the dramaturgy of the self

[aamcnamara]

The reading for my sociology class today was a guy named Goffman, who has this theory about how the "self" is performative. That is, everyone is performing some "front" for some audience all the time, and we use settings and props and mannerisms in our performances to make them more convincing.

And according to him, life is performance. If you stop performing one role, you're just performing a different one. If you strip away all the performance, there quite literally is nothing left.

Which just strikes me as an ultimately sort of sad way to look at life. Maybe it's me being naive or not cynical enough, but--if we can never stop performing? If we always are faking it, on some level? That's sort of depressing.

I feel like there's a true me. Sometimes it's hidden, maybe most of the time some part of it is hidden in one way or the other, but with friends that I really connect to, I feel like I can be every bit of me. I can express every bit of the reactions that pop up in my brain without censoring myself--"she won't appreciate that joke", "they wouldn't think that was interesting", "he'd just look at me like, 'what?'".

At one point or another when I was auditioning for play after play in high school and not getting into any of them, I came up with the theory that maybe the reason no one cast me in shows was that I'm not very good at not being me. I've spent so much time becoming as much me as I can that when I'm acting I can never really forget that me. Being cast in this play in college means that that probably isn't in fact the case (at least, I hope against hope that I wasn't typecast in this part), but the ideas slot into one another.

Maybe I'm deluding myself, that my self exists. Maybe "my really me" is just a different performance I put on. But I don't think so. Sociology is all about distrusting things--distrusting thoughts, distrusting impulses and initial reactions--but if I can't trust me, trust my self, then when I'm thinking about sociology, what am I standing on?

Comments

[vcmw]

If you turn it inside out, it can be considered an answer to a certain kind of depression. So many people reach certain points in their life where they begin to feel kinda disassociated and detached. At that point they look at all of these things they are doing and go "these are performances, these are roles, this is NOT me!" (as best exemplified in that song that goes "this is not my beautiful house"). And having this feeling of being surrounded by a performance that is not-you can make you feel trapped or caged by an external force. Someone in that position may no longer be sure that they have a real self, or not know how to value the different parts of themselves. So that person would still be panicked if they were told "these performances are just part of you, there is a real self"... on the other hand, tell someone in that panicked state that we ARE the performances, and maybe you open them up to an idea of agency - the idea that they own the performance and can redraft it - that if they are performing a role the role is within their own ownership, doesn't have to be dictated by society, can be rewritten, etc.

Also, sometimes it can be a helpful mindset to try on when trying to let go of negative behaviors. There is a thread in cultural discussion that suggests that whatever comes easiest to us, whatever we "do naturally," is our true self. But behaviors wear pathways in the brain that make them feel as if they "come naturally." So someone who is trying to rewrite those pathways and leave behind a well worn but negative behavior could welcome the idea that various behaviors are equally real/unreal, because that would justify letting go of the "natural" seeming negative behavior. Focus on a "true self" might have led that person to see their negative behavior as "true" and then have led them to an unhappy cognitive place that by seeking out a more positive behavior they were being "untrue."

Sorry for the proliferation of quote marks, I know they're a sign of lazy writing.