performances

from the presentation of self in everyday life by erving goffman

"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 characters they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.  in line with this, there is the popular view that the individual offers his performance and puts on his show 'for the benefit of other people.'"

"when the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term 'sincere' for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance.  it should be understood that the cynic, with all his professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasure from his masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously."

"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."

"we find that the individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge him and the situation in a particular way, and he may seek this judgment as an ultimate end in itself, and yet he may not completely believe that he deserves the valuation of self which he asks for or that the impression of reality which he fosters is valid."

"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.  this is communication in the traditional and narrow sense.  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. . . the individual does of course intentionally convey misinformation by means of both of these types of communication, the first involving deceit, the second feigning."

"it is also highly 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

"regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of others, especially their responsive treatment of him."

"tom burns. . .presents the argument that in all interaction a basic underlying theme is the desire of each participant to guide and control the responses made by the others present.  a similar argument has been advanced by jay haley. . . but in regard to a special kind of control, that having to do with defining the nature of the relationship of those involved in the interaction."

"now given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression he makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. . . this kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game - a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery.  it should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual's conduct, he can gain much by controlling it."

"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"

"ordinarily the definitions of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. . . each participant is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable.  the maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing his own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service."

"together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored.  real agreement will also exist concerning the desirability of avoiding an open conflict of definitions of the situation."

"we can appreciate the crucial importance of the information that the individual initially posseses or acquires concerning his fellow participants, for it is on the basis of this initial information that the individual starts to define the situation and starts to build up lines of responsive action.  the individual's initial projection commits him to what he is proposing to be and requires him to drop all pretenses of being other things."

"the work adjustment of those in service occupations will often hinge upon a capacity to seize and hold the initiative in the service relation, a capacity that will require subtle aggressiveness on the part of the server when he is of lower socio-economic status than his client."

"given the fact that the individual effectively projects a definition of the situation when he enters the presence of others, we can assume that events may occur within the interaction which contradict, discredit, or otherwise throw doubt upon this projection.  when these disruptive events occur, the interaction itself may come to a confused and embarrassed halt.  some of the assumptions upon which the responses of the participants had 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.  at such moments the individual whose presentation has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down."

"any projected definition of the situation also has a distinctive moral character. . . society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.  connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is.  in consequence, when an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect.  he also implicitly forgoes all claims to be things he does not appear to be and hence forgoes the treatment that would be appropriate for such individuals.  the others find, then, that the individual has informed them as to what is and as to what they ought to see as the 'is'."

"one cannot judge the importance of definitional disruptions by the frequency with which they occur, for apparently they would occur more frequently were not constant precautions taken.  we find that preventive practices are constantly employed to avoid these embarrassments and that corrective practices are constantly employed to compensate for discrediting occurrences that have not been successfully avoided.  when the individual employs these strategies and tactics to protect his own projections, we may refer to them as 'defensive practices'; when a participant employs them to save the definition of the situation projected by another, we speak of 'protective practices' or 'tact'.  together, defensive and protective practices comprise the techniques employed to safeguard the impression fostered by an individual during his presence before others."

"in addition to the fact that precautions are taken to prevent disruption of projected definitions, we may also note that an intense interest in these disruptions comes to play a significant role in the social life of the group... there seems to be no grouping which does not have a ready supply of these games, reveries, and cautionary tales, to be used as a source of humor, a catharsis for anxieties, and a sanction for inducing individuals to be modest in their claims and reasonable in their projected expectations."