Life as Theater

A Dramaturgical Sourcebook

Dennis Brissett, Charles Edgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351508681
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Life as Theater is about understanding people and how the dramaturgical way of thinking helps or hinders such understanding. A volume that has deservedly attained the status of a landmark work, this was the first book to explore systematically the material and subject matter of social psychology from the dramaturgical viewpoint. It has been widely used and quoted, and has sparked ferment and debate in fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, speech communication, and formal theater studies.Life as Theater is organized around five substantive issues in social psychology: Social Relationships as Drama; The Dramaturgical Self; Motivation and Drama; Organizational Dramas; and Political Dramas. This classic text was revised and updated for a second edition in 1990, and includes approximately 66 percent new materials, all featuring individual introductions that provide the dramaturgical perspective and reflect the most learned thinking and work being done within this point of view. This book's sophistication will appeal to the scholar, and its clarity and conciseness to the student. Like its predecessor, it is designed to serve as a primary text or supplementary reader in classes. This new paperback edition includes an introduction by Robert A. Stebbins that explains why, even fifteen years after its publication,Life as Theater remains the best single sourcebook on the dramaturgic perspective as applied in the social sciences.

Part I

THE DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVE

“Oh Dear, … you keep waiting for the real thing, but this is all there is.”

Allen Wheelis
The lllusionless Man and the Visionary Maid

Since the early 1970s dramaturgy has become a most ubiquitous form of scholarship. Dramaturgical perspectives have been advanced by scholars in such diverse disciplines as anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, communications, formal theater studies, and the like. While much of the output in dramaturgical thinking has been either about or inspired by the work of Erving Goffman, there have been some notable efforts, for example, by Lyman and Scott, 1975; Combs and Mansfield, 1976; Manning, 1977; Harre, 1979; Gronbeck, 1980; Perinbanayagam, 1985; Hare, 1985, Cochran, 1986; and Hare and Blumberg, 1988, to extend, elaborate, and make a case for dramaturgy as a distinctive model, and in some cases a theory, of human behavior.

As a result, the literature of dramaturgy is replete with arguments about its metaphysics, epistemology, methodology, applicability, formal properties, origins, and relationship to other forms of thought. Accompanying these exercises has been interminable bickering about what the Godfather of Dramaturgy, Erving Goffman, said, meant, accomplished, or failed to accomplish. Within this complicated arena of mixed agenda, it is therefore with some trepidation that we advance our own effort at dramaturgical understanding. We are guided only by the Oxford dictionary’s tautological characterization of dramaturgical analysis as ⁴’to propound … a few dramaturgical definitions.” That our proposals will be chiefly social-psychological stems from our conviction that the dramaturgical insight emerges most forcefully in the face-to-face encounters between human beings. Though its applicability may be much broader, both its origin and its continuing salience reside primarily in human interaction.

The Dramaturgical Principle

The most straightforward definition of dramaturgy is that it is the study of how human beings accomplish meaning in their lives. Like other forms of interpretive explanation, it focuses on “connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants” (Geertz, 1983:34). Meaning in the dramaturgical sense emerges out of a behavioral consensus between human beings. It is a consequence (not an antecedent) of at least two persons behaving in the same, or similar, ways to people and objects in their environment. Meaning has two basic elements. On the one hand, it is a behavioral outcome of human activity (the result of what people do). On the other, it is the defining characteristic of what has been called the “social act” (Mead, 1934):

Meaning is thus not to be conceived fundamentally as a state of consciousness or as a set of organized relations existing or subsisting mentally outside the field of experience into which they enter; on the contrary, it should be conceived objectively as having its existence entirely within the field itself. The response of one organism to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of that gesture (p. 78).

It is, then, with “social acts” and emergent meanings that Dramaturgy is interested. Its world view (Pepper, 1942) is neither “organicism,” a concern with understanding parts within wholes, nor “mechanism,” a concern with understanding the forces that move human behavior. Rather its frame of reference is contextualism or pragmatism—a concern for historical events:

The root metaphor for contextualism is the historical event. Not necessarily an event in the past, the event is alive and in the present. In this sense, history is an attempt to represent events, to bring them to life again. The historic event, the event in actuality is the dynamic, dramatic, act …

The imagery called out by the historical event metaphor is that of an ongoing texture of multiply(sic) elaborated episodes, each leading to others, each being influenced by collateral episodes, and by the efforts of multiple actors who perform actions … (Sarbin, 1977:6,14).

What is crucial to the dramaturgical vision of social life is that meaning is not a bequest from culture, socialization, or institutional arrangements, nor the realization of either psychological or biological potential. Rather, meaning is a continually problematic accomplishment of human interaction and it is fraught with change, novelty, and ambiguity. As “William James once argued … , each step [that persons or collectivities] make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed” (Sarbin, 1977:38). Meaning then is established, not reflected in the ongoing process of association with other people and as W.H. Auden reminds us, we must “learn to think of societies as continually flowing, as a ‘dangerous’ tide … that never stops or dies … and held one moment burns the hand” (Turner, 1974:37, quoted in Sarbin, 1977).

So, according to the dramaturgists, meaning is a behavioral, socially emergent, problematic, variable, and in fact arbitrary, concoction of human interaction. “The emergence of meaning (is) a completely tentative and contingent phenomenon” (Peribanayagam, 1985:26). Every meaning that is made could have been made otherwise. At the same time, to be social is to be meaningful. In fact, our very being resides in our meaningful relationships with other people’s our doings constitute our being.

It is in the study of how humans accomplish meaningful lives that the dramaturgical principle becomes most obvious. Not what people do nor what they intend to do, nor even why they do it, but how they do it, is the dramaturgical curiosity. Following Kenneth Burke’s (1965) suggestion that a proper understanding of human behavior must focus on action, dramaturgy emphasizes the expressive/impressive dimension of human activity. The fundamental principle of dramaturgy is that the meaning of people’s doings is to be found in the manner in which they express themselves in interaction with similarly expressive others. It is not that this expressiveness “is virtually as important as what they do” (Lofland, 1975:293) nor that this expressiveness is simply “a ‘by product’ of instrumental (goal oriented) action” (Manning, 1977:24). Rather, people’s expressiveness is coincidental not incidental to whatever else might be going on. Indeed, “situations do not simply define themselves. They must be constructed by symbolic communication and hence social life must be expressive, whatever else it might be” (Collins and Makowsky, 1972:207).

The ubiquity of this expressiveness underlies the view that human behavior is dramatic. “What is distinctive about humans is their capacity to devote themselves to expressive activities” (Ryan, 1980:30). In other words, human behavior both constitutes and is constituted by rhetoric; individuals are persuasive and influential in mobilizing the behavior of other people. “Through rhetoric, which is both a representational and a transformational activity, human beings exercise their innate symbolic capacities, give form to shared experience and maintain the order of social intercourse” (Voskeritchian, 1981:1841).

Thus, humans and their actions are not viewed as products of forces (whether these be social, cultural, psychological, spiritual) that act on them. Rather humans, by virtue of their expressiveness, are empowered to negotiate their meanings in situations with similarly empowered others. The dignity of humans, in fact, resides in such empowerment. Rather than construing humans as objects that at most deflect, filter and interpret the forces that act on them, dramaturgy asserts the power of human beings as subjects of their destiny. In fact, matters of power, influence, and control are not viewed as unitary, distinguishable forces at all but rather as meanings that emerge out of interaction itself. Stone and Farberman (1986) enunciate this dramaturgical empowerment in their discussion of the two fundamental competing metaphors of social psychology:

First, man is conceived as a passive neutral agent buffeted about by stimuli that impinge upon his nerve endings. These stimuli may be external-reifications of society, culture, physical environment, or words and other symbols. They may also be internal-instincts, needs or drives. Or they may be some combination of external and internal forces. Second, and in direct contrast, man is viewed as an active agent, selecting those stimuli or objects to which he shall respond, accomplishing his selections in the matrix of communication and transforming his society or his social world in the process (p. 11).

Siding with this second image, dramaturgy asserts that people’s activities, their selections, their accomplishments, and their communications in social interaction with others establish their meanings. It is in the very expressiveness of their doings that the inexorable flow of meaningful human behavior resides. But it is only in interaction with similarly expressive and empowered others that meaning emerges, and herein resides the fragility and precariousness of its achievement. Dramaturgy is a fully two-sided view of human interaction.

It is important to understand that there is nothing in this expressive/impressive dimension of life that necessitates, requires, or demands any consideration of cognition, volition, deliberation, or intention. It is simply that whether we like it or not, plan it or not, want it to be or want it not to be, our behavior is expressive. It is how we come to know others and it’s how we come to know ourselves:

In every encounter, no matter what else is accomplished or what the intention of the persons, the individual effectively conveys a definition of the situation which includes an image of self, and this definition of the situation may be confirmed, modified, or rejected. The audience will tend to identify the person by his presented self, which includes elements of which he may be unaware, whether he wills it or not (Zicklin, 1968:240).

In this sense, dramaturgy is a social behavioral (Mead) rather than a cognitive or phenomenological image of human activity. Its focus is on the communicative dimensions of human interaction rather than on what the interactants might be thinking, feeling, or experiencing. Erving Goffman (1959) makes this crystal clear in the first three pages of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

The expressiveness of the individual … appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives and the expression that he gives off. The first involves verbal symbols or their substitute which he uses admittedly and solely to convey the information that he and others are known to attach to these symbols. This is communication in the traditional and narrow sense. The second involves a wide range of action that others can treat as symptomatic of the actor, the expectation being that the action was performed for reasons other than the information conveyed in this way (p. 2).

It is with communication in this broad sense that dramaturgy is interested— both discursive (speech and language) and nondiscursive (clothing, hair style, 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 are just 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 (a point 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, far-reaching. 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 self-indulgent, scheming, deceitful conniver and con man who fashions an illusionary existence for himself by manipulating the thoughts and actions of others.

It is our 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 render judgments 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 a client: “Yes, Mr. Jones, I understand. 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 I do 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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Life as Theater
• copy
• Contents
• Aldine Transaction Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Dramaturgical Perspective
• Part II Social Relationships as Drama
• Part III The Dramaturgical Self
• Part IV Motivation and Drama
• Part V Organizational Dramas
• Part VI Political Dramas
• Appendix I The Five Key Terms of Dramatism
• Appendix II The Never Ending Show
• Appendix III Appearances and Reality
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX