39 pages • 1 hour read
Erving GoffmanThe Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Labor Relations
Scenes between workers, or workers and bosses, populate Goffman’s text. The recurring motif of labor dynamics becomes an essential and helpful example for Goffman’s overall analysis of performances, especially with respect to the way performances are spatially structured events divided between a front and back region. The language of front and back regions comes largely from the world of theater production (i.e., front stage and back stage). Moreover, just as within theater performances, everyday interactions between a performance team and its audience are divided between an area in view of the audience and an area that’s out of sight. Goffman finds this basic division between the visible/audible and the invisible/inaudible at work within every social interaction. Now, the reason labor relations recur in the text is that these performances perfectly exemplify the division between front and back stage. Regarding Goffman’s studies of the everyday social life of the Shetland Hotel in Scotland, we read the following description of the dynamics between the restaurant’s front and back stage:
“Over the kitchen stove, wet socks would be dried on the steaming kettle—a standard practice on the island. Tea, when guests had asked for it heavily infused, would be brewed in a pot encrusted at the bottom with tea leaves that were old. Fresh herrings would be cleaned by splitting them and then scraping out the innards with newspaper” (117-18).
Behaviors such as these, which are common practices in every Scottish working-class household, are clearly kept out of sight of hotel guests. In other words, the spaces in which performances play out (especially between workers and customers) is divided along the line of a front and back region, the back region being where performers can drop their act and relate to each other in a manner that, if made apparent to the audience, would ruin the restaurant’s impression and atmosphere.
Sign-Vehicles
Throughout Goffman’s text, one encounters performances given in a specific time and place, such as at work, at home, or at a dinner party. Thus, in every performance there are nonverbal ways an individual may foster a desired impression upon their audience. Goffman uses the term “sign-vehicles” to describe certain nonverbal cues that largely act as the performance’s backdrop or setting, as well as others that serve as objects from which an audience may infer something about the kind of person they are dealing with. Goffman writes:
“For those present, many sources of information become accessible and many carriers (or “sign-vehicles”) become available for conveying […] information. If unacquainted with the individual, observers can glean clues from his conduct and appearance which allow them to apply their previous experience with individuals roughly similar to the one before them or, more important, to apply untested stereotypes to him” (1).
In other words, sign-vehicles are the always-present adornments of the performer’s intentional gestures and expressions—clothing, hair, accent, posture, race, class, sex, gender, nationality, even the decoration of the setting. Thus, sign-vehicles are the less explicit ways an observer may acquire information about the individual performer via inference.
Belief
When Goffman begins analyzing the individual performer who enacts a particular role in front of an observer, he identifies two key ways the individual may relate to their role: either cynically or sincerely. The cynical individual “has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience” (18), while the sincere individual believes “in the impression fostered by their own performance” (18). For Goffman, the cynical and the sincere individual constitute two extremes along a spectrum of possible ways an individual may relate to their performance and its believability. Thus, belief plays a central role not only with respect to the audience but also to the individual performers. Moreover, potential problems and disruptions may arise during a performance if an individual is too cynical or feels too alienated from their role within the performance team. Performance teams must cultivate relations within the group to avoid an alienated performer disrupting or defecting from the team as a whole. Not only must performance teams manage the impression that the audience leaves with, they must also manage individual teammates’ levels of cynicism and sincerity. Thus, belief is equally managed on behalf of both the performers and the audience.
