Gary D. Jaworski, <i>Erving Goffman and the Cold War</i>

When Erving Goffman arrived on the northernmost Shetland Island of Unst in the early 1950s to conduct ethnographic field studies for his dissertation, a rumor soon spread among the roughly 300 inhabitants of the village of Baltasound that the eccentric-looking stranger was not the agricultural student he claimed to be but a U.S. spy. The anecdote, circulated from one of the most remote places in the Western world, alludes to the research interests and research style of today's classical sociologist and the social mood in the approaching Cold War. Gary D. Jaworski examines this context in Erving Goffman and the Cold War, exploring its interfaces and effects.The thesis of the book is that Goffman's program for the sociology of interaction order, while based on direct observations of everyday social and communicative action, is thoroughly informed by his experiences during the Cold War, from attention to empirical details to theoretical constructions. This is because the interaction order encompasses the same action problems at the micro level that are structurally present in the macro sphere. In the broad field of research on Goffman, which almost unanimously depicts him as a microsociologist and an analyst of the capitalist competitive society, as well as for the now immense number of sociological studies that take up, examine, and elaborate on his terms and concepts to describe current social phenomena and developments, this perspective is new and may seem quite strange and even provocative to some. Fortunately, Jaworski succeeds very impressively and convincingly in creating a panorama with painstaking reconstructions of historical and social contexts, against which Goffman shows himself in an unusual but illuminating way as both a “child of his time” and an extraordinarily gifted and independent-minded sociologist.The background image on which the reinterpretation is based is laid out in seven chapters. Each focuses on a distinct thematic aspect, and all are titled with terms that, because they were chosen from the Cold War vanishing point out of Goffman's writings, have not yet gained wide currency and therefore seem all the more useful for opening up a new perspective on Goffmann's work as a whole: loyalty, secrecy, strategy, spies, interrogation, provocation and aggression. Jaworski understands these conceptual constructions as natural metaphors. In each case, Goffman borrows common expressions from everyday language, stretches and fills them creatively for his analyses, before relating them to each other and transferring them into theoretical concepts in unusual ways. The same applies to the big picture, the Cold War, as a formulation from Goffman's dissertation suggests, according to which “it is often better to conceive of interaction not as a scene of harmony but as an arrangement for pursuing a cold war”—Communication Conduct in an Island Community (Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2022 [1953]), p. 27. The rules of the Cold War and the interaction order of everyday social life bear analogous traits. In both spheres, the parties pursue their own, now and then contradictory, interests and have only uncertain, incomplete knowledge of the other. However, because their respective assessments of the situation and decisions to act are mutually dependent and rich in consequences for both sides, shadowing and deceiving, probing and uncovering are just as much a part of day-to-day business as cultivating social forms for confidence-building measures and diplomatic negotiations.Why did Goffman see the social world in this light? Jaworski traces the influences on Goffman's worldview back to two almost equally original sources: the “ethos” of the Cold War and the “thought style” of his scientific environment. Following the anthropologist and biologist Gregory Bateson, ethos refers to an atmosphere and general emotional state perceived by the people of a particular culture, which colors their attitude toward the world. In the case of the Cold War, the ethos is political and is expressed in a climate of threat, fear, and mistrust. Outwardly, it motivates a variety of tactics for concealing and simultaneously gathering information but also forms of action for border violations and military confrontations. Inwardly, it leads to the development of forms for avoiding and repairing conflicts and the mutual assurance of loyalty to the shared social order and worldview.The ethos overlaps with the thought style characteristic of Goffman's network. The phrase, which goes back to the physician and bacteriologist Ludwik Fleck, refers to socially trained thinking and research in places of action, mediated by people, methods and theories, topics, and discussions. The special quality of a thought style is demonstrated by the fact that it creates the possibility of distancing oneself from one's own “thought collective” and thus transcending the routines of thinking to see something different and discover something new. Goffman's outstanding position as a social scientist and the lasting influence of his sociology are based on the fact, that—in his characteristically unruly and inspiring manner—he not only fundamentally criticized his thought collective but also significantly expanded its style of thinking through shifts and breaks, refinements, and additions to perspectives and approaches, terminology, and concepts in terms of complexity and possibility.In this way, Goffman deviated from the prevailing consensus at the University of Chicago seeing loyalty and disloyalty as purely dichotomous attitudes. The problem was studied in detail in Chicago as the target of anti-Communist suspicions and investigations. However, Goffman believed that a much more dynamic concept was needed, one that considered the specifics of the social situation and worked in between loyalty and disloyalty. Goffman's view of secrecy also goes beyond existing, one-sided and narrow positions when he understands secrecy not only as withholding information, but also as keeping away from everything that the other party does not explicitly disclose. Through this extension, social action takes on the features of strategic interaction, in which social forms, such as polite indifference, deference, and behavior protect the dignity of the individual and ensure the continuity of a social situationIt is no different with spies and interrogations, because the actors and communication situations that are ideal types for the climate of fear and mistrust require heightened sensitivity even for subtle, unintended disclosures and for social role-playing games in which everyone switches competently between perpetrator and victim so that social situations and personal self-presentations succeed. Finally, Jaworski illustrates the extent to which Goffman places the sociological perspective above all psychologizing and naturalizing explanations with two latent hostilities in everyday social life. Provocations and aggression are not aimed at irritating, humiliating, or hurting the other person to such an extent that the social situation is seriously disrupted or even impossible. Rather, they are moral violations in moral struggles over the definition of social situations whose highest moral principles are the preservation of the reputation of all those involved and the stability of the social order that safeguards their dignity.With its shift in perspective, Goffman and the Cold War stands out pleasantly from the multitude of recent publications on Erving Goffman. It thus succeeds in providing important impulses for discussion, for both the development of Goffman's work and a more precise understanding of its inner systematics. Moreover, the book encourages new reflections and in-depth research on Goffman's theoretical orientations and empirical interests. Nevertheless, it goes too far in one respect and falls short in another. Too far, because Jaworski elevates all of Goffman's terms plus everything else in his use of language to a natural metaphor. Thus, the picture becomes overloaded and blurred. The ultimately philosophical question arises whether Goffman's investigation of the interaction order is not a single sociological metaphor after all.On the other hand, the historical reconstruction falls short when Jaworski refers to ethology as an important link for the sociology of the interaction order and encourages further research along these lines. Goffman's many references to animal behavioral research certainly suggest this assessment, as do the first approaches to its reappraisal, such as Colin Jerolmack, Belicia Toe, and Abigal Westberry, “The Interactional Zoo: Lessons for Sociology from Erving Goffman's Engagement with Animal Ethology,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2 (June 2024), pp. 137--159. But even though Jaworski speaks out in favor of ethology, he says conspicuously little about the animal heritage of the interaction order and the dispositions of the human condition behind it.The central thesis of Goffman and the Cold War would be made even more plausible by insights from recent ethological research such as Michael Tomasello, The Evolution of Agency. Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Human (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), which encourages us to understand the Cold War as a culturally specific manifestation of the conditio humana: in the sense of Max Weber as an individual historical case that, in Georg Simmel's understanding, gives rise to the particular forms of sociation that Goffman observes and describes in his sociology of the interaction order.