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When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed.
Interested in aspects of their self like Socio-economic status, conception of self, attitude towards the others, competence, trustworthiness etc
Information about the individual helps to define the situation, allowing for expectations for the situation and how they should act to be established and how to get the correctresponse from the audience
Relying on a combination of past encounters, assumptions and social settings as means to predict present and future behaviour
The expression that he gives and the expression that he gives off. The first involves verbal symbols or their substitutes which he uses admittedly and solely to convey the information that he and the others are known to attach to these symbols. This is communication in the traditional and narrow sense. The second involves a wide range of action that others can treat as symptomatic of the actor, the expectation being that the action was performed for reasons other than the information conveyed in this way.
The individual does of course intentionally convey misinformation by means of both of these types of communication, the first involving deceit, the second feigning.
When the person is in the immediate presence of others, his activity will have a promissory character.
Of course, the others also live by interference in their dealings with the physical world, but it is only in the world of social interaction that the objects which they make interferences will purposely facilitate and hinder this inferential process.
121
Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him.
Or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts.
We must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him. Ordinarily the definitions of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur.
122
Together the participants contribute to a single overall definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honoured.
Referred to as “working consensus”
When the individual employs these strategies and tactics to protect his own projections, we may refer to them as “defensive practices”; when a participant employs them to save the definition of the situation projected by another, we speak of “protective practices” or “tact”.
In addition to the fact that precautions are taken to prevent disruption of projected definitions, we may also note that an intense interest in these disruptions comes to play a significant role in the social life of the group. Practical jokes and social games are played in which embarrassments which are to be taken unseriously are purposely engineered.
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To summarize, then, I assume that when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation. This report is concerned with some of the common techniques that persons employ to sustain such impressions and with some of the common contingencies associated with the employment of these techniques.
For the purpose of this report, interaction (that is, face-to-face interaction) may be roughly defined as the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence. An interaction may be defined as all the interaction which occurs throughout any one occasion when a given set of individuals are in one another’s continuous presence; the term “an encounter” would do as well. A “performance” may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.
Those who contribute the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants
The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolded during a performance and which may be presented or played though on other occasions may be called a “part” or “routine”. These situational terms can easily be related to structural ones.
When a performer repeatedly plays the same role to the same audience across various occasions, it is likely that a social relationship will arise out of that repeated performance
I [use] the term “performance” to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers.
Goffman refers to the “front’ as a label which expresses a part of the performance which regularly functions in everyday life in a generalised and fixed fashion
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“setting’ involving 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. A setting tends to stay put, geographically speaking, so that those who would use a particular setting as part of their performance cannot begin their act until they have brought themselves to the appropriate place and must terminate their performance when they leave it. It is only in exceptional circumstances that the setting follows along with the performers; we see this in the funeral cortege, the civic parade and the dreamlike processions that kings and queens are made of. Goffman describes these exceptional performers as becoming highly sacred
The tendency for performers to offer their observers an impression that is idealized in several different ways
125
To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the manner of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony – as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community. Furthermore, insofar as the expressive bias of performances comes to be accepted as reality, then that which is accepted at the moment as reality will have some of the characteristics of a celebration.
Some performances are carried off successfully with complete dishonesty, others with complete honesty; but for performances in general neither of these extremes is essential and neither, perhaps, it is dramaturgically advisable.
And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchanges of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies.
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All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify
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 the solely because of the effect this is likely to have. The expressions it is felt he is giving off will be especially “inaccessible” to him.
In short, we all act better than we know how.
The details of the expressions and movements used do not come from a script but from a command of an idiom, a command that is exercised from moment to moment with little calculation or forethought
127
Audiences tend to accept the self projected by the individual performer during any current performance as a responsible representative of his colleague-grouping, of his team, and of his social establishment.
Performance disruptions, then, have consequences at three levels of abstraction: personality, interaction, and social structure.
The very structure of the self can be seen in terms of how we arrange for such performances
The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.
128
There will be a team of persons whose activity on stage in conjunction with available props will constitute the scene from which the performed character’s self will emerge, and another team, the audience, whose interpretive activity will be necessary for this emergence. The self is a product of all these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks of this genesis.
The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersone, of course, and sometimes breaks down, exposing its separate components’ back region control; team collucion; audience tact; and so forth,
Each performed character will appear to emanate intrinsically from its performer.
Turning from the individual as character to the individual as performer
Goffman describes the attributed of the performer as psychobiological in nature yet identifies that they arise out of intimate interaction with the contingencies of staging performances
Goffman concludes by referencing the language of performance and the stage as a scaffold which should be removed.
The report is concerned specifically with the structure of social encounters – the structure of those entities in social life that come into being whenever persona enter one another’s immediate physical presence.
The same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situatuins.
The interactional tasks that all of us share