The Presentation of Self in Everyday life
"To use a different imagery, the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage."
A book that gives a theory and a perspective to look at the social world with. Given and acknowledging the problem of other minds, Goffman sets out to functionalize the ways the social self performs itself to others. In doing so, sociology receives the fun tool of dramaturgical analysis as a means to analyze social actors.
The question I had and for other books related that speak upon the social self is simply: Why is there a need for performance?1 Language is a social technology used for communication and I can see how that may lend itself into being normative, but is there really any function in being reductive about the identities a person can take on?
Performance
The idea of performance drawn out in this book is fairly simple. Playing the role that is socially expected of you whether that be the role of a professional role, gender, or student. These categories have well and specific expectations in actions and behaviors with it’s medium being us humans. What philosophers and sociologists gain in analyzing performance is to draw out then these modes of being. This is the underlying idea of symbolic interactionism.
Front and Backstage
As part of a theatre, there is the front stage where the performance occurs and everything behind the curtains lends itself to the backstage. This piece of the dramaturgical analysis is the most cynical for me, as it states that from my perspective I could never get to know the “true other”. Any perceptions of the other will always be the front-stage and of what goes on. Although, I don’t think Goffman is exactly as fatalistic because he states that you can have glimpses into the backstage, but not fully as you don’t have access to another person’s mind. Such situations of the backstage, is finding out the “true” nature of someone, hearing gossip that was always behind your back, and so forth.
A common critique of Goffman’s work on the front and backstage is that the distinction between the two are not entirely clear. But, that is by design. Similar to how actor’s have to deal with the question of internalizing their role; the actor becoming the role. People situated in social contexts can be seen taking onto the attitudes of the role and even self-regulating themselves to play into them. Psychology already have a term for this: a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Related Topics and Connections
Judith Butler’s Gender Roles:
Reading through the book, I had this background neuron continually activating which really felt like the idea’s put out by Goffman on Performance was related to Butler’s work on Performativity. They both conceptualize the self and more specifically gender coming into itself through performance. It is through this that a lot of people (academics) view Butler’s work as a more developed front, but I view it as the same. The point of contention highlighted in a paper is how much agency the self has, but I think the underlying points of both theories posits the self as reflective and in continuation of… being and becoming. 2
Sartre’s The Look:
Same thing as above occurred when revisiting some of Sartre’s work in phenomenology, specifically the portion of affective consciousness. It basically brings to bear the idea that you can not know your social self as it is fundamentally perceived by others. In the same light, this is why I think assigning yourself to a pop-culture icon is self-reductive; Which is different than recognizing the relation between yourself and other pop-culture icons.
Mead’s Ideas:
The easiest for last. Goffman seems to have developed the ideas set forth in Mead’s “Mind, Self, and Society”
Citations
Brickell, C. (2005). Masculinities, performativity, and subversion. Men And Masculinities, 8(1), 24–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x03257515
Dolezal, L. (2012). Reconsidering the look in Sartre’s: Being and Nothingness. Sartre Studies International, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/ssi.2012.180102