1 - Sociology and the rituals of interaction

Summary

The various stories about the origins of the concept of performance always tend to share one name in common: Erving Goffman. Goffman was trained in the University of Chicago School of Sociology, founded by Robert Park. The Chicago sociologists used the urban space and institutions around them to develop insights based on close observation of human interactions, a method sometimes called human ecology. But it was Goffman's work in particular that had an impact on the thinking about performance. Most accounts of the development of a non-theatrical concept of performance begin with a work he first published in 1956, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This was a groundbreaking analysis of the structures and dynamics of interpersonal encounters, which built on an essay published the previous year. We shall look at what Goffman outlines in that essay before moving back to Presentation of Self.

‘On face-work’ appeared in 1955 in a journal of psychiatry. His other essays of this period appeared in journals of sociology and anthropology. It is that disciplinary fluidity which suggests something of the new territory being opened up by research based in observations of the ‘glances, gestures, positionings and verbal statements’ of regular, continuous human contact. ‘On face-work’ lays the groundwork for much that was to come, from Goffman and from others, by the simple shift of focus from individual person to group interaction. As he said later, in 1967, ‘the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another’ (Goffman 2005: 2, 1). Needing to forge a new vocabulary, Goffman defined ‘face’ as ‘an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes’ and to ‘have face’ is to present an ‘image that is internally consistent’: ‘At such times’, says Goffman, underlining his demolition of the romance attached to that item of the human body which has so often been regarded as most personal, ‘the person's face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter’. Because ‘face’ is dependent on socially approved attributes the individual is locked into a system of social expectation, which means that individuals are as much concerned with others’ behaviour as their own, …