Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

One finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. 17

When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. 18

If the individual has one thing to conceal during a performance, and even if the likelihood of disclosure occurs only at a particular turn or phase in the performance, the performer’s anxiety may well extend to the whole performance. 65

The individual may privately maintain standards of behavior which he does not personally believe in, maintaining these standards because of a lively belief that an unseen audience is present who will punish deviations from these standards. 80

Self-deception can be seen as something that results when two different roles, performer and audience, come to be compressed into the same individual. 81

When a performer guides his private activity in accordance with incorporated moral standards, he may associate these standards with a reference group of some kind, thus creating a non-present audience for his activity. 81

The individual may privately maintain standards of behavior which he does not personally believe in, maintaining these standards because of a lively belief that an unseen audience is present who will punish deviations from these standards. 81

Secondly, it is apparent that if members of a team must co-operate to maintain a given definition of the situation before their audience, they will hardly be in a position to maintain that particular impression before one another. Accomplices in the maintenance of a particular appearance of things, they are forced to define one another as persons “in the know,” as persons before whom a particular front cannot be maintained. 83

…giving the show away. 83

To withhold from a teammate information about the stand his team is taking is in fact to withhold his character from him, for without knowing what stand he will be taking he may not be able to assert a self to the audience. 89

The obvious point must be stated that if the team is to sustain the impression that it is fostering, then there must be some assurance that no individual will be allowed to join both team and audience. 93

When one examines a team-performance, one often finds that someone is given the right to direct and control the progress of the dramatic action. 97

First, the director may be given the special duty of bringing back into line any member of the team whose performance becomes unsuitable. 98

The director is likely to respond to this responsibility by making dramaturgical demands on the performance that they might not make upon themselves. This may add to the estrangement they may already feel from him. A director, hence, starting as a member of the team, may find himself slowly edged into a marginal role between audience and performers, half in and half out of both camps, a kind of go-between without the protection that go-between usually have. 99

It is clear that accentuated facts make their appearance in what I have called a front region; it should be just as clear that there may be another—a “back region” or “backstage”—where the suppressed facts make an appearance. 111-12

A back region or backstage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course […] it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed. […] Here the team can run through its performance, checking for offending expressions when no audience is present to be affronted by them; here poor members of the team, who are expressively inept, can be schooled or dropped from the performance. Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character. 112

In general, of course, the back region will be the place where the performer can reliably expect that no member of the audience will intrude. 113

The surest sign of backstage solidarity is to feel that it is safe to lapse into an associable mood of sullen, silent irritability. 132

Behind these realizations about oneself and illusions about others is one of the important dynamics and disappointments of social mobility, be it mobility upward, downward, or sideways. In attempting to escape from a two-faced world of front region and back region behavior, individuals may feel that in the new position they are attempting to acquire they will be the character projected by individuals in that position and not at the same time a performer. 132

Thus the higher one’s place in the status pyramid, the smaller the number of persons with whom one can be familiar, the less time one spends backstage, and the more likely it is that one will be required to be polite as well as decorous. 133

It must be allowed that one can become so habituated to one’s front region activity (and front region character) that it may be necessary to handle one’s relaxation from it as a performance. One may feel obliged, when backstage, to act out of character in a familiar fashion and this can come to be more of a pose than the performance for which it was meant to provide a relaxation. 134

The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles […] Front region control is one measure of audience segregation. Incapacity to maintain this control leaves the performer in a position of not knowing what character he will have to project form one moment to the next, making it difficult for him to effect a dramaturgical success in any one of them. 137

By proper scheduling of one’s performances, it is possible not only to keep one’s audiences separated from each other (by appearing before them in different front regions or sequentially in the same region) but also to allow a few moments in between performances so as to extricate oneself psychologically and physically from one personal front, while taking on another. Problems sometimes arise, however, in those social establishments where the same or different members of the team must handle different audiences at the same time. If the different audiences come within hearing distance of each other, it will be difficult to sustain the impression that each is receiving special and unique services. 138

First, all those already in the audience may be suddenly accorded, and accept, temporary backstage status and collusively join the performer in abruptly shifting to an act that is a fitting one for the intruder to observe. 139

One over-all objective of any team is to sustain the definition of the situation that its performance fosters. This will involve the over-communication of some facts and the under-communication of others. Given the fragility and the required expressive coherence of the reality that is dramatized by a performance, there are usually facts which, if attention is drawn to them during the performance, would discredit, disrupt, or make useless the impression that the performance fosters. These facts may be said to provide “destructive information.” A basic problem for many performances, then, is that of information control. 141

First, there are what are sometimes called ‘dark’ secrets. These consist of facts about a team which it knows and conceals and which are incompatible with the image of self that the team attempts to maintain before its audience. Dark secrets are, of course, double secrets: one is the crucial fact that is hidden and another is the fact that crucial facts have not been openly admitted. 141

The knowledge that one team can have of another’s secrets provides us with two other types of secrets. First there are what might be called ‘entrusted’ secrets. This is the kind which the possessor is obliged to keep because of his relation to the team to which the secret refers. If an individual who is entrusted with a secret is to be the person he claims he is, he must keep the secret, even though it is not a secret about himself. 143

Performers appear in the front region and back regions; the audience appears only in the front region and the outsiders are excluded from both regions. 145

A misalliance is something that brings backstage and into the team someone who should be kept outside or at least in the audience. 163

In our Anglo-American society, it may be noted, “Good Lord!”, “My God!”, or their facial equivalents often serve as a performer’s admission that he has momentarily placed himself in a position in which it is patent that no performed character can be sustained. These expressions represent an extreme form of communication out of character, and yet have become so conventionalized as almost to constitute a performed plea for forgiveness on the grounds that we are all poor fellow performers. 169

When teammates are out of the presence of the audience, discussion often turns to problems of staging. 175

When a participant conveys something during interaction, we expect him to communicate only through the lips of the character he has chosen to project, openly addressing all of his remarks to the whole interaction so that all persons present are given equal status as recipients of communication. Thus whispering, for example, is often considered improper and prohibited, for it can destroy the impression that the performer is only what he appears to be and that things are as he has claimed them to be. 176

By acknowledging to one another that they are keeping relevant secrets from the others present, they acknowledge to one another that the show of candor they maintain, a show of being only the characters they officially project, is merely a show. By means of such byplay, performers can affirm a backstage solidarity even while engaged in a performance, expressing with impunity unacceptable things about the audience as well as things about themselves that the audience would find unacceptable. 177

…secrets can be kept in this way but not the fact that secrets are being kept. 179

Any extra concession to the audience on the part of one member of the team is a threat to the stand the others have taken and a threat to the security they obtain from knowing and controlling the stand they will have to take. 201

When these flusterings of symptoms of embarrassment become perceived, the reality that is supported by the performance is likely to be further jeopardized and weakened, for these signs of nervousness in most cases are an aspect of the individual who presents a character and not an aspect of the character he projects, thus forcing upon the audience an image of the man behind the mask. 212