Goffman is considered a founding doyen of American sociology, although originally hailing from Canada. This book, written in 1959, is an example of personal fieldwork mixed with broader anecdotal reporting. It is concerned with the public persona that all humans put on in the face of company. “This mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.” Goffman conceives of all public interactions as akin to performances. “A performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products…. A performer often engenders in his audience the belief that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case.” He quotes the authority of William James, “[An individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares…. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”
Goffman stresses the tenuousness of the public mask that we are constantly forced to maintain, “The impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps…. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs…. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time…. A false impression maintained by an individual in any one of his routines may be a threat to the whole relationship or role of which the routine is only one part, for a discreditable disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of activity in which he may have nothing to conceal…. When one’s activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed.”
The performative Self is most often the Self that accrues status and recognition in society. “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 realized.” Goffman furthers James’ observation that any one Self requires multiple masks for each of his multiple settings, which requires a fair amount of juggling. “The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles…. Incapacity to maintain this control leaves the performer in a position of not knowing what character he will have to project from one moment to the next.” Even in the most intimate of settings, we all still put on some type of mask. “There are very few friend relationships in which there is not some occasion when attitudes expressed about the friend behind his back are grossly incompatible with the ones expressed about him to his face…. Secret derogation seems to be much more common than secret praise, perhaps because such derogation serves to maintain the solidarity of the team, demonstrating mutual regard [within the friend group] at the expense of those absent.” In fact, roles and performances are always in flux and open for recalibration, based on the facts revealed and the interplay of the performers. “The performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation, absorbing all of the team’s energies and constituting their sole social reality; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities. Whether the performers feel their official offering is the “realest” reality or not, they will give surreptitious expression to multiple versions of reality, each version tending to be incompatible with the others.”
Goffman notes that the audience is an active member in any kind of public performance. They can be generous or biting in their understanding of the mask the performer seeks to convey to his public. They can give the benefit of the doubt or act as unbelieving skeptics. “This involves: the giving of a proper amount of attention and interest; a willingness to hold in check one’s own performance so as not to introduce too many contradictions, interruptions, or demands for attention; the inhibition of all acts or statements that might create a faux pas; the desire, above all else, to avoid a scene…. When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully “not see” the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out.”
Putting on this constant public performance is not always easy for the Self to maintain. The harder one tries to perform an unreality for the public, the greater the strain to the psyche. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” This is hard to pull off, in the sense that every Self cannot but help project some sort of public front when in the presence of other humans. The discrepancy might be small or large, but some performative aspect is always there. “When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part.” Goffman concludes, “The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited…. The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome, of course, and sometimes breaks down, exposing its separate components.”
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