A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman
A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman
You make a pass:
The initiator exposes himself to rejection and to the judgment that he is undesirable, which judgment anyone who keeps his distance is allowed to avoid; the recipient exposes herself to providing personal evidence of another’s desirability without obtaining the relationship that is the usual safeguard of this admission. The solution is strategic tact. The initiator undertakes to be tentative enough and discourageable enough so that if he is to be rejected, this can be done delicately, by indirection, as it were, allowing him to maintain the line that no overture had been intended. And the recipient, when desiring to encourage an overture does so in a manner that can be seen as mere friendliness should the need arise to fall back on that interpretation…. An ambiguity thus results, but this does not derive from some lack of consensus, failure of communication, or breakdown in social organization, but from competent participation in the r...
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