Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), one of sociologist Erving Goffman's earliest works, he uses the imagery of the theater as an analogy to everyday life in order to portray the importance of human interaction in the production of self-identity and self-design. Ideas found in the book follow the symbolic interactionist tradition in general—that all reality is socially constructed. Goffman sees the individual self as a product of the various means by which it is produced, maintained, and constrained through interaction with others who both create and threaten it. Thus, people do not merely act for the sake of action; rather, all actions are social performances with the aim of not only achieving the inherent purposes of the action itself but also of giving and maintaining certain impressions to others.

Goffman outlines several techniques people employ in order to manage these social performances: the selection of a stage or backstage (the physical setting), the actor's personal appearance and mannerisms, dramatic actions directed by certain props, idealistic representations, misrepresentations, and mystifications. The actor is also an audience for his viewers' play, even while he is being watched by the audience. The involved parties are audience members and performers simultaneously, with an agreed-upon definition of the situation. Goffman acknowledges that when the accepted definition of a situation has been discredited, some or all of the actors may pretend that nothing has changed if they find this advantageous. Goffman claims that this type of artificial, willed credulity happens on every level of social organization, from top to bottom. To Goffman, there exists no pure reality or pure contrivance, but rather all actions take place within a liminal state between reality and contrivance.

Goffman's concept of the presentation of self in everyday life is recognized as a contribution both to systematic sociological theory and to an understanding of human consciousness. It is representative of the dramaturgical model in the humanities and social sciences developed by Kenneth Burke, Victor Turner, and Goffman during the mid-20th century. This model, which uses the notion of performance as an approach to understanding the self and society, can be seen in Burke's “dramatistic approach,” Turner's concept of “social drama,” and Goffman's “dramaturgical” approach to everyday life through interaction models. Goffman's concept contributed greatly to the theory of social constructionism outlined by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their seminal 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality.

The dramaturgical model has spread to many intellectual elds or disciplines through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From this perspective, politics, for example, can be seen as a form of symbolic action, as spectacle or as “the performance of power.”