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Information, Contemplation and Social Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Wittgenstein has a remark in which he admonishes us to remember that not everything which is expressed in the language of information belongs to the language game of giving information.

In this paper I want to illustrate how the language of information may be used to disguise the character of the interest we take in social life, an interest whose candid and undisguised manifestations are to be found in literature.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1970

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References

page 107 note 1 Veblen, Thorsten, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London, 1925)Google Scholar; Hughes, Everett G., Men and their Work (Glencoe, Ill., 1958)Google Scholar; Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd (New York, 1953)Google Scholar; Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Goffman, Erving, Stigma (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

page 107 note 2 Harding, D. W., ‘The Role of the Onlooker’, Scrutiny (12 1937).Google Scholar

page 108 note 1 Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, I11., 1957).Google Scholar

page 116 note 1 All the distinctive phraseology in this passage is that of Riesman and his collaborators.

page 117 note 1 The Diogenes Club was started for the convenience of the many men in London who, ‘some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows yet are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals … contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one … no talking is, under any circumstances, permitted, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion … a very soothing atmosphere’. Sherlock Holmes's brother, Mycroft, was a founder-member.

page 119 note 1 This passage is an amalgam of phrases from Goffman's book.

page 120 note 1 It may be Goffman's awareness of the truistic character of his central thesis which intermittently goads him into a display of paradox on the subject of the self and its performances, so that while conceding that ‘the general notion that we make a presentation of ourselves to others is hardly novel’, he nevertheless insists that ‘the very structure of the self can be seen in terms of how we arrange for such performances’. For example, ‘when we observe a young American middle-class girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boy friend, we are ready to point to items of guile and contrivance in her behaviour. But like herself and her boy friend, we accept as an unperformed fact that this performer is a young American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the greater part of the performance’ (The Presentation of Self, p. 74).Google Scholar Goffman's feints at elucidating this remark are as recalcitrant to intelligible paraphrase as the Duchess's counsel to Alice to be what she would seem to be: ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’

page 128 note 1 This may explain, too, why inside views are rarely resorted to in The Presentation of Self, where a satirical ‘distance’ is the effect aimed at. The necessity for this precaution can be seen if we consider what can happen when it is neglected, as in the case of the redrafted suicide note which Goffman cites to illustrate the ubiquity of impression-fostering. Goffman uses the discrepancy between ‘By the time you read this nothing you can do will be able to hurt’ and ‘By the time you get this I will be where nothing you can do will hurt me’ to show ‘that the final feelings of a desperately uncompromising person were somewhat rehearsed in order to strike just the right note’. The effect of Goffman's resort to direct quotation here is that instead of relishing the irony of Goffman's reflections we find ourselves reflecting, without much relish, on Goffman.

page 131 note 1 Philosophical Investigations, 62.Google Scholar