Dramaturgy before Goffman
Long before Goffman, there was dramaturgy. If we understand that dramaturgy is not a strategy to deceive others â although it can be used that way or merely an attempt to gain a strategic advantage, although it can be used in that way too â but more simply a technique of communication, we can see that dramaturgy is endemic to the business of being human. Thought of in this way, we have only to look to the Greeks for insight into the beginnings of drama. Volumes have been written on Greek dramatists, especially the fifth and sixth century bce tragedies written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Tragedy was a favourite motif of Greek dramatists and usually centred on a central figure â a tragic hero who was destined for greatness but was in the end destroyed by his own hubris. The Greeks invented the theatre where actors drew a slice of life from which audiences could identify and used a multiplicity of ruses, such as masks, whereby a single actor could play several different characters in a single play.
Given the powerful example of Greek dramaturgy, it is clear that Goffman was by no means the first to recognise that social life has many of the attributes of theatre. People play roles to others who serve as audiences for these performances. Then the roles are reversed: actors become audiences, audiences become actors in other parts and so forth. âAll the worldâs a stageâ, as William Shakespeare famously said in the 16th century. Indeed, Shakespeare performed his hugely successful plays at the Globe Theatre in London. Theatre was the popular culture of its time, and the portraits of life that he put on the stage have endured long after he had gone because they struck at themes that we all share as participants in the drama of life.
So, Goffman had many other predecessors and some contemporaries who also helped us understand the usefulness of this way of thinking. For example, the literary critic Kenneth Burke, over a long and distinguished career, presented a model of social life that he called âdramatismâ in which any rounded statement about social life required an analysis of what he termed the âpentadâ of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (Burke 1945).1 Burkeâs dramatistic project was primarily a device used to analyse literature, but it also anticipated much of Goffman, especially his early writings. Burke asked the fundamental question: âWhat is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?â He then proceeds to lay out clearly the five key terms of dramaturgy which must be addressed in a rounded account of human motives as follows.
Act
The act, according to Burke, names what took place, in thought or deed. It is what happened, whether it be a kiss or a murder.
Scene
Since all acts take place somewhere, scene is crucial to dramaturgical thinking. It is the place of action, its background and the situation in which it occurred.
Agent
Acts are performed by someone. So, the question is who or what kind of person performed the act. Here Burke is not talking about personal psychology, but rather what kind of person is to be dramaturgically introduced: a hero, a villain, a fool or even a collective body like a committee. People, in Burkeâs sense are not things but social constructions. Goffman makes good use of Burke when he defines what he means by a âselfâ:
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⊠. A correctly staged self and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation â this self â is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it.
(Goffman 1959:252)
Agency
Agency, for Burke, is necessary because it addresses the question of âHow?â Actors are dependent on instruments to carry out acts. Agency covers a wide variety of things, from style â how one appears to others â to guns and knives as violent instruments of force. And, of course, symbolic language is the basic tool humans use to perform themselves and thus constitutes agency.
Purpose
Purpose is an answer to the question of âWhy?â Here again, Burke situates motives in dramatic action, not in personal psychology or biological necessity. The astute observer will notice that these five elements are the first thing one learns in a journalism class about writing stories for publication. âWho? What? Where? How? and Why?â This is what the reader first needs to know. Simply put, without the elements of the pentad, the human drama is not possible.
Along with Burke, his acolyte Hugh Dalziel Duncan published prolifically on areas aligned with Burkeâs thinking (e.g. Duncan 1962, 1968). Duncan was a sociologist who used the ideas of Burke and applied them to conventional themes such as politics, religion and communication. Something of a firebrand, his books often excoriated sociologists for not paying sufficient attention to communication as the basis of social order. But they also introduced Burkeâs dramatism to a sociological audience by translating his major themes into sociological terms, especially the proposition that symbolic conduct can best be analysed as ritual drama of guilt, hierarchy, redemption and victimage. Goffman took dramatism a step further by applying the dramatic metaphor to the study of face-to-face behaviour.
By the 1960s there were many other subscribers to the dramaturgical image of man. Gregory P. Stoneâs groundbreaking essay âAppearance and the Selfâ (Stone 1962) forced a consideration that the self appears as much as it is performed verbally and that such matters as clothing, hairstyles, non-verbal signals and all the accoutrements of fashion were key elements of the self. He considered such matters fundamental to an understanding of self, just as Goffman did.2 Because the focus of this chapter is on Goffmanâs dramaturgy, it is important to illustrate and discuss the themes in what many scholars believe is his most dramaturgical work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
Performances are multi-layered, argued Goffman, and are not constituted simply by one-on-one interactions but also by people acting as members of what he calls âteamsâ. Teams may be formed very quickly or over time. They may also disappear almost as quickly. Teammates are evaluated according to simple criteria: they are good teammates if they contribute to the impressions being fostered, and they are bad ones if they give the show away. We know this, too. As Goffman puts it: âSince we all participate on teams, we must all carry within ourselves the sweet guilt of conspiratorsâ (Goffman 1959:105).
Husbands and wives going to a âcommand performanceâ (such as an office get-together where the boss will be in attendance) understand implicitly that they are expected to play the role of âhappily married coupleâ with all the social and cultural idealisations attendant to that role. A dominant wife may play her dominance down and act like a compliant wife, deferring to her husband while in the presence of the boss. A cold husband may snuggle his wife for the proper effect at the same party. Teammates are evaluated in terms of whether they keep up the teamâs front or act out of character with it. Such skills as dramaturgical loyalty and dramaturgical circumspection are called upon, whereas actions which would undermine the impression being fostered by the team are avoided.3 Clearly, they know the truth of such situations, which is that âpeople will talkâ.
Performances always take place somewhere, and this geography of performance includes its own set of rules and understandings. Goffmanâs most well-known and easily understood conceptual distinction is that between backstage and frontstage. The frontstage is a place where performances are given and where dramaturgical circumspection is at its height. Performers frontstage are always âonâ and where anything that shows is, by definition, part of the show. This is contrasted with the backstage, which is a place where performances are prepared for. It is important that a person as performer is aware of and respects these boundaries. Many a career has been destroyed in network television because a live mic was mistaken for a dead one.4 The backstage is a place where the impressions formulated frontstage are regularly contradicted. These are places where people unwind, take off their make-up and comment about their own or other actorâs performances. In these places, one finds
reciprocal first-naming, cooperative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, âsloppyâ sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or substandard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and âkiddingâ, inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic ways, minor self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching and flatulence.
(Goffman 1959:128)
Backstages are so essential to the integrity of a performance that their existence is often guarded by signs: âEmployees onlyâ, âKitchen personnelâ, âNo Admittanceâ, or even the simple designation of some rooms for âMenâ and others for âWomenâ alert potential entrants to the dramaturgical requirements of gender. In the latter case, in these gender-specific rooms, the costuming and make-up that signals to others that they are in the presence of one gender or the other, and thus the roles they are playing along with accompanying appearances, can be adjusted, re-arranged or temporarily discarded because one presumes that actors will only encounter members of the same gender.5 Communication out of character can simply be constituted by appearance in the wrong place, as when oneâs pastor on Sunday morning is seen coming out of a porn theatre on Saturday night.
A mere dictionary definition of dramaturgy would lead one to believe that it is simply the process of writing and staging a play. But to sociological users of this perspective, it is much more than that. It is an appreciation and explication of the idea that to be human is to be involved in a life that that has a marked similarity to the things of the theatre. Goffman said this repeatedly in a vast body of work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) being only the first. He occasionally played it down, pointing to its âobviousâ shortcomings, but repeatedly came back to it in his thinking and writing. It is not too much to say that it was his overriding metaphor, for as he well knew, âAll the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isnât are not easy to specifyâ (Goffman 1959:72).