We cast roles for one another, but how far?

The established order of the world is like a theater play in which everyone takes part voluntarily, in which everyone, giving up their real personality and identity for this play, puts on the costumes and masks suited to the role written for them.

So said Erwing Goffman, in our piece on his books, the continuation of which we promised a while ago. We actually live by playing roles to one another. With the role they play, everyone steps outside their own naturalness, and this is the routine of our lives. Everyone takes part in this routine by preparing for it.

What is strange is that we all together also give credit to a discourse that often defends and exalts naturalness.

We like the one who says "Either appear as you are or be as you appear." This saying has a place among sayings. Yet in social relations, we could make the world narrow for someone who really appears as he is by going beyond protocols, we could even lynch him all together.

Just think, if you are a teacher, you have to play the demeanor and behavior that being a teacher requires, with the lines and costumes that your role requires. No one can even predict what a teacher or a doctor or a father or a mother who behaves naturally, as it comes from within, might do. Because when a human being starts to behave naturally, there is no limit to what kinds of behavior will come out of him. When there are no customs, habitus, patterns of behavior holding the human being, he has unlimited behavioral options before him.

Our role is written in part by people's expectations of us, and what we expect from answering those expectations also determines it.

Of course, beyond this basic level of behavior, there are also the theater orders that people establish. The order of international relations is to some extent where this theater is staged. Stages where no one shows their real face in diplomatic discourse, where they even only utter the lines written for them and behave as expected of them, yet in fact everyone is playing their own natural role.

It is extraordinary leaders who disrupt this theater stage and show the backstage. Without doubt Trump is one of them. Since the day he took office, he has given a performance that exposes, with his extraordinariness, the theatricality of the theater that has long been going on between the Gulf countries and the USA, and between the EU countries and the USA.

There are also, without doubt, cases that reveal the theatrical character of this theater, its hypocritical character. We can say with ease that 15 July, the coup in Egypt and the Khashoggi case are among these mask-removing cases.

It is not possible to fit developments in the world we live in within the limits of a theory. Goffman, who theorized the social world through the metaphor of theater and masks, in his works after the first great work in which he set out his basic thesis, The Presentation of Self, also tried to elaborate his thesis further by concentrating on different levels of the presentation of self.

In his likewise famous book Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (trans. Ş. Geniş, L. Ünsaldı, S.N. Ağırnaslı, 2014), while thinking, he also undertook a kind of symbolic interactionist analysis of the different groupings formed in society by people stigmatized because of illness, crime or other identity traits.

Starting from this book, one can think about how minority identities represent a stigmatization in a society. With Frantz Fanon's famous example, one may recall the Black man walking on the road in apartheid-era South Africa, the child beside a woman coming toward him first saying "Look, mother, a Black man," and, as he approaches, repeating this phrase first with anxiety, then with fear, and when he comes very close, jumping into his mother's arms. In this example, how that Black man sees himself, his consciousness of how the child and his mother see him, and the limits on which he relies in managing impressions with this consciousness explain very well what Goffman wrote about the management of spoiled identity.

Goffman's books Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (trans. Adem Bölükbaşı, 2017) and Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (trans. Ebru Arıcan, 2015) likewise deal with the management of impressions at two levels: at the level of rituals, which are carried out within daily life as full stage performance, and at the level of the performance in spaces allocated to mental illnesses, which he distinguishes as "total institutions," in mental hospitals, where doctor-patient relations are presented in a radically masked and decorated manner. Face-to-face rituals within daily life are put forth in a full stage performance through means such as gestures, facial expressions and body language.

Reading Goffman's texts in parallel with what Michel Foucault wrote on the birth of madness and of mental hospitals and on the birth of the prison could also be an interesting and fruitful method. But Goffman's emphasis on the obligations of the human being to play the roles given in social life does not permit a determinism that would prevent the individual from displaying an originality and difference in his own performance. When Marx says, in the introduction to Louis Bonaparte and the 18th Brumaire, in the briefly cited saying, "man makes history, but by playing the role written for him," Goffman does not lend credit to the deterministic fate that Marx assigns to the human being.

In the same way, he does not permit the understanding of Durkheim and the later structural functionalists in which the human being is wholly determined by society, reduced to a fated organ of the great organism without an existence of his own, granting the individual no sphere of being. The performance he displays while playing the roles assigned in advance according to the place he occupies in society also offers him enough options to be able to display a difference.

Whatever role is written for him, the human being has infinite options of behavior and can always find a way of existing freely against the understanding that regards international or national or local oppression as a fate. Goffman's dramaturgy reminds us once more that there can always be another possibility.

We have mentioned before Goffman's book The Presentation of Self, published by Metis Publications. The other three books we mention here have also come out from Heretik Publications in successful translations and editions.

It is an important gain for our intellectual life, which is still quite dependent on translation substitution.