setting. The individual will already have a fair idea of what modesty, deference, or righteous indignation looks like, and can make a pass at playing these bits when necessary. He may even be able to play out the part of a hypnotic sub¬
ject
2
or commit a “compulsive” crime3
on the basis of models for these activities that he is already familiar with.A theatrical performance or a staged confidence game requires a thorough scripting of the spoken content of the routine; but the vast part involving “expression given off”
is often determined by meager stage directions. It is ex¬
pected that the performer of illusions will already know a good deal about how to manage his voice, his face, and his body, although he—as well as any person who directs him—
may find it difficult indeed to provide a detailed verbal statement of this kind of knowledge. And in this, of course, we approach the situation of the straightforward man in the street. Socialization may not so much involve a learning of the many specific details of a single concrete part—often there could not be enough time or energy for this. What does seem to be required of the individual is that he learn enough pieces of expression to be able to “fill in” and manage, more or less, any part that he is likely to be given.
The legitimate performances of everyday life are not
“acted” or “put on” in the sense that the performer knows in advance just what he is going to do, and does this solely because of the effect it is likely to have. The expressions it is felt he is giving off will be especially “inaccessible” to him
.4
But as in the case of less legitimate performers, the incapacity of the ordinary individual to formulate in ad¬vance the movements of his eyes and body does not mean 2 This view of hypnosis is neatly presented by T. R. Sarbin,
“Contributions to Role-Taking Theory. I: Hypnotic Behavior,”
Psychological Review, 57, pp. 255-70.
3 See D. R. Cressey, “The Differential Association Theory and Compulsive Crimes,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 45, pp. 29-40.
4 This concept derives from T. R. Sarbin, “Role Theory,” in Gardner Lindzey, Handbook of Social Psychology (Cambridge:
Addison-Wesley, 1954), Vol. 1, pp. 235-36.
74
that he will not express himself through these devices in a way that is dramatized and pre-formed in his repertoire of actions. In short, we all act better than we know how.
When we watch a television wrestler gouge, foul, and snarl at his opponent we are quite ready to see that, in spite of the dust, he is, and knows he is, merely playing at being the “heavy,” and that in another match he may be given the other role, that of clean-cut wrestler, and per¬
form this with equal verve and proficiency. We seem less ready to see, however, that while such details as the num¬
ber and character of the falls may be fixed beforehand, the details of the expressions and movements used do not come from a script but from command of an idiom, a command that is exercised from moment to moment with little cal¬
culation or forethought.
In reading of persons in the West Indies who become the “horse” or the one possessed of a voodoo spirit,6 it is enlightening to learn that the person possessed will be able to provide a correct portrayal of the god that has entered him because of “the knowledge and memories accumulated in a life spent visiting congregations of the cult”;0 that the person possessed will be in just the right social relation to those who are watching; that possession occurs at just the right moment in the ceremonial undertakings, the pos¬
sessed one carrying out his ritual obligations to the point of participating in a kind of skit with persons possessed at the time with other spirits. But in learning this, it is important to see that this contextual structuring of the horse’s role still allows participants in the cult to believe that possession is a real thing and that persons are possessed at random by gods whom they cannot select.
And when we observe a young American middle-class girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boy friend, we are ready to point to items of guile and contrivance in her f behavior. But like herself and her boy friend, we accept as an unperformed fact that this performer is a young 6 See, for example, Alfred Metraux, “Dramatic Elements in Ritual Possession^” Diogenes, 11, pp. 18-36.
6 Ibid,, p. 24.
American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the greater part of the performance. It is commonplace to say that different social groupings express in different ways such attributes as age, sex, territory, and class status, and that in each case these bare attributes are elaborated by means of a distinctive complex cultural configuration of proper ways of conducting oneself.
To he a
given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attri¬butes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto. The unthinking ease with which performers consistently carry off such standard-maintaining routines does not deny that a performance has occurred, merely that the participants have been aware of it.
A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of ap¬
propriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articu¬
lated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.
Sartre, here, provides a good illustration:
Let us consider this waiter in the caf6. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid.
He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the reck¬
lessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpet¬
ually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game.
He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other;
his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms;
he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But
j6
THE PRESENTATION OF SELFwhat is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take in¬
ventory of it; the waiter in the cafe plays with his con¬
dition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public de¬
mands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auction¬
eer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor.
A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier- thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is not longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight “fixed at ten paces”). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.7
7 Sartre, op. cit., p. 59.
TEAMS
In thinking about a performance it is easy to assume that the content of the presentation is merely an expressive ex¬
tension of the character of the performer and to see the function of the performance in these personal terms. This is a limited view and can obscure important differences in the function of the performance for the interaction as a whole. ___ ^
First, it often happens that the performance serves mainly to express the characteristics of the task that is per¬
formed and not the characteristics of the performer. Thus one finds that service personnel, whether in profession, bu¬
reaucracy, business, or craft, enliven their manner with movements which express proficiency and integrity, but, whatever this manner conveys about them, often its major purpose is to establish a favorable definition of their service or product. Further, we often find that the personal front of the performer is employed not so much because it allows him to present himself as he would like to appear but be¬
cause, his appearance and manner can do something for a scene of wider scope. It is in this light that we can under¬
stand how the sifting and sorting of urban life brings girls with good grooming and correct accent into the job of receptionist, where they can present a front for an organi¬
zation as well as for themselves.
But most important of all, we commonly find that the definition of the situation projected by a particular partici¬
pant is an integral part of a projection that is fostered and sustained by the intimate co-operation of more than one
78
participant. For example, in a medical hospital the two staff internists may require the intern, as part of his training, to run through a patient’s chart, giving an opinion about each recorded item. He may not appreciate that his show of relative ignorance comes in part from the staff studying up on the chart tire night before; he is quite unlikely to appreciate that this impression is doubly ensured by the local team’s tacit agreement allotting the work-up of half the chart to one staff person, the other half to the second staff person.1 This teamwork ensures a good staff showing
—providing, of course, that the right internist is able to take over the catechism at the right time.
Furthermore, it is often the case that each member of such a troupe or cast of players may be required to appear in a different light if the team’s over-all effect is to be satis¬
factory. Thus if a household is to stage a formal dinner, someone in uniform or livery will be required as part of the working team. The individual who plays this part must direct at himself the social definition of a menial. At the same time the individual taking the part of hostess must direct at herself, and foster by her appearance and manner, the social definition of someone upon whom it is natural for menials to wait. This was strikingly demonstrated in the island tourist hotel studied by the writer (hereafter called “Shetland Hotel”). There an over-all impression of middle-class service was achieved by the management, who allocated to themselves the roles of middle-class host and hostess and to their employees that of domestics—although in terms of the local class structure the girls who acted as maids were of slightly higher status than the hotel owners who employed them. When hotel guests were absent, little nonsense about a maid-mistress status difference was al¬
lowed by the maids. Another example may be taken from middle-class family life. In our society, when husband and wife appear before new friends for an evening of sociability, the wife may demonstrate more respectful subordination to the will and opinion of her husband than she may bother
1
Writer’s unpublished study of a medical service.to show when alone with him or when with old friends.
When she assumes a respectful role, he can assume a dom¬
inant one; and when each member of the marriage team plays its special role, the conjugal unit, as a unit, can sus¬
tain the impression that new audiences expect of it. Race etiquette in the South provides another example. Charles Johnson’s suggestion is that when few other whites are in the region, a Negro may call his white fellow worker by his first name, but when other whites approach it is under¬
stood that mistering will be reintroduced.2 Business eti¬
quette provides a similar example:
When outsiders are present, the touch of businesslike
formality is even more important. You may call your secretary “Mary” and your partner “Joe” all day, but when a stranger comes into your office you should refer to your associates as you would expect the stranger to address them: Miss or Mr. You may have a running joke with the switchboard operator, but you let it ride when you are placing a call in an outsider s hearing.3
She [your secretary] wants to be called Miss or Mrs. in front of strangers; at least, she won’t be flattered if your
“Mary” provokes everyone else into addressing her with familiarity.4
I will use the term “performance team” or, in short, team to refer to any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a single routine.
Until now in this report we have taken the individual s performance as the basic point of reference and have been concerning ourselves with two levels of fact the individual and his performance on one hand and the full set of par¬
ticipants and the interaction as a whole on the other. For the study of certain kinds and aspects of interaction, this perspective would seem sufficient; anything that did not fit this framework could be handled as a resolvable com¬
plication of it. Thus co-operation between two performers 2 Charles S. Johnson, op. cit., pp. 137-38.
3 Esquire Etiquette (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953). P- 6.
4 Ibid., p. 15.
8
o
THE PRESENTATION'OF SELFeach of whom was ostensibly involved in presenting his own special performance could be analyzed as a type of collusion or “understanding” without altering the basic frame of reference. However in the case-study of particular social establishments, the co-operative activity of some of the participants seems too important to be handled merely as a variation on a previous theme. Whether the members of a team stage similar individual performances or stage dissimilar performances which fit together into a whole, an emergent team impression arises which can conveniently be treated as a fact in its own right, as a third level of fact located between the individual performance on one hand and the total interaction of participants on the other. It may even be said that if our special interest is the study of impression management, of the contingencies which arise in fostering an impression, and of the techniques for meet¬
ing these contingencies, then the team and the team- performance may well be the best units to take as the fundamental point of reference.6 Given this point of refer¬
ence, it is possible to assimilate such situations as two- person interaction into the framework by describing these situations as two-team interaction in which each team con¬
tains only one member. (Logically speaking, one could even say that an audience which was duly impressed by a particular social setting in which no other persons were present would be an audience witnessing a team- performance in which the team was one of no members.) The concept of team allows us to think of performances that are given by one or more than one performer; it also covers another case. Earlier it was suggested that a per¬
former may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and
6
The use of the team (as opposed to the performer) as^the fundamental unit I take from Von Neumann, op. cit., especially p. 53> where bridge is analyzed as a game between two players, each of whom in some respects has two separate individuals to do the playing.observer of the same show. Presumably he intracepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way. It will have been necessary for the individual in his performing capacity to conceal from himself in his audience capacity the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself. This intricate maneuver of self-delusion constantly occurs; psychoanalysts have pro¬
vided us with beautiful field data of this kind, under the headings of repression and dissociation.6 Perhaps here we have a source of what has been called “self-distantiation, namely, that process by which a person comes to feel es¬
tranged from himself.7
When a performer guides his private activity in accord¬
ance with incorporated moral standards, he may associate these standards with a reference group of some kind, thus creating a non-present audience for his activity. This pos¬
sibility leads us to consider a further one. The individual may privately maintain standards of behavior which he does not personally believe in, maintaining these standards because of a lively belief that an unseen audience is present who will punish deviations from these standards. In other words, an individual may be his own audience or may 6 Individualistic modes of thought tend to treat processes such as self-deception and insincerity as characterological weaknesses generated within the deep recesses of the individual personality.
It might be better to start from outside the individual and work inward than to start inside the individual and work out. VV e may say that the starting point for all that is to come later consists of the individual performer maintaining a definition of the situa¬
tion before an audience. The individual automatically becomes insincere when he adheres to the obligation of maintaining a working consensus and participates in different routines or per¬
forms a given part before different audiences. Self-deception can be seen as something that results when two different roles, per¬
former and audience, come to be compressed into the same in¬
dividual.
7 See Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 209.