Dramaturgical Selves

Everyday Life-Drama, Self & Person Life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. For in learning to perform our parts in real life we guide our own productions by not too consciously maintaining an incipient familiarity with the routine of those to whom we will address ourselves Irving Goffman – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Performance & Popular Culture Shift from competence to performance From logics of cultural and social systems to the dialectics of social-cultural processes Changing socio-symbolic fields rather than structures Mundane “everyday” (the quotidian) and the dominant genres of cultural performance

Everyday performances Performances as INTERACTION constraints – play upon the individual and transform activities into performances Activity oriented towards communication command of an idiom dramatic realization

Presentation of Self When the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society, more so in fact, than does his behavior as a whole We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons

Performing Social Structure A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.

Performance(ing) a condition in which a group or its perceptive members turn bend or reflect back onto themselves – Reflect on relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structure, ethical and legal rules – other sociocultural components Genres of cultural performances are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality – they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify, chronicles and events

LIFE-DRAMA-SELF There is a continuous dynamic process linking performative behavior – art, sports, ritual, play – with social and ethical structure Social reality is a cross-fertilization of natural languages and meta-languages