Life as a masked play

"Life in general resembles a theatrical play. We all take part in this play to perform the roles written for us, carefully putting on the costumes required for these roles and wearing the necessary masks," says Erving Goffman, the pioneer of the dramaturgical school in sociology.

And he adds,

people can play several roles at once.

When a doctor addresses a patient, he does not neglect to display the stereotyped behaviors expected of a doctor toward that patient. The distance he displays in place of the intimacy with which he treats his own family members places a mask in between. After parting from his patient, he returns to all his familiarity and ease.

But within this ease too, he may wear other masks because of his other roles. A doctor is also a father or mother. When he steps out of the role he plays with his patient and turns to his children, this time toward them too he assumes the roles that fatherhood or motherhood requires, and the costume and mask that this role requires. He speaks to his child not as a stranger or as a friend, but with the gestures, the facial expressions and the discourse that a mother or father requires.

Although this conversation seems more informal than the conversation with patients, in fact in it too there is a role and a mask appropriate to one's status within the family. Seen from this angle, everyone in life lives on a kind of stage, and every stage has a backstage.

But the backstage is not always far from the play either. Almost all of social relations reflect this stage arrangement.

Not even we want people to treat us as they are. A doctor's receiving us without his white coat and without the stethoscope around his neck, which is in fact often of no use, would seem to us too a lack of seriousness. We know that a professor too is a human being and has human qualities and weaknesses, but we do not expect, we do not want him to display them in front of us. When he does, he scratches out the charisma peculiar to being a professor.

A person's success or difference in playing the role he undertakes in accordance with the status he holds in society can be evaluated as a kind of stage performance. A teacher is not merely busy transmitting information to the students watching him on stage; in transmitting this knowledge, he is also putting on the stage performance of a personality, a role, expected of a teacher. For this, for example, he is expected to hide his private life and his personal characteristics outside his teaching from his students.

On stage, he must behave within these limits in order to give the flesh-and-blood performance of the ideal type of a teacher, not of just any human being. We can think of this again and again for all categories of social being, whether as a member of a profession, in accordance with one's position within the family, as the male and female sexes, or in accordance with positions in the political process.

In all these statuses, people never expect one another to be natural. Even if appearing as one is is regarded as a virtue, no one expects his fellow actor to behave naturally, as he is, in a manner that does not suit the role imposed on him. One does not want to see childish roles from one's father, or to hear from a politician a helpless discourse that can solve no problem. In many places women do not expect or want even their husbands to enter the kitchen and help them, because they feel that if they did, the roles that society has loaded so well would become mixed up with one another.

Therefore everyone expects behavior appropriate to their own roles from others, and when behavior inappropriate to this role comes, it immediately stands out, the process falters, and an incongruity becomes visible in society. This alone shows that there is in fact a serious consensus in society, a common ground of understanding, and that it operates strongly.

Goffman describes this role performance within the play of life along these lines in his book titled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. According to him, in presenting their selves in social life, people in fact look for ways of managing the impressions about themselves. People have an awareness of the impression about themselves, though there is a great deal of difference between the levels of this awareness. Of course not everyone has the same level of awareness. But as people undertake their roles, they already have certain stereotyped awarenesses about the impressions appropriate to those roles, and the whole of social life takes place in people's bustle of showing these roles to one another.

This first and fundamental book of Goffman's has been translated and published by Metis Publishing in Barış Cezar's fine Turkish. It is an important gain for sociology, social psychology and thinking about society in general. In fact I had set to work on his other three books, published more recently by Heretik Publishing, but I decided to begin with this first book of his. Let us, God willing, speak of his other two books later.