Reinvigorating the Tradition of Symbolic Interactionism

I take Scheff’s article to be in the honorable tradition of scholarly work that tries to preserve the best of the past while anticipating and contributing to the expansion of ideas. Scheff recognizes the pivotal importance of Goffman’s work to symbolic interactionism in particular and to sociology in general and wants to expand our understanding of Goffman by revealing a poorly recognized debt. This debt connects Goffman to his predecessor Cooley, who had outlined a simple, powerful model of social interaction aptly named the “looking-glass self.” In Scheff’s view, recognizing this debt deepens our understanding of Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, particularly the version of dramaturgy that is found in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). This, in turn, is important because it opens the door to a sociology of emotions. As Scheff points out, Goffman pursued the sociology of emotions in a narrow way, focusing on embarrassment. Scheff advocates a wider view, which he associates with Hochschild’s (2003) work. This exists at the intersection of symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis. As an example of what can be harvested from this approach, Scheff presents an intriguing account of the role of shame in social life. Someone who has shame has, in Goffman’s (1963) vocabulary, a “discredited self” because his or her stigma is publicly known. As Scheff and Goffman suggest, embarrassment is the recognition that shaming is occurring. Embarrassment marks the transition from a discreditable to a discredited self. By contrast, someone who feels guilt has only a “discreditable self” because no one else knows yet of the stigma. Thus shame is temporally connected to guilt. This was part of the fascination with guilt for Philip Rieff (1990), whose sociological investigation of guilt as a guiding and constraining emotion also led him back to Cooley. Here I want to present four issues that I think are implicitly or explicitly raised by Scheff’s interesting article. Their explication must itself be part of the reinvigorating of the tradition that Scheff has initiated. First, I wish to consider the role of the looking-glass self in Cooley’s overall approach. Second, I will comment on weaknesses in Goffman’s analysis of the self. Third, I will comment on the prospects