Master of Lost Chords

by Thomas J. Scheff (February 2014)

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.

The Lost Chord (1877)

For many years I have been wondering why a book by my teacher, the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982), has been so popular. His scholarly text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), has sold well over a million copies, and is still selling. According to Amazon.com, its rank today, 54 years later, is surprising (#6,448). What is it about this book that is so highly appreciated?

In later reading his most popular book, I was critical and remained so for many years. It seemed that his examples of everyday moments were of great interest, but he showed little concern about connecting them to theory.

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one. I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two. But the concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost. (1995, p. 128).

Human languages in actual usage are fragmented, incomplete, and context dependent. For these reasons, even simple discourse would be impossible to understand directly, if taken literally. We understand the speech of others to the extent that we can guess, however briefly, their point of view.

Taking the point of view of others, (role-taking), makes highly complex languages possible, as opposed to the small instinctive vocabularies of other mammals. Humans can imagine the point of view of another person or persons. The imagination is not always accurate, but it is accurate enough, enough of the time, to keep the wheels spinning.

Most role-taking by adults appears to occur at lightning speed, so fast that it disappears from consciousness. In modern societies, particularly, which strongly encourage individualism, there are incentives for forgetting that one is role-taking. Each of us learns to consider ourselves a stand-alone individual, independent of what others think. Children learn role-taking so early and so well that they forget they are doing it. The more adept they become, the quicker the movement back and forth, learning through practice to reduce silences in conversation to an unbelievably short time. Studies of recorded conversations of adults such as the one by Wilson and Zimmerman (1986) help us understand how forgetting the whole inner process is possible.

Conclusion

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What's Love Got to Do with It?: The Emotional World of Popular Songs (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers) 2011.

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