Vicissitudes of the sacred: Erving Goffman and the book of job

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, American sociologists have been made increasingly aware, mostly by Marxist and phenomenological critics, of the latent moral or practical implications of what often purports to be objectively impersonal scientific theories. Whereas Goffman's imaginative writing style and intensely personal observational technique never allowed him to be easily placed in the camp of the positivist objectivists, the profound moral issues and assumptions of his work, as Friedson's statement implied, never fully appeared in a clear light either, probably because of Goffman's strategic decision to accommodate his moral insights somewhat to the positivist intellectual milieu of the 1950s. The present analysis reveals, however, that, even more than allowing tacit moral assumptions to operate in the back-ground of his work, Goffman focussed centrally on an investigation of the various levels of moral understanding, a project for which he used the Book of Job as his signpost. Goffman's inquiry, it should be emphasized, was not conducted through an external observation of other people's consciousness but rather by means of an intensely personal reflection upon the governing “frames” of his own consciousness as it looked out upon the everyday social world. What we have chronicled in this essay is the dramatic evolution of Goffman's own moral consciousness, not the moral understandings of the subjects of his studies, the latter, of course, changing as Goffman's own moral understandings evolved. exact nature and purpose of his moral investigation. As we have seen, an ongoing reference for Goffman's moral inquiry was not a rationalist philosophical treatise, but rather one of the most poetic and profound narratives of the Bible, a work in which the radical mystery and transcendence of the Sacred, beyond all structures of nature, society, and the human ego, are asserted. The symbolic and narrative features of the Job text accord well with its emphasis on the mystery of Being, whose fundamental depth and power could not easily be compressed within the outlines of abstract rationalist propositions. Goffman, likewise, combines a final emphasis on the mystery of Being, beyond all finite “frames” and “fabrications,” with a pervasively symbolic and narrative style in his writing. In directing our attention toward the ultimate mystery of Being, of which finite “frames” provide only a tentative revelation, Goffman mounts an additional critique of Durkheim, not only for naively assuming that sacred representations must always reflect the social rather than the individual inclinations of human nature, but also for assuming that the social dimension of “homo duplex” alone serves as the ultimate and final reference for sacred forms. Much like contemporary existentialists who emphasize human finitude and the mystery of Being, Goffman uses Job's increasingly open psyche as his basis for understanding that beyond nature, beyond society, and beyond the individual lies a mystery of Being that continually surpasses, indeed itself engenders the ever-changing outlines of these other finite structures of existence. In the end, Goffman is perhaps more mythmaker than moralist, a religious poet who, for an age in which the traditional symbols of Being have been displaced by new cognitive forms, particularly those of science, magically transformed contemporary scientific language into archetypal symbols of the Sacred. Goffman's task was extremely difficult, one that would have strained the intellectual ingenuity and linguistic resources of a less talented man, namely the task of conveying to large numbers of relatively unprepared, deeply preoccupied and increasingly self-absorbed moderns a message about a completely unfashionable, economically useless and essentially ego-threatening mystery. Let us hope the large silence that now exists in his absence will not be filled by words less meaningful than his own.