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The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Greg Smith, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Greg Smith
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The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Greg Smith, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Greg Smith
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This book explores the fertility and enigma of Erving Goffman's sociological reasoning and its capacity to shed fresh light on the fundamental features of human sociality. Thematically arranged, it brings together the work of leading scholars of Goffman's work to explore the concepts and themes that define Goffman's analytical preoccupations, examining the ways these ideas have shaped significant fields of study and situating Goffman's sociology in comparison to some eminent thinkers often linked with his name. Through a series of chapters informed by the same inventive and imaginative spirit characteristic of Goffman's sociology, the book presents fresh perspectives on his contribution to the field and reveals the value of his thought for a variety of disciplines now increasingly aware of the importance of Goffman's sociology to a range of social phenomena. A fresh perspective on the legacy of one of sociology's most important figures, The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in interactionist and micro-sociological perspectives.
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PART I Concepts and themes
1 DRAMATURGY
DOI: 10.4324/9781003160861-3
Introduction
When most scholars in the social sciences think of ‘dramaturgy’, they usually think of the remarkable career of the late sociologist Erving Goffman. Small wonder. Profound and enduring contributions to dramaturgical thinking were made in such classics as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959), Asylums (Goffman 1961a), Encounters (Goffman 1961b) and Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967) among many others. But dramaturgy and Goffman are not the same thing, no matter how many scholars treat them as synonymous. In this chapter we will detail a few of the beginnings of the dramaturgical view of human beings, the basic structure of dramaturgical thinking and articulate the dramaturgical principle and its relationship to dramaturgical awareness. Finally, the discussion summarises his work as it relates to dramaturgical thinking and concludes with a short assessment of his considerable legacy.
Dramaturgy before Goffman
Long before Goffman, there was dramaturgy. If we understand that dramaturgy is not a strategy to deceive others – although it can be used that way or merely an attempt to gain a strategic advantage, although it can be used in that way too – but more simply a technique of communication, we can see that dramaturgy is endemic to the business of being human. Thought of in this way, we have only to look to the Greeks for insight into the beginnings of drama. Volumes have been written on Greek dramatists, especially the fifth and sixth century bce tragedies written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Tragedy was a favourite motif of Greek dramatists and usually centred on a central figure – a tragic hero who was destined for greatness but was in the end destroyed by his own hubris. The Greeks invented the theatre where actors drew a slice of life from which audiences could identify and used a multiplicity of ruses, such as masks, whereby a single actor could play several different characters in a single play.
Given the powerful example of Greek dramaturgy, it is clear that Goffman was by no means the first to recognise that social life has many of the attributes of theatre. People play roles to others who serve as audiences for these performances. Then the roles are reversed: actors become audiences, audiences become actors in other parts and so forth. ‘All the world’s a stage’, as William Shakespeare famously said in the 16th century. Indeed, Shakespeare performed his hugely successful plays at the Globe Theatre in London. Theatre was the popular culture of its time, and the portraits of life that he put on the stage have endured long after he had gone because they struck at themes that we all share as participants in the drama of life.
So, Goffman had many other predecessors and some contemporaries who also helped us understand the usefulness of this way of thinking. For example, the literary critic Kenneth Burke, over a long and distinguished career, presented a model of social life that he called ‘dramatism’ in which any rounded statement about social life required an analysis of what he termed the ‘pentad’ of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (Burke 1945).1 Burke’s dramatistic project was primarily a device used to analyse literature, but it also anticipated much of Goffman, especially his early writings. Burke asked the fundamental question: ‘What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?’ He then proceeds to lay out clearly the five key terms of dramaturgy which must be addressed in a rounded account of human motives as follows.
Act
The act, according to Burke, names what took place, in thought or deed. It is what happened, whether it be a kiss or a murder.
Scene
Since all acts take place somewhere, scene is crucial to dramaturgical thinking. It is the place of action, its background and the situation in which it occurred.
Agent
Acts are performed by someone. So, the question is who or what kind of person performed the act. Here Burke is not talking about personal psychology, but rather what kind of person is to be dramaturgically introduced: a hero, a villain, a fool or even a collective body like a committee. People, in Burke’s sense are not things but social constructions. Goffman makes good use of Burke when he defines what he means by a ‘self’:
While this image is entertained concerning the individual so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action… . A correctly staged self 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.(Goffman 1959:252)
Agency
Agency, for Burke, is necessary because it addresses the question of ‘How?’ Actors are dependent on instruments to carry out acts. Agency covers a wide variety of things, from style – how one appears to others – to guns and knives as violent instruments of force. And, of course, symbolic language is the basic tool humans use to perform themselves and thus constitutes agency.
Purpose
Purpose is an answer to the question of ‘Why?’ Here again, Burke situates motives in dramatic action, not in personal psychology or biological necessity. The astute observer will notice that these five elements are the first thing one learns in a journalism class about writing stories for publication. ‘Who? What? Where? How? and Why?’ This is what the reader first needs to know. Simply put, without the elements of the pentad, the human drama is not possible.
Along with Burke, his acolyte Hugh Dalziel Duncan published prolifically on areas aligned with Burke’s thinking (e.g. Duncan 1962, 1968). Duncan was a sociologist who used the ideas of Burke and applied them to conventional themes such as politics, religion and communication. Something of a firebrand, his books often excoriated sociologists for not paying sufficient attention to communication as the basis of social order. But they also introduced Burke’s dramatism to a sociological audience by translating his major themes into sociological terms, especially the proposition that symbolic conduct can best be analysed as ritual drama of guilt, hierarchy, redemption and victimage. Goffman took dramatism a step further by applying the dramatic metaphor to the study of face-to-face behaviour.
By the 1960s there were many other subscribers to the dramaturgical image of man. Gregory P. Stone’s groundbreaking essay ‘Appearance and the Self’ (Stone 1962) forced a consideration that the self appears as much as it is performed verbally and that such matters as clothing, hairstyles, non-verbal signals and all the accoutrements of fashion were key elements of the self. He considered such matters fundamental to an understanding of self, just as Goffman did.2 Because the focus of this chapter is on Goffman’s dramaturgy, it is important to illustrate and discuss the themes in what many scholars believe is his most dramaturgical work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
Performances are multi-layered, argued Goffman, and are not constituted simply by one-on-one interactions but also by people acting as members of what he calls ‘teams’. Teams may be formed very quickly or over time. They may also disappear almost as quickly. Teammates are evaluated according to simple criteria: they are good teammates if they contribute to the impressions being fostered, and they are bad ones if they give the show away. We know this, too. As Goffman puts it: ‘Since we all participate on teams, we must all carry within ourselves the sweet guilt of conspirators’ (Goffman 1959:105).
Husbands and wives going to a ‘command performance’ (such as an office get-together where the boss will be in attendance) understand implicitly that they are expected to play the role of ‘happily married couple’ with all the social and cultural idealisations attendant to that role. A dominant wife may play her dominance down and act like a compliant wife, deferring to her husband while in the presence of the boss. A cold husband may snuggle his wife for the proper effect at the same party. Teammates are evaluated in terms of whether they keep up the team’s front or act out of character with it. Such skills as dramaturgical loyalty and dramaturgical circumspection are called upon, whereas actions which would undermine the impression being fostered by the team are avoided.3 Clearly, they know the truth of such situations, which is that ‘people will talk’.
Performances always take place somewhere, and this geography of performance includes its own set of rules and understandings. Goffman’s most well-known and easily understood conceptual distinction is that between backstage and frontstage. The frontstage is a place where performances are given and where dramaturgical circumspection is at its height. Performers frontstage are always ‘on’ and where anything that shows is, by definition, part of the show. This is contrasted with the backstage, which is a place where performances are prepared for. It is important that a person as performer is aware of and respects these boundaries. Many a career has been destroyed in network television because a live mic was mistaken for a dead one.4 The backstage is a place where the impressions formulated frontstage are regularly contradicted. These are places where people unwind, take off their make-up and comment about their own or other actor’s performances. In these places, one finds
reciprocal first-naming, cooperative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, ‘sloppy’ sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or substandard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and ‘kidding’, inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic ways, minor self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching and flatulence.(Goffman 1959:128)
Backstages are so essential to the integrity of a performance that their existence is often guarded by signs: ‘Employees only’, ‘Kitchen personnel’, ‘No Admittance’, or even the simple designation of some rooms for ‘Men’ and others for ‘Women’ alert potential entrants to the dramaturgical requirements of gender. In the latter case, in these gender-specific rooms, the costuming and make-up that signals to others that they are in the presence of one gender or the other, and thus the roles they are playing along with accompanying appearances, can be adjusted, re-arranged or temporarily discarded because one presumes that actors will only encounter members of the same gender.5 Communication out of character can simply be constituted by appearance in the wrong place, as when one’s pastor on Sunday morning is seen coming out of a porn theatre on Saturday night.
A mere dictionary definition of dramaturgy would lead one to believe that it is simply the process of writing and staging a play. But to sociological users of this perspective, it is much more than that. It is an appreciation and explication of the idea that to be human is to be involved in a life that that has a marked similarity to the things of the theatre. Goffman said this repeatedly in a vast body of work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) being only the first. He occasionally played it down, pointing to its ‘obvious’ shortcomings, but repeatedly came back to it in his thinking and writing. It is not too much to say that it was his overriding metaphor, for as he well knew, ‘All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify’ (Goffman 1959:72).
The dramaturgical principle
Stripped to its essentials, dramaturgy is about how people create meanings in their lives. Like other kinds of ‘interpretive’ paradigms, it ‘connects action to its sense rather than behaviour to its determinants’ (Geertz 1983:34). Meaning in the dramaturgical sense emerges out of an acting consensus between human beings. George Herbert Mead called this meaning a ‘social act’ and described it as follows:
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 this field itsel...