Description
Pettit M. The con man as model organism: The methodological roots of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical self. History of the Human Sciences. 2011;24(2):138-154. doi:10.1177/0952695111398828 Topic The general topic for this assignment is “the impact of digital technology.” You will need to significantly narrow down the topic to a specific focus that interests you. For example, you can explore the impact of digital technology on education, on political participation, on interpersonal communication, and on business strategies. You could also focus on the impact of digital media on different aspects of our wellbeing, i.e., social, psychological, physical, occupational, etc. Conduct research into your chosen topic. Develop a well-focused research question, and produce an annotated bibliography using the following outline template as a guide. Steps for Completion: Using the skills developed in Unit 3, develop and articulate a well-focused research question on your topic. You will include this question in the introduction to your annotated bibliography. Identify the information you will need to write about your research question. Use the skills developed in Unit 3. You will need to include a list of specific questions to help direct your research in the introduction to your annotated bibliography. Produce your annotated bibliography, using the template provided. Make sure you write between 250–300 words for each source. Remember to list your entries in alphabetical order, by author’s last name. Outline Outline for Annotated Bibliography Introduction Introduce the general topic that you have been researching. Explain your specific research question, emphasizing the scope or specific issue of focus. Explain the different kinds of information you will need to find in your research so that you can answer the research question. List some specific questions that you will use to guide your research. Citations (minimum of six citations) For each source, include: Proper APA citation. Place the sources in order alphabetically by author’s last name. 250- to 300-word paragraph that includes: Summary—What is the main argument or conclusion? Relevance/authority—Does the source have the credibility necessary to contribute meaningfully to the topic? How? Position—What particular position does the source take towards the topic? How does it compare to other sources being looked at? Usefulness—How will this source be useful in answering your research question?
The con man as model
organism: the
methodological roots
of Erving Goffman’s
dramaturgical self
Michael Pettit
York University, Canada
Abstract
This article offers a historical analysis of the relationship between the practice of
participant-observation among American sociologists and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical
model of the self. He was a social scientist who privileged ethnography in the field over the
laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the mental test. His goal was a natural
history of communication among humans. Rather than rely upon standardizing technologies
for measurement, Goffman tried to obtain accurate recordings of human behavior
through secretive observations. During the 1950s, he conducted three major studies as a
participant-observer, disguised from those studied through insincere performances.
As originally presented, his dramaturgical theory did not draw upon the theater as the
governingmetaphor, but rather the confidence game. It is suggested that Goffman’s writings
exemplify what Gerd Gigerenzer calls the tools-to-theories heuristic. Goffman’s depiction
of the confidence man’s behavior closely mirrored how he and his fellow sociologists
described the practice of participant-observation. Both were represented as embedded
and attentive yet coolly detached observers skilled at playing different roles as the situation
necessitated. The similarities between his ownprofessional behavior and the activities of the
confidence man may have suggested to Goffman the latter as a model for human nature.
Keywords
confidence man, dramaturgy, Erving Goffman, participant-observation, practice
Corresponding author:
Michael Pettit, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J
1P3.
Email: mpettit@yorku.ca
History of the Human Sciences
24(2) 138–154
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0952695111398828
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In a series of books and essays published in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman
(1922–82) famously championed a dramaturgical perspective on the self. He argued
against the common-sense distinction between the sincerity of everyday behavior and
the contrived performances of actors. He portrayed humans as ‘impression managers’,
constantly staging performances to meet and exceed the expectations of various
‘audiences’. Individuals, often operating as part of a team, prepared for their roles in the
‘back region’ to perform a kind of play in front of the persons they encountered in their
daily routines. The theatrical play provided an apt model since ‘ordinary social
intercourse itself is put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically
inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies’ (Goffman, 1959: 78). His
dramaturgical theory built upon his ‘realization that while the performance offered by
impostors or liars is quite flagrantly false and differs in this respect from ordinary
performances, both are similar in the care their performers must exert in order to
maintain the impression that is fostered’. Since both genuine and dishonest performances
require the use of dramatic effects to render them convincing, Goffman claimed that ‘we
can profitably study performances that are quite false in order to learn about ones that are
quite honest’ (ibid.: 73). Philip Manning (1989, 1992) has argued that in between the
book’s 1956 and 1959 editions, Goffman made changes which moved the text’s center
of gravity away from a view of the self as a hidden manipulator to focus instead on rituals
of trust and tact. Left unaddressed in this account is the origin of this theory and why
Goffman is often seen as championing a deceitful self. How did the con man come to
serve as a model for human nature?
Despite the fact that Goffman remains one of the most highly cited figures in the
social sciences, he has attracted little sustained interest among historians of the human
sciences. Insofar as he rarely spoke about his methods, disliked being interviewed and
left no personal papers, he does not make for an easy subject of historical analysis.1
Another reason for this neglect is a preoccupation among historians of the postwar social
sciences with the Cold War as the over-arching explanatory framework (Heims, 1993;
Herman, 1995; Edwards, 1996; Latham, 2000; O’Connor, 2000; Solovey, 2001; Gilman,
2003; Rohde, 2009). Goffman’s career does not fit neatly in a narrative organized around
the growth of social scientific knowledge in service of the American state, especially its
military ambitions on the world stage. Recently, historian Joel Isaac has suggested the
need to attend to how the practices of cold-war era social scientific research fit within
the ways of knowing developed over the longer histories of these disciplines and
deployed by other sciences (Isaac, 2007).
This article moves away from a view casually mentioned in the sociology literature
with some frequency that Goffman is a thinker too idiosyncratic to withstand sustained
analysis. Although he preferred the artfully crafted essay over the exact analysis of data
(Lofland, 1980), Goffman shared with the other postwar social scientists an interest in
forms of communication within ‘small groups’. This commitment was not only methodological,
but ontological: these scientists conceived of society in terms of an assortment
of small collectives rather than individualized atoms or an undifferentiated mass
(Pooley, 2006; Cohen-Cole, 2009). Moreover, his focus on communication in ‘relatively
closed systems’ (Goffman, 1959: 232) demonstrated common assumptions with the
cybernetics movement (Edwards, 1996).2
Pettit 139
My approach is to historicize Goffman’s early writings from the 1950s in terms of the
investigative practices he deployed. He was a social scientist who privileged ethnography
in the field over the laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the
mental test as a means of generating knowledge about human nature. As historian
Robert Kohler has argued, laboratories and field sites are more than just geographic
places. They ‘are cultural domains first and foremost, where different languages,
customs, materials and moral economies, and ways of life prevail’ (Kohler, 2002: 5).
Moreover, rather than trying to formulate universal laws Goffman focused on the models
provided by richly detailed concrete examples, a style of reasoning fitting within the
tradition of natural historical description.
Taking such an approach offers a different picture of Goffman’s historical place than
that advanced by social theorists. Alvin Gouldner argued Goffman’s thinking belonged
to a specific moment in the history of capitalist development, the emergence of a postindustrial
service economy. Gouldner contended that the dramaturgical theory reflected
the bourgeois ideology of the postwar corporate middle-manager and represented ‘the
transition from an older economy centered on production to a new one centered on mass
marketing and promotion, including the marketing of the self’ (Gouldner, 1970: 381). In
contrast, Gonos (1980) argued that Goffman articulated the viewpoint of the alienated
‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’ or small-time business owner pushed aside by a nationally
integrated economy. More recently, commentators have moved away from identifying
him with a particular class, seeing him instead as advancing a theory of the ‘postmodern
self’ (Tsee¨lon, 1992; Manning, 2000).
In analysing the relationship between theory and practice in Goffman’s dramaturgical
writings, what the cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer (1991) calls a ‘tools-totheories
heuristic’ provides a helpful framework.3 Gigerenzer contends that ‘scientific
tools (both methods and instruments) suggest new theoretical metaphors and theoretical
concepts once they are entrenched in scientific practice’. Familiarity with these tools
within a disciplinary community also facilitates the reception of the theoretical
metaphors they inspire (1991: 256). Reconfiguring certain distinctions central to the
logical positivists’ understanding of scientific progress, he contends that tools used in the
context of justification loop back to provide resources in the context of discovery. This is
not a deliberate, intentional process. Rather familiarity with the practical aspects of certain
techniques helps make a particular understanding of human nature more thinkable.
Gigerenzer focuses on tools for data analysis used in cognitive science such as inferential
statistics, but his approach has broader implications. Left unexplored is the possibility
that tools used for the collection of data also provide metaphors and concepts available
to the scientist.
The connection between two sources for Goffman’s theory of the self seems particularly
worthy of consideration: his own use of participant-observation as a method and
his repeated evocation of the confidence man. Goffman’s 1950s essays are not narratives
of his experiences of the field (Fine and Martin, 1990). Instead, I argue that the methodology
of participant-observation became an unacknowledged source in Goffman’s
modeling of human nature. The performative nature of participant-observation resonated
with his interest in the figure of the confidence man. He never undertook any field studies
of these professional criminals, but he repeatedly returned to their example as a model
140 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
for behavior. Goffman’s depiction of the con man owed much to his own experiences as
a participant-observer. Both were modern professionals who succeeded in life by cultivating
their own insincerity to allay the worries of a potentially incredulous audience.
The model of the participant-observer is particularly interesting because, unlike his criminal
counterpart, this form of insincerity was in part virtuous.
Goffman’s Natural History
In 1969, Everett C. Hughes, one of Goffman’s primary mentors at the University of
Chicago, made a telling analogy about his student’s methodology. Hughes suggested that
‘Goffman and [Konrad] Lorenz work in the same way; they observe with aggressive
intensity the behavior of their subjects in situations, or occasions’ (Hughes, 1969:
426).4 At first, the comparison may strike the reader as odd as the two were polar opposites
at the level of theory. The Austrian naturalist emphasized the primacy of instincts in
the constitution of behavior while Goffman stressed the malleability of the self through a
multitude of personae, tailored to meet local circumstances. Lorenz dealt with the deep
time of evolution where Goffman concerned himself with the dynamics of the immediate
situation.
Goffman had first suggested the affinities between his approach and that of the
European ethologists. He claimed that the inspiration for the analysis of ‘place’ in
Asylums was not the theatrical stage, but the work of Heini Hediger and Lorenz on
animal territoriality (Goffman, 1961: 227). Goffman cited a paper by the Swiss-
Canadian psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger which turned to ethology to interpret the patient’s
experience of the mental hospitals. Just as captive animals came to behave in a stereotyped
fashion due to the conditions of captivity, Ellenberger suggested that some of
the patient’s actions might reflect the conditions of confinement more than the underlying
disease (Ellenberger, 1960). The zoo offered a powerful metaphor for questioning
the asylum’s status as a curative space. Goffman concurred with Ellenberger that
each institution constituted a ‘closed community’ that elicited stereotyped behaviors
from its occupants.5 In the preface to Relations in Public (1971), he expanded upon
his appreciation of ethology. Because of its focus on social groups, ethology turned
the naturalist into a student of ‘face-to-face interaction’. He admired the ethologists
for developing ‘a field discipline that leads them to study animal conduct in very
close detail and with a measure of control on preconceptions’. He also warned that
the ethologist’s tendency ‘to apply a Darwinian frame’ led to ‘some very unsophisticated
statements’ when applied to human behavior (ibid.: xvii). In his masterful exegesis
of Goffman’s oeuvre, Burns (1992: 27) concludes that ethology contributed little
to the sociologist’s theoretical formulations.
Hughes never suggested that Goffman shared a theory of human nature with Lorenz,
but rather he argued that they worked in the same fashion. The similarity resided at the
level of scientific practice. They held in common a style of observation rather than any
specific theory. Lorenz rejected the control of the laboratory as a scientific ideal. In its
place, he stressed the importance of observing over long stretches of time the naturally
occurring behaviors of various organisms. He transformed his estate in Altenberg
into a scientific farm, where he raised and bred geese and jackdaws to study their
Pettit 141
developmental patterns from birth (Burkhardt, 2005). What differentiated Goffman
from the ethologist was his rejection of the ideal of a pure nature. Lorenz’s science
was predicated on the conviction that one can observe authentic behavior only in a
relatively uncontaminated pastoral setting while Goffman reveled in the fleeting artifice
and appearances characteristic of the modern. The anthropologist Lloyd Fallers
recognized this way of knowing and praised Goffman for it. Where most sociologists
seemed content to ‘draw their data from experimental small groups’ Goffman was ‘a
fieldworker in the anthropological tradition, an observer (whether through his own
eyes or those of others) of man in his native habitat’ (Fallers, 1962: 191).
Goffman had not begun his career as a human ethologist. When he commenced his
graduate studies at the University of Chicago, he first worked as an employee at Social
Research Inc. Although the agency was not as expansive as Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau for
Applied Social Research (Barton, 1979), the social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner created
it in 1946 to conduct market research for paying clients (Platt, 1996: 158). Under its
auspices, Warner undertook a project sponsored by the Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS) to ascertain the reaction of housewives to the radio serial, Big Sisters. Of particular
interest was connection between the audience member’s socio-economic position
and her personality traits. To accomplish this task, Warner recruited 60 wives of junior
executives, skilled and white-collar workers. To provide a measure of the individual
housewife’s personality, he turned to a leading projective technique, the Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT) (Warner and Henry, 1948). Projective tests like the Rorschach
and TAT materialized a specific understanding of the self (Galison, 2004). Using a fixed
and tightly controlled set of evocative images whose meaning was by design ambiguous,
the scientist asked subjects to craft narratives based upon what they perceived. Advocates
of these tests largely adhered to the psychoanalytic conviction that such talk would
uncover unconscious tendencies and personal secrets that the interviewee would not
intentionally reveal.
Under Warner’s supervision, Goffman set out to expand the sample to include housewives
recruited from the Hyde Park neighborhood surrounding the university. As his
research progressed, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the approach taken in the
CBS study. He became more interested in the embodied performances and rituals
through which the women responded to and challenged the psychological test (Goffman,
1949). He argued that the transforming of the TAT from an aid to clinical judgment to a
standardized tool for measurement in social research meant that its utility had been lost.
He wrote: ‘Bracketed statements by the interviewer concerning the pauses and reactions
of the subject frequently lead to fruitful, clinical insights; in most instances, however,
such statements are insufficiently precise and specific for purposes of standardization
and quantification.’6 In place of the standardized test, he came to practise a social
psychology based on field observations, transforming his own camouflaged person into
an instrument of observation.7
The Participant-Observer as Model
Gigerenzer argues that tools become heuristics for scientific theories not when they are
first introduced as innovations, but once their use becomes unremarkable and diffuse
142 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
within a disciplinary community. Fieldwork as a participant-observer had achieved this
status among sociologists at the University of Chicago by the time of Goffman’s arrival
in 1948. More importantly, his dramaturgical theory closely mirrored how he and others
described participant-observation as a scientific activity.
As a methodology, participant-observation began in the mid-1880s when a wide array
of reform-minded journalists began practising deceptive ‘class passing’ as a means of
investigating social phenomena supposedly out of sight of respectable society. They
feigned madness to gain access to asylums, ‘tramped with tramps’ and waited on tables.
They aimed for a total and unnoticed immersion within a given community for an
extended period of time. Researchers used both observations of their surroundings and
their own embodied experiences as equivalent kinds of evidence. Participantobservation
was pioneered by journalists like Nellie Bly and Josiah Flynt, but academics,
like the political economist Walter Wyckoff and the psychologist Amy Tanner, also
adopted it (Pittenger, 1997; Higbie, 1997; Lutes, 2002; Pittenger, 2003; Pettit, 2008).
Under the guidance of Robert E. Park, the Chicago School of Sociology likewise
derived its scientific authority from ‘the evidence of experience’ (Scott, 1991). Park and
his students turned the city of Chicago into a privileged ‘truth-spot’ to generate models
about urbanization, poverty and criminality as social processes. In the 1920s and 1930s,
Chicago served as both their universalized laboratory for understanding modernization
and their field-site rife with local concerns (Gieryn, 2006). Research consisted of
informal interviews, the collection of official documents, and first-hand observation.
When training students, Park drew upon the skills he developed as a newspaper reporter
between 1891 and 1898. In part, he conceived of the sociologist as a ‘superreporter’
committed to conveying the long-term stories beneath the surface of the daily headlines
(Bulmer, 1984: 90). The celebrated monograph series Park oversaw trafficked in the
lives of those formerly deemed marginal: prostitutes, tramps, delinquents and criminal
gangs. Like the naturalistic proletarian and hard-boiled novels of the era, the resulting
sociological narratives depicted the activity of such persons as both the locus for the
breakdown of social order and a defining feature of the modern, urban experience
(Cappetti, 1993; Salerno, 2007).
Platt (1983) has effectively debunked the myth that participant-observation was the
primary investigative practice deployed in the postwar Chicago department, but her
research also demonstrates its wide acceptance as a method there. Nels Anderson’s
ethnography of the hobo brought participant-observation as a technique within the
purview of the department’s program (Anderson, 1923). While they adopted an eclectic
array of tools, the department’s postwar leaders still advocated a ‘you’ve got to touch it’
empiricism, which privileged the evidence of first-hand experience. Platt also found that
Chicago graduates of Goffman’s generation cited the compulsory course on fieldwork as
the formative rite in their education (Platt, 1995). In addition, Goffman’s two main
mentors, Hughes and Warner, encouraged both a methodological and an institutional
rapprochement between sociology and anthropology (Abbott, 1999: 62–77).
In contrast to this continued emphasis on situated experience, Talcott Parsons
organized the practice of social inquiry very differently at Harvard’s Department of
Social Relations. There research centered on the formulation of a highly abstract general
theory of action (Isaac, 2010). The cultural anthropologist David M. Schneider made this
Pettit 143
contrast central to his positive evaluation of his friend’s promotion to associate professor
in 1958. He explained to the tenure committee that Goffman ‘is not, like Talcott Parsons,
concerned with the systematic development of a logically coherent theoretical scheme of
ample proportions which may (or may not) at some later date (usually unspecified) be
run against a few facts for goodness of fit and perhaps even tested’. Instead, ‘Goffman’s
initial query is always a theoretical one, and once the question is asked, it is asked in
terms of concrete observational material and organized with reference to them’.8 In
another context, Hughes claimed that ‘the essence of his method is close observation and
the reporting of behavior in ‘‘small’’ but dramatic and fateful situations, which he then
extrapolates to larger systems of things in a sophisticated but not quantitative way’
(Hughes, 1969: 425). The hallmark of Goffman’s ethnography was his skill at generating
theory out of his descriptions of minute social encounters recorded as an embedded
observer.
Goffman famously resisted publishing an account of his methodology for conducting
fieldwork, but hints are found in his doctoral dissertation on a formerly isolated farming
community on the Shetland Islands north of mainland Scotland. His aim was the observation
of the everyday rituals of communication within this community that had recently
opened itself to a small tourist trade. Living among the islanders for a year and half, he
struggled ‘to play an unexceptional and acceptable role in community life. My real aim
was to be an observant participant, rather than a participating observer’ (Goffman,
1953: 2). He wanted to be present enough to observe behavior, but he also sought to
absent himself from the actual communicative process. His goal was ‘to observe people
off their guard’ (ibid.: 5), but this required a certain level of invisibility. Because of his
desire to pass unnoticed and not interfere with the ‘nature’ of social intercourse, he felt
that he had to eschew the standardizing technologies of the anthropologist.9 He conceded
that ‘mechanical devices such as tape recorders and motion-picture cameras, or rigid
techniques such as time-sampling, would have provided a desirable check on these
recording biases’, but he warned his readers that ‘these corrective devices, however,
were not practical for social, economic, and technical reasons’ (ibid.: 4). To be a successful
ethnographer, he had first and foremost to camouflage his intentions and manage
people’s impressions of this outsider so as not to arouse suspicion. At a time when Robert
K. Merton labored to ‘focus’ and structure the scientific interview (Lemov, 2010),
Goffman moved in the opposite direction. Rather than seeking greater control over the
situation, he hoped to ensure accuracy by managing the presentation of his own presence.
In making such claims, Goffman suggested that observing humans accurately necessitated
sacrificing one’s sincerity. As a social scientific practice, Goffman’s brand of ethnography
involved a specific configuration of what the philosopher Bernard Williams
calls ‘the virtues of truth’. According to Williams, the cultivation of truthfulness requires
a commitment to two distinct virtues, accuracy and sincerity. Adherence to these
virtues mitigates the distorting influence of the will towards self-deception and deceit
of others. Accuracy is a disposition towards acquiring correct beliefs about the world
by struggling against the pleasing assurances of prior convictions. A commitment to
sincerity guarantees that one is as transparent and forthcoming as possible when
representing one’s knowledge to others (Williams, 2002). Williams suggests that accuracy
is the virtue that pertains to the acquisition of knowledge while sincerity governs its
144 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
transmission. The example of ethnography demonstrates that this is not always the case.
Measuring and recording devices that would have granted Goffman’s observations
greater exactitude risked making his objects of study act differently. He worried that
revealing his true identity would render certain communicative situations out of reach.
Too much transparency compromised the collection of data while insincerity granted
him the access necessary to make accurate observations of fleeting face-to-face interactions.
Insincerity was virtuous behavior because it literally got the investigator closer to
the truth. When it came to the site of inquiry, he advocated a version of objectivity best
described as accuracy in the absence of sincerity.
Goffman celebrated the vantage point of an insincere performer rather than the
perspective of a distant and impartial recording device. In 1960, he wrote to Hughes,
describing his experiences studying ‘the service relations and the frayed edges of
American civilization’ in Las Vegas. He insisted on the necessity of observing behavior
as a card dealer at the casino. He contrasted his own physical position with that of the
management which took the form of ‘roof mirrors behind which an invisible man
watches the employees’.10 Although the technology was readily available, Goffman
rejected this disembodied, aerial-eye view in favor of the truthfulness acquired disguised
on the floor. His best-known investigation of this type consisted of the ethnography he
conducted on the social life of institutionalized psychiatric patients at St Elizabeth’s
Hospital in Washington, DC. Starting in 1954, he spent a year on the ward floor, posing
‘in the role of an assistant to the athletic director’ while only ‘the top hospital management
knew what my aims were’ (Goffman, 1961: ix). He always circumscribed his position
in these situations, remaining more of an observer than a fully immersed participant.
He consistently chose a role adjacent to the primary action, whether that of the athletics
director rather than the patient or the card dealer rather than the gambler.
He claimed that professional subterfuge served as a means of identifying members of
his cohort at Chicago. He concluded his 1960 letter to Hughes on a wry note, promising
to ‘save my card, collect one from Howie [Becker] and members of all the other locals,
and we’ll present them to you on a birthday: for by their union cards you shall know the
participant observers’.11 Such prolonged work in the field semi-disguised as a member of
a trade or profession became a means of establishing one’s authority and credentials.
Becker famously used his piano-playing skills to investigate ‘the natural history of an
individual’s use of marihuana’ in Chicago’s jazz clubs (Becker, 1953: 236).
A number of Goffman’s contemporaries offered ethnographies of the asylum from the
viewpoint of an attendant. The year 1948 witnessed a new wave of asylum expose´s
including Albert Deutsch’s photo-essay The Shame of the States alongside the novel and
film versions of Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit, a classic in the confinement narrative
genre. Harold Orlansky, an anthropology doctoral candidate at Yale, published a scathing
account in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine, Politics. Based upon the observations he
recorded during a 14-month stint as an attendant, Orlansky concluded that ‘the American
asylum manifests, in embryo, some of the same social mechanisms which in Germany
matured into death camps’ (Orlansky, 1948: 162). A number of Chicago sociologists
took up Orlansky’s suggestion that the asylum attendant, endowed with arbitrary power
over others, constituted a potentially dangerous occupation worthy of concern. Harold
Taxel served as an orderly for 9 months while ‘no one on the staff had knowledge of the
Pettit 145
research being conducted’ (Taxel, 1953: 19). Robert H. Willoughby argued that
‘participant-observation was thought to be the best tool for putting one’s self into the
same frame of reference as the attendant’. He prided himself on conducting 8 months
of observation ‘without the assistance of and to a great extent without the knowledge
of the administration’ (Willoughby, 1953: 15–16). In the early 1950s, such insincere
performances were standard practice at Chicago.
More controversially, this cultivated insincerity shaped Goffman’s expository style.
His style of observation did fit within the long tradition of natural history, but his work
did not read like traditional natural histories. Where Orlansky’s article was an earnest
denunciation of the dehumanizing tendencies built into the social organization of the
mental hospital, Goffman never offered an outright condemnation of the treatment of
patients. Instead, he carefully described the behaviors he witnessed on the ward floor,
but altered their meaning by ironically framing them with the categories derived from
the sociology of occupations rather than the psychopathology of mental illness (Becker,
2003). In person and on the page, he presented himself through a distant voice saturated
by sarcasm, satire and irony (Fine and Martin, 1990). Playful trickery had long formed an
important part of his self-presentation. His sister, the actress Frances Bay, recalled that
he was a ‘real prankster as a kid’ (Posner, 2008). Goffman, along with Becker, became
known for their preferences for ‘the offbeat to the familiar, the vivid enthnographic detail
to the dull taxonomy, the sensuously expressive to dry analysis, naturalistic observation
to formal questionnaires, the standpoint of the hip outsider to the square insider’
(Gouldner, 1962: 208). This stance resonated with a style of mid-century dispassionate
emotional restraint, what historian Peter Stearns calls ‘American Cool’ (Stearns, 1994).
Cultivated insincerity allowed Goffman to advance biting criticisms while appearing
detached from and disinterested in the matter at hand. Irony served as his surrogate for
objectivity. This calculated cynicism about modern organizational structures made him a
hero among many intellectuals on the left, but, as Gouldner suggested (1970), his was
also a style championed in the hallways of 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agencies
(Frank, 1997).
Goffman’s innovation then was neither the problems he studied nor his investigative
practice, but his advocacy of a model of personhood that closely resembled the
well-established methodology of participant-observation. Historian Joel Isaac (2009) has
documented how the practice of theory became central to the identity of the social
scientist in the 1950s. His account focuses on a set of highly influential ‘organization
men’ such as Parsons and Herbert Simon. Coming out of the University of Chicago,
which had long insisted that the researcher develop an intimate knowledge of the noir
aspects of the city (Salerno, 2007), Goffman developed a different model of the social
theorist. His was an embedded and attentive yet coolly detached observer skilled at playing
roles, the sociologist as urban hipster. This model of the researcher informed his satirical
expository style and account of the self. It also informed his notorious
‘hypermasculine’ trickster persona centered on his own composure, poise and emotional
control (Scheff, 2006: 13). His career reveals a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic as the
methodology he deployed – manipulating others to pass unnoticed in the farming village,
asylum ward, or casino – which became a model for the individual’s experience of
putting on various masks to fit the occasion. The similarities between this professional
146 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
behavior and the activities of the confidence man may have suggested the latter as a
model for human nature.
The Ethnographer and the Con Man
The normalization of insincerity formed a major and rather unique component of
Goffman’s account of the self. The clearest expression of this viewpoint is also the
earliest, ‘On Cooling the Mark out’ (1952). In this essay, Goffman made the play metaphor
central to his analysis, but it did not refer to the theater. Instead, he discussed the
carefully choreographed performances and management of people’s identities that go
into a confidence game. Gleefully adopting the criminal’s slang as his own, he noted how
‘the operation of any particular racket, taken through the full cycle of its steps or phases,
is sometimes called a play’. Moreover, confidence games are ‘practiced on private persons
by talented actors who methodically and regularly build up informal social relationships
just for the purpose of abusing them’ (Goffman, 1952: 451).
Confidence games provided Goffman with the material to think through the conflict
between one’s self-image and perception by others. The successful defrauding of the
mark disconfirmed his self-understanding as a savvy commercial actor. ‘A mark’s participation
in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the
proposition that he is a smart man’ (ibid.: 1952: 452). In order to avoid legal reprimand,
con men had developed techniques to mitigate the frustration and anger that derive from
this disappointment. This process of ‘cooling-out’ became a model for all situations
where individuals were confronted with disappointing outcomes that contradicted their
established self-images. Through social interactions, the victim is successfully cast in a
new role to perform without insult to the actor. Cooling-out is the management of disappointment
when confronted with the contradictions of self-deception, when a person
recognizes that his or her most cherished identity was simply a temporary role. The very
lack of integration among the various social roles a person performs was the source of
salvation since she or he could find refuge in other roles. The individual’s capacity to
be cooled out and reassigned an identity signaled to the young sociologist the malleability
of human nature. Writing in the journal Psychiatry, Goffman contended that his theory
explained the psychotherapeutic encounter. Rather than revealing hidden depths or
bringing forth a person’s authentic inner self, the psychotherapist operated as ‘the
society’s cooler’ by assigning a new, safer role to disappointed and frustrated clients
(ibid.: 462).
Goffman never conducted fieldwork among confidence men, but rather drew heavily
on the linguist David W. Maurer’s ethnographic studies of the argots of the professional
criminal. Maurer also saw in the figure of the criminal swindler a model for thinking
about social relations in general. He insisted that ‘their methods differ more in degree
than in kind from those employed by more legitimate forms of business’ (Maurer,
1940: 16). Trained as a scholar of Elizabethan drama at Ohio State University in the early
years of the Great Depression, Maurer began his forays into the vernacular with a study
of the jargon exclusive to the men working in the North Atlantic fishing trade (Maurer,
1930). This examination of ‘schoonerisms’ set the pattern for his subsequent career. He
Pettit 147
would record through correspondence, stenography and new audio technologies the
idiosyncratic speech of various occupational subcultures.
Starting with the cant deployed among members of traveling carnivals (Maurer,
1931a), he became particularly intrigued by the language and culture of crime. Central
to his linguistic studies was the belief that each criminal specialty had developed its own
argot. This was because the various types of criminals constituted professions in a sociological
sense. Gamblers, forgers and confidence men were not isolated rogues, but
modern entrepreneurs engaged in highly organized industries with rules, apprenticeships,
alliances and, most importantly, an exclusive, technical vocabulary. In academic
journals, Maurer produced encyclopedic lexicons of the various trades of the underworld.
He insisted that to comprehend these speech-systems as linguistic phenomena
required an understanding of the behavioral patterns performed within the subcultural
classes. The psycho-sociological ramifications of acquiring an argot can most readily
be seen in Maurer’s interpretation of prostitution, a sector of the crime world he claimed
lacked its own distinct language. Maurer argued that argots did not develop out of an
urge to deceptively camouflage the criminal activity from the law. Rather they emerged
out of the sense of camaraderie that characterized the homosocial community of an occupation.
A member acquired fluency by achieving a certain status within a professional
network, an economic position never granted the prostitute, who always remained subservient
to the pimp. Moreover, unlike other professional criminals who ‘depend heavily
on a shrewd analytical and psychological approach’, Maurer concluded that prostitution
did not require such mental skills (Maurer, 1939: 549). He defined argot-formation as a
masculine trait that required intelligence and creativity, qualities he found wanting
among the prostitutes he interviewed.
Despite his claims about abstaining from sensationalism, glamour and excitement,
Maurer’s project was rooted in his conviction that the argots he collected constituted
elements of a dying culture. In an early study of the cant cultivated in the social space
of the carnival, he stressed how criminal argots had their origin in the rough world of
horse-and-wagon travel. Things had changed and ‘commercialization – so some of the
old-timers feel – has emasculated modern showmanship, and along with it modern circus
and carnival slang. However that may be, there yet remains plenty of glamour and of
grief in the road-show business and its jargon still retains a redeeming modicum of
romance’ (Maurer, 1931b: 327–8). Argot was a remaining auditory vestige of a more
rugged, masculine era that needed to be preserved in the industrial age.
What Maurer, trained in the analysis of literature, brought to the study of swindlers
was an explication of the dramaturgical structure of the confidence game. ‘Big time confidence
games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the
cast except the mark knows his part perfectly.’ With this metaphor in place, Maurer
began assigning roles:
The insideman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and
can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insideman for their cues; he must be not
only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must be able to retain the
confidence of an intelligent man even after that man has been swindled at his hands.
(Maurer, 1940: 108)
148 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
This description of social intercourse as an inherently deceptive dramatic performance
provided a rich resource for Goffman. Since the coining of the term during the 1849 trial
of William Thompson (Bergman, 1969), writers had depicted the confidence man as a
threat to a middle-class culture organized around the ideal of sincerity (Halttunen,
1982; Lindberg, 1982). Goffman challenged this tradition of defining the American
middle class against the figure of the con man. The confidence game provided him with
a social situation where the artifice of behavior and the reality of its consequences were
not dichotomous. During the big con, one had to perform a deceptive role to achieve real
success. It does not seem unlikely that Goffman’s own professional insincerity as a
participant-observer made this re-evaluation of the confidence man’s import more
thinkable.
Conclusion
The swindler and the participant-observer occupy an ambiguous place in The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life as stage-acting becomes the governing metaphor. In terms of
the methods of communication, Goffman made no distinction between the operation of
the con man and the everyday performers. Both ‘must employ elaborate and meticulous
personal fronts and often engineer meticulous social settings’ in order to secure trust and
reliability among the audience (Goffman, 1959: 218–19). Despite these affinities, he
argued that the con man and the participant observer were not ordinary actors. These
individuals occupied ‘discrepant roles’, such as the shill and the informer, which enabled
them to move between the regions ascribed to the performer and the audience. Capable
of mimicking the actions of both teams, these specialists could accrue inside information
about each side and threaten the stability of the communicative system with this privileged
knowledge (ibid.: 144–8). No longer the primary metaphor for human behavior,
they remained central to his account. Embedded within the communication system, they
were also one of the few classes of persons capable of understanding its true functioning
from within its operation. The confidence man, the actor and the ordinary person all
perform the life-episodes, but only the former two have the capacity to articulate the process.
Indeed, social science for Goffman consisted precisely in just this articulated
knowledge.
If ‘the play’ originally referred to the confidence man’s carefully choreographed
swindle, when did Goffman acquire the more literal theatrical metaphor? Following his
biographer’s insightful reconstruction of the various locations Goffman inhabited
(Winkin, 1999), Ian Hacking suggests that Goffman’s wartime work classifying films
depicting scenes of daily life for the National Film Board of Canada may have inspired
such a perspective (Hacking, 2004: 289–90). In a discussion of the irrelevancy of the
common-sense distinction between sincere and contrived performances added to the
1959 edition, Goffman noted ‘recent uses of the ‘‘psychodrama’’ as a therapeutic
technique’ (1959: 78). During the 1930s, Jacob Levy Moreno introduced the theory of
psychodrama to American psychiatrists through his private Beacon Hill Sanitarium.
With the assistance of other participants, patients were expected to confront and
overcome their inner conflicts by acting out a series of roles relevant to their daily
lives in front of an audience and under the supervision of a therapist/director. In 1939,
Pettit 149
St Elizabeth’s became the first state hospital to begin experimenting with Moreno’s
psychodrama technique. Two years later, Frances Herriott, a prote´ge´e of Moreno with
a background in musical theater, oversaw the construction of a stage in the hospital’s
Hitchcock Hall to set the scene properly for therapeutic relief. She documented that Red
Cross volunteers, nurses and attendants participated in her psychodrama class (Herriott,
1940; Herriott and Hagan, 1941; Herriott, 1945).12 There is no evidence that Goffman
had direct contact with the psychodramatic workers during his year at St Elizabeth’s, but
their shared institutional niche offers a possible explanation for his shift in metaphors
during this period.
Submerged within the earliest version of Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are two
closely related models of the self: the participant-observer and the confidence man. His
language of actors and plays originally did not refer to the theater, but to the activities of
the commercial swindler. He followed Maurer in noting how with the increasingly
organized nature of crime, swindlers were not all that different from the denizens of
respectable society. Before advancing his dramaturgical theory, he had pursued a
number of studies as an insincere participant-observer. The model of the ethnographer
at the University of Chicago closely resembled Goffman’s description of the con man:
each was a cool, detached observer who navigates the social by practising small
interpersonal hustles. The participant-observer’s accuracy hinged upon success at
emulating the con man’s art of self-presentation. These were the professionals that
Goffman most identified with the cool management of people’s impressions and emotions.
His adoption of the con man as model was a choice, but one which his experiences
as a participant-observer facilitated. He reversed the moral valence surrounding such
confidence games, whether scientific or commercial. He argued that all social interaction
consisted of the constant transmission and reception of insincere signals.
Notes
1. His only explicit statements about the nature of fieldwork were published posthumously and
derived from a series of spoken remarks that he requested not to be recorded (Goffman, 1989).
The absence of personal or professional papers has been partially remedied by Dmitri Shalin
who edits the online Erving Goffman Archive, a site that contains a wonderful collection of
interviews with Goffman’s family, colleagues and students, at: http://www.unlv.edu/centers/
cdclv/ega/
2. During the 1960s and 1970s, Goffman moved away from his dramaturgical theory, embracing
game theory in its place. Despite this new theory’s more robust mathematical foundation, it
too trafficked in the idiom of confidence men with its gambling metaphors and an emphasis
on the human as a strategic manipulator of others.
3. I describe this process as ‘a tools-to-theory heuristic’ rather than reflexivity because Goffman
does not appear to deliberately model the self upon his scientific practices. He did not exhibit
the degree of reflexivity about ethnography famously presented in Rabinow (1977).
4. On Goffman’s relationship with Hughes, see Jaworski (2000).
5. This fascination was not an idiosyncratic particularity, but rather reflected a broad romance
with ethology in the American behavioral sciences of the postwar era (Vicedo, 2009).
150 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)
6. Erving Goffman, ‘Filed Report for Soc. 301 A, 1948’, Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 131,
folder 8, University of Chicago Library.
7. Goffman would incorporate unpublished findings from Social Research’s market research into
his account of people’s ‘secret consumption’, which deviated from prescribed standards of
taste (1959: 50–1).
8. David M. Schneider to Reinhard Bendix, 6 November 1958, David M. Schneider Papers, box
14, folder 6, University of Chicago Library.
9. Pinch (2010) discusses Goffman’s attention to the materiality of the setting in his analysis of
the social interaction.
10. Goffman to Hughes, 13 December 1960, Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago
Library.
11. ibid.
12. Buchanan (1982) notes that psychodrama had been practised at St Elizabeth’s Hospital continuously
since 1939.
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Biographical Note
Michael Pettit is an assistant professor at York University, Ontario, where he is affiliated with the
graduates programs in the History & Theory of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies.
He is currently completing a book on the history of deception as both an object and a methodology
in psychology.
154 History of the Human Sciences 24(2)