Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

by Erving Goffman

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

The participant’s dramaturgical problems

of presenting one’s self

“a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery”

Expressions we give vs. give off

"The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off"

An information game

“When an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation”

Belief in the part one is playing

“the individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge him and the situation in a particular way”

Sincere or cynical?

Front

The Joe Schmo Show

“A given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations”

Front

“He [an observer] can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for him to mobilize his past experience and stereotypical thinking”

A desire to perform the given task or a desire to maintain the

corresponding front

Nene LeakesNew York

Dramatic Realization

“In mobilizing his behavior to make a showing, he will be concerned not so much with the full round of the different routine he performs but only with the one from which his occupational reputation derives.”

Idealization

“incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society”

“upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and efforts to keep from moving downward are expressed in are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front”

Concealment

“profitable form of activity that is concealed from his audience”

Concealment

“we tend to conceal from our audience all evidence of ‘dirty work’

Real Housewives

“Foster the impression that the routine they are presently performing is their only routine or at least their most essential one”

Catch Me If You Can

Maintenance of Expressive Control

“the audience may misunderstand the meaning that a cue was designed to convey, or may read an embarrassing meaning into gestures or events that were accidental, inadvertent, or incidental and not meant by the performer to carry any meaning whatsoever”

Misrepresentation

“When we think of those who present a false front or ‘only’ a front, of those who dissemble, deceive, and defraud, we think of a discrepancy between fostered appearances and reality”

What are the ways in which a given impression can be

discredited?

Mystification

“We have, then, a basic social coin, with awe on one side and shame on the other. The audience senses secret mysteries and powers behind the performance.”

Reality & Contrivance

“Anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness”

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”