The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - by Erving Goffman

Introduction

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. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.

The expressiveness of the individual (and therefore his capacity to give impressions) appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: 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. As we shall have to see, this distinction has an only initial validity. The individual does of course intentionally convey misinformation by means of both of these types of communication, the first involving deceit, the second feigning.

Let us now turn from the others to the point of view of the individual who presents himself before them. He may wish them to think highly of him, or to think that he thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact he feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; he may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to defraud, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. 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. This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.

Of the two kinds of communication—expressions given and expressions given off—this report will be primarily concerned with the latter, with the more theatrical and contextual kind, the non-verbal, presumably unintentional kind, whether this communication be purposely engineered or not.

Knowing that the individual is likely to present himself in a light that is favorable to him, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly his verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which he seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions he gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of his expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. In this a fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of his communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitor lifted his fork or spoon to his mouth, the eagerness with which he passed food into his mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) “actually” thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with still another person (C). She would then covertly examine the facial expressions of A as he regarded B in conversation with C. Not being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what he was “actually” feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer.

Now given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression he makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. For example, in gaining admission to a tight social circle, the participant observer may not only wear an accepting look while listening to an informant, but may also be careful to wear the same look when observing the informant talking to others; observers of the observer will then not as easily discover where he actually stands.

This kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery. It should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual’s conduct, he can gain much by controlling it. The others of course may sense that the individual is manipulating the presumably spontaneous aspects of his behavior, and seek in this very act of manipulation some shading of conduct that the individual has not managed to control. This again provides a check upon the individual’s behavior, this time his presumably uncalculated behavior, thus re-establishing the asymmetry of the communication process. Here I would like only to add the suggestion that the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained.

In noting the tendency for a participant to accept the definitional claims made by the others present, we can appreciate the crucial importance of the information that the individual initially possesses or acquires concerning his fellow participants, for it is on the basis of this initial information that the individual starts to define the situation and starts to build up lines of responsive action. The individual’s initial projection commits him to what he is proposing to be and requires him to drop all pretenses of being other things. As the interaction among the participants progresses, additions and modifications in this initial informational state will of course occur, but it is essential that these later developments be related without contradiction to, and even built up from, the initial positions taken by the several participants. It would seem that an individual can more easily make a choice as to what line of treatment to demand from and extend to the others present at the beginning of an encounter than he can alter the line of treatment that is being pursued once the interaction is underway.

Given the fact that the individual effectively projects a definition of the situation when he enters the presence of others, we can assume that events may occur within the interaction which contradict, discredit, or otherwise throw doubt upon this projection. When these disruptive events occur, the interaction itself may come to a confused and embarrassed halt. Some of the assumptions upon which the responses of the participants had been predicated become untenable, and the participants find themselves lodged in an interaction for which the situation has been wrongly defined and is now no longer defined. At such moments the individual whose presentation has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down.

One cannot judge the importance of definitional disruptions by the frequency with which they occur, for apparently they would occur more frequently were not constant precautions taken. We find that preventive practices are constantly employed to avoid these embarrassments and that corrective practices are constantly employed to compensate for discrediting occurrences that have not been successfully avoided. 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.” Together, defensive and protective practices comprise the techniques employed to safeguard the impression fostered by an individual during his presence before others. It should be added that while we may be ready to see that no fostered impression would survive if defensive practices were not employed, we are less ready perhaps to see that few impressions could survive if those who received the impression did not exert tact in their reception of it.

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. Fantasies are created in which devastating exposures occur. Anecdotes from the past—real, embroidered, or fictitious—are told and retold, detailing disruptions which occurred, almost occurred, or occurred and were admirably resolved. There seems to be no grouping which does not have a ready supply of these games, reveries, and cautionary tales, to be used as a source of humor, a catharsis for anxieties, and a sanction for inducing individuals to be modest in their claims and reasonable in their projected expectations. The individual may tell himself through dreams of getting into impossible positions. Families tell of the time a guest got his dates mixed and arrived when neither the house nor anyone in it was ready for him. Journalists tell of times when an all-too-meaningful misprint occurred, and the paper’s assumption of objectivity or decorum was humorously discredited. Public servants tell of times a client ridiculously misunderstood form instructions, giving answers which implied an unanticipated and bizarre definition of the situation. Seamen, whose home away from home is rigorously he-man, tell stories of coming back home and inadvertently asking mother to “pass the fucking butter.”

Performances

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on—and this seems to be the typical case—then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the “realness” of what is presented.

At the other extreme, we find that the performer may not be taken in at all by his own routine. This possibility is understandable, since no one is in quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person who puts it on. Coupled with this, the performer may be moved to guide the conviction of his audience only as a means to other ends, having no ultimate concern in the conception that they have of him or of the situation. When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all his professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.

I have been using 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. It will be convenient to label as “front” that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance. Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. For preliminary purposes, it will be convenient to distinguish and label what seem to be the standard parts of front.

First, there is the “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.

If we take the term “setting” to refer to the scenic parts of expressive equipment, one may take the term “personal front” to refer to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex, age, and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like. Some of these vehicles for conveying signs, such as racial characteristics, are relatively fixed and over a span of time do not vary for the individual from one situation to another. On the other hand, some of these sign vehicles are relatively mobile or transitory, such as facial expression, and can vary during a performance from one moment to the next.

While in the presence of others, the individual typically infuses his activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscure. For if the individual’s activity is to become significant to others, he must mobilize his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey. In fact, the performer may be required not only to express his claimed capacities during the interaction but also to do so during a split second in the interaction. Thus, if a baseball umpire is to give the impression that he is sure of his judgment, he must forgo the moment of thought which might make him sure of his judgment; he must give an instantaneous decision so that the audience will be sure that he is sure of his judgment.

The problem of dramatizing one’s work involves more than merely making invisible costs visible. The work that must be done by those who fill certain statuses is often so poorly designed as an expression of a desired meaning, that if the incumbent would dramatize the character of his role, he must divert an appreciable amount of his energy to do so. And this activity diverted to communication will often require different attributes from the ones which are being dramatized. Thus to furnish a house so that it will express simple quiet dignity, the householder may have to race to auction sales, haggle with antique dealers, and doggedly canvass all the local shops for proper wallpaper and curtain materials. To give a radio talk that will sound genuinely informal, spontaneous, and relaxed, the speaker may have to design his script with painstaking care, testing one phrase after another, in order to follow the content, language, rhythm, and pace of everyday talk.

And so individuals often find themselves with the dilemma of expression versus action. Those who have the time and talent to perform a task well may not, because of this, have the time or talent to make it apparent that they are performing well.

The notion that a performance presents an idealized view of the situation is, of course, quite common. Cooley’s view may be taken as an illustration: If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or “train ourselves from the outside inward?” And the same impulse to show the world a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the world. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed by the unworthy.

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, in so far 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. To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends his client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The world, in truth, is a wedding.

It has been suggested that the performer can rely upon his audience to accept minor cues as a sign of something important about his performance. This convenient fact has an inconvenient implication. By virtue of the same sign-accepting tendency, 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.

In response to these communication contingencies, performers commonly attempt to exert a kind of synecdochic responsibility, making sure that as many as possible of the minor events in the performance, however instrumentally inconsequential these events may be, will occur in such a way as to convey either no impression or an impression that is compatible and consistent with the over-all definition of the situation that is being fostered. When the audience is known to be secretly skeptical of the reality that is being impressed upon them, we have been ready to appreciate their tendency to pounce on trifling flaws as a sign that the whole show is false; but as students of social life we have been less ready to appreciate that even sympathetic audiences can be momentarily disturbed, shocked, and weakened in their faith by the discovery of a picayune discrepancy in the impressions presented to them. Some of these minor accidents and “unmeant gestures” happen to be so aptly designed to give an impression that contradicts the one fostered by the performer that the audience cannot help but be startled from a proper degree of involvement in the interaction, even though the audience may realize that in the last analysis the discordant event is really meaningless and ought to be completely overlooked. The crucial point is not that the fleeting definition of the situation caused by an unmeant gesture is itself so blameworthy but rather merely that it is different from the definition officially projected. This difference forces an acutely embarrassing wedge between the official projection and reality, for it is part of the official projection that it is the only possible one under the circumstances. Perhaps, then, we should not analyze performances in terms of mechanical standards, by which a large gain can offset a small loss, or a large weight a smaller one. Artistic imagery would be more accurate, for it prepares us for the fact that a single note off key can disrupt the tone of an entire performance.

The expressive coherence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy between our all-too-human selves and our socialized selves. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs. As Durkheim suggested, we do not allow our higher social activity “to follow in the trail of our bodily states, as our sensations and our general bodily consciousness do.” A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time.

It was suggested earlier that an audience is able to orient itself in a situation by accepting performed cues on faith, treating these signs as evidence of something greater than or different from the sign-vehicles themselves. If this tendency of the audience to accept signs places the performer in a position to be misunderstood and makes it necessary for him to exercise expressive care regarding everything he does when before the audience, so also this sign-accepting tendency puts the audience in a position to be duped and misled, for there are few signs that cannot be used to attest to the presence of something that is not really there. And it is plain that many performers have ample capacity and motive to misrepresent the facts; only shame, guilt, or fear prevent them from doing so.

Sometimes when we ask whether a fostered impression is true or false we really mean to ask whether or not the performer is authorized to give the performance in question, and are not primarily concerned with the actual performance itself. When we discover that someone with whom we have dealings is an impostor and out-and-out fraud, we are discovering that he did not have the right to play the part he played, that he was not an accredited incumbent of the relevant status. We assume that the impostor’s performance, in addition to the fact that it misrepresents him, will be at fault in other ways, but often his masquerade is discovered before we can detect any other difference between the false performance and the legitimate one which it simulates. Paradoxically, the more closely the impostor’s performance approximates to the real thing, the more intensely we may be threatened, for a competent performance by someone who proves to be an impostor may weaken in our minds the moral connection between legitimate authorization to play a part and the capacity to play it. (Skilled mimics, who admit all along that their intentions are unserious, seem to provide one way in which we can “work through” some of these anxieties.)

Further, while we may take a harsh view of performers such as confidence men who knowingly misrepresent every fact about their lives, we may have some sympathy for those who have but one fatal flaw and who attempt to conceal the fact that they are, for example, ex-convicts, deflowered, epileptic, or racially impure, instead of admitting their fault and making an honorable attempt to live it down. Also, we distinguish between impersonation of a specific, concrete individual, which we usually feel is quite inexcusable, and impersonation of category membership, which we may feel less strongly about. So, too, we often feel differently about those who misrepresent themselves to forward what they feel are the just claims of a collectivity, or those who misrepresent themselves accidentally or for a lark, than about those who misrepresent themselves for private psychological or material gain.

Finally, since there are senses in which the concept of “a status” is not clear-cut, so there are senses in which the concept of impersonation is not clear either. For example, there are many statuses in which membership obviously is not subject to formal ratification. Claims to be a law graduate can be established as valid or invalid, but claims to be a friend, a true believer, or a music-lover can be confirmed or disconfirmed only more or less. Where standards of competence are not objective, and where bona fide practitioners are not collectively organized to protect their mandate, an individual may style himself an expert and be penalized by nothing stronger than sniggers.

When we turn from outright impersonations and barefaced lies to other types of misrepresentation, the common-sense distinction between true and false impressions becomes even less tenable. Charlatan professional activity of one decade sometimes becomes an acceptable legitimate occupation in the next. We find that activities which are thought to be legitimate by some audiences in our society are thought to be rackets by others.

More important, we find that there is hardly a legitimate everyday vocation or relationship whose performers do not engage in concealed practices which are incompatible with fostered impressions. Although particular performances, and even particular parts or routines, may place a performer in a position of having nothing to hide, somewhere in the full round of his activities there will be something he cannot treat openly. The larger the number of matters and the larger the number of acting parts which fall within the domain of the role or relationship, the more likelihood, it would seem, for points of secrecy to exist. Thus in well-adjusted marriages, we expect that each partner may keep from the other secrets having to do with financial matters, past experiences, current flirtations indulgencies in “bad” or expensive habits, personal aspirations and worries, actions of children, true opinions held about relatives or mutual friends, etc. With such strategically located points of reticence, it is possible to maintain a desirable status quo in the relationship without having to carry out rigidly the implications of this arrangement in all areas of life.

Perhaps most important of all, we must note that a false impression maintained by an individual in any one of his routines may be a threat to the whole relationship or role of which the routine is only one part, for a discreditable disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of activity in which he may have nothing to conceal. Similarly, if the individual has only one thing to conceal during a performance, and even if the likelihood of disclosure occurs only at a particular turn or phase in the performance, the performer’s anxiety may well extend to the whole performance.

While we could retain the common-sense notion that fostered appearances can be discredited by a discrepant reality, there is often no reason for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embarrass. A cynical view of everyday performances can be as one-sided as the one that is sponsored by the performer. For many sociological issues it may not even be necessary to decide which is the more real, the fostered impression or the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving. The crucial sociological consideration, for this report at least, is merely that impressions fostered in everyday performances are subject to disruption. We will want to know what kind of impression of reality can shatter the fostered impression of reality, and what reality really is can be left to other students. We will want to ask, “What are the ways in which a given impression can be discredited?” and this is not quite the same as asking, “What are the ways in which the given impression is false?”

Whether an honest performer wishes to convey the truth or whether a dishonest performer wishes to convey a falsehood, both must take care to enliven their performances with appropriate expressions, exclude from their performances expressions that might discredit the impression being fostered, and take care lest the audience impute unintended meanings. Because of these shared dramatic contingencies, we can profitably study performances that are quite false in order to learn about ones that are quite honest.

I have suggested ways in which the performance of an individual accentuates certain matters and conceals others. If we see perception as a form of contact and communion, then control over what is perceived is control over contact that is made, and the limitation and regulation of what is shown is a limitation and regulation of contact. There is a relation here between informational terms and ritual ones. Failure to regulate the information acquired by the audience involves possible disruption of the projected definition of the situation; failure to regulate contact involves possible ritual contamination of the performer. It is a widely held notion that restrictions placed upon contact, the maintenance of social distance, provide a way in which awe can be generated and sustained in the audience—a way, as Kenneth Burke has said, in which the audience can be held in a state of mystification in regard to the performer.

I would like, finally, to add that the matters which the audience leave alone because of their awe of the performer are likely to be the matters about which he would feel shame were a disclosure to occur. As Riezler has suggested, 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, and the performer senses that his chief secrets are petty ones. As countless folk tales and initiation rites show, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience from learning this too.

An honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected with the solid world than one might first assume. And this implication will be strengthened if we look again at the distance usually placed between quite honest performances and quite contrived ones. In this connection take for example, the remarkable phenomenon of stage acting. It does take deep skill, long training, and psychological capacity to become a good stage actor. But this fact should not blind us to another one: that almost anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness in what is being contrived before them. And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies. Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.

A theatrical performance or a staged confidence game requires a thorough scripting of the spoken content of the routine; but the vast part involving “expression given off” is often determined by meager stage directions. It is expected that the performer of illusions will already know a good deal about how to manage his voice, his face, and his body, although he—as well as any person who directs him—may find it difficult indeed to provide a detailed verbal statement of this kind of knowledge. And in this, of course, we approach the situation of the straightforward man in the street. Socialization may not so much involve a learning of the many specific details of a single concrete part—often there could not be enough time or energy for this. What does seem to be required of the individual is that he learn enough pieces of expression to be able to “fill in” and manage, more or less, any part that he is likely to be given. 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 this solely because of the effect it is likely to have. The expressions it is felt he is giving off will be especially “inaccessible” to him. But as in the case of less legitimate performers, the incapacity of the ordinary individual to formulate in advance the movements of his eyes and body does not mean that he will not express himself through these devices in a way that is dramatized and pre-formed in his repertoire of actions. In short, we all act better than we know how.

A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.

Teams

We commonly find that the definition of the situation projected by a particular participant is an integral part of a projection that is fostered and sustained by the intimate co-operation of more than one participant. For example, in a medical hospital the two staff internists may require the intern, as part of his training, to run through a patient’s chart, giving an opinion about each recorded item. He may not appreciate that his show of relative ignorance comes in part from the staff studying up on the chart the night before; he is quite unlikely to appreciate that this impression is doubly ensured by the local team’s tacit agreement allotting the work-up of half the chart to one staff person, the other half to the second staff person. This teamwork ensures a good staff showing—providing, of course, that the right internist is able to take over the catechism at the right time.

Furthermore, it is often the case that each member of such a troupe or cast of players may be required to appear in a different light if the team’s over-all effect is to be satisfactory. Thus if a household is to stage a formal dinner, someone in uniform or livery will be required as part of the working team. The individual who plays this part must direct at himself the social definition of a menial. At the same time the individual taking the part of hostess must direct at herself, and foster by her appearance and manner, the social definition of someone upon whom it is natural for menials to wait.

Another example may be taken from middle-class family life. In our society, when husband and wife appear before new friends for an evening of sociability, the wife may demonstrate more respectful subordination to the will and opinion of her husband than she may bother to show when alone with him or when with old friends. When she assumes a respectful role, he can assume a dominant one; and when each member of the marriage team plays its special role, the conjugal unit, as a unit, can sustain the impression that new audiences expect of it.

I will use the term “performance team” or, in short, “team” to refer to any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a single routine.

When a performer guides his private activity in accordance with incorporated moral standards, he may associate these standards with a reference group of some kind, thus creating a non-present audience for his activity. This possibility leads us to consider a further one. The individual may privately maintain standards of behavior which he does not personally believe in, maintaining these standards because of a lively belief that an unseen audience is present who will punish deviations from these standards. In other words, an individual may be his own audience or may imagine an audience to be present. (In all of this we see the analytical difference between the concept of a team and that of an individual performer.) This should make us go on to see that a team itself may stage a performance for an audience that is not present in the flesh to witness the show. Thus, in some mental hospitals in America, unclaimed deceased patients may be given a relatively elaborate funeral on the hospital grounds. No doubt this helps to ensure the maintenance of minimal civilized standards in a setting where back-ward conditions and the general unconcern of society can threaten these standards. In any case, on occasions when kinfolk do not appear, the hospital minister, the hospital funeral director, and one or two other functionaries may play out all the funeral roles themselves and, with the dead patient now laid out, perform a demonstration of civilized regard for the dead before no one present.

When we turn from a one-man team to a larger one, the character of the reality that is espoused by the team changes. Instead of a rich definition of the situation, reality may become reduced to a thin party line, for one may expect the line to be unequally congenial to the members of the team. We may expect ironic remarks by which a teammate jokingly rejects the line while seriously accepting it. On the other hand, there will be the new factor of loyalty to one’s team and one’s teammates to provide support for the team’s line.

There seems to be a general feeling that the most real and solid things in life are ones whose description individuals independently agree upon. We tend to feel that if two participants in an event decide to be as honest as they can in recounting it, then the stands they take will be acceptably similar even though they do not consult one another prior to their presentation. Intention to tell the truth presumably makes such prior consultation unnecessary. And we also tend to feel that if the two individuals wish to tell a lie or to slant the version of the event which they offer, then not only will it be necessary for them to consult with one another in order, as we say, “to get their story straight,” but it will also be necessary to conceal the fact that an opportunity for such prior consultation was available to them. In other words, in staging a definition of the situation, it may be necessary for the several members of the team to be unanimous in the positions they take and secretive about the fact that these positions were not independently arrived at.

I would like to add a further general fact about maintaining the line during a performance. When a member of the team makes a mistake in the presence of the audience, the other team members often must suppress their immediate desire to punish and instruct the offender until, that is, the audience is no longer present. After all, immediate corrective sanctioning would often only disturb the interaction further and, as previously suggested, make the audience privy to a view that ought to be reserved for teammates. Thus, in authoritarian organizations, where a team of superordinates maintains a show of being right every time and of possessing a united front, there is often a strict rule that one superordinate must not show hostility or disrespect toward any other superordinate while in the presence of a member of the subordinate team. Army officers show consensus when before enlisted men, parents when before children, managers when before workers, nurses when before patients, and the like. Of course, when the subordinates are absent, open, violent criticism may and does occur.

And, of course this kind of solidarity in the presence of subordinates also occurs when performers are in the presence of superordinates. For example in a recent study of the police we learn that a patrolling team of two policemen, who witness each other’s illegal and semi-illegal acts and who are in an excellent position to discredit each other’s show of legality before the judge, possess heroic solidarity and will stick by each other’s story no matter what atrocity it covers up or how little chance there is of anyone believing it.

It is apparent that if performers are concerned with maintaining a line they will select as teammates those who can be trusted to perform properly. Thus children of the house are often excluded from performances given for guests of a domestic establishment because often children cannot be trusted to “behave” themselves, i.e., to refrain from acting in a way inconsistent with the impression that is being fostered. Similarly, those who are known to become intoxicated when drink is available and who become verbose or “difficult” when this occurs constitute a performance risk, as do those who are sober but foolishly indiscreet, and those who refuse to “enter into the spirit” of the occasion and help sustain the impression that guests tacitly unite in maintaining to the host.

In general, the members of the team will differ in the ways and the degree to which they are allowed to direct the performance. It may be noted, incidentally, that the structural similarities of apparently diverse routines are nicely reflected in the like-mindedness that arises in directors everywhere. Whether it is a funeral, a wedding, a bridge party, a one-day sale, a hanging, or a picnic, the director may tend to see the performance in terms of whether or not it went “smoothly,” “effectively,” and “without a hitch,” and whether or not all possible disruptive contingencies were prepared for in advance.

A team, then, may be defined as a set of individuals whose intimate co-operation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained. A team is a grouping, but it is a grouping not in relation to a social structure or social organization but rather in relation to an interaction or series of interactions in which the relevant definition of the situation is maintained. We have seen, and will see further, that if a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent and character of the co-operation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret. A team, then, has something of the character of a secret society.

Regions and Region Behavior

A region may be defined as any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception. Regions vary, of course, in the degree to which they are bounded and according to the media of communication in which the barriers to perception occur. Thus thick glass panels, such as are found in broadcasting control rooms, can isolate a region aurally but not visually, while an office bounded by beaverboard partitions is closed off in the opposite way. In our Anglo-American society—a relatively indoor one—when a performance is given it is usually given in a highly bounded region, to which boundaries with respect to time are often added.

Given a particular performance as a point of reference, it will sometimes be convenient to use the term “front region” to refer to the place where the performance is given. The fixed sign-equipment in such a place has already been referred to as that part of front called “setting.” We will have to see that some aspects of a performance seem to be played not to the audience but to the front region. The performance of an individual in a front region may be seen as an effort to give the appearance that his activity in the region maintains and embodies certain standards. These standards seem to fall into two broad groupings. One grouping has to do with the way in which the performer treats the audience while engaged in talk with them or in gestural interchanges that are a substitute for talk. These standards are sometimes referred to as matters of politeness. The other group of standards has to do with the way in which the performer comports himself while in visual or aural range of the audience but not necessarily engaged in talk with them. I shall use the term “decorum” to refer to this second group of standards, although some excuses and some qualifications will have to be added to justify the usage.

It may be noted that the part of personal front I have called “manner” will be important in regard to politeness and that the part called “appearance” will be important in regard to decorum. It may also be noted that while decorous behavior may take the form of showing respect for the region and setting one finds oneself in, this show of respect may, of course, be motivated by a desire to impress the audience favorably, or avoid sanctions, etc. Finally, it should be noted that the requirements of decorum are more pervasive ecologically than are the requirements of politeness. An audience can subject an entire front region to a continuous inspection as regards decorum, but while the audience is so engaged, none or only a few of the performers may be obliged to talk to the audience and hence to demonstrate politeness. Performers can stop giving expressions but cannot stop giving them off.

We are accustomed to assuming that the rules of decorum that prevail in sacred establishments, such as churches, will be much different from the ones that prevail in everyday places of work. We ought not to assume from this that the standards in sacred places are more numerous and more strict than those we find in work establishments. While in church, a woman may be permitted to sit, daydream, and even doze. However, as a saleswoman on the floor of a dress shop, she may be required to stand, keep alert, refrain from chewing gum, keep a fixed smile on her face even when not talking to anyone, and wear clothes she can ill afford.

One form of decorum that has been studied in social establishments is what is called “make-work.” It is understood in many establishments that not only will workers be required to produce a certain amount after a certain length of time but also that they will be ready, when called upon, to give the impression that they are working hard at the moment.

A back region or backstage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. There are, of course, many characteristic functions of such places. It is here that the capacity of a performance to express something beyond itself may be painstakingly fabricated; it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed. Here stage props and items of personal front can be stored in a kind of compact collapsing of whole repertoires of actions and characters. Here grades of ceremonial equipment, such as different types of liquor or clothes, can be hidden so that the audience will not be able to see the treatment accorded them in comparison with the treatment that could have been accorded them. Here devices such as the telephone are sequestered so that they can be used “privately.” Here costumes and other parts of personal front may be adjusted and scrutinized for flaws. Here the team can run through its performance, checking for offending expressions when no audience is present to be affronted by them; here poor members of the team, who are expressively inept, can be schooled or dropped from the performance. Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character.

Work and recreation regions represent two areas for backstage control. Another area is suggested by the very widespread tendency in our society to give performers control over the place in which they attend to what are called biological needs. In our society, defecation involves an individual in activity which is defined as inconsistent with the cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of our performances. Such activity also causes the individual to disarrange his clothing and to “go out of play,” that is, to drop from his face the expressive mask that he employs in face-to-face interaction. At the same time it becomes difficult for him to reassemble his personal front should the need to enter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is a reason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them. When asleep in bed the individual is also immobilized, expressively speaking, and may not be able to bring himself into an appropriate position for interaction or bring a sociable expression to his face until some moments after being wakened, thus providing one explanation of the tendency to remove the bedroom from the active part of the house. The utility of such seclusion is reinforced by the fact that sexual activity is likely to occur in bedrooms, a form of interaction which also renders its performers incapable of immediately entering into another interaction.

One of the most interesting times to observe impression management is the moment when a performer leaves the back region and enters the place where the audience is to be found, or when he returns therefrom, for at these moments one can detect a wonderful putting on and taking off of character.

The decorations and permanent fixtures in a place where a particular performance is usually given, as well as the performers and performance usually found there, tend to fix a kind of spell over it; even when the customary performance is not being given in it, the place tends to retain some of its front region character. Thus a cathedral and a schoolroom retain something of their tone even when only repairmen are present, and while these men may not behave reverently while doing their work, their irreverence tends to be of a structured kind, specifically oriented to what in some sense they ought to be feeling but are not. So, too, a given place may become so identified as a hide-out where certain standards need not be maintained that it becomes fixed with an identity as a back region. Hunting lodges and locker rooms in athletic social establishments may serve as illustrations. Summer resorts, too, seem to fix permissiveness regarding front, allowing otherwise conventional people to appear in public streets in costumes they would not ordinarily wear in the presence of strangers.

Throughout Western society there tends to be one informal or backstage language of behavior, and another language of behavior for occasions when a performance is being presented. The backstage language consists of reciprocal first-naming, co-operative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, “sloppy” sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and “kidding,” inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic acts, minor physical self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching, and flatulence. The frontstage behavior language can be taken as the absence (and in some sense the opposite) of this. In general, then, backstage conduct is one which allows minor acts which might easily be taken as symbolic of intimacy and disrespect for others present and for the region, while front region conduct is one which disallows such potentially offensive behavior. It may be noted here that backstage behavior has what psychologists might call a “regressive” character. The question, of course, is whether a backstage gives individuals an opportunity to regress or whether regression, in the clinical sense, is backstage conduct invoked on inappropriate occasions for motives that are not socially approved.

In saying that performers act in a relatively informal, familiar, relaxed way while backstage and are on their guard when giving a performance, it should not be assumed that the pleasant interpersonal things of life—courtesy, warmth, generosity, and pleasure in the company of others—are always reserved for those backstage and that suspiciousness, snobbishness, and a show of authority are reserved for front region activity. Often it seems that whatever enthusiasm and lively interest we have at our disposal we reserve for those before whom we are putting on a show and that the surest sign of backstage solidarity is to feel that it is safe to lapse into an asociable mood of sullen, silent irritability.

It is interesting to note that while each team will be in a position to appreciate the unsavory “unperformed” aspects of its own backstage behavior, it is not likely to be in a position to come to a similar conclusion about the teams with which it interacts. When pupils leave the schoolroom and go outside for a recess of familiarity and misconduct, they often fail to appreciate that their teachers have retired to a “common room” to swear and smoke in a similar recess of backstage behavior. We know, of course, that a team with only one member can take a very dark view of itself and that not a few psychotherapists find employment in alleviating this guilt, making their living by telling individuals the facts of other people’s lives. Behind these realizations about oneself and illusions about others is one of the important dynamics and disappointments of social mobility, be it mobility upward, downward, or sideways. In attempting to escape from a two-faced world of front region and back region behavior, individuals may feel that in the new position they are attempting to acquire they will be the character projected by individuals in that position and not at the same time a performer. When they arrive, of course, they find their new situation has unanticipated similarities with their old one; both involve a presentation of front to an audience and both involve the presenter in the grubby, gossipy business of staging a show.

Two kinds of bounded regions have been considered: front regions where a particular performance is or may be in progress, and back regions where action occurs that is related to the performance but inconsistent with the appearance fostered by the performance. It would seem reasonable to add a third region, a residual one, namely, all places other than the two already identified. Such a region could be called “the outside.” The notion of an outside region that is neither front nor back with respect to a particular performance conforms to our common-sense notion of social establishments, for when we look at most buildings we find within them rooms that are regularly or temporarily used as back regions and front regions, and we find that the outer walls of the building cut both types of rooms off from the outside world. Those individuals who are on the outside of the establishment we may call “outsiders.”

In Chapter One of this report it was suggested that performers tend to give the impression, or tend not to contradict the impression, that the role they are playing at the time is their most important role and that the attributes claimed by or imputed to them are their most essential and characteristic attributes. When individuals witness a show that was not meant for them, they may, then, become disillusioned about this show as well as about the show that was meant for them. The performer, too, may become confused, as Kenneth Burke suggests: We are all, in our compartmentalized responses, like the man who is a tyrant in his office and a weakling among his family, or like the musician who is assertive in his art and self-effacing in his personal relationships. Such dissociation becomes a difficulty when we attempt to unite these compartments

The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles.

It should be clear that just as it is useful for the performer to exclude persons from the audience who see him in another and inconsistent presentation, so also is it useful for the performer to exclude from the audience those before whom he performed in the past a show inconsistent with the current one. Persons who are strongly upward or downward mobile accomplish this in a grand manner by making sure to leave the place of their origins. And just as it is convenient to play one’s different routines before different persons, so also is it convenient to separate the different audiences one has for the same routine, since that is the only way in which each audience can feel that while there may be other audiences for the same routine, none is getting so desirable a presentation of it. Here again front region control is important.

When audience segregation fails and an outsider happens upon a performance that was not meant for him, difficult problems in impression management arise. Two accommodative techniques for dealing with these problems may be mentioned. First, all those already in the audience may be suddenly accorded, and accept, temporary backstage status and collusively join the performer in abruptly shifting to an act that is a fitting one for the intruder to observe. Thus a husband and wife in the midst of their daily bickering, when suddenly faced with a guest of brief acquaintance, will put aside their intimate quarrels and play out between themselves a relationship that is almost as distant and friendly as the one played out for the sudden arrival. Relationships, as well as types of conversation, which cannot be shared among the three will be laid aside. In general, then, if the newcomer is to be treated in the manner to which he has become accustomed, the performer must switch rapidly from the performance he was giving to one that the newcomer will feel is proper. Rarely can this be done smoothly enough to preserve the newcomer’s illusion that the show suddenly put on is the performer’s natural show. And even if this is managed, the audience already present is likely to feel that what they had been taking for the performer’s essential self was not so essential.

A second way of handling the problem is to accord the intruder a clear-cut welcome as someone who should have been in the region all along. The same show, more or less, is thus carried on, but it is made to include the newcomer. Thus when an individual pays an unexpected visit to his friends and finds them giving a party, he is usually welcomed loudly and coaxed into staying. If the welcome were not enthusiastically extended, his discovery that he has been excluded might discredit the front of friendliness and affection that obtains between the intruder and his hosts on other occasions.

Ordinarily, however, neither of these techniques seems to be very effective. Usually when intruders enter the front region, the performers tend to get ready to begin the performance they stage for the intruders at another time or place, and this sudden readiness to act in a particular way brings at least momentary confusion to the line of action the performers are already engaged in. The performers will find themselves temporarily torn between two possible realities, and until signals can be given and received members of the team may have no guide as to what line they are to follow. Embarrassment is almost certain to result. Under such circumstances it is understandable that the intruder may be accorded neither of the accommodative treatments mentioned but rather treated as if he were not there at all or quite unceremoniously asked to stay out.

Discrepant Roles

One over-all objective of any team is to sustain the definition of the situation that its performance fosters. This will involve the over-communication of some facts and the under-communication of others. Given the fragility and the required expressive coherence of the reality that is dramatized by a performance, there are usually facts which, if attention is drawn to them during the performance, would discredit, disrupt, or make useless the impression that the performance fosters. These facts may be said to provide “destructive information.” A basic problem for many performances, then, is that of information control; the audience must not acquire destructive information about the situation that is being defined for them. In other words, a team must be able to keep its secrets and have its secrets kept. Before proceeding it will be convenient to add some suggestions about types of secrets, because disclosure of different types of secrets can threaten a performance in different ways.

First, there are what are sometimes called “dark” secrets. These consist of facts about a team which it knows and conceals and which are incompatible with the image of self that the team attempts to maintain before its audience. Dark secrets are, of course, double secrets: one is the crucial fact that is hidden and another is the fact that crucial facts have not been openly admitted.

Secondly, there are what might be called “strategic” secrets. These pertain to intentions and capacities of a team which it conceals from its audience in order to prevent them from adapting effectively to the state of affairs the team is planning to bring about. Strategic secrets are the ones that businesses and armies employ in designing future actions against the opposition.

Thirdly, there are what might be called “inside” secrets. These are ones whose possession marks an individual as being a member of a group and helps the group feel separate and different from those individuals who are not “in the know.” Inside secrets give objective intellectual content to subjectively felt social distance. Almost all information in a social establishment has something of this exclusion function and may be seen as none of somebody’s business.

The knowledge that one team can have of another’s secrets provides us with two other types of secrets. First, there are what might be called “entrusted” secrets. This is the kind which the possessor is obliged to keep because of his relation to the team to which the secret refers. If an individual who is entrusted with a secret is to be the person he claims he is, he must keep the secret, even though it is not a secret about himself. Thus, for example, when a lawyer discloses the improprieties of his clients, two quite different performances are threatened: the client’s show of innocence to the court, and the lawyer’s show of trustworthiness to his client.

The second type of information about another’s secrets may be called “free.” A free secret is somebody else’s secret known to oneself that one could disclose without discrediting the image one was presenting of oneself. A person may acquire free secrets by discovery, involuntary disclosure, indiscreet admissions, retransmission, etc. In general we must see that the free or entrusted secrets of one team may be the dark or strategic secrets of another team, and so a team whose vital secrets are possessed by others will try to oblige the possessors to treat these secrets as secrets that are entrusted and not free.

Given a particular performance as the point of reference, we have distinguished three crucial roles on the basis of function: those who perform; those performed to; and outsiders who neither perform in the show nor observe it. We may also distinguish these crucial roles on the basis of information ordinarily available to those who play them. Performers are aware of the impression they foster and ordinarily also possess destructive information about the show. The audience know what they have been allowed to perceive, qualified by what they can glean unofficially by close observation. In the main, they know the definition of the situation that the performance fosters but do not have destructive information about it. Outsiders know neither the secrets of the performance nor the appearance of reality fostered by it. Finally, the three crucial roles mentioned could be described on the basis of the regions to which the role-player has access: performers appear in the front and back regions: the audience appears only in the front region; and the outsiders are excluded from both regions. It is to be noted then that during the performance we may expect to find correlation among function, information available, and regions of access, so that, for example, if we knew the regions into which an individual had access we would know the role he played and the information he possessed about the performance.

In actual fact, however, the congruence among function, information possessed, and accessible regions is seldom complete. Additional points of vantage relative to the performance develop which complicate the simple relation among function, information, and place. Some of these peculiar vantage points are so often taken and their significance for the performance comes to be so clearly understood that we can refer to them as roles, although, relative to the three crucial ones, they might best be called discrepant roles.

Perhaps the most spectacularly discrepant roles are those which bring a person into a social establishment in a false guise. Some varieties may be mentioned.

First there is the role of “informer.” The informer is someone who pretends to the performers to be a member of their team, is allowed to come backstage and to acquire destructive information, and then openly or secretly sells out the show to the audience. The political, military, industrial and criminal variants of this role are famous. If it appears that the individual first joined the team in a sincere way and not with the premeditated plan of disclosing its secrets we sometimes call him a traitor, turncoat, or quitter, especially if he is the sort of person who ought to have made a decent teammate. The individual who all along has meant to inform on the team, and originally joins only for this purpose, is sometimes called a spy.

Secondly, there is the role of “shill.” A shill is someone who acts as though he were an ordinary member of the audience but is in fact in league with the performers. Typically, the shill either provides a visible model for the audience of the kind of response the performers are seeking or provides the kind of audience response that is necessary at the moment for the development of the performance.

We must not take the view that shills are found only in non-respectable performances (even though it is only the non-respectable shills, perhaps, who play their role systematically and without personal illusion). For example, at informal conversational gatherings, it is common for a wife to look interested when her husband tells an anecdote and to feed him appropriate leads and cues, although in fact she has heard the anecdote many times and knows that the show her husband is making of telling something for the first time is only a show. A shill, then, is someone who appears to be just another unsophisticated member of the audience and who uses his unapparent sophistication in the interests of the performing team.

We consider now another impostor in the audience, but this time one who uses his unapparent sophistication in the interests of the audience, not the performers. This type can be illustrated by the person who is hired to check up on the standards that performers maintain in order to ensure that in certain respects fostered appearances will not be too far from reality. He acts, officially or unofficially, as a protective agent for the unsuspecting public, playing the role of audience with more perception and ethical strictness than ordinary observers are likely to employ. Sometimes these agents play their hand in an open way, giving the performers preliminary warning that the next performance is about to be examined. Thus first-night performers and arrested persons have fair warning that anything they say will be held as evidence in judging them. A participant observer who admits his objectives from the beginning gives the performers whom he observes a similar opportunity. Sometimes, however, the agent goes underground and by acting as an ordinary gullible member of the audience gives the performers rope with which to hang themselves. In the everyday trades, agents who give no warning are sometimes called “spotters,” as they will be here, and are understandably disliked. A salesperson may find that she has been short-tempered and impolite to a customer who is really a company agent checking up on the treatment bona fide customers receive. A grocer may find that he has sold goods at illegal prices to customers who are experts on prices and have authority concerning them.

There is yet another peculiar fellow in the audience. He is the one who takes an unremarked, modest place in the audience and leaves the region when they do, but when he leaves he goes to his employer, a competitor of the team whose performance he has witnessed, to report what he has seen. He is the professional shopper—the Gimbel’s man in Macy’s and the Macy’s man in Gimbel’s; he is the fashion spy and the foreigner at National Air Meets. The shopper is a person who has a technical right to see the show but ought to have the decency, it is sometimes felt, to stay in his own back region, for his interest in the show is from the wrong perspective, at once more lively and more bored than that of a thoroughly legitimate spectator.

Another discrepant role is one that is often called the go-between or mediator. The go-between learns the secrets of each side and gives each side the true impression that he will keep its secrets; but he tends to give each side the false impression that he is more loyal to it than to the other. Sometimes, as in the case of the arbitrator in some labor disputes, the go-between may function as a means by which two obligatorily hostile teams can come to a mutually profitable agreement. Sometimes, as in the case of the theatrical agent, the go-between may function as a means by which each side is given a slanted version of the other that is calculated to make a closer relationship between the two sides possible. Sometimes, as in the case of the marriage broker, the go-between may serve as a means of conveying tentative overtures from one side to the other which, if openly presented, might lead to an embarrassing acceptance or rejection.

A further discrepant role may be considered, that of the “non-person”; those who play this role are present during the interaction but in some respects do not take the role either of performer or of audience, nor do they (as do informers, shills, and spotters) pretend to be what they are not. Perhaps the classic type of non-person in our society is the servant. This person is expected to be present in the front region while the host is presenting a performance of hospitality to the guests of the establishment. While in some senses the servant is part of the host’s team (as I have treated him previously), in certain ways he is defined by both performers and audience as someone who isn’t there. Among some groups, the servant is also expected to enter freely into the back regions, on the theory that no impression need be maintained for him.

In addition to those in servant-like roles, there are other standard categories of persons who are sometimes treated in their presence as if they were not there; the very young, the very old, and the sick are common examples. Further, we find today a growing body of technical personnel—recording stenographers, broadcasting technicians, photographers, secret police, etc.—who play a technical role during important ceremonies but not a scripted one.

We have considered some types of persons who are not, in a simple sense, performers, audience, or outsiders, having access to information and regions we would not expect of them. We consider now four additional discrepant roles, involving, in the main, persons who are not present during a performance but who have unexpected information about it.

First, there is an important role that might be called “service specialist.” It is filled by individuals who specialize in the construction, repair, and maintenance of the show their clients maintain before other people. Some of these workers, like architects and furniture salesmen, specialize in settings; some, such as dentists, hairdressers, and dermatologists, deal with personal front; others, such as staff economists, accountants, lawyers, and researchers, formulate the factual elements of a client’s verbal display, that is, his team’s argument-line or intellectual position.

Service specialists are like members of the team in that they learn the secrets of the show and obtain a backstage view of it. Unlike members of the team, however, the specialist does not share the risk, the guilt, and the satisfaction of presenting before an audience the show to which he has contributed. And, unlike members of the team, in learning the secrets of others, the others do not learn corresponding secrets about him. It is in this context that we can understand why professional ethics often oblige the specialist to show “discretion,” i.e., not to give away a show whose secrets his duties have made him privy to.

A note should be added about one variety of specialist role, the role of “training specialist.” Individuals who take this role have the complicated task of teaching the performer how to build up a desirable impression while at the same time taking the part of the future audience and illustrating by punishments the consequences of improprieties Parents and schoolteachers are perhaps the basic examples of this role in our society; the sergeants who drill officer cadets provide a further example. Performers often feel uneasy in the presence of a trainer whose lessons they have long since learned and taken for granted. Trainers tend to evoke for the performer a vivid image of himself that he had repressed, a self-image of someone engaged in the clumsy and embarrassing process of becoming. The performer can make himself forget how foolish he once was, but he cannot make the trainer forget.

The service specialist has been mentioned as one type of person who is not a performer yet has access to back regions and destructive information. A second type is the person who plays the role of “confidant.” Confidants are persons to whom the performer confesses his sins, freely detailing the sense in which the impression given during a performance was merely an impression. Typically, confidants are located outside and participate only vicariously in back and front region activity.

A third role remains to be considered. Like the role of specialist and confidant, the role of colleague affords those who play it some information about a performance they do not attend. Colleagues may be defined as persons who present the same routine to the same kind of audience but who do not participate together, as teammates do, at the same time and place before the same particular audience. Colleagues as it is said, share a community of fate. In having to put on the same kind of performance, they come to know each other’s difficulties and points of view; whatever their tongues, they come to speak the same social language. And while colleagues who compete for audiences may keep some strategic secrets from one another, they cannot very well hide from one another certain things that they hide from the audience. The front that is maintained before others need not be maintained among themselves; relaxation becomes possible.

It is interesting to note that when teammates come in contact with a stranger who is their colleague, a sort of ceremonial or honorific team membership may be temporarily accorded the newcomer. There is a visiting-fireman complex whereby teammates treat their visitor as if he had suddenly come into very intimate and long-standing relationships with them. Whatever their associational prerogatives, he tends to be given club rights. These courtesies are especially given when the visitor and the hosts happen to have received their training in the same establishment or from the same trainers, or both. Graduates of the same household, the same professional school, the same penitentiary, the same public school, or the same small town provide clear examples.

Communication Out of Character

When two teams present themselves to each other for purposes of interaction, the members of each team tend to maintain the line that they are what they claim to be; they tend to stay in character. Backstage familiarity is suppressed lest the interplay of poses collapse and all the participants find themselves on the same team, as it were, with no one left to play to. Each participant in the interaction ordinarily endeavors to know and keep his place, maintaining what ever balance of formality and informality has been established for the interaction, even to the point of extending this treatment to his own teammates. At the same time, each team tends to suppress its candid view of itself and of the other team, projecting a conception of self and a conception of other that is relatively acceptable to the other. And to ensure that communication will follow established, narrow channels, each team is prepared to assist the other team, tacitly and tactfully, in maintaining the impression it is attempting to foster.

During sudden disruptions of a performance, and especially at times when a misidentification is discovered, a portrayed character can momentarily crumble while the performer behind the character “forgets himself” and blurts out a relatively unperformed exclamation.

These crises are exceptional, however; a working consensus and a public keeping of place is the rule. But underneath this typical gentleman’s agreement there are more usual but less apparent currents of communication. If these currents were not undercurrents, if these conceptions were officially communicated instead of communicated in a surreptitious way, they would contradict and discredit the definition of the situation officially projected by the participants. When a social establishment is studied, these discrepant sentiments are almost always found. They demonstrate that while a performer may act as if his response in a situation were immediate, unthinking, and spontaneous, and while he himself may think this to be the case, still it will always be possible for situations to arise in which he will convey to one or two persons present the understanding that the show he is maintaining is only and merely a show. The presence, then, of communication out of character provides one argument for the propriety of studying performances in terms of teams and in terms of potential interaction disruptions. It may be repeated that no claim is made that surreptitious communications are any more a reflection of the real reality than are the official communications with which they are inconsistent; the point is that the performer is typically involved in both, and this dual involvement must be carefully managed lest official projections be discredited. Of the many types of communication in which the performer engages and which convey information incompatible with the impression officially maintained during interaction, four types will be considered: treatment of the absent, staging talk, team collusion, and realigning actions.

When the members of a team go backstage where the audience cannot see or hear them, they very regularly derogate the audience in a way that is inconsistent with the face-to-face treatment that is given to the audience. In service trades, for example, customers who are treated respectfully during the performance are often ridiculed, gossiped about, caricatured, cursed, and criticized when the performers are backstage; here, too, plans may be worked out for “selling” them, or employing “angles” against them, or pacifying them. Among other things, this activity seems to provide a kind of ritual profanation of the front region as well as of the audience.

When teammates are out of the presence of the audience, discussion often turns to problems of staging. Questions are raised about the condition of sign-equipment; stands, lines, and positions are tentatively brought forth and “cleared” by the assembled membership; the merits and demerits of available front regions are analyzed; the size and character of possible audiences for the performance are considered; past performance disruptions and likely disruptions are talked about; news about the teams of one’s colleagues is transmitted; the reception given one’s last performance is mulled over in what are sometimes called “post mortems”; wounds are licked and morale is strengthened for the next performance. Staging talk, when called by other names such as gossip, “shop talk,” etc., is a well-worn notion. I have stressed it here because it helps point up the fact that individuals with widely different social roles live in the same climate of dramaturgical experience. The talks that comedians and scholars give are quite different, but their talk about their talk is quite similar.

In spite of the expectation that everything said by the performer will be in keeping with the definition of the situation fostered by him, he may convey a great deal during an interaction that is out of character and convey it in such a way as to prevent the audience as a whole from realizing that anything out of keeping with the definition of the situation has been conveyed. Persons who are admitted to this secret communication are placed in a collusive relationship to one another vis-à-vis the remainder of the participants. By acknowledging to one another that they are keeping relevant secrets from the others present, they acknowledge to one another that the show of candor they maintain, a show of being only the characters they officially project, is merely a show. By means of such byplay, performers can affirm a backstage solidarity even while engaged in a performance expressing with impunity unacceptable things about the audience as well as things about themselves that the audience would find unacceptable. I shall call “team collusion” any collusive communication which is carefully conveyed in such a way as to cause no threat to the illusion that is being fostered for the audience.

One important kind of team collusion is found in the system of secret signals through which performers can surreptitiously receive or transmit pertinent information, requests for assistance, and other matters of a kind relevant to the successful presentation of a performance. Typically, these staging cues come from, or to, the director of the performance, and it greatly simplifies his task of managing impressions to have such a subterranean language available. Staging cues often relate those engaged in presenting a performance to those who are offering assistance or direction backstage. Thus, by means of a foot-buzzer, a hostess can give directions to her kitchen staff while acting as if she is fully involved in the mealtime conversation. Similarly, during radio and television productions a vocabulary of signs is employed by those in the control room to guide performers, especially as regards their timing, without allowing the audience to become aware that a system of control communication is in operation in addition to the communication in which performers and audience are officially participating. So also, in business offices, executives who want to terminate interviews both rapidly and tactfully will train their secretaries to interrupt interviews at the proper time with the proper excuse.

Staging cues have been suggested as one main type of team collusion; another type involves communications which function chiefly to confirm for the performer the fact that he does not really hold with the working consensus, that the show he puts on is only a show, thereby providing himself with at least a private defense against the claims made by the audience. We may label this activity “derisive collusion”; it typically involves a secret derogation of the audience although sometimes conceptions of the audience may be conveyed that are too complimentary to fit within the working consensus.

Derisive collusion occurs most frequently, perhaps, between a performer and himself. School children provide examples of this when they cross their fingers while telling a lie or stick out their tongues when the teacher momentarily moves to a position where she cannot see the tribute. So, too, employees will often grimace at their boss, or gesticulate a silent curse, performing these acts of contempt or insubordination at an angle such that those to whom these acts are directed cannot see them. Perhaps the most timid form of this kind of collusion is found in the practice of “doodling” or of “going away” to imaginary pleasant places, while still maintaining some show of performing the part of listener.

Derisive collusion also occurs between members of a team when they are presenting a performance. Thus, while a secret code of verbal insults may perhaps be employed only on the lunatic fringe of our commercial life, there is no commercial establishment so reputable that its clerks do not cast each other knowing looks when in the presence of an undesirable client or a desirable client who conducts himself in an undesirable way. Similarly, in our society it is very difficult for a husband and wife, or two close friends, to spend an evening in convivial interaction with a third person without at some time looking at each other in such a way as to contradict secretly the attitude they are officially maintaining toward the third person.

Collusive communication has been suggested as one way in which teammates can free themselves a little from the restrictive requirements of interaction between teams; it is a kind of deviation from type which the audience is meant to remain unaware of, and it tends, therefore, to leave the status quo intact. However, performers rarely seem content with safe channels for expressing discontent with the working consensus. They often attempt to speak out of character in a way that will be heard by the audience but will not openly threaten either the integrity of the two teams or the social distance between them. These temporary unofficial, or controlled, realignments, often aggressive in character, provide an interesting area for study.

When two teams establish an official working consensus as a guarantee for safe social interaction, we may usually detect an unofficial line of communication which each team directs at the other. This unofficial communication may be carried on by innuendo, mimicked accents, well-placed jokes, significant pauses, veiled hints, purposeful kidding, expressive overtones, and many other sign practices. Rules regarding this laxity are quite strict. The communicator has the right to deny that he “meant anything” by his action, should his recipients accuse him to his face of having conveyed something unacceptable, and the recipients have the right to act as if nothing, or only something innocuous, has been conveyed.

In many kinds of social interaction, unofficial communication provides a way in which one team can extend a definite but non-compromising invitation to the other, requesting that social distance and formality be increased or decreased, or that both teams shift the interaction to one involving the performance of a new set of roles. This is sometimes known as “putting out feelers” and involves guarded disclosures and hinted demands. By means of statements that are carefully ambiguous or that have a secret meaning to the initiate, a performer is able to discover, without dropping his defensive stand, whether or not it is safe to dispense with the current definition of the situation. For example, since it is not necessary to retain social distance or be on guard before those who are one’s colleagues in occupation, ideology, ethnicity, class, etc., it is common for colleagues to develop secret signs which seem innocuous to non-colleagues while at the same time they convey to the initiate that he is among his own and can relax the pose he maintains toward the public.

When individuals are unfamiliar with each other’s opinions and statuses, a feeling-out process occurs whereby one individual admits his views or statuses to another a little at a time. After dropping his guard just a little he waits for the other to show reason why it is safe for him to do this, and after this reassurance he can safely drop his guard a little bit more. By phrasing each step in the admission in an ambiguous way, the individual is in a position to halt the procedure of dropping his front at the point where he gets no confirmation from the other, and at this point he can act as if his last disclosure were not an overture at all. Thus when two persons in conversation are attempting to discover how careful they are going to have to be about stating their true political opinions, one of them can halt his gradual disclosure of how far left or how far right he is just at the point where the other has come to the furthest extreme of his actual beliefs. In such cases, the person with the more extreme views will tactfully act as if his views are no more extreme than the other’s.

This process of gradual guarded disclosure is also illustrated by some of the mythology and a few of the facts associated with heterosexual life in our society. The sexual relation is defined as one of intimacy with the initiative allocated to the male. In fact, courting practices involve a concerted aggression against the alignment between the sexes on the part of the male, as he attempts to maneuver someone for whom he must at first show respect into a position of subordinate intimacy.

When the working consensus established between two teams is one involving avowed opposition, we find that the division of labor within each team may ultimately lead to momentary realignments of the kind that make us appreciate that not only armies have the problem of fraternization. A specialist on one team may find that he has a great deal in common with his opposite number on the other team and that together they talk a language which tends to align them together on a single team in opposition to all the remaining participants. Thus, during labor-management negotiations, opposing lawyers may find themselves exchanging collusive looks when a layman on either team makes a patent legal gaffe. When the specialists are not permanently part of a particular team but rather hire themselves out for the duration of negotiations, they are likely to be more loyal in some ways to their calling and their colleagues than to the team they happen at the time to be serving. If, then, the impression of opposition between the teams is to be maintained, the crosscutting loyalties of specialists will have to be suppressed or expressed surreptitiously. Thus lawyers, in sensing that their clients want them to be hostile to the opposing lawyers, may wait until a backstage recess before having a friendly collegial chat about the case in progress.

In this chapter four types of communication out of character have been considered: treatment of the absent; staging talk; team collusion; and realigning actions. Each of these four types of conduct directs attention to the same point: the performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation, absorbing all of the team’s energies and constituting their sole social reality; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities. Whether the performers feel their official offering is the “realest” reality or not, they will give surreptitious expression to multiple versions of reality, each version tending to be incompatible with the others.

The Arts of Impression Management

When an outsider accidentally enters a region in which a performance is being given, or when a member of the audience inadvertently enters the backstage, the intruder is likely to catch those present flagrante delicto. Through no one’s intention, the persons present in the region may find that they have patently been witnessed in activity that is quite incompatible with the impression that they are, for wider social reasons, under obligation to maintain to the intruder. We deal here with what are sometimes called “inopportune intrusions.”

Unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, and faux pas are sources of embarrassment and dissonance which are typically unintended by the person who is responsible for making them and which would be avoided were the individual to know in advance the consequences of his activity. However there are situations, often called “scenes,” in which an individual acts in such a way as to destroy or seriously threaten the polite appearance of consensus, and while he may not act simply in order to create such dissonance, he acts with the knowledge that this kind of dissonance is likely to result. The common-sense phrase, “creating a scene,” is apt because, in effect, a new scene is created by such disruptions. The previous and expected interplay between the teams is suddenly forced aside and a new drama forcibly takes its place. Significantly, this new scene often involves a sudden reshuffling and reapportioning of the previous team members into two new teams.

I have considered some major forms of performance disruption—unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes. These disruptions, in everyday terms, are often called “incidents.” When an incident occurs, the reality sponsored by the performers is threatened. The persons present are likely to react by becoming flustered, ill at ease, embarrassed, nervous, and the like. Quite literally, the participants may find themselves out of countenance. When these flusterings or symptoms of embarrassment become perceived, the reality that is supported by the performance is likely to be further jeopardized and weakened, for these signs of nervousness in most cases are an aspect of the individual who presents a character and not an aspect of the character he projects, thus forcing upon the audience an image of the man behind the mask.

In order to prevent the occurrence of incidents and the embarrassment consequent upon them, it will be necessary for all the participants in the interaction, as well as those who do not participate, to possess certain attributes and to express these attributes in practices employed for saving the show. These attributes and practices will be reviewed under three headings: the defensive measures used by performers to save their own show; the protective measures used by audience and outsiders to assist the performers in saving the performers’ show; and, finally, the measures the performers must take in order to make it possible for the audience and outsiders to employ protective measures on the performers’ behalf.

Defensive Attributes and Practices

Dramaturgical Loyalty

It is apparent that if a team is to sustain the line it has taken, the teammates must act as if they have accepted certain moral obligations. They must not betray the secrets of the team when between performances—whether from self-interest, principle, or lack of discretion. Thus, older members of a family must often exclude a child of the house from their gossip and self-admissions, since one can never be sure to whom one’s child will convey one’s secrets. Hence it may only be when the child arrives at the age of discretion that the voices of his parents will cease to drop as he enters the room.

Dramaturgical Discipline

A performer who is disciplined, dramaturgically speaking, is someone who remembers his part and does not commit unmeant gestures or faux pas in performing it. He is someone with discretion; he does not give the show away by involuntarily disclosing its secrets. He is someone with “presence of mind” who can cover up on the spur of the moment for inappropriate behavior on the part of his teammates, while all the time maintaining the impression that he is merely playing his part. And if a disruption of the performance cannot be avoided or concealed, the disciplined performer will be prepared to offer a plausible reason for discounting the disruptive event, a joking manner to remove its importance, or deep apology and self-abasement to reinstate those held responsible for it. The disciplined performer is also someone with “self-control.” He can suppress his emotional response to his private problems, to his teammates when they make mistakes, and to the audience when they induce untoward affection or hostility in him. And he can stop himself from laughing about matters which are defined as serious and stop himself from taking seriously matters defined as humorous. In other words, he can suppress his spontaneous feelings in order to give the appearance of sticking to the affective line, the expressive status quo, established by his team’s performance, for a display of proscribed affect may not only lead to improper disclosures and offense to the working consensus but may also implicitly extend to the audience the status of team member. And the disciplined performer is someone with sufficient poise to move from private places of informality to public ones of varying degrees of formality, without allowing such changes to confuse him.

Perhaps the focus of dramaturgical discipline is to be found in the management of one’s face and voice. Here is the crucial test of one’s ability as a performer. Actual affective response must be concealed and an appropriate affective response must be displayed. Teasing, it often seems, is an informal initiation device employed by a team to train and test the capacity of its new members to “take a joke,” that is, to sustain a friendly manner while perhaps not feeling it. When an individual passes such a test of expression-control, whether he receives it from his new teammates in a spirit of jest or from an unexpected necessity of playing in a serious performance, he can thereafter venture forth as a player who can trust himself and be trusted by others. A very nice illustration of this is given in a forthcoming paper by Howard S. Becker on marijuana-smoking. Becker reports that the irregular user of the drug has a great fear of finding himself, while under the influence of the drug, in the immediate presence of parents or work associates who will expect an intimate undrugged performance from him. Apparently the irregular user does not become a confirmed regular user until he learns he can be “high” and yet carry off a performance before non-smokers without betraying himself. The same issue arises, perhaps in a less dramatic form, in ordinary family life, when a decision has to be reached as to the point in their training at which young members of the team can be taken to public and semipublic ceremonies, for only when the child is ready to keep control of his temper will he be a trustworthy participant on such occasions.

Dramaturgical Circumspection

Loyalty and discipline, in the dramaturgical sense of these terms, are attributes required of teammates if the show they put on is to be sustained. In addition, it will be useful if the members of the team exercise foresight and design in determining in advance how best to stage a show. Prudence must be exercised. When there is little chance of being seen, opportunities for relaxation can be taken; when there is little chance of being put to a test, the cold facts can be presented in a glowing light and the performers can play their part for all it is worth, investing it with full dignity. If no care and honesty are exercised, then disruptions are likely to occur; if rigid care and honesty are exercised, then the performers are not likely to be understood “only too well” but they may be misunderstood, insufficiently understood, or greatly limited in what they can build out of the dramaturgical opportunities open to them. In other words, in the interests of the team, performers will be required to exercise prudence and circumspection in staging the show, preparing in advance for likely contingencies and exploiting the opportunities that remain.

Obviously, one such technique is for the team to choose members who are loyal and disciplined, and a second one is for the team to acquire a clear idea as to how much loyalty and discipline it can rely on from the membership as a whole for the degree to which these attributes are possessed will markedly affect the likelihood of carrying off a performance and hence the safety of investing the performance with seriousness, weight, and dignity. The circumspect performer will also attempt to select the kind of audience that will give a minimum of trouble in terms of the show the performer wants to put on and the show he does not want to have to put on.

Protective Practices

First, it should be understood that access to the back and front regions of a performance is controlled not only by the performers but by others. Individuals voluntarily stay away from regions into which they have not been invited. (This kind of tact in regard to place is analagous to “discretion,” which has already been described as tact in regard to facts.) And when outsiders find they are about to enter such a region, they often give those already present some warning, in the form of a message, or a knock, or a cough, so that the intrusion can be put off if necessary or the setting hurriedly put in order and proper expressions fixed on the faces of those present.

Once the audience has been admitted to a performance, the necessity of being tactful does not cease. We find that there is an elaborate etiquette by which individuals guide themselves in their capacity as members of the audience. This involves: the giving of a proper amount of attention and interest; a willingness to hold in check one’s own performance so as not to introduce too many contradictions, interruptions, or demands for attention; the inhibition of all acts or statements that might create a faux pas; the desire, above all else, to avoid a scene.

When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully “not see” the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out.

Whenever the audience exercises tact, the possibility will arise that the performers will learn that they are being tactfully protected. When this occurs, the further possibility arises that the audience will learn that the performers know they are being tactfully protected. And then, in turn, it becomes possible for the performers to learn that the audience knows that the performers know they are being protected. Now when such states of information exist, a moment in the performance may come when the separateness of the teams will break down and be momentarily replaced by a communion of glances through which each team openly admits to the other its state of information. At such moments the whole dramaturgical structure of social interaction is suddenly and poignantly laid bare, and the line separating the teams momentarily disappears. Whether this close view of things brings shame or laughter, the teams are likely to draw rapidly back into their appointed characters.

In spite of the fact that performers and audience employ all of these techniques of impression management, and many others as well, we know, of course, that incidents do occur and that audiences are inadvertently given glimpses behind the scenes of a performance. When such an incident occurs, the members of an audience sometimes learn an important lesson, more important to them than the aggressive pleasure they can obtain by discovering someone’s dark, entrusted, inside, or strategic secrets. The members of the audience may discover a fundamental democracy that is usually well hidden. Whether the character that is being presented is sober or carefree, of high station or low, the individual who performs the character will be seen for what he largely is, a solitary player involved in a harried concern for his production. Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task.

Knowing that his audiences are capable of forming bad impressions of him, the individual may come to feel ashamed of a well-intentioned honest act merely because the context of its performance provides false impressions that are bad. Feeling this unwarranted shame, he may feel that his feelings can be seen; feeling that he is thus seen, he may feel that his appearance confirms these false conclusions concerning him. He may then add to the precariousness of his position by engaging in just those defensive maneuvers that he would employ were he really guilty. In this way it is possible for all of us to become fleetingly for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others might imagine us to be. And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

Shared staging problems; concern for the way things appear; warranted and unwarranted feelings of shame; ambivalence about oneself and one’s audience: these are some of the dramaturgic elements of the human situation.

Conclusion

This report has been chiefly concerned with social establishments as relatively closed systems. It has been assumed that the relation of one establishment to others is itself an intelligible area of study and ought to be treated analytically as part of a different order of fact—the order of institutional integration. It might be well here to try to place the perspective taken in this report in the context of other perspectives which seem to be the ones currently employed, implicitly or explicitly, in the study of social establishments as closed systems. Four such perspectives may be tentatively suggested.

An establishment may be viewed “technically,” in terms of its efficiency and inefficiency as an intentionally organized system of activity for the achievement of predefined objectives. An establishment may be viewed “politically,” in terms of the actions which each participant (or class of participants) can demand of other participants, the kinds of deprivations and indulgences which can be meted out in order to enforce these demands, and the kinds of social controls which guide this exercise of command and use of sanctions. An establishment may be viewed “structurally,” in terms of the horizontal and vertical status divisions and the kinds of social relations which relate these several groupings to one another. Finally, an establishment may be viewed “culturally,” in terms of the moral values which influence activity in the establishment—values pertaining to fashions, customs, and matters of taste, to politeness and decorum, to ultimate ends and normative restrictions on means, etc. It is to be noted that all the facts that can be discovered about an establishment are relevant to each of the four perspectives but that each perspective gives its own priority and order to these facts.

It seems to me that the dramaturgical approach may constitute a fifth perspective, to be added to the technical, political, structural, and cultural perspectives. The dramaturgical perspective, like each of the other four, can be employed as the end-point of analysis, as a final way of ordering facts. This would lead us to describe the techniques of impression management employed in a given establishment, the principal problems of impression management in the establishment, and the identity and interrelationships of the several performance teams which operate in the establishment. But, as with the facts utilized in each of the other perspectives, the facts specifically pertaining to impression management also play a part in the matters that are a concern in all the other perspectives.

In recent years there have been elaborate attempts to bring into one framework the concepts and findings derived from three different areas of inquiry: the individual personality, social interaction, and society. I would like to suggest here a simple addition to these inter-disciplinary attempts. When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part. When an event occurs which is expressively incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are simultaneously felt in three levels of social reality, each of which involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact.

First, the social interaction, treated here as a dialogue between two teams, may come to an embarrassed and confused halt; the situation may cease to be defined, previous positions may become no longer tenable, and participants may find themselves without a charted course of action. The participants typically sense a false note in the situation and come to feel awkward, flustered, and, literally, out of countenance. In other words, the minute social system created and sustained by orderly social interaction becomes disorganized. These are the consequences that the disruption has from the point of view of social interaction.

Secondly, in addition to these disorganizing consequences for action at the moment, performance disruptions may have consequences of a more far-reaching kind. 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. Audiences also accept the individual’s particular performance as evidence of his capacity to perform the routine and even as evidence of his capacity to perform any routine. In a sense these larger social units—teams, establishments, etc.—become committed every time the individual performs his routine; with each performance the legitimacy of these units will tend to be tested anew and their permanent reputation put at stake. This kind of commitment is especially strong during some performances. Thus, when a surgeon and his nurse both turn from the operating table and the anesthetized patient accidentally rolls off the table to his death, not only is the operation disrupted in an embarrassing way, but the reputation of the doctor, as a doctor and as a man, and also the reputation of the hospital may be weakened. These are the consequences that disruptions may have from the point of view of social structure.

Finally, we often find that the individual may deeply involve his ego in his identification with a particular part, establishment, and group, and in his self-conception as someone who does not disrupt social interaction or let down the social units which depend upon that interaction. When a disruption occurs, then, we may find that the self-conceptions around which his personality has been built may become discredited. These are consequences that disruptions may have from the point of view of individual personality.

We must be very cautious in any effort to characterize our own society as a whole with respect to dramaturgical practices. For example, in current management-labor relations, we know that a team may enter joint consultation meetings with the opposition with the knowledge that it may be necessary to give the appearance of stalking out of the meeting in a huff. Diplomatic teams are sometimes required to stage a similar show. In other words, while teams in our society are usually obliged to suppress their rage behind a working consensus, there are times when teams are obliged to suppress the appearance of sober opposition behind a demonstration of outraged feelings Similarly, there are occasions when individuals, whether they wish to or not, will feel obliged to destroy an interaction in order to save their honor and their face.

Perhaps a moral note can be permitted at the end. In this report the expressive component of social life has been treated as a source of impressions given to or taken by others. Impression, in turn, has been treated as a source of information about unapparent facts and as a means by which the recipients can guide their response to the informant without having to wait for the full consequences of the informant’s actions to be felt. Expression, then, has been treated in terms of the communicative role it plays during social interaction and not, for example, in terms of consummatory or tension-release function it might have for the expresser.

Underlying all social interaction there seems to be a fundamental dialectic. When one individual enters the presence of others, he will want to discover the facts of the situation. Were he to possess this information, he could know, and make allowances for, what will come to happen and he could give the others present as much of their due as is consistent with his enlightened self-interest. To uncover fully the factual nature of the situation, it would be necessary for the individual to know all the relevant social data about the others. It would also be necessary for the individual to know the actual outcome or end product of the activity of the others during the interaction, as well as their innermost feelings concerning him. Full information of this order is rarely available; in its absence, the individual tends to employ substitutes—cues, tests, hints, expressive gestures, status symbols, etc.—as predictive devices. In short, since the reality that the individual is concerned with is unperceivable at the moment, appearances must be relied upon in its stead. And, paradoxically, the more the individual is concerned with the reality that is not available to perception, the more must he concentrate his attention on appearances.

The individual tends to treat the others present on the basis of the impression they give now about the past and the future. It is here that communicative acts are translated into moral ones. The impressions that the others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral character. In his mind the individual says: “I am using these impressions of you as a way of checking up on you and your activity, and you ought not to lead me astray.” The peculiar thing about this is that the individual tends to take this stand even though he expects the others to be unconscious of many of their expressive behaviors and even though he may expect to exploit the others on the basis of the information he gleans about them. Since the sources of impression used by the observing individual involve a multitude of standards pertaining to politeness and decorum, pertaining both to social intercourse and task-performance, we can appreciate afresh how daily life is enmeshed in moral lines of discrimination.

Let us shift now to the point of view of the others. If they are to be gentlemanly, and play the individual’s game, they will give little conscious heed to the fact that impressions are being formed about them but rather act without guile or contrivance, enabling the individual to receive valid impressions about them and their efforts. And if they happen to give thought to the fact that they are being observed, they will not allow this to influence them unduly, content in the belief that the individual will obtain a correct impression and give them their due because of it. Should they be concerned with influencing the treatment that the individual gives them, and this is properly to be expected, then a gentlemanly means will be available to them. They need only guide their action in the present so that its future consequences will be the kind that would lead a just individual to treat them now in a way they want to be treated; once this is done, they have only to rely on the perceptiveness and justness of the individual who observes them.

Sometimes those who are observed do, of course, employ these proper means of influencing the way in which the observer treats them. But there is another way, a shorter and more efficient way, in which the observed can influence the observer. Instead of allowing an impression of their activity to arise as an incidental by-product of their activity, they can reorient their frame of reference and devote their efforts to the creation of desired impressions. Instead of attempting to achieve certain ends by acceptable means, they can attempt to achieve the impression that they are achieving certain ends by acceptable means. It is always possible to manipulate the impression the observer uses as a substitute for reality because a sign for the presence of a thing, not being that thing, can be employed in the absence of it. The observer’s need to rely on representations of things itself creates the possibility of misrepresentation.

We come now to the basic dialectic. In their capacity as performers, individuals will be concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by which they and their products are judged. Because these standards are so numerous and so pervasive, the individuals who are performers dwell more than we might think in a moral world. But, qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we do not have a moral concern with them. As performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it may well be that the more attention we give to these goods, then the more distant we feel from them and from those who are believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery, the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces one to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage.

The general notion that we make a presentation of ourselves to others is hardly novel; what ought to be stressed in conclusion is that the very structure of the self can be seen in terms of how we arrange for such performances in our Anglo-American society. In this report, the individual was divided by implication into two basic parts: he was viewed as a performer, a harried fabricator of impressions involved in the all-too-human task of staging a performance; he was viewed as a character, a figure, typically a fine one, whose spirit, strength, and other sterling qualities the performance was designed to evoke. The attributes of a performer and the attributes of a character are of a different order, quite basically so, yet both sets have their meaning in terms of the show that must go on.

First, character. In our society the character one performs and one’s self are somewhat equated, and this self-as-character is usually seen as something housed within the body of its possessor, especially the upper parts thereof, being a nodule, somehow, in the psychobiology of personality. I suggest that this view is an implied part of what we are all trying to present, but provides, just because of this, a bad analysis of the presentation. In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. 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.

In analyzing the self then we are drawn from its possessor, from the person who will profit or lose most by it, for he and his body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg; in fact these means are often bolted down in social establishments. There will be a back region with its tools for shaping the body, and a front region with its fixed props. 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 of these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks of this genesis.

Let us turn now from the individual as character performed to the individual as performer. He has a capacity to learn, this being exercised in the task of training for a part. He is given to having fantasies and dreams, some that pleasurably unfold a triumphant performance, others full of anxiety and dread that nervously deal with vital discreditings in a public front region. He often manifests a gregarious desire for teammates and audiences, a tactful considerateness for their concerns; and he has a capacity for deeply felt shame, leading him to minimize the chances he takes of exposure. These attributes of the individual qua performer are not merely a depicted effect of particular performances; they are psychobiological in nature, and yet they seem to arise out of intimate interaction with the contingencies of staging performances.