The Class Position of Goffman’s Sociology: Social Origins of an American Structuralism

Abstract

All social theory is class-based. Any theoretical system or problematic expresses the imaginary relation of a class or class-fragment to the real relations of production that characterise a social formation in a particular historical conjuncture. The sociology it produces contains, in a form stamped by its class position and more or lass transfigured or obscure, a semblance of the structures and processes constituted by each of the levels of the social formation — the economic system, the political system, and the cultural-ideological system — and of the personality system of its agent (‘theorist’), each of which exercises some determination on the theoretical system.¹ As an imaginary construction, a theoretical system enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from its material base such that it can reflect earlier or anticipated later stages in the history of the social formation.²