anthony giddens - on rereading the presentation of self some reflections

On Rereading The Presentation of Self: Some ReflectionsAuthor(s): ANTHONY GIDDENSSource: Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 290-295Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25677370 .Accessed: 02/07/2014 05:40

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Goffman ssous a^^SS On Rereading The Presentation of Self: Some Reflections

ANTHONY GIDD6NS London School of Economics

It is over twenty years since I opened The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman [1959] 1990). Indeed, in searching

through my books, I found it had disappeared from the shelves at some point over that peri od. So I had to order a new one. It came

resplendent in an edition published by Penguin books, showing that Goffman reached audiences stretching well beyond those tapped by most academic authors.

I got a few surprises looking at the book

again after all this time. I'd forgotten how

anthropological the book is?the sort of man from-Mars style that Goffman deploys. He describes the work as "a sort of handbook"

and, alternatively, as a "report." His own PhD on the Shetland Islands is quite frequently referred to?a study that falls into the catego ry of what he calls "respectable researches," where regularities of behavior are "reliably recorded." In the text, these examples taken from empirical field work famously jostle with quotations and observations from literary texts.

Goffman uses anthropological method, but he is not really acting as an anthropolo gist?the book presumes and draws upon tacit

knowledge in which the author and reader have to collaborate. He points up the "alien" nature of everyday practices when they are looked at "from the outside"; yet in most cases he is all too plainly an insider. He would have to be because, although he writes in an anthro

pological vein, he is far more concerned with the everyday and the mundane than the exotic.

Moreover, Goffman is not really concerned, as most anthropologists are, with uncovering cul tural divergence or difference. His territory is a universal one, since much of what he has to

say applies to all cultures. I forgot how little there is about language

in the book. I used to teach about Goffman and I suppose after a while his various books tended to merge seamlessly in my mind. Even

more than Harold Garfinkel, Goffman uncov ered and displayed to view the contextuality of

language?tracing a route that arrived, in a

virtually independent manner?at conclusions that Ludwig Wittgenstein reached in a far

more tortuous, philosophical way. Language is not just a matter of "difference," as the struc turalists argue?all language-use is heavily and irremediably context-saturated, and based on a multiplicity of forms of tacit knowledge, awareness of context, and bodily gesture, which couldn't themselves be put into words. There is a great deal about communication in Presentation of Self?indeed in a sense it is all about communication?but Goffman hadn't

yet pursued the implications he would later draw. (There is just one place in the text where all this is previsaged. It is where he discusses the expressions 'Good Lord!' and 'My God!' and how they are used to display recognition of disjunctures in everyday performance. A

person might say 'Good Lord!' if reminded of an appointment he or she forgot about. The

expression, with its religious overtone, con

veys to the listener that the individual accepts the importance of the lapse and the need to

repair it.) I was struck by what a flat style Goffman

adopts. He uses many colorful quotations, and

plainly selected them with an eye to their effect on the reader?their "sit up and take notice" quality. One such anecdote is the "novelistic incident," an early quote from a work by the novelist William Sansom. It con cerns Preedy, a "vacationing Englishman" in

Spain, and is used to highlight the distinction he makes between expressions of self-identity "given" deliberately to others, and those inad

vertently "given off." Preedy's elaborate per sonal rituals on the beach and getting into the

sea?designed to impress others with his

sophistication and sang-froid?are described

by the novelist with a proper sense of irony and are designed to amuse as well as instruct.

290


ON R R RDING TH PR S NTf)TION Of S LF 291

Goffman sometimes allows himself little digs of his own when he describes the contrived nature of some of our attempts to create a cer

tain impression of others. Mostly, however, his own style is dry as dust, as if to say that at least he?Goffman?is confining his own

impression-management to the business of academic analysis. This can't be wholly true, though, since he displayed so much artfulness in his selection of quotation.

Goffman is careful to qualify the dra

maturgical metaphor. No aspect of Presentation of Self'has attracted more critical attention than its use of what Goffman describes as "the projections ... of the theatri cal performance." Goffman makes it clear, however, how aware he is of the limitations of this approach, speaking of its "obvious short

comings"?even if in the end he is less than

wholly consistent in what he says about those

shortcomings. The theatre is all about make believe and is meticulously prepared before hand. In everyday life by contrast, "things are real" and performances "sometimes not well rehearsed." (Yet, interestingly, Goffman quali fies the statement 'things are real' by putting the word 'presumably' before it). On stage, actors present themselves as characters inter

acting with other players. However, unlike in "real life" there is a third party present: the audience. In the conclusion to his book, Goffman suggests that the dramaturgical approach is merely one "perspective" among several others. A segment of interaction may be viewed "technically," "politically," "struc

turally," and "culturally" as well as in terms of the metaphor of theatre. He then qualifies even further in his final two or three para graphs: "And so here the language and mask of the stage will be dropped." It formed, he

suggests, simply a sort of scaffold?a prepara tory phrase to a construction of a building as such. But scaffolds are built only in order to be later taken down?the substance of the build

ing is actually "the structure of social encoun ters."

Much importance is given to collaborative

settings, as contrasted to the activities of the

single performer. We are all actors as it were, but the play's the thing. The preening of

Preedy is actually an unusual vignette in the

context of the book. Most of it is concerned with mutually organized settings in which

groups of actors are involved. Actors normal

ly function as "teams," in settings in which the main point of the performance is to express and regulate a series of tasks-in-hand rather than display the personal qualities of the actor. The study of trust in differing areas of the social sciences has become a major preoccu pation since Goffman wrote Presentation of Self?he had a lot to say of relevance to it.

Achieving the trust of others in social situa tions is partly accomplished by sustaining a collective impression of competence- "pro fessionalism" on the part of the disparate groups of waiters, airline personnel, and med ical staff that crowd Goffman's pages is partly a matter of personal compatibility, but is also

very much also a matter of collective impres sion management. There is collusion involved and sometimes outright deception or sleight of hand. Mostly, however, he says, "team-work"

depends upon an intrinsic authenticity which cannot be reduced to mere ritual. Not all restaurant staff, air transportation workers, doctors, or nurses "know what they are doing," but the vast majority have to, or the whole

enterprise would soon collapse. Rereading Presentation of Self after so

much time away is to reexperience its com

pelling power. Goffman may have drawn upon Simmel, Cooley, Durkheim, and Radcliffe Brown, but in large part he mapped out new

territory by looking for the unfamiliar in the familiar?and vice versa. He is the theorist of copresence; much more than that, he explored the massively complex nature of what copres ence actually is. Copresence?the behavior of

subjects who are confined together for some while?has distinctive features that more

impersonal connections necessarily lack. Yet it is Goffman's achievement to have shown that the grand institutions of society both operate through, presume, yet at the same time struc

ture, the rituals that people follow when they are together in public places.

Durkheim argued with great force and conviction that society is far more than just the sum of its individual actors, and he was entire

ly right to do so. Yet he was never able to relate that fundamental insight to an account of


292 SOCIAL PSVCHOLOGV QUART6RLY

agency; as a consequence, in his writings we all tend to appear as the playthings of social forces much more powerful than ourselves. Goffman showed the way out of this impasse. "Society" is always and everywhere the cre ation of highly skilled and knowledgeable agents. Yet the continuous, minute, and

amazingly complicated way in which we

"bring off" social life with others at the same time depends fundamentally upon shared forms of tacit knowledge that can in no sense be reduced to the specific actions of individ uals.

Presentation of Self retains an enduring importance too because of the weight it gives to the emotions, a major aspect of Goffman's

originality. "Impression management" at first blush appears as something cognitive and in some part of course it is. Yet as organized in the context of everyday rituals, and done in a collaborative way, it is the key to the conti

nuity of self and the containment or regula tion of emotion.

Freud regarded repression as internal to the personality, and constructed an elaborate

theory of neurosis and psychosis around it. In Presentation of Self Goffman shows that a

great deal of emotional management pro ceeds socially. In "back regions"?such as the kitchen in a restaurant, hidden from the view of the customers?people are able to

express feelings of frustration or rage that

they must carefully conceal in their front

region performances. They might make fun of their patrons too. Back regions hence form a safety valve for emotions that might other wise "flood out" and seriously compromise the competence which the performers want to

put on display. Goffman doesn't write much about mad

ness in Presentation of Self but all the ele ments of his later ruminations about it are there in the book. Mental illness, or at least certain forms of it, he implies, resides more in the minutiae of everyday life than in grand delusions. Those who we label as "mad," both in a "serious" and in a more trivial day to-day sense, either cannot or will not deploy. the cues that "normal" people routinely make use of to show to others that they are compe tent agents. The mentally disturbed sit or

stand too close to others, and either stare at or refuse the gaze of the other altogether; they don't "listen" (i.e., demonstrate atten

tiveness) to what others are saying, or inter

rupt them aggressively. They may sit with their limbs slack, unable or unwilling to

deploy the continuous monitoring of bodily appearance and demeanor that is taken for

granted in the diverse contexts of social life. The protective practices that prevent

social activity from being swamped by anxi eties or hatreds are marvellously analyzed by Goffman in Presentation of Self. Discretion and tact play a fundamental role here. They may seem like quite trivial aspects of perfor mances, but they are deeply influential. Tact and circumspection, Goffman shows, are demanded not only of "performers" but of "audiences" too. For instance, people rou

tinely stay away from areas in restaurants, homes, or workplaces to which they have not been invited, actively helping sustain the "show" that is being put on. If an outsider for some reason enters a back region, he or she will typically give those in it a chance to reassemble their public selves, even if only by a discrete knock on the door. When in the back region, the "intruder" normally observes due discretion by not glancing around too openly at what is in the room, in case it could compromise the identity the

occupier is offering. "Intimates"?those who know the performer well?may be free to flout some of these restrictions, since they are already privy to at least some of the per former's secrets.

Presentation of Self has been influential in almost every social science discipline, especially sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. Its impact has extended through to theatre studies (natural ly), media and cultural studies?and to the theatre itself. We know that playwrights Tom

Stoppard and Michael Frayn have read Goffman. I'm not sure that Harold Pinter ever did, but his writing ranges over much of the same territory, although Goffman's pic ture of everyday life on the face of things is far more benign than that of Pinter.

For all of its fine qualities, and its staying power, from its first publication Presentation


ON R R RDING TH PR S NTRTION Of S lf 293

of Self met with a barrage of criticism from other social scientists.1 One could summarize these as worries about: (1) the status of the

dramaturgical metaphor; (2) the absence of a discussion of power; (3) the lack of a sense of

history or institutional change in Goffinan's

work; and (4) the ambiguous role of "reflexiv

ity," a term Goffman doesn't make any play with, but arguably is intrinsic to his writings.

The first of these sets of objections has

probably been most commented on, but seems to me the least interesting. I see no particular difficulty in comparing aspects of social life to the theatre, and it is an idea that goes back centuries. Nor is there any problem in taking over concepts coming from the theatre into the social sciences, as long as they are carefully defined and used. The notion of "role" is per haps the most prominent example. As men

tioned, Goffman surrounds the theatrical

analogies he uses with a host of qualifications about their application to the wider social world. Even if Goffman did not especially per sist with it afterwards, as a heuristic device the

language of "actors," "performances," "audi

ences" and so forth proved highly valuable in

stimulating the novel ideas that he elaborated. Power is a different story. One couldn't

say that power and domination are altogether absent from Presentation of Self. Certain pas sages and sections of the book are about how we "do" power. For instance Goffman offers a discussion of how filial deference?and there fore differential power between the genera tions?was organized in traditional China, based upon the work La Civilisation Chinoise, written by Marcel Granet (1929). Elaborate ritual and careful bodily demeanor ensure that the son treats his father as "a chief" ... "One comes night and morning to pay homage. After which, one waits for orders."

Yet there is no systematic discussion of

power in Presentation of Self nor as far as I know in any other of Goffman's major works. He has a possible defense: he is concerned with interpersonal interaction between indi viduals in situations of copresence. Any influ

1 See the diversity of critical appraisals offered in Fine, Manning, and Smith 2000.

ences that go beyond such situations he simply defines as not his area of concern?let others, using different perspectives, explore them. A moment's reflection, however, will show that such a defence is inadequate. Copresence could never be defined as simply studying vis ible circumstances in which individuals inter act with one another. The vast bulk of what frames situations of copresence is invisible? it consists of institutions, both taken for grant ed, but also drawn upon, by the parties to the interaction. This is most obvious in the case of

language and communication, which pre sumes a vast apparatus of rules and signals deployed by a linguistic community. Yet it is also true of systems of power, which both

structure, yet are reproduced by, everyday rit uals of different sorts.

Presentation of Self would have been an even more impressive study if it had contained a more systematic analysis of this issue. Consider the example of professions, which in one guise or another crop up often in the book. How doctors talk to patients, and how the con text of interaction is structured, expresses

much larger aspects of medical institutions, including major differentials of power. It

would be impossible to understand fully why the interaction takes the form it does without

grasping these. They are not just a "back

drop": they help constitute, as well as being constituted by, the interaction.

Goffman discusses "pieces" of interaction

mostly as separate segments?observations of behavior in a diversity of times and places.

Wilfully, or perhaps as a by-product of his fondness for describing short episodes of

behavior, the pieces are never put together. At one point in Presentation of Self for example, he has some four or five paragraphs on situa tions in which individuals are treated as "non

persons," an obvious manifestation of power. For instance, in the Deep South, whites would discuss their slaves in their presence as though they were not there. Slaves, like servants in

medieval courtly society, were expected to enter freely into back regions, the basis that no

management of impression was needed for them. The observation, while interesting, is not followed through or its wider implications teased out.


294 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUflRT RLY

What applies to power applies also to his

tory. Anthropologists who study small oral cultures may know little of their history and are therefore perhaps justified in acting as if it can be ignored. The same is not true of con

temporary societies however, from which the vast majority of Goffman's examples come. Of course, one can put Presentation of Self alongside other texts, and in this way attempt to add an historical dimension to some of the

examples Goffman discusses. In his celebrat ed book The Civilizing Process (1969), for

example, Norbert Elias analyses the historical

origins of civility in what Goffman would call

front-region behavior and the social organiza tion of privacy.2 Elias was far more influenced

by Freud than Goffman was, but plainly the interactions Goffman discussed in everyday life do have an evolution that is absolutely intrinsic to their character. The social psychol ogist Thomas Scheff is one among several

prominent authors who have developed these connections in an interesting and potentially highly fruitful way?he relates them to

episodes of deadly violence as in war (Scheff 1999).

Lack of attention to reflexivity in Presentation of Self?and in Goffman's subse

quent works?is puzzling. Reflexivity can be

interpreted on two levels: in relation to the author and in relation to the contexts of social life with which he is concerned. Goffman

rarely seems "present" in his books, any more than Durkheim or Radcliffe-Brown did. Yet there are plenty of questions to be asked. What

impression did Goffman want Presentation of Self to make on the reader? Every book is about impression management, since books are designed to convey certain messages, not

only about what the text "says" but about the

impressions it also "gives." In using so many fictional examples, yet introducing them in a casual and off-hand way, Presentation of Self gives an impression of lightly worn erudition and also a certain cool. It is clearly designed to draw readers in and cause them to reflect upon their own lives?"now that Goffman has

pointed it out, I recognize that, yes, this is

2 For a relevant discussion, see Kasson 1990.

what I do, how others react to me and how I react to them." The author appeals to the same

body of tacit knowledge in persuading the reader of his argument as the characters that

appear in the text. What does Goffman actually mean when

he compares his use of "the language and mask of the stage" to scaffolding that can be dismantled once the job is done? He could mean something banal?that the metaphor of the theatre directed his attention both to a

"subject-matter" (copresence) and a way of

analyzing it, which when uncovered, could better be discussed without the framework that

originally inspired it. Yet Goffman's comments raise the problematic?and, one would have

thought, inescapable?issue that reflexivity presumes in relation to itself. The student of

reflexivity is also a reflexive actor?the sense in which Goffman's observations are "objec tive" then becomes harder to tease out.

Reflexivity also directly impacts the

episodes and happenings that are the stuff of Goffman's work. In one sense, he is the

sophisticated analyst of the phenomenon. He shows that the reflexive monitoring of the

body, the gaze, and of cues routinely given and

given off by others is both amazingly complex and intrinsic to social life. Yet reflexivity is also a learning process, and this thought leads us back to history. All social actors are capa ble of reflecting the conditions of their action, and of altering them. Not only are they capa ble of it, they do it all the time, both setting into motion and being influenced by wider

problems of change which are thereby brought about. I find Goffman's disinclination to wres tle with such problems frustrating.

The Presentation of Self first published in

1959, was Goffman's first book. It was suc ceeded by a dazzling variety of others, each and every one of them a major achievement. I don't think he coped fully with the range of

problems I have noted above, but he elaborat ed brilliantly on many of the observations and

insights introduced in Presentation of Self. His most directly "structural" work was his study of "total institutions"?organizations such as

asylums or prisons in which individuals are

kept confined from the larger social world

(Goffman 1961). Goffman's originality is in


ON R R RDING TH Pfl S NTflTION Of S Lf 295

full display in his analysis, but he left it to oth ers to supply the wider developmental context in which such institutions came into being and evolved. It was Michel Foucault (1975) who most persuasively showed how total organiza tions connect to wider processes of modern ization and to power.

In one of my essays (Giddens 1988) I note

that, just like Durkheim, Foucault seemed to

deny to individuals those very qualities as

agents which Goffman focused upon so per suasively. The mystery of the social world is how it can be the case that all ('competent') human actors are highly skilled and knowl

edgeable about what they do and why, but are at the same time driven by social forces far

larger than themselves. Goffman was com

pletely correct how extraordinarily complex human action and interaction are, and that

they have to be actively and continuously monitored by those who produce them. Yet, in an era of globalization, Durkheim's stress that

society is far greater than the sum of the indi viduals who compose it seems to me more acute than ever. No individual possesses more than a miniscule fraction of the knowledge

upon which social continuity and order

depend; yet somehow it all more or less holds

together, even now that our interdependence with others is in many ways worldwide.

R F R NC S

Elias, Norbert. 1969. The Civilizing Process. 2 vol umes. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Fine, Gary Alan, Philip Manning, and Gregory W. H.

Smith, eds. 2000. Erving Goffman. 4 volumes.

London, UK: Sage. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The

Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House.

Giddens, Anthony. 1988. "Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist." Pp. 250-79 in Erving

Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, edit

ed by Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton.

Cambridge, UK: Polity. Goffman, Erving. [1959] 1990. The Presentation of

Self in Everyday Life. New York: Penguin. -. 1961. Asylums. New York: Doubleday.

Granet, Marcel. 1929. La civilisation chinoise. Paris, France: Editions Albin Michel.

Kasson, John F. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners

in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New

York: Hill and Wang. Scheff, Thomas J. 1999. Being Mentally III: A

Sociological Theory. New York: Aldine de

Gruyter.

Anthony Giddens is a member of the House of Lords, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. He was Director of the LSE from 1997 to 2003, and was made a peer in 2004. He has honorary degrees or comparable awards from 21 uni versities. He is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian

Academy of Science, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He was the BBC Reith Lecturer in 1999. According to Google Scholar, he is the most widely cited sociologist in the world. His many books include The Constitution of Society (1984), Beyond Left and Right (1994), The Third Way (1998), and Europe in the Global Age (2006). His most recent major work is The Politics of Climate

Change (2009). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.


Article Contentsp. 290p. 291p. 292p. 293p. 294p. 295

Issue Table of ContentsSocial Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 285-404Front MatterOpeningsThe Rhythm of the Whip [pp. 285-289]Goffman EssaysOn Rereading The Presentation of Self: Some Reflections [pp. 290-295]Some Frames for Goffman [pp. 296-299]Framing and Face: The Relevance of The Presentation of Self to Linguistic Discourse Analysis [pp. 300-305]

Two On InteractionEscaping Embarrassment: Face-work in the Rap Cipher [pp. 306-324]"Categorizing the Categorizer": The Management of Racial Common Sense in Interaction [pp. 325-342]

City Air Makes Free": A Multi-Level, Cross-national Analysis Of Self-efficacy [pp. 343-364]Beyond the United States and Japan: Testing Yamagishi's Emancipation Theory of Trust across 31 Nations [pp. 365-383]Building Cohesion in Positively Connected Exchange Networks [pp. 384-402]Back Matter

anthony giddens - on rereading the presentation of self some reflections

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