Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
Transcript of Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 1/16
On Goffman's Frame AnalysisAuthor(s): Fredric JamesonSource: Theory and Society, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 119-133Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656942
Accessed: 05/12/2009 15:20
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society.
http://www.jstor.org
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 2/16
119
Review Article
ON GOFFMAN'SFRAME ANALYSIS*
FREDRIC JAMESON
Thoughbetraying races of the Hauptwerk-prolongedgestationperiod,wide-
rangingsecondary referencesfrom linguisticsto theatricalhistory, a volumi-
nous file of clippingspoured n pell-mell-FrameAnalysismay also be regarded
as yet anotherversion,albeit a vastly distendedone, of that peculiarmono-
graphicform which is Goffman'sinvention and to which we returnbelow. It
is in any case further testimony to the increasingrapprochementbetween
ethnomethodology and semiotics, a developmentwhich may seem healthier
for the latter, where it means liberation from a narrow dependence on
linguistics, than for ethnomethodology, where, as we shall see in the present
case, it suggeststhe spell of some distantandunattainable ormalization,and
is accompaniedby a decided shift in emphasis from the content of social
events and social phenomena to their form, from the concrete meaningsof
the rawmaterial n question to the way in which they mean andultimatelyto
the natureof socialmeaning n general.
This is the sense in which FrameAnalysis constitutes a virtualmonument to
the new tendency, with its elaborate defense of the proposition that
meanings, n everyday life, are the projectionof the structureor form of the
experiences n which they are embodied, andthat they may most adequately
be dealt with in terms of the ways in which such experiences are framed, n
which they relate to, transpose (change "key," to use Goffman's musical
analogy) or cancel other frames.That one may talk aboutsocial life this way(indeed, that, after Goffman, it will be difficult to avoid talkingabout it in
these terms), FrameAnalysis triumphantlydemonstrates.It is semiotic, notso much in its applicationof specializedsemiotic terminologyandconceptual
Departmentof Literature,University f California, anDiego.
* Erving Goffman: Frame Analysis, HarperColophon Books (New York), 1974.
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 3/16
120
instruments, as rather through the analogy between its fundamental
program-the invention of something like a grammarand a set of quasi-
syntactic abstractionsfor analyzing social life-and the strategy of Franco-
Italiansemiotics insofar as the latter involvedthe metaphoricalapplicationof
linguistic categoriesto larger and more complex culturalphenomena.What
will concernus here is ratherthe price to be paidfur suchan undertakingn
the form of the systematic pre-preparation f Goffman'sraw materialandin
particulara preliminaryneutralizationof the latter's social and historical
content.
Not that Goffman'sis the only form which a semiotizationof ethnomethod-
ology might take: we should mention, for a complete pictureof the possible
options, the rather different emphasis of Garfinkel himself, or of Aaron
Cicourel,on the textual dimensionof socialraw materials,andon the ways in
which ordinarypeople transmute heirown "facts" into "accounts"as well as
those in which sociologists do it for them. This approach,a good deal more
overtly linguistic than Goffman's,brackets questionsof ultimate realityand
limits itself deliberatelyto the considerationof such realitiesonly insofaras
they have alreadybecome texts: the methodologicalrestriction s not unlike
that of Bartheswhen, inSysteme de la mode, he decidedto limit his semiotic
analysis of clothing styles to the verbal descriptions of the latter in the
fashion magazinesrather than to take on the full substantialityof the things
themselves. Goffman'saims are granderand more imprudentlymetaphysical
than this, for he meansto giveus statementsabout the "objective"structures
themselves; and, although questions may be raisedabout the status of the
observer in his system, I think I would rather link the relative unself-
consciousnessof his procedureswith that attack on the "subject" (in otherwords, on individualconsciousness),which is, as we shall see, one of the most
interesting eaturesof his new book.
The other fundamental comparison for grasping Goffman's project and
measuring ts originalityis of coursethat oldertraditionof CentralEuropean
sociology-the unjustly neglected GeorgSimmel as well as Schutz himself-
from which ethnomethodology ultimately derives, and which attemptedto
rewrite social objects or institutions-Durkheim's"facts"-in terms of socialpraxis,or in other words, to use the more recent formulation, o graspsocial
reality in terms of its socially constructed character. The fundamental
objection to this approach-that its very stresson the transparencyof social
realities and institutions leaves it poorly equipped to do justice to the
increasingreificationand opacity of life under ate capitalism-cannot retract
its historic significanceas a systematic attempt, by displacingattention from
the natura naturata of society to its natura naturans, to break through
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 4/16
121
precisely that increasingly mpenetrableobject-worldheaped up about it by
increasinglynaccessible ocioeconomic forces.
At the same time, it may be suggested that the new phenomenologically
oriented sociology reflected a fundamentalchangein the characterof social
life itself in the great industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and in particular that the new methods evolved in
response to new difficulties in dealing with this new raw material, from
which, with the general secularization of life, the rigidcustom of the older
traditional or village folksways had disappeared.This is a sense of anomie
quite unlike, but intimately relatedto, that diagnosedby Durkheim,whose
judgements on it, like those of his German contemporary Tonnies, were
surely conditioned by the implicit or explicit comparisonbetween this new
"freedom of the city" and the older organic community or Gemeinschaft
supplanted by it. What interests us here, however, is the formal problem
posed by such new socialmaterial,which no longerseemsto offer any "laws"
or moeurs or prescribedbehavior patterns to describe. In our perspective,
indeed, a whole complex of problems, such as for instancethat of the nature
of social "structure," seem misconceived: thus the "problem" of socialstructurewould appear rather o raisethe historical ssue of the emergenceof
a society about which such a question could be asked in the first place. So
Malinowskireminds us that modern ethnography was born at the moment
when a fundamentalchangetook place in Western hinkingon the question
of whether primitive social groups were utterly anarchic (more properly,
anomic), or, on the contrary,only too terrifyinglyorderedand legislated:"It
is a very far cry from the famous answer given long ago by a representative
authority who, asked what are the manners and customs of the natives,answered: 'Customsnone, mannersbeastly!', to the position of the modern
Ethnographer.This latter, with his tables of kinshipterms,genealogies,maps,
plans and diagrams,provesthe existence of an extensiveandbig organization,
shows the constitution of the tribe, of the clan, of the family;andhe gives us
a picture of the natives subjected to a strict code of behaviorand good
manners, o which in comparison he life at the Court of Versaillesor Escurial
was free and easy."'1Yet precisely that liberation of humnan ctivity and
social life under capitalism, which allowed us for the first time to perceiveand measure the rigid structuresand organization of the various kinds of
pre-capitalist ocial forms, places the student of modern social life in that
dilemma to which we referred to above, and to which phenomenological
sociology may be seen as one historicalsolution, namely the descriptionof
the laws of what is not supposedto haveany lawsany more,andthe analysis
of the structureof what is supposedto havefreed itself from structure.
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 5/16
122
Goffman's situation is, to be sure, ratherdifferent from that of the socio-
logists of the older Europeanmetropolis;yet the formalproblemin question,
in the ostentatiously mobile and fluid Americaof today, is if anythingmore
acute. It does not seem quite right,however,to characterize his situation,as
he does himself, as one in which face-to-face encounters have become the
public or the political arena2. We are now far enough away from 1968 to
have realizedthat the mediapersonalization o which Goffmanreferswasnot
so much the sign of some impendingsocial transformation,as rathera mode
of containment in its own right. Still, the allusionsuggests that it is against
the Sixties as a whole that Goffman'swork must be seen, and in particular,
that it is in terms of the Utopian promises of the counterculturethat his
method becomes visible as a historicalposition andan ideologicalstatement.
For the vocation of the whole counterculturalmovementwas the elimination
of the last remnantsof preciselythose taboos and customs which it used to
be the mission of sociology or anthropologyto tabulate, and the Sixties (or
rather,that part of the Sixties) held out the ultimateUtopianvisionof a life
space in which people could meet face to face in some absolute and un-
mediated sense, beyond all status or conventions, without recourse to
preliminary dentificationsand independentof all the traditional ormulasof
conversationalritual, in short, utterly divested of all of those abundantcues
with which the older social groupingshedged and defused the anxieties
implicit in the encounter with the Other. Today, when the unmediated
languageof hippie talk has proved to be a tissue of conventions in its own
right, and been degradedto the status of a media sub-code, when it has
become clearer to us that, far from abolishingthe older groups and social
units, the hippie enterprize was itself dependent for its realization on
precisely the existenceof social classin the formof the sharedbackgroundofdisgruntledmiddle class children,the failure of this powerfulbut fll-founded
anarchistic dream threatens to discredit Utopian thinking in general.
Goffman's reply-his programmaticdemonstrationof the way in which, in
the absenceof the older skeletal structureof custom, the apparent ormless-
ness of modern life is articulatedby the firm cartilegeof his socio-semiotic
frames-is part of an only too predictable backlashand one of the most
systematic rebukes to all of those prematurepredictions of the "withering
away"of the socialorder andof socialconvention.
Clearly,however, this ideologicalandanti-Utopianbias is little more thanthe
basicmotivationof Goffman'swork, whose authoritymust on the other hand
be measuredby its success and its inventiveness n coping with that formal
problem of sociological description in a post-traditionalworld to which we
referredabove. This work has so often been describedas "literary"by its
admirers (or detractors?) that it does not seem impertinent to draw on
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 6/16
123
literary analogies as a way of underscoring the specificity of its own
procedures,all the moreso since the older social novel or novel of moeurs has
some claim to be considered an ancestor of phenomenologicalor ethno-
methodologicalsociology in its own right.
What is relevantfor us in the history of that particularnovelistic form is the
hesitation of the latter, indeed its alternation, between two basic and
apparently incompatible formal strategies. On the one hand, and most
frequently, the social novel uses its anecdotal material to typify social
custom, or in other words, to reveal the latter by offeringillustrationsand
examples of its basic rules. In this kind of narrative, hen, the relationship
between social order andplot is one of the general o the particular, r better
still, of genus to species or class to member.This strategy (in some respects
reaching its climax in naturalism,and in the bestseller which emergedfrom
naturalism) ends to find itself locked, not in a hermeneutic,but merelyin a
vicious, circle:to perceivethe typicality of customor character-type,we have
to have known it aheadof time, so that the only aesthetic surprises n store
for us will be held by precisely those deviations from custom or typicality
which can no longer serveas very good examples of the latter. So the novel
embracesthe new vocationof documentationorjournalism,only to find that
it hastherebyrendered tself superfluous n the process.
So, whether by narrative nstinct or by conscious design, a rather different
strategy comes into being which we will describe as the detection or
revelationof social constraintsand institutions by means of transgression: he
novelist who chooses this second strategy must constructhis plot, less as a
guided tour than as a hunting expedition, in which traps are laid, feints arerehearsed,a whole apparatusmarshalled n view of an event which may or
may never occur, namely the blundering of the game into the nets thus
provided, he triggering f the snares, he slow emergence nto visibility of the
elusive sense of society as law. The presupposition nherent in an approach
like this amounts to a refusal to considerSociety as an entity or substance n
the functionalist sense; it implies the view that social institutions are essen-
tially negative existents, and havethe beingof taboos, springing nto life only
when we infringe hem, andquite invisibleand imperceptible, ndeed wellnighnon-existent, when they are respected and we remain within the intangible
barbed wire of a whole network of electric eyes. So the greatest novelists
were instinctivelyaware that there did not exist some object called Victorian
society, of which you could provide some elaboratemimesis;but that on the
other hand the instrument of plotting lay to hand to devise a set of
circumstancessuch that alarmsignalswould go off page after page, causing
the ghostly reality of the Social Orderto make its appearancebefore the
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 7/16
124
mind's eye more effectively than any sociology textbook. I suppose that the
last great example of such a novel-which deserves the qualification of
"experimentalnovel" in a very different sense than that intended by Zola
himself-was Ford'sParade'sEnd, which charts a virtual ransgressivemapof
pre-World-War-Iritishsociety.
The reader will long since have grasped the intent of this digression to
underscore a similarshift in "narrative trategy" in the sociological schools
themselves: on this view, the originalityof ethnomethodologicaldescription
is to have replaced the older illustrativeand typifying sociology, which still
believed in the reality of social laws and institutions, with a new strategyof
indirection. Hence the instinctive predilection of the new approach for
transgressivematerialsand its nowhere clearly formulatedsense that what is
revealingabout contemporarysociety is not so much what it admits to being
(or is supposed to be) but ratherwhat is not supposed to happen in it, what
goes wrong with it, what we have no words or terms to designate, and so
forth. Its "institutions"are then felt to be visible only at theirouter limits, in
those strangeno-man's-lands n which people are no longer certain how to
behave, and where, as in those ambiguous zones beyond either national
jurisdiction, it is the feeling of being beyond the social order that suddenly
allows us to grasp what the social order really was in the first place.
Meanwhile,and in that spirit, the most characteristic aw materialsof such a
research strategy will be drawn from what, in Riesman's old terminology,
might be called the shame parts of a guilt-or anxiety-culture: hence what is
so often felt to be the "morbidity"of ethnomethodology, its ostentatious
selection of cases of intersexualism (Garfinkel), homosexual passing, the
"Draculasyndrome" (e.g., colostomy patients who must periodicallyretirefrom public, in Lyman and Scott), physical stigmaor "the managementof
spoiled identity" (Goffman), etc. These interestsnot only illuminateareasof
social life we do not know, or avoid thinking about, but also suggestan
orientationwhich remainsoperative n the ethnomethodologicaldescriptions
of "normal"everyday life as well, as may be seen from the whole areaof
face-to-face behaviorwhich is in may ways Goffman's privileged object of
study. Heretoo, we are unable to escape the feeling that the most revealing
accounts of face-to face interaction are not offered by completed and thusnormative examples of the latter, by demonstrationsof interaction fully
realized, as rather by deviations from that norm, by unsuccessfulor only
partly successful encounters, interactions that have somehow been short-
circuited or disrupted by misunderstanding, mbarrassment, ole confusion,
breaking rame,andso forth.
Goffman'sworks are of course punctuatedby frequent disclaimers hat his
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 8/16
125
material is drawn only from our own society and that his findings are
thereforenot necessarilybindingon other social forms: but the admission s
not so much an invitation to comparativeresearchand to a more genuinely
historical approachto his subject as it is a dismissal of those perspectives.
Perhapsone may reintroducethem into the presentdiscussionby way of an
old paradox,namely the still disturbingnotion that life imitatesart andthat
it is form (ProfessorGoffman'sformsjust as much as any others) which, far
fromreflecting content, cause it to come into beingin the firstplace: in other
words,when we have to do with phenomenaof consciousness,appearances a
reality in its own right. It would follow, then, to choose an instance among
just such "aborted" encounter situations, that if the older thought forms
(philosophical systems, the nascent sociology of Auguste Comte, the
moralizingwisdom of the era along with the beginningsof modernpsycholo-
gy, the nomenclatureof everydayspeechjust as muchas the novels of Balzac
or Dickens) did not recognize embarrassment s a social event in its own
right-something it may be said to havebecome, not only in Goffman,but in
Proust andJoyce, as well as in the other-directed ociety itself-then there is a
sense in which this phenomenonmay be said not yet to have existed in that
period. WhenLucien de Rubempre,a buddingpoet andsocialclimber,whosemother is in reality a midwife, regalesan aristocratic alon with the difficul-
ties a literary genius finds in coming to birth, his subsequentdiscomfiture
("your excellent mother will be a greathelp to you") is not felt by Balzac to
be interesting in itself, but is presented as proof of a conspiracy against
Lucien and expressed as something like a figure or a weak drawingroom
equivalent of those "realer" events which are the duelling strike or the
liquidation of a businessadversary.Meanwhile, his same apparentlyfactual
"kernel" of the phenomenon of embarrassmentwould surely prove to havean even more astonishinglydifferent reality amid the guffaws and the ritual
humiliations of a primitivetribe. This is then the sense in which it may be
said that Goffman's form itself invents or constructs reality, the example
meanwhile admonishingus to correct this work through a constant histo-
ricization of its raw material, in such a way that what was presented as a
propositionabout social life in generalmay be reprocessed nto material or a
diagnosisof this particularhistoricalsociety alone.
Weare thus led to a closerexaminationof the nature of that particularprobe
of contemporarysocial life which is Goffman's form, and to a descriptionof
the operationsand procedureswhich allow him to abstractwhole dimensions
from the concrete here-and-nowof contemporary ife. The formalproblem
involved in any such process of abstraction is of course that of givingthe
illusion (or arousing the conviction) that a "complete statement" has been
made; in this case, however, since Goffman's objects are so intangible (not
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 9/16
126
only in the sense of being "psychological"or "phenomenological,"but also
in that marginalityand transgressivenesseferred o above), the strategicpart
of the operation is surely that of nomination, and few will question
Goffman's immense talent for inventing new terms and new names for his
newly constructedsocial objects.
Indeed this part of his work strikesme as so symptomaticthat I am tempted
to characterize he latter as a kind of object lesson in the socialization of a
private language, something that will probably seem offensive unless I add
that this effort seems to me to be the drivingforce behind most of today's
intellectual life (or at least, the "advanced"parts of it) and unless I rapidly
sketch in a picture of that new historical and intellectualsituation in which,
some "primitiveaccumulation" stage of theory havingbeen completed, the
new skill of semiosis, or simultaneous translationfrom one code or private
language nto another, becomes the evolutionary quality most necessary for
survival.Jean Baudrillard as indeed gone so far as to assertthat language n
this shares he transformation f the older capitalism nto something n which
the classical "referent"-value in the case of commodities, meaningor the
"signified" in the case of signs-is rapidly disappearing,creatinga dizzying
and uninterruptiblecirculationin the void, both of media-commoditiesand
of those empty "signifiers"which we have in this context termed private
languages.3I would myself have preferred o stress the fragmentation f the
publics, following upon the atomizationand monadization of contemporary
society, and the increasinguncertaintyas to whetheryour own local "code"
will be meaningfuldown the hall, let alone acrossthe border.At any rate, it is
certainthat the older-shall we call them referentialor realistic?-theoretical
workswhich offered their theoriesas solutionsto problemsat leastostensiblypresented by the material tself are in the process of being replacedby a new
kind of theoretical work-the meta-book-whose task is the invention of a
theory about other theories, the construction of a master theory through
which their apparent inconsistencies can be overcome, or, in the case of
theories which do not contradict each other because they have no visible
connection with each other at all, in whose largercontext they may be made
fruitfully to interact for the first time. Frame Analysis is, happily, only a
timid example of this kind of book, more fully developedin France,wherethe Anti-Oedipeof Deleuze and Guattarimay serve as the canonicalexample;
it is at any rate in a context like this that the talent for inventingnew names
and terms becomesa major ntellectualstrength.
It is, however,not enoughto observethat the greaterpartof this new coinage
of terminology has its origins in what I preferto call "figures"rather than
"metaphors" ("role," from the theatrical realm, and "frame" from the
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 10/16
127
semiotics of painting, are only two such figuralborrowings, o which we will
return below): what is in many ways an even more crucial part of the
operation is the defiguralizationof the term, the removal of its too obviousmetaphorical races, its transformation nto somethingneutralandscientific,
but also personalized and marked,as it were, with that peculiarmixture of
with-it Americanese and ironic distance which gives Goffman's style its
distinction. This is what happens, for instance, in the construction of the
concept of "keying,"to my mind the most interestingnew figureof Frame
Analysis: the notion of musicalkeys, of modulation and the like, is a familiar
enough sourceof occasionalfiguresof speech,but to transform he noun into
a verb is to terrorize the reader into a conviction that the operation issomethinghe and all the rest of us do all the time, and that thereis no point
pretending we don't know what the terms means (compare, e.g., the word
"passing"used above). Meanwhile, he new concept is supported by a series
of cross-referencesto analogous concepts in other disciplines, the most
strikingbeing those drawnfrom the linguistic area,which rangefrom Austin's
performativeutterances and the more recent concept of the "code" all the
way to Volosinov-Bakhtin's ccount of indirect discourse style indirect ibre
or erlebte Rede). These references certainly shed new light on the notion ofkeying, but I'm not sure that they are meant to do any more than to indicate
the vast rangeof other fields to which the term "keying" might some day be
relevant. Indeed, no effort is made to reach a theoretical synthesis of these
various terms; rather, he existence of analogousterms in neighboring ields is
itself the point to be made, suggesting, in that Zeitgeist atmosphere of
modern theorization to which we have already referred, that the fact of a
need for such a concept in other disciplinesamplyjustifies a similarconstruc-
tion in this one.
Of course, the usefulness of the concept for Goffman is intrinsic and
structural as well, for he needs a means of bringing identity or at least
regularity into what is otherwise the flux of social experience, and this
without falling back on the "natural"or common sense categories n use in
daily life. Hencethe idea of "a systematic transformation .. acrossmaterials
already meaningful in accordance with a schema of interpretation, and
without which the keyingwould be meaningless" p. 45). This does not quite
eliminate the problem-unresolved in Frame Analysis-of some ultimate,
"natural" reality that might be independent of social construction
("according to the definitions so far employed, the innermost part of a
framed activity must be something that does or could have status as untrans-
formed reality," p. 156-the italics are intended to draw attention to the
prudence of the formulation);still, the notion of "keying" certainlytends to
displace our attention to the process of semiotic transformationand away
from the materials hus transformed.
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 11/16
128
At this point, then, we are offered, as might be expected, a whole rangeof
illustrationswhich document the operationsof "keying"on all levelsof daily
life: Goffman divides his materialinto five generalheadings-make-believe,
contests, ceremonials, technical redoings, and regroundings "the perfor-
mance of an activity more or less openly for reasons or motives felt to be
radically different from those that govern ordinary actors," p. 74). The
respectivespace allotted these variousexamplesmakesit clearthat they do
not interest the frame analyst equally: in particular, contests and
ceremonials-conventionalized o the point where an "original" s no longer
present or necessary for imitation, and where therefore the process of
semiotic transformation s itself either less striking or rather different from
that encountered elsewhere-would seem to spring from a type of social
life-traditional and archaic, pre-media if not necessarily pre-capitalist-
qualitatively different from the present, late stage of capitalism which
providesthe bulk of Goffman's examples.Even when we limit ourselvesto
the latter, however,it is hard to escape the impressionthat logical priorities
have been reversed n the rhetoricof such a demonstration,and that it is not
the concept of "keying"which is validatedby the difficultiesandproblems t
can be shown to resolve, as rather the reverse,the variousexamples andillustrationsbeing useful merely to show how wide the rangeof applicability
of this term or figure s; and,as in a dictionaryor grammar ook, to furnisha
range of different but acceptable syntactical exercizes for the beginnerto
practice on. But this means that Frame Analysis is only apparentlyabout
social life; in reality, it is self-referential nd its deepestsubjectis the validity
of its own terminology.Thus the figureof "keying"proves n the long runto
be its own example,andto validate ts own meaningby showinghow muchin
the way of heterogeneousmaterial t canitself "key."
Something ike this couldbe shown, I think, for all of Goffman'smajoressays
or monographs;and our descriptionof his formmightwell have beenratified
by the ultimate confirmationby pastiche, for it is not hardto imaginesome
quasi-Goffmanian igure-let us say, the notion of the boundary and the
no-man's-landto which we had recourse earlier as the most transient
metaphoricalexpression-which, parleyedinto the status of a technicalterm,
might then be illustrated in just the way described above, with materialranging rom the uncertaintiesof everydaylife to, say, the ritualof the Noh
play. Before returning to our initial hesitation, however, and trying to
determinewhether Frame Analysis is to be thought of as one more figural
monograph of this type, or whether it representssomething like a new
departurefor Goffman, it seems appropriate o take note of an important
variant n the formjust describedand, if only for completeness'sake,to open
up a new categoryor sub-categoryalongside t.
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 12/16
129
This categorywould, to my mind,encompassall of those Goffmanian igures
which have remainedlinked to spatial experience, in which, therefore, the
original concrete situation from which they were derivedpersistswith a kind
of historical residuality,like an after-imageof the real. thus the concept of
"framedspace" is alreadylittle more than a figureof speech,by comparison
with that of the "total institution"presented nAsylums. The slippage roma
real place (the more traditionalsociologicalinvestigationof Asylums) to that
of semiotic or signifyingspace (as in the notion of the "frame" tself) is most
clearly observable,perhaps,in what is to my mind the most tantalizingof
Goffman's ndividualessays,on the so-called"Insanityof Place," published n
appendix and as though in after-thought o Relations in Public: here, for
almost the first and last time in Goffman, the semiotic effects, the meaning-
construction, of the various "frames" of experience are anchored in the
coercive realities of society itself as a concrete historicalphenomenon,and
the admirablepassionbreathedby this essay is comparable o that with which
Michel Foucault has denounced the various forms of confinement (even
though Goffman'sindignation, ike that of Foucault,ultimately expressesan
ethicaljudgementon the social orderrather han a politicalanalysisof it).
Frame Analysis constitutes a break with the earlieressays in preciselythat
feature to which we have attributed the originality of ethnomethodology in
the first place, namely its transgressivetrategy;and the impatiencewith that
older indirection, the ambition to achievethe monumentalityand the system
of a positive statement, are surely not alien to the dissatisfactionwhich one
may feel with the new work. For Frame Analysis, alone of Goffman's
investigations,abondonsthe earlierexploration of marginal xperienceand of
the malfunctioningof non-marginal ituations and institutions in an attemptto make a description, for the first time, of the functioning of those
institutions and of the laws according to which everyday life is actually
organized.The elaborate conceptuality of the "frame" is the result of this
ambition to evolve abstractionswhich hold for all social situations, and do
without those fragile links to concrete and historically determinate ones
which were still present in transgressivephenomena.The semiotic thrust of
the new work is clearly enough dictated by such aims: for, unable and
probably unwilling to return to the older positive sociology of institutionsand customs, Goffman can only evolve in the direction of the analysis of
socialmeaning.
Yet the contradictions in the new enterpriseare to my mind nowhere so
strikingly dramatizedas in the new kind of raw materialwhich fills these
pages. I must confess, indeed, that I found the constantstreamof newspaper
clippings, anecdotes, and believe-it-or-not happenings almost unbearably
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 13/16
130
tedious over several hundred pages; but the. issue is not my own personal
reaction, but rather the question of whether this material is not in itself
structurally quite different from that-case studies, anomalies, "morbid"
phenomena sometimes no less anecdotal than what is found here-which
provided the basis for the earlier monographs.It seems to me, indeed, no
accident that Goffman's illustrations are here increasinglydrawn from the
realm-inauthentic above all others-of the fait divers and the media pseudo-
event. At the very moment, in other words, when his analysis strives for its
greatest degree of formalizationand semiotic generality,his content becomes
irremediably rivialized:nor can his use of this raw materialbe justified, as he
tries disarmingly o do in his introduction (15-16), on the grounds of its
"typification"or on the strength of its capacity to dramatize"the power of
our conventional understandings o cope with the bizarrepotentials of social
life, the furthest reaches of experience."For the fait divers s not a fact or an
experience at all: it is a type of discourseand one peculiarlysymptomatic of
the superstructureof present-day neo-consumerism4; o that it is to have
been very particularly he dupe of the referentialor "realistic"illusion to
have taken it for real content in the first place. Here perhapsmore than
anywhere else, then, ProfessorGoffman's choice of what we have charac-
terized as ethnomethodology's semiotic, rather than its textual, strategyhas
played him false.
This said, there is yet another fundamentalcontradictionat work in Frame
Analysis, this time in the very development of its central figure: yet that
contradictionmay perhapsbest be arrivedat througha briefcharacterization
of what is strongest, both in Goffman's own semiotic turn and also in the
structuralist deology itself to which it becomes thereby related. This is thepolemic joined on the status of the "subject"or of individualconsciousness:
a debate whose more notorious monumentsare Foucault'scelebrationof the
"end of man" andAlthusser'santi-humanism, ut which canmoresoberlybe
characterizedas an inquiryinto the degreeto which individualconsciousness
or individualexistence may be considered an intelligiblefield of study in its
own right.
The debate unites data from schizophreniaand the experienceof drugswiththat whole tradition of the "hermeneuticof suspicion" (Ricoeur) in which
the instrumentsof demystification developed by Marx,Freud andNietzsche
find common groundin a devalorizationof the pretensionsof Reason or of
the consciousmind: yet the historical and ideologicalforce of recentFrench
attacks on the "philosophy of the subject," like those mentioned above,
seems to me to find its propercontext only when it is understoodas a final
and sometimes only imperfectly formulated attempt to liquidate the last
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 14/16
131
vestiges of bourgeois individualism tself and to preparethe basis for some
new post-individualistichought modeto
come.
FrameAnalysis participates n this effort to the degreeto which its central
conceptual instrument-that of the frame tself-offers a way of analyzing he
"phenomenological"material of everyday ife in impersonal erms.Indeed,in
this sense, we might reversethe terms of our previousargumentand suggest
that what is wrong with the semiotic approachhere(as well as in some of its
majorEuropeanpractitioners) s if anythingan insufficientformalization, he
failureto go far enough preciselyin dissolvingthe anthropomorphic estiges
of common-senseor surfacecategories,most notably that of the subject:so it
is a disappointmentthat, for all its work in the area of narrativeanalysis,
semiotics has continued to work with categoriesnot noticeably distinct from
the older anthropomorphic common sense ones of the "character."5
Goffman's notion of the frame and Qfits function as the very organizerof
social meaninggoes a long way towardssuggestinga mode of analysiswhich
would allow us to do without those "characters"who are the manipulated
subjectsof present-day ocialhappenings.
But FrameAnalysis is, in the area of the subject, even moreinstructive han
this: for in his closing pagesthe logic of Goffman'senterprize eads him to
that decisivediscoveryto which other contemporary hinkers-Lacan, Sartre,
Girard,come to mind6 -have been led by very differentavenuesof research,
namely the revelation of the reality of the collectivebeneath the appearance
of individualexperience, the disclosureof the individualsubject as a field of
multiple forces, not a substance but a locus, a nexus, of sheerrelationships.
So it is that Goffman's inquiry into the formal elements that make up an
interaction or an encounter leads to the discoverythat what we used to call
an individual is in reality the interplay and intersection of four different
functions, "principal, strategist, animator and figure" (p. 523), whose
complex operations among each other ultimately result in the pheno-
menologicaldata of our social experience. Goffmanresumeshis discoveryas
follows: "Starting with the traditional notion of the individual as self-
identified with the figure he cuts duringordinary nteraction, I have argued
some frame-relevantgrounds for loosening the bond: that playfulness andother keyings may be involvedwhich sharplyreduce personalresponsibility;
that often what the individualpresents is not himself but a story containinga protagonist who may happen also to be himself; that the individual's
presumably nward state can be shared around selectively, much as a stage
performer manages to externalize the inner feelings of the characterhe
enacts."(p. 541).
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 15/16
132
Such a passage, n which the unique strengths of Goffman'swork are visible
in heightenedand concentrated orm, is not without offeringsome clues as to
a fundamentalweaknessas well, one which preventshim from developinghis
discovery about the nature of the subject into new andunexploredareas,and
deflects his argumentback into the now sterile terms of a long-deadpolemic
(his attack on the false problemsof introspectivepsychology at the end of
the previousparagraph).For the final contradictionof FrameAnalysisseems
to me precisely this persistence, in the midst of the newly depersonalized
languageof framingsand situations, of just that older,still anthropomorphic
vocabulary of "roles" and theatricalperformanceswhich formed the con-
ceptual horizon of Goffman's first and still SartreanPresentationof Self in
EverydayLife (1959). The concept of "role"was, indeed, a two-edged one,
for in those days it could be turned precisely against the psychology of the
"person"or subject, and be fully as much a force for demystificationas for a
reinforcementof the anthropomorphic llusion. This can surely no longer be
the casetoday, where, at least in the United States, the rhetoricof role, game,
performance,mask and drama,has become a whole ideology in its own right:
thus the frequently suggestive appeals to the authority and example of
theatricalhistory, throughoutFrame Analysis, have a curiouslyretrospectiveatmosphereabout them, striking one ultimately as the researchnotes from
some immense and never completed thesis on play-actingwhich was to have
served as the philosophicalbasis for the older book on "roles". Here, the
latter coexists uneasily with the new metaphor of the frame, and this
uncertainty about the very figure around which the new book was to be
organizedis no minor flaw in a work whose attractiveness ies in the new
figures t promisesus.
NOTES
1. Argonauts of the WesternPacific (New York, 1961), p. 10.
2. "Recently this neglected field-the field of public life-has begun to receive very
active attention, this being an aspect no doubt of a complex unsettling expressedvariously in the current unsafety and incivility of our city streets, the new political
device of intentionally breaking the ground rules for self-expression during meetings
and contacts, the change in rules of censorhip, and the social molestation encouraged
in the various forms of 'encounter group' and experimental theater." Relations in
Public (New York, 1971), pp. ix-x.
3. Pour une critique de l'economie politique du signe (Paris, 1972), esp. pp. 172-199.
4. See Roland Barthes, "Structure du fait divers," in Essais Critiques (Paris, 1964, also
in English translation, 1972); and Georges Auclair, Le Mana quotidien: Structure et
fonctions de la chronique des fait divers (Paris, 1970).
7/28/2019 Jameson - On Goffman's Frame Analysis
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jameson-on-goffmans-frame-analysis 16/16
133
5. See, for an important critique of the category of "character," Frangois Rastier, Essais
de semiotique discursive (Paris, 1973), pp. 185-206.
6. Sartre's "whirligigs," cf. Saint Genet (New York, 1971), pp. 333-353, Lacan'sL-schema of the constitution of the subject, cf Ecrits (Paris, 1966), pp. 53, 548ff,
Girard's"triangular mediation" of desire, cf. Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore,
1965) offer other examples of the "explosion of the subject" in contemporary
psychology.
Theory and Society, 3 (1976) 119-133? Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands