Performance Anxiety in Media Culture

The Trauma of Appearance and the Drama of Disappearance

Steven Bailey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137557889
• eBook ISBN: 9781137557896
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Business generale

Performance Anxiety in Media Culture explores the culture of performance anxiety in the media-saturated contemporary world. It uses comparative case studies including film, social media, and popular music to examine the ways that personal concern regarding self-presentation becomes transformed into shared cultural expressions through the use of media technologies. Three initial chapters are dedicated to exploring the work of Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard as critical for a thorough understanding of how implications of a range of recent transformations in the methods for staging social performances are staged and in the ways that they are experienced and interpreted by others. Three subsequent chapters explore diverse case studies in the culture of performance anxiety: the representation of such anxieties in recent French cinema, the appearance of them in the world of fashion-based 'outfit of the day' blogs, and the attempt to refine a more fixed social persona in the nostalgic culture of rockabilly music.

1

The Subject is Performance: Goffman as Dramaturgical Prophet

Introduction

In Milan Kundera’s intriguing 1995 novel Slowness, the protoganist Berck, a French public intellectual, finds himself in a challenging situation when his rival, the Depute Duberques, kisses an HIV-positive person on the mouth before television cameras at a social event. Kundera describes Berck’s dilemma, explaining his three-fold concern regarding being perceived as a mere imitator of Duberques, risking possible infection, and being regarded as cowardly. Kundera writes:

So he settled for staying put and smiling inanely. But those few seconds of hesitation cost him dearly, because the camera was there and, on the nightly news, the whole of France read on his face the three phases of his uncertainty and snickered. (pp. 15–16)

In an instant, Berck faces a remarkably complex set of calculations to determine the correct strategy for performing an appropriate humanity and fails miserably; later, in a characteristically cynical Kunderian irony, he bests Duberques via a photograph with a ‘little dying black girl whose face was covered with flies.’

I begin with Kundera, as few writers have so brilliantly captured the strategic challenges of individual performance upon a social stage conditioned and perhaps defined by the presence of the media eye. While the passage above draws in highly charged socio-political issues and similarly emotional stage props to illustrate the ways that displays of fundamental virtues—integrity, concern, courage—are implicated in carefully managed interpersonal behavior, the seemingly organic character of these very virtues is evidence of the power of technology to penetrate both social performance and its reception. A moment’s decision, under the glare of the television lights and the gaze of the cameras, could make one a national moral exemplar or a national laughingstock, at least until the next chance for opportunistic redemption. What is particularly interesting about Kundera’s reflection on this cultural condition is the stress not on the image itself nor upon its postmodern proliferation but instead on the faulty strategic logic and individuated decision making of one player in the drama of image production. Slowness is a nice place to start my call for a renewed attention to the sociological tradition inaugurated by Erving Goffman, as Goffman’s work, as well as that of many of his followers in the dramaturgical sociological tradition, provides a systematic treatment of questions of symbolically significant social performance and the importance of both the strategic behavior of social subjects and the interpretive capabilities of a wide range of audiences.

It is in this sense that I want to point to the Goffmanian dramaturgical tradition as having a prophetic character, prophetic in that it subjected social performance to an analytic scrutiny that anticipates Kundera’s fictional reflection but more broadly a contemporary obsession with social performance, one greatly increased by the technology-fueled ‘promiscuity’ of the image today, to borrow a phrase from Jean Baudrillard. The argument and analysis that follows is aimed at a revisitation of Goffman’s work in light of its potential relevance for the contemporary cultural scene and to set the stage for a dialogue in later chapters that will pull this school of thought into an encounter with the sometimes consonant and sometimes productively dissonant work of Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Lipovetsky. Beyond providing a general sense of the unique contribution of the Goffmanian tradition, a second important task will be to distinguish this reading of Goffman from that provided by many of his earlier followers as well as some of his sharpest critics.

The center of my case for a return to Goffman is the recognition of a critical unifying thread that runs through his work, from the earliest and most influential symbolic interactionist period, associated especially with The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life through the final, phenomenological phase reflected in Frame Analysis and Gender Advertisements. Consistent through this work is a sense of social performance as a fundamental and indeed defining characteristic of any humanness, a sense that we are made human through our artifice, a position he shares with thinkers as disparate as Lacan and Baudrillard. As numerous scholars have pointed out, Goffman tended to eschew systematic theoretical works (at least until Frame Analysis), so tracing this theme requires significant exegetical effort. However, it is perhaps best to begin with Goffman’s earlier interpreters and critics, as their treatment of his work is useful in locating a crucial misreading that has impacted the ways that Goffman has been taken up in contemporary theory, and one that does a good deal to explain why significant aspects of his work have so often been neglected.

The esteemed Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner provides the most extensive engagement with Goffman’s work from a wider sociological theory perspective, and Gouldner’s fiercely critical perspective on Goffman offers a keen and intense variation on the aforementioned misreading. Gouldner’s analysis, provided in his wide-ranging The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology has two central foci: a philosophical-theoretical critique of Goffman as an ungrounded relativist and a political critique of Goffman as a bourgeois cynic. The former is evident in Gouldner’s blunt claim that ‘Goffman’s is a social ‘dramaturgy’ in which appearances and not underlying essences are exalted … in short, unlike Functionalism, it has no metaphysics of hierarchy’ (p. 379). Along the same lines, Gouldner claims that ‘Goffman thus declares a moratorium on the conventional distinction between make-believe and reality, or between the cynical and the sincere’ (p. 379), thereby accusing him of a philosophical postmodernism several years—Gouldner is writing in 1970—before the concept would gain common use. Gouldner’s political critique is related to the issue of relativism, but draws more directly on a classical Marxist language, arguing that ‘We might say that Functionalism was based upon a conception of men and their activities as “use-values,” while dramaturgy is based upon a conception of them solely as “exchange values” ’ (p. 383).¹ Additionally, Gouldner argues that ‘it [Goffman’s theory] is a clever unmasking of the clever and, at the same time, a how-to-do-it manual of the modern utilitarianism of the new middle class. It is an invitation to the enjoyment of appearances’ (p. 384).

Gouldner’s perspective on Goffman is worth examination as it mixes some relatively conventional objections to dramaturgical sociology with some unintended insight on the very value of Goffman’s work, particularly within a contemporary cultural context. The complaint that Goffman does not recognize a distinction between ‘make-believe and reality’ is a common objection not just to Goffman’s work but to other scholarship in the social constructionist tradition, for instance Berger and Luckmann, and would become a standard attack on a variety of forms of theoretical postmodernism. Some of the trouble with this line of criticism rests simply in the lurking assumption that ‘reality’ and ‘make believe,’ particularly within fields of socio-cultural practice, can be easily delineated. The more telling aspect, and indeed the more provocative, of Gouldner’s critique is his disdain for a perspective in which ‘appearances and not underlying essences are exalted’ and that serves as ‘an invitation to enjoy appearances;’ in these instances, Gouldner comes close to enunciating the very center of the most common misreading of Goffman—the adherence to an opposition of appearance to essence.

A similar pattern of thought is evident in Jurgen Habermas’ critical view of Goffman. As Nirmala Srinivasan points out, Habermas regarded Goffman’s understanding of human agents as one of ‘self-seeking egocentric actors’ (p. 141) and understood Goffman as a ‘cynic focusing on the strategic self-interest of individual actors’ (p. 143). Here, there is an automatic collapse of performance into selfishness, paralleling Gouldner’s collapse of appearance into superficiality, although there is little in Goffman’s oeuvre to support such a move.² Indeed, one might argue that Goffman’s model of subjectivity—admittedly, one implied more than theoretically explicated—is intrinsically socialized in a manner that renders conventional notions of egocentricity and self-interest if not obsolete then certainly demanding a thorough rethinking. One of the tasks of this chapter and those that follow will be to point to aspects of dramaturgical theory that pose a model of the social subject that is particularly appropriate for understanding the contemporary—and to use Habermas’ terminology, ‘detraditionalized’—lifeworld.

Much of the confusion evident in Habermas and Gouldner, as well as a number of Goffman’s other critics, is not so much theoretical or even analytical but rather rhetorical. Gouldner’s notion of Goffman’s work as a kind of bourgeois instruction manual and Habermas’ condemnation of its apparent cynicism appear to stem, at least partly, from a failure to recognize a kind of homeopathic strategy in much of Goffman’s most influential work. Goffman tends to eschew strongly polemical meta-analysis, instead displaying a rather cool descriptive tone, and it could be argued that this strategy produces analysis as a sort of counter-object that matches the strategic removal, which is not to say cynicism, that Goffman finds in social practice. While Jean Baudrillard would attempt a rather more extreme version of such an approach in his later, highly aphoristic writing and face similar misunderstanding and political attack, Goffman, particularly in Asylums and Stigma, uses a degree of rhetorical distance and an avoidance of strongly normative language to increase the vividness of his analysis. As with Baudrillard, this is not grounds for accusations of atheoreticism, cynicism, or most dramatically a denial of material reality. It has had the effect, though, of obscuring at least some of the most intriguing aspects of Goffman’s larger senses of social performance, role-play, and through these concepts, social subjectivity; it is the purpose of the next section to explore these insights in greater detail.

The Subject Is Performance: Goffman’s Evolving Perspective

In this section, I will move through some of Goffman’s most important work and trace his development and revision of a model of the performing social subject. It will focus on his first and most famous monograph, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, as well as the closely related and highly influential essay ‘Role Distance,’ the early 1960s case studies Asylums and Stigma, the later and more theoretical Frame Analysis, and the curious penultimate book, Gender Advertisements, with some reference to other works. Unlike many other major thinkers (e.g., Baudrillard, Foucault, Wittgenstein), it is impossible to clearly identify any definitive breaks in Goffman’s intellectual development; while some scholars have understood the more phenomenological orientation of Frame Analysis in such a fashion, I will argue that it is more intellectually productive to stress the evident continuities between it and the earlier work.

As Thomas Scheff points out in his Goffman Unbound, in the final chapters of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (henceforth POS), Goffman moves from a description of social situations and behaviour to a more directly psychological account of the systems of consciousness that support that behavior (pp. 34–35). Indeed, it is in the very final section, scarcely more than three pages, that Goffman presents his fundamental argument regarding selfhood and performance: ‘The general notion that we make a presentation of ourselves to others is hardly novel; what ought to be stressed in conclusion is that the very structure of the self can be seen in terms of how we arrange for such performances in our Anglo-American society’ (p. 252). A more careful attention to this argument would have a done a good deal to mitigate the sorts of misreading evident in Habermas and Gouldner; rather than a cool operator removed from a cynical performance, Goffman places access to the self in such performances rather than behind them. As Srinivasan argues, ‘The regional and time/space dimensions of interaction displayed in the agent’s dramatic performance indicate the knowledgeability and capability of the discursive subject’ (p. 145). It is important that just a bit later in the same section and indeed the final paragraphs of POS, Goffman makes it clear that the theatrical metaphor, often identified as his single greatest contribution to sociological theory, is intended as a ‘scaffold’ for the analysis of self-presentation techniques rather than offered in the service of a philosophical argument for a radical constructionism that would level fictional and real social encounters (pp. 254–55). Greater attention to this double layering of metaphor—‘scaffold’ upon ‘theater’—would likely have impacted the emergence of a Goffmanian dramaturgical sociology school and certainly lessened the tendency for drama and theater to take on near metaphysical as much as metaphorical significance for critical analysis.

In light of the somewhat curious and probably unintentional stylistic twist of establishing the primacy of performance as a locus of subjectivity only at the end of POS, the burden is then placed on the reader to interpret the preceding sections in light of this point. This is particularly so with the respect to the concept of role, which will be especially important in my own rethinking of Goffman. In POS and the 1961 essay ‘Role Distance,’ Goffman posits the role as an intertwining of corporeality and discursivity, with the former quality evident in the repeated stress on the embodiment of the role (e.g., discussions of physical faux pas that can discredit a role performance in POS) and the latter in the very notion of ‘role distance.’ Role distance, clearly, requires the ability to thematize a role, that is to understand it—perhaps but not necessarily intuitively—in terms of symbolic expectations removed from an individual actor, and thus as socially inorganic in some respects.³

The meshing of the body and cultural-discursive meta-understanding is clear in Goffman’s famous example of children on a merry-go-round in the ‘Role Distance’ essay⁴ as well as Robert Stebbins’ extensive analysis of the role-distance practices of jazz musicians, perhaps the best-known application of the concept. Stebbins’ analysis is useful for two reasons: first, as noted above, he stresses the embodied character of such behavior and the importance of physical gestures in displays of role distance. More interestingly, though, through the use of musicians as his object of study, he links role-distance signals to aesthetic strategies. Stebbins notes that musicians ‘may intentionally “jazz up” the square tune’ (p. 410), linking role-consciousness to the act of aesthetic production, echoing both the pragmatists, and, as shall be explored in Chapter 2, the psychoanalytic theory of Otto Rank. Through Goffman’s and Stebbins’ analyses of role distance, then, one finds further muddling of the essence/appearance schema that troubled Gouldner and Habermas; role distance in fact might be presented diagrammatically as a kind of loop in which an additional layering of performance would appear both closer to, but also curiously further away from any subjective core. In fact, a purely straightforward reading of role distance—that is, one lacking any irony—would lead one into an almost Orwellian claim that the truth of the self is evident in its dishonesty; avoiding this trap demands a recognition of the doubleness, lack, and indeed irony at the center (or absent center) of the subject. While such a recognition would be uncontroversial in, say, a Lacanian perspective, its importance for dramaturgical sociology is less often acknowledged.

If POS and ‘Role Distance’ provide a strong initial sense of a performing subject, the large-scale study of Asylums and the deep investigation into Stigma focus more extensively on the material and symbolic contexts that enable and constrain the development and performance of roles. Asylums is valuable for its elucidation of two critical aspects of Goffman’s theorization of performance within specific contexts: the ubiquity of meaningful performance even within highly constrained social circumstances and the ways that material contexts—in this case the ‘total institution’—impact upon ‘the boundary that the individual places between his being and the environment’ (p. 24).

To the first point, while the institutions analyzed by Goffman, for example mental hospitals and military installations, are specifically designed to provide a highly restricted symbolic milieu, one that limits the range of available behaviors through a set of regulations, the denial or standardization of performance ‘props’ (as in the requirement for uniforms or even nudity), and the brute reality of physical confinement, this ‘horizontal’ reduction in symbolic environment does not produce a parallel ‘vertical’ reduction in the significance of a given social performance. Indeed, the meaning of such gestures may be magnified within this context. The point may appear obvious given Goffman’s orientation, but it certainly runs counter to the line of thinking exemplified by Gouldner, who, as noted, posed Goffman as a kind of normalizer of bourgeois social conventions.

The second point is more critical, particularly in establishing a fundamental consonance of Goffman’s work and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In a particularly intriguing and indeed telling passage, Goffman describes the use of forms of bodily humiliation within the total institution,

Perhaps the most obvious kind of contaminative exposure is the directly physical kind—the besmearing and defiling of the body or of other objects closely identified with the self. Sometimes this involves a breakdown of the usual environmental arrangements for insulating oneself from one’s own sources of contamination, as in having to empty one’s own slops or having to subject one’s evacuation to regimentation, as reported from Chinese political prisons. … (p. 25)

Intriguingly, Goffman describes such practices as ‘violation(s) of one’s informational preserve regarding self’ (p. 23), thus acknowledging the interwoven and deeply symbolic character of institution, performance, and self and the particular significance of objects such as excrement and other contaminating materials as ‘information.’ The links with the Freudian tradition are obvious enough—Freud had plenty to say about excrement—but it is the ways that such materials are configured in the symbolic construction of self that puts Goffman in line with Lacan as well, removing them from a bio-organic notion of self in favour of a more semiotic framework.

Stigma takes this analysis further, focusing on the challenges of identity management in the face of the titular phenomenon. One notable aspect of Goffman’s treatment of social stigma is the theorization of a ‘virtual identity’ (in 1963, long before the emergence of a virtual culture as such) and the significance of the potenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Faces on the Stage and Faces in the Stalls
• 1. The Subject is Performance: Goffman as Dramaturgical Prophet
• 2. Performance Anxiety: Role-ing with Lacan
• 3. Liquid Stages and Melting Frames: Objective De-Stabilization
• 4. From Looking to Being to Killing: Performance Anxiety in Recent French Language Cinema
• 5. Protesting Disappearance: The Drama of the Stylish Self in the World of OOTD
• 6. ‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget’ or, ‘Rockabilly Rebel, What Ya Gonna Do’?
• Conclusion: Performance as a Psycho-Existential Problem or, Between Performance Studies and Performativity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index