Framing

I have always been charmed by the work of the American sociologist Ervin Goffman, especially by his book Frame Analysis. I have devoted already two blogs to this book (see Sources below) and framing is also an important theme in my photography (see for example https://henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/213265933_Vensters.html ). However, after I had read Nathalie Heinich’s La cadre-analyse d’Erving Goffman [Erving Goffman’s frame analysis], I thought that it would be a good idea to write another blog about it, even if this might mean that I would repeat something that I had written already before. It stresses how important framing is to my mind. In describing Goffman’s ideas I’ll mainly follow chapter I in Heinich’s book.
When you want to understand what Frame Analysis is about, you can best start reading the subtitle of the book, which says that it is An Essay on the Organization of Experience. This experience has two aspects: An experienced part of the activity that takes place (called “strip” by Goffman) and the way this activity is organized (“frame”). A strip is “any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity” (p. 10), while a frame consists of the basic elements of a social situation that “are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events … and our subjective involvement in them” (10-11) In short, a frame is the way we experience what happens. Events and situations can be framed in different ways, but the point of departure is the basic frame or “primary frame” as Goffman calls it. “Such a [primary] framework is seen … as not depending on or harking back to some prior or ‘original’ interpretation”. (21) To give an example: I hear a bang and I see people running. I wonder what is happening. Is it an explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a car? One of these possibilities forms the basic interpretation or primary frame of what is happening.
However, once we have a primary frame, an activity can be given a new interpretation that modifies the original interpretation. Goffman calls such a modifying frame a “key”: “The set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else. The process of transcription can be called keying.” (43-44) For example: The bang is not a real terrorist bomb attack, but it is a scene in a stage play. Goffman distinguishes five fundamental ways a primary frame can be keyed:
- make-believe
- contests (such as in sport)
-ceremonials
- technical redoings (like exercises, experiments, role playing)
- regroundings (for example in charity work: a princess serves as a salesperson at a salvage sale).
|All these ways of keying an activity have in common that they are “straight”: They appear in the same way to all participants and onlookers. However, besides keying there is also another way to transform a primary frame: fabrications. It is “the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on.” (83) Plots and conspiracies are of this kind and the individuals involved can be divided into “the operatives, fabricators, deceivers” and their co-workers on the one hand and “the dupes, marks, pigeons, suckers, butts, victims, gulls” on the other hand. Fabrications, unlike keyings are subject to a special kind of discrediting, for once discovered what is going on and seen as a deception, they collapse. Fabrications can be divided into benign fabrications and exploitive fabrications. Benign fabrications are such like playful deceit, experimental hoaxing (like psychological experiments: the subject isn’t aware of what is being tested), training hoaxes and a few more. Examples of exploitive fabrications are the plots and conspiracies just mentioned. Another way to subdivide fabrications is to distinguish between other-induced and self-imposed fabrications.
Once Goffman has introduced his concepts, his next step is to apply them. I think that most important in the analysis that follows in his Frame Analysis is the idea that frames can be layered: They can fit one into another like the well-known matryoshka dolls (“Russian dolls). In this way we can get a stratification of frames. An example from theatre is an opera that I have seen long ago in which the singers played that they were performing an opera. It’s a “trick” regularly used in stages plays. An example used by Goffman and taken from “real life” is the case of a company agent who is sent around incognito to see if service standards are being maintained.
Another interesting theme discussed by Goffman is the possibility to break the frame. But should I say more? I think that it’s clear from what I have said that applying the idea of frames is one of the most important ways to understand what is happening around us. It helps us also to find our way in what is happening. By applying frames, we constitute what we see and experience. Often frames are shared among individuals in the sense that they apply more or less the same frames to the same situations or events. If so all participants share an understanding of what is going on and what everyone is doing. If this is the case, frames help to understand ourselves and others. 

Sources
- Goffman. Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (my edition).
- Heinich, Nathalie, La cadre- analyse d’Erving Goffman. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020; 23-41.
My blogs:
- “Frame analysis”, dated 10 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/frame-analysis_73.html
- “Framing the mind”, dated 13 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/framing-mind.html