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How can I avoid embarrassment?

How can I be seen as a poised and socially skilled person?

How can I be seen as someone who is safe and comfortable to interact with?

I'm going to teach you how to do all these things, using a key concept from Erving Goffman's sociology, the expressive order.

Goffman uses this idea to explain, at a deep and fundamental level, how the social world works.

The expressive order is a concept Goffman introduced in his book, The Presentation of Self, and wrote more about in his book, Interaction Ritual. He defines this idea of the Expressive Order in his famous article “On Face Work,” which talks about the concept of Face, the thing that we save when we “save Face” and that we lose when we “lose Face.”

If you go back to some of my earliest videos (linked in this one), I talked about the concept of face. I talked about it repeatedly in subsequent videos because it's such a core concept.

Face and the Expressive Order

Face, according to Goffman, is the positive social value a person claims by acting in a certain way, by dressing in a certain way, or by carrying themselves in a certain way.

We claim for ourselves that we are people of value and merit and distinction who deserve to be respected and treated with dignity and honor and so on. That's face. It's the thing we lose when we get embarrassed or humiliated.

Goffman defines the expressive order as, "An order that regulates the flow of events, large or small, so that anything that appears to be expressed by them will be consistent with face."

What? So Goffman, as smart as he is, can be obscure when you read definitions like this. So I'm going to try to give you an everyday definition of the expressive order.

The expressive order is the entire set of meanings that are being sustained in a given interaction. Whenever you enter an interaction, there's a set of meanings that are being sustained by that interaction.

What do I mean by that? I mean, who am I? Who are you? What are we doing here? Who are the ratified participants in this interaction, that is, who's in this and who's not in this? What are we up to? What's the point? What's our relative social status? What is the level of intimacy or connectedness between us? What's the power between us? What are the reciprocal obligations between us?

All of these meanings are being sustained by the way we interact with one another, by the things that we say, and by the things that we do. These obligations are on us to continue to sustain this interaction.

 Analogies of Social Interaction

I have a couple of analogies that I use when I try to think of what's going on in the expressive order in any interaction, and what is our obligation.

I should first say that your primary obligation as a competent member of the social world is to maintain the expressive order of the interaction. That is, you come into an interaction and you have a moral obligation to the other people in the interaction to maintain the set of meanings that they are projecting into this interaction.

You can't go in and suddenly point out, "Oh, you're not who you claim to be." That's terrible. That will embarrass the other person and make you seem like someone who's not safe to interact with.

So our primary obligation and the primary point of most social interactions is to act in such a way that saves face for everyone, and we do that by maintaining the expressive order of the interaction and this set of meanings. I grant that you are who you say you are, I am who I claim I am, and I'll continue behaving in a way that's consistent with this definition of the situation.

If I do something that's out of harmony with the definition of the situation, I may cause myself to lose face or cause others to lose face, and I've disrupted the expressive order of the interaction. And then I actually have an obligation to try and repair the expressive order, to restore those meanings that people were claiming when I entered the interaction in the first place.

1. Hacky Sack

In metaphors or analogies I use to think about this, I imagine that people are playing some sort of game. The best game I can think of is this game Hacky Sack.

Now, I don't know if everyone outside of America knows exactly what Hacky Sack is. I'll insert a video of people playing hacky sack here. Hacky Sack is a game where people stand in a circle and they have this little beanbag, and they use their feet and their arms and their body to keep this beanbag up in the air. They're sort of playing catch with this beanbag in a circle.

I'm kicking this bag, and two people are kicking this bag back and forth to one another. And the whole point is to keep the bag in the air and keep playing.

So you enter an interaction and it's as if, metaphorically, people are playing hacky sack, they are trying to keep this ball in the air. In this case, the ball that they're trying to keep in the air is the expressive order. They're trying to keep intact this set of meanings, who I claim to be, who you claim to be, what it is we're up to, who are the valid participants in this interaction, what the point of the interaction is, all that stuff is part of the expressive order.

2. Drama or Stage Performance

We are engaged in the game, or as Goffman would say, engaged in a drama where we play out these parts. In this drama, our commitment is to maintain the reality of the drama. We don't want to break out of character. If you're an actor in a play and you're in a scene, you can't suddenly break character and be yourself. If you do, you're betraying everyone else in the scene.

This is what it's like in the social world. Goffman says the world is like a stage. We're all just actors on the stage. Every interaction is like a scene, and we're committed to the drama that's being played out in that scene. That's the expressive order.

In a drama, we're committed to maintaining the drama of a fictional world. Goffman would say that in some sense, the social world is like that. We're maintaining a fiction, and the fiction is you are who you claim to be, I'm who I claim to be, we have the dignity that we claim for ourselves, the point of the interaction is what it claims to be, and we're all committed to maintaining that fiction.

Now, it's a fiction only in the sense that it's created by us in the interaction. It's not that it's not real, it's just that the reality could fall apart at any moment.

When Face is Lost

We've all been in a situation where the line we're taking or the role we're playing in a situation falls apart. And suddenly, the drama of the whole interaction, the meanings that we’re trying to sustain fall apart.

There's embarrassment, maybe humiliation, and a lot of panic. Then everyone works together to put the expressive order back together. There may be apologies, people making excuses, rationalizations, all these other things, and some people may even flee the interaction. expressive order is then restored, this set of meanings which we've all agreed to and which allow us all to save face and not to lose face, or as Goffman might say, to stay in face or in character.

When you enter an interaction, you have to realize that the ball is in the air and people are playing hacky sack. Your job when you enter the interaction is to keep that hacky sack in the air, to keep the ball in the air, in this case, the little bean bag. If the ball drops, it's actually not a tragedy. Even in the game of hacky sack, you can't keep the little beanbag in the air all the time. It falls. It inevitably falls. And that's part of the game. When the beanbag falls to the ground, people don't attack one another nor do they flee in fear. They just pick the ball up and they start again. There may be some disappointment, the person who missed the beanbag might be blamed or they might make a joke about him, but then they start to play again.

This is what interaction is like. We can't always maintain the expressive order. Sometimes it falls apart. But we don't panic and flee most of the time when there's a kind of breach in the expressive order. We do what's necessary. We apologize. We make an excuse. We gather ourselves up again.

Let's say you're in an interaction and you do something to embarrass yourself, you belch or you fart or you swear in a situation where it's not appropriate to swear, or you reveal a private fact about someone else in the interaction that they didn't want revealed.

Suddenly there's a panic because people realize the interaction order has been broken, like the Hacky Sack has fallen to the ground, but then people don't completely panic.

You do your part. You apologize, you make an excuse. You do things to help people save face and they do things to help you save face. The expressive order is restored and we resume our interaction, just the way the people playing Hacky Sack continue to play the game after the beanbag falls down.

 

Moral Commitment to Maintain the Expressive Order

This analogy captures two things that are of the essence of the expressive order as well, and that is, on the one hand, we are trying to keep the hacky sack in the air. We are trying to maintain the expressive order, this fragile pattern of meanings. All of the things that I claim about myself and all of the things that you claim about yourself, and all of the things that we jointly claim about the meaning of this situation – this is a fragile web of meanings.

We're trying to keep it together, but it could be sort of torn asunder at any moment. It’s the same way that we're trying to keep the beanbag in the air in Hacky Sack, but we know it's in the nature of things that the beanbag sometimes falls. Why? Because people are imperfect.

That’s the same reason the expressive order sometimes falls apart, because people are imperfect. We can't always play out our roles perfectly. Sometimes new information enters in unexpectedly or unexpected things happen, or we lose control of ourselves or someone else loses control and the expressive orders threatened.

We don't panic and flee, normally. What we do then is make an effort to restore the expressive order. By making an effort to restore the expressive order, we show that we are civilized people, that we are committed to the expressive order. In a way, it's this commitment to the expressive order which is more important than the expressive order itself always being maintained.

All human beings know that social situations are risky, that people could lose face at any time, and that this fragile web of meanings could fall apart. We know that's in the nature of social interaction. So when it happens, we don't panic. But if we interact with someone who appears not to be committed to restoring the integrity of the expressive order, then that person is not safe to interact with if they're not going to maintain the expressive order.

Erving Goffman uses the word “moral” when he describes the nature of our commitment to maintain the expressive order. He says, "We have a moral commitment to maintain the expressive order." What does he mean by moral? Well, Goffman believes that face-to-face interaction between people is a kind of sacred space. And what he means by that is that it's characterized by ritual and it's extremely important to people.

We're deeply emotionally attached to our face, to this positive social value that we claim for ourselves. We're also deeply emotionally attached to the meanings that we ascribe to ourselves and to other people and to situations. So when we enter into face-to-face interaction, this is sacred space, and the commitment to maintaining the integrity of these meanings, the expressive order, is therefore a moral commitment that we have to one another.

In fact, what we mean when we say a person is poised or socially skilled or diplomatic is they have this strong, moral commitment to maintaining the expressive order. They know that interaction is risky, and that at any moment, either one of us could lose face. The web of meanings could fall apart and we could be humiliated, but the people involved in the interaction have a commitment to sustaining and restoring the expressive order if it breaks down.

The only reason we ever feel safe entering into interactions given their inherently risky nature that we could be humiliated or that things could fall apart at any time, is that we know that we have a commitment to maintaining the expressive order. We know that if our other person is a decent person with diplomacy and poise and class, they will have a reciprocal commitment to maintaining the expressive order. We're both jointly committed to this idea that we're not going to let the other person to be humiliated or let this web of meanings fall apart. If it does, we'll both work together to put it back together. That's why interaction feels safe when we're with another normal person.

If ever we're with a person who we sense doesn't have this commitment to maintain the expressive order, we think, "Oh, that person is not safe to interact with. They have no class. They have no shame. They have no social skill." We think that if things were to break down, they might intentionally break down the expressive order, or if things broke down, they would have no commitment to restoring it. We don't want to interact with those sorts of people because they lack the moral commitment to maintain this set of meanings that we're all so attached to.

In this sense, every interaction is a moral drama about our commitment to the expressive order. In an important way, dramatizing our commitment to the expressive order is more important than the expressive order always being perfectly maintained.

I've already said that the expressive order is not going to be perfectly maintained. It's too fragile. It will fall apart. It's in the nature of things that we will embarrass ourselves or that things will go wrong and we'll lose face. But the moral drama of the interaction is in the way we dramatize our commitment to putting things back together. In that way, we show, “I am a person with dignity and honor, you are a person with dignity and honor and self-esteem, and we dramatize our respect for each other's honor and dignity and self-esteem and face by showing our commitment to restoring the expressive order of things when they inevitably break down.”

 

Summary

So what's the takeaway lesson from all this? The lesson is always to be aware of your moral commitment to keep this fragile web of meanings that we call the expressive order together. And if it breaks down, as it inevitably will from time to time, do your best to dramatize that you're committed to the expressive order by helping put it back together.

Sometimes this means not paying attention when someone else embarrass themselves. Sometimes this means doing whatever's necessary to restore face when someone has lost face or repair the web of meanings when it's broken down.

If you enter into a situation, you’re suddenly in the game. You have to keep that Hacky Sack in the air. When it falls down, you have to show disappointment and you have to start up the game again. That's our analogy of social interaction. By doing this, you will illustrate and dramatize that you are a poised, diplomatic and socially skilled person, someone who is trustworthy and safe and comfortable to interact with.

Thanks so much for watching this video and reading this post today. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you next time.