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gestures—indeed, a myriad of objects that people use in their communication with others) Dramaturgy focuses on the inextricable connection between the two All verbal communication occurs within some kind of nonverbal and apparent context Communication, like faces, "appear" (Stone, 1962) Conversely, people's actions speak and, as the wisdom of the ages would have it, often do so much louder than words. Not only universes of discourse (Mead, 1934) but also universes of appearance (Stone, 1986) become important arenas of understanding. It is in this interplay between the discursive and the nondiscursive that the uncertainty and problematic nature of social life take on added measure. As Levine (1977) has observed, speech is one of concreteness and personal commitment and the responsibility for the spoken word is almost automatically assumed. But nonspeech is subject to negotiation and even dissociation by the sender. It is easier to deny something that you were alleged to mean than it is to deny something you were alleged to say. Ambiguity, says Levine, "resides in the fact that the . . . [nonspeech] . . . mode is both necessary for the adequate demonstration of expressive meanings (the most sensitive areas in social life) and readily disavowed (because of its weak connection to syntax" (Levine, 1977:243) Given the complexities and vicissitudes of this process, it not only may be that man is "condemned to freedom" (Sartre, 1959) but also that he is condemned to expression, no matter how imperfect it may be It is with the implications of this expressive condemnation that dramaturgy is interested
Dramaturgical Awareness
The dramaturgical principle we have articulated is one thing; any given individual's awareness of it is quite another Certainly, during the course of the ordinary events of everyday life, or even through what has been called the "demand effects" of social scientists who constantly ask us if we are aware of this or that principle of human behavior, human beings may come to be not only expressive, but also aware of their expressiveness The awareness of this principle can then be used to organize one's experiences, communicate more effectively with other people, manipulate and deceive them, or present one's self in a more favorable light Thus, there are at least four possibilities:
First there is the interaction in which the individual does not care how he is seen by others . . . secondly, we have the individual who generates an impression unintentionally, merely by doing what he generally does, or being the way he generally is. . . . Third, we find the individual who wants to communicate to others how he experiences the world, including himself, and wants to give a candid realization of his own unique, total, being in the world. .. . In this mode, the person intends to grasp the way in which the other experiences himself as the other reveals this in thoughts, expression, and actions. . . . Finally, one would face those orientations to the other in which a conscious attempt is made to make the other perceive the attributes and characteristics of self that one has chosen to emphasize (Zicklin, 1968:240).
Dramaturgical awareness is variable. People do not necessarily intend to be dramaturgical, nor do they have an intrinsic need to be dramaturgical. Sometimes people care a great deal about how they appear to other people; sometimes they could not care less. In any particular relationship, awareness of one's expressiveness would seem to depend on both the significance and tolerance of the other. For whatever reason, some others arejust more important to the actor. At the same time, some audiences are very enabling; while others are very critical and challenging It would thus seem that the level of awareness by the actor of himself and his acts is established, in large part, by the degree of his involvement with the audience, and its reception of him
No matter what the level of awareness by the actor of his act, this awareness is simply not essential to an understanding of dramaturgy In fact, being dramaturgically aware is not necessarily helpful in interaction (Lyman and Scott, 1975) for awareness by itself gives little clue as to how one goes about impressing others Many principles other than dramaturgy, e.g., psychoanalysis, structural functionalism, classical conditioning, and exchange theory can just as well be used to guide one's impression management (apoint we have never seen made by a critic of dramaturgy) Thus, despite the character of dramaturgical awareness or its absence, it is how people interact with others that allows, facilitates, and is the source of the emergence of meaning in their lives
None of these observations and qualifications should be seen as diminishing the impact of dramaturgical awareness in human affairs. Its utilization by both individuals and organizations in the Western world is, as we will see, farreaching Dramaturgical awareness can be an important contingency in people's attempts to construct meaning in their lives, but it is not crucial to a dramaturgical understanding of meaning Here, the pay-off is in the behavior That is the key People's doings establish their meanings and their beings For "in the beginning was the deed Not the motive, least of all the word" (LeCarre, 1986:296)
The Relation Between the Dramaturgical Principle and Dramaturgical Awareness
Most social scientists who write of and about dramaturgy concede that behavior has expressive consequences. Indeed, in most fundamental ways that is what interaction is all about. But when considering the question of dramaturgical awareness, it is altogether a different story There are those who characterize dramaturgy in general, and particularly the work of Goffman, as a study of dramaturgical awareness run amok The dramaturgical image of man is posited as being a person who is constantly employing his dramaturgical awareness in order to influence the impressions that others have of him Usually cited is an excerpt from Goffman (1959): ".. when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the
situation" (p 15) This singularly innocuous statement of dramaturgical awareness is then translated: the motives are seen as nefarious, control is seen as manipulation, and impression is seen as inauthenticity Deegan (1978), for instance, characterizes Goffman's writings as a sociology of defense mechanisms, Lyman and Scott (1975) dwell on the differences between appearances and actuality, while Wilshire (1982) insists that a dramaturgical view of life implies that people conceal and also conceal the motivation to conceal In this rather conventional response, dramaturgical man is alleged to be a selfindulgent, scheming, deceitful conniver and con man who fashions an illusionary existence for himself by manipulating the thoughts and actions of others
It isour claim, on the other hand, that while some people, some of the time, do exactly this, such behavior is not a necessary consequence of employing dramaturgical awareness The intentions circumscribing one's impression management may, in fact, be noble; the control one seeks to exercise may be negotiable or even conciliatory; and the impressions one wishes to foster need not be illusionary. "Not all presentations are misrepresentation" and, in fact, "people may be as interested in revealing as in concealing" (Hannerz, 1980:210,235). Con games, deceit, cynicism, and treachery are all dramaturgically accomplished to be sure, but love, truth, sincerity, and authenticity are as well. Moreover, the observation that when people are doing one thing they are not doing something else, does not necessarily imply that they attempt to reveal one thing and hide something else. Although social transactions are "thickly people" (Strauss, 1959:57), the resources and opportunities needed to actualize this thickness are rare indeed. Not to do so is certainly not necessarily an act of concealment. In fact, to construe impression management as illusionary or inauthentic is to make a nonsituational, ontological judgment of a performance whose meaning emerges in the situational conduct accorded it—a legitimate sociological exercise perhaps, but not a dramaturgical one The social possibility of multiple selves also renderjudgments of an inauthentic self highly problematic, as Hannerz (1980) has suggested:
If, on the other hand, one could think of a society which is only one single stage—a most extreme type of folk society, or, for inmates of a total institution without an underlife—the difference between the presented self and the self that could be known would have to center on an "inner" self, not normally revealed in overt behavior. This is a rather problematic notion (p. 232).
It makes no necessary difference in the last analysis whether an individual wishes to be deceitful or honest, manipulative or negotiable, selfish or altruistic, or for that matter simply wants to get on with what he's doing; the meaning of his enterprise will be established in the expressive/impressive dimension of his behavior. It is the making, not the faking (Geertz, 1983:27) of meaning that is fundamental Whether a person consciously uses a dramaturgical awareness in guiding his behavior may or may not be advantageous, for the best laid plans of
the clever impression manager often go astray because not all audiences are as passive, unsuspecting or unknowing as the critics of dramaturgy often make them out to be
Consider, for example, the following encounter:
An eager young lawyer, fresh out of law school and trying out a brand new desk, heard someone about to enter his office. He immediately lifted his telephone receiver and pretended to be talking with aclient: "Yes, Mr. Jones, Iunderstand. At the moment I'm very busy with several cases, but I think I can work yours in." Hanging up the receiver, certain that he had made quite an impression on his visitor, he turned and inquired solemnly, "And what can Ido for you, sir?" "Oh, I'll only be a moment," replied the man. "I'm from the telephone company and I'm here to connect your phone" (From Telephone Talk, Southwestern Bell).
In fact, the audience's "arts of piercing an individual's effort at calculated unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior" (Goffman, as quoted in Psathsas, 1977:85) For example, in the section on political dramaturgy we are going to wonder whether and how a hypothetical candidate for public office who's intentions were decent and honorable and who's capabilities were sterling would establish these virtues in the face of probing media audiences who are quite capable of transforming one thing into another and making anything look like anything else. On the other hand, the voting public constitutes yet another audience, and they too are sometimes shrewd enough to discount the more cynical pack characteristics of the press. In all of this, outcomes are the crucial dramaturgical issue, not blueprints, intentions, or any other preperformance characteristics. But whatever the outcome, the manager of impressions would do well to heed Baumann's (1967) caution: "The real meaning of the drama cosi e se vi pare is not an illustration of appearance as mere sham but of appearance as a form of existence" (p. 597). The common view that things are not as they appear must be qualified, for appearance has a strange and paradoxical quality in social life, namely: appearances can never be destroyed by reality, but only by another set of appearances In this sense, the phrase "things are not what they appear to be" may be seen as an interpersonal strategy for persuading one's audience to see things another way The strategic nature of this phrase in book writing has been identified beautifully by Goffman (1974):
There is avenerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much arole to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic. (What can betterpush abook than the claim that it will change what the reader thinks is going on?) (p. 1).
Yet another way of dealing with the relation between the dramaturgical principle and dramaturgical awareness is to recognize the principle and dismiss
the awareness as having any important role in the everyday activities of human beings:
The everyday actor's obligations at least so far as fundamental qualities are concerned, do not leave him free to select an attitude toward the character he communicates He does not experience life as theater He is constrained to be what he claims indeed his need to believe in himself seems even stronger than his need to be certain that others entertain a particular view of him (Messinger et al., 1962:110)
This view of the nonrelevance of dramaturgical awareness to the acting individual seems overdrawn As we have argued previously, the nature of the actor's involvement with his audience(s) may itself occasion such awareness Of course, there are delimited circumstances in which people pay little attention to the immediate consequences of their expressive activities. They simply may be ignorant or uncaring of such consequences, may be unable to attend to the consequences they see, or be unwilling to acknowledge them. In fact, when things are going smoothly, the awareness of our awareness (whether that awareness is dramaturgical or not) is rarely given heed. The dramaturgical realization (like the psychoanalytic, mechanistic, or any other) occurs most commonly in those situations where interaction has gone awry—hence the preoccupation by dramaturgists with such issues as embarassment,/awxpas, apologies, accounts, and the like. For it is in those contexts where our on-going behavior is interrupted or where we interrupt the behavior of others that we become conscious of self, purpose, and our attitude toward life. Such situations as these have been explored primarily by sociologists in their attempt to understand the issue of human motivation In situations where motivation becomes an issue, "interaction is disrupted, identities are threatened, meanings are unclear, situations seem disorderly, people have intentions that run counter to other wishes, seemingly inexplicable events take place, and people do not know what's happening to them " (Stokes and Hewitt, 1976:842)
There is also a larger sense of things that seems to occasion an awareness of the dramaturgical principle Such realization often occurs in those glimpses of human absurdity afforded an increasingly large number of people in a pluralistic, mass society (Novak, 1970) In these circumstances meaning arises in the face of the awareness of either universal absurdity (Lyman and Scott, 1970), or in the hiatus between necessity and possibility (Berger, 1963) It is in either of these conditions that one often finds the catalyst for dramaturgical realization Finally, it may be simply the privilege of being able to think about ourselves (Mead's dialogue between the "I" and the "Me") that also carries with it the burden of creating a fictional self for both ourselves and others with whom we relate out of a cosmos that neither knows nor cares about the niggling concerns of human beings.
The
Basic Problem of Social Psychology and the Dramaturgical Resolution
The basic problem of social psychology, whether posed as the Hobbesian dilemma (How is Society Possible?), the tension between self and society (George Mead, 1946), or the "basic dialectic" (Berger and Luckman, 1966), has always been one of accounting for the complex relation between the individualizing aspects of human nature, on the one hand, and the socializing aspects of it, on the other As Gronbeck (1980) suggests, this individual/society problem has been typically resolved by grasping one of its horns
Some seize upon the 'self to explore I/me in the dizzying 'life world' of mundane experience or the Self seeking to perform roles competently. Others trumpet the doctrine of societal supremacy, concentrating upon the social world as pre-given, all important, and determinative, and hence viewing individuals as either captives of language/routine/ritual or creatures of expectations/significant others (p. 320).
While significant scholarly arguments regarding the maximization or minimization of either the individual or society have been waged, most of the literature in social psychology is testimony to the limitations of too rigid an adherence to either side of this coin. Dramaturgical social psychology, with its emphasis on the expressive/impressive dimension of human behavior, seems to be the perspective which most consistently avoids the polar implications of the distinction and the one which most consistently incorporates both the individual and the social into its version of human behavior. The dramaturgical insight, advanced initially by Evreinoff (1927) and Ichheiser (1949) and later developed by Burke and Goffman, is simply that human life is simultaneously both individualizing and socializing, in so much as people and the realities they construct (roles, norms, institutions, organizations, cultures, etc.) have expressive consequences. It simply cannot be helped. Being either an individual or a social creature is not a choice we have, for "to have an identity is to join with some and depart from others, to enter and leave social relations at once (Stone, 1986:189)
As Goffman (1967) reaffirms, individual expressiveness requires human association:
The individual may desire, earn and deserve deference, but by and large he is not allowed to give it to himself, being forced to seek it from others In seeking it from others, he finds he has added reason for seeking them out, and in turn society is given added assurance that its members will enter into interactions and relationships with one another If the individual could give himself the deference he desired, there might be a tendency for society to disintegrate into islands inhabited by solitary, cultish men, each in continuous worship at his own shrine (quoted in Branco, 1977:6)
At the same time, without the existence of distinctive individuals, we would have a situation of the sort that Durkheim (1973) describes so well:
If we try to construct intellectually the ideal type of asociety where cohesion was exclusively the result of resemblances, we should have to conceive of it as an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts were not distinguishable one from another Consequently, they would have no arrangement, in short, it would be devoid of all definite form and all organizations It would be the veritable social protoplasm, the germ whence would arise all social types We propose to call the aggregate thus characterized, horde (quoted in Branco, 1977:6)
So it is not that human beings are (always, often, sometimes) either social products or that society is (always, often, sometimes) a human product It is that both individuals and society, though ostensibly opposite and frequently antagonistic, are mutually interdependent It is in grasping the significance of this mutuality of apparent contradiction that the dramaturgical metaphysic resides
Opposites are abstract concepts that belong to the realm of thought and are relative. By the very act of focusing our attention on any one concept .. . we create its opposite. . . . The unity of opposites is never experienced as a static identity, but always as adynamic interplay between two extremes (Thompson, 1983 as quoted in Dossey, 1984:18).
This notion of the dynamic interplay between opposites is found in many modes of thought. For example, it permeates the Zen Buddhist tradition. As Holborn writes: ". . . absolute perfection in which not a trace of the imperfect was found, would fail to embody beauty. It was through imperfection that perfection was recognized and beauty appreciated" (Holborn, 1978 as quoted in Dossey, 1984:8). Within sociology, mutual interdependence seems the axis of the negotiated order perspective that attempts to show how human subjects constitute and are constituted by social objects (Maines, 1982:275). "The domain of subject-object unity is the domain of mesostructure and it envisions human beings as suspended in webs of significance of their own creation (Geertz, 1973 as quoted in Maines, 1982:275).
The recognition of this inherent dialectic in human affairs also serves as the centerpiece for an ethnomethodological perspective on human deviance Douglas (1970:13) among others has argued for the mutual interdependence of deviance and respectability:
Each necessarily implies the other; each is a necessary condition of the existence of the other. This is by no means simply a matter of abstract and arbitrary definitions given to the terms by sociologists. Deviance and respectability are necessarily linked together in the social meanings of the terms as used by the members of our society in their everyday lives: when we observe and analyze the moral communications in our everyday lives we find that the social meanings of either deviance (immorality) or respectability (morality) can be adequately understood only if reference, whether implicit or explicit, is made to the other, its opposite.
This is to suggest that human life is not an either/or proposition In fact, supposing that it is leads to arbitrary, tautological, and reified conceptions of human affairs, a criticism of much social psychology that is implied in dramaturgical thinking A dramaturgical perspective transforms any "troublesome
The Dramaturgical Perspective
either-or . . . into a both-and" (Burke, 1955:293 as quoted in Voskeritchian, 1981:55). But it is not just in matters obviously social that this is apparent. It is even the case in our understanding of something as seemingly unambiguous as health and disease, a point recounted nicely by Robert Dingwall in a story of a young physician who, upon joining the laboratory of an older physician, wondered what the normal hemoglobin of the blood to be:
When I answered, 'Twelve to sixteen grams, more or less,' he was very puzzled. Most labs, he pointed out, called 15 grams normal, or perhaps 14.5. He wanted to know how, if my norm was so broad and vague, how he could possibly tell whether a patient suffered from anemia, or how much anemia. I agreed that this is a very difficult thing to tell. So difficult, in fact, that trying to be too precise is actually misleading, inaccurate, stultifying to thought, and philosophically very unsound. He wanted to know why Ididn't take one hundred orso normal individuals, determine their hemoglobin by our method, and use the resulting figure as the normal value for our method. This, I agreed, was a splendid idea. But how were we to pick out the normals? The obvious answer is, just take one or two hundred healthy people, free of disease. . . . But this is exactly the difficulty. We think of health as freedom from disease, and disease as an aberration of health. This is traveling in circles, getting us nowhere (Dingwall, 1976:46-47).
So whether we are trying to understand something as "subjective" as which religious views are the correct ones, or something as seemingly "objective" as the question of under just how much pressure blood should be coursing through human veins, we are stuck with our recognitions and understandings of things as being found only in their coincidence to what appears to be their opposites. Owing perhaps to the blessing and curse that is our nature as symbolic beings, we are like sculptors, creating a positive view of things only by working in the negative; carving out what we do not want in order to define and establish what we do.
Following the implications of this mutuality of human life, the language of dramaturgy is relational (Zicklin, 1968), and adamantly so Social structures are malleable, but human malleability is structured Selves are social, but sociation is individualizing Human deviance is normalizing, but normality is differentiating In a sense, then, dramaturgy is a "modular conception of intrinsic properties" (Helmer, 1970) but only if one allows for the connectedness of the extrinsic social with the intrinsic individual This is what accounts for Goffman's insistence that the interactional context of behavior is "where the action is." The situations which interaction establishes are the focus of this form of analysis, not the structures or cultures in which these situations are found, nor the personalities of those who are found in them
Social situations constitute a reality sui generis, as he (Durkheim) used to say, and therefore need and warrant analysis in their own right, much like that accorded other basic forms of social organizations (Goffman, 1964:134)
Furthermore, it is not just that human behavior happens to occur in situations (an observation often made by scholars of whatever philosophical persuasion). It is that human behavior is fully situational. For it is only by confronting others in face-to-face interaction that the meaning of both individuality and sociality emerges. And it is by the analysis of situated, setting-specific conduct that dramaturgy mediates the apparent contradictions between us/them, me/we, inside/outside, and all of the other polar dualisms that bedevil the analysis of human affairs (Manning, 1973:136) Moreover, it is not only the formal, but also the processual and transitory elements of human situations that preoccupy the dramaturgists Such matters as timing, tempo, rhythm, and pause are deemed as important to the meaning of a social encounter as the pentad of Burke which focuses on the more formal properties of who, what, where, when, and how It is not that dramaturgists overemphasize the ambivalences, ambiguities, embarrassments, and problematics of interaction as some of its critics maintain, only that these matters are recognized and given their due Other theories and models of human behavior often ignore their very existence or at least discount their importance
Dramaturgical thinking is not a linear sequential explanation of human behavior based on mechanistic assumptions as most positivistic social science is Its point of departure is Kenneth Burke's profound assertion that the difference between a thing and a person is that one merely moves whereas the other acts, and therefore the language of mechanism is inapplicable to the study of human selves (Burke, 1966:53). Moreover, it is an understanding and appreciation of Greg Stone's observation that no socialized being ever does simply one thing at a time. Because of the communicative, fully situational world in which people live, it must not be forgotten that when we are doing something we are always also doing something else as well. Thus, when dramaturgists speak of individuals as both subjects and objects of their behavior, as expressing character as well as self, as role-making as well as role-playing, as confirming structural regularities as well as constructing emergent possibilities, it is only to affirm the unity of human life. When dramaturgists focus on the ostensibly psychological question of the individual's expressiveness, they are simultaneously focusing on the impressive force of social ritual, and so the age-old distinction between the individual and society quietly dissolves. For a person:
.. . is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self, and a self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, dignity, to have considerateness . . . These are some of the elements of behavior which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him as an interactant (Goffman, 1967:44, quoted in Helmer, 1970:578).
By the same token, to insist on the malleability of social structure is not to minimize its appearance in people's lives, but on the contrary to underscore its
significance, for personal qualities are always viewed in the dramaturgical version of things as properties of external relations:
Universal human nature is not avery human thing. By acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic properties, but from moral rules that are impressed upon him from without. These rules, when followed, determine the evaluation he will make of himself and of his fellow participants in the encounter, the distribution of his feelings and the kind of practices he will employ to maintain a specified and obligatory kind of ritual equilibrium .. . if a particular person or group or society seems to have a unique character all its own, it is because its standard set of human nature elements are pitched and combined in a particular way (Goffman, 1967:45 quoted in Helmer, 1970:578).
Individuals do express themselves, but their "private" expressions are always simultaneously an expression of something and so that expression is therefore drawn out of a public, rather than a private world It is in this sense that we "are all living paradigms" (Nieberg, 1981:190), distinctive, and full of life, but also utterly conventional and as such exemplary models of social life As is true for all models, be they personal or social, concrete or abstract, dramaturgy contains within itself "a belief which denies the uniqueness of the invention in order to claim that it is true" (Helmer, 1970:579)
The Drama of Self
The distinctiveness of the dramaturgical perspective emerges most vividly in its analysis of the question of human individuality. Dramaturgy focuses on the sense of individuality that persons acquire through interacting with others; it is viewed as a shared, interactive phenomenon. This is a radical departure from most views of self. It has been traditional in the literature of social psychology to employ two concepts in discussing the nature of individuality: personality and self. Dramaturgists, like most other sociologically based social psychologists, have preferred the concept "self" in order to avoid certain assumptions inherent in personality theory. This semantic preference for self avoids construing individuality as: (1) an internal psychobiological entity consisting of conscious and unconscious elements; (2) individuality as a structure of attitudes, values, traits, and needs; and (3) individuality as the source of motivation and behavioral consistency
It is fair to say that the psychological conception of personality is the more common-sense view of individuality People tend to believe that the personality they lay claim to is no less than the sum total of all that they have experienced and can call their own One's personality, in this view, isbelieved to be a private possession that is carried from situation to situation While it may be said to influence one's behavior, it is assumed to be a psychological entity independent of one's interactions with others Dramaturgical conception then comes as
something of a shock For in sharp contrast to personality theorists, dramaturgists view individuality asbasically a social rather than apsychological phenomenon Rather than construing individuality as independent of its social presentation, dramaturgists insist "that without a presentation of self, a self is not possible" (Krielkamp, 1976:137) This means that a person's individuality, like everything else we have discussed thus far, is a shared interactive phenomenon that only emerges in conduct with others To use Harry Stack Sullivan's terminology, aperson's self emerges, ismaintained, andislost only through a process of "consensual validation." The self, then, isthe meaning of theorganism, and it is created just as any meaning is—established by the action of that organism and the action of others with respect to it In dramaturgy, the self is social in character, nota private possession of theperson at all,butis, in a sense given to him by the very people he wishes to share it with. As Goffman (1959) has observed:
In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage andincharacter effectively attempts to induce others tohold in regard to him.While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that aself is imputed to him, this self itself does notderive from itspossessor, butfrom thewhole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it (p. 252).
The observation that society labels as "delusional" or "mentally ill" those persons who insist on an image of themselves that no one else will validate speaks to the social reality of individuality. If one insists that he is Napoleon or Jesus Christ he will not long be deprived of more secluded surroundings!
At the turn of the century, the pragmatic philosopher George Mead (1946) articulated thefoundations for anondualistic, dramaturgical view of self when he wrestled with thequestion ofhowtoaccount for thetwomost obvious features of self-hood: continuity and novelty. Previous views had all seen the self as a kind of "ghost in the machine" (Ryle, 1949) that started the process of action moving. This "solution" was, of course, no solution at all, for it took for granted the very thing it sought to explain—the process of human action. Mead resolved the question in an ingenious way. He simply spoke of the self as a meaning as opposed to a thing, rooted it in the acting nature of human beings as John Dewey had proposed, and noted that it always arose as a part of a social process. Others were essential totheself! Inthecourse of interacting with others, we form both an "I" and a "Me." These were not "things" or entities, according to Mead, but were themselves phases of the social process. The "I" is the spontaneous part ofthe self, always restless andimpulsive. Itisnota content, but a movement. The "me," on theother hand, is the self that is created by the
response of the other. The "I" then responds to the "me" and a never-ending conversation ensues which accounts forboth thenovelty andconsistency thatcan be observed in any person's self.
We can illustrate Mead's contention that it is impossible to separate the self from others by noting the construction of a coin. A coin is composed of two sides, a head and a tail. And,of course, heads arenottails. Butwhen youbuy a quart of milk, it does not make a whit of difference which side is up when making a payment. Of course, it would make no sense at all to saw the coin in half in order to resolve the question of which side is the "real" coin, for if you did, it would no longer be a coin. Theself isofthe same order. Itisboth personal and social. Separating thetwoaspects, intheservice of either apsychological or sociological bias, is ultimately not a very pragmatically sound thing to do because what you have is no longer what you think you have since it is now separated from its other side which gave it meaning in the first place
Given an understanding of Mead's remarkable achievement in resolving the age-old question of how we can account for continuity and novelty in the same conceptual framework, it will be easy to seehow dramaturgists have advanced a strikingly different perspective on theself Because theself is a meaning andnot an entity, ithasakind of fictional, constructed, concensually validated quality to it
One's interaction does not reflect, but rather establishes a self Selves are fictions because each could have been constructed otherwise andthey areso vital because they were constructed the way they were It is in this sense that selves are not facts that correspond to some objective internal reality of people's being Rather, they are concoctions, inventions that emerge through interaction and facilitate the ongoing communication between human beings (Stone, 1986) To wonder whether selves are genuine, veritable, true, or even authentic, is to ask the unanswerable ontological question that has been debated by generations of philosophers, theologians, and psychologists. To be concerned with the conditions under which selves are plausible is to reckon with the dramaturgical understanding of individuality. The singular importance of the self lies in its synthetic nature—on the one hand, illusionary and created, and, on the other hand, synthesizing the personal and social aspects of an organism's existence. There is only behavior and the meaning that people attach to it. The notion of "self" is no exception.
Becoming aware of ourselves as objects is what enables people to take themselves into account when acting. It is the catalyst for both self-evaluation and self-worth and is theunderpinning for Mead's assertions about the "internal conversation" between the "I" andthe "me."In a sense, onecan speak of this "inner forum" as a "theater of the mind," but only if one recognizes that the intra- andinterpersonal episodes of self-production arenotqualitatively different phenomena Any socialized creature acts toward himself out of the same social stuff with which he interacts with others Being either aperformer oraudience to oneself iscircumscribed by theavailable symbols, situational arrangements, and
others to whom one's self makes reference. For the sense of self that arises in this "theater of the mind" to become meaningful, it still must be executed and negotiated in interaction with others.
On the other hand, being aware of our awareness of self is of a different order, and dramaturgists have laid strong claim to the significance and variability of this aspect of selfhood. While it may be true as Susan Sarandon's character says about her dim-witted lover in the film Bull Durham that the "world can be a wonderful place for those who are not cursed with self-awareness," for most people it is very difficult to achieve such a state of oblivious, nondramaturgical grace. But on those occasions when people do become aware of their expressive nature, they may choose to either maximize or minimize this expressiveness. It is in this context that matters of intention, desires, wishes, and deliberations become relevant; dramaturgical awareness allows impression-formation to become impression-management (Miller, 1984) In some instances, the dramaturgically aware individual:
. . . not only intends to perform the action necessary to his role but also intends to appear ina particular way while orthrough carrying out these actions. .. . To act inthis dramaturgical or expressive sense .. . is, to act on the basis of a second-order expressive intention—the intention to appear in a particular way, describable in terms of the actor's culture-laden selfrepresentation (Miller, 1984:143).
Through dramaturgical awareness, obviously people can attempt to manipulate, con, and deceive other people They can set out to control the impressions others receive of them and sometimes, even more importantly, the impression that others receive of themselves. They can attempt to manage the career and outcome of the encounter either for selfish or altruistic purposes. As discussed previously, however, whether they engage in all or any of this, is quite another matter. For since meaning emerges in the interaction itself, the best that can be observed is that persons who are dramaturgically aware sometimes get into the business of dramatizing themselves; they attempt to make their selves vivid and clear (Krielkamp, 1976:127). Despite the level of one's self-awareness, it must be remembered that:
the other knows more about the individual than the individual himself does, for he observes the Iin the acts that reveal the self, whereas the individual requires an act of reflection to view these acts (Baumann paraphrase of Natanson, 1956:60, in Baumann, 1967:580).
Like a person's face, which is never seen directly by its wearer, but only by its viewer, the self is better known to the other than it is to its possessor
The dramaturgical principle of self is thus a subspecies of the dramaturgical principle generally In Michael Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being the reader is presented with this dramaturgical paradox—one that also forms the basis of the title of the book: "If we only get one life to live, how can
we possibly learn to live it?" The answer is that we do not learn and then live, but instead do the best we can since it is the only life we have In the process of doing, we come to realize what we may not have previously known But although the self can only be constructed out of this "light stuff," the experience of self can be unbearably heavy, especially in view of the fact that most people in the post-Freudian world have come to believe that selfhood is only an exercise in discovering or finding oneself, and not simultaneously a matter of constructing and establishing a self Dramaturgists insist that because the self is a meaning and not an entity there is nothing that can be discovered apart from the process of doing It is in the doings, not the minds and hearts of people, that selves emerge
The Performative and Transformational Nature of the Self
Whenever human beings interact, selves are created and shared. Like other meanings, they arise, are sustained for a while and then may become irrelevant in the face of new possibilities. Given the expressive/impressive dimension of humanness that we previously spoke of, selves cannot simply "be" apart from interaction, since their being always emerges in the course of a performance with others. Again, meaning is "done" whether the actor intends it or not. To appear before others is to involve oneself in the process of selfhood. For as Goffman has noted: "To stay in one's room away from the place where the party is given is to stay away from where reality is being performed The world, in truth, is a wedding" (Goffman, 1959:36)
Moreover, as a person acquires a self in the process of acting out the various dramas of life with others who are doing the same thing, that "self" changes over time Indeed, no performance, no matter how good or satisfying it is, goes on forever, and even if one were to attempt to make it last forever, the audience's view of it would change and therefore so would its meaning This is a position that fits any number of classical and modern philosophers as diverse as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Husserl as well as Baldwin and Mead According to each of these scholars, the self is an object which must have other objects in order to come into being (Baumann, 1967:583) As those objects change, so will the self Mead expressed it this way:
What determines the amount of the self that gets into communication is the social experience itself Of course, a good deal of the self does not need to get expression We carry on a whole series of different relationships to different people We are one thing to one man and another thing to another. There are parts of the self which exist only for the self inrelationship to itself (Mead, 1946:142, as quoted in Baumann, 1967:595)
Having more than one self is a performative necessity! On the other hand, among the multitude of selves that are created in relationships with others, in most situations a sense of continuity as well as change must be established To be
sure, a semblance of continuity (or at least similarity) exists between situations and audiences. Moreover, the insistence on the part of many audiences for selfconsistency on the part of the individual, limits the range of self-presentation that will be consensually validated. Fortunately, names are typically attached to selves and because most people go through life with the same name, a sense on continuity is, so to speak, built in. But then there are nicknames and other terms of endearment which are so situationally specific that they create a self which exists perhaps with only one special audience. The competent performer then typically has a repertoire of many selves:
No human being is the same at all times, but changes from moment to moment, from place to place, according to the contact he makes with his fellowmen (quote from MacClinttock, 1951, in Baumann, 1967:595)
Following this line of reasoning, the dramaturgical position on the question of permanence and change in matters of selfhood emphasizes the considerable dexterity required of actors to avoid what might be viewed as the polar limits of plausible self-presentation: presenting so many conflicting selves that one is labeled a chameleon or a schizophrenic, on the one hand, or so few that one is viewed as depressed or even catatonic, on the other!
The problem of the "reality" of the self viewed dramaturgically as a form of doing is also reminiscent of the example of Schrodinger's cat, an interesting problem in quantum physics named after Erwin Schrodinger, a physicist who first posed the problem of creating several realities at once. The elements of the example follow:
1. A closed steel case containing one radioactive atom. The atom has a half-life of one hour, that is, in a large sample of such atoms half of them would remain after the passage of one hour while the otherhalf would have decayed. Thus, after one hour, the probability of finding the atom in the case is .5.
2 A photocell sensitive to emitted radiation If the atom decays the resulting radiation trips the photocell, which in turn releases a deadly gas
3. A live cat is introduced into this cage at the same time that precisely one atom of radioactive element has been released in it. Question: At the end of one hour, what will we find on opening the case, a live cat or a dead cat? (Lincoln and Guba, 1985:85-86).
Lincoln and Guba report that according to quantum physics, this question can only be answered by the act of opening the cage: You control the fate of the cat After one hour, there are two equally likely scenarios regarding whether the cat is alive or dead As Wolfe observes: "In a certain sense, the universe has become two universes In one there is a living cat and a happy you, and in the other there is a dead cat and a sad you" (p 190) If you did not reach over to open the cage and thereby disturb it (activate it or "pop the qwiff") these two universes would go on forever, side-by-side When you open the cage, you literally create the
reality that you find Until then, there are only possibilities (Lincoln and Guba, 1985:86-87).
The self as meaning is, of course, of the same order. We are all just possibilities until we act. We create selves by "popping the qwiff'—interacting in certain ways in certain situations before certain audiences with their own corresponding selves at stake as opposed to some other way with all of its attendant possibilities. Life is full of qwiff-popping. The selves which arise between husband and wives over the kitchen table are quite different than those which emerge between men and women over drinks in a singles bar. The selves which may arise in the course of turning tricks in New York City are of a different order than are those selfhood possibilities which might emerge, for example, from working with Sister Teresa in the slums of Calcutta. Or to use a common instance sometimes referred to as "diagnostic fear," the implications for self of having one's suspicions of cancer validated by medical tests are different than the fear that the nagging pain in one's abdomen just might be the Big C—but could be something else These examples of various contemporary situations are all instances of popping a qwiff—creating a reality where none existed before simply by acting Moments are full of created selves, rising and falling, building up and tearing down in a never-ending creation of new realities which constitute the drama of life
The self, then, is as temporarily relative as any other meaning, even though it seems to be about "deeply held and stable" things In "Six Characters in Search of an Author," the magnificent play by the Italian master Luigi Pirandello, we are introduced to this idea that the self is a situationally relative phenomenon:
[We have] the illusion of being always "the same person for all people," and always "the one" we believe ourselves to be in each of our acts. It is not true! It is not true! We notice it clearly when by some misfortune we are unexpectedly caught suspended in one of our acts: I mean that we notice then that all of us was not in that act, and that it would therefore be an atrocious injustice tojudge us only on that act, keeping us attached to that pillory for an entire existence, as if our whole existence were summed up in that one act (Pirandello, 1954:93-94).
Just who are you, anyway? The question as it stands, is absurd (Turner, 1972) because it is general and transcendent, when in fact it can only be answered situationally as the examples given above indicate Selves always and only arise in the context of situations, and as people move around in the drama of life, their selves change too And because we can both be aware of ourselves and aware of our awareness, constructing an inventory of the selves we have been can be an exercise in experiencing ourselves as a series of transformations Despite the somewhat dated nature of his examples, no one has captured this point better than Peter Berger (1963):
People on the move physically are frequently people who are also on the move in their selfunderstanding Take the amazing transformations of identity and self-image that can be the
result of a simple change of residence. Certain places have served as the classic locations in which such transformations are produced almost as on an assembly line. One cannot, for example, understand Greenwich Village without understanding Kansas City. Since its inception as agathering place of those interested in changing their identity, it has served as a sociopsychological apparatus through which men and women pass as through a magical retort, going in as nice Midwesterners, and coming out as nasty deviants. What was proper before is improper after, and vice versa. What used to be taboo becomes de rigueur, what used to be obvious becomes laughable, and what used to be one's world becomes that which must be overcome (p. 58).
One of the ways in which the self is dramaturgically transformed is through what George Mead called the "retrospective act." Looking back on who and what we were at a given time in the past is often an illuminating experience. Human beings have the capacity to see themselves as objects of their own experience and to note what they are now and compare it with what they used to be. It is as if they were an audience to their own behavior. As we act on ourselves in a present, we may reconstruct our pasts.
Obviously going through such atransformation involves areinterpretation of one's past, and a radical one at that One now realizes that the great emotional upheavals of the past were but puerile titilations, that those whom one thought important people inone's life were but limited provincials all along The events of which one used to be proud are now embarrassing episodes in one's prehistory They may even be repressed from memory if they are too much at variance with the way in which one wants to think of oneself now Thus, the glowing day when one was class valedictorian makes room in one's reconstructed biography for a then unimportant-seeming evening when one first tried to paint, and instead of reckoning an era from the date when one accepted Jesus at a church summer camp one does so from that other date, previously one of anxious shame but now one of decisive self-legitimation, when one lost one's virginity in the back of a parked automobile We go through life refashioning our calendar of holy days, raising up and tearing down again the signposts that mark our progress through time toward ever newly defined fulfillments For itwill be clear by now that no magic is so strong that it may not be overcome by a newer brand (Berger, 1963:58-59)
Indeed, it may be enlightening to discover that the original meaning of the term "person" is the Greek "persona" which means, literally, a mask. Life without masks is not life as we know it at all As Oscar Budel (1966) has observed:
The fiction, the mask alone, either self-imposed or, as in most cases, forced on many by society, makes life possible. If this mask is ever torn off, willingly or by force, man is no longer able to live, to function in a society based upon the law of common fictions: either he returns to wearing his mask, to "living" .. . or he becomes "crazy", "insane" as far as [others are] concerned (pp. 51-52).
The self-as-mask metaphor fails us only to the extent that it may imply that masks always cover a face that is not itself a mask But because the face is perhaps the most important expressive tool human beings possess, open to an almost infinite range of variations and possibilities, and since expression always involves a defining other located in a situation, it must itself be construed as a
mask which could always have been put on differently than it was Take off one mask and you find another, remove that one and another pops into place, and so on ad infinitum.
Inextricably connected with the dramaturgical understanding of individuality is a concern with the problem of human motivation Taking as its point of departure John Dewey's dictum that human beings are characteristically active, dramaturgical analysis does not involve any speculation as to why this activity originates Rather, it is an attempt to identify the directions that on-going action takes Consequently, the question of human motivation is recast Motives are not viewed as forces that stir people to act. Instead, motives are seen as expressive communications, both verbal and nonverbal, that are utilized in certain encounters to justify or rationalize the conduct of persons in those situations. In this sense, motives do not compel human action—they enable it. The right motive may keep an interaction going; its absence may contribute to the collapse of the situation. Motives are best understood in the same way that every other dramaturgical concept is—as elements in social interaction not as phenomena that reside in individuals, societies, or cultures.
This strikingly different conception of motivation points to an extremely important relationship between motives and the self that is not ordinarily emphasized in social psychology Our previous discussion asserted that the self is the meaning of the organism and argued that this meaning is established in social interaction between an acting person and his or her validating audience Motives play a crucial role in this process, for they turn on understanding in problematic situations by linking the question of who one is with the question of what one is doing If one reflects on these questions for even a moment, itbecomes clear that this linkage provides us with a way of understanding how the various identities which comprise the self are constructed, whether those identities be utterly routine ones such as "mother" and "father," or deviant ones such as "mentally ill" or "criminal." To know the identity of a person is often to know that person's motives, for the identities into which a person is cast assume the motives that are to be imputed to that person. As a matter of fact, we very often answer questions about our motives by simply stating who we are. For example, showing your badge and saying "I'm a Secret Service Agent" will usually get you entree right to the front of any line. Breaking into a line is problematic behavior. Justifying it with your identity smooths the water. To be motivated, then, is not to be energized by internal or external forces (a language suited to machines, but not to human beings). Rather it is simply to be in communication with others about the sense of one's potentially questionable behavior.
This dramaturgical conception of motivation implies a final assertion about the nature of human selves and their relationship to other selves In many theories of motivation, an individual who is motivated is generally viewed as being conscious: certainly of oneself, probably of other's selves, usually of one's behavior, and, ideally at least, of the relationship between one's behavior and one's
Dramaturgical Perspective
drama and that theater is life are, in fact, using the idea of ontology dramaturgically—as rhetoric to convince people that a dramaturgical understanding is true and is therefore to be believed. In so doing, they may be guilty of that timehonored act of scholarly legerdemain, themselves putting the dramaturgical rabbit into the hat and then later pulling it out and proclaiming its discovery to all who will listen. The pursuit of reality and truth is surely an honorable act, but like all of the rest of life, the pursuit should not be equated with its attainment As William James put it, the truth is what one can "come out with"; and those courses of events that prove most coercive over belief in the long run are what pass as truth, but the report in the long run is never fully in "We die not knowingjust what we have done or what we have become" (quoted in Wilshire, 1982:272)
So it seems to us that to characterize dramaturgy as metaphor is not to diminish its importance as much as it is to acknowledge our limits in the human analysis of human behavior In fact, those who would demean the dramaturgical enterprise as simply, only, or merely a perspective or metaphor, in our estimation, are missing the essential similarity between doing social science, and doing anything else
The Legacy of Goffman
When most people think of "dramaturgy" or the "dramaturgical model," they often think only of the work of the late Erving Goffman Indeed, his name has become almost synonymous with the dramaturgical conception of social life And while this facile equation of dramaturgy with Goffman's scholarship is incorrect, he nevertheless made important and enduring contributions to this point of view, although, as we shall show, he did so perhaps more by his attitude, style, and persona than by his writings. In a brilliant, if brief, career cut short by his death in 1982 at the age of 60 while still highly productive and intellectually influential, Goffman propounded a theme first articulated in the 1959 publication of his classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life—that to be ahuman being is somehow to be involved in a life that has a marked similarity to the things of the theater [stage]. He said it over and over again in a myriad of forms. And when critics challenged his views on a multitude of grounds— phenomenological, ontological, methodological, etc.—he simply continued to render new territories of social life understandable by invoking his insightful and enigmatic perspective
Goffman's insistence that social life can be understood as a series of performances was tied to an understanding that still strikes many people as strange and contradictory: that the most revealing insights to be gleaned about human beings lie simply in a close look at what is right on the surface Appearance is real You can learn a good deal about a book by its cover We do it every day Indeed, it is often all we have. This is not to say that we are always correct and that we cannot
learn a great deal more, but only to say that we live by our hunches and everyday hypotheses based on what we see That we may come to discard our initial impressions according to what we eventually see is testimony to the ubiquity, malleability, and importance of appearance in everyday life Appearance can never be destroyed by "reality," but only replaced by other appearances "This world view is . . . related to the notion that we live by inference or, as it is eloquently expressed by George Mead, that 'social life is lived chiefly in the imagination' " (Posner, 1978:70). In a sense, Goffman reaffirms Cooley's early insistence that "the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society" (Cooley, 1902:87). So Goffman was about guises, semblances, veneers, surfaces, illusions, images, shells, and acts. He was not, as most scholars pompously try to bill themselves, about substances, things, facts, truths, and depths. But more importantly, Goffman's argument dissolves the very distinction between the merely apparent and the fundamentally real in social life. Life to him appeared to consist of various levels of understanding and awareness, not of layers covering a fundamental core which could be duly revealed by proper scientific work. As a result, he appeared to reverse the order of everything The theater of performances is not in people's heads, it is in their public acts People encounter each other's minds only by interacting, and the quality and character of these interactions come to constitute the consequential reality of everyday life In everyday life things really are as they seem to be; but since "how they seem to be" is ever changing, Goffman's "insistence on taking nothing at face value can be said to be the most empirically relevant of his legacies" (Lofland, 1984:22)
He seemed to grasp just how controversial such a reversal was and to revel in the mystery and charisma his ideas engendered in both readers and critics alike. Except for one sparkling exception in the early 1980s, he ignored all critical commentary about his work (and there was plenty of it), and stayed blissfully— some would say arrogantly—above it all. He worked with some of the best students produced by graduate schools during the halcyon days of the 1960s and 1970s when social science was in bloom, and much of the work and writing of that era was inspired by his formidable presence
Through the course of his teaching and writing, Goffman carved out a space— "the bounded study of the interaction order"—as something that could be studied to great advantage on its own terms And these terms were extravagantly social If truth were to be found, Goffman was committed to a search "for the most elusive of truths—quotidian truths, the truths of our everyday lives, truths that reside not in us but in our social interactions" (Scheibe, 1987:502) It is Goffman's unprecedented interactional persistence that set him apart from most other social scientists, and enabled him to "carry on his life work, 'to combat the touching tendency to keep a part of the world safe from sociology' " (Goffman, 1961:152) Nowhere is this as clear as in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life where he directs "attention to a topic that is tacitly forbidden—the sanctity
The Dramaturgical Perspective of self-showing," where he notes that this sanctity resides not in the self at all, but is a product of highly fragile social understandings (Scheibe, 1987:502). Although he was a "sociological pluralist" (Lofland, 1984:19), using a variety of theoretical perspectives (symbolic interactionism, Simmelian formalism, Schutzian phenomenology, semiotic analysis, and Durkheimian functionalism, to mention only a few), his work was first and foremost a kind of field ethnology with deep anthropological roots. The anthropological connection can be seen by noting that his master's degree was in anthropology at the University of Chicago where he worked with the renowned W Lloyd Warner, not with the symbolic interactionists who were so prominent at that time and with whom Goffman is often linked The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was a version of his dissertation which was a field study called "Communications Conduct in an Island Community," that community being the Shetland Islands, a small crofting settlement off the coast of Scotland It is also of some note that his last years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he held an endowed chair, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
So for all of his theoretical acumen, Goffman was not essentially atheorist nor was he interested primarily in theoretical things—particularly "theory talk," a form of intellectual self-aggrandisement which he particularly despised. He was an empiricist, an observer, a producer of insights, and a conceptual iconoclast who never wandered very far from what was right in front of his eyes. He would entertain and utilize any theoretical concept that would help him advance insights into his subject matter:
I think that at present, if sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back to where it best applies, followed from there wherever it seems to lead, and pressed to disclose the rest of the family. Better, perhaps, different coats to clothe the children than a single, splendid tent in which they all shiver (Goffman, 1961:xii-xiv).
For Goffman, observation was first, theory was second He spent perhaps more time in the field than any prominent social scientist of our time—in the aforementioned Shetland Islands, in St Elizabeth's Hospital where he worked as a recreation attendant while collecting material for his vastly influential book Asylums, in Las Vegas where he worked in gambling casinos while writing an essay entitled "Where the Action is." Beyond those occasions there was a sense in which Goffman was always in the field no matter what he was doing or what he was working on As numerous Goffman stories attest, every encounter, whether it was a cocktail party or a presidential address was an occasion to see what was going on in terms of his general thesis that life is an interactionally produced theater-like product involving scenes, props, settings, and manifold possibilities for disaster. He was sensitive to "prop failures" and all of the other instances of performances going awry—accounts, apologies, and requests, "remedial interchanges," and mistakes at work. In short, he was curious about all of those occasions in which human beings experience "close brushes with life"
(Budel, 1966:48) He was interested in not what people were intending to do, but simply what they did and not "men and their moments, but moments and their men." In this sense he was always more of an anthropologist and a field researcher watching the habits of the natives than he was what most sociologists and psychologists have come to be and to expect of each other's work
The manner in which his observations were reported was also atypical of professional sociologizing. In an era of systematic theorizing and formal research reporting, Goffman employed and legitimated the time-honored essay as his expository style, a preference which diminished his work in the eyes of professional colleagues, but endeared him to students and to the public at large. This is not to say that Goffman's writings are unsystematic, for he conveyed rigor as well as insight. But in an essay:
.. . the author seeks ardently for a slippery truth, but makes no claim to having necessarily found it. It is an exploratory and essentially open form in which one may use data from anyone; friends, journalists, novelists, and social scientists alike. No one within ithas greater authority than any other. Finally, precisely because it is so personal, the essayist is free to develop his or her own style, to make jokes, to be whimsical, to digress, to employ both the tragic and comic modes; to use, that is, all the literary devices which the author of a scientific article can, at best, only smuggle in surreptitiously. Those who proclaim scientific truth must dress in sober apparel; essayists may wear whatever they choose (Strong, 1983:348).
So Goffman's writings persuade the reader far more than they prove any particular point (Glaser and Strauss in Lyman, 1973:360). This persuasiveness, if not seductiveness, is articulated with an appeal to obviousness, self-evidence, and reason "The dominant mood is descriptive and affirmative; Goffman is telling what is happening, not what he thinks is happening" (Craib, 1978:82) This persuasiveness is enhanced by Goffman's ability to engage the reader in his journey He is not condescending; he does not exclude himself from his observations He promotes the nonspecial character of his analysis Just look around, he seems to be saying, we all are in this together:
the reader is led into an 'identification in superiority' With Goffman we become privileged observers in a special way: we see through tricks, acts, illusions of all sorts With Goffman, the reader is no fool The reader becomes an "insider," his status is confirmed by the systematic use of argot and suspicion The alliance is confirmed when the suspicion is extended by Goffman to himself, and the alliance is a knowing one in which both Goffman and the reader admit to the possibility that Goffman might be fooling the reader (Craib, 1978:81-82)
Nor was Goffman an ideologue and this sometimes infuriated the ideological climate in which so much scholarship takes place these days While some kind of ideology is implied in every piece of writing or position taken, Goffman was contemputous of those who tried to make ideology out of everything In an oftquoted passage in Frame Analysis, for example, he notes:
Of course, it can be argued that to focus on the nature of personal experiencing—with the implication this can have for giving equally serious consideration to all matters that might momentarily concern the individual—is itself a standpoint with marked political implications, and that these are conservative ones. The analysis developed does not catch at the differences between the advantaged and disadvantaged classes and can be said to direct attention away from such matters. I think that is true. I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And Ido not intend here to provide a lullaby, but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people snore (Goffman, 1974:13-14).
Goffman was interested in what was going on, not in changing it to fit some preordained political agenda Ideologically he was hard to fathom because he was a pair of eyes, not apair of hands And yet, if one accepts the facile political distinction between being a spectator on the sidelines vs being a player in the game, it should be pointed out that his books Asylums and Stigma stimulated a massive revision of the way we look at institutions which supposedly "care" for the deviants that social life produces as though on an assembly line, and arguably effected more changes in those worlds than all of the political lobbying in the world could have.
Yet the Byzantine machinations of the profession were something that Erving Goffman mastered. He knew how to present himself in a way that maximized interest in his work, and he had no peer when it came to academic gamesmanship. The masks and cons of his writings were also a part of his persona. His books were kaleidoscopes which gave a different view every time they were turned. Randall Collins, for example, notes that Goffman's talent was that he could write in layers:
The outer layer of each book gave one message; the inner content told another. Goffman was good at titles: Asylums, Stigma, Gender Advertisements, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. On the surface, if one did not read his books carefully, but only picked them up and looked at the cover, it appeared that the was making one expose after another. The inner content was, of course, something else. Not only did he defend society against what he considered to be the romanticized claim of the self; in Gender Advertisements, a book which feminists thought was a feminist book, he actually wrote a defense of the traditional, functionally-justified, male-dominant sex roles. In Frame Analysis Goffman appears to be taking upthe multiple-reality themes of the hippies, and extending the cognitive radicalism of Garfinkel's ethnomethodologists. On the contrary, Frame Analysis is really an attack on Schutz and Garfinkel, and a claim that although there are multiple reflexive frames in social life, nevertheless there is no infinite regress but only a limited number of such frames. Social life is complicated, Goffman asserts, but it nevertheless is functionally manageable; it does not recede into infinity, and though it can be changed it is highly resistant to being over overthrown (Collins, 1986:108).
From the initial quotation of the philosopher Santayana on the frontispiece of his first book, Goffman seemed to know that his work was a challenge to conventional academic studies of social life:
Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, atonce faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts: yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation" (Santayana, 1922:131-32).
As it turned out there were a host of critics who seemed angry with "images for not being things and words for not being feelings." For instance, Martindale dismissed both Goffman and his "view of civilization as largely an everchanging panorama of fabrication in which the most basic stratification is between the deceivers and the deceived and the self in the end always remains .. . an amoral merchant of morality ever intent on the pillage of others or the avoidance of their pillage of him. . . ."In Martindale's view Goffman "transformed paranoia and schizophrenia into the norms of social life" (Martindale, 1981:364) Others scored him for his haphazard and often literary methodology, questioned his "scientific" credentials, and sniffed that he was "the waste of a good novelist" (Time, April 10, 1972, p 47) But as we mentioned before, he remained above the storms of controversy (perhaps even reveling in and, by his aloof stance, actually encouraging them) and simply kept working, cranking out a vast array of fascinating books and articles
Eventually, the discipline came around, perhaps because, as one critic reluctantly conceded, he was "the only genius we've got." He was elected President of the American Sociological Association, and his last published work was his presidential address "The Interaction Order" which he was scheduled to deliver but could not because of the illness which eventually took his life In his last years he seemed to transform himself from the enfant terrible who was constantly putting down others for the masks and pretentions they wore, to a mature, responsible senior member of a profession which needed his assistance in shaping an agenda for the future (Arlene Daniels, Memorial Panel on Erving Goffman, Midwest Sociological Association, Kansas City, MO, April, 1984).
But beyond his formidable scholarship, his engaging style of writing, and his ability to attract a large audience to his work, Goffman's importance to the dramaturgical vision of social life perhaps lies most in his attitude. On the one hand, there was his attitude toward the subjects of his observation and analysis While his depiction of social life was often cynical (Maclntyre, 1971), and seemed to dwell on "the potential horror in a society where the appearance of civility is just that" (Williams, 1986:349), ironically Goffman seemed always optimistic about the human capacity to get through it all and to make a continuously liveable life, even if that life was lived in the back ward of a mental hospital Sure life is hard work, is disappointing, is frustrating, but you can handle it, he seemed to be saying Rather than yielding to despair in the face of the everyday task of establishing and maintaining a life, Goffman emphasized
resourcefulness and therefore hope In this, he echoed the words of George Bernard Shaw:
'People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are I don't believe in circumstances The people who get on in this world are the people who get upand look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them' (Shaw, from the play Mrs. Warren's Profession as quoted in Posner, 1978:76)
In Goffman's thinking, everyone had the capability of making some difference, establishing some self, even in those total institutions that would seem to prohibit any but a shabbily clad, institutionally mandated version of it And despite the fuss that has been made about Goffman's travels into the seamy underworld of everyday life, a world inhabited by spys, con-artists, grifters, perverts, and deviants, for the most part he insisted that other people were good for you, were willing to help you along, if only because they wanted you to help them as well
So what makes Goffman's attitude so beguiling and his tone so seemingly bizarre:
..
. is the combination of this emphasis on the fragility of social life and the tenuousness of our definitions of situations and self, with a general air of complete confidence. He does not seem worried about the dangers;on the contrary, he sounds completely assured and confident. All his concern with the fragility of social relationships and the insubstantiality of our contact with reality is embodied in a text which exudes confidence and certainty. Goffman has a sure sense of self and reality, he does not sound lost (Krielkamp, 1976:120-21).
He subtly, but clearly, admonishes his readers that they need not be, either. On the other hand, there was the attitude of Goffman, the serious and conscientious scholar, who nevertheless did not act like he believed that any of the great debates of scholarship should be taken very seriously. In fact, he "systematically refused to take part in the inter-galactic paradigm-mongering which conventionally passes for really serious sociology" (Strong, 1983:347). He was self-effacing about the limitations of his own work and liked to pull the rug out from under those who tried to deify him. John Lofland reports that Goffman once characterized himself and others who did his kind of work as just "elegant bullshitters," and that on another occasion he replied to a student who suggested that the dignity and integrity of the self are moral concerns that permeate his work by saying: "I only put in all that self stuff because people like to read about it" (Lofland, 1984:21) Conversely, he was generally salutatory toward the work of others, at least that which was not pompous, pretentious, and overly impressed with itself He was generous in his footnotes, often in funny and self-deprecating ways, praising and recognizing students, colleagues, and scholars who had helped along the way But he loved to poke holes in academic pretentiousness of all kinds, too—from the Messianic claims of some kinds of applied sociology to the overblown egos of numerous scholars and professors who crossed his path He could be witheringly sarcastic, but such savagery was,
especially in his later years, usually reserved for the mandarins of the profession who richly deserved it His own work was full of qualifications, hedges, and strange twists and turns Like Simmel, the 19th century formalist to whom Goffman bears some resemblance, what he would give the reader with one hand he would take away with the other For example, in the last two pages of Presentation of Self, after one of the most remarkable renderings of the implications of the theatrical metaphor, Goffman (1959) turns the tables by admitting that:
. . . this attempt to press a mere analogy so far was in part a rhetoric and a maneuver. The claim that all the world's a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation, knowing that atany time they will easily be able to demonstrate to themselves that it is not to be taken too seriously (p. 254).
This passage is typical of Goffman's style—draw the reader in and then tell him that in a sense he was only fooling All of life, including (and perhaps especially) academic versions of it, is a form of play-acting, to be given only so much of its due; to be played seriously, but without declarations of faith to a dubious ultimate truth
So Goffman was a strange sort of dramaturgist, if a dramaturgist at all. A man who used the language of dramaturgy, but thought it more a guide to thinking than a theory; never a mirror of reality or an hypothesis to be tested by the methodological arsenals of social science, but a device to elucidate what was in the front of his eyes, and he used his observations to inform and sometimes even to entertain his readers For as we have noted, Goffman's work can be read in a wide variety of ways, and can be seen as illustrative of various forms of theoretical persuasion Moreover, he himself focused on slightly different versions of essentially the same theme, and therefore seems to have gone through various phases in his work But no one can be sure, because, as Collins has pointed out, he was so adept at burying his intellectual tracks (Collins, 1986:110-111) As in all things, he seemed more interested in going straight to what he thought was the heart of an empirical matter than he was in following some theoretical trail hacked out by someone else
In the spirit of Antonin Artaud's call for "No More Masterpieces" on the grounds that they limit and stifle rather than expand our thinking, we will not call him, then, a "dramaturgist." If others do, it is only because his scholarship follows a more-or-less consistent conceptual and empirical, if not theoretical, theme: life is a drama-like enterprise involving continuous forms of expression and impression If it seems that he used the dramaturgical principle on some occasions and abandoned it on others, it is only because the organizing focus of the drama was a kind of root metaphor from which he was then free to explore a wide range of theoretical and empirical territory Frame Analysis, as Goffman indicates at the beginning of the book, is about the secondary phenomenological question of how experience arises—not reality, but how something can be
framed in such a way that it will seem to be real His last book, Forms of Talk seems very close to a semiotic analysis, but as always, not really Each time he reflected on the theoretical meaning of his work, he saw difficulties at least insofar as any given theory spoke directly to his fundamental substantive theme—the consequences of people being expressive creatures who live in a world of meaning.
Goffman is best seen as a series of empirical themes with a lot of theoretical points buried in the margins. He was dramaturgical to be sure, but he was also interactional, semiotical, functional, and phenomenological. Yet none of these identities hold his work, and that is why he was a kind of theoretical Rorschach Test—you could see in him almost any theory of your choice. He was not really a dramaturgist, because he was not really committed to any perspective at all. But he was often dramaturgical, and he articulated and in some ways even popularized what he called at times The Theatrical Frame, and that is why he is important to an understanding of this way of thinking. He is an enigma to intellectual classifiers because theory, method, ideology, and all of the other accouterments of social science, seemed to Goffman mere means to ends rather than ends in themselves He had his eyes on social life much more than on theory or method or social science, so his characteristic attitude when subjected to the ubiquitous grillings about those things was typical of his attitude generally: "my methods have their problems, but so do yours Method isn't social science—so let's get on with the real business at hand," he seemed to be saying From the margins of his work one could find where he stood on these matters For example, in the preface to Relations in Public he says in defense of his own approach:
the method that is often resorted to here—unsystematic, naturalistic observation—has very serious limitations I claim as a defense that the traditional research designs thus far employed have considerable limitations of their own Concepts are devised on the run in order to get on with setting things up so that trials can be performed and the effects of controlled variation of some kind or other measured, the science of which is assured by the use of lab coats and government money A sort of sympathetic magic seems to be involved, the assumption being that if you go through the motions attributable to science, then science will result But it hasn't Understanding of ordinary behavior has not accumulated; distance has (Goffman, 1971:xv-xvi)
On the one occasion in which he did respond to criticism of his work, it is significant that he did so because the criticism was of the sort that tried to classify his work as an expression of a certain type of theory. Two critics saw his work as a form of "structuralism," a theoretical sin in their view on a par with child molestation. His response was bitingly vintage Goffman and demonstrated his disdain for "scholasticism," a glib alternative to the difficult empirical work he believed had to be done if we are ever to understand the complex world around us. He attacked the pair for their clumsy attempt at theoretical compartmentalizing in the following terms:
One proclaims one's membership in some named perspective, gives pious mention to its central texts, and announces that the writer under review is all off by virtue of failing to qualify for membership. A case of guilt by pigeonholing. As if a writer's work is a unitary thing and can be all bad because he or she does not apparently subscribe to a particular doctrine, which doctrine, if subscribed to, would somehow make writings good. This vested interest in treating an individual's diverse efforts as a succinctly characterizable corpus supports a crude fallacy. That at any current moment in his working life, the true nature and purpose of his doings can be unmasked, reconstituting how they are to be correctly understood, and predicting what can only come of them hereafter (Goffman, 1981:61).
These kinds of comments and especially the manner in which they were expressed, suggest Goffman's uniqueness in an arena where theory and method are often given lip service as mere means, but in fact are more commonly treated as sacramental ends in themselves.
So when all is said and done, it may well be that the real meaning of life as theater is to be found in this dramaturgical attitude itself: the distance we are able to put between ourselves and the roles we play, and the ease with which we appropriate whatever is available to assist us in the task of creating a self that is not there until it is performed And as the foregoing shows, Goffman's very life was a demonstration of such an exercise—his marginality in his own profession, his writing in layers, his mixed theoretical messages, his empirical eyes, and his desire to mask and mystify while giving the reader the sense that he now has the inside dope. Like the self he described in his work, Goffman was himself a layered onion with a series of surfaces rather than an artichoke with a core to be discovered.
To get as close as we can to what people are doing and to distance ourselves as far as we can from our own vested interests in legitimizing our roles as social observers seems to be the moral of the Goffman story. Let us take our concerns with social interaction, but not ourselves, seriously. And while we may all be just "elegant bullshitters," there is a serious import to our work:
For myself, I believe that human social life is ours to study naturalistically, sub specie aeternitatis. From the perspective of the physical and biological sciences, human social life is only a small irregular scab on the face of nature, not particularly amenable to deep systematic analysis And so it is But it's ours. With a few exceptions, only students in our century have managed to hold it steadily in view this way, without piety or the necessity to treat traditional issues I'm not one to think that so far our claims can be based on magnificent accomplishment Indeed, I've heard it said that we should be glad to trade what we've so far produced for afew really good conceptual distinctions and acold beer But there's nothing in the world we should trade for what we do have The bent to sustain in regard to all elements of social life a spirit of unfettered, unsponsored inquiry, and the wisdom not to look elsewhere but ourselves and our discipline for this mandate This is our inheritance and that so far is what we have to bequeath If one must have a warrant addressed to social needs, let it be for unsponsored analysis of the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authority—priests, psychiatrists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders, parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all the other well-placed persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality (Goffman, 1983b:17)
And, finally, in some of the last words he ever wrote:
Whatever our substantive focus and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do is to keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction (Goffman, 1983b:2)
In our view, it is this "Goffmanesque" attitude toward social psychological work that may be, in the last analysis, the most important legacy he left to an understanding of what it means to see the world dramaturgically.
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Ils se dressaient grotesquement sur les chevilles
Et tentaient de leurs mains sans ongles de frapper,
Ou rampant sur le ventre ainsi que des chenilles
Ils se pressaient avec effort pour s’étouffer.
Mais la Parque toujours touchait les petits êtres
Et tranquille marchait vers le soleil couchant
Et toujours par milliers ceux qui venaient de naître
Affluaient à ses pieds comme l’herbe des champs.
Et je lui dis: «Ceci n’est qu’ortie et qu’ivraie:
Dans cet endroit maudit pourquoi porter tes pas
Puisque l’enfance humaine est une grande plaie
Qui coule et s’agrandit et ne guérira pas?»
Et la déesse alors au fond de la vallée
S’arrêtant, me montra dans un entassement
Effroyable, au milieu des formes emmêlées,
Un visage, rien qu’un, mais sensible et charmant...
Et le soleil mourant sur cette maladie
De la terre éclaira dans l’humus qui poussait
Un œil déjà bleuté par la naissante vie,
Un tremblotant éclat d’âme qui paraissait.
Et la Parque me dit: «Tout le mal de la terre
Est payé par un seul, s’il est vraiment humain.»
Et je la vis partir tranquille et solitaire
Parmi le flot montant des monstres enfantins.
LA RÉGION DES ÉTANGS
J’atteignis vers le soir la plaine des étangs.
Un vent glacé soufflait parmi les vastitudes, Mes pieds s’enchevêtraient aux herbages flottants.
J’allais vite et j’étais ivre de solitude.
De longs roseaux vivants cherchaient à me saisir. Des plantes se collaient avec leurs fleurs gluantes.
Vers moi de toutes parts comme un vaste soupir
Montait la fade odeur des choses croupissantes.
Un souffle gras sortait de ces stagnations, Une buée épaisse, animée, une haleine Qui semblait le ferment des putréfactions Millénaires, dormant sous ces mares malsaines.
Et j’entendis, venant d’en bas, parler la voix Et je vis émerger la face aux gros yeux glauques:
«L’escalier spongieux, dit-elle, est près de toi.
Descends parmi la vase et les eaux équivoques.
«Viens dormir avec nous au fond des lits tourbeux
Dans l’émanation des poisons délétères. Viens rejoindre ce soir les hommes sans cheveux Qui sont jusqu’à mi-corps enfoncés dans la terre.
«Avec les serpents d’eaux, les vers et les têtards Tu joueras dans les végétaux des marécages, Oubliant parmi les parfums des nénufars Qu’il est un ciel immense où passent les nuages.
«Tu nous seras pareil, sans espoir, sans amour, Tu connaîtras, vautré dans la vase éternelle, Le bonheur de l’aveugle et l’ivresse du sourd Et tu ne sauras plus les choses qui sont belles.»
Alors je vis des bras tendus pour me saisir
Et des milliers de blancs visages apathiques.
Et le peuple de ceux qui n’ont plus de désir
Sortait de l’eau couvert de plantes aquatiques.
Et j’avais déjà mis le pied sur l’escalier
Qui plongeait en tournant dans une boue épaisse,
Je voyais des palais informes, des piliers
Parmi les joncs sans sève et les herbes sans sexe,
Lorsqu’un grand vent passant à travers les marais
Me souffla des odeurs de forêts aux narines
Et je m’enfuis vers l’horizon où je voyais
Des sapins s’accrochant au ciel sur des collines...