Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 20, No.

3, 1997

Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience1
Murray S. Davis

By originating and developing the sociological investigation of human experience, Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman have shifted social phenomena at the edge of awareness to the center of attention, and have legitimated their study for contemporary sociologists. Both Simmel and Goffman describe these subtle social phenomena by distinguishing their perceptual boundaries and crossover elements, pointing out their common features when their statuses differ, and reversing their traditional location in means-end and cause-effect chains. But Durkheim's influence on Goffman's basic conceptions of interaction, individual, and society differentiated his interpretation of these social phenomena from Simmel's. Moreover, Simmel's and Goffman's explanations of these social phenomena evolve in different directions, revealing the antithetical goals toward which spiritual transcendental Simmelians and cynical reductive Goffmanians would lead sociology. KEY WORDS: Simmel; Goffman.; sociology; phenomenology; theory.

The most enduring contribution of each founder of sociology has been to legitimate the investigation of one dimension of social life. Thus Marx convinced future sociologists of the value of studying the economic dimension; Durkheim the normative dimension; Weber the historical dimension. The more radical versions of their programs attempt to subordinate all the other dimensions of social life to what they regarded as its dominant dimension. Georg Simmel has been primarily responsible for motivating sociologists to investigate social life's experiential dimension. Although he and his Direct correspondence to Murray S. Davis, 900 Contra Costa Ave., Berkley, CA 94707.
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followers have had to fight an uphill battle to maintain the legitimacy of studying the nuances of human experience rather than merely its subordination to something else, they have felt this battle worth fighting because human beings believe their experience is their most essential characteristic: "I experience; therefore I am." All the classical sociologists, of course, dealt with human experience, but Simmel examined far more of its varieties than the rest.2 Like Weber, Simmel analyzed historical experiences, such as the blase reserve unique to modern metropolises (Levine 1971:324-339; Frisby 1984:38). Unlike Weber, Simmel also analyzed many transhistorical experiences, those occurring not only today but yesterday and (probably) tomorrow, such as adventurousness (Wolff 1959:243-258) or sociability (Wolff 1950:40-57). Simmel derived his conception of experience from Kant. But Kant focused on experience of the natural world, organized by the universal mental categories of the outside observer, whereas Simmel focused on experience of the social world, organized by the local mental categories of the participants themselves. These primary organizations of experience by members of society can be reorganized either by scholarly investigators who employ historical (including contemporary) categories or by scientific investigators who employ transhistorical (sociological) categories (see Oakes 1977; Oakes 1980; Wolff 1959:310-356; Wolff 1950:3-26). Therefore Simmel considered the sociology of human experience to be a second order (sociological) organization of the primary (social) organization of human experience. In their very different ways George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schutz, and Erving Goffman endorsed Simmers call for the sociological investigation of human experience. Since Goffman has inspired the current generation of experiential sociologists more than the others, I will compare only his version of this investigation with Simmers in this article. The book that would compare all four theorists' versions, THE QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGISTS, awaits an author. Goffman gave Simmel less credit for founding this field than he deserved. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he did acknowledge the similarity between his experiential approach and Simmers: "The justification for this approach (as I take to be the justification for Simmers also) is that the illustrations together fit into a coherent framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had..."(1959:xii). But in his major book on the subject Frame Analysis he attributed the origin of the field to William James and Alfred Schutz (1974:2-5), mentioning Simmers work only once to illustrate of a minor point (1974:249n). Though uninterested in the difference between transhistorical and historical experiences that preoccupied Simmel, Goffman presented in this book a layered analysis of first and second order experiences similar to Simmers: from

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what he called "primary frameworks"either "natural" or, if it involves a "willful" agency, "social"to their secondary transformations, which he called "rekeyings." Surprisingly, Goffman (1974:11-13), unlike Simmel, avoids discussing the rekeying of primary frameworks by social scientists like himself. Although Simmel made many distinctions between academic disciplines, he did not distinguish his sociology of human experience from his other sociologiesthat is, he did not add phenomenological sociology to the other subtypes of sociology (general, formal, and philosophical)because all of them include it. Whenever he discussed a human behavior, he tried to articulate the subtle but distinctive feeling it evoked. Merely opening the front door, for example, can shift a person's experience between the mundane and the sublime:
By [building a dwelling], a piece of space was unified in itself and separated from the rest of the world. The door cancels the separation of the inside from the outside because it constitutes a link between the space of the human and everything.-.outside of it. Exactly because the door can be opened, its being shut gives a feeling of being shut out, [which] is stronger than the feeling emanating from just a solid wall.... The door relates the finite unity...again to infinite space.... From the door...life flows out of the limitedness of the isolated being-by-yourself, and...into the unlimited number of directions in which paths can lead (Kaern 1994: 409-410).

Goffman emphasized behaviors that evoke more vivid feelings, especially about oneself: "in the language of Kenneth Burke, doing is being" (1961b:88). Performance disruptions that precipitate status loss and reality collapse produce his paradigm experience of debasement:
These [performance] disruptions [(unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes)]...are often called "incidents." When an incident occurs, the reality sponsored by the performers is threatened. The persons present are likely to react by becoming flustered, ill at ease, embarrassed, nervous, and the like (1959:212).

In Frame Analysis, however, he distinguished behavior from experience and therefore sociology from phenomenology:
This book is about the organization of experiencesomething that an individual actor can take into his mindand not the organization of society. I make no claim whatsoever to be talking about the core matters of sociologysocial organization and social structure.... I am not addressing the structure of social life but the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives. I personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual's current involvements to be second; this report deals only with matters that are second (1974: 13).

Unlike Simmel but like Durkheim (see below), Goffman assumed that society is more basic than experience and that consequently sociology is a more fundamental science than phenomenology. Yet anyone who writes a

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576 page book on the phenomenology of social life must attribute some importance to his topic, however "secondary" a science it may be.

METHOD

Following the German anti-positivist tradition of Dilthy, Windelband, and Rickert, Simmel dismissed quantitative methodology as unable to deal with human experience.3 But neither Simmel nor Goffman ever formalized the qualitative methodology they used, refusing to turn it into textbook rules that could be taught to less imaginative students. Unteachable sociologies are said to be based on art rather than on science, though Simmel's "artistic" method is not completely without rules:
For us the essence of aesthetic observation and interpretation lies in the fact that the typical is to be found in what is unique, the law-like in what is fortuitous, the essence and significance of things in the superficial and transitory.... To the adequately trained eye, the total beauty, the total meaning of the world as a whole radiates from every single point (Etzkorn 1968:69).

In one way or another, all sociologists begin their theory creation by using similar inductions, which ascend from an individual topic to a general theory. Having once gotten their general theories, however, most sociologists switch to deductions, which descend from their general theories to individual topics. But deduction has a drawback. The paradigm case from which they first induced their general theory may be interesting because it unexpectedly inverts the relation between the typical and the unique, the law-like and the fortuitous, or the significant and the superficial. But as they generalize away from it, sociologists risk boring their readers by applying their general theory in expected ways. Simmel and Goffman, however, remain interesting by continuing to employ induction without switching to deduction. They proceeded not by finding their general themes in particular phenomena but by continuing to examine particular phenomena to discover their general themes.
The unity of these investigations does not lie, therefore, in an assertion about a particular content of knowledge and its gradually accumulating proofs, but rather in the possibilitywhich must be demonstratedof finding in each of life's details the totality of its meaning (Simmel 1978:55).

Indeed, they seem to become aware of their general themes at the end of their investigations rather than at the beginning. They did not look for particular instances to which to apply their general themes but came upon aspects of particulars that struck them as so interesting that they must be used to augment their general themes. The advantage of their continual inductions is to maintain their readers' interest in their general themes,

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which are enlivened by their interpretation of all their particularsnot just their paradigm ones. The reader cannot predict what Simmel and Goffman would say about a new topic because they did not know themselves. If the drawback of mechanical deduction is boredom, the drawback of continual induction is confusion, for the general idea produced by leaping from one instance to the whole does not always fit together clearly with the general idea produced by leaping from another instance to the whole. The many partially overlapping models analysts have used to organize Simmel's world view, as well as the many expressions Simmel uses to indicate that he is speaking only metaphorically ("so to speak," "as if," "as it were," and the verb "seems" [Wolff 1959:xi], betray this imperfect fit, and signify his failure to unify his theories. This failure suits Simmel to the tenor of our times more than his own. If modernism in social theory is defined as the attempt to develop a new coherent and comprehensive theory of social life to replace the old religious and political orthodoxies, then Simmel failed as a modernist theorist more than Marx, Durkheim, or Weber did. But if postmodernism is defined as giving up the attempt to form a coherent theory of all of social life for a clearer understanding of its partially disintegrated parts, then Simmel is the first postmodernist social thinker. Considering all his unsuccessful attempts to unify his own theories, Simmel seems to be a postmodernist who wanted to be a modernist.4

RHETORIC

Who would want to read a comprehensive social theorist without a coherent world view? Those who find they are more attracted to his analysis of the particulars of society than they are repelled by his inability to connect them fully. The unity of Simmers or Goffman's approach appears less in its internal structure than in its external relation to its audience and their expectations. Both employ certain rhetorical procedures to make whatever they discuss seem interesting to their audience. Elsewhere (Davis 1971) I discuss how people find interesting what contradicts their weakly held expectations. Here I will describe how Simmel and Goffman deny their audiences' beliefs about their experience by demonstrating (1) that the seemingly undifferentiated world contains invisible but experiential boundaries distinguishing in from out, (2) that the seemingly homogeneous elements within these boundaries are both high and low status, and (3) that the seemingly unidirectional flow of causation between these bounded elements flows backward as well as forward.

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In-Out. Although people experience their world as differentiated phenomenologically, they cannot contemplate many of its differentiations cognitively because they lack concepts for them. By naming these phenomenological units at the edge of awareness, and by pointing out the experiential boundaries around them that cut off one phenomenon from another, both Simmel and Goffman supply the concepts that allow this contemplation. Simmel, for instance, notes the difference between "the adventure" and "the life" it is a part of:
Each segment of our conduct and experience bears a two fold meaning: it revolves about its own center...and at the same time is a segment of a course of life.... The most general form of adventure is its dropping out of the continuity of life.... We ascribe to the adventure a beginning and an end much sharper than those to be discovered in other forms of our experience.... [T]he adventure...is a form of experiencing. The content of the experience does not make the adventure... (Wolff 1959:243, 244, 253).

Drawing attention to these experiential boundaries (both spatial and temporal) is, a technique of great generality. Even when Simmel dealt with an abstraction like an intellectual disciplinesociology, history, philosophy, moral sciencehe demarcated what the discipline encompasses and what it excludes. Boundary delineation became one of the fundamental techniques of the Chicago School of Sociology, for many social phenomena, besides their obvious physical boundaries, are surrounded by phenomenological boundaries that can be experienced but not touched.5 Simmel's concept of "boundary"though superseded by Gregory Bateson's concept of "frames"allowed Goffman to distinguish previously undiscovered social units, particularly the encounter:
If we think of an encounter as having a metaphorical membrane around it,....[w]e can see that the dynamics of an encounter will be tied to the functioning of the boundary-maintaining mechanisms that cut the encounter off selectively from wider worlds (19616:66).

In his later work, Goffman distinguished other phenomenologically "bracketed" social units: ambulatory units, contacts, formal meetings, platform performances, and social occasions (1983:7). Bounding social units phenomenologically allowed Simmel and Goffman to discuss the relation between inside and outside. Simmel noted how a person's subjective and objective attributes, meaningful in the outside world, are "cut off," rendered meaningless, during sociable encounters:
Sociability emerges as a very peculiar sociological structure. The fact is that whatever the participants in the gathering may possess in terms of objective attributesattributes that are centered outside the particular gathering in questionmust not enter it. Wealth, social position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities and merits may not play any part in sociability.... But in addition to these objective elements that, as it were, surround the personality, the purely and deeply personal traits of one's life, character, mood, and fate must likewise be

Simmel and Goffman eliminated as factors in sociability..... Yet, this world of sociabilitythe only world in which a democracy of the equally privileged is possible without frictionsis an artificial world. It is composed of individuals who have no other desire than to create wholly pure interaction with others which is not disbalanced by the stress of anything material (Wolff 1950:45-46, 48).

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Rather than praise Simmel (as he did Bateson) for his concept of boundary, Goffman criticized him for making his boundaries too impermeable:
Simmel's embarrassing effort to treat sociability as a type of "mere" play, sharply cut off from the entanglements of serious life, may be partly responsible for sociologists having failed to identify the rules of irrelevance in sociability with similar rules in serious areas of life (19616:21).

He quoted the early part of Simmel's article in which Simmel cuts off sociability from the rest of life where personal traits are relevant, but apparently did not reach the later part of his article where Simmel brings life, and thus these personal traits, back in. There, Simmel pointed out that the experience of life or vitality, intensified in the adventure (Wolff 1959:254255), subsides in excessively formal sociability, as in the etiquette of court society during the ancien regime:
If sociability entirely cuts its ties with the reality of life out of which it makes its own fabric..., it ceases to be a play and becomes a desultory playing-around with empty forms, a lifeless schematism...proud of its lifelessness (Wolff 1950:55-56).

Goffman (19616:16-81) was trying to establish the similarities between sociable and serious interactions so he could generalize a feature of their boundaries from one to the other: the common "irrelevance rules" and "transformation rules" by which personal traits are kept out from or, suitably modified, allowed back in to both sociable and serious interactions. Simmel was trying to do almost the same thing, only more inchoately. Goffman calls Simmel's seemingly impermeable distinction between sociability and the entanglements of serious life "embarrassing," but it is Goffman who ought to be embarrassed for not reading Simmel more carefully. Simmel follows the same procedure throughout much of his writing: he first distinguishes a phenomenon (e.g., sociability, the adventure, art) from the stream of life, and then reverses course to show that a total separation would devitalize the phenomenon. Finally, the division between inside and outside allowed Simmel and Goffman to discuss whatever or whoever crosses this boundary inappropriately. Thus Simmel, in a Note to his spatial chapter, described the stranger as such a trespasser "who comes today and stays tomorrowthe potential wanderer...who...has not quite gotten over the freedom of coming and going" (Levine 1971:143). Goffman's equivalent to the stranger is the mental patient, trapped within a total institution, whose salient characteristic is its boundary, phenomenological and physical:

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A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.... Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forest or moors (196la:xiii, 4). [italics mine]

The mental patient is a captive stranger, so to speak, who cannot wander off until the total institution is done transforming him or her into a full group memberindicated by the stranger's loss of "objectivity," or independent standpoint, and acceptance of the group's standpoint, however objectively bizarre it first seemed (1961a:125-170). High-Low. Within major differentiations, we usually experience our world as relatively homogeneous. We find Simmel's and Goffman's writing provocative because they show us that it is not. Rather than consider similar phenomena together, as we do, Simmel and Goffman combine different phenomena under a single concept. Thus Simmel gathers together vastly dissimilar content under his main analytic concept of "form":
We do find that the same form of interaction obtains among individuals in societal groups that are most unlike imaginable in purpose and significance. Superiority, subordination, competition, division of labor [etc.] are found in the state as well as in a religious community, in a band of conspirators as in an economic association. in an art school as in a family (Wolff 1959:317).

Goffman (19616:18) encompasses the same range of dissimilars when exemplifying his concept of "focused gatherings" with both love-making and boxing. The phenomena considered by Simmel and Goffman in their examples differ mainly in status. Simmel and Goffman continually mix small, seemingly petty phenomena with large, seemingly important phenomena, for both attempt to discover in life's trivia its grand themes. As Simmel puts it:
In addition to the phenomena which are widely visible and very imposing in their magnitude and external importance, there are an immeasurable number of minor forms of relation and kinds of interaction among men. Although each of these taken separately may appear trivial, it is one of a mass that can scarcely be estimated. By inserting themselves between the comprehensive, official, so to speak, social formations, it is really these minor forms that bring about society as we know it (Wolf 1959:326-327).

This idea so impressed Goffman that he quoted a similar passage (Simmel, 1950:9-10) at length in his dissertation (Goffman 1953:iv) and alluded to it in his first book (1959:xii). The small stuff of social life is not merely equally important to its big stuff, but more important. Since seemingly trivial interactions perform what is necessary to hold society together more than seemingly influential inter-

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actions, sanctioning study of these minor forms of social life, which affect our experience most directly, is Simmers and Goffman's main legacy for contemporary sociologists. Goffman is very suspicious of seemingly influential interactions, or, more precisely, of the interactions of seemingly influential people:
If one must have warrant addressed to social needs, let it be for unsponsored analyses of the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authoritypriests, psychiatrists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders, parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all the other well-placed persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality (Goffman 1983:17).

Just as sociology is politically dangerous to the extent that it discredits official views of society, Simmel's and Goffman's sociology is professionally dangerous to the extent that it discredits official views of sociology, for it demonstrates that there are more important things to investigate than the "large social formations" recognized by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.6 Beyond bringing out the sociological significance of the small, Simmel and Goffman also bring it out of the minusculeareas of social life in which almost nothing appears to be going on. Thus Simmel points out the social functions of "the glance":
...[T]he glance by which the one seeks to perceive the other is itself expressive. By the glance which reveals the other, one discloses oneself. By the same act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders himself to be understood by the observed. The eye cannot take unless at the same time it gives. The eye of a person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another (Park and Burgess 1924:358).

Considered merely a brief involuntary behavior, the glance actually reveals the glancer's secret: in whom he or she is actively interested. Explicitly building on Simmers observation about observation, Goffman discusses the social functions of the complementary concept of "civil inattention":
...one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present...while at the next moment withdrawing one's attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design (1963a:84).

The genius of Simmel and Goffman is their ability to generate sociological insight from a social minutia like "seeming to pay or not pay attention." Backward-Forward. The major processes in our experiential world, like means and ends or cause and effect, run in one direction. Simmel and Goffman capture our attention by pointing out instances in which this conventional direction is reversed. For Simmel. the prime example of a meansend reversal is money:
Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its quality as a means...so thoroughly and unreservedly developed into a psychological value absolute, into a

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Originally a means to gain other ends, money has become an end in itself. For Goffman (1959), the prime example of a cause-effect reversal is the presentation of self. Originally, merely an effect of the "real self" that caused it, the "presented self" takes on a life of its own. Mythological overtones enhance the interest of both these means-end or cause-effect reversals, which imply Golem or Frankenstein myths about creations that get away from their creators. For Simmel, human beings create money to help them achieve their ends, but then money transforms itself from their servant into their master, becoming the end that human beings must strive for. For Goffman, human beings create presented selves to protect their real selves, but then must maneuver to maintain their presented selveseven at a cost to their real selves.

INTERPRETATION

Although their methodological and rhetorical procedures for performing and presenting their phenomenological investigations are similar, their theoretical interpretations of their results are different. Goffman was partially familiar with Simmers workthe part kept alive in the sociology department of the University of Chicago by Everett Hughes, and the part translated during the 1950's by Kurt Wolff. But Goffman also received graduate training in social anthropology under Lloyd Warner, who exposed him to Durkheim. On the inconclusive evidence of citation count, Goffman was influenced by Durkheim as much as by Simmel, for Goffman referred explicitly to each of them in his published work the same number of times: 12.7 Durkheim's influence on Goffman has been analyzed extensively, particularly by Randall Collins (1988). But how Goffman's Durkheimian heritage distinguishes his perspective from Simmers has been articulated less clearly. Goffman's main contribution to the history of social theory was to apply Durkheimian forms to Simmelian content, particularly Durkheim's macro anthropological concepts to Simmers micro sociological topics. Goffman's unlikely marriage of two of sociology's founding fathers is best illustrated by the title he chose for his collection of early essays: Interaction Ritual An intellectual inheritance from Durkheim differentiates Goffman's conception of interaction, individual, and society from Simmers.

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Interaction. For Simmel, interaction is the main vehicle of social life. But Simmel not only shows that all social activity is interaction, he also explains why some seems not to be:
The large systems and super-individual organizations that customarily come to mind when we think of society are nothing but immediate interactions that occur among men constantly, every minute, but that have become crystallized as permanent fields, as autonomous phenomena. As they crystalize, they attain their own existence and their own laws, and may even confront spontaneous interaction itself (Wolff 1950: 10).

In 1910, Simmel (Levine 1971:127-140) gave a speech on "The Sociology of Sociability" to the first meeting of the German Sociological Association. He began his speech (127-128) by shifting the crucial sociological distinction from between micro and macro to between psychological and sociological, from between individual and society to between the "content of sociation"the psychological impulses, interests, and purposes that bring people togetherand the "forms of sociation"the social patterns that result from their being together. In the rest of his speech, he focused on one particular social patternsociabilitya "pure" or "meta" social pattern that allows individuals to play with the contents (impulses, interests, and purposes) other social patterns take seriously. In 1982, Goffman (1983:1-17) prepared a speech on "The Interaction Order" for his presidential address to the American Sociological Association. (He could not deliver it because of his fatal illness, but it did appear in the American Sociological Review shortly afterward.) Although he does not mention Simmel, Simmel appears to be his unacknowledged opponent at several points during this speech. First, Goffman, manifesting his Durkheimian inheritance, reemphasizes the distinction between micro and macro that Simmel de-emphasized. For Goffman, the relation of the interaction order "upward" to the social structural orders is a more crucial sociological issue than its relation "inward" to psychology (8-12). Goffman's paradigmatic analysis of interaction (1961b:17-84) shows how generic interaction is constrained by extra-interactional social structures or moral rules whereas Simmers paradigmatic analysis of interaction in his Soziologie shows how generic interaction is divaricated into specific types ("forms") of interaction by different psychological motivations. Second, implicitly recalling his only open disagreement with Simmel (1961b:21), Goffman reaffirms the relevance of personal characteristics and statuses in interactions presumably based on "equality." (This minor technical dispute turns on the difference between the kinds of interactions in which participants are supposed to repress this relevance: sociable interactions for Simmel [Levine 1971:132133]; service interactions for Goffman [1983:14-16].) Finally, although both

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Simmel and Goffman emphasize the centrality of interaction, Goffman focuses on embodied social interaction:
My concern over the years has been to promote acceptance of this face to face domain as an analytically viable one, a domain which might be titled, for want of any happy name, the interaction order, a domain whose preferred method of study is microanalysis. My colleagues have not been overwhelmed by the merits of the case (Goffman 1983:2).

Simmel treats embodied social interaction as only one kind of more general, more pervasive, interaction between everythingbeing concerned less with the internal "analytic viability" of interaction than with its external "synthetic generality." One implication of the idea that everything interacts with everything else, which Simmel elaborated in his untranslated late work Lebensanschauung (see Levine 1971: xviiff), is that everything tries to organize everything else into a coherent, self-referential "world." Everything, concrete or abstract, begins to act as an agent that tries to organize the elements of its environmentincluding other agentsaround itself. Every element can be organized around two (or more) centers, like an optical illusion. The cup handle can be organized around the cup, or around the outside world (Wolff 1959:267-275). The individual tries to organize every cultural object or social institution around himself or herself; every cultural object or social institution tries to organize the individual's entire life around itself. Lewis Coser aptly termed the last organizer "greedy institutions." But in Simmel's world not only social institutions but everything is greedythe cultural object (including the intellectual perspective) and even the individual are equally totalizing. Each agent is trying to make the others subservient to itself to "devour" the others as if in a Pac-man video game, or more precisely to obtain cultural, sociological, or psychological nourishment and energy from the others as if in an all-inclusive version of Social (and Cultural) Darwinism. By emphasizing its creative synthetic aspects, Simmel exalts ordinary social interaction into a consciously controlled highly civilized art form (Davis 1973). In contrast, by emphasizing its repetitive ritual aspects, Goffman paints a primitive portrait of ordinary social interaction. Though its techniques are consciously controlled, its ceremonial goals are primeval. Individual For Simmel, then, following Kant, the individual is an active organizing agent in its own right, a "player" in the current language of Hollywood. One's ability to synthesize the world around oneself might vary from successful (the adventurer) to unsuccessful (the urbanite), but it is still an active attempt. The goal of this attemptand one of Simmers high-

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est values, as Donald Levine (1971) has persuasively arguedis to complete one's personality and consequently to enhance one's individuality. Goffman's view of the individual is completely different. He treats the individual less as an active synthesizing ego than as a passive synthesized self.8 Throughout his writing Goffman manifests a second Durkheimian gene by itemizing the numerous sociological roots of the seemingly autonomous psychological ego. For Goffman, the individual is objectified and diffuse, less "self" than "self-image":
In analyzing the self then we are drawn from its possessor, from the person who will profit or lose most by it, for he and his body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg...(1959:253).

Consequently, Goffman advances the imperialism of his discipline, spreading sociology's intellectual reach to topics to which it seemed inapplicable:
The concept of role distance helps to combat this touching tendency to keep a part of the world safe from sociology.... It is right here, in manifestations of role distance, that the individual's personal style is to be found. And it is argued in this paper that role distance is almost as much subject to role analysis as are the core tasks of roles themselves (1971b:152).

Simmel, on the other hand, emphatically denies that the individual is entirely social. Indeed, the nonsocial parts of the individual are as important as the social:
...[E]very element of a group [has] not only a societal part but, in addition, something else....[T]he way in which [the individual] is sociated is determined or codetermined by the way in which he is not... The chapters of this book [Soziologie] discussseveral types whose essential sociological significance lies in the very fact that...they are excluded from society...[:] the stranger, the enemy, the criminal, even the pauper. But this peculiar relationship to society not only holds for such generalized types as these but...for any individual whatever....Man's interactions would be quite different if he appeared to others only as what he is in his relevant societal category, as the mere exponent of a social role momentarily ascribed to him A society is, therefore, a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time....(T]he individualis not incorporated into any order without also confronting it (Wolff 1959:345-348).

Despite widely broadening the range of sociological topics himself, Simmel rejects the claim, which Goffman would accept, that sociology is "the science of everything human" (1959:311ff). Goffman's third Durkheimian trait is to characterize the person's self as sacred, quoting Durkheim's 1906 essay "The Determination of Moral Facts" to this effect:
The human personality is a sacred thing; one does not violate it nor infringe its bounds...(Goffman 1959:69; see also Goffman 1967:47).

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Since only the sacred can be readily profaned, Goffman finds presentations of selves that are objectified, diffuse, and sacred to be especially vulnerable:
By definition, we can participate in social situations only if we bring our bodies and their accoutrements along with us, and this equipment is vulnerable by virtue of the instrumentalities that other bring along with their bodies. We become vulnerable to physical assault, sexual molestation, kidnapping, robbery and obstruction of movement.... Similarly, in the presence of others we become vulnerable through their words and gesticulation to the penetration of our psychic preserves, and to the breaching of the expressive order we expect will be maintained in our presence (1983:4).

To counteract the degradation that continually threatens the self in interaction, the individual must continually engage in protective rituals to defend it or remedial rituals to reconsecrate it (1967:5-46). The Simmelian individual is as stable as the Goffmanian individual is fragile. Simmel usually treated those who are proactive, confidently able to play with interactionlike the flirt (Wolff 1950:50-51). Goffman usually treated those who are passive, precariously prone to collapse whenever their false claims are discreditedlike the stigmatized (Goffman 1963b). If Goffman had written about the stranger, he would have emphasized his or her terrified reaction to the group suddenly turning on him or her (with perhaps the Holocaust as the subtext). If Goffman had written about the adventurerin fact, he did in "Where the Action is" (1967:149-270)he would have emphasized not the active synthesizing of external forces but the fear of being overwhelmed by them that makes most would-be adventurers chose the commercialized versions of adventureslike those found in Las Vegasthat limit their risk. Society. Differentindeed oppositetrends in modern society exacerbate the human condition for Simmel and Goffman. For Simmel (1978:446-469; Etzkorn 1968:1-46; Levine 1971:227-234, 324-339), the fundamental cultural-psychological process should work the following way: Human beings externalize themselves in ideal cultural objects ("objective culture") and then reinternalize these ideal cultural objects to perfect themselves ("subjective culture")as one cultivates oneself by reading a good book written by someone else. Thus Simmers modernist aspect is reflected in his description of the ideal society: one that should produce coherent articulated individuals. In actuality, however, modern society disrupts this fundamental process. Its money economy, division of labor, and increasing population has broken this cycle. Cultural objects have become too irrelevant, specialized, and numerous to be reinternalized. There are now too many uninspiring books that must be read. The connection between objective culture and subjective culture, outer self and inner self, is broken. Rather than being reintegrated around the human subject, cultural objects now pull the human subject apartinto specialized

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graduate programs, for instance. The world of cultural objects waxes while the human subject wanes, reacting to this cultural oppression with the psychological maladies of modern urban life. Thus Simmel's postmodernist aspect is reflected in his description of the actual society: one that does produce blurred and fragmented individuals. Goffman's evaluation of the individual who constructs himself or herself out of socially given pieces is very different from Simmel's. If Simmel is concerned with the failure of self-construction, Goffman is concerned with its success. The same self-constructive process that Simmel praises as creating the ideal individual, Goffman disparages as creating merely a poseur. Goffman is a modernist theorist insofar as he implies that the constructed individual is artificial, compared to authentic human nature (e.g., 1959). He is a postmodernist theorist insofar as he implies that "authentic" human nature is also constructed, and therefore also artificialthough more subtly so (e.g., 1967:44-45). Simmers fundamental cultural-psychological process is disrupted by an expanding culture's disintegration; Goffman fundamental social-psychological process is distorted by an expanding institution's integration. In Asylums (1961a), Goffman pointed out how a mental hospital achieves total control over its patients' means of communicating their selves, and therefore over their selves themselves. In the 1960's and 1970's, many readers inferred (erroneously) from Goffman's description of this particular total institution that he also regarded modern society as a whole as becoming totalitarian, like a giant mental hospital, totally controlling their selves in the same way. For both Simmel and Goffman, then, the main pathology of modern society is that individuals have been losing control over their outer selves, objectified in cultural objects or social institutions, necessary to develop (Simmel) or to communicate (Goffman) their inner selves. Overwhelmed cultural-psychologically, for Simmel, the individual sinks slowly into depression; overwhelmed social-psychologically, for Goffman, the individual collapses quickly into shame. Yet both Simmel and Goffman provide some hope for those who must confront the oppressive features of modern society they describe. Simmel points to the social-biological vitalism that can transcend its stressful partitions and estrangements:
At present, we are experiencing a new phase of the old struggleno longer a struggle of a contemporary form, filled with life, against an old, lifeless one, but a struggle of life against the form as such, against the principle of form (Etzkorn 1968:12).

In his late cultural writings (Etzkorn 1968:11-26), Simmel details how the life force is overcoming the old distinctions of cultural forms, particularly in ideology, art, philosophy, ethics, and religion. In his late war writings

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(Watier 1991:219-234), he details how the vitality liberated by the beginnings of World War I is overcoming the distinctions of social forms, particularly between the individual and the society. Goffman points to the social-psychological disengagement that can transcend modern society's stressful couplings and linkages. Ordinary people can distance themselves from their roles (1961b:83-152); mental patients from the objectifications of their outer selves:
The inmate tends to learn that degradations and reconstructions of the self need not be given too much weight.... He learns that a defensible picture of self can be seen as something outside oneself that can be constructed, lost, and rebuilt, all with great speed and some equanimity. He learns about the viability of taking up a standpointand hence a selfthat is outside the one which the hospital can give and take away from him (1961a:164-165).

In summary, Simmel and Goffman offer diametrically opposed modes of salvation: Simmel proposes revitalized social and cultural connections to counteract the distressing effects of their separations; Goffman proposes calculated social psychological separations to counteract the distressing effects of their connections.

EXPLANATION

Both Simmel and Goffman regarded human beings as contradictory creatures, but explained these contradictions by prioritizing their opposite sidesleading readers away from human beings in different directions. Those drawn to Simmel or Goffman may be unaware that the theorist's appeal comes largely from his temperament, which the direction of his explanations reveals. Some readers are intuitively sympathetic to Simmel because his explanations relate everything he discussed upward toward the music of the spheres (or forms). No matter how negative a topic may appearlike money or conflictSimmel could find its positive functions. No matter how trivial a topic may appear, Simmers explanation of it would eventually draw the reader up to the realm of pure forms, similar if not identical to Plato's. Even when he shifted his explanatory goal toward the end of his career beyond forms to the life force, he treated it as ennobling the human beings swept along by its vitality, for he was more concerned with the continual process of transcending than with the particular spiritual forms transcended into. Thus all of Simmers discussions elevate humanity in general and the reader in particular toward spiritual realms where their contradictions are overcome or universalized.

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Other readers are intuitively sympathetic to Goffrnan because his explanations relate human contradictions downward toward their bestial side. Especially in his early work (e.g., 1959), Goffman emphasized lowly valued Machiavellian motivations for human behavior: concern for appearances rather than substance, self-interest rather than altruism, and artifice rather than authenticity. Goffman's preference for anthropological over historical examples also indicates his movement away from the civilized. Especially in his later work (e.g., 1971), he emphasized the ethological basis of ethnological behavior, the animal influences behind even the traits that seem most humanin the process reapplying or coining terms that feralize humankind like "group territories" (1961a:239) and "creature releases" (19636:68). In his final overview, he observed "the interaction order catches humans in just that angle of their existence that displays considerable overlap with the social life of other species" (1983:3). (It didn't for Simmel.) Later he said he wants to identify the basic substantive units of "the interactional zoo" (1983:6). Goffman, in short, overcame the contradictions of the human animal by showing how they result from the pretensions of a basically manipulative mammalian to be a civilized human being.9 The "upward" explanations of Simmel and the "downward" explanations of Goffman attract different psychological types. Simmel appeals to those with poetic or religious sensibilitylife's spiritualists. Goffman appeals to those with comic or skeptical sensibilitylife's cynics. Thus Simmel and Goffrnan represent two orientations toward human existence, two vectors to tack social science explanations away from it. We can say of Simmel and Goffman what Simmel said of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The antithetical approaches to human existence include not only the optimism of Nietzsche and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, but also the transcendental spiritualism of Simmel and the reductive cynicism of Goffman. Although Simmel and Goffman are ultimately irreconcilable, even someone temperamentally drawn to one more than the other can enlarge his or her own mind by contemplating their differences:
There can be no unification [between Simmel and Goffman] based on objective content, but only one achieved by a subject who can regard both positions. By sensing the [cosmic] reverberations in the distance opened up by these opposites, the soul grows, despite, indeed, because of, the fact that it does not decide in favor of one of the parties. It finally embraces both the [spiritualism] and [cynicism] of life as the poles of its own expansion, its own power, its own plenitude of forms. And it enjoys that embrace (Simmel 1991:181).

CONCLUSION

I have tried to show how both Simmel and Goffman legitimate the sociological investigation of human experience, allowing a professional so-

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ciologist to study it without being accused of "not doing sociology." Their similar inductive methods and counter-intuitive rhetorics make its investigation compelling, even though their different interpretive schemes and explanatory directions make its sociology confusing. Despite the difficulty of forming a coherent sociology of human experience, the very fact that some sociologists now study its varieties helps confirm its existence. By authorizing its investigation, Simmel and Goffman have given human experience, and hence human beings, more ontological weight. The dominant sociological approach treats experience as an afterthought, an epiphenomenon, a derivative of social structure. The Simmelian-Goffmanian sociological approach, however, starts its investigation with experience and progresses toward social structureand beyond toward spiritual or organic structures. From the human perspective, the structure at which sociological investigation terminates is less important than the experience from which it begins.

ENDNOTES
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Georg Simmel's Actual and Potential Impact on Contemporary Sociology, held at the University of Colorado, April 11-12, 1996. 2. Marx focused on the single experience of "alienation," though he found it pervasive. Durkheim focused on both the similar experience of "anomie" and the opposite experience of "sacredness," though he emphasized the former's behavioral consequences, such as suicide, and the latter's nonexperiential beliefs, practices, and functions. Weber focused on both religious and economic experiences, though confining his investigation to their relations and transformations in distinct societies and times. 3. Simmel's dismissal of quantitative social science does not mean that it is necessarily incompatible with his (and Goffman's) work. He rightly feared that this compatibility would be achieved by diminishing his ideas, as was done by some quantitative American sociologists like Emery Bogardus (Levine et al. 1976:836). But he did not see that it could also be achieved by developing quantitative social science. Rather than contract the qualitative experiences Simmel studied to fit quantitative social science, methodologists could expand quantitative social science to encompass these qualitative experiences. In fact, mathematics seem to be developing in that direction, for its recent chaos, catastrophe, complexity, fuzzy logic, and fractal geometry models are far more relevant than its previous statistical models to describing Simmel's (and Goffman's) world. 4. In a note to the introductory chapter of his Sociology, Simmel admits that its postmodernist technique (the "fragmentary" connection of its chapters) falls short of its modernist goal ("the future perfection of sociology"), but believes it to be a necessary first step: ...the chapters of this volume are intended as examples (methodologically-speaking) and mere fragments (as far as their content is concerned) of what I hold to be the science of society.... The less the present offering can be rounded out into a systematic whole and the further apart its elements are, the more comprehensive is the circumference within which the future perfection of sociology will be able to connect the isolated points that can now be identified (Wolff 1959:335-336). 1.

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Unfortunately, the chapter of his Sociology in which Simmel discusses this technique in most detail"Space and the Spatial ordering of Society"; along with its "Note on Social Boundaries"has still not been translated into English (though see Lechner 1991: 195-201, for a summary). Consequently, I must draw on those writings where he employs this technique without discussing it fully. 6. Adherents of the view that birth order has psychological effects might consider the hypothesis that Simmel's concern with microsociology stems from his being the last of 7 childrenthe smallest, the closest to the floorwhereas Weber's concern with macrosociology steins from his being the first of 7 childrenthe largest, the closest to adult power. 7. An annotated list of Goffman's citations of Durkheim and Simmel is available from the author. I regard citation counts as inconclusive because they are more subjective than they seem. The citation counter of Goffman must decide whether or not to include his unpublished dissertation. Gregory Smith (1989), who did, found that Goffman cited Simmel 21 times. I did not because, of the 7 references to Simmel in Goffman's dissertation, the 3 on interpersonal knowledge and discretion as well as the 2 on sociability overlap those in the publications Goffman extracted from his dissertation, inflating the count. The citation counter must also decide whether to count each citation separately or to combine nearby citations to closely related material. This decision depends on whether one assumes, like Smith, that every citation refers to a different idea or, like me, that several citations may refer merely to different aspects of the same idea. Goffman cited Simmel and Durkheim together in his published work twice, displaying their difference in "Symbols of Class Status" (1951:294) and their similarity in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959:69). 8. Goffman's individual is passive not in the static sense of being a mere conduit for larger social forces but in the homeostatic sense of being reactive, continuallysometimes franticallytrying to restore identity equilibrium by distancing the low status selves suddenly generated by one's own faux pas or by reconciling the contradictory selves simultaneously manifested by diverse external sources of identity. 9. Although both Simmel's "vitalism" and Goffman's "zoologism" center on organic life, each emphasizes its opposite features. Vitalism emphasizes the creative aspect of life; zoologism the mechanical Vitalism allows human beings to transcend themselves by creating new patterns; zoologism requires them to descend into themselves by instinctively repeating old patterns.

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