2
GOFFMAN’S WORK: THEMES OF COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA

INTRODUCTION

Chapters 3 and 4 provide analyses of studies of mediated social interaction and engagement with media and sociological theories in relation to Goffman’s writings on the relation between structure and agency and the role of social interaction in social solidarity. However, in addition to a considerable literature on media studies influenced by Goffman, there is an extensive secondary literature within sociology on his work that has also been influential in the adoption of his ideas in media and communication. Furthermore, many of the applications of Goffman’s concepts in the study of the media are somewhat dissociated from the context of his work and his empirical, theoretical and normative commitments. In this chapter, therefore, I introduce Goffman’s ideas, focusing on the potential implications for media and communication research and taking into account how his ideas have been interpreted in sociology. This will provide a context for the reviews of applications of his work in the study of mediated social interaction and in relation to sociological themes and questions in media sociology in Chapters 3 and 4. The chapter reviews Goffman’s writings from his work on the interaction order in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Interaction Ritual (1967), the application of his analysis of social interaction to the study of social exclusion in Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963a), his books Behaviour in Public Places (1963b), Strategic Interaction (1969) and Frame Analysis (1974), to his later work on gender representations (1979) and the sociology of language in Forms of Talk (1981).

DRAMATURGY: THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Self-presentation as performance

Goffman is most well known for his work on self-presentation in social interaction as performance in the encounters of everyday life. This work was part of his PhD (2022 [1953]) and formed the basis for his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Significantly, while developing his account of how social interaction was organized according to dramaturgical principles, Goffman (1955, 1956) also developed an analysis of social interaction ritual. The juxtaposition of these investigations into performance and ritual provides a broader context for understanding Goffman’s account of social interaction and his understanding of the role of interaction in self-formation and civility. Taken together, drama and ritual address two dimensions of the social self: purposive social interaction in the form of persuasive performance and its dynamic relationship to mutuality and cooperation, and ritual interactions that constitute an environment that sustains social standing by recognizing common humanity and cooperating in constructing reciprocal forms of social interaction and civility.

In his PhD, Goffman conducted a participant observation study of social interaction in the Scottish island community of Shetland. He would ‘hang out’ in public places such as a hotel bar or restaurant, attend events such as dances, and sometimes accept invitations to visit people at home. His PhD was influenced by the tradition of urban ethnography that developed in the interdisciplinary environment of the Chicago School of Sociology (Bulmer, 1984). The Chicago School had strong associations with the progressive political movement in the early twentieth-century United States; it was committed to social reform and using academic research to expose the challenging conditions of life in the rapidly expanding city of Chicago. Although influenced by this tradition, Goffman’s study was neither a work of social anthropology, as we discover little about social relations, structures or processes on the island, and nor was it an urban ethnography.

Broadly speaking, Goffman was interested in how people used their interactions with others in everyday social encounters to manage their lives in modern society (Giddens, 1990). His primary unit of observation and analysis was social encounters, which occur whenever two or more people gather or meet in everyday life. He aimed to understand how people organized encounters in such a way as to be able to present themselves and manage civil engagements with others. Performance is how we project an image of ourselves and communicate our inner thoughts and feelings to others in social encounters. In contrast, ritual focuses more on caring for the self and creating the conditions for civility.

In developing his analysis of self-presentation as performance, Goffman searched for functional equivalents between how performances are organized in the theatre and how they are organized in everyday social encounters. Theatrical performances are organized through scripting, staging, rehearsal and character presentation in front of an audience in a space of performance: the frontstage. In the backstage, actors prepare themselves for their onstage performance. In everyday encounters, people take turns, address others, coordinate speech and action, open and close conversations and seek to make a positive impression on others. Significantly, in this analysis, Goffman was comparing the established cultural form of the theatre with the informal organization of performance in everyday life.

For example, the theatre is a specially constructed performance space with a stage and seats for the audience; it thereby separates performers and audience, fixing their social roles and restricting their access to specific regions of the theatre. In contrast, the performance of the self in everyday life occurs in living rooms, offices and coffee shops, and participants take turns at being performers or audiences. Theatres have props, scenery, lighting and make-up departments, whereas the performance of self in everyday life makes use of whatever is to hand, such as ‘furniture, décor, physical layout and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props for the spate of human action played out before, within or upon it’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 22). Theatrical performers are dressed and made up in character, whereas in everyday life participants make use of their bodies, clothing and conduct to construct a ‘personal front’ that includes ‘insignia of rank; clothing, sex, age, and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 22). Theatrical performances are rehearsed, and actors prepare by warming up, putting on their costumes and applying make-up; the stage is set, the lighting planned, the curtain raised for the performance in front of an audience, and the play unfolds as a sequence of scenes organized into acts. Everyday social encounters have some of these elements – for example, they have openings and closings and people play different interactional and social roles within them – but most interactions in social encounters have a sense of liveness and flexibility and offer the freedom to people to influence the unfolding of interactions rather than follow a script.

Another contrast is that the theatre audience recognizes that the part an actor plays is fictional, their words usually written by an author rather than being the actor’s own or representative of their personal identity. In contrast, in everyday life, people typically perform themselves or their social roles, raising different questions about truthfulness and authenticity. Goffman draws our attention to the different communication roles in social encounters. In the theatre, actors use their acting skills to give a credible and arresting performance of their character across the unfolding scenes of the play in collaboration with their fellow performers. The audience also reacts appropriately to the onstage action by laughing, gasping or watching silently, and by applauding at the end.

While performance in the theatre commonly follows a script, everyday social encounters are more spontaneous and constructed on the fly. However, Goffman recognized a form of ‘scripting’ in everyday life, as when an ‘individual will already have a fair idea of what modesty, deference, or righteous indignation looks like, and can pass at playing these bits when necessary’ (1959, p. 79). In addition to this repertoire of dramatic cameos, some social encounters follow a conventional schema as a sequence of actions or routines, like the plot of a play divided into acts and scenes. For example, eating in a restaurant involves booking a table, travelling to the restaurant, being greeted and seated, looking at the menu, ordering, eating and paying the bill: the conventions of eating in a restaurant thus follow a script.

Goffman developed his analysis of how social roles were performed in everyday life, illustrating this through an example from Sartre (1956) that captures the performance of the waiter’s role. Sartre noticed the obsequiousness of the waiter’s bodily orientation towards diners, his demeanour, expressions and mode of address. What is the waiter doing? ‘He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch for long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 82). Goffman explored how waiters, wrestlers, con artists and spies included theatrical elements in their self-presentations. A wrestling match is organized based on an agreement between the fighters on sequences of...