Goffman and Foucault
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20063665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert S Leib (0000-0003-4459-3832, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Pages | 349-360 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-11 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781003160861-33 |
| OpenAlex | W4280537272 |
| ISBN | 9781003160861 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
The works of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault are theoretically and practically complementary in many ways. First, I review areas of overlap between Goffman and Foucault’s perspectives and methods. Second, I describe several higher-order concepts – order, episteme, regime, framing, agonism, and containment – which for both thinkers describe the relations between individuals and institutions. Third, I develop their connection through Foucault’s disciplinary power – highlighting concepts of territory, visibility, documentation, mortification, and looping – which describe the primary techniques of analysing space and controlling the distribution and interaction of bodies within it. Fourth, I argue that their analyses are also complementary under what Foucault calls security power. I establish this by analysing Foucault’s 1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population (2007), alongside Goffman’s Strategic Interaction (1969). From Foucault, I focus on the concepts of risk, population, and danger, which describe how governments aim to keep all individual choices within an acceptable range. I propose a new figure of selfhood arising through population management, the ‘statistical self’, which describes the risks inherent in one’s demographic identity. From Goffman, I draw concepts of strategic interaction and gameworthiness, and I propose the concept of the ‘security self’, the existential object of an individual’s experience within a security milieu
Aesthetics · Discipline · Episteme · Epistemology · Existentialism · Governmentality · Michel foucault · Ontological security · Political science · Politics · Population · Security studies · Social science · Sociology · Engineering · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |