I'm reading this book many years too late - I was supposed to it for A-level, but like most of my cohort I
just took notes from the relevant text-book chapter. Anyway. Goffman is (was)
a symbolic interactionist, which is most easily described as the space where sociology meets
psychology, and proposes a dramaturgical analogy for studying social
interaction. Page references are for the Penguin paperback 1990 reprint.
It is interesting to note that while each team will be in a position to appreciate the unsavoury "unperformed" aspects of its own backstage behaviour, it is not likely to be in a position to come to a similar conclusion about the teams with which it interacts [...] Behind these realizations about oneself and illusions about others is one of the important dynamics and disappointments of social mobility, be it mobility upwards, downwards or sideways. In attempting to escape from a two-faced world of front region and back region behaviour, individuals may feel that in the new position they are attempting to acquire they will be the character projected by individuals in that postion 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. p133
Whatever it is that generates the human want for social contact and for companionship, the effect seems to take two forms: a need for an audience before which to try out one's vaunted selves, and a need for team-mates with whom to enter into collusive intimacies and backstage relaxation. p201
The performance given by the 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 performers feel their offical 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. p202
And finally...
In telling an untruth, the performer is enjoined to retain a shadow of jest in his voice so that, should he be caught out, he can disavow any claim to seriousness and say that he was only joking. In misrepresenting his physical appearance, the performer is enjoined to use a method which allows of an innocent excuse. Thus balding men who affect a hat indoors and out are more or less excused, since it is possible that they have a cold, that they merely forgot to take their hat off, or that rain can fall in unexpected places; a toupee, however, offers the wearer no excuse and the audience no excuse for excuse. p228
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)
