Culture & Society
Theory, http://tcs.sagepub.com/
Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman, Impression Management
and the Postmodern Self
Etrat Tseélon
Theory Culture Society 1992 9: 115
DOI: 10.1177/026327692009002006
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/9/2/115
Published by:
®SAGE
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University
Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepuboom/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/9/2/115.refs.htm|
>> Version of Record -
May 1, 1992
What is This?
Downloaded from tossagepubbom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman,
Impression Management and the
Postmodern Self
Efrat Tseé'lon
The Self According to Goffman and Impression Management
In his classic book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
Goffman provides an account of social life which is modelled on the
theatre. In this book he details how people qua actors plan and
execute different performances in front of various audiences, and
how participants (actors and audience) co-operate in negotiating
and maintaining a definition of the situation. The self for Goffman
is not an independent fixed entity which resides in the individual.
Rather, it is a social process. ‘In dramaturgical analysis the meaning
of the human organism is established by its activity and the activity
of others with respect to it . . . 'sel‘ves are outcomes not antecedents
of human interaction’ (Brissett and Edgley, 19.75: 3).
In his book Goffman articulated a principle which enjoys the dual
merit of being both a culturally specific phenomenon and ‘a univer-
sal human possibility’. The ‘facade self’ represents a particular
variant of bourgeois social character. The construction of ‘fronts’
and the threat of being caught in embarrassing situations is, how-
ever, a ‘human constant’ (Kuzmics, 1991). Two concepts are central
to understanding Goffman’s position on the issue of sincerity of
presentational behaviour: region behaviour, and audience segrega-
tion. ‘Region behaviour’ refers to the discrepancy between one’s
behaviour when with different kinds of audience (e.g. strangers,
'
own ‘team members’):
when one’s activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the
activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the
fostered impression, are suppressed there may be another region
. . . a -—
‘backregion’ or ‘backstage’ where the suppressed facts make an appearance.
—
(Goffman, 1959: 114)
Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 9
(1992), 115—128
Downloaded from tessagepubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.
116 Theory, Culture ’& Society
‘Audience segregation’ refers to a device for ensuring that: ‘those
before whom one plays one of his parts won’t be the same
individuals before whom he plays a different part in another setting’
(Goffman, 1959: 57).
This device summarizes Goffman’s conception of private and
public. It is a dynamic symbolic interactionist concept which refers
not to a structural element (such as a place, or a part of the self),
but to the experience of being visible or invisible (Foddy and
Finighan, 1980). Thus, although Goffman uses the metaphor ‘stage’
and ‘backstage’, or ‘private’ and ‘public’ a careful reading of his
-—
account reveals that he uses them as different kinds of stage, not as
a private and a false public (Tseélon, 1991a). Impression
true
Management (IM) traces its roots to Goffman’s dramaturgical
metaphor. But it appropriated this metaphor to portray a very dif-
ferent type of actor. Goffman’s actor has no interior and exterior.
Rather s/he has a repertoire of ‘faces’ each activated in front of a
different audience, for the purpose of creating and maintaining a
given definition of the situation. Thus, according to Goffman,
‘region behaviour’, ‘audience segregation’, as well as techniques of
emphasis and dramatism are designed to conceal irrelevant informa-
tion, not some real truth. Acting, for him, is an existential
metaphor. In contrast, IM (e. g. Arkin, 1980; Baumeister, 1982,
1986; Buss and Briggs, 1984; Schlenker, 1980, 1985; Snyder, 1987;
Tedeschi, 1981) took Goffman’s stage metaphor literally. And just
as dramatic actors have indeed an off-stage persona and a stage per-
sona, the social actor a la IM has ‘private realities’ and ‘public
appearances’. .
The difference between these two approaches to presentation of
self is in the meaning attributed to the social game: the Goffmanes-
que approach views people’s presentational behaviour as a process
‘
of negotiation. According to this view, people offer definitions of
themselves in various interaction contexts which the audience either
accepts or challenges. This ‘game’ is the point of the interaction, an
end in itself. It is a game of representation. In contrast, the position
advanced by IM researchers views presentational behaviour as
manipulative. According to this view people present various images
of themselves as a strategic move. Unlike Goffman’s approach, this
‘game’ is not an end in itself but a means to an end of gaining bene-
fits. It is a game of mispresentation. Jones and Pittman summarized
the differences between the two approaches as the difference between
actors’ expressions and actors’ attempt to create impressions:
Downloaded from tcssagepubecm at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Tse'e'lon, Is the Presented Self Sincere? 117
Goffman crystallized one viewpoint on impression management Goffman’s . . .
emphasis, however, was on the subtle ways in which actors project or convey a
definition of the interaction situation as they see it. Attempts on the part of the
actor to shape others’ impressions of his personality received only secondary
emphasis. (1986: 231, emphasis added)
In their appropriation of the term, IM theorists use self-
presentation almost always as synonymous with mispresentation
(contrasted with self-expression, private reality, etc.). It should be
pointed out that some writers within the tradition of 1M (e.g.
Schlenker, 1980, 1985; Schlenker and Leary, 1982, 1985) contended
that self-presentation did not necessarily involve conscious decep-
tion, and that one should not jump to the conclusion that all people
are essentially liars, or that self-presentation is a transient, momen-
tary display divorced from self-conception. They emphasized that in
many cases it involved bringing actual attributes or accomplish-
ments to the attention of others. Alternatively, it could reflect non-
conscious habitual responses triggered by relevant social cues. Thus,
Schlenker’s concept of self-projection (1980), Baumeister’s concept
of self-construction (1982), and Cheek and Hogan’s concept of self-
interpretation (1983), were all attempts to distil a truly representa-
tional concept out of the self-presentational package. However, a
manipulative model of the individual is implicit in much of IM
discourse and practices (see, for example, Baumeister, 1986, for a
collection of recent formulations).
The term ‘impression management’ which refers to self-
presentational behaviour connotes disguise or distortion. Similarly,
such terms as ‘strategies’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘control’, which often
describe this behaviour, convey a sense of contrived insincerity (e.g.
Schlenker and Leary, 1982; Schneider, 1981; Snyder, 1981). Some-
times otherwise neutral descriptions manifest inadvertent reference
to an underlying model of deception. For example,
Subjects in the immediate evaluation conditions of experiment 1 had been
responding honestly rather than self-presenting when they assumed greater per-
sonal responsibility self-presenting for failure than for success. (Arkin et al.,
1980: 32)
instead of pleasing the audience, some other manipulative effect on the audience
is sought. (Baumeister, 1982. 22)
Are there some channels of expression and communication that are more reveal-
ing than others about a person’s true inner ‘self’, even when he or she is practic-
ing the arts of impression management? (Snyder, 1981: 104) (emphases added
throughout)
Downloaded from tessagepubeom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
118 Theory, Culture & Society
The basic assumption of IM research is thus that private views are
different from public ones, and that the private self is sincere, while
the public persona is designed to form a false impression. The model
of the individual is that of a manipulator who makes cost-oriented
calculations of how and when to gain credit falsely without risking
disrepute. This is evident, for example, in the rationale for the
research paradigm typically employed by the ‘mispresentation’
approach to self-presentation: ‘The most common procedure for
testing self-presentational motives is by comparing two situations
that are identical in: all respects except that some circumstance is
public in one situation but private in the other’ (Baumeister, 1982: 4).
Thus the research paradigm consists of experimental manipula-
tions intended to create a discrepancy between so-called private and
public reporting conditions (e.g. Tedeschi and Rosenfeld, 1981).
The inherent assumption is that the private condition is true while
the public condition is false. A discrepancy between the two is then
taken to indicate the operation of the presented self (in the public
condition), as opposed to the true self (in the private condition). A
paradigmatic case is the technique developed to investigate self-
presentational behaviours by Jones and Sigall (1971) called ‘the
bogus pipeline’. This is essentially a mock lie-detector which is
aimed at catching the subjects ‘off guard’ in order to get at the ‘real
truth’ of their behaviour. Arkin et al. (1980: 28) described the bogus
pipeline technique as a strategy ‘for reducing distortion and dissimu-
lation in verbal responses convincing the subjects that the
. . .
experimenter is capable of detecting whether they are telling the
truth, thus leading subjects to be more frank in revealing socially
undesirable information’.
Another research device used by IM researchers, Snyder’s
Self-Monitoring Scale (1974, 1979), reflects an ontology which con-
trasts sincerity (low self-monitoring) with multiplicity (high self-
monitoring) (Tseélon, 1991b). The self-monitoring scale consists of
self-report items that tap various facets of self-monitoring ability.
Those high on the scale are said to be pragmatic: skilled at detecting
social cues, and adept at playing to an audience and are therefore
presenting themselves in different ways. Those low on the scale are
said to be principled: more consistent across situations and over
time, and to exhibit a high correspondence between their private
attitudes and their subsequent behaviours irrespective of the situa-
tion. Thus the scale rests on the conception that being honest is
incongruent with being socially skilled: ‘we want to know which of
Downloaded from toaaagepubeom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Tseélon, Is the Presented Self Sincere? 119
a person’s behaviors truly reflect underlying attitudes and feelings
and which are impression management techniques being used to
create an image’ (Snyder, 1981: 103).
This difference, I argue, reflects two models of self that are
implicitly assumed by each approach: Cartesian duality and Prag-
matist plurality. [M is based on an essentialist (Cartesian) notion of
self, which focuses on the individual as an autonomous unit, and on
a metaphysics of depth which contrasts private realities with public
appearances. ‘The‘ inner nature of selfhood is regarded as . . .
axiomatic by much modern psychological thought’ (Baumeister,
1987: 165). Dramaturgy, on the other hand, is based on a socially
defined (pragmatist) notion of self, on what Harré (1986) calls
‘metaphysics of conversation’. This is the notion that the category
of the individual is itself constituted in discursive practices.
The Self According to Gergen
For the purpose of my thesis, I will use the analytic framework
outlined by Gergen in his book The Saturated Self (1991) in order
to situate ‘the self according to Goffman’ within a postmodern
frame, and ‘the self according to Impression Management’ within a
dualistic frame. In his book Gergen traces the historical career of the
view of the self through romantic, modern and the current post-
modern discursive traditions, each resting on metaphorical imagery
and vocabulary which echo the world view and the spirit of the time.
While the romantic self emphasizes the autonomous individual self,
and the supremacy of emotions, the modern self emphasizes essen-
tial qualities. I would like to illustrate the contours of these two con-
ceptions by two literary archetypal characters. The romantic self is
captured in Rosaura, the heroine of Life is a Dream by the famous
Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca. Rosaura is a committed
woman wandering around the kingdom disguised as a man, in
searchof her disloyal lover, one of the king’s men, who promised
to marry her, in order to revenge her betrayed honour. Segismundo
is the king’s son who has been jailed and denied the throne by his
father the king, and is now planning a rebellion against him. In the
episode from which the following quote is taken Rosaura is making
a plea to the would-be king to let her join his troops:
As a woman, I
Have come here to persuade thee to redeem
My honor; as a man I come to urge
Thee to redeem thy crown. As a woman
Downloaded from tessagepubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
120 Theory, Culture & Society
I come to soften thee as I prostrate
Myself before thy feet, and as a man
I thee with my sword and self.
come to serve
But please remember: if thou dost attempt
To make love to me as a woman, as
A man I’ll kill thee staunchly in defense
Of my good name; because I aim to be,
If someone tries to conquer my love’s will,
A woman who will cry, a man who’ll kill. (1636/1958: 89-90)
Thus, to Rosaura, intense feelings, commitment calling, to inner
notions of the essence of man and
(despite her male garb),
woman
of virtue and vice, and of honour and chivalry are clear and certain.
The modern self is illustrated by Ulrich, the hero of Musil’s novel
The Man Without Qualities. In contrast to Rosaura, Ulrich is con-
stantly torn by doubts, uncertainties and inconsistencies. He feels
himself equally capable of ‘every kind of virtue and every kind of
badness’, and has no sense of an enduring essence: ‘If he had been
asked to say what he was really like, he would have been at a loss’.
From his experiencing of the world
nothing, no ego, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is in a process of invisi-
ble but never-ceasing transformation. (1930/ 1953: 296)
The mind . . .
regards nothing as firmly established, neither any personality nor
any order of things or ideas. (1930/1953: 180)
The postmodern self, according to Gergen consists of images (not
of essences) which are part of relationships (not of the individual).
Gergen’s postmodern self resembles the feminist self (Chodorow,
1978; Gilligan, 1982), and the symbolic interactionist self (Brissett
and Edgley, 1975). But unlike the feminist self it is not essentialist,
and unlike the symbolic interactionist self which (as articulated by
Mead and James) has a consistent I and variable Me’s the post- —
modern view treats even the I as a discursive phenomenon, not an
essentialist one. According to this view, the unity of the I is ‘more
like the unity of a story than like a unity of a thing’ (Harré, 1986).
The postmodern self grows out of Foucault’s critique of the tech-
nologies of self-production, and Derrida’s deconstruction of logo-
centrism, the unitary discourse of the subject as a source of original
meaning. And it exposes both the modern and the romantic
vocabularies of selfhood as unifying discourses of the centred sub-
ject with no reality outside their ‘text’.
Downloaded from tessagepuheom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Tseélon, Is the Presented Self Sincere? 121
For analytic purposes I will reduce Gergen’s tripartite division of
romantic, modern and postmodern selves to Cartesian and post-
Cartesian selves. The Cartesian self consists of the romantic and the
modern, the post-Cartesian refers to the postmodern self. The
rationale for collapsing the romantic and the modern into a Carte-
sian is that the modern self shares with the romantic self a dualistic
belief (even though romanticism focuses on the inner part, while
modernism is a return to the Enlightenment supremacy of the exter-
nal part) (Sypher, 1962). At the same time the modern self shares
with the postmodern self the depiction of the fragmented, fractured
identity (even though modernism attempts to rescue the essential
self from that chaos, while for postmodernism there is no essence
to rescue).1 Therefore a distinction between a Cartesian and a post-
Cartesian self appears less confusing than Gergen’s framework.
The move from the Cartesian to the post-Cartesian self parallels
the shift towards the ‘loss of the subject’ in literary theory, and
marks an ontological shift from essentialist entity and ontological
unity, to ontological dialectics. Epistemologically, it is a transition
from what Jameson (1984) calls a depth (stage) model of auto-
nomous selves with inner essence and outward expression, to a sur-
face (screen) model of an interconnected self constituted in a
network of relationships. Thus according to Gergen (1991: 156)
as all becomes image the concept of the true and independent self
. . . whether -—
constituted by a deep interior or a machine-like rationality loses its descriptive--
and explanatory import. One is thus prepared to enter a stage, in which self
. . .
is replaced by the reality of relatedness -
or the transformation of ‘you’ and ‘I’
to ‘us’.
Gergen’s depiction I argue that the Goffmanesque self
In line with
is postmodern in that it consists of surfaces, or performances. It is
a transient self which is situationally and interactively defined; a
social product which does not have existence outside an interaction.
It does not rely on a dualistic image of the self but is anchored,
instead, in a metaphysics of surface: an interplay of images, of
signifiers with no underlying signifieds, a text with no ‘reality’
behind it (Jameson, 1984). ‘The one thing that Goffman prohibited’
as MacCannell (1983) argues, is the admittance, into his sociology,
of the semiotic sign which displaces the immediate (overt behaviour)
into a symbol of something which is neither immediate nor present
(underlying essence). In terms of the social theorist Baudrillard
(1983), while the icon of Cartesian self is the technology of
Downloaded from tessagepubeom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
122 Theory, Culture & Society
production, the metaphor of the post-Cartesian self is the techno-
logy of reproduction.
Is the Goffmanesque Self Sincere?
A Cartesian View
’IM’s interpretation of Goffman’s depiction as an account of decep-
tion is not a singular voice. Critics of Goffman have argued the same
point all along. For example, Helmer (1970) draws an analogy
between Goffman’s characters and Musil’s archetypal ‘man without
qualities’. However, Helmer is reluctant either to endorse the idea
of the loss of self, or to attribute this quality to Goffman’s
characters. The very posing of his thematic question ‘is a man
without qualities imaginable?’ reflects the reluctance to depart from
an essentialist conception. So he finds a compromise: he reintro-
duces the Cartesian distinction by interpreting Musil’s ‘man without
qualities’, as well as Goffman’s characters as lacking extrinsic and
not intrinsic qualities, and by redefining internal qualities within
Goffman’s framework as ‘delusions’ or ‘self-deceptions’. This way
he manages to salvage at least one ‘real’ intrinsic quality even in
Goffman’s post-Cartesian characters: ‘the faculty of self-deceiving’
(1970: 577). Silver and Sabini (1985) argue that dramaturgy does not
respond well to questions of sincerity, and hence ignores the real
self. Similar concerns have been expressed by other critics as the
following examples show:
Never has social life appeared more dangerous, more potentially self-destructive
than in Goffman’s world of face-to-face encounters. (O’Neill, 1972: 15)
In Goffman the social order is merely a desperate holding action against the crisis
of trust which underlies face-to-face interaction. Whatever the outrage there is a
conspiracy between the agent and his victim to support the action for the sake of
the identities it generates. (O’Neill, 1972: 15)
Man as actor bears a lighter moral yoke than either Puritan or devout Catholic:
he is not born into sin, he enters into it if he happens to play an evil part. (Sennett,
1974: 109)
Goffman’s is a social ‘dramaturgy’ in which appearances and not underlying
essences are exalted. (Gouldner, 1970: 378)
Goffman lays bare the elaborate strategies by which men ingeniously contrive to
persuade others to buy a certain definition of the situation and to accept it at face
value. (Gouldner, 1970: 384) (emphases added throughout)
Downloaded from tessagepubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Tseélon, Is the Presented Self Sincere? 123
These examples show how Goffman’s description of a social
negotiation in which one proposes a certain definition of the situa-
tion which others accept for the sake of creating a co-operative
interaction, is interpreted by Goffman’s critics as a Machiavellian
affair where one contrives to manipulate others to buy a certain
definition of the situation at face value, which is not a real value.
These charges can be seen to evoke the Cartesian grammar of the
consistent durable independent self, in particular the romantic
vocabulary of the self. This is a discourse which considers the
private self as the seat of truth over mere appearances. It is also a
discourse which valorizes congruence between private and public.
Within this framework, the self which is incoherent, situationally
defined and plays with surface appearances, is insincere. In a similar
vein, IM’s view of the constructed self as incompatible with the
sincere self regards Goffman’s actors as inevitably con-actors.
Messinger et a1. (1962) in a classic critique of Goffman were the first
to accuse him of neglecting the real self. Their dramaturgical inter-
pretation of mental patients’ behaviour contends that the inmates
are not satisfied with appearing normal but also strive to be normal.
What is common to all the above criticisms is that they are set in a
dualistic ontology which contrasts appearing with being and whose
criterion of sincerity is the correspondence between depth and sur-
face, between the real self and the outward appearance. From a
postmodern perspective where appearances do not mask reality but
are reality, the inmates’ struggle is a search for ‘images of normality’,
not for ‘an essence of normality’. Moral judgement is valid only
relative to a given cultural and ontological context. Sincerity as con-
gruence between the private self and the public self is meaningless
within a postmodern vocabulary of selfhood.
A Post-Cartesian View
Goffman himself did not take issue with the question ‘when is per-
formance more sincere?’ because in a true postmodern spirit he
regarded even sincere performance as still constructed. He stressed
that while all dishonest behaviours ‘staged’, not all ‘staged’
are
behaviour is dishonest. ‘While people usually are what they appear
to be, such appearances could still have been managed’ (1959: 77).2
In his view the essence of impression management is that it is just
as important to represent oneself as possessing a certain quality as
actually to possess the quality one is claiming (1959: 81). Goffman,
however, was more concerned with the mechanics of creating an
Downloaded from tceeagepubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
124 Culture & Society
Theory,
appearance and less with the relationship between appearance and
reality:
there are many individuals who sincerely believe that the definition of the situa-
tion they habitually project is the real reality. In this report I do not mean to ques-
tion their proportion in the population, but rather the structural relation of their
sincerity to the performances they offer. (1959: 77)
In other words, Goffman’s account is not ‘the psychology of
deception’ but rather ‘the semiotics of dramatization’, or to use
expression ‘substituting the standpoint of a sociological
Gouldner’s
aesthetics for bothmorality and utility’ (1970: 388). As Perin- ’
banayagum (1985: 81) observes
It is not that dramatization is
a deliberate and cynical way of manipulating others,
of managing impressions so as to impress and control them; it is that dramatiza-
tion is the parsimonious and efficient way of incorporating the other in the acts
and scenes of the self and thus becomes basic social process.
Similarly, Silver and Sabini (1985) challenge the idea that enacted
roles and genuine feelings are necessarily in opposition. Instead,
they argue, the objective standards and the experienced episodes are
intimately linked and not in opposition. Sincerity, even sincerity
seen as a match between feelings and avowals, requires rules, stand-
ards and even manipulations the constructed stuff.
—
In anticipation of the argument (drawing, for example, on Frame
Analysis) that Goffman would distinguish between behaviour which
is ‘true, original, and authentic, and that which is a mere copy’
(MacCannell, 1983), I would like to offer a postmodern interpreta-
tion of the Goffmanesque self. Such an interpretation looks for
coherence between a particular author’s theories no more than it
looks for a unitary subject within these theories. It relies, however,
on the observation that Goffman replaces a concern with ‘deep
value’ with a concern with ‘face value’, and challenges the distinction
between the ‘real’ and the ‘staged’. This concern fits in with a
postmodern cultural context characterized by a crisis of representa-
tion (i.e signs do not mirror reality), and the loss of the self (as the
centered subject of representation). Baudrillard (1983) character-
izes the postmodern culture as ‘an age of simulacra’ which marks a
transition from representations (signs whose referents are reality),
to simulations (signs whose referents are other signs, a reproduced
reality, or hyperreality). This transition from representations to
Downloaded from tcssagepubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
Tseélon, Is the Presented Self Sincere? 125
simulations threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘real’
and ‘imaginary’. The distinction between real and fake, fact and fic-
tion becomes a matter of
style rather than substance. Thus accor-
ding to Baudrillard ‘The very definition of
reality becomes: that of
which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction’. Against this
backdrop, distinctions between true self and untrue self are called
into question. In this context, Gouldner’s indictment that Goff-
man’s dramaturgy blurs the distinction between apparent and real
sounds more like a critique of postmodern culture than a criticism
of Goffman’s universe as such, as the following examples show:
Goffman thus declares a moratorium on the conventional distinction between
make-believe and reality, or between the cynical and the sincere. (Gouldner,
1970: 380)
Style becomes the strategy of interpersonal legitimation for those who are
disengaged from work and for whom morality itself has become a prudent conve-
nience. (Gouldner, 1970: 381)
Dramatology reaches into and expresses the nature of the self as pure commodity,
utterly devoid of any necessary use-value: it is the sociology of soul-selling. ‘
(Gouldner, 1970: 383)
Once established hierarchies of value and worth are shaken, and the sacred and
profane are now mingled in grotesque juxtapositions. (Gouldner, 1970: 390)
And as Gergen (1991: 170) summarizes it:
With postmodern consciousness begins the erasure of the category of self we . . .
'
realize increasingly that who and what we are is not much the result of our ‘per-
sonal essence’ . . . but how we are constructed in various social groups. The initial
stages of this consciousness result in a sense of the self as a social con artist,
manipulating images to achieve ends. As the category of ‘real self’ continues to
recede from view, however, one acquires a pastiche-like personality.
conclusion, I have argued that Goffman provided the rhetorics
In
of self-presentation in amoral terms (Edgley and Turner, 1975: 8),
while IM (and some of Goffman’s critics) interpret self-presentation
in immoral terms. However, an analysis of self-presentation as
immoral or insincere is only meaningful within a Cartesian concep-
tion which assumes private/public dichotomy, and defines sincerity
as correspondence between the two. Goffman’s universe is, then,
neither intrinsically moral nor immoral. The moral interpretation
depends on the ontology of the critic. IM provides an essentialist
alternative, postmodernism provides an open-ended one.
Downloaded from tessagenubcom at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 28, 2014
