Interactional Sociolinguistics
Reading
Week 1
Required Reading
All the World's a Stage
Interaction has been compared to many things: from playing in a a tennis match to 'climbing a tree which is climbing you back' (Erickson). Perhaps the most famous metaphors for interaction comes from the American sociologist Erving Goffman, who, in his classic, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life compared social interaction to a 'play'.
Goffman says that everyday life is like a performance and we always play different roles. In order to play those roles successfully, we need to have a stage, scenery, costumes and a collection of voices, facial expressions and movements. These are what Goffman calls the 'front'. He says the front is the expressive equipment we use in performances, in other words, the equipment we use (including our clothes, our make-up, our laughs, smiles, frowns, our mobile phones, our Hello Kitty pencil boxes, our restaurants, bars, karaoke boxes and classrooms) to create the kind of 'impression' (or 'line') that we want.
Goffman divides front into three parts. The first is the setting. Setting is all the things around you that you use to play the role. The university with it's classrooms, offices and lecture theaters provides me with the equipment I need to play the role of a teacher and the equipment you need to play the role of students. A restaurant is a setting that allows people to play the roles of waiters, cooks and customers.
The second part of front is appearance. Appearance includes the clothes you wear, your make-up, and hair style. Of course, you put on different costumes to play different roles. When I play the role of a lecturer I wear a tie. But I have a very different appearance when I am shopping in Causeway Bay on Saturday afternoon. Waiters, police officers and secondary school students have their uniforms, but, when you think about it, we all have uniforms. If you look around you, you can see that there is a certain type of uniform that you wear when you are being a student, which is of course very different from the uniform you will wear when you get married.
The last part of front is manner. While setting and appearance are more constant, manner can change according to the situation. There are, however, certain set ways of acting when you perform certain roles, certain tones of voice, gestures and facial expressions. Notice the manner that a police officer has when he or she is directing traffic, when a teacher teaches, when a doctor has a consultation with a patient. You will notice that there are certain things these people are supposed to do when they perform these roles. These are what we call manner.
In a way, you can think of front as all of the 'cultural tools' you have available to you to play certain roles, the things (objects, places), ways of talking, ways of looking and ways of acting you use to project the impression that you want, to say, 'Look, now I am being a teacher (or a father, or a shopkeeper, or a pop star, or a businessperson, etc.).
If you don't have these 'cultural tools', then it is very difficult for you to play the role. A policeman without a badge is not a policeman. A teacher without a classroom would have a very difficult time getting people to listen to him or her. A businessman without an office would find it difficult to do much business.
RoutinesGoffman says that we employ 'fronts' to perform 'routines'. Routines are specific performances or kinds of performance. As we have said, a 'performance' is any activity that you do which takes place in front of an 'audience'. So, performance is a more 'generic' (general term). What we perform are routines. They are 'strips of action' that usually have some kind of internal logic or structure. It is usually pretty easy to tell when a routine begins and ends.
Most of the routines that we perform are routine, that is they follow rather consistent and predictable patterns. You could even give names to the different routines that you perform: the 'lecture routine', the 'riding the MTR routine', the 'shopping routine', the 'eating at McDonald's routine'. That is not to say that we always act in exactly the same way whenever we perform a particular routine. But, every routine has it's own sets of expectations about how you should perform and limitations regarding how you should not perform. Routines are not something that come naturally--we have to learn routines just as actors have to study their lines, and if you are unfamiliar with a routine, you probably won't be able to perform it very well. It is not uncommon for people who are about to perform an unfamiliar or particularly important routine to rehearse before they perform. Someone who is about to go out on their first date, for example might spend some time in front of a mirror practicing their facial expressions, and someone going for a job interview might prepare themselves by thinking about the questions that might be asked.
Different routines also have different Fronts associated with them. I employ one Front when I am performing the 'teaching routine', for example, and a different front when I am performing the 'taking my dog for a walk routine'. Of course, it is possible also to employ the same front for different routines. I use more or less the same front when I am teaching and when I am having staff meetings with my colleagues.
So, if your life is like a play, your
Routines are like the different scenes you play.
'What's
Your Line?'
In
Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to interaction, we use Fronts to
perform roles. When we perform these roles, we try to maintain and
promote a certain 'line'. Our line is
basically ‘our version of
reality’, our idea about what’s going on.
It
is easy to confuse the notion of role and the notion of line. Role
is basically the general ‘type’ of character we are playing (such as a
teacher, a soldier, a student or a pop singer). Line is
much more specific. It includes the attitude we take up towards ourselves and
our performance of this role, the attitude we take towards other people, and the
attitude we take towards the situation.
The
idea that we want to ‘promote’ our line is very important. So we can
say that the role that Tung Che Hwa plays is that of the Chief Executive
of Hong Kong. He uses his office, his car, his suit, his smile, etc. as his front
in order to play this role. The line that he is promoting includes what
he believes is good or bad for Hong Kong, how he sees our relationship with
China and other countries, his policies, his ‘agenda’. As a politician, his
main job is trying to sell his line to the people who elect (or
‘select’) him..
A
similar situation can be seen with your boyfriend. He is playing the general
role of a boyfriend. He may use flowers, candy, smiles, kisses and romantic
words as his Front. His Line is
basically the kind of relationship he is trying to promote. Some boyfriends
may want to promote a very serious relationship with you, and others might want
to promote a more casual one. The problem, of course, comes when your line
is different from his.
Line
can
also be seen in relation to storylines, a concept we will talk about about when we
talk about positioning. Just as fronts are usually
‘selected’ rather than created, that is, there are a number conventionalized
fronts that we tend to choose from (conventionalized ways to play a
teacher, a soldier, a student or a pop singer), there are also a number of
conventionalized lines that people choose from. Tung Chee Hwa did not
make up his policies all by himself. He appropriated his line from other
people (partly the Chinese government; partly the business community).
Similarly, your boyfriend did not make up his line all by himself.
It is based on some conventionalized idea of love or relationships
between boys and girls which he learned from TV, movies, comic books, his
parents or other sources in the society. So Lines essentially come from
cultural storylines.
So, to sum up, your line is the version of who you are, who the other person or people are, and what is going on that you try to ‘sell’ to the other people. If they ‘buy’ (accept) your line, then things go smoothly. But if they challenge your line, then you might have to either defend your line or change your line.
Regions
‘Regions’
are the places where we perform and where we prepare for our performances. The
idea of ‘regions’ is easy to understand if you imagine a theater. In a
theater you have the ‘stage’ where the performance takes place, and you have
‘backstage’ where the actors put on their costumes and make-up and
rehearse their routines. In the same way, in real life, you can divide
places into those where you are ‘performing’ and those where you preparing
for your performance.
‘Onstage’
regions include public places like classrooms, restaurants, MTR trains, shops,
etc. Certain regions in your flat can also be onstage too (typically the living
room) if people are visiting your home. Backstage places are more private, like
toilets, your bedroom, etc. They are places where you let down your front
and act more ‘natural’, where you get dressed, look at yourself in the
mirror and check your appearance, put on your make-up, and so forth.
What
makes a region an onstage or a backstage region is not so much the
place itself but whether or not an audience is present. Even a very public place
can be like backstage if you think nobody is watching you. Similarly, a private
place can become onstage if an ‘audience’ enters it. It is also important to
remember that not everybody counts as an ‘audience’. As you remember, we
said that we perform in ‘teams’, and so a ‘team member’ is not really
the same as an audience. A ‘team member’ is really a fellow actor in your
performance who is cooperating with you to promote your line. So it is typical
to invite other team members into our backstage regions, and we treat our team
members differently when we are with them backstage. For example, we may
criticize our team members backstage in ways that we might not when we are on
stage.
Disturbances
According to Goffman, when we are ‘performing’ in social interaction, the goal is to maintain our ‘line’, to help others to maintain their ‘lines’, and to ensure that the interaction goes smoothly. When this happens, the ‘face’ of the people involved is preserved. When something goes wrong, that is, when the performance is ‘disrupted’ in some way as to cause the ‘loss of face’ for participants, this is called an incident. Incidents involve the discrediting of one or more of the participants (a challenge to his or her ‘line’ and/or ‘face’). Some incidents are intentional—that is, one or more participants try to challenge another’s ‘line’ or take away their ‘face’ on purpose. This can be called a scene, as in the well known expression, ‘making a scene’. A scene is when the performance is disrupted intentionally.
Often, however, the performance is disrupted
unintentionally either by an unintentional action or an intentional action or
statement whose significance is not appreciated by the person who says or does
it. The first kind of disruption might occur when somebody, for example, reveals
a secret ‘by accident’ or loses control of what they are saying or doing.
The second kind of disruption, known a faux pas , is when you say or do
something on purpose, but you do not realize that what you are saying or doing
will cause a disruption to the performance. Faux pas is a French word which
literally means ‘false step’, and that’s a good way to remember what it
means: a kind of mis-step in social interaction. Goffman calls a faux pas an
incident in which ‘a performer unthinkingly makes a contribution which
destroys his own team’s image.’ So faux pas specifically have to do
with mistakes we make which jeopardize our own face or the face of our team
members. When we mistakenly make a comment that jeopardizes the image of the
other team, this can be referred to by the English idiom ‘putting your foot in
your mouth.’
Supplementary Readings
Ronald Wardhaugh, 'The Social Basis of Talk' (from How Conversation Works, Blackwell, pp. 1-23) (e-group)
Adam Barnhart, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (URL)
Optional Readings