Worlds of Talk

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Conversation

Martin Malone

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745667638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about how we present our selves in everyday talk and interaction. Selves and conversations are skilful accomplishments requiring trust, dependency, and co-ordination. They are produced by multiple partners co-operating in the production of social events. The self is a 'performed character' - a 'dramatic effect' in Goffman's terms - which results from shaping our behavior to create a desired impression. Talk is both the means and the product of such events. Selves live in worlds that talk creates.

Using the methods of conversation analysis, this book seeks to discover how selves are created and transformed in everyday talk. It examines how pronouns are used to create interactional boundaries, the strategic manipulation of interactional support, talk in dealing with conflict, and stylistic differences associated with gender. Theoretical discussion is combined with fine-grained analysis of ordinary conversations.

The book will be of particular interest to students and professionals in sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

1

The Interaction Order and the Self

If indeed “each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations” (Tannen, 1990, p. 13), then it is in the flowing, reciprocal exchange of conversation that the self becomes real. Without such talk, the self would be inconceivable, because it would lack the symbolic medium necessary for self-presentation.

The self is immanently social: an interactional achievement, a “performed character,” a “dramatic effect” (Goffman, 1959, pp. 252–3) that is the result of crafting our behavior so that it makes sense to others. Conversations and selves are both interactional accomplishments requiring trust, dependency, and coordination. They are produced by multiple partners cooperating in the production of social events. Talk is both the machinery and the product of such events. Selves live in the worlds that talk creates.

Talk is the principal way for others to know “who” we are. This book applies Erving Goffman’s insights about the interaction order to our self-presentations in talk.

SELF-PRESENTATION AND TALK

Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and philosophers all devote attention to the nature of the self, the social actor who produces thought, emotions, rational and irrational actions, language, and society. What the self is and does, how it comes about, and its relation to other selves and the society around it are questions basic to all these disciplines. Like most important questions today, their study is not and cannot be confined to a single discipline. Understanding the self requires the integration of many lines of inquiry.

One of sociology’s most serious omissions in its claim to be a “science of society” is the scant attention it has traditionally given to spoken interaction.¹ Linguistics has been a little better at recognizing the reciprocal problem – that the complex code it studies is in fact used by people in social situations to achieve real practical goals. However, most mainstream modern linguistics (with the exception of pragmatics) has more in common with mathematics and logic than with any study of how humans communicate.

One would expect that these two fields would tell us about how people communicate with each other in everyday life. But traditional approaches have resulted in a lack of interest in both the theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. Neither traditionally trained sociologists nor linguists are generally prepared to deal with the complexity of conversation, with its multiple meanings, taken-for-granted presuppositions, situational rootedness, and the many other minutiae of interaction which conversation researchers have described over the last 30 years.

One also searches in vain in the psychological literature on the self for a sophisticated treatment of conversation in self-presentation. Two recent works in which one would expect sympathetic treatment of these topics (Berkowitz, 1988; Gergen, 1991) are nearly devoid of interest in conversation. Carl Backman (in the Berkowitz volume) notes the absence of concern with conversation and its dismissal from studies of friendship and courtship, where one might assume that talk played a significant role (pp. 253–4). Talk and conversation are simply nontopics for Gergens study of “identity in contemporary life” (1991).

Contemporary philosophy provides us with useful approaches to the problem, but its own biases toward written as opposed to spoken discourse create a peculiarly distorted picture of the nature of the self. Whether we turn to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (1981), Taylor’s moral philosophy (1989), or Kerby’s semiotic/narrative approach (1991), we find the same underlying assumption that the self is like a written text, worked over and composed like a narrative. Their preference is for language not talk. They ignore the rough-and-tumble of conversation for the more orderly confines of the text. Their work is stimulating and provoking but is not about spoken interaction, the place where selves are created, developed, and reshaped on a daily basis.

The study of conversation stands at an exciting threshold of discovering the connections between informal talk and the meaning of the worlds it creates. It is at this juncture that the reciprocal creation of society and self takes place. But crossing that threshold requires combining insights from a number of disciplines. We are ready to begin to understand how conversational talk constructs a social self. The work must be interdisciplinary. As Geertz has said, the most important, fruitful, and exciting work today is going on between disciplines, not within them (1983).

Theoretical bases

Four sets of related ideas provide the intellectual foundations for this study. Broadly, they come from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, symbolic interactionism, and semiotics.

1 Actions are designed for recipients The first assumption, from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, is that social actions are designed to “make sense,” to be “accountable,” to those who are their intended recipients. The meaning of actions is not transparent. Actions must be constructed and performed in such a way that a particular intention is conveyed, based on the actor’s knowledge of “shared background expectancies” (Rawls, 1989a, p. 16).

2 Talk is multi-functional The second assumption, from sociolinguistics, as well as speech-act theory, is that talk is multi-functional. Because utterances refer not only to an external world, but also to the person who makes those utterances, talk is always self-referential (cf. Ricoeur, 1981).

3 Self-presentation is semiotic The third assumption, from semiotics and also from symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology, is that the self should be understood from a semiotic perspective as an “assemblage of signs” (Perinbanayagam, 1991, p. 12). Because talk is always self-referential and, as such, is metonymic, hearers interpret utterances as signs which stand for a larger self. Similarly Goffman recognizes that the “available repertoire” of “culturally standard displays” used in face-to-face interaction (whether gestures, postures, facial movements, or utterances) is composed of “sign vehicles fabricated from the depictive materials at hand” that actors use to create their presentations (1983b, p. 11).

4 The self is the product of a moral order The fourth assumption is basic to both Goffman and ethnomethodology and is also influenced by the work of Charles Taylor (1989). For Goffman, the sacred nature of the self, the respect for the self-presentations of others, the seriousness of presenting and protecting one’s own face, and a commitment to the “involvement obligations” of interaction (1959, 1967) point to interaction as a moral order. For Garfinkel, social life is based on a belief that others are behaving toward us sensibly (accountably) and with goodwill. Social life works not because people follow normative rules, but rather because they follow constitutive rules which make sense of what is going on. Breaches of these rules do not result in chaos (or “anomie”), but rather in insult and anger (1963). For Taylor, “selfhood and morality turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes” (1989, p. 3). Identity is meaningless without connection, without an orientation in a “moral space” (ibid., p. 28) composed of questions about and attachments to valued goods.

These assumptions lead to a theoretical perspective in which it is understood that social actions are designed to make sense to those who participate in them. Self-presentation takes place in encounters, situations of co–presence in which “persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived” (Goffman, 1963a, p. 17). It is these face-to-face interactions that structure our behavior and our need to present our selves. Thus social actors are aware of the need to organize their actions so that they are recognizable tokens of the meanings they intend to convey or the actions they intend to pursue. They are “designed for the recipient,” as Sacks said (1992, vol. 2, p. 230).

Mutual understanding results from a sensitivity to the necessity of making sense to others. Shared assumptions about sense-making lead to an exquisite sensitivity to the self-referential nature of talk. We are always aware that what we say tells as much about us as it does about the external world. For that reason, conversational talk always provides metaphorical information about the self. It offers others signs of who we are. Interactionist approaches to social analysis must be sensitive to this collaborative construction of face-to-face encounters, to the mutuality of conversation; to what Boden calls “the consequentiality of sequence” (1990, p. 254). For both Goffman and Garfinkel, it is this mutuality, this interdependence, that make interaction moral. This morality is not the result of external social organizational features, of norms, or values, or folkways. It is a morality intrinsic to interaction that is constitutive of interaction. Because interaction is meaningful, action is moral, and the self is of necessity a moral creature.

ERVING GOFFMAN AND THE INTERACTION ORDER

Over a period of nearly 30 years, from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the work of Erving Goffman explicated the role of a third order in social life, neither institutional nor individual – what he named “the interaction order” (1983b).² From his earliest to his final writing, Goffman sought to describe how the interactional demands of situations are the primary source of structure for the social self. Interactional constraints are the product not of social structure, but rather of the needs of self-presentation. They are not the products of such standard sociological forces as race, gender, class, or age. Instead, they are cross-situational demands whose ends are “the creation and maintenance of self and meaning” (Anne Warfield Rawls, 1987, p. 143).

Rawls shows how the work of Erving Goffman, the ethnomethodologists, and conversation analysts converge on the description of “an interaction order sui generis which derives its order from constraints imposed by the needs of a presentational self rather than a social structure” (ibid., p. 136). Their work emphasizes the locally produced nature of the demands of the interaction order: that is, that interaction must satisfy self-presentational demands, while being “constrained by, but not ordered by, institutional frameworks” (Rawls, 1989b, p. 147).

In one of his earliest essays, “On face-work” (1967, but first published in 1955), Goffman establishes how the interaction order constitutes face-to-face behavior. He defines “face” as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (p. 5). Face is an interactive concept, dependent on the back-and-forth play of actor and audience. In this essay, Goffman describes the interaction order as a set of expectations so designed that “the person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of other participants” (p. 11). Face-to-face interaction is then dependent on a “reciprocity of perspectives” (Schutz, 1970) between interactants, in which each respects the self-presentation of the other in expectation of being accorded the same respect.

This simple reciprocity profoundly structures our everyday dealings, by creating an order based on the demands of self-presentation, not social institutions. The threats which might upset this order, such as revelations of hidden, “stigmatized” information (Goffman, 1963b) or the loss of this respect in “total institutions” such as prisons and insane asylums (Goffman, 1961a), were insightfully scrutinized by Goffman for what they said about normal interactions.

In his introduction to the essays collected in Interaction Ritual, Goffman claims that “the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another (1967, p. 2). The interaction order is “the behavioral order found in all peopled places, whether public, semi-public, or private, and whether under the auspices of an organized social occasion or the flatter constraints of merely a routinized social setting” (ibid.).

In an earlier description of the interaction order, he said that it provided regulation, “the kind that governs a person’s handling of himself and others during, and by virtue of, his immediate physical presence among them” (1963a, p. 8).³ It is like a set of traffic rules, which do not specify where people are going, only how they must treat each other while they are getting there.

Kendon points out that Goffman was at pains in the introductions to his early works to specify that the study of the interaction order was not to be confused with the study of small groups (1961b), the study of psychology (1967), or the study of communication (1969) (Kendon, 1988, pp. 15–17). The interaction order was to be seen as “a separate branch of sociology” (Kendon, 1988, p. 14), one which had not been adequately studied up until this time.

Perhaps the best account of the interaction order can be gleaned from Goffman’s presidential address to the American Sociological Association (1983b), in which he lays out its characteristics, its basic substantive units, and its relations to and differences from the institutional order and social organization. Goffman lists ten characteristics of the interaction order, which can be seen as the essence of face-to-face interaction. First, interaction is relatively circumscribed in time and space (p. 3). Second, the interaction order results from “certain universal preconditions of social life,” such as the need to share equipment, or space, or “access routes” “jointly, adjacently, or sequentially” (ibid.).

Third, is the “promissory or evidential character” (ibid.) of social life. This is what Mannheim (1971) and Garfinkel (1967) refer to as the documentarity of interaction. People treat face-to-face behavior as meaningful and read meanings into both our intended and unintended movements, and we know this and act accordingly. Thus behavior is semiotic; it is a sign vehicle for social meanings and is inevitably multi-functional and polysemic.

Fourth, face-to-face interaction involves a “joint focus of attention,” and hence the “sustained intimate coordination of action” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 3) (see esp. Goffman, 1967). This observation is basic to both the symbolic interactionist concern with how people fit “their respective lines of action to one another” (Blumer, 1969, p. 84), and the conversation-analytic premise that talk is a locally produced sequential accomplishment (Sacks et al., 1974).

Fifth, face-to-face interaction means that people characterize each other both categorically, as members of “one or more social categories,” and individually, in “a uniquely distinguishing identity” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 3). People respond to others in complex ways that may simultaneously reflect their uniqueness and their shared identities.

Sixth, interaction’s spatial dimension means that there are territorial effects – what Goffman calls “personal territory contingencies” (ibid., p. 4) having to do with our vulnerability to both physical and psychic assault, as well as with our ability to inflict such damage. These contingencies mean that all interaction is entered into with an awareness of risks and potentialities in terms of treatment of and by others (see esp. Goffman, 1971, pp. 28–61).

This leads to a seventh characteristic, which is that potentially threatening behaviors are part of “a fundamental duality of use” of behaviors, such that vulnerabilities may be proffered as marks of courtesy or affection (Goffman, 1983b, p. 4). This essentially ethological observation is consistent with our knowledge of dominance and submission behaviors in many species. Human manifestations of deference are ritual resources based on the communicative potential of these behaviors (see esp. Goffman, 1967). This is part of the basis of my emphasis on the multi-functionality and polysemy of conversational talk.

Eighth, these territorial contingencies require a set of “techniques of social management” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 4), in which bodily displays are enacted and read as if part of a “natural theater.” Once again, behavior is treated as meaningful and so must be managed in terms of its “recipient design” features (Sacks et al., 1974).

Goffman’s last two points recognize that extra-situational factors must also be considered in interaction. Goffman introduces the notion of “standing behavior patterns” (1983b, p. 4) to remind us that people bring certain expectations with them to a situation. Finally, he also recognizes that individuals have unique biographies “of prior dealings with the other participants” and a “vast array of cultural assumptions” (ibid.) that they bring to any interactional setting. While Schegloff (1987b) wisely warns that we cannot presume the relevance of contextual features, such as race or gender, if there is not some conversational warrant for so doing, we can at least presume that people come to interaction with a store of experience and assumptions.

These characteristics of face-to-face interaction are a set of fundamental observations on the nature of our everyday dealings with each other. Taken together, they define an order of experience that is constitutive of social life. It is located in time and place, treated as meaningful but potentially (and of course, usefully) ambiguous and threatening, and semi-permeable to external influences. These characteristics are responsible for the orderliness of this order. Most significantly, they are products of social encounters, not of some larger social structural forces.

Goffman defines five “basic substantive units” that comprise the order. His units provide a set of concepts moving from smallest to largest, including actors and events. First are people, who are either “singles” or “withs” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 6) (see esp. Goffman, 1971, pp. 3–27). These are “self-contained units for the purposes of participation in the flow of pedestrian social life” (1983b, p. 6). Second is “contact,” “any occasion when an individual comes into another’s response presence” (ibid.). Third are the encounters “in which persons come together into a small physical circle as ratified participants in a consciously shared, clearly interdependent undertaking” (ibid., p. 7). These may be conversations, card games, service transactions, and so forth (see esp. Goffman, 1964).

Fourth is the “platform format, … in which an activity is set before an audience” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 7). The key feature of this encounter is that there is an audience whose job it is to observe, not to interact. Finally, Goffman calls the largest of interactive events “celebrative social occasions … the foregathering of individuals admitted on a controlled basis, the whole occurring under the a...