Looking Out My Window and Thinking about Goffman

On page 8 of Frame Analysis (1974), Erving Goffman writes:

“I assume that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: “What is going on here?” Whether asked explicitly, as in times of confusion and doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it is presumed by the way the individuals then proceed to get on with the affairs at hand.”

For me, Goffman’s ideas are most helpful and accessible when I come back to the idea that his fundamental purpose as a social scientist was to (hopefully) help other social scientists to be able to address the question of what is going on in different social settings. Right away, he kicks things off by throwing out two terms that ground his investigation of social life:

"The term “strip” will be used to refer to any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity, including here sequences of happenings, real or fictive, as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them. …And of course much use will be made of Bateson’s use of the term “frame” I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them." (p. 10).

Later, he puts these concepts in the context of an overall analytic model:

In sum, then, we tend to perceive events in terms of primary frameworks, and the type of frameworks we employ provides a way of describing the event to which it is applied. (p. 24)

So. I am writing this post a Monday morning. In the still chilly, pre-spring sunlight, with the sky a very pale blue, I look out of my window onto the quad at 10:52am, and I see people—presumably, mostly students—hurrying across several zigzagging lines of sidewalk, some crossing the lawn that separates these walks, and almost all of them walk with a sense of urgency, many of them walking in groups of twos, threes and fours. Clearly, I can apply Goffman’s question to this scene, from my vantage point. In a while, I will view a similar scene, but I will be among increasing numbers of people traveling across campus.

With this in mind, the other points that Goffman eloquently brings out for me are the ideas that:

(1) The frames provided by different kinds of media (he uses theater, movies, radio) shape how we perceive social action, and
(2) Media (or modes of communication) can take on different kinds of significance within social action of different types (he gives examples of music as a background while working, music as a bridge between scenes in a radio drama, and music as a portent to dramatic action).

Accordingly, in order to explore these concepts as they are evidenced in everyday life, Goffman writes that “a corpus of transcription practices must be involved for transforming a strip of offstage, real activity into a strip of staged being,” (p. 138) and in developing these transcription practices and conventions, he says that:

Behind the need for these conventions is something worth examining in more detail, something that might be called the “multiple channel effect.” When an individual is an immediate witness to an actual scene, events tend to present themselves through multiple channels, the focus of the participant shifting from moment to moment from one channel to another…The staging of someone’s situation as an immediate participant therefore requires some replication of this multiplicity, yet very often replication cannot be fully managed….In addition to the “multiple channel effect,” another element in the organization of experience can be nicely seen in the radio frame: syntactically different functions are accorded to phenomenally similar events. The question is that of the realm status of an event; and some sort of frame-analytical perspective is required in order for this question to be put.

Goffman wrote Frame Analysis within a time period in which more fluid interactionist perspectives brought a significant challenge to social science that emphasized structure and form. However, the ability of his ideas (particularly in a time when the means for sophisticated multi-channel analyses were limited) to help us to continue to keep in mind the “laminated” character of all social life, continues to shape my thinking, even within the postmodern, post-structuralist times that we currently inhabit.