The presentation of self in everyday life

Critical Analysis

Introduction

In the introduction to this book, the author presents an overview of his main thesis: that social interactions can be viewed as theatrical performances.

When someone initially interacts with someone else, they quickly assess the other person by gathering information about them. That information frames a situation, and “the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.” Sign-vehicles hold this information, and the information is presented through conduct and appearance, and allow someone to make initial stereotypes based on interactions and through other similar signs. “True” attitudes and beliefs can only be attained indirectly through involuntary behaviors. The information presented, then, must have a “promissory” nature, as others need to take the person at their metaphorical word on what they are presenting.

Others, then, interpret the promise, and if they then “act as if the individual has conveyed a particular impression,” it can be considered an effective projection, and an effective understanding has been formed. This understanding does not need to be honest; instead, it can be a veneer of consensus, with each person revealing and concealing things. This is a “working consensus.” It is established quickly upon an initial information exchange, and that becomes a definition of a situation, constraining what are then potential responses and interactions. Initial projection commits someone to what they are presenting themselves as, and while this can be modified, it can be modified only slightly. Things that follow may then discredit this projection, which causes social incongruity. The projection must be moral, and “society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect the others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way.” Presenting self makes a moral demand on other people.

The author ends the introduction by offering initial definitions of the way the consensus is built and the moral demand is offered. Interaction is defined as “the reciprocal influences of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence. An interaction is all the interactions which occurs throughout any one occasion,” and this is synonymous with an encounter. The others in the encounter are the audience. The pattern of action that emerges is a performance, and pre-established patterns are parts or routines. All of this is summarizes by the author as a set of “dramaturgical problems” of presenting themselves and their activity before other people.

Chapter 1: Performances

In this chapter, the author presents the core of his argument: that nearly everything is a performance, and the characteristics that we assign to an “actual” performance can be reappropriated both metaphorically and literally to the way society works.

In a performance, a performer may or may not believe his own acting. The performer may also have no real interest in believing their own acting, or if anyone else believes it either. This is a cynic. This person may move back and forth between cynicism and belief of their performance. That performance has a “front” which is the “expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance.” There is also “setting,” which involves furniture and layout. A “personal front” includes objects, clothing, artifacts, posture, age, size, and all of the other ways an actor attempts to have someone else relate them.

The author also defines “manner” as the “stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role the performer will expect to play,” and “appearance” as the way the various setting and personal front elements explain social status. An audience expects those things to be aligned, and to do this they work to put a situation into a category that helps to “mobilize his past experience and stereo-typical thinking.” The front becomes factual, and there are already many fronts established as fact.

Activities include signs that show facts that may be otherwise subtle or hidden; he must “mobilize his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey” and must work to present those signs immediately, to be taken seriously.

During a performance, a performer is aware of how they are being observed, and so they tend to put on a show of an idealized situation. The performance highlights values that are “accredited” by society, and when this happens, it is a celebration: “The world, in truth, is a wedding.” The ideal nature of the performance means that action that is inconsistent with the ideal needs to be concealed. The performer may conceal profitable gain, errors and mistakes, process of making, and illegal or cruel acts. And, they often work to show that “it was not necessary for them to suffer any indignities, insults, and humiliations” to achieve the ideal.

A performer also works to make an audience feel that the audience itself is ideal. They indicate that what they are performing is the most important thing to perform and the most important performance of this; this means that they must not present the same act to the same audience twice.

An audience may misunderstand the presentation the performer is engaging in. This can have disproportionate implications, as “a single note off key can disrupt the tone of an entire performance.” A performer cannot convey disrespect, or give the impression they are too much or too little aware of what is happening. Performance is fragile.

Some performers misrepresent the facts of their right to perform. An audience may then question if the presentation is true or false, but the author views this as a question of if “the performer is authorized to give the performance in question.”

Chapter 2: Teams

In this chapter, the author extends the notion of performance beyond a single individual, to one of teams—"a set of individuals whose intimate co-operation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained.”

A performance is often more focused on a task than on a performer. For example, service workers perform to make their services (not themselves) appear favorable. This typically requires more than one participant, cooperating. A team arises which “can conveniently be treated as a fact in its own right,” something existing between individual performances and group performances. A team may have many people or just two, or even one (or none). Any member of the team has the power to disrupt a team performance, and this means that team members need to rely on and trust one-another. Since they all are working to present the same impression outside of the team, they will need to break character within the team. Teams become bonded by “familiarity.”

A team presents a unique form of reality, and this then changes the way individual team members are allowed to perform. For example, a single team member cannot take a public stand until the team has decided on what the stand can be. Teams have hierarchical dimensions, and a team member can’t play the appropriate part without full information, but that may not be provided to them. Teams require trust. In a team performance, there is a team of audience and a team or performers, and a team-member cannot be allowed to be on both teams at once.

Performance teams have a director who controls the drama. They may be given a special ability to control others who offer inappropriate performances. They also have the ability to distribute parts, roles, and sign equipment. However, these are “dramaturgical terms” and those who hold these roles may not have other types of power outside of the performance. Some team members appear in the front of the audience with regularity, while some never perform outside of the team.

Chapter 3: Regions and Region Behavior

In this chapter, the author introduces the idea of a region, which is a place that is “bounded to some degree by barriers to perception.”

A performance, which is typically conducted inside, is a region that includes time. Anyone in the region can then observe the performance. The region has a “front region,” which is where the performance occurs. In the region are requirements, which include moral and instrumental requirements. These are requirements of decorum. Make-work is an example, which is the idea that a worker provides the impression of working hard at a given moment.

Another region is the “back region” which can be thought of as a backstage. This is a place where the front region impression is contradicted. It is typically located away from the performance, and the expectation is that no audience member can enter, because vital secrets are visible. Controlling backstage depends on work control, where attempts are made to “buffer” the space around the performers.

Sometimes, a performer leaves the back stage and enters the front stage, and “at these moments we can detect a wonderful putting on and taking off of character.”

Decorations and fixtures delineate a region as front stage. Back stage, then, has familiarity as not special, and so there is a level familiarity between performers when they are in that region. This style can be applied in any region, turning it into backstage. Backstage depends on and creates bonds, and the “surest sign of backstage solidarity is to feel that it is safe to lapse into an associable mood of sullen, silent irritability.” Sometimes, people work to escape this “two-faced world” and so they work to find another position and region, but “when they arrive, of course, they find their new situation has unanticipated similarities with their old one.”

Chapter 4: Discrepant Roles

Teams communicate, and some of the information they share is destructive. That information must not be shared with an audience. There are different types of destructive information, or secrets. Dark secrets are facts about a team which it knows, and that contradict the performance. Strategic secrets are “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” (?). Inside secrets are those that help delineate who is in a group. Entrusted secrets are those that have been given to the performer to keep private. Free secrets are those that can be disclosed without causing harm. Place helps contain or separate secrets from the audience and performers.

There are roles related to secrets; one is an informer, who works to find the secrets and share them. Another is a shill, who pretends to be in the audience, but is actually part of the performer group. An agent is someone hired to understand the standards being used to maintain secrets. A professional shopper is someone in the audience who is working to learn about a performance and then bring the information to another performer. A non-person is someone who is present but doesn’t take the part of any of the roles, including performer or audience. A service-specialist constructs and maintains the show, and often know the secrets. A training specialist teaches the performers.

Another role exists, called a colleague. These are people who “present the same routine to the same kind of audience but who do not participate together, as team-mates do, at the same time and place before the same particular audience… [they] share a community of fate.” These individuals become aware of shared points of view and social language, and can relax around each other. When a stranger who is a colleague enters backstage, he is “given club rights” and courtesies.

The author revises earlier definitions to include colleagues, considering them as a “weak audience whose members are not in face-to-face contact with one another during a performance, but who eventually to pool their responses to the performance they have independently seen.”

Conclusion: The Framework

The author concludes the text by summarizing the framework that has been presented, and by offering a discussion of morality as it relates to performance. The framework itself can be called a framework of impression management.

The framework is made up of:

• A team of performers, presenting to an audience
• An agreed-upon ethos and rules for the performance
• A back and front region, with access controlled to prevent the audience and outsiders from entering where they are not welcome
• Secrets, shared and kept
• An attitude towards the audience that is out of character of the performance
• Disruptions to the performance, with all involved working to save the show
• Selection criteria about who can be included on the team

There are other accepted ways of thinking about the social world, and the author describes these and the way this framework may contribute and work with those alternative perspectives. A social context might be political, structural, technical, or cultural, and the author argues that “the dramaturgical approach may constitute a fifth perspective.” It is a way of organizing facts, and a way to describe all parts of impression management as it relates to a context.

When a performance begins, a person projects a definition of the situation; the person is a part of the projection. When something happens that is contradictory, social issues result. One is embarrassment and confusion. Another is an impact on reputation. A third is that ego is negatively impacted, and “the self-conceptions around which he has built his personality may become discredited.”

The author qualifies the whole of his argument, indicating that “we must be very cautious in any effort to characterize our own society as a whole with respect to dramaturgical practices.” Instead, small social units should be considered.

Finally, the author discusses the morality of this way of considering social life. People tend to believe the impressions that are presented to them, and “it is here that communicative acts are translated into moral ones.” Impressions are claims, and claims have moral character. As performers, “we are merchants of morality.”

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research

Introduction

• Presents an example of a large theory, one that tries to encompass and explain all of human behavior
• Provides a lens for examining design education, where each individual acts as the author describes, and the studio is the stage
• Provides a way of thinking about multiple performances happening (“off stage” during one-on-one critiques) at once
• Relates to critique and trust, as the initial presentation of self then dictates subsequent expectations

Chapter 1: Performances

It describes that a common performance technique is to hide the complexity that went into the end-result. Quoting more broadly,

“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. In some cases, if very little effort was actually required to complete the object, this fact will be concealed. In other cases, it will be the long, tedious hours of lonely labour that will be hidden.” (28)

This plays out in studio in several ways. One is that students are practicing their performance, and a basic lever they have to pull is this one: hiding their messy process work. Another is that students have only the process work to show, as the output is neither finished nor polished nor packaged, and so they need to find a way to offer that performance. Still another is that students are viewing this output-only performance over and over on social media, and part of teaching is to show that performance is happening.

Chapter 2: Teams

• It offers a metaphor for considering the students as a team, performing in front of the professor (or administrators) as an audience (and the opposite, as well)
• It questions actual “teamwork”—when students are placed into groups—and how the various roles are distributed within the team (if there is a director, etc)

Chapter 3: Regions and Region Behavior

• Shows studio as a clearly unique region, bounded by physical space and time, and illustrates front and back stage elements; but which is which, and whom is performing to whom, is a question of power dynamics

Chapter 4: Discrepant Roles

• The casual nature afforded to a colleague upon entrance is often based on shared training and is related to design “pedigree”—which schools, programs, and traditions someone experienced

This is getting really tired. The metaphor was played out a long time ago.

Conclusion: The Framework

This text has several obvious connections to design studio practice and culture.

One is to consider the entire studio as a stage, the students as the performers, and the professor as the audience. If we follow this (and the other considerations) as literally as the author, the students are not well trained in their performance of being designers, but are well trained in their performance of being students and young adults. The professor may be an audience member judging the show, or the team, or the individuals. Experience would tell them not to take the show at face value, and so they question the morality presented in the show. Performance impression management is likely not very unique to design here, except that the close proximity of all of the show members impacts the dynamic and vibe.

Another is to think of the students as the audience and the professor as the performer. This is much closer to the ideas Goffman presents about not allowing or cracks or seams in the presentation, as if the trust students have in the professor’s ability to teach requires unfailing evidence that they are experts. If that’s true, it questions what it means to learn together, or to not know the specifics of a design problem and know only the specifics of design process.

Another view of this is that the students are the audience and the performers, performing and viewing each other. This is clearly true, but I don’t know if it’s uniquely true. Maybe it is more true and more important because of the lack of control over a “prop” (the things that are made)?

I guess another could be the idea of all of design school being either an audience for everyone else, or on performance to everyone else.

I don’t know where “being creative” fits into this storyline, especially in a highly visual place of creativity. It is just a big force on producing a convincing impression to others? A breakdown in the script?.... the overt metaphor really is unnecessary…