Erving Goffman and his Dramaturgical Sociology.
Erving Goffman's The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959[1],
provides a detailed description and analysis of process and meaning in mundane
interaction. Goffman, as a product of the
Goffman employs a "dramaturgical approach" in his study, concerning himself with the mode of presentation employed by the actor and its meaning in the broader social context: "The perspective employed in this report in that of the theatrical performance, the principles derived are dramaturgical ones." (Goffman 1990, 13) Interaction is viewed as a "performance", shaped by environment and audience, constructed to provide others with "impressions" that are consonant with the desired goals of the actor. The performance exists regardless of the mental state of the individual, as persona is often imputed to the individual in spite of his or her lack of faith in - or even ignorance of - the performance. Goffman uses the example of the doctor who is forced to give a placebo to a patient, fully aware of its impotence, as a result of the desire of the patient for more extensive treatment. In this way, the individual develops identity or persona as a function of interaction with others, through an exchange of information that allows for more specific definitions of identity and behaviour.
The process of establishing social identity, then, becomes closely allied to the concept of the "front", which is described as "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". (Goffman 22) The front acts as a vehicle of standardization, allowing for others to understand the individual on the basis of projected character traits that have normative meanings. As a "collective representation", the front establishes proper "setting", "appearance", and "manner" for the social role assumed by the actor, uniting interactive behaviour with the personal front. (Goffman 27) The actor, in order to present a compelling front, is forced to both fill the duties of the social role and communicate the activities and characteristics of the role to other people in a consistent manner.
This process, known as "dramatic realization" (Goffman 30), is predicated upon the activities of "impression management", the control (or lack of control) and communication of information through the performance. (Goffman 208) In constructing a front, information about the actor is given off through a variety of communicative sources, all of which must be controlled to effectively convince the audience of the appropriateness of behaviour and consonance with the role assumed. Believability, as a result, is constructed in terms of verbal signification, which is used by th 313h71d e actor to establish intent, and non-verbal signification, which is used by th 313h71d e audience to verify the honesty of statements made by the individual. Attempts are made to present an "idealized" version of the front, more consistent with the norms, mores, and laws of society than the behaviour of the actor when not before an audience. (Goffman 35) Information dealing with aberrant behaviour and belief is concealed from the audience in a process of "mystification", making prominent those characteristics that are socially sanctioned, legitimating both the social role of the individual and the framework to which the role belongs. (Goffman 67)
Goffman explores nature of group dynamics through a discussion of "teams" and the relationship between performance and audience. He uses the concept of the team to illustrate the work of a group of individuals who "co-operate" in performance, attempting to achieve goals sanctioned by the group. (Goffman 79) Co-operation may manifest itself as unanimity in demeanour and behaviour or in the assumption of differing roles for each individual, determined by the desired intent in performance. Goffman refers to the "shill", a member of the team who "provides a visible model for the audience of the kind of response the performers are seeking", promoting psychological excitement for the realization of a (generally monetary) goal, as an example of a "discrepant role" in the team. (Goffman 146) In each circumstance, the individual assumes a front that is perceived to enhance the group's performance.
The necessity of each individual to maintain his or her front in order to promote the team performance reduces the possibility of dissent. While the unifying elements of the team are often shallower and less complete than the requirements of performance, the individual actor feels a strong pressure to conform to the desired front in the presence of an audience, as deviance destroys the credibility of the entire performance. As a result, disagreement is carried out in the absence of an audience, where ideological and performance changes may be made without the threat of damage to the goals of the team, as well as the character of the individual. In this way, a clear division is made between team and audience.
Goffman describes the division between team performance and audience in terms of "region", describing the role of setting in the differentiation of actions taken by individuals. (107) Extending the dramaturgical analysis, he divides region into "front", "back", and "outside" the stage, contingent upon the relationship of the audience to the performance. While the "official stance" of the team is visible in their front stage presentation, in the backstage, "the impression fostered by the presentation is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course", indicating a more "truthful" type of performance. (Goffman 112) In the backstage, the conflict and difference inherent to familiarity is more fully explored, often evolving into a secondary type of presentation, contingent upon the absence of the responsibilities of the team presentation. To be outside the stage involves the inability to gain access to the performance of the team, described as an "audience segregation" in which specific performances are given to specific audiences, allowing the team to contrive the proper front for the demands of each audience. (Goffman 137) This allows the team, individual actor, and audience to preserve proper relationships in interaction and the establishments to which the interactions belong.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life provides penetrating insight into the nature of interpersonal interaction and the institutions to which interaction more strongly applies. Despite an unusual, anecdotal methodology, Goffman's work displays an uncommon analytical rigor in dealing with a comparatively unexplored area of social thought. Through an inquiry into the everyday life of humanity, the book provides a strong foundation for the understanding of microsociological phenomena, an understanding bolstered by an investigation of his other writings. (see Interaction Ritual and Stigma)
The first reality that we encounter when we study the world is that of its expressivity, so that to know the society is, actually, to fix the "real" sociological "setting" of our world. Man as "expressive being" and as "interpretative agent" becomes thus an object of study of sociology. (Badescu 479)
It is also important for us to realize that we do not as a matter of fact lead our lives, make our decisions, and reach our goals in everyday life either statistically or scientifically. We live by inference. I am, let us say, your guest. You do not know, you cannot determine scientifically, that I will not steal your money or your spoons. But inferentially I will not, and inferentially you have me as a guest. (William I. Thomas qtd. in Goffman 15)
Speaking about the intentional or non-intentional expressions fostered, we can maintain that any individual will act more or less accordingly to this pattern: "Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing himself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response he is concerned to obtain." (Goffman 17)
But since we are concerned with humans, we must keep in mind that we cannot apply the law mechanisms that usually dissect and analyse the phenomena of our world. Therefore "disruptive events" may occur that may lead to "breaking up of reference frame", and that is because: "Some of the assumptions upon which the responses of the participants have been predicated become untenable, and the participants find themselves lodged in an interaction for which the situation has been wrongly defined and is now no longer defined." (Goffman 23)
Dramaturgical sociology starts with this very first stage, the one of the "performance" of the individual given before the audience of the collectivity he dwells in.
When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to posses, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, un general, matters are what they appear to be. (Goffman 28)
The image of man as a social being is that of a spectacular, perpetual actor and thus acting on the stage of life not so much to live for himself, but to convince the others of the veracity of the "reality" that he makes up, through the representation of his game. He is condemned to be interpret and to lure the others, through his performances, into a "reality" that is nothing else than the sum of these interpretations. Only the sociologist can have "doubts" and thus escape this continuous "fabrication" of dramaturgical images and "realities". (Badescu 483) In fact, Goffman stated the performers and audiences actually are a team, mutually involved in giving a performance validation. They are a secret society of sorts, sharing an often-unspoken conspiracy for the performance at hand be completed uninterrupted.
That everyone wears a mask is a fact that can already be intuited by an untrained eye, sociologically speaking. But in order to find its roots which go so far that, at a given moment, the mask could be taken as the human face, as the difference is no longer visible without an analytical lens, we must go back to history and cultural substrata:
It is probably no mere
historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It
is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere more
or less consciously, playing a role. It is in these roles that we know each
other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. (
Therefore, either we go back to the etymological data, or we look back into the primary forms of theatrical representation, such as the Greek theatre, the French chanson de geste or the Celtic, Saxon or Slavic performed heroic songs, a things becomes certain: people have used (consciously or not) theatrical manifestation from ancient times in order to represent oneself or the others.
In a sense, and in so far as
this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves - the role we
are striving to live up to - this mask is our truer self, the self we would
like to be. In the end our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral
part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve
character, and become persons. (
From one point
on, the collective memory does not clearly differentiate anymore between the
masks and their bearers, between the representation and the object of it, and
history will remember what is more verisimilar from a subjective point of view,
not objective. Histories such as El Cid,
The Knez Igor or La Chanson de Roland bear witness of this fact. People remember the
mask, the public appearance, the manipulation of the image to be more correct,
so that the words of
The rapport between intimacy and anonymity in the phenomenological sociology (especially the one of A. Schütz) is reformulated as a rapport between the back stage and the front stage in the dramaturgical sociology of E. Goffman. (Badescu 485) This rapport between the mask, that is what an individual displays through his performances, and what he really is, makes out of the interactive reality an elusive, problematic one. The notions of "performances", "character" and "persona", "front", "stage", with its compounds: "front stage" and "back stage" etc., acquire a central position in the new discourse.
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 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. (Goffman 32)
From the perspective of dramaturgical sociology, in any manifestation one can distinguish the "setting", involving furniture, décor, and the other frame references that make up the stage: "It is only in exceptional circumstances that the setting follows along with the performers; we see this in the funeral cortège, the civic parade, and the dream-like processions that kings and queens are made of." (Goffman 33)
If we tale the term 'setting' to refer to the scenic parts of expressive equipment, one may rake the term 'personal front' to refer to the other 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. (Goffman 34)
Goffman differentiates these stimuli of the "personal front" into "appearance" "manners", according to the function accomplished by the information that these stimuli convey. The first, "appearance" is defined as such: "These stimuli also tell us of the individual's temporary ritual state: that is, whether he is engaging in formal social activity, work, or informal recreation; whether or not he is celebrating a new phase in the season cycle or in his life-cycle." (Goffman 34) "Manners", on the other hand, is a notion to be used when we 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." (Goffman 35) A certain congruence between appearance and manners is to be expected. Other times, the two sides of the "personal front" tend to contradict each other, for example when and individual belonging to the high social class behaves in a manner that would suggest intimacy and an egalitarian attitude, before a certain audience. "In addition to the expected consistency between appearance and manner, we expect, of course, some coherence among setting, appearance, and manner." (Goffman 35)
One of the properties of the social front is that it induces to other persons the routines associated to a given situation and to transfer them to other situations. Front, therefore, is inductive, it stimulates mimetic behaviour. The tendency of the actor (performer) to present himself in conformity with the categorial traits (the ideal type) of their activity (performance) is a general law of behaviour. All who are part of a category are constrained to maintain the "same social front" in certain situations. (Badescu 488)
The problem of the discrepancies between the "front" and the substance (reality) is examined by Goffman under the name of "idealization", that is the operation of concealing the discrepancies by means of decorating and embellishing the front.
E. Goffman also differentiates between two main regions of the stage: the "front stage" and the "back stage"; there is also the one of "out of stage" which means to be outside the scope of the audience or the performers. He takes a step forward and states that "dirty work" is a universal sociological trait, in the sense that all social organizations try to embellish and thus manipulate what comes out on the front stage, whereas in the back stage, everything that is dirty is laid open. The clean man of the front stage is dirty in the back stage.
One of the most important notions brought forth by Goffman refers not only to the information about the universal character of the time gap between the front and the back region, but also to the totally new plans inaugurated by him in the dramaturgical sociology, as the one referring to the "sociology of routines". (Badescu 501)
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 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. (Goffman 37)
There is, from this point of view, a hierarchy of "sign-equipment" associated to each role that belongs to a "social front". Social fronts, according to Goffman, can be divided thus:
I have suggested that social front ca 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 if a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. (Goffman 39)
The maintenance of a certain social front (called by Goffman "maintenance of expressive control") requires a perfect balance (real or not) of setting, appearance and manner of presentation, which, regardless of any moral or ethical issues, we must admit to be quite a performance (not in Goffman's terms), as it involves intelligence, lucidity as well as imagination and creativity.
Any performance tends to be generalized through socialization. Goffman draws attention to an important aspect of this process of socialization, namely to the tendency of self idealization: "I want to consider here another important aspect of this socialization process - the tendency for performers to offer their observers an impression that is idealized in several different ways." (Goffman 44) The tendency towards idealization is also universal and thus normal, in Goffman's view. "Thus, when an 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 behaviour as a whole." (Goffman 45) Within the stratified structure of society, there is the tendency to "idealize" the higher strata.
There are several means of idealization:
"secret consumption"
the one that is based on the mechanism of infallibility: "Secondly, we find that errors and mistakes are often corrected before the performance takes place, while telltale signs that errors have been made and corrected are themselves concealed." (Goffman 52)
the marketing of the final product: "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." (Goffman 52)
And from this perspective, Goffman points out that there is an expressive coherence in any culture, and individuals fashion their public front according to it.
Atatea situatii ale vietii zilnice, plus atatea situatii speciale, cum ar fi cele legate de funerarii, de solemnitati, de ocazii sacre, de celebrari etc., reclama o "coerenta expresiva", ba chiar un depozit de "expresii" ("sign-equipement"), pe care orice cultura trebuie sa-l detina pentru a face fata crizelor, asa cum economiile, pentru a preintampina bancrutele tragice, au nevoie de mari tezaure. (Badescu 507)
"The expressive coherence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy between our all-too-human-selves and our socialized selves." (Goffman 63) Socialization, therefore, transfigures the aspects of the person that we are and also it confers stability to some states, especially to fronts/masks.
Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old dimensions and its old place. Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become 'persons' or masks. (Santayana qtd. in Goffman 65)
The most salient idea is that we must accept ourselves just as we are, with our instincts and our rationalizations, to be human is to be humanly complete. The mask dehumanizes through the refusal of the occulted part. And speaking of the mask, Simone de Beauvoir offers a beautiful image:
Even if each woman dresses in conformity with her status, a game is still being played: artifice, like art, belongs to the realm of the imaginary. It is not only that girdle, brassiere, hair-dye, make-up disguise body and face; but that the least sophisticated of women, once she is 'dressed', does not present herself to observation; she is, like the picture or the statue, or the actor on the stage, an agent through whom is suggested someone not there - that is, the character she represents, but is not. It is this identification with something unreal, fixed, perfect as the hero of a novel, as a portrait or a bust, that gratifies her; she strives to identify herself with this figure and thus to seem to herself to be stabilized, justified in her splendour. (Simone de Beauvoir qtd. in Goffman 65)
This is a perfect illustration of the maintenance of expressive control: the expression in this case is what the others see and perceive, the very criterion by which they judge us. Thus, clothes, especially for a woman, are a means of great efficacy in controlling the expression conveyed, that is the symbolical image that the others will decode using the same criteria as the woman in question: the fostered image (false or not) is veridical from the point of view of establishing the status quo.
Through a dramaturgical approach, Goffman brings to the level of scientific research the method of theatrical analysis, that is he uses in a most unusual way the notions of art for the understanding of science: "The perspective employed in this report in that of the theatrical performance, the principles derived are dramaturgical ones." (Goffman 13) But since within man art and science are inseparable, like reason and affect, just as such, theatre, dramaturgical notions can very well explain, and Goffman proves it to us, apparently inexplicable phenomena of social life. And the chief reason for it lies in the Latin Nosce te ipsum:
Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him. (Goffman 13)
Key words
Symbolical interactionism, dramaturgical sociology, microsociology, performance, setting, appearance, manner, character, persona, audience, team, region, front stage, back stage, out of stage, front, mask, sign-equipment, dramatic realization, impression management, idealization, maintenance of expressive control.
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