Psychosocial Feelings within Simmel’s Sociology

Abstract

Before I introduce you to the key question of my article, let me tell a story about Erving Goffman, which is supposed to have gone to a canteen, waited for another person to leave his/her seat and dish to look for mustard or salt & pepper, and then sat at his/her place to eat his/her dish before he/she came back.¹ In doing this, he showed that his behaviour would break the basic trust which supports the most futile activities in our daily life, the diffuse feeling of confidence, which assures in us an ontological security. This security allows us to dedicate ourselves to trivial activities (e.g. looking for mustard), without fearing that some intruder could eat the dish we leave behind. The lesson from this story, is that our social life is based on inconsiderable little things, which nevertheless involve a whole complex of presuppositions that we take for granted, such as normal appearances or expected attitudes. It also demonstrates the importance of a feeling of general confidence that sustains the routines of everyday life, assuring a coordination a minima by the means of a polite inattention. This confidence is a form of trust and belief; it assumes a suitable development of events, and it enables anticipations on the actions of other actors.

Winkin reports this experience in the “subjunctive” (Winkin in: Goffman 1981: 97-98).