Goffman

Works

Four books and one late address define the range.

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) sets out dramaturgy: front and back region, teams, impression management, and expressions given as against expressions given off.
• Asylums (1961) develops total institutions, the mortification of the self, and the underlife of secondary adjustments.
• Stigma (1963) distinguishes virtual from actual social identity and the discredited from the discreditable, and analyses passing and covering.
• Frame Analysis (1974) asks how participants answer the question what is it that is going on here, through primary frameworks, keying and fabrication.
• “The Interaction Order” (1983), his presidential address, states the case for the domain as a domain and was delivered after his death.

Central ideas

Five, of which the cooperative one is most often missed.

• The interaction order: the encounter has an organisation of its own, with its own regularities, which is neither individual psychology written small nor social structure written large.
• Dramaturgy: conduct before others is organised into regions. A front region is where a performance is maintained for a given audience and a back region is where it is prepared — both are regions, and neither is the place where the truth lives.
• Face and face-work: face is the positive social value a person effectively claims by the line others assume they have taken. The decisive point is that face-work is cooperative — participants protect each other's face, and tact is the norm rather than the exception, because a spoiled encounter costs everyone in it.
• Stigma as a relation rather than an attribute: it exists between an attribute and a stereotype in a particular situation, which is why the same feature can be discrediting in one encounter and unremarkable in another.
• Frames and keying: the same activity can be play, rehearsal, deception or the thing itself, and participants continuously establish which.

Distinctive vocabulary

Four terms that have escaped into ordinary speech carrying the wrong sense.

• Performance: all activity of a participant before a set of observers that influences them. Not pretence, not insincerity, and not something a person could stop doing.
• Back region: a region relative to a particular audience, with its own audience of its own. Not authenticity and not the real self.
• Impression management: the ordinary and mostly cooperative work of sustaining a definition of the situation. Not manipulation, though it covers manipulation.
• Stigma: a situated relation between attribute and stereotype, distinguishing the discredited from the discreditable. Not shame and not prejudice.

Debates and disagreements

Two arguments about the theory and one about what it leaves out.

• Whether dramaturgy implies a cynical manipulator behind the performance, or instead dissolves the person into performances with nothing behind them. He rejected both readings and held that the self is a product of a scene rather than its cause, but the ambiguity is genuinely in the text.
• Alvin Gouldner's charge that this is a sociology of the encounter written in indifference to power — attentive to how a performance is managed and silent on who gets to stage it.
• Whether the interaction order is genuinely autonomous or was made to look so by bracketing structure and then reporting its absence.

Intellectual relationships

A Durkheimian argument conducted at the scale of a conversation.

• Durkheim supplies the sacred, and interaction ritual is the deliberate move of treating the individual as a sacred object whose treatment carries ritual weight in ordinary encounters.
• Simmel supplies the interest in forms of sociation independent of their content.
• The Chicago School and Everett Hughes are the training; Goffman resisted the symbolic-interactionist label without escaping it.
• Garfinkel's ethnomethodology developed alongside, with the same insistence that ordinary competence is an achievement.
• Giddens draws on him for the knowledgeable actor, and Hochschild's feeling rules extend face-work into paid work; both are in the same lens lineage here.
• Butler's performativity is the adjacent idea most often mistaken for his, and it is not a development of it.

How it changes this reading

Goffman is named in two lens lineages: Sociological and Performative-dramaturgical.

• For the Sociological lens he supplies a way to describe conduct at the level of the exchange itself — what an encounter required, what it made available, what it cost to keep intact — without ascending to claims about who someone is.
• The cooperative half of face-work is what makes that useful here: if protecting another person's presented self is the ordinary condition of an encounter rather than a favour, then a description of an exchange can be about the exchange's requirements rather than about anyone's character.
• For the Performative-dramaturgical lens he is the member who is not talking about theatre at all. Schechner, Phelan and Carlson work on performance as a practice; Goffman applies the word by analogy to conduct that has no stage, no script and no training, and the entry's divergence section keeps that distinction load-bearing.
• They are not evidence about anyone's conduct, sincerity, or intent.

Useful comparisons

He sits in two lineages and is the odd member of one of them.

• In the Sociological lens: Goffman on the encounter, Bourdieu on durable dispositions, Giddens on structure as medium and outcome, Hochschild on managed feeling.
• In the Performative-dramaturgical lens: Richard Schechner on restored behaviour across ritual and theatre, Peggy Phelan on performance's ontology as disappearance, Marvin Carlson on the field and on reception, and Goffman on everyday conduct that nobody rehearsed.
• The two placements ask different things of him: the sociological one wants the organisation of the encounter, the dramaturgical one wants the analogy — and the analogy is the part that travels badly.

Where the ideas meet

Across both lineages the same refusal recurs.

• None of these positions treats presentation as a decoration over a truer unpresented version.
• All treat the presence of others as constitutive of what is happening rather than incidental to it.
• Each takes ordinary competence as an achievement worth describing rather than as background.

Where they part

Two disagreements inside the dramaturgical lineage and one outside it.

• Phelan holds that performance's being is disappearance, and that documenting it turns it into something else. Goffman's entire method is documentation of everyday performance. The lineage contains that disagreement rather than resolving it, and a reading that cites both owes an account of which it means.
• Schechner and Carlson work on trained and staged practice; Goffman's performers are untrained and unstaged. Carrying a term from one to the other — restored behaviour to a conversation, or back region to a theatre — borrows a word without its apparatus.
• Goffman is not Butler. Dramaturgy presupposes a performer who manages an impression; performativity denies a subject prior to the acts that constitute it. The words are nearly the same and the positions are not compatible.

Limits

• Dramaturgical vocabulary describes the organisation of encounters and not what anyone was trying to do in one.
• Front and back are relative to a particular audience, so neither can be used to locate a person's real self.
• Face-work is observed in interaction; a written record contains the traces of an encounter and not the encounter.

Criticisms

The objections are about power, method, and an unresolved ambiguity.

• Gouldner's charge that the framework is indifferent to power, hierarchy and institutions, describing the tactics of a performance while leaving unasked who controls the stage.
• The method is unsystematic by design — fiction, news clippings, anecdote and his own observation, without sampling or replication. He was candid about it, and whether it is a limitation or the right method for the domain remains open.
• The status of the self is never settled: the text supports both a cynical reading and a reading in which there is no one behind the performances, and he rejected both.
• Whether the framework can carry structural inequality is contested, and his own writing on the arrangement between the sexes is part of that dispute.

Common misreadings

Five uses these placements do not license.

• Reading front and back region as false and true, which turns a relational distinction into a claim about authenticity the theory does not make.
• Treating impression management as deceit, when the argument is that all conduct before others is expressive and that the protection of face is usually cooperative.
• Conflating his performance with Butler's performativity — the commonest error with his vocabulary and the one that reverses the most.
• Using stigma for shame, prejudice, or a bad attribute rather than for a situated relation between an attribute and a stereotype.
• Using frame loosely for perspective, which drops keying and fabrication and with them everything the analysis was for.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish what anyone intended, felt, or was concealing in an encounter.
• It cannot recover an interaction from a record of it.