ABSTRACT
Alvin W. Gouldner’s once-famous dismissal in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology of Goffman’s dramaturgy as no more than “a complexly articulated theoretical expression that resonates the new experience of the educated middle class” (Gouldner 1970:389) seems wrong for many reasons-not least due to the disappearance of the once new middle classes. As astute an interpreter as Gouldner was, he did not grasp the changes already taking hold in Europe when he left it in 1976 to return to St. Louis. Goffman, on the other hand, seems to have enjoyed a plausible affi nity with the early ideas of many of the now famous developments in European social theory, especially those in France and Italy. The point cannot be proven so much as suggested by Goffman’s well-known proclivity for Émile Durkheim, in whose later writings so many of the French who came after found warrant for the general notion that the apprehension of things in themselves is social, not mental, and thus devilishly removed from the
positive facts represented in the musings of the social and human sciences. One could say that the now long French tradition of taking apart (one wants at all costs to avoid the much abused term ‘deconstructing’) received traditions of knowledge is not unreliably homologous to Goffman’s idea that the truth of social appearances is found not in appearances but in the strategic control of information arising from schemes construed in a backstage.
