Behavior in Public Places

Goffman, Erving 1966. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press.

Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives. The set of norms does not specify the objectives the participants are to seek, nor the pattern formed by and through the coordination or integration of these ends, but merely the modes of seeking them. Traffic rules and the consequent traffic order provide an obvious example. Any social system or any game may be viewed quite properly as an instance of social order, although the perspective of social order does not allow us to get at what is characteristically systemic about systems or what is gamelike about games. (Goffman 1966: 8)

In this study I shall try to be concerned with one type of regulation only, the kind that governs a person's handling of himself and others, and by virtue of, his immediate physical presence among them; what is called face-to-face or immediate interaction will be involved. (Goffman 1966: 8)

There are many social settings that persons of certain status are forbidden to enter. Here an effort to prevent penetration of ego-boundaries, contamination by undersirables, and physical assault seems to be involved. (Goffman 1966: 10)

But the individual may also give information expressively, through an incidental symptomatic significance of events associated with him. In this case one might say that he emits, exudes, or gives off information to someone who gleans it. Linguistic messages can be "about" anything in the world, the sender and the subject matter having no necessary connection, coinciding only when autobiographical statements are being made. Expressive messages are necessarily "about" the same causal physical complex of which the transmitting agency is an intrinsic part. (Goffman 1966: 13)

For the course of a social occasion, one or more participants may be defined as responsible for getting the affair under way, guiding the main activity, terminating the event, and sustaining order. Also, a differentiation is sometimes found among full-fledged participants and various grades of onlookers. Further, between beginning and end there is often an "involvement contour," a line tracing the rise and fall of general engrossment in the occasion's main activity. (Goffman 1966: 18)

The harm produced by physical interference in any of its forms is partly due to the social humiliation of being seen as helpless, by the offender and possibly by others, and so has distinctly social-psychological components. Other important ways in which the regulations ensuring physical safety impinge upon nonphysical matters will be considered later. (Goffman 1966: 23)

The commubnicative behavior of those immediately present to one another can be considered in two steps. The first deals with unfocused interaction, that is, the kind of communication that occurs when one gleans information about another person present by glancing at him, if only momentarily as he passes into and then out of one's view. Unfocused interaction has to do largely with the management of sheer and mere copresence. The second step deals with focused interaction, the kind of interaction that occurs when persons gather close together and openly cooperate to sustain a single focus of attention, typically by taking turns at talking. Where no focused interaction occurs, the term unfocused gathering can be used. Where focused interaction occurs, clumsier terms will be needed. (Goffman 1966: 24)

A typical sign of an oncoming psychosis is the individual's "neglect" of his appearance and personal hygiene. (Goffman 1966: 27)

In every society these communication possibilities are institutionalized. While many such usable events may be neglected, at least some are likely to be regularized and accorded a common meaning. Half-aware that a certain aspect of his activity is available for all present to perceive, the individual tends to modify this activity, employing it with its public character in mind. Sometimes, in fact, he may employ these signs [dress, bearing, movement and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving or saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expression] solely because they can be witnessed. (Goffman 1966: 33)

Further, while these signs seem ill suited for extended discursive messages, in contrast to speech, they do seem well designed to convey information about the actor's social attributes and about his conception of himself, of the others present, and of the setting. These signs, then, form the basis of unfocused interaction, even though they can also play a role in the focused kind. (Goffman 1966: 34)

Just as the individual finds that he must convey the right thing, so also he finds that while present to others he will inevitably convey information about the allocation of his involvement, and that expression of particular allocation is obligatory. Instead of speaking of a body idiom, we can now be a little more speçific and speak instead of an "involvement idiom" and of rules regarding the allocation of involvement. (Goffman 1966: 37)

Exline, Ellsworth, etc. norm of attention.

The individual's own body, or an object directly associated with his body, provides a very common object for his own involvement. And while such activity may have a technical instrumental rationale, as when an individual attempts to remove a splinter with a needle, usually a self-decorative or self-indulgent element is seen to be at work. In any case, as instances of auto-involvement, of self-directed, self-absorbing physical acts, we have: eating, dressing, picking one's teeth, cleaning one's fingernails, dozing, and sleeping. These activities will be referred to as "auto-involvements"; the easier term "self-involvements" would seem also to include absorption in less distinctive somatic matters, such as discussing and fantasies concerning the self. (Goffman 1966: 65)

autokommunikatsioon

One of the disturbing and characteristic things about occult involvements, both verbal and bodily, is that the others present cannot "get at" the general intention by which the individual is apparently governed, and cannot credit the offender's account should he offer one. This suggest that in ordinary life there is an expectation that all situated activity, if not obviously "occasioned," will have a degree of transparency, a degree of immediate understandability, for all persons present. It is not that the specific actions of the actor must be fully understood - they certainly are not, for example, when the family watches the repairman fix the TV set - but merely that they be given a situational coating through being in a context of known ends or generally recognized techniques. (Goffman 1966: 76)

Where there are only two participants in a situation, an encounter, if there is to be one, will exhaust the situation, giving us a fully-focused gathering. With more than two participants, there may be persons officially present in the situation who are officially excluded from the encounter and not themselves so engaged. These unengaged participants change the gathering into a partly-focused one. If more than three persons are present, there may be more than one encounter carried on in the same situation - a multifocused gathering. I will use the term participation unit to refer both to encounters and to engaged participants; the term bystander will be used to refer to any individual present who is not a ratified member of the particular encounter in question, whether or not he is currently a member of some other encounter. (Goffman 1966: 91)

In brief, then, encounters are organized by means of a special set of acts and gestures comprising communication about communicating. (Goffman 1966: 99)

Metakommunikatsioon korrastab läbikäimisi.

It may be noted that while all participants share equally in the rights and obligations described, there are some rights that may be differentially distributed within an encounter. Thus, in spoken encounters, the right to listen is one shared by all, but the right to be a speaker may be narrowly restricted, as, for example, in stage performances and large public meetings. (Goffman 1966: 100)

Persons who can sustain lapsed encounters with one another are in a position to avoid the problem of "safe supplies" during spoken encounters - the need to find a sufficient supply of inoffensive things to talk about during the period when an official state of talk prevails. (Goffman 1966: 103)

...when an individual opens himself up to talk with another, he opens himself up too pleadings, commands, threats, insult, and false information. The mutual considerateness characteristic of face engagements reinforces these dangers, subjecting the individual to the possibility of having his sympathy and tactfuness exploited, and causing him to act against his own interests.
Further, words can act as a "relationship wedge"; that is, once an individual has extended to another enough consideration to hear him out for a moment, some kind of bond of mutual obligation is established, which the initiator can use in turn as a basis for still further claims; once this new extended bond is granted, grudgingly or willingly, still further claims for social or material indulgence can be made. (Goffman 1966: 105)

Jäi pooleli lk 156.