The Performance of Self
When going about your daily life have you ever paused and felt like you are acting out of fear, pretending to be something you aren’t, or had a lack of understanding of what you’re doing? Whatever it is for you, treating life like a performance leads us on the path of losing our sense of self.
What if our life was a production where everything we do and experience is done for an audience? Like acting on a stage. Our life then would be a production where everything we do and experience in life exist as performance.
In our performance, there are three aspects to consider: role, status, and the self.
The Self Defined by Sociology
Sociology defines roles as patterns of behavior that are often recognized in representing a person’s social status. Terms like brother or son are examples of defined roles in society. The status of someone seen through their Role describes their responsibilities and benefits based on their rank and role in society. Statuses therefore can be ascribed by chance or achieved by choice. But life is not as clear-cut as “I’m a son and that’s that” because we all fulfill a multitude of roles. This is where conflict and strain in a role leave an individual lost and confused as if one doesn’t know their self then who are they acting as?
The concept of self is tricky because what is the core of one’s self? How do we know what our core looks like? And why does it matter if we disguise our self or not in front of others?
Erving Goffman, George Mead, and Charles Cooley were three sociologists from the 1900s who all had different views on what the self might be. In order to understand the self, it is easier to view it through the analogy of someone’s life as an actor on a stage.
Goffman
Goffman concluded that each and every person is an actor on a stage where individuals use impression management to display themselves in the desired manner. For example, a show on stage has different scenes with new environments and performances. This is like how an individual performs differently at home, work, school, etc because different scenes require different roles. Even as a performer, we might not know what is or is not a performance as we are able to trick ourselves with the scenes and characters we engage with around ourselves.
Mead
For Mead, a sense of self is developed and based on someone's interactions with other individuals. Heading into these social interactions the self develops based on the self-awareness and self-image of the individual. These two aspects act to create a stage that the actors then act on. Generally, if an individual is unaware of these two they will fall off the stage, and if are aware they can perform precise movements around the stage with ease. As an “actor” engages with other actors, not only do they adjust their character for the set scene, but their concept of self develops into something new over time. The time spent in social interaction has no effect on how great of a change an individual will see in themself.
Cooley
The Looking-Glass Self was a theory made by Charles Cooley that is the process where an individual bases their sense of self on how they think others see them. This theory is much like looking in some sort of mirror where actors compare each other, making micro judgments as they deliver lines and make movements. Whether we like it or not, a significant other is anyone who has the ability to influence one’s thought process and/or is someone whose opinion matters to the “actor” on stage. For example, if an actor in a scene is continually berated with insults these harsh words will start to construct an image of the self that is from another actor's words. This other actor may or may not believe what they say but the power of words reinforced many times develops an actor into someone they may not be.
The Problem with Treating Life like a Performance
Goffman, Mead, and Cooley all considered what the self is while also examining how the self is impacted by the pursuit of performance. While acting or performance can be used to understand their ideas of the self or the world around us, if life was all about performing then the world would lose all sense of what is genuine, real, and our sense of self.
There is no denying that humanity has always had an obsession with self-presentation and image. I think of ancient stories such as the Greek Myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection. We look to movies or theatre or social media and our self is warped over these gradual interactions. This feeds our performance as we want to display a “performance” that will be worthy of validation, affirmation, excitement, empathy, etc.
Living with the intention to perform lacks depth as actors are reflecting reality not experiencing it. No matter how convincing the role or performance was, the performer needs to address that if unattended to the self will change over time with more roles.
There is a time and place for someone to treat their life as a performance. Seeing it as a performance is a helpful analogy to understand the concepts of self like what Mead and Cooley talked about. Having a little performance flair for an interview or social media post or school presentation can also be a more practical way a performance mindset manifests in one-self. The tricky part, like for many famous actors and actresses, is knowing when to break character to resorting back to the true self (just look up stories of actors and actresses battling against their performance and especially method actors). Viewing life like a performance should be used as a tool to view life.
Look at performance like you look at a hammer. You use a hammer for a specific set of tasks and that’s it. Use the hammer for anything but those tasks and something is bound to break.
At the end of the day, perhaps through various life experiences, self-reflection, and the wisdom of others one can balance living life as performance while preserving who they are.
