Performing and lying

I took these notes near the end of the January Carapace:

Cris said that every time he goes to a strip club he likes to pretend it's his first time. People are so helpful. He said that he is an improviser and likes to lie to people.

I really noticed that last part about improvising and lying. There is an uneasy relationship between performance and authenticity (or sincerity).

In a way, people are always engaging in social performances. But, this raises a question about sincerity. Are people ever being “real”? Goffman (1959) says 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” (p. 17). In this case, the individual is performing, but is performing in a way he or she believes is real.

In practice, Thompson (2010) has found that people find performance and sincerity to be at odds with one another. Ghost tour guides “must assume a performance persona in order to command the authority to perform, but the persona betrays the guide’s ability to persuade the audience of anything, let alone the existence of ghosts” (p. 86). Tourists do not take the guides seriously when they say they believe in ghosts if the whole thing is just an act. Thompson says that guides can be seen as more personally sincere by “rendering their performance personae porous” (p. 86). There are times when the guides are not performing, such as before the tour while tourists are arriving, and as they walk between sites on the tour. By allowing the tourists to see their “real” selves between performances, the guides are taken to be more personally sincere.

Observers “tend to see real performances as something not purposely put together at all, being an unintentional product of the individual’s unselfconscious response to the facts in his situation” (Goffman, 1959, p. 70). However, Goffman suggests that “an honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected with the solid world than one might first assume” (p. 71). People are almost never operating from a script, as a stage actor would. Everyday performances always involve improvisation. He says that “the incapacity of the ordinary individual to formulate in advance the movements of his eyes and body does not mean that he will not express himself through these devices in a way that is dramatized and pre-formed in his repertoire of actions” (pp. 73-74). Our words and actions may be unplanned, but they are not unrehearsed. Even the most “unintentional” response is likely to come from an individual’s “repertoire of actions.”

So, people are always acting, improvisation, but that doesn’t mean that they are not sincere.

Cris’s comment, though, sounds like rather than understanding all interactions as improvisations, he views interacting with strangers as an opportunity to very intentionally improvise.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Thompson, R. C. (2010). “Am I going to see a ghost tonight?”: Gettysburg ghost tours and the performance of belief. The Journal of American Culture, 33(2), 79–91.