Goffman, Erving 1974 [1955]. On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. In: Ben G. Blount (Ed.), Language, Culture and Society: A Book of Readings. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, Inc., 224-249
Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him either in face-to-face or mediated contact with other participants. In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line - that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaoluation of the participants, especially himself. (Goffman 1974: 224)Ajad mingit liini vä? Goffman is trapped in the lingo of his time, viewing behaviour as something necessarily patterned. Here these patterns express the views (attitudes?) towards: 1) the situation; 2) others (participants); 3) himself. In this sense (1/3 of it), every contact is minimally self-communication in the sense of availing "my view of what I am doing."
Regardless of whether a person intends to take a line, he will find that he has done so in effect. The other participants will assume that he has more or less willfully taken a stand, so that if he is to deal with their response to him he must take into consideration the impression they have possibly formed of him. (Goffman 1974: 224)This seems far from a methodological statement, Goffman is projecting lines on to the ontological level. Whether you want to take a line or not, it is inevitable. But what is this line? A stand? A role? The impression others have - or rather have possibly formed - of oneself?
The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes - albeit an image that others share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession of religion by making a good showing for himself. (Goffman 1974: 224)Positive social value. Claiming for oneself. Line assumed to be taken. Approved social attributes. A good showing. Oddities, many many oddities.
A person tends to experience an immediate emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him; he catchects his face; his "feelings" become attached to it. If the encounter sustains an image of him that he has long taken for granted, he probably will have few feelings about the matter. If events establish a face for him that is better than he might have expected, he is likely to "feel good"; if his ordinary expectations are not fulfilled one expects that he will "feel bad" or "feel hurt." In general, a person's attachment to a particular face, coupled with the ease with which disconfirming information can be conveyed by himself and others, provides one reason why he finds that participation in any contact with others in a commitment. A person will also have feelings about the face sustained for the other participants, and while these feelings may differ in quantity and direction from those he has for his own face, they constitute an involvement in the face of others that is an immediate and spontaneous as the involvement he has in his own face. One's own face and the face of others are constructs of the same order; it is the rules of the group and the definition of the situation which determine how much feeling one is to have for face and how this feeling is to be disturbed among the face involved. (Goffman 1974: 224-225)Okay, "immediate emotional response to the face" is plainly obvious as the face is the main source of emotional expression. Contact with others "allows" one to experience an immediate emotional response. The word "catchect" is confusing here as it seems to have gone out of use. "Feelings" becoming attached to face is also confusing: what does he mean by this? Does he mean that associating emotional responses with facial expressions creates a face (an image)? The sustaining of image can be taken for granted - discourse on self-image [enesekuvand] is profuse in social psychology. That is to say, I have few feelings about the matter :D It is noteworthy that events can establish a face for oneself that exceeds expectations. "A person's attachment to a particular face"... "coupled with the ease with which disconfirming information can be conveyed"... (define:disconfirm) *confused* Finding participation in any contact with others a commitment is what Goffman seems to want to explain. Attachment to a particular face is one reason for this, as any contact can force a new line upon oneself and "threaten face". It is also noteworthy that face is (a verbal AND nonverbal) construct. It is constructed in accord with "the rules of the group" AND "the definition of the situation". He does specify the definition of the situation here as that which determined how much "feeling" "one is to have for face and how this feeling is to be distributed among the faces involved." That is, the definition of the situation sets rules on how much involvement is accorded to the face of onseself and others. Among friends face is less important as less threat is present.
A person may be said to have, or be in, or maintain face when the line effectively takes presents an image of him that is internally consistent, that is supported by judgments and evidence conveyed by other participants, and that is confirmed by evidence conveyed through impersonal agencies in the situation. At such times the person's face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them. (Goffman 1974: 225)The face is effective only when the line is congruent (internally consistent, supported by the judggements and evidence conveyed by others, and evidence from the situation). A congruent face is not in or on the body (the face is not a physical face), but diffused in "the flow of events in the encounter". The face is a face only when these events in the situation are "read and interpreted" by others as congruent.
The line maintained by and for persons during contact with others tend to be a legitimate institutionalized kind. During a contact of a particular type, an interactant of known or visible attributes can expect to be sustained in a particular face and can feel that it is morally proper that this should be so. Given his attributes and conventionalized nature of the encounter, he will find a small choice of lines will be open to him and a small choice of faces will be waiting for him. Further, on the basis of a few known attributes, he is given the responsibility of possessing a vast number of others. His coparticipants are not likely to be conscious of the character of many of these attributes until he acts perceptibly in such a way as to discredit his possession of them; then everyone becomes conscious of these attributes and assumed that he willfully gave a false impression of possessing them. (Goffman 1974: 225)The face is oftentimes imputed on persons by their social roles, institutionalized and legitimized lines. It is very goffmanian to say that encounters are conventionalized. I wonder if this applies to ephemeral interactions also - I guess it does, in so far as public behaviour is always conventionalized to some degree. Here the premise is that encounters are conventionalized by a small selection of lines and faces. Moreover, others presume one to have a selection of lines and faces - to presume some roles and norms to be followed. Discrediting assumed faces follows the known logic of norms: not being conscious of them until something has gone awry and the "lack" becomes plainly ovbious (perceptible).
Thus while concern for the face focuses the attention of the person on the current activity, he must, to maintain face in this activity, take into consideration his place in the social world beyond it. A person who can maintain face in the current situation is someone who abstained from certain actions in the past that would have been difficult to face up on later. In addition, he fears los of face now partly because the others may take this as a sign that consideration for his feelings need not be shown in the future. There is nevertheless a limiting to this interdependence between the current situation and the wider social world; an encounter with people whom he will not have dealings with again leaves him free to take a high line that the future will discredit, or free to suffer humiliations that would make future dealings with them an embarrassing thing to have to face. (Goffman 1974: 225)That is, the face is not something merely in the situation, something you could simply focus your attention on. Maintaining a face must also be congruent with the social world beyond the concrete situation. The face must have a history of not being discredited in the past; and must project to a likely future that can be lived up to. One may fear loss of face because others may develop too many expectations, or on the other hand, dismiss the person as someone towards whom a positive face should be kept. Goffman here actually says that in "an encounter with people whom he will not have dealings with again" one can invent new lines and faces (invent in the sense that future will discredit these).
A person may be said to be in wrong face when information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him. A person may be said to be out of face when he participates in a contact with others without having ready a line of the kind participants in such situations are expected to take: The intent of many pranks is to lead a person into showing a wrong face or no face, but there will also be serious occasions, of course, when he will find himself expressively out of touch with the situation. (Goffman 1974: 225)In wrong face, disconfirming information breaks a face; In no face a person hdoes not have an expected line. Being pranked is one example, being thrown into a social situation which is foreign to the person is another (say, mixing with a new or "wrong" crowd). The solution seems to be to mix with many people and "develop a repertoite" of lines and faces. This may be why pickpockets for example (my understanding here is stereotypical) are good socializers - they are forced by their actions into appropriating the social styles of diverse groups.
When a person senses that he is in face, he typically responds with feelings of confidence and assurance. Firm in the line he is taking, he feels that he can hold his head up and openly present himself to others. He feels some security and some relief - as he also can when the others feel he is in wrong face but successfully hide these feelings from him. (Goffman 1974: 225-226)Finally something positive: being in a face and feeling to be so brings forth feelings of confidence and assurance. A confident and assured presentation implies a firm line and openness. Goffman himself mentions "holding his head up", but I think many other behaviours could be added: expanding the chest, having a straight back, open and free movements of limbs, active (vivid, expressive) facial expressions, etc. Generally, this seems to be related to the approach taken by nonverbal lie-detectionism a la Navarro: spotting comfort and discomfort. In this sense spotting face-congruence is a sign that a person is not only speaking truth but also acting truthfully, without inhibition or insecurity. Security and "relief" are important here. Goffman perceptively adds that this kind of positive face may be maintained even when other participants in the situation are not taken in by the face, but "successfully hide these feelings". This reminds me of some popular writer's contention on emotional contagion: when walking around with a bright smile the whole world seems to bebright and smiling, because when faced with such a smile it spreads and other people will instinctively display a smiling face back - even if for just a few seconds - and thus leave the impression that they are feeling the same. Literally, smile and the world smiles with you.
When a person is in wrong face or out of face expressive events are being contributed to the encounter which cannot be readily woven into the expressive fabric of the occasion. Should he sense that he is in wrong face or out of face, he is likely to feel ashamed and inferior because of what has happened to the activity on his account and because of what may happen to his reputation as a participant. Further, he may feel bad because he had relied upon the encounter to support an image of self to which he has become emotionally attached and which he now finds threatened. Felt lack of judgmental support from the encounter may take him aback, confuse him, and momentarily incapacitate him as an interactant. His manner and bearing may falter, collapse, and crumble. He may become embarrassed and chagrined; he may become shamefaced. The feeling, whether warranted or not, that is perceived in a flustered state by others, and that he is presenting no usable line, may add further injuries to his feelings, just as his change from being in wrong face or out of face to being shamefaced can add further disorder to the expressive organization of the situation. Following common usage, I shall employ the term poise to refer to the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others. (Goffman 1974: 226)Wrong face or out of face expressive events cannot be readily woven into the expressive fabric of the occasion. This is my first encounter with such terms, but I think I can appropriate them: the "expressive fabric of the occasion" seems to be the "emotional undercurrent" of a situation. Say, a party occasion is usually jolly, jocoucious, cheery, happy, etc. Being wrong or out of face at a party - say, sullen - may bring forth feelings of shame, inferiority, threat to reputation, etc. It is also important that people get attached to their social face as this is essentially their "social currency" (a passport to cross social borders, in terms of groups or hierarchy). In Brave New World Bernard gets attached to his wrongfully upheld face: he is the solicitor of the Savage and suddenly quite popular. He enjoyes the fact that people become polite to his face, although they keep criticizing him behind his back. When the Savage finally chooses not to cooperate with Bernard and stands his party up, Bernard's guests drop their false politeness and talk bad about him to his face. He is - to use Goffman's words - suddenly taken aback, fonfused and incapacitated as an interactant (he staggers around the room and apologized to people's face). The term poise is a useful one as the words demeanor and decorum are incomparably more complex. Poise as CAPACITY to suppress and conceal any TENDENCY to become shamefaced DURING encounters with others. I capitalized these words because poise is a capacity or ability, skill, etc. to deal with (suppress, conceal, hide, overcome) any tendency (inclination, disposition, starting) to become shamefaced (embarrassed, disconfirmed, disencouraged) during (while, at the same time, synchronically) encounters. The most important piece of this puzzle is the DURING - just like meta-communication, it must happen WHILE the tendency is showing itself. In this sense it is a true capacity, a skill to be learned or mastered, because it is quite hard to do (we usually think of "the right thing to say" after the fact, regretting what we actually did or said). So poise, besides being quite interesting, is also a very useful explanatory device for social skills. Also, finally, define:chagrined - "abashed: feeling or caused to feel uneasy and self-conscious; "felt abashed at the extravagant praise""
In our Anglo-American society, as in some others, the phrase "to lose face" seems to mean to be in wrong face, to be out of face or to be shamefaced. The phrase "to save one's face" appears to refer to the process by which the person sustains an impression for others that he has not lost his face. Following Chinese usage, one can say that "to give face" is to arrange for another to take a better face than he might otherwise have been able to take, the other thereby gets face given to him, this being one way in which he can gain face. (Goffman 1974: 226)A few different usages of the face concept. Apparently it is used by both the Chinese and American Indians (the latter's concept of the face was apparently studied by Mauss in The Gift in 1954). Losing face is indeed a common phrase in American lingo, an idiom for losing the positive impression one gives to others. Thus, also, the term "faceless" for someone who has no social face, denoting someone who is "base" or - in current social lingo - has no "social nerve" (If I understand this phrase correctly).
As an aspect of the social code of any social circle, one may expect ot find an understanding as to how far a person should go to save his face. Once he takes on a self-image expressed through face he will be expected to live up to it. In different ways in different societies he will be required to show self-respect, adbjuring certain actions because they are above or beneath him, while forcing himself to perform others even though they cost him dearly. By entering a situation in which he is given a face to maintain, a person takes on the reponsibility of standing guard over the flow of events as they pass before him. He must ensure that a particular expressive order is sustained - an order that regulates the flow of events, large or small, so that anything that appears to be expressed by them will be consistent with his face. When a person manifests these compunctions primarily from duty to himself, one speaks in our society of pride; when he does so because of duty to wider social units, and receives support from these units in doing so, one speaks of honor. When these compunctions have to do with postural things, with expressive events derived from the way in which the person handles his body, his emotion, and the things with which he has physical contact, one speaks of dignity, this being an aspect of expressive control that is always praised and never studied. In any case, while his social face can be his most personal possession and the center of his security and pleausre, it is only on loan to him from society; it will be withdrawn unless he conducts himself in a way that is worthy of it. Approved attributes and their relation to face make of every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell. (Goffman 1974: 226-227)define:abjure - "Solemnly renounce (a belief, cause, or claim)." Here Goffman defines the face as "an aspect of the social code of any social circle". It is a self-image expressed through the face, and expected to be lived up to. It involves self-respect - avoiding actions that are "above or beneath" (In BNW, bernard does not live up to his face as he acts "above" his positionality). Taking on a face is a responsibility to stand guard "over the flow of events" - to act as a behavioural censor. This means censorship over the expressive order which regulates the flow of events, a code for consistent expressions. define:compunction - "A feeling of guilt or moral scruple that follows the doing of something bad: "spend the money without compunction"." or "A pricking of the conscience". The origin for compunction is divided into three classical categories by Goffman; they are pride, honor and dignity. The first is directed towards oneself, the second to others, and third to the situaton at large.
Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect so also is he expected to sustain a standard of considerateness; he is expected to go to certain lenghts to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings. In sonsequence, he is discinlined to witness the defacement of others. The person who can witness another'ś humiliation and unfeelingly retain a cool countenance with himself is said in our society to be "heartless," just as he who can unfeelingly participate in his own defacement is thought to be "shameless." (Goffman 1974: 227)It is funny that instead of referring to "empathy", he is saying "emotional identification with the others and with their feelings". If only postmodern/literarytheorywriting people would go to such lenghts to replace their handy and seemingly meaningless jargon with such simple eloquence.
Of course, the more power and prestige the others have, the more a person is likely to show consideration for their feelings, as H. E. Dale 1941 suggests. "The doctrine of 'feelings' was expounded to me many years ago by a very eminent civil servant with a pretty taste in cynicism. He explained that the importance of feelings varies in close correspondence with the importance of the person who feels. If the public interest requires that a junior clerk should be removed from his post, no regard need be paid to his feelings; if it is a case of an Assistant Secretary, they must be carefully considered, within reason; if it is a Permanent Secretary, his feelings are a principal element in the situation, and only imperative public interest can override their requirements." (Goffman 1974: 227; footnote 3)An astonishing remark, and completely true I'm afraid. Power and consideration do go hand in hand.
Salesmen, especially street "stemmers," know that if they take a line that will be discredited unless the reluctant customer buys, the customer may be trapped by considerateness and buy in order to save the face of the salesman and prevent what would ordinarily result in a scene. (Goffman 1974: 227; footnote 4)I actually have a personal experience with this. A salesman spoke to me in a manner that implicated me in spending money on something I did not need or wish. I had to fight to get a word in edgewise and tell him off with "you are presuming I will do something I will not do, please stop it". I feel that there is no need to be considerate with people who's business it is to abuse you with their inconsiderateness.
The combined effect of the rule of self-respect and the rule of considerateness is that the person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participants. This means that the line taken by each participant is usually allowed to prevail, and each participant is allowed to carry off the role he appears to have chosen for himself. A state where everyone temporarily accepts everyone else's line is established. This kind of mutual acceptance seems to be a basic structural feature of interaction, espely the interaction of face-to-face talk. It is typically a "working" acceptance, not a "real" one, since it tends to be based not on agreement of candidly expressed heart-felt evaluations, but open a willingness to give temporary lip service to judgments with which the participants do not really agree. (Goffman 1974: 227-228)Thus in face-to-face interaction, on account of self-respect and the rule of considerateness, people tend to conduct themselves so as to maintain faces. This means that lines are allowed to prevail and chosen roles allowed to be carried off. This is a stete in which lines are temporarily established and accepted. This state is based on willingness to give lip service to judgments that may not really be agreeable. That is, for the sake of group interaction, for example, roles are allowed to be taken which disintegrate after the group does.
The mutual acceptance of lines has an important conservative effect upon encounters. Once the person initially presents a line, he and the others tend to build their later responses upon it, and in a sense become struck with it. Should the person radically alter his line, or should it become discredited, then confusion results, for the participants will have propared and committed themselves for actions that are now unsuitable. (Goffman 1974: 228)That is, faces have an accumulative effect: a line acted out in one encounter will be conveyed on to the next and either verified or discredited, so as to "make sure" that interactions can embody suitable actions. In this sense every interaction is a continual negotiation of roles and conversational responsibilities.
Ordinarily, maintenance of face is a condition for interaction, not its objective. Usual objectives, such as gaining face for oneself, giving free expression to one's true beliefs, introducing repreciating information about the others, or solving problems and performing tasks, are typically pursued in such a way as to be consistent with the maintenance of face. To study face-saving is to study the traff rules of social interaction; one learns about the code the person adheres to in his movement across the paths and designs of others, but not where he is going, or why he wants to go there. One does not even learn why he is ready to follow the code, for a large number of different motives can equally lead him to do so. He may want to save his own face because of his emotional attachment to the image of self which it expresses, because of his pride or honor, because of the power his presumed status allows him to exert over the other participants, and so on. He may want to save the others' face because of this emotional attachment to an image of them, or because he feels that his coparticipants have a moral right to his protection, or because he wants to avoid the hostility that may be directed toward him if they lose their face. He may feel that an assumption has been made that he is the sort of person who shows compassion and sympathy toward others, so that to retain his own face, he may feel obliged to be considerate of the line taken by the other participants. (Goffman 1974: 228)A lenghty outline of the reasons for maintaining face. Relevant for my purposes now is the one about gaining and maintaining power over others. This is very much the condition of power initself, as any kind of control of others' conduct rests on the assumption that the power-holder has some positive qualities (a certain face) that the others lack. The bit about emotional attachment to self-images and moral right to protection reminds me the need to maintain power for the sake of having the positive feeling of helping others. It is a synthetic form of producing the feeling of "purpose". Being powerful feels being purposeful, important. To relate this to a previous footnote, the person in power is shown consideration of feelings towards because he is indeed in the position to be considerate and help others, while the clerk lacks such powers. That is, any position of power is a nexus of self-interest.
By face-work I mean to designate the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face. Face-work serves to counteract "incidents" - that is, events whose effective symbolic implications threaten face. Thus poise is one important type of face-work, for through poise the person controls his embarrassment and hence the embarrassment that he and others might have over his embarrassment. Whether or not the full consequences of face-saving actions are known to the person who employs them, they often become habitual and standardized practices; they are like traditional plays in a game or traditional steps in a dance. Each person, subculture, and society seems to have its own characteristic repertoire of face-saving practices. It is to this repertoire that people partly refer when they ask what a person or culture is "really" like. And yet the particular set of practices stressed by particular persons or groups seems to be drawn from a single logically coherent framework of possible practices. It is as if face, by its very nature, can be saved only in a certain number of ways, and as if each social grouping must make its selection from this single matrix of possibilities. (Goffman 1974: 228-229)Thus the main issue of this article: the actions people take to make whatever they do consistent with their face. It is relevant that actions and doings are here on different levels: the procedures of face-work modify social significance of the actions/deeds. Face-work serves to liquidate "incidents" - indecent actions; to appropriate that which is inappropriate. It is the play of symbolci inplications of actions. Poise, defined earlier as "the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others", is one important type of facework - it serves to control embarrassment (and, significantly, the embarrassment that others might have over embarrassment; that is, embarrassment begets embarrassment). Relevant here is the fact that face-work may go on without the actor intentionally or knowingly doing it - "they often become habitual and standardized practices". This is extremely significant as it may become a powerful explanatory device in intercultural differences: for example, sexual encounter between John and Lenina does not happen because they have different understandings of sexuality and what it means to be embarrassed about such matters. Lenina's "everyone belongs to everyone" and free having of everyone is in awful contrast with John's medieval chivalry which demands love to be earned, to be worthy of it. Their conflict is brought about partly because their "traditional plays in a game or traditional steps in a dance" are markedly different. Neither of them can comprehend each other's face-saving practices and it leads to physical confrontation and Lenina being trapped in the bathroom. The last sentence of this lenghty quote almost seems to draw on Ruesch and Bateson: that is, each group appropriates a selection of all possible combinations (much like phonemes or graphemes).
If a person is to employ his repertoire of face-saving practices, obviously he must first become aware of the interpretations that others may have placed upon his acts and the interpretations that he ought perhaps to place upon theirs. In other words, he must exercise perceptiveness. But even if he is properly alive to symbolically conveyed judgments and is socially skilled, he must yet be willing to exercise his perceptiveness and his skill; he must, in short, be prideful and considerate. Admittedly, of course, the possession of perceptiveness and social skill so often leads to their application that in our society terms such as politeness or tact fail to distinguish between the inclination to exercise such capacities and the capacities themselves. (Goffman 1974: 229)This is where stuff gets semiotic: face-work is a matter of interpreting acts. To elaborate, to interpret, assign possible meanings, test these interpretations and finally form concrete associations between what acts and when come across how. Being prideful and considerate seems like it might be universal, but there could easily be plenty of situations in which pride and consideration are not what is expected of anyone and acting thus will lead to trouble (not only loss of face, but perhaps even physical confrontation). Goffman's remark about the sparse discrimination of the difference between competence and performance has much to do with the difficulties I am having with demeanor and decorum. I'm repeating myself, but this really is so: they sound like nice words, but there is hard time to be had defining them properly.
Presumably social skill and perceptiveness will be high in groups whose members frequently act as representatives of wider social units such as lineages or nations, for the player here is gambling with the face to which the feelings of many persons are attached. Similarly, one might expect social skill to be well developed among those of high station and those with whom they have dealings, for the more face an interactant has, the greater the number of events that may be inconsistent with it, and hence the greater the need for social skill and forestall or counteract these inconsistencies. (Goffman 1974: 229; footnote 6)Yes, this is the issue with all reference groups: being a part of a group means representing the group outside of it (as well as inside, I suppose). It almost seems that Goffman is hinting at a "collective face" here; or in simpler words, "group identity", which can bestow power (or the lack of power, for that matter) to a face.
I have already said that the person will have two points of view - a defensive orientation toward saving his own face and a protective orientation toward saving the others' face. Some practices will be primarily defensive and others primarily protective, although in general one may expect these two perspectives to be taken at the same time. In trying to save the face of others, the person must choose a tact that will not lead to loss of his own; in trying to save his own face, he must consider the loss of face that his action may entail in others. (Goffman 1974: 229)This is a quality in good authors: the capacity to discriminate meanings in or for words that for all practical purposes are synonyms. Defense (of others) and protection (of oneself) are thus two different activities or functions that may coexist in a single act. The general theme here is interconnectedness: what and how I do something will reflect my views of myself, others in the situation and the situation itself.
In many societies there is a tendency to distinguish three levels of responsibility that a person may have for a threat to face that his actions have created. FIrst, he may appear to have acted innocently; his offense seems to be unintended and unwitting, and those who perceive his act can feel that he would have attempted to avoid it had he foreseen its offensive consequences. In our society one calls such threats to face faux pas, gaffes, boners, or bricks. Secondly, the offending person may appear to have acted maliciously and spitefully, with the intention of causing open hurt. Thirdly, there are incidental offenses; these arise as an unplanned but sometimes anticipated by-product of action - action the offender performs in spite of its offensive consequences, although not out of spite. From the point of view of a particular participant, these three types of threat can be introduced by the participant himself against his own face, by himself against the face of others, by the others against their own face, or by the others against himself. Thus the person may find himself in many different relations to a threat to face. If he is to handle himself and others well in all contingencies, he will have to have a repertoire of face-saving practices for each of these possible relations to threat. (Goffman 1974: 229-230)1) Appearing to have acted innocently - not knowing how an act could be interpreted; 2) appearing to have acted maliciously and spitefully - this is the case with many gestures in Greece, for example, where certain acts have plaily different interpretations than elsewhere; 3) incidental offenses which are caused despite possible consequences, although not out of spite - this is when the possible interpretation is known ahead of time, but the action is commited anyway. The directions of threats to face are Me→Me, Me→Others, Others→Me; and Others→Themselves. Goffman says that for all of these relations, a repertoire of face-saving practices is necessary. The picture would be quite murkier if the "Others" were not an integral face, but more like in later social dynamics with relations like Me→Buddy, Me→FineQT, Buddy→Himself, etc.
THE BASIC KINDS OF FACE-WORK#avoidance, #avoidance, #AVOIDANCE! Avoidance is a surefire method to avoid threats to face. One can use go-betweeners (mediators), but in institutionalized and group interactions avoidance may not be enough, as it may itself become a way of offending (I'm turning away from you or avoiding seeing you because I don't like you).
The avoidance process. The surest way to prevent threats to his face is to avoid contacts in which these threats are likely to occur. In all societies one can observe this in the avoidance relationship and in the tendency for certain delicate transactions to be conducted by go-betweeners. Similarly, in many societies, members know the value of voluntarily making a gravious withdrawal before an anticipated threat to face has had a chance to occur. (Goffman 1974: 230)
Once the person does chance an encounter, other kinds of avoidance practices come into play. As defensive measures, he keeps off topics and away from activities that would lead to the expression of information that is inconsistent with the line he is maintaining. At opportune moments he will change the topic of conversation or the direction of activity. He will often present initially a front of difference and composure, suppressing any show of feeling until he had found out what kind of line the others will be ready to support him with. Any claims regarding self may be made with belittling modesty, with strong qualifications, or with a note of unseriousness; by hedging in these ways he will have prepared a self for himself that will not be discredited by exposure, personal failure, or the unanticipated acts of others. And if he does not hedge his claims about self, he will attempt to be realistic about them, knowing that otherwise events may discredit him and make him lose face. (Goffman 1974: 230)These other avoidance practices are milder and go as follows: avoiding certain topics of talk or co-activities, avoiding inconsistent information from reaching the avoidee, directing the topic of conversation or activity, presenting a front and suppressing feelings, qualify claims of self with belittling modesty (decrease, compress), stronger claims (amplify, boost) or present with a note of unseriousness (neutralization). By these methods one can prepare or modify the situation to counteract the impending offense.
In an unpublished paper by Harold Garfinkel has suggested that when the person finds that he has lost face in a conversational encounter, he may feel a desire to disappear or "drop through the floor," and that this may involve a wish not only to conceal loss of face but also to return magically to a point in time when it would have been possible to save face by avoiding the encounter. (Goffman 1974: 230)This is surely very garfinkelish. I have also noticed that when in a classroom environment for example someone loses face in conversation they will try to make it up by continuing to speak, usually (but always, though) embarrassing himself more.
Certain protective manuevers are as common as these defensive ones. The person shows respect and politeness, making sure to extend to others any ceremonial treatment that might be their due. He employs discretion; he leaves unstated facts that might implicitly or explicitly contradict and embarrass the positive claims made by others. He employs circumlocutions and deceptions, phrasing his replies with careful ambiguity so that the others' face is preserved even if their welfare is not. He employs courtesies, making slight modifications of his demands on or appraisals of the others so that they will be able to define the situation as one in which their self-respect is not threatened. In making a belittling demand upon the others, or in imputing uncomplimentary attributes to them, he may employ a joking manner, allowing them to take the line that they are good sports, able to relax from their ordinary standards of pride and honor. And before engaging in a potentially offensive act, he may provide explanations as to why the others ought not to be affronted by it. For example, if he knows that it will be necessary to withdraw from the encounter before it has terminated, he may tell the others in advance that it is necessary for him to leave, so that they will have faces that are prepared for it. But neutralizing the potentially offensice act need not be done verbally; he may wait for a propitious moment or natural break - for example, in conversation, a momentary lull when no one speaker can be affronted - and then leave, in this way using the context instead of his words as a guarantee of inoffensiveness. (Goffman 1974: 230-231)Protective manuevers: showing respect and politeness; employing discretion; employing circumlocutions and deceptions; employing courtesies; employing joking manner; providing explanations before an offense. The only nonverbal method Goffman can here think of involves quietly leaving the company when a suitable pause in the conversation emerges. The presumption is that leaving in the middle of conversation is offensive.
When a person fails to prevent an incident, he can still attempt to maintain the fiction that no threat to face has occurred. The most blatant example of this is found where the person acts as if an event that contains a threatening expression has not occurred at all. He may apply this studied nonobservance to his own acts - as when he does not by any outward sign admit that his stomach is rumbling - or to the acts of others, as when he does not "see" that another has stumbled. Social life in mental hospital owes much to this process; patients employ it in regard to their own peculiarities, and visitors employ it, often with tenuous desperation, in regard to patients. In general, tactful blindness of this kind is applied only to events that, if perceived at all, could be perceived and interpreted only as threats to face. (Goffman 1974: 231)"Maintaining a fiction" is an interesting phrase. The bit about "studied nonobservance" is sometimes reported in body language books, not to mention more serious authors who recognize the social importance of this manuever. Of course it needs to be kept in mind that this kind of "tactful blindness" is socioculturally specific - what for one group is an offensive act may fot another be a pleasant obligation (passing gas during dinner, for example).
A more important, less spectacular kind of tactful overlook is practiced when a person openly acknowledges an incident as an event that has occurred, but not as an event that obtained a threatening expression. If he is not the one who is responsible for the incident, then his blindness will have to be supported by his forbearance; if he is the doer of the threatening deed, then his blindness will have to be supported by his willingness to seek a way of dealing with the matter, which leaves him dangerously dependent upon the cooperative forbearance of the others. (Goffman 1974: 231-232)When a misdeed is not threatening but openly acknowledged then it is the cooperative forbearance of the other that will support blindness to the matter. define:forbearance - "Patient self-control; restraint and tolerance." I'm not exactly sure what is the importance of this, but I cannot be sure that it will not become important in some way or another.
Another kind of avoidance occurs when a person loses control of his expressions during an encounter. At such times he may try not to overlook the incident as to hide or conceal his activity in some way, thus making it possible for the others to avoid some of the difficulties created by a participant who has not maintained a face. Correspondingly, when a person is caught out of face because he had not expected to he thrust into interaction, or because strong feelings have disrupted his expressive mask, the others may protectively turn away from him or his activity for a moment, to give him time to assemble himself. (Goffman 1974: 232)There the terminology suggests that Goffman is indeed talking strictly about facial expressions, whereas elsewhere the face seems to be a social construct more dispersed than the expressive skin and muscles on a person's head.
The corrective process. When the participant in an undertaking or encounter fail to prevent the occurrence of an event that is expressively incompatible with the judgments of social worth that are being maintained, and when the event is of the kind that is difficult to overlook, then the participants are likely to give it accredited status as an incident - to ratify it as a threat that deserves direct official attention - and to proceed to try to correct for its effects. At this point one or more participants find themselves in an established state of ritual disequilibrium of disgrace, and an attempt must be made to re-establish a satisfactory ritual state for them. I use the term ritual because I am dealing with acts through whose symbolic component the actor shows how worthy he is of respect or how worthy he feels others are of it. The imagery of equilibrium is apt here because the length and intensity of the corrective effort is nicely adapted to the persistence and intensity of the threat. One's face, then, is a sacred thing, and the expressive order required to sustain it is therefore a ritual one. (Goffman 1974: 232)The corrective process is the part of face-work that restores, in a sense, the espressive compatibility of an event with the judgments of social worth that are being maintained. The act itself may be physical (tummy rumbling, for example), but the corrective process is thoroughly semiotic. This is stated here as the direction of official attention (direction of sign-processes or mindfullness) towards the symbolic correction of the disgraceful act. The statement that one's face is a sacred ritual and the expressive order required to sustain it therefore a ritual one is fairly familiar, ambiguously reminding me of some continental ethnologists's similar views (or perhaps I'm confusing something here). In any case, the use of the words "in any case" themselves are a kind of corrective practice, aimed at symbolically rectify the fact that I may have fumbled with my scarce knowledge of continental enthographers. Another noteworthy bit is that the ritual is an indication of "how worthy" one "is of respect". That is, politeness and respect are starting to link up.
The sequence of acts set in motion by an acknowledged threat to face, and terminating in the re-establishment of ritual equilibrium, I shall call an interchange. Defining the message or move as everything conveyed by an actor during a turn at taking action, one can say that an interchange will involve two or more moves and two or more participants. Obviously examples in our society may be found in the sequence of "Excuse me" and "Certainly," and in the exchange of presents or visits. The interchange seems to be a basic concrete unit of social activity and provides one natural empirical way to study interaction of all kinds. Face-saving practices can be usefully classified according to their position in the natural sequence of moves that comprise this unit. Aside from the event which introduces the need for a corrective interchange, four classic moves seem to be involved. (Goffman 1974: 232-233)Interchange is the modus operandi of corrective actions. It's minimal conditions are two people and two actions: an inter(ex)change.
There is, first the challenge, by which participants take on the responsibility of calling attention to the misconduct; by implication they suggest that the threatened claims are to stand firm and that the threatening events itself will have to be brought back into line. (Goffman 1974: 233)E.g. "Who farted?" In non-conversations this could also mean visual interaction between the participants and calling attention to the misconduct via visual behaviour.
The second move consists of the offering, whereby a participant, typically the offender, is given a chance to correct for the offense and re-äestablish the expressive order. Some classic ways of making this move is available. On the one hand, an attempt can be made to show that what admittedly appeared to be a threatening expression is really a meaningless event, or an unintentional act, or a joke not meant to be taken seriously, or an unavoidable, "understandable product of extenuating circumstances. On the other hand, the meaning of the event may be granted and effort concentrated on the creator of it. Information may be provided to show that the creator was under the influence of something and not himself, or that he was under the command of somebody else and not acting for himself. When a person suddenly finds that he has demonstrably failed in capacities that the others assume him to have and to claim for himself - such as the capacity to spell, to perform minor tasks, to talk without malapropisms, and so on - he may quickly add, in a serious or unserious way, that he claims the incapacities as part of his self. The meaning of the threatening incident thus stands, but it can now be incorporated smoothly into the flow of expressive events. (Goffman 1974: 233)"The expressive order" is the equilibrium or harmony of interaction. The classic moves are quite well known: downlaying the error, negotiating its meaning, claiming its rationality (its "understandability") etc. The part of external influence on misconduct is interesting, as this could include both drugs or substances AND the line of command (I wonder if anyone has analyzed "power as a drug").
As a supplement to or substitute for the strategy of redefining the offensive act or himself, the offender can follow two other procedures: he can provide compansation to the injured - when it is not his own face that he has threatened; or he can provide punishment, penance, or expiation for himself. These are important moves or phases in the ritual interchange. Even though the offender may fail to prove his innocence, he can suggest through these means that he is now renewed person, a person who has paid for his sin against the expressive order and is once more to be trusted in the judgmental scene. Further he can show that he does not treat the feelings of the others lightly, and that if their feelings have been injured by him, however innocently, he is prepared to pay a price for his actions. Thus he assures the others that they can accept his explanation without this acceptance constituting a sign of weakness and a lack of pride on their part. Also, by his treatment of himself, by his self-castigation, he shows that he is clearly aware of the kind of crime he would have committed had the incident been what it first appeared to be, and that he knows the kind of punishment that ought to be accorded one who would commit such a crime. The suspected person thus shows that he is thoroughly capable of taking the role of the others toward his own activity, that he can still be used as a responsibile participant in the ritual process, and the rules of conduct which he appears to have broken are still sacred, real, and unweakened. An offensive act may arouse anxiety about the ritual code; the offender allays this anxiety by showing that both the code and he as an upholder of it are still in working order. (Goffman 1974: 233-234)define:expiation - "atonement: compensation for a wrong; "we were unable to get satisfaction from the local store"." The important part here is admitting the error or misconduct; directing awareness to it and showing signs of atonement without further offense (threat to the face). The bit about upholding rules of conduct is what I find troublesome as this is exactly the point of reifying rules which may not be beneficial to anyone but are upheld because they are "still sacred, real, and unweakened." Perhaps we should blaspheme against rules, demonstrate their unreality and weaken their grip on our conduct?! This seems to be a matter of opinion and not surprisingly on this issue I tend to disagree with a text that is more than half a century old by now. It is because rules of conduct have eroded away by themselves - as well as they should; no rule, no problem.
After the challenge and the offering have been made, the third move can occur: the person to whom the offering is made can accept it as a satisfactory means of re-establishing the expressive order and the faces supported by this order. Only then can the offender cease the major part of his ritual offering.In a twisted sense this seems to bring out the primitiveness of modern people: their communicative offenses must be attoned for by making an offering, re-establishing the cosmic "expressive order" of interaction harmony. You make an offering to the gods of encounter and receive atonement or "indulgence of forgiveness." Generally this seems to hold true even for the modern man, but the same generality and indefinite nature of this discussion creates a sense of vagueness. What is this "offering" exactly?
In the terminal move of the interchange, the forgiven person conveys a sign of gratitude to those who have given him the indulgence of forgiveness.(Goffman 1974: 234)
The phases of the corrective process - challenge, offering, acceptance, and thanks - provide a model for interpersonal ritual behavior, but a model that may be departed in significant ways. For example, the offended parties may give the offender a chance to initiate the offering on his own before a challenge is made and before they ratify the offense as an incident. This is a common courtesy, extended on the assumption that the recipient will introduce a self-challenge. Further, when the offended persons accept the corrective offering, the offender may suspect that this has been grudgingly done from tact, and so he may colunteer additional corrective offerings, not allowing the matter to rest until he has received a second or third acceptance of his repeated apology. Or the offended persons may tactfully take over the role of the offender and volunteer excuses for him that will, perforce, be acceptable to the offended persons. (Goffman 1974: 234)It would be a long stretch but two definitions can be drawn from this. Firstly, common courtesy as a precipitation of the corrective process, "letting it slip" before the ritual of expressive order restoration ensues. Secondly, self-challenge might be defined as an interactional self-criticism or a form of self-monitoring which seeks to correct offenses before they are taken. Useless definitions to be sure, but nevertheless intersting for me.
An important departure from the standard corrective cycle occurs when a challenged offender patently refuses to heed the warning and continues with his offending behavior, instead of setting the activity to rights. This move shifts the play back to the challengers. If they countenance the refusal to meet their demands, then it will be plain that their challenge was a bluff and that the bluff has been called. This is an untenable position; a face for themselves cannot be derived from it, and they are left to bluster. To avoid this fate, some classic moves are open to them. For instance, they can resort to tactless, violent retaliation, destroying either themselves or the person who had refused to heed their warning. Or they can withdraw from the undertaking in a visible huff - righteously indignant, outraged, but confident of ultimate vindication. Both tacks provide a way of denying the offender his status as an interactant, and hence denying the reality of the offensice judgment he has made. Both strategies are ways of salvaging face, but for all concerned the costs are usually high. It is partly to forestall such scenes that an offender is usually quick to offer apologies; he does not want the affronted persons to trap themselves into the obligation to resort to desperate measures. (Goffman 1974: 234)Here the offender denies the offense and "continues with the offending behavior". define:untenable - "(esp. of a position or view) Not able to be maintained or defended against attack or objection: "this argument is clearly untenable"." define:bluster - "Talk in a loud, aggressive, or indignant way with little effect: "you threaten and bluster"; "“I don't care what he says,” I blustered"." The act of "denying the offender his status as an interactant" is a fairly familiar: it is treating the person as a non-person, someone who does not exist. Thus it seems on a grand scale that politeness or maintaining a face is a method of exclusion in the interaction system: those who don't follow the rules of the expressive order are effectively shut of from the system, delineated as "outside" the borders of the interaction, avoided. A desperate measure indeed.
It is plain that emotions play a part in these cycles of response, as when anguish is expressed because of what one has done to another's face, or anger because of what has been done to one's own. I want to stress that these emotions function as moves, and fit so precisely into the logic of the ritual game that it would seem difficult to understand them without it. In fact, spontaneously expressed feelings are likely to fit into the formal pattern of the ritual interchange more elegantly than consciously designed ones. (Goffman 1974: 234-235)Here firstly Goffman proclaims emotions to be "moves" or actions, prescribes them a function in the interaction. An odd one, to be sure, but still a function. And secondly he is probably right about spontaneity here, as planned (conscious) apologies are rarely very fluid, an automatic ritualistic response is more effective as a corrective process. I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop here and pick up later as I haven't even reached half of the article and the second half seems too promising to read while tired.
MAKING POINTS: THE AGGRESSIVE USE OF FACE-WORKThat is, threats to face and the ensuing corrective ritual of apology can be monopolized to uplift one's ego. This is, for example, "fishing for compliments" which today mostly stands for a girl posting a (somewhat) beautiful pictur ef herself and in the caption proclaiming herself to be ugly in some manner, thus giving the males who comment the picture an opportunity to argue for the obvious. Gullibly they think they are uplifting the poor girl's low self-esteem, not seeing the self-applauding egoism behind the facade. Goffman mentiones here also a tactic of abusing the forbearance of others, offending those who are known not to overlook affronts. This is indeed an aggressive move, but done very often - in fact, I would posit this as an aspect of power relations: "I can say about you whatever I wish and you will simply have to take it". This is how I imagine the "ritually unsatisfactory state" that "cannot readily be completed". The last bit, arranging for others to offend and feel guilt and remorse is social machiavellianism at its best.
Every face-saving practice which is allowed to neutralize a particular threat opens up the possibility that the threat will be willfully introduced for what can be safely gained by it. If a person knows that his modesty will be answered by others' praise of him, he can fish for compliments. If his own appraisals of self will be checked against incidental events, then he can arrange for favorable incidental events to appear. If others are prepared to overlook an affront to them and actually forbearantly, or to accept apologies, then he can rely on this as a basis for safely offending them. He can attempt by sudden withdrawal to force the others into ritually unsatisfactory state, leaving them to flounder in an interchange that cannot readily be completed. Finally, at some expense to himself, he can arrange for the other to hurt his feelings, thus forcing them to feel guilt, remorse, and sustained ritual disequilibrium. (Goffman 1974: 235)
When a person treats face-work not as something he need be prepared to perform, but rather as something that others can be counter on to perform or to accept, then an encounter or an undertaking becomes less a scene of mutual considerateness than an arena in which a contest or match is held. The purpose of the game is to prevent everyone's line from an inexcustable contradiction while scoring as many points as possible against one's adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself. An audience to the struggle is almost a necessity. The general method is for the person to introduce favorable facts about himself and unfavorable facts about the others in such a way that the only reply the others will be able to think up will be one that terminates the interchange in a grumble, a meager excuse, a face-saving I-can-take-a-joke laugh, or an empty stereotyped comeback of the "Oh yeah?" or "That's what you think" variety. The losers in such cases will have to cut their losses, tacitly grant the loss of a point, and attempt to do better in the next interchange. Points made by allusion to social class status are sometimes called snubs; those made by allusions to moral despectability are sometimes called digs; in either case one deals with a capacity at what is sometimes called "bitchiness." (Goffman 1974: 235)Face-work is here defined as something one needs to be prepared for, which in my mind made a connection between what Foucault discusses in The Hermeneutics of the Self as paraskeue. Face-works consists not only of orationes logoi or elements of discourse, but as well of social strategies for threats to one's self-conception (of social worth). The aggressive strategy here discussed is that of defending one's own
In aggressive interchanges the winner not only succeeds in introducing information favorable to himself and unfavorable to the others, but also demonstrates that as interactant he can handle himself better than his adversaries. Evidence of this capacity is often much more important than all the other information the person conveys in the interchange, so that the introduction of a "crack" in verbal interaction tends to imply that the initiator is better at footwork than those who must suffer his remarks. However, if they succeed in making a successful parry of the thrust and then a successful riposte, the instigator of the play must not only face the disparagement with which the others have answered him but also accept the fact that his assumption of superiority in footwork has proven false. He is made to look foolish, he loses face. Hence it is always a gamble to "make a remark." The table can be turned and the aggressor can lose more than he could have gained had his move won the point. Successful ripostes or comebacks in our society are sometimes called qsuelches or toppers; theoretically it would be possible for a squelch to be squelched, a topper to be topped, a riposte to be parried with a counter-riposte, but except in staged intercahnges this third level of successful action seems rare. (Goffman 1974: 236)define:riposte - "A quick clever reply to an insult or criticism." This is where the aggressive attitude turns to power: better self-handling is a desirable quality (to carry oneself well even in situations of considerable pressure). I aggressive interchanges the content of the ripostes may not be as important as the skillful expression. define:footwork - "The manner in which one moves one's feet in various activities such as sports and dancing." Presumably Goffman here means footwork in the non-literal sense of "moves" or actions in the interchange.
THE CHOICE OF APPROPRIATE FACE-WORKThis is where culture is mixed in: different sociocultural groups probably use distinct and diffuse strategies to reinstate the ritual order (not to mention having diverging definitions of the ritual order itself). It seems to be a case that an aspect of this poise it to not exhibit signs of discomfort nonverbally. For example, hiding one's face with a hand is a dead giveaway that a person is feeling shamefaced.
When an incident occurs, the person whose face is threatened may attempt to reinstate the ritual order by means of one kind of strategy, while the other participants may desire or expect a practice of a different type to be employed. When, for example, a minor mishap occurs, momentarily revealing a person in wrong face or out of face, the others are often more willing and able to act blind to the discrepancy than is the threatened person himself. Often they would prefer him to exercise poise, while he feels that he cannot afford to overlook what has happened to his face and so becomes apologetic and shamefaced, if he is the creator of the incident, or destructively assertife, if the others are responsible for it. Yet on the other hand, a person may manifest poise when the others feel that he ought to have broken down into embarrassed apology - that he is taking undue advantage of their helpfulness by his attempts to brazen it out. Sometimes a person may himself be undecided as to which practice to employ, leaving the others in the embarrassing position of not knowing which tack they are going to have to follow. Thus when a person makes a slight gaffe, he and the others may become embarrassed not because of inability to handle such difficulties, but because for a moment no one knows whether the offender is going to act blind to the incident, or give it joking recognition, or employ some other face-saving practice. (Goffman 1974: 237)
Folklore imputes a great deal of poise to the upper classes. If there is truth in this belief it may lie in the fact that the upper-class person tends to find himself in encounters in which he outranks the other participants in ways additional to class. The tanking participant is often somewhat independent of good opinion of the others and finds it practical to be arrogant, sticking to a face regardless of whether the encounter supports it. On the other hand, those who are in the power of a fellow-participant tend to be very much concerned with the valuation he makes of them or witnesses being made of them, and so finds it difficult to maintain a slightly wrong face without becoming embarrassed and apologetic. It may be added that people who lack awareness of the symbolism in minor events may keep cool in difficult situations, showing poise that they do not really possess. (Goffman 1974: 236; footnote 18)This is very relevant: the secret to dignity and poise is being good (outranking) on other ways than the obvious, there must be a reference to "something bigger". Christians, for example, are sometimes able to keep their cool in difficult situations by keeping in mind that they are "in Christ". This "extra" has to be something which enables one - even for oneself's sake - to perceive others in same way "beneath". Goffman also notices the role of ignorance - lack of knowledge of "symbolism in minor events" or the face as such, will show poise that comes about by not following the expressive order or dismissing it as anything of value.
COOPREATION IN FACE-WORKHere it may be that these terms are inadequate for Goffman because his ethnocentrism limits him from ascribing a loss of face to the whole situation when a gaffe or faux pas is commited. On the other hand in Goffman's terminology there is no such thing as "face of the situation", there is expressive order or equilibrium. It seems that despite the passage starts with the contention that assigning blame is of secondary importance, nevertheless by resorting to individuals' faces, he is making an individual responsible for misconduct which might stem from the situation as such, not from particular participants. There are - as Goffman put it himself earlier - "impersonal agencies in the situation". And for the bit about handshake being something that cannot be declined resonates well with the music video I just watched in which one can see a New Zealand politician John Key extending his hand to a sportsman when in fact that sportsman is shaking the hand of another man. It is an awfully embarrassing thing to even watch - John Key's response is automatic: he sees a hand extended towards him and echos this not realizing until it is too late that the hand was directed at the person next to him; and for a second or two he keeps trying to grab the hand, trying to grip the little finger of the sportsman. That is, a handshake can in extraordinary cases be declined by shaking the hand of another person. A rare but possible situation.
When a face has been thretened, face-work must be done, but whether this is initiated and primarily carried through by the person whose face is threatened, or by the offender, or by a mere witness, is often of secondary importance. Lack of effort on the aprt of one person induces compensative effort from others; a contribution by one person relieves the others of the task. In fact, there are many minor incidents in which the offender and the offended simultaneously attempt to initiate an apology. Resolution of the situation to everyone's apparent satisfaction is the first requirement; correct apportionment of blame is typically a second consideration. Hence terms such as tact and savoir-faire fail to distinguish whether it is the person's own face that his diplomacy saves or the face of the others. Similarly, terms such as gaffe and faux pas fail to specify whether it is the actor's own face he has threatened or the face of other participants. And it is understandable that if one person finds he is powerless to save his own face, the others seem especially bound to protect him. For example, in polite society, a handshake that perhaps should not have been extended becomes one that cannot be declined. Thus one accounts for the noblesse oblige through which those of high status are expected to curb their power of embarrassing their lessers, as well as the fact that the handicapped often accept courtesies that they can manage better without. (Goffman 1974: 237-238)
Since each participant in an undertaking is concerned, albeit for differing reasons, with saving his own face and the face of the others, the tacit cooperation will naturally arise so that the participants together can attain their shared but differently motivated objectives. (Goffman 1974: 238)This "tacit cooperation" may very well be inspired by the early ethnomethodologists. For example, Hayek (1940s) spoke of "tacit knowledge"; Collins (1981) spoke of "tacit knowledge" or agreement; and between these two, Garfinkel spoke of "tacit means" for securing and guaranteeing the rights and obligations.
One common type of tacit cooperation in face-saving is the tact exerted in regard to face-work itself. The person not only defends his own face and protects the face of the others, but also acts so as to make it possible and even easy for the others to employ face-work for themselves and him. He helps them to help themselves help him. Social etiquette, for example, warns men against asking for New Year's Eve dates too early in the season, lest the girl finds it difficult to provide a gentle excude for refusing. This second-order tact can be further illustrated by the wide-spread practice of negative-attribute etiquette. The person who has an unapparent negatively valued attribute often finds it expedient to begin an encounter with an unobtrusive admission of his failing, especially with persons who are uninformed about him. The others are thus warned in advance against making disparaging remarks about his kind of person and are saved from the contradition of acting in a friendly fashion to a person toward whom they are unwittingly being hostile. This strategy also prevents the others from automatically making assumptions about him which place him in a false position and saves him from painful forbearance or embarrassing remonstrances. (Goffman 1974: 238)define:remonstrance - "A forcefully reproachful protest." It is somewhat tiresome that Goffman keeps throwing words at the reader that have by now gone long out of use; this one originates from 15th century Middle French and most notably used by some calvinists in a 1610 work "Five Articles of Remonstrance". In regard to the content, Goffman seems here to suggest that the tacit cooperation is basically tacit knowledge, in so far as it concerns (knowledge of) face-work. In this sense tacit cooperation is nothing more than implicit acknowledgement of face-work strategies or simply general considerateness. I am in doubt if negative-attribute etiquette is as common as Goffman makes it out to be. This may be one of those points at which Goffman is speaking of his own society at a specific time history.
Tact in regard to face-work often relies for its operation on a tacit agreement to do business through the language of hint - the language of innuendu, ambiguities, well-placed pauses, carefully worded jokes, and so on. The rule regardint his unofficial kind of communication is that the sender ought not to act as if he had officially conveyed the message he has hinted at, while the recipients have the right and the obligation to act as if they have not officially received the message containing the hint. Hinted communication, then, is deniable communication; it need not be faced up to. It provides a means by which the person can be warned that his current line or the current situation is leading to loss of face, without this warning itself becoming an incident. (Goffman 1974: 239)This is like reading one of those popular books on body language. The word in later discourse is "plausible deniability": you need not "face up to it", you can deny it. Of course this presumes that there is tacit agreement as to what these hints should mean, what they should be interpreted as to refer. To hint at a "loss of face" may be complicated in a social environment wherein the concept of face is not readily recognized and people operate with different sets of understandings of social life. Thus it may happen all too easily that a hint of this kind "falls on deaf ears".
Another form of tacit cooperation, and one that seems to be much used in many societies, is recoprocal self-denial. Often the person does not have a clear idea of what would be a just or acceptable apportionment of judgments during the occasion, and so he voluntarily deprives or depreciates himself while indulging and complimenting the others, in both cases carrying the judgments safely past what is likely to be just. The favorable judgments about himself he allows to come from the others; the unfavorable judgments of himself are his own contributions. This "after you, Alphonse" technique works, of course, because in depriving himself he can reliably anticipate that the others will compliment or indulge him. Whatever allocation of favors is eventually established, all participants are first given a chance to show that they are bound or constrained by their own desires and expectations, that they have a properly modest view of themselves, and that they can be counted upon to support the ritual code. Negative bargaining, through which each participant tries to make the terms of trade more favorable to the other side, is another instance; as a form of exchange perhaps it is more widespread than the economist's kind. (Goffman 1974: 239)#self- Self-denial I have come across elsewhere but surely with other meanings. As I am a fan of these kinds of conjunctions, I'll try to figure this one out: Goffman says of self-denial that it is voluntarily depriving or depreciating oneself while indulging and complimenting the other. Thus self-denial appears here as a means of lowering oneself and uplifting the other (past judgments that are likely to be just). So, in his terms, threatening one's own face for the sake of the others'. Being modest and supporting the ritual code is of course very goffmanian, but is it "the universal truth"? Surely there are social functions which go against these without resorting to aggressive face-work.
A person's performance of face-work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were not socialized this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. The person would find it impractical to be oriented to symbolically conveyed appraisals of social worth, or to be possessed of feelings - that is, it would be impractical for him to be ritually delicate object. And as I shall suggest, if the person were not a ritually delicate object, occasions of talk could not be organized in the way they usually are. It is no wonder that trouble is caused by a person who cannot be relied upon to play the face-saving game. (Goffman 1974: 239)Performance of face-work. Tacit agreement. WIllingness to abide. Ground rules of social interaction. Hallmark of socialization as an interactant. Feelings and faces. Symbolically conveyed appraisals of social worth. Possessing feelings. Being a ritually delicate object. Occasions of talk. Face-saving game.
THE RITUAL ROLES OF THE SELFThe distinction - although clothed in fancy words - seems a simple one, yet again that between competence and performance. The self as an image formed from expressive implications of the full flow of events is related to action (performance); the self as a player meant to cope with judgmentally contingent situations is related to capacities (competence).
So far I have implicitly been using a double definition of self: the self as an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking; and the self as a kind of player in a ritual game who copes honorably or dishonorably, diplomatically or undiplomatically, with the judgmental contingentcies of the situation. A double mandate is involved. As sacred objects, men are subjects to slights and profanation; hence as players of the ritual game they have had to lead themselves into duels, and wait for a round of shots to go wide of the mark before embracing their opponents. Here is an echo of the distinction between the value of a hand drawn at cards and the capacity of the person who plays it. The distinction must be kept in mind, even though it appears that once a person has gotten a reputation for good or bad play this reputation may become part of the face he must later play at maintaining. (Goffman 1974: 239-240)
Once the two roles of the self have been separated, one can look to the ritual code implicit in face-work to learn how the two roles are related. When a person is responsible for introducing a threat to another's face, he apparently has a right, within limits, to wriggle out of the difficulty by means of self-abasement. When performed voluntarily these indignities do not seem to profane his own image. It is as if he had the right of insulation and could castigate himself qua actor without injuring himself qua object of ultimate worth. By token of the same insulation he can belittle himself and modestly underplay his positive qualities, with the understanding that no one will take his statements as a fair representation of his sacred self. On the other hand, if he is forced against his will to treat himself in these ways, his face, his pride, and his honor will be seriously threatened. Thus, in terms of the ritual code, the person seems to have a special licence to accept mistreatment at his own hands that does not have the right to accept from others. Perhaps this is a safe arrangement because he is not likely to carry this licence too far, whereas the others, were they given this privilege, might be more likely to abuse it. (Goffman 1974: 240)Thus self-abasement (#self-) is acceptable as it is a form of positive face-work (corrective procedure) but being belittled or degraded by others is not acceptable. Seems plainly obvious.
Further, within limits the person has a right to forgive other participants for affronts to his sacred image. He can forbearantly overlook minor slurs upon his face, and in regard to somewhat greater injuries he is the one person who is in a position to accept apologies on behalf of his sacred self. This is a relatively safe prerogative for the person to have in regard to himself, for it is one that is exercised in the interests of the others or of the undertaking. Interestingly enough, when the person commits a gaffe against himself, it is not he who has the licence to forgive the event; only the others have that prerogative, and it is a safe prerogative for them to have because they can exercise it only in his interests or in the interests of the undertaking. One finds, then, a system of checks and balances by which each participant tends to be given the right to handle only those matters which he will have little motivation for mishandling. In short, the rights and obligations of an interactant are designed to prevent him from abusing his role as an object of sacred value. (Goffman 1974: 240)The obvious point, though, needs to be made, as there are indeed those who may try to take the responsibility of accepting apologies in behalf of others (e.g. mothers may accept apology over what has been done to her son or something to that effect). This of course is possible when others hace offended self. When one offends oneself then the matter is differen: apologizing to oneself has very little interactional implications, other participants must accept the apology.
SPOKEN INTERACTIONThis distinction first baffles me. I have presumed that "encounter" implies "copresence" and is certainly immediate. Interaction on the other hand could be both (co)present-immediate and absent-mediate, as in my mind it involves an exchange of actions, whatever they may be; while encounters for me imply that the participants meet ("during direct personal contact"). So it remains kinda ambiguous what a mediate encounter could be. Goffman's remark about the relationship of signs/symbols and social worth - that minor things must be witnessed - made me wonder what an asemiotic communication of social worth might be? Could it perchance be what happens in a situation where there are no common symbols as such and social worth is decided upon major things such as biological endowment, size and shape of the body, brute physical behaviour etc. If so then it almost seems that this is what might be looming behind any and all social systems: that behind the myriade of minor things there are major things which would be inpolite to point out but which function socially nevertheless.
Most of what has been said so far applies to encounters of both an immediate and mediate kind, although in the latter the interaction is likely to be more attenuated, with each participant's line being gleaned from such things as written statements and work records. During direct personal contacts, however, unique informational conditions prevail and the significance of face becomes especially clear. The human tendency to use signs and symbols means that evidence of social worth and of mutual evaluations will be conveyed by very minor things, and these things will be witnessed, as will the fact that they have been witnessed. An unguarded glance, a momentary change in tone of voice, an ecological position taken or not taken, can drench a talk with judgmental significance. Therefore, just as there is no occasion of talk in which improper impressions could not intentionally or unintentionally arise, so there is no occasion of talk so trivial as not to require each participant to show serious concern with the way in which he handles himself and the others present. Ritual factors which are present in mediated contacts are here present in an extreme form. (Goffman 1974: 240-241)
In any society, whenever the physical possibilities of spoken interaction arises, it seems that a system of practices, conventions, and procedural rules comes into play which function as a means of guiding and organizing the flow of messages. An understanding will prevail as to when and where it will be permissible to initiate talk, among whom, and by means of what topics of conversation. A set of significant gestures is employed to initiate a spate of communication and as a means for the persons concerned to accredit each other as legitimate participants. When this process of reciprocal ratification occurs, the persons so ratified are in what might be called a state of talk - that is, they have declared themselves officially open to one another for purposes of spoken communication and guarantee together to maintain a flow of words. A set of significant gestures is also employed by which one or more new participants can officially withdraw, and by which the state of talk can be terminated. (Goffman 1974: 241)This is well put. There are: 1) system of practices (patterned behaviours); 2) conventions (arbitrary collective prescriptions); and 3) procedural rules. This last notion is often used (by ethnomethodologists, for example), but I don't remember coming across a definition. The closest to a working definition I found was "how the practice is performed", which says very little. The bit about "guiding and organizing the flow of messages" seems to come close to the foucaultian "conduct of conduct". Where "significant gesture" might come from is well known. define:spate - "A large number of similar things or events appearing or occurring in quick succession: "a spate of attacks on travelers"." define:ratification - "making something valid by formally ratifying or confirming it; "the ratification of the treaty""
The meaning of this status can be appreciated by looking at the kinds of unlegitimated or unratified participants that can occur in spoken interaction. A person may overhear others unbeknownst to them; he may overhear them when they know this to be the case and when they choose either to act as if he were not overhearing them or to signal to him informally that they know he is overhearing them. In all of these cases, the outsider is officially held at bay as someone who is not formally participating in the occasion. Ritual codes, of course, require a ratified participant to be treated quite differently from an unratified one. Thus, for example, only a certain amount of insult from a ratified participant can be ignored without his avoidance practice causing loss of face to the insulted person; after a point they must challenge the offender and demand redress. However, in many societies, apparently, many kinds of verbal abuse from unratified participants can be ignored, without this failure to challenge constituting a loss of face. (Goffman 1974: 241; footnote 28)I need to revisit this when I have a better overview of the interaction system and it's fluid borders.
A single focus of thought and visual attention, and a single flow of talk, tends to be maintained and to be legitimated as officially representative of the encounter. The concerted and official visual attention of the participants tends to be transferred smoothly by means of formal or informal clearance cues, by which the current speaker signals that he is about to relinquish the floor and the prospective speaker signals a desire to be given the floor. An understanding will prevail as to how long and how frequently each participant is to hold the floor. The recipients convey to the speaker, by appropriate gestures, that they are according him their attention. Participants restrict their involvement in matters external to the encounter and observe a limit to involvement in any one message of the encounter, in this way ensuring that they will be able to follow along whatever direction the topic of conversation takes them. Interruptions and lulls are regulated so as not to disrupt the flow of messages. Messages that are not part of the officially accredited flow are modulated so as not to interfere seriously with the accredited message. Nearby persons who are not participants visibly desist in some way from exploiting their communication position and also modify their own communication, if any, so as not to provide difficult interference. A particular ethos or emotional atmosphere is allowed to prevail. A polite accord is typically maintained, and participants who may be in real disagreement with one another give temporary lip service to views that bring them into agreement on matters of fact and principle. Rules are followed for smoothing out the transition, if any, from one topic of conversation to another. (Goffman 1974: 241-424)These are fairly familiar themes from The Presentation and Public Behavior. Essentially, norm of attention and norm of participation. Some of it could be integrated with other stuff, like for example "self-selection is the response to formal or informal clearance cues". Restricting involvement in other matters external to the encounter is loosely related to immobilizing ("stilling"). It is important that an ethos or emotional atmosphere is allowed to prevail against the individual emotions of the participants; in a sense this is the micro-bio-political regulation of emotion I thought of when reading Foucault, though it would need to be in a grander scale (involve masses, not just a group).
These rules of talk pertain not to spoken interaction considered as an ongoing process, but to an occasion of talk or episode of interaction as a naturally bounded unit. This unit consists of the total activity that occurs during the time that a given set of participants have accredited one another for talk and maintain a single moving focus of attention. (Goffman 1974: 242)This seems to be where Rom and Harré (1976) got their ideas from. The episode-approach is not without it's problems, though. I'm not yet able to contrast it with the interaction sequence approach, but I can definitely remark that this is not the ideal "interaction system" I am trying to develop tools for. This is because Goffman holds it that an encounter must be centered on "talk" with a single focus. A social gathering or an "encounter" may not be centered on talk but on communal action, and there could possible be multiple items of focus. To put it bluntly, a riot is not a conversation. Some may try to view such interactions as riots as a type of conversation (of gestures, for example), but this is not what I am after. "Episode" is a neat emblem to consider but surely there must be more apt tools for my purposes. Perhaps I would have to invent them instead of modifying existing approaches, but this is not today.
The conventions regarding the structure of occasions of talk represent an effective solution to the problem of organizing a flow of spoken messages. In attempting to discover how it is that these conventions are maintained in force as guides to action, one finds evidence to suggest a functional relationship between the structure of the self and the structure of spoken interaction. (Goffman 1974: 242)This suggestion resonates well with what K.P. remarked on in my love of self-communicational notions: that auto-communication is plainly self-directed while self-communication implies a self-in-relation-to-others, a social self so to say. In identifying the manyfold forms of self-communication I am actually trying to map the functional relationship of the structure of the self (in terms of embodiment and proprioception) and the structure of social action. I deter from and/or detest to seeking out "structures", as this seems to be an inefficient way of going about things, but the idea still holds: self-communication is the base of communication, it is what precedes, concurs and follows communication.
The socialized interactant comes to handle spoken interaction as he would any other kind, as something that must be pursued with ritual care. By automatically appealing to face, he knows how to conduct himself in regard to talk. By repeatedly and automatically asking himself the question, "If I do or do not act in this way, will I or others lose face?" he decides at each moment, consciously or unconsciously, how to behave. For example, entrance into an occasion of spoken interaction may be taken as a symbol of intimacy or legitimate purpose, and so the person must, to save his face, desist from entering into talk with a given set of others unless his circumstances justify what is expressed about him by his entrance. Once approached for talk, he must accede to the others in order to save their face. Once engaged in conversation, he must demand only the amount of attention that is an appropriate expression of his relative social worth. Undue lulls come to be potential signs of having nothing in common, or of being insufficiently self-possessed to create something to say, and hence must be avoided. Similarly, interruptions and inattentiveness may convey disrespect and must be avoided unless the implied disrespect is an accepted part of the relationship. A surface of agreement must be maintained by means of discretion and white lies, so that the assumption of mutual approval will not be discredited. Withdrawal must be handled so that it will not convey an improper evaluation. The person must restrain his emotional involvement so as not to present an image of someone with no self-control or dignity who does not rise above his feelings. (Goffman 1974: 242-243)Each moment is a point of possible self-selection and self-censorship. Taking part of an interaction may be a sign of a social relationship. The remark about "undue lulls" I have personally experienced. Of course it leads to avoidance.
The relation between the self and spoken interaction is further displayed when one examines the ritual exchange. In a conversational encounter, interaction tends to proceed in spurts, an interchange at a time, and the flow of information and business is parcelled out into these relatively closed ritual units. The lull between interchanges tends to be greater than the lull between turns at taking in an interchange, and there tends to be a less meaningful relationship between the two sequential interchanges than between two sequential speeches in an interchange. (Goffman 1974: 243)Encounters have a definite structure, a give-and-take, it is an interr-change. Goffman sees these structures as being ritualistic, that is, they are somewhat traditional, developed over time, and can be forgot.
This structural aspect of talk arises from the fact that when a person volunteers a statement or message, however trivial or commonplace, he commits himself and those he addresses, and in a sense places everyone present in jeopardy. By saying something, the speaker opens himself up to the possibility that the intended recipients will affront him by not listening or will think him forward, foolish, or offensive in what he has said. And should he meet with sucha reception, he will find himself committed to the necessity of taking face-saving action against them. Furthermore, by saying something the speaker opens his intended recipients up to the possibility that the message will be self-approving, presumtuous, demanding, insulting, and generally an affront to them or to their conception of him, so that they will find themselves obliged to take action against him in defense of the ritual code. And should the speaker praise the recipients, they will be obliged to make suitable denials, showing that they do not hold too favorable an opinion of themselves and are not so eager to secure indulgences as to endanger their reliability and flexibility as interactants. (Goffman 1974: 243)This hooks up very nicely with #avoidance - we avoid interactions, or expressing ourselves verabally in ongoing interactions so as to not jeopardize our face with coming across incomprehensive [arusaamatu] or insulting [ülbe]. Face-saving action is a cost initself, it is a skill not everyone is versed well in.
Thus when one person volunteers a message, thereby contributing what might easily be a threat to the ritual equilibrium, someone else present is obliged to show that the message has been received and that its content is acceptable to all concerned or can be acceptably countered. This acknowledging reply, of course, may contain a tactful rejection of the original communication, along with a request for modification. In such cases, several exchanges of messages may be required before the interchange is terminated on the basis of modified lines. The interchange comes to a close when it is possible to allow it so do so - that is, when everyone present has signified that he has been ritually appeased to a degree satisfactory to him. A momentary lull between interchanges is possible, for it comes at a time when it will not be taken as a sign of something untoward. (Goffman 1974: 244)This almost seems to be a case of meta-communication, but the synchronic or same-timedness factor is missing. So it is rather a metalingual ordeal: modifying what has been said so as to present the content of the exchange in more favorable light.
In general, then, a person determines how he ought to conduct himself during an occasion of talk by testing the potentially symbolic meaning of his acts against the self-images that are being sustained. In doing this, however, he incidentally subjects his behavior to the expressive order that prevails and contributes to the orderly flow of messages. His aim is to save face; his effect is to save the situation. From the point of view of saving face, then, it is a good thing that spoken interaction has the conventional organization given it; from the point of view of sustaining an orderly flow of spoken messages, it is a good thing that the self has the ritual structure given it. (Goffman 1974: 244)This "determining" of possible conduct might be related to self-censure, I'm not sure if I'm drawing too lengthy of a connection here. In any case this is how the person is indoctrinated in the expressive order: by testing out what is appropriate firsthand, perhaps on friends and acquaintances and then put to good use among strangers. And of course by saving faces we are saving the situation, as these are heavily involved concepts: the situation also consists of the elementary human relations between the interactants within the interaction. I think "conventional organization" might be what Goffman means by the "ritual order"; I prefer the former formulation of course, as rituals have many connotations (some of which I am not quite sure of). Nevertheless Goffman sees no problem claiming that "the self" has a ritual structure.
I do not mean, however, to claim that another kind of person related to another kind of message organization would not do as well. More important, I do not claim that the present system is without weaknesses or drawbacks; these must be expected, for everywhere in social life a mechanism or functional relation which solves one set of problems necessarily creates a set of potential difficulties or abuses all its own. For example, a characteristic problem in the ritual organization of personal contacts is that while a person can save his face by quarreling or by indignantly withdrawing from the encounter, he does this at the cost of the interaction. Furthermore, the person's attachment to face gives others something to aim at; they can not only make an effort to wound him unofficially, but may even make an official attempt utterly to destroy his face. Also, fear over possible loss of his face often prevents the person from initiating contacts in which important information can be transmitted and important relationships re-established; he may be led to seek the safety of solitude rather than the danger of social encounters. He may do this even though others feel that he is motivated by "false pride" - a pride which suggests that the ritual code is getting the better of those whose conduct is regulated by it. Further, the "after you, Alphonse" complex can make the termination of an interchange difficult. So, too, where each participant feels that he must sacrifice a little more than has been sacrificed for him, a kind of vicious indulgence cycle may occurs - much like the hostility cycle that can lead to open quarrels - with each person receiving things he does not want and giving in return things he would rather keep. Again, when people are on formal terms, much energy may be spent in ensuring that events do not occur which might effectively carry an improper expression. And on the other hand, when a set of persons are on familiar terms and feel that they need not stand on ceremony with one another, then inattentiveness and interruptions are likely to become rife, and talk may degenerate into a happy babble of disorganized sound. (Goffman 1974: 244-245)Another poignant point about #avoidance. Now I noticed that indeed in the footnote #29 Goffman identifies signs of satisfaction with the interchange as metacommunication; although it is not it by Jürgen Ruesch's strict definition, it is much more apt than the "metalingual" notion which is quite frankly beyond me. In any case Goffman here notices that when someone avoids interactions for sake of their own feeble self-defence mechanisms and fear of losing face even at best attempts, others may view this as "false pride". Even more, the feeling that "the ritual code is getting the better of those whose conduct is regulated by it" should be correct, in my opinion, as it indeed forces people to conduct themselves in frankly unneccessary ways; e.g. "after you, Alphonse". A quick googling revealed that this is a reference to a film clip dating back to 1903 wherein two men walk into a salong (bar) and order a drink; the waiter/teller/whatever puts it on the counter and then Alphonse and Gaston offer it to each other back and forth until a man comes in and simply shoots the drink and their feet (It's a western thing). The trope is, then, simply being "obsessively polite to one another". Oh, no, the youtube clip I saw was not the original source, as it was made after a comic strip from 1901:
The ritual code itself requires a delicate balance, and can be easily upset by anyone who uphold it too eagerly or not eagerly enough, in terms of the standards and expectations of his group. Too little perceptiveness, too little savoir-faire, too little pride and considerateness, and the person ceases to be someone who can be trusted to take a hint about himself or give a hint that will save others embarrassment. Such a person comes to be a real threat to society; there is nothing much that can be done with him, and often he gets his way. Too much perceptiveness or too much pride, and the person becomes someone who is thin-skinned, who must be treated with kid gloves, requiring more care on the part of others than he may be worth to them. Too much savoir-faire or too much considerateness, and he becomes someone who is too socialized, who leaves the others with the feeling that they do not know how they really stand with him, or what they should do to make an effective long-term adjustment to him. (Goffman 1974: 245)This delicate balance seems very hard to maintain. This is actually where Goffman links up trust and politeness: you cannot trust someone who does not have the same "procedural rules" - he may misunderstand those miniscule details about social life that are so very important to uphold the expressive order and structure of social worth itself. On the other hand, too much politeness may come across as a way of distancing people: I behave towards you as if you were a stranger towards whom perfect manners must be maintained at all times, thus barring from decorum being lifted and communication taking informal course that is relevant for personal relationships to develop.
In spite of these inherent "pathologies" in the organization of talk, thefunctional fitness between the socialized person and spoken interaction is a viable and practical one. The person's orientation to face, especially his own, is the point of leverage that the ritual order has in regard to him; yet a promise to take ritual care of his face is built into the very structure of talk. (Goffman 1974: 245)That is, these rituals are inevitable. If civilized interaction is to ensue, talk must be conventionally organized, people oriented to maintaing faces and taking lines, and upholding the expressive order which keeps things neatly at bay from getting too unfomfortable.
FACE AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPSThis is a very clear statement of Goffman's destination in this kind of discussion: getting through the occasion without offending others. Goffman's musings about greetings and farewells seems kind of banal, but at the same time very much valid: being apart is an inevitable part of any and all relationships so the end-nodes of copresence are important and the roles of greetings and farewells is to somehow "compensate" (although it fully cannot, of course) for the dispresence (not sure if invented a word, but simply "being separate" is not specific enough in my opinion).
When a person begins a mediated or immediate encounter, he already stands in some kind of social relationship to others concerned, and expects to stand in a given relationship to them after the particular encounter ends. This, of course, is one of the ways in which social contacts are geared into the wider society. Much of the activity occurring during an encounter can be udnerstood as an effort on everyone's part to get through the occasion and all the unanticipated and unintentional events that can cast participants in an undesirable light, without disrupting the relationships of the participants. And if relationships are in the process of chance, the object will be to bring the encounter to a satisfactory close without altering the expected course of development. This perspective nicely accounts, for example, for the little ceremonies of greeting and farewell which occur when people begin a conversational encounter or depart from one. Greetings provide a way of showing that a relationship is still what it was at the termination of the previous coparticipation, and, typically, that this relationship involves sufficient suppression of hostility for the participants temporarily to drop their guards and talk. Farewells sum up the effect of the encounter upon the relationship and show what the participants may expect of one another when they next meet. The enthusiasm of greetings compensates for the weakening of the relationship caused by the absence just terminated, while the enthusiasm of farewells compensates the relationship for the harm that is about to be done to it by separation. (Goffman 1974: 246)
It seems to be a characteristic obligation of many social relationships that each of the members guarantees to support a given face for the other members in given situations. To prevent disruption of these relationships, it is therefore necessary for each member to avoid destroying the others' face. At the same time, it is often the person's social relationship with others that leads him to participate in certain encounters with them, where incidentally he will be dependent upon them for supporting his face. Furthermore, in many relationships, the members come and share a face, so that in the presence of third parties an improper act on the part of one member becomes a source of acute embarrassment to the other members. A social relationship, then, can be seen as a way in which the person is more than ordinarily forced to trust his self-image and face to the tact and good conduct of others. (Goffman 1974: 246)Mutual support for the face is what generally seems to denote "being a friend". In Goffman's other works, this is the metaphorica "backstage". Sharing a face is an interesting point, as in group presentations, for example, the embarrassment of one is an embarrassment of all. This may be the reason why it is so hard to break the ritual expressive order even for positive ends.
THE NATURE OF THE RITUAL ORDERThat is, the ritual order accomodates the maintenance of faces against all other factors; the expressive order accomodates people without much else needed. Other types of social orders an accumulative modus operandi is more probable: you need to accumulate knowledge and skills (work hard for the credits) to sustain a particular image. In effect Goffman seems to argue against social capital (in Bourdieu's sense); while cultural and economic capital must be accumulated, social capital is of a somewhat different nature, "accomodative". They don't hand out money (although today they do hand out cultural information profusely), but assume you to be socially what you seem to be. Unless you show signs of faking, of course.
The ritual order seems to be organized basically on accommodative lines, so that the imagery used in thinking about other types of social order is not quite suitable for it. For the other stypes of social order a kind of schoolboy model seems to be employed; if a person wishes to sustain a particular image of himself and trust his feelings to it, he must work hard for the credits that will buy this self-enhancement for him; should he try to obtain ends by improper means, by cheating or theft, he will be punished, disqualified from the race, or at least made to start all over again from the beginning. This is the imagery of a hard, dull game. In fact, society and the individual join in one that is easier on both of them, yet one that has dangers of its own. (Goffman 1974: 246)
Whatever his position in society, the person insulates himself by blindness, half-turths, illusions, and rationalizations. He makes an "adjustment" by convincing himself, with the tactful support of his intimate circle, that he is what he wants to be and that he should not do to gain his ends what the others have done to gain theirs. And as for society, if the person is willing to be subject to informal social control - if he is willing to find out from hints and glances and tactful cues what his place is, and keep it - then there will be no objection to his furnishing this place at his own discretion, with all the comfort, elegance, and nobility that his wit can muster for him. To protect this shelter he does not have to work hard, or join a group, or comete with anybody; he need only be careful about the expressed judgments he places himself in a position to witness. Some situations and acts and persons will have to be avoided; others, less threatening, must not be pressed too far. Social life is an uncluttered, ordely thing because the person voluntarily stays away from places and topics and times where he is not wanted and where he might be disparaged for going. He cooperates to save his face, finding that there is much to be gained from venturing nothing. (Goffman 1974: 247)Sure, if one wishes to be dull. The "adjustment" of convincing oneself that what is given is what is correct, I see as a negative force. It inhibits society from realizing more. Not subjecting to informal social control could advance culture more. That is not to say that one should ignore hints and glances and hintful cues, but one should go about making his own judgments whether these should be taken at face value or rejected decorum that can be surpassed. This is not a comfortable, elegant and noble position but then again we do not live in the 50s anymore. I'm not sure about social life being unclutteres because when one looks at the fine grain of society there appear countless insignificant gestures and misunderstandings which are not always smoothed over.
Facts are of the schoolboy's world - they can be altered by diligent effort but they cannot be avoided. But what the person protects and defends and invests his feelings in is an idea about himself, and ideas are vulnerable not to facts and things but to communication. Communications belong to a less punitive scheme than do facts, for communications can be by-passed, withdrawn from, disbelieved, conveniently misunderstood, and tactfully conveyed. And even should the person misbehave and break the truce he has made with society, punishment need not be the consequence. If the offense is one that the offended persons can let go by without losing too much face, then they are likely to act forbearantly, telling themselves that they will get even with the offender in another way at another time, even though such an occasion may never arise and might not be exploited if it did. If the offense is great, the offended persons may withdraw from the encounter, or from future similar ones, allowing their withdrawal to be reinforced by the awe they may feel toward someone who breaks the ritual code. Or they may have the offender withdrawn, so that no further communication can occur. But since the offender can salvage a good deal of face from such operations, withdrawal is often not so much an informal punishment for an offense as it is merely a means of terminating it. Perhaps the main principle of the ritual order is not justice to face, and what any offender receives is not what he deserves but what will sustain for the moment the line to which he has committed himself, and through this the line to which he has committed the interaction. (Goffman 1974: 247)Damn, this is brilliant. To paraprase my previous remark, the society itself is a myriad of facts, we make sure we can make sense of these by developing ideas that blind us from the "unwanted" ones.
Throughout this paper it has been implied that underneath their differences in culture, people everywhere are the same. If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the fact that society everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilizing the individual for this purpose is through ritual; he is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self and self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and a certain amount of poise. These are some of the elements of behavior which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him as an interactant, and it is these elements that are referred to in part when one speaks of universal human nature. (Goffman 1974: 247-248)This is basically the main premise of body language: we may have different ways of using our bodies, but the fact that we use our bodies and that we are anatomically and physiologically very similar, remains. To put it in another nomenclature: the ground of selection is the same, the actual combination varies.
Universal human nature is not a very human thing. By acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic propensities but from moral rules that are impressed upon him from without. These rules, when followed, determine the evaluation he will make of himself and of his fellow-participants in the encounter, the distribution of his feelings, and the kinds of practices he will employ to maintain a specified and obligatory kind of ritual equilibirium. The general capacity to be bound by moral rules may well belong to the individual, but the particular set of rules which transforms him into a human being derives from requirements established in the ritual organization of social encounters. And if a particular person or group or society seems to have a unique character all its own, it is because its standard set of human-nature elements is pitched and combined in a particular way. Instead of much pride, there may be little. Instead of abiding by the rules, there may be much effort to break them safely. But if an encounter or undertaking is to be sustained as a viable system of intraction organized on ritual principles, then these variations must be held within certain bounds and nicely counterbalanced by corresponding modifications in some of the other rules and undertakings. Similarly, the human nature of a particular set of persons may be specially designed for the special kind of undertakings in which they participate, but still each of these persons must have within him something of the balance of characteristics required of usable participants in any ritually organized system of social activity. (Goffman 1974: 248)This final bit is my point of departure: I am not so much interested in "any ritually organized system of social activity"; I am interested in the improvised social action of ephemeral or enigmatic encounters or interactions, for which ritual ascriptions may be lacking or nonexistant. I think this article has been a terrific preparation for reading Berger and Luckmann, and Searle.
Since this article took a lot of of me - I read it with the intensity usually accorded to full books - I'm going to be thorough enough to summarize point-by-point the main notions used. I am running the risk of this article becoming my code-text, but this may not be bad initself as this text is quite well-known and well-used by authors I recognize as my intellectual fellows.
- a line
- pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which views are expressed (of self, others, and situation)
- legitimate and institutionalized visible attributes that can be sustained in a particular face
- qc LINE definition
- qc LINE definition
- a face
- the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact
- an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes
- a social construct delineated by rules of the group and the definition of the situation
- can be the most personal possesion and the center of one's security and pleasure, but it is only a loan ffrom the society, it will be withdrawn unless he conducts himself in a way that is worthy of it
- qc FACE definition
- qc FACE definition
- having, being in or maintaining a face
- when the line taken effectively presents an image that is internally consistent, supported by judgements and evidence conveyed by other participants, and confirmed by ecidence conveyed by impersonal agencies in the situation
- abstaining from certain actions in the past that would have been difficult to face up on later
- fearing the loss of face because the others may take this as a sign that soncideration for his feelings need not be shown in the future
- responding with feelings of condifence and assurance, being firm in the line he is taking; presenting himself openly to others; feelings of security and relief
- being in the wrong face
- when information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him
- being out of face - participating in a contact with others without having ready a line of the kind participants in such situations are expected to take
- being in wrong face or out of face - expressive events are being contributed to the encounter which cannot be readily woven into the expressive fabric of the occasion; shamefacedness ensues
- being shamefaced - being perceived in a flustered state and not presenting any usable line by others; can add further disorder to the expressive organization of the situation
- poise - the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others
- to lose face - to be in wrong face, to be out of face or to be shamefaced
- saving one's face
- the process by which the person sustains an impression for others that he has not lost his face
- an aspect of social code of any social circle
- living up to the self-image expressed through the face one is expected to live up to
- standing guard over the flow of events as they pass before him, ensuring that a particular expressive order (consistent with the face) is sustained
- pride - when a person manifests these compunctions primarily from duty to himself
- honor - when he does so because of duty to wider social units, and receives support from these units in doing so
- dignity - when these compunctions have to do with postural things, with expressive events derived from the way in which the person handles his body, his emotion, and the things with which he has physical contact
- to give face - to arrange for another to take a better face than he might otherwise have been able to take
- standard of considerateness - the expectation of going to certain lenghts to save the feeling and the face of others present, willingly and spontaneously because of empathy.
- heartlessness - witnessing another's humiliation and unfeelingly retaining a cool countenance of himself
- shamelessness - unfeelingly participating in the defacement of oneself
- face-work> - the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face
0 comments:
Post a Comment