Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Introduction
The expressiveness of the individual (and
therefore his capacity to give impressions) appears to involve two radically different
kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off. The first
involves verbal symbols or their substitutes which he uses admittedly and
solely to convey the information that he and the others are known to attach to
these symbols...The second involves a wide range of action that others can
treat as symptomatic of the actor, the expectation being that the action was
performed for reasons other than the information conveyed in this way. (2)
Of the two kinds of communication - expressions
given and expressions given off - this report will be primarily concerned with
the latter, with the more theatrical and contextual kind, the non-verbal,
presumably unintentional kind, whether this communication be purposely engineered
or not. (4)
When we allow that the individual projects a
definition of the situation when he appears before others, we must also see
that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves
effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response
to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him.
(9)
To summarize, then, I assume that when an
individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to
control the impression they receive of the situation. This report is concerned with some of the
common techniques that persons employ to sustain such impressions and with some
of the common contingencies associated with the employment of these
techniques. The specific content of any
activity presented by the individual participant, or the role it plays in the
interdependent activities of an on-going social system, will not be at issue; I
shall be concerned only with the participant’s dramaturgical problems of
presenting the activity before others. The issues dealt with by the stagecraft
and stage management are sometimes trivial but they are quite general; they
seem to occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension for
formal sociological analysis. (15)
For the purposes of this report, interaction
(that is, face-to-face interaction) may be roughly defined as the reciprocal
influence of individuals upon one another’s action when in one another’s
immediate physical presence. An interaction may be defined as all the
interaction which occurs throughout any one occasion when a given set of
individuals are in one another’s continuous presence; the term “an encounter”
would do as well. A “performance” may be
defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which
serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. Taking a particular participant and his
performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute
the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. The pre-established pattern of action which
is unfolded during a performance and which may be presented or played through
on other occasions may be called a “part” or “routine.” These situational terms can easily be related
to conventional structural ones. When an
individual or performer plays the same part to the same audience on different
occasions, a social relationship is likely to arise. Defining social role as the enactment of
rights and duties attached to a given status, we can say that a social role
will involve one or more parts and that each of these different parts may be
presented by the performer on a series of occasions on the same kinds of
audience or to an audience of the same persons. (15-16).
I Performances17
When an individual plays a part he implicitly
requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before
them. (17)
When the individual has no belief in his own act
and no ultimate concern with the belief of his audience, we may call him
cynical, reserving the term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the
impression fostered by their own performance. (18)
Front:
I have been using the term “performance” to refer
to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his
continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some
influence on the observers. It will be
convenient to label as “front” that part of the individual’s performance which
regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for
those who observe the performance.
Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind
intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. (22)
First, there is the “setting,” involving furniture,
decor, physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and
stage props for the spate of human action played out before, within, or upon
it. A setting tends to stay put,
geographically speaking, so that those who would use a particular setting as
part of their performance cannot begin their act until they have brought
themselves to the appropriate place and must terminate their performance when
they leave it. (22)
If we take the term “setting” to refer to the
scenic parts of expressive equipment, one may take the term “personal front” to
refer to those items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately
identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow
the performer wherever he goes. As part
of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex,
age, and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns;
facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like. (24)
It is sometimes convenient to divide the stimuli
which make up personal front into “appearance” and “manner,” according to the
function performed by the information that these stimuli convey. “Appearance” may be taken to refer to those
stimuli which function at the time to tell us of the performer’s social
statuses. “Manner” may be taken to refer
to those stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role
the performer will expect to play in the oncoming situation. (24)
In addition to the expected consistency between
appearance and manner, we expect, of course, some coherence among setting,
appearance, and manner. (25)
In addition to the fact that different routines
may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to
become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to
which it gives rise, and tends to take on a meaning and stability apart from
the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. The front becomes a “collective
representation” and a fact in its own right. (27)
I have suggested that social front can be divided
into traditional parts, such as setting, appearance, and manner, and that
(since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not
find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the
generalized social guise in which it appears to us. These two facts, taken together, lead one to
appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found
in the social fronts of a whole range of routines but also that the whole range
of routines in which one item of sign-equipment is found will differ from the
range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found.
(29-30)
Dramatic
Realization: While in the
presence of others, the individual typically infuses his activity with signs
which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might
otherwise remain unapparent or obscure. For if the individual’s activity is to become significant to
others, he must mobilize his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to
convey. (30)
Idealization: Thus, when the individual presents himself
before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the
officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does his
behavior as a whole. (35)
It is important to realize that when an
individual offers a performance he typically conceals something more than
inappropriate pleasures and economies…First, in addition to secret pleasures
and economies, the performer may be engaged in a profitable form of activity
which he hopes they will obtain...Secondly, we find errors and mistakes are
often corrected before the performance takes place, while telltale signs that
errors have been made and corrected are themselves concealed. Thirdly, in those interactions where the
individual presents a product to others, he will tend to show them only the end
product, and they will be led into judging him on the basis of something that
has been finished, polished, and packaged...A fourth discrepancy between
appearances and over-all reality may be cited.
We find that there are many performances which could not have been given
had not tasks been done which were physically unclean, semi-illegal, cruel, and
degrading in other ways; but these disturbing facts are seldom expressed during
a performance. (43-44)
Maintenance
of Expressive Control: It has
been suggested that the performer can rely upon his audience to accept minor
cues as a sign of something important about his performance. This convenient fact has an inconvenient
implication. By virtue of the same
sign-accepting tendency, the audience may misunderstand the meaning that a cue
was designed to convey, or may read an embarrassing meaning into gestures or
events that were accidental, inadvertent, or incidental and not meant by the
performer to carry any meaning whatsoever. (51).
In response to these communication contingencies,
performers commonly attempt to exert a kind of synecdochic
responsibility, making sure that as many as possible of the minor events in the
performance, however instrumentally inconsequential these events may be, will
occur in such a way as to convey either no impression or an impression that is
compatible and consistent with the over-all definition of the situation that is
being fostered. (51)
Misrepresentation: When we think of those who present a false front
or “only” a front, of those who dissemble, deceive, and defraud, we think of a
discrepancy between fostered appearances and reality. We also think of the precarious position in
which these performers place themselves, for at any moment in their performance
an event may occur to catch them out and baldly contradict what they have
openly avowed, bringing them immediate humiliation and sometimes permanent loss
of reputation. (59)
Mystification: It is a widely held notion that restrictions
placed upon contact, the maintenance of social distance, provide a way in which
awe can be generated and sustained in the audience - a way, as Kenneth Burke
has said, in which the audience can be held in a state of mystification in
regard to the performer. (67)
The audience senses secret mysteries and powers
behind the performance, and the performer senses that his chief secrets are
petty ones. As countless folk tales and
initiation rites show, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there
really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience from learning
this too. (70)
Reality
and contrivance: In our own Anglo-American culture there seems
to be two common-sense models according to which we formulate our conceptions
of behavior: the real, sincere, or honest performance, and the false one that
thorough fabricators assemble for us, whether meant to be taken unseriously, as in the work of stage actors, or seriously,
as in the work of confidence men. (70)
A status, a position, a social place is not a
material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of
appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness
or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted
and portrayed, something that must be realized. (75)
II Teams77
Teams: I will use the term “performance team” or, in
short, “team” to refer to any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a
single routine. (79)
A teammate is someone whose dramaturgical
co-operation one is dependent upon in fostering a given definition of the
situation: if such a person comes to be beyond the pale of informal sanctions
and insists on giving the show away or forcing it to take a particular turn, he
is none the less part of the team. (83)
To withhold from a teammate
information about the stand his team is taking is in fact to withhold his
character from him, for without knowing what stand he will be taking he may not
be able to assert a self to his audience. (89)
Since we all participate on teams we must all
carry within ourselves something of the sweet guilt of conspirators. And since each team is engaged in maintaining
the stability of some definitions of the situation, concealing or playing down
certain facts in order to do this, we can expect the performer to live out his
conspiratorial career in some furtiveness.
(105)
III
Regions and Region Behavior106
A region may be defined as any place that is
bounded to some degree by barriers to perceptions. Regions vary, of course, in the degree to
which they are bounded and according to the media of communication in which
barriers to perception occur. (106)
One form of decorum that has been studied in
social establishments is what is called “make work.” It is understood in many establishments that
not only will workers be required to produce a certain amount after a certain
length of time but also that they will be ready, when called upon, to give the
impression that they are working hard at the moment. (109)
A back region or backstage may be defined as a
place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance
is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course (112)
Since the vital secrets of a
show are visible backstage and since performers behave out of character while
there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the
back region will be kept closed to members of the audience or that the entire
back region will be kept hidden from them (113).
The notion of an outside region that is neither
front nor back with respect to a particular performance conforms to our
common-sense notion of social establishments, for when we look at most
buildings we find within them rooms that are regularly or temporarily used as
back regions and front regions, and we find that the outer walls of the
building cut both types of rooms off from the outside world. Those individuals who are on the outside of
the establishments we may call “outsiders.”
(135)
IV
Discrepant Roles141
A basic problem for many performances, then, is
that of information control; the audience must not acquire destructive information
about the situation that is being defined for them. In other words, a team must be able to keep
its secrets and have its secrets kept.
(141)
First, there are what
are sometimes called “dark” secrets.
These consist of facts about a team which it knows and conceals and
which are incompatible with the image of self that the team attempts to
maintain before its audience. (141)
Secondly, there are what
might be called “strategic” secrets.
These pertain to intentions and capacities of a team which it conceals
from its audience in order to prevent them from adapting effectively to the
state of affairs the team is planning to bring about. (142)
Thirdly, there are what
might be called “inside” secrets. These
are ones whose possession marks an individual as being a member of a group and
helps the group feel separate and different from those individuals who are not
“in the know.” (142)
The informer is someone who pretends to the
performers to be a member of their team, is allowed to come backstage and to
acquire destructive information, and then openly or secretly sells out the show
to the audience. (145)
Secondly, there is the role of the “shill.” A shill is someone who acts as though he were an ordinary member of the audience but is in fact in
league with the performers. (146)
In the everyday trades, agents who give no
warning are sometimes called “spotters,” as they will be there, and are
understandably disliked. (147)
There is yet another peculiar fellow in the
audience. He is the one who takes an unremarked, modest place in the audience and leaves the
region when they do, but when he leaves he goes to his employer, a competitor
of the team whose performance he has witnessed, to report what he has
seen. He is the professional shopper - the
Gimbel’s man in Macy’s and the Macy’s man in Gimbel’s; he is the fashion spy and the foreigner at
National Air Meets. (148-149)
Another discrepant role is one that is often
called the go-between or mediator. The
go-between learns the secrets of each side and gives each side the true
impressions that he will keep its secrets; but he tends to give each side the
false impression that he is more loyal to it than the other. (149).
Perhaps the classic type of non-person in our
society is the servant. This person is expected to be present in the front
region while the host is presenting a performance of hospitality to the guests
of the establishment. (151)
In addition to those in servant-like roles, there
are other standard categories of persons who are sometimes treated in their
presence as if they were not there; the very young, the very old, and the sick
are common examples. (152)
First, there is an important role that might be
called “service specialist.” It is filled
by individuals who specialize in the construction, repair, and maintenance of
the show their clients maintain before other people. (153).
Confidants are persons
to whom the performer confesses his sins, freely detailing the sense in which
the impression given during a performance was merely an impression. (159)
Colleagues may be defined as persons who present
the same routine to the same kind of audience but who do not participate
together, as teammates do, at the same time and place before the same
particular audience. (160)
An interesting implication of these suggestions
is that a team which constantly performs its routines to the same audience may
yet be socially more distant from its audience than from a colleague who
momentarily comes into contact with the team.
(162)
Renegades often take a moral stand, saying that
it is better to be true to the ideals of the role than to the performers who
falsely present themselves in it. (165)
V
Communication Out of Character 167
In our Anglo-American society, it may be noted,
“Good Lord”, “My God!”, or their facial equivalents often serve as a
performer’s admission that he has momentarily placed himself in a position in
which it is patent that no performed character can be sustained. These expressions represent an extreme form
of communication out of character, and yet have become so conventionalized as
almost to constitute a performed plea for forgiveness on the grounds that we
are all poor fellow performers. (169)
Treatment
of the Absent: When the members of a team go backstage where
the audience cannot see or hear them, they very regularly derogate the audience
in a way that is inconsistent with the face-to-face treatment that is given to
the audience. (170)
Two common techniques of derogating the absent
audience may be suggested. First, when
performers are in the region in which they will appear before the audience, and
when the audience has left or has not yet arrived, the performers will
sometimes play out a satire on their interaction with the audience, and with
some members of the team taking the role of the audience. (171)
Secondly, a consistent difference between terms
of reference and terms of address often appears. In the presence of the audience, the
performers tend to use a favorable form of address to them. (172).
Staging Talk: When teammates are out of the presence of the
audience, discussion often turns to problems of staging. Questions
are raised about the condition of sign equipment; stands, lines and positions
are tentatively brought forth and “cleared” by the assembled membership ; the
merits and demerits of available front regions are analyzed; the size and
character of possible audiences for the performances are considered; past
performance disruptions and likely disruptions are talked about; news about the
teams of one’s colleagues is transmitted; the reception given one’s last
performance is mulled over in what are sometimes called “post mortems”; wounds
are licked and morale is strengthened for the next performance. (175-176)
The talks that comedians and scholars give are
quite different, but their talk about their talk is quite similar. (176)
Team
Collusion:
I shall call “team collusion” any collusive
communication which is carefully conveyed in such a way as to cause no threat
to the illusion that is being fostered for the audience. (177).
Staging cues are, of course, employed between
performers and a shill or confederate in the audience, as in the case of “Cross
fire” between a pitchman and his plant among the suckers. (178).
Closely associated with staging cues, we find
that teams work out ways of conveying extended verbal messages to one another
in such a way as to protect a projected impression that might be disrupted were
the audience to appreciate that information of this kind was being
conveyed. (184)
We may label this activity “derisive collusion”;
it typically involves a secret derogation of the audience although sometimes
conceptions of the audience may be conveyed that are too complimentary to fit
within the working consensus. (187.)
Realigning
Actions:
[Performers] often attempt to speak out of
character in a way that will be heard by the audience but will not openly
threaten either the integrity of the two teams or the social distance between
them. These temporary unofficial, or
controlled, realignments, often aggressive in character, provide an interesting
area of study. (190).
Perhaps the most common drift of undercurrent
communication is for each team subtly to put itself in a favorable light and
subtly to put the other team in an unfavorable one, often under the cover of
verbal courtesies and compliments which point in the other direction. (191).
In many kinds of social interaction, unofficial
communication provides a way in which one team can extend a definite but non-compromising
invitation to the other, requesting that social distance and formality be
increased or decreased, or that both teams shift the interaction to one
involving the performance of a new set of roles. This is sometimes known as “putting out
feelers” and involves guarded disclosures and hinted demands. By means of statements that are carefully
ambiguous or that have a secret meaning to the initiate, a performer is able to
discover, without dropping his defensive stand, whether or not it is safe to
dispense with the current definition of the situation. (191)
Whatever it is that generates the human want for
social contact and for companionship, the effect seems to take two forms: a
need for an audience before which to try out one’s vaunted selves, and a need
for teammates with whom to enter into collusive intimacies and backstage
relaxation. (206)
VI The
Arts of Impression Management 208
In the beginning of this report, in considering
the general characteristics of performances, it was suggested that the
performer must act with expressive responsibility, since many minor,
inadvertent acts happen to be well designed to convey impressions inappropriate
at the time. These events were called “unmeant gestures.” (208).
It should be added that the individual held
responsible for contributing an unmeant gesture may chiefly discredit his own
performance by this, a teammate’s performance, or the performance being staged
by his audience (209).
Defensive
Attributes and Practices - In
order to prevent the occurrence of incidents and the embarrassment consequent
upon them, it will be necessary for all the participants in the interaction, as
well as those who do not participate, to possess certain attributes and to
express these attributes in practices employed for saving the show. (212).
1. Dramaturgical Loyalty. It is apparent that if a team is to sustain
the line it has taken, the teammates must act as if they have accepted moral
obligations. They must not betray the
secrets of the team when between performances - whether from self-interest,
principle, or lack of discretion. (212)
2. Dramaturgical Discipline. A performer who is
disciplined, dramaturgically speaking, is someone who remembers his part and
does not commit unmeant gestures or faux pas in performing it. (216)
3. Dramaturgical Circumspection. In addition, it will be useful if the members
of the team exercise foresight and design in determining in advance how best to
stage a show. (229)
Protective
Practices: tactful tendencies of
the audience.
First, it should be understood that access to the
back and front regions of a performance is controlled not only by the
performers but by others. (229).
We often find that when interaction must proceed
in the presence of outsiders, outsiders tactfully act in an uninterested,
uninvolved, unperceiving fashion, so that if physical isolation is not obtained
by walls or distance, effective isolation can at least be obtained by
convention. (230).
Once the audience has been admitted to a
performance, the necessity of being tactful does not cease. (230).
A final instance of tact in handling the
performer may be cited. When the
performer is known to be a beginner, and more subject than otherwise to
embarrassing mistakes, the audience frequently shows extra consideration,
refraining from causing the difficulties it might otherwise create. (232)
Tact
Regarding Tact
I would like to conclude by mentioning two general
strategies regarding tact with respect to tact.
First, the performer must be sensitive to hints and ready to take them,
for it is through hints that the audience can warn the performer that his show
is unacceptable and that he had better modify it quickly if the situation is to
be saved. (234)
Secondly, if the performer is to misrepresent the
facts in any way, he must do so in accordance with the etiquette for
misrepresentation; he must not leave himself in a position from which even the
lamest excuse and the most co-operative audience cannot extricate him. (234)
Shared staging problems; concern for the way
things appear; warranted and unwarranted feelings of shame; ambivalence about
oneself and one’s audience: these are some of the dramaturgical elements of the
human situation. (237).
Conclusion
The
Framework
A social establishment is any place surrounded by
fixed barriers to perception in which a particular kind of activity regularly
takes place (238).
The framework bears upon dynamic issues created
by the motivation to sustain a definition of the situation that has been
projected before others. (239)
The
Analytical Context
It seems to me that the dramaturgical approach
may constitute a fifth perspective, to be added to the technical, political,
structural, and cultural perspectives...This would lead us to describe the
techniques of impression management employed in a given establishment, the
principal problems of impression management in the establishment, and the
identity of the interrelationships of the several performance teams which
operate in the establishment (240).
Personality-Interaction-Society
When an event occurs which is expressively
incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are
simultaneously felt in three different levels of social reality, each of which
involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact. (242).
First, the social interaction, treated here as a
dialogue between two teams, may come to an embarrassed and confused halt; the
situation may cease to be defined, previous positions may become no longer
tenable, and participants may find themselves without a charted course of
action. (242).
Secondly, in addition to these disorganizing
consequences for action at the moment, performance disruptions may have
consequences for a more far-reaching kind.
Audiences tend to accept the self projected by the individual performer
during any current performance as a responsible representative of his
colleague-grouping of his team, and of his social establishment. (242)
Finally, we often find that the individual may
deeply involve his ego in his identification with a particular part,
establishment, and group, and in his self-conception as someone who does not
disrupt social interaction or let down the social units which depend upon that
interaction. (243).
The Role
of Expression is Conveying Impressions of Self: Perhaps
a moral note can be permitted at the end.
In this report the expressive component of social life has been treated
as a source of impressions given to or taken by others. Impression, in turn, has been treated as a
source of information about unapparent facts and as a means by which the
recipients can guide their response to the informant without having to wait for
the full consequences of the informant’s actions to be felt. Expression, then, has been treated in terms
of the communicative role it plays during social interaction and not, for
example, in terms of consummatory or tension-release
function it might have for the expresser. (248-249).
In short, since the reality that the individual
is concerned with is unperceivable at the moment, appearances must be relied
upon it its stead. And paradoxically,
the more the individual is concerned with the reality that is not available to
perception, the more must he concentrate his attention on appearances (249).
We come to the basic dialectic. In their capacity as performers, individuals
will be concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to
the many standards by which they and their products are judged. Because these standards are so numerous and
pervasive, the individuals who are performers dwell more than we might think in
a moral world. But, qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue
of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a
convincing impression that these standards are being realized. (251).
Staging
and the Self
In this report, the individual was divided by
implication into two basic parts: he was viewed as a performer, a harried fabricator of impressions involved in the
all-too-human task of staging a performance; he was viewed as a character, a figure, typically a fine
one, whose spirit, strength, and other sterling qualities the performance was
designed to evoke. The attributes of a
performer and the attributes of a character are of a different order, quite
basically so, yet both sets have their meaning in terms of the show that must
go on. (252).
In analyzing the self then we are drawn from its
possessor, from the person who will profit or lose most by it, for he and his
body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture
will be hung for a time. (253).
A character staged in a theater is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but the successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques – the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations. Those who conduct face to face interaction on a theater’s stage must meet the key requirement of real situations; they must expressively sustain a definition of the situation: but this they do in circumstances that have facilitated their developing an apt terminology for the interactional tasks that all of us share. (254-255)