction and self-construction that can productively be
applied to the analysis of contemporary society. For example, Dell and Marinova
(2002), Papacharissi (2002) Robinson (2001), and Ross (2007) all seek to utilize
Goffman’s presentation of self to explore new possibilities of identities and selfformation through internet technologies and online communities. Jenkins (2009)
identifies the notion of co-presence within the interaction order as central to
reworking Goffman’s ideas with the development of new communication technologies. Building on Jenkin’s approach, Rettie (2009) argues that Goffman’s
face-to-face interaction model can be adapted from unmediated to mediated
interaction, for example in analyzing mobile phone communication.
Knorr-Cetina (2009) follows Jenkins’ (2009) notion of the increasing importance
of temporality, and argues for a shift from Goffman’s emphasis on a physicalspatial proximity to one oriented around new media technologies where we meet
in time, not in place (Knorr-Cetina, 2009: 63).
While these theorists focus on self-construction and presentation in Goffman’s
thought, others have focused on frames as the primary analytical category. (See
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Altheide (1985), Dayan and Katz (1994), Gitlin (1980), Chayko (1993), Kang
(1997) and Bell and Milic (2002)). Kang attempts to replicate Goffman’s study of
Gender Advertisements twenty years later, while Bell and Milic propose to combine
frame analysis with semiotic analysis to formulate hypotheses about contemporary
advertisements. Chayko uses the concept of frame, the concepts or perspectives
that orient social action, to explore virtual reality and argues that due to the rise
of sophisticated interactive technologies such as virtual reality, frames are needed
as new ways of locating the “boundaries” of an experience. Other scholars, such
as Fairclough (1995) and Scannell (1991), have utilized Goffman’s notion of footing,
the shifting alignment between speakers and hearers in any social situation, while
Meyrowitz (1985) and Thompson (1995) have extended Goffman’s notion of
dramaturgy, the theatrical component that occurs in all face-to-face interactions, by
replacing the fixity of place with the flexibility of media technologies.
But beyond applying trans-historical concepts to contemporary phenomena,
one can view Goffman as an explicit theorist of historically-situated selves.
Langman (1991) and Travers (1991) most clearly emphasize Goffman’s explicit
contributions to the understanding of the historically-situated self. Langman
explores the postmodern aspect of the self from the perspective of how the self is
constituted through consumption-based lifestyles, where objects function
semiotically to demonstrate membership in a “consumption-based pseudocommunity” that reflects one’s cultural tastes (Langman, 1991, p. 334). Langman
argues for a cultural Marxist view of the postmodern self which is a “commodified
simulacrum of identity, an empty shell with no interior to hide, and without
defenses against the anxieties of its own weakness” within the fluid and unstable
relationships defined by the postmodern world. (Langman, 1991, p. 338).
Langman’s analysis resonates with Travers’s account of the move from “normal
appearances” to “simulation” in interaction; Goffman’s “normal appearances”
are linked to Baudrillardian “simulations that articulate within a simulational
universe” where all references to orient interaction are abolished (Travers, 1991,
p. 321). Ytreberg (2002) also selects texts that highlight Goffman’s interest is new
forms of framing and interaction, focusing on Goffman’s concepts of hyperritualization and dramatic forms of talk, to show how editing is the main process
by which all incongruent, superfluous and disruptive elements are removed,
leaving a compressed and sanitized version of social interaction. Scholars such as
Dowd (1991) have gone so far as to argue that for Goffman “the contemporary self
is not, in fact, real (in the sense of constituting an enduring, recognizable entity
that exists independently of the mass media) but merely a collection of discardable
images.” (Dowd, 1991, p. 199).
Finally, a number of interpretations point to the resonance of Goffman’s
concepts with postmodern theorizing; in this view, he is an early exponent of the
postmodern discovery that everything is shifting, fragmentary, performed, and
perspectival. His attention to blurring of the real and the staged, the discursive
turn of frame analysis, the protean or shape-shifting quality of the dramaturgical
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self are elements of postmodern theorizing. For example, Tseelon (1992) argues
that Goffman’s concern with “face” challenges the distinction between the real
and the staged: “Goffman’s actor has no interior or exterior. Rather s/he has a
different repertoire of ‘faces’ each activated in front of a different audience, for the
purpose of creating and maintaining the definition of a situation.” (Tseelon, 1992,
p. 116). For Tseelon, Goffman is an extreme postmodernist without any sense of
a consistent “I” of experience which holds it together, since the self is ultimately
a series of surfaces or performances which exist only in the fleeting moments of
interaction. For Tseelon, this claim resonates with postmodernism’s assertion that
the real and the imaginary are contrasting styles without a difference of substance.
(Tseelon, 1992, p. 123). Gamson et al. (1992) in their discussion of Goffman’s
work highlight the politics of framing, where frames themselves become the locus
of struggle of interpretations, rather being simple impositions of meaning to which
we must yield (Gamson, 1992, p. 384). Patricia Clough (1990) examines
Goffman’s shift from dramaturgy and the physical to semiotics and the simulated
in her discussion of Goffman’s Gender Advertisements. She argues that interpretive
emphasis should be shifted to the semiotic issue of framing and that “engrossment” (being absorbed in activity, whether real or make-believe) became for
Goffman the only criterion for establishing the grounds on which social life can be
interpreted (Clough, 1990, p. 197). What unites these observers is that they are
not interpreting Goffman’s work as the study of historical change, but rather
argue that Goffman is an early exponent of the postmodern view that all societies
and cultures are characterized by discursive and performative social construction
of reality and the self.
PART TWO: GOFFMAN AND HIS INTERLOCUTORS: THE SELF IN THE SOCIETY OF
CONSUMPTION AND MEDIA
In this section we begin with an examination of Goffman’s contribution to an
understanding of historical change and bring out his conversation with theorists
of historical change. We show how he developed concepts for understanding the
self that extensively overlap those of Marxist-influenced theorists of advanced
capitalist society. These are not postmodern theorists, but theorists of advanced
capitalism and postmodern culture. We argue that Goffman explicitly and
intentionally contributed to a historical social psychology, introducing and
elaborating specific concepts that address changes that emerged in the second
part of the twentieth century. Focusing on Gender Advertisements we place him in
a conversation with three Marxist-influenced scholars (Guy Debord, Jean
Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson) who problematized the changing dynamics
of the cultural landscape in relationship to the self. We discuss how he explicitly
addressed the same phenomena that they examined, though he invented different terms for these phenomena and inserted them into a different theoretical
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perspective—one which was less Marxist in its origins and more focused on
carving out a space for coherent selves within these emerging cultural
conditions.
Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson often dominate theoretical conversations around the issues of mass media and consumer society within
advanced capitalist societies. However refracted, a shared underlying Marxist
orientation is often identified in their work (Best and Kellner (1991, 1997), Gane
(1990), Homer (1998), Kellner (1989), and Kellner and Homer (2004), Langman
(1991), Smart (1991, 1993), and Stevenson (2002). We connect Goffman to these
figures through his concepts of commercial realism, dramatic scripting, the glimpse,
hyper-ritualization, and the dissolution of authenticity and autonomy . . . His work reveals
him to be an active contributor to debates on media and commodity consumption, and therefore we situate Goffman as a central player in these debates around
image, ritual, the dissolving or disintegrated self, and the dissolution of the social
fabric through the limitlessness of wants and desires engendered in capitalist
society.
Before embarking on a more detailed comparison of Goffman’s work with each
of these theorists, we summarize the ideas shared by the three theorists (and we
argue, with Goffman as well). Their ideas revolve around four key images that
constitute a portrait of the self in advanced capitalist society:
Dissolution and fragmentation of the self : Media destroy the coherence and boundaries
of the self. The “local self” historically formed in in-person interactions loses its
coherence, and the new selves are formed by and through the media. The self is
shaped by media messages, socialized by the media, and loses its boundaries and
local grounding because of the media impact. (This theme was also broached by
Goffman’s contemporary, David Riesman (1950)).
False needs and limitless wants: The self is increasingly motivated by the limitless
wants and “false needs” that are characteristic of consumer capitalism and that
emanate from the media; this view was also elaborated by the Frankfort School
theorists, especially Marcuse (1964).
The collapse of boundaries between the real and the hyper-real or simulated: Individuals in
viewing the media lose the capacity to distinguish the real from the hyper-real and
the simulated. This collapse of boundaries invades the self, so that real feelings are
replaced by surface intensities and a simulacrum of affect takes the place of real
affect in a manner so complete that one can no longer recognize the differences.
Media events and media-induced feelings become just as real as real events and
real emotions. Thus the terms “authenticity” and “reality” lose their meanings.
Invasion and colonization of the self : The behaviors and gestures of the self are “taken
over” by hyper-ritualized, stylized gestures, poses, and facial expressions that are
“implanted” by the media and replicated across many individuals. Thus there is
a complete loss of spontaneity and authenticity, and these words have become
meaningless.
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Goffman recognizes these processes but he does not abandon an existentialist view
of the self as grounded, coherent, and embodied, and he suggests a dynamic
tension—a dialectical relationship—between the “dissolved self ” and the spatially
and materially coherent self.
Guy Debord and Goffman: Separation, Commodification, and the Society of
the Spectacle
Debord argues that the rise of mass media in conjunction with advanced capitalism and commodity fetishism has created a world where human beings have
become cut off from social life. The “society of the spectacle” is a world defined
by an overwhelming sphere of spectacle and fantasy, a false reality conveyed in
the media through spectator sports, advertising, corporate messages, and political
propaganda. Experience in the world is mediated through commodities and
spectacles, so much so that we experience the world primarily in a vicarious,
mediated way only through representations . . . The spectacle comes to define the
entire social organization in society. Whereas direct face to face interaction once
governed society, the spectacle becomes the new medium of social interaction that
defines all realms of social life. In addition to media and political propaganda, the
spectacle is the entire set of social relationships in capitalist society that is projected
into and mediated by images.
Spectacle is deeply connected to the capitalist economy both as a reflection of
the alienated relations of production and as a mechanism that drives the consumption necessary to sustain advanced capitalist economies. Now, in contemporary society, Debord argues:
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity
of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new
unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world
evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The
spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. (Debord,
1994, p. 12).
In modern capitalism, the society of the spectacle is now perfected, transforming
the world into a dystopia and people into passive and disoriented “viewers” and
“consumers.” As Debord argues:
The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his
own unconscious activity, works like this: The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more
he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own
desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the
individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents
them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere” (Debord, 1994, p. 23).
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The more absorbed we become in the spectacles and commodities of society, the
less autonomy we have over ourselves. As viewers and consumers of spectacles,
our identity becomes externally defined by another who represents us to ourselves.
For example, we assess ourselves in reference to celebrities and view ourselves
according to our imagined expectations of the responses of others depicted in the
media.
As the society of the spectacle comes to dominate all aspects of social life, the
world of media culture becomes the real world where excitement, pleasure and
the good life occur. When the distinction between the artificial and the real, the
abstract and the concrete disappear, commodification of life creates the need for
the latest goods and things while fostering the illusion of self-realization and
happiness through commodity consumption. Satisfaction does not come from the
material object but from its symbolic value and the status, prestige, and distinction
that it confers and that we use to define our identities.
The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation
of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what
one possessed. (Debord, 1994, p. 16)
For Debord the commodity’s symbolic value comes to dominate the thing itself,
and the symbolic properties of the commodity become the defining values or
attributes of a thing.
The spectacle forms new types of social relations and new forms of interactions.
For Debord, the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation
between people that is mediated by images, where images themselves become real
beings with real effects on our behavior. As a result, one loses one’s orientation in
a world super-saturated with commodities and spectacles and can no longer
differentiate the image from the reality. The mapping of the self and the spaces of
the capitalist imaginary are characterized by separation, disintegration, fragmentation, and barriers between self and productive forces, and between self and
creative activity. Ultimately for Debord,
The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by
the presence-absence of the world. It also obliterates the boundaries between true and false by
repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the
organization of appearances. Individuals who passively accept their subjection to an alien
everyday reality are thus driven toward a madness that reacts to this fate by resorting to illusory
magical techniques. (Debord, 1994, p. 153).
The totalizing effect of the spectacle led to Debord’s pessimism about the possibility of any escape from the society of the spectacle and a sense of fatalism that
was carried over into the subsequent theories of the postmodernists whom he
influenced.
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Let us now turn to Goffman’s conceptualization of these processes. In the late
1970s, in his work Gender Advertisements, Goffman adapted his early work on “the
presentation of self ” to the growing sphere of the media by tailoring the concepts
of frames and frame analysis to chart the impact of media—especially
advertising—on our thought processes. The frame—the particular wording of
statements or composition of visual images—forces us to think in a particular way
and keeps us from thinking in other ways. Although framing is omnipresent in
human societies, the contents and institutional setting of framing take on powerful
new forms in the age of advertising and commercialization. Goffman was especially interested in how gender is conveyed and reproduced by framing practices
in advertisements. In Gender Advertisements, he collected and displayed hundreds of
such ads that define, frame, and constrain the meaning of gender.
Goffman argues that advertisements are displays of gender rituals which guide
and shape our perceptions and interpretations of reality. Advertisements are
conventionalized and abstracted representations of gender; they are concentrated
mirrors of gender displays in everyday social life, rather than direct and complete
representations of gender behaviors. Our understandings of gender (or any other
aspect of identity that advertisements depict to us) are always partial and distorted.
In Gender Advertisements Goffman argues that the “commercial realism” of advertisements serves to conflate media images (culture) and everyday life (nature). As
a result, our taken for granted way of seeing and understanding the world is one
already pre-formulated through the structures of mass media. For Goffman “commercial realism” is:
the standard transformation employed in contemporary ads, in which the scene is conceivable
in all detail as one that could in theory have occurred as pictured, providing us with a simulated
slice of life; but although the advertiser does not seem intent on passing the picture off as a
caught one, the understanding seems to be that we will not pressing too far to account for just
what sort of reality the scene has. The term “realistic,” like the term “sincerity” when applied to
a stage actor, is self-contradictory, meaning something is praiseworthy by virtue of being
something else, though not something else. Commercial realism is likely to be sharply distinguished from scenes posed with unlikely professionals and apparently intended to be wrongly
seen as caught, and from seems that are caught ones now embedded in an advertisement . . . The
point about an ad is what its composer meant us to infer as to what is going on in the
make-believe pictured scene, not what had actually been going on in the real doings that were
pictured. The issue is subject, not model. (Goffman, 1979, p. 15).
Advertisements work as frames in that they provide the context and orientation
for our experiences. Advertisements construct the viewpoint through which the
viewer understands and identifies himself with a particular set of meanings and
references. Advertisers encourage potential customers to identify themselves with
specific brands, to create a three-way link among self-identity, the branded
product as a material object, and the advertising image (such as the face of a
celebrity, an abstract logo like the Nike swoosh, a glimpse of nature, or the sound
of a product name or jingle).
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The reference set of the advertisement is one that is taken as “real” or as a
reality insofar as we believe it to be real in its presentation. Goffman draws our
attention to the ways in which ads are composed not to depict the substantive
particularities of the people or items they portray, but on the contrary to create
frames into which every viewer can insert himself or herself in order to identify
with the ads.
For Goffman, identification is no longer an individual psychological orientation
through a emotional association, because Goffman’s world of commercial realism
offers little room for individuality or “authentic” expression. Where once the self
was a matter of presentation, it is now a matter of following “dramatic scriptings”
which for Goffman:
Include all strips of depicted personal experience made available for vicarious participation to an
audience or readership, especially the standard productions offered commercially to the public
through the medium of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, and the legitimate (live)
stage. This corpus of transcriptions is of special interest, not merely because of its social
importance in our recreational life, or, as already suggested, because of the availability of so
much explicit analysis of these materials; their deepest significance is that they provide a
mock-up of everyday life, a put together script of unscripted social doings, and thus are a source
of broad hints concerning the structure of this domain. (Goffman, 1974, p. 53).
Mass mediated interaction is intertwined with personal interaction, in fact, they
have become one and the same. Everyday life is not totally determined by media
culture completely imposing itself on people as if everything were pre-scripted, but
it draws upon media scripts, specifically those that are highly condensed and
identified with in the process. These media scripts are not texts to be memorized,
but notes or templates to provide a consistent guide for improvisations. Often the
“act” is plagiarized and packaged from pre-existing performances (including one’s
own, but also those of media models). In this prescriptive world of identification
the zones of front stage and backstage, authentic and inauthentic, collapse and the
critical distance between the self and its mediated prescription evaporates.
Here Goffman’s arguments resonate with his early work in Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1959); however, that work focused on a self that performed for a
particular and defined audience. Here in the world of commercial realism, the self
presents itself in scripted form to the undefined general audience of social world.
In Presentation of Self Goffman focused on specific, real audiences; in Gender Advertisements he has shifted to a generalized mass-mediated world which has become
the shared point of reference for all individuals in the contemporary massmediated world. Through the commercial realism and dramatic scriptings that
socialize our behaviors and desires, Goffman depicts a social world where
spectatorship of the images and signs of advertisements replace activity in the
construction of our identities. Displaying branded products—the most coveted
phone or the “best” brand of gym shoes—becomes the leading way to announce
to interaction partners and to ourselves who we are.
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Jean Baudrillard and Goffman: Simulation, Simulacra, and the Implosion of
Social Life
Baudrillard, building on Debord’s notion of the spectacle, views society as a world
supersaturated with mass media to the extent that the social itself has been
destroyed. The overabundance of information has led, not to the development of
society, rather to its dissolution and a state of entropy (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 100).
Media are no longer producers of socialization, they are now the forces of
implosion by which all distinctions and differentiations have become eradicated.
For Baudrillard:
There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term (I am talking above all about the
electronic mass media)–that is to say, a power mediating between one reality and another,
between one state of the real and another–neither in content nor in form. Strictly speaking this
is what implosion signifies: the absorption of one pole into another, to short-circuit between
poles of every differential system of meaning, the effacement of terms and of distinct oppositions
and thus that of the medium and the real . . . This critical-but original-situation must be thought
through to the very end; it is the only one that we are left with. It is useless to dream of a
revolution through content or through form, since the medium and the real are now in a single
nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable. (Baudrillard, 1994, pp. 102–103).
Media serve to produce a mass audience through homogenization of ideas, by
which the masses absorb all content reflected at them. Media culture caters to the
masses in terms of styles, tastes, and images which reproduce the taste of the
masses and their interest in spectacles. This looping effect of images and desire
further undermines the boundary between the media and reality. It implodes the
difference between mass consciousness and media projections isolating and containing the masses in the universe of simulacra. Once reality and the spectacle
were separated; with the dissolving of the distinction between the spectacle and
the real, the masses have come to prefer the spectacle to reality.
The implosion of meaning leads to a new social organization that no longer
abides by rules of origination, orientation and direction. The social has comes to
reproduce itself through its own images to the point of overwhelming confusion
and incoherence:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation
is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models
of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor
survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is
the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the
territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose
vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our
own. The desert of the real itself (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1).
Signs constitute a new realm of experience of the hyperreal where all referents
are replaced with self-referential signs. The subject/object is obliterated in a
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ent world. The notion of an “independent” reality vanishes into a world of
simulations where all significance and meaning comes through the entertainment codes, norms, aesthetics, and values of media culture in which everyone
now evaluates selves and others’ behaviors, ideas, identities, according to the
new dominant hegemonic ideals. The real as referent disappears, and face-toface interaction disappears into simulated interaction; simulations and signs proliferate and refer only to themselves, and simulations reflect simulations so that
orientation and originality disappear in endless reflections. Here the real collapses or “implodes” into “the hyperreality of communication and of meaning.
More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished” leaving us with a
reality that can no longer be located. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 81). The consumption of fashion magazines illustrates the way the ideal replaces the real. The
images of fashion models replace regular people and become perceived as real
women, as faithful copies of reality. The boundary between the real and
hyperreal disappears, vitiating the discourses of truth, reference, finality, or
boundaries (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 10).
In the whirlwind of the hyperreal, individuals become absorbed into the media
culture in which public and private distinctions erode and all space becomes
media space. This creates a new form of subjectivity of images and events. This is
a subjectivity formed without an interior, without an inner life of self or privacy.
Subjectivity becomes transparent and exterior, and the end result of this implosion of reality is a schizophrenic mode of living:
the schizo is bereft of every scene, opened everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest
confusion . . . It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the
world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limit of his own
being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now
only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (Baudrillard, 1983d, pp.
132–133).
Here Baudrillard uses the trope of the screen, a viewing area of images that are
projected onto it without any of the filtering effects of a looking-glass, which had
been the self-metaphor of bygone times.
Goffman uses the concept of hyper-ritualization to understand these types of
phenomena. Just as Baudrillard called into question the nature of the “real” and the
firm distinctions between media and society to define one’s reference point, so too
did Goffman chronicle a shift in the texture of everyday life in new modes of
sociality. For Goffman, the world in commercial realism is presented in ways
appear to be real, but that differ from the actual life in two substantial ways. First,
since everyday life is highly ritualized, people attempt to conform to the normative
ideals of gender (or any other category) and in doing so, present versions of
themselves that are highly stylized exaggerations of those gender behaviors.
Second, since these ideals appear as natural and grounded in everyday life rather
than as social fabrications, people can never fully live up to or actualize them. A
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world defined through commercial realism is one where everyday social life is
portrayed and therefore comprehended through the projections of ideals. In turn,
this creates what Goffman refers to as the “hyper-ritualization” of behavior and
interaction. Goffman asks:
What is the difference between the scenes depicted in advertisements and scenes from actual
life? One answer might be “hyper-ritualization.” The standardization, exaggeration, and simplification that characterize rituals in general are in commercial posing found to an exaggerated
degree, often re-keyed as babyishness, mockery, and other forms of unseriousness . . . By and
large, advertisers do not create the ritualized expressions they employ; they seem to draw upon
the same corpus of displays, the same ritual idiom, advertisers conventionalize our conventions,
stylize what is already a stylization, make frivolous use of what is already something considerably
cut off from contextual controls. Their hype is hyper-ritualization. (Goffman, 1979, p. 84)
For Goffman, advertising edits out the unevenness of everyday life and displays
only the polished ideal without defects or flaws. As these displays are massmediated, they become the basis of social interaction, and mediate the ritualized
interaction orders of society. In a world of commercial realism, what appears real
is not real at all, since hyper-ritualization has become the fabric that holds society
together and reproduces that realism. The extensively air-brushed photograph of
a celebrity model becomes the standard of beauty that individuals and social
groups use to assess their own and others’ attractiveness As Juliet Schor points out,
the mansions, cars, jewelry and vacations of celebrities become widely-shared
reference group standards, obliterating the older standard of “keeping up with the
Joneses” (i.e., friends and neighbors) in earnings and consumption (Schor, 1998).
Goffman’s earlier work provides a foundation for understanding this shift. For
Goffman, reality is constructed by social mechanisms which regulate patterns of
existence. It is only in the interaction that social reality exists; there is no world
apart from daily interaction. Goffman states:
In arguing that everyday activity provides an original against which copies of various kinds can
be struck, the assumption was that the model was something that could be actual and, when it
was, would be more closely enmeshed in the ongoing world than anything, molded after it. . . .
Life may not be an imitation of art, but ordinary conduct, in a sense, is an imitation of
properties, a gesture at the exemplary forms and the primal realization of these ideals belongs
more to make believe than to reality. (Goffman, 1971, p. 562).
Goffman here prefigures Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and simulacra in that
what we do in daily life is to copy others’ behavior, which in turn is itself always
already a copy or simulacrum of “the real.” In the end, there is no “real” for
Goffman since all of social life is an imitation; imitation is all we have to guide us
through everyday life. As a result, that which appears as natural is actually a social
construction, and those social constructions are built on imitations of other imitations. For Goffman, however reality is framed is “real” so long as that definition
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holds and is accepted and therefore we act accordingly to that definition of the
situation. The boundary between what is real and not real is itself a social
construction, so that we all recognize but evade the issue of whether news and
advertising content are “true.”
Hyper-ritualization is the historically and contextually determined reworking of
Goffman’s previously more abstract theory of meaning into a contemporary
critique of the transformation of social life through advertising. For Goffman,
whether we are actors in a commercial or undertaking an actual ritual action,
what we are enacting is always already a commercial:
When a man in real life lights a cigarette for a woman, the presupposition is that females are
worthy objects, physically limited in some way, and that they should be helped out in all their
transitions. But this “natural” expression of the relation between the sexes, this little interpersonal ritual, may no more be an actual reflection of the relationship between the sexes than is
the couple pictured in the cigarette ad a representative couple. Natural expressions are commercials performed to sell a version of the world under conditions no less questionable and
treacherous than the ones that advertisers face. (Goffman, 1979, p. 84)
By showing how contemporary culture dissolves the difference between advertising and everyday life, Goffman’s concept of hyper-ritualization undermines
notions of authenticity and autonomy. Accordingly all social interaction is constituted through hyper-rituals which themselves no longer refer to anything other
than themselves; commercial realism has enveloped all social life to the extent that
the commercial and the real are one and the same.
Fredric Jameson and Goffman: Postmodernity, Hyper-Crowds and
Surface Intensities
Just as Baudrillard drew upon on Debord’s ideas, Jameson is in a dialog with
Baudrillard. As early as 1979, Jameson was formulating his thoughts in response
to Baudrillardian categories. In “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”,
Jameson argues that
for Jean Baudrillard, for example, the repetitive structure of what he calls the simulacrum (that
is the reproduction of “copies” which have no original) characterizes the commodity production
of consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality and a free-floating absence
of “the referent” (e.g., the place hitherto taken by nature, by raw materials and primary
production, or by the “originals” of artisanal production or handicraft) utterly unlike anything
experienced in any earlier social formation” ( Jameson, 2000/1979, pp. 130–131).
Jameson deployed the same vocabulary and dystopic tone, but specifies that the
object of cultural critique is postmodern culture, a reflection of the relations of
production in the current phase of capitalism, characterized by extended
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commodity production (“the consumer society”), “high tech” or electronic technology, multi-nationalism (or globalization), and media penetration of the unconscious. (Gane, 1990, pp. 329–330). Jameson and Baudrillard share the conviction
that through the development of postmodern hyperspace, the individual body has
become lost and disoriented and the individual is no longer able to locate herself
within the physical built-environment.
This high-tech media saturated culture is characterized by surface intensities,
the loss of the past, and dissociated, fragmented states of feeling and patterns of
consciousness. The era of postmodernism is defined by its negation of historical
context and disregard of chronological order, resulting in the change in social
formation by which our selves are defined through hyper-crowds and surface
intensities. The transformation of our understanding of history into a series of
nostalgic, commercialized pastiches has an effect on the coherence of the self;
history takes on a “schizophrenic structure” which renders us bewildered as we
experience the world as a series of pure and unrelated presents in time ( Jameson,
1984, p. 59). As a result, historicity and historical depth, historical consciousness
or the sense of the past, are abolished.
As objects become transformed into mere decoration, our emotional responses
change as well. Messages and representations are flattened with surface intensities
emphasized at the expense of “deep meaning.” Sudden short-lived bursts of
feeling associated with a visual image take the place of deeper emotions; for
example, we feel happy when we join millions of others in looking at You Tube
video of a funny cat or sad when we see a picture of a factory collapse in
Bangladesh. The affect may be briefly intense, but it remains short-lived, freefloating and disconnected from action.
This waning of affect, laments Jameson, does not deflate or eradicate expressive
forms, but rather shifts their register from the realm of substantive feelings to
fleeting “intensities.” In the wake of shifts arose surface relations to commodity
culture, a flattening of politics and feeling. On the other hand, in his desire to
distinguish the modern subject’s integrity of feeling from the ephemeral surface
intensities of the postmodern subject who is not one, Jameson writes:
Such terms inevitably recall one of the more fashionable themes in contemporary theory—that
of the “death” of the subject itself the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or
individual—and the accompanying stress, whether as some new moral ideal or as empirical
description, on the decentering of that formerly centered subject or psyche. (Of the two possible
formulations of this notion—the historicist one, that a once-existing centered subject, in the
period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational
bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position for which such a subject
never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage—I obviously
incline towards the former; the latter must in any case take into account something like a “reality
of the appearance”. ( Jameson, 1984, p. 63).
For Jameson, the new form of socialization is the “hyper-crowd” where all social
interaction reflects this notion of hyper, an abstraction that leads one away from
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face to face or physical human interaction into one of unending layers of mediation. The hyper-crowd is a new form of social organization, a new collective
practice by which individuals dissolve into the mass, losing boundaries like contemporary buildings with reflective surfaces which can no longer be distinguished
from their context (Jameson, 1998, p. 12). Like the new architecture that defines
the postmodern condition, the new individual becomes an entity that reflects the
collective gathering which is produced in and through the media—a hypercrowd, without boundaries or distinctions.
Much as Jameson defined the postmodern condition through surface intensities
and the fragmented, a-historical context, Goffman describes the effects of commercial realism.
In actual life as we wind our way through our day we pass into and out of immediate perception
range of sequences of others; fleeting opportunity for viewing also occurs when they pass us. In
metropolitan circumstances this means that we will be momentary onlookers of those whom we
cannot identify biographically through name or appearance, that is, that we will catch glimpses
of courses of action of strangers . . . The totality of viewings of the courses of action of strangers
which we obtain throughout our days constitutes our glimpsed world. This is not quite an
impersonal world, especially for sophisticated viewers. But it is a truncated one, and one in
which almost everything can be located in broad categories only. (Goffman, 1979, p. 22).
Here we can see Goffman defining contemporary social life through a world of
surfaces and perpetual motion, of fragments and foreignness, as our lives are
assembled together through the various “glimpses” we have of social interaction.
The built environment, resonating with Jameson’s own concern for the reflecting
surfaces, channels our experiences into moments without the time or the ability to
discern whom we are actually observing. In this sense, commercial realism created
a world where one has only partial views, fragmented information, and piecemeal
meanings which can only be interpreted through the broadest of categories.
Through Goffman’s analysis, we can see how social interaction itself has
become hazily defined, with our reference points now grounded in types or
models which provide our only points of reference. As Goffman argues:
Glimpses of real life (like photographs of it) provides us with models who are portraying
themselves, whereas commercial realism does not—cartoons and other drawings may not even
employ models. Yet there are ways in which commercial realism provides us something that is
fuller and richer than real glimpses. (Goffman, 1979, p. 23).
The glimpses we have of real life are no different than photographs of real life;
their difference dissolves as they become functional equivalents. Here our references, whether actual or represented media images, are both seen as real models
to which we orient ourselves. Models, in either case, are “portraying themselves,”
such that the model we emulate is herself modeling the referent of a model. Like
a hall of mirrors, the models with whom we orient ourselves are themselves
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modeling other referents and therefore leave us in an infinite regress in which we
can no longer discern where the real and the imitation begin or end.
While this disorientation may appear to undermine the quality of our experience, for Goffman commercial realism provides us with something more satisfying
and more intense than our glimpses of “real” life, since advertisements can be
unambiguously choreographed and positioned in innumerable combinations in
ways that a “live scene” can never be coordinated. It is as Goffman argues:
The magical ability of the advertiser to use a few models and props to evoke a life-like scene
of his own choosing is not primarily due to the art and technology of commercial photography;
it is due primarily to those institutionalized arrangements in social life which allow strangers
to glimpse the lives of persons they pass, and to the readiness of all of us to switch at any
moment from dealing with the real world to participating in make-believe ones. (Goffman, 1979,
p. 23).
The world of commercial realism has not simply altered social life through the
advancement of technology, rather it has changed the fundamental organization
of social life through defining new modes of social interaction. Commercial
realism provides the possibility for us to switch from the “real” world to a world
of “make-believe” and back again. In highlighting how this can happen at any
moment, Goffman is not simply “signifying” that the boundaries between media
and reality have blurred, he is documenting their very dissolution as the realms of
art, advertising, and everyday life become one and the same. Thus we see many
individuals whose gestures, voice patterns, and facial expressions perfectly replicate the faces, voices, and bodies of models in advertising or TV programs, rather
than those of interaction partners in physically proximate social contexts, such as
family and friends.
Goffman’s key concepts—commercial realism, dramatic scriptings, hyperritualization, and the glimpse of life—tie together the disparate threads for grasping how self-construction and social life have altered in response to the concrete
historical changes that took place in the twentieth-century media age. Goffman
recognized these processes relatively early in the historical shift to forms of society
and culture that later came to be called “the postmodern.” His analysis resonates
deeply with the work of several seminal postmodern theorists. In all eras, human
selves are constructed in gatherings, limited and shaped by frames, and then
performed and presented. While these are constants in Goffman’s analysis,
forming a social-psychological baseline, they are at the same time primordial
terms flexible enough to enable us to view change and to see historical variation
in the processes of self-formation and the kinds of selves that are produced.
Gatherings have turned into hyper-gatherings, frames for self-construction and
reference are diffused by commercial media and no longer established primarily
in face-to-face gatherings, and performances are consequently ever more fragmented and scripted.
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PART THREE: GOFFMAN AND THE RETURN TO SELF: NEGOTIATING
TERRITORIES IN THE MASS MEDIA ENVIRONMENT
Despite the new historical configuration of an implosion, dissolving, or absorption
of the self into the new media culture, Goffman’s “territories of the self ” posits a
self with spatial and temporal integrity, permitting the formation of an “I” that is
the constitutive whole of our experiences. Goffman’s “Territories of the Self ”
provides a notion of spatiality through which we can understand which experiences are internal and which are external to “us,” as well as a notion of self which
provides a compass for navigating the ongoing transformations and regulatory
mechanisms of the contemporary mediascape. For Goffman, the self remains a
semi-autonomous entity that will not inevitably dissolve under the onslaught of
the new media culture. As a result, Goffman suggests a way out of the impasse
delineated by the other three theorists; he acknowledges the new historical conditions but insists on the possibility of self-preservation and self-assertion within
these structural arrangements.
Goffman’s essay “The Territories of the Self ” examines the balance between
self-determination as a coherent, spatially-located self and the normative order of
social interaction. By utilizing the spatial and cartographic notion of “territory,”
Goffman places individuals within the spaces of social life in order to understand
how we define our relations to others, maintain the social world formed out of the
nexus of these relations, and develop our own autonomy and identity and,
therefore constitute ourselves in the process. Goffman argues:
When we restrict our attention to activity that can only occur during face-to-face interaction, the
claimant tends to be an individual (or a small set of individuals) and to function as his own agent.
The same can be said of the counter-claimant, but in addition the impediment that occurs in his
name is likely to involve his own activity or body. Therefore, conventional terms such as
“victim” and “offender” will often be adequate. And one type of claim becomes crucial: it is a
claim exerted in regard to “territory.” (Goffman, 1971, pp. 28–29)
The notion of “territories” bridges the public and private realms of life in order to
explain the vicissitudes of social organization. Despite the apparent neglect of
agency in Frame Analysis (and other later works), Goffman offers a countervailing
argument to the thesis that selves have become nothing more than hyperritualized performances framed and scripted through commercial realism and
enforced by hyper-gatherings. His countervailing position draws on both his
loosely empirical method of micro-observation of interaction and his existential
orientation; both of these premises in turn link to his interest in the embodied self.
Goffman argues that the self is never completely absorbed, dissolved, or disoriented, and instead argues that the body through its spatial-territorial presence
ultimately unifies disparate self-performances and maintains boundaries. He
writes:
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Territories vary in terms of their organization. Some are “fixed”: they are staked out geographically and attached to one claimant, his claim being supported often by the law and its courts.
Fields, yards, and houses are examples. Some are “situational”; they are part of the fixed
equipment in the setting (whether publicly or privately owned), but are made available to the
populace in the form of claimed goods while in use. Temporary tenancy is perceived to be
involved, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours, informally exerted, raising constant questions
as to when the claim begins and when it terminates. Park benches and restaurant tables are
examples. Finally, there are “egocentric” preserves which move around with the claimant, he
being the center. (Goffman, 1971, p. 29)
For Goffman, territories may shift depending on contexts and situations, but they
are always employed in the interactions amongst individuals. Even in heavily
mediatized societies of the spectacle and the commodity, the embodied self retains
a degree of coherence, integrity, and perhaps even autonomy. “Territories of the
Self ” focuses on the curious tension between intensification of our own control
over the territories of the self and dissolution of those boundaries into the social
order. All such definitions are locally produced and are therefore always linked to
the individual communal structures within which they are rendered meaningful.
In interpreting Territories of the Self, we must consider the following passage:
In considering the minor situational and egocentric preserves of the self—the respect shown for
them and the defenses employed of them—we are led to deal with what is somehow central to
the subjective sense that the individual has concerning his selfhood, his ego, the part of himself
with which he identifies his positive feelings. And here the issue is not whether a preserve is
exclusively maintained, or shared, or given up entirely, but rather the individual is allowed in
determining what happens to his claim. An apparently self-determined, active deciding as to
how one’s preserves will be used allows these preserves to provide the bases of a ritual idiom.
(Goffman, 1971, p. 60).
A superficial interpretation could lead one to think Goffman was retreating into
the concept of an autonomous subject actively marking the world around itself.
However, on closer inspection, Goffman’s analysis does not accept the terms
“autonomy,” “subject,” and “action” as givens, rather it focuses on the marked
parameters that permit such differentiated subjectivities to emerge.
Goffman emphasizes the materiality and spatiality of the body itself as the core
around which territories are established:
The issue of a system of reference is especially delicate in connection with the territorial
functioning of the body. The very notion of an egocentric territory suggests that the body is not
only a preserve but also a central marker of various preserves-personal space, stall, turn, and
personal effects, This becomes especially evident when the preserve in question is claimed not
merely for the possessor of the body but for a multi-person party of which the possessor is only
one member. (Goffman, 1971, p. 44)
The key idea in Goffman’s analysis of “territories” is that they have a dual nature.
They are both the form and substance of meaning-defining sociality. Through the
use of territories, the self is formed or manifested in concrete spatialized materiality
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and actualized substantively, enabling a reflexive perception of self-determination
in the contexts within which people exist. The concept of will or volition, which we
associate with the autonomous subject/agent, is not an internal force generating a
subject/object dualism. The self ’s actions do not run up against or negotiate
territorial arrangements, rather the territories’ duality rests in their ability to define
and delimit action and the self ’s very possibility of action. This characteristic
persists across all the varieties of “territories of the self” (Goffman, 1971, p. 40). As
a result, the individual, who can be considered a territory or the center of multiple
territories, is not simply a passive response to violations, but an active participant
who can also exercise violations of his/her own on others. For Goffman:
If territoriality-like preserves are the central claim in the study of comingling, then the central
offense is an incursion, intrusion, encroachment, presumption, transgression, defilement,
besmearing, contamination—in short, a violation. Now it seems the case that the chief agencies
and authors of this kind of boundary offense are individuals themselves and what can be
intimately identified with them. (Goffman, 1971, p. 44)
What Goffman provides in “The Territories of the Self” is a geography of self that
determines not the inner definition of the individual, rather the parameters of
interaction that define both the self and the possibility for a self to occur. In
“Territories of the Self,” Goffman shows us the dynamic between abiding characteristics of the self (as spatial material existence) and its changing contexts (both
micro and macro).
We can see Goffman as a theorist of media and consumer society who shares
the concerns outlined in Debord, Baudrillard, and Jameson, and like them, he
rejects any grounding of the self in psychobiological essentialism. But unlike them,
he offers a sense of self and agency that is not reducible to fleeting images. For
Goffman, the prevailing social conditions are not historical endpoints in which all
sense of self and autonomy are permanently eroded. Rather, they have become
the new historically situated mechanisms of socialization through which the self
comes to understand itself and negotiate the world within which it is immersed.
Goffman’s theorization of the self leads to the contention that modern society
contains two diametrically opposed potentials. The self is highly regulated
through the dramatic scriptings, hyper-ritualization, and the dissolving boundary
between fact and fiction of commercial realism—almost to the point of erasure,
and yet these socio-historical dynamics also contain and propel new modes of
self-construction with the potential for at least some degree of agency and
autonomy in our historical conditions . . . In this way we see that Goffman’s
creative, existentialist synthesis addresses some of the under-theorized aspects of
both Marxist and postmodernist perspectives, namely the incompleteness of theorizing both social structures and agents within them, and allows us to theorize a
much more humanistic picture of social life.
Interpreting Goffman’s work as a complete theory (rather than inconsistent
fragments from scattered moments of his life) not only highlights the historical
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grounding of his work in the mass-mediated consumer society of his day, it brings
us to the most compelling aspect of Goffman’s social analysis. His project was not
to lead us to a “conclusion” of what the self is; rather his project refocuses our
priorities in an effort to gain an understanding of how the self is negotiated within
and against the conditions and contours of contemporary commodified consumer
society which threaten to dissolve or erode it. By focusing on the mechanisms of
socialization, Goffman enables us to discuss the self both in its historical circumstances and as an ongoing performative actualization in these contexts. Thus the
discussion can take place at both macro and micro levels, and in both a synchronic
and a historicist framework. We must read the hyperreal and commodified self of
Gender Advertisements together with the embodied, coherent and at least partially
autonomous self of “Territories of the Self.” The threat is the condition of the
hyperreal and the hyper-ritualized, associated with the anomie of limitless
commercially-induced wants. Goffman is able to imagine a world that offers only
anomie, hyper-replication, and conformity induced by the stylized and ritualized
mass production of taste, desire, and self-construction in mediated hypergatherings. But for Goffman, this dystopia is only a limit condition, a thought
experiment that “real selves” do not experience in actual historical circumstances;
and our society contains the potential for autonomy, individuation, and the
creation of a coherent self. Placing Goffman’s work in dialogue with Debord,
Baudrillard, and Jameson introduces a way into exploring the totality of social
conditions in relation to the subjects that are formed and live within them that his
interlocutors addressed only indirectly. The impasse in practice of this struggle led
Debord to despair, Baudrillard to surrender—hiding his Marxist tendencies
under a mask of ecstatic celebration of the postmodern—and Jameson to an
abstract project of cognitive mapping, in effect laying out a distant route for a very
long march towards social transformation. Goffman’s emphasis on the mechanisms of socialization is strikingly congruent with the Marxist position that the
present contains more than one possible future, that there is structural predictability but never complete determination of the outcome. In the concluding words
to “Territories of the Self” Goffman drives this irreducibility of the self home:
Thus, on the issue of will and self-determination turns the whole possibility of using territories
of the self in a dual way, with comings-into-touch avoided as a means of maintaining respect and
engaged in as a means of establishing regard. And on this duality rests the possibility of
according meaning to territorial events and the practicality of according meaning to territorial
events and the practicality of doing so. It is no wonder that felt self-determination is crucial to
one’s sense of what it means to be a full-fledged person. Personal will or volition may be seen,
then, not as something which territorial assignments must come to terms with and make
allowances for, but rather as a function which must be inserted into agents to make the dual role
of preserves work. (Goffman, 1971, pp. 60–61)
By viewing the totality of Goffman’s work, we can see how Goffman’s project
shifts the ground from an argument about totalizing outcomes of the contempo© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Erving Goffman: Theorizing the Self in Advanced Consumer Capitalism
23
rary condition to a more open-ended examination of the socialization and selfconstruction in the contemporary period. Goffman’s emphasis on our interactive
selves both re-inscribes our concern with the immediate micro-level of the physical and social and takes us into the macro-realm of conceptualizing the self within
the totality of mass-mediated consumer culture. Rather than concluding that we
have arrived at the end-goal of capitalism’s complete commodification, Goffman
remains historically grounded and sensitive to the contingent historical conditions
of his time. Against complete commodification, Goffman reminds us of continuity
in selves, selves that are always sufficiently coherent to survive and persevere
against intrusions, transgressions and the possibility of dissolution. In “Territories
of the Self,” Goffman leaves open the possibility that the mechanisms that socialize us in the age of the hyperreal may themselves give way to new and unforeseen
modes of becoming a self and to a social world that allows that self to be
actualized.
Black Hawk Hancock & Roberta Garner
Sociology
DePaul University
990 W. Fullerton Ave
Chicago 60614
Illinois
United States
[email protected]
[email protected]
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