Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis

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On Goffman's Frame AnalysisAuthor(s): Fredric JamesonSource: Theory and Society, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 119-133Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656942

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119

Review Article

ON GOFFMAN'SFRAME ANALYSIS*

FREDRIC JAMESON

Thoughbetraying races of the Hauptwerk-prolongedgestationperiod,wide-

rangingsecondary referencesfrom linguisticsto theatricalhistory, a volumi-

nous file of clippingspoured n pell-mell-FrameAnalysismay also be regarded

as yet anotherversion,albeit a vastly distendedone, of that peculiarmono-

graphicform which is Goffman'sinvention and to which we returnbelow. It

is in any case further testimony to the increasingrapprochementbetween

ethnomethodology and semiotics, a developmentwhich may seem healthier

for the latter, where it means liberation from a narrow dependence on

linguistics, than for ethnomethodology, where, as we shall see in the present

case, it suggeststhe spell of some distantandunattainable ormalization,and

is accompaniedby a decided shift in emphasis from the content of social

events and social phenomena to their form, from the concrete meaningsof

the rawmaterial n question to the way in which they mean andultimatelyto

the natureof socialmeaning n general.

This is the sense in which FrameAnalysis constitutes a virtualmonument to

the new tendency, with its elaborate defense of the proposition that

meanings, n everyday life, are the projectionof the structureor form of the

experiences n which they are embodied, andthat they may most adequately

be dealt with in terms of the ways in which such experiences are framed, n

which they relate to, transpose (change "key," to use Goffman's musical

analogy) or cancel other frames.That one may talk aboutsocial life this way(indeed, that, after Goffman, it will be difficult to avoid talkingabout it in

these terms), FrameAnalysis triumphantlydemonstrates.It is semiotic, notso much in its applicationof specializedsemiotic terminologyandconceptual

Departmentof Literature,University f California, anDiego.

* Erving Goffman: Frame Analysis, HarperColophon Books (New York), 1974.



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instruments, as rather through the analogy between its fundamental

program-the invention of something like a grammarand a set of quasi-

syntactic abstractionsfor analyzing social life-and the strategy of Franco-

Italiansemiotics insofar as the latter involvedthe metaphoricalapplicationof

linguistic categoriesto larger and more complex culturalphenomena.What

will concernus here is ratherthe price to be paidfur suchan undertakingn

the form of the systematic pre-preparation f Goffman'sraw materialandin

particulara preliminaryneutralizationof the latter's social and historical

content.

Not that Goffman'sis the only form which a semiotizationof ethnomethod-

ology might take: we should mention, for a complete pictureof the possible

options, the rather different emphasis of Garfinkel himself, or of Aaron

Cicourel,on the textual dimensionof socialraw materials,andon the ways in

which ordinarypeople transmute heirown "facts" into "accounts"as well as

those in which sociologists do it for them. This approach,a good deal more

overtly linguistic than Goffman's,brackets questionsof ultimate realityand

limits itself deliberatelyto the considerationof such realitiesonly insofaras

they have alreadybecome texts: the methodologicalrestriction s not unlike

that of Bartheswhen, inSysteme de la mode, he decidedto limit his semiotic

analysis of clothing styles to the verbal descriptions of the latter in the

fashion magazinesrather than to take on the full substantialityof the things

themselves. Goffman'saims are granderand more imprudentlymetaphysical

than this, for he meansto giveus statementsabout the "objective"structures

themselves; and, although questions may be raisedabout the status of the

observer in his system, I think I would rather link the relative unself-

consciousnessof his procedureswith that attack on the "subject" (in otherwords, on individualconsciousness),which is, as we shall see, one of the most

interesting eaturesof his new book.

The other fundamental comparison for grasping Goffman's project and

measuring ts originalityis of coursethat oldertraditionof CentralEuropean

sociology-the unjustly neglected GeorgSimmel as well as Schutz himself-

from which ethnomethodology ultimately derives, and which attemptedto

rewrite social objects or institutions-Durkheim's"facts"-in terms of socialpraxis,or in other words, to use the more recent formulation, o graspsocial

reality in terms of its socially constructed character. The fundamental

objection to this approach-that its very stresson the transparencyof social

realities and institutions leaves it poorly equipped to do justice to the

increasingreificationand opacity of life under ate capitalism-cannot retract

its historic significanceas a systematic attempt, by displacingattention from

the natura naturata of society to its natura naturans, to break through



121

precisely that increasingly mpenetrableobject-worldheaped up about it by

increasinglynaccessible ocioeconomic forces.

At the same time, it may be suggested that the new phenomenologically

oriented sociology reflected a fundamentalchangein the characterof social

life itself in the great industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, and in particular that the new methods evolved in

response to new difficulties in dealing with this new raw material, from

which, with the general secularization of life, the rigidcustom of the older

traditional or village folksways had disappeared.This is a sense of anomie

quite unlike, but intimately relatedto, that diagnosedby Durkheim,whose

judgements on it, like those of his German contemporary Tonnies, were

surely conditioned by the implicit or explicit comparisonbetween this new

"freedom of the city" and the older organic community or Gemeinschaft

supplanted by it. What interests us here, however, is the formal problem

posed by such new socialmaterial,which no longerseemsto offer any "laws"

or moeurs or prescribedbehavior patterns to describe. In our perspective,

indeed, a whole complex of problems, such as for instancethat of the nature

of social "structure," seem misconceived: thus the "problem" of socialstructurewould appear rather o raisethe historical ssue of the emergenceof

a society about which such a question could be asked in the first place. So

Malinowskireminds us that modern ethnography was born at the moment

when a fundamentalchangetook place in Western hinkingon the question

of whether primitive social groups were utterly anarchic (more properly,

anomic), or, on the contrary,only too terrifyinglyorderedand legislated:"It

is a very far cry from the famous answer given long ago by a representative

authority who, asked what are the manners and customs of the natives,answered: 'Customsnone, mannersbeastly!', to the position of the modern

Ethnographer.This latter, with his tables of kinshipterms,genealogies,maps,

plans and diagrams,provesthe existence of an extensiveandbig organization,

shows the constitution of the tribe, of the clan, of the family;andhe gives us

a picture of the natives subjected to a strict code of behaviorand good

manners, o which in comparison he life at the Court of Versaillesor Escurial

was free and easy."'1Yet precisely that liberation of humnan ctivity and

social life under capitalism, which allowed us for the first time to perceiveand measure the rigid structuresand organization of the various kinds of

pre-capitalist ocial forms, places the student of modern social life in that

dilemma to which we referred to above, and to which phenomenological

sociology may be seen as one historicalsolution, namely the descriptionof

the laws of what is not supposedto haveany lawsany more,andthe analysis

of the structureof what is supposedto havefreed itself from structure.



122

Goffman's situation is, to be sure, ratherdifferent from that of the socio-

logists of the older Europeanmetropolis;yet the formalproblemin question,

in the ostentatiously mobile and fluid Americaof today, is if anythingmore

acute. It does not seem quite right,however,to characterize his situation,as

he does himself, as one in which face-to-face encounters have become the

public or the political arena2. We are now far enough away from 1968 to

have realizedthat the mediapersonalization o which Goffmanreferswasnot

so much the sign of some impendingsocial transformation,as rathera mode

of containment in its own right. Still, the allusionsuggests that it is against

the Sixties as a whole that Goffman'swork must be seen, and in particular,

that it is in terms of the Utopian promises of the counterculturethat his

method becomes visible as a historicalposition andan ideologicalstatement.

For the vocation of the whole counterculturalmovementwas the elimination

of the last remnantsof preciselythose taboos and customs which it used to

be the mission of sociology or anthropologyto tabulate, and the Sixties (or

rather,that part of the Sixties) held out the ultimateUtopianvisionof a life

space in which people could meet face to face in some absolute and un-

mediated sense, beyond all status or conventions, without recourse to

preliminary dentificationsand independentof all the traditional ormulasof

conversationalritual, in short, utterly divested of all of those abundantcues

with which the older social groupingshedged and defused the anxieties

implicit in the encounter with the Other. Today, when the unmediated

languageof hippie talk has proved to be a tissue of conventions in its own

right, and been degradedto the status of a media sub-code, when it has

become clearer to us that, far from abolishingthe older groups and social

units, the hippie enterprize was itself dependent for its realization on

precisely the existenceof social classin the formof the sharedbackgroundofdisgruntledmiddle class children,the failure of this powerfulbut fll-founded

anarchistic dream threatens to discredit Utopian thinking in general.

Goffman's reply-his programmaticdemonstrationof the way in which, in

the absenceof the older skeletal structureof custom, the apparent ormless-

ness of modern life is articulatedby the firm cartilegeof his socio-semiotic

frames-is part of an only too predictable backlashand one of the most

systematic rebukes to all of those prematurepredictions of the "withering

away"of the socialorder andof socialconvention.

Clearly,however, this ideologicalandanti-Utopianbias is little more thanthe

basicmotivationof Goffman'swork, whose authoritymust on the other hand

be measuredby its success and its inventiveness n coping with that formal

problem of sociological description in a post-traditionalworld to which we

referredabove. This work has so often been describedas "literary"by its

admirers (or detractors?) that it does not seem impertinent to draw on



123

literary analogies as a way of underscoring the specificity of its own

procedures,all the moreso since the older social novel or novel of moeurs has

some claim to be considered an ancestor of phenomenologicalor ethno-

methodologicalsociology in its own right.

What is relevantfor us in the history of that particularnovelistic form is the

hesitation of the latter, indeed its alternation, between two basic and

apparently incompatible formal strategies. On the one hand, and most

frequently, the social novel uses its anecdotal material to typify social

custom, or in other words, to reveal the latter by offeringillustrationsand

examples of its basic rules. In this kind of narrative, hen, the relationship

between social order andplot is one of the general o the particular, r better

still, of genus to species or class to member.This strategy (in some respects

reaching its climax in naturalism,and in the bestseller which emergedfrom

naturalism) ends to find itself locked, not in a hermeneutic,but merelyin a

vicious, circle:to perceivethe typicality of customor character-type,we have

to have known it aheadof time, so that the only aesthetic surprises n store

for us will be held by precisely those deviations from custom or typicality

which can no longer serveas very good examples of the latter. So the novel

embracesthe new vocationof documentationorjournalism,only to find that

it hastherebyrendered tself superfluous n the process.

So, whether by narrative nstinct or by conscious design, a rather different

strategy comes into being which we will describe as the detection or

revelationof social constraintsand institutions by means of transgression: he

novelist who chooses this second strategy must constructhis plot, less as a

guided tour than as a hunting expedition, in which traps are laid, feints arerehearsed,a whole apparatusmarshalled n view of an event which may or

may never occur, namely the blundering of the game into the nets thus

provided, he triggering f the snares, he slow emergence nto visibility of the

elusive sense of society as law. The presupposition nherent in an approach

like this amounts to a refusal to considerSociety as an entity or substance n

the functionalist sense; it implies the view that social institutions are essen-

tially negative existents, and havethe beingof taboos, springing nto life only

when we infringe hem, andquite invisibleand imperceptible, ndeed wellnighnon-existent, when they are respected and we remain within the intangible

barbed wire of a whole network of electric eyes. So the greatest novelists

were instinctivelyaware that there did not exist some object called Victorian

society, of which you could provide some elaboratemimesis;but that on the

other hand the instrument of plotting lay to hand to devise a set of

circumstancessuch that alarmsignalswould go off page after page, causing

the ghostly reality of the Social Orderto make its appearancebefore the



124

mind's eye more effectively than any sociology textbook. I suppose that the

last great example of such a novel-which deserves the qualification of

"experimentalnovel" in a very different sense than that intended by Zola

himself-was Ford'sParade'sEnd, which charts a virtual ransgressivemapof

pre-World-War-Iritishsociety.

The reader will long since have grasped the intent of this digression to

underscore a similarshift in "narrative trategy" in the sociological schools

themselves: on this view, the originalityof ethnomethodologicaldescription

is to have replaced the older illustrativeand typifying sociology, which still

believed in the reality of social laws and institutions, with a new strategyof

indirection. Hence the instinctive predilection of the new approach for

transgressivematerialsand its nowhere clearly formulatedsense that what is

revealingabout contemporarysociety is not so much what it admits to being

(or is supposed to be) but ratherwhat is not supposed to happen in it, what

goes wrong with it, what we have no words or terms to designate, and so

forth. Its "institutions"are then felt to be visible only at theirouter limits, in

those strangeno-man's-lands n which people are no longer certain how to

behave, and where, as in those ambiguous zones beyond either national

jurisdiction, it is the feeling of being beyond the social order that suddenly

allows us to grasp what the social order really was in the first place.

Meanwhile,and in that spirit, the most characteristic aw materialsof such a

research strategy will be drawn from what, in Riesman's old terminology,

might be called the shame parts of a guilt-or anxiety-culture: hence what is

so often felt to be the "morbidity"of ethnomethodology, its ostentatious

selection of cases of intersexualism (Garfinkel), homosexual passing, the

"Draculasyndrome" (e.g., colostomy patients who must periodicallyretirefrom public, in Lyman and Scott), physical stigmaor "the managementof

spoiled identity" (Goffman), etc. These interestsnot only illuminateareasof

social life we do not know, or avoid thinking about, but also suggestan

orientationwhich remainsoperative n the ethnomethodologicaldescriptions

of "normal"everyday life as well, as may be seen from the whole areaof

face-to-face behaviorwhich is in may ways Goffman's privileged object of

study. Heretoo, we are unable to escape the feeling that the most revealing

accounts of face-to face interaction are not offered by completed and thusnormative examples of the latter, by demonstrationsof interaction fully

realized, as rather by deviations from that norm, by unsuccessfulor only

partly successful encounters, interactions that have somehow been short-

circuited or disrupted by misunderstanding, mbarrassment, ole confusion,

breaking rame,andso forth.

Goffman'sworks are of course punctuatedby frequent disclaimers hat his



125

material is drawn only from our own society and that his findings are

thereforenot necessarilybindingon other social forms: but the admission s

not so much an invitation to comparativeresearchand to a more genuinely

historical approachto his subject as it is a dismissal of those perspectives.

Perhapsone may reintroducethem into the presentdiscussionby way of an

old paradox,namely the still disturbingnotion that life imitatesart andthat

it is form (ProfessorGoffman'sformsjust as much as any others) which, far

fromreflecting content, cause it to come into beingin the firstplace: in other

words,when we have to do with phenomenaof consciousness,appearances a

reality in its own right. It would follow, then, to choose an instance among

just such "aborted" encounter situations, that if the older thought forms

(philosophical systems, the nascent sociology of Auguste Comte, the

moralizingwisdom of the era along with the beginningsof modernpsycholo-

gy, the nomenclatureof everydayspeechjust as muchas the novels of Balzac

or Dickens) did not recognize embarrassment s a social event in its own

right-something it may be said to havebecome, not only in Goffman,but in

Proust andJoyce, as well as in the other-directed ociety itself-then there is a

sense in which this phenomenonmay be said not yet to have existed in that

period. WhenLucien de Rubempre,a buddingpoet andsocialclimber,whosemother is in reality a midwife, regalesan aristocratic alon with the difficul-

ties a literary genius finds in coming to birth, his subsequentdiscomfiture

("your excellent mother will be a greathelp to you") is not felt by Balzac to

be interesting in itself, but is presented as proof of a conspiracy against

Lucien and expressed as something like a figure or a weak drawingroom

equivalent of those "realer" events which are the duelling strike or the

liquidation of a businessadversary.Meanwhile, his same apparentlyfactual

"kernel" of the phenomenon of embarrassmentwould surely prove to havean even more astonishinglydifferent reality amid the guffaws and the ritual

humiliations of a primitivetribe. This is then the sense in which it may be

said that Goffman's form itself invents or constructs reality, the example

meanwhile admonishingus to correct this work through a constant histo-

ricization of its raw material, in such a way that what was presented as a

propositionabout social life in generalmay be reprocessed nto material or a

diagnosisof this particularhistoricalsociety alone.

Weare thus led to a closerexaminationof the nature of that particularprobe

of contemporarysocial life which is Goffman's form, and to a descriptionof

the operationsand procedureswhich allow him to abstractwhole dimensions

from the concrete here-and-nowof contemporary ife. The formalproblem

involved in any such process of abstraction is of course that of givingthe

illusion (or arousing the conviction) that a "complete statement" has been

made; in this case, however, since Goffman's objects are so intangible (not



126

only in the sense of being "psychological"or "phenomenological,"but also

in that marginalityand transgressivenesseferred o above), the strategicpart

of the operation is surely that of nomination, and few will question

Goffman's immense talent for inventing new terms and new names for his

newly constructedsocial objects.

Indeed this part of his work strikesme as so symptomaticthat I am tempted

to characterize he latter as a kind of object lesson in the socialization of a

private language, something that will probably seem offensive unless I add

that this effort seems to me to be the drivingforce behind most of today's

intellectual life (or at least, the "advanced"parts of it) and unless I rapidly

sketch in a picture of that new historical and intellectualsituation in which,

some "primitiveaccumulation" stage of theory havingbeen completed, the

new skill of semiosis, or simultaneous translationfrom one code or private

language nto another, becomes the evolutionary quality most necessary for

survival.Jean Baudrillard as indeed gone so far as to assertthat language n

this shares he transformation f the older capitalism nto something n which

the classical "referent"-value in the case of commodities, meaningor the

"signified" in the case of signs-is rapidly disappearing,creatinga dizzying

and uninterruptiblecirculationin the void, both of media-commoditiesand

of those empty "signifiers"which we have in this context termed private

languages.3I would myself have preferred o stress the fragmentation f the

publics, following upon the atomizationand monadization of contemporary

society, and the increasinguncertaintyas to whetheryour own local "code"

will be meaningfuldown the hall, let alone acrossthe border.At any rate, it is

certainthat the older-shall we call them referentialor realistic?-theoretical

workswhich offered their theoriesas solutionsto problemsat leastostensiblypresented by the material tself are in the process of being replacedby a new

kind of theoretical work-the meta-book-whose task is the invention of a

theory about other theories, the construction of a master theory through

which their apparent inconsistencies can be overcome, or, in the case of

theories which do not contradict each other because they have no visible

connection with each other at all, in whose largercontext they may be made

fruitfully to interact for the first time. Frame Analysis is, happily, only a

timid example of this kind of book, more fully developedin France,wherethe Anti-Oedipeof Deleuze and Guattarimay serve as the canonicalexample;

it is at any rate in a context like this that the talent for inventingnew names

and terms becomesa major ntellectualstrength.

It is, however,not enoughto observethat the greaterpartof this new coinage

of terminology has its origins in what I preferto call "figures"rather than

"metaphors" ("role," from the theatrical realm, and "frame" from the



127

semiotics of painting, are only two such figuralborrowings, o which we will

return below): what is in many ways an even more crucial part of the

operation is the defiguralizationof the term, the removal of its too obviousmetaphorical races, its transformation nto somethingneutralandscientific,

but also personalized and marked,as it were, with that peculiarmixture of

with-it Americanese and ironic distance which gives Goffman's style its

distinction. This is what happens, for instance, in the construction of the

concept of "keying,"to my mind the most interestingnew figureof Frame

Analysis: the notion of musicalkeys, of modulation and the like, is a familiar

enough sourceof occasionalfiguresof speech,but to transform he noun into

a verb is to terrorize the reader into a conviction that the operation issomethinghe and all the rest of us do all the time, and that thereis no point

pretending we don't know what the terms means (compare, e.g., the word

"passing"used above). Meanwhile, he new concept is supported by a series

of cross-referencesto analogous concepts in other disciplines, the most

strikingbeing those drawnfrom the linguistic area,which rangefrom Austin's

performativeutterances and the more recent concept of the "code" all the

way to Volosinov-Bakhtin's ccount of indirect discourse style indirect ibre

or erlebte Rede). These references certainly shed new light on the notion ofkeying, but I'm not sure that they are meant to do any more than to indicate

the vast rangeof other fields to which the term "keying" might some day be

relevant. Indeed, no effort is made to reach a theoretical synthesis of these

various terms; rather, he existence of analogousterms in neighboring ields is

itself the point to be made, suggesting, in that Zeitgeist atmosphere of

modern theorization to which we have already referred, that the fact of a

need for such a concept in other disciplinesamplyjustifies a similarconstruc-

tion in this one.

Of course, the usefulness of the concept for Goffman is intrinsic and

structural as well, for he needs a means of bringing identity or at least

regularity into what is otherwise the flux of social experience, and this

without falling back on the "natural"or common sense categories n use in

daily life. Hencethe idea of "a systematic transformation .. acrossmaterials

already meaningful in accordance with a schema of interpretation, and

without which the keyingwould be meaningless" p. 45). This does not quite

eliminate the problem-unresolved in Frame Analysis-of some ultimate,

"natural" reality that might be independent of social construction

("according to the definitions so far employed, the innermost part of a

framed activity must be something that does or could have status as untrans-

formed reality," p. 156-the italics are intended to draw attention to the

prudence of the formulation);still, the notion of "keying" certainlytends to

displace our attention to the process of semiotic transformationand away

from the materials hus transformed.



128

At this point, then, we are offered, as might be expected, a whole rangeof

illustrationswhich document the operationsof "keying"on all levelsof daily

life: Goffman divides his materialinto five generalheadings-make-believe,

contests, ceremonials, technical redoings, and regroundings "the perfor-

mance of an activity more or less openly for reasons or motives felt to be

radically different from those that govern ordinary actors," p. 74). The

respectivespace allotted these variousexamplesmakesit clearthat they do

not interest the frame analyst equally: in particular, contests and

ceremonials-conventionalized o the point where an "original" s no longer

present or necessary for imitation, and where therefore the process of

semiotic transformation s itself either less striking or rather different from

that encountered elsewhere-would seem to spring from a type of social

life-traditional and archaic, pre-media if not necessarily pre-capitalist-

qualitatively different from the present, late stage of capitalism which

providesthe bulk of Goffman's examples.Even when we limit ourselvesto

the latter, however,it is hard to escape the impressionthat logical priorities

have been reversed n the rhetoricof such a demonstration,and that it is not

the concept of "keying"which is validatedby the difficultiesandproblems t

can be shown to resolve, as rather the reverse,the variousexamples andillustrationsbeing useful merely to show how wide the rangeof applicability

of this term or figure s; and,as in a dictionaryor grammar ook, to furnisha

range of different but acceptable syntactical exercizes for the beginnerto

practice on. But this means that Frame Analysis is only apparentlyabout

social life; in reality, it is self-referential nd its deepestsubjectis the validity

of its own terminology.Thus the figureof "keying"proves n the long runto

be its own example,andto validate ts own meaningby showinghow muchin

the way of heterogeneousmaterial t canitself "key."

Something ike this couldbe shown, I think, for all of Goffman'smajoressays

or monographs;and our descriptionof his formmightwell have beenratified

by the ultimate confirmationby pastiche, for it is not hardto imaginesome

quasi-Goffmanian igure-let us say, the notion of the boundary and the

no-man's-landto which we had recourse earlier as the most transient

metaphoricalexpression-which, parleyedinto the status of a technicalterm,

might then be illustrated in just the way described above, with materialranging rom the uncertaintiesof everydaylife to, say, the ritualof the Noh

play. Before returning to our initial hesitation, however, and trying to

determinewhether Frame Analysis is to be thought of as one more figural

monograph of this type, or whether it representssomething like a new

departurefor Goffman, it seems appropriate o take note of an important

variant n the formjust describedand, if only for completeness'sake,to open

up a new categoryor sub-categoryalongside t.



129

This categorywould, to my mind,encompassall of those Goffmanian igures

which have remainedlinked to spatial experience, in which, therefore, the

original concrete situation from which they were derivedpersistswith a kind

of historical residuality,like an after-imageof the real. thus the concept of

"framedspace" is alreadylittle more than a figureof speech,by comparison

with that of the "total institution"presented nAsylums. The slippage roma

real place (the more traditionalsociologicalinvestigationof Asylums) to that

of semiotic or signifyingspace (as in the notion of the "frame" tself) is most

clearly observable,perhaps,in what is to my mind the most tantalizingof

Goffman's ndividualessays,on the so-called"Insanityof Place," published n

appendix and as though in after-thought o Relations in Public: here, for

almost the first and last time in Goffman, the semiotic effects, the meaning-

construction, of the various "frames" of experience are anchored in the

coercive realities of society itself as a concrete historicalphenomenon,and

the admirablepassionbreathedby this essay is comparable o that with which

Michel Foucault has denounced the various forms of confinement (even

though Goffman'sindignation, ike that of Foucault,ultimately expressesan

ethicaljudgementon the social orderrather han a politicalanalysisof it).

Frame Analysis constitutes a break with the earlieressays in preciselythat

feature to which we have attributed the originality of ethnomethodology in

the first place, namely its transgressivetrategy;and the impatiencewith that

older indirection, the ambition to achievethe monumentalityand the system

of a positive statement, are surely not alien to the dissatisfactionwhich one

may feel with the new work. For Frame Analysis, alone of Goffman's

investigations,abondonsthe earlierexploration of marginal xperienceand of

the malfunctioningof non-marginal ituations and institutions in an attemptto make a description, for the first time, of the functioning of those

institutions and of the laws according to which everyday life is actually

organized.The elaborate conceptuality of the "frame" is the result of this

ambition to evolve abstractionswhich hold for all social situations, and do

without those fragile links to concrete and historically determinate ones

which were still present in transgressivephenomena.The semiotic thrust of

the new work is clearly enough dictated by such aims: for, unable and

probably unwilling to return to the older positive sociology of institutionsand customs, Goffman can only evolve in the direction of the analysis of

socialmeaning.

Yet the contradictions in the new enterpriseare to my mind nowhere so

strikingly dramatizedas in the new kind of raw materialwhich fills these

pages. I must confess, indeed, that I found the constantstreamof newspaper

clippings, anecdotes, and believe-it-or-not happenings almost unbearably



130

tedious over several hundred pages; but the. issue is not my own personal

reaction, but rather the question of whether this material is not in itself

structurally quite different from that-case studies, anomalies, "morbid"

phenomena sometimes no less anecdotal than what is found here-which

provided the basis for the earlier monographs.It seems to me, indeed, no

accident that Goffman's illustrations are here increasinglydrawn from the

realm-inauthentic above all others-of the fait divers and the media pseudo-

event. At the very moment, in other words, when his analysis strives for its

greatest degree of formalizationand semiotic generality,his content becomes

irremediably rivialized:nor can his use of this raw materialbe justified, as he

tries disarmingly o do in his introduction (15-16), on the grounds of its

"typification"or on the strength of its capacity to dramatize"the power of

our conventional understandings o cope with the bizarrepotentials of social

life, the furthest reaches of experience."For the fait divers s not a fact or an

experience at all: it is a type of discourseand one peculiarlysymptomatic of

the superstructureof present-day neo-consumerism4; o that it is to have

been very particularly he dupe of the referentialor "realistic"illusion to

have taken it for real content in the first place. Here perhapsmore than

anywhere else, then, ProfessorGoffman's choice of what we have charac-

terized as ethnomethodology's semiotic, rather than its textual, strategyhas

played him false.

This said, there is yet another fundamentalcontradictionat work in Frame

Analysis, this time in the very development of its central figure: yet that

contradictionmay perhapsbest be arrivedat througha briefcharacterization

of what is strongest, both in Goffman's own semiotic turn and also in the

structuralist deology itself to which it becomes thereby related. This is thepolemic joined on the status of the "subject"or of individualconsciousness:

a debate whose more notorious monumentsare Foucault'scelebrationof the

"end of man" andAlthusser'santi-humanism, ut which canmoresoberlybe

characterizedas an inquiryinto the degreeto which individualconsciousness

or individualexistence may be considered an intelligiblefield of study in its

own right.

The debate unites data from schizophreniaand the experienceof drugswiththat whole tradition of the "hermeneuticof suspicion" (Ricoeur) in which

the instrumentsof demystification developed by Marx,Freud andNietzsche

find common groundin a devalorizationof the pretensionsof Reason or of

the consciousmind: yet the historical and ideologicalforce of recentFrench

attacks on the "philosophy of the subject," like those mentioned above,

seems to me to find its propercontext only when it is understoodas a final

and sometimes only imperfectly formulated attempt to liquidate the last



131

vestiges of bourgeois individualism tself and to preparethe basis for some

new post-individualistichought modeto

come.

FrameAnalysis participates n this effort to the degreeto which its central

conceptual instrument-that of the frame tself-offers a way of analyzing he

"phenomenological"material of everyday ife in impersonal erms.Indeed,in

this sense, we might reversethe terms of our previousargumentand suggest

that what is wrong with the semiotic approachhere(as well as in some of its

majorEuropeanpractitioners) s if anythingan insufficientformalization, he

failureto go far enough preciselyin dissolvingthe anthropomorphic estiges

of common-senseor surfacecategories,most notably that of the subject:so it

is a disappointmentthat, for all its work in the area of narrativeanalysis,

semiotics has continued to work with categoriesnot noticeably distinct from

the older anthropomorphic common sense ones of the "character."5

Goffman's notion of the frame and Qfits function as the very organizerof

social meaninggoes a long way towardssuggestinga mode of analysiswhich

would allow us to do without those "characters"who are the manipulated

subjectsof present-day ocialhappenings.

But FrameAnalysis is, in the area of the subject, even moreinstructive han

this: for in his closing pagesthe logic of Goffman'senterprize eads him to

that decisivediscoveryto which other contemporary hinkers-Lacan, Sartre,

Girard,come to mind6 -have been led by very differentavenuesof research,

namely the revelation of the reality of the collectivebeneath the appearance

of individualexperience, the disclosureof the individualsubject as a field of

multiple forces, not a substance but a locus, a nexus, of sheerrelationships.

So it is that Goffman's inquiry into the formal elements that make up an

interaction or an encounter leads to the discoverythat what we used to call

an individual is in reality the interplay and intersection of four different

functions, "principal, strategist, animator and figure" (p. 523), whose

complex operations among each other ultimately result in the pheno-

menologicaldata of our social experience. Goffmanresumeshis discoveryas

follows: "Starting with the traditional notion of the individual as self-

identified with the figure he cuts duringordinary nteraction, I have argued

some frame-relevantgrounds for loosening the bond: that playfulness andother keyings may be involvedwhich sharplyreduce personalresponsibility;

that often what the individualpresents is not himself but a story containinga protagonist who may happen also to be himself; that the individual's

presumably nward state can be shared around selectively, much as a stage

performer manages to externalize the inner feelings of the characterhe

enacts."(p. 541).



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Such a passage, n which the unique strengths of Goffman'swork are visible

in heightenedand concentrated orm, is not without offeringsome clues as to

a fundamentalweaknessas well, one which preventshim from developinghis

discovery about the nature of the subject into new andunexploredareas,and

deflects his argumentback into the now sterile terms of a long-deadpolemic

(his attack on the false problemsof introspectivepsychology at the end of

the previousparagraph).For the final contradictionof FrameAnalysisseems

to me precisely this persistence, in the midst of the newly depersonalized

languageof framingsand situations, of just that older,still anthropomorphic

vocabulary of "roles" and theatricalperformanceswhich formed the con-

ceptual horizon of Goffman's first and still SartreanPresentationof Self in

EverydayLife (1959). The concept of "role"was, indeed, a two-edged one,

for in those days it could be turned precisely against the psychology of the

"person"or subject, and be fully as much a force for demystificationas for a

reinforcementof the anthropomorphic llusion. This can surely no longer be

the casetoday, where, at least in the United States, the rhetoricof role, game,

performance,mask and drama,has become a whole ideology in its own right:

thus the frequently suggestive appeals to the authority and example of

theatricalhistory, throughoutFrame Analysis, have a curiouslyretrospectiveatmosphereabout them, striking one ultimately as the researchnotes from

some immense and never completed thesis on play-actingwhich was to have

served as the philosophicalbasis for the older book on "roles". Here, the

latter coexists uneasily with the new metaphor of the frame, and this

uncertainty about the very figure around which the new book was to be

organizedis no minor flaw in a work whose attractiveness ies in the new

figures t promisesus.

NOTES

1. Argonauts of the WesternPacific (New York, 1961), p. 10.

2. "Recently this neglected field-the field of public life-has begun to receive very

active attention, this being an aspect no doubt of a complex unsettling expressedvariously in the current unsafety and incivility of our city streets, the new political

device of intentionally breaking the ground rules for self-expression during meetings

and contacts, the change in rules of censorhip, and the social molestation encouraged

in the various forms of 'encounter group' and experimental theater." Relations in

Public (New York, 1971), pp. ix-x.

3. Pour une critique de l'economie politique du signe (Paris, 1972), esp. pp. 172-199.

4. See Roland Barthes, "Structure du fait divers," in Essais Critiques (Paris, 1964, also

in English translation, 1972); and Georges Auclair, Le Mana quotidien: Structure et

fonctions de la chronique des fait divers (Paris, 1970).



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5. See, for an important critique of the category of "character," Frangois Rastier, Essais

de semiotique discursive (Paris, 1973), pp. 185-206.

6. Sartre's "whirligigs," cf. Saint Genet (New York, 1971), pp. 333-353, Lacan'sL-schema of the constitution of the subject, cf Ecrits (Paris, 1966), pp. 53, 548ff,

Girard's"triangular mediation" of desire, cf. Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore,

1965) offer other examples of the "explosion of the subject" in contemporary

psychology.

Theory and Society, 3 (1976) 119-133? Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis

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