All the world's a stage
A post about Goffman's Dramaturgical Analysis and considering (a little) it's application in schools. Also a bit about online identities and the exhibitional approach, but more on that in another post.
It was suggested to me once that I could, as a teacher, build a presence around school by putting a pin in the sole of my shoes. The idea is that even when you’re not seen, you’re heard – omnipresent and surveillant. The ‘tap tap’ of the teacher’s shoes like the ripples in a glass signalling the coming of T-Rex on Jurassic Park. It means that if you’re ‘good’ then before you’ve turned a corner any trouble will have fled, and maybe it even extends your aura. I tried it for a while in an echoey building and I reckon it worked.
Within education there must exist hundreds of tricks that are employed to help build a persona. Pupils might need to mask emotions in order to maintain the characters they take on, and teachers might have to feign them so as not to upset students, or to help them learn the impact of their actions. In many ways school structures magnify these portrayals: why is it that teachers don’t share their first name with their pupils? Why is it so normal to limit access to our true selves, especially to a group of people we will work with for years?
Symbolic interaction provides a lens through which to understand social interactions through meanings attached to symbols. These meanings are never static, but rather “shifting, emergent, and ultimately ambiguous.” (Plummer, 1996, p2), and formed at the interplay of individuals and societies. For interactionist then, it is the action and interpretation of humans that creates structure in social situations. Erving Goffman (1959) used this approach to describe the presentation and reflexive formation of the self through his dramaturgical analysis. Perhaps drawing on Shakespeare’s famous “All the world’s a stage”, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman uses the theatre as a metaphor for real life. People are viewed as actors, engaged in performances in different regions of the stage. For Goffman, these performances were described as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (p26). Humans actively construct and project their identities during interactions, engaging in impression management, presenting their role using different dramatic devices such as body language and speech, but also control over when and how their performance is seen by their audience. Within the school setting there are many well-known roles that these actors can take, amongst both the pupils and the staff: the performance of the teacher involves their appearance, the way they hold themselves, their words and actions in their classroom and their preceding reputation, both amongst staff members and through the informal school culture amongst pupils.
Goffman’s analogy of everyday face to face interactions being negotiated like actors manage performances is pretty immediately attractive. We know it because we do it every day! I would argue that only the surest of people hasn’t varied their tone and delivery based on their audience; puffing their chest up as they enter a pub, or speaking their best English at a job interview. It could be argued that we do this as a show of respect – perhaps we try to mimic the social status of the people we meet in order to make them feel comfortable. But I doubt this is true, and more likely our chameleonization primarily serves ourselves: My mum once told me that if I’m ever in trouble with the police to make sure I’m wearing glasses in order that I can take them off and look deferential and you’ll be more likely to get off scot-free. Manage the show.
If we consider, as Goffman suggest, our interactions to be crafted to present a desired impression on our audience, then it calls into question the nature of one’s true identity: “which is more real, the fostered impression of the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving?” (Goffman, 1959, p72). Performances differ based on context, as people attempt to maintain control over the impression others build of them, but there also exists a private backstage, where the act is dropped, and people drop their social identities. The conclusion of Goffman is firmly that identity is not a fixed entity, but a dynamic product of numerous social interactions, and shaped by the roles that individuals are playing, the impressions they seek from their audience, and their perception of those impressions. Whether this backstage identity is the more ‘real’ than the actor in role is obscure. Goffman concluded that there is no core self, but that the ‘masks’ we wear when in role all contribute to what is real:
In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves – the role we are striving to live up to – this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. (Goffman, 1959, p30)
Perhaps a more useful approach to understanding the identity behind the performance is to look for instances of discrepancies in the intended impression. We often recognise when a performance is incongruous with the role, such as when a teacher makes a mistake in their writing on the blackboard and the mysticism of their subject knowledge is lost, or when a member of a peer group ‘misses the mark’ in admitting to liking some area of popular culture that has more recently become ‘uncool’.
Goffman’s interpretation of social interactions draws on numerous social anthropological analyses as well as his own field research, including a year spent at a psychiatric hospital. From these influences he was able to coin the term ‘total institution’ to define a place where individuals are cut off from society and controlled in a formally administered period of their life (Goffman, 1961), including places like the psychiatric hospital, prisons, orphanages and arguably, schools. Clearly, in the time since Goffman first penned his work the nature of school, in the UK and more widely, has changed somewhat, and likely draws far fewer parallels with the mid-twentieth century institutions Goffman was considering! However, for Goffman this was a site to explore not the system or the staff, but the individual under the confines of their situation, and to this end he is able to appreciate the formation of identity through analysis of their performances.
I consider myself lucky to have made many of my mates before social media, and they’re a useful grounding plate for the things I leave online. They can tell me what a wally I sound like when I post something, and the acceptance that I’m never going ‘get’ platforms that emerged in my thirties is a bit of a comfort for me. But Goffman’s got me and the rest of us pegged: we all wear masks in public and put on a performance. What that means for young people who have to maintain a line through an offline and online presence, where the face behind the filter is for all to see at school the next morning, we need to find out.
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situations of mental patients and other inmates.
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