The Con Man as Model Organism: The Methodological Roots of Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Self. History of the Human Sciences, forthcoming. more

The Con Man as Model Organism: The Methodological Roots of Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Self In a series of books and essays published in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) famously championed a dramaturgical perspective on the self. He argued against the common sense distinction between sincerity of everyday behavior and the contrived performances of actors. He portrayed humans as ‘impression managers,’ constantly staging performances to meet and exceed the expectations of various ‘audiences.’ Individuals, often operating as part of a team, prepared for their roles in the ‘back region’ to perform a kind of play in front of the persons they encounter in their daily routines. The theatrical play provided an apt model since ‘ordinary social intercourse itself is put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies’ (Goffman, 1959: 78). His dramaturgical theory built upon his ‘realization that while the performance offered by impostors or liars is quite fragrantly false and differs in this respect from ordinary performances, both are similar in the care their performers must exert in order to maintain the impression that is fostered.’ Since both genuine and dishonest performances require the use of dramatic effects to render them convincing, Goffman claimed that ‘we can profitably study performances that are quite false in order to learn about ones that are quite honest’ (Goffman, 1959: 73). Philip Manning (1989, 1992) has argued that in between the book’s 1956 and 1959 editions, Goffman made changes which moved the text’s centre of gravity away from a view of the self as a hidden manipulator to focus instead on rituals of trust and tact. Left unaddressed in this account is the origin of this theory and why Goffman is often seen as championing a deceitful self. How did the con man come to serve as a model for human nature? Despite the fact that Goffman remains one of the most highly cited figures in the social sciences, he has attracted little sustained interest among historians of the human sciences. Insofar as he rarely spoke about his methods, disliked being interviewed, and left no personal papers, he does not make for an easy subject of historical analysis.1 Another reason for this neglect is a preoccupation among historians of the postwar social sciences with the Cold War as the over-aching explanatory framework (Heims, 1991; Herman, 1995; Edwards, 1996; Latham, 2000; O’Connor, 2000; Solovey, 2001; Gilman, 2003; Rohde, 2009). Goffman’s career does not fit neatly in a narrative organized around the growth of social scientific knowledge in service of the American state, especially its military ambitions on the world stage. Recently, historian Joel Isaac has suggested the need to attend to how the practices of Cold War era social scientific research fit within the ways of knowing developed over the longer histories of these disciplines and deployed by other sciences (Isaac, 2007). This article moves away from a view casually mentioned in the sociology literature with some frequency that Goffman is a thinker too idiosyncratic to withstand sustained analysis. Although he preferred the artfully crafted essay over the exact analysis of data (Lofland, 1980), Goffman shared with the other postwar social scientists an interest in forms of communication within ‘small groups.’ This commitment was not only methodological, but ontological: these scientists conceived of society in terms of an assortment of small collectives rather than individualized atoms or an undifferentiated mass (Pooley, 2006; Cohen-Cole, 2009). Moreover, his focus on communication in ‘relatively closed systems’ (Goffman, 1959, 232) demonstrated common assumptions with the cybernetics movement (Edwards, 1996).2 My approach is to historicize Goffman’s early writings from the 1950s in terms of the investigative practices he deployed. He was a social scientist who privileged ethnography in the field over the laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the mental test as a means of generating knowledge about human nature. As historian Robert Kohler has argued, laboratories and field sites are more than just geographic places. They ‘are cultural domains first and foremost, where different languages, customs, materials and moral economies, and ways of life prevail’ (Kohler, 2002: 5). Moreover, rather than trying to formulate universal laws Goffman focused on the models provided by richly detailed concrete examples, a style of reasoning that fit within the tradition of natural historical description. Taking such approach offers a different picture of Goffman’s historical place than that advanced by social theorists. Alvin Gouldner argued Goffman’s thinking belonged to a specific moment in the history of capitalist development, the emergence of a postindustrial service economy. Gouldner contended that the dramaturgical theory reflected the bourgeois ideology of the postwar corporate middle-manager and represented ‘the transition from an older economy centered on production to a new one centered on mass marketing and promotion, including the marketing of the self’ (Gouldner, 1970: 381). In contrast, Gonos (1980) argued that Goffman articulated the viewpoint of the alienated ‘lumpen-bourgoisie’ or small-time business owner pushed aside by a nationally-integrated economy. More recently, commentators have moved away from identifying him with a particular class, seeing him instead as advancing a theory of the ‘post-modern self’ (Tseëlon, 1992; Manning, 2000). In analyzing the relationship between theory and practice in Goffman’s dramaturgical writings, what the cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer (1991) calls a ‘tools to theories heuristic’ provides a helpful framework.3 Gigerenzer contends that ‘scientific tools (both methods and instruments) suggest new theoretical metaphors and theoretical concepts once they are entrenched in scientific practice.’ Familiarity with these tools within a disciplinary community also facilitates the reception of the theoretical metaphors they inspire (1991: 256). Reconfiguring certain distinctions central to the logical positivists’ understanding of scientific progress, he contends that tools used in the context of justification loop back to provide resources in the context of discovery. This is not a deliberate, intentional process. Rather familiarity with the practical aspects of certain techniques helps make a particular understanding of human nature more thinkable. Gigerenzer focuses on tools for data analysis used in cognitive science such as inferential statistics, but his approach has broader implications. Left unexplored is the possibility that tools used for the collection of data also provide metaphors and concepts available to the scientist. The connection between two sources for Goffman’s theory of the self seems particularly worthy of consideration: his own use of participant-observation as a method and his repeated evocation of the confidence man. Goffman’s 1950s essays are not narratives of his experiences of the field (Fine and Martin, 1990). Instead, I argue that the methodology of participant-observation became an unacknowledged source in Goffman’s modeling of human nature. The performative nature of participant-observation resonated with his interest in the figure of the confidence man. He never undertook any field studies of these professional criminals, but he repeatedly returned to their example as a model for behavior. Goffman’s depiction of the con man owed much to his own experiences as a participant-observer. Both were modern professionals who succeeded in life by cultivating their own insincerity to allay the worries of a potentially incredulous audience. The model of the participant-observer is particularly interesting because, unlike his criminal counterpart, this form of insincerity was in part virtuous. Goffman’s Natural History In 1969, Everett C. Hughes, one of Goffman’s primary mentors at the University of Chicago, made a telling analogy about his student’s methodology. Hughes suggested that ‘Goffman and [Konrad] Lorenz work in the same way; they observe with aggressive intensity the behavior of their subjects in situations, or occasions’ (Hughes, 1969: 426).4 At first, the comparison may strike the reader as odd as the two were polar opposites at the level of theory. The Austrian naturalist emphasized the primacy of instincts in the constitution of behavior while Goffman stressed the malleability of the self through a multitude of personae, tailored to meet local circumstances. Lorenz dealt with the deep time of evolution where Goffman concerned himself with the dynamics of the immediate situation. Goffman had first suggested the affinities between his approach and that of the European ethologists. He claimed that the inspiration for the analysis of ‘place’ in Asylums was not the theatrical stage, but the work of Heini Hediger and Lorenz on animal territoriality (Goffman, 1961: 227). Goffman cited a paper by the Swiss-Canadian psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger which turned to ethology to interpret the patient’s experience of the mental hospitals. Just as captive animals came to behave in a stereotyped fashion due to the conditions of captivity, Ellenberger suggested that some of the patient’s actions might reflect the conditions of confinement more than the underlying disease (Ellenberger, 1960). The zoo offered a powerful metaphor for questioning the asylum’s status as a curative space. Goffman concurred with Ellenberger that each institution constituted a ‘closed community’ that elicited stereotyped behaviors from its occupants.5 In the preface to Relations in Public (1971), he expanded upon his appreciation of ethology. Because of its focus on social groups, ethology turned the naturalist into a student of ‘face-to-face interaction.’ He admired the ethologists for developing ‘a field discipline that leads them to study animal conduct in very close detail and with a measure of control on preconceptions.’ He also warned that the ethologist’s tendency ‘to apply a Darwinian frame’ led to ‘some very unsophisticated statements’ when applied to human behavior (Goffman, 1971: xvii). In his masterful exegesis of Goffman’s oeuvre, Burns (1992: 27) concludes that ethology contributed little to the sociologist’s theoretical formulations. Hughes never suggested that Goffman shared a theory of human nature with Lorenz, but rather he argued that they worked in the same fashion. The similarity resided in at the level of scientific practice. They held in common a style of observation rather than any specific theory. Lorenz rejected the control of the laboratory as a scientific ideal. In its place, he stressed the importance of observing over long stretches of time the naturally occurring behaviors of various organisms. He transformed his estate in Altenberg into a scientific farm, where he raised and bred geese and jackdaws to study their developmental patterns from birth (Burkhardt, 2005). What differentiated Goffman from the ethologist was his rejection of the ideal of a pure nature. Lorenz’s science was predicated on the conviction that one can observe authentic behavior only in a relatively uncontaminated pastoral setting while Goffman reveled in the fleeting artifice and appearances characteristic of the modern. The anthropologist Lloyd Fallers recognized this way of knowing and praised Goffman for it. Where most sociologists seemed content to ‘draw their data from experimental small groups’ Goffman was ‘a fieldworker in the anthropological tradition, an observer (whether through his own eyes or those of others) of man in his native habitat’ (Fallers, 1962: 191). Goffman had not begun his career as a human ethologist. When he commenced his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, he first worked as an employee at Social Research Inc. Although not as expansive Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau for Applied Social Research (Barton, 1979), the social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner created the agency in 1946 to conduct market research for paying clients (Platt, 1996: 158). Under its auspices, Warner undertook a project sponsored by the Columbia Broadcasting System to ascertain the reaction of housewives to the radio serial, Big Sisters. Of particular interest was connection between the audience member’s socio-economic position and her personality traits. To accomplish this task, Warner recruited sixty wives of junior executives, skilled, and white-collar workers. To provide a measure of the individual housewife’s personality, he turned to a leading projective technique, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) (Warner and Henry, 1948). Projective tests like the Rorschach and TAT materialized a specific understanding of the self (Galison, 2004). Using a fixed and tightly controlled set of evocative images whose meaning was by design ambiguous, the scientist asked subjects to craft narratives based upon what they perceived. Advocates of these tests largely adhered to the psychoanalytic conviction that such talk would uncover unconscious tendencies and personal secrets that the interviewee would not intentionally reveal. Under Warner’s supervision, Goffman set out to expand the sample to include housewives recruited from the Hyde Park neighborhood surrounding the university. As his research progressed, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the approach taken in the CBS study. He became more interested in the embodied performances and rituals through which the women responded to and challenged the psychological test (Goffman, 1949). He argued that by transforming the TAT from an aid to clinical judgment to a standardized tool for measurement in social research its utility had been lost. He wrote, ‘Bracketed statements by the interviewer concerning the pauses and reactions of the subject frequently lead to fruitful, clinical insights; in most instances, however, such statements are insufficiently precise and specific for purposes of standardization and quantification.’6 In place of the standardized test, he came to practice a social psychology based on field observations, transforming his own camouflaged person into an instrument of observation.7 The Participant-Observer as Model Gigerenzer argues that tools become heuristics for scientific theories not when they are first introduced as innovations, but once their use becomes unremarkable and diffuse within a disciplinary community. Fieldwork as a participant-observer had achieved this status among sociologists at the University of Chicago by the time of Goffman’s arrival. More importantly, his dramaturgical theory closely mirrored how he and others described participant-observation as a scientific activity. As a methodology, participant-observation began in the mid-1880s when a wide array of reform-minded journalists began practicing deceptive ‘class passing’ as a means of investigating social phenomenon supposedly out of sight of respectable society. They feigned madness to gain access to asylums, ‘tramped with tramps,’ and waited on tables. They aimed for a total and unnoticed immersion within a given community for an extended period of time. Researchers used both observations of their surroundings and their own embodied experiences as equivalent kinds of evidence. Pioneered by journalists like Nellie Bly and Josiah Flynt, academics, like the political economist Walter Wyckoff and the psychologist Amy Tanner, also adopted participant-observation (Pittenger, 1997; Higbie, 1997; Lutes, 2002; Pittenger, 2003; Pettit, 2008). Under the guidance of Robert E. Park, the Chicago School of sociology likewise derived its scientific authority from ‘the evidence of experience’ (Scott, 1991). Park and his students turned the city of Chicago into a privileged ‘truth-spot’ to generate models about urbanization, poverty, and criminality as social processes. In the 1920s and 1930s, Chicago served as both their universalized laboratory for understanding modernization and their field-site rife with local concerns (Gieryn, 2006). Research consisted of informal interviews, the collection of official documents, and first-hand observation. When training students, Park drew upon the skills he developed as a newspaper reporter between 1891 and 1898. In part, he conceived of the sociologist as a ‘superreporter’ committed to conveying the long-term stories beneath the surface of the daily headlines (Bulmer, 1984: 90). The celebrated monograph series Park oversaw trafficked in the lives of those formerly deemed marginal: prostitutes, tramps, delinquents, and criminal gangs. Like the naturalistic proletarian and hard-boiled novels of the era, the resulting sociological narratives depicted the activity of such persons as both the locus for the breakdown of social order and a defining feature of the modern, urban experience (Cappetti, 1993; Salerno, 2007). Platt (1983) has effectively debunked the myth that participant-observation was the primary investigative practice deployed in the postwar Chicago department, but her research also demonstrates its wide acceptance as a method there. Nels Anderson’s ethnography of the hobo brought participant-observation as a technique within the purview of the department’s program (Anderson, 1923). While they adopted an eclectic array of tools, the department’s postwar leaders still advocated a ‘you’ve got to touch it’ empiricism, which privileged the evidence of first-hand experience. Platt also found that Chicago graduates of Goffman’s generation cited the compulsory course on fieldwork as the formative rite in their education (Platt, 1995). In addition, Goffman’s two main mentors, Hughes and Warner, encouraged both a methodological and institutional rapprochement between sociology and anthropology (Abbott, 1999: 62-77). In contrast to this continued emphasis on situated experience, Talcott Parsons organized the practice of social inquiry very differently at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. There research centered on the formulation of a highly abstract general theory of action (Isaac, 2010). The cultural anthropologist David M. Schneider made this contrast central to his positive evaluation of his friend’s promotion to associate professor in 1958. He explained to the tenure committee that Goffman ‘is not, like Talcott Parsons, concerned with the systematic development of a logically coherent theoretical scheme of ample proportions which may (or may not) at some later date (usually unspecified) be run against a few facts for goodness of fit and perhaps even tested.’ Instead, ‘Goffman’s initial query is always a theoretical one, and once the question is asked, it is asked in terms of concrete observational material and organized with reference to them.’8 In another context, Hughes claimed that ‘the essence of his method is close observation and the reporting of behavior in ‘small’ but dramatic and fateful situations, which he then extrapolates to larger systems of things in a sophisticated but not quantitative way’ (Hughes, 1969: 425). The hallmark of Goffman’s ethnography was his skill at generating theory out of his descriptions of minute social encounters recorded as an embedded observer. Goffman famously resisted publishing an account of his methodology for conducting fieldwork, but hints are found in his doctoral dissertation on a formerly isolated farming community on the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland. His aim was the observation of the everyday rituals of communication within this community that had recently opened itself to a small tourist trade. Living among the islanders for a year and half, he struggled ‘to play an unexceptional and acceptable role in community life. My real aim was to be an observant participant, rather than a participating observer’ (Goffman, 1953: 2). He wanted to be present enough to observe behavior, but he also sought to absent himself from the actual communicative process. His goal was ‘to observe people off their guard’ (Goffman, 1953: 5), but this required a certain level of invisibility. Because of his desire to pass unnoticed and not interfere with the ‘nature’ of social intercourse, he felt that he had to eschew the standardizing technologies of the anthropologist.9 He conceded that ‘mechanical devices such as tape recorders and motion-picture cameras, or rigid techniques such as time-sampling, would have provided a desirable check on these recording biases,’ but he warned his readers that ‘these corrective devices, however, were not practical for social, economic, and technical reasons’ (Goffman, 1953: 4). To be a successful ethnographer, he had to first and foremost camouflage his intentions and managed people’s impressions of this outsider so as not to arouse suspicion. At a time when Robert K. Merton labored to ‘focus’ and structure the scientific interview (Lemov, 2010), Goffman moved in the opposite direction. Rather than seeking greater control over the situation, he hoped to ensure accuracy by managing the presentation of his own presence. In making such claims, Goffman suggested that observing humans accurately necessitated sacrificing one’s sincerity. As a social scientific practice, Goffman’s brand of ethnography involved a specific configuration of what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls ‘the virtues of truth.’ According to Williams, the cultivation of truthfulness requires a commitment to two distinct virtues, accuracy and sincerity. Adherence to these virtues mitigates the distorting influence of the will towards selfdeception and deceit of others. Accuracy is a disposition towards acquiring correct beliefs about the world by struggling against the pleasing assurances of prior convictions. A commitment to sincerity guarantees that one is as transparent and forthcoming as possible when representing one’s knowledge to others (Williams, 2002). Williams suggests that accuracy is the virtue that pertains to the acquisition of knowledge while sincerity governs its transmission. The example of ethnography demonstrates that this is not always the case. Measuring and recording devices that would have granted Goffman’s observations greater exactitude risked making his objects of study act differently. He worried that revealing his true identity would render certain communicative situations out of reach. Too much transparency compromised the collection of data while insincerity granted him the access necessary to make accurate observations of fleeting face-to-face interactions. Insincerity was virtuous behavior because it literally got the investigator closer to the truth. When it came to the site of inquiry, he advocated a version of objectivity best described as accuracy in the absence of sincerity. Goffman celebrated the vantage point of an insincere performer rather than the perspective of a distant and impartial recording device. In 1960, he wrote to Hughes, describing his experiences studying ‘the service relations and the frayed edges of American civilization’ in Las Vegas. He insisted on the necessity of observing behavior as a card-dealer at the casino. He contrasted his own physical position with that of the management which took the form of ‘roof mirrors behind which an invisible man watches the employees.’10 Although the technology was readily available, Goffman rejected this disembodied, aerial eye view in favor of the truthfulness acquired disguised on the floor. His best-known investigation of this type consisted of the ethnography he conducted on the social life of institutionalized psychiatric patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Starting in 1954, he spent a year on the ward floor, posing ‘in the role of an assistant to the athletic director’ while only ‘the top hospital management knew what my aims were’ (Goffman, 1961: ix). He always circumscribed his position in these situations, remaining more of an observer than a fully immersed participant. He consistently chose a role adjacent to the primary action, whether that of the athletics director rather than the patient or the card dealer rather than the gambler. He claimed that professional subterfuge served as a means of identifying members of his cohort at Chicago. He concluded his 1960 letter to Hughes on a wry note, promising to ‘save my card, collect one from Howie [Becker] and members of all the other locals, and we’ll present them to you on a birthday: for by their union cards you shall know the participant observers.’11 Such prolonged work in the field semi-disguised as a member of a trade or profession became a means of establishing one’s authority and credentials. Becker famously used his piano-playing skills to investigate ‘the natural history of an individual’s use of marihuana’ in Chicago’s jazz clubs (Becker, 1953: 236). A number of Goffman’s contemporaries offered ethnographies of the asylum from the viewpoint of an attendant. 1948 witnessed a new wave of asylum exposés including Albert Deutsch’s photo-essay The Shame of the States alongside the novel and film versions of Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit, a classic in the confinement narrative genre. Harold Orlansky, an anthropology doctoral candidate at Yale, published a scathing account in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine, Politics. Based upon the observations he recorded during a fourteen month stint as an attendant, Orlansky concluded that ‘the American asylum manifests, in embryo, some of the same social mechanisms which in Germany matured into death camps’ (Orlansky, 1948: 162). A number of Chicago sociologists took up Orlansky’s suggestion that the asylum attendant, endowed with arbitrary power over others, constituted a potentially dangerous occupation worthy of concern. Harold Traxel served as an orderly for nine months while ‘no one on the staff had knowledge of the research being conducted’ (Traxel, 1953: 19). Robert H. Willoughby argued that ‘participant-observation was thought to be the best tool for putting one’s self into the same frame of reference as the attendant.’ He prided himself on conducting eight months of observation ‘without the assistance of and to a great extent without the knowledge of the administration’ (Willoughby, 1953: 15-16). In the early 1950s, such insincere performances were standard practice at Chicago. More controversially, this cultivated insincerity shaped Goffman’s expository style. His style of observation fit within the long tradition of natural history, but his work did not read like traditional natural histories. Where Orlansky’s article was an earnest denunciation of the dehumanizing tendencies built into the social organization of the mental hospital, Goffman never offered an outright condemnation of the treatment of patients. Instead, he carefully described the behaviors he witnessed on the ward floor, but altered their meaning by ironically framing them with the categories derived from the sociology of occupations rather than the psychopathology of mental illness (Becker, 2003). In person and on the page, he presented himself through a distant voice saturated by sarcasm, satire, and irony (Fine and Martin, 1990). Playful trickery had long formed an important part of his self-presentation. His sister, the actress Frances Bay, recalled that he was a ‘real prankster as a kid’ (Posner, 2008). Goffman, along with Becker, became known for their preferences for ‘the offbeat to the familiar, the vivid enthnographic detail to the dull taxonomy, the sensuously expressive to dry analysis, naturalistic observation to formal questionnaires, the standpoint of the hip outsider to the square insider’ (Gouldner, 1962: 208). This stance resonated with a style of mid-century dispassionate emotional restraint, what historian Peter Stearns calls ‘American Cool’ (Stearns, 1994). Cultivated insincerity allowed Goffman to advance biting criticisms while appearing detached and disinterested from the matter at hand. Irony served as his surrogate for objectivity. This calculated cynicism about modern organizational structures made him a hero among many intellectuals on the left, but, as Gouldner suggested (1970), his was also a style championed in the hallways of 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agencies (Frank, 1997). Goffman’s innovation then was neither the problems he studied nor his investigative practice, but his advocacy of a model of personhood that closely resembled the well-established methodology of participant-observation. Historian Joel Isaac (2009) has documented how the practice of theory became central to the identity of the social scientist in the 1950s. His account focuses on a set of highly influential ‘organization men’ such as Parsons and Herbert Simon. Coming out of the University of Chicago, which had long insisted that the researcher develop an intimate knowledge of the noir aspects of the city (Salerno, 2007), Goffman developed a different model of the social theorist. His was an embedded and attentive yet coolly detached observer skilled at playing roles, the sociologist as urban hipster. This model of the researcher informed his satirical expository style and account of the self. It also informed his notorious “hypermasculine” trickster persona centered on his own composure, poise, and emotional control (Scheff, 2006: 13). His career reveals a ‘tools to theory’ heuristic as the methodology he deployed – manipulating others to pass unnoticed in the farming village, asylum ward, or casino – became a model for the individual’s experience of putting on various masks to fit the occasion. The similarities between this professional behavior and the activities of the confidence man may have suggested the latter as a model for human nature. The Ethnographer and the Con Man The normalization of insincerity formed a major and rather unique component of Goffman’s account of the self. The clearest expression of this viewpoint is also the earliest, ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’ (1952). In this essay, Goffman made the play metaphor central to his analysis, but it did not refer to the theater. Instead, he discussed the carefully choreographed performances and management of people’s identities that go into a confidence game. Gleefully adopting the criminal’s slang as his own, he noted how ‘the operation of any particular racket, taken through the full cycle of its steps or phases, is sometimes called a play.’ Moreover, confidence games are ‘practiced on private persons by talented actors who methodically and regularly build up informal social relationships just for the purpose of abusing them’ (1952: 451). Confidence games provided Goffman with the material to think through the conflict between one’s self-image and perception by others. The successful defrauding of the mark disconfirmed his self-understanding as a savvy commercial actor. ‘A mark’s participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man’ (Goffman, 1952: 452). In order to avoid legal reprimand, con men had developed techniques to mitigate the frustration and anger that derive from this disappointment. This process of ‘cooling out’ became a model for all situations where individuals were confronted with disappointing outcomes that contradicted their established self-image. Through social interactions, the victim is successfully cast in a new role to perform without insult to the actor. Cooling out is the management of disappointment when confronted with the contradictions of selfdeception, when a person recognizes that their most cherished identity was simply a temporary role. The very lack of integration among the various social roles a person performs was the source of salvation since they could find refuge in their other roles. The individual’s capacity to be cooled out and reassigned an identity signaled to the young sociologist the malleability of human nature. Writing in the journal Psychiatry, Goffman contended that his theory explained the psychotherapeutic encounter. Rather than revealing hidden depths or bringing forth a person’s authentic inner self, the psychotherapist operated as ‘the society’s cooler’ by assigning a new, safer role to disappointed and frustrated clients (Goffman, 1952: 462). Goffman never conducted fieldwork among confidence men, but rather drew heavily on the linguist David W. Maurer’s ethnographic studies of the argots of the professional criminal. Maurer also saw in the figure of the criminal swindler a model for thinking about social relations in general. He insisted that ‘their methods differ more in degree than in kind from those employed by more legitimate forms of business’ (Maurer, 1940: 16). Trained as a scholar of Elizabethan drama at Ohio State University in the early years of the Great Depression, Maurer began his forays into the vernacular with a study of the jargon exclusive to the men working in the North Atlantic fishing trade (Maurer, 1930). This examination of ‘schoonerisms’ set the pattern for his subsequent career. He would record through correspondence, stenography, and new audio technologies the idiosyncratic speech of various occupational subcultures. Starting with the cant deployed among members of traveling carnivals (Maurer, 1931a), he became particularly intrigued by the language and culture of crime. Central to his linguistic studies was the belief that each criminal specialty had developed its own argot. This was because the various types of criminals constituted professions in a sociological sense. Gamblers, forgers, and confidence men were not isolated rogues, but modern entrepreneurs engaged in highly organized industries with rules, apprenticeships, alliances, and most importantly an exclusive, technical vocabulary. In academic journals, Maurer produced encyclopedic lexicons of the various trades of the underworld. He insisted that to comprehend these speech-systems as linguistic phenomena required an understanding of the behavioral patterns performed within the subcultural classes. The psycho-sociological ramifications of acquiring an argot can most readily be seen in Maurer’s interpretation of prostitution, a sector of the crime world he claimed lacked its own distinct language. Maurer argued that argots did not develop out of an urge to deceptively camouflage the criminal activity from the law. Rather they emerged out of the sense of camaraderie that characterized the homosocial community of an occupation. A member acquired fluency by achieving a certain status within a professional network, an economic position never granted the prostitute, who always remained subservient to the pimp. Moreover, unlike other professional criminals who ‘depend heavily on a shrewd analytical and psychological approach,’ Maurer concluded that prostitution did not require such mental skills (Maurer, 1939: 549). He defined argot-formation as a masculine trait that required intelligence and creativity, qualities he found wanting among the prostitutes he interviewed. Despite claims about abstaining from sensationalism, glamour, and excitement, Maurer’s project was rooted in his conviction that the argots he collected constituted elements of a dying culture. In an early study of the cant cultivated in the social space of the carnival, he stressed how criminal argots had their origin in the rough world of horse and wagon travel. Things had changed and ‘commercialization – so some of the oldtimers feel – has emasculated modern showmanship, and along with it modern circus and carnival slang. However that may be, there yet remains plenty of glamour and of grief in the road-show business and its jargon still retains a redeeming modicum of romance’ (Maurer, 1931b: 327-328). Argot was a remaining auditory vestige of a more rugged, masculine era that needed to be preserved in the industrial age. What Maurer, trained in the analysis of literature, brought to the study of swindlers was an explication of the dramaturgical structure of the confidence game. ‘Big time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly.’ With this metaphor in place, Maurer began assigning roles: ‘The insideman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insideman for their cues; he must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must be able to retain the confidence of an intelligent man even after that man has been swindled at his hands’ (Maurer, 1940: 108). This description of social intercourse as an inherently deceptive dramatic performance provided a rich resource for Goffman. Since the coining of the term during the 1849 trial of William Thompson (Bergman, 1969), writers had depicted the confidence man as a threat to a middle class culture organized around the ideal of sincerity (Halttunen, 1982; Lindberg, 1982). Goffman challenged this tradition of defining the American middle class against the figure of the con man. The confidence game provided him with a social situation where the artifice of behavior and the reality of its consequences were not dichotomous. During the big con, one had to perform a deceptive role to achieve real success. It does not seem unlikely that Goffman’s own professional insincerity as a participant-observer made this reevaluation of the confidence man’s import more thinkable. Conclusion The swindler and the participant-observer occupy an ambiguous place in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as stage acting became the governing metaphor. In terms of the methods of communication, Goffman made no distinction between the operation of the con man and the everyday performers. Both ‘must employ elaborate and meticulous personal fronts and often engineer meticulous social settings’ in order to secure trust and reliability among the audience (Goffman, 1959: 218-219). Despite these affinities, he argued that the con man and the participant observer were not ordinary actors. These individuals occupied ‘discrepant roles,’ such as the shill and the informer, which enabled them to move between the regions ascribed to the performer and the audience. Capable of mimicking the actions of both teams, these specialists could accrue inside information about each side and threaten the stability of the communicative system with this privileged knowledge (Goffman, 1959: 144-148). No longer the primary metaphor for human behavior, they remained central to his account. Embedded within the communication system, they were also one of the few classes of persons capable of understanding its true functioning from within its operation. The confidence man, the actor, and the ordinary person all perform the life episodes, but only the former two had the capacity to articulate the process. Indeed, social science for Goffman consisted precisely in just this articulated knowledge. If ‘the play’ originally referred to the confidence man’s carefully choreographed swindle, when did Goffman acquire the more literal theatrical metaphor? Following his biographer’s insightful reconstruction of the various locations Goffman inhabited (Winkin, 1998), Ian Hacking suggests that Goffman’s wartime work classifying films depicting scenes of daily life for the National Film Board of Canada may have inspired such a perspective (Hacking, 2004: 289-290). In a discussion of the irrelevancy of the common sense distinction between sincere and contrived performances added to the 1959 edition, Goffman noted ‘recent uses of the ‘psychodrama’ as a therapeutic technique’ (1959: 78). During the 1930s, Jacob Levy Moreno introduced the theory of psychodrama to American psychiatrists through his private Beacon Hill Sanitarium. With the assistance of other participants, patients were expected to confront and overcome their inner conflicts by acting out a series of roles relevant to their daily lives in front of an audience and under the supervision of a therapist/director. In 1939, St. Elizabeths became the first state hospital to begin experimenting with Moreno’s psychodrama technique. Two years later, Frances Herriott, a protégé of Moreno with a background in musical theatre, oversaw the construction of a stage in the hospital’s Hitchcock Hall to properly set the scene for therapeutic relief. She documented that Red Cross volunteers, nurses, and attendants participated in her psychodrama class (Herriott, 1940; Herriott and Hagan, 1941; Herriott, 1945).12 There is no evidence that Goffman had direct contact with the psychodramatic workers during his year at St. Elizabeths, but their shared institution niche offers a possible explanation for his shift in metaphors during this period. Submerged within the earliest version of Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are two closely related models of the self: the participant-observer and the confidence man. His language of actors and plays originally did not refer to the theater, but to the activities of the commercial swindler. He followed Maurer in noting how with the increasingly organized nature of crime, swindlers were not all that different from the denizens of respectable society. Before advancing his dramaturgical theory, he had pursued a number of studies as an insincere participant-observer. 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The absence of personal or professional papers has been partially remedied by Dmitri Shalin who edits the online Erving Goffman Archive (http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/ega/). This site contains a wonderful collection of interviews with Goffman’s family, colleagues, and students. 2 During the 1960s and 1970s, Goffman moved away from his dramaturgical theory, embracing game theory in its place. Despite this new theory’s more robust mathematical foundation, it too trafficked in the idiom of confidence men with its gambling metaphors and an emphasis on the human as a strategic manipulator of others. 3 I describe this process as ‘a tools to theory heuristic’ rather than reflexivity because Goffman does not appear to deliberately model the self upon his scientific practices. He did not exhibit the degree of reflexivity about ethnography famously presented in Rabinow, 1977. 4 On Goffman’s relationship with Hughes, see Jaworski, 2000. This fascination was not an idiosyncratic particularity, but rather reflected a broad romance with ethology in the American 5 behavioral sciences of the postwar era (Vicedo, 2009). 6 Erving Goffman, ‘Filed Report for Soc. 301 A, 1948,’ Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Box 131, Folder 8, University of Chicago Library. 7 Goffman would incorporate unpublished findings from Social Research Inc.’s market research into his account of people’s ‘secret consumption,’ which deviated from prescribed standards of taste (1959, 50-51). 8 David M. Schneider to Reinhard Bendix, November 6, 1958, David M. Schneider Papers, University of Chicago, Box 14, folder 6 9 Pinch, 2010 discusses Goffman’s attention to the materiality of the setting in his analysis of the social interaction. Goffman to Hughes, December 13, 1960, Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Library. Goffman to Hughes, December 13, 1960, Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Library. Buchanan, 1982 notes that psychodrama had been practiced at St. Elizabeths Hospital continuously since 1939. 10 11 12