Goffman, Erving. Frame
Analysis.
There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic. (What can better push a book than the claim that it will change what the reader thinks is going on?) A current example of this tradition can be found in some of the doctrines of social psychology and the W. I. Thomas dictum: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This statement is true as it reads but false as it is taken. Defining situations as real certainly has consequences, but these may contribute very marginally to the events in progress; in some cases only a slight embarrassment flits across the scene in mild concern for those who tried to define the situation wrongly. All the world is not a stage - certainly the theater isn’t entirely. (Whether you organize a theater or an aircraft factory, you need to find places for cars to park and coats to be checked, and these had better be real places, which, incidentally, had better carry real insurance against theft.) Presumably, a “definition of the situation” is almost always to be found, but those who are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even though their society often can be said to do so; ordinarily, all they do is to assess correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly. True, we personally negotiate aspects of all arrangements under which we live, but often once these are negotiated, we continue on mechanically as though the matter had always been settled. (1-2)
Within the terms, then, of the bad name that the analysis of social reality has, this book presents another analysis of social reality. I try to follow a tradition established by William James in his famous chapter “The Perception of Reality,” first published as an article in Mind in 1869. Instead of asking what reality is, he gave matters a subversive phenomenological twist, italicizing the following question: Under what circumstances do we think things are real? The important thing about reality, he implied, is our sense of its realness in contrast to our feeling that some things lack this quality. One can then ask under what conditions such a feeling is generated, and this question speaks to a small, manageable problem having to do with the camera and not what it is the camera takes pictures of. (2)
In his answer, James stressed the factors of selective attention, intimate involvement, and noncontradiction by what is otherwise known. More important, he made a stab at differentiating the several different “worlds” that our attention and interest can make real for us, the possible subuniverses, the “orders of existence” (to use Aaron Gurwitsch’s phrase), in each of which an object of a given kind can have its proper being: the world of abstract philosophical truths, the worlds of myth and supernatural beliefs, the madman’s world, etc. Each of these subworlds, according to James, has “its own special and separate style of existence,” and “each world, whilst it is attended to, is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.” Then, after taking this radical stand, James copped out; he allowed that the world of the senses has a special status, being the one we judge to be the realest reality, the one that retains our liveliest belief, the one before which the other worlds must give way. James in all this agreed with Husserl’s teacher, Brentano, and implied, as phenomenology came to do, the need to distinguish between the content of a current perception and the reality status we give to what is thus enclosed or bracketed within perception. (2-3)
James’ crucial device, of course, was a rather scandalous play on the word “world” (or “reality”). What he means was not the world but a particular person’s world - and, in fact, as will be argued, not even that. There was no good reason to use such billowy words. James opened a door; it let in wind as well as light. (3)
In 1945 Alfred Schutz took up James’ theme again in a paper called “On multiple Realities.” His argument followed James’ surprisingly closely, but more attention was given to the possibility of uncovering the conditions that must be fulfilled if we are to generate one realm of “reality,” one “finite province of meaning,” as opposed to another. Schutz added the notion, interesting but not entirely convincing, that we experience a special kind of “shock” when suddenly thrust from one “world,” say, that of dreams, to another, such as that of the theater. (3-4)
Interest in the James-Schutz line of thought has become active recently among persons whose initial stimulus came from sources not much connected historically with the phenomenological tradition: The work of those who created what has come to be called “the theater of the absurd,” most fully exhibited in the analytical dramas of Luigi Pirandello. The very useful paper by Gregory Bateson, “A theory of Play and Phantasy,” in which he directly raised the question of unseriousness and seriousness, allowing us to see what a startling thing experience is, such that a bit of serious activity can be used as a model for putting together unserious versions of the same activity, and that, on occasion, we may not know whether it is play or the real thing that is occurring. (Bateson introduced his own version of the notion of “bracketing,” a usable one, and also the argument that individuals can intentionally produce framing confusion in those with whom they are dealing; it is in Bateson’s paper that the term “frame” was proposed in roughly the sense in which I want to employ it.) The work of John Austin, who, following Wittgenstein, suggested again that what we mean by “really happening” is complicated, and that although an individual may dream unrealities, it is still proper to say of him on that occasion that he is really dreaming. (I have also drawn on the work of a student of Austin, D. S. Schwayder, and his fine book, The Stratification of Behavior.) The efforts of those who study (or at least publish on) fraud, deceit, misidentification, and other “optical” effects, and the work of those who study “strategic interaction,” including the way in which concealing and revealing bear upon definitions of the situation. The useful paper by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, “Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction.” Finally, the modern effort in linguistically oriented disciplines to employ the notion of a “code” as a device which informs and patterns all events that fall within the boundaries of its application. (7-8)
Further, it is obvious that in most “situations” many different things are happening simultaneously - things that are likely to have begun at different moments and may terminate dissynchronously. To ask the question “What is it that’s going on here?” biases matters in the direction of unitary exposition and simplicity. This bias, too, I must be temporarily allowed. (9)
So, too, to speak of the “current” situation (just as to speak of something going on “here”) is to allow reader and writer to continue along easily in their impression that they clearly know and agree on what they are thinking about. The amount of time covered by “current” (just as the amount of space covered by “here”) obviously can vary greatly from one occasion to the next and from one participant to another; and the fact that participants seem to have no trouble in quickly coming to the same apparent understanding in this matter does not deny the intellectual importance of our trying to find out what this apparent consensus consists of and how it is established. To speak of something happening before the eyes of observers is to be on firmer ground than usual in the social sciences; but the ground is still shaky, and the crucial question of how a seeming agreement was reached concerning the identity of the “something” and the inclusiveness of “before the eyes” still remains. (9)
[2]
Primary Frameworks
When the individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary. I say primary because application of such a framework or perspective is seen by those who apply it as not depending on or harking back to some prior or “original” interpretation; indeed a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful. (21)
Primary frameworks vary in degree of organization. Some are neatly presentable as a system of entities, postulates, and rules; others - indeed, most others - appear to have no apparent articulated shape, providing only a lore of understanding, an approach, a perspective. Whatever the degree of organization, however, each primary framework allows its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness if asked, yet these handicaps are no bar to his easily and fully applying it. (21)
In sum, then, we tend to perceive events in terms of primary frameworks, and the type of framework we employ provides a way of describing the event to which it is applied. When the sun comes up, a natural event; when the blind is pulled down in order to avoid what has come up, a guided doing. When a coroner asks the cause of death, he wants an answer phrased in the natural schema of physiology: when he asks the manner of death, he wants a dramatically social answer, one that describes what is quite possibly part of an intent. (24-25)
III. (28)
The notion of primary framework, unsatisfactory as it is, does allow one immediately to consider five distinctive matters and to appreciate something of their bearing on our overall understanding of the workings of the world. (28)
1. First, the “astounding complex.” An event occurs, or is made to occur, that leads observer to doubt their overall approach to events, for it seems that to account for the occurrence, new kinds of natural forces will have to be allowed or new kinds of guiding capacities, the latter involving perhaps, new kinds of active agents. (28)
2. Cosmological interests, in some ways the largest we can have, support a humble entertainment: the exhibition of stunts, that is, the maintenance of guidance and control by some willed agency under what are seen as nearly impossible conditions. (30)
3. Consider now “muffings,” namely, occasions when the body or some other object assumed to be under assured guidance, unexpectedly breaks free, deviates from course, or otherwise slips from control, becoming totally subject to - not merely conditioned by - natural forces, with consequent disruption of orderly life. Thus, “flubs,” “goofs,” and - when the guidance of meaning in talk should have occurred - “gaffes.” (31-32)
4. Next to consider is “fortuitousness,” meaning here that a significant event can come to be seen as incidentally produced. An individual, properly guiding his doings, meets with the natural workings of the world in a way he could not be expected to anticipate, with consequential results. (33)
5. The final matter to consider bears upon the segregation is expressed in “tension” and joking. As will be argued throughout, individuals can rather fully constitute what they see in accordance with the framework that officially applies. (35)
3
Keys
and Keyings (40)
Since Bateson’s discussions of animals at play, considerable work has been done on the subject, allowing one to attempt to state in some detail the rules to follow and the premises to sustain in order to transform serious, real action into something playful. (41)
a. The playful act is so performed that its ordinary function is not realized. The stronger and more competent participant restrains himself sufficiently to be a match for the weaker and less competent.
b. There is an exaggeration of the expansiveness of some acts.
c. The sequence of activity that serves as a pattern is neither followed faithfully nor completed fully, but is subject to starting and stopping, to redoing, to discontinuation for a brief period of time, and to mixing with sequences from other routines. (42)
d. A great deal of repetitiveness occurs.
e. When more than one participation is to be involved, all must be freely willing to play, and anyone has the power to refuse an invitation to play or (if he is a participant) to terminate the play once it has begun.
f. Frequent role switching occurs during play, resulting in a mixing up of the dominance order found among the players during occasions of literal activity.
g. The play seems to be independent of any external needs of the participants, often continuing longer than would the actual behavior it is patterned after.
h. Although the playfulness can certainly be sustained by a solitary individual toward a surrogate of some kind, solitary playfulness will give way to sociable playfulness when a usable other appears, which, in many cases, can be a member of another species.
i. Signs presumably are available to mark the beginning and terminations of playfulness. (43)
A full definition of keying can now be suggested:
a. A systematic transformation is involved across materials already meaningful in accordance with a schema of interpretation, and without which the keying would be meaningless. (45)
b. Participants in the activity are meant to know and to openly acknowledge that a systematic alteration is involved, one that will radically reconstitute what it is for them that is going on.
c. Cues will be available for establishing when the transformation is to begin and when it is to end, namely, brackets in time, within which and to which the transformation is to be restricted. Similarly, spatial brackets will commonly indicate everywhere within which and nowhere outside of which the keying applies on that occasion. (45)
d. Keying is not restricted to events perceived within any particular class of perspectives. Just as it is possible to play at quite instrumentally oriented activities, such as carpentry, so it is also possible to play at rituals such as marriage ceremonies, or even, in the snow, to play at being a falling tree, although admittedly events perceived within a natural schema seem less susceptible to keyings than do those perceived within a social one. (45)
e. For participants, playing, say, at fighting and playing around at checkers feels to be much the same sort of thing - radically more so than when these two activities are performed in earnest, that is, seriously. Thus, the systematic transformation that a particular keying introduces may alter only slightly the activity thus transformed, but it utterly changes what it is a participant would say was going on. In this case, fighting and checker playing would appear to be going on, but really, all along, the participants might say, the only thing really going on is play. A keying, then, when there is one, performs a crucial role in determining what it is we think is really going on. (45)
1. Make-believe: By this term I mean to refer to activity that participants treat as an avowed, ostensible imitation of running through of less transformed activity, this being done with the knowledge that nothing practical will come of the doing. (48)
2. Contests: Consider sports such as boxing, horse racing, jousting, fox hinting, and the like. The literal model seems to be fighting (or hunting or fleeing from) of some kind, and the rules of the sport supply restrictions of degree and mode of aggression. (Examine what occurs during ritualized sparring contests over troop dominance by rival male animals, or when solicitous elders separate two brawling youths and license them only for a “fair fight” with rules, an informal umpire, and a circle of earnest watchers. (56)
3. Ceremonials: Social ritual such as marriage ceremonies, funerals, and investitures are examples. Something unlike ordinary activity goes on in them, but what goes on in them is difficult to be sure of. Like scripted productions, a whole mesh of acts are plotted in advance, rehearsal of what is to unfold can occur. (58)
4. Technical redoings: Strips of what could have been ordinary activity can be performed, out of their usual context, for utilitarian purposes openly different from those of the original performance, the understanding being that the original outcome of the activity will not occur. These run-throughs are an important part of modern life yet have not been much discussed as something in their own right by students of society. (59)
5. Regroundings: Major types of keys have been reviewed: make-believe, contests, ceremonials, and technical redoings. A further general class needs be mentioned, it being conceptually the most troublesome of the lot. What is involved is the performance of an activity more or less openly for reasons or motives felt to be radically different from those that govern ordinary actors. The notion of regroundings, then, rests on the assumption that some motives for a deed are ones that leave the performer within the normal range of participation, and other motives, especially when stabilized and institutionalized, leave the performer outside the ordinary domain of the activity. (74)
4
Designs and Fabrications (85)
First to consider are benign fabrications, those claimed to be engineered in the interest of the person contained by them, or, if not quite in his interest and for his benefit, then at least not done against his interest. Here inadvertent disclosure collapses the disclosed design and can make the erstwhile dupe somewhat suspicious of the operation in the future, but no great damage to the operator’s moral character need result. Benign fabrications themselves come in varieties. (87)
A second class of fabrications, the exploitative kind, is now to be considered: one party containing others in a construction that is clearly inimical to their private interests, here defining “private interests” as the community might. (103)
If, then, one thinks of deception as falsehood intendedly produced by persons not taken in by their own fabrication and one thinks of illusion as error resulting from a misconstruing that no one induced purposely and that is understandable in the circumstances, then one can think of self-deception (or delusion) as wrongheadedness actively aided, if not solely produced, by the head that is wrong. (112)
It is here in regard to this reach that one can locate a basic concept: suspicion. It is what a person feels who begins, rightly or not, to think that the strip of activity he is involved in has been constructed beyond his ken, and that he has not been allowed a sustainable view of what frames him. Suspicion must be distinguished from another important feeling, doubt, this being generated not by concern about being contained but concern about the framework or key that applies, these being elements that ordinarily function innocently in activity. Suspicion and doubt are to be seen, then, as two very central affects generated by the very way in which experience is framed. Insofar as it is hard to imagine a citizenry without suspicion or doubt, it is hard to imagine experience that is not organized in terms of framing. (122)
5
The Theatrical Frame (124)
Because the language of the theater has become deeply embedded in the sociology from which this study derives, there is value in attempting from the start to address the matter of the stage. There is value, too, because all kinds of embarrassments are to be found. All the world is like a stage, we do strut and fret our hour on it, and that is all the time we have. But what’s the stage like, and what are those figures that people it? (124)
A performance, in the restricted sense in which I shall now use the term, is that arrangement which transforms an individual into a stage performer, the latter, in turn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at length without offense, and looked to for engaging behavior, by persons in an “audience” role. (124)
Performances can be distinguished according to their purity, that is, according to the exclusiveness of the claim of the watchers on the activity they watch. (125)
The argument, then, is that the theatrical frame is something less than a benign construction and something more than a simple keying. In any case, a corpus of transcription practices must be involved for transforming a strip of offstage, real activity into a bundle of these conventions, those which mark the difference between actual face-to-face interaction and that kind of interaction when staged as part of a play. (138)
I have suggested how staged interaction differs from what it copies and how, in turn, radio and novel differ from the stage. Observe that this argument is compatible with the folk notion that everyday life is to be placed on one side and the fanciful realms on the other. However, terms were introduced which begin to provide what will be needed in order to question this division. (155)
6
Structural Issues in Fabrications (156)
The notion of primary framework has been defined, and it was argued that a strip of activity correctly perceivable as organized in terms of these frameworks is subject to two basic types of transformation, two basic replicating processes, each capable of littering the world with a multitude of copies: keyings and fabrications. Whatever the “actual” is, it is something that is subject to these two modes of recasting. Further, keyings themselves are subject to rekeying, a transformation of transformations. Now one must consider that, of course, fabrications, too, may enter in various ways into this process of retransformation. Indeed, examples of constructions have already been employed without the point being made that retransformations were involved. (156)
There is a popular view that the fabrication of fabrication can be typified by the Big Con; the dupes are innocents who have allowed avarice to misguide them into helping (they think) with a financial conspiracy, and the operators are criminals who play characters utterly alien and false for them, doing so by means of elaborate props temporarily assembled for the occasion. If this view were valid, the world would be a less treacherous place than it is. (165)
Three techniques of recontainment have been reviewed: secret monitoring, penetration, and entrapment. All three are subject to much moral and legal concern, to strict limits of various kinds, and to attendant disputes about the enforcement of these limits. These recontainments are thought not nice; although the legality of engaging in them varies considerably, a question of ethics always exists. (174)
In general, then, the deepest layering can be expected to occur in scripted presentation of a novelistic, theatrical, or cinematic kind, and to be, therefore, in some sense unreal. But this unreality should not conceal from us the fact that while watching the show, the audience can follow along and read off what is happening by attending to the relevant framing cues. That is the great lesson, and it tells us about a crucial human capacity exercised in regard to actual events as well as fictive ones. (186)
A central difference between natural and social frameworks is the role accorded actors, specifically individuals. In the case of natural perspectives, individuals have no special status, being subject to the same deterministic, will-less, nonmoral way of being as any other part of the scene. In the case of social frameworks, individuals figure differently. They are defined as self-determined agencies, legally competent to act and morally responsible for doing so properly. In this latter connection, then, individuals have an entirely special role in activity. Moreover, this role is diffusely relevant. The properties we attribute to normal actors, such as correct perception, personal will, a range of adult competencies, access to memory, a measure of empathy regarding others present, honesty, reliability, fixed social and personal identity, and the like are counted on in a multitude of ways whenever interpersonal dealings occur. (188)
In almost all that has been considered so far about fabrication in general and actor tranforms in particular, the assumption holds that although the particular activity in question is managed as a fabrication, still, activity of that kind could actually occur. There are claimed actions, however, such as the various forms of second sight, humanoid visitations from outer space, astrological influence, and the like, that might be impossible, and therefore what is being fabricated is not merely one occasion of the activity by also the possibility of that activity itself. And since these possibilities involve arcane powers, forces radically incompatible with our whole system of empirical knowledge about the workings of the physical world, one can say (as I would) that what is being fabricated are frameworks themselves. Thus, one can take the position that a person who is taken to be possessed and involuntarily responsive to the will and force of otherworldly personages who have taken residence in him must be deceiving either himself and his audience or only the audience; but surely someone is being deceived on every occasion when possession is felt to occur. (197)
7
Out-of-Frame Activity (201)
Here adopt an imagery. Say that in every circumstance in which an individual finds himself he will be able to sustain a main story line of activity, and that the range of matters so treatable will vary from one setting to another. From the perspective of the participants one might refer here to a capacity; from the perspective of the situation itself, a channel or “track.” And using the same metaphor, one could go on to consider some of the channels of subordinated activity - deeds or events managed in what (at least) appears to be a dissociated way. (pp. 201-202)
A significant feature of any strip of activity is the capacity of its participants to “disattend” competing events - both in fact and in appearance - here using “disattend” to refer to the withdrawal of all attention and awareness. This capacity of participants, this channel in the situation, covers a range of potentially distracting events, some a threat to appropriate involvement because they are immediately present, others a threat in spite of having their prime location elsewhere. (202)
It has been suggested that during the occurrence of any activity framed in a particular way one is likely to find another flow of other activity that is systematically disattended and treated as out of frame, something not to be given any concern or attention. Drawing loosely on a particular imagery, it was said that the main track carrying the story line was associated with a disattended track, the two tracks playing simultaneously. Now a second stream of out-of-frame activity must be considered, this one even more consequential, perhaps, for the main activity than the first, yet nonetheless - to a degree - kept out of focus. (210)
In doings involving joint participation, there is to be found a stream of signs which is itself excluded from the content of the activity but which serves as a means of regulating it, bounding, articulating, and qualifying its various components and phases. One might speak here of directional signals and, by metaphorical extension, the track that contains them. (210)
The argument, then, is that we have a natural capacity to build up strips of engrossing, lively experience from the dramatic interplay of characters who are governed by all manner of different participation statuses and all manner of modifications in regard to tracks or channels. In this connection, a note about behavior in mental hospitals might be added, since it is here that very obvious illustrations of variable participation statuses and other elements of frame can be found. (246)
Given these bizarre forms of ward behavior, one must come to see that after all they are not so extraordinary, for what seem to be involved are merely atypical framing practices – practices which ought to be easy to adopt were there reason to do so, and which, once adopted, would generate a continuous array of insane behavior. Since realms are built up through the maintenance of these conventions, realms can be attacked by declining to sustain these conventions. A frame perspective, then, allows us to generate crazy behavior and to see that it is not all that crazy. (246)
And when that is done, one can go on, as I shall try to do in the last two chapters, to look at what really goes on in ordinary interaction and what the common sense “working world” of practical realities is. (246)
8
The Anchoring of Activity (247)
It has been argued that a strip of activity will be perceived by its participants in terms of the rules of premises of a primary framework, whether social or natural, and that activity so perceived provides the model for two basic kinds of transformation - keying and fabrication. It has also been argued that these frameworks are not merely a matter of mind but correspond in some sense to the way in which an aspect of the activity itself is organized - especially activity directly involving social agents. Organizational premises are involved, and these are something cognition somehow arrives at, not something cognition creates or generates. Given their understanding of what it is that is going on, individuals fit their actions to this understanding and ordinarily find that the ongoing world supports this fitting. These organizational premises - sustained both in the mind and in activity - I call the frame of activity. (247)
1. Activity framed in a particular way - especially collectively organized social activity - is often marked off from the ongoing flow of surrounding events by a special set of boundary markers or brackets of a conventionalized kind. These occur before and after the activity in time and may be circumscriptive in space; in brief, there are temporal and spatial brackets. These markers, like the wooden frame of a picture, are presumably neither part of the content of activity proper nor part of the world outside the activity but rather both inside and outside, a paradoxical condition already alluded to and not to be avoided just because it cannot easily be thought about clearly. (251-252)
2. Although the brackets I have mentioned are perhaps the most obvious ones, they bear primarily on recreational life, and should not be allowed to direct our attention from the places where bracketing does its everyday work. Mathematics, for example, employs the elegant and powerful device of simple typographic brackets -()- which establish the boundaries of a strip of any length, all items in which are to be transformed in the same way and the at the same time, and a place next to and on the outside of the left-hand bracket, the operator slot, in which any mathematical expression there inserted determines what the transformation will be. The number of lines deep that the brackets are is taken to signify the number of lines of mathematical symbols to be included in the bracketed reading. It is as though all our human capacity to think and act in terms of frame were compressed and refined - a line drawing of a line drawing. Only less elegant, but even more important, are the bracketing practices employed in the syntactical organization of sentences, where sequential placement, punctuation marks, and part of speech determine what one or more words are to be bracketed together and what syntactic role is to be performed by the constituent unit thus formed. (254-255)
14 Conclusions (560)
1. This study began with the observation that we (and a considerable number of theys) have the capacity and inclination to use concrete, actual activity - activity that is meaningful in its own right - as a model upon which to work transformations for fun, deception, experiment, rehearsal, dream, fantasy, ritual, demonstration, analysis, and charity. These lively shadows of events are geared into the ongoing world but not quite in the close way that is true of ordinary, literal activity. (560)
Here, then, is a warrant for taking ordinary activity seriously, a portion of the paramount reality. For even as it is shown that we can become engrossed in fictive planes of being, giving to each in its turn the accent of reality, so it can be shown that the resulting experiences are derivative and insecure when placed up against the real thing. James and even Schutz can be read in this way. But if that is comfort, it comes too easy. (560)
First, we often us “real” simply as a contrast term. When we decide that something is unreal, the reality it isn’t need not itself be very real, indeed, can just as well be a dramatization of events as the events themselves - or a rehearsal of the dramatization, or a painting of the rehearsal, or a reproduction of the painting. Any of these latter can serve as the original of which something is a mere mock-up, leading one to think that what is sovereign is relationship, not substance. (A valuable watercolor stored - for safekeeping - in a portfolio of reproduced masters is, in that context, a fake reproduction.) (560-561)
Second, any more or less protracted strip of everyday, literal activity seen as such by all its participants is likely to contain differently framed episodes, these having different realm statuses. A man finishes giving instructions to his postman, greets a passing couple, gets into his car, and drives off. Certainly this strip is the sort of thing that writers from James on have had in mind as everyday reality. But plainly, the traffic system is a relatively narrow role domain, impersonal yet closely geared into the ongoing world; greetings are part of the ritual order in which the individual can figure as a representative of himself, a realm of action that is geared into the world but in a special and restricted way. Instruction giving belongs to the realm of occupational roles, but it is unlikely that the exchange will have occurred without a bordering of small talk cast in still another domain. The physical competence exhibited in giving over and receiving a letter (or opening and closing a car door) pertains to still another order, the bodily management of physical objects close at hand. Moreover, once our man goes on his way, driving can become routine, and his mind is likely to leave the road and dart for moments of fantasy. Suddenly finding himself in a tight spot, he may simultaneously engage in physically adroit evasion and prayer, melding the “rational” and the “irrational” as smoothly as any primitive and as characteristically. (Note that all these differently framed activities could be subsumed under the term “role” - for example, the role of suburbanite - but that would provide a hopelessly gross conceptualization of our purposes.) (561)
2. But there are deeper issues. In arguing that everyday activity provides an original against which copies of various kinds can be struck, the assumption was that the model was something that could be actual and, when it was, would be more closely enmeshed in the ongoing world than anything modeled after it. However, in many cases, what the individual does in serious life, he does in relationship to cultural standards established for the doing and for the social role that is built up out of such doings. Some of these standards are addressed to the maximally approved, some to the maximally disapproved. The associated lore itself draws from the moral traditions of the community as found in folk tales, characters in novels, advertisements, myth, movie stars and their famous roles, the Bible, and other sources of exemplary representation. (562)
II
In looking at strips of everyday, actual doings involving flesh-and-blood individuals in face-to-face dealings with one another, it is tempting and easy to draw a clear contrast to copies presented in fictive realms of being. The copies can be seen as mere transformations of an original, and everything uncovered about the organization of fictive scenes can be seen to apply only to copies, not to the actual world. Frame analysis would then become the study of everything but ordinary behavior. (563)
However, although this approach might be the most congenial, it is not the most profitable. For actual activity is not merely to be contrasted with something obviously unreal, such as dreams, but also to sports, games, ritual, experimentation, practicing, and other arrangements, including deception, and these activities are not all that fanciful. Furthermore, each of these alternatives to the everyday is different from the others in a different way. Also, of course, everyday activity itself contains quickly changing frames, many of which generate events which depart considerably from anything that might be called literal. Finally, the variables and elements of organization found in nonliteral realms of being, albeit manifest and utilized in distinctive ways in each of these realms, are also found in the organization of actual experience, again in a version distinctive to it. (563)
The argument, then is that strips of activity, including the figures which people them, must be treated as a single problem for analysis; and here, the everyday is not a special domain to be placed in contrast to the others, but merely another domain. (564)
Realms and arrangements other than the ordinary can, of course, be a subject matter of interest in their own right. Here, however, another use is claimed for them. The first object of social analysis ought, I think, to be ordinary actual behavior - its structure and its organization. However, the student, as well as his subjects, tends to take the framework of everyday life for granted; he remains unaware of what guides him and them. Comparative analysis of realms of being provides one way to disrupt this unselfconsciousness. Realms of being other than the ordinary provide natural experiments in which a property of ordinary activity is displayed or contrasted in a clarified and clarifying way. The design in accordance with which everyday experience is put together can be seen as a special variation on general themes, as ways of doing things that can be done in other ways. Seeing these differences (and similarities) means seeing. (564)
2. As a paradigm case, take three or four flesh-and-blood individuals performing an actual task in one another’s immediate presence - in short, an everyday strip of activity. What can frame analysis find to say about the scene and its participants? (564)
First, the tracks or channels of activity. Assume that there is a main activity, a story line, and that an evidentiary boundary exists in regard to it. Assume at least four subordinate tracks, one sustaining disattended events, one directional, one overlaid communication, and one matters for concealment. (564)
Second, the laminations. The strip under question presumably has none. Neither a keying is present nor a deception. Certainly such straightforwardness is possible. But one should see that it is not likely for a very long period of time. And often effort will have to be exerted to ensure even this. The absence of laminations is to be seen, then, as something worth seeing. (565)
Third, the question of participation status. A two-person chat sustained in a sequestered place implies, on first analysis, a full sharing of ratified participation status and, overlaid, an exchange of speaker and recipient roles. (565)
But expand on these possibilities. Add a third participant, and allowance must be made for the speaker addressing the participants as a whole or singling out a particular other, in which latter case one is forced to distinguish between addressed and unaddressed recipients. (Then it can be seen that an unaddressed recipient, especially a chronic one, may stand back somewhat from ordinary participation and view the speaker and his addressee as a single whole, to be watched as might a tennis match or colloquy onstage.) With a third participant the possibility has also been created for a two-person collusive net and a distinction between colluders and excolluded. Add, instead, a third person who is a nonparticipating stranger and one has the bystander role whose performer is cut off from the others by civil inattention. Script the two-person arrangement or either of the three-person arrangements and perform it on a stage and one then has, in addition, the performer-audience roles. (565)
In brief, arrangements which articulate multiperson interaction may be folded back into two-person talk, there to be given a structural role. And as spoken narrative forces simultaneously occurring events into a temporal sequence, and as cartoon strips force temporally sequenced events into a spatial sequence, so living interaction may itself be somewhat coerced by those sustaining it so that sequencing is more marked than it might otherwise be and timing of turns more nicely determined by a hidden effort to allow clear score keeping. It is thus that a child who falls and scrapes his knee may wait until he crosses the street to his parent before bursting into tears that are as hot and fresh as these things get. It is thus that an adult may puncture a conversation with a burst of laughter, a spurt of anger, a sudden interruption, a downward look of chagrin and embarrassment - or any other genuine flooding out - and somehow manage in effect to time this rupture so that it neatly occurs at a juncture in the other’s talk that would best allow an unseen audience an unimpaired view, a completed hearing, of what it is that called forth this response. And here instead of our following the usual practices in the general conspiracy to sustain beliefs about our human nature, in this case, that behind our civil niceties something undisciplined, something animal like, can there be found. (566)
3. Given this perspective, one can turn to the central but very crude concept of participant (or player or individual), for again the comparative approach allows us to address assumptions about ordinary activity that would otherwise remain implicit. And one can begin to see, for example, that the body itself and how it functions in a frame is an issue that warrants systematic treatment. (566)
Start with a board game such as chess. The dramatic focus is two opposing sets of figurines destined to move against each other in regulated ways. Behind this interaction of moves are two players, each of whom stands to gain or lose by the outcome, each of whom diagnoses what moves his side should make, and each of whom physically manipulates - animates - the pieces on his side. (566-567)
It should be obvious how differently from this chess can be arranged and yet be, overall, the same game. The figures may be actual persons on a courtyard square. The diagnostic, cognitive function may be performed by a committee or a computer. The manipulation may be performed by third parties in response to voiced commands, or by an electrical arrangement, or by the figure itself in the case of courtyard matches. When the game is played only “for fun,” then each of the two parties exercising the cognitive function presumably gains or loses whatever is going by way of psychic stakes. But if there is money at stake, or national pride, or team score, then, of course, parties other than the two mentioned can directly participate as principals, that is, as backers, partners, and so forth. So, as already suggested, the following functions: figures, strategists, animators, principals. (567)
Two points should be mentioned about chess. Although the several functions discussed can be performed by different entities, our very notion of player assumes that a full overlay will be present and that this needs no thinking about. Second, the role of the human body is here very limited. It is the pieces that cut the swath. Ordinarily a body is seen as unproblematic, routine, of no consequence. A polite request with instructions and one’s own move can be physically made by the opponent. It is the cognitive function that is problematic. (567)
The dance might now be mentioned. Here the choreographer seems to claim much of the strategic function. Again, of course, the body figures largely, but this time in no way as a utilitarian task performance. The purpose is the depiction of some overall design, including bodily mimed feeling and bodily symbolized fate, and although muscle and bone and training and stamina are certainly required, and problematically so, all this is exerted for pictographic ends. Boxers, of course, can display grace and economy of movement, as can tennis players, but this must be a by-product, at most a marginal concern, the main one being physical, describable in terms of a state to be accomplished in whatever way seems most effective at the time - within the rules, that is. (568)
When one turns to ceremony and ritual, another combination of elements is found. On the face of it, no decision-making function is operative, the whole having been scripted by tradition, lore, and protocol. Again the figures involved are bodies, but although some practice may be required in performance of the ritual, proper execution can easily become routine and unproblematic. And again, utilitarian procedures are not involved; the controlling, open intent is a kind of symbolization, a special kind of rounded, well-formulated representation. (568)
One can see, then, that in everyday interaction, the body figures in a limited but nonetheless very complicated way, and this one sees by checking back to the role it plays in other frames of activity. (570)
4. Consider now the human nature said to ground the behavior of he who participates in ordinary doings. Again approach this comparatively, starting this time with the emotional self-response displayed by figures in various frames. (570)
In stage and movie performances it is apparent that a well-trained and highly committed actor will be willing to take the part of an emotionally effusive character or an extremely self-contained one, depending only on what the script calls for. In the former case, he will be willing (in character) to break down under assorted pressures, flaunt his problems and feelings, beg for mercy, cry, groan, curse, and generally carry on in a manner he might well find quite unsuitable in real life - because of both the manners of his social group and his own particular version of them. Furthermore, on the stage he is willing to emote before a much larger number of people than would witness these outpourings in ordinary life were he there to indulge them; and moreover this larger group looks right at him instead of tactfully disattending. (570)
In sum, as natural persons we are supposed to be epidermally bounded containers. Inside there are information and affect states. This content is directly indexed through open expression and the involuntary cues always consequent upon suppression. Yet when the individual engages in bluff games such as poker, one finds that he either blocks off almost all expression or attempts the most flagrant, expressively ramified deceptions - the kind which would give him a very bad reputation were he to attempt unsuccessfully such a display in his actual, literal activity. (572)
An answer is apparent. Incapacity to perfectly contrive expression is not an inheritance of our animal or divine nature but the obligatory limits definitionally associated with a particular frame - in this case, the frame of everyday behavior. When the frame is shifted, say, to bluff games, and this frame gives the player the assurance that his dissembling will be seen as “not serious” and not improper, then magnificently convincing displays occur, designed to attest to holdings and intentions the claimant in fact does not possess. In brief, we all have the capacity to be utterly unblushing, provided only a frame can be arranged in which lying will be seen as part of the game and proper to it. And the same virtuosity can be elicited when the deceiver knows that what he is participating in is really an experiment, or in the best interests of an obviously misguided recipient, or as an illustration of how someone else carried on. It appears, then, that “normal honesty” is a rule regarding the frame of ordinary literal interaction, which rule, in turn, is a particular phrasing of a more general structural theme, namely, that the party at play has something to conceal, has special capacity and incapacity for doing so, and labors under rulings regarding how he is to comport himself in this regard. (573)
And at the heart of it? The individual comes to doings as someone of particular biographical identity even while he appears in the trappings of a particular social role. The manner in which the role is performed will allow for some “expression” of personal identity, of matters that can be attributed to something that is more embracing and enduring than the current role performance and even the role itself, something, in short, that is characteristic not of the role but of the person - his personality, his perduring moral character, his animal nature, and so forth. However, this license of departure from prescribed role is itself something that varies quite remarkably, depending on the “formality” of the occasion, the laminations that are being sustained, and the dissociation currently fashionable between the figure that is projected and the human engine which animates it. There is a relation between persons and role. But the relationship answers to the interactive system - to the frame - in which the role is performed and the self of the performer is glimpsed. Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them. Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides for where and how we will show through, the culture itself prescribing what sort of entity we must believe ourselves to be in order to have something to show through in this manner. (573-574)
6. And “oneself,” this palpable thing of flesh and bone? A set of functions characteristically superimposed in ordinary, literal doings but separated in all manner of ways in other realms of being. So, too, the persons we have dealings with. And if these functions - functions such as principal, strategist, animator, figure, - are separated in extraordinary realms of being, why shouldn’t analyses be able to separate them in ordinary reality? (575)