Gary Marx on Erving Goffman, from 'Role Models And Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman' (1984) 13(5)
Theory and Society 649-662 ...
I still recall his opening remarks to the class. With a wry smile he said "we will try and keep you entertained". I loved that. It reflected his sensitivity to the fact that student audiences are easily turned off, especially in Berkeley in the spring. It also seemed to say something about his need to be liked or, at least not be boring. The academy is not usually thought of as a place of entertainment, at least of a willful variety. Whatever most professors do, entertainment is usually secondary. But here a famous professor opens his class with a promise to entertain. Perhaps it was a way of showing role distance or applying the stage imagery he favored. He was expressing a shared sense that course work was often less than engaging. He wasn't about to be a purveyor of such materials or guilty of putting students to sleep.
The course was very demanding. Its lengthy and comprehensive reading list was a tour de force containing everything of importance in the field beginning with E. A. Ross's 1901 book on social control. What is more, Goffman really expected you to have read it all. Much of his lecture material was drawn from his then unpublished book Stigma. The method he used to study stigma was very different from that presented in other courses. It demonstrated that you could take an interesting topic and just write about it, without having hypotheses, an operational methodology or systematic quantitative data. It was a wonderful example of the unbridled sociological imagination rummaging hither and yon for interesting insights around a bounded theme. Concepts were important but it was premature to imbed them in a grand theory or to confine them to a single means of data collection.
Goffman presented himself as a detached, hard-boiled intellectual cynic; the sociologist as 1940s private eye. His was a hip, existential, cool, essentially apolitical (at least in terms of the prevailing ideologies) personal style. As a Canadian Jew of short stature working at the margins (or perhaps better, frontiers) of a marginal discipline, he was clearly an outsider. His brilliance and marginality meant an acute eye and a powerful imagination. He had a fascination with other people's chutzpah, weirdness and perhaps even degradation. He appreciated people who had a good thing going and those able to assert themselves in the face of what could be an oppressive social structure and culture. In a stodgy, timid, bureaucratic world the hustler has a certain freshness and perverse appeal. ...
Goffman's verbal and writing styles were very powerful. In class he played them beautifully - subtle wit, sarcasm, poker-faced delivery, and understatement had one on the edge of the seat. The class was entertaining. Goffman's humor and sharpness were without parallel. But this was always as a means to revealing some hidden and poignant truth. He offered a searing moral message regarding individual dignity. His slightly mysterious and mercurial character and the ability to shift selves or to hide his own self (a notion he probably would have rejected) increased his appeal.
There was a very human quality to the earthy details of everyday life that he forced us to attend to. It gave sociology a reality and believability that the more abstract and disembodied theoretical and quantitative approaches clearly lacked. In requiring that actors be understood and approached on their own terms, his naturalistic method had a hidden or implicit morality and a democratic relativism that granted a degree of dignity to actors, no matter how abhorent their behavior. Whether intended or not, the course went beyond conveying substantive information and offered directives on life.
Marx goes on to comment that -
Goffman beautifully illustrated for the student how the written word could have power. Writing, he taught us, could offer a way to quietly and safely express your personality and beliefs. You could satisfy your curiosity, express role distance and alienation, and comment on the ironies, paradoxes, and injustices that seemed so rampant. What was more, you could pretty much do this at your own pace and, under the mantle of being a sociologist, even gain a degree of respectability for it.
You could also be successful as a sociologist without becoming a dreaded organization man. Goffman always dressed casually outside of class and did not like to shave. His speech was neither pedantic nor formal and was larded with contemporary hip expressions. While it now seems trivial and almost inexplicable as an issue, I recall a long conversation in which I asked him if it was really necessary to join the ASA. He said no, you didn't have to belong, and cited some well known sociologists as examples.
As a teacher he had his weaknesses. He was both brilliant and learned, if humble about the state of the sociological art and the grave barriers to better understanding. There was little time for student involvement or reason to believe that beginning students could contribute much, absent direct experiential involvement with their subject matter. In class he did not try to draw the student out to see what he or she thought, or could do. Although he was to cite my term paper for his deviance course when he published Stigma, he made only a few cursory comments on the paper and those were hard to read. He was sparse with his praise and was a severe grader. Bennett Berger ('This Is A Fan Letter About Erving Goffman', Dissent, Summer 1973) reports that Goffman said he only gave As to students who taught him something.
What he did well as a teacher was communicate intellectual excitement and heighten one's consciousness of the craft involved in self presentations no less that the cruelty found in many social control efforts to manage others' identities. His material was very fresh. He obviously cared a great deal about it and was actively engaged with it. He used his courses to drive home an argument. As John Lofland observes he demonstrated the difference between "professing and merely teaching." ('Erving Goffman's Sociological Legacies', Urban Life, Vol. 13, no. 1, April 1984, 7-34.)
Yet this could have a negative side. His derisive treatment of psychological and psychiatric perspectives was very appealing at the time, but in retrospect this was not intellectually responsible. He presented a caricature. It is fine for a teacher to have a point of view, but this ought to come after a good faith effort to present alternatives. With respect to practical matters such as care taking criticism is easy. Pointing to the failures of intervention and total institutions is worthwhile. But if this is not linked to suggestions for reform or alternatives, it's a bit of a cop out, at least insofar as one seeks to milk the tit of moral indignation. His earlier deviance work did not show much sensitivity to the needs, demands, and contradictions faced by social controllers and those who set policy. Granted, impression management, fronts, manipulation, and self-serving ideas abound in total institutions. But is it sufficient to just point these out? It would have been nice if he had used his powerful empathetic skills to also describe how the world looks from the standpoint of those responsible for control.
In his dealings with students there were at least two Goffmans. One was wise, warm, and of good humor, eager to impart knowledge via morality tales and specific advice and make the student feel like he or she was within the chosen circle of persons in the know. His use of the inclusive term "student" to refer to himself and others involved in scholarly endeavors made you feel a part of the enterprise. The other Goffman was controlled, insensitive, and indifferent and made sure the student knew his place. Most of the "Tales of Goffman" are negative. In many of his dealings with others he did not reflect the sensitivity and concern for the underdog shown in his early written work.
