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3.  Goffman and the public order

Following Goffman, it is useful to think of interaction in public settings – in relational terms – as a legitimate field of study. Goffman’s interest in ‘social situation’ – or what he (1964) refers to in his essay titled ‘the neglected situation’ – lies at the root of the interactional or micro-situational turn in sociology, later developed in the ethnomethodological and the conversation analytic tradition. ‘Social situations’ are defined as ‘an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities’ with ‘turns at talking’ as the unit of analysis – rather than social structure. Goffman points out: “rules of conduct in streets, parks, restaurants, theatres, shops, dance floors, meeting halls, and other gathering places of any community tell us a great deal about its most diffuse forms of social behaviour” (1963: 3–4).

This brings about the issue of gatherings (in the sense of focused encounters) and aspects of co-mingling, territoriality and orientations in public life along two dimensions: constraints and social organisation (Goffman 1963, 1971). Goffman is concerned with the study of social organisation (including ‘total institutions’) via the interactional features within specific settings. The interaction order of everyday talk can form the basis for an understanding of behaviour in institutional settings. In Asylums (Goffman 1961), for instance, rather than studying deviance, he focuses on the underlying patterns of normal behaviour. Conversation is always a part of a larger frame of social interaction, and hence talk has to be analysed ‘from the outside in’. For Goffman, social interaction includes all aspects of verbal and non-verbal cues, dress code, limb discipline, situational improprieties (e.g. in terms of tightness and looseness of involvement) in behaviour in public and semi-public places.

The primacy of ‘social interaction’ is a foregone conclusion in Goffman’s ­framework: even ‘self-talk’ (e.g. outcries, mutterings) implies a certain kind of socialisation and a social audience (e.g. overhearers, bystanders). Goffman claims that “when in the presence of others, the individual is guided by a special set of rules, which have here been called situational proprieties. Upon examination, these rules prove to govern the allocation of the individual’s involvement within the situation, as expressed through a conventionalized idiom of behavioural cues” (1963: 243). His work builds on etiquette manuals such as ‘The Laws of Etiquette’ by ‘A Gentleman’ (1836) (see also Schlesinger 1946). All gatherings have a concern for ‘fitting in’ and maintaining ‘interactional tonus’ or what Bateson (1936) calls ‘tone of appropriate behaviour’. Goffman draws on game metaphors to characterise the coordinating aspects of interactants: ‘come into play’, ‘stay in play’. He (1959) also extends the dramaturgical metaphors of backstage and frontstage to illustrate the discrepancy between public and private presentations of ‘self’. Rules of social interaction are thus intimately linked with self-presentation and face-management. For Goffman (1955: 215), an individual’s face is the positive social value which is on loan from

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family, peer group) and the systems (e.g. state, market). For Habermas, communicative action (as distinct from strategic and instrumental action) is paramount to the lifeworld and its reproduction. In other words, the notion of the lifeworld (which means implicit assumptions, intuitive knowledge, moral values etc.) is the ‘horizon­ -forming context of communication’ as it makes understanding happen.

According to Habermas, the private and the public constitute two spheres in the lifeworld. The public sphere (in its political and cultural sense) is thus an extension of the lifeworld, or more appropriately, it functions as ‘mediator between state, market and individual, that is, systems and lifeworld’ (Fornäs 1995: 80). In the Habermasian sense, the ‘public sphere’ comes to be seen as distinct from organisational and bureaucratic state institutions. The institutional spheres or fields are, however, “dependent on the ordering principles of both systems, but also on communicative action based in the lifeworld” (Fornäs 1995: 74). In passing, it can be noted that Gramsci (1971), however, draws the line between private and public elsewhere: institutions such as churches, schools, newspapers are seen as part of the private domain and the State (of the ruling class) is neither public nor private. In his seminal work on ideology and ideological­ state apparatuses, Althusser (1994) maintains that it is unimportant whether the institutions­ in which ideological state apparatuses are realised are public or private; what matters is how they function (see Section 5.2 on the colonisation of the private domain through the adoption of surveillance procedures).

Staying within the political field, Habermas defines the public sphere as a ‘body of private persons assembled to form a public’ – to discuss matters of ‘public concern’ or ‘common interest’ (cf. Sennett 1977). There are resonances here with the Goffmanian notion of gathering, but the Habermasian project is strikingly different with its focus on rational argumentation as opposed to interactional order. The notion of ‘common interest’ allows for the bracketing of participants’ status, as the public sphere is regarded as a forum for public opinion formation. For Habermas (1989: 36), public discourse as “a kind of social intercourse, […] far from presupposing the equality of status, ­disregarded status altogether”. As Calhoun (1992: 13) points out, ‘the idea that the best rational argument and not the identity of the speaker was supposed to carry the day was ­institutionalised as an available claim’. The Goffmanian participant categories are hardly invoked here, but we can anticipate a link between available role-categories and production/reception formats in the public domain. According to Habermas (1989: 27):

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public: they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.