Erving Goffman and the Cold War 1666936804, 9781666936803

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Erving Goffman and the Cold War

Erving Goffman and the Cold War Gary D. Jaworski

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jaworski, Gary D., 1954- author.   Title: Erving Goffman and the Cold War / Gary D. Jaworski.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical     references.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023027142 (print) | LCCN 2023027143 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666936803 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666936810 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Goffman, Erving, 1922-1982. | Cold War--Social     aspects--United States. | United States--Social conditions--1945- |     United States--Civilization--1945- | Sociology--United     States--History--20th century.  Classification: LCC HM479.G64 J39 2023  (print) | LCC HM479.G64  (ebook) |     DDC 301.097309/04--dc23/eng/20230628  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027142 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027143 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Loyalty



21

Chapter 2: Secrecy



53

Chapter 3: Strategy



77

Chapter 4: Spies



101

Chapter 5: Interrogation



Chapter 6: Provocation Chapter 7: Aggression Conclusion



153



179

211

Bibliography Index

125

219

243

About the Author



251

v

For my wife, Susan

Acknowledgments

This investigation emerged from a puzzlement after a long hiatus from scholarship. Reading Goffman’s chapter on secrets in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I pondered its purpose and place in Goffman’s thought. I reached out to a number of scholars and scanned the literature for answers. Having found no satisfactory answer, I decided to conduct a study myself. I was curious about not only Goffman’s interest in secrets but also the larger context in which he wrote about them. The result was a lengthy manuscript on “Secrets and Society in Erving Goffman’s Sociology,” a work that presaged this longer work. It has been a stimulating journey. Along the way, I have benefitted from communication with a wide range of scholars and archivists. These I am pleased here to recognize. I gratefully acknowledge Andrew Abbott, Philip Manning, Larry Nichols, Guy Oakes, Dmitri Shalin, and Greg Smith for their encouragement and counsel during the early stages and throughout the project. Most helpful from the start has been the Belgian Goffman scholar Yves Winkin. It is difficult to imagine this work being written without his warm collegiality, openness to discuss issues, and generous sharing of resources. These debts will be obvious throughout the book, as I draw on resources that Winkin collected for his own Goffman biography and shared with me. For critical readings and helpful advice on select chapters, the I thank Daniel and Cheryl Albas, Robert Ayson, Michael D. Barber, Dean MacCannell, Mary Jo Deegan, Paul Erickson, Gregor Fitzi, Patricia Greenfield, Jefferson Pooley, Dina and Joel Sherzer, Larry Stern, and Richard Swedberg. The editor and two anonymous readers for Lexington Books were constructive and helped improve the book overall. A special note of thanks goes to Gary T. Marx for ongoing consultation and inspiration. The author kindly acknowledges the late Edgar H. Schein for stimulating conversations on Goffman and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the late Professor Robert Jervis for sharing remembrances of Goffman and Schelling during his years at Berkeley and Harvard. Additional thanks go to historians Robert C. Bannister, Janet Farrell Brodie, and Kyle ix

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Courdileone. The archivists of the United States National Archives at College Park, MD, deserve a special note of appreciation. The editors and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Classical Sociology and Symbolic Interaction helped me to clarify and improve my arguments in chapters that first appeared there. Parts of the introduction and chapter 1 were published in Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 22, no. 3 (August 2022), 320–349. Part of chapter 2 appeared in The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies, edited by Gregor Fitzi (New York: Routledge, 2020), 380–397. Chapter 3 includes material previously published in The American Sociologist (2019), vol. 50, no. 3, 388–403, and in The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022), 108–118. Chapter 4 was published in Symbolic Interaction (2021), vol. 44, no. 2, 392–411. An earlier version of chapter 5 was presented at the virtual Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2021. All previously published works have been updated and expanded for this volume. Material from the Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, the Everett Cherrington Hughes Papers, the Papers of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Office of the Vice-President, Records, 1937–1946 is quoted with permission of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Material from the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America is quoted with permission of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Material from the Mike Keen Papers is quoted with permission of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Correspondence from the Lon L. Fuller Papers is quoted with permission of the Harvard Law Library. Correspondence from the David Riesman Papers is quoted courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. For research assistance, the author thanks Elayne Stecher and Christine Colburn of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Lauren Stark at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Monica Blank of the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY; Kate Collins of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; and Melissa McMullen of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archive, SUNY, Albany.

Introduction

Prevailing‌‌ portraits of Erving Goffman present him as a micro-sociologist who eschewed the study of broader social issues in favor of the investigation of mundane reality. This understanding makes it easy to dismiss him as irrelevant to an examination of wider matters. Moreover, he is often characterized as an “outsider” or “marginal man,” views that miss his meaningful connections to a wide range of thinkers, as well as to the resonance of his writings well beyond sociology.1 Goffman’s world was in fact richly connected. With some he counted cards in Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe; with others he skied in Canada; and with others still he saw movies in New York City, shopped for antiques in England, and dined at home in Bethesda, Berkeley, Zephyr Cove, Cambridge, and Philadelphia. His Sunday brunches on Rittenhouse Square were legendary. When he was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs in 1966–1967, he did more than just write. He participated in a small group that met monthly for dinner at the faculty club; these dinners included discussions with philosopher John Rawls and a number of Harvard’s Young Turks, such as Robert Nozick in philosophy, Charles Fried in law, and David Mumford in mathematics.2 Further, he took multiple paid speaking gigs at conferences across Europe and was, though not the life of the party, certainly a center of attention.3 In short, Goffman maintained meaningful connections to scholars in many fields in the U.S. and abroad. It is time to set the prevailing views aside. This book intends to advance a new way of thinking about Erving Goffman: as a social theorist of and in the American Cold War. Through a series of studies of cold war themes in his work, Erving Goffman and the Cold War will demonstrate that Goffman was exploring interactionally the same issues that marked American Cold War realities at the societal level, problems such as loyalty and betrayal, fear and aggression, and trust and suspicion. Far from ignoring those compelling realities, Goffman’s writings uncover interactional analogues of Cold War America. This can be seen in the wide cast of cold war characters in his work: conspirators, spies, interrogators, informers, eavesdroppers, colluders, traitors, communists, conscientious objectors, and more. This study will situate Goffman’s writings within the “ethos” or emotional 1

2

Introduction

tenor of the early Cold War, during his formative years, and within the historical events and networks of actors of the American Cold War. It will show that Goffman was no “stranger,” but rather a well-networked scholar connected to individuals within and beyond sociology, and surprisingly allied with both cold warriors and their critics. Goffman was inspired by anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s notion of “ethos” as it was developed in Naven, the now classic ethnography of the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea. There Bateson saw the need to abstract from the larger culture he studied the key element of the group’s affective life. He gave the word “ethos” to the culturally patterned emotional attitudes and behavior of a people, including their “sentiments to the rest of the world” and certain definite “attitudes toward reality.”4 The affective life of a people can sometimes be temporary and changeable, such as during episodic crises or socially sanctioned celebratory periods. Oftentimes it becomes stabilized and is guided through well-established channels. It is this conception of an ongoing affective life, especially as it was differentially expressed in Iatmul men and women, that Bateson found most helpful to his work. Goffman gave the term a more general expression: he called it a “group atmosphere,” or the “feeling” of an era.5 This book will also draw on the conception of the affective life of a people. For if the Cold War accomplished anything, it set a new emotional tone to the country, an atmosphere that Goffman’s work at once expresses and scrutinizes. When Goffman was conceiving and writing The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, his first major published work, the ethos of Anglo-American society had drastically changed. Rules of politeness and decorum were undermined while society was in the throes of years of anti-communist fervor. The University of Chicago itself, along with some of its top professors, including two of Goffman’s, was raked over the coals in two inquisitions during Goffman’s time there alone. But more broadly, the House Un-American Activities Committee, since 1938, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations and investigations, from 1950–1954, sanctified anti-communism as the country’s ruling credo, relentlessly destroying lives and livelihoods while upending bonds of the liberal social order.6 In Goffman’s words, this was one of society’s “moments of great crisis.”7 Gone were the sentiments voiced by British novelist E. M. Forster on the eve of World War II: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”8 In its place were subjects compelled by congressional committee and FBI investigators to betray friends and associates, naming them as communist, communist sympathizers, or fellow travelers.9 For many, under widespread fear of communist subversion, loyalty to the nation supplanted loyalty to family and friends. Moreover, the secrets one learns about others through

Introduction

3

the normal course of life, and which are usually left unsaid thanks to rules of discretion, were now pried open by congressional committee and revealed out of fear for career and livelihood. Learning people’s secrets was so widespread it even became entertainment, as is evidenced by the popular American television game show, I’ve Got A Secret (1952–1967). The ethos of suspicion created by the emerging national security state supplanted the liberal order of Goffman’s youth, which had been protected by the politeness and decorum he so admired. In place of decency and discretion, in place of a general right to know and standards of fair play, were now secrecy, distrust, doubt, suspicion, uncertainty, and aggression. Not only distrust of one nation to another, but of person to person. For Goffman this meant, most centrally, a deep distrust of what people say with their words. It naturally leads to questions of loyalty and trust and how those can be demonstrated. The years of total war had been followed by decades of ongoing aggression just short of all-out war. In his dissertation of 1953, Goffman would tellingly characterize social interaction as “an arrangement for pursuing a cold war.”10 The American ethos had indeed changed. In 1954, the year Goffman shared a typescript of his first book with select friends,11 Senator McCarthy was squelched at the Army-McCarthy hearings, censured by his colleagues in the Senate, and ostracized by his party. Tellingly, it was McCarthy’s violation of senatorial politesse, not his rabid anticommunism, that provided the warrant for his censure.12 As the long nightmare of attacks on decency and decorum was ending, new threats were looming. The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was heating up. The Korean War of 1950–1953 sought to contain the spread of communism beyond the 38th parallel, while the returning POWs from that conflict sparked fears of a new fifth column threatening the country.13 In this same year as McCarthy’s decline, the U.S. carried out Operation Castle, a new series of tests of terribly powerful thermonuclear weapons at the Bikini Atoll. The nuclear arms race carried implications for every aspect of social life; indeed, it imperiled the very existence of the human situation. Goffman’s entire intellectual and professional development was carried out within these ideological battles and global threats. If with historians we mark the beginning of the Cold War with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, then the adult Goffman never knew a world outside of that great and fearsome divide. He died in 1982. Others have explored Goffman’s experiences and encounters as a youth,14 but global events and actions created the America that formed the fertile backdrop of his work as an adult. Consider what is at stake with this perspective: much that is now considered mundane becomes weighty. Take one aspect of Goffman’s early years— his job in the summer of 1943 working at the National Film Board (NFB)

4

Introduction

of Canada. Goffman commentators typically note the job, mention his boss, the celebrated Scottish documentarian John Grierson, and speculate about Goffman’s possible early interest in becoming a filmmaker.15 But the NFB was not making art films for art cinemas and Grierson was no dilettante; the NFB was an arm of the Canadian war effort and Grierson was the country’s chief propagandist. Grierson wrote of his self-identity in these very terms: “I have been a propagandist all my working life because I have believed that we needed to do our democratic mind over if we were going to save democracy.”16 He and his army of cameramen, scriptwriters, and editors made such films as Action Station!, 13 Platoon, The War for Men’s Minds, Atlantic Patrol, Warclouds in the Pacific, and Zero Hour, an account of the invasion of Normandy. They made hundreds of such films for distribution throughout Canada and the U.S., and it was Goffman’s job to pack, label, and ship them to their destination. As a Grierson biographer noted, “Films were to become weapons of war, helping to weld together home-front efforts and also telling the story of Canada’s contribution to her partners in the world struggle.”17 NFB films were commissioned by Canadian government departments, such as National Defense, Munitions and Supply, Wartime Prices and Trade Board, War Finance Committee, and the Wartime Information Board. The raw footage used to create the films came from British Ministry of Information, the U.S. Signal Corps, the Free French newsreel, and captured material from Germany, Italy and, later, Japan.18 During Goffman’s summer at the NFB, Grierson was not only film commissioner; he had accepted an appointment as general manager of the Canadian Wartime Information Board, orchestrating all the country’s war propaganda in press, radio, film, graphics, and others. It was Grierson who made Hitler dance a “jig” by taking a single image and looping it repeatedly to make it appear that the Nazi dictator had danced while Paris burned.19 This brief episode in Goffman’s life may be considered insignificant, a minor early job in a full though abbreviated life. Or, it might be viewed, as here, as an instance of the hot and cold war realities that formed the fertile backdrop of Goffman’s thinking. The battle over propaganda and influence over people’s thoughts and action is precisely at the core of “cold” warfare. In Goffman’s summer government job working for the country’s chief arm of propaganda, he saw up close what a government propaganda operation running at full steam looked like. He would see this again after the war in the U.S., as government-sponsored propaganda projects in communication studies and “brain warfare” dominated much of the American academy.20 Of course, we do not know how much Goffman knew about what was going on at the NFB, nor do we know what he thought about it at the time. His plea at the end of his life for an “unfettered, unsponsored inquiry,” however, may provide a clue.21

Introduction

5

GOFFMAN AS SOCIAL THEORIST OF THE COLD WAR From the Marshall Plan of 1947 to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and beyond, Goffman’s writings in this period, it will be shown, reflected and reflected upon the times. Most centrally, his work engaged with President Truman’s America during the early years of the Cold War. Truman’s “Loyalty Order,” Executive Order 9835 of 1947, both legitimated and empowered the loyalty investigations that followed, including the culmination in McCarthyism. And his war in Korea impacted not just the world abroad but also at home, shaping America’s historical path and cultural constructs. These and other decisions of Truman’s presidency helped to create the range of problems—secrecy, aggression, loyalty, and subversion—on which Goffman would work and even at times the language with which he would write about it. American literary critic Irving Howe’s words about himself ring true for Goffman’s as well: “In the fifties, for better or worse, almost everything began that would dominate our life in the following decades.”22 Erving Goffman and the Cold War will attend carefully to Goffman’s language. He created so many fertile sociological terms—role distance, presentation of self, face-work, expression games, to name a few—that it is easy to miss other ways his language drew from and turned back upon his times. Harold Garfinkel noticed this quality of his work early on.23 He called attention to Goffman’s use of “natural metaphors,” terms that are already in use by everyday actors and, when developed analytically, can inform thinking and express larger truths (he was writing about Goffman’s use of the confidence artist’s phrase “cooling out the mark”). As this book will show, Goffman’s natural metaphors often point toward Cold War realities. Notably, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life brims with reference to people taking “lines” of action and with team members “aligning” to this or that definition of the situation. The word was commonly used in the 1950s to refer to a person’s trade or “line of work,” as is shown by the long-running popular American television game show, “What’s My Line” (original series 1950–1967), initially called “Occupation Unknown.” Here a group of four celebrity panelists would question a guest to determine that person’s line of work. A related show, “To Tell the Truth” (original series from 1956–1968), added an imposter element to the format. In that show, celebrity contestants faced a line-up of three people contending to be the same person. By asking them a series of questions, the players sought to identify the true character while revealing the imposters. These shows were lighthearted in tone but deadly serious in purpose; they trained the American masses in how to spot a fake. This was not frivolous entertainment; these were also times of talk about the “party line,” that is, the ideology of a political party, including of

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Introduction

course the Communist party line. How do you spot communists when they employ so much deception and double-speak? Goffman’s use of “line” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life extended the natural metaphor of the “line” to dramaturgical analysis, in effect showing his readers that, like Democrats, Republicans and Communists, everyday people take lines too; indeed, like those political operatives, our lives are largely scripted. Goffman followed this “natural metaphor” approach throughout his early career. He showed that not only nations, but also everyday people were strategic; that games broadly conceived illuminate social encounters; that secrets can be extended to “destructive information” more generally; that interrogation is a natural metaphor for everyday interaction; that normal people were akin to spies; that interaction was a cold war. Goffman transformed each of these italicized words by extending them from the vernacular to broader metaphorical and analytical usage. People thought he was just building a sociology; but as a critical analyst of the Cold War, he was doing so much more than that. He was theorizing the interpersonal life of an era. It may be helpful to characterize the process, as we see it, involved in the movement from the general cultural ethos to specific “natural metaphors.” It is not that Goffman was some kind of “cultural dope” who was in thrall to an overwhelming Cold War zeitgeist. Rather, his personal oppositional style—however it developed—and the relationships he formed, often outside of sociology, mediated the impact and resulting conceptual developments. The zeitgeist presented options and Goffman made selections. Indeed, the Cold War offered him a virtual smorgasbord of opportunities to twist or break the rigid distinctions and bounded realities of the era. And twist them he did. Goffman’s style is often identified by referring to Kenneth Burke’s term “perspective by incongruity”—the practice of creatively employing terms beyond their customary usage.24 This book includes specific studies of the ways that Goffman metaphorically extended cold war terms in his own unique way. Strategy, spies, and interrogation, for example, were not limited to governments and the military, Goffman showed; they were a common feature of everyday life at the interactional level. But Burke’s idea somewhat obscures the several ways Goffman accomplished this transformation. He employed not one approach but several: he would reverse the order of significance of those terms, expand their meaning, and employ outrageous associations. In the chapters that follow, then, we will see all these separate approaches at work in his writing. Apparently, Goffman did not think much of sociology as an intellectual discipline. His ironical attitude even to his own work was pointed out by a friend who served as one of Winkin’s informants. Goffman told this friend on more than one occasion that his own work was “pretty small potatoes.”25 With these words, Goffman was conveying the point that “sociology in general was

Introduction

7

a rather insignificant affair and any prominence he had was merely being a big frog in a very little pond.” Goffman’s critics and commentators may not share his view of sociology’s importance, but they often see him as something of a deficient sociologist because his work failed to articulate levels of analysis beyond face-to-face interaction. Focused as it is on the interactional minutiae of social life, these commentators maintain, Goffman’s work neglects to include an examination of the institutional and societal levels of analysis. His work is thus seen as limited at best and wrong at worst. But these criticisms mostly miss Goffman’s thinking on this matter. It does little service to describe Goffman’s subject matter as dealing with the mundane aspects of social life. To be sure, his examples often include quotidian matters, such as commerce in cigarettes, staring at others, or asking for the time of day. Goffman conceded that his subject matter can often be seen as “picayune and petty.”26 Even Simmel himself addressed the small and inconsequential qualities of the dyad—the way the stuff of close relationships can be so often repeated that they attain a “tone of triviality.”27 Still, however trivial these conversational games may be, Goffman reminded us, they are necessary if society’s work is to be done.28 It would be wrong to suppose that these trivial interactions are the only subject of Goffman’s study. They are but entry points into the profound matters he was unquestionably analyzing. Whether he was exploring “small acts of living” in Asylums, or alienation from the “sociable moment” in Interaction Ritual, or the “little maneuvers” of radio announcers in Forms of Talk, and so on, Goffman hinted that his investigations provided insight into “wider matters.”29 Turn again to the opening discussion of some of the greatest challenges in the post-World War II era: secrecy, distrust, doubt, suspicion, uncertainty, aggression, loyalty, and disloyalty. All these wider matters were examined in countless studies by postwar social and behavioral scientists. We will discuss some of them in this book. But these same issues are cogently examined in Goffman’s work as well—all within the interaction order. Goffman’s originality was to explore the central issues of the age uniquely at the interactional level, thereby revealing interactional analogues of Cold War America—its secrets and aggressions, its loyalties and betrayals. The mundane order was ripped from the headlines, literally, as he pulled stories from the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, among others. Accordingly, he examined secrecy not by studying the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission but via the multiple kinds of secrets at the level of face-to-face interaction, including the “dark secrets” that are never told. In an era of patriotism, he wrote original analyses of interactional loyalty and betrayal. And in a time of anticommunism, he carefully crafted a sociology that was critical of Anglo-American society. In contrast, then, to the view of Goffman as a master of mundane matters, the view

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Introduction

advanced here is that Goffman was one of the Cold War’s most perceptive and profound social theorists. In this perspective lay both his originality and his security. For in the politically treacherous times of the Cold War, Goffman could seem to be writing about politically antiseptic issues of mundane social life, when in fact it was anything but that. The very mundanity of his subjects shielded from view the subversive elements of his work.30 Goffman’s work was a response to, an engagement with, and a commentary on the American Cold War. By extracting Goffman from his roots in Cold War America, commentators have often missed important elements of this sociology. These often-neglected subjects are the focus of this work. It may be questioned if Goffman intended his work to be seen as a commentary on the Cold War. This study takes an agnostic position on this question. Frankly, Goffman didn’t say much, in the sources now available, about what he intended to do. Indeed, he was often elusive about such matters. Moreover, it wasn’t his style to make moral pronouncements. Gary T. Marx offers a wise assessment of this matter: As one who came of age during the McCarthyite, cold war, and anticommunist hysteria, Goffman was well aware of the risks faced by outspoken professors. In his view, it was unwise to make direct moral arguments in one’s writing. If you want to send a message call Western Union. If you desire to make a moral argument, simply present the facts that point in the direction of the argument one would make. As he told John Lofland, “just lay it there.” Readers should draw the right conclusion without it being forced on them. The poignancy of so many of his well-chosen examples permitted that.31

He wanted his work to be read and understood on its own merits, though he provided few clear guides on how to do that. Erving Goffman and the Cold War, then, is an interpretation of his work. It is an interpretation, though, with multiple warrants. First, and centrally, Goffman was relationally connected to places and people intimate with Cold War politics and policy. He associated with cold warriors Edward A. Shils, Douglas Waples, Thomas C. Schelling, the early researchers on brainwashing at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC, among many others to be discussed in these pages. This is why viewing Goffman as a “marginal man” has become a tired trope in Goffman studies. It is counterproductive to fresh analysis because it underscores Goffman’s aloofness from other people and directs attention away from those meaningful connections that he in fact did possess. Furthermore, commentators often essentialize Goffman’s character as being detached and distant, an interpretation that reinforces the notion of him as a “marginal

Introduction

9

man.” This way of thinking is precisely the kind of pigeonholing he abjured. But Goffman appears to have been not that way with everyone. Like most people, he was complex. With the disabled he showed deference; with certain friends, warm camaraderie; with others, intellectual engagement and, yes, sometimes open rivalry. Moreover, some forms of Goffman’s reticence may have been situational, not characterological. An instance of this may be seen in the relationship Goffman had formed with Schelling when he spent the academic year 1966–1967 as a Fellow at Harvard. Near the end of his life, Schelling took the opportunity to reflect on his relationship with Goffman during that year. Schelling stated ruefully that Goffman was “distant,” and he reported with apparent regret that “we did not become close friends.” But Goffman’s distance in this case might have been an appropriate course of action. What Schelling didn’t report in that letter was that those were the years of the Vietnam War. A year before Goffman’s fellowship, in 1965, the U.S. began a systematic aerial bombing campaign referred to by the government as “controlled escalation.” In his study of the Rand Corporation, Alex Abella described the campaign as “the careful, escalated infliction of pain.” He also noted that Schelling was “one of the main instigators of this policy.” It was a policy that was not only legitimated by Schelling’s ideas on war as negotiation; it was directly “instigated” by him as he consulted with the policy’s framers. In the event, the policy failed to end the war, which continued another decade and with terrible losses on both sides. Goffman certainly knew of Schelling’s role as a war strategist. During Goffman’s Harvard fellowship, Schelling occasionally dined with him at his residence in Cambridge and was joined by people like New York State Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. All of this raises the question: what is the proper course of conduct toward a host (in this case Schelling) whom one knows to be complicit with morally problematic policies? Perhaps “distance” is a legitimate non-confrontational option. In any event, this episode is further reason to set aside the marginal man trope and explore a new line of thought.32 Second, the themes of Goffman’s writing strongly match the ethos of the early Cold War. Goffman came to intellectual maturity in the late 1940s to 1950s, a time when the emotional tenor of the country mirrored the political polarization of the Cold War. As Goffman said in his dissertation, the interaction order had come to resemble a cold war. And he seems to have taken on this tone in his interaction with some others. As one friend surmised, “I think he [Goffman] thought of the world as an armed camp.”33 Furthermore, President Truman’s “Loyalty Order” of 1947 legitimated and empowered the hunt for disloyalty in America. Harold M. Hyman characterized the situation best when he wrote about how the “national frustration inspired an unprecedented search for disloyalty in America. In the dozen years after 1945 that search permeated all levels of government and society.”34 While this loyalty

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Introduction

battle was fought, Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life introduced the notion of “dramaturgical loyalty,” the practice of acting as if one were loyal but retaining one’s freedom. The security concerns of the emerging national security state generated not only hostility and suspicion; they led to a concentration on secrecy as a weapon against communism. Indeed, the University of Chicago was something of a battleground over secrecy, as it had housed in wartime the Metallurgical Laboratory that helped build the atom bomb, and then in the postwar era the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which took a vocal stand against secrecy restraints on science and scientists. Goffman was there during these heady times. It is no surprise, then, that he made secrecy a central theme of his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The Korean War of 1950–1953 added to the era’s emotional tumult. The conflict culminated in a moral panic over returning veterans who were believed to have been “brainwashed” by their communist captors. Goffman engaged with this issue of “coercive persuasion” during his years in the Washington, DC, area while conducting research at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Finally, the hunt for communists during McCarthyism transformed universities into divided campuses. Goffman effectively side-stepped this problem by taking a research position outside of academic campuses in John Clausen’s “Socioenvironmental Lab,” in the newly established (in 1949) National Institute of Mental Health. In Asylums, Goffman praised the “freedom and opportunity to engage in pure research” he experienced there. Goffman wrote, in full: The point I want to make is that this freedom and opportunity to engage in pure research was afforded me in regard to a government agency, through the financial support of another government agency, both of which were required to operate in a presumably delicate atmosphere in Washington, and that this was done at a time when some universities in this country, the traditional bastions of free enquiry, would have put more restrictions on my efforts. For this I must thank the open- and fair-mindedness of psychiatrists and social scientists in government.35

As Stuart Kirk has noted, with those words “Goffman reminds readers of the chilling Red scare at leading universities and contrasts it with the unexpected openness of government psychiatrists and social scientists at NIMH.”36 All was not rosy in the Socioenvironmental Lab, however; at least one fellow member of Clausen’s Lab was terminated because of the political activities and associations of a spouse.37 In sum, Goffman’s work engaged with all these socio-political concerns and the emotional fallout they created throughout society. He transformed them into examinations of loyalty, secrecy, information control, and more

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11

at the interactional level in what amounts to studies in microcosm of the American Cold War. Third and last, Goffman was the only postwar sociologist who deeply engaged with the literature on spies and espionage, the world of the intelligence community, and the problems of deception, imposters, and secrets—in short, with issues that connect with the undercurrents of Cold War society.38 Alvin W. Gouldner rightly characterized Goffman’s image of social interaction as built along the lines of espionage—as people “seeking to convince the other that he really is what he claims to be, and each seeking to penetrate the other’s ‘cover.’”39 But he neglected to see the larger sociological significance of this insight. In contrast, Guy Swanson understood the importance of Goffman’s view that “we are all and always spies and spied upon.” He saw that “espionage and counterespionage and counter-counterespionage must be important in structuring all interactions and are not just ad hoc procedures.”40 Considered in this light, Goffman still has no equal. To summarize the book’s thesis, we hold that Goffman’s thought can be profitably situated in the historical and sociological context of its production. Analysts have too readily abandoned the examination of context in favor of the study and extension of his arsenal of terms. But when one examines Goffman’s thought in the context of the early Cold War of his formative years, one finds other aspects of his works that rise to importance. For one, there are the “natural metaphors” he employed in his analysis. Goffman extended American idioms and vernacular terms from specific to more general meanings with analytical purpose. Examining these metaphors reveals that they almost invariably align with Cold War concerns. This book focuses on a range of these metaphors that seem to connect to widespread cares of the early Cold War: to concerns about loyalty, betrayal, secrecy, spies, and interrogation, among others. Arguing that Goffman had no interest in these larger matters, that he was a microsociologist strictly considered, steers commentators directly away from these wider considerations. It is as though contemporary students of Goffman have put on blinders; and in a sense this is what the “thought-style,” to borrow Ludwick Fleck’s term, of a generation of scientists accomplishes: it leads investigators to view exceptions to ruling ideas as anomalies.41 But soon, when the exceptions accumulate, they no longer seem incongruous. Goffman’s lifelong interest in spies and espionage, preoccupation with deception and examination of interrogation, association with Schelling and other Rand Corporation consultants, time as consultant at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and association with deception researchers, the chapter on secrets in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and book on strategic interaction—all of these, and others still, are not anomalies of a committed microsociologist but are accumulated evidence of Goffman as a perceptive social theorist of the American Cold War.

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Introduction

AN OVERVIEW The following chapters proceed thematically rather than chronologically, though the first four chapters necessarily focus on the critical decade of the 1950s, as this was a period of Goffman’s great productivity. Chapter 1 examines the twentieth century anti-communism crusades—one in each decade of the 1930s-1950s—against the University of Chicago and its professors. Goffman was a graduate student during the last two attacks and two of his professors, Ernest W. Burgess and Donald Horton, had to defend themselves at secret and public trials. But the university and professors were not merely defensive; trial transcripts show that they actively resisted the accusations. These experiences formed the backdrop of Goffman’s writings of the 1950s, writings that examined the key issues of those years—loyalty and betrayal—and featured ethnographic research and scholarly analysis on resistance against social oppression. As McCarthyism ended, new expressions of anti-communism emerged. Returning soldiers from the Korean War were believed to have been brainwashed by their captors. On ships back to the U.S., and again on native soil, these men were interviewed by scholars stationed at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, during a year when Goffman was also there as consultant. Goffman’s connections to researchers Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar Schein, and the literature on brainwashing, inform key arguments of his Asylums. These analyses deepened his investigation of the interactional process of betrayal while expressing the same issue of resistance that was demonstrated by his professors during the Chicago anti-communism campaigns. In September of 1949 President Truman announced that the USSR had exploded a nuclear weapon, and with that the American monopoly of nuclear weapons was over. Soon spies were arrested in Canada, Britain, and the U.S., and the primacy of secrecy and fear of betrayal became a part of Cold War culture. These were the years (1952–1954) when Goffman, fresh with a PhD but without an academic appointment, stayed on at Chicago as research assistant, first to sociologist Edward A. Shils and then to political scientist Edward C. Banfield. Goffman had considerable freedom to read extensively, as Shils gave him wide latitude to work independently and just report back.42 By the end of that period, as discussed above, Goffman had a typescript of the book that would become The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Chapter 2 examines Goffman’s abiding interest in the notion of secrecy and compares the ideas of Goffman and Shils on secrecy and society during the early Cold War. Shils examined the crisis in his The Torment of Secrecy (published in 1956), a study of the loyalty-security issues of the McCarthy years. The first edition of Goffman’s book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday

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13

Life, published in the same year as Shils’s study, was also a study of secrecy. Goffman devoted a full chapter to the subject and made the term central to the concluding lessons of the study. The Cold War was a game of strategy between two nations, a game of ideological competition and military might. As such, “strategy” became a word filled with military meaning. The Strategic Bombing Survey of World War II gave way to the U.S. Strategic Air Command that defined America’s preparedness for nuclear war. “Strategists” was the name for the men who assisted the U.S. government in calculating ways of avoiding and perhaps winning nuclear war. Chapter 3 discusses Goffman’s relation to one of the era’s most prominent of these actors, Thomas Schelling. It examines the Schelling-Goffman intellectual relationship and Goffman’s coinage and development of the term “strategic interaction,” a game-theoretic approach to sociology that transfers the thinking of global conflict to the interaction order. It offers the first in-depth examination of Goffman’s participation in the 1964 Berkeley conference on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” a conference where he contended with the era’s top game theorists and nuclear strategists, such as Albert Wohlstetter and Daniel Ellsberg. Later, at Schelling’s invitation, Goffman spent a year as fellow at Harvard. The result was his Strategic Interaction (published in 1969), a book that is neglected even today among Goffman scholars. This chapter reveals the book’s connection to Cold War realities and strategic thinking. Chapter 4 examines Goffman’s keen interest in spies and espionage. The postwar era was a time of heightened mass media attention to spies and spying—in film, television, and print—and this certainly provided a horizon of understanding for Goffman’s interest. Moreover, Goffman’s contact in the mid-1950s with Schelling, who also shared an interest in spies, may have reinforced that concern. But this chapter looks more closely at Goffman’s contact with Chicago professors Shils in sociology and Waples in communication, both of whom worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war and became cold warriors after it. Goffman offered a unique perspective on spies as analogues to postwar lives: we are in an important sense all spies, he argued. During World War II, U.S. counterintelligence teams on the ground interrogated legions of enemy combatants and suspected collaborators. These interrogations, often crudely done owing to time constraints and lack of personnel, nevertheless often enough became data for social scientists after the war. But during the McCarthy era, a time of suspicion and high anxiety, academics themselves became targets of the interrogators, now conducted by U.S. government elected officials and their agents. Over time, the need for eliciting information from individuals who were unwilling to provide

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Introduction

it had broadened, and the techniques for doing so had been enhanced. For Goffman’s generation, then, interrogation was not only background, topic, and resource for social scientific analysis; it was a real personal possibility. Chapter 5 examines this historical situation of wartime and postwar interrogation, and the way Goffman incorporated the term into his work. Goffman’s uniqueness is not that he thought and wrote about interrogation, but that he extended the term analytically, building it into his framework of sociology. This previously missed topic in his work reveals that—like line, strategy, games, spying, and cold war itself—Goffman found a way through “natural metaphors” to bring Cold War realities to bear in his analysis of the interaction order. The 1950s were dangerous times for friendships, especially those friendships with subversive implications. But intellectuals often find kinship across borders and beyond face-to-face association in imagined communities with distant authors. Goffman found validation and support for his iconoclasm in the provocative writings of leading Anglo-American satirists. He was admittedly a fan of “The Goon Show,” the British postwar radio show that inspired the satire boom of the 1950s and 1960s. He told his Berkeley students about that show, about the “Beyond the Fringe” radio show that followed it, and about other satirists like Nigel Dennis, whose Cards of Identity he especially esteemed. Chapter 6 presents the first examination of Goffman’s imagined community with all these satirists, including twentieth-century British masters of satire Evelyn Waugh and Stephen Potter, author of Gamesmanship. It will examine Goffman’s keen interest in specific satirists whose social criticism he admired. And it makes a case for seeing these satirists as exemplars of the leitmotif of provocation in the broader Anglo-American culture. Goffman cogently wrote that social interaction was “an arrangement for pursuing a cold war.” Chapter 7 takes that characterization seriously by examining Goffman’s analyses of aggression in the interaction order. It examines Goffman’s writings in the context of the postwar debate about aggression: is it innate, inevitable, worsening? Four intellectual perspectives on conflict are examined—social-structural, psychoanalytic, game theory, and ethology— and these perspectives are illustrated with reference to case studies from Goffman’s work. These include his analyses of microaggression, character contests, and hostile gestures—studies of aggression in the small that mirrored the battles and preparations for battle of the wider world. A conclusion comments on the implications of this study for understanding the history of sociology and social thought. Other disciplines—notably anthropology, economics, and psychology—have closely scrutinized their historical connections to the Cold War. These academic disciplines have revealed and healed from an accounting of research that directly or inadvertently contributed to questionable practices. While Goffman was no closet

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15

cold warrior, he does bear witness to the ways that twentieth-century sociology and social thought struggled to develop a worthy intellectual enterprise out of a country built on global conflict. This book is positioned within my own personal history. I grew up in the culture of fear, anxiety, and existential vulnerability of the Cold War. As a boy during the years of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I imagined every plane I heard overhead to be a Soviet bomber. Every alarm sounded by the local fire station warned of annihilation to come. These experiences cannot but help to shape a young psyche and stamp the interests of the grown mind. As a graduate student, I learned academic rules of discretion: to respect some subjects as off limits to scholarly attention. These rules seemed sensible to me, both epistemologically and morally. But all those secrets have led to a discipline that has barely come to terms with its relation to war and the military, and to the ways these relations, both open and hidden, have shaped the research and research questions that have dominated American sociology. Accordingly, the leading figures of twentieth-century American sociology are often scarcely known except as hagiographic shadows. Yet, there can be no adequate history of sociology and social thought without an understanding of the way it connects to its historical and social context. For studies of social thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, this inevitably involves questions regarding World War II and its aftermath. Recent studies, such as Üta Gerhardt on Talcott Parsons’s work with the Office of Strategic Services and his commitment to fight the rise of National Socialism, and Anne Warfield Rawls on Harold Garfinkel’s early years and his commitment to social justice through the examination of race and “Reds,”43 return thinkers to the real-world issues with which they struggled and the historical context of their work. We think of Goffman when we read Rawls’s exasperation about writings on Garfinkel: Despite Garfinkel’s long-standing focus on issues of social justice and inequality, and his deep immersion in classical and contemporary social theory and philosophy, it has become a curious commonplace to treat Garfinkel and ethnomethodology as fundamentally unconcerned with those matters.44

Goffman was concerned with different issues than Garfinkel, but the “curious” treatment of him is the same. The present study is meant as a modest contribution to this important line of investigation.

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A NOTE ON SOURCES Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the Belgian sociologist Yves Winkin interviewed many of Goffman’s family, friends, colleagues, students, and admirers for a planned biography. Dr. Winkin has generously shared some of this material with me; this study draws on that information when it is germane to the project. I have been able to secure approvals from the relatives of some of Winkin’s informants, and these have been noted in appropriate places. In cases where I have been unable to secure permission, I have protected the privacy of the person by anonymizing the interviewee and referring to them in general ways, such as a “Winkin’s informant” or other similar general designations. For each anonymized reference, I include the date of the interview or material as part of the record and to facilitate the work of later researchers. I am most grateful to Dr. Winkin and the family members who have given their permission to use this material. I apologize for any omissions or oversights and will correct and amend as necessary in any future editions of the book. NOTES 1. For portrayals of Goffman as an “outsider” and “marginal man,” see Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Soren Kristiansen, The Social Thought of Erving Goffman (New York: Sage, 2015) and Jürgen Raab, Erving Goffman: From the Perspective of the New Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2019), although the trope is widely employed in Goffman studies. 2. Letter from Thomas C. Schelling to Yves Winkin, April 30, 1991. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. Email from Charles Fried to the author, October 23, 2022. Lon L. Fuller to Erving Goffman, October 26, 1966, Lon L. Fuller papers, Harvard Law School Library, Historical and Special Collections, Box 3, Folder 12. 3. Yves Winkin, “Erving Goffman: The Traveling Hermit,” Etnografia e Ricera Qualitativa 1 (2022), 153–174. 4. Gregory Bateson, Naven. 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 119. 5. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Essays on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 97. 6. See Elizabeth Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford, 1986) and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 7. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, Anchor, 1959), 167. 8. E. M. Forster, “Two Cheers for Democracy,” The Nation 147, No. 3 (1938), 65–68.

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17

9. See, for example, Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). 10. Erving Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953, 40. 11. Recipients of Goffman’s manuscript include friends Robert W. Habenstein (PhD, University of Chicago,1954), Warren A. Peterson (PhD, University of Chicago, 1956) and Harold Garfinkel. Goffman’s book manuscript was then titled “The Management of Impressions in Social Establishments” and is dated March 1954. Garfinkel’s handwritten notes are in the Harold Garfinkel papers (Collection 1273), Box 157, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 12. Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). 13. Eugene Kinkead, “The Study of Something New in History,” The New Yorker (October 26, 1957), 102 ff., and Eugene Kinkaid, In Every War But One (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959). 14. Dmitri Shalin, “Interfacing Biography, Theory and History: The Case of Erving Goffman.” Symbolic Interaction 37, no. 1 (2013), 2–40; Yves Winkin, “Goffman’s Greenings,” in The Contemporary Goffman, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (New York: Routledge, 2010), 51–63; Sherri Cavan, “When Goffman was a Boy: The Formative Years of a Sociological Giant.” Symbolic Interaction 37, no. 1 (2014), 41–70. 15. As an example, see Louis Menand, “Some Frames for Goffman,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72, No. 4 (2009), 298, drawing on the unsupported statement of Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9. For an exception, see Greg Smith, Erving Goffman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 14. 16. Quoted in Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 126. 17. Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 149. 18. Hardy, John Grierson, 120. 19. See Laurence Stallings, “Hitler Did Not Dance that Jig: The Secret Behind a Masterstroke of Propaganda.” Esquire 50, no. 4 (October 1958), 280, 284. 20. Timothy Melley, “Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of Cold War,” Grey Room 45 (2011), 18–39; Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 21. Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983), 17. 22. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 246. 23. Harold Garfinkel, “Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists,” Psychiatric Research Reports 6 (1956): 181–198. 24. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History. 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 308–314. 25. Letter to Yves Winkin, December 22, 1992. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin.

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26. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 247. 27. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff. (New York: Free Press, 1950), 125–126. 28. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 135. 29. On “wider matters,” see Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 138. 30. Gary T. Marx writes of Goffman as a teacher, “Writing, he taught us, could offer a way to quietly and safely express your personality and beliefs . . . under the mantle of being a sociologist.” Gary T. Marx, “Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman.” Theory and Society 13 (1984), 649–662. 31. Gary T. Marx, “Maps, Masks, Meshes, Misses and More: Metaphors in Search of Understanding Erving Goffman and Society,” in The Anthem Companion to Erving Goffman, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (New York: Anthem Press, 2023), 212 32. The quote “we did not become close friends” is from Thomas C. Schelling, “Remembering Erving Goffman.” Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin, 2015. http:​//​cdclv​.unlv​.edu​/archives​/interactionism​/goffman​/ schelling​_15​.html. The analysis of the Rand Corporation and the Vietnam War is by Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 177. Abella drew on Fred Kaplan, “Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling’s little-known role in the Vietnam War,” Slate (Oct. 11, 2005), https:​//​slate​.com​/news​-and​-politics​/2005​/10​/nobel​-winner​-tom​-schelling​-s​ -roll​-in​-the​-vietnam​-war​.html. Goffman dining with Schelling and Senator Moynihan is from an Yves Winkin interview, August 24, 1991. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 33. Richard Daniels. “Goffman Was Always Ready to Explain, and He Did That without Condescension, with Patience, and with Grace,” in Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (2009), 1–17. https:​//​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu​/goffman​_archives​/15 34. Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 333. 35. Goffman, Asylums, xi. 36. Stuart A. Kirk, “Instituting Madness: The Evolution of a Federal Agency,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, ed. Carol S. Aneshensel and Jo C. Phelan (New York: Springer, 1999), 540. 37. Social psychologist Herbert Kelman recounts his termination from NIMH, and his successful bid to be reinstated, in Herbert C. Kelman, “Personal Reflections on My Work in Conflict Analysis and Resolution” in Herbert C. Kelman and Ronald J. Fisher, Herbert C. Kelman: A Pioneer in the Social Psychology of Conflict Analysis and Resolution (New York: Springer, 2016), 8. 38. Thus, a recent analysis of social theory through the lens of imposters begins with Goffman. See Steve Woolgar, Else Vogel, David Moats and Claes-Fredrick Helgesson, ed. The Imposter as Social Theory (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021), 8. 39. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 382. 40. Guy E. Swanson, Review of Erving Goffman Strategic Interaction, American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 4 (1974), 1005.

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41. Ludwik Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 42. Yves Winkin interview, September 17, 1988. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 43. Üta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons on National Socialism (New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), Anne Warfield Rawls, “The Early Years, 1939–1953: Garfinkel at North Carolina, Harvard and Princeton,” Journal of Classical Sociology 13, no. 2 (2013), 303–312. 44. Jason Turowetz and Anne Warfield Rawls, “The Development of Garfinkel’s ‘Trust’ Argument from 1947 to 1967: Demonstrating How Inequality Disrupts Sense and Self-Making.” Journal of Classical Sociology 21, no. 1 (2021), 22.

Chapter 1

Loyalty

This chapter examines early Cold War social science literature on loyalty and betrayal. It examines those subjects as they are expressed mainly in Goffman’s writings of the 1950s and surrounding years. The examination is partly analytical and partly historical. It explores the concepts that Goffman employed to understand issues of loyalty and betrayal as well as the social and intellectual context of that work. The analysis turns on key features of the early Cold War America within which Goffman wrote, though not just on the general context of those times but, more importantly, on key features of Goffman’s specific situation at Chicago and later as he conducted research for the chapters that made up his book Asylums. The special burden of this chapter is to show that examining Goffman’s work within these particular social and historical contexts provides fresh insight into his work. To identify Goffman’s distinctive approach to these subjects, the analysis compares Goffman’s writings on loyalty and betrayal to those of Morton Grodzins. Grodzins is not well known among contemporary sociologists. He was a University of Chicago political scientist whose academic star was ascendant in the 1950s, and who died prematurely in 1964 at age 46.1 Despite the relative inattention given to his work today, there are several important reasons to revisit Grodzins’s writings in this context. First, he was not a minor character in the years of interest here. Grodzins was one of the most articulate and productive postwar social scientists writing on loyalty and treason. In Americans Betrayed, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, he set forth a rare critique of the official treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. He argues that certain conditions of America, and some of the country’s most central groups and agencies, created disloyal behavior in its members. His later study, The Loyal and Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (published in 1956), is a classic of social science analysis.2 Second, he was deeply connected to the University of Chicago faculty in the Social Sciences Division, serving briefly as its dean (1953–1954) and even briefly as head of the University of Chicago Press (1951–1953). He 21

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was one of the most outspoken representatives of the pluralist philosophy of many of the faculty, especially as that philosophy applied to the subject of loyalty. As Goffman too came from this fertile soil, this comparison provides a way to examine how Goffman’s approach stands out as distinctive from those others. And, last, Grodzins set forth a view that locates the wellsprings of loyalty and disloyalty in face-to-face relations. Here I introduce the term “Chicago consensus” to identify a distinct academic focus on the role of primary groups in the stability of western democracies, a focus that employed the shorthand “face-to-face” in a way that differed from Goffman’s use of the term but with which Goffman was, often enough, mistakenly allied. It is admitted that Edward A. Shils might also have served these comparative purposes. His penetrating book The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (published in 1956) directly examined the roots of the loyalty-security crisis of the postwar and early Cold War America.3 Indeed, Shils there argued for the distinction between loyalty and security, affirming the need for the latter and deriding efforts to enforce the former. As they were published in the same year, his book was often reviewed along with Grodzins’s The Loyal and the Disloyal. But we defer a fuller examination of Shils and Goffman until a later chapter, where it can be a singular focus, instead of adding greater complexity here in an already crowded analysis. Still, Shils does occupy a limited though important role here in the current discussion, as will soon be clear. The analysis proceeds in three main sections. The first examines the twentieth century anticommunism crusades aimed at the University of Chicago. These efforts recurred irregularly from the 1930s through the 1950s but always focused on the faculty and curriculum. The last such crusade in 1953, the year of Goffman’s dissertation defense, impacted two of Goffman’s professors, Ernest W. Burgess and Donald Horton, both of whom actively resisted not only the charges against them but also the very right of government commissions to make those charges. These circumstances, it is argued, formed the specific background conditions of Goffman’s writings on loyalty and resistance. The second examines Grodzins’s writings on loyalty and disloyalty, including his book Americans Betrayed, published in 1949, just as the loyalty-security crisis of those years was coming to a head. Communist spies in government positions were uncovered in Canada, England, and the U.S, and government hearing and trials—including the first nationally televised congressional hearing of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss in 1948—were underway to expose other such spies.4 In this section, Grodzins’s approach to loyalty and disloyalty is further examined in relationship to the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study led by Dorothy Swaine Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley. Thomas was a member of Grodzins’s dissertation committee, but subsequently they ended up in a

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23

heated feud and parted both personally and intellectually. Our purpose in layering these comparisons, one upon the other, is to bring to light distinguishing features of the texts that might be lost by looking at them alone. An examination of Goffman’s own writing on loyalty and betrayal makes up the next section of the chapter. The distinctive examination of loyalty in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life becomes sharpened when contrasted to the “Chicago consensus” as found in Grodzins’s writings. Special attention is given to the ways that Goffman’s approach transcended the polarity between loyal and disloyal, patriot and spy, that is found in the consensus approach. Grodzins was stuck in the polarity and ended up arguing that most people were, as one of the scholars in the memorial address put it, “a little bit loyal and a little bit disloyal,” an ultimately unsatisfying position. Goffman, in contrast, explored the reality of interactional resistance—a third way through the loyalty-security crisis of the early Cold War. This section also explores the problem of American soldiers returning home from the Korean War and Goffman’s contact with early researchers into “brainwashing” and mind control at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC. The relationships Goffman formed there, and the brainwashing research he reviewed, helped to shape his own views as expressed in Asylums. In a conclusion, we reflect on all these analyses in terms of their role as social criticism in times of national crisis. At bottom, the chapter examines the ways social scientists wrote in the chill of the early Cold War in ways that shielded them from scrutiny while still offering powerful critiques against the status quo. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANTICOMMUNISM CRUSADES Over the course of almost twenty years, the University of Chicago was a target of three successive waves—1935, 1949, and 1953—of anticommunist crusades. In each case, faculty and curricula were investigated, publicly and in secret, for spreading subversive ideas and supporting seditious activities. Further, in each crusade the university community mounted a vigorous defense, though the manner of defense would change in each successive attack. The first was the Walgreen investigation of 1935, a full-blown public inquisition of the University of Chicago with backing by professional patriots, red-baiting Hearst newspapers, and the Illinois State Senate.5 The target was the Great Books approach of Social Science I, which, although subsequently charged with conservatism, was then charged with radicalism. The curriculum was singled out for its “subversive” entries, such as including sections of the Communist Manifesto on its reading lists. The faculty were

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employing these texts to indoctrinate their students, or so argued Chicago businessman Charles Walgreen, his young niece, and the Illinois State Senate. A vigorous defense was waged by university President Robert Maynard Hutchins, faculty, and administration, who framed the matter as an attack on academic freedom. After pointing out that the university had 901 teachers who taught 3,492 courses, Hutchins announced that he could find nothing subversive in the outlines of 161 of those courses that deal with social economic and political problems. “On behalf of the faculty,” he concluded, “I repudiate the charges made against them.”6 In the end, the university was exonerated of the charges. Having gained national attention, a triumphant Hutchins was featured on the cover of a June 1935 Time magazine and was flatteringly profiled within it. Subsequent attacks on the university were made during far more dangerous times. President Roosevelt had died on April 12, 1945, and Harry S. Truman was then in office at a time when the Republican Party controlled Congress and made anticommunism its driving dogma.7 It was at this time that Joseph McCarthy and Richard M. Nixon came into national power. In March of 1947, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 establishing the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which gave presidential imprimatur to loyalty investigations, broad-reaching authority to a Loyalty Review Board, and a charge to the Department of Justice to draw up a list of “each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General . . . designates as totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive.”8 Many academics, including those in the social sciences, had been in consulting positions during Roosevelt’s New Deal era in a wide range of federal agencies, such as the Consumers’ Advisory Board, Census Bureau, Federal Relief Administration, Children’s Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics, among many others. Government service and academic scholarship were then viewed as not only compatible but patriotic.9 In this new era under Truman’s Executive Order, past information on employees collected by the government as provided for by the Hatch Act of 1939, as well as information gathered from new investigations, were scrutinized under a broadened conception of subversion. Even political liberalism and past alignment with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were then considered suspicious positions. Further, one had to contend not only with the specious lists produced by “super patriots,” such as Elizabeth Dilling, whose self-published The Red Network (1934) registered a “who’s who” in radicalism. It also contended with the U.S. Attorney General’s still suspect but official and extensive list of subversive organizations, including so-called communist “front” organizations. In his penetrating study of loyalty tests in American history, Harold M. Hyman identified the

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post-World War II era as a time of “unprecedented search for disloyalty in America.”10 For Goffman, 1949 was a pivotal year. He submitted his master’s thesis and, in October, left Chicago for Edinburgh on way to the Shetland Islands for his dissertation research. But in the spring of that year, accusations of subversion and attempts to impose loyalty oaths again shook the University of Chicago. This time, the attacks came from the Broyles Commission, an Illinois State anticommunist crusade, now with the full weight of the federal government behind it. Officially named the “The Seditious Activities Investigation Commission,” the inquisition “devoted two years to secret investigation of subversive activities throughout the state”11 and then a series of public investigations in April and May into alleged subversion at the University of Chicago and Roosevelt College. In response to the charges, seven full professors at the university who had been mentioned by name in one of the accusations were instructed to file affidavits in reply. Goffman’s former professor, Ernest Burgess, the noted sociologist and then chairman of the Department of Sociology, was one of those professors. He and the others were subpoenaed by the Broyles Commission and called for interrogation during the public hearing. The university community, facing fresh charges that its professors were indoctrinating students with subversive ideas, mounted an organized resistance and defense, again led by Hutchins who was now university chancellor, and Laird Bell, the new chairman of the board of trustees.12 Burgess had long shown an interest in Russian society, especially the post-revolution family. He knew the Russian language and, in the 1930s joined by his sister, twice visited Soviet Russia. Moreover, he was affiliated with an organization promoting amity between Russia and the U.S.—the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, which made the U.S. Attorney General’s subversive list. For the arch anticommunists of the era, this was sufficient evidence of Burgess’s danger. He was listed as a “radical” in Dilling’s The Red Network13 and was repeatedly investigated by the FBI from 1943–1953. Shils described Burgess as a “gentle little man, with a soft, shy smile”; but he was anything but a pushover.14 He was twice placed on the FBI Security Index and, because of his forceful challenges, twice removed.15 Experienced in dealing with Red-baiters, Burgess was the first of the professors to testify at the public inquisition. There would be no question of his position on the accusations: “I have never been and am not now a communist,” Burgess’s testimony begins. “I have never been and am not now in sympathy with Communism.” On the matter of his affiliation with the listed organization, Burgess admitted the charge and referred to the endorsement of the same organization by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1944 and by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in

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November 1945. Moreover, he stated, “I further believe that the Attorney General made a mistake when he listed this organization as subversive, and I hold also, as an American citizen, I have a free right to judge what evidence there is.”16 A contemporaneous evaluation of the Broyles Commission that examined all public testimony as well as transcripts of the commission’s secret sessions, which had been remarkably made available, had this to say about the hearings: “Despite vague references to education as the ‘danger spot’ for communist infiltration and unsubstantiated allegations of ‘redness’ in schools, the startling fact emerges that the commission could not discover a single teacher in Illinois who was a Communist or advocated communism in his teaching.” In the end, this evaluation concludes, “the Broyles commission stands condemned by its own record as an anti-subversive investigation agency which failed to find subversion yet lacked the good grace to say so.”17 It didn’t take long for the next wave of anticommunist hysteria to hit the University of Chicago. As mentioned earlier, Goffman had left Chicago in late 1949 to conduct research for his doctoral dissertation on an island in the Shetlands. He spent Fall 1951 through Spring 1952 in Paris writing it up and returned to Chicago in 1952. That year, he married Angelica Schuyler Choate, became a father, and worked as research assistant to Edward Shils.18 The next year, he was ready to submit his doctoral thesis, stand for its defense, and take his French language examination. While these final steps were being taken, a new anti-communism investigation was launched and his former professor Burgess was again interrogated, as was Donald Horton, a young assistant professor in the Department of Sociology who was to serve on Goffman’s dissertation committee and administer his French language examination that very year. Horton had come to Chicago via Penn and Yale, where he took a PhD in anthropology (in 1943). During part of World War II, he was a researcher with Carl Hovland’s team in the Experimental Section of Samuel Stouffer’s project with the U.S. War Department, working on evaluating the U.S. Army’s training films for troops in the U.S. and European theater.19 Further, he co-wrote Fear in Battle (published in 1943) with Yale’s John Dollard, a study of fear and courage in battle. Horton’s own battle with the anticommunist inquisition was soon to come. The approach of the university this time was not to defend its academic freedom as in 1935, nor to forcefully deny accusations of communist sympathy as in 1949, but open and outright resistance. During the hearings the faculty, now accompanied by university-provided expert legal counsel, employed the legal defense of the fifth amendment to the Constitution and made outright attacks on the Jenner committee’s legitimacy. At every turn, the hearing transcripts show, the professors and university-appointed counsel objected to the committee’s procedures and challenged its authority. Horton’s

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statement, after being instructed by the interrogator to name names, is emblematic of the resistance: I regret to say that I must decline to answer this question on three grounds: One, on the ground of my privilege against self-incrimination under the fifth amendment of the Constitution; secondly, a moral ground, that it is deeply repugnant to one of my strongest convictions to play the role of informer; and thirdly, because I challenge the authority of this committee to conduct the inquiry.20

Horton’s statement, the official transcript reveals, led to a “demonstration by the audience” of mostly students. Repeated attempts to get Horton to name names were unsuccessful: he repeated his three objections and was, ultimately, excused. Had Horton been charged and tried, he most certainly would have been jailed. Although Horton emerged as something of a local folk hero, his status came with a warning about the potentially ruinous consequences of revelations about past allegiances. Even the committee’s secret executive sessions were openly and brazenly challenged. “Wants No Secrecy” was the caption above the photograph of sociologist Burgess in the Chicago Daily Tribune on June 9, 1953, the day he was in court facing charges.21 He was one of ten people who were called before the committee’s executive session, which was held in private “merely for the protection of the innocent,” the committee chairman stated.22 Burgess and two other professors were questioned there but they were not called before the public session later that day. But Burgess and the others wanted their day in court, so they protested and issued a statement to the press. Burgess wanted an open hearing “in order to do what I can to counteract the rising tide of public hysteria in the United States,” he said to reporters. “My life in this great city of Chicago and in freedom-loving United States has been an open book. I have nothing to conceal,” Burgess added. However, the only hearing he got was in the press. As public events, university students were surely aware of these hearings and acts of resistance. In fact, students filled the audience of Horton’s trial. For Goffman they were likely to be even more salient, as Horton would serve on his dissertation committee and, only one month after the hearing, administer his French language examination. I postulate that these events stayed with Goffman and entered his own developing intellectual point of view. The antipode to this view is that Goffman was unaware of the world around him, a stance that is inconsistent with all that is known about him. Of course, none of these waves of anticommunism were just local to Chicago; they were a grave national concern. The story of these decades in America is one of repression in all its forms, as well as of resistance to that repression. It is a story of not just the congressional hearings, but also of those

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who resisted them by refusing to name names. It was not only the internment of people of Japanese descent but also of those who sought to critically analyze the conditions of that injustice. The purge of radicals from government and schools, the denunciations, arrests, suicides, suspicion, and secrecy—the common denominator of all these is war, or being on the brink of it, and the need to impose loyalty in a population to maintain order. There is little question, then, why loyalty became a subject of social science interest during those years at the University of Chicago. Problems of loyalty and disloyalty defined the times. Grodzins’s study of the wartime internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, his investigation of loyalty and treason more generally, and Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life all address the issue of loyalty and disloyalty in mid-twentieth century America. Grodzins’s title Americans Betrayed reveals the moral reversal the author would make: the betrayal symbolized by the internment camps was made by U.S. politicians against the Japanese Americans, not the other way around. Goffman would also make pointed moral and sociological critiques of mid-century America, as later sections will show. MORTON GRODZINS AND THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF LOYALTY AND DISLOYALTY The “Chicago Consensus” Grodzins argues that the question of loyalty to a nation must begin with an understanding of people’s loyalty to other social groups.23 Over the course of history, the author shows, echoing Toennies’s argument about the shift from community to society, social conditions have changed in fundamental ways. The first is the proliferation of groups to which an individual may belong and to which the person may build allegiances. Expanding beyond the family, village, and guild of the early community, individuals in modern societies may build allegiance to a plurality of primary groups, voluntary associations, and formal organizations, along with the nation state. To this new “diversity of loyalties” is added a second recent development, the “softening of loyalties.” Here Grodzins points to a new sensitivity to group opinion of what Chicago colleague David Riesman and colleagues had called the “other-directed” character type.24 This new propensity to conform to group opinion, Grodzins suggested, makes individuals more likely to be collaborators, acquiescing to morally suspect trends, but less likely to be traitors, standing out from the crowd in their heterodox beliefs and actions. Grodzins underscored the view that the sources of loyalty and disloyalty rest in “face-to-face” relations of everyday living. But his understanding of

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this term is unlike the view advanced by Goffman. For Grodzins, and for other postwar social scientists at the University of Chicago, face-to-face was something of a shorthand or code for the problem of primary groups as sources of attachment to the larger society, a view that I call here the “Chicago consensus.” Primary groups are those small groups—such as family, club, and friendship—where close, personal, and enduring relationships obtain. These kinds of relations provide satisfactions that larger, more impersonal groups cannot sustain. To quote Grodzins, “[Loyalty] comes largely from [a person’s] face-to-face groups. Loyalty to nation is shaped by loyalty to other groups and other ideas.”25 The “Chicago consensus,” as I use the term here, was a research program on primary groups as providing both a source of solidarity and a needed reinforcing function to larger social and cultural forces at work. Goffman’s notion of the interaction order was a decidedly face-to-face domain.26 But for Goffman this quality was unrelated to the notion of primary groups as articulated in the “Chicago consensus” view, a research program that examined face-to-face groups as sources of affection and solidarity. But for Goffman “face-to-face” relations can also be collusive and undermining, as shown by his studies of con artists, mental patients, and the stigmatized. But more than this, Goffman rejected the primary-secondary group distinction in sociology. He called it an “insight sociology must escape from.”27 For the rules of the interaction order that were of interest to him directly cut across those made by this distinction. It was Shils who was spearheading the postwar sociological examination of primary groups as a source of solidarity, as he grappled intellectually with the problem of the sources of postwar social stability. He wrote, “In the decade following the war . . . I was concerned to delineate the place of personal primary groups in the minimal cohesion of the larger society.”28 Traces of this effort are found in a course of lectures he gave in 1947 and again in 1948 at the London School of Economics on “Primary Groups in the Social Structure,” and in a series of postwar writings on the subject.29 All these efforts critically examine the ways that social thinkers of many persuasions considered or failed to consider what Shils called, “the very important problem which has more recently come to the fore—the influence of primary group membership on the operation of ‘great society.’”30 Shils had surveyed much of social thought from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in his effort to come to a satisfactory answer to this problem. He had considered Tönnies, Schmalenbach, Simmel, Le Play and Weber; Mayo, Lewin, Moreno, and Warner; Stouffer, Bales, Bavelas, and Merton. But two sources stand out as relevant and significant for present purposes. The first is Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century politician and political philosopher. It is Burke who Shils is quoting, without attribution, in the

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above line when he employs the term “great society.” The notion comes from the philosopher’s A Philosophical Enquiry (1757) where he distinguished between two sorts of societies. One is “the society of sex,” with its corresponding passions of love and lust. The other is the “great society,” whose corresponding feelings are affection and tenderness.31 Shils was searching in those years for the sources of such affection and tenderness in modern, urbanized and highly individualized societies. The second thinker of importance in this context is Charles Horton Cooley, whose book Social Organization (first published in 1909) was the first to clearly define and develop ideas on primary groups and the moral ideals they create and sustain. It was Cooley who added the words “face-to-face” to his definition of primary groups, thereby including spatial propinquity into the very core of the term. Shils was mindful of the limitations of Cooley’s ideas, such as a too facile connection between primary groups and the larger society, a vision that Philip Rieff characterized as “a serene vision of the self lying peacefully in the maternal bed of society.”32 But Shils credits the Progressive-era American sociologist with accurately conveying a central element of such groups. As Shils wrote, for Cooley, . . . the small face-to-face group was primary in the sense that moral standards which constitute the consensual framework even of an individualistic society were formed in such groups . . . and are renewed and strengthened by membership in such groups.33

This view of the importance of primary groups on social structure was institutionalized at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s and became something of a consensus view there. It was incorporated into the curriculum of Chicago’s Social Sciences Division, explored in doctoral dissertations, developed in publications of the University of Chicago Press (including Grodzins’s own books), and debated in extra-classroom conversations.34 When Grodzins reflected on the inspiration for his larger investigation of loyalty and disloyalty, he credited, first, the University of Chicago itself, and especially “the learning process that made possible by teaching in the exciting program of general education after World War II.”35 The interdisciplinary program of study had educated him. He then thanked the scholars that were grouped in the university’s Social Sciences Division, many of whom— Shils, Riesman, Strauss, among many others—he consulted along the way. Representative of this research program was Herbert Goldhamer, Shils’s student and later co-author and colleague, whose 1942 dissertation on participation in voluntary organizations represents an early product of this research problem. There the link between levels of society was conveyed via a mechanistic analogy of a “communication belt” between social groups and

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the state.36 Later, he would integrate this research problem into his teaching program, such as his “Communication and Social Solidarity” (1948–1949), which examined “the analysis of social solidarity with special reference to the communication process in primary and secondary groups.”37 Grodzins absorbed this approach; his notion of “reinforcing loyalties” elevated and extended Goldhamer’s mechanical view and emphasized the importance of satisfying domestic or local relationships as mutually reinforcing to national loyalty.38 This stance was also built upon Burke’s analysis in Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published in 1790. There, Burke famously wrote about the importance of domestic life and local loyalties providing “mutually reflected” feelings that reinforce ties to the nation.39 Family, club, and friendship provide strong reinforcing links in a series that leads to the nation. While Grodzins was not satisfied with Burke’s all-too-easy convergence of local and larger loyalties, his argument for the importance of multiple loyalties is tied directly to the political philosopher’s treatise on the French Revolution. Accordingly, for an understanding of loyalty and disloyalty in mid-twentieth century America, prominent Chicago social scientists turned to the thinking of the eighteenth-century founder of modern conservatism and the earlytwentieth century Midwestern progressive who sought secular sources of moral guidance. These unlikely sources, however, when viewed in the context of America’s Cold War, yield a surprising legacy: they tacitly support subversive conclusions. By underscoring the notion that loyalty to family and friends was vital to a healthy democracy, the “Chicago consensus” ran counter to efforts by the anticommunist accusers to undermine those bonds by, for example, rewarding informers who testify against friends and by enforcing oaths of direct loyalty to the nation. The segments of society that were under attack by the anticommunism crusades, so this perspective held, were the necessary glue that held individual to society and state. AMERICANS BETRAYED As a graduate student, Grodzins had participated as a research assistant in the University of California Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study that was led by Dorothy Swaine Thomas, the sociologist and demographer.40 This extraordinary project examined each phase of the military and civilian efforts to intern and administer persons of Japanese descent, both aliens and citizens, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The complex project continued throughout and after the war years and resulted in three official publications: The Spoilage, The Salvage, and Prejudice, War and the Constitution.41 Grodzins completed his doctoral dissertation at

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Berkeley with materials he collected while he was a research assistant with this study. In fact, Thomas was on his dissertation committee. But the book he wrote with those same materials, Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation, was published over the objection of both Thomas and the University of California as a violation of the study’s rules. The full story of this episode is a young PhD’s worst nightmare—he experienced sustained attacks on his research and reputation by the very people who underwrote his doctoral work. For our purposes, it is sufficient that say that Grodzins emerged as victorious in his battle with Thomas, who unsuccessfully fought to keep the study data from unauthorized use and herself as the study’s main author.42 The purpose of Americans Betrayed was not to examine the process of relocation and internment of Americans of Japanese descent, as in Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage. Nor was it to examine the life histories of those who were later dispersed and settled in the Chicago area and elsewhere in the Midwest, as was accomplished in the companion volume, The Salvage. Grodzins’s subject was the political decision to evacuate. As such, Americans Betrayed is a study of policymaking during a crisis. In a volume rich with detail, Grodzins analyzed the long-standing and deep-seated animosity against the Japanese in the Pacific states and the role of opposition groups in fomenting race hatred and pressuring politicians to act against the Japanese. As he writes, “the record demonstrates clearly that state and local officials, in effect, became powerful influences upon federal officials in fostering the evacuation.” Ultimately, the decisions of the U.S. President, Congress, and even of the Supreme Court, Grodzins maintained, were driven by the “racial viewpoint of the West Coast,” and under the cover of national defense: the U.S. military maintained that the evacuation was a “military necessity.”43 Americans Betrayed also added elements of what came to be called “decision theory” by exploring the ways that ambiguity or lack of adequate information entered those decisions. Two areas of such ambiguity specifically are discussed. Politicians were uninformed about the actual state of public opinion on the question of the evacuation—most Americans were not in favor of it. In addition, there was inadequate knowledge of the Japanese themselves. The culture and social lives of the people were a virtual unknown to most Americans. Thus, driven by racial prejudice and cultural ignorance, the federal decision to evacuate demonstrates a “negation of political rationality.” As such, Grodzins pointedly stated, the political decision to evacuate Americans of Japanese descent from their communities and relocate them in concentration camp-style settings for the duration of the war “betrayed all Americans.”44 Thus understood, there is no inherent conflict between the thesis of Americans Betrayed and the Thomas-directed volumes; they examine

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different subjects and different aspects of the fateful historical episode. It is possible to imagine them as complementary works rather than ones at odds, and indeed this is how they were originally conceived. Examining, on the one hand, the role of racial prejudice and irrationality of the political decision-making process and, on the other, the mad instrumental rationality of the process by which that decision was carried out, seems emblematic of the times. But Thomas’s efforts to first silence the book and then discredit it surely accounts for Grodzins’s disinclination to go along with Thomas’s approach. After Americans Betrayed, Grodzins embarked on an investigation of “the nature of national loyalty and disloyalty.”45 Thomas and colleagues, however, had no such ontological aspirations. “LOYALTY” AND “DISLOYALTY” AS ADMINISTRATIVE DESIGNATIONS For in the Thomas volumes, loyalty and disloyalty would be examined not as natural classes of behavior or belief but as categories of government administration and control. The study’s first published volume, The Spoilage, is an extraordinary document. It surveys each stage of evacuation and overall administration of about 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent as they were, first, forcibly removed from their communities, second, moved to “relocation centers,” and, finally, interned in concentration camp-style facilities in the U.S. for the duration of the war. Significantly, The Spoilage discusses “loyalty” and “disloyalty” only in quotation marks. The book examines those terms strictly as “administrative determinations.”46 And it explores how those designations were defined and implemented by the U.S. War Department and the War Relocation Board (WRA) via the rational social science tool of a questionnaire. Two questions were critical to the administrative determination of “loyalty” or “disloyalty.” They were constructed using what survey designers now call a forced-choice response format: yes or no. • Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? • Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and . . . foreswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor? For the WRA officials who were administering the questionnaire, the answers to these questions simply reflected a person’s essential loyalty or disloyalty. But to the individuals and families answering those questions many other considerations entered their response. Some parents pressured

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their sons to answer “no” not because of disloyalty but because they feared it spelled certain death in battle; answering in the negative would thus mean that the family would remain intact when the war concluded. Some children did not want to abandon their elderly parents and answered “no” to keep the family together. Some were resentful toward the U.S. for the way they were being treated as U.S. citizens and answered “no” in protest. Some feared answering “yes” would result in reprisal from the Japanese government should they win the war. In all, the questions didn’t measure what they were designed to measure; instead, the answers revealed allegiances to parents and family, reasonable calculations of outcomes, fears, and resentments.47 Thomas’s study adumbrates the position most famously advanced later by Foucault on the relationship between knowledge and power, examining the way systems of classification are linked to the exercise of domination. Admittedly, in a key passage The Spoilage seemingly absolves the War Department and WRA of responsibility by characterizing the injustices as “unanticipated” and “almost fortuitous” effects of the government processing of people.48 But these words, meant for the censors, barely mask the story that the book tells overall: it exposes an egregious wartime example of the administrative processing of people. Indeed, the phrase “almost fortuitous” belies the implied exoneration, for something that is almost fortuitous is almost certainly by design.49 We see here a tactic devised by intellectuals for escaping from jeopardy during treacherous times. A word or two of exculpation will fool the censors; but scholars who read the entire book carefully will not be equally misled. The Spoilage is a condemnation of the very thing those few words seemingly absolve. Considered in this way, Thomas’s ideas connect to a different lesson in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: its critique of rational systems of control. Burke’s antipathy to the French Revolution was based not only on the violence of the upheaval but also on the rationalistic rebuilding of the country’s political system. As historian and Burke biographer F.P. Lock writes, the “new electoral system created artificial units thereby destroying the regional loyalties and identities, the ‘little platoons,’ that Burke cherished.”50 In its place were divisions derived from abstract principle. Returning to the American wartime moment here under consideration, the U.S. War Department and WRA fashioned a questionnaire—a clumsy tool for a complex job—that similarly abstracted people from their actual social relationships. Embodying the view that national loyalty and disloyalty were as easily identifiable as “yes” and “no,” the questionnaire, as shown above, missed nearly everything about the lives of the people they were administering. Whereas government agencies defined loyalty and disloyalty within their own administrative categories, and the Chicago social scientists defined them as behavior that reflects conflicting loyalties to primary groups that

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are aligned or unaligned with the national spirit, the Thomas study detached the terms from individual minds and revealed for posterity how bureaucratic categories supported social repression. It may be concluded that neither the wartime agencies nor the Chicago social scientists offered reliable answers to the question of loyalty and betrayal. Into this environment, Goffman entered with his own take on these matters. GOFFMAN ON LOYALTY AND BETRAYAL Goffman’s Country There is no sociology of patriotism in Goffman; no concept of the nation or citizenship; no statement of obligations to one’s country. This is perhaps not unusual as Goffman had left his native Canada for the U.S. and felt that he was a guest in America. Goffman’s relationship to country and citizenry was problematic. One of Winkin’s informants, a friend from graduate school days at Chicago who stayed in touch with him, had this to say while reminiscing about Goffman’s time at Berkeley: “While student protest was in high gear and professors’ typewriters [were] tossed out of five-story windows, I can’t remember Goffman being interested very much as a sociologist or a citizen of California. For all I know, he wasn’t a citizen of anywhere.”51 Another informant, a colleague in Berkeley’s Sociology Department concurred—he was “not a good citizen of the department.”52 But Goffman did have a “country” to which he was ever loyal: his life’s work in sociology. One sociologist writes about his oeuvre as “Goffman’s country” and another as “Goffman territory.”53 Goffman himself viewed his relation to sociology in these same terms. He reflected on his own bad citizenship toward the discipline in response to a letter from Irving Louis Horowitz, who had written to Goffman about a small service he had provided to the profession.54 Goffman had indeed carved out his intellectual territory—the interaction order—and was totally dedicated to its development. True, Goffman visited other countries, other theoretical approaches, such as game theory and conversation analysis. But when he stepped on the soil of those other lands he was not warmly received, either by the native tribes or by his fellow sociologists. Illustrative is the rather critical response Goffman received at the 1964 conference on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” where Goffman confronted the leading game theorists of not just his time but all time. When it was Goffman’s turn to lead the discussion session on “Enforcement and Communication Systems,” it did not go especially well for him, despite having Thomas Schelling as an ally. As discussed in chapter 3 below, it appears that the session chairman cut him short and labeled him a sorcerer’s

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“apprentice.” Goffman received a similar chilly reception by key phenomenologists and symbolic interactionists, among others. These issues of country and the interaction order are nicely illustrated in the wartime novel of love and spying, The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen, one of Goffman’s favorite mid-twentieth century novelists (according to one of Winkin’s informants). Stella asks Robert, her lover-spy, why he sold government secrets to the enemy. Stella: [W]hy are you against this country? Robert: Country? Stella: This is where we are. Robert: I don’t see what you mean—what do you mean? Country?—there are no more countries left; nothing but names. What country have you and I outside this room?55

From the perspective of the interaction order, any social gathering contains no countries or nation states only persons in interaction, with allies at our side and betrayers at our back. Goffman had this to say about the relation between interactional worlds and nation states: “the interaction order prevailing even in the most public places is not a creation of the apparatus of a state. Certainly, most of this order comes into being and is sustained from below as it were.”56 From this perspective, Goffman argued, the “grander forms of loyalty and treachery” are set aside in favor of examining “small acts of living.” It is these “small acts” of loyalty and betrayal, of treachery and resistance, that occupy the pages of Goffman’s Cold War writings throughout the 1950s.57 In this approach, Goffman revealed his affinity to Ivy Compton-Burnett, the twentieth-century English novelist of the interwar years.58 She took as her theme, the poet and novelist Edwin Muir wrote, “the tyrannies and internecine battles of English family life in leisured well-conducted country houses . . . [where] the family conflict is intimate, unrelenting, very often indecisive and fought out mainly in conversation.”59 In a footnote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman briefly illustrated interactional betrayal via a side glance by citing Compton-Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune.60 This novel tells the story of one extended family as the members interact exclusively with each other, over the course of fourteen months, through loss and gain. The story line features betrayal, sacrifice, gratitude, envy, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, embarrassment, heroism, front, dignity, courage, bravery, insult, courtesy—all within the confines of their little conversational world. A main character, Dudley, voiced the novel’s point of view when he stated, “[m]y strong point is those little things which are more important than big ones, because they make up life. It seems that big ones do

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not do that . . . ”61 This was Goffman’s point of view as well, as he revealed the issues of the day as they were expressed in the small interactional worlds he called gatherings.62 BEYOND PATRIOT AND SPY Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life prioritized teams as the dramaturgical perspective’s “fundamental point of reference,” as opposed to the perspective of the individual actor. On the one hand, “[w]hen we turn from a one-man team to a larger one,” Goffman explained, the interactional world changes. Instead of the “rich definition of the situation” presented by the individual performer, reality may become “reduced to a thin party line.” On the other hand, he admitted, “there will be the new factor of loyalty to one’s team and one’s teammates to provide support for the team’s line.”63 Much of the book’s argument hinges on this notion of team loyalty and its fragility. For in the book’s chapter on “Discrepant Roles,” we find that teams are plagued by disloyal members, such as informers and spies, who have access to team secrets and are willing to inappropriately share them with others. There is also the “go-between,” who “tends to give each side the false impression that he is more loyal to it than to the other.”64 But Goffman’s analysis is more complex than this. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life breaks with the loyalty-disloyalty frame of reference of the “Chicago consensus” discussed earlier. Admittedly, democracy is unstable because of the very structure of social interaction: its back regions are fairly bursting with secrets, and team members who are involved under false guise, and those who are legitimately involved, so often gain access to those secrets, and so often reveal them. But survival through troubled times is still possible. The interactional options in life are broader than being loyal or disloyal, a patriot or a spy. Goffman revealed a wide range of survival options. In addition to “techniques of derogation”—various surreptitious put-downs and other caustic remarks—he identified others, such as secret communications, derisive collusion, “going away,” and similar practices “in which teammates can free themselves a little from the restrictive requirements of interaction between teams.”65 Besides these “safe channels of discontent,” there are also opportunities for “guarded disclosure” by which two members of an intimate society make themselves known to each other.66 Further, he also introduced the term “dramaturgical loyalty,” whereby teammates act “as if” they have accepted the obligations of the group. Dishonestly donning a mask of loyalty is here seen as a protective strategy.67 Under normal conditions, people need no recourse to these evasions and secret communications. But Goffman was not writing in such times. “[A]t times of crisis,” he wrote, standard collective

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understandings momentarily break and these forms of “communication out of character” rise in importance. From this perspective, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is rightly considered a manual of resistance to a time of crisis now called the McCarthy era.68 It is apparent that Harold Garfinkel’s essay, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” speaks to the many state and congressional hearings of the 1950s.69 Garfinkel rightly addressed the locus of such denunciation in the courts, the denunciation of “Reds,” and the counter-denunciation of informers. Later examinations of the HUAC hearings and the McCarthy era, such as Navasky’s study of the blacklisting of the “Hollywood Ten,” readily employ Garfinkel’s term in their own analyses. “We judge from the nature of the congressional hearings themselves,” Navasky observed, “that their purpose was the obverse of what it was advertised to be. These were not information-gathering investigations so much as they were degradation ceremonies.”70 But Goffman’s writings of the 1950s are usually read as detached from this same context, as though the author somehow stood outside of his own time. Yet, there are almost no features of Cold War culture that escape Goffman’s attention. The theme of resistance to social obligations and constraints runs strong in his work. It represents a third way through the central polarity of the time: the obligation to demonstrate loyalty or be deemed disloyal. Not long after the initial publication of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman presented a paper at the 1957 annual meeting of the American Sociological Society, “The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital,” which in an expanded version was published in his Asylums. It is ostensibly a study of what he called the underlife of “Central Hospital,” which is now known to be St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC. By underlife Goffman meant the collection of practices—he called them “secondary adjustments”—by which the inmate resists or escapes organizational “assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be.” It is curious that in this essay about a mental hospital, Goffman would broach the question of “collaboration with the enemy.”71 Despite his commitment to the ethnography of a specific research site, Goffman clearly had “wider matters” in mind. MCCARTHYISM, BRAINWASHING, AND GOFFMAN’S ASYLUMS “Collaboration with the enemy” signals Goffman’s engagement with the issues of POWs returning home from the Korean War. In the same years as McCarthyism and anticommunist fervor, America faced widespread concern

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about national moral decline, a loss of toughness and national pride.72 These issues were stimulated by rumors and reports from Korea during the conflict, and more forcefully after the armistice of 1953 and repatriation of the POWs, that American soldiers had been easily broken by Chinese interrogators in prison camps and had collaborated with the enemy by signing peace petitions, making radio appeals, participating in peace rallies, accepting special privileges or favors, making false confessions, and so on.73 It was also believed that few soldiers followed the duty to escape; that no organized resistance was made. More than this, twenty-one Americans decided not to repatriate and remained in Korea after the war. To the super patriots of the day—in the U.S. military, government, and larger public—all of these were anathema and a sign of the country’s moral decline. The methods the Chinese used in their interrogations and indoctrination were closely scrutinized and the word “brainwashing” was introduced by Edward Hunter, who John Marks described as “a CIA propaganda operator who worked undercover as a journalist,” to describe what was happening.74 Brainwashing quickly developed into a major Cold War cultural motif; much like a funhouse mirror, the fears and anxieties of the times were distorted into frightful shapes. Questions were asked: What if those returning soldiers were spies who could be activated back at home and programmed to create havoc? That was the issue posed by Condon’s fictional portrayal of Korean War POWS in The Manchurian Candidate; but it was also posed by the doomsayers of the press.75 By 1955, the U.S. media coverage of brainwashing had reached a fever pitch. Coincidently, this is when Goffman was a consultant at the nation’s center of brainwashing research—Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC. He was there by invitation from David Rioch, the Institute’s leader of neuropsychiatry. Rioch had earlier been director of research at Chestnut Lodge psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland and had been a close associate of Harry Stack Sullivan and his Washington School of Psychiatry. While Sullivan had died by this time (he died in 1949), there was plenty of opportunity for Rioch to learn that Goffman was in the area and engaged in a study of mental patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital. At Walter Reed, Rioch was building an interdisciplinary team whose members were at the forefront of the emerging field of neuropsychiatry. During the Korean conflict, he sent teams of researchers to the battle area and had himself twice visited the soldiers fighting there, including those who fought the battle of Pork Chop Hill. His empathy for the terrible plight of the soldiers grew on those visits. At Walter Reed he was supportive of research on what was then called shell shock and other forms of severe mental illness among the soldiers. And he welcomed and supported early researchers on Chinese thought control or brainwashing: Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar H. Schein.76 In his published memoir, Schein recalled, “Rioch regularly brought in academics

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like Erving Goffman, Fred Fiedler, and Leon Festinger to consult with us on our projects. Goffman was around a lot because at that time he was studying socialization processes at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the big psychiatric facility in Washington.”77 Schein also shared that, in addition to an occasional group lecture, Goffman would have visited the Institute monthly to meet with those researchers who had signed up to talk with him.78 Goffman presented early results of his research in St. Elizabeths Hospital at the October 1956 “Group Processes” conference in Princeton, NJ, organized by Margaret Mead and focused on the problem of communication and persuasion.79 His presence as a speaker at the conference, and his presentation on “interpersonal persuasion,” reveals his connection to the issues faced by the POWs and his interaction with Rioch, Schein, and the others. The transcript of Goffman’s presentation shows that his talk covered a lot of territory. He discussed the definition and examples of total institutions, the administrative processing of people, the contingencies that land some people in the hospital and not others, the structure and process of the ward system, and other subjects. It also shows that when he covers the area in the title of the talk—interpersonal persuasion—Goffman discussed total institutions as following a similar process that Schein described is involved in brainwashing, in a paper that Goffman cited in the references of his talk.80 Total institutions are “impositional systems,” Goffman said, where a person enters already with a culture and the total institution “breaks it down” and “builds up” the person with a new culture—here in line with the psychiatric model and in Chinese brainwashing in line with communist ideology. Other similarities of behavior between mental patients and Korean war POWs may be identified. Schein, Lifton, and other early brainwashing researchers noted that the predominant reaction of prisoners of war to the complex challenges they faced was a kind of behavior the soldiers called “playing it cool.” This consisted, Schein reported, “primarily in a physical and emotional withdrawal” from both the Chinese captors and from the rest of the prisoner group. Goffman relied on the evidence presented by Schein and Lifton in his own discussion of “playing it cool” as the most common form of adaptation to total institutions more generally. Writing of these inmates, Goffman explained, “they may learn to cut their ties to the outside world just enough to give cultural reality to the world inside but not enough to lead to colonization.”81 It is also at the conference that Goffman first discussed his ideas on betrayal and what he called there a “treachery funnel” and in Asylums a “betrayal funnel.”82 In the institutional passage from person to patient, each figure in the process—from family member, say, to police, to psychiatrist, to the admission suite of the mental hospital—betrays the patient’s trust by not only promising that all will be okay, but implicitly asking the patient to go along with the

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process; with each successive removal of rights and freedoms the patient is expected to voluntarily submit. Here too we see parallels with brainwashing victims, such as those singled out for thought reform during the early years of the People’s Republic of China reported on by Hunter. One such person was a student assigned to a hard labor camp that included reeducation. The student told Hunter that “you had to put yourself into the mind of agreeing that you are going there voluntarily to improve yourself.”83 So, voluntary submission to repression was a parallel expectation in both communism and Western total institutions. We see that Goffman had gone much further in his thinking about betrayal than was revealed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. There, betrayal was shown in a glance; here, it is a sequence of interactional steps that leads, ultimately, to a person’s institutionalization in a mental hospital and transformation into a psychiatric patient. Like Grodzins on interned Japanese Americans, here too Americans were being betrayed. A final step in Goffman’s thinking about these ideas is shown in Behavior in Public Places, which draws extensively on the ethnographic material on mental patients that he analyzed in Asylums.84 There he discussed disloyalty and betrayal while adding in the notion of containment. Containment, of course, denotes the dominant geopolitical strategy of Truman’s Cold War America, the policy of actively halting the spread of communism around the world. Goffman discussed everyday encounters as arenas of containment: fragile little worlds whose boundaries—just like larger social entities— require loyalty to go smoothly. Only here loyalty is to the occasion and threat comes not from communism but from corruption, such as the infiltration of fame and money into social occasions. Goffman cited Lillian Ross’s account of the U.S. film industry as an illustration of how Hollywood had corrupted everyday morality by leading people who were dining at a famous restaurant to be more interested in the comings and goings of film stars than in the intimates with whom they were dining. Indeed, Ross’s own lunch partner, a Hollywood mogul, was, she reported, “the only man in Chasen’s who was not at that moment looking around at someone other than the person he was talking to.”85 These and other examples of “engagement disloyalty” illustrated for Goffman a creeping demoralization, a turning away from “obligations of participants to withhold attention from matters outside of the engagement.86” Here again we see Goffman’s approach to the interaction order, examining the same issues occurring in the larger world only here observed in the little worlds of encounters. Mirroring the concerns about containment, disloyalty, and betrayal in Truman’s America were the same issues mutatis mutandis at the level of the interaction order. Goffman’s central contribution was to shift the locus of the sociology of loyalty from the nation and the primary group to the occasion.

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Although Schein was not present at the “Group Processes” conference, Lifton was there and presented his own talk on “Chinese Communist Thought Reform.” Goffman was especially solicitous of Lifton, and he would draw a connection between his own arguments and Lifton’s research interest throughout his presentation. Also present was Columbia University psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo. During World War II, Meerloo had served as Chief of the Psychology Department of the Netherlands Forces in England and maintained an interest in the “sociopsychological problems created by a world in upheaval,” as he stated in his autobiographical sketch for the conference. Meerloo had just published a controversial and rather sensational account of brainwashing as “rape of the mind,” a position which Schein would soon debunk.87 Others present and active in the discussion were anthropologists Gregory Bateson, Ray Birdwhistell and Margaret Mead, experimental social psychologist Alex Bavelas, research pediatrician Helen Blauvelt, psychiatrist and humanist Jerome D. Frank, the Macy Foundation’s Medical Director Frank Fremont-Smith, Chestnut Lodge psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, Pavlovian psychologist Howard S. Liddell, public health psychiatrist Harris B. Peck, psychiatrist and editor of the conference proceedings Bertram Schaffner, and Harvard psychiatrist John P. Spiegel. As this account shows, Goffman’s intellectual network was expanding, and it included many who were looking critically at what Schein called “coercive persuasion” and Lifton “totalism.”88 Indeed, all these terms being developed then—total institutions, totalitarianism, totalism, coercive persuasion—were tapping into the same central social and political processes of the Cold War: ideological persuasion. All were also rhetorical devices for commenting on and persuasively arguing a point of view. While the term “totalitarianism” was coopted into an ideological device for building support for anticommunism, the others undercut the explicit exoneration of America in that term. In contrast, Goffman, Lifton, and Schein were highlighting phenomena in the West—McCarthyism, prisons, mental institutions, basic training centers, boarding schools, orthodox religious orders—that paralleled the soul-crushing forms in the East. Goffman, Lifton, and Schein found support in the shared critical sensibility of each other’s work.89 Goffman had also connected with the world of research funded by military and CIA money. Lifton’s research on Chinese thought reform had been partially funded by a grant from the Asia Foundation, which he later learned was a CIA front organization.90 Albert Biderman’s early work was conducted for the U.S. Air Force, and in 1957 he received a one-year grant from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, also a conduit of secret CIA money.91 Schein had the closest association with the Human Ecology group. As a Harvard-trained experimental social psychologist, and one of the first brainwashing researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research,

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he became consultant to the Human Ecology group, working closely with administrator James L. Monroe in reviewing and recommending research projects to be funded.92 It was during this time that Goffman received a grant from the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, whose support, he acknowledged “allowed me to spend the summer of 1959 working on the manuscript” of Behavior in Public Places; he had earlier acknowledged the grant in both “Fun in Games” and “Role Distance,” which were published in his Encounters.93 Thus, the Human Ecology Society took partial funding credit for three of Goffman’s publications.94 Goffman’s “Underlife” essay and chapter is similarly concerned not only with mental patients but with all of us. The subtitle of Asylums includes “other inmates,” and Goffman was clearly thinking of individuals not just within but beyond total institutions. “I have argued the same case [as Czeslaw Milosz in his The Captive Mind on the importance of internal revolt as being essential to spiritual health] in regard to total institutions,” Goffman writes. “May this not be the situation, however, in free society, too?”95 Indeed, the whole point of the “secondary adjustments” he catalogued was to show how inmates are like those who are not similarly institutionalized. It was the study of persons in extremis that brought out the connections between inmates and everyday life most forcefully for him. “Extreme situations,” Goffman wrote, “do provide instruction for us.” Through the memoirs of “meticulous idealists,” he continued, “we come to see the self-defining implications of even the minor give-and-take in organizations.”96 He had in mind the story of anarchist poet and artist Lowell Naeve, a conscientious objector during World War II who wrote about his experience in prison.97 Goffman summarized Naeve’s story in this way: . . . to move one’s body in response to a polite request, let alone a command, is partly to grant the legitimacy of the other’s line of action. To accept privileges like yard exercise or art materials while in jail is to accept in part the captor’s view of what one’s desires and needs are, placing one in a position of having to show a little gratitude and cooperativeness . . . and through this some acknowledgement of the right of the captor to make assumptions about oneself.

Furthermore, he added, [e]ven a kind warden’s polite request to show one’s paintings to visitors may have to be rejected, lest this degree of cooperativeness seems to underwrite the legitimacy of the jailor’s position and, incidentally, the legitimacy of his conception of oneself.98

The “meticulous idealists” that Goffman admired evoke the stance of resistance by University of Chicago professors to the anticommunism crusades,

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especially the 1953 Jenner committee hearings—where the authority of the accusers was actively questioned; where it was insisted that the television cameras and harsh lights were turned off; where the very right to ask questions was rebuffed; and where the command to name names was met with outright refusal. In the “Underlife” essay, Goffman wrote that in agreeing to answer a captor’s questions, you are accepting their definition of who you are and acceding to their right to define your identity. Therefore, by rejecting their questions, you are rejecting that definition of self and all its implications. The “Underlife” essay can be read today in allegorical terms, as a story about a time when the forces of anticommunism tried to define American citizens, and some of them refused to submit through clever means, including outright resistance. CONCLUSION The hunt for disloyal citizens in Cold War America posed a dilemma for many social scientists. How does one write critically about loyalty and disloyalty during treacherous times while avoiding becoming a potential target? Grodzins and Goffman represent two ways of resolving this challenge. Grodzins was personally and professionally courageous. He took on renowned professors at the University of California, and indeed the university itself, by gamefully aligning with top University of Chicago professors and administrators and crafting rhetorically winning arguments. With this challenge, his entire career was at stake—and he prevailed. At his memorial service referenced earlier, the speakers consistently and vigorously hailed Grodzins’s virtue of courage. Intellectually, his examination of loyalty and disloyalty followed the “Chicago consensus” line; indeed, he was its most articulate advocate. But this consensus view was itself subtly subversive in that it bolstered the very elements of society that the anticommunism crusades tried to undermine—fealty to family and friends above nation. Goffman, on the other hand, was personally and professionally cautious. Whatever qualities he may have had, courage is not one that is mentioned in student and colleague remembrances located in the online Erving Goffman Archives. But intellectually he was original and penetrating, and his writings of the 1950s were subversive in their own way.99 Goffman (and Lifton and Schein) were charting the parallel paths of McCarthyism and communist brainwashing, on the one hand, and legitimate American institutions and arrangements, on the other. In this sense, these works were doubly subversive: attacks on both houses, so to speak. Goffman did so subtly, artfully, and through studied legerdemain. He was adept at hiding in open sight, as it were. He found a way to write on loyalty and betrayal

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without appearing himself to be disloyal: his critique of loyalty was written in the language of the theater, thereby distancing the subject from the serious, real world. If life’s a stage, then the analysis doesn’t really matter. He was skilled at what Leo Strauss called writing “between the lines.”100 Goffman placed the search for freedom in the mouths of mental patients, who spoke as proxies for all of us. His shape-shifting works employed first this analogy and then that, and then another, each time covering similar territory but in a new language. He was the master of the “brief indication,” burying a passing statement in a long essay that pointed the way only to the devoted reader. Grodzins may have been openly courageous, but Goffman in his careful ways may prevail. Tellingly, Grodzins’s intellectual opponents were also careful in crafting their writings. While brazenly engaged in intellectual confrontation, where practically no holds were barred, both Thomas and tenBroek et al., in carefully worded sentences, exonerated key historical actors in one of the most shameful episodes of twentieth-century American history, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. But those brief words of exoneration are mostly contradicted by their own books, whose overall thrust was damning. From these instances, it is possible to draw the conclusion that “writing between the lines” was something of an occupational necessity during those most treacherous times. This obviously raises the important question of interpretation and how to get at the heart of what they said, if the heart is mostly hidden. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman highlighted the importance of teams and the alignment with teams as a critical element of everyday life. Here we see this same phenomenon at work in the networks revealed within Grodzins’s and Goffman’s writings. Grodzins aligned himself with key colleagues, such as Riesman and Shils, who represented a “Chicago consensus” view on the crucial importance of primary groups to democratic social order. This was not the only view on the matter, as is shown by Goffman, who did not follow it, and de Grazia, who strenuously argued against it. Goffman was himself building links to the researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the scholars of the “Group Processes” meetings. For both Grodzins and Goffman, those communities provided the intellectual and moral support associated with being part of a tribe. They also perhaps help solve the knotty problem of interpretation of writing between the lines. Looking at the tribes reveals patterns: similarities of approach, tactics, and answers. In this gestalt we see the unity and uniqueness of all the writings on loyalty and disloyalty examined here. And we see many styles of challenge and opposition in all those writings.

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NOTES 1. I am pleased to thank Ann Grodzins Gold and Joy Carlin for sharing the text of unpublished talks given at a Memorial Service for Ann’s father on March 12, 1964. The speakers were Edward Levi, David Riesman, Eugene Rabinowitch, and Hans Morgenthau. I draw on these texts as needed below. To protect the privacy of the memorialists, I anonymize quotes from the text. 2. Here I draw on the following works by Morton Grodzins, “Political Aspects of the Japanese Evacuation.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1945; Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); “Making Un-Americans.” American Journal of Sociology 60, No. 6, (1955): 570–582, and The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 3. Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (New York: The Free Press, 1956). 4. Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 226. 5. John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 267–276; John P. Howe, “News of the Quadrangles.” The University of Chicago Magazine 27, No. 9 (1935): 345–352. 6. Quoted in Howe, “News of the Quadrangles,” 346. 7. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 551–553. 8. Quoted in Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare, A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29–30. 9. For example, Edward W. Burgess, “Social Planning and the Mores.” The University of Chicago Magazine 27, No. 6 (1935), 211. 10. For the Attorney General’s list, see Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 191–196. The quote on the “hunt for disloyalty in America” is from Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 333. 11. E. H. Harsha, “Illinois: The Broyles Commission.” In The States and Subversion, ed. Walter Gelhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952), 55. 12. John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 279. 13. Elizabeth Dilling, The Red Network: A ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (Chicago: Published by the author, 1934), 269. 14. Edward A. Shils, “Some Academics, Mainly in Chicago.” The American Scholar 50, No. 2 (1981): 184–185. 15. Mike F. Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 33–53. 16. Harsha, “Illinois: The Broyles Commission.” Burgess quotations on pages 118, 123. Burgess was not alone in challenging the Attorney General’s list. See Robert Justin Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2008), chapter 3.

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17. Harsha, “Illinois: The Broyles Commission, 136, 139. 18. Yves Winkin, “Life and Work of Goffman.” In Goffman-Handbuch: Leben— Werk—Wirkung, ed. Karl Lenz and Robert Hettlage. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2022), 3–11. 19. Roger N. Shepard, “Carl Iver Hovland, June 12, 1912—April 16, 1961.” Biographical Memoirs, 73. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998), 254. 20. Subversive Influence in the Educational Process. (June 8), United States Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, and Other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee of the Judiciary, Chicago, Illinois, 1953, 344. 21. P. Wood, “U of C Profs Balk at Quiz on Red Links.” Chicago Daily Tribune (June 9, 1953), A2. All Burgess quotes in this paragraph are from this source. 22. Subversive Influence, 337. 23. Morton Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 24. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 25. Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal, 129. 26. Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983), 2 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Edward A. Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 29. Edward A. Shils, “Primary Groups in the American Army.” In Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The American Soldier,’ ed. Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (NY: The Free Press, 1950), 16–39; Edward A. Shils, “The Study of the Primary Group.” In The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method, ed. David Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 44–69; Edward A. Shils, “Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties.” The British Journal of Sociology 8, no. 2 (1957), 130–145. 30. Shils, “The Study of the Primary Group,” 46. 31. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (London: Penguin, 1998), 97. 32. Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Routledge, 1983), xxi. See also Philip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 294–321. 33. Edward Shils, “The Primary Group in the American Army,” 45; see also Shils, “Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties,” 133. 34. A notable exception was Sebastian de Grazia. As a young assistant professor in the Division of the Social Sciences of the University of Chicago, he published The Political Community: A Study of Anomie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), an explicitly anti-pluralist tract that was highly critical of this view of competing loyalties and, in the process, incurred the considerable wrath of Edward Shils.

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See Edward A. Shils, Letter to Herbert Goldhamer, February 25, 1948. Edward Shils Papers, Folder: Correspondence 1948. Box 1, Series III. Special Collections, University of Chicago. The letter from Shils I viewed by courtesy of Jefferson Pooley. 35. Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal, 262. 36. Herbert Goldhamer, “Some Factors Affecting Participation in Voluntary Associations,” in Contributions to Urban Sociology, ed. Ernest W. Burgess and Donald J. Bogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 225. 37. Announcements. (1948–1949) The University of Chicago. The College and the Divisions. 48(4). For this and several other archival sources referenced in the chapter, I am grateful to Yves Winkin. 38. Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal, 68, 277. 39. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition. Edited by J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 185. 40. Janice Roscoe, “Dorothy Swaine Thomas: 1899–1977,” in Women in Sociology: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Mary Jo Deegan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 400–408. 41. Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946); Dorothy S. Thomas, The Salvage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Jacobus tenBroek, J, Edward N. Barnhart and Floyd W. Matson, Prejudice, War and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). 42. For detailed studies of the Grodzins affair, see Peter T. Suzuki, “For the Sake of Inter-university Comity: The Attempted Suppression by the University of California of Morton Grodzins’ Americans Betrayed,” in Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, ed. Yuki Ichioka (Los Angeles: University of California, Asian American Studies Center, 1989), 95–123; and Stephen O. Murray, “The Rights of Research Assistants and the Rhetoric of Political Suppression: Morton Grodzins and the University of California Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991), 130–156. 43. Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, 5. 44. Ibid., quotations at 371, 374. 45. Morton Grodzins, “Making Un-Americans.” American Journal of Sociology 60, No. 6 (1955), 570–582. 46. Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 53. 47. Ibid., 53–83; Grodzins, “The Making of Un-Americans,” 572–575. 48. Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 53. 49. The third official volume of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, Prejudice, War and the Constitution, echoes (on page 208) and reinforces Thomas’s bid to exonerate powerful California business and political interests by stating that the dereliction “was one of folly, not knavery.” But the book’s conclusion argues for broad responsibility for the undermining of constitutionally protected rights. In those pages, the responsible parties include the U.S. President, Congress and Supreme Court, as well as a prejudiced public and military. Incredibly, the only category of historical actors exonerated by tenBroek and his colleagues was

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California business and political interests, an area emphasized in Grodzins’s study. For an examination of this and other efforts by Thomas and her colleagues to discredit Grodzins’ study and thereby protect powerful allies, see Suzuki, “For the Sake of Inter-University Comity.” 50. F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke: Volume II: 1784–1797 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 291. 51. Letter to Yves Winkin, January 27–29, 1988. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 52. Yves Winkin interview, March 11, 1987. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 53. For “Goffman’s country,” see Kieran Flanagan, Seen and Unseen: Visual Culture, Sociology and Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 36; “Goffman’s territory” is in Alan Dawe, “The Underworld-View of Erving Goffman.” The British Journal of Sociology 24, No. 2 (1973), 246. 54. Erving Goffman to Irving L. Horowitz, October 6, 1972, Horowitz Transaction Publishers Archive, Penn State University Libraries, Digital Collection. 55. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948), 301, italics added. 56. Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983), 6. 57. On “small acts of living,” see Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 181. 58. Hilary Spurling, Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 59. Edwin Muir, “Unhappy Families.” The [London] Observer (January 30, 1949), 3. 60. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 203n18, citing Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Family and a Fortune (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), 13. 61. Compton-Burnett, A Family and a Fortune, 46. 62. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Essays on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 244. 63. Goffman, Presentation of Self, with quotes at 80, 85. 64. Ibid., 149. 65. Ibid., 190. 66. Goffman (Ibid., 194–195) also mentions “double-talk,” a kind of collusive communication between superordinate and subordinate, wherein information that the latter is not privy to is nevertheless shared by the boss out of organizational necessity: the place can’t run without the information to which the subordinate isn’t officially privy. This formulation was an extension of ideas in the classic article on the foreman by Fritz Roethlisberger, “The Foreman: Master and Victim of Double-Talk.” Harvard Business Review 23 (1945), 285–294. Goffman (in ibid.,194n6), however, adds in a note that in everyday speech, double-talk also denotes “protectively ambiguous answers to questions for which the asker desired a clear-cut response”—a regular practice in the public anti-communism hearings and trials of the period, particularly those involving convicted perjurer and suspected communist spy Alger Hiss, a famous double-talker (in the everyday sense) of the time.

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67. Ibid., 212–216. 68. Ibid., 204. That these lessons are there in the book is unquestionable; Goffman’s sly way of handling the subject is also without doubt—it is there for people to see for themselves but never openly stated. Countless commentators missed it, but the cognoscenti were aware. In the mid-1970s, during politically more active times, British sociologists Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor published their book, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life (London: Allen Lane, 1976), whose intellectual heroes are announced as Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman. 69. Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61 (1956), 420–424. 70. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 425. 71. Goffman, Asylums, 181. 72. Albert Biderman, March to Calumny: The Story of American POWs in the Korean War. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 1–12; Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92. 73. Edgar H. Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War.” Psychiatry 19, No. 2 (1956), 164. 74. Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951); John D. Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 133. 75. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); Eugene Kinkead, In Every War But One (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 188. 76. In her biography of Harry Stack Sullivan, Perry comments that Rioch and his sister had grown up with parents who were missionaries of the strict “Campbellite” Christian sect, had attended a sectarian college, and had intimate experience of “escaping from the restrictions of rigid belief systems.” See Helen S. Perry, Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1982), 391. 77. Edgar H. Schein, Becoming American: My First Learning Journey (Bloomington, IL: iUniverse, 2016). 78. Edgar H. Schein, interview with the author, August 19, 2020. 79. Bertram H. Schaffner, Group Processes: Transactions of the Third Conference (New York: Josiah H. Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1957). 80. Edgar H. Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War.” Psychiatry Vol. 19, No. 2 (1956), 149–172. 81. Schein, The Chinese Indoctrination Program,” 165; Goffman, Asylums, 64–65, 65 n123. 82. Goffman in Schaffner, Group Processes, 140; Goffman, Asylums, 140, 141 n20. 83. Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China, 39. 84. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Essays on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 179–190. 85. Lillian Ross, Picture (New York: NYRB, 2002). Originally published in 1952.

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86. On “engagement disloyalty,” see Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 179. Goffman had earlier discussed these issues as “alienation from interaction,” in an essay where he wrote of a conversation as “a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains” in Erving Goffman, “Alienation from Interaction,” Human Relations 10, no. 1 (1957), 47. 87. On Meerloo, see G. Goodman, Jr., “Dr. Joost Meerloo is Dead at 73: Was Authority on Brainwashing.” The New York Times (November 26, 1976), 93. Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1956). A debunking of Meerloo is in Edgar H. Schein, “Brainwashing and Totalitarianization in Modern Society.” World Politics 11, No. 3 (1959), 430–441. 88. Edgar H. Schein with Inge Schneier and Curtis H. Barker, Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-psychological Analysis of the ‘Brainwashing’ of American Civilian Prisoners by Chinese Communists (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961); Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (New York: Norton, 1961). 89. For a statement on this shared sensibility, see Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011), 71–73. Other scholars at this time who drew on thought control research in examining their subject include the discussion of Martin Luther’s religious conversion in Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W. W. Norton 1958), 133– 135; and the discussion of secular forms of conversion in Anselm L. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press 1959), 120–125. 90. Robert Jay Lifton, “Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric Evaluation.” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (1956), 5–88. Lifton recounts how he learned of the CIA funding of this research in Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century, 46. 91. Albert D. Biderman, Communist Techniques of Coercive Interrogation (San Antonio, Texas: Air Force Personnel & Training Research Center, 1956); Albert D. Biderman, March to Calumny: The Story of American POWs in the Korean War. New York: Macmillan, 1963), 275. On “Human Ecology” funding, see David H. Price, “Buying a Piece of Anthropology. Part 1: Human Ecology and Unwitting Anthropological Research for the CIA.” Anthropology Today 23, No. 3 (2007), 8–13. 92. Edgar H. Schein, interview with the author, September 10, 2020. 93. The quotation is from Goffman, “Acknowledgments,” in Behavior in Public Places. Additional acknowledgment of funding from the Human Ecology group is in Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 15 n1, 83 n1. 94. In his exposé, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ former State Department staffer John D. Marks writes (on page 171), quoting a source, that grants like these “bought legitimacy” for the Society and made the recipients “grateful” and more willing to talk with operatives. He continues, CIA psychologist John Gittinger “mentions the Society’s relationship with Erwin [sic] Goffman of the University of Pennsylvania. . . . The Society gave him a small grant to help finish a book that would

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have been published anyway.” As a result, Gittinger was able to spend hours talking with him about, among other things, an article he had written earlier on confidence men. These hucksters were experts at manipulating behavior, according to Gittinger, and Goffman unwittingly “gave us a better understanding of the techniques people use to establish phony relationships—a subject of interest to the CIA.” 95. Goffman, Asylums, 320. 96. Ibid., 181. 97. Lowell Naeve, “A Field of Broken Stones,” in Prison Etiquette: A Convict’s Compendium of Useful Information, ed. Holly Cantine and Dachine Rainer (Bearsville, NY: Retort Press, 1950), 28–44. 98. Goffman, Asylums, 181. 99. A case might be made for heroism and subtlety as a general pattern of academic response to the Cold War. See John McCumber, “Academic Stealth in the Early Cold War.” Ch. 1 in The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 100. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Il: The Free Press, 1952), 36.

Chapter 2

Secrecy

In addition to the imposition of loyalty, the early Cold War made secrecy an overriding concern for citizens and scientists alike. But the meaning of secrecy had shifted. During World War II, secrecy was a virtue: it was seen as a way of helping to win the war. Unguarded talk was the enemy and discretion valued. The saying “loose lips sink ships” reflected this view. After the war, and especially after the treasonous sharing of nuclear secrets by spies had seized the headlines and captured the public imagination, secrets were portrayed as unsecured and dangerous. The shift was documented in the daily newspapers. An analysis of references to the keyword “secrets” in Chicago newspapers showed that from 1945–1949 the references increased by almost 50 percent.1 News of the Canadian spy Igor Gouzenko, of Whittaker Chambers’s accusations against alleged spy Alger Hiss, of informant Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee—these were the kinds of stories that made page one of the area papers in those years. Secrets were now portrayed as potentially destructive. Of course, these two views are the obverse of each other: what was once viewed positively was later viewed negatively; but during the early Cold War the negative meaning prevailed. When Goffman considered secrecy, he did so within this political environment of fear and distrust. His writings show that he too viewed secrets as destructive and everyone as akin to spies. The intellectual worlds Goffman inhabited were equally formative. The years of Goffman’s graduate study (1945–1953) were heady times not only for the Chicago school of sociology but also for other fields of inquiry. Goffman was keenly interested in research on communication. Consider alone the handful of books that were published during and after the war and which decisively shaped communication theory and practice: von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, and Rausch and Bateson’s Communication.2 These books were key texts of the new 53

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Information Age and they provided Goffman with welcome intellectual innovation along with answers to vexing questions of the time, such as the problem of rational behavior in uncertain times. All of them would become important to Goffman, several are cited in his dissertation, and one was decisive. In the “theory of games” Goffman found truths that were consistent with the interactional worlds he was inhabiting. This chapter examines Goffman’s enduring interest in secrets. It begins with a close textual analysis of his writings, especially the early articles and dissertation up to his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In that book, Goffman devoted a full chapter to the subject of secrets and made the term central to the concluding lessons of the study. Next, the chapter compares the ideas of Goffman and Shils on secrecy and society during the early Cold War. While Goffman had finished his PhD in 1953, he had recently married and soon had a son. He stayed in Chicago and spent 1952–1953 working as a research assistant to Shils, which involved wide reading. The extent of Shils’s involvement in Goffman’s work as his assistant is unclear. Did Shils, for example, provide direction or counsel? Did they ever discuss what Goffman had read? Current information bearing on these questions is limited to a statement from Shils, who reported that Goffman’s only obligation was to report back to him on what he had read.3 Did Goffman do this and was there a written report? At present, we do not know. Shils would soon begin writing The Torment of Secrecy, a study of the loyalty-security crisis of the McCarthy years. Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, first published in 1956, the same year as Shils’s study, was also a study of secrecy.4 This is not how the book is usually read. If they think of it at all, readers are more apt to follow Alvin Gouldner’s association of Goffman’s argument with the emerging postwar American consumer culture. For Gouldner, Goffman’s ideas reflect the rise of a new middle class that accompanied the shift from “an older economy based on production to a new one centered on mass marketing and promotion.” Rather than producing things, Gouldner asserted, the new middle class produces performances. Sweaty palms replace sweaty brows.5 In our reading, however, the book makes more sense when it is understood in the context of the secrecy dramas of early Cold War America. The first readers of Goffman’s book manuscript align somewhat with this view. Winkin’s informants include Goffman’s friends who had read Goffman’s book in manuscript. One of them expressed the view that “if [Goffman] could tone down somewhat the emphasis on the smelly and destructive occurrences backstage, it would be a really great piece of work.”6 “Smelly and destructive” are perfect descriptors of the culture of secrecy in which Goffman was writing. Following the comparison of Goffman and Shils on secrecy, the chapter examines Goffman’s use of Simmel’s phrase “secret of the other,” found in the German sociologist’s

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classic text on “The Secret and Secret Societies.” In this phrase, Goffman found a way to examine secrets in a more positive manner than is found elsewhere in his writings. Through all this analysis, the aim of this chapter is to offer a fresh look at Goffman’s writings through the lens of one of the singular issues of the early Cold War. GOFFMAN ON SECRECY AND SOCIETY An interest in secrets is already revealed in Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.”7 The conceptual apparatus is preliminary, and examples are limited to the community in the Shetland Islands he was studying, but the basic ideas that Goffman would develop throughout his career can be found in those pages. This is not the place to analyze in detail the steady bearings that the dissertation provided for Goffman; but it is possible to note the way in which this text adumbrates his later writings about secrecy and society. Goffman borrowed the basic terms of information theory and employed them in his study of the island community. He writes of “senders” and “recipients,” of “messages” or “signs,” “noise” and “coding.” But more than the terminology, he contemplated and answered the key question of the intellectual era: where is rationality to be located?8 In answering this question, Goffman gave primacy to “information about others.” The greater the knowledge of others, Goffman contended, the more likely a person is to predict their behavior and prepare for it and indeed even control it. Moreover, the actor can learn what is expected of him and thus “determine for himself who and what he is.”9 This is pure Meadian symbolic interactionism, but Goffman went beyond Mead by adding ideas from others. From the “theory of games” Goffman took the idea of interaction as a tactical and calculated game and persons as rational manipulators. From this perspective, both sender and recipient are engaged in tactical control of information by sharing only so much information about themselves that meets their needs, while scrutinizing the other for as much information as they can gain. Goffman called this a game of “concealment and search,” a formulation that echoes the “search problem” of the war years, that is, how to find and destroy German submarines.10 Yet Goffman was cognizant of the limitations of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s model. The “rational man” concept advanced by the theory is inadequate on its own. It allows for an understanding of social interaction that transcends context, but, Goffman contended, interpersonal communication is by its nature situated conduct. This is shown by the “expressive component” of communication—the part that is considered spontaneous, emotive and, to

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an extent, uncontrollable. With philosopher Gilbert Ryle, Goffman deliberated on the view that “our knowledge of other people” relies on so much “unstudied talk,” that is, on the part of one’s communication that is “spontaneous, frank and unprepared.”11 Goffman wrote, “It would seem that the unthinking impulse aspect of interaction is not a residual category that can be appended as a qualification to the rational model of communication; the spontaneous, unthinking aspect of interaction is a crucial element of interaction.”12 These ideas Goffman would examine, develop, and ultimately reject. Over time, he came to see the belief in spontaneous or unthinking action as a form of lay sociology that was not to be followed but overcome. Indeed, already by The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he had argued against viewing team performances as spontaneous, immediate responses to a situation. Instead, he came to see that people can step back from their situation and engage with it in multiple ways, such as by taking a new line.13 In thus prioritizing the region of “information of the other,” Goffman also entered the complex territory of interpersonal communication: of innuendo, bluffing, calculated display, etiquette, deceit, and secrets—all of which are mentioned or discussed in the dissertation. As such, the subject of secrets was, in part, a natural extension of the focus on interpersonal communication. It becomes more when Goffman turned information theory in a sociological direction through a discussion of several strongly institutionalized social roles which aid in the communication process. He discussed the “drafter,” such as a secretary, a person who assists the sender with formulating a message. Another institutionalized role is the “relayer,” such as a stenographer (Goffman was writing in the 1950s), a person who receives the sender’s message and codes it for transmission. Finally, there is the “courier,” such as a messenger or postal worker, the person who delivers the message. All these specialized roles, Goffman contended, face a “strong moral prohibition against taking advantage of the position in which their occupational duties place them.” Despite these prohibitions, abuses occur, and people make “inappropriate use” of the information with which they are entrusted. An example: “on the island, persons who use the telephone and telegraph tend to allow for the fact that messages may not remain a secret.” In other words, someone may be eavesdropping and using the information received for their own interests.14 These ideas are considerably extended and deepened in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. There Goffman presented his view of social interaction as an endless round of face-to-face performances on a “stage” with audiences of people, and often with the help of “teams” who sustain the impressions that are being fostered. This social interaction order is a moral order, where idealized impressions are offered, sustained, and occasionally threatened. The matter of secrets was introduced in a chapter titled “Discrepant Roles” where

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Goffman discussed a “basic problem” for many performances as one of information control. For performances to be accepted, certain information—what Goffman now calls “destructive information”—must be excluded. “In other words,” Goffman wrote, “a team must be able to keep its secrets and have its secrets kept.”15 The chapter presents a typology of secrets and, with it, a nascent sociology of information control in modern societies. “Dark secrets” refers to information that a team knows and conceals that is incompatible with the image that the team is attempting to maintain before its audiences. The name of this type of secret is suggestive, and one expects a revealing analysis. In fact, Goffman gave it very little attention other than to refer the reader to another part of the book where marital secrets are discussed. “Strategic secrets”—Goffman mentioned as examples the practices of business and the military—denotes information that a team may use in the future against the opposition. The key difference between dark and strategic secrets is that the former is a dangerous or discrediting secret that one “holds on” to, perhaps forever, and the latter is one that is used, or potentially used, in some imminent or future strategic interaction. By “inside secrets” Goffman meant the kind of information that serves the function of exclusion, helping one group to distinguish itself from others. Secrets are not, however, only about the concealed information that a group or team has about itself. They may also denote information that one group has about another. Here Goffman compared “entrusted secrets,” information that one is granted and obligated not to share, and “free secrets,” or information that one learns from means other than entrusted sharing, such as through independent discovery or indiscreet admission.16 The chapter follows with an examination of “the kinds of persons who learn about the secrets of a team and with the bases and the threats of their privileged position.”17 Here Goffman took up themes, such as those discussed above, of the opportunities of “drafters” and “couriers” to inappropriately use the information with which they have been entrusted. It also reprised his even earlier pre-dissertation article on “Symbols of Class Status,” where he wrote of “curator groups,” those whose work with elites—as personal assistants, hairdressers, butlers, nannies, among many others—gives them a privileged “backstage” view.18 For Goffman, those workers are well placed to “learn the secrets of the show.” But in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman takes these themes in a darker direction by exploring a wider range of roles with access to “destructive information.” In addition to drafters, couriers, and service specialists, Goffman now writes of “informers,” including traitors, turncoats, and spies. He writes of “shills,” those who are secretly in league with the performer, including “protective agents” and “spotters.” He writes of the “go-between” or mediator. He writes of the “non-person,”

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people who are present in a region but who are treated as though they were not there. He writes of the “confidant” and of “renegades.” Instead of viewing these ideas, as Gouldner does, as reflecting a change in the economic means of production, it may be productive to view them as manifesting a change in Anglo-American ethos. By this I mean that certain formulations in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life represent an emotional shift in society that overlaps with the postwar battle over secrecy and spies, along with the cultural changes that followed from the anti-communism attacks. The best evidence for this view comes from Goffman himself. In the book’s conclusion, he contrasts two interactional cultures: the “gentlemanly” culture and the “manipulative” one. In the “gentlemanly” culture, interaction is guided by principles of just action, including the “golden rule,” on the part of both the actor and various others. Goffman referred to people acting with future consequences in mind which “will be the kind that would lead a just individual to treat them now in a way they would want to be treated.” To this view, Goffman sharply contrasted an approach to action that does not follow just means but gives the impression of following just means. Those manipulators of impressions, those “merchants of morality,” represent a sharp contrast to the gentleman, who truly follows those principles.19 Setting aside for now the gender-bias of this formulation, Goffman appears to be setting the subject of his study on the far side of this equation. The discussions of aggressive and collusive actions, performance disruptions, and efforts to “save the show” from destructive information—all these and other topics discussed in the book’s later chapters represent the deterioration of old orders and the emergence of new realities in the 1950s. Goffman’s book is a study of the interaction order of the early Cold War. It might be tempting to link this formulation to the contrast between the “inner-directed” and “other-directed” character types found in Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.20 But I think this understanding would be mistaken, and not just because Goffman rejected the notion of national character types that is presented in that study. Goffman’s formulation articulated critical moral and emotional attitudes and, as such, is closer to the analysis of Shils than to Riesman. In The Torment of Secrecy, Shils extolled the importance for a free society of “pluralistic principles” such as “live and let live,” mutual respect, and respect for privacy. He wrote about the British aristocrat, who was expected to “act like a gentleman” as he took his place in local or national government. The gender bias grates, but the possible links to Shils encourages a closer analysis.

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EDWARD A. SHILS AND THE TORMENT OF SECRECY It is instructive at this point to read Goffman’s analysis of secrets, as presented in that important chapter on “Discrepant Roles,” against the examination of secrets in Shils’s The Torment of Secrecy. There are good reasons in this context to read Goffman against Shils. Admittedly, Shils’s book was a polemic and Goffman’s a prolegomenon. Moreover, Shils pointedly attacked the obsessive fear of secrets and subversion in Cold War America, and Goffman coolly analyzed them. Certainly, they were different people with very different research programs. But both wrote on secrets inspired by the same time and the same place. Reading Goffman against Shils, then, helps reveal in bold relief the distinctiveness of Goffman’s analysis of secrets. The Torment of Secrecy is an essential document of Cold War America and a critical turning point in the author’s thinking. As a work of sociology and political philosophy, it is unusual to say the least. In the book’s 238 pages, it presents no references to other authors and its footnotes are employed only to elaborate on points the author makes in the main text. The book stands apart as a creation solely of its author, a work not so much scholarly as learned. As his friend Joseph Epstein wrote, in this book Shils would persuade “by the power of undeniable assertion.”21 This approach was not unusual for Shils. His London pamphlet on The Atomic Bomb in World Politics is written in the same breathless style.22 The Torment of Secrecy is a book-length polemic against a decade (1946–1956) of America’s preoccupation with secrets and subversion during what is now called the McCarthy era. But it is more than a polemic; it offers a lucid analysis of the American traditions that foster extremism and of the traditions of pluralism that protect the country from immoderation. And it does far more than that as well. In his book, Shils presents a classic argument in favor of a pluralist society. He writes: Liberalism is a system of pluralism. It is a system of many centers of powers, many areas of privacy and a strong internal impulse towards the mutual adaptation of the spheres rather than a dominance or the submission of any one to the others. Each sphere in the liberal society enjoys a partial autonomy and at the same time it influences and is influenced by the other spheres.23

In a democratic-liberal society, then, these “spheres”—of government, economy, law, science, religion, and the like—are characterized by an approximate “balance.” Shils noted, remarking on a sphere he knew well, in a “liberal society, philosophers are not kings, the intellectuals do not rule any sphere except their own, nor do businessmen, politicians or priests govern intellectual life.”24 But in the decade following World War II in America, with its relentless preoccupation with subversion and secrecy, and corresponding

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monomania to uncover and disclose, the House Un-American Activities Committee ran roughshod over lives and liberties.25 In addition, Senator McCarthy and his supporters were fueled in their extremism by deep-seated American traditions of hyper-patriotism, xenophobia, isolationism, fundamentalism, and populism. After a decade of this activity, the “loose consensus” required in a democratic society was significantly damaged. Shils wrote, “The nearly ten-year-long disturbance of public peace by the angry quest for publicity about conspiracy and by baseless worries about secrecy has left wounds on American society from which it cannot soon recover.” What was needed, Shils prescribed, was a return to balance, or what he calls in an apposite phrase, respect for “the dignity of spheres.”26 Shils’s sketch of the history of this obsession with secrets begins, appropriately, with the atomic bomb. After the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively, Americans were shown to possess what was then called “the secret”—scientific knowledge of how to make an atomic bomb. Although Americans briefly dreamed of postwar peace and harmony, with the United States holding an atomic monopoly and thereby acting as paternalistic world leader, the reality of the postwar era soon eroded those fantasies. Shils himself had such dreams in 1945 and was disillusioned, along with others, when it was revealed that the Soviets wanted “the secret” too and were engaged in active espionage in Canada, Britain, and in the United States. Soon spies and spy rings were brought to light: Alan Nunn May in Britain, Igor Gouzenko in Canada, Alger Hiss and, later, the Rosenbergs in the United States, and on and on.27 All were, or were thought to be, sharing scientific secrets with the Soviets.28 Thus, the connection between spies, secrets, and subversion having been made, and fueled by American extremist traditions, the frenzied hunt for communists in America began. In one of his memoirs, Shils reported that he started working on The Torment of Secrecy in 1954.29 As he reflected on the matters of concern that led him to write the book, Shils addressed the attacks by Senator McCarthy and others as well as the policies of classification and secrecy promulgated by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC), procedures that effectively muzzled scientists and speech about scientific knowledge. At this time, Shils was involved with a group of scientists that founded and published the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (hereafter Bulletin). These included Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith, both scientists who had held key positions in the University of Chicago’s “Metallurgical Lab,” which was part of the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb. The scientists knew very well the dangers of the doomsday machine they had helped to create. The Bulletin was then a great bulwark in defense of the autonomy of science and freedom of speech. Through its editorial page and published articles,

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the Bulletin fiercely defended scientific autonomy in the face of governmental control; over time it came to be known as “the conscience of the scientific community.”30Archival records of the early years of the Bulletin, donated by Shils to the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, include thick folders of newspaper clippings on the spy trials of the 1950s, copies of the USAEC’s “periodical digest” (a summary of relevant articles from some 50 periodicals), typescript copies of unpublished speeches on secrecy and science, among many others. These files reveal that concern with science and secrets was widespread, and that Shils and his book gave voice to the discontent of many others. Though it is not possible in this context to do justice to the full range of the Bulletin’s archival records, two typescript copies of speeches contained therein serve as point and counterpoint to the issues that America was facing. A discussion of those speeches also reveals the similarities and differences between Shils’s and Goffman’s views on secrets and society. The first of these papers was an untitled 1948 speech delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors by Vannevar Bush, arguably the most politically powerful scientist of the mid-twentieth century.31 As Chairman of the U.S. Government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, he oversaw the nearly limitless wartime spending on science related to military needs, including the Manhattan Project. He was also President (1938–1955) of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and therefore ostensibly in charge of another great sum of money for scientific research. Among other distinctions, Bush is considered a founder of the computer age, the information age, and the National Science Foundation. To Shils he was also associated with irresponsible policies of official secrecy that were damaging scientists and their work. As such, Shils thought the speech was “nonsense.”32 The structure of Bush’s speech hinges on two sets of values: freedom of the press and scientific open communication, on the one hand, and national security and secrecy on the other. Granting legitimacy to both sets of values, Bush argued that when questions of conflict occur “common sense” should prevail. By this he presumably meant that the press should voluntarily censor itself by avoiding reporting on matters of national security. He was less concerned about the sharing of technical secrets, as these classified details are always unavailable to the press. He was concerned about reporting seemingly innocent information that could leak and reveal information to an enemy, thereby damaging U.S. security plans. He detailed two pertinent examples of how “common sense” about secrecy had worked in this way during the war. The first was the development of active sonar for the detection of submarines, “a secret that had been kept and kept well,” Bush wrote. The second

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was the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. Here he stated: We had under way in the country in the midst of a terrible war the development of a titanically powerful weapon and were diverting scarce and vital materials and manpower to completing it. Knowledge of this would unquestionably have affected the war plans, the strategy, the choice of weapons and techniques, of all our enemies. A leak here might have had fatal consequences. There was no leak.33

These examples show that the keeping of secrets can be done, Bush argued. And though now, he wrote, “we have few real secrets,” they are ones we must keep and keep “in the democratic way.” In a conclusion that offered even more flag waving, Bush reminded the audience of newspaper editors that “freedom of the press” is also a freedom not to publish and that the greater good is served well by “sincere and reasonable men” who follow the “common-sense requirements to protect information that might be of aid and comfort to the enemy.” Shils questioned the speech’s veracity. In the postwar years, government secrets were mounting not lessening, and the heavy hand of the government, military, and USAEC were, in Shils’s view, imperiling science and the democratic values that Bush championed in his speech. As historian Janet Farrell Brodie confirmed, “In the decades after World War II, unprecedented secrecy developed in the United States; secrecy became a principal hallmark (along with growing surveillance) of the emerging national security state.”34 This is why the second speech forms such a powerful counterpoint to Bush’s talk. If the first presented for Shils a pure fairy tale, the second revealed the very real “torment” with which American society was afflicted. Gerard Piel was the publisher of Scientific American magazine. Though he was Harvard educated, he lacked Vannevar Bush’s doctoral credentials, MIT connections, and U.S. presidential influence. Yet he transformed a flagging science magazine into a publication of national prominence and used his position as publisher to develop and promote a view of science in its social context. And he was an inexhaustible writer. In 1950, he presented a lengthy talk titled “Science and Secrecy” at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors—the same audience addressed by Vannevar Bush two years earlier.35 It was unmistakably written in opposition to Bush’s speech, as it took as its starting point the fundamental assumptions of his speech: the opposition between freedom of the press and secrecy, the concept of “reasonable men,” and questions of the public good. In addition, Piel had one quality that Bush did not possess—he was one of them, that is, he was a journalist.

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Piel addressed an act of censorship, earlier in that year, by the USAEC toward an article published in his magazine. Although too complex to discuss in detail here, suffice it to say that the USAEC communicated standards, and enforced those standards, against an article in Scientific American that was written by future (in 1967) Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist Dr. Hans Bethe, an article written for public discussion on the hydrogen bomb. The presses were stopped, sentences were deleted, and all copies of the original article were destroyed. But there was more. A security officer of the USAEC, Piel recounted, “visited our printing plant and supervised the destruction of the type and the melting down of the printing plates with the deleted material and the burning of 3,000 copies of the magazine which had been printed before the presses were stopped.”36 Piel revealed that the sentences in question were, in each case, reporting on information that was already in the public domain. That is, the author was not divulging the government’s secret information; he was restating already published findings. As Piel astutely argued, the operant definition of secrecy here is that information is “secret” when the USAEC says it is; no other justification was necessary. This amounted to a very new kind of policy enacted that year by the Commission, and indeed which became the hallmark of the proliferating government institutions of the Cold War. As Piel stated, quoting the words of one of the USAEC’s commissioners, it was a policy of “keep your traps shut.” As historian Alex Wellerstein noted in his report on the story, Piel turned the tables on the USAEC by converting the episode into “a major publicity coup,” including garnering a front-page article in the The New York Times. Because the Commission was bound by its own rules of secrecy, Piel’s version of the narrative prevailed, and the USAEC was prevented from giving its side of the story.37 The episode also reveals a limitation of the analysis of secrets in The Torment of Secrecy. Shils’s conceptual contribution to the sociology of secrets was his distinction between “functional secrecy,” the control of information that is needed for a society’s self-protection, and “symbolic secrecy,” the projection of fantasies of ideological extremists, such as the view of communists hiding in every closet.38 But an issue of great concern to Shils was the new loyalty-security system of the emerging national security state and was exemplified by the Commission’s “shut your trap” policy. Government agencies compelled maximal loyalty while they disregarded all barriers of decency and discretion when probing someone’s background. They excluded scientists from research projects based not on scientific qualifications but on scientifically irrelevant criteria, such as past friendships or sexual preference.39 Then, even if the scientist passed all loyalty tests, the “keep your traps shut” policy created an atmosphere of distrust, and the expansion of the scope of official secrecy obstructed the open communication required of scientific work.40

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Shils rarely quoted the words of others in his book, but he gave voice to the nuclear physicist whose words were censored by the USAEC and recounted in Piel’s speech on “Science and Secrecy” just discussed. Shils quoted Bethe, who wrote, “Perhaps the greatest impediment to the scientist . . . is the political climate of the country. We sense a distrust of scientists and of intellectuals in general . . . This trend is perhaps the greatest outside influence which hinders the effective work of scientists.”41 Despite his careful analysis, Shils did not follow through on his own inquiry and name the type of secret that he had identified, what might be called “compulsory secrets”—the increasing authority of government agencies to compel secrecy through its Byzantine systems of classification and clearance procedures. Breach of these procedures could result in career suicide. Political scientist and U.S. senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had studied Shils’s book closely, was closer to the mark when he wrote of “secrets as a form of regulation.”42 Goffman too failed to consider this emergent reality. Recall Goffman’s early typology of secrets in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, including his discussion of “dark secrets,” “strategic secrets,” and the like. This typology did not include the notion of “compulsory secrets” or, indeed, even an elementary discussion of how authoritative bodies can force someone not to reveal information. Goffman’s paired terms “entrusted secrets-free secrets” imply a rather benign view of authority. For him, secrets may be “dark,” with troublesome implications for the image that a team was projecting, or they may be “strategic,” with troublesome implications for the entity against which one was employing them. But for Goffman, secrets were not compulsory, a crucial limitation that he shared with Shils. Yet, Goffman transcends Shils in his expansive view of secrecy. Like Shils, Goffman examined the ways in which secrets can be “destructive information.” But as will be shown in the next section, he also presented a more benign view of secrets that followed the work of Georg Simmel. Here again Shils and Goffman diverged. Shils admits that he didn’t find Simmel’s analysis of secrets relevant to his book, because Simmel had not written about science and secrecy.43 GOFFMAN, SCHUTZ, AND THE “SECRET OF THE OTHER” Goffman on “Simmel’s Dictum” As one reads Goffman on secrets, it is instructive to consider Simmel’s sociological analysis of secrets and secrecy.44 Simmel occupies a uniquely central place in the intellectual traditions of the University of Chicago,

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where Goffman took his PhD. There is a clear and well-established line of thought from Simmel to Albion W. Small, founding chair of the Department of Sociology, to Robert E. Park, the intellectual leader after Small, and then to Everett C. Hughes, who was primus inter pares among post-World War II Simmel scholars, and then to Goffman, among others.45 Indeed, Simmel’s essay “The Secret and Secret Societies” (hereafter referred to as “The Secret”) first appeared in print in The American Journal of Sociology in Small’s English translation.46 Two years later, Simmel included the final and somewhat longer version of that essay as the fifth chapter of his magnum opus Soziologie.47 But it was Kurt H. Wolff’s English translation of the chapter in The Sociology of Georg Simmel that made the ideas broadly accessible to scholars in English-speaking countries.48 Wolff translated Simmel’s often complex German into readable English, compared to Small’s sometimes inelegant phrasing, and he broke out Simmel’s longish paragraphs into multiple sections with subject headings. These changes turned Simmel’s daunting chapter into an essay with easily digestible parts. Goffman’s doctoral dissertation is replete with Simmel quotations from the Wolff translation, including several from the chapter on “The Secret.”49 This encourages an examination of their respective views on the subject. Near the end of his doctoral dissertation, Goffman cited a line from “The Secret” that he called “Simmel’s dictum”: Discretion consists by no means only in the respect for the secret of the other, for his specific will to conceal this or that from us, but in staying away from the knowledge of all that the other does not expressly reveal to us.50

Simmel introduced a different term a little later when he wrote about “an ideal sphere that lies around every human being.” Most of Goffman’s commentators have noted Goffman’s reference to Simmel’s phrase the “ideal sphere” surrounding every human being.51 They have rightly pointed out that the reference signals Goffman’s explicit interest in the inherent dignity of persons, a theme that he explored pointedly in Asylums and Stigma. They have also identified Goffman’s Durkheimian bearings on this matter. Goffman tells us as much in his early article on “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor.” “In this paper,” he wrote, “I have suggested that Durkheimian notions about primitive religion can be translated into concepts of deference and demeanor.”52 There is no question, however, that Goffman found something valuable in Simmel’s analysis of “discretion” found in his chapter on “The Secret.” He referred to “Simmel’s dictum,” quoted above, not only in his dissertation but also later in “On Face-Work.”53 And as Tom Burns suggested, Goffman refined Simmel’s idea of an “ideal sphere” into his own notion of “civil inattention.”54

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For Simmel, discretion is the duty to stay away from “all that the other does not expressly reveal to us”—one’s secrets. As such, prying into those secrets cannot be done without destroying the “personality value of the individual.” Simmel himself employed an analogy of private property to explain this point. People rightly consider their material goods to be an expression of their personalities and, further, they expect the right to keep that property inviolate. Similarly, Simmel argued, one’s “intellectual property” is also highly personal and must not be violated through theft or invasion. To do so—to engage in the “avid, spying grasp” of another’s every word—is to violate a person to the core. Still, Simmel appreciated the complexities of modern life and the numerous invasions they entail. Even the most decent person can come across information that another would not willingly share. (Goffman included this source of information in his original typology of secrets, discussed above, when he wrote of “free secrets”). More importantly for Simmel, the “interests of interaction and the interdependence of members of society” constantly challenge the duty of discretion. There is no general norm that can be relied upon to answer the question about how much knowledge of the other is appropriate. Without clear moral guidelines, Simmel wrote, this question must be answered by individual decision on a daily basis.55 The phrase “secret of the other” may be too poetic to have entered the general sociological lexicon. In his post-dissertation writings, Goffman cited it only in a footnote and developed his ideas primarily through the analogy of ritual, in such terms as “avoidance rituals,” “presentational rituals,” “face-work,” and the like. But the phrase encourages the present effort to understand Goffman’s views on secrecy. Like Simmel, Goffman was not only interested in “destructive secrets” or “dark secrets” and the like. For both Simmel and Goffman, secrets are not inherently aligned with moral badness, sociological dysfunction, or government compulsion. In fact, secrets can also be aligned with the greatest good—with respect for a person’s dignity and worth. These views Goffman shared not only with Simmel but also with his early mentor, Everett Hughes.56 To quote Simmel, “the secret has no immediate connection with evil, evil has an immediate connection with secrecy: the immoral hides itself for obvious reasons.”57 Alfred Schutz and the “Secret of the Other” Additional perspective on Goffman’s references to “Simmel’s dictum” may be gained by comparison to the relevant writings of Alfred Schutz. To approach this idea, first a brief detour. Elsewhere, I have reported on efforts by Albert Salomon, one of the original faculty members of what was first called the “University in Exile,” to interpret Simmel as a vital precursor to the phenomenological philosophy

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that the New School for Social Research in New York City was championing.58 As a part of this effort, in the early 1960s, Salomon led a seminar on “Simmel and Schutz as Sociologists.” This seminar explored the affinities between the two figures, including their common background in the philosophy of Bergson and the similarity of the intellectual problems on which they worked.”59 Despite the fundamental differences between their intellectual worlds, Salomon maintained that Simmel and Schutz displayed an “inner affinity.” This inner affinity included their mutual concern for “the secret of the other.”60 Evidence of this inner affinity is found in Schutz’s appreciation of “Simmel’s excellent analysis of the sociology of the letter.”61 Simmel’s analysis of the letter is found in Soziologie as the “Excursus on Written Communication” within the chapter on “The Secret,” though in Wolff’s English translation the text is included as just another section named “Written Communication.”62 Simmel’s analysis of the letter contrasted face-to-face communication with communication through the written word. He explored the paradox of written communication: it enhances the logical clarity of communication while magnifying the ambiguity surrounding an understanding of the individual. Because the reader of a letter does not have immediate access to the visual and audible signs of delivery, the letter is more open to interpretation and to misunderstanding. Hence, what Simmel called the “secret of the other”—the inner thoughts and emotions of one’s most intimate life—while potentially available through face-to-face interaction, is concealed in written communication.63 Schutz first referenced Simmel’s “secret of the other” in his early study Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, translated into English as The Phenomenology of the Social World.64 Like Goffman, he cited Simmel’s notion in a footnote. Schutz’s famous book, the only one published during his lifetime, is foundational for phenomenological sociology around the world. As such, no adequate summary can be offered in the space available here. But a key distinction may be noted for present purposes. Schutz distinguished between directly experienced social reality, as may be found in a face-to-face situation, and indirectly experienced reality, such as our relationship to individuals and groups with whom we have no direct social contact—in Schutz’s terms the larger classes of our “contemporaries,” “predecessors,” and “successors.” Schutz’s phenomenological sociology privileged the “directly experienced social relationship of real life.”65 In such a situation, I am in direct spatial and temporal experience of the other, what Schutz called “simultaneity.” I can look in the person’s eyes, ask him or her a question, hear the tone of voice, and watch the person’s bodily movements. In all this, I am aware of this other human being as a person. The situation is very different for someone who only indirectly observes another. In these circumstances, we

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know people only as types. Among the examples cited is Simmel’s text on the letter. Here, Schutz cited several key sentences from Simmel’s “Excursus on Written Communication,” which in the English language edition employ Wolff’s translation. In this translation, Simmel wrote: One may say that, whereas speech reveals the secret of the speaker by means of all that surrounds it—which is visible but not audible, and which also includes all the imponderables of the speaker himself—the letter conceals this secret. For this reason, the letter is clearer than speech where the secret of the other is not the issue; but where it is the issue, the letter is more ambiguous. By the ‘secret of the other’ I understand his moods and qualities of being, which cannot be expressed logically, but on which we nevertheless fall back innumerable times, even if only to understand the actual significance of quite concrete utterances.66

For Schutz, these ideas underscored the errors of straying too far from the concrete individual in his uniqueness. For, as one moves away from the concrete individual, one never confronts the subject as a real person; people are known only as types. Schutz extended these ideas in his incisive wartime essay in social psychology, “The Homecomer,” first published in the American Journal of Sociology in March of 1945. World War II would end only months later. Schutz defined the “homecomer” as “one who comes back for good to his home.”67 Employing basic concepts in phenomenology that he was developing at the time, Schutz analyzed the returning veteran as a special case of a subject’s experience of growing up at home, of being away, and of returning home again. This was an experience that Schutz himself had after World War I.68 In the face-to-face relations of the “pure we-relation” at home, each person “participates in the onrolling inner life of the Other.”69 Schutz continued: In the face-to-face relation I can grasp the Other’s thoughts in a vivid present as they develop and build themselves up, and so can he with reference to my stream of thought; and both of us know and take into account this possibility. The Other is to me, and I am to the Other, not an abstraction, not a mere instance of typical behavior, but, by the very reason of our sharing a common present, this unique individual personality in this unique personal situation.

Such “pure we-relations,” Schutz admitted, reveal manifold degrees of intimacy and anonymity. “In the highest form of intimacy,” Schutz wrote quoting Kipling, “we know the Other’s ‘naked soul.’” But separation and return changes all that. The “absent one” experiences a significant shift in the “system of relevance” and in the degree of intimacy. The aspirations and values that a person had at home may shift considerably. Moreover, what counts now—in the case of the veteran, the military group to which one belongs and

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the attitudes of the officers and comrades—are not shared by “those left at home.” For them, understanding the one who left home is no longer formed by face-to-face interaction; rather, wartime propaganda builds up stereotypes of the soldier, which do not reveal an individual’s personal, unique experiences. For those at home, for example, stories of wartime courage abound in the media, whereas for the soldier conduct in battle may be seen merely as acts of survival or the performance of duty. Communication from home via the letter manifests this same shift from intimacy to distance, and from uniqueness to stereotype. “Many a soldier in the combat line,” Schutz wrote, “is astonished to find letters from home lacking any understanding of his situation, because they underscore the relevance of things which are of no importance to him in his actual situation.” Moreover, Schutz asserted, “when the soldier returns and starts to speak—if he starts to speak at all—he is bewildered to see that his listeners, even the sympathetic ones, do not understand the uniqueness of these individual experiences which have rendered him another man.”70 The above analysis shows that both Goffman and Schutz made room in their work for the ideas that Simmel expressed in his notion of “secret of the other.” Schutz’s phenomenologically informed sociology made conceptual space for the individual’s uniqueness and ineffable personal experiences. This perspective gave him a strong position from which to critique those social developments, such as wartime propaganda, that turned the individual into a means toward wartime ends—“to increase the efficiency of war production or the subscription to war bonds.”71 Goffman also emphasized the dignity of the individual and leveled strong criticism at those social arrangements, such as total institutions, whose effect was to destroy individual dignity and uniqueness. Though he traded in the types and typifications that social scientists make, he grounded his analysis in face-to-face interactions. Moreover, for Goffman as for Schutz, the critique of “what is” implied a vision, however tacit, of “what should be,” an imagined society where persons matter. Although as some have argued Goffman was no phenomenologist, his own “inner affinity” with Simmel reveals, also, an affinity with Schutz and the philosophical tradition he developed.72 On this matter, it is appropriate to heed the words of Schutz himself when he wrote that “the attempts of Simmel, Max Weber, [and] Scheler to reduce social collectivities to the social interaction of individuals is, so it seems, much closer to the spirit of phenomenology than the pertinent statements of its founder.”73 In this respect, Simmel, Schutz, and Goffman each stand firmly within the “spirit of phenomenology” and as champions of human dignity and individual uniqueness.

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CONCLUSION Goffman’s writings reveal a preoccupation with the shifting ethos and anomie of the early Cold War. His concern for loyalty and betrayal was matched by an equally strong attention to secrecy, including its destructive forms. For Goffman was writing in thrall of the early Cold War, and it was smelly and destructive, as one of Winkin’s informants noticed, which is to say that there was something rotten going on. What was rotten was the revelation of secrets. From his dissertation to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and beyond, Goffman’s model involved individuals whose structural position provides access to secrets, and whose moral strictures enjoin those incumbents against divulging information, but who do so anyway. This links the problem of secrecy to the problem of loyalty. As Hegel wrote, “no man is a hero to his valet.” But no one expected the valet to open the safe, remove the secret files, photograph the contents, and sell them to the enemy (see chapter 3). Goffman’s advance was to define secrets dramaturgically, as a kind of information that potentially undermines the prevailing definition of the situation. Locked away in safes and other back spaces, the information is harmless; but when it is revealed, such information can be destructive. And Goffman gave an accounting of the roles that were engaged in these illegitimate revelations: spies, informants, renegades, and others. Shils was also troubled by the loyalty-security crisis of the early Cold War. His Torment of Secrecy aimed directly to show the sources and terrible costs of a decade of “agitation about secrecy, subversion, and espionage.”74 Shils’s talent as a polemicist was on full display in this bold and brave book. As much as Goffman’s analysis demonstrated subtlety, Shils’s was outspoken and direct. What is revealed here again is a pattern of academic heroism and stealth identified by John McCumber at UCLA and exemplified in the previous chapter at Chicago by Grodzins and Goffman, and here by Shils and Goffman.75 The political pressure of the early Cold War is displayed forcefully here. Shils was a protected scholar, powerful within the university and without. Goffman, on the other hand, in 1956, had no academic affiliation or tenure. He was also a foreigner and Ukrainian Jew with career ambitions in the U.S. The cost of advancing politically controversial ideas could have been very high. But even Shils had to exercise caution. His analysis omitted discussion of the very kind of “compulsory secrecy”—the “shut your trap policy”—advanced by the bureaucratic agencies of the expanding national security state. On this he is one with Goffman, whose The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is silent on this growing form of secrecy. It would have been interesting for Goffman to have explored the interactional equivalents

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of this larger governmental development. Today it would perhaps be called bullying, or something worse. Goffman, however, diverged from his time by contemplating the positive aspects of the secret—the view of a person’s privacy and inner dignity that is nurtured by respect and protected by discretion. Shils’s position was that, after a decade of imbalance, the social order needed rebalancing by restoring what he called the “dignity of the spheres””: each sphere of society being autonomous and self-regulated.76 Goffman’s position is the interactional equivalent of this view. He argued for the dignity of the individual and commitment to the occasion. Despite their intellectual differences, then, both thinkers underscored the need to restore order after the tumultuous secrecy dramas of the early Cold War. NOTES 1. On August 3, 2022, I conducted a search on the site newspapers.com using the keyword “secrets” in newspapers of Chicago, Illinois, for 1945–1949. The incidence of that keyword increased from 2,656 in 1945 to 3,891 in 1949, during Goffman’s formative years when he resided in Chicago. 2. John von Neumann, and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944); Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: On Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948); Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1949); Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1951). 3. Yves Winkin, interview with Edward Shils, September 17, 1988. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 4. Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (New York: Free Press, 1956); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, Monograph No. 2, 1956). 5. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 381–382. 6. Winkin informant, “Memorandum in re: Goffman’s Manuscript.” February 13, 1954. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 7. Erving Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953. 8. Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 9. Goffman, “Communication Conduct,” 72.

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10. Ibid., 84; on the World War II “search problem,” see Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271. 11. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 12. Goffman, “Communication Conduct,” 244 n2. 13. Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday), 207. 14. Goffman, “Communication Conduct,” quotations on 108, 107. 15. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 141. 16. Ibid., 141–143. 17. Ibid., 143–144. 18. Erving Goffman, “Symbols of Class Status,” The British Journal of Sociology 2, No. 4 (1951): 294–304. 19. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 250–251. 20. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). 21. Edward Shils, Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals. Edited and with an Introduction by Joseph Epstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press., 1997), 11. 22. Edward Shils, The Atomic Bomb in World Politics (London: National Peace Council, 1948). 23. Shils, Torment, 154. 24. Ibid., 155. 25. Elaine Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1998). 26. Shils, Torment, 198, 157. 27. The capture of Nunn May cut close to home, as he had spent time in the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, which was part of the Manhattan Project. 28. For a balanced and insightful discussion of current historical research bearing on the question of the nature and extent of Soviet espionage networks in the United States, see Kyle A. Cuordileone, “The Torment of Secrecy: Reckoning with American Communism and Anticommunism After Venona.” Diplomatic History 35, no. 4 (2011), 615–641. 29. Edward Shils, A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 73. 30. Linda Greenhouse, “Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch Dies; Manhattan Project Chemist, 71.” The New York Times (May 16, 1973), 50. 31. Vannevar Bush, “Remarks Before American Society of Newspaper Editors” (April 16, 1948). Box 30, Folder 1. The Papers of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 32. The word “nonsense” is written in Shils’s hand at the top of the typescript speech. 33. Vannevar Bush, “Remarks Before American Society of Newspaper Editors,” 4.

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34. Janet Farrell Brodie, “Learning Secrecy in the Early Cold War: The RAND Corporation.” Diplomatic History 35, no. 4 (2011), 643–670. 35. Gerard Piel, “Science and Secrecy,” April 21, 1950. Box 30, Folder 1. The Papers of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 36. Ibid., 5. 37. Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 236–239, quote at 238. 38. Shils, Torment, 235–238. 39. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence (New York: Viking, 2018), 35–36. 40. Shils, Torment, 187–191. 41. Ibid., 188. On Bethe, see S. S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), where this episode is discussed on page 162. 42. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 59. 43. Shils, Fragment of a Sociological Biography, 71. 44. The relation between Simmel and Goffman has been a continuing subject of scholarly interest. Among the most valuable sources are Greg Smith, “A Simmelian Reading of Erving Goffman,” PhD diss., University of Salford, 1989; Greg Smith “Snapshots ‘Sub Specie Aeternitatus’: Simmel, Goffman and Formal Sociology,” in Georg Simmel: Critical Assessments III, ed. David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1994), 354–383; Murray S. Davis, “Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience.” Qualitative Sociology 20, no. 3 (1997), 396–388; Gary D. Jaworski, Georg Simmel and the American Prospect; and Uta Gerhardt, “Of Kindred Spirits: Erving Goffman’s Oeuvre and its Relationship to Georg Simmel.” In Goffman’s Legacy, ed. Javier Treviño (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 143–165. See also Gary T. Marx and Glenn W. Muschert, “Simmel on Secrecy: A Legacy and Inheritance for the Sociology of Information.” In Soziologie als Möglichkeit: 100 Jahre Georg Simmels Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, ed. Cécile Rol and Christian Papilloud (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenshcaften, 2009), 217–233. 45. Donald N. Levine, Elwood B. Carter, and Eleanor Miller Gorman, “Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology.” The American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976), 813–845, 1112–1132; Gary D. Jaworski, Georg Simmel and the American Prospect (New York: SUNY Press, 1997). 46. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” Translated by Albion W. Small. American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 4 (1906), 441–498. 47. Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1908). 48. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950).

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49. Greg W. H. Smith, “A Simmelian Reading of Erving Goffman.” PhD diss., University of Salford, 1989. 50. Goffman, “Communication Conduct,” 320, emphasis added. 51. See for example Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 39; Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 86. 52. Erving Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Random House, 1967). Originally published in American Anthropologist 58, no. 3 (1956), 473–502. Research in the University of Chicago Special Collections has expanded the view of Durkheim’s formative place in that publication. See Gary D. Jaworski, “A Note on Three Versions of Goffman’s Paper, ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,’” Academia Letters, 2021. https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​/48993716​/A​_Note​_on​_Three​_Versions​_of​ _Goffman​_s​_Paper​_The​_Nature​_of​_Deference​_and​_Demeanor_. 53. Erving Goffman, “On Face Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction,” in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Random House, 1967). Originally published in Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 19, no. 3 (1955), 213–231. 54. Burns, Erving Goffman, 39. 55. These views on secrecy encourage reflection on Goffman’s own practices of secrecy: sealing of his private papers, objecting to including his photograph on book jackets, and so on. Goffman researchers have often reflected on Goffman’s strong views of privacy, and on the ethics of their own practices, as they conduct research on Goffman’s ideas and biography. See, for example, Yves Winkin, “Erving Goffman: What is a Life? The Uneasy Making of an Intellectual Biography.” in Goffman and Social Organization, ed. Greg Smith (New York, Routledge, 1999), 19–41; Jef Verhoeven, “Backstage with Erving Goffman: The Context of the Interview.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 28, no. 3 (1993), 307–315; and Gary T. Marx and Dmitri N. Shalin, “Marx-Shalin Exchange on the Goffman Project.” In Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives (2008), ed. Dmitri N. Shalin. https:​//​ digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu​/goffman​_archives​/85. 56. Gary D. Jaworski, “Erving Goffman: The Reluctant Apprentice.” Symbolic Interaction 23, no. 3 (2000), 299–308. 57. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 331. 58. Gary D. Jaworski, “Contested Canon: Simmel Scholarship at Columbia and the New School.” The American Sociologist 29, no. 2 (1998), 4–18. 59. Ibid., 11. 60. Salomon makes this argument about the “inner affinity” of Simmel and Schutz, and he characterizes that kinship using Simmel’s notion of “secret of the other,” in his seminar notes to “Simmel and Schutz as Sociologists.” See Albert Salomon, lecture notes to “Simmel and Schutz as Sociologists,” 1962. Salomon Papers. Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv, Universität Konstanz, Mappen Number 29. The phrase “the secret of the other” is the translation that both Albion W. Small and Kurt H. Wolff use for the original “Das Geheimnis des Anderen” and is clearly the only appropriate translation. See Simmel, Soziologie, 348.

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61. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Alvin Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 112 n12. 62. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 352–355. 63. Ibid., 355. 64. Alfred Schutz, Der sinhaffte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Vienna, Julius Springer, 1932), 233–234 n1; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 204 n69. 65. Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 164. 66. Ibid., 204 n69, quoting Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 355. 67. Alfred Schutz, “The Homecomer.” The American Journal of Sociology 5 (1945), 369–376, quotation at 369. Reprinted in Schutz, Collected Papers II, 104. 68. Michael D. Barber, The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (New York: SUNY Press, 2004). 69. Schutz, Collected Papers II, 110. 70. Ibid., 112. 71. Ibid., 114. 72. George Psathas, “Early Goffman and the Analysis of Face-to-Face Interaction in Strategic Interaction,” in The View from Goffman, ed. Jason Ditton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), 52–79. 73. This quotation was brought to my attention in Lester Embree, “Founding Some Practical Disciplines in Schutzian Social Psychology.” Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologie 6, no. 1 (2010), 4. Ebree’s citation, however, is incorrect. The quote from Schutz is in Collected Papers III (1970) not Collected Papers II (1964). The author thanks Professor Michael D. Barber for providing the correct citation. 74. Shils, Torment, 174. 75. John McCumber, “Academic Stealth in the Early Cold War.” Ch. 1 in The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 76. Shils, Torment, 157.

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Strategy

Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (published in 1944) presented an exotic mathematical theory in search of an application. As historians of economic thought Robert J. Leonard and Philip Mirowski have separately shown, it was the military interest in the theory of games, and the willingness of mathematicians working under military patronage to give attention to it, that ultimately gave the theory life.1 During World War II the theory of games found its purpose as an effective tool to help solve wartime problems, such as the accuracy and effectiveness of Allied aerial bombings and anti-submarine warfare. Then after the war it transformed into a powerful intellectual perspective that has shaped policy and thought ever since.2 At the center of this work was the RAND (an acronym for “research and development”) Corporation, a think tank founded in 1948 and originally funded by the Army Air Force. The Air Force had dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thus exclusively controlled, at least for a time, America’s most dangerous weapon. This made them a powerful and well-funded branch of the armed services.3 The “theory of games” that developed at RAND was, above all, a theory of strategy, as von Neumann’s original ideas were worked out while contemplating a game of poker. There are other kinds of games, of course: games of luck and games of sport. But the theory of games that was advanced at RAND and that shaped Cold War intelligence was based on games of strategy. These games involve at least two players in a conflict situation, where one loses and the other wins, and where the outcome is decided by a series of moves based on the rational calculation of advantage.4 And all this takes place in a situation of imperfect knowledge. Thus understood, strategy was both distinctly American and a distinctly RAND approach to intelligence.5 There was no British equivalent of Sherman Kent’s Cold War treatise Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (published in 1949) and even today the role of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee includes assessment, monitoring, and oversight, but not strategy.6 This is not to say that strategic thinking was 77

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absent elsewhere; only that “strategy” had not become the sacred principle it became in the U.S., where it was the lynchpin of a national culture of intelligence.7 Perhaps there was an “elective affinity” between games of strategy and mid-twentieth-century American society. Prominent figures argued so when they noted that the game theory notion of strategy coincided with American views of business and war: bluffing, feigning, and calculation are prominent in both the national pastime of poker and in business practice.8 Goffman adopted and developed the notion at some point in the early 1960s. It is worthy of note that Goffman’s early ideas on games in his paper “Fun in Games” do not employ the language of strategy.9 Nor does Schelling employ the term in his 1956 paper on bargaining; his approach there was tactical not strategic.10 For both, the language of strategy came later and with contact with RAND. Strategy was RAND and RAND was strategy. Schelling eventually became one of the RAND “defense strategists” who assisted the U.S. government in calculating ways of winning the Cold War. He was also key to Goffman’s contact with the RAND world and its way of thinking. A year before his death in 2016, Schelling wrote about Goffman in response to an inquiry from sociologist Dmitri Shalin.11 Schelling reports there that he first met Goffman “when he [Goffman] was at the Institutes of Health in Washington.” He also says that Goffman then gave him reprints of his articles “On Face-Work” (published in 1955) and “Cooling the Mark Out” (published in 1952). This places their meeting in 1955 or 1956 when Goffman was conducting observational research at St. Elizabeths Hospital that would become the basis for the essays in his celebrated and successful book Asylums. Though at the time Schelling had yet to become fully engaged at RAND, he had been invited to spend the summer of 1956 there and he spent a full year at RAND the following year.12 Schelling avows that Goffman had initiated that first meeting, and Schelling later visited with him. They had much to talk about. Goffman had studied von Neumann and Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and so had Schelling.13 They surely discovered that there were, as Burns later wrote, parallels and “even convergence” in the way their ideas were developing.14 A relationship of mutual admiration ensued. Confirmation of this esteem is found in Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict, first published in 1960, which includes unusually laudatory references to Goffman.15 These references are found in the book’s chapter 5, titled “Enforcement, Communication and Strategic Moves,” and in a version of that chapter published two years earlier.16 Schelling called Goffman’s paper “On Face-Work” a “brilliant study in the relation of game theory to gamesmanship and a pioneering illustration of the rich game-theoretic content of formalized behavior structures like etiquette, chivalry, diplomatic practice, and—by implication—the law.” But there is more. All told, Schelling included three

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footnote citations to Goffman’s work, more than he gave to any other author in that chapter, including von Neumann and Morgenstern (2 citations) and Luce and Raifa (also 2 citations). It is not too much to contemplate that his chapter 5 was Schelling’s written response to the conversations he had had with Goffman during their first meeting in Washington, DC. The present chapter explores the results of that meeting and the long Goffman-Schelling relationship that resulted from it. It begins with an examination of Goffman’s article “On Face-Work” as an early foray into game theory, and on the esteem game theorists had for that piece. The chapter then turns to the 1964 Berkeley conference on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” where Goffman’s contact with game theorists was considerably extended. I examine the challenges Goffman faced at that conference and Schelling’s strong support of him during his presentation. This analysis provides important background to the discussion that follows of the area in game theory where the two thinkers were most closely engaged—the issues of enforcement and communication. Here we draw on not only the conference proceedings but also the definitive discussion of these matters in Goffman’s 1969 Strategic Interaction. The chapter draws a refined portrait of their relationship and respective ideas based on a review of conference transcripts, available correspondence, and close textual analysis of their writings. GOFFMAN’S “ON FACE-WORK” AS PROTO-GAME THEORY Goffman’s 1955 “On Face-Work” was subtitled “An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” As such, the paper is typically identified as demonstrating Goffman’s Durkheimian bearings—an analysis of the sacred self and the rituals upholding it. It is indeed that. But the essay is also a study in game theory. Schelling very much admired the paper and said so repeatedly in The Strategy of Conflict. What is it that Schelling saw in the paper? In addition to Goffman’s unique and sometimes surprising observations, “On Face-Work” was an early statement of game theory that pre-dates Schelling’s own 1956 essay on bargaining.17 It creatively incorporates three elements from the emerging game theory of the time: the notion of equilibrium, the concept of move, and the idea of constraint. Although centuries old, the idea of equilibrium became the cornerstone of multiple theoretical approaches between the 1940s and 1960s in America.18 It found its way into Lawrence Henderson’s biochemical and sociological writings, Talcott Parsons’s social systems theory, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, and von Neumann and Morgenstern’s game theory, to name only a few. In game theory, when a mathematical model reaches equilibrium, that

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is considered a “solution” to the problem. Famed game theorist John Nash won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his mathematical solution to the problem of equilibrium in noncooperative games. Goffman too portrayed the ritual order as a kind of equilibrium and “losing face” as a disruption of that balance, creating “ritual disequilibrium’ or disgrace.”19 It follows that actions must be taken to re-establish equilibrium. Goffman called these actions the “corrective process,” which involves all the face-saving practices he identified, such as tactful overlooking, apologies and excuses, joking and deception, and strategic withdrawal. “The ritual code,” he wrote, “itself requires a delicate balance.”20 A sequence of acts takes place during ritual disequilibrium involving at least two participants and two turns. “Sorry” and “No problem” is the paradigmatic interchange. Goffman proposed to call a “move” as “everything conveyed by an actor during a turn at taking action.” He introduced a classification of four classic moves: challenge, offering, compensation to the injured party, and punishment or expatiation for oneself. “These are important moves or phases in the ritual interchange,” he concluded.21 Goffman’s analyses invariably include social compulsion or constraint, whether of moral obligations or norms that guide behavior or the social structural factors that further limit or enable them. The notion of constraint plays a key role in game theory, too. This is obvious through a look at board games like chess, the classic game of X’s and O’s, or the children’s game of rock paper scissors. In each of these two-person games, and following the basic rules of the game, a sequence of moves by one player limits or sets up the ongoing options of the other. A player’s ability to win, then, depends on others’ choices. For rock paper scissors, a simultaneous zero-sum game, the winning and losing happen at the same time with each hand. Goffman works this idea of constraint into his essay; in fact, “face” itself is the constraint. Goffman described the process by which people in encounters willingly suspend conflict and display a “working acceptance” of each other’s definitions of themselves offered into play. As such, Goffman wrote, the “mutual acceptance of lines has an important conservative effect upon encounters.” He continued, “once the person initially presents a line, he and the others tend to build their later responses upon it, and in a sense become stuck with it.”22 Considered within the theory of games, the actor’s choice of face functions as a “move” and constrains the other’s choices during the encounter. This is game theory thinking at its subtlest. Goffman then takes the analysis a step further and subtlety disappears. He wrote that individuals could use their knowledge of this process for self-interested gain. Now face-work becomes an opportunity not only to preserve the self but also achieve advantage. “The purpose of the game,” he proposed, “is to preserve everyone’s line from an inexcusable contradiction, while scoring as many points as possible against one’s adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself.”23 This is

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the same position he would advance more fully in Strategic Interaction more than a decade later. Schelling carried his appreciation for Goffman beyond those citations in The Strategy of Conflict. Two articles by Goffman were included as required reading in his famed 1970 Harvard undergraduate seminar on “Conflict, Coalition and Strategy.”24 Goffman’s “Where the Action Is” was required in the “Contests and Disputes” section of the seminar (for a discussion, see chapter 7), and “Embarrassment and Social Organization” made it into the “Two Party Interactive Models” section. But Schelling was not alone in admiring Goffman’s writings as relevant to game theory. The Yale economist and game theorist Martin Shubik, who had once been Oskar Morgenstern’s assistant at Princeton, also admired the sociologist. In the 1970s, when Shubik was putting together a collection of writings on gaming and the behavioral sciences, he considered including “On Face-Work” as the book’s second chapter (after James C. Coleman’s “In Defense of Games”25). Shubik wrote to Goffman informing him of his intentions to include something by him, and he noted flatteringly that he was “an old admirer of the Goffman style of social analysis.” Besides, he stated, “I need something to act as an antidote to deadly, dull, misinterpreted experiments on 2x2 matrices.”26 Although the edited book was never published, Shubik wrote an introduction to Goffman’s “On Face-Work” should the project have come to fruition. I quote that statement here both for its historical value and for another measure of the esteem in which he was held by some game theorists: What is an article on “face work” doing in a collection of papers on gaming? Erving Goffman’s work is always stimulating and especially he helps those of us with less sociological imaginations to see our studies, teaching interactions or experimental designs in a new light. Face work and the briefing, control and debriefing of a game are undoubtedly linked. How to control for ego effects is an extremely difficult task in virtually any use of gaming. Besides, this article is fun.27

We may now return to Schelling’s report on their first meeting. In addition to the earlier points already mentioned, Schelling also wrote, “I’ve often remarked that if there were a Nobel Prize for sociology and/or social psychology, he’d deserve to be the first one considered.” This was not just a throw-away line or false praise. Schelling had won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for, as the prize statement reads, “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”28 Schelling certainly thought that Goffman had achieved the same result in sociology and was also worthy of the award.

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THE 1964 CONFERENCE ON “STRATEGIC INTERACTION AND CONFLICT” The deep connection between Goffman and Schelling is documented in the published transactions of the three-day, invitation-only conference in 1964 on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” held under the auspices of Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, then directed by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. Goffman was a member of the conference Planning Committee and he attended and actively participated in discussions during the three days. Even the conference title bears his mark: Goffman had coined the term “strategic interaction.” It is not widely known or accepted that Goffman coined “strategic interaction.” Leading scholars today still question the claim. Some have speculated that perhaps Schelling had coined the term. At present, there seems to be no evidence for this hypothesis. The only time Schelling employed the term in his published works is when he cited his own original contribution that he presented at the 1964 conference and included in its transactions.29 Further, when Schelling presented his approach to sociologists at a summer 1964 meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, he referred to it simply as “strategic analysis.”30 But at least one of Goffman’s contemporaries, Kathleen Archibald, credited Goffman with it in the published transactions of the conference. There Archibald acknowledged his contribution when she wrote in the introduction, “In using Erving Goffman’s term ‘strategic interaction’ as a label for the conference, we hoped to designate a particular network of concepts of interest to several disciplines.”31 But the answer to this ongoing question of authorship is ultimately provided by Goffman himself. He divided up the credit in this way: Schelling identified the “intelligible area in its own right” and he [Goffman] gave it a “label.”32 Thus, Goffman played the equivalent role that William James played in the founding of the philosophical perspective of pragmatism. Charles Sanders Peirce created the field, and James, who coined the term “pragmatism,” gave it a name.33 The “Strategic Interaction and Conflict” conference assembled leading and emerging figures in strategic and conflict studies. As background to our discussion of the conference, it is instructive to review the players. Here are some of the main characters: Like Goffman, Kathleen Archibald was a Canadian and was one of the organizers of the conference, this in her capacity as coordinator in Lipset’s Institute of International Studies; and she edited the transactions of the conference. It is she who confirmed that “strategic interaction” was Goffman’s term. Soon after the conference, Archibald took

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her PhD in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and would serve for years as a staffer at the RAND Corporation and in various capacities at several West Coast American and Canadian universities.34 In his Strategic Interaction, Goffman acknowledged Archibald’s helpful comments on a draft of the book’s first chapter and said he “incorporated [those comments] freely into the text without acknowledgement.”35 Frederick Balderston hailed from a Quaker family and was a conscientious objector during World War II, where he served as a volunteer American Field Service ambulance driver and lieutenant attached to the British Army. He earned his PhD in Economics at Princeton University in 1953, the same year that Goffman took his doctorate at Chicago. A professor at Berkeley at the time of the conference, Balderston was part of the group of scholars there, including Goffman, called the “Center for Integration of Social Science Theory.”36 So, Balderston and Goffman knew each other before the conference. Balderston served as chairman of the session in which Goffman led the discussion. One of Kurt Lewin’s star students in experimental psychology who followed him to MIT, Alex Bavelas took his PhD in 1948. At the time of the conference, he was a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Bavelas’s work on the effects of communication patterns on group stability was important to Schelling’s own solution to the stability problem.37 Before she became a leading feminist sociologist,38 Jessie Bernard was making her mark as a conflict theorist and advocate of game-theoretic approaches in sociology.39 Of all the conference participants, she was perhaps closest to Goffman in her theoretical bearings, as she rooted her views on conflict in the works of Robert Park, with whom she had studied in the 1920s. Where Bernard diverged from Goffman was in her enthusiasm for a version of game theory in the social sciences that featured mathematical game-theoretic solutions. Bernard was an active participant in the sessions as discussant. She and Kathleen Archibald were the only women on the conference roster.40 Morton Deutsch was a Columbia University social psychologist whose books, including Preventing World War III and The Resolution of Conflict, sealed his reputation as an expert on conflict resolution.41 This expertise became especially relevant when game theory expanded beyond the zero-sum framework of its founders and was turned into a method of arriving at resolutions of conflict. During the war, he had served in the Army Air Force and flew 30 missions as a navigator over Nazi-occupied Europe.42 In the late 1950s, Schelling and Deutsch each made Swiftian “modest proposals” on how to reduce the “reciprocal fear of surprise [nuclear] attack.” Schelling proposed that the U.S. and Soviets exchange kindergarten children and Deutsch proposed that

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American and Soviet government leaders send their offspring to each other’s countries in a cultural exchange program.43 It was reasoned that knowing that an attack on one’s enemy was also an attack on one’s kin and countrymen would greatly reduce the likelihood of surprise attack. Neither proposal was implemented. By the time of the conference in 1964, Daniel Ellsberg had already served as Marine platoon leader, RAND strategic analyst, and member of the State Department under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He was thirty-three years old and a man of the establishment. His years with the government, however, included time learning discomfiting realities about not only the Vietnam War but also the command and control of America’s nuclear weapons.44 To whom could he disclose these distressing details and how? Only a handful of years after the conference, Ellsberg began copying every document in his Top Secret safe at RAND, including seven thousand pages of a study on official decisions made during the Vietnam War. He would leak those pages, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, thereby becoming the most famous whistleblower of the era. Ellsberg was a key discussant, and critic, of Goffman’s contribution to the conference. William Gamson, the noted political sociologist and author of The Strategy of Social Protest45 attended the conference and set down his recollections for Dmitri Shalin.46 “There were about 20 people on the panel,” Gamson recalled, “sitting around the table, making presentations, responding.” With all that star power and gravitas in the room, it was an intimidating conference. Still, Gamson remembered Goffman’s “fearlessness” and one-upmanship during the meeting, taking on the likes of nuclear war strategist Wohlstetter. “He took on the RAND Corporation people,” Gamson reported, “and was challenging them.” While he didn’t favor Goffman’s readiness to employ ad hominem critiques, Gamson affirmed that Goffman was “challenging people who ought to have been challenged.” The great Hungarian-born American economist and game theorist, John C. Harsanyi attended the conference. He was then teaching at Berkeley after a biopic-worthy personal journey from Budapest to Austria to Australia and finally to the United States. Like Schelling, he would win the Nobel Prize (1994) in Economics. Harsanyi shared his Nobel Prize with John Nash and his co-author Reinhardt Selten, all of whom made important contributions to the problem of equilibrium in noncooperative games. A mathematical psychologist, Anatol Rapoport published Fights, Games and Debates in 1960 and with it a reformulation of game theory that moved beyond the views of von Neumann and Morgenstern. In place

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of their assumption of rationality and emphasis on noncooperative zero-sum solutions, Rapoport introduced ethical positions such as the “assumption of similarity” and “assurance of understanding.”47 A pacifist and socialist in political convictions, he nevertheless worked on research for RAND and on U.S. Air Force contracts through his association with the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan.48 Martin Shubik was a Yale economist and game theorist who studied with Oskar Morgenstern at Princeton (where he took a PhD in 1953) and with von Neumann, who was at the Institute for Advanced Study, also in Princeton, NJ. Shubik famously resided in the same dormitory suite as game theory legends John Nash and Lloyd Shapley. Like so many of the other conference participants, Shubik was a RAND consultant who employed game theory to answer questions of military and defense strategy. One of the original nuclear strategists at RAND, Albert Wohlstetter was largely responsible for sweeping away the Eisenhower-era views on nuclear deterrence, such as the principle of “massive retaliation,” and clearing the way for the emerging doctrines of “limited war” and “second strike” capabilities.49 For these contributions, a year after the conference, he received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the first of two times he would receive this honor. Wohlstetter was one of the RAND people that Gamson recalled Goffman challenging at the conference. GOFFMAN AS SORCERER’S APPRENTICE While Goffman may have been fearless, as Gamson recalled, he was also vulnerable. His own contribution to the conference produced a pointed discussion and appears to have been cut short. This debate was not during the main part of the conference, which consisted of a series of invited and original papers by select figures—such as Deutsch, Harsanyi, Rapoport, and Schelling—along with general discussion of those papers. Rather, Goffman’s central contribution was in the second part of the conference where speakers introduced pre-selected topics followed by an open discussion of those topics. The five discussion topics included such areas as “The Concept of Rationality” (introduced by Harsanyi) and “The Vocabulary of Basic Moves” (introduced by Schelling).50 Goffman introduced the discussion of “Communication and Enforcement Systems” in the conference’s fifth and final session. The four other introductions were brief and went forward without incident. Indeed, Schelling admitted during his introduction to the topic of “The Vocabulary of Basic Moves” that “I haven’t prepared anything.”51 In contrast, Goffman

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prepared what amounted to a full paper, and session chairman Balderston in his introductory remarks did not fail to mention this fact: “Erving Goffman is going to talk about communication and enforcement systems. His comments will be more extensive than our other introductions—he almost has a paper,” Balderston remarked.52 Thus, at the very beginning of the session Goffman was introduced as a person who had skirted the conference rules. Balderston was a year younger than Goffman, but he took his chairmanship duties very seriously. Goffman began his presentation by stating that his interest in “strategic interaction” was based on the opportunity it provided to gain “analytical coherence” in different fields of study, especially those fields pertaining to the study of interaction and communication. He identified Park and Burgess as the founding figures of these topics in sociology. Their textbook Introduction to the Science of Society introduced generations of students to the study of those subjects.53 Goffman implied in his presentation that there had been, over the years, something of a conceptual muddle around these terms. For Goffman, game theory, and especially Schelling’s version of it, provided an opportunity to further clarify these concepts. Continuing his talk, Goffman identified four sub-areas in sociology involving communication. Goffman had been working on all these topics since his graduate school years. The first is the study of gatherings or ongoing and face-to-face interaction. Goffman said that in this area of study the examination of communication is secondary to an interest in examining the moral order of a society. The second area is the study of “intelligence systems.” This topic Goffman addressed in the most general terms and appeared to have been a subject to which he anticipated contributing. An example would be his analysis in Strategic Interaction of the rationalization of intelligence agencies. Third is the study of “interpersonal activity,” which examines the structural factors that govern the motivations of individuals. This area Goffman stated was closest to game theory and includes the study of relationships, face, and ritual equilibrium—all topics that were analyzed in Goffman’s “On Face-Work.” The fourth area of study that involved communication, Goffman said, “I propose to ‘dub’ ‘strategic interaction.’” Goffman viewed strategic interaction within the context of communication because he thought it helped to distinguish it analytically from the other three sub-areas of study.54 Among the many analytical features of strategic interaction that Goffman discussed during his presentation, one passed unremarked by his fellow conferees and another generated considerable controversy. For Goffman, a key feature of “strategic interaction” was the interdependence of fate of the players. While an organic system is characterized by the interdependence of species, and the market system involves an interdependence of supply and demand, the system of strategic interaction is

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characterized by what Goffman called “massive interdependence.”55 “One’s whole situation can be radically transformed by the action of the other,” he said. With the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 fresh in memory, this element of Goffman’s vision of the world was noncontroversial and passed unremarked. The very ordinariness of this idea may disclose more than an underlying assumption of game theory; it may also reveal a common feature of the worldview of all the conference participants: a sense of existential vulnerability. Where Goffman ran into controversy was in his attempted elucidation of the differences among words, deeds, and strategic moves. This part of the presentation was more pedantic than profound. “A move is neither action nor communication,” Goffman asserted. “A faked move is not communication,” he added. “Weighted words constitute a move but are not yet communication in my sense,” he continued. For the defense intellectuals in the room, these and other similar pronouncements were tantamount to a discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In stark contrast to the fatefulness of the world he portrayed, Goffman was debating matters of questionable practical value and that held little or no apparent intellectual consequence. In the event, disagreements started with Ellsberg and continued with many others in the room, including Bavelas, Deutsch, Harsanyi, and Shubik. Goffman continued against all arguments. In his interaction with his fellow conference participants, and in the theoretical position he advocated during his remarks, Goffman was taking the stance of a noncooperative game theorist. Indeed, he proposed that analysts should begin “with pure strategy between implacable, ungovernable, dishonest enemies, and work back.”56 Ellsberg asked simply—why?—and he questioned the implications of Goffman’s position: Ellsberg: [Your language] . . . seems to me to be destroying—or discouraging one from making—very important analogies, which are really functional equivalents between various kinds of activities. Goffman: Give me an example? Ellsberg: Yes. It seems as though you are looking only at pure conflict situations in which one party has no prior reason to imagine that the other one has any reason to be truthful or informative. You seem to be ignoring the possibility, even in a conflict situation, of a desire for coordination, for truth-telling . . . [After more back and forth, Ellsberg continued . . . ]. Focussing attention on possibilities or even alerting—for example the words “Look out!” by an unknown speaker in your vicinity are a signal to ready yourself to begin looking out. More specifically, “Look over there!” Just turn your eyes from here to there and see what you can see. A lion, isn’t it?

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Goffman: But this is the classic theme in western stories. The person who wants to take a shot at you says, “Look, there’s something behind you.” Ellsberg: But you’re not always at high noon on the street of a western town.57

Finally, even session chairman Balderston expressed exasperation: he gave Goffman the sobriquet sorcerer’s “apprentice” and requested that sorcerer Schelling “straighten [him] out.” Ever the supporter, Schelling defended Goffman saying, “I am very sympathetic to Erv’s style of sorcery.”58 Nevertheless, the enforcement system of the conference—the privilege of the chairperson to direct the proceedings—worked as it was designed and just as Goffman theorized. Balderston asked Goffman to finish, a “move” that ended his presentation and initiated an informative and lively discussion.59 In the discussion that followed, the dialogue returned to the issues of communication, but unburdened by the pedantic distinctions Goffman was attempting to make. How is it best to optimize communication between opposing parties? What is the role of secrecy in strategic games? Is there such a thing as a “secret move?’ A sense of this dialogue follows: Schelling: If I know there’s a burglar downstairs, and I want to be sure I don’t get in a gun fight, I may, or my wife may tell me to, throw my gun out the window so the burglar won’t see any gun. That is not a strategic move designed to keep the burglar out or to let him in. It is designed to reduce the strategies available. But if I throw the gun downstairs or show him the gun in my hand, this is designed to influence him. Maybe we can distinguish things that don’t yet change the information state but eventually will. If I load my gun now, and later on he finds out it is loaded, that will influence him. But you don’t load a gun in a dark room to influence him, but because the act of loading changes the strategies available to you. Goffman: What would you call those uncommunicated acts? Schelling: Let’s call them acts that do not change the state of information. Maybe the word “communication” should be ruled out because people have strong desires about how to use it, but there is such a thing as . . . Wohlstetter: Secret acts. Goffman: But not secret moves. Schelling: There’s a difference between an act that you deliberately make secret and one that is inherently secret. Goffman: There can’t be a secret move then? Schelling: There cannot be a totally strategic move, as I’ve used the term, unless it is intended to be non-secret to somebody . . .

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As this exchange reveals, Goffman remained an active participant in the discussion. But with his formal presentation ended, a question remains: Was there more in his prepared remarks than is found in the conference transactions? This we cannot know for sure at present because a copy of the actual presentation is not now available. However, a comparison of the conference transcript with the published book allows us to say with certainty that Goffman’s conference presentation was an early version of the eponymous second chapter of his book Strategic Interaction. Both the conference presentation and book engage game theory through the fictional character of “Harry,” Goffman’s hapless foil who faces lions, spears, and enemy airplanes in a series of game-theoretic illustrations of “implacable” foes. Further, both the conference presentation and book expound on themes of interaction, communication, and enforcement. Moreover, we know that only a year after the conference, Goffman had made available a document to at least one of his students, Marvin B. Scott. Scott noted, in the introduction to his dissertation on the social organization of horse racing, and later in the book based on it, that he relied on Goffman’s unpublished manuscript, “Strategic Interaction and Communication, 1965,” which Scott described as a “greatly expanded and revised” version of some of Schelling’s ideas in The Strategy of Conflict.60 This was certainly a version of the paper that Goffman had spoken from in his remarks at the 1964 conference and that would later be turned into the “Strategic Interaction” chapter. Burns was perhaps right when he wrote of Strategic Interaction that the last “twenty or thirty pages of the book” contained its most vital contribution.61 In those pages are found Goffman’s ideas on enforcement and communication, ideas that go far beyond those presented at the 1964 conference. SCHELLING AND GOFFMAN ON ENFORCEMENT The themes of communication and enforcement are central to Schelling’s reorientation of game theory as presented in the essays that made up The Strategy of Conflict. He sought to overcome the limitations of the pioneering book by von Neumann and Morgenstern, whose work came to be associated with two-person noncooperative zero-sum games. In poker, chess, and other games of strategy on a board and in life, there is a winner and loser. For Schelling, the complexity of cases he wished to deal with were not encompassed by that narrow framework. He was interested in nonzero-sum games involved in “wars and threats of war, strikes, negotiations, criminal deterrence, class war, race war, price war, and blackmail; maneuvering in a bureaucracy or in a traffic jam; and the coercion of one’s own children.”62 He chose the term “mixed-motive games” to represent this wider area of cases

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where people are engaged in some mixture of both conflict and cooperation. Key “moves” in these games included “threats” and “promises,” each a form of commitment to a particular course of action. But threats are not threats until they are communicated, and words are “mere words” unless they are backed up by some enforcement. Communication and enforcement, therefore, are necessary for credible commitments. Schelling posited the analytical and real significance of “enforcement schemes,” social arrangements that provide some outside authority to enforce compliance and allow for the detection of noncompliance. For example, the effectiveness of nuclear arms control and disarmament hinges on the ability to apply effective enforcement agreements. But he admitted a wide range of other arrangements that may serve the same function. He conceded that “trust” is a possible basis for producing compliance between partners, but not one that should be taken for granted. Even in the absence of enforceable agreement, Schelling proposed, parties may create circumstances that produce jeopardy for noncompliance and thus increase the probability of conformity, thereby acting as a sort of enforcement “in effect.” As examples he cites tearing a treasure map in half, allowing one partner to carry the gun and the other ammunition, holding meetings in public where neither side can escape, and the taking and exchange of hostages. Here Schelling tendered, as mentioned earlier, his Swiftian “modest proposal” for how to ensure that the U.S. and Soviets, despite their mutual hatred and distrust, would not revert to a surprise nuclear attack: he suggests the two countries trade kindergarten children. While he ultimately decided that this proposal was unworkable, he noted that in many cases “a unilateral promise is better than none.”63 It must be admitted that Schelling’s analysis of enforcement falls short. He recognized the importance of the subject but did not systematically analyze the types or functions of various enforcement schemes. Nor did he expound on the multiple meanings or kinds of enforcement. A measure of how much Schelling missed the mark is Robert Ayson’s important study of Schelling’s ideas on “strategy as social science”: it has only one reference to enforcement in its index.64 This is the topic, however, that Goffman introduced at the 1964 conference, and he presented a masterful discussion of enforcement in the final sections of Strategic Interaction. At the 1964 conference, Goffman’s presentation tied the notion of enforcement to Schelling’s version of game theory and its concept of official “enforcement schemes.” Here is Goffman in a typical statement from the conference transactions: “I think a basic question that Schelling’s work poses for us is to ask why anybody should give any weight whatsoever to what anybody ever says—and the simplest answer is that an enforcement system transforms meaningless words into acts for which the system makes you responsible.”65 One of the few concrete examples he offered is that of

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raising one’s hand in an auction house, a setting that Goffman knew well. In Strategic Interaction, however, these tethers were removed. While the text still engaged with Schelling’s ideas, it now presented enforcement in a much broader scope. Indeed, that book’s eponymous chapter masterfully surveys the grand sweep of constraints on human social interaction. The essay moves along several dimensions—nature and culture, tight and loose games, external and internal enforcement—and results in a complex yet comprehensive statement on the moral order of mid-twentieth century American society.66 Goffman’s analysis of enforcement begins with a discussion of nature as a source of constraint on human behavior.67 Here Goffman hints at classical game theory, which includes an analysis of “games against nature,” to point out that nature itself—a flood, a forest fire, a terminal diagnosis—may set the conditions and the options within which one must act. Even inaction before nature, Goffman reminded, is in effect a move in a game, as it represents a commitment to a course of action that will carry real life or death consequences. Such games Goffman called “tight games,” as the constraints are strong and the consequences grave and often inescapable.68 Goffman’s view of nature is revealed in his word choice: he called it “implacable nature,” in the sense that nature is determined and unsparing. Society, however, loosens games. This is so even when enforcement is vested in a group of officials such as in Schelling’s “enforcement schemes.” While admitting that the guards and judges of social institutions administer a “socially organized system of sanctions,” Goffman nevertheless emphasized the possibilities and multiple opportunities for misperception, cheating, bribery, and influence—for the ways in which people subvert their enforcers. Opportunities abound for persons in lowly and lofty social positions. Imagine a U.S. president who signals to a long-standing enemy nation that he invites the enemy to steal information from and damage the claims of a political rival. Such a president could escape negative sanctions simply by claiming the words were just a joke. Goffman foresaw how an act of treason can be “re-keyed” into little more than a quip. Indeed, Goffman’s own writings prior to Strategic Interaction provide added weight to this claim. Those writings, from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to Stigma and Asylums—all discuss ways of “bypassing, subverting, or challenging the enforcement system.”69 Games are loosened even more when not guards or judges but players themselves are in charge of enforcement within the context of broad compelling norms. Here Goffman turned the analysis back to the interaction order: “From institutional settings, where specialized ready agencies can be called upon to give weight to words, we can turn to less formal situations, situations in which the participants themselves must provide the enforcement.” In contrast to Schelling, and indeed to his own presentation at the 1964 conference,

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Goffman now affirmed the view that “internalized standards constitute the chief enforcement system for communication in society.” Such standards render the person a “kind of moral commitment mechanism.”70 Here, Goffman addressed a wide range of cultural standards that impose a normative basis for conduct, standards such as trust, sportsmanship, fair play, and, as Ellsberg reminded him, of truth-telling. These cultural standards provide a ground for constraint where the principal enforcer is the person himself or herself. A sociologist who was keenly aware of people’s secrets and lies, Goffman nevertheless understood the importance of truth-telling for social interaction. He contrasted the lay version of truth-telling with his own sociological view. In the lay version, people believe that if a person is addressing you while directly looking you in the eyes, that person is likely telling you the truth. A person’s eyes, in this view, provide a “window to a room that is lit from within by emotional expression.”71 While Goffman considered this belief “misguided,” he nevertheless understood it to be widespread. He related a story about U.S. President Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, believing Soviet Premier Khrushchev and his advisors because their expressive behavior was indicative that their statements were “self-believed.” In contrast to this lay view, Goffman’s sociological approach examined virtue within the context of community and society. “When members of a community are socialized into the use of speech,” Goffman wrote, “they are also socialized into the importance of truth-telling and being reputed as truth-tellers.” For Goffman, the significance of truth-telling lies not in looking within, into someone’s eyes, but without. Who will play, work, live, love, or follow us if we cannot be relied on to give our word and keep it? Stated differently, who will give weight to our words? Truth as a virtue, in this sociological view, is based on “organizational necessity” and with the end of truth-telling so goes social order.72 But Goffman did not end his survey with the ways in which broad cultural norms provide internalized constraints on conduct. He continued with an examination of enforcement at the level of face-to-face interaction. Here Goffman discussed a different set of touchstones, including standards of taste, mutual respect, sympathy, and tact. His analysis shows that the behavioral constraints imposed by broad cultural standards are not simply additive to the “good manners” expected in polite informal face-to-face conversation; they may conflict with each other. For example, in formal settings truth-telling may be construed as a primary value, whereas in informal interaction tact and truth are often at odds. Goffman made these points in the most general way, but one could identify many examples: Face-to-face interaction is an arena of conduct . . . and conduct is judged first off not in regard to sincerity and candor, but “suitability.” Certain forms of

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prevarication and insincerity will certainly be offensive, but also there will be many situations where a sincere expression of feelings and a candid statement of opinions will be defined as quite unnecessary if not actually offensive. Other considerations will often dominate, such as a desire to show sympathy and tact, whatever else one is feeling.73

In summation: We live in a world of constraints, some natural and others social or human made. Though the constraints of nature may be rigid and unforgiving, social institutions and conventions “loosen” enforcement to permit a degree of relative freedom. People are ever creative at devising means of escape from their judges and jailers. The constraints of the moral order place limits on those games. Cultural norms of “fair game” and truth-telling, for example, provide a kind of enforcement that people place on themselves, rules that form the ground of social order at the interactional level. Moreover, the etiquette of polite conversation instills additional conventions, different from broader cultural norms but no less compelling. In the end, there is also the constraint of simple utility—the chance of being discovered as noncompliant is sufficient to motivate falling in line. Goffman does here for game theory what Durkheim in the Division of Labor in Society did for the utilitarian thinking of his day: he revealed the deep moral community underlying social interaction, and he uncovered the non-game-like elements of games. While “enforcement schemes” are external and formal, standards of moral conduct provide a form of enforcement that is deeply hidden; they are internalized and enacted. Game theory may treat norms as a “regrettable limitation,” Goffman wrote, but for the sociologist, the normative limitations on pure gaming “may be a matter of chief interest.”74 In this light, “Strategic Interaction” may be seen as Goffman’s private message to Schelling, and public declaration to all, that he was no sorcerers “apprentice.” Just as Durkheim did for Spencer so Goffman did for Schelling. He presented a sociological critique of neo-rationalist thinking, as sociologist Randall Collins75 has observed, and was standing up for himself and for his identity as a sociologist. Goffman theorized this notion of standing one’s ground in “Strategic Interaction” when he wrote that a response to an offense may have nothing to do with strategy or self-interest, or even with successful enforcement; the “first need” of an offended party, Goffman wrote, “may be to stand up and be counted”—one’s personal honor demands such a response.76 Through its expansive view of enforcement and its critical analysis of the limitations of game-theory in light of sociological wisdom, Goffman stood up as the formidable sociologist that he was.

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POSTSCRIPT What Goffman thought about Strategic Interaction we do not know. The lack of access to Goffman’s personal papers makes it impossible to answer this question. Was he pleased with the book? Was he happy to move on to other projects? Consider possessing a list of people to whom he sent a copy of the book and in what spirit he sent it? We do not have such a list. We do know, however, of one person to whom the book was sent: J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The communication to and from Hoover was obtained by sociologist Mike Keen through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as part of the research for his book, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology.77 The results of his FOIA request are now available in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library. A pathbreaking study, both through its methods (extensive research via FOIA) and content, Keen’s book does not include a chapter on Goffman. This is because the results of the FOIA request on Goffman were exceedingly sparse. They do, however, include a letter from Marilyn Sale, then editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, which published Goffman’s book.78 The letter, dated January 15, 1970, reads: Dear Mr. Hoover, We are sending to you, under separate cover, a copy of Erving Goffman’s Strategic Interaction, which we will publish shortly, and which we believe might be of interest to you and your staff. In this book, Professor Goffman uses espionage and police literature to show how men elicit, cover, and reveal information in game-like interaction. Yours sincerely, Marilyn Sale Editor

The January 23 response from Hoover’s office reported, “I have not yet received this book, but I am looking forward to doing so.” Further, the FBI’s copy of Hoover’s return letter adds an internal FBI office note that stated that the Bureau’s files “reveal nothing identifiable regarding Miss Sale or Professor Goffman, based on information available.” In other words, neither was on an FBI list of subversives. Nor was there information on file on the term “strategic interaction.”79

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Had Goffman authorized this prepublication announcement to the FBI? Did he think that the analyses in Strategic Interaction carried practical significance for crime fighting? Or was it a lark, a piece of Goffmanian mischief-making, and a joke done for his and others’ amusement? We may never know. NOTES 1. See, for example, Robert J. Leonard, “Creating a Context for Game Theory,” in Toward a History of Game Theory, ed. E. Roy Weintraub (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 29–76, and Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Philip Mirowski, “What were von Neumann and Morgenstern Trying to Accomplish?” in Toward a History of Game Theory, ed. Weintraub, 113–147. 2. S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); S.M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3. On the relation between the Air Force and RAND, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983); David R. Jardini, Thinking Through the Cold War: RAND, National Security and Domestic Policy, 1945–1975 (Digital Services LLC, Kindle edition, 2013); and Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 186–187. A celebration of the relationship and legacy is found in the golden jubilee volume 50th Project Air Force: 1946–1996 (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1996), https:​//​apps​.dtic​.mil​/sti​/citations​/ADA317859. 4. This characterization comes from the head of RAND’s math division, John D. Williams, in his popular treatise The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy (New York: Dover, 1986). Titled in the seventeenth-century style of The Compleat Angler (1676), Williams’s book, like its namesake, was written after a brutal war. Williams was one of the mathematicians working on the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of World War II. 5. Historian David MacIsaac referred to the view of some historians that “the distinctly American concept of strategic bombing,” during World War II, and especially the emphasis on “precision bombing,” was a direct extension of American war experience in the country’s Revolutionary War. Like MacIsaac, however, I view the emphasis on strategy as an effort to reduce questions of conflict to scientific analysis; and in the case of Cold War strategic thinking the reduction of those questions to mathematical analysis specifically at the RAND Corporation. See David MacIsaac, “General Introduction,” in Vol. 1, The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (New York: Garland Press, 1976), viii-ix.

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6. See “Joint Intelligence Committee” on the UK government website: https:​//​www​ .gov​.uk​/government​/groups​/joint​-intelligence​-committee 7. Simon Ball, Philipp Gassert, Andreas Gestrich, and Sonke Neitzel, Cultures of Intelligence in the Era of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 8. See Oskar Morgenstern, “The Cold War is Cold Poker” The New York Times Magazine, (February 5, 1961), 14; John McDonald, Strategy in Poker, Business and War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). Originally published in 1950. 9. Erving Goffman, “Fun in Games,” in Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 17–81. 10. Thomas Schelling, “An Essay on Bargaining,” The American Economic Review 46, no. 3 (1956), 281–306. 11. Schelling, Thomas. “If There Were a Nobel Prize for Sociology and/or Social Psychology, Goffman Would Deserve to Be the First One Considered,” in Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (2015), 1–2. https:​ //​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu​/goffman​_archives​/97. 12. Robert Dodge, The Strategist: The Life and Times of Thomas Schelling (Hollis, NH: Hollis Publishing, 2006), 47. 13. Schelling’s biographer reports that Schelling estimated he spent “100 hours reading and rereading” von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book. See Dodge, The Strategist, 48. 14. Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 63. 15. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 115–16n20, 128n8, and 149n22. 16. Thomas Schelling, “The Strategy of Conflict: Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (September 1958), 203–264. 17. Schelling, “An Essay on Bargaining.” 18. Till Düppe, “Equilibrium: History of the Concept.” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (London: Elsevier, 2015), 912–917. 19. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Random House, 1967), 19. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. Ibid., 11–12. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Thomas Schelling, Reading List, “Conflict, Coalition and Strategy.” (Fall 1970). https:​//​www​.irwincollier​.com​/harvard​-reading​-list​-and​-final​-exam​-for​-course​ -conflict​-coalition​-and​-strategy​-schelling​-1970​/. 25. James S. Coleman, “Introduction: In Defense of Games.” American Behavioral Scientist 10, no. 22 (1966), 3–4. 26. Martin Shubik to Erving Goffman, February 19, 1970. Martin Shubik Papers, Readings in Game Theory, (1970–1978 and undated), Box 87–88. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 27. Martin Shubik, [Handwritten note on Goffman’s “On-Face-Work”]. Martin Shubik Papers, Readings in Game Theory, (1970–1978 and undated), Box 87–88. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Goffman

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references the four-person game “So Long Sucker,” created by Shubik and others, in Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 572 n3. 28. Schelling’s “prize motivation” is from the Nobel Prize website. https:​//​www​ .nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/economic​-sciences​/2005​/schelling​/facts​/. 29. Thomas C. Schelling, “Uncertainty, Brinkmanship, and the Game of ‘Chicken,’” in Strategic Interaction and Conflict: Original Papers and Discussion, ed. Kathleen Archibald (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1966), 74–87. 30. Thomas C. Schelling, “Strategic Analysis and Social Problems,” Social Problems 12, no. 4 (1965), 369–379. 31. Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, v. 32. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 100 n24. 33. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 347–351. 34. Kathleen Archibald, “The Utilization of Social Research and Policy Analysis.” PhD diss., Washington University, 1968. 35. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 3. 36. Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962), ix-x. 37. Alex Bavelas, “Communication Pattern in Task-Oriented Groups.” In Group Dynamics, ed. Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander (Evanston, IL: Paterson, 1953), 443–506; Robert Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as Social Science (New York: Frank Cass, 2004), 174–175. 38. Robert C. Bannister, Jessie Bernard: The Making of a Feminist (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 39. Jessie Bernard, “The Theory of Games of Strategy as a Modern Sociology of Conflict.” American Journal of Sociology 59 (1954), 411–424. 40. In his survey of sociology and game theory, Richard Swedberg identified Jessie Bernard as a “pioneer” in the field and Goffman as someone who had offered only “scattered but lively discussions” of game theory in his works. See Richard Swedberg, “Sociology and Game Theory: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives.” Theory and Society 30 (2001), 315. 41. Quincy Wright, William M. Evan, and Morton Deutsch, (eds). Preventing World War III: Some Proposals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962); Morton Deutsch, The Resolution of Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). 42. Sam Roberts, “Morton Deutsch, Expert on Conflict Resolution, Dies at 97,” The New York Times (March 21, 2017), B15. 43. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 136; Deutsch et al., Preventing World War III, 83–86. 44. Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). 45. William Gamson, “A Theory of Coalition Formation.” American Sociological Review 26 (1961), 373–382; William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (New York: Dorsey, 1975).

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46. William Gamson, “A Stranger Determined to Remain One,” in Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (2009), 1–23. https:​//​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu​/goffman​_archives​/25 47. Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). 48. Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made, 176–180. 49. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), chapter 6. 50. For a discussion of the conversation that took place during the session on “The Concept of Rationality,” see Paul Erickson, et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–26. 51. Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, 157. 52. Ibid., 198. 53. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921). 54. Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, 200. 55. Goffman’s phrase “massive interdependence” offered an unfortunate echo of John Foster Dulles’s principle of “massive retaliation,” a cornerstone of the Eisenhower-era nuclear strategy that had been rejected by the defense intellectuals attending the 1964 conference. Goffman changes the phrase to “full interdependence” in Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 136. 56. Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, 212. 57. Ibid., 209–210. 58. Ibid., 213. 59. Balderston’s precise words were, “Can we get Erving to make a magnificent peroration and then have a discussion?” Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, 208. 60. Marvin B. Scott, “The Social Organization of Horse Racing.” PhD diss., University of California, 1966, 3; Marvin B. Scott, The Racing Game (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), 3 n5. 61. Burns, Erving Goffman, 59. 62. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 83. 63. Ibid., 136. 64. Robert Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as Social Science (New York: Frank Cass, 2004). 65. Archibald, Strategic Interaction and Conflict, 203. 66. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 86–145. 67. Ibid., 89–91. 68. Ibid., 119. 69. Ibid., 118. 70. Ibid., 127. 71. Ibid., 128. 72. Ibid., 130. 73. Ibid., 134. 74. Ibid., 114.

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75. Randall Collins, Sociology Since Midcentury: Essays in Theory Cumulation (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 219–254. 76. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 134. 77. Mike Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). 78. Marilyn Sale. Letter to J. Edgar Hoover (January 15, 1970). Mike Keen Papers, Box 7, Folder 7, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 79. J. Edgar Hoover, Letter to Miss Marilyn Sale (January 3, 1970). Mike Keen Papers, Box 7, Folder 7, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Chapter 4

Spies

Goffman stands alone among postwar sociologists for his abiding interest in spies, espionage, and intelligence systems more generally. He read and often cited the vast popular and scholarly spy literature that appeared after World War II and during the Cold War. He read spy novels, of course; but he favored first-person accounts by intelligence officers and agents in the field to advance and illustrate his ideas.1 And he did this not only in one or two publications but throughout his career. Only his friend Harold Wilensky, in his book Organizational Intelligence, paralleled Goffman’s interest.2 Goffman’s steadfast interest in spies, like his enthusiastic preoccupation with secrecy and loyalty, invites examination. What were the wellsprings of this unusual interest in spies and espionage and what lessons did he draw from this career-long scrutiny? Why did he spend so much time examining a world with which he presumably had no direct experience? Unlike most of his closest fellow students at Chicago, Goffman had not served in the armed forces or military intelligence during World War II; indeed, he may have actively avoided such service.3 According to the testimony of at least one friend, he even dodged talking about the war.4 The world around him, however, was not so reticent. In the immediate post-World War II period and into the Cold War era when Goffman was first writing, American and British popular culture were awash with spy thrillers in book, magazine, television, and film formats. In 1953, former British naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming introduced his character James Bond in his spy novel Casino Royale, followed by a quick succession of seven other novels in the 1950s alone; there followed a Bond movie franchise beginning in the early 1960s. Other spy novels followed, notably former British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) operative Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (published in 1958), American novelist Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (published in 1959), former SIS agent John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (published in 1963), and countless pulp fiction imitators. American television continued the fascination with the genre in such shows as The 101

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Avengers (1961–1969), Get Smart (1961–1969), The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964–1968), and I Spy (1965–1968). Though espionage storylines in British and American film dropped off a bit from the wartime high,5 essential films, such as 5 Fingers (1952) discussed below, added to the cultural narrative about espionage. There was, thus, a broad popular interest in spies and espionage during World War II and in the subsequent Cold War period during tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But closer roots of Goffman’s interest may be found. Goffman’s contact with Schelling may have been involved. In Schelling’s conversation with sociologist Richard Swedberg, the economist reveals that his own attempt to understand the principles underlying bargaining were based on close reading of both ancient history and espionage fiction, of Thucydides and (eventually) le Carré.6 When Schelling and Goffman first met in the mid-1950s, did Schelling share his enthusiasm for this literature with Goffman? Had Goffman already developed independently his own taste for the genre before they met? Though it may be impossible to answer these questions, it is certain that an interest in spies and espionage extended to students as well. Robert Jervis, for example, who holds the unique distinction of having both Schelling and Goffman serve on his dissertation committee, helped formulate “a theory of deception in international relations” in his book The Logic of Images in International Relations. Jervis acknowledged intellectual debts to both Goffman and Schelling and admitted the importance of literature on spying and espionage as providing useful data to understanding deception, however limited that information may be from the standpoint of theory-building.7 An interest in spies and espionage was thus manifest in both the cultural horizon in which Goffman lived and the intellectual exchange in the networks with which he was connected. These sources, however, are unlikely to have been sufficient to shape Goffman’s life-long interest. This chapter explores more direct sources of Goffman’s interest in spies and espionage—the classrooms of the University of Chicago where Goffman took his Master’s (in 1949) and PhD (in 1953) degrees. It examines, first, his real-life connections to the intelligence community through two University of Chicago professors, Shils and Waples. In these relations, we find Goffman’s interest in spies revealing both local and national promptings. Second, we examine Goffman’s most sustained reflections on spies and espionage in his 1969 book Strategic Interaction. This book makes some extraordinary claims, including an argument about the kinship between spies and everyday people, who are said to encounter the same kinds of dramaturgical problems, especially performative vulnerabilities. Next, the chapter discusses the development of Goffman’s ideas on vulnerability in his magnum opus Frame Analysis. Here he extended the argument about the discrediting of performance to the vulnerability of the

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structure of experience as such. The resulting reflections on suspicion offer a chilling portrait of the kind of world Goffman seemed to believe was emerging in Cold War America. A conclusion examines our understanding of not just the roots and reasons for Goffman’s immersion in espionage literature but also the value, as he saw it, of that literature to unlock some of the mysteries of modern life. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONTEXT: EDWARD SHILS AND DOUGLAS WAPLES After World War II, one wouldn’t have had difficulty encountering former members of military or government service, including intelligence services, at the University of Chicago, or indeed on the campuses of nearly any major university in the U.S. They were abundant. As Abbott and Sparrow have shown for the discipline of sociology alone, of the roughly 1,300 PhD sociologists in their data set from the 1940s, “9 percent saw government service at some point in their careers . . . another 5 percent saw government and military service, and 22 percent saw military service alone.”8 Although we don’t have comparable figures for disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, geography, economics, history, international relations, political science, communication, mathematics, philosophy, or, indeed, any of the natural sciences, such figures would only serve to bolster the already well-known close collaboration between academia and government and the military in the post-World War II years.9 As studies like that of Abbott and Sparrow are published for other disciplines, academics will come to understand, like the protagonists of Ondaatje’s Warlight, that many of those closest to them in their community were secretly a part of the war effort.10 Goffman’s staunch supporter Gregory Bateson had served in the OSS in Burma; his friend and fellow graduate student, Hans Mauksch, was a military intelligence officer; Edward T. Hall served in the Army and then trained American diplomats for the U.S. Department of State in their Foreign Services Institute. Others, like his friend and early colleague Tom Burns of the University of Edinburgh, were former prisoners of war. To be active in academia in the 1940s and 1950s was to be surrounded by men and women of this sort.11 By circumstance and choice, Goffman came to be associated with academics and others who were affiliated with the U.S. military, government, and postwar think tanks, conferences, and foundations, including those that were advancing and supporting U.S. interests in Cold War America. This is not to say that something nefarious was going on, but Goffman was closer to the corridors of influence in these years than perhaps is normally represented. Most widely known among these contacts was Edward Shils, who

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served in the OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch in the London Office. Shils went to work in the OSS soon after it was created in June 1942.12 In late 1943, Shils was assigned to the Psychological Warfare Division, which was tasked with assessing the motivation to fight of captured Wehrmacht soldiers. Interrogators of the captured prisoners employed a special questionnaire devised by Shils and colleague Henry Dicks, along with Morris Janowitz, who was recruited to be a research analyst.13 As Pooley writes, “Shils and Dicks (with the close collaboration of Janowitz) were focused, especially, on the question of tenacity: Why did German soldiers maintain the fight, and with such disciplined resolution?”14 After the war, Shils returned to Chicago, with Janowitz, whom he had convinced to take up graduate study in sociology. Back at home, the two analyzed the questionnaire data and presented their results in a landmark postwar study, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II.”15 There they argued that the motivation to fight was not ideology or hyper-patriotism or “manliness” but the soldiers’ loyalty to each other, their sense of camaraderie, and indeed their desire for esteem in their fellows’ eyes. Here was the genesis of Shils’s emphasis on the importance of primary group ties. As Shils’s research assistant from 1952–1953, Goffman ostensibly worked on a project on social stratification funded with $30,000 of Ford Foundation money.16 Available archival records do not provide a clear indication of whether Shils and Goffman spent any time together on this project and, if so, what was discussed.17 In his writings, however, Goffman does refer to Shils as an important reference point in those years. In his dissertation and again in the important early paper, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” Goffman noted that Shils’s course lectures on “primary groups,” and views on deference were relevant to his own developing ideas.18 Further, Goffman recognized the Ford Foundation grant and “Professor Shils” in the “Acknowledgements” to both the 1956 and 1959 versions of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.19 Such open acknowledgements, though, were not the only way Goffman communicated his alliances; he revealed them in footnotes. For example, in the 1959 American edition, in a discussion of informers and spies, there appears a footnote to a single page in Hans Speier’s Social Order and the Risks of War.20 Speier was a German émigré who became one of the leading American “defense intellectuals” of the postwar era, and eventually headed up RAND’s “Social Sciences Division.” Daniel Bessner’s important biography of Speier shows that he and Shils had developed a close friendship since the 1930s.21 That friendship was strengthened by mutual offers of patronage. Speier was offered a deanship in Chicago’s Social Science Division, a position which he politely turned down to remain at RAND. For his part, Speier had invited Shils to serve as consultant at RAND and had helped Shils secure the $30,000 Ford Foundation grant on which Goffman served as research assistant, and

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which certainly provided Goffman with the time and resources to research his first book and other early publications.22 Goffman’s footnote to Speier’s book, then, was reference to a relationship of considerable importance to his early career. Shils was not the only faculty member at Chicago with ties to the U.S. intelligence community and who was noteworthy in Goffman’s intellectual milieu. Goffman was also sitting in on seminars and classes in areas of interest to him, including with Douglas Waples.23 This is a name that is not widely known among contemporary sociologists, though Waples is acknowledged as a central figure in the history of the field of mass communication.24 In fact, Waples had been at Chicago since 1925, where he taught courses in education and assisted in the creation and development of Chicago’s Graduate Library School.25 He published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review and authored or coauthored a series of studies, such as What People Want to Read About, People and Print, and What Reading Does to People, that helped create the field of reading studies.26 Waples becomes relevant to our story thanks to the vision of University President (and later Chancellor) Robert Maynard Hutchins. He expanded the University of Chicago from an institution of departments to a center of experiments in interdisciplinary collaboration. Chicago faculty members proposed new interdisciplinary committees to support their academic and wartime interests.27 The Committee on Social Thought, founded in 1941 by John U. Nef, is perhaps the most renowned of these new committees. There were many others as well, including the short-lived “Committee on Communication and Public Opinion” (1942–1945) and the “Committee on Communication” (1947–1960) that followed it. The faculty of the Committee on Communication included a wide range of junior and senior scholars, including Bernard Berelson, David Riesman, Herbert Goldhamer, Sebastian de Grazia, and Kenneth P. Adler. Waples was a founder and leader of both these committees and the ideas that circulated there were ones with which thoughtful students had to contend. By August of 1942, Waples’s war service had begun. His precise wartime activities during the years 1942–1948 are only partially known. His own autobiography, written for family and friends, is more of a sketch than a full story, the result of an intelligence officer’s trained incapacity for candor.28 Even the most thorough review of his life and work by Kamberelis and Albert draws from this same thin soup. Waples admitted to being involved in military and intelligence assignments in war information, anti-subversion, and “black propaganda,”29 but details are limited. The lack of clarity is also a result of the protracted length of Waples’s war service (six years) and his involvement in various capacities with several agencies: the OWI, OSS, and U.S. Army. Some things are known, however. After receiving a Major’s commission in

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the U.S. Army in December 1942, Waples was assigned stateside to various training duties where he lectured, tested, and reviewed, among others, foreign language training in the U.S. By his own admission, these efforts were “not highly successful,”30 and one can imagine him itching for a role with greater impact. This came in August of 1944 when he was transferred to the Morale Operations (MO) Division of the OSS, where he oversaw the collection of information useful for subversive work. The purpose of this branch of the OSS was attacking “the morale and the political unity of the enemy through . . . psychological means operating or purporting to operate within the enemy or occupied territories.”31 It was in this covert branch where Waples learned and practiced the art of subversive propaganda, the full range of deceptive communication, from rumors and poison-pen letters to fake newspapers and radio stations. Some of the MO Division’s deception campaigns were so successful that they fooled not only the Germans but the American and British media as well.32 Before he left for the European Theater later that year, Waples went on a 12-day U.S. recruiting trip for the OSS—with visits to academic colleagues in Chicago, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Bloomington, Columbus, and Pittsburgh—to secure the assistance of persons with foreign language facility for work in the European Theater and the Far East. When the Allied countries entered Germany and administered the defeated nation, Waples was given a special assignment for which he is best known. In Germany, the U.S. Army established the Office of Military Government (OMGUS), whose aim was not just to administer the defeated country but to fundamentally transform it from a hostile nation to a pro-democratic state. At this time, the recently promoted Lieutenant Colonel Waples served as “Director of Information Control” in the Information Control Division (ICD) of OMGUS. He spent four years in Germany (1945–1948), one of the longest tenures in the ICD.33 In this capacity, he oversaw German reeducation (“denazification”) in the American zone of control in postwar Western Germany by shaping what they read. To do so, Waples had to identify and give refuge to German publishers whom the U.S. government could trust. The city of Leipzig was the center of publishing before the Nazi era and after the war still contained the country’s most prominent publishers. The U.S. military forces held that city since April 17, 1945, but it was scheduled to be transferred to the Soviets on July 2. Thus, he and his fellow officers had two and a half months to do their job.34 In his autobiography, he claims that he and his team did it in one week! He took special pleasure in reporting on this effort, when he wrote in his autobiography that he and several other officers: . . . went down publishers’ row in that city and picked some publishers whom we considered the best compromise between the most important pre-war German publishers and those most likely to be cleared by our own Intelligence Branch,

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which had a veto on all of our recommendations to license. Those we picked were moved out of Leipzig on the eve of the Russian occupation and across Germany by military convoy to Wiesbaden on the Rhine where they have prospered ever since.35

This was just the beginning of a thorough restructuring of the book and magazine publication industry in postwar Germany.36 After Waples returned to Chicago in 1948, he returned to the Graduate Library School as Professor of Communication and, upon the departure of Bernard Berelson, led the Committee on Communication from 1951–1958. The curriculum of the Committee reveals a solid grounding in the latest knowledge in communication, with a heavy focus also on “applied” subjects. As future author of a dissertation on “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” Goffman would have been keenly aware of these courses, including Waples’s own seminar Sociology 494: Psychological Warfare and Strategic Intelligence (offered from 1949 forward). This course represents a continuation of warfare by academic means. A key text used in the seminar was Yale historian and CIA cold warrior Sherman Kent’s (1949) Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. The modern CIA considers Kent as the “father of intelligence” and has named the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis in his honor. In the postwar years, Waples’s seminars on psychological warfare and strategic intelligence were already applying lessons learned to the Soviet Union, the next target of the U.S.37 Indeed, Waples transformed the Committee into a proving ground for former military personnel and other individuals whose careers would include serving in the U.S. government’s Cold War propaganda organizations, especially the United States Information Agency (USIA). Just two examples may suffice. One of the young instructors of the Committee on Communication was Kenneth P. Adler. Born and raised in Germany, he had escaped Nazi persecution because his parents had sent him to an English boarding school at age thirteen. After the war, Adler enjoyed a 25-year career with the USIA, including in Germany, where he conducted research on Western European public opinion about the U.S., as well as research into the effectiveness of the Voice of America and other American propaganda sources in Eastern Europe.38 Another was James Nelson Tull, who earned an MA from the Committee and whose early promise Waples saw clearly. Tull became a career U.S. foreign service officer who spent time in Saigon and Laos during the mid-1950s to early 1960s, and later was Head of the USIA’s Work Group in Washington, DC, where he was part of the approval process of internal communications during the Vietnam War. These are just two of the people Waples wrote about so proudly when he revealed in 1953: “Our Chicago group includes some 40 individuals (faculty and students) who have had several years’ experience with aspects of Mil.

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Govt.”39 “Mil Govt” was shorthand for the postwar military government in the countries that the U.S. administered after the war. According to historian Hajo Holborn, in the immediate postwar years, some 150 million people around the world were administered by the American military government, a population which was then larger than that of the U.S.40 Thus, Goffman’s formative years at Chicago included contact with a wide range of people with connections to military intelligence and wartime government work. Shils and Waples especially reveal deep connections to the intelligence community. While the world war and emerging cold war shaped the teaching of key Chicago faculty, those lessons also molded the problems and at times the language with which Goffman examined them. SOCIOLOGY OF INFORMATION CONTROL IN STRATEGIC INTERACTION Whatever Goffman may have gleaned from the information theory of Claude Shannon and from colleagues like Harold Garfinkel, it is nevertheless true that he was immersed in a set of worldly problems of information control and spies.41 The theoretical problem of information paralleled the real-world dialectic of information concealment and revealment in wartime and in daily face-to-face interaction. Nowhere is the attention to this matter more evident than in Goffman’s most thorough engagement with hot and cold wars in his 1969 Strategic Interaction. In that book’s two essays, Goffman advanced a sociology of information control beyond that which he developed elsewhere. Goffman now brought the analysis of spies to the forefront of his work: “I will draw upon the popular literature on intelligence and espionage for illustration,” Goffman wrote, for no party seems more concerned than an intelligence organization with “the individual’s capacity to acquire, reveal and conceal information.”42 In the book’s first chapter on expression games, Goffman was especially interested in one critical aspect of information control, called “expressed information,” and its difference from “communication.” Consider an interaction between an interrogator and a person under interrogation. A person may respond to questions with words that are more or less complete, more or less correct, and made with more or less candor. But the exchange is complicated by the fact that the communicated information goes beyond this “transmitted information.” It includes other types of information that are “expressed,” such as a person’s attitude, demeanor, or facial display. Further complicating this situation is the fact that the scrutiny of such expressions and communication is two-way—both parties are scrutinizing each other—and further, that it is in the interest of one or both parties to manage or control the information the

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other obtains. Under these conditions one has an “expression game,” with each party engaged in an intentional effort to strategically control information. “I argue,” Goffman wrote, “that this situation is so general and so central that by looking at such games and at the various restrictions and limitations placed on them, we can begin to learn about important assumptions and beliefs concerning the nature of individuals.”43 The opening “moves” of an expression game include various acts of concealment or “cover moves” as Goffman called them, such as secrecy and feinting (faked courses of action), various “uncovering moves” (efforts to expose the secrets) and “counter-uncovering moves” (efforts to shore up the cover).44 Among the illustrations Goffman provided from government and military history, many of them from World War II and the cold war that America was in at the time, include a discussion of “identity tags,” such as passports and other identity papers. Goffman illustrated the idea of “counter-uncovering” with an entry from the memoir of Dr. Stanley P. Lovell, the biochemist who was the Director of Research and Development of the OSS.45 This was the branch responsible for equipping the Allies’ operatives, spies, and saboteurs during World War II. Because passports and other identity papers present something of an “open challenge” and an “admission that an expression game is being played,”46 the OSS employed a vast technical facility for producing those papers. In Goffman’s terms, this was a “counter-uncovering” operation, with an effort to create identity papers with such apparent authenticity that the enemy would be unable to detect their fraudulence. At stake in this game were the very lives of the operatives and agents and the mission they fought for—the Allies’s success against their adversaries. In these pages, secrecy is presented not only as the intentional withholding of potentially “destructive information”; the word “secret” is used for information that people are unwilling to share, destructive or not. In a conceptual discussion of the word “secret,” Goffman acknowledged the complexities of withholding information and the slipperiness of the term. When an observer succeeds in uncovering access to another’s guarded information, but does not reveal the discovery, which is the secret? Is a secret about another’s secret itself a secret? Uncharacteristically, Goffman did not name this type of information. In The Torment of Secrecy, however, Shils did name it: He employed the term “secondary secrecy” when referring to the strategic value of not revealing to others that their secret has been discovered. In fact, military history and the history of the intelligence services are replete with examples of such “secondary secrecy.” Both Goffman and Shils had wartime instances in mind, as is evidenced by the examples they cite. For Goffman, it was cryptographers breaking a code but not wanting to give away this knowledge to the other side, “lest the code be changed and the breaking have to be done all over again.”47 For Shils, it was the hard work to “penetrate the spy network,

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to gain the confidence of spies and to discover who their confidences were.” This sort of activity,” Shils wrote, “had to be kept secret too, for perfectly obvious reasons.”48 Near the end of “Expression Games,” Goffman questioned the value of the very intelligence organizations that he had been employing for illustrative purposes. He presented an all-too brief Weberian analysis of the rationalization and growth of intelligence organizations. The problems of disloyalty are amplified when organizations are rationalized. One disloyal person at the top of a hierarchical organization can render the whole establishment vulnerable, Goffman contended. Moreover, the growth of networks of spies and counterspies also creates special weaknesses. Entire networks are in danger of being undone when only one is caught. These problems render intelligence organizations “unstable.” Goffman added another problem inherent in the intelligence community: “Among all the things of the world,” he wrote, “information is the hardest to guard, since it can be stolen without removing it.”49 Goffman’s critique of intelligence organizations did not extend to his views on individual spies and spy-craft. He was especially impressed with the great spies of World War II: Elyesa Bazna, code named “Cicero,” and Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy. These were men of action who placed themselves in fateful situations for their respective countries. Cicero was a German agent who worked in the British Ambassador’s residence in Turkey as a valet, precisely one of Goffman’s “discrepant roles.” This position gave him access to the ambassador’s safe, which he entered and regularly copied and sold important documents to the Germans.50 Cicero’s story was widely known in the U.S. after the war, as it was turned into a Hollywood movie 5 Fingers (1952), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and staring British actor James Mason.51 Richard Sorge was a Russian intelligence officer working with a German military attaché in Tokyo. For eight years he and the members of his spy ring transmitted from Japan valuable information to the Soviets. Some contemporary scholars of espionage believe that the information Sorge sent to the Soviets had likely prevented a Nazi victory and hastened the end of World War II.52 Two former British intelligence agents turned novelists—who disagreed on most else—agreed on Sorge. Ian Fleming, the creator of “James Bond,” considered Sorge “the most formidable spy in history,” and John le Carré wrote of him as “the spy to end spies.”53 Goffman too admired the daring agent, calling him “the very great Russian spy.”54 These men, and other men and women like them, were taking huge risks, testing their character while keeping cool in dangerous circumstances. They regularly faced the possibility of discovery by others, along with consequent exposure, discrediting, and worse.55 They personified Goffman’s view of the precarious interaction

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order of modern Western societies: people are ever on the verge of being discredited. It is little wonder then why, as mentioned earlier, Goffman in his dissertation described social interaction as “an arrangement for pursuing a cold war.” The strategic interaction of nations and their agents during World War II, and in the Cold War that followed it and within which Goffman was writing, were a difference in degree not in kind from everyday interaction. Thus, Goffman insisted that “we all must face moments of this kind, albeit much less extreme in every regard, and it is the sharing of this core contingency [of the risk of disclosure and discrediting] that makes the stories of agents relevant.”56 Again, “we are like them [intelligence officers] in significant ways, so they are like us.”57 ESPIONAGE AND THE STRUCTURE OF EXPERIENCE IN FRAME ANALYSIS In Frame Analysis, Goffman extended this argument about spies and the vulnerability of their conduct to discrediting to an understanding of the vulnerability of experience more generally. The world is a treacherous place not just because we fear performative discrediting but because we are vulnerable in so many other ways, including being taken in by fraud and deception. It is helpful at this point to present an explication of the book’s chapter 6, “Structural Issues in Fabrications,” which presents Goffman’s ideas on vulnerability through a critique of the view of deception typified by the “Big Con.” In those pages, Goffman showed that the structure of the classic con, a structure that he himself had uncritically accepted, or at least neglected to criticize in his early paper on con artists, is inadequate to understanding the structure of contemporary experience.58 This is because the classic con offers a simplistic portrayal of deception. Here is how Goffman portrayed the “popular view” of the Big Con: . . . the dupes are innocents who have allowed avarice to misguide them into helping (they think) with a financial conspiracy, and the operators are criminals who play characters utterly alien and false for them, doing so by means of elaborate props temporarily assembled for the occasion.59

In this portrayal, the structure of the classic con has no layers. It is structured along simple polar terms: innocent vs. corrupt, behavior vs. performance, permanent vs. temporary. Goffman countered, “If this view were valid, the world would be a less treacherous place than it is.” Goffman then invited his readers to consider a different and more alarming arrangement: one based

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not on moral clarity about good guys and bad guys but on moral ambiguity; not on select performances but on performances all around; and not on the construction of a temporary setting for the purpose of deception but on a setting that never comes down because it’s always there—and it’s always there because it’s everywhere. Under these conditions, which Goffman seemed to have considered closer to everyday life, deception deepens and recurs. Espionage plays a key role in his argument. Although the Big Con is usually considered a game for criminal enterprise, it also has analogical expression in the world of espionage. Goffman’s many examples in Strategic Interaction of the complex, often British, World War II espionage operations, are structurally akin to a con game. One might only point to the operation code-named “Mincemeat,” which involved a dead body washed ashore, false papers, a detailed background story, and so on—indeed a whole alternate reality created—to deceive German troops. This was a military hoax that rivaled the complexity of a classic con.60 And like many classic criminal cons, this military operation achieved its purpose. Admittedly in these pages, the Big Con is, for Goffman, a foil against which he presented a view of the structure of experience that was more nuanced than the simple deception model typified by the classic con. Indeed, it is in this nuance and subtlety that the contemporary cogency of his analyses may lie.61 In any event, the pages may be read as a form of “Good-Bye to All That”—a rethinking of ideas he had earlier entertained and a farewell to the innocence those earlier ideas implied. This view accords with the valuable analysis of Anders Persson, who has argued that a case can be made for reading Goffman’s Frame Analysis as a general statement on fraud and deception.62 There are multiple limitations of the Big Con as a model of deception. First, Goffman noted that the mark may not be a discrete victim but “society at large.” To the extent that, for example, the mass media or online disinformation campaigns bamboozle people, the victims of deception are potentially boundless—everyone is a potential dupe. Second, deception can take place without people being aware of being swindled, and thus no “cooling out” is needed. Goffman called attention to “secret monitoring” from spy cameras and from corporate spies. If American television is any indication, we may have reached a point where corporate spying on employees has become normalized. The American reality television series “Undercover Boss” (2010-present) depicts a corporate owner or executive going undercover to expose a company issue. The boss is a spy engaged in an elaborate ruse. Each episode’s feel-good moment, such as when the boss rewards a deserving employee with money, does not gainsay the show’s suspect position on spying on employees as not only normal but positive. Even at work, then, one is not safe from deception, a development that Goffman’s work first predicted. Third, not only is contemporary deception boundless and secret, but it may

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also occur on one’s own personal space—on vacation, at home, in a car, on the street, indeed anywhere. The classic con often involves the construction of an elaborate space that creates a temporary setting for crime. In the 1973 film “The Sting,” directed by George Roy Hill, for example, the setting is an elaborate but fake betting parlor. However, thanks to infiltration technologies, spying and other forms of deception may occur anywhere, including on one’s home territory and body. In Windows Into the Soul, Gary T. Marx followed his teacher Goffman in exploring these new technologies and asked if we are moving toward becoming a maximum-security society—“a society ever more transparent and porous, as the traditional borders that formerly protected personal information were weakened or obliterated by new technologies, new ways of living, and new threats.”63 The final limitation of the Big Con is its underlying innocence-corruption assumption. Vulnerability, Goffman argued, is not only a concern for those being conned but, he wrote, “the duped can easily dupe.” That is, the so-called “innocent” can turn the tables on the original deceivers. In Goffman’s illustration, lifted from his own life, a gambler who is normally ripped off at the casino tables learns to count cards and pulls a “switch” on the house. The house is now in the losing position, if only temporarily.64 This insight may readily be extended to social life more generally, with everyone as potential perpetrator and victim. After considering all these points, the appeal of the classic con as a model of deception is greatly diminished. The complexities of modern deception, Goffman proposed, result in “something more layered than the Big Con.”65 Indeed, if contemporary deception is boundless, hidden, extensive, and reciprocal, then the world may truly be, as Goffman said, a treacherous place. Goffman next explored the question of how many “frames” a strip of activity can undergo while still allowing people to situationally interact. Stated differently, how many layers can a deception take before the situation breaks down into mutual suspicion? Consider the earlier discussion of the reality show “Undercover Boss” (Goffman’s example involved a company spy from a car rental company). An untransformed activity like washing the dishes at a restaurant attains additional meaning when a boss does this job undercover to investigate the business. The boss’s “exploitive fabrication” may be further transformed into a television show, with a crew filming the man who is a CEO and spy who washes dishes for a hidden purpose. Further, all of this may be written into the script of a theatrical performance. So, washing dishes transforms into spying which, in turn, transforms into entertainment, which then is retransformed into theater. Goffman asked, “how many laminations can a strip of activity sustain? How far can things go? How complex can a frame structure be and still be effective in setting the terms for experience?”66 This structural question is now the way Goffman explored the question of vulnerability.

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In answering this question, Goffman turned first to the case of espionage and especially the issue of “turning” an intelligence agent, that is, inducing an agent to act against his declared allegiances. Imagine a spy working for one country is turned by another country and now becomes a double agent. Such an agent might be useful for not only learning information about the other side, but also for feeding misinformation to disrupt the other side’s war plans. Consider now what might transpire if that agent is discovered to be working for the other side; the agent is discredited but may not be eliminated. Instead, the nation that was initially fooled is now positioned to play the other side at their own game. The double agent feeds misinformation to one side, and then feeds misinformation to the other as well. How far can this misinformation game go before, as Goffman wrote, “no one can trust anyone.”67 Under these circumstances, people are less vulnerable to shame than they are to the ravages of suspicion. In Strategic Interaction, Goffman examined tales of double agentry as recounted in first-person accounts of spying from World War II.68 Goffman’s friend, admirer, and critic Tom Burns had disparaged Goffman’s sources, calling them “tedious” and “old hat” and written at a level “somewhere between True Detective and Reader’s Digest,” that is, between lowbrow and middlebrow.69 But Goffman’s sources in this instance are not of this type. He examined French journalist Gilles Perrault’s The Secret of D-Day: Where and When, British spy-runner Major A.W. Sansom’s, I Spied Spies, and the authoritative Inside S.O.E., a history of British special operations from 1940– 1945, by E. H. Cookridge, himself a wartime intelligence officer.70 Rejecting these sources as illegitimate data would be akin to forbidding the historian from examining the ex-officer memoirs of World War I.71 Admittedly, the three books are early accounts of wartime espionage and thus do not benefit from later historical research and authoritative documents that came to light later. But Goffman triangulated these sources to explore the underlying process and results of double agentry. Though each of the three books recounted different instances of real double agents in the field, they all told a similar story. It is a story of the ultimate confusion that was generated by the complexity of the double and triple agent situation. Misinformation was so rife, that no one believed anything that came across their desk; even the truth was disbelieved. Sansom characterized the resulting trouble using an old-world tale. He wrote: I recalled the old Jewish joke about two rival traders who lived in a village half-way between Minsk and Pinsk. They were born spies, and each of them spent much time watching to see where the other trader was going to buy or sell. One morning one of the traders prepared to set off with horse and cart very

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early, for security reasons; but his rival had anticipated this and was already in the street. “Where are you going, Isaac?” He asked. “To Minsk, Moses,” Isaac replied. “Isaac,” said Moses sorrowfully, “you tell me you’re going to Minsk because you want me to think you’re going to Pinsk. But I happen to know that you are going to Minsk—so why do you lie about it?”72

When Freud told a variation on this story in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he classified the joke as an example of the absurd. For, “according to the uncontradicted assertion of the first Jew,” Freud wrote, “the second is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie.” Such jokes, Freud concluded, attack “the certainty of our knowledge itself.”73 And indeed, real double agents with their duplicity and exploitative fabrications only contributed to the uncertainty and absurdity of war. And perhaps they also allude in Goffman’s work to the absurdity and uncertainty of life during the Cold War.74 Some of Goffman’s contemporaries were examining trust and suspicion using experimental situations.75 In contrast, Goffman’s model of generalized suspicion derives from real-world experiences in wartime. It was from the experience of spies in war that Goffman came to understand Cold War suspicion. In Frame Analysis, he cast the problem in this way: “After a certain number of turnings, no one can trust anyone, and the effort to assess what weight to give to events reported by the agent can come to outweigh whatever value the agent has either as a source of possibly valid information about the enemy or as a conduit for transmitting misleading information to them.”76 Is this not so in everyday life as well? Given his disbelief in what people say with their words, his intellectual preoccupation with deception, and his reluctance to be filmed, photographed, and recorded, Goffman himself might be seen as embodying this generalized suspicion. Relief comes from realizing that everyday life does not normally take on this complexity or urgency; the “transformational depth” is more limited. Much of it is more akin to a play within a play, two frames of meaning going on simultaneously; or it is like stage or film comedy, where people think one thing is going on but later learn it is another. The surprise birthday party is based on the premise that one thing is going on, say, returning home from dinner, while when the lights are switched on at home, another thing entirely is happening when guests suddenly appear. Surprise! Television situation comedy follows the same format by examining the humor that can come from misunderstanding a comment, a gesture, or a frame. Life is filled with surprises of these sorts, instead of the tergiversations of the spy. So, all of life is not like an espionage game after all.

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The greatest layering, Goffman suggested, comes in scripted presentations, such as in novels, theater, and cinema, where writers can conjure many deliberate twists and turns, and readers or viewers can mostly follow them. That humans can follow these meandrous meanings is for Goffman “the great lesson,” for it reveals the considerable human capacity for following cues and making sense of the world.77 Indeed it might be conjectured that the appeal of television shows and films featuring story lines with twists, turns, and multi-perspectival points of view reveals not only a human capacity for grasping the layering of meaning, but also a contemporary thirst for that complexity. There was perhaps a time in the mid-twentieth century when for many the only permissible layering was light irony. These were the years of satire, where one message was framed in terms of another. But times have changed, and people now want more than a wink. They want a wink, a nod, a shrug and even direct, collusive confrontation as in the work of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. At this point in the chapter, Goffman appeared hopeful; but we might add a pessimistic sidebar. If he is right in holding that scripted media allow for the greatest laminations of frames, including the greatest deception, then does that analysis not point to our current malaise: the preponderance of disinformation in today’s online media (much of it scripted) without clear cues for the consumer to discern the exploitive fabrications involved? If so, Goffman may have heralded the present disinformation age without following fully through on an analysis of it. That task now falls to others. CONCLUSION Loyalty, secrets, strategy, and spies—this quartet of “natural metaphors” marks Goffman’s early works and encourages a fresh look at his writings. In this chapter and throughout, we have examined Goffman not as a microsociologist or a stranger in the academy but a social theorist of the postwar and early Cold War. He was an analyst of wider matters as they were expressed in everyday interactional worlds. In the years of the early Cold War, so many lives were upended, so many identities exposed, so much deception hidden and revealed. But all this mayhem occurred not only on a global stage but also in the occasions of everyday life. The problem of failed performance and discrediting, for example, is a challenge not just for spies but for everyone. We are all walking around with forged papers, fearing sudden discovery of our various acts of subterfuge. Goffman’s allusive language gradually guides his readers into the realities of the hot and cold war era. Still, another view of this work is possible. When, for example, he characterized the backstage area of dramaturgical team work as taking the form of a

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“council of war,” while the outcome looked more like a “temporary truce,” it could be argued that he was merely employing a literary device.78 Novelist and short story writer Mary McCarthy, in a story that Goffman appreciated and cited, employed allusive simile too when she wrote of domestic relationships taking the form of “disarmament conferences”—I will reduce my demands if you reduce yours.”79 But the response to this objection is that the writings of both Goffman and McCarthy evoke an era that their original readers had been through. As such, their terms were not just rhetorical but referential; the analogies tied their thinking to an era and pointed to the historical realities so many had faced together. To cite another instance, it is not by accident that Goffman used the term “desertion” to convey the ways people illegitimately leave an encounter.80 It was another “natural metaphor” that emerged from the immediate war years and that fit circumstances of abrupt departure outside of war. If people can desert their military station and their spouses, then they can precipitously take leave of everyday encounters too. If war is an extension of normal social processes, then finding interactional analogies is not only warranted but theoretically necessary, as everyday life takes similar forms as those found under more extreme conditions. One doesn’t have to be a Simmel, or a Goffman, to see that conflict takes analogous forms in nation states and interaction orders. A focus on interaction would reveal loyalty and secrecy problems, strategic interaction, and spying. Goffman, though, was particularly adept at making these connections. Goffman’s interest in “information control” can also be viewed as a phenomenon and phrase he had no need to invent. The Allied victory over Germany occasioned a vast reeducation campaign undertaken by the U.S. military government via its Information Control Division. Chicago professor Waples was one of the leaders of this effort. Thus, Waples and his postwar Committee on Communication were part of the larger context within which Goffman wrote about spies. It is no coincidence, we propose, that Goffman chose to analyze the interactional features of everyday information control while Waples was telling tales of his experiences in postwar Germany as Director of Information Control. For the U.S. military government after the war, and for Waples as one of its official representatives, information control was something that governments did to vanquished enemies, or to subdue potentially dangerous populations. The media that people read, saw, and listened to were strictly controlled. For Goffman, however, seen through the prism of the interaction order, information control is the daily activity of everyone. It is a game of deception and counter-deception, and players are ever on the verge of being discredited. As such, information control and spies are closely bounded terms. I asked at the beginning of this chapter why Goffman spent so much time examining a world with which he presumably had no direct experience. The

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answer may be because espionage provided a master key to central problems of the time. Like Freud’s guilt, Heidegger’s anxiety, and Sartre’s nausea, Goffman’s embarrassment revealed key structural facts of twentieth-century psyche and society. When persons are not who they are expected to be— under whatever circumstances—situations become fragile things and, like societies, can collapse. Spies came to personify for Goffman this problem of discrediting, as their discreditable selves were under continuous scrutiny and challenge. Considered in this way, the discreditation problem of spies is generalized to Anglo-American society at large. And as Goffman came to consider the vulnerability of experience more broadly, it was to spies again he turned. Now, though, it was not the immediate situation that was at risk, but the whole information state. When the spy game produces nothing but lies and damn lies, even the truth looks like a lie; the result is a destructive and generalized suspicion. In information theory terms, all is noise. The Cold War ethos of suspicion had been generalized to the whole interaction order. And yet, we should avoid painting too dismal a picture. As Gary Marx pointed out, Goffman was a complex thinker and a Simmelian at heart. He saw and acknowledged the paradoxes and contradictions of social interaction. While deception abounds, the deceived can turn the tables with the victim becoming the victor. And not all fabrications are deceitful; for Goffman frames refer to a wide range of designs and meanings. And yet Goffman made special use of espionage literature to explore the fragility of experience. The proliferation of exploitive frames, and the masking of manipulation within non-exploitive designs, pose a risk that Goffman first heralded. We are perhaps closer today to that situation of generalized suspicion than even Goffman foresaw. NOTES 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 145–146; Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969); Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), 210–225; Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 121, 291. 2. Harold L. Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence: Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1967). 3. Dmitri Shalin interview with Dennis Wrong about Erving Goffman entitled “Bobby Adamson Said, ‘Pooky Is a Genius, and as Soon as He Starts Writing His Own Stuff It Will Be Recognized,’” in Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (2011), 1–53.  https:​//​digitalscholarship​.unlv​.edu​/ goffman​_archives​/76.

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4. Robert Habenstein, “He Was a Heck of a Nice Guy, Kind of Shy, and the Kids Liked Him.” In Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (2009). http:​//​cdclv​.unlv​.edu​/archives​/interactionism​/goffman​/habenstein​_08​.html 5. Jay Robert Nash, Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Deeds & Double Dealing from Biblical Times to Today (New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc, 1997), 549–561. 6. Richard Swedberg, “A Conversation with Thomas Schelling, Part 1” (June 11, 2013). https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=O18M​_j6xG8E​&t​=2s. 7. Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (New York: Morningside Books, 1989), 10–11. 8. Andrew Abbott and James T. Sparrow, “Hot War, Cold War: The Structures of Sociological Action, 1940–1955,” in Sociology in America: A History ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 287–288. 9. See, for example, Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10. Michael Ondaatje, Warlight (New York: Knopf, 2018). 11. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (New York: Beacon, 1982), 174–175; “Hans O. Mauksch (1917–1993),” ASA Footnotes (January 1994), 14; Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, “Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the Mandate for Intercultural Training,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 3 (2009), 262–281; Tom Burns, Description, Explanation and Understanding: Selected Writings, 1944–1980 (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 37–45. 12. This paragraph is based on two key sources: Jefferson D. Pooley, “An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006, and Roy MacLoed, “Consensus, Civility, Community: Minerva and the Vision of Edward Shils,” in Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 45–68. Both authors have been granted access to Shils’s private papers, which are normally closed to researchers, although Pooley’s access came only after he finished his dissertation (email to the author from Jefferson Pooley, February 27, 2020). 13. The questionnaire is reproduced in Daniel Lerner’s book Sykewar: Psychological Warfare Against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day (New York: George W. Stewart, 1949), 121–124. 14. Pooley, “An Accident of Memory,” 122. 15. Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1948), 280–315. 16. Daniel Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 184. 17. My efforts to locate the Ford Foundation grant application, assuming there was one, and Final Report, at both the University of Chicago and in the records of the Ford Foundation, have turned up nothing. Much will become clearer if these

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documents are found. Until then, researchers do have access to the Shils-authored study written for the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America. See Edward A. Shils, “The Bases of Social Stratification in Negro Society.” Sc Micro R-6534, Reel 12. Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America: Research Memoranda (1940). Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. There, following his article with Herbert Goldhamer, Shils defines “social stratification” as “the distribution of deference.” See Herbert Goldhamer and Edward A. Shils, “Types of Power and Status.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939), 171–182. And he employs in that report the same scientistic language that Goffman uses in his references to the Ford Foundation grant, namely, that the study offers a “propositional inventory of social stratification.” In fact, there is no inventory of propositions, as that term is normally used, in the Carnegie-Myrdal study. It is, however, an insightful review and analysis of not only the scholarly literature but also the author’s own experience, the experiences of others, and the insights found in “a number of fictional and autobiographical works written by Negroes.” Shils, The Bases of Social Stratification,” “Foreword.” If one were looking for a predecessor to Goffman’s use of biography, literature, and keen personal observation, Shils’s report would be a good place to start. 18. Erving Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953, 128; Erving Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3, (1956), 473–502. 19. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Monograph No. 2. (1956); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). 20. Goffman, The Presentation of Self (1959), 146, citing Hans Speier, Social Order and the Risks of War: Papers in Political Sociology (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1952). 21. Daniel Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 146–147. 22. Ibid., 184. 23. Personal correspondence with Yves Winkin (April 9, 2018), who wrote to me in an email, “I remember Bob Habenstein telling me that Goffman attended seminars ran by members of the Committee on Communication (Waples and others).” Winkin was reporting on conversations he had had with Robert W. Habenstein, a World War II Army veteran, friend of Goffman’s, and fellow student at the University of Chicago. Goffman himself affirms that he learned from Committee chairman Bernard Berelson’s course on content analysis. See Erving Goffman, “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1 (1981), 62. And war veteran and fellow graduate student Fred Davis, in an unpublished interview with Winkin (on May 28, 1987), stated that Goffman sat in on a course on communication taught by charter member of the Committee Herbert Goldhamer and was “rather admiring” of it. The atmosphere of the University of Chicago in these postwar years was very liberal regarding attending classes; students were free to audit the classes that interested them and not attend the ones in which they were registered. This explains why none of

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these courses are listed on Goffman’s University of Chicago official course transcript: he sat in on classes and borrowed fellow students’ course notes rather freely. 24. For Waples and mass communication studies, see Pooley, “An Accident of Memory”; Jefferson Pooley and Elihu Katz, “Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research.” Journal of Communications 58, no. 4 (2008), 767–786; Karin Wahl-Jorgenson, Karin, “How Not to Found a Field: New Evidence on the Origin of Mass Communication Research.” Journal of Communications 54, no. 3 (2004), 547–564; Karin Wahl-Jorgenson, “The Chicago School of Sociology and Mass Communication Research: Rise, Rejection, Incorporation, and Rediscovery.” In Media History and the Foundation of Media Studies, ed. John Nerone (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 544–577. For biographical sources on Waples, I have relied on the above-cited Pooley and MacLoed studies charting Waples’s role as a founder of the field of communication, and these sources: Bernard Berelson, “Douglas Waples, 1893–1978.” The Library Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1979), 1–2; George Kamberelis and Marta K. Albert, “Douglas Waples (1893–1978): Crafting the Well-Read Public,” in Shaping the Reading Field: The Impact of Early Pioneers, Scientific Research, and Progressive Ideas, ed. Susan Israel and E. Jennifer Monaghan (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2007), 247–277; and Waples’s OSS Personnel File in the National Archives of the United States. Waples, Douglas. 1942–c.1962. Entry A1 224; OSS Personnel File, 1942–c.1962; Record Group: 226; Box Number 815; United States National Archives at College Park, MD. 25. John Richardson, Jr., “Douglas Waples (1893–1978).” Journal of Library History 15, no. 1 (1980), 76–83; John Richardson, Jr., The Spirit of Inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921–51 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982). 26. Douglas Waples and R. W. Tyler, What People Want to Read About (Chicago: American Library Association and University of Chicago Press, 1931; Douglas Waples, People and Print (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); Douglas Waples, Bernard Berelson and Franklyn R. Bradshaw, What Reading Does to People: A Summary of Evidence on the Social Effects of Reading and a Statement of Problems for Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Studies in Library Science, 1940). 27. For a comparison with Harvard University, see Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 158–190. 28. Douglas Waples and Dorothy B. Waples, On the March: A Short Autobiography for Friends and Family. Privately printed, 1967. 29. Kamberelis and Albert, “Douglas Waples,” 273. 30. Waples and Waples, On the March, 6. 31. Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 135. 32. Ibid. 33. Erwin J. Warkentin, The History of U.S. Information Control in Post-War Germany: The Past Imperfect (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). 34. Ibid., 145. 35. Waples and Waples, On the March, 7.

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36. Warkentin, The History of U.S. Information Control, 114–155. 37. Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). Douglas Waples, Sociology 494: Psychological Warfare and Strategic Intelligence. Course Syllabi. 1949–1953. Box 175, Folder 13. Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 38. Eva-Marie Schrankl, Quo Vadis: The Odyssey of a Woman in the XXth Century. Translated from the German by the Author. (Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press, 2013), 400–402. 39. Douglas Waples, “Notes on Local Studies Relating to P.W. [Psychological Warfare].” (May 5, 1953). Box 175, Folder 13. Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 40. Hajo Holborn, American Military Government: Its Organization and Policies. (Washington: Infantry Journal Press, 1947), xi. 41. Andrew P. Carlin, “Goffman and Garfinkel: Sociologists of the ‘Information Order,’” in The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022), 335–359. 42. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 4. 43. Ibid., 10–11. 44. Ibid., 11–28. For a contemporary version of these ideas, see Marx, Windows into the Soul, Ch. 6. 45. Stanley P. Lovell, Of Spies and Stratagems (New York: Prentice Hall, 1963). A recent treatment that draws on declassified archival materials is John Lisle, The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2023). 46. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 22. 47. Ibid., 51. 48. Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (New York: Free Press, 1956), 26. 49. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 78–79. 50. Patrick K. O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII’s OSS (New York: Free Press, 2004), 69. 51. In the movie version of the story, the spy is a social climber, the accomplice is a countess who has title but no wealth, and the money paid for the purloined documents turns out to be counterfeit. James Mason’s (playing Cicero) protracted sardonic laughter at the film’s conclusion disdainfully mocks the whole spy game, and by extension the game of postwar social mobility, as a fraud. 52. On Sorge, see Robert Whymant, Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Spy Ring (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) and F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). The latter is still the best account and the source cited by Goffman in Strategic Interaction. Sorge also makes an appearance in Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (New York: Crown, 2020). Sorge’s story would eventually become a movie as well, in the 2003 Spy Sorge, directed by Japanese filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda. The

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character’s continued appeal is witnessed by the 2019 Russian-directed and acted television mini-series, “Richard Sorge: Master Spy.” 53. John le Carré, “The Spy to End Spies.” Encounter (November 1966), 88. 54. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 79. 55. Of course, Goffman explored the themes of fatefulness, character, and “cool” under pressure in his lengthy essay “Where the Action Is” in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Random House, 1967), 149–270. It is evident that Goffman’s thinking about spies was part of his general thinking about fatefulness, moral character, and the situational potential for discrediting, on which see Dmitri N. Shalin, “Erving Goffman, Fateful Action, and the Las Vegas Gambling Scene.” UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal 20, no. 1 (2016), 1–38. The conceptual framework of game theory allowed Goffman to theorize interactions that manifested “mutual fatefulness.” See Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 137, and Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1961), 35, and to move beyond the “men of action” framework. 56. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 80. In Presentation of Self, Goffman made a similar argument, but he was writing about “imposters” and “liars.” Goffman wrote, “Because of these shared dramatic contingencies [of the possibility of audiences discrediting performances], we can profitably study performances that are quite false in order to learn about ones that are quite honest.” Goffman, Presentation of Self, 66. 57. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 81. 58. Erving Goffman, “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” Psychiatry 15 (1952), 451–465. 59. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 165. 60. Goffman wrote about the operation using the title of the 1950s memoir by Ewen Montagu, The Man Who Never Was (New York: Bantam Press, 1964), discussed in Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 50. The story has been filmed twice, once in 1956 directed by Ronald Neame, and as “Operation Mincemeat” in 2021 directed by John Madden. 61. Martin Innes and Andrew Dawson, “Erving Goffman on Misinformation and Information Control: The Conduct of Contemporary Russian Information Operations.” Symbolic Interaction 45, no. 4 (2022), 517–540. 62. Anders Persson, “Frame Analysis.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022), 129. See also his Framing Social Interaction: Continuities and Cracks in Goffman’s Frame Analysis (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 75. 63. Gary T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4. 64. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 180 n43. 65. Ibid., 178. 66. Ibid., 182. 67. Ibid. 68. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 56–58; citing Major A. W. Sansom, I Spied Spies (London: Harrap, 1965), 35–37.

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69. Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 59. 70. Gilles Perrault, The Secret of D-Day: Where and When? (Boston: Little Brown, 1965), Sansom, I Spied Spies, op cit., and E. H. Cookridge, Inside the S.O.E.: The Story of Special Operations in Western Europe 1940–45 (London: Arthur Baker, 1966). 71. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 72. Sansom, I Spied Spies, 38. 73. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. and ed. by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 137–138. 74. It should be mentioned that this inversion technique was evidently part of intelligence tradecraft, as shown in a story about David Cornwell, better known as spy novelist John le Carré, who used it even in his personal life. “If you’re going south, tell them north,” he once counseled a friend. See Suleika Dawson, The Secret Heart: John Le Carré: An Intimate Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2022): 65. 75. Morton Deutsch, “Trust and Suspicion,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 2, no. 4 (1958), 265–279; Harold Garfinkel, “A Conception of and Experiments with ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Concerted Actions,” In Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Approaches, ed. O. J. Harvey (New York: Ronald Press, 1963), 187–238. On Garfinkel, see Jason Turowetz and Anne Warfield Rawls, “The Development of Garfinkel’s ‘Trust’ Argument from 1947–1967” Journal of Classical Sociology 21, no. 1 (2021), 3–37. 76. Ibid, 182–183. 77. Ibid., 186. The chapter continues with discussions of other forms of transformed meaning, such as drunkenness, malingering, hypnosis, and psychological regression—all of which are, in Goffman’s perspective, forms of human deception. As these discussions do not involve the subject of spies, we bracket their discussion here. 78. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 175. 79. Mary McCarthy, “The Friend of the Family.” In Cast a Cold Eye (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), 43–84, with quote at 82, cited by Goffman in Presentation of Self, 219 n11. 80. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 187.

Chapter 5

Interrogation

Making someone talk who does not wish to talk is a universal problem that took on considerable significance during the Cold War and perhaps ever since. To ancient methods of extracting information through ordeal—by threats, torture, or during the “third degree”—were added modern methods, such as brainwashing, narco-analysis, the lie-detector test, and hypnosis. But broadly considered, there are many other ways of seizing information, including eavesdropping, spying, and questioning during trial, but also flattery, seduction, cajoling, and other forms of trickery. As Goffman’s work came to explore these matters, broader intellectual and analytical issues emerged that led to considering the problem of information as a problem of information sharing. Attempts to penetrate secrecy barriers and expose sensitive information at the societal level found their interactional analogue in interrogation situations. For present-day generations, police questioning—in real life and more likely on television and in film—is the closest one might come to comprehending official interrogation. The current literature, even in sociology, abounds with studies of police work and police questioning, studies of how to conduct such investigations both effectively and legally.1 The classic studies of Inbau and Reid on methods of police questioning, Ekman on ways to uncover deception, and Fisher on the “art of detection” are analyses that Goffman himself read and referenced.2 But interrogations during hot and cold wars are also common, and Goffman’s generation of scholars would have known of political interrogation during the McCarthy era and military interrogation during World War II and the Korean War, some of them at first-hand. It is instructive at the outset, therefore, to review several interrogation stories that are relevant to Goffman’s world. Consider again the situation of Donald Horton discussed in chapter 1. Horton was an assistant professor in Chicago’s Department of Sociology and a member of Goffman’s dissertation committee. A few months before Goffman’s dissertation defense in 1953, Horton was called before Illinois 125

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state’s Jenner committee—one of the many little HUACs at the state level that sought to uncover communist subversion.3 As shown above, this had been only the most recent in a string of anti-communism crusades against the University of Chicago and its faculty. The university’s response to the Jenner committee was outright and unremitting resistance, and Horton’s responses to the interrogator’s questioning exemplify that stance. On legal and moral grounds, he refused to answer questions or name names despite the jeopardy in which such a stance put him. As these hearings were public occasions that were attended by students and were covered in the local press, Goffman surely would have been aware of this most recent inquisition of his professor.4 Also consider the case of Edward Shils. It would be ethically objectionable today to utilize information secured during military or police interrogation as a basis for understanding the behavior of the interrogated. But this is precisely what Shils and Janowitz did in “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II” (hereafter Cohesion), their landmark study of the social sources of German soldierly cohesion and resolute belligerence.5 The authors announce at the outset of that article that the “methods of collecting data included “front line interrogation of prisoners of war” along with intensive psychological interviews, captured enemy documents, reports of combat observers, and so on.6 Indeed, the authors make repeated and explicit use of information obtained during interrogation.7 It is evident that the study could not have been written without these data. Of course, interrogation must not be equated with its more coercive forms, such as unremitting physical and psychological assault; but one might legitimately ask today, beyond questions of reliability and ethics, what are the legitimate scholarly uses of information secured by prolonged and intensive questioning by officials?8 The authors do not broach these questions and admit only to a necessary (given the wartime conditions) absence of “scientific rigor” in their methods.9 A related story is provided by Bertram H. Schaffner, MD, secretary of the exclusive “Group Processes” meetings held in Princeton, NJ, and organized by Margaret Mead, attended by Goffman from 1956–1958, and funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. Schaffner was a practicing psychiatrist whose war service took him to defeated Germany where he worked in the screening center of the Military Government’s Information Control Division (ICD), which was assessing the suitability of German nationals in the American Zone for work in the mass media institutions (books, magazines, film, and radio, for example) of a denazified postwar Germany.10 He and his colleagues found that reports of the harried and overworked military interrogators, whom he called “vetters,” alone were inadequate to weed out the offensively categorized Whites (acceptable to work in a creative or supervisory capacity) from the Greys (acceptable to work under supervision) or the Blacks (completely unacceptable). So, he and they created a three-day process of intensive

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screening, involving intelligence testing, psychiatric interview, completion of Rorschach tests, sentence completion tests, political essay tests, observation of social behavior, and so on. As Schaffner reported, it was vital that every attempt was made “to avoid any procedure reminiscent of Gestapo or police measures.”11 But the fact is that the entire operation was taking place under the direction of the chief of intelligence for the ICD.12 Unlike the Shils and Janowitz study, which even its authors admitted may have lacked “scientific rigor,” Schaffner believed that the three-day intensive investigation established a “scientific basis” for personnel selection that was useful to American occupation officials. Of this usefulness there can be no doubt. Based on this and other data, he authored Father Land, a study of German national character that came to strikingly different conclusions than the study of the Chicago sociologists. From all his data, Schaffner concluded that the German soldiers’ willingness to fight and die rather than to live was a result of conforming to the German ideal of identification with Hitler as authoritarian father-figure. The “primary group” that mattered in Father Land was the German family of origin, not the fellow soldiers one was fighting alongside, as argued in Cohesion. And, last, consider Goffman himself. As I discussed in chapter 1, when Goffman was conducting research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, he was also consulting at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.13 There he met Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar Schein, who had recently interviewed American prisoners of war of the Korean conflict—not interrogating them but serving as witness by listening and telling the story of the methods used by their Chinese interrogators.14 At this time, Goffman knew about and drew from this research, and he cited CIA-funded literature on communist interrogation and brainwashing.15 The purpose of this sampling of political and military interrogation stories is not to condemn by means of outrageous examples, but to suggest the opposite: that interrogation was not an extraordinary occurrence at mid-century but a widespread practice during the “good war” of World War II, during America’s “forgotten war” in Korea, and during the “cold war” anti-communism trials on American soil. Further, the work of liberal reformers culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision stimulated social science investigation into police interrogation methods. Goffman’s own analysis of police interrogation training manuals, discussed below, was part of this larger social scientific awareness of the practice.16 In Goffman’s generation, then, interrogation was background, topic, and resource for social scientific analysis. In what follows, we will see that Goffman’s uniqueness was not that he thought and wrote about interrogation, but that he extended the term from the theater of politics and war to the theater of everyday life and employed the term analytically, building it into

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his framework of sociology. Only Harold Garfinkel’s concept of “degradation ceremonies” comes closest to Goffman in the elevation of interrogation into a sociological construct.17 Garfinkel had lived through and was troubled by the twentieth-century “Red” hunts and the professional patriots who prosecuted them.18 He spent time reflecting on the social meaning and functions of being labeled a “Red.” This discernment along with the televised McCarthy-Army hearings of 1954 provided immediate context to his investigation of those trials not as information-seeking efforts but as degradation ceremonies, the symbolic identification of communists as America’s ultimate public enemy. Garfinkel’s approach adumbrated more recent studies, which also view the information-seeking aspects of interrogation as a pretext and the symbolic functions as primary.19 For Goffman, however, interrogation was a concept whose main features involve seeking information about the other that the person is unwilling to share.20 Why did Goffman emphasize the information sharing functions of interrogation instead of its symbolic functions? This chapter will attempt to answer this question by, first, examining Goffman’s approach to information control in his work. The initial sections will examine the theme of interrogation in his work more broadly. These sections take a chronological approach by examining this theme and its development over time as Goffman makes subtle shifts in the conceptual schemas that bear on the problem of interrogation. The broader category of information that concerns us is information sharing, whether revealed wittingly or unwittingly, and whether elicited, extracted, induced, inferred, mined, tricked, or snatched. The chapter then scrutinizes Goffman’s connections to other researchers and practitioners who were also examining questions of information in this way. We will be interested in exploring how Goffman’s views shared similarities with those others, similarities of questions and answers, of theoretical assumptions and attitudes. In the final analysis, the chapter offers both an analysis of Goffman’s relationships and an extended example of how he turned Cold War realities into analytical concepts. GOFFMAN ON INFORMATION SHARING Winkin has called Goffman’s 1953 doctoral dissertation “the Rosetta stone for his entire work.”21 It is, indeed, not possible to overstate the ways that Goffman’s dissertation embodies the themes and intellectual problems of his future scholarship.22 One can find there the beginnings of not only his immediate post-dissertation pieces, such as “On Face-Work” and “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” but also later books, such as Behavior in Public Places and Strategic Interaction.23 This general observation is true as well for

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his thoughts on interrogation: there is continuity on the subject from his first to the last published works. Goffman’s dissertation portrayed social interaction as an information game. On the one hand, social interaction involves gathering information about others with whom one interacts to find out as much about them as possible. The purpose of this scrutiny, he said, is to help predict others’ behavior and prepare for it and how to best conduct oneself. On the other hand, people often have good reasons to tactfully control information about themselves, in effect undercutting these attempts at information gathering. They may, for example, provide misinformation such as outright lying or affecting a pose that does not meet with reality; or they may provide inadequate information, such as putting on a “poker face” or otherwise inhibiting candor; or they may treat the situation as a joke, providing unserious information to limit the information one is obligated to reveal. This mutual back and forth between subject and other Goffman called a game of “concealment and search.”24 Information games are mutual, but they are not balanced. Taking his point of departure from Simmel, Goffman underscored the asymmetrical character of the communication process. As Simmel wrote, “ . . . all of human intercourse rests on the fact that everybody knows somewhat more about the other than the other voluntarily reveals to him.”25 It seems that people are better at discovering information about others than they are at concealing things about themselves. This is what Goffman had called the “witness advantage.”26 This is so in part because society provides so many opportunities to let one’s guard down, willingly or not. In this context, Goffman mentioned police laboratory methods as an institutional expression of this asymmetry: in the battle of wills between citizen and the law, the police emerge victorious.27 There are also occasions—such as with a spouse, a priest, a therapist, or a lawyer—where ordinary protective strategies are culturally expected to be set aside in favor of revealing “indelicate information.” In addition to those situations where one willingly reveals private information, there are others in which this sharing occurs unwillingly, such as under narco-analysis or if one is overheard while speaking or being spied upon through eavesdropping. Thus, in his dissertation Goffman had already discussed information about self and others, including information that is not voluntarily revealed, drawing on examples from police investigations and narco-hypnosis, spying and eavesdropping, before he used the term interrogation analytically in later publications. Goffman’s thinking about interrogation developed along with his views on the information dynamic of concealment and search within the interaction order. Throughout his works, Goffman explored the individual, cultural, and structural complexities of this dynamic. He examined on the one hand, the myriad ways people attempt to uncover information about the other, and, on the other, the ways people respond at attempts to expose those secrets.

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Consistent with this emphasis, commentary on Goffman’s views on privacy have underscored the importance he placed on the protections of privacy and individual dignity.28 In this vein, Levine and colleagues have shown that Goffman examined a full range of such exposures, from the “minimal intrusiveness” of everyday life to the “maximal intrusiveness” of total institutions.29 While underscoring Goffman’s views on the need for concealment, this literature has been less successful at examining the equally forceful arguments he made on the corresponding obligation to disclose, or, more broadly considered, on the social organization of information sharing. A review of Goffman’s key writings on these themes will thus serve to highlight both the development of Goffman’s thinking on these matters and the context within which his thinking on interrogation developed. Goffman continued the theme of information about others and its exposure in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. There Goffman included an instructive, and often ignored, discussion of secrets in the chapter on “Discrepant Roles.” As shown in chapter 2, it is an important analysis because it points to the ways in which definitions of the situation can be undermined by the revelation of “destructive information”—secret information that can threaten performances and undermine reputations and careers. People with access to such information, and who can reveal it, include not only the police and eavesdroppers but also, he now revealed, a wide range of other characters, such as informers, shills, go-betweens, and service specialists—people who are often our closest allies. Goffman continued his analysis of the collective patterns of social exposure. Not only, as discussed in the dissertation, do cultural expectations oblige people to let down their guard and reveal secrets, but also certain social positions provide unique structural access to information about others that is normally held in trust. Those persons may exploit this structured access by divulging secret information despite cultural and legal rules against such revelation. Later in this chapter, this same point is made about the interrogation of prisoners of war, who were enjoined by military code against talking to their interrogators but who did it anyway, for interesting sociological reasons as we shall see. In Behavior in Public Places, Goffman went beyond the examination of information about others as the prize in an information game, or as the exposure of secrets that ought to be withheld, to the investigation of a complex public order regulated by a wide range of complex social obligations. Now, seeking information about others is shown to be sanctioned and bound within the rules of public order, which provide for a sense of safety when outside of one’s private domain. Interaction with the unacquainted, for example, is closely regulated. One risks sanction for talking to strangers without invitation—although requests for certain kinds of information are more permissible, such as the “free needs” of asking for time or directions. And certain

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places, like bars or gatherings at a colleague’s home, provide greater openness to talking with the unacquainted, as do other special circumstances. Though social rules allow a person to approach and remind an acquaintance of how they are connected, those rules disallow taking up too much of someone’s time or of demanding too much attention or information. In public, then, seeking direct contact with and gaining information about others is subtly regulated and limited. But there is also an obligation to disclose. Snubbing someone’s overture can place a person under the same moral suspicion as the person who oversteps her place. Thus, while people are obliged to tread lightly when seeking access and information, others are obliged to accept some ingress as a cost of social life. In the calculus of the public order, though, Simmel’s asymmetry seems to prevail. We reveal more information than we are willing, but often no more than is expected. In such circumstances, Goffman found some comfort. For in the mid-twentieth century middle-class American society of his analysis, “making a scene” was a form of social treason and “fitting in” a moral good.30 The value of fitting in is plain from the above analysis. One need not become a recluse to escape searching questioning. Indeed, it may be counter-productive to do so. Consider the fate of famed American novelist J.D. Salinger. His attempt to withdraw from the public eye in search of tranquility earned him not respect but rebuke and frequent efforts to catch him unawares.31 Goffman had preferred a different approach. Like the spy who lives next door, one can hide in plain sight, going along with the rules of the public order while keeping one’s private life and private identities mostly to oneself. The rules of situational propriety provide the cover. Goffman expressed this paradox when he wrote, “the way in which [an individual] can give the least amount of information about himself—although this is still appreciable—is to fit in and act as persons of his kind are expected to act.”32 Thus, he not only thought that citizens faced the same discreditation problems as spies, he endorsed spy-like behavior. In Strategic Interaction, Goffman portrayed an espionage view of social life, where the challenges faced by spies and informers are presented as analogues to those faced in everyday life. As shown earlier, he drew on mostly first-hand accounts by Anglo-American spies and others involved in intelligence services during World War II. Goffman expanded his dissertation discussion of the game of “concealment and search” by portraying interrogation as a model of the ways in which ordinary members of society, in their interaction with others, conceal and reveal information. Like spies undergoing interrogation, both sides know that the potential informer will try to conceal protected information, and both know that the interrogator will use special methods to attempt to uncover that concealed information, and, finally, both know that the would-be informer will attempt to counter the interrogator’s

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efforts. This combative back and forth of control move, uncovering move and counter uncovering-move, Goffman believed, provided a useful model of everyday interaction. Goffman’s surprising observation is that people seem to be not very good at this game, and especially not very good at concealment. In the espionage view of everyday life, seduction and betrayal are fundamental and our bodies are among the greatest offenders. We give ourselves away because of our “‘natural’ weakness” at controlling our expressive behavior (we blush, avert our eyes, sweat, and express other physical and behavioral signs).33 In the language of Paul Ekman, those behaviors are “nonverbal leakage” that provide clues to deception.34 Further, our interrogators seem to have the upper hand. Goffman examined police interrogation manuals as special data to reveal what presumably happens in the interrogation room and, by extension, in everyday life.35 A common tactic, he reported, is to deliberately disrupt the rules of propriety. Whereas outside of the interrogation room, people usually take care to make others feel at ease—engaging in “civil inattention” or “face-work,” for example—within the room the interrogator takes deliberate steps to unsettle the suspect, Goffman reported. Investigators knowingly attempt to “push a person’s buttons” while provoking them to lose self-control. The interrogation manuals that Goffman studied provide instruction on these and other time-tested methods to make someone talk.36 INFORMATION SHARING AND FRAME ANALYSIS In the reading list to Goffman’s 1970 course on “Frame Analysis,” there is a division of the readings into “basic materials” and “specialized materials.”37 The first part includes authors who were relevant to Goffman’s thinking about frames, such as Bateson, Husserl, James, Schutz, and others. The second section includes thirteen subcategories of readings on a wide range of topics that are explicitly discussed in the 1974 book, such as experiments, theater, TV and radio, and meetings. It also includes readings on the topics of hypnosis, possession, and drunkenness. A long final subcategory of the reading list is “fabrications and constructions,” which Goffman divided into “official methods” and presumably unofficial methods that he named “cons, swindles and fakes.” It is revealing that Goffman began his list of “official methods” with readings on interrogation. His view of the way official versions of reality are constructed was shaped by an inquiry into forms of interrogation. In this reading material, the information extracted by interrogation is designed to construct a world, an official version of reality. The recommended readings on interrogation are of two sorts: training manuals for interrogators and specialized analyses of the topic. In Frame Analysis,

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Goffman does not employ these sources for the purpose of presenting a sustained discussion of interrogation, like he did in Strategic Interaction. But from those recommended readings and Goffman’s discussions in the book, we can glean Goffman’s understanding of the practice. We begin with a reading by Goffman’s Berkeley student Norman K. Linton, who published a paper on “The Witness and Cross-Examination” that Goffman favorably cited.38 The paper contrasts, on the one hand, the relative freedom people have in everyday life to negotiate and qualify judgments made about them and, on the other, the restrictions on those behaviors in a courtroom cross-examination. Training manuals for new lawyers advise that questions in a cross-examination should be framed to elicit “yes” or “no” answers. Thus, in everyday life a person might offer an affirmative defense by saying, “Yes, I betrayed you, but I did it to protect my sick brother,” whereas in the courtroom, in answer to the question, “Did you betray the defendant,” the answer would have to be “yes” without qualification. The first eases moral culpability, the second ensures it. Linton examined a range of tactics employed in cross-examination to both deny a witness the presentational defenses normally allowed in everyday morality and, further, to discredit their character. “The court trial,” Linton observed, is a “form of information game in which the credibility of the witness is a major issue.”39 In addition to discreditation, Linton’s paper represented another of Goffman’s themes: the constructed and “unreal” elements of the trial. In fact, books of advice for young lawyers encourage them to view with suspicion witnesses, experts, and freely given information. Witnesses are assumed to be untruthful, and facts are assumed to be constructed. As Linton put it, in those books of advice “the trial and the ‘facts’ upon which the decision is to be made are conceptualized as constructions and, to a large extent, unreal.”40 Linton cited as an example of this advice from prominent Michigan trial attorney Asher L. Cornelius, whose The Cross-Examination of Witnesses is listed among Goffman’s recommended readings. Cornelius wrote, In cross-examining, remember this, that no case is ever tried upon the facts as they actually occurred; it is tried upon the facts as they are made to appear, through the medium of human testimony.41

Another “unreal” construction of official fabrication is the confession. We get a sense of Goffman’s thinking on confession when he wrote, in Frame Analysis, about “police interrogation teams cook[ing] up a line to take that is calculated to produce a confession.”42 Relevant here is the sense of the word “frame” as used in the term “frame-up,” or a conspiracy to falsely incriminate someone.

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Police methods of eliciting confessions are addressed in another of Goffman’s recommended readings by Bernard Weisberg, who was General Counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, Illinois Division. Weisberg was lead author of Secret Detention by Chicago Police, a 1959 ACLU report on the practice of long incommunicado imprisonments by the Chicago police to produce a confession.43 The recommended reading by Weisman was part of a group of papers from an international symposium on police interrogation held at Northwestern University in 1960.44 This symposium was one of a spate of examinations of those practices leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Miranda v. Arizona (in 1966) that changed American police practices by requiring officers to inform a suspect, prior to questioning, of what are now called Miranda Rights. Weisberg discussed the then-common practice of secret police interrogation and the methods employed to trick subjects into making incriminating statements. Lying, bluffing, sympathizing, minimizing, prolonged questioning—all these forms of chicanery were permissible in state courts, which ignored the federal rules of citizen protection and instead followed the general rule that deception and trickery do not nullify a confession.45 Thus, an officer might falsely tell a suspect that witnesses or accomplices have implicated him, or bluff and say they possess physical evidence of culpability, or sympathetically relate that in the same circumstances they too might have taken the same action, or minimize an offense by blaming the victim. Weisberg’s brilliant analysis showed that in all this conduct, the police were not just doing what was expedient; they were following the techniques that were recommended in authoritative police interrogation manuals, such as Inbau and Reid’s Criminal Interrogation and Confession, another of Goffman’s recommended readings.46 Those techniques certainly worked in securing confessions. Weisberg reported that “in all the Fourteenth Amendment confession cases decided by the United States Supreme Court during the past 25 years, the defendant was questioned without counsel being present.”47 Secret interrogation, violating a statute guaranteeing access to counsel, postponing right to habeas corpus by keeping a suspect’s whereabouts unknown—though all these practices may work in securing a confession, they are illegal. Weisberg entered frame analysis territory in his discussion of the free will assumptions of the idea of coercion. When a person is compelled to confess after being beaten or forced, the resulting confession is mistrusted, and the accused’s culpability is reduced or removed. But modern police practices may have moderated the use of force or threats in inducing confession. In the late 1950s, with the publication of Theodor Reik’s The Compulsion to Confess, there emerged a Freudian view of an offender having a strong, unconscious urge to confess.48 Accordingly, the “gentler” tactics of police at mid-century could be justified as efforts merely to help the person relieve himself of guilt

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feelings. When confession is considered in this way, the person’s responsibility is restored. Weisberg shifted the frame one more time when he explored the question of the expansion of the idea of coercion. To what extent, he asked, does the “experience of being isolated and interrogated after arrest [operate] as pressure on the prisoner to give admissions which are sought by his interrogators?” To what extent is secret questioning in a police station “inherently coercive?”49 Thus, Weisberg not only confirmed Goffman’s view of confessions as fabricated statements, and at times exploitatively so, but he also implicitly employed Goffman’s understanding of natural and social frameworks when he explored the shifting frames of thinking about human criminal behavior. HYPNOSIS: FABRICATED SHARING As just mentioned, Goffman’s Frame Analysis includes the underappreciated distinction between two cosmological views: the natural and social frameworks. In the former, natural causes reign over human agency, and in the latter, it is reversed. We don’t blame the apple for falling on someone’s head, though we blame the adolescent for throwing one. Social life includes battles and compromises between these two ways of seeing the world, as Weisberg’s analysis of confession showed. Goffman considered other instances where the actor transforms in such a way that social responsibility is believed to be lessened or eliminated. This is the case in hypnosis, drunkenness, and insanity. For each of these, it is believed, “it is not his fault.” Consider hypnosis. It is commonly thought, Goffman noted, to involve an individual who is put into a special trance state by a powerful Svengali-like hypnotist who can make a person do and see all kinds of things against their will. In one demonstration of hypnosis of three subjects, one subject acted like a child, another imagined seeing a comedy movie and laughed uncontrollably, and a third lost control of her limbs.50 After coming out of the trance, the subject may be further following the orders of the hypnotist through the means of a post-hypnotic suggestion that was implanted without the individual’s awareness. In all this, the actor’s responsibility is believed to be reduced, as the subject has been transformed by the esoteric techniques of the hypnotist and, in a special trance state, does things that are not freely chosen. One can readily see the similarity of this scenario to the feared “Manchurian Candidate” of the late 1950s, the cultural fantasy that American Korean War veterans may have been hypnotized by their captors and turned into agents ready to kill. The U.S. government certainly wanted to know if this was possible, and, as will be shown later, several government agencies had funded research to explore the possibilities. A hypnotist named Estabrooks claimed

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that this was not only possible, but also that he was doing it for the U.S. military during the last world war and during the cold war as well.51 In contrast to this approach, Goffman took a radical view. He called hypnosis a “fabricated framework.”52 This term refers to those forms that are fictional through and through. Not only are the ways we think about an activity fabricated, the activity itself is fabricated. As examples, Goffman mentioned alien visitations and astrological influences, whose possibilities defy current empirical science. The alien encounter is a fabrication and so is UFOlogy. A horoscope is a fabrication, and so is astrology. In this same light, hypnosis—or the idea that there exists a special trance state where people are under the control of another—is a fabricated framework. Hypnosis is a fabrication through and through. It is not, Goffman stated, a special state but a special situation. Following the work of social psychologist Theodore Sarbin and psychiatrist Martin Orne, and later of Canadian psychologist Nicholas Spanos, Goffman held that hypnosis is not a special dissociative state but an instance of ordinary role taking. Goffman described the view in this way: . . . the subject is gradually led into a social situation in which he feels obliged to maintain the view that the hypnotizer appears to have committed himself to, namely, that there is such a thing as hypnosis and that the subject is falling under it.53

Sarbin’s 1950 article is the classic view of hypnosis considered in this way. He stated it simply at the outset: “hypnosis is one form of a more general kind of social psychological behavior, namely, role-taking.”54 Psychiatrist Orne agreed with this view and integrated it into his own investigations, showing that hypnosis is not a battle of wills but a cooperative effort between hypnotist and subject.55 In this approach, hypnosis is seen as part of an interpersonal relationship in a situation. It is an interaction between the subject and hypnotist, and like all interactions can be viewed in terms of people driven by needs and engaging in role playing. The subject wishes to be hypnotized and goes along with the hypnotist by playing the role of hypnotic subject, as expressed in the above quote from Goffman. How this works is partly explained by the notion of “demand characteristics,” a term that Orne had coined. In experiments, these refer to subtle ways that the experiment conveys the nature of the hypothesis to the subject. Wishing to please the experimenter, the subject complies, thereby confirming the experimenter’s hypothesis. With these factors in mind, the subjects in a hypnotic situation act not by mindlessly following suggestions conveyed while in an exceptional trance state, but rather by mindfully following their understanding of the hypnotist’s expectations. “Subjects in deep hypnosis,” Orne writes, “tend to confabulate in the direction of what they perceive to be expected of them.”56

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How reliable, then, is the information that the hypnotist is said to extract from the hypnotized subject? There is certainly information, Orne admitted, but that information “may be either accurate or inaccurate.” And the inaccurate information may be the result of deliberate deception or “unwitting confusion of fantasy and reality.” As such, Orne called hypnosis a “pseudo-reality situation.”57 For Goffman, it was a fabricated framework. INTERROGATION AND THE COLD WAR “THOUGHT COLLECTIVE” Non-intercourse with the enemy is a clear rule of conduct for American service members who are imprisoned during war. In American mass culture, this injunction is expressed as “name, rank, and serial number” only. This wording of the military Code of Conduct originated after the Korean War and, indeed, in response to it, though the general norm is centuries old.58 Albert Biderman and other researchers of the U.S. Air Force Prisoner of War Study found that, despite the unambiguous norm, Air Force POWs rarely conformed to the rule of silence in interrogation. Was this compliance a result of special techniques employed by the Chinese communist interrogators? Were the prisoners “brainwashed” or coerced? Biderman’s answer was no. Like the work on hypnosis at the time, the study of interrogation pointed instead to basic social psychological principles and, indeed, Goffmanian ones.59 A recommended reading in Goffman’s course on “Frame Analysis,” Biderman’s 1960 paper explored the question of why prisoners yield in interrogation. It shifted the discussion away from esoteric techniques to an understanding of the factors that operate in social situations more generally. The “interrogation situation” is an instance of more general social-psychological principles: the need in a situation of taking a viable social role and of maintaining an esteemed self-image. In everyday interaction, silence or “refusal to interact” carries specific meanings. It can convey hostility, coyness, arrogance, and guilt—none of which might be advantageous under prolonged questioning by an enemy interrogator. So, in an interrogation situation a noncooperative prisoner could signal that he had something to hide, based on the principle that silence implies guilt or at least incriminating knowledge. The same principle holds for prisoners who attempted selective silence; this too implied withholding information and resulted in prolonged or intensified interrogation. Prisoners discovered that “don’t know” is at least an answer. Although it went beyond name, rank, and serial number, “don’t know” was used twice as often as outright refusals, Biderman found. Thus, pressures on the prisoner to interact with the interrogator helped “to preclude definitions of himself and his role

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which he regard[ed] as highly disadvantageous.”60 Further, taking a compliant role served as a shield of the self, an attempt to protect a sense of autonomy and control in a situation that sought to undermine those safeguards. Interrogators understood the prisoners’ need to protect their self-esteem and used it to trick them into answering questions, by gulling them into talking even during feigned cooperativeness. In contrast to the POW, who attempted to preserve some normalcy under aberrant conditions and protect his embattled self, the interrogator’s role permits incivility. Thus, various expressions of hostility were common and were employed strategically to instigate a response. Interrogators engaged in what Goffman in Frame Analysis called “the manufacture of negative experience.”61 Denouncing the prisoner as a liar or a spy, discrediting prisoner statements and attitudes, angrily responding to even cooperative behavior—all these enactments of the hostile role went necessarily unreciprocated. Interrogators cleverly directed this unreciprocated hostility by encouraging subjects to betray fellow prisoners or their own country. We see in Biderman’s data and related arguments the similar approaches of mid-century investigators into interrogation, hypnosis, and deception. A new group of researchers rejected standard thinking about the omnipotent role of the primary actor: whether interrogator, hypnotist, or deceiver. The then dominant view maintained that those powerful individuals using esoteric techniques were able to create altered psychological states in unwitting individuals. In place of this view there emerged an examination into the working of social situations and the social psychological processes that shaped the behavior of the interactants.62 The emerging new approach examined information concealment and revealment within a new set of presuppositions and concepts. The approach (1) reconceptualized the phenomenon to be studied from a psychological to a situational point of view; (2) employed social role concepts in the analysis, thus emphasizing reciprocal interaction rather than unilateral coercion; (3) highlighted information extraction as opposed to the symbolic functions of interrogation; and (4) expressed skepticism toward not only past thinking on the subject but also the limitations of their own and others’ work. What a refreshing contrast to, say, Estabrooks who confidently announced at the outset of his book on hypnotism that the “science” of hypnosis was on par with physics, chemistry, and mathematics.63 The new view also implicitly condemned the Manchurian Candidate-style thinking of the time, the view that powerful individuals were employing mysterious techniques to control soldiers and citizens. This new set of assumptions and concepts, I believe, represents the style of thinking of what Ludwik Fleck, in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, called a “thought-collective.”64 Fleck’s notion of “thought-collective” seems better attuned to the data than do other notions that sociologists of

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science employ, such as scientific communities, invisible colleges, interstitial academies, and the like. Fleck’s term has been rendered in a variety of ways, but the notion comes down to three main elements: the social interaction, mutual communication, and shared convictions of a network of scholars. It is not surprising that Goffman shared this “thought style” with Cold War deception researchers. He was deeply connected to the network of researchers and practitioners who were engaged in work on the problem of securing information from unwilling subjects. As I showed earlier, during his time in Washington, DC, in the 1950s, Goffman had served as consultant at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, meeting there with researchers in both group and one-on-one settings. He had met Lifton and Schein and learned of their work examining Korean War POWs who had been imprisoned and interrogated by the Chinese. Especially important was Goffman’s association with Edgar Schein, the Harvard social psychologist who later served as consultant to the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a source of secret CIA money. Goffman also knew John Gittinger, the lead CIA psychologist who was the Agency’s key contact at Walter Reed and who, ultimately, led the notorious MKUltra program.65 Goffman’s network included Albert Biderman, an ally of Schein’s and a researcher who was examining these same matters for the U.S. Air Force, and who was also then in Washington, DC. through his association with the Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc., an organization funded in part by military intelligence money. The issue of interrogation was especially acute for the U.S. government, military intelligence, and the CIA. All funneled money into research on the ways interrogation, hypnosis, and deception works, or can work, effectively against the enemy. The CIA, through the Human Ecology group, funded much of this research. Some of it is included in the 1961 book edited by Biderman and Herbert Zimmer, The Manipulation of Human Behavior. This included the work of Martin Orne, a leading expert on hypnosis whose skeptical attitude toward much hypnosis research was shared by Goffman. Orne was a “stage worthy magician” who made hypnosis his primary research subject. He and Schein had been graduate students together at Harvard University. This personal connection and the relevance of his work to the CIA’s interest in methods of extracting information, led to his being funded by Human Ecology money, as was Biderman and Goffman too for that matter.66 When Goffman joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, Orne had already been there for four years. Another network formed during Goffman’s time at Berkeley. Goffman was linked to Ted Sarbin, the originator of the role-taking approach to hypnosis. Sarbin was a clinical psychologist who spent two years in the early 1940s at the University of Chicago on a post-doctoral fellowship. Ernest W. Burgess was his sponsor. The ideas of George Herbert Mead were still alive there and

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helped form Sarbin’s mature thinking. His writings emphasized role-taking as a key social psychological process, including in hypnosis. Sarbin took a position at Berkeley in 1949, well before Goffman arrived there. In the late 1950s he became involved with Berkeley’s Center for Integrated Social Science Theory, an effort in which Goffman also participated. In this “center,” select scholars would meet and discuss each other’s work in progress. This led Sarbin’s biographers to reference the “many intense conversations with Goffman” that had a profound effect on his thinking.67 The direction, it seems, had gone both ways. Sarbin’s role-taking approach to hypnosis preceded and validated Goffman’s and Orne’s thinking on the subject. This is true also for Goffman and Paul Ekman, who though outside of the circle of researchers just described became, over time, closely connected to Goffman at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, where they both had consulting roles. As expected, Ekman’s work exhibits the same four elements as the other authors. This is no accident, as Goffman reviewed Ekman’s seminal paper on “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception” for the journal Psychiatry. Further, Ekman reported that he and Goffman had “many conversations” about the book on lying he was writing.68 Goffman was not only a participant in this thought-collective; he formed a connecting line to all the others. Goffman interacted with all the key members mentioned above: debating ideas, commenting on drafts of papers, and even interacting socially with some of them. Goffman’s important role in this collective is illustrated clearly in the case of Biderman, whose early published reports on the U.S. Air Force-funded study of interrogation were uninformed by the new thought style.69 Other than the argument against the assumption of a powerful interrogator using esoteric techniques, there was little in his early work that linked Biderman to the new thinking about eliciting information. All this changed after Schein connected Biderman with Goffman,70 the result of which was Biderman’s 1960 paper discussed above; the paper now emphasized role analysis and social situation concepts.71 The new style can be seen in the “Goffmanian” phrases the paper presented: “silence as a form of interaction,” manipulation of the “prisoner’s role,” “shielding the self,” the social-psychological aspects of “interrogation situations,” among others. None of these terms had been in the earlier work. Further, Goffman was extensively cited in the 1960 article, and so were Simmel and Tom Burns. Clearly, the harmony of Biderman’s work with the latest thinking on interrogation and other forms of information extraction is due in no small measure to Goffman’s advocacy of the thought style. It should also be noted that Biderman acknowledged his funding sources. In addition to the U.S. Air Force, now he thanked the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, thus acknowledging the secret CIA money that funded this

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latest work. And he acknowledged the head of that organization, Col. James L. Monroe, and its lead consultant, Edgar Schein. Importantly, the “thought-collective’s” work coincided with the development of the CIA’s own secret interrogation guide, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual drafted in 1963 and developed further over the years (KUBARK was a CIA codename for itself).72 After the manual was declassified and released in 1997, it became notorious for including coercive techniques that in more sensitive times were believed to border on torture, and which indeed anticipated later “enhanced interrogation” techniques in post-9/11 America. While members of the “thought-collective” examined here developed ideas that were in keeping with the official Cold War needs of information extraction, to their credit they uniformly sought to soften, and sometimes to undermine, suspect kinds of interrogation or protection from interrogation. Authors, for example, underscored the errors of implanting hypnotic suggestions in American soldiers, of teaching them how to fake psychiatric symptoms (teaching malingering), and so on. These mistaken approaches advocated by others were likely to backfire, the researchers noted, creating psychological damage to the soldiers. Orne’s research, for example, emphasized the ineffectiveness of hypnosis with resistant individuals—the very target of the KUBARK manual’s techniques. And as noted earlier, his research showed that under hypnosis subjects were as likely to yield false information as true information, thereby generating results with uncertain reliability. Orne’s research directly questioned the value of hypnosis for official interrogation.73 Accordingly, the CIA’s 1963 draft openly objects that Orne’s research was “too cautious or pessimistic.” In contrast, the manual found that Biderman’s Goffmanian paper just mentioned was especially “interesting” and “directly relevant” to the work of the CIA.74 The manual’s author extolled Biderman’s “insight” into the “interaction between interrogator and interrogatee,” insights that I noted earlier were framed in terms of the “thought style” of the network and improved in draft by Goffman. Thus, there was a very real connection between the Cold War “thought-collective” of deception researchers and the development of official interrogation techniques in America’s ongoing Cold War. Given Goffman’s connections to government, military, and CIA-sponsored researchers, his role as an intellectual guide to that esoteric group, and his own writings on interrogation and hypnosis, his commitment to viewing interrogation as a form of information extraction becomes understandable. He was following a shared commitment of a Cold War “thought-collective.”

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“FELICITY’S CONDITION”: UNVOICED AND VOICED SHARING A new area of shared information is opened when it is realized that relevant information includes not just information that is wrung out of a person, or information that is wittingly or unwittingly revealed, but also information that can be expected to be shared and that is unvoiced. We continually share information about ourselves without being aware of it. This new type of information about the other is called presuppositions, a passive form of shared information that is inferred rather than said in so many words. It is this topic that is analyzed in Goffman’s posthumously published paper, “Felicity’s Condition.”75 Work in sociolinguistics had pointed the way to the significance of shared presuppositions in understanding the organization of talk. In this literature, the meaning of a conversation is dependent on the immediately prior utterance, on the topic or theme of the conversation, and on the mutual attention each person gives in his mind to the other. Each of these factors contributes to meaning within the context of the conversation of which it is a part. But Goffman expanded this to include larger social contexts of the conversation— unstated understandings that are also taken for granted. For one, interactants can presume that the other brings shared experience and knowledge to the encounter: no one enters an encounter as a blank slate. Indeed, the more experience people have together, the larger is this corpus of shared information. In addition, an even larger share of information lay in what can be expected a person knows given their various social statuses, such as their age or the locale in which they reside. Every New Yorker, for example, knows that “the City” refers not to Long Island City but to New York City. Everyone in Albuquerque knows that “Christmas” refers to a dish with both red and green chilies on a plate. Further, knowledge of the other can be inferred by examining information they do reveal, which increases the probability that they would likely know other related information. If a person, say, demonstrates knowledge of explosive chemicals, she may also know how to make a bomb. These broader kinds of knowledge Goffman called “imported information,” that is, information about the other that is brought into the immediate conversational encounter from outside, so to speak. The most critical information about others—the presupposition about presuppositions—Goffman called “Felicity’s Condition.” This term refers to the sociological conditions underlying conversations—the necessity of demonstrating, through interactional competence, that one’s verbal acts are not “a manifestation of strangeness.”76 Stated differently, people need to demonstrate that they are sane before a conversation can have legs. Here Goffman

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examined a wide range of conditions under which strangers and intimates may address another in such a way that a person is “obligated to disclose something you would rather not.”77 He examined how “dramatic events” may connect people in “deeply human” ways and warrant uninvited conversation. He discussed the obligation of making public apologies—because one must, not because one wants to—and of responding to “summons” and requests for “free goods,” like requests for the time, directions, or date. In all these ways and others, he recounted the social obligations of responding to unwanted but socially accepted access to one’s personal information. In Goffman’s understanding, these are “interrogations” going on in everyday life. Initiating conversation without these warrants, “out of the blue,” or not responding when legitimate social norms obligate, and infelicitous conversation is likely to occur. It could also create the impression that the rule-breaker is strange or, in extreme form, “deranged.”78 No one is exempt from this requirement. Even national leaders, when they speak in gobbledygook, may be considered insane.79 An example of this observation may be provided by one of Goffman’s favorite World War II novelists, Elizabeth Bowen, in The Heat of the Day, her wartime novel of love and spying. In the story’s opening chapter, the enigmatic counterintelligence agent Harrison attends an outdoor public concert of a Viennese orchestra in Regent’s Park, London. The event was so moving (one of Goffman’s “dramatic events”) that the guileless Louie Lewis, who had been seated not far from him, dared to initiate a conversation with Harrison. Harrison gave her no satisfaction: Louie: “That was number seven they’ve played.” Harrison: Not speaking, at once looked, distasteful, the other way. Louie: “Like to see my programme?” Harrison: “N’thanks, he said . . . ” Louie: In a voice quick with injury, she continued: “All right, I just thought you might want to know . . . I was not just speaking to you—if that’s what you thought.” Harrison: “Did I?” Louie: “Oh, you did!—now I’m sorry I spoke.” Harrison: “Right: then suppose we leave it at that.”80

Harrison’s infelicitous conversation, which continues for several more pages, could lead one to question if he were indeed sane. As it turns out, the character was a British counterespionage agent and as such eccentric and a bit “off.” But we can see in this dialogue an instance of the same problem of silence

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that Cold War researchers discovered had plagued Air Force POWs during the Korean War. Harrison’s silence implied incivility and occasioned Louie’s injury and anger, thereby initiating the same dynamic that was found in interrogation situations. Purposeful silence in interaction is infelicitous whether it is found in mundane situations or extraordinary ones. In “Felicity’s Condition,” Goffman summed up his thoughts on sanctioned but intrusive inquiry with a now-dated analogy: “We are all information storage drums, and for every possible interrogator, there will be an access sequence that allows for entrée to the files.”81 This analogy shows that Goffman continued to hold his espionage view of social life beyond the early Cold War years and into his late career in the early 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War. But now interrogation was given a broader meaning: it was extended from specific historical practices into an analytical concept. Thus, the set of all instances in which individuals directly ask questions of others that those others would rather not reveal may be called “interrogation.” So defined, the notion of interrogation becomes an analytical term within the study of the interaction order. CONCLUSION From first to last Goffman was vexed by the problem of information sharing within everyday interaction. This investigation is reflected in his repeated engagement with the intellectual issues related to interrogation. Some in Goffman’s generation suffered from very real interrogations and others participated in them; but Goffman’s writings do not present a strong moral stance against the practice.82 He came to understand interrogation, as Weber wrote in a different context, “sine ira et studio” (without hatred or passion), within the developing terms of his sociology of information, views that developed over time in important ways. The first such development is from examining interrogation as a concrete military and political phenomenon—such as those exemplified in the interrogation stories mentioned in the beginning of this chapter—to an understanding of it as an analytical construct with broader import. Interrogation was another of Goffman’s “natural metaphors” in that he took an everyday term and extended its meaning and use. In the broader sense in which Goffman used the term, interrogation is no longer confined to the interrogation room; it now takes place throughout the world, so long as a subject is obligated (or coerced or tricked) into sharing information that she’d rather keep to herself. Furthermore, he viewed the limited sharing of these “secrets of the other” as a socially necessary practice, a condition of “felicity.” Here Goffman made his greatest departure from Garfinkel, who had allowed for a time when

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degradation ceremonies might disappear. This is shown in the closing sentence of his famous paper, where Garfinkel wrote that his analysis reveals “how to render denunciation useless.”83 Goffman held no such prospect for interrogation as he understood it; in fact, interrogation in his sense became a necessary part of the social fabric. The second change offers clarity on this last point. In his dissertation and later in Strategic Interaction, as discussed above, Goffman specifically identified police labs as employing agents skilled in uncovering information from unwilling citizens.84 The examination of blood samples, saliva, hair follicles, and now of DNA; the use of wire taps, informers, and undercover agents; the professional skill in behavioral lie detection—in all these ways the battle of wills between citizen and police are decided mostly in favor of the law. They just have so much expertise and technology at their disposal. Confirmation of this point comes from Goffman’s former student Gary Marx, who wrote in his penetrating study of police surveillance, “we are under constant observation.”85 But this understanding of information sharing as the outcome of a battle of wills was replaced, over time, in Goffman’s writings by the more pervasive role of cultural obligations. Now, sharing information becomes not the loss of an information game but a condition of public order. Indeed, “Felicity’s Condition” provides a detailed audit of the many ways people are obliged to share information with others, despite a preference to keep that information to themselves.86 We are “interrogated” on the street, in people’s homes, at bars and resorts, in meetings and other encounters—in short, nearly anywhere; and not by the cops but by each other. And, indeed, there are all those unvoiced sharings that people can presuppose about others as they interact with them. The resulting disclosures are now viewed as one of the conditions of public order, a sign that one is a member in good standing in the community. In this view, Goffman was advocating neither retreat nor resistance. Rather, as a student of the Cold War, he was signaling that fitting in is a way of preserving one’s secrets—spies do it all the time, and citizens can too. It might also be inferred that his stance on “fitting in” was also a subtle denunciation of the “drop out” generation. Finally, we see Goffman’s views shift from linking information sharing to a natural body—to the “undermining flux”87 of one’s own substance—to relocating it in a coded body. Goffman’s statement from “Felicity’s Condition,” quoted earlier, that “for every possible interrogator, there will be an access sequence that allows for entrée to the files” implies that people reveal information not because of “leakage” or other bodily betrayals, but because of codes or rules that provide for differing degrees of access to personal information. With a stranger, some files may be opened; with an acquaintance, others; with an intimate, others still. This understanding of a coded body reveals that Goffman had finally broken with the mind-body dualism from

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which he sought always to escape.88 A person is socially coded to share information as those rules and situations allow, not as the body dictates. The foregoing represents the personal dimension of Goffman’s work on interrogation. His writings exhibit the subtle conceptual shifts just discussed. But there is also a collective dimension to this work. The historical record reveals Goffman’s participation in a “thought collective” that “stylized” the problem of interrogation in a unique way, a Goffmanian way. The effect of Goffman’s thought style on interrogation, hypnosis, and deception studies was direct: he was a thought leader of the collective. His role went beyond the indirect influence on ideas by virtue of being a dominant intellectual of the time to direct impact via interaction, intellectual exchange, and review and comment on writings of the principals. But the collective exercised what Fleck called a “gentle constraint” on him as well. This is shown in his commitment to viewing interrogation as a means of information sharing, as opposed to viewing its symbolic functions, as Garfinkel had emphasized. From the point of view of Goffman’s social theory of the Cold War, a different point was being argued: not only does the national security state feed off information; so do its citizens. NOTES 1. For much of this literature, see the references in Gary C. David, Anne Warfield Rawls, and James Trainum, “Playing the Interrogation Game: Rapport, Coercion, and Confessions in Police Interrogations.” Symbolic Interaction 41, no. 1 (2017), 3–24. 2. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), passim. 3. Subversive Influence in the Educational Process. United States Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, and Other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee of the Judiciary. Chicago, Illinois (June 8, 1953). 4. P. Wood, “U of C Profs Balk at Quiz on Red Links.” Chicago Daily Tribune (June 9, 1953), A1, A2. 5. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948), 280–315. 6. Ibid., 282, emphasis added. 7. Ibid., 284, 288, 289, 297, 302, 311, 312. 8. The value of such data as a topic of study is shown in the recent investigation of what went on in the interrogation rooms of both sides in the Korean War, a study that draws on recently declassified investigation and counterintelligence files. See Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 9. Shils and Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration,” 314.

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10. Schaffner’s work for the ICD connects him to the war service of Douglas Waples, University of Chicago professor of communication and “Director of Information Control” in the Military Government ICD from 1945–1948. See chapter 4. 11. Bertram Schaffner, Father Land: A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 121. 12. Ibid., 118. 13. Edgar H. Schein, Becoming American: My First Learning Journey (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2016), 103. 14. Robert Jay Lifton, “Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric Evaluation. The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (1956), 75–88; Edgar H. Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War.” Psychiatry 19, no. 2 (1956), 149–172. 15. For example, Lawrence Hinkle and Harold G. Wolff, “Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of ‘Enemies of State,’” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 76 (1956), 115–174, cited in Erving Goffman, “Characteristics of Social Institutions.” Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry (Washington, DC: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1957), 65n44; and in Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 25–26n39. 16. Richard A. Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 117. 17. Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5 (1956), 420–424. 18. In a 1947 paper on the “Red,” only recently published, Garfinkel cites Elizabeth Dilling’s infamous red-hunting manual, The Red Network, which lists sociologist Ernest W. Burgess as a “radical.” See Harold Garfinkel, “The ‘Red’ as Ideal Object.” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 1 (2012), 24. 19. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28–38. A much-redacted memoir by a Post-9/11 interrogator shares the view that “the contention that enhanced interrogation techniques [sic] provided critical intelligence and saved lives is flat wrong.” Glen L. Carle, The Interrogator (New York: Bold Type Books, 2011), 296. 20. For a comparison of Garfinkel and Goffman on information, see Andrew P. Carlin, “Goffman and Garfinkel: Sociologists of the ‘Information Order,,’” in The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022), 335–347. 21. Yves Winkin, “The Cradle: Introduction to the Mediastudies.press Edition.” In Erving Goffman, Communication Conduct in an Island Community (Bethlehem, PA: Mediastudies.press, 2022). 22. Erving Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953. 23. Erving Goffman, “On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 18, no. 3 (1955), 213–231; Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956), 264–274; Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social

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Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963); Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). 24. Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” 84. 25. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 323. 26. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 9. 27. Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” 84. 28. Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York: Random House, 2000); Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967). 29. Levine, Donald N., Ellwood B. Carter, and Eleanor Miller Gorman, “Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology, II.” The American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 5 (1976), 1112–1132. 30. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 11–12. 31. Kenneth Slawenski, J.D. Salinger: A Life (New York: Random House, 2012), 400–401. 32. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 35. 33. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 40. 34. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception.” Psychiatry 32, no. 1 (1969), 88–105. 35. Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 33–40. 36. Current studies of police interrogation underscore not these techniques but “building rapport” and “offering a narrative” as essential ingredients to securing information and even a confession. Anne M. Coughlin, “Interrogation Stories.” Virginia Law Review 96, no. 7 (2009), 1599–1661. A recent analysis of the “interrogation game” sees these contemporary tactics as “part of a larger deception” of building trust for the purpose of tricking a suspect into revealing damaging information, and as inherently coercive. See David, Rawls, and Trainum, “Playing the Interrogation Game,” 6. In Goffman’s terms, these modern techniques would be forms of “seduction.” Goffman, Strategic Interaction, 37–39. 37. This reading list is available In Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, Dmitri N. Shalin, ed. (UNLV: CDC Publications, 2007–2019). http:​//​cdclv​ .unlv​.edu​/ega​/documents​/eg​_fall​_70​.pdf. 38. N.K. Linton, “The Witness and Cross-Examination.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 10 (1965), 1–12. 39. Ibid., 3. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Asher L. Cornelius, The Cross-Examination of Witnesses (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929 42. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 104. 43. Bernard Weisberg, Secret Detention by the Chicago Police (Glencoe: IL: The Free Press, 1959).

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44. Bernard Weisberg, “Police Interrogation of Arrested Persons: A Skeptical View,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 52 (1961), 21–46. 45. A recent book on contemporary cases of false confession and criminal justice suggests to this author that not much has changed in the intervening years. See Saul Kassin, Duped: Why Innocent People Confess—and Why We Believe Their Confessions (Guilford, CT: Prometheus Books, 2022). 46. Fred E. Inbau and John R. Reid, Criminal Interrogation and Confession (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1962). 47. Weisberg, “Police Interrogation of Arrested Persons,” 29. 48. Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959). 49. Ibid., 35. 50. These three examples are from a demonstration of hypnosis by Dr. Martin Orne that was taped for a psychology class and is now available online: https:​//​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=blZyGk​-1K1U 51. George H. Estabrooks, “Hypnotism in Warfare,” chap. 9 in Hypnotism (New York: Dutton, 1957). 52. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 197–200. 53. Ibid., 197 n66. 54. Theodore R. Sarbin, “Contributions to Role-Taking Theory: I. Hypnotic Behavior.” The Psychological Review 57, no. 5 (1950), 255–270. 55. Martin Orne, “The Nature of Hypnosis: Nature and Artifact.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (1959), 277–299. 56. Martin Orne, “The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation,” in The Manipulation of Human Behavior, ed. Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer (New York: Wiley, 1961), 194. 57. Ibid. 58. Exec. Order No. 10631, 3 C.F.R. (1954–1958) Comp., p. 266. https:​//​www​ .archives​.gov​/federal​-register​/codification​/executive​-order​/10631​.html. 59. Albert D. Biderman, “Social Psychological Needs and ‘Involuntary’ Behavior as Illustrated by Compliance in Interrogation.” Sociometry 23 (1960), 120–147. 60. Ibid., 130. 61. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 385. 62. This shift reflected a larger change in postwar social psychology, as noted in William Douglas Woody, Jill W. Payne, Kathryn LaFary, David Gretz, and Charlie Rosenblum, “Investigating Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation: Recognizing the Legacy of the Cold War.” International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation 1, no. 1 (2020), 1–16. 63. Estabrooks, Hypnotism, 7. 64. Ludwik Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 110. My understanding of Fleck is drawn from Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle, ed. Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1986). 65. John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Norton, 1979). To shift frames here, in the American movie “Jack

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Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014), directed by Kenneth Branagh, the title character is recruited by a senior CIA officer at Walter Reed Army Hospital. 66. This paragraph is based on the author’s conversation with Edgar Schein, September 8, 2022. 67. Frank J. Barrett and Karl E. Scheibe, “A Sketch of Theodore R. Sarbin’s Life.” Narrative Inquiry 25, no. 2 (2015), 372–399 with quote at 384. 68. Paul Ekman, “A Life’s Pursuit,” in The Semiotic Web 1986, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (New York: de Gruyter, 1987), 3–46. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: Norton, 1985). A measure of the importance of Goffman to Ekman is recorded in the dedication to Telling Lies: it is dedicated to Goffman’s memory (and also to Ekman’s wife). 69. Albert D. Biderman, “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 33, no. 9 (1957), 616–625. Albert D. Biderman, “Effects of Communist Indoctrination Attempts: Some Comments Based on an Air Force Prisoner-of-War Study.” Social Problems 6, no. 4 (1959), 304–313. 70. Author’s conversation with Edgar Schein, September 8, 2022. 71. Biderman, “Social Psychological Needs” (1960), 120 note. It might be expected that the paper would align with Gofman’s ideas. Biderman acknowledged that the paper “benefitted from discussion” with Goffman (and also others). 72. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963. (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018). 73. See Martin Orne, “The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation.” 74. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, 111. 75. Erving Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition.” The American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 1 (1983), 1–53. 76. Ibid., 27. 77. Ibid., 32. 78. Ibid., 26. 79. Bandy X. Lee, editor, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). 80. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948), 6–7. 81. Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition,” 47. 82. Goffman’s son Thomas E. Goffman, MD, took an explicitly moral stance against waterboarding, the American military’s controversial practice after the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001. See Thomas E. Goffman, MD, “The Uncertain State of U.S. Interrogation Techniques,” Military Medicine 174, no. 4 (2009), xii-xiv. Dr. Yves Winkin brought this article to my attention. 83. Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” 424. 84. Indeed, according to Jonathan Rubenstein’s mid-1970s Goffman-informed study of city police, not only specialized police labs but also everyday patrol cops must daily secure “information from unwilling participants” to do their jobs. Jonathan Rubenstein, City Police (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 216.

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85. Gary T. Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 221. 86. Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition,” 32–46. 87. Santayana quoted in Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 57. 88. Nick Crossley, “Body Techniques, Agency and Intercorporeality: On Goffman’s Relations in Public.” Sociology 29, no. 1 (1995), 134.

Chapter 6

Provocation

Goffman’s life and work are a provocation. All accounts indicate that he was a mischievous young man who was keen to annoy and exasperate.1 The story, reported by Winkin, of him creating and exploding “stink bombs” at home, and possibly also at his high school graduation, displays a talent for both creation and destruction.2 As an adult, he continued his incendiary behavior. Witness the many first-person accounts, reported in the online Erving Goffman Archives, of him initiating interactional disruptions, engaging in aggressive oneupmanship, and making various put-downs: commenting on cheap ties, bulging midriffs, and libraries filled with “common” books.3 Like Augie March, he had opposition in him. Goffman was also keen on provoking the provokers. When in the late 1960s Goffman joined fellow sociologist Alan Blum in attending a performance of the experimental theater troupe Living Theater in New York City, Goffman urged his friend to join him by going on stage to see how the troupe would respond to audience members invading their space. The troupe was keen on breaking the invisible barrier between the stage and audience. It would be interesting, Goffman reportedly said to Blum, to see how the actors would react to audience members reciprocating the barrier-breaking.4 Goffman commentators usually explain this conduct by associating it with Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, where he deliberately broke the rules of expected behavior to reveal the hidden background assumptions of everyday life. But this is an inadequate view, a function largely of the professional limitation on seeing beyond disciplinary boundaries. History, culture, and myth reveal a world full of disruptors, tricksters, pranksters, and provocateurs in myth, literature, and everyday life. And provocation via proxy wars, super spies, and other means was a leitmotif of the early Cold War. Goffman had more models for disruption than his friend Garfinkel at UCLA. He reveled in the pranks of Alan Funt, whose practical jokes on radio in The Candid Microphone (starting in 1947) and then on television in Candid Camera (starting in 1948) brought disruption to the masses. Funt 153

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employed hidden microphones and cameras for the purpose of “catching the world off guard.” He began by just listening to people talk unawares, but soon learned that his role was one of provocation. He wrote, I would “tease, cajole and shock unsuspecting people in order to record their reactions.” Ask a locksmith to help release a man locked in a freezer, then haggle over the price. Ask a mover to deliver a locked trunk, while a voice moans within it. How would someone react? The public loved to watch people “blow their tops.” Funt called himself an “eavesdropper at large” and believed his pranks revealed something about human nature, an area that Goffman also felt he was exploring.5 Funt’s book and a movie based on his exploits were both included on Goffman’s 1970 course syllabus on “Frame Analysis.” Much earlier, David Riesman had called Funt “next to Paul Lazarsfeld the most ingenious sociologist in America.”6 A different kind of disruption was the special province of the Marx Brothers, also a favorite of Goffman. He took special delight in the total social disruption portrayed in the now-famous scene of the overcrowded passenger ship cabin in “Night at the Opera” (1935), directed by Sam Wood. Here Groucho served as maître de chaos, inviting more and more people— cleaning staff, engineers, a manicurist, a fellow passenger, waiters, food service staff—into a tiny cabin until the swelling, undulating mass of humanity filled the entire space, top to bottom, and eventually toppled out en masse into the hall, like fish dropping from a net. Funnier still than the tumult itself is the extraordinary aplomb with which the characters try to manage the crazy, crowded scene, each trying to perform their assigned function—making a bed, manicuring an occupant, and so on—despite the in-cabin chaos. As one of Winkin’s informants put it, “without doing any harm, [the Marx Brothers] completely disrupted society, in a laughable way.”7 Goffman was exposed to this topsy-turvy humor even earlier than this. In Winnipeg, he lived only a few blocks from the Queen Theater, a cultural space for Jewish events and meetings, and went there with his sister to see vaudeville acts, where disruption was a key to the humor.8 These shows, both bawdy and hilarious, operated on the principle, one analyst wrote, of “treating ‘low’ subjects in a dignified, ceremonious manner and ‘high’ subjects in a crude, undignified manner.”9 Considered even more broadly, it can be said that Goffman evokes the world of his forebears and specifically Hershel of Ostropol, the legendary Ukrainian trickster. Hershel’s many verbal assaults on the rich and powerful, and sometimes common folk, have been passed down as poems, novels, stories, and stage performances.10 Did Goffman hear the folklore of this trickster at home, school, or see it on stage? We do not know. But the trickster is a universal social type and Goffman played that recognizable role in the second half of the twentieth century. His provocations have become legendary; stories once shared verbally are now collected in the

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Erving Goffman Archives, ensuring that those tales, like those of Ostropoler, retain a long life. This chapter explores Goffman’s immersion in the Anglo-American tradition of satire, considered as the rhetoric of provocation.11 Viewed in this light, Goffman may be seen not as a lone agent but as part of a tradition, and one that boomed during the early Cold War years. He found an imagined community with fellow satirists and was himself part of the wave of satire in the 1950s and 1960s. How do we locate this community of interest? He pointed the way in his reading, writing, and classroom lectures. SATIRE AS CULTURAL FLASHPOINT Whereas generations of youth in the 1970s might gather around the television to watch “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” and later generations would do the same with “Saturday Night Live” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Goffman was part of the radio generation. He listened, likely during his time in the Shetlands, to “The Goon Show,” a weekly radio show on BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960. He “loved it,” an informant told Winkin, and he “used to try to imitate them” though he wasn’t very good at it.12 The Goon Show was the brainchild of Irish writer and comedian Spike Milligan, who formed the comedy troupe with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine. The comedians and listening audience had been through World War II together and came out able to laugh. But in place of wartime reverence for the British government and way of life, the Goons substituted mockery and silliness—an iconoclasm with a toy squeaky hammer. The zany, irreverent half-hour programs featured odd characters, funny voices, and an array of sound effects that drew a huge listening audience. The shows featured a succession of quick gags often with a play on and with words. “I’m not a spy, I’m a shepherd,” the accused man states. The retort: “Ah, a shepherd’s pie.” Though a hit in England, the program was known only to a small coterie in America, where it became something of a cult; those in the know might say a line or two from a favorite skit or character and signal their special, secret fellowship. Goffman, fellow sociologist Fred Davis, and a few others at Chicago enjoyed this unique bond. Goffman praised the Goons to his students at Berkeley, but by then the show’s time had passed and no longer captured the imagination of his mostly American students, who were raised on television not radio. Yet, in the 1950s, the show was at the vanguard of the satire boom to come.13 Like others of his generation, Milligan drew from his World War II experience (he was a gunner in the Royal Artillery) to fuel his subversive humor. His scripts reverberate with wartime experiences.14 In “The Canal,”

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the November 2, 1954, episode, Lord Valentine serves Bluebottle a cocktail. A great explosion ensues. Bluebottle: “Who made that cocktail?” Lord Valentine: “Molotoff.”15 Such references to the war and munitions run through the episodes. Consider other satirical masterpieces set in World War II, such as Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (begun in 1953 and published in 1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (published in 1969), which fictionalizes the author’s childhood experience of the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. J. D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye (published in 1951), with its critique of “phony” culture, during and after a long war service in the Army Counterintelligence Corps.16 Satirists were also molded in the war bureaucracies on the home front. American novelists Philip Wylie and Jerome Weidman (authors Goffman had read) came away from their service in the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) filled with satirical venom. Weidman wrote Too Early to Tell (published in 1946), a story that lambastes the workers in his fictional “Bureau of Psychological Combat,” an obvious stand-in for the OWI; and Wylie penned his Generation of Vipers (published in 1943), a vitriolic attack on American institutions. Whereas Wylie and Weidman displayed the subtlety of a howitzer, Milligan was blessed with a light touch. Soon, the next generation of British satire emerged, groomed by the Goons and facing new social challenges like the Cold War, the atom bomb, and Soviet aggression. The Oxford-educated Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore and the Cantabrigians Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller came together to form “Beyond the Fringe,” a stage revue whose satire took on these new realities. The troupe’s iconoclasm is made obvious in the first few minutes of the show. The opening act began with “Steppes in the Right Direction,” a short skit that engaged the chief battleground of the Cold War: the ideological battle between communism and democracy. A character played by Dudley Moore is taken by the three others to be a “Bolshevik,” and they try to win him over to the other side. But the British government and cultural figures they extolled as moral exemplars—such as then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, novelist Ian Fleming, and the legendary character Robin Hood—are weak icons. Moore persisted in his derogation and turned all the others against those hollow figures of British greatness. End scene. Blackout. With laughs and brilliant writing, the skit attacked the cherished shibboleths of Western greatness. By the end of the show, few illusions remain unscathed. British manners, the Royal Family, U.S.-Britain relations, nuclear test bans, social class, the death penalty, and attitudes toward pornography—all were satirized.17 Goffman was a huge fan.18 The comedy revue was a modest hit in America; it had a two-year Broadway run, and in the 1970s Peter Cook and Dudley Moore toured the U.S. with their spin-off sketch comedy show, “Good Evening.” It is understandable that the revue would become a cultural flashpoint for comedians and audiences, but the impact was more widespread. The spy

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novelist John le Carré revealed that the show played a role in his work. In a revealing admission, he stated that his successful book The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (published in 1963) had “glamorized the spy business to Kingdom Come.” His characters enacted “clever conspiracies” that were far from the real-life “muddle and futility” he had known as an intelligence officer. In effect, his highly successful novel was a “fan letter to the British secret establishment.” He was determined to set aside the “Little England fantasies” and get it right the next time. Those fantasies, he revealed, “were being hilariously torn to shreds by the Beyond the Fringe team.” He vowed that his next novel would be different: I would use the spy story to tell a roman noir in which the British Intelligence Service would be portrayed as a political somnambulant, tapping about in the after-lunch haze of victory, uncertain anymore whether it is fighting the Russians or the Germans, but fighting anyway, because not to fight is to wake up. The Looking Glass War would be a deliberate reversal, if not an actual parody, of The Spy.19

Thus, “Beyond the Fringe” inspired his turn to parody and anti-establishment views in The Looking-Glass War (published in 1965) and his later works. Two picaresque novels that Goffman appreciated display the kind of satire that he enjoyed: Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (published in 1928) and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy (published in 1958).20 The structure of the picaresque genre—the episodic misadventures of a character—allows for a story that evolves through a series of mishaps from one social situation to another. Thus, a character can encounter conflict situations, in seriatim, in domestic, religious, economic, and military contexts while, in each case, the author directs a critical eye onto those social institutions. By the end of a picaresque novel, the protagonist’s story has been told and the entire social structure is critically revealed. In this way, Waugh’s Decline and Fall chronicled the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, a young man who is unjustly ejected from college, then employed without credentials in a provincial school, engaged to an heiress, arrested for human trafficking, imprisoned for seven years, released from prison under false pretenses, returned to society masquerading under his same name, and enrolled again to study for the clergy. The novel’s satire aimed at British social institutions of the 1920s: its public schools, marriage, upper class, clergy, and penal institutions. Through all of this, the protagonist tried to maintain “honor” while all of society’s representatives undermined him: his honor meant nothing to them and their self-interest. Thus, Pennyfeather’s “decline and fall” is linked to the decline and fall of the British moral order, or at least as it was perceived by the conservative Waugh.21 Despite its dissimilar content and politics, the late

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1950s sex romp Candy followed a similar format. The title character Candy Christian is repeatedly shafted (literally so) by representatives of society that claim legitimacy but act illegitimately. Whether by a scholar, poet, filmmaker, religious guru, or medical doctor (the 1968 film adaptation adds the military), Candy was urged to give herself to men who exploited her sexually while those elites voiced lofty justifications for their acts. The novel takes special aim at an ethos of sacrifice that is exploited by social elites for their personal gain. As the phony philosophy professor Mephesto says, “To give of oneself fully . . . is a beautiful and thrilling privilege.” Thus, Candy’s misadventures exposed the moral bankruptcy of an entire era.22 Goffman did not follow the approach of the picaresque novel, with its episodic structure and serial critique of social institutions. He was inclined instead to examine social processes that cut across social groups and categories and that manifest in social interaction. But the effect of these novels, the way in which the justifications of an unjust society are exposed, was the outcome he too was aiming for. The Beats were keen satirists of the 1950s. William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (published in 1959 though written over the preceding decade) was first published in Paris by Olympia Press, as was Candy, and it was also banned in several U.S. cities. Candy’s co-author Terry Southern (a Goffman favorite) called Naked Lunch “[a]n absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life.” In a 1961 class on “Deviance and Social Control” at Berkeley, Goffman discussed Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness (published in 1952), considered by some to be the first Beat novel (others credit John Clellon Holmes’s Go, published in the same year).23 It featured with rare openness a plotline about abortion, alienation, casual marijuana use, racial passing, and so on. But it wasn’t the biting satire per se that interested Goffman. The Beats were open to discussing subjects like racial passing and personal front that were of interest to sociologists for the social processes they revealed. Thus, we see that sociological truths were the precipitate that the solution of satire revealed.24 One satirical tradition Goffman mostly avoided was the scatological. A man of many talents, he was not known as a ribald storyteller. Still, when given the proper subject matter, he could hint in that direction. In his “Response Cries,” Goffman discussed words and nonwords that function as curses or apologies.25 There he covered en passant belches, passing wind, laughing aloud, muttering, ejaculatory expressions, like hell or shit, and a wide range of other sounds and expressions. The essay referenced the Scottish American linguist prankster James McCawley, the founder of scatolinguistics. McCawley wrote under the pseudonyms “Quang Phuc Dong” and the Spoonerism “Yuck Foo.” Both of those characters were supposedly linguists at the fictitious South

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Hanoi Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.). Goffman cited McCawley’s (in the guise of his pseudonym) brilliant essay, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject,” published in a mock Festschrift to himself, Studies Out in Left Field. There, he analyzed the linguistic functions of “Fuck you,” “Damn you,” and similar utterances. We quote McCawley/Dong: A sentence consisting of these items plus a noun phrase [e.g., “Fuck you, man!”] has neither declarative, nor interrogative, nor imperative meaning: one can neither deny nor “answer” nor “comply with” such an utterance. These utterances simply express a favorable or unfavorable attitude on the part of the speaker toward the thing or things denoted by the noun phrase.26

Goffman went along with the joke, citing the essay by Dong, but not for any humorous or satirical purpose; instead, Goffman referenced the essay’s precise linguistic content as it relates to his subject. Curse words and other “interjected imprecations” are not linguistic utterances but serve other functions: they are indicators of the speaker’s attitude for McCawley, evidence of the speaker’s control, poise, and competency for Goffman. Here again, as with his use of Waugh’s Decline and Fall discussed earlier, Goffman employed satirical content to score sociological points. I wish to highlight the importance of this point. Goffman was a sociologist who employed satirical writings for non-satirical purposes. Fine and Martin may have viewed Goffman as moralist in the limited pages of Asylums they examined, but in this broader view of his work and classroom teaching there is another story to tell.27 The foregoing shows that Goffman drew mostly on satirists who provoked and did so to score sociological not moral points. It is essential to understand Goffman within this wave of satire of the 1950s and 1960s. After all, he told us in his writings and classroom lectures that this material mattered to him. He often drew from the evolving Anglo-American tradition of satire. He was not only attuned to this content in radio, film, television, and novels; he drew from it as a needed resource. The satirists he appreciated shared with him a common spirit—as with all tricksters, it was a spirit of both destruction and creation, the crossing of boundaries and creating new forms.28 The importance of the “disruptive imagination” in Goffman’s life and work helps make sense of his choice of “anarchist” as a characterization of his political position.29 Just using that word was a provocation.30 On the one hand, one cannot take this avowal too seriously. Goffman certainly did not adhere to the intellectual principles of political anarchism.31 On the other hand, he was inclined toward the social disruption of the Marx Brothers, the provocation of Terry Southern, and the anti-establishment views of “Beyond the Fringe,” and all the others discussed above. Disruption and

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creation are the common traits of all tricksters. More perhaps than any other sociologist, Goffman embodied those traits. THE 1950S AND THE RISE OF INTELLECTUAL SATIRE Postwar satire can be seen not only in popular culture but also in the intellectual world of theater, literature, and scholarship, satire that tickled the mind as well as the funny bone. Satiric disruption joined comic disruption in the postwar culture. Intellectual satire is characterized not by reference to a humorous situation (as in the Marx Brothers scene discussed above) but to an intellectual or moral problem.32 The problems uppermost on many intellectuals’ minds throughout the 1950s were Cold War problems, and satire provided a way of responding to them by means of a manifest fiction.33 Satire became a typical mode of responding to these problems because it displayed the very same dynamic that underlay the historical era itself: it was another form of provocation. Goffman was immersed in this postwar lifeworld of intellectual satire. Foremost were the works of Stephen Potter, the English writer and satirist.34 After some success as a literary critic in the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote and produced programs “of national importance” for the BBC during the war—radio documentaries (like with Grierson in Canada, this was a euphemism for propaganda) supporting the World War II effort. Among others, there was a program on the British Tank Corps, another on a naval battle, and a moving tribute to Winston Churchill. After the war, however, he released his inner satirist. Schooled by Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (published in 1903), he had a taste for critique of England’s social institutions. But Potter was a different kind of satirist. He didn’t write exposés of hypocrisy and moral decay; he was cheeky and provocative. Potter’s social set played lots of games—golf, tennis, billiards, ping-pong, cricket, squash, croquet, boule, word games and invented games, too—and played to win. But winning was not just a game of skill or talent or luck; it was a stratagem. “Gamesmanship,” Potter’s term for getting ahead without cheating, is not a moral wrong; in fact, it was, and in many quarters still is, the Anglo-American way. Potter’s bite and humor, like that of Swift’s, comes from taking an idea to its absurd extreme. First came Gamesmanship (published in 1947) then Lifemanship (published in 1950) followed by One-Upmanship (published in 1952), and later others too—works that together presented not only a satire of the self-help genre (as they are sometimes presented) but of the commitment to winning above all, and by extension, perhaps, a critique of the preceding two world wars whose gains and losses were apparent to all.35 The books introduced fresh terms into social analysis. In addition to

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exploiting the “manship” suffix, which turned being into doing, he employed the terms “interplay,” or what sociologists call reciprocal interaction; “byplay,” a theatrical term for action carried on aside while the main action proceeds; and “counter-gamesmanship,” efforts by an opponent to thwart another’s winning stratagems. A success in England, Potter’s works also gained popularity across the pond. He went on the lecture circuit in the U.S. and drew positive reviews and discussions in the popular press. Potter’s work made it into Time magazine (in 1949) before Goffman’s did (in 1969).36 Goffman approved of Potter’s widely read books. He called them “rather sound writings,” high praise from Goffman, and drew from them the sociological lessons they conveyed.37 He too employed the terms by-play and interplay in his books and wrote of “counter-moves.” Most importantly, both authors shared the view that much of gamesmanship involves doing not saying.38 In tennis, for example, as Potter portrayed it, playing against tempo or otherwise acting to introduce doubt can unsettle an opponent and may provide an advantage; no special words need be spoken. Postwar game theory supported this view by prioritizing the language of “moves,” things we do or steps we take, not words. Chess, blackjack, tic-tac-toe and many other games may be played with no talking at all. Concurrent with these developments in game theory was the work of John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (initially delivered at Harvard in 1955), which introduced the notion of “performative utterances,” the idea that some utterances are ways of carrying out actions. “I do,” I’m sorry,” “I warn you”—all are performative utterances. Goffman too maintained a robust interest in “actions [that are] allowed to do all the speaking.”39 Although the source of Goffman’s appreciation of everyday calculation was von Neumann and Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, not Potter, the English satirist brought these considerations decisively into an examination of everyday life, Goffman’s chosen terrain. Potter’s work became a key benchmark for the satire of so many others to follow. Intellectuals turned to satire to respond to Cold War realities. One of the first to do so was Chicago sociologist David Riesman, during Goffman’s graduate student years. By the late 1940s, the ideological battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was well under way and it cast a pall over social life and stultified positive social change. So thought Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, when he described the situation in October 1950: “It was disquieting to find out on my return to the United States this year the prevalence of the belief that full-scale world war is inevitable. Many men of good will have lost hope for any solution short of war.”40 From this deep concern for the prospects of renewed global conflict there emerged a range of innovations, such as the Hutchins Committee’s world constitution, the United Nations’s UNESCO and its culture of peace, and the Norman Wait

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Harris Foundation’s 23rd conference on “the world community,” the 1947 meeting that inspired Riesman’s satirical “The Nylon War.”41 In it he told the story—tongue firmly in cheek—of Operation Abundance, a U.S. effort purportedly underway to “bomb” select cities across the U.S.S.R. not with weapons but with consumer goods. To Moscow, Vladivostok, Rostov, and other Soviet cities, the U.S. was dropping pallets of American-made products: nylon stockings, tampons, men’s shaving products, cigarettes, yo-yos, wrist watches, and other desirables. Eventually refrigerators and Jeeps were also airdropped. And the effort was working, the essay reported. Soviet citizens not only gobbled up the goods, but they also turned aside the lesser quality Soviet goods in favor of the American, demanding more and more. The Soviets turned the tables, dropping their own goods on U.S. cities. But those goods were so shoddy that Americans rejected them. Riesman built realism into the story, reporting on the internal and external political fallout from the campaign and he added two mock footnotes to give the piece a sense of authenticity, a practice Potter also employed.42 Like Potter and Goffman, Riesman promoted the primacy of the deed over the word. The story implied that democracy could prevail not through ideological pronouncements but through creative programs like Operation Abundance. Such actions could generate discontent with the Soviet government and shift the country’s economic priority from guns to goods. Though the piece was a lark, it was meant for a serious purpose: to break through what Riesman called “a sense of doom about our society,” the pessimistic attitude, expressed in the above quote from Judge Douglas, that the Cold War was inevitable and that a bi-polar and hostile world was the only possible world.43 Riesman could not have known that the Cold War would endure another forty years, and that it would advance from an ideological battle to a nuclear arms race and the possibility, by accident or design, of Armageddon. By the late 1950s, Schelling’s work at RAND led him to the problem of the reciprocal fear of surprise attack. The problem was this: the mutual suspicion and hostility of the two superpowers created conditions that increased the chance that one or the other country would make a surprise first attack. Even among those defense intellectuals aligned with the establishment, there was strong motivation to identify ways to convince politicians not to use nuclear weapons in a game of brinkmanship (a new Potter-inspired Cold War term) or as a first-strike weapon. How does one drive home that point? For Schelling, Swiftian satire became a sensible response to the madness of nuclear peril. He proposed a novel way to set up conditions that would strongly de-motivate surprise attack, at least on the part of the Americans: the equivalent of a “junior year abroad” at the kindergarten level. “If every American five-year-old went to kindergarten in Russia,” he wrote, “and if each year’s incoming group arrived before the graduating class left, there

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would not seem to be the slightest chance that America would ever initiate atomic destruction in Russia.” Knowing that an attack on one’s enemy was also an attack on one’s kin and countrymen would greatly reduce the likelihood of surprise attack.44 This is the Schelling that Goffman admired, the intellectual satirist, not the other Schelling of the later 1960s, the one whose ideas and counsel helped intensify the Vietnam War. Schelling’s proposal, of course, was never meant to be implemented. Nor was Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” that the rich eat poor children to reduce poverty expected to gain acceptance. The point of those proposals, like Riesman’s “The Nylon War,” was to prod readers into realizing that alternatives to menacing circumstances were conceivable. Throughout the 1950s, Goffman was publishing a series of non-satirical papers on interactional sociology. His 1956 essay “On the Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” published in American Anthropologist, is characteristic of his writings at the time: it is serious and brilliant scholarship. But look at that issue of the journal, and one also sees anthropologist Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.”45 Miner’s article was sandwiched between Goffman’s paper and a study on the diffusion of aboriginal fish poisons. As such, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” masqueraded as entirely innocent, but it was a joke with Goffman’s paper as the set-up. Miner’s paper on the American Indian tribe “Nacirema” was a spoof of middle-class American ethnocentrism. By describing everyday American “body rituals” such as daily teeth brushing and showering as exotic practices, Miner prodded readers into seeing the dangers of exoticizing other cultures. In the 1950s, when Americanism often manifested as jingoism, this was a story with a subversive message. The paper is rightly famous now for its use as a pedagogical tool for breaking through college students’ prejudices toward non-Western peoples. But it is also notable as a subtle attack on the same practice among some anthropologists, whose distinctions between primitive and modern cultures was still enmeshed in some anthropological thinking.46 Miner was soon to be a satirist not only of American life but also of the social sciences. In “Researchmanship” (published in 1960) Miner signaled his satire with a nod to the “manship” language of Stephen Potter, indicating again the saliency of Potter to subsequent Cold War satire. The paper offered a critique, as one analyst wrote, of “the instrumentalization of social science research under Cold War imperatives.”47 What were these imperatives? First, the priority of funding over ideas, and the bending of research problems to the interests of the funders. Second, the redefinition of significant results in the form of quantitative data as analyzed by expensive computers. Third, the collection of data abroad, preferably somewhere one’s spouse wanted to visit. Fourth, the injunction to publish lots of articles and books with long titles. The satire would have been less biting if not for Project Camelot, a U.S. Army

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conceived and funded research project that caught many social scientists, Schelling included, with their hands in the Cold War till. The project was conceived in 1963, proposed in 1964, and cancelled before starting in 1965. The project manifested all four of the Cold War imperatives that Miner’s paper satirized—for the express purpose of supporting American military intervention in developing countries.48 CARDS OF IDENTITY AND GOFFMAN’S CRITIQUE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 49 Goffman held great interest in the contemporary satires of psychoanalysis by Jay Haley and Nigel Dennis.50 Haley’s 1958 “The Art of Psychoanalysis” was considered essential reading in Goffman’s 1961 class on deviance at Berkeley. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman called the paper “excellent.”51 Who was Haley and why was this paper important to him?52 Haley was a protégé of Gregory Bateson, the English anthropologist, husband of and co-author with Margaret Mead, and Goffman’s early mentor. Haley was an original member of Bateson’s project team on communication that led to the “double-bind” theory of schizophrenia.53 The double bind theory posited a family matrix whose distorted communication patterns generated inner disorientation in the child. Thus, the unit of analysis is the family system not the individual, and the dynamic process is of communication not the unconscious. As such, the Bateson project was a formative learning experience for Haley. He had been an enthusiastic advocate of Freudianism and turned away from psychodynamic psychotherapy and toward a view of the patient as understood and treated in the family context.54 Though common now, this approach was cutting edge for the time and Haley is considered a founder of Family Therapy. “The Art of Psychoanalysis” may be understood through this lens of Haley’s estrangement from Freudianism. It reflected his rejection of the view of therapy as long-term and fixated on the patient’s unconscious mind. While psychoanalysis was emerging from its dogmatic days of the 1920s and 1930s, still in the early 1950s dynamic psychotherapy was the only widely accepted form of therapy. And what went on in the psychiatrist’s office was something of a secret, as the activity took place behind the closed doors of an analyst’s office. Haley wrote a spoof masquerading as a report on a fictional three-volume work by a student at “Potters College in Yoevil, England” (the fictional correspondence college that Potter introduced in Gamesmanship) that purported to provide a thorough investigation of what goes on in psychoanalytic practice. Here Haley accomplished for psychiatry what Potter did for

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everyday life, and Miner for Cold War research—he analyzed it as a form of gamesmanship. A series of moves takes place in therapy where, as Haley wrote, “one person is constantly maneuvering to imply that he is in a ‘superior position’ to the other person in the relationship.” By its very nature, Freudian therapy involves a patient in an unequal position. The patient must voluntarily come to the therapist for help, pay the analyst an hourly fee, and lie down on a couch “feet up in the air and [with] the knowledge that the analyst has both feet on the ground.” All these elements place the therapist in a one-up position relative to the patient. But the patient also has ploys, such as stating some shocking news about sexual deviancy. But the therapist has been trained to avoid falling for patient ploys by maintaining an impassive demeanor. The therapist’s response to such a shocking admission is silence, which ensures he remain one-up. On and on the therapy goes, with patient and analyst each engaged in a prolonged bout of gamesmanship.55 As presented by Haley, psychoanalytic terms may be translated into gamesmanship language. A patient’s resistance, for example, is a ploy for one-upmanship; transference is the patient’s attempt to struggle gamely in the hope of getting one-up; symptoms are ploys “no sensible person would use”; and cure is a point when the patient no longer cares who is in control. All of it is good fun, of course, but at the expense of the dominant psychological perspective that Goffman also thought was dead wrong. It was the 1950s and “depth psychology” was in vogue and under satiric attack. Nowhere is this better shown than in another of Goffman’s favorites, Nigel Dennis’s satirical novel Cards of Identity (published in 1955).56 Dennis was a playwright, novelist, and critic who had worked as translator and secretary to the Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler, an original member of the Freud circle. Dennis came to Adlerian psychology through his aunt, the British novelist Phyllis Bottome, and uncle Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British diplomat and one-time SIS Head of Station of Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In other words, he was a spy. First Ernan and then Phyllis became confirmed Adlerians. Then the couple passed those teachings onto the upper-class boys in the language school they ran in the late 1920s in the Tyrolian town of Kitzbühel. The students included their nephew Nigel and his schoolmate Ian Fleming, the future prolific novelist and creator of the fictional spy character James Bond. Dennis later revealed that Cards of Identity was indebted to Adler’s ideas and personal example. The book was, as Daniela Carpi wrote, “a narrative rereading of Adler’s psychological principles.”57 It could not have been otherwise, as Adlerian teachings had been the air Dennis breathed. Dennis accepted Adler’s dismissal of Freud’s “depth” psychology, his understanding of the individual as a unity, his socially oriented approach: the social was as important as the inner realm, and his acceptance of the role

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of fictions and counter-fictions in the formation of identity. This latter point is particularly important, for Freud’s break with Adler in 1911 coincided with the publication of Hans Vahinger’s Philosophy of the As-If, a study of fictionalism in all areas of thought that assisted Adler in conceiving his alternative psychoanalytic theory.58 Adler’s new “Individual Psychology” included a dramaturgical understanding of the individual as the writer and protagonist of her own life. Individuals create their own fictions, their own identities, then they wear the masks that fit their story. “The psychological life of a person,” Adler wrote, “is oriented to a final act, like that of a character created by a good dramatist.” He continued, “the individual then wears the character traits demanded by his fictional goal, just as the characters mask (persona) of the ancient actor had to fit the finale of the tragedy.”59 As Dennis was himself a talented dramatist, there is little doubt as to why he saw these ideas as congenial to his way of thinking. Indeed, Cards of Identity was turned into a play and was staged in 1956 at London’s Royal Court Theatre.60 Dramatic action derives from these same principles: if identities are created, they can also be manipulated. Adler held that people, especially neurotics, were vulnerable to individuals who seduced them with calculated fictions. This was his criticism of the social response to World War I: people were manipulated by leaders who cultivated “war lust.” Paul E. Stepansky has shown that Adler did not have a very sophisticated understanding of the social sources of this seduction. He saw it simply as a native vulnerability made worse by a lack of community feeling.61 In any event, Dennis affirmed the view of his master when he wrote that identities are susceptible to “the power at the disposal of the charlatan or Big Brother, who uses psychology to re-write the fictions of others in forms that are useful to himself.”62 Like Haley, Dennis underscored the role of power in the therapeutic relationship. But whereas Haley articulated the ploys that patients, even schizophrenic patients, utilize to overcome their subordinate status, and whereas Goffman added, in Asylums, an extensive discussion of the “secondary adjustments” that mental patients make to retain their humanity in total institutions, Dennis warned of the greater power of the analyst whose command and callousness were total. It may have seemed so at the time. Demagogues and dictators marked much of the mid-twentieth century. But later evidence, such as from the researchers of brainwashing after the Korean conflict discussed earlier, found that the power to change minds was not total and not lasting. Indeed, it will soon be shown that even Dennis admitted this point at the end of his novel.63 The problem of identity creation and manipulation is the grand theme of Cards of Identity. The book opens with a con. Henry Paradise sells mediocre horses to the local swells, for whom he then works and from whom he

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then steals. It is a scheme with which he has had some success; he wore a nice wristwatch to show for it. But he had been patronless for a year and his spinster sister Miss Paradise, who shares his home, urged him to find the next mark (or patron) at the nearby estate of the Mallet family. The next time Miss Paradise sees Henry, though, he has disappeared into the role of the Mallet’s butler, and now goes by the name of Henry Jellicoe. Upon finding him so transformed, Miss Paradise is nonplussed; she learns from Captain and Mrs. Mallet that her Henry is dead. And in a sense, he is, as one identity is gone, and another has been assumed. In her confusion, Miss Paradise too has been given a new identity. Captain Mallet has manipulated Henry and Miss Paradise into believing that they are different people with different pasts and presently serve as the butler and housekeeper, respectively, of the manor. The con has been switched. The simple schemers have been fooled by a more sophisticated swindle: the psychiatrists are in town. The good Captain Mallet is not a captain at all, or even a Mallet. He is the conniving leader of the Identity Club, a London-based psychoanalytic society, and he needs more staff to assist with the upcoming annual meeting of the Club that will soon take place at the country manor, which he and his “family” have appropriated. So, he turns to the local doctor’s office to find more help for the meeting. Fresh recruits were found in a local doctor, who through weeks of identity manipulation became the gardener; the nurse, who likewise was turned into the gardener’s assistant; and a patient Mrs. Finch or Chirck, her last name being uncertain even to herself, became the housekeeper. Mallet is a Svengali of identity transformation. As with actual psychoanalytic societies, the Identity Club members meet to discuss case studies, the ostensible purpose of the annual meeting. These cases, however, are not based on the patients the members see in their practice; the club has long given up the idea that case studies must be of real patients. Instead, they are fictions spun out of the Grand Theory they espouse. These too can be instructional. The novel’s long mid-section narrates three outrageous and hilarious such cases. They are cases, however, that exhibit authenticity. The novel’s case studies were examined by a bona fide psychoanalyst, Dr. Leslie Schaffer, who wrote in the journal Psychiatry that despite their outrageous content “all of them [were] models of their kind, regrettable though this may be.”64 At the novel’s end, when the three case studies had been presented and a Shakespearean play of duplicity and intrigue had been performed by the staff, the Identity Club members make their hasty retreat back to London, leaving the staff to sort out their identities. Miraculously, they all quickly return to their former selves. Dennis was not only narratively recasting Adler’s battle with Freud and depth psychology; he was fighting closer battles. The novel’s third case study hints at possible historical sources of the book. The author’s argument against

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psychiatry may be seen as opposition to more contemporaneous instances of identity manipulation, such as the political interrogators of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, communist mind control in the satellite countries during the late 1940s and 1950s, and American McCarthyism, a perversion of the anti-communist spirit in the early 1950s when Dennis was writing the book. Dennis built this kind of “witch hunting” into the story line when it is revealed, early in the novel, that the American members of the Identity Club would be unable to attend the upcoming annual meeting in England. They were being summoned, the novel reported, to appear before “some committee” and international travel might jeopardize their ability to return home.65 Without naming it, Dennis here alluded to the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee, part of the vicious 1950s anti-communism crusade. If personal identities and case studies are fictions, consider the status of confessions. What are they and what are their relation to the identity of the confessor? This is the problem of the novel’s third case study, the purported confession of a convert from communist agent to religious monk. The multiplicity and duplicity of identities is fully revealed in the confession. If a spy is caught and brought to trial, there is the confession made in court; this version of the story is told to judges and the press. But that is often followed by a second confession in the form of a commercial book, a version for material gain. Then perhaps there is an additional confession written privately for one’s family, maybe in the form of a diary or letter to one’s children. That too may be published for posterity’s sake. Which confession tells the truth? Which reveals the person’s “real” identity? Is there such an identity for a spy? A character queries, “Would I ever find a real, final confession underlying all the others?” An answer is quickly given, “I began to feel that far from stripping myself really naked, each confession only covered me with another petticoat.”66 These considerations were not imaginary but matters of historical record. Cards of Identity was published in 1955, three years after the publication of Whittaker Chambers’s memoir Witness. Chambers was a Times magazine journalist with a secret life: he was a Soviet spy, then an anti-communist convert, and finally a HUAC informant and accuser.67 Chambers accused State Department staffer Alger Hiss of espionage. The hearings and trials continued for two years, from 1948 to 1950. In the end, Hiss was convicted of perjury, a verdict that helped justify and embolden anti-communist fervor in the U.S. and abroad. Chambers’s memoir recounts his life and experience on all these matters. Tellingly, in it are represented all three of Dennis’s kinds of confession: in court, for gain, and for children. Thus, Cards of Identity is a fictional novel that presents a fictional case study written by a fictional doctor all of which point to actual people and events of the years during the Cold War when Dennis was writing the book.

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Cards of Identity may be considered the unofficial start of the anti-psychiatry movement. Before Thomas Szasz’s attack on “mental illness” as a legal term in 1958, and before R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self in 1960, and of course before Goffman’s 1961 Asylums, there was Dennis’s 1955 novel.68 It was not a shot across the bow, but a direct hit. Schaffer’s review of the book in Psychiatry described the novel’s prognosis for psychiatry as grim. Dennis’s critique of the fabrication of case histories was unique for the era. His narrative portrayed cases as fictions, not stories of real patients but as fantasies spawned by approved theory. Goffman followed suit in Asylums with a damaging assessment of the mental hospital case record. Such records are not a dossier of a person’s background and behavior, good and bad, he argued, but thinly disguised morality tales. After reporting for several pages on the specific weaknesses of the case histories he studied, Goffman concluded: The events recorded in the case history are, then, just the sort that a layman would consider scandalous, defamatory, and discrediting. I think it is fair to say that all levels of mental-hospital staff fail, in general, to deal with this material with the moral neutrality claimed for medical statements and psychiatric diagnosis, but instead participate, by intonation and gesture if by no other means, in the lay reaction to these acts.69

Another direct hit is shown in Dennis’s portrayal of the Identity Club members’ approach to “symptoms.” The Identity Club therapists reductively interpreted legitimate social anxieties as signs of some underlying inner malady. A character says, “think of the state of the world, doctor,” a reference to the threat of nuclear war. The doctor responds that worry about the bomb is a dodge whose origin lies in damaged maternal bonds in early childhood. “Then the atom bomb does not exist?” the patient queries. The answer: “Some of my colleagues say it doesn’t; they lump it in with all other internal problems, like road-accidents, industrial injuries, cancer, death, and so on.”70 Dennis may have made up the story, but not the psychoanalytic practice. The reduction of social problems to disturbances of inner life was then common psychiatric practice. Goffman fought against similar views in his early paper on embarrassment, when he contrasted his sociological approach to the psychoanalytic literature. Among others, he cited Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, who interpreted “embarrassed hands” as a sign of repressed masturbatory desires.71 Thus, the perspective of Cards of Identity—its anti-psychiatry stance, view of identity as fluid and constructed, extended brief against case histories, and attack on the obvious inadequacies of psychiatric symptomology—all are positions on which Goffman was aligned. They both saw psychiatry as a

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swindle. Goffman wrote of psychiatry that it was one of the few professions that “have so well been able to institutionalize, to sell on the social market, their own fantasies of what they were engaged in doing.”72 CONCLUSION Examining Goffman’s engagement with Anglo-American satire reveals that he favored satirists who were disruptors more than those who were moralists. In fact, we find no moralism in Funt, the Marx Brothers, Potter, Riesman, Haley, or McCawley/Dong. Whether the satire took comedic or intellectual form, it was the anarchic spirit, the provocation, he favored. Who else but a prankster such as linguist McCawley would contrive a fictitious university with the initials S.H.I.T.? As such, this analysis supports and identifies the warrants for Goffman’s self-characterization as a political anarchist. This characterization has been a puzzlement since it was first reported; but it makes sense now considering the foregoing analysis. Satire’s destructive aspects are joined to their creative double—there is a sociological precipitate that emerges from the acid bath of satire. In fact, as was shown above, even when an author took a strong moral stance, as for example by the British satirists Waugh and Dennis, Goffman drew from them sociological rather than moral lessons. It may be objected that the authors considered here are no more important than the many others he cited. Goffman’s footnotes exhibit a wide range of sources that were referenced in diverse ways.73 Why should these sources be any different? The response is that these satirical sources were distinctive in that they found their way not only into his footnotes but also his classroom lectures and research files. While those authors mirrored Goffman’s style, they were important to him for other reasons as well. Later in his life, Goffman had acknowledged an official “community of help” of about a dozen mostly Penn-associated scholars, people who read and commented on his writings and provided other sources of support.74 But the Anglo-American satirists of the Cold War represented an unofficial community of help during darker times. They shared many of his viewpoints, took some of the same steps he was taking, and provided legitimacy to his enterprise. The culture of provocative satire that Goffman drew from in his work was also a circle of support. Most of the writers examined here were writing in the post-World War II era and the Cold War that followed it. They manifest the issues of the era: existential vulnerability exposed by Funt and the Marx Brothers; global aggression addressed by Schelling and Riesman; fabrication and seduction by false leaders exposed by Dennis; and the adoration of winning that underlay

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all of this as shown in Potter’s brilliant work. Goffman was one of the few sociologists of his generation who could absorb all these developments and turn them into the great creative project of social theory of the Cold War era. NOTES 1. Oxford English Dictionary, “Provocation,” Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2. Yves Winkin, “Erving Goffman: What is a Life? The Uneasy Making of an Intellectual Biography” in Goffman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy, ed. Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 22–23. 3. See, for example, Dmitri Shalin interviews with Charles Glock (November 12, 2008), Gerald Handel (February 16, 2009), and Louis Kriesberg (June 22, 2009) in Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (UNLV: CDC Publications, 2009). http:​//​cdclv​.unlv​.edu​/ega​/. 4. Author’s interview with Alan F. Blum, February 15, 2023, courtesy of Professor Blum. Professor Blum asked me to note the following: “The interview exposes one small part of Blum’s archive of impressions based upon their personal relationship over time and his engagement with Goffman’s work that he used and continues to reflect upon in his ongoing research on the dialectic of self-management. Blum has learned from Goffman about ways of finding relief in a social order that puts autonomy, integrity and creativity in peril, ways neither mechanically conformist nor mechanically transgressive but in-between. Blum’s personal and often humorous experiences with Goffman has led him over time to view his body of work as grounded in an erotic infrastructure more complex than what is detailed in the Goffman industry by academics who display it at worst in the parasitic foraging of outsiders, at best in the good-hearted exegeses of admirers, or of sentimental former students. In this respect Blum tries to rescue Goffman as a person rather than a platitude, as an influence to integrate in life rather than a commodity.” Alan F. Blum, email to the author, February 17, 2023. 5. Alan Funt, Eavesdropper at Large: Adventures in Human Nature with Candid Mike and Candid Camera (New York: Vanguard, 1952), 23, 24. Goffman addresses human nature throughout his work. See, for example, the last two paragraphs of his “On Face-Work” in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 44–45. 6. David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 126. This characterization was not included in later editions of the book. 7. Goffman’s appreciation of Alan Funt, Terry Southern, and this scene from the Marx Brothers comes from Yves Winkin’s interview dated August 24, 1991. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. 8. Sherri Cavan, “When Goffman was a Boy: The Formative Years of a Sociological Giant.” Symbolic Interaction 37, no. 1 (2014), 59–60.

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9. A. Owen Aldridge, “American Burlesque at Home and Abroad: Together with the Etymology of Go-Go Girl,” Journal of Popular Culture 5, no. 3 (1971), 568. 10. Some of these tales are collected and retold in Eric A. Kimmel, The Adventures of Hershel of Ostropol (New York: Holiday House, 2019). For a scholarly discussion, see David Chapin and Ben Weinstock, The Road from Letichev: History and Culture of a Forgotten Jewish Community in Eastern Europe, Volume 1. (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2000), 79–84. 11. On satire as provocation, see Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 35–70. The classic look at Goffman’s satire is Gary Alan Fine and Daniel D. Martin. “A Partisan View: Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman’s Asylums.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19, no. 1 (1990), 89–115. Fine and Martin present a classic view of satire as moral critique, a view that has been criticized as assuming a uniform moral order where right can be easily discerned from wrong. The view of satire as provocation expands our understanding beyond this classic view. This chapter explores Goffman’s interest in satirists who provoked and disrupted order, more anarchist than moralist. 12. Winkin interview, August 24, 1991. Also, Yves Winkin, interview with Richard Jeffrey and Edith Jeffrey, October 24, 1991. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin and Edith Jeffrey. 13. Humphrey Carpenter, That Was Satire that Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 53–55. 14. Spike Milligan, The Goon Show Scripts (London: Woburn Press, 1972). 15. Ibid, 90. 16. Kenneth Slawenski, J.D. Salinger: A Life (New York: Random House, 2012). 17. Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. Beyond the Fringe: A Revue (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1963), 5–8. 18. “Beyond the Fringe” comic Alan Bennett was a fan of Goffman; he even wrote a perceptive review of Goffman’s Forms of Talk. See Alan Bennett, “Cold Sweat,” London Review of Books 3, no. 19 (1981), 1–8. 19. John le Carré, “Forward to the Lamplighter Edition,” in The Looking Glass War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), vii-ix. 20. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (London: Chapman & Hall, 1928); Maxwell Kenton (a pseudonym of Terry Southern), Candy (Paris: Olympia Press, 1958). The film adaptation of 1968 was directed by Christian Marquand. An account of the writing and reception of Candy is Nile Southern, The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy (New York: Arcade, 2004). 21. But it is the chapter on Pennyfeather’s incarceration that Goffman cited in Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 185 n19. There, Goffman underscored the cultural relativity of the prison experience. He pointed to the title of Waugh’s chapter on Pennyfeather’s time in prison, “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make” (Waugh, Decline and Fall, 159–171). What did this mean? Pennyfeather curiously found prison to be a time of freedom and respite. “It was the first time he had been really alone for months. How very refreshing it was, he reflected.” The root of this perspective is the English public school system, an institution whose harsh strictures make English public-school men experience prison as a familiar and even

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welcome experience. Of course, Waugh is using prison to take aim at the school. But Goffman in this instance was targeting neither. He was underscoring the cultural relativity of the prison experience by drawing on Waugh, and on the sober analysis of the French colonial administrator, Robert Delavignette. In his Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, Delavignette discussed the ways in which custom determines whether prison is experienced as punishment or not. Delavignette wrote, “Now, imprisonment is not always understood in the same way among the peoples of French West Africa. In one place it seems an adventure that has nothing dishonorable about it; in another, on the contrary, it is equivalent to being condemned to death.” (Robert Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1968), 86). Instead, then, of drawing on Waugh’s satire for a moral critique of total institutions, Goffman employed it to score sociological and anthropological points. 22. Goffman discussed Candy in Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 161. 23. Gary T. Marx, email to the author, April 11, 2022. 24. Goffman cited Brossard in Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 52, and in Relations in Public by comparing a situational impropriety of one of the novel’s characters to the ritual debasement of the Pope (washing feet of the poor), thus comparing the lowliest and the most eminent in a most Goffmanian way. Again, in this latter text, Goffman employed a satirical text to score analytical points. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (London: Penguin Press, 1972), 79–80 n44; Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2010), 54–55 n44. 25. Erving Goffman, “Response Cries,” in Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 78–123. Goffman’s citation is on page 115 note 18. 26. Quong Phuc Dong, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject,” in Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley, ed. Arnold M. Zwicky, Peter H. Salus, Robert I. Binnick, and Anthony L. Vanek (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1971), 6. 27. Gary Alan Fine and Daniel D. Martin. “A Partisan View,” 100–106. 28. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 10. The Ur-text of this subject, of course, is Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1956). 29. Reported in William A. Gamson, “Goffman’s Legacy to Political Sociology,” Theory and Society 14 (1985), 605. 30. Also consider Paul Feyerabend, who called his philosophical approach “anarchist,” a word he chose, he admitted, because it was outrageous. “I love to shock people,” he wrote. Paul Feyerabend, Killing Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 142. 31. I examine these anarchist principles in the discussion of another sociologist, in Gary Dean Jaworski, “Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Sociological Anarchism,” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 3 (1993), 61–77.

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32. This distinction draws on George E. Wellwarth, “Nigel Dennis: The Return of Intellectual Satire,” in The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 307–312. 33. This characterization draws on Edward W. Rosenheim’s definition of satire as “an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars,” in Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 31. This is not to say that Cold War problems were the only matters of concern; certainly issues of racial injustice in America were also prominent, and gender discrepancies were an emergent concern. 34. This profile draws on Alan Jenkins, Stephen Potter: Inventor of Gamesmanship (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). 35. Stephen Potter, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1947); Lifemanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950); One-Upmanship (London Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952). 36. David Riesman was on Time’s cover on September 27, 1954. Nigel Dennis, who will be discussed below, was a staff book reviewer for Time from 1940 to 1958. See “Cult Novelist Nigel Dennis Dies,” Associated Press News, July 21, 1989. 37. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 16 n6. 38. Ball’s attempt to systematize Potter’s insights for sociological theory errs by missing this vital point. Donald W. Ball, “Pottermanship: The Psychological Sociology of S. Potter (and the Yoevil School),” in The Humanities as Sociology: An Introductory Reader, ed. Marcello Truzzi (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1973), 141–162. 39. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (London: Penguin Press, 1972), 61 n13; Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 37 n13. 40. William O. Douglas’s address to the Fourth Annual Assembly of United World Federalists was published as “An Obligation to History,” Common Cause 4, no. 6 (January 1951), 281–284. 41. On the Hutchins Committee, see Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), chapter 6. Riesman published “The Nylon War” in Common Cause (Vol. 4, no. 7, February 1951, 379–385), the Hutchins Committee’s monthly periodical, although the piece did not have its origins in that effort. It was conceived at the 1947 Harris Foundation meeting. Riesman recounted the origin of the essay in a letter to the University of Chicago’s comptroller in David Riesman to Catherine S. Mitchell, June 11, 1951, David Riesman Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUGFP 99.16, Box 45. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. 42. Some readers who did not recognize the piece as satire thought America was really “bombing” the U.S.S.R. with consumer goods. Riesman received letters and phone calls from people who asked to be kept up to date about the unreal operation. Years later, he expressed dismay at satire as a way of reaching the masses. Satire was too snobbish, he thought. See Riesman’s “Epilogue” to a reprint of “The Nylon War”

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in Preventing World War III: Some Proposals, ed. Quincy Wright, William M. Evan, and Morton Deutsch (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 223. 43. A “sense of doom,” see Riesman in Quincy Wright, et al. (eds) Preventing World War III, 224. 44. On “surprise attack,” see Thomas C. Schelling, “The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack.” RAND Corporation Paper P-1342, April 16, 1958, revised May 28, 1958. For Schelling’s kindergarten proposal, see The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 136. 45. Both are published in American Anthropologist, Volume 58, Issue 3 (June 1956). Miner was a University of Chicago Ph.D. (1938) under Robert Redfield. He had been a counterintelligence officer during World War II (as was J.D. Salinger). It is not farfetched to wonder if there was something about this training that allows a person to flip the perspective more easily, as the war work had instructed them to do. For more on Miner, see James B. Griffin, “Horace Mitchell Miner (26 May 1912–26 November 1993),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 3 (1995), 289–292. 46. See Mark Burde, “Social-Science Fiction: The Genesis and Legacy of Horace Miner’s ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.’” American Anthropologist 116, no. 3 (2014), 549–561. 47. Ibid, 553. 48. On Project Camelot, see the classic account and collection of essays in The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). 49. For a more comprehensive discussion of Goffman and psychoanalysis, see the commendable study by Philip Manning, Freud and American Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), esp. 72–85. 50. Goffman also acknowledged Edgar Borgatta’s delightful send up of Freudian theory, in Goffman, Frame Analysis, 391, n17, citing Edgar F. Borgatta, “Sidesteps Toward a Nonspecial Theory,” Psychological Review 61, no. 5 (1954), 343–52. It is puzzling that, as Goffman noted, some scholars failed to spot the fakery of the piece, taking it as serious scholarship, given the author’s musing in a footnote that he was extending small group research into the “no-person group” via the “no-way mirror,” obvious absurdities. 51. The author thanks Gary T. Marx for sharing this reading list with me. Goffman cited Haley in Presentation of Self, 191n1. 52. Not long ago, at the University of Pennsylvania, there were several file cabinets containing Goffman’s collection of writings by others, a scholar’s lifetime assortment of offprints and unpublished papers. As a part of his research on Goffman, Yves Winkin sponsored the creation of a list of the contents of those cabinets. The “List of Files of Erving Goffman,” dated June 1998, registers a bounty of works by writers that mattered to him. I was shown this list courtesy of Dr. Winkin. In the “H” files one could find Julien Huxley on the courtship habits of the red-throated loon, Edward T. Hall’s works on proxemics, Dell Hymes on communicative competence, and eleven papers by Jay Haley, including the 1958 “The Art of Psychoanalysis.”

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53. On the “double bind,” see the papers collected in Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family, ed. Carlos E. Sluzki and Donald C. Ransom (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1976). For a discussion of the project, including Haley’s role in it, see David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Chapter 12. 54. “I was very Freudian in those days,” Haley said in an interview. “I had done a lot of reading in that literature.” AAMFT Presents: Founders Series. Jay Haley interviewed by William Doherty, 1990. YouTube. Downloaded May 23, 2022. https:​ //​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=F7GJuk1frMg. 55. Jay Haley, “The Art of Psychoanalysis,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 15, no. 3 (Spring, 1958), 190–200. The paper is also included in Haley’s collection of irreverent essays, The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ and other Essays (New York: Grossman, 1969). 56. One of Winkin’s informants spoke of Goffman’s interest in Cards of Identity (Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (New York: Vanguard Press, 1955; Penguin Modern Classics, 1966) in Yves Winkin, Interview, September 1, 1986. Courtesy of Dr. Winkin. An Associated Press obituary called Dennis a “cult novelist,” as his satirical novel had “won cult status among disenchanted young Britons in the 1950s.” Goffman was not British (he was Canadian) but he may have been “disenchanted” and he was a member of this cult, too—as he was of the “The Goon Show” discussed earlier. Both the revue and the novel were, in contemporary parlance, “disrupters.” 57. I consulted the following in writing this brief profile: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Portrait from Life (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1957); Daniela Carpi, “Nigel Dennis and Alfred Adler: A Study of Identity,” Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 5 (2005), 283–316; Pam Hirsch, The Constant Liberal: The Life and Work of Phyllis Bottome (London: Quartet, 2010), 148; Pam Hirsch, “Apostle of Freedom: Alfred Adler and his British Disciples,” History of Education 24, no. 5 (2005), 473–48; Paul E. Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow: Adler in Context (New York: Routledge, 2012); and George E. Wellwarth, “Nigel Dennis: The Return of Intellectual Satire,” op.cit. 58. Hans Vahinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob was first published in German in 1911 and translated into English in 1924. See Hans Vahinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (New York: Routledge, 2021), viii. 59. Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher ed., The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings. (New York: Basic Books, 1956), 94. 60. Nigel Dennis, Two Plays and a Preface: Cards of Identity & The Making of Moo. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958). Reference to the staging the play at the Royal Court Theatre is from “Cult Novelist Dies.” 61. Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow, 28–29. 62. Nigel Dennis, “Alfred Adler and the Style of Life,” Encounter 35, no. 2 (August 1970), 10. 63. Edgar H. Schein with Inge Schneier and Curtis H. Barker. Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-psychological Analysis of the ‘Brainwashing’ of American Civilian Prisoners by Chinese Communists (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).

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64. Leslie Schaffer, Review of Cards of Identity. Psychiatry 21, no. 2 (May 1, 1958), 231. 65. Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (New York: Vanguard Press, 1955), 135; (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 113. 66. Dennis, Cards of Identity, 1955, 262; 1966, 213. 67. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952). As Dennis also worked part-time for Time magazine during these years, it would not be inappropriate to call them colleagues. 68. Thomas Szasz, “Psychiatry, Ethics, and the Criminal Law,” Columbia Law Review 58, no. 2 (February 1958), 183–198; R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Penguin Books, 1960) 69. Goffman, Asylums, 158. Goffman also commented on fictionalized composites of psychological case studies in Goffman, Frame Analysis, 391–392 n17. 70. Dennis, Cards of Identity, 1955, 75; 1966, 65. 71. Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (November 1956), 264 n2, citing Sandor Ferenczi, “Embarrassed Hands” in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 315–316. 72. Erving Goffman, “Mental Symptoms and Public Order” in Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 139. 73. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “Goffman’s Footnotes,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022). 74. See Erving Goffman, “Response Cries,” 78 n1.

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Aggression

Real and threatened violence pervaded mid-twentieth century society. Like all responses to global threats, Goffman’s was personal. The context of aggression that mattered most to him was not the violence of Nazism or of the Holocaust but of the postwar conflict between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. For, as the foregoing chapters have shown, Goffman expressed great concern for the problems of the early Cold War—of the false front of Soviet spies in America, their penetration of this country’s nuclear secrets, and the resulting obsession of the emerging U.S. national security state for enforcing secrecy and loyalty. Still, the war had a hidden presence in his writing; he often had others refer to it for him.1 It was the contest between the two superpowers that shaped the world in which Goffman was engaged. Already, by his dissertation in 1953, Goffman characterized the interaction order as akin to a cold war. This was by far his most telling “natural metaphor.” For here was a game of two players with conflicting interests, whose knowledge of the other was incomplete and uncertain, involving deception and feigning, and where decisions and actions are interdependent and fateful for both parties. This description characterized both the global scene and the interactional worlds Goffman examined. The postwar climate or ethos included a sense of deep uncertainty and mutual fatefulness, a view that the future was uncertain and painfully tied to the policies and decisions of an opposing superpower. For sensitive souls of the early Cold War, and Goffman was certainly one of them, these aspects of the time were germane to life and thought. Where does Goffman’s work fit into the problem of cold war aggression? How did he address social conflict and hostility? Is there a sociology of aggression in his writings? In what ways was he aligned or unaligned with Freud, Lorenz, and other prominent investigators of human aggression? These are the concerns that are addressed in this chapter. It is structured in two parts. The first part analyzes the intellectual perspectives on aggression that Goffman absorbed and responded to. The second part presents three case 179

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studies of Goffman’s work that illustrate in greater detail the way he integrated discussions of aggression and conflict into his work. These are shown in his studies of interactional microaggression, character contests, and of staring and aggression—analyses that provide unique insight into his thinking on a central feature of the Cold War landscape. PART ONE: GOFFMAN AS CONFLICT SOCIOLOGIST Unlike many other thinkers of the period who were touched by the world war and its aftermath, and who struggled to understand history’s worst human atrocity of the extermination camps, there was no corresponding effort on Goffman’s part to explain human aggression. He took it as a given. One looks in vain in Goffman’s work for intellectual engagement with, for example, Freud’s “death drive” thesis in Civilization and its Discontents, Dollard’s frustration-aggression hypothesis, Adorno and colleagues’ Fascism-scale in The Authoritarian Personality, or even Lorenz’s On Aggression.2 Instead of these, Goffman was a conflict sociologist.3 His was a conflict approach that existed prior to the one that emerged as “conflict theory” in subsequent generations, with its Marxian roots and focus on class, power, and unequal resources. That textbook version of conflict theory did not exist as such when Goffman was first writing in the early Cold War. He drew on other sources of thinking about conflict that emphasized a basic hostility in human affairs and fundamental opposing interests. His work responded to and assimilated at least four traditions of thinking about conflict: social-structural sociology, the psychoanalytic tradition, game theory, and ethology. For each of these midtwentieth-century approaches, conflict was a hallmark of social life. The Social-Structural Tradition Sociology’s answer to the postwar obsession with aggression was the concept of conflict. The term side-stepped the biological and/or psychological roots of aggressive behavior and substituted for them social-structural causes. The key distinction initially employed was the classic in-group, out-group notions of William Graham Sumner, as featured in his 1906 book Folkways.4 These terms reflected the idea that conflict has roots in the structure of society. For, it is in the nature of groups to set boundaries by distinguishing between insiders and outsiders. Those boundaries build solidarity within the group by creating “we feelings” among members, and by generating competitiveness or hostile feelings toward those outside of the group.5 Sumner illustrated the moral conflict arising from this social clash by referencing the language of “opprobrious epithets” of in-group members toward an out-group, such as

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“pig eater,” and “cow eater,” and “uncircumcised.” Goffman updated Sumner in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with a discussion of terms of distance and derogation of his era. Goffman wrote: Thus musicians will call customers squares; native American office girls may secretly refer to their foreign colleagues as “G.R.’s” [for “German Refugees”]; American soldiers may secretly refer to English soldiers with whom they work as “Limeys”; pitchmen in carnivals present their spiel before persons who they refer to in private as rubes, natives, or towners; and Jews act out routines of the parent society for an audience of goyim, while Negroes, when among themselves, will sometimes refer to whites by such terms as “ofay.”6

In the postwar era, it was not uncommon for sociologists to take up Sumner’s structural terms when examining even extreme forms of hostility. Robert K. Merton’s examination of racial discrimination in his 1948 essay on “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” is perhaps the most prominent expression of this approach. Even today, Merton’s imagery appears current and on point. He wrote, “the ugly fence which encloses the in-group happens to exclude the people who make up the out-groups from being treated with the decency ordinarily accorded human beings.”7 Merton was able to make much of Sumner’s terms, addressing not only racial prejudice and institutional discrimination, but also human cruelty. In this structural sociological approach, there was no need to examine “F-scales” and other measures of human psychological propensity to violence to explain human cruelty. As Sumner wrote, “it is in the conditions of human existence.”8 Another structural approach to conflict became widely accessible in 1950 when Wolff translated and published portions of Simmel’s Soziologie and a few other pieces as The Sociology of Georg Simmel; and then again in 1955 with Wolff’s translation of Simmel’s essay on conflict in Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations.9 Like Sumner, Simmel approached conflict from a social-structural perspective. Neither innate human aggressiveness, nor pathological individuals, nor faulty family socialization need account for human conflict; it is a basic interactional form. Simmel developed the idea of the positive functions of conflict beyond Sumner’s approach. Like Sumner, he admitted that hostility can strengthen group boundaries, and that conflict can be “consciously cultivated to guarantee existing conditions.”10 But he added that it also has inner and outer efficacy: inner in the sense of making circumstances feel bearable, outer by the capacity of conflict to develop new relations and structures. For Simmel, antagonism is a sociological element “almost never absent” from social interaction.11 Goffman never cited Simmel’s essay on conflict, but he was more than familiar with the work of one of Simmel’s students, Robert Park.12 Park

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advanced an interactional perspective on conflict in his book with Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, an important text of the Chicago School of Sociology. Like Simmel, Park and Burgess described conflict as a basic form of interaction, and therefore as amenable to sociological analysis. Written in the aftermath of World War I and also of the 1919 summer race riots in Chicago, Omaha, and elsewhere in the U.S., the volume focused attention on the ways that the civil order masked conflicts and rivalries. As they declared, “The delicate nuances and grades of attention given to different individuals moving in the same social circle are the superficial reflections of rivalries and conflicts beneath the smooth and decorous surfaces of polite society.”13 In this quotation at least, the authors directed students to look closely at the civil order and find the simmering aggression that lay beneath the surface. This is an invitation to which Goffman clearly responded. The Psychoanalytic Tradition Freud’s thoughts on aggression developed later than his ideas of the libido, but his conception of the two drives ultimately paralleled each other in his work. Both involved psychic energies that can be built up as tension and then released; both can be attached to objects other than their original source; and both can be sublimated and socialized in productive ways.14 Ultimately, in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud would speculatively characterize the two drives as great opposing forces, Thanatos and Eros, the drives of destruction and of love. But psychoanalysts and researchers drew less on this late speculative work than on Freud’s other writings on aggression, including Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. There the model of tension and release is forcefully and convincingly presented. Freud noted, for example, that the way laughter can be explosively released implies a buildup of tension.15 Though the “hydraulic model” of emotions is not unique to Freud (Simmel, Lorenz, and others employ it, too), the idea of sex and aggression as inner drives that can be thwarted by social conventions, and surreptitiously released, is tied to his perspective. At mid-century, these ideas found their way into sociology, such as is found in Rose Laub Coser’s “Laughter Among Colleagues,” a paper that Goffman had read and commented on prior to its publication.16 The paper drew on Coser’s late-1950s research of staff and patients in a small East coast private mental hospital, specifically on the humorous interactions that occurred during twenty staff meetings she had taped and transcribed. It seems there was a lot of joking going on among the staff—an understandable reaction, perhaps, to the stresses of work in a mental hospital and the complex hierarchy of the place.

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Coser offered a multi-dimensional approach to humor, viewing the humorist as a great equalizer, a disguised moralist, and a contributor to social cohesion. But central to her approach was the Freudian view of the humorist as a “disguised aggressor” and joking as a permissible outlet for that aggression.17 But this aggressive humor, being channeled within a social structure, is not subversive; it respects the status quo. As she reported, humor is often top down: the psychiatrist made jokes at the expense of the junior staff, and the junior staff directed their jokes toward themselves or patients below them in the hospital’s ranking system. Humor was very seldom directed upward to the bosses; and in the staff meetings she studied, women staff seldom joked at all. Coser’s summary includes these Freudian lines: The use of humor tends to be so patterned that its inherent aggression is prevented from being disruptive . . . Hence release of aggression in a witty manner may do much to prevent the undisguised outbreak of hostility or the bottling up of frustrations. Humor helps to convert hostility and to control it, while at the same time permitting its expression.18

Coser’s paper, thus, presented a hydraulic view of aggression that gets “pent up” and finds “release” in various places, including in humor. By releasing tension, by directing aggression into safe channels (i.e., away from the actual targets), by diminishing the seriousness of the attack, laughter contributes to social order.19 Like the graylag geese studied by Lorenz, humans were ever expressing aggression but always in ways that preserve the order. Coser was not alone in favoring psychoanalytic explanations of aggressive derogation. It was also conveyed in Peter Blau’s 1955 book on bureaucracy, originally a Columbia University dissertation.20 (Coser’s paper also drew from dissertation research at Columbia.) Blau’s book included a case study of a state employment agency, a bureaucratic entity whose express purpose was to assist workers seeking employment. Agency interviewers were expected to follow a service ideal, a mission to serve clients and serve them well by securing jobs. The agency job-interviewers in fact worked hard to secure jobs for applicants, but sometimes those clients either did not show up for the job or otherwise refused to accept the position. They might also be demanding, or resistant, or difficult. Then the clients were the focus of a great deal of backstage complaining behavior, including ridicule, malicious jokes, and other forms of invective. Blau interpreted this behavior as a “discharge of aggression” often with corresponding guilt feelings on the part of the agency representative. Complaining behavior was both an expression of “pent-up aggression” and a way to assuage “guilt feelings” by seeking to justify one’s behavior with another.21 These psychological reactions had dysfunctional

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effects for the bureaucracy, Blau argued, as they fostered anti-client norms that ran counter to the service ideals of the organization. The point to be made here and supported throughout this chapter is that none of these psychological processes of pent-up emotions, tension release, guilt, and so on were a part of Goffman’s analysis. For Goffman, everyday life indeed evidenced a latent hostility; but Goffman’s characterization of that hostility appears to have been made without foundation in Freudian principles. There is some debate about Goffman’s relation to the psychoanalytic tradition, some commentators pointing to rejection and others to engagement.22 But it is certain that it is difficult to find evidence of Goffman’s acceptance of Freud’s theory of aggression. There were plenty of opportunities for him directly to engage with that position. Consider Goffman’s “Embarrassment and the Social Organization” (published in 1956), where he cited Dollard’s paper on “the Dozens”—a study of the pattern of interactive insult via obscene jests and taunts in America’s Black communities at the time (Dollard’s paper was first published in 1939). Goffman noted there that the function of insult was a test of composure; but he remained silent on the explicitly Freudian interpretation of that pattern that Dollard presents in the paper’s closing pages.23 For his part, Dollard engaged with the social-structural tradition on conflict when he noted that the sustained insults of the Dozens were more likely to lead to actual fights when the aggressive interaction took place with members of an out-group. Within an in-group, individuals were more likely to control their temper during play; indeed, the rules of the Dozens identified a person who was led to fight as the weaker player and the loser of the battle. “Fighting itself proves,” he wrote, “that you have run out of verbal retort and that you have been bested by your opponent.”24 But the frustration-aggression approach of the paper is rooted directly in Freud’s writings. With this observation, Dollard seems to have been thinking of wider matters. He drew an analogy between the pattern of insult among individuals playing the Dozens and offenses against nations. “It has been long known by diplomats,” he wrote, “that it is dangerous to humiliate an important nation twice on the same score.” In his closing words which were published at the onset of World War II, Dollard tendered a warning. “Patterns of aggressive expression,” he wrote, “like the Dozens, are undoubtedly valuable, but if unchecked interaction teases out of individuals or nations the ultimate in repressed aggression that pattern is a dangerous one to human society.”25 These ideas did not fall on deaf ears. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Dollard was a consultant to U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a Yale man, from 1942–1945.26 In contrast to the Columbia University sociologists, Goffman paid homage to the work on the “joking relationship” of Radcliffe-Brown and other social

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anthropologists. For them, the disrespect that was displayed in the barbed insult or joke expressed only a “pretense of hostility and a real friendliness.”27 So, what looked like aggression was not. Goffman’s friend and former colleague Tom Burns, in “Friends, Enemies and the Polite Fiction” (published in 1953), followed in this social-structural tradition.28 Burns maintained that the banter and ironic comments of everyday social interaction both manifest and mend the multiple embarrassments deriving from modern industrial organization. For example, a person can be both a friend from the old clique, and now a manager thanks to a promotion. The person who was once just a buddy is now a boss. This disparity can cause conflict and enmity on and off the job, as relationships that were once based on equality may now have a hierarchical dimension. But together sharing a joke at someone else’s expense or engaging in witty banter that only insiders can fully appreciate can safeguard that primary relationship and maintain the status quo. For Radcliffe-Brown, the joking relationship was only a “playing at” aggression that is understood by the interactants to be not taken seriously. Burns displayed his affinity with this approach when he wrote, “to use banter is to play at being hostile, distant, unfriendly, while intimating friendliness.”29 Expressing his alignment with this position, Goffman also examined play forms of aggression. His Gender Advertisements included twenty advertisements portraying mock assault: picking someone up, grabbing or squeezing them, pouring water on them, and so on. Goffman noted that playful games with children may include mock assaults, playfully treating them like a prey under attack by a predator. Men also play these games with women, who collaborate with cries of alarm or fear. He further notes, “of course, underneath this show a man may be engaged in a deeper one, the suggestion of what he could do if he got serious about it.”30 Here Goffman is eager to document not aggression per se, but aggression display. The Game Theory Tradition Game theory is a type of conflict theory, or so argued some of its practitioners. One was John D. Williams, the head of RAND’s mathematics division, the place where game theory during the Cold War had been institutionalized, advanced, and promoted. Williams had written a primer on the theory of games of strategy for the lay reader, which RAND published in 1954.31 There he asserted that the key focus of game theory was the conflict situation, defined as those in which two or more parties held opposing interests. Further, the theory examined situations where both parties have some agency; it is essential that they be able to exert some control over the situation. The approach also incorporated the notion that some aspects of the situation are not within the control of either party. Thus, if someone is backed up against a

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wall, that obstacle is an element of the situation that must be considered. And last, the state of information in the situation is imperfect and troublesome. This acknowledged the role of deception, such as bluffing or feigning, and the inability of one party to know for sure what the other’s next step may be. Game theory advanced a method for assessing what steps self and other might take in any given conflict situation considered in this way.32 It was rather like a game of poker, or of war, and as such the model both mirrored and shaped the geopolitics of the era. To illustrate these RAND ideas, one thinks of Schelling’s discussion of soldiers fighting a battle where one side was positioned with a ravine to the rear, thus blocking retreat.33 In such a battle there are clear opposing interests, and the officers on each side possess some discretion over the decisions they make. And then there’s that gully. What will each side do and what will they think the other side will do? In thinking through this question, Schelling identified analogous situations where an opponent is blocked from retreat. He shared stories of racial injustice protesters who chained and padlocked themselves across a thoroughfare; of World War II German machine gunners, some of whom were said to be chained to their guns; and of the fighters with a ravine at their backs, in effect chained to their positions. Game theory can help to strategize those situations where an opponent’s only option is victory, and where resolve is steadfast or “firmly fixed.” And what are the functional equivalents of chains and ravines? Schelling suggested, “discipline may do it.”34 Jessie Bernard also advanced game theory as a “modern sociology of conflict,” in a paper published in the same year as the Williams lay reader just discussed.35 Her paper was clearly written in the shadow of the conflict between the superpowers, as she acknowledged a truth of the Cold War, namely, “that the conflicting systems must somehow or other live in the same social world.”36 She became known as an advocate of game theory for the social sciences and was one of only two women who attended the 1964 conference on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict” at Berkeley discussed earlier. But she abandoned the pursuit. In part the problem she faced was the problem of the early adopter. Bernard took as her model the approach of the RAND mathematicians, with their work on zero-sum games, payoff matrices, and mathematical solutions. She drew on RAND mathematician McKinsey and secured pre-publication comments on her paper from both Oskar Morgenstern and his then assistant Martin Shubik. Her approach thus rose or fell with the mathematicians. But all the elements they developed soon became hotly contested. Zero-sum games were considered too limited for an analysis of broader concerns; the values to be entered into payoff matrices came to be seen as arbitrary; and the notion of a “solution” was attacked. Worse, these attacks came from within the Mathematics Division itself, from

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Olaf Helmer, one of the first mathematicians brought on at RAND.37 By 1958, Schelling had published his “reorientation” of game theory and pursued this further in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict. Consequently, at RAND the Mathematics Division, though still ascendant, nevertheless met with the rise of the Social Sciences Division, with people like Hans Speier, Herbert Goldhamer, William Kaufmann, and Schelling. Now game theory developed a more expansive conceptual armament, with terms like counterforce, assessment, enforcement, credibility, and cooperation. It was this expanded set of ideas with which Goffman engaged. Goffman employed game theory ideas in “On Face-Work,” in his discussion of the “aggressive uses of face-work.” There he borrowed the language of fencing—of thrust, parry, and riposte—as elements of the social game. If someone attacks one must respond with a riposte, a retaliation, or suffer the loss of face in the aggressive attack.38 The language of battle is clear. In this way, Goffman discussed aggressive interactional practices, such as the ways in which a verbal assault may discredit a proffered self, the aplomb with which one might confront aggressive maneuvers, and the possible contribution of aggression to in-group cohesion. But all of this is done without analyzing the sources or nature of aggression. Instead, aggression is presented as a fact of existence; it is there in the situation but an unexamined element of it. The same approach appears in Relations in Public, where Goffman briefly noted the way city streets had become sites for aggressive challenge through eye contact.39 The game theory model builds aggression, in the sense of a readiness to attack or confront an opponent, into its assumptions. Classic game theory is a model of winning and losing, of maneuvering the pieces of a game, a ball in play, or otherwise making a move, to win. Inherent in the model is a conflict between players and an assertive pursuit of one’s interests. When Goffman wrote, in “The Interaction Order,” that “our experience of the world has a confrontational character,” we see the conflict perspective embedded in his approach to sociology.40 The Ethology Tradition Goffman engaged with ethological thought during his years at Berkeley and early on at Penn, just as the battle over aggression was heating up. A succession of popular books appeared in the 1960s that advanced a view of human aggression as an instinct that derives from the evolutionary inheritance from our hominid ancestors. Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis in 1962 was followed by Lorenz’s On Aggression in 1966 and a number of other works in quick succession, such as Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, Anthony Storr, Human Aggression, and Love and Hate by Lorenz’s former student, Irenäus

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Eibl-Elbsfeldt, among many others.41 There were also numerous commentaries on and critiques of all these works. Goffman’s entry into this field was Relations in Public, first published in 1971, his answer to not only ethology but also the rising national violent crime rates and general pattern of incivility in America at the time.42 For Ardrey, human aggression is based on our origins as a predator, our beginnings in a line of killer apes. Lorenz however disagreed.43 Predators have fangs and claws and horns; they threaten, chase away, and challenge the same species within a territory, but tend not to kill them. They have developed “reliable and permanently effective” biological inhibitions on killing members of the same species, a key factor in the preservation of the species.44 Without it, predators would decimate each other. Humans, however, did not develop those killer physical features: we are modest in size and speed and born without fangs, claws, or horns. Consequently, instinctive inhibitions were not developed over the course of human evolution. Because we have not developed the inhibitions that other animals have against “intraspecific aggression,” humans kill each other. But for Lorenz, although humans are natural born killers, we invented morality and law as analogous institutions that perform the same function as biological instinct against intraspecific aggression.45 The invention and development of weapons, however, and especially nuclear weapons, created the condition of possibility for the elimination of the species. Despite these important differences, Lorenz, Ardrey, and all the ethologists shared the view that animal behavior was genetically determined. This literature was not unrelated to the ongoing Cold War. All the mainstream writers expressed a larger apprehension about nuclear war and concern for peace and human survival; they were actively taking a stance on these issues. Even Ardrey expressed fear that soon the human species may be “consumed by a blinding flash.”46 Further, the larger ideological significance of ethology must be noted. The rise of ethology in the West coincided with the fall of Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. T. D. Lysenko was the mid-century Soviet proponent of the Lamarckian view on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the view that environment not natural selection was the motor of evolution. Under Stalin, this view was official Soviet science policy; it was also scientifically wrong. In early 1965, Lysenko was removed as director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a move that symbolized the final triumph of natural selection over the contrary Soviet policy.47 Thanks to ethology, the West was triumphant again. Yet, what is proud in one respect may be scandalous in another. By linking human aggressive behavior to inborn instincts, ethology lent ideological support to U.S. national policies reinforcing the inevitability of violence, racial and gender exclusion, and the appeal of authoritarian dictatorships. All these behavioral

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patterns, some ethologists said, were the outcome of a prolonged process of natural selection and are now hard-wired into the human animal. For Ardrey, even the development of nuclear weapons is as genetically programmed as is a bird building a nest.48 What is society to do? For some, the only appropriate response was force or repression. Ardrey, Lorenz, and their followers and admirers gave rise to a furor. Many reviews excoriated the books and sometimes the authors. Ardrey was portrayed by one reviewer as “a hard-nosed huckster of biological doom.”49 More deference was granted to Lorenz, who was a respected naturalist (Ardrey was a passionate layman).50 Still, it was mostly agreed that Lorenz was strongest when he presented naturalistic observations of the lower animals like his prized graylag geese. When he extended his observations to human behavior, however, he was described as “out of his depth” or engaged in “transparently wistful thinking”51 In “Avowal of Optimism,” the final chapter of On Aggression, Lorenz proposed that if nothing can be done to reduce human aggressiveness, societies can at least channel the instinct into acceptable forms, like sports or international amity. Wistful thinking, indeed. The stark opposition to ethology continued beyond the 1960s. The “Seville Statement on Violence,” adopted by UNESCO in 1989, and subsequently endorsed by forty scientific organizations, appeared to condemn the arguments of On Aggression. Peace is possible, the statement affirmed, because “there is nothing in our biology which is an unsurmountable obstacle to the abolition of war and other institutional violence.” Further, the statement continued, “war is a social invention” and thus “peace can be invented to replace it.”52 Despite this protest, the reading list of Goffman’s 1969 seminar on “Public Order” presented two full pages, single-spaced, of books and articles on “Animal Studies.”53 These included the contested books by Ardrey and Lorenz, and many others, such as by zoo biologist Heini Hediger. Like his earlier adoption of game theory during the heyday of RAND and contested Cold War military policy, so Goffman was willing to step into the fray with the maligned ethologists. Admittedly, others joined him in taking the first steps of linking ethology and the social sciences. Some, like anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, chose to retain the Darwinian perspective on the evolution of human behavior. Others, like psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, extended ethology through psychology into social philosophy. The sociologists Lyman and Scott proposed an interactionist reading of the ethological concept of territory. Even Schelling saw value in Lorenz’s On Aggression, which was required reading in his 1970 seminar on game theory.54 Thanks to all these authors and others, ethology was gaining a measure of respectability in the social and behavioral sciences. Goffman was keen on the work of Hilary Callan, future Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, whose book Ethology and Society: Towards an Anthropological View predated his.

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Callan’s book drew extensively on Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places and proposed that Goffman’s situational terms were a worthy starting point for a rapprochement between ethology and social anthropology.55 Goffman believed that he could separate the “good” from the “bad” in ethology. Sociology could learn from the field’s conceptual advances and methodology of close behavioral description; but he thought sociology should jettison its evolutionary perspective and view of current behavior patterns as those that were most adaptive for survival. Ethology’s ardent adaptationism was the real culprit. This view justified current behavior patterns as evolutionarily the best at preserving the species. Goffman firmly opposed this element of ethology. In the Preface to Relations in Public, he argued against “conservative” thinking that considered “what is” as “what is best” and discredited “the political doctrine that order is ‘natural,’ that any order is good, and that a bad social order is better than no order at all.”56 Goffman’s former professor Everett Hughes viewed Goffman as a sociological Konrad Lorenz, as both thinkers followed similar methods and themes. They were both close observers of behavior and explored the theme of aggression and order. Hughes wrote, “Men threaten each other’s person and face but allow each other to live—sometimes—to do likewise another day. Order is broken and restored.”57 Goffman adapted many ethological concepts but made his own interactionist terms central to his study. Issues of order and aggression were recast as “supportive interchanges” and “remedial interchanges,” ritual patterns that inhibit aggression and strengthen social bonds. Importantly, Goffman’s interactionist ethology was closely aligned with the traditional ethologists’ view that animal society is not a war of all against all. If this Hobbesian view were correct, all species would have been eliminated by now. Rather than constant war, nature reveals that aggression is inhibited and controlled. This basic finding of the traditional ethologists, based on naturalistic observations of animals in the wild, accorded with Goffman’s observations as well. This was expressed as early as in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life where he wrote about face-to-face interaction taking the form neither of war nor of peace but of “a temporary truce, a working consensus, in order they get their business done.”58 Now, in Relations in Public, Goffman again affirmed this ethological finding by examining the ways that people avoid outright confrontation, on the one hand, and affirm social bonds, on the other. Borrowing from ethology, this included various “displays,” or behavior patterns that have become formalized and stylized—in ethology language “ritualized”—to communicate “no harm.” Consider Goffman’s discussion of greetings, a topic that was de rigueur in ethological writings.59 Greetings between acquaintances and friends, he argued, signify “situation normal”—the relationship is

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safe and routine interaction may continue. But see a friend and offer no greeting, or a perfunctory one, and a message is sent that “something is wrong.” Also important for behavior in public places is greeting among strangers. In such greetings, Goffman noted, “there is an element of guarantee of safe passage.” Even the fixed smile operates in this way: it is a sign of no offense, no contest, and sympathy with the other.60 The human repertoire of “supportive interchanges” goes a long way to heal and maintain social order. Though people are often hurt by major relationship losses and minor interactional slights, ritual reassurances—both verbal and gestural, like the head nod or the hug—right the order. To quote Goffman, “Without such mercies, conversation would want of its fundamental basis of organization—the ritual interchange—and everywhere unsatisfactory persons would be left to bleed to death, from conversational savageries performed on them.”61 Goffman’s language here is more than just stylistic flourish; his language of “safe passage,” “no harm,” and “savageries,” for example, expressed his participation in the ethologists’ central preoccupation with the problem of controlling aggression. Consider together Desmond Morris’s chapter on “Fighting” in The Naked Ape and Goffman’s on “supportive interchanges” in Relations in Public—they cover broad common ground. PART TWO: GOFFMAN’S STUDIES IN CONFLICT AND AGGRESSION With the discussion of these traditions as background, we can now proceed with specific analyses of the ways Goffman incorporated and responded to the various perspectives on conflict. We find that Goffman’s writings regularly engaged with the issues of human aggression. Goffman and Microaggression It is widely understood that Goffman took the title of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the defining statement of his dramaturgical sociology, from Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a defining statement of psychoanalysis. Some of Goffman’s contemporaries thought that this borrowing was an act of hubris. But there is good reason to suggest that Goffman’s challenge of Freud went even further than the title and that this was not an act of effrontery but of respect. Chapter 5 of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life sets forth a sociological counterpoint to the key argument of Freud’s theories on jokes and wit, namely, that forms of derogation manifest a hidden aggression. Illuminating the various kinds of concealed aggression is the underlying task of both works.

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For Freud, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, jokes may provide the satisfaction of a repressed instinct, whether of the pleasure principle or of the aggression drive. In both instances, the joke temporarily revokes the socialized repression of basic drives by evading internal and external censors. So, hostile jokes, which have as their aim “an insulting and wounding purpose,” are both an attack and an evasion.62 They are a satisfaction of repressed aggression, but also a temporary lifting of a prohibition. And they do so through the disguised means of aggressive humor. For Goffman in chapter 5 of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life there is also a pervasive aggression underlying everyday life. But the basis for the surreptitious derogation, humorous or not, is not a repressed wish but a requirement of social order. The aggression may hit or miss its mark; it may be hidden or open; it may be voiced in backstage or in the front—but in all the root of surreptitious derogation is not social repression but the need for social order. A functionalist approach substitutes for a psychoanalytic one. For Goffman, the surface of social interaction conceals a deeper and hidden level of aggression. This surface level is equated to a “truce” or a “gentleman’s agreement” where respect, friendliness, and mutual harmony reflect a need for social interaction to go forward smoothly. But behind and beneath the open concord are “multiple currents” of sentiment, including a pervasive aggression. When Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life wrote about “discrepant sentiments,” he meant mostly this pervasive undercurrent of hostility in social life.63 The communication of hostility, like Freud’s jokes, is surreptitious, and it must be if the official definition of the situation is to be maintained. A business transaction, a diplomatic dinner, a date or hook-up— all may be transacted with perfect civility, but all may be rife with undercurrents of aggression. So, people are always, or at least almost always, involved in at least two levels of communication simultaneously: the acknowledged and the hidden. The hiding of “other-derogation” takes two significant forms: covert and overt. Covert communications of distance or disdain are never revealed to the others with whom one interacts; this type of derogation is reserved only for backstage revelations to one’s own team members. Anyone who has ever taught college students knows of the ridicule that students sometimes receive behind closed doors, as essays in blue books or their equivalents are shared with colleagues, and multiple malapropisms are exposed. The same “equation of abuse” no doubt happens in reverse in the college dorm. The problem of the “hot mic” reveals the special technical challenges public figures may face with keeping their “secret derogations” secret. What the official thinks is said in private or behind the scenes is in fact shared. Goffman’s examples of these “standard forms of aggression” range from the service trades, where

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restaurant customers are ridiculed and imitated in the kitchen, to friends talking behind each other’s backs. Indeed, techniques of other derogation may be clever and quick, as a smile to one can be betrayed to another by a simple turning of the head that reveals to a confidant the rolled eyes of disdain. Goffman underscored the advantages of covert derogation for maintaining the solidarity of the team. The in-group hostility to members of an out-group, when undertaken in secrecy, produces cohesion and consensus within. The second form of other derogation takes place in public in front of the audience—and while they’re looking, so to speak. Overt acts of aggression may be as timid as daydreaming during a conversation, meeting, or lecture, to furtive glances, and subtle ridicule to the other’s face. Some of these acts might today be considered “passive aggressive.” But this term is a psychologization of techniques that in Goffman’s work are not linked to psychological disorder but to the needs of social order. Consider the student who rubs her eye with the middle finger while the professor is lecturing. Or the prisoner of war who insults the interrogator to his face! In both instances, there is a safety that comes from the situation despite the distance and derogation that is expressed. The activity goes on despite the aggressive action. Goffman cited Schein’s research on Korean War POWs and their Chinese interrogators: It should be pointed out, however, that the prisoners found numerous ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of the Chinese demands. For example, during the public self-criticism sessions they would often emphasize the wrong words in the sentence, thus making the whole ritual ridiculous: “I am sorry I called Comrade Wong a no-good son-of-a-bitch.” Another favorite device was to promise never to “get caught” committing a crime in the future. Such devices were effective because even those Chinese who knew English were not sufficiently acquainted with idiom and slang to detect subtle ridicule.64

Goffman was not alone in exploring the topic of face-to-face derogation: it was a Chicago School tradition. Charles S. Johnson, in his Patterns of Negro Segregation (published in 1943), in a chapter that Goffman cited, pointed to the ways Southern Blacks avoided contact with whites as a form of accommodation to racial animosity. When that contact was unavoidable, however, one of the methods of sly retaliation without incurring serious risks included addressing Whites not by “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” the respectable usage, or by their first name, an obvious slight, but by some elevated title that was obviously incorrect, like “captain” or “judge.”65 Along these same lines, Dollard had written earlier of practices that “slight, elide, and make a mockery of the deference forms.”66 Under the rubric of “realigning actions,” Goffman discussed overt aggression that is heard by the audience but that does not openly threaten the

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interaction. Consider the subtle rebuke, the innuendo, expressive pauses, and conversational overtones—all openly aggressive but with sufficient deniability to strike a target without imperiling the conversation. The attacker can always say, “I didn’t mean anything by it,” and onward the interaction will go. In this context, Goffman discussed the ways in which Potter’s “one-upmanship” applied. As shown earlier, Potter’s postwar career was made by chronicling the many individual and group practices of self-elevation and other derogation. Giving a gift, making a compliment, driving a vehicle—all may involve ways of scoring points for oneself at the other’s expense. Here Goffman also cited Haley’s article on the “Art of Psychoanalysis,” with its satirical application of Potter’s principles to psychotherapy. Haley maintained that there is a battle going on behind the therapist’s closed door, with the analyst and analysand each engaged in the game of scoring points. Finally, in this section, Goffman discussed forms of “guarded disclosure” that test whether an unfamiliar other is aligned with one’s own sentiments. Political or ethnic affiliations, for example, are not always readily known. With one’s own kind, one might be inclined to set aside official civility and express one’s preferred sentiments or prejudices. The liberal would like to bash the conservative, the antisemite the Jew, and so on; but public civility prohibits, or used to prohibit, such behavior. Under these circumstances, there is sometimes a “feeling out” process of ambiguous statements the response to which might betray a hidden alignment. Once the other’s true preferences are known, one can proceed safely and say, in effect, “We are alike, and now let the other-bashing begin.” Goffman is perhaps unique in his generation for his revelation of the “concerted aggression” that underlay heterosexual gender roles. The official line of respect for the other masks the actual aggressive maneuvering of an equal into a subordinate position. Whatever the official line of proper conduct may be, male sexual conquest is nevertheless enacted. Indeed, the cultural fantasies of male seduction, such as in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Goffman noted, enact “aggressive redefinitions” of social roles, with males always available to subdue or seduce even their social superiors. Thus did Goffman in his first book reveal a deep and hidden undercurrent of aggression in everyday life, hostility that is usually surreptitious enough to avoid reprisal and ensure cohesion within in-groups. Within the truce of everyday situations, many underground battles are fought. So, we see again that The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was a study in the ethos of the time. As shown earlier, the book was an examination of loyalty and betrayal, and of secrecy and spies, and now here in this chapter it includes an analysis of the underlying aggression of everyday life. Each of these themes marked the newspaper headlines of the times and inspired grand social science research. And each was examined at the interactional level in Goffman’s first book.

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Fights, Games, and Character Contests Goffman’s most focused discussion of character contests is in his essay, “Where the Action Is,” the study of risk, character, and fatefulness that grew out of his research and personal experience in gambling casinos.67 As such, one would expect the paper to be focused on gambling and risk. But in fact, there is very little on gambling in that section of the essay. In what context, then, should we understand his work on contests in general and character contests in particular? Those contexts go well beyond the Las Vegas gambling scene. Goffman had broader issues in mind. He pointed out the relevance of character contests to commerce, diplomacy, warfare, card games, and personal relations. Card games and warfare. Goffman was thinking like a game theorist as he wrote about character contests as “a special kind of moral game.”68 He spoke of the “fundamental illusion” that is encouraged when we believe that character is the key to social continuity and morale. “We are allowed to think,” he wrote, “there is something to be won in the moments that we face so that society can face moments and defeat them.”69 Like other fights, character contests are fought on a “moral field” of battle; they are contests over good and bad, right and wrong. Though these larger values are at stake, some specific offense takes the issue to the personal level where it transforms into a contest between self and other. One thinks of insult humor, a form of character contest of reciprocal insult. Cross a moral line by insulting one’s mother, and the fight over respect becomes personal and perhaps deadlier. Who will prevail? One thing is certain, an attempt is made by one person to rise on the moral battlefield with the fall of the other. In his analysis of the last royally sanctioned duel in France in 1547, as told by Brantome, Norwegian historian Silvert Langholm noted that the two fated opponents represented major divisions in French society, a rift between two kings and between factions and status groups that had formed around those royal divisions.70 Though the duel was fought between two nobles, where individual honor was at stake, larger and weightier matters were played out in the duel. Goffman too discussed the duel in history, as he knew that contemporary character contests represent the modern equivalent of those two-person battles, and that the contemporary counterpart of honor or valor is character. Like those contests recorded in history books, the modern moral game starts with a “provocation,” an offense against the moral order with a violation that is taken personally. In its simplest form, the game ends with a “satisfaction,” such as an apology, which restores the contested rule and terminates the game. (Recall that this is the same basic sequence that Goffman discussed in “On Face-Work.”) Goffman avers that everyday life is replete with these little skirmishes. Like the border disputes of nation states, where one country

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invades another, or tests the porosity of borders on land, air, or sea, everyday life includes countless incursions into the “territories of self.” People stand too close, sneeze without covering their mouths, or inappropriately touch or bump up against others in a subway. Even noisily opening a candy wrapper in a quiet library may become a morally charged event. Most of these skirmishes end quickly and without contest. But contests played in earnest also occur. There are “run-ins” with others where one side takes the offense seriously and the other side declines to back down or give satisfaction. The result is moral combat. Goffman was especially interested in the way character contests end.71 The problem of the ending allowed Goffman to offer a detailed refutation of zero-sum assumptions that marked classic game theory. Zero-sum games allow for a single ending scenario: one player wins and the other loses. But Goffman noted that in moral combat “the characterological implications of the play can unfold in different ways, and not necessarily with ‘zero-sum’ restrictions.”72 Consider some of the options. Certainly, a victor may defeat an opponent. In the Western shoot-out, the fastest gun lives and the challenger is dispatched. In a game of “chicken” played with automobiles, one person pulls away before the other. But in character contests, Goffman noted, there is the possibility that both emerge with honor and character affirmed. Two people may fight to the point of mutual exhaustion (and admiration). In the historic duel, the king can stop the contest at a point where both parties had shown their valor; then the duel ends “in equal honor.” Further, both can lose, in the sense that both exhibit such weak character by, for example, employing “dirty tricks,” that the moral character of both remains suspect at the conclusion. Also, one can lose and the other can gain only a little, not the whole pot. This is possible because character is not an absolute quality but a matter of degrees that is decided during and at the conclusion of the contest. These various scenarios reflect the nature of character contests: since they are fought largely over character, a defeat in physical ways can nevertheless be a win in characterological ways. There is also the possibility of a “tie.” In addition to these considerations, Goffman proposed that “winning” is a matter of definition, not necessarily a quantitative matter as reflected in the “payoff matrices” of the game theorist. And this is true whether the opponents are friends, gang members, or nations. Referencing supporting literature of his time, Goffman explained, In negotiations between nations . . . no unambiguous criteria may emerge for agreeing as to who won and who lost. Scoring in some cases may be so flexible that each side can maintain its own view of the final outcome. Thus, some fights between rival street gangs end with both teams feeling that they won. This sort of conceit is facilitated by a variable intermix of concern for the physical

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or manifest outcome, allowing one team to stress score in primary attributes the other in properties of character.73

Goffman expanded his discussion to the vulnerabilities of the public order, where the contact with diverse people in public spaces can lead not only to run-ins with would-be offenders, but also with taunts and invasions that threaten territorial boundaries. Yet, despite this evident vulnerability, Goffman saw the emergence of a modern “anti-umbrage perspective,” a set of norms that proscribe taking quick offense. As anti-violence norms suffuse throughout society, people are less likely to take quick offense, and therefore less likely to duel. Instead, he noted, people are more likely to avoid conflict, by hedging expressions of hostility.74 This argument adds to the thesis on the “civilizing process” of Norbert Elias, whose study in the history of affect control in Western societies had also noted a “distinct curve of moderation,” and shares in its optimism.75 Goffman’s discussion of the various ways in which character contests may end is a contribution to the conflict resolution literature of the time. This is how Schelling saw those pages. He included Goffman’s pages on character contests from “Where the Action Is” in the required readings of the “Contests and Disputes” section of his 1970 Harvard seminar on game theory referenced earlier. There Goffman was paired with a quartet of other articles that set forth leading-edge ideas on conflict resolution. One was the Langholm study of duels mentioned above. Langholm’s interest in the duel lay in an examination of conflict resolution mechanisms. His study, like Goffman on character contests, was interested in the way conflict ends, and especially in the ways in which broad rules of the game provide conditions of acceptance of the verdict. Those rules are vague enough to provide for a variety of outcomes, and a distribution of honor or character, beyond the “all or nothing” of zero-sum games. Today, when some politicians refuse to accept the loss of an election and continue fighting to press the idea that they won, the importance of rules of the game not only for conflict resolution but also for day-to-day politics is reaffirmed. Rule-governed methods for resolving conflicts are as necessary now as they were during the Cold War when Goffman was writing. Schelling’s seminar also paired Goffman’s analysis of character contests with an article by Johan Galtung, the founder of modern peace research. In the mid-1960s, Galtung was building a theoretical paradigm on “institutionalized conflict resolution.”76 A presentation of the full details of this paradigm is unnecessary at present, but the point can be made here that Galtung, like Schelling, explored analogies between conflict at the level of the nation and interpersonal conflict. So, the relevance of Goffman’s discussion of character conflict, for example, to an analysis of international hostilities and the resolution of those hostilities, was assumed. The same can be reported for the

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conflict literature Goffman drew on. When Short and Strodtbeck, for example, wrote about “why gangs fight,” they assumed parallels between the processes they saw in gangs and those of nations. “As with leaders of nations,” they suggested, “the qualities that raise boys to the top of juvenile gangs are not necessarily those that best qualify them to stay there, or to rule.”77 What a different approach this was from those critics of Goffman who claimed he was merely a master of the mundane. The game theorists, peace researchers, and conflict resolution experts, in contrast, saw the forest for the trees. In their effort to understand global conflicts needing resolution, they looked for the formal structural similarity of conflict resolution mechanisms at several levels of analysis. Cold and hot wars, fights, verbal duels, debates, trials, and voting all represent at least two-parties in conflict and thus belong in the same paradigm.78 Galtung also presented the view, articulated by both Goffman and Galtung’s Norwegian colleague Langholm, on the inadequacy of zero-sum solutions. Galtung indicated as an example of the zero-sum mind-set the World War II policy toward Germany of “unconditional surrender.” As the historian and sociologist showed, as societies move away from zero-sum solutions, from the view of winning as total defeat and humiliation of the enemy, hostility should be lessened in amount and severity. One of the processes at work here, all of these authors note, is “saving face,” the avoidance of deep humiliation on the part of the opponent and thus the avoidance of revenge or other cycles of violence. The same point is made in Schelling’s pairing of Goffman with an article by Goffman’s Berkeley colleague Jerome H. Skolnick. There, Skolnick referred to the trend away from pure conflict as a “regression toward cooperation.”79 Thus, all of this literature, Goffman’s included, presented a sanguine picture of social progress, a view that forecast a remarkable reduction of aggression.80 But this may have been an illusion of the time. That a modern anti-umbrage perspective would reduce hostility (Goffman); that societies might enact non-violent alternatives to war (Galtung); that a “regression to cooperation” might end conflict (Skolnick)—all these ideas can now be seen as chimerical. The alternative view might have been to affirm the necessity of aggression, as Freud, Lorenz, and others were doing. This view, however, was anathema to the liberal sensibilities of the time. It still is today. But over a half-century later, the world has not cooperated with these ideas. And it is easy to see why. The analysts got their interpretations right but their prognostications wrong. All agreed that conflict resolution measures relied upon the acceptance of rules of the game. The problem now is that some are not following those rules. What happens when reputations are not damaged but strengthened by a revelation of dirty tricks? What happens when a loser fails to acknowledge defeat, and proceeds to attack and undermine the rules of the game? And what happens when such people have wealth and power and are

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found in many countries throughout the world? Then cheery conclusions do not merit consideration and new perspectives need to be developed. Threats, Stares, and Other Gestures in Social Interaction As developed by Lorenz and his followers, ethology had always involved the comparative study of behavior in animals and humans. Ethology did not extrapolate animal findings to humans; rather, the animal-human nexus constituted the very basis of ethological investigations. As historian Marga Vicedo has shown, for example, the study of the human mother-infant bond was always integral to Lorenz’s study of imprinting in ducks.81 The comparative study of gestures lent ethology a unique and fruitful field of investigation. Lorenz and his colleagues would sit for hours watching the behavior of their favorite animal species. Invariably, they would see in those behavior patterns the gestures also found in their own species; anthropomorphism, such as discussion of the “chivalrous” lizard, was inevitable.82 Gestures provided a region of behavior for naturalistic observation; and because of the parallels between human and animal gestures, ethology could make plausible arguments about the pre-programmed human animal. The study of gesture, then, became a key area of study for the ethologists, and that literature blended in, and in places converged, with the independently developed field of nonverbal communication.83 In On Aggression, Lorenz described the ritualized threatening behavior of surface-feeding ducks.84 Whether threatening with the long, lowered neck of the ruddy sheldrake or via the backwards over-the-shoulder movement of the mallard, the incitement is always accompanied by a stare directly at the object of anger. Desmond Morris went further. “A direct stare,” he wrote, “is typical of the most out-and-out aggression. It is part of the fiercest facial expressions and accompanies all of the most belligerent gestures.”85 For the ethologists, then, the stare is a primary gesture of aggression. Humans stare too, and for much the same reason: “look me in the eye and say that” is an open challenge to a fight.86 What would “the stare” look like through a social interactionist lens? In Relations in Public, Goffman answered that question. Like the ethologists, he viewed the stare as involving the violation of a kind of territory, a region he called a person’s “informational preserve.” This term relates to a person’s sense of privacy, including the “right not to be stared at.”87 But Goffman understood the act differently than did the ethologists. As described in the analysis of Lorenz and Morris mentioned above, the stare is eye to eye, a direct conflict mano a mano. For Goffman, in contrast, the stare involves an audience. It is a kind of “gesture in the round” for all to see. In public spaces

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in particular, a stare is often seen by others; in fact, those others may see the stare even when the victim cannot. Consider the behavior sequence that Goffman described as accompanying looking at someone whose attributes include some “noteworthy” characteristic.88 For purposes of this discussion, let us say the noteworthy person is a celebrity. In this sequence, an onlooker may stare at a celebrity seen on the street and then, as the celebrity nears, tactfully look away, only to stare again after the celebrity passes by.89 This sequence implies, Goffman noted, that staring is permitted if others see it; the “no staring” prohibition applies only to the object of the stare. Other complications of the human stare may be mentioned. One of the defenses against being caught staring is to turn the stare into a scan.90 The offender adjusts the look and perhaps the whole body to appear as though the “no stare” rule is being followed. Offenders, for example, can adjust their look to make it seem that they are scanning a larger area than just the person in question. Goffman here was highlighting the role of disguise. The difference between being looking at and staring can be guyed. As Goffman noted, the latter can be made to look like the former, thereby removing the would-be offender from the firing line of public offense.91 Thus, in Goffman’s analysis, the consideration of a gesture should include not simply a violation and resulting instinctive aggressive response, in this case the stare; it should recognize that the world of social gestures is situated in a moral, not just a natural, universe and, as such, involves the judgment of situated others, of the victim, and of the offender’s moral management of the offense. Further, those moral principles revolve around not the ethological assumptions of adaptability or species preservation; nor do they have to do with other biological mandates. They are based instead in ideas of the sacred nature of the individual and the needs of social order. Goffman developed these ideas further with his discussion of “body gloss.” Before we proceed, a cautionary note is in order. Even the best work on Goffman and ethology extracts the understanding of these ideas from his obvious concern about aggression and incivility.92 Although Goffman’s opening words of Relations in Public about the “unsafety and incivility of our city streets”93 are often noted, those words do not inform subsequent commentary on Goffman’s notions, including the idea of body gloss. But the notion, though certainly extendible beyond these origins, is enhanced when it is considered in the context in which Goffman wrote, and in terms of the problems with which he grappled. For him, as for the ethologists, the attenuation of aggression and the management of order were worthy problems for study. Humans, like animals, must camouflage or disguise themselves—these are synonyms of “gloss”—from potential danger. Some animals are able to change the outward appearance of their bodies to ward off threats. The chameleon can change colors and blend in with

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surroundings. Many species puff up their plumage or fur to appear bigger and more threatening. Coral reef fish, according to Lorenz, turn bright colors when angry and take on softer colors when trying to avoid an attack. The human body, however, has evolved with few of these abilities. Morris noted that human hair stands up when a person is under attack (note cartoon depictions of a person’s hair standing on end), but that hair is mostly covered by clothing or so slight that the mechanism has no survival value. But the body does change, though not in the pre-programmed ways of the animals discussed above. In Goffman’s terms, humans effect a “body gloss,” a unique form of camouflage.94 Goffman called body gloss “a kind of emergency effort” to help persons manage situations that may call their character into question.95 The whole body is used as a sign of “no harm,” in effect saying “here is the evidence of my true intent. I am honorable and mean no harm.” The stare that becomes a scan is just such a guise.96 Goffman’s discussion of the “circumspection gloss,” especially, provided examples of how body gloss helps people move safely through public space. Keeping the hands visible on the subway is wise caution against charges of untoward touching. Moving someone’s property gingerly signals no intent to steal the stuff. The multiple glosses people employ with their body to maneuver through public space show that, like animals, humans use the body to avoid threats. But human disguise is too variable to be instinctive; it is rather highly dramaturgical. In this way, Goffman rejected the confusion of reducing gestures to biology and returned them instead to the moral order that humans inhabit. Again, as in the discussion of aggression above, Goffman averred that human gestures may look like those of animals, but they are always and ever different, because they manifest in a moral universe not a natural one. Looking into the eyes does not always take the form of an aggressive stare. As shown in the experimental research of British social psychologist Michael Argyle, people do in fact look away more often when talking to another person, perhaps as a hedge against appearing aggressive. But when they are listening to someone speak, people more often look into the eyes of the speaker, thereby expressing a bond with that person. In fact, looking away while another person speaks can be construed itself as a hurtful act. The wide range of gazes studied in the 1960s—the averted gaze, the guarded gaze, even the dramatic gaze—all express attenuated forms of hostility. They are like the earlier-discussed microaggressions that Goffman studied—the ones that are expressed openly yet vaguely enough not to be obvious to the object and deniable by the subject. They provide, one clinician wrote, a “‘safe’ outlet for heaped up aggression.”97 Thus, the stare, the scan, and other forms of gaze that Goffman examined all tied to the theme of aggression in his and the ethologists’ work.

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Simmel was of course one of the first sociologists to recognize the sociological significance of the eye and the way even momentary interaction can be based on mutual glances.98 The interaction of mutual glances, for Simmel, is an act of pure reciprocity, as the glance of eye to eye lasts only a moment and leaves no trace. But Simmel also adopted the age-old view that the eye was the route to the soul. However momentary, the glance reveals the intentions of the other and discloses the self. Goffman rejected this view of the eyes as a window into the soul. He alludes to the words of Matthew 6:22, “The eye is the lamp of the body,” when he wrote disparagingly of the lay view that credits the eye as “a window to a room that is lit from within by emotional expression.” The formula that one can look in the eye of another person and see there the truth in their words is a lay belief that Goffman rejected and forewarned. Such a belief has repeatedly put nations at risk when leaders shake each other’s hands, look into each other’s eyes, and come away professing mutual understanding.99 As Simmel noted, the evanescent quality of the mutual glance makes it a great symbol of the modern world, whose situations are also changeable and ephemeral. More than this, the public order, as Goffman called it, co-mingles great armies of different races, ethnicities, and class backgrounds together in the same battlefield of everyday life. Like other animals, most have taken on the avoidance pattern of behavior, minimizing contact with others and especially minimizing eye contact. A general “no-stare” rule is followed that protects people from overture but also closes them off from contact and communication. Simmel employed powerful imagery to convey the feeling that results from this feature of modernity. He reported that urban living creates the “feeling that the individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors.” For Goffman, though, the central problem was not closed doors but clenched fists. CONCLUSION Aggression is an underappreciated topic in Goffman studies. Like loyalty, secrecy, spies, and interrogation, aggression is a topic that comes to life when examining Goffman’s work within the context of Cold War America. It is a subject that needs a great deal of gleaning from his work. It is not possible to look at one book or article and see his engagement with postwar aggression, or the main intellectual positions on it. Our analysis has taken a total scanning of his work to uncover the theme; and even with this, we may have only scratched the surface. But some things may be said with certainty. One is that Goffman characteristically absorbed whole traditions of thinking about conflict and aggression. We examined four of them here: social-structural,

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psychoanalytic, game theory, and ethology. He was not a partisan advocate for any point of view; rather, he absorbed them all and took what he wanted from them. Is there a sociology of aggression in his writings? I think there is. But it is not the purpose of this chapter to set out systematically the analysis that is implicit in his writings. The purpose here has been to show the gleanings, especially in so far as the writings connect with the traditions of thought examined above. Two main themes have emerged from this discussion. The first is that there is order rather than disorder. Goffman’s consistent position was that the interaction order was indeed an order, at least structurally so. It needed examination ethnographically and conceptually, but order there was, however messy or contingent or fragile concrete life may be. The second theme is conflict. Despite the order Goffman was committed to revealing, the world exhibited conflict as a basic property of social life. No great struggle between the death drive and drive for life, nor class conflict, nor tooth-and-nail existence existed in Goffman’s work. Yet conflict was built into the very perspectives he explored. Goffman’s great value is that he examined the ways that the dialectic of order and conflict manifests in social interaction. In this respect, as has been said many times by others, Goffman was not a Parsons or a Marx (or Freud) but a Simmel. He viewed both principles as operative in everyday life. Order was seen in the everyday truce of social interaction, and conflict is observed in the undercurrent of aggression that is expressed in the background. The attenuation of conflict can be seen in everyday life via character contests, which allow contestants, most of the time, to live another day, as Hughes put it. And he studied the gestures that provoke but also those that preserve social order. Humans appear as cautious creatures in Goffman’s work. They express their aggression in the backstage, cover their tracks with body gloss, and communicate “no harm” in countless ways, though they are covert aggressors. Order is broken and restored. Character is challenged and the challenge is met. In this scenario, we see the structural and functional similarities among the order of nature, the social order, and the great conflict between the superpowers. Goffman’s sociology of Cold War America mirrored his time. NOTES 1. Goffman’s reference to a short story by Mary McCarthy, and to an early paper by Kurt Lewin, are cases in point. See Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), 27 n37; 30 n1. 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. Norton Critical Edition. (New York: Norton, 2021); John Dollard, Leonard W. Doob, Neal E.

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Miller, O.H. Mowrer and Robert R. Sears. Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939); Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper, 1950; Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1966). 3. Randall Collins’ writings on conflict theory and interaction ritual cannot be taken up here, as this is not the purpose of the present book. But interested readers can examine a recent statement in Jörg Rössel and Randall Collins, “Conflict Theory and Interaction Rituals,” in Handbook of Sociological Theory, ed. Jonathan H. Turner, 509–531. (New York: Springer, 2006). 4. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (New York: Ginn and Company, 1906). 5. Ibid., 12–13. 6. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 173. 7. Robert K. Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” The Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1948), 193–210, with quote at 203. 8. Sumner, Folkways, 10. 9. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950); Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (New York, MacMillan, 1955). 10. Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, 18. 11. Ibid., 24. 12. See Greg Smith’s inventory of references to Simmel in Goffman’s writings, in Greg Smith, “A Simmelian Reading of Erving Goffman,” PhD diss., University of Salford, 1989, 431–444. 13. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921), 574. 14. Here I draw from Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris and Rudolph M. Lowenstein, “Notes on the Theory of Aggression,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 3, no. 1 (1947), 9–36. 15. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1960), 114. 16. Rose Laub Coser, “Laughter Among Colleagues,” Psychiatry 23, no. 1 (1960), 81–95, with Goffman acknowledged on p. 81. See also Rose Laub Coser, “Laughter in the Ward,” in Life in the Ward (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1962), 84–88. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 95. 19. In this context, mention should be made of Lewis A. Coser’s notion of “safety-valve institutions” in Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956), 151–158. For a critique, see Gary D. Jaworski, Georg Simmel and the American Prospect (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 85.

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20. Peter M. Blau, The Dynamics of Bureaucracy: A Study of Interpersonal Relations in Two Government Agencies. Revised Edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Originally published in 1953. 21. Ibid., 106–109. 22. These two positions can be seen expressed in, on the one hand, by Philip Manning, Freud and American Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), and, on the other, by Black Hawk Hancock and Roberta Gardner, “Theorizing Goffman and Freud: Goffman’s Interaction Order as a Social-Structural Underpinning for Freud’s Psychoanalytic Self,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 40, no. 4 (2015), 417–444. 23. Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956), 267 n5, citing John Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult,” American Imago 1, no. 1 (1939), 3–25. For an update, see Elijah Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. Dollard, “The Dozens,” 13. 25. Ibid., 25. See also, Dollard. et al., Frustration and Aggression, 153. 26. Walter H. Waggoner, “Dr. John Dollard, 80, Psychologist, is Dead; A Teacher and Writer.” The New York Times (October 11, 1980), 20. 27. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships,” in Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 91. This collection of his papers was first published in England in 1952. 28. Tom Burns, “Friends, Enemies, and the Polite Fiction” in Description, Explanation and Understanding: Selected Writings, 1944–1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 46–62, with quotation at 49. The paper was originally published in 1953. 29. Ibid., 49. 30. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 52–53. 31. RAND mathematician J.C.C. McKinsey had written an earlier Introduction to the Theory of Games (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1952), RAND Report R-228, and published in the same year by McGraw Hill. As noted in Alex Abella’s history of RAND, McKinsey was fired from RAND in 1951 when the FBI thought his open homosexuality marked him as a security risk. Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York, Harcourt, 2008), 74. John D. Williams then published The Compleat Strategyst (New York: Dover, 1986). 32. Ibid., 3–5. 33. Thomas C. Schelling, “Strategic Analysis and Social Problems,” Social Problems 12, no. 4 (1965), 367–368, referencing Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, trans. Rex Warner (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), 236. 34. Thomas C. Schelling, “Strategic Analysis and Social Problems,” 368. 35. Jessie Bernard, “The Theory of Games of Strategy as a Modern Sociology of Conflict,” American Journal of Sociology 69, no. 5 (1954), 411–424. 36. Ibid., 413.

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37. See Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 337–338. 38. Starting in the mid-1960s, the “come-back” was a regular feature of the Cold War-era satirical magazine MAD Magazine (The magazine’s title is a play on Mutually Assured Destruction, a military strategy of the early Cold War). Al Jaffee’s regular “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” presented a compendium of aggressive comebacks that parodied the aggressive interchanges in everyday life. “Are you going up?’ the woman asked the ladies packed into an elevator marked “Next Car Up.” One of the “snappy” responses: “No, we’re going sideways this time.” Al Jaffee, MAD’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (New York: DC Comics, 1968). Jaffe’s “snappy answers” were ripostes not to the aggression of another but to the inanity of their questions. So, populist satire and sociological analysis were both drawing attention to the everyday use of aggressive put-downs and comebacks during the Cold War era. Goffman referenced MAD’s “snappy answers” in Relations in Public, where he revealed that it was William Labov who brought the book to his attention. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York, Basic Books, 1971), 171 n53; see also 179. 39. Goffman, Relations in Public, 15–16. 40. Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983), 4. 41. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Atheneum, 1961); Konrad Lorenz On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1966); Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: Dell, 1967); Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (New York: Atheneum,1968); Irenäus Eibl-Elbsfeldt, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns (London: Methuen, 1971). Goffman also cited Robert Ardrey’s, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Dell, 1966). For an examination of the rise of popular ethology in the 1950s and 1960s, see Nadine Weidman, Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). 42. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public. For a recent book addressing the “decivilization” in the 1960s to which Goffman responded, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). 43. Lorenz, On Aggression, 124–126; 233. 44. Ibid., 125. 45. Ibid. 46. Ardrey, African Genesis, 34. 47. Ernst W. Caspari and Robert E. Marshak, “The Rise and Fall of Lysenko.” Science 149, no. 3681 (1965), 275–278. For the full story, see David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 48. Ardrey, African Genesis, 32. 49. Marvin Mudrick, “Mars or Venus.” The Hudson Review 19, no. 4 (1966–67), 653–658, with quote at 654. 50. And this despite his known connections to the Nazi regime. See Ute Deichmann, Biologists Under Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 179–205, and

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Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 231–280. 51. For “out of his depth,” see Werner J. Dannhauser, “On Aggression, by Konrad Lorenz.” Commentary (Feb. 1967), 89–92, and “transparently wistful thinking” is from Marion J. Levy, “Our Ever and Future Jungle.” World Politics 22, No. 2 (1970), 301ff. quote at p. 302. Critical essays on Lorenz and Ardrey are collected in Man and Aggression, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 52. “The Seville Statement on Violence: Preparing the Ground for the Construction of Peace.” General Conference of UNESCO, November 16, 1989 (Geneva: UNESCO, 1991), 7. https:​//​unesdoc​.unesco​.org​/ark:​​/48223​/pf0000094314. 53. Goffman’s “Public Order” reading list is available In Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (UNLV: CDC Publications, 2007– 2019). http:​//​cdclv​.unlv​.edu​/ega​/documents​/eg​_fall​_70​.pdf. 54. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, “The Zoological Perspective in Social Science.” Man. New Series 1, no. 1 (1966), 75–81; Erik H. Erikson, Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience (New York: Norton, 1977); Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, “Territoriality: A Neglected Sociological Dimension,” Social Problems 15, no. 2 (1967), 236–249; Schelling’s “Conflict, Coalition and Strategy” (1970) reading list is available online at https:​//​www​.irwincollier​.com​/harvard​-reading​-list​ -and​-final​-exam​-for​-course​-conflict​-coalition​-and​-strategy​-schelling​-1970​/ 55. Hilary Callan, Ethology and Society: Towards an Anthropological View (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Goffman must have been in communication with Callan about his project, as she is acknowledged in his book as the source of an idea. See Goffman, Relations in Public, 93 n32. 56. Ibid., xx. 57. Everett C. Hughes review of Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual. American Journal of Sociology 75, No. 3 (1969), 425–426, with quote at 425. 58. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 175. 59. Goffman, Relations in Public, 73–80. 60. Ibid., 124. 61. Ibid., 68–69. 62. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1960), 104. 63. The following discussion summarizes the key arguments of chapter 5 of Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, titled, “Communication Out of Character.” That chapter is an analysis of everyday aggression in many of its forms. To ease the reading, I forego multiple citations. All the quoted phrases are from this chapter. 64. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 188, citing Edward H. Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War,” Psychiatry 19 (1956), 149–172, with quotation at 159–160. 65. Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper, 1943), 280. Goffman referred to Johnson’s chapter on avoidance in “On Face-Work” and he cited the same chapter in Presentation of Self, 38 n4.

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66. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 304. 67. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Anchor, 1967), 239–258. 68. Ibid., 240. 69. Ibid., 239. 70. Silvert Langholm, “Violent Conflict Resolution and the Loser’s Reaction: A Case Study from 1547,” Journal of Peace Research 2, no. 4 (1965), 324–347. See George H. Powell, Dueling Stories of the Sixteenth Century: From the French of Brantome (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904), 74. 71. The termination of conflict was a common theme of scholarship on conflict resolution. See Lewis A. Coser, “The Termination of Conflict,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 5, no. 4 (1961), 347–353. 72. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 244. 73. Ibid., 247. 74. Ibid., 258. 75. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), with quote at 166. Originally published in 1939. On Goffman and Elias, see Helmut Kuzmics, “Goffman and Elias: Between Deception and Embarrassment,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Greg Smith (New York: Routledge, 2022), 323–335. 76. Johan Galtung, “Institutionalized Conflict Resolution: A Theoretical Paradigm,” Journal of Peace Research 2, no. 4 (1965), 348–397. 77. James F. Short, Jr. and Fred Strodtbeck, “Why Gangs Fight.” In James F. Short, Jr. Modern Criminals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1973), 35–46. First published in 1964. 78. Galtung, “Institutionalized Conflict Resolution,” 358. 79. Jerome H. Skolnick, “Social Control in the Adversary System,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 11, No. 1 (1967), 52–70. 80. A fourth article was also paired with the others. Omar K. Moore and Alan R. Anderson, “Puzzles, Games, and Social Interaction,” in Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences, ed. David Braybooke (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 68–79. But that article was not aligned in the same way as the others. It did, however, propose the notion of the “umpire” as an objective arbitrator of conflict, a view that is basic to Schelling’s notion of enforcement and credibility and institutionalized in the role of the nuclear weapons inspector. But like the rules of the game, so the umpire is under attack in today’s world. See Michael Lewis, “Against the Rules” podcast. Pushkin Industries (2019). https:​//​www​.pushkin​.fm​/podcasts​/against​-the​-rules 81. Marga Vicedo, “The Father of Ethology and the Foster Mother of Ducks: Konrad Lorenz as Expert on Motherhood,” Isis 100 (2009), 263–291. 82. Lorenz, On Aggression, 118–119. 83. The study of gestures was integral to the Cold War problem of the control of aggression. The Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, under the counsel of Lionel Tiger, funded a program of research on the evolutionary roots of human aggression. One project funded was the Gesture Project of Desmond Morris, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh, and Marie O’Shaughnessy, Gestures: Their Origin and Distribution (New

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York: 1979). See the foundation website section, “Our Work,” at: https:​//​www​.hfg​.org​ /our​-work​/. The depiction and ethological analysis of gestures of affection and aggression in animals and humans is the central preoccupation of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns. For an historical account of the development of nonverbal communication studies and gesture studies, see Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 68–72. 84. Lorenz, On Aggression, 56–57. 85. Morris, The Naked Ape, 163. 86. For a contemporary examination of staring that sees it as essentially not an aggressive act but an inquisitive one, see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 87. Goffman, Relations in Public, 39. 88. Goffman’s observation of this sequence was disputed by later research. See Mark S. Cary, “Gaze and Facial Display in Pedestrian Passing,” Semiotica 28, no. 3 (1979), 323–326. 89. Goffman, Relations in Public, 126. 90. Ibid.,127. 91. Ibid., 40. 92. Bernard Conein, “Ethologie et sociologie. Contribution de l’éthologie à la théorie de interaction sociale.” Revue français de sociologie 33 (1992), 87–104. 93. Goffman, Relations in Public, xviii. 94. For a knowing study of “glossing” as an exploitative façade, see Nicole Lasky, Scott Jacques, and Bonnie S. Fisher, “Glossing Over Shopping: How Thieves Act Normal,” Deviant Behavior 36, no. 4 (2015), 293–309. 95. Goffman, Relations in Public, 128. 96. Ibid., 132. 97. Morris D. Riemer, “Abnormalities of the Gaze—A Classification.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 29 (1955), 670. 98. Georg Simmel. “Sociology of the Senses: Visual Interaction,” In Introduction to the Science of Sociology, edited by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, 356–361 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921). 99. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 127–128, with quote at 128.

Conclusion

This book has argued that there is value in expanding our thinking about Goffman from being a perceptive microsociologist to seeing him as a powerful social theorist of the Cold War. This shift in perspective opens new vistas and accounts for often ignored facts. Now we can look at The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, for example, not just as a new dramaturgical sociology, but also as Goffman’s response to early Cold War America. That book’s themes of loyalty, betrayal, and secrecy make sense only with this broader conception in mind. Indeed, the chapter on secrets in that book has been mostly unstudied probably because analysts didn’t know what to make of it, or because it didn’t seem central to the dramaturgical model, however central it may have been to Goffman’s conception of the whole work. Entire subjects, like interrogation, are ignored in the literature because there is no way of understanding the topic within standard approaches. Therefore, it goes unseen, or if not unseen, at least unstudied. The same may be said for Goffman’s contributions to the study of aggression throughout his work. A kind of conceptual fetishism is at work in sociology that looks at Goffman’s terms as shiny things to study in themselves instead of as part of a context of historical and human relationships. This includes his relationship to concrete problems he was grappling with, such as deception and aggression. Careful analysis of Goffman’s contributions to contemporary sociological theory is of course a valuable and necessary enterprise. Sociology grows partly by extending earlier insights, and Goffman had plenty of them. But with the gains of this approach, there has been loss. In the effort to locate and extend the transcendent in Goffman’s writings, sociologists have lost the person and his time. This is no small cost, as many of the problems that were germane to his thought are still with us now. Granting the legitimacy of sociology’s rationalist project, an historicist approach, such as is presented here, is proper too, and it carries an added benefit of revealing a lesser-known Goffman that deserves recognition and reflection. There is further gain. Goffman’s strategy of examining interactional analogues of Cold War realities, his original analyses of the problems of his era, such as misinformation

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and aggression, and his steady commitment to interactionist analysis even while revealing wider matters, may still carry promise today. We can appreciate the caution of some scholars about examining Goffman’s life and work when so much of his personal papers are unavailable. But it is unnecessary to wait for all the archives to be opened for work to begin. It is possible to build a case based on material currently available, or with some digging. As demonstrated above, a single letter from Schelling placed his meeting with Goffman a whole decade earlier than was commonly thought. This one fact led to a meaningful reappraisal of the Goffman-Schelling relationship. There is plenty of evidence beyond the present book to encourage action instead of waiting. Shalin’s careful study of Goffman’s research on gambling, and Winkin’s on Goffman’s international travel, were written before all the facts were in. Notably, Goffman is believed to have written a fuller manuscript on gambling that has not yet been uncovered.1 None of these limitations should stand in the way of careful study of currently available evidence on Goffman’s ideas in social and historical context. Another hesitancy I discovered may be noted. Some of my informants consider Goffman a personal hero. His ideas mattered to them at important times of their lives. Often, it is Goffman’s analysis in Asylums that is cited as cause for distinction, especially his study of total institutions and the underlife of mental patients. These and other ideas must have seemed not only pertinent to the times but also to the lives of scholars. Yet, hero worship can lead to caution and fear that looking closely will deflate a beloved icon. In this respect, viewing Goffman as transcendent is safer than seeing him as involved in what one analyst called the “smelly” aspects of social life, such as with the Cold War problematics of secrecy and spies or the cold warriors with whom he sometimes associated. But nothing in this book or in the overall project of examining social scientists in a cold war context should be construed as deflating. Our position is that the advance of knowledge can be ennobling and edifying. In addition to examining the cold war problems he studied, this book advances the position that the larger emotional context of the time—the ethos—must also be considered. If we have not devoted much attention to establishing the content of this Cold War ethos, it is because the historical record on this matter is already clear. That the late 1940s-1950s was an age of suspicion, spies, aggression, and an overriding concern for loyalty and betrayal is incontrovertible. That the era gave rise to a wave of satire and other provocations is also historical fact. Our main concern has been to examine the ways Goffman’s writings mirrored these concerns through the “natural metaphors” he used to examine them. As noted in the introduction, it was Garfinkel who first employed this term to describe what Goffman was doing. The metaphors were natural in the sense that they derived from everyday life

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and not some abstract analytical scheme. Goffman’s use of “cooling the mark out” was a special term of an underground community of criminals, a phrase that Goffman then extended metaphorically in a sociological direction. There is no reason to think that this was the only term he extended in this manner. In fact, this book has explored a number of others, including “cold war” itself, in his work. As a new entrant into American society after the war, Goffman was necessarily alert to postwar American idioms and vernacular, and it appears he self-consciously employed some of them in his work. Even now, it is not unusual for people to employ the term “spy” or “interrogate” in ways that are broader than their denotative meaning. Scholars thus are said to interrogate texts by asking questions of the material, just as Goffman saw interrogation in unwanted questioning in everyday social interaction. But the book goes further than arguing that analysis of Goffman’s ideas should include an examination of the context within which those ideas were developed. It also maintains that Goffman’s work featured interactional analogues of wider Cold War matters. Goffman’s examination of interactional loyalty, betrayal, secrecy, and aggression; his focus on the mutual fatefulness of strategic interaction; his study of the ending of character contests that set forth similar ideas on conflict resolution as those advanced by global peace researchers—all these point the reader to the broader relevance of his work than just an investigator of mundane reality. As shown in the preceding chapters, Goffman examined the way the era’s troubles manifest in interactional life. The midcentury problem of national loyalty was also the problem of everyday encounters—both require a measure of fidelity if they are to subsist. The same is true for exposure. Secrets must be stowed, and exposure tamed, not only for the sake of the national security state but for the needs of social cohesion; otherwise, things fall apart. Goffman was critical of the cult of confession in the twentieth century. He objected to the extension of psychoanalytic practices throughout society, such as in encounter groups, industrial management practices, and beyond. But he also acknowledged that public order is built on a degree of ingress and self-revelation. The modern institution of marriage requires it. Many religions expect it. Even the public interaction order obliges people to share information with others, if only in response to requests for “free goods.” Privacy is an important counter-value to the attempt at total exposure of the surveillance state. But total privacy, Goffman showed, is equally untenable for a democratic social order. Thus, interrogation is a fact of social life, though people still find ways to escape it. When Goffman characterized interaction as a cold war, he implied that interactional deception, interrogation, opposing interests, and one-upmanship all characterize everyday interaction. It is as though the Cold War had seeped into all the crevices of everyday life.

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The way interactional forms serve as analogues of wider matters does not reveal perverse ontological assumptions. Goffman was not saying that everything, small or large, is one. Rather, his thinking was closer to logical analysis, set theory in particular. Goffman saw diverse social phenomena as revealing similar analytical features and thus as part of the same set. This style of thinking was not unique to Goffman, though it was his forte. It was a tradition of analysis at the University of Chicago that can be traced from Simmel through Park and Hughes.2 But it was also a style of thinking that was part of the social anthropology tradition that Goffman inherited, such as is involved in the comparative study of institutions that serve “functionally equivalent” purposes; or the examination of parallel or isomorphic structures. Schelling also was a master at this style of thought. As decision theorist Howard Raiffa once said of Schelling’s method, “the analogies keep tumbling out of his mind.”3 They tumbled out of Goffman’s, too. Sometimes, Goffman would identify several common characteristics that unite phenomena. His concept of total institutions was of this sort. Prisons, mental institutions, nunneries, and boarding schools—despite their apparent differences—share similar features that permit analysis of them as a distinct institutional kind. In other cases, he would identify a single defining characteristic that unites disparate phenomena. This was the thinking behind his view that middle-class American lives were analogous to the lives of spies. Both are subject to the discrediting of proffered identities and the negative consequences that follow from that exposure. Everyday lives, then, manifest the same problems of self as undercover agents working at the international level. In this manner, Goffman was able to identify and analyze the interactional analogues of wider matters in Cold War America. He was a theorist of and not just in the Cold War. These considerations show that like others of his generation Goffman offered a normative social theory of the Cold War era. Yet the normative implications of his writings are highly complex, reflecting as they do the great mixture of political positions in his work.4 Goffman’s conservatism is seen in his concern for social equilibrium in the face of moral disquiet. However vulnerable and contingent experience may be, balance is built into the interaction order. Face-work, we saw, regulates itself, as tact and discretion, on the one side, and apology and contrition, on the other, support interactional equilibrium. The same process works, Goffman theorized, in the character contest: most of them end not in permanent wounds but in a draw. Goffman’s liberalism is seen in his support for the dignity of the individual. Following Simmel’s lead, Goffman maintained that multiple group affiliations provide a saving grace effect by helping to hide discrediting aspects of the self from others. The pluralist society has built-in shields from generalized disgrace, often ensuring that a failure in one aspect of life is not a death sentence for all. Further, Goffman sided with those critics of aggressive conflict who

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warned of the dangers of loss of face and the role of humiliation in the cycle of international violence. Thus, a consideration of dignity is necessary even in international relations. Goffman’s anarchism sets him apart from all others. His overall stance of provocation tears down absolutes and manufactures “negative experience,” a breaking that extends beyond micro-interactional to social sabotage and is even employed in military “psychological warfare.”5 Goffman said that humans are stance-taking entities; but his own multiple stances manifest a unique response to the political precarity of Cold War America: Multiple stances make it difficult to pin a person down. We can go further, but with somewhat less confidence, by arguing that beyond reflecting those times, Goffman’s ideas were implicated in them. His involvement in the group of researchers and practitioners on deception is the most apparent case. The evidence shows that Goffman’s ideas helped shape work on deception and interrogation that was funded primarily by military and intelligence sources. One can see Goffman’s mark on this research in concrete ways, a mark that was based on his participation in networks of researchers whose studies of deception were then necessarily reported back to funders via reports and publications. Despite Goffman’s late-career call for unsponsored research, his own contributions fed into the sponsored research of others. In the introduction, I commended recent scholarship exploring the confrontation of twentieth-century thinkers with real-world problems. Although this scholarship is central to our understanding of twentieth-century sociology, we remain shocked when new cases appear where ivory tower intellectuals collide with social and political realities. This was the case with a recent biography of Berkeley sociologist of religion Robert N. Bellah.6 According to Bellah’s biographer, the sociologist’s career was nearly upended early on at Harvard, when Dean McGeorge Bundy, in the mid-1950s, bent to FBI pressure and sought to root out communist influence at the school. This included graduate students who may have been a member of the Communist Party at some point in their life. Bellah was encouraged to “name names,” which he refused to do. Then Bellah had been interviewed three additional times by the FBI, who interrogated him about past activities and about his mental health. With strong support from Parsons, Bellah was eventually offered a one-year instructorship at Harvard, although, again according to his biographer, any additional reappointments were contingent on Bellah’s willingness to testify against past associates. Bellah refused the position and its terms by leaving Harvard and studying at McGill University in Canada. The reason for our shock about Bellah’s story is that the discipline has not confronted these matters head on. They remain disciplinary secrets, known by a few but not openly discussed. But unveiling these secrets is necessary for understanding the atmosphere within which sociologists lived and worked.

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As reported in chapter 1, we know that Goffman’s former professor Donald Horton faced similar difficulties at Chicago, except that he was interrogated not in a dean’s office but during public adversarial proceedings. What message did these proceedings send to students at Harvard, Chicago, and elsewhere? Reticence and caution must have been prudent choices if one wished to avoid facing similar difficulties. Goffman’s own reticence is well known. He was an intensely private person who believed a thinker’s ideas, not their lives, should be studied. This reticence is usually considered a personal eccentricity, but it may be an expression of more general conditions, such as the toughness of Anglo masculinity, or the avoidance of embarrassment to self and others. But reticence may also be a more general expression of potential threat. Goffman’s unwillingness to be pinned down to any position or perspective; his rejection of the emerging cult of confession; his insistence on personal privacy and his apparent elusiveness—all may be considered as part of a coping style of caution during a time of attacks on scholars from many quarters. Recent studies of scholars’ lives reveal that caution and reticence were indeed the shared characteristics of many postwar and early Cold War intellectuals.7 This analysis serves as a challenge to future students of the history of American sociology in the Cold War era. Three directions may be suggested. The first is to follow up with additional work on Goffman along the lines initiated here. Much is now known about the Goffman-Schelling relationship; but much more would be revealed should their correspondence become available. The year Goffman spent as Shils’s research assistant, and the subsequent year with political scientist Edward Banfield, are still largely unknowns. Goffman’s intellectual relationship to Freud’s writings is worthy of additional consideration. The matter is by no means settled. A full study of Goffman’s work vis-à-vis ethology has yet to be written. These are just some suggestions that follow from findings in the present book. Readers may discover their own leads to explore further. The second is to extend the present analysis to a broader set of Goffman’s colleagues and contacts. Collective biographies of postwar deception researchers, or social scientists at RAND, would add immensely to the knowledge about the shaping of early Cold War research. We agree with Joel Isaac, who argued in favor of Cold War studies that involve tracing concrete intellectual developments within institutional settings, such as academic departments, think tanks, and so on.8 For the present study, the challenge has been that Goffman was not a joiner but a participator. So, one needs to look at concrete but more ephemeral gatherings, like the conferences he attended in the 1950s and 1960s. Last, broader studies of sociology’s wartime and postwar connections to the intelligence community and military funding, along the lines that David Price accomplished with anthropology, would be most welcome.9

Conclusion

217

As I was writing this book, America faced new tests of its democracy during a resurgence of conspiracies, deportations, internments, congressional hearings, spy trials, and attacks on real and imagined enemies from inside and outside the country—and the constitutional crises that accompany them. It had become a time of war and brinkmanship. A new batch of spy thrillers had flooded the media markets, and the spy stories that Goffman knew gained a new audience. What would Goffman have said about the woes of today? The present examination of his writings within the context of his time may help us gain purchase on the grim realities we now face. NOTES 1. Dmitri N. Shalin, “Erving Goffman, Fateful Action, and the Las Vegas Gambling Scene,” UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal 20, no. 1 (2016), 1–38. Yves Winkin, “Erving Goffman: The Traveling Hermit,” Etnografia e Ricera Qualitativa 1 (2022), 153–174. 2. Gary D. Jaworski, Georg Simmel and the American Prospect (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), ch. 2. 3. Howard Raiffa quoted in Benjamin Wilson, “Keynes Goes Nuclear: Thomas Schelling and the Macroeconomic Origins of Strategic Stability.” Modern Intellectual History 18 (2021), 185. 4. For a discussion, see Gary T. Marx, “Maps, Masks, Meshes, Misses and More: Metaphors in Search of Understanding Erving Goffman and Society,” in The Anthem Companion to Erving Goffman, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (New York: Anthem Press, 2023), 212–213. 5. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 428. 6. Matteo Bortolini, A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 7. Marina MacKay, Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 42–50; John McCumber, The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Ch. 1. 8. Joel Isaac, “The Human Sciences in Cold War America,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007), 744. 9. David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the S­econd World War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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Index

“5 Fingers” (film), 102 A Family and a Fortune (ComptonBurnett), 36–37 Abella, Alex, 9 Adler, Kenneth P., 105 African Genesis (Ardrey), 187–89. See also ethology anticommunism, 2, 3, 8, 12, 31, 42, 49n66, 58, 127, 168; University of Chicago and, 22, 23–28, 43, 44, 126. See also Burgess, Ernest W.; interrogation Archibald, Kathleen, 82–83 Argyle, Michael, 201 Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. (USAEC), 60–61 Authoritarian Personality (Adorno), 180 Balderston, Frederick, 83 Banfield, Edward C., 12, 216 Bateson, Gregory, 2, 42, 53, 103, 132, 164 Bavelas, Alex, 29, 42, 83, 87 Bazna, Eleysa (“Cicero”), 110 Bell, Laird, 25 Bellah, Robert N., 215–16 Bennett, Alan, 156 Bentine, Michael, 155

Bentley, Elizabeth, 53 Berelson, Bernard, 105 Bernard, Jessie, 83, 186–87 Bessner, Daniel, 104 Bethe, Hans, 63, 64 “Beyond the Fringe” (radio show), 14, 156, 159 Biderman, Albert, 42, 137–40; Goffman and, 140 Birdwhistell, Ray, 42 Blau, Peter: malicious jokes in, 183; Freudianism in, 183–84 Blauvelt, Helen, 42 Blum, Alan, 153 Borgatta, Edgar F., 175n50 brainwashing, 8, 10, 12, 23, 38–41, 42, 44, 125, 127, 166 brinkmanship, 162, 217 Brodie, Janet Farrell, 62 Broyles Commission, 25 Bundy, McGeorge, 215 Burns, Tom, 65, 78, 140; prisoner of war, 103; “Friends, Enemies and the Polite Fiction,” 185; Strategic Interaction critique, 89, 114

243

244

Index

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10, 60–61 Burgess, Ernest W., 12, 22, 25, 27, 139; anticommunism at Chicago, 25–27 Burke, Edmund, 29–30, 31, 34 Burke, Kenneth, 6 Bush, Vannevar, 61–62 Callan, Hillary, 189–90, 207n55 Candy (Southern and Hoffenberg), 158, 159 Captive Mind (Milosz), 43 Cards of Identity (Dennis): Adlerian psychology and, 165–66; American McCarthyism in, 168; anti-psychiatry movement and, 169; confession in, 168; Goffman aligned with, 169–70; synopsis of, 166–67. See also Dennis, Nigel Carpi, Daniela, 165 Catch 22 (Heller), 156 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 156. See also Salinger, J. D. Center for Integrated Social Science Theory (Berkeley), 83, 140 Chambers, Whittaker, 22, 168 Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), 180 Clausen, John, 10 Collins, Randall, 93, 204n3 Communication (Rausch and Bateson), 53 Cook, Peter, 156 Cookridge, E. H., 114 Cooley, Charles H., 30 The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 23 Concept of Mind (Ryle), 53 confession, 39; ACLU study of Chicago police, 134;

Cards of Identity (Dennis) and, 168; Compulsion to Confess (Reik), 134–35; Criminal Interrogation and Confession (Inbau and Reid), 125, 134; Goffman on, 133, 213, 216 Cornwell, David. See John le Carré Coser, Rose Laub: laughter in, 182–83; humorist as disguised aggressor, 183 Cross-Examination of Witnesses (Cornelius), 133 cryptographers, 109 Cuban Missile Crisis, 5, 15, 87, 92 Cybernetics (Wiener), 53 Davis, Fred, 155 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 157, 159, 172–173n21 De Grazia, Sebastian, 45, 47–48n34, 105 Dennis, Nigel, 14; Alfred Adler and, 165; Asylums (Goffman), 169–70; Ian Fleming and, 165; Whittaker Chambers and, 168, 177n67. See also Cards of Identity (Dennis) Deutsch, Morton, 83–84 Dilling, Elizabeth, 24 The Divided Self (Laing), 169 Dollard, John, 26, 180, 184, 193 Douglas, William O., 161, 162 Durkheim, Emile, 93 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 25 Ekman, Paul: Goffman and, 125, 140, 150n67; non-verbal leakage, 132 Elias, Norbert, 197‌‌

Index

Ellsberg, Daniel, 13; Goffman critic, 87–88; Pentagon Papers, 84 Estabrooks, George H., 138 ethology: criticism of, 189–90; rise of, 187–89 ethos, 6, 9, 58, 70, 212; Cold War change in, 2–3, 118, 179; defined, 2; Gregory Bateson and, 2 Feyerabend, Paul, 173n30 Fiedler, Fred, 40 Festinger, Leon, 40 Fleck, Ludwik, 11, 138–39; Fleming, Ian, 101, 110, 156 Frank, Jerome D., 42 Fremont-Smith, Frank, 42 Freud, Sigmund, 118, 165–67, 203, 216; aggression in, 180, 182, 184, 198; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 115, 182, 192; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 191 Fromm-Reichman, Frieda, 42 Forster, E. M., 2 Fox, Robin, 189 Funt, Alan, 153–54, 170 Galtung, Johan, 192–93 game theory, 54, 55, 80, 195; Conflict theory, 185–86; RAND Corporation and, 77–78 Gamson, William, 84, 85 Garfinkel, Harold, 108, 144–45; breaching experiments, 153; degradation ceremonies, 38, 128, 145; Reds, 15–16 Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 156 gesture, 199, 200, 208n83 Gittinger, John, 139 Go (Holmes), 158

245

Goffman, Erving: aggressive uses of face-work, 187; anarchism in, 159, 215; Angelica Schuyler Choate, 26; anti-violence norms, 197–99; body gloss, 200–201; character contests, 195–99; Cold War deception researchers: Sarbin, Orne, Biderman, Ekman, 139–41; “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” 55, 107; comparison with Freud on aggression, 182–85; containment, 41; critique of the “Big Con” as a model of deception, 111–13; critique of intelligence organizations, 110; critique of zero-sum assumptions of game theory, 196; Daniel Ellsberg and, 87–88; “Discrepant Roles,” 56–58, 59, 130; discrepant sentiments, 192; double agentry, 114–15; ending of “character contests,” 196–99; epithets, 181; ethology on Relations in Public, 190–91; face-to-face relations, 7, 22, 28–29; “Felicity’s Condition,” 142, 144, 145; Frederick Balderston and, 83, 88; information control, 108–9; information games as asymmetrical, 129; information sharing, 132–35; information theory and, 55; interactional microaggression, 191–94; interactional resistance, 37–38; line, 5–6, 14, 37, 80, 133;

246

Index

loyalty and betrayal, 37–38, 40–41, 44–45; manufacture of negative experience, 138; marginal man, 1, 8–9; merchants of morality, 58; mock assault, 185; National Film Board (Canada), 4, 5; normative implications of his work, 214–15; “On Face-Work” as proto-game theory, 79–81; “On the Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” 65; playing it cool, 40; “Public Order” course syllabus (1969), 189–90; realigning actions, 193–94; research assistant to Edward Shils, 12, 26, 54, 104, 216; social interaction as akin to cold war, 3, 9, 14, 111, 179; spontaneity, 56; small acts of living, 36; total institutions, 40–43, 69, 130, 166, 212, 214; sorcerer’s apprentice, 88; St. Elizabeths Hospital, 10, 38, 40, 78, 127; strategic interaction, 82; “Strategic Interaction and Conflict” conference (1964), 35, 79, 82–89; staring, 199–202; techniques of derogation, 192–94; truth-telling, 92; vulnerability of experience, 113–16; wider matters, 38; witness advantage, 129 Goldhamer, Herbert, 30–31, 105 Goldsmith, Hyman, 60 “Goon Show” (radio show), 14, 155–56 Gouldner, Alvin, 11, 54, 58

Gouzenko, Igor, 53, 60 Greene, Graham, 101 Grierson, John, 4 Grodzins, Morton, 21–22; Americans Betrayed, 21, 22, 32–33; Chicago consensus and, 22, 23, 28–31; D. S. Thomas and, 22–23, 31–32; The Loyal and the Disloyal, 21; loyalty, 28; pluralism, 22 “Group Processes” conference (1956), 40, 42, 45, 126 Haley, Jay, 170; “The Art of Psychoanalysis,” 164–65, 166, 175n52, 194; Freudianism, 164; Gregory Bateson, 164 Hall, Edward T., 103 Harsanyi, John C., 84, 85, 87, 88 Heat of the Day (Bowen), 36, 143–44 Hediger, Heini, 189 Hershel of Ostropol, 154–55 Hiss, Alger, 22, 53, 60, 168 Hoover, J. Edgar, 94 Horowitz, Irving L., 35 Horton, Donald, 12, 22, 26, 125; anticommunism at University of Chicago, 26–27. See also Burgess, Ernest W. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 2, 53, 60, 126, 168. See also anticommunism How To Do Things With Words (Austin), 161 Hughes, Everett C., 190 Human Aggression (Storr), 187 Hunter, Edward, 39, 41 Husserl, Edmund, 132 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 24, 105 Hyman, Harold M., 10, 24–25 Hypnosis: fabricated framework, 136–37;

Index

lay view of, 135; role-playing approach to, 136. See also Orne, Martin Information Agency, U.S. (USIA), 107 Interrogation, 6, 11, 14, 125; during anticommunism trials, 25; Goffman on, 108, 128–30, 131, 132, 133; information vs. symbolic functions of, 128, 146; political and military practice of, 125–28. See also Biderman, Albert Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park and Burgess), 86, 182 “I’ve Got a Secret” (TV show), 3 James, William, 82, 132 Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Berkeley), 33–35. See also Thomas, Dorothy Swaine Jervis, Robert, 102 Kaufmann, William, 187 Kennedy, John F., 92 Korean War, 10, 127, 135, 137, 144, 166; brainwashing and, 39; POWs and, 38–40 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (CIA manual), 141 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 194 Langholm, Silvert, 195–96, 197, 198 Las Vegas, 1, 195 le Carré, John, 101, 102, 110, 157; Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 157; The Looking-Glass War, 157 Leonard, Robert J., 77 Levi, Edward, 46n1 Lewin, Kurt, 203n1

247

Liddell, Howard S., 42 Lifton, Robert Jay, 12, 39, 42, 44, 127; totalism, 42 Linton, Norman K., 133 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 82 Love and Hate (Eibl-Elbsfeldt), 187 Lovell, Stanley P., 109 Lysenkoism, 188 MacIsaac, David, 95n5 MACY Foundation, 42, 126 MAD’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (Jaffe), 206n38 Manchurian Candidate (Condon), 39, 101, 135, 138 Manhattan Project, 60 Manipulation of Human Behavior (Biderman and Zimmer), 139 Marks, John, 39 Marx Brothers, 170; “Night at the Opera” (1935), 154 Marx, Gary T., 8, 113, 118, 145 massive retaliation (Dulles), 98n55 A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon), 53 Mauksch, Hans, 105 May, Alan Nunn, 60 McCarthy, Joseph, 3, 24, 60; Army-McCarthy hearings, 3, 128 McCarthy, Mary, 117, 203n1 McCawley, James, 158–59, 170 McKinsey, J. C. C., 205n31 Mead, George H., 55, 139 Mead, Margaret, 40, 42, 126, 164 Meerloo, Joost A. M., 42 Merton, Robert K., 181 Metallurgical Lab (University of Chicago), 10, 60 Miller, Jonathan, 156 Milligan, Spike, 155–56 Miner, Horace: “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” 163; researchmanship, 163–64;

248

Index

WWII counterintelligence officer, 175n45 Miranda v. Arizona (1966), 127 Mirowski, Philip, 77 Monroe, James L., 43, 141 Moore, Dudley, 156 Morgenstern, Oscar, 85, 186 Morgenthau, Hans, 46n1 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 9, 64 Naeve, Lowell, 43 Naked Ape (Morris), 187, 191 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 158 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 10–11 natural metaphor, 5, 6, 11, 14, 116, 117, 144, 179, 212–13 Nixon, Richard M., 24 nuclear weapons, 3, 12, 13, 83, 84, 85, 90, 156, 162, 169, 188–89

Prejudice, War and the Constitution (tenBroeok et al.), 45, 48–49n49. See also Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Berkeley) Project Camelot, 163–64 provocation: Goffman and, 153; Cold War leitmotif, 153 Quang Phuc Dong. See James McCawley

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 13, 15, 103–4, 105–6, 109, 121n24 On Aggression (Lorenz), 180, 187, 189, 199 Operation Mincemeat (WWII), 112, 123n60 Orne, Martin, 136–37

Rabinowitch, Eugene, 46n1, 60 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 184–85 Raiffa, Howard, 214 RAND Corporation, 216; U.S. Air Force and, 77; strategy, 78; theory of games and, 77–78; Vietnam War and, 9. See also Schelling, Thomas C. Rapoport, Anatol, 84–85 Riesman, David, 28, 45, 46n1, 58, 154, 161, 170; “Nylon War,” 162, 174n41 Rioch, David, 39–40 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 24 Ross, Lillian, 41

Parsons, Talcott, 15, 79 Patterns of Negro Segregation (Johnson), 193 Peck, Harris B., 42 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 82 Perrault, Gilles, 114 perspective by incongruity (Burke), 6 Persson, Anders, 112 Philosophy of the As-If (Vahinger), 166 picaresque, 157–58 Piel, Gerard, 62–63 Pooley, Jefferson, 48n34, 104 Potter, Stephen, 14, 160–61 pragmatism, 82 Price, David, 216

Sale, Marilyn, 94 Salinger, J. D., 131; WWII counterintelligence officer, 156, 175n45 Salomon, Albert, 66–67 Salvage (Thomas), 32 Sansom, A. W., 114 Sarbin, Theodore, 136, 139–40 Satire: Goffman and, 159; manifest fiction as, 160, 174n33; rhetoric of provocation as, 155, 172n11 scatology, 158–59 Schaffer, Leslie, 167‌‌

Index

Schaffner, Bertram, 42; Father Land, 127; “Group Processes” conference, 42, 126; Information Control Division (WWII), 126–27 Schein, Edgar H., 12, 39, 44, 129, 193; coercive persuasion, 42. See also Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology Schelling, Thomas C., 8, 9, 35; blocked retreat, 186; “Conflict, Coalition and Strategy,” 81, 189, 197; enforcement schemes, 89–90, 91; espionage fiction, 102; first meeting with Goffman, 78, 79; interest in On Aggression (Lorenz), 189; kindergarten proposal, 162–63; “On Face-Work,” admiration for, 78–79; Project Camelot, 164; reciprocal fear of surprise attack, 90; strategy, 78; The Strategy of Conflict and, 78, 79, 81 Schutz, Alfred, 132; “The Homecomer,” 68–69; secret of the other, 66–69 Scott, Marvin B., 89, 189 Secombe, Harry, 155 Secrecy, 109; compulsory secrecy, 64, 70; Goffman and Shils on, compared, 63–64; Goffman’s typology of, 57–58, 64; functional vs. symbolic (Shils), 63; from virtuous to dangerous, 53; secondary secrecy, 109;

249

secret of the other, 54, 64–69, 74n60 Sellers, Peter, 155 Shalin, Dmitri, ix, 78, 84, 212 Shils, Edward, 8, 12, 45, 54, 216; “Cohesion and Disintegration” (Shils and Janowitz), 104, 126; Hans Speier and, 104; Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 104; primary groups in, 29–30, 104; The Torment of Secrecy, 13, 22, 54, 58, 59–60, 63–64, 70, 109 Shubik, Martin, 87, 186, 208n83; “On Face-Work,” admiration for, 81, 85 Simmel, Georg, 7, 117, 140; American translations of, 65; discretion, 65; eye-to-eye contact, 202; ideal sphere and, 65; “On Written Communication,” 68; positive functions of conflict, 181–82; secret of the other, 65–66; “The Secret and Secret Societies,” 55; The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 65 Skolnick, Jerome, 198 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 156 Small, Albion W., 65 Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, 42–43, 139–40; Goffman and, 43, 139 Sorge, Richard, 110, 122n52 Spanos, Nicholas, 136 spies, 101–3; analogues of everyday life, 111, 131 Speier, Hans: Edward Shils and, 104; Ford Foundation grant and Goffman’s project on social stratification, 104–5;

250

RAND Corporation, 187 Spiegel, John P., 42 Spoilage (Thomas and Nishimoto), 32, 33–34 Stepansky, Paul E., 166 “The Sting” (1973 film), 113 Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Kent), 77, 107 Strauss, Leo, 45 Sumner, William Graham: Folkways and, 180; epithets, 180–81 suspicion, 114, 116 Swanson, Guy, 11 Swedberg, Richard, 102 Swift, Jonathan, 163 Szasz, Thomas, 169 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern), 53, 77, 78, 79, 89 Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 22, 31. See also Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (Berkeley); Salvage (Thomas); Spoilage (Thomas and Nishimoto) Tiger, Lionel, 189, 208n83 “To Tell the Truth” (TV show), 5 Too Early To Tell (Weidman), 156 trickster, 153, 154, 160 Truman, Harry S., 12, 24; Loyalty order (1947), 5, 10, 24; Truman Doctrine (1947), 3 Tull, James Nelson, 107 Walgreen investigation (University of Chicago), 24 Wallerstein, Alex, 63

Index

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 8, 12, 23, 39, 42, 45, 127 Waples, Douglas, 8; autobiography of, 105; Committee on Communication, 105–8; Director of Information Control, 106–7, 117; Graduate Library School (Chicago), 105; Office of Strategic Service (OSS), 106; war service and, 105–7 Warlight (Ondaatje), 103 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, 116 Waugh, Evelyn, 14 The Way of All Flesh (Butler), 160 Weisberg, Bernard, 134–35. See also confession “What’s My Line” (TV show), 5 Who Walk in Darkness (Brossard), 158 Wilensky, Harold, 101 Williams, John D., 185 Winkin, Yves, ix, 16, 120n23, 128, 153, 155, 175n52 Wohlstetter, Albert, 13, 84, 85, 88 World War I (1914–1918), 68, 114, 166, 182 World War II (1939–1945), 2, 7, 13, 15, 26, 30, 42–43, 53, 59, 62, 68, 77, 83, 95n5, 101–3, 109–12, 114, 120n23, 125–27, 131, 143, 155–56, 160, 170, 184, 186, 198; bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 60, 77; Holocaust, 179 Yuck Foo. See James McCawley

About the Author

Gary D. Jaworski is an independent scholar in New York City. The author of Georg Simmel and the American Prospect (SUNY Press, 1997), Jaworski is former professor of sociology at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ.

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