Abstract
In exploring the many aspects of denial, Jared Del Rosso delivers the sort of jolt we got from Erving Goffman’s early work: the taken-for-granted is exposed in new, surprising ways, and we are invited to reimagine social life. He begins Denial: How We Hide, Ignore, and Explain Away Problems with Goffman’s work on how people avoid disrupting face-to-face interaction by civilly ignoring one another’s lapses. It is easy to imagine that such denial is a vital social lubricant; without overlooking flaws in one another’s performances, many encounters would collapse.
The discussion moves on to the bystander effect and a catalog of accounts that begin problematizing denial: failing to acknowledge hazards faced by others puts them at risk, and the denials in disclaimers, excuses, and justifications allow individuals to avoid taking responsibility. The chapters in the second half of the book move beyond microsociology by examining how organizations and then institutions use denial to ward off criticism and scandal. The final substantive chapter views denial’s role in obscuring the centrality of race in American culture. Social lubrication aside, Del Rosso is focused on denial’s problematic features.
This is a short, well-written, provocative book. Many readers will find its tour of denial’s many forms compelling, and they can nod along appreciatively as Del Rosso carefully extends his claims for denial’s important and often troubling role in social life. I admire this book, and I’d encourage students to read it.
At the same time, I found myself engaged with the book’s argument; it inspired me to think about its topic, which is otherwise easily taken for granted. For starters, it occurs to me that denial is probably a fundamental, vital social process. The face work that Del Rosso uses as his starting point (e.g., ignoring a misbuttoned shirt) allows interaction to proceed, but notice the many analogous ways in which all sorts of social activity depends on bracketing: “Let’s talk about this [and not about anything else]” underpins virtually all interactions.
This strikes me as an essential sort of denial: the participants agree to treat everything except the topic at hand as irrelevant. Science, for instance, depends on such agreements: we try to isolate the defined variables and measure how they interact, reporting the results even when low levels of explained variance reveal that other factors must be at work. To be sure, it is always possible to challenge these agreements, to argue that the topic under discussion is being defined too narrowly, that other relevant matters need to be considered to fully understand it, just as scholars can call for further research that incorporates other variables. Thus, critiques that an apparently important relationship may be spurious challenge the denial of some factor’s relevance.
In other words, denial involves trade-offs. Del Rosso is good at pointing denial’s use in many invidious, self-serving, hypocritical ways; it is easy to accept such critiques. But bracketing—denial—seems essential to the social construction of reality. We can’t understand/acknowledge/discuss everything all at once. Rather, social life proceeds by first agreeing to focus on something, and then agreeing to expand (or narrow) that focus as necessary. Both denial and critiques of denial seem fundamental, necessary social processes.
Social movements, including those within sociology, usually begin by challenging some sort of denial, by saying that we ought to pay more attention to what has been overlooked. In their most enthusiastic forms, such claims argue that what had been denied is so central that it must be considered more important than anything else, thereby in turn denying the legitimacy of disputing that centrality. And thus we arrive at irony: denunciations of denial can justify calls for more (albeit different) denial.
Nor does this end the matter. Del Rosso is critical of collective amnesia (referring to denial of aspects of history), and argues that acknowledgement is important. However, when we look at regions marked by centuries-long conflicts (think Ireland, the Balkans, or the Middle East), we don’t find problems caused by denial in the form of collective amnesia, so much as rival, detailed collective memories that interpret the past by denying different aspects of what happened. Such disputes over what ought to be denied call into question the notion that ending denial might somehow lead to a simple resolution.
Del Rosso is hardly oblivious to these complexities; the book features a theoretical appendix that clearly recognizes that the study of denial, like denial itself, requires making choices, and he acknowledges that he has chosen to focus on denial’s problematic consequences. His topic, then, proves to be amazingly fruitful. We could imagine a parallel volume called Truth that examines the social nature of agreements to attend to and accept some claims about reality. Of course, the sociological literature is filled with analyses of disputes over truth, and we realize that communities create standards for assessing truth claims and that establishing truth is always contingent on social agreements. Unless we decide to halt partway through our journey, studying denial—the road less traveled—inevitably brings us back to such contingencies.