Little naked pangs of the self: the real performance of the self and the function of trust in Goffman's action theory

The aim of this article is to discuss some of the leading features of Erving Goffman's action theory as an alternative to the ‘orthodox’ paradigms of sociology, viewed as a structuralist and functionalist science that defines social constructs by their shared rules and values, and as a drifting of action, in the sense of intention, toward an individualistic version. The author examines Goffman's shift of the focus of attention from the boundaries of a social sense of action to the social dialectic of ‘defining a situation’ (W. Thomas) as conducted by the social actors in a renewal of Simmel's ‘empowering covenants’ (wechselwirkung) in the multiple casual social connections that make up the ‘social buzz’ in a society. The author moreover discusses Goffman's action as a kind of playacting regulating cognitive and expressive face-to-face ‘traffic’ between the social actors. This relational dynamic creates an interactive play based on encounters – in which one's opening to another is fraught with risks of deception – regulated by trust as a central resource for social interactions. Trust, in its interpersonal and systemic variants, constitutes a universal social datum and an elementary precondition for social exchanges and the cooperation between individuals. Trust, thus, functions as comparer between reciprocal expectations and a regulator of freedom tending to the stability of the social system.