Everything is a Performance: The World's a Stage

The best way to understand the social world is to view it as a stage.

We are the performers and the audience.

The roles we play are based on our many identities.

In every performance, we seek validation and social support for our identity.

Performances can succeed or fail.

Success means increased self-esteem, confidence, and the ability to claim that identity for another day.

Failure means embarrassment, loss of face, humiliation, and difficulty sustaining the identity that was most closely associated with the failed performance.

There's a very famous quote from Shakespeare I wrote down from one of his poems. He says "All the world's a stage and all the men and women, many players, they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."

This beautiful poem goes on to talk about all the different roles a person plays throughout the course of their life.

But the most important aspect of this metaphor in the beginning is the idea that the world is a stage and that we are all players on the stage.

 

The World’s a Stage

This metaphor has been developed into a whole theory of communication by people like the sociologist Erving Goffman and others, but especially Goffman. If you've read some of my blog about politeness and face, you'll know that Erving Goffman, who was a 20th-century sociologist, is one of my heroes and one of the people whose work influenced me most in the way I think about communication. Goffman is famous also for thinking about the social world as a stage and all of us being performers on that stage.

One of the most important things to understand about how communication works is that in every social situation, we are engaged in a performance. That is, we are all playing a role. Just as Shakespeare says, "And one man in his time plays many parts, so all of us actually have many roles that we play in our lives." We think of them as our identities or as our role identities.

In my life, I might say something like “I'm a father and a brother and a son and a friend and a college professor. I’m a scientist, a musician, and a blogger. I'm all of these things.” These are the various identities that make me up as a person and associated with each of these identities is a set of performances, so I am, in every social situation, acting out one or more of these roles.

This has a lot of important implications. I try to explore a few of them in this video, but I'll come back to this idea over and over again, because it's so central to the way I think about communication.

Identity as the Performance

What's one of the first ideas to think about? One is that some of us like to think of our identity as having one identity, our authentic identity.

I sometimes ask people, "Well, where is that identity?" People will maybe touch their chest and say, "Well, it's right here. It's in my heart. That's my central identity and that's who I really am," or maybe, "It's in my head and I really know who my authentic self is." Or if we're having a identity crisis, we might think, "I don't know who my authentic self is," and we're trying to find it.

But with Goffman and people who think of the world as a stage, they wouldn't actually say that we have an authentic identity. There is no one authentic identity. There's multiple roles that we're playing. We play different roles in different situations at different times. Also, by this way of thinking, there is no center that is our authentic self and there is no singular identity. There's nothing but performances. Our identity doesn't exist apart from these social performances.

I tell my students that sometimes we want to think of ourself as a person, our identity. Like a peach – if we eat all the outer part of the peach and then in the middle, there's the pit, and that's our core self or identity, and it's solid and it's there. But that's not really what a human being is like, at least not by my way of thinking. We're more like an onion. In an onion, you peel away all the layers and in the middle, there's nothing. It's nothing but layers.

That's the way I think of our identities and ourselves. There is no core, it's nothing but performance. Or another way to think of it: It's performance all the way down. There's no core. You strip away all the performances and there's nothing left, so our identities are nothing but performances in the social world.

What are these identities? Each of these identities – father, brother, college, professor, blogger, musician or whatever they are – is associated with particular performances. First of all, to have an identity is a sort of imagined thing. When I think of myself as a father, I have an idealized vision of myself in that role, an idealized sense of how I should act and how I should behave.

Of course, then I have my actual performances in the world as a father, and sometimes my performances in the world live up to my idealization and sometimes they don't. That's the way it is with all of our identities. We have these identities, which are these idealized, imagined fantasies of who we want to be in each of our roles as a brother, father, son, employee, and we try to act out in the social world a performance that corresponds to this vision we have in our imagination.

 

The Audience

If we think of the world as a stage and our identity as being nothing more than our performances, there's one other key concept in this metaphor, and that's the idea of an audience. In any performance, there is an audience, and actually, it's not really a performance unless there's an audience. The performance doesn't really seem real or valid unless there's an audience. It's the same thing in the social world.

Now, the interesting thing about performances in the social world is we can be our own audience, and in fact, we are our own audience. Oftentimes, we are our own most important audience for many of our performances. That is, no matter what anyone thinks of our performance, we are often always our harshest critic of our own performances, so even when there's no one else around, we're still engaged in the social performance with ourselves as the only audience.

But in many, many social situations there are actually other people, whether it's one-on-one or there's a crowd, where we're literally performing in front of an audience of these other people. With each performance, we are trying to gain support or legitimacy for one of these identities. So in every single social situation, I'm making a decision, "Which of my identities should I act out in this situation?" and that determines how I'm going to perform in the social situation. We behave in a particular way in order to dramatize our identity in front of an audience.

 

Role Support

Just like in a real performance, the audience can either like our performance or not like our performance. The strength of our identity and self-esteem and the validity of our identities ebbs and flows based on how much support we feel like we're getting from the important audiences in our lives. The theoretical word they use for this is "role support" – we seek support from certain audiences for certain of our identities, and they can either give us the support or not.

To try to summarize a couple of these important ideas: The world is a stage, we have these role identities, many of them, but there's nothing to these identities except our performances. The identities consist of these performances and we can't sustain these identities without performing in the social world. But just performing isn't enough. We actually need audiences to validate our performances, and then we can feel like that identity is valid and secure and so on.

For me as a college professor, I have to give lectures and teach students and mentor students and things like that. Those are the performances that are essential to my identity as a college professor. In order to feel like I'm really a good college professor, the critical audience for me is my students. Those students have to validate my performance. If they do, then my identity as a college professor is safe and secure for another day.

But the interesting thing about our identities is that each of our identities has this hunger for support, for role support, and this hunger is insatiable. We never lose our appetite for role support. Today, I might give a lecture and my students might like it and I can leave thinking, "Oh, I did a great job. I'm a really good college professor," or I talk with my kids and my kids say, "Oh, you're a good dad," and for that day, I feel like a good dad. But tomorrow, that feeling kind of goes away and I need moral support the next day, so our identities are not secure in the sense that they last for a long time. We constantly need role support from important audiences that are able to give us that.

It's interesting that not all audiences can validate all of our identities. Some audiences can validate some identities and not others. For example, my students can validate my identity as a college professor, but they can't validate my identity as a father. If a student says to me, "You're a good father," I sort of say, "Well, thank you, but what would you know?" That validation doesn't really count.

Each of our identities requires validation and support from specific audiences that have the credibility to validate that particular performance. If we engage in an artistic performance, like we sing a song or act in a play or paint a painting and our mother says, "Oh, that's lovely, honey. That was such a good performance." Well, we think, "That's my mother. She loves everything that I do," and so we don't feel like our mother's approval validates our performance in a lot of domains. But if an art critic says they like our painting, or if the audience gives us a standing ovation or we get a raise at work, that's the kind of validation that really counts to us.

We go through the social world trying to seek validation for these role identities and feeling really bad when we don't get it. In every situation, we're trying to decide how to be, how to act, what to say, and we're making all these choices about how to behave. We're evaluating our own performance and we're evaluating the feedback we get from audiences.

 

Performance and Face

In some of the recent blog entries, I talked about this idea of face, saving face and losing face. This idea of face is really connected to the idea of performances and identity that I'm trying to develop today in this post.

When we lose face, what's really happening? You lose face normally through a failed performance, so a classic losing face might be something like you walk into a room if you're a man and your zipper is down and you embarrass yourself. Another example is you mispronounce a word in front of your friends, or you spill food on yourself. All of these performances are inconsistent with the identity that you're trying to project. When you perform in a way that's inconsistent with your desired identity, with your imagined identity, this discrepancy between your idealized self and the real self that just showed up in your performances causes embarrassment, loss of face, and humiliation. It causes us to want to run and flee from the social situation.

The Social World is Our Stage

So much of social interaction can be understood in terms of how people are engaging in performances in order to bolster one or more identities, so you can begin to think about your own social behavior as like, "What am I saying? Why am I saying it? Why did I act that way?" You can think to yourself, "Well, which of my identities was I acting out? Which role was I playing in that situation? What kind of support I trying to get for that role?"

When you look at the behavior of other people in terms of their identity, don't take it personally as if it was about you. Think about their behavior as their own need to engage in a performance that somehow supports and validates one of their identities. If you can understand other people's identity goals, what roles they are trying to act out and what kind of support they are seeking out for those identities, people's behaviors starts to make a lot more sense.

I have an identity-centered view of the social world. I talk about health and illness and chronic illness and embarrassment and politeness and all of these ideas, which come back to the centrality of identity. So I see one of the most fundamental ideas in understanding the social world is just this idea that the world is a stage, that we are all playing roles, that we have multiple identities, not just one. Then at any given moment, I'm engaged in a performance. This performance dramatizes and illustrates for other people that I am a certain sort of person and that I have the right to claim a certain kind of identity.

When things go well in the social world, my performances are consistent with my imagination and with my ideal self, and I feel validated by an important audience. They give me role support and everything goes well and I leave that situation feeling happy and content and validated. I may even have my self-esteem bolstered.

When things go badly, our performances fall short of this ideal and the audiences that matter to us don't give us role support. In those situations, we feel embarrassed and humiliated. We want to run away from the social situation. We might be even abandoned that identity. If we just can't get support for some of our identities, it’s so painful that over time we might just say, "Forget about it. I'm not going to try to be a musician/artist/college professor anymore. I just can't get any support for that identity."

I'll leave you with one last example. If you remember the movie “Castaway” with Tom Hanks, he's on an island all by himself. What does Tom Hanks do? In order not to go crazy, he eventually makes friends, right? You remember who his friend is in the movie? It's a volleyball that he paints a face on, so he puts eyes and a nose and a mouth and he names this volleyball "Wilson" because that was the brand name of the volleyball. Over the years that he's stuck on this island alone, he develops a relationship with Wilson and he talks about Wilson. Why does he do this? I think we can understand this in terms of performances and the social world being a stage and the need to have support for our identities.

 

Summary

The fact is, if you are completely isolated without any audience, it becomes almost impossible to sustain any identity at all. To sustain an identity, we have to have an audience in front of whom we can engage in performances. If there's no audience, there could be no role support. We can get no validation for identities and literally, our sense of self disappears.

We could get into why people in solitary confinement go crazy, in part because there's no social interaction. We are social animals who need audiences so we can engage in performances and validate our identities. That's what it's like to be a person in the social world and again and again, I'm going to return to this idea of identity, interaction, performance, to explain a lot of what's happening and the choices that we make.

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