the dramaturgy of the self
Oct. 28th, 2009 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraThe 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-03 03:19 am (UTC)