Without language, Mead argues, there is no way to be aware of that otherwise invisible realm known as the self, and without that, children have no way to construct their own ideas about who they are as selves. It is through language, then, that we discover the human possibility of a self by discovering what other people have done with that possibility. We become aware of our point of view as a point of view rather than as ‘the way things are.’
Once we see this, we can construct all kinds of ideas about ourselves that make up the self. Because they are about the self, we use them to think about the self just as we would think about someone else (as in ‘how to be your own best friend’). We can talk to it, have feelings about it, evaluate and judge it, believe in it or not, defend or condemn it, scold or praise it, feel proud or ashamed of it, ‘get hold’ of it, disown it (‘I’m not myself today’), lose it, be conscious of it (‘self-conscious’) or not, or try to accept, understand, or ‘get over’ it. We can say and do things to affect how other people perceive us and how they treat us as a result. We can wade into deep pools of paradox, thinking of ourselves as unique and separate from the world around us, even though ‘unique’ is a cultural concept from that same world, and the self exists only in relation to other selves.
No wonder one of our most exhilarating experiences is when someone ‘believes’ in us. And no wonder one of the greatest crises we can experience happens when we stop ‘believing in ourselves’ and feel lost, cut loose with nothing to hang onto.
Note, however, that whether this experience turns into a crisis depends on the culture we live in. In many Asian cultures, thinking of the self as unique and separate from groups and society is neither a given nor an ideal of social life. In traditional Japanese culture, for example, it is a far greater crisis to lose a deep sense of attachment to the whole and be thrust from it into the uncertainties of the individual self.
To participate as selves in social systems, we have to locate ourselves in relation to them by seeing how and where we connect to them and how this reflects back a sense of who we are. Most people do not know that self my friend told me to take care of. What they do know about me are the statuses I occupy and the roles that go with them. At birth, we are known only by a handful of statuses—gender, race, age, and family position—because there is not much else about us to know. As we grow, we accumulate a social identity by occupying one status after another and using them to locate ourselves in relation to social systems and other people.
As Erving Goffman points out, when we occupy a status, the role that goes with it provides us with a ready-made self that we can adopt as a path of least resistance toward acceptance by others.4 In this sense, most people know little about who we are on the inside. What they ‘know’ consists primarily of cultural images of the typical person who occupies this or that status—the typical girl, the typical student, the typical lawyer, the typical business manager, the typical politician. In social space, we are not ‘who we are’ in some absolute, objective sense. We are who people think we are, a reality they construct from cultural ideas before they know anything about us based on direct experience.
Most people, for example, know very little about the real me as I experience myself. But anyone who thinks they know about fathers, men, heterosexuals, white people, writers, grandfathers, brothers, husbands, public speakers, baby boomers, Ph.D. recipients, the middle class, and people whose households include dogs, goats, and a snake may think they know quite a lot about me. What they actually know, however, are paths of least resistance that go with statuses I occupy and the likelihood that I usually follow those paths. I may, in fact, choose quite differently, but they can’t know that unless they see how I participate in social life.
Not only do other people know us primarily through role relationships, but this is also a major way for us to know ourselves. Think back for a moment to Mead’s idea that we discover ourselves through first discovering others. If so, then it follows that how we see, evaluate, and feel about ourselves is shaped by the statuses we occupy, which means that as we construct the ideas and feelings about who we are that constitute the social self, we depend primarily on information that comes from outside ourselves.
These outside sources of information take the form of two kinds of ‘others.’ Significant others are specific people who act like mirrors, reflecting images back to us that we may incorporate into our sense of who we are.5 ‘Significant’ in this case means ‘specific’ rather than important. If a man in the audience at one of my presentations comes up to me afterward and tells me he thinks I did a great job (or a rotten one), he becomes a significant other for me, because the information he gives comes from him as an individual. He also offers me a reflection of myself to consider as information that I may or may not include in my sense of who I am. This reflection is known as the ‘looking-glass self’: I use him as a mirror, and the reflection consists of what I think he thinks of me (which may or may not turn out to match how he actually sees me).6
Early in life, most information about ourselves comes from significant others, such as family members and playmates. Only later through a complex process of socialization do we begin to grasp what is called the ‘generalized other.’7 The generalized other is not a specific person or even a group of people. It is our perception of how people in general view a social situation and the people who occupy different statuses within it.
When I go to my regular dentist, David, for a checkup, for example, I interact with someone I know as an individual. I know something about what he expects, what he’s like as a person, and how he does things. This makes him a significant other to me. When I went to him for the first time, however, his name, gender, race, approximate age, and occupation were the only things I knew about him as an individual. How, then, did I know how to behave, and how did he? Without knowing each other, we had to rely on cultural ideas about dentists and their patients and what goes on between them. Until we learned about each other as significant others, these generalized others were all we had to put together some idea of what the situation was about and who he and I were in relation to each other. In the beginning, we knew only the statuses we occupied and the social relationship between them. In other words, we knew each ‘other’ only in a generalized way.
What makes the generalized other difficult for young children to grasp is that it’s a purely abstract collection of ideas about status occupants. We learn what significant others expect from us by what they say and do, and children pick that up very quickly. But to distinguish between the specific woman who is my mother and ‘mother’ as a social status requires a level of cognitive ability that develops only as children mature.
The ideas that make up the generalized other are cultural, which encourages us to assume that we share their meanings with other people. On the basis of this belief, we also assume that people will perceive, interpret, and evaluate us in certain ways when they know which statuses we occupy. This is why people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual may tend to be careful about revealing their sexual orientation to heterosexuals. It is also why heterosexuals feel no qualms at all about revealing theirs, to the extent that they do not experience it as revealing something at all, much less coming out or ‘admitting’ their sexual orientation. It is why it matters what clothes we wear when we go out in public, especially how we present ourselves as male or female, because such choices shape who other people think we are. This is why privilege and oppression based on race, gender, and disability status are so powerful. People think they know which status we occupy simply by looking at us or even just hearing our names, and, as a result, easily associate us with ideas about who we are, whether we are ‘normal,’ what we can and cannot do, what we are worth, and what our rights are in relation to them. In this sense, we need to extend the idea that we construct reality in a cultural sense (introduced in Chapter 2), for the reality we create is also profoundly structural in relation to statuses, roles, and the generalized other.
Sin
ce statuses and roles are elements of social systems, who we are—to ourselves and to other people—is profoundly rooted in our participation in systems and the socialization process through which we learn how to do it. This makes understanding ourselves a basic part of sociological practice and not merely the province of psychology. Statuses and roles connect us to the social world and overlap our lives with other people’s lives. They locate, identify, and anchor us in social space. Without them, we do not exist in a social sense, and without that, there is little left of what we know and experience as a self or a life.
This can be a disturbing idea for people living in a culture that places a high value on being an autonomous and unique individual. But, in fact, it does not diminish our worth as people. It simply means that we (and our worth) exist in relation to something larger, that we are not the beginning and end of things. Even rebels and iconoclasts who reject society are organizing their sense of self and their lives in relation to something larger than themselves—the society they reject. And they occupy recognizable statuses within those societies, such as ‘rebel’ and ‘iconoclast.’ In most high schools and colleges, for example, a few students usually play the role of the ‘nonconformist’ who conforms to a cultural type by openly rejecting the idea of conforming to cultural types.
None of this means that we are nothing more than occupants of statuses and roles. Not only can we make creative choices about how to participate in social systems, but there are mysteries of human existence that are far more than social constructions. Every culture has ideas about such mysteries and about itself, but the best we can do with them is to construct reality second- or third-hand. Only in rare moments do we manage to shake ourselves loose from social systems and experience the mysteries of life and death more directly. But that experience can be enough to remind us that however we construct our sense of social life and ourselves, mystery piled upon mystery lie beneath it. We are not machines, and neither are social systems. Both are far more complex, elusive, and interesting than that.
Self in Systems
The key to how we participate in systems is the concept of social interaction, and the key to that is the difference between action and behavior. Everything we do is behavior, but only some behavior takes the form of action.
A baby girl’s first step, for example, is a behavior but not an action. When she is older and walks across the room in response to someone saying, “Please come here,” however, what she is doing is both a behavior and an action. The difference? In the first case, the behavior involves no interpretation on her part. She does not consider the meaning of what she is doing (and not doing) and how this behavior will be perceived and interpreted by someone else. She does not consider it because she lacks the language and abstract cultural ideas necessary for thinking about what she is doing or what other people expect of her and make of what she does. In the second case, she can use language to anticipate what her behavior would mean to someone else and then take this idea into account in choosing what to do. She can imagine alternatives and the most likely responses to each.
In short, behavior based on meaning is action, and actions are the building blocks of our participation in social systems and social life as we interact with other people.
On the level of individuals, interaction is the process through which social systems happen, but it is also how we happen as social beings. As Goffman puts it in several fascinating books, we are like actors on a stage.8 Every social situation has its props and setting, its script and opportunities for improvisation. And every play has an audience, except that in social life we are all actors and part of someone else’s audience at the same time.
As actors, we use a variety of techniques to have our performances seen as authentic, as worthy of the role we are playing, as being convincing enough for us to be accepted in that situation for who we claim to be. We usually make an effort to show up looking the part, for example, and wearing the right clothes, having the right attitude for the situation, knowing our lines, and carrying the right props. Like actors, we create impressions of who we are, what Goffman calls ‘the presentation of self.’
Like every impression, the presentation of self is an ongoing process. It needs to be sustained and managed, especially when we do something that is ‘out of character’ or otherwise calls our performance into question. When two people go out on a date, for example, each spends time shaping the self they will present to the other—choosing what to wear, whether to shower or use deodorant or cologne, how to style their hair, the use of jewelry and makeup. Every action contributes to the impression they create—what they say and how they say it, what they order in the restaurant and how they eat it, when, how often, and how long they look at each other, and with what facial expression, what they laugh at and what they don’t, how much they talk and how much they listen, and how and when they touch each other.
When they part company, each is likely to wonder about the impression made on the other, whether they said or did something that was misunderstood, taken to indicate something about the self that doesn’t fit with how they see themselves or would like to be seen. Like players before an audience, as the curtain falls, they wait for the response, the volume and duration of applause, anything that might tell them how well their performance was accepted. On a date, it might be whether a kiss goodnight is forthcoming, or whether the “I had a great time” or “I’ll call you” sounds sincere or merely polite (yet another way to manage impressions).
As in a play, both actors and audience in social life want everything to go as it’s supposed to, because if it does not, it may compromise our own ability to play our roles effectively. Even as an audience for someone else’s performance, we are never just that, for the audience has its role to play, too. This is why when actors in a theater forget their lines or otherwise ruin their performances, people in the audience often feel uncomfortable. The role of witness to someone else’s failed performance is difficult to play, because the mere fact of our sitting there and watching it happen contributes to the actor’s pain. We become part of the actor’s failure, since if we were not there— if there were no audience—the failure could not happen.
And so we do what we can to protect the actor from failure. We don’t call attention to the forgotten line, the stumble, the momentary lapse, the wooden delivery, but act as though it never happened, allowing the performance to continue with the hope that the people ‘on stage’ will ‘get their act together.’ In doing this, we protect them and ourselves as well as the integrity of the play in which we all participate. Both actors and audience have impressions to manage.
As actors, of course, there are many things we can do to protect our own performances. We can disown them with such disclaimers as “I was only kidding” or “I didn’t mean it” or “I don’t know what came over me.” A man might say something sexist but then try to distance himself from it by saying that it doesn’t mean that he is sexist. Or, as Goffman points out, he might react with embarrassment that lets people know that although his performance may have failed this time, he is still committed to doing better the next time around.9 His red face and awkwardness show that he believes in the importance of what people expect of him, a display that may protect him by reinforcing his claim to the part he has in the play.
Looking at social life as theater might give us reason to wonder whether we have an authentic self at all, whether everything isn’t just a cynical matter of figuring out how to make the best impression, protect performances, and play audience to someone else. The very idea of a role can seem to preclude the possibility of being authentic, as if creating impressions and trying to turn in an acceptable performance invariably mean faking it and wearing masks that conceal our ‘real’ selves.
But the line between who we are and how we participate in social life is not as clear and neat as it might seem. To act as though it were is to invite all kinds of trouble. If we pretend that our role behavior is somehow not connected to who we r
eally are, for example, then we avoid taking responsibility not only for the role but also for our portion of the play.
Goffman argues that we are always being ourselves, even though we may feel uncomfortable owning up to the results and allowing them to affect how other people see us. If I play a role in a way that seems to contradict who I think I am, the person playing that role is still me and is no less real than the ‘me’ who rejects this performance as not reflecting the real me. If I fake it and act in ways that don’t reflect how I really feel, it is still me who does the faking, who appears and behaves in ways that create a particular impression.
Whatever the performance turns out to be, it comes from somewhere in me, and any unreality in that lies in my not being aware of it and denying my connection to the consequences my behavior produces. As such, the problem of authenticity is not that we perform roles and manage impressions. The problem is that we don’t embrace and own our actions for what they are as part of who we are. The problem is not that we have so many roles to perform that can make us appear inconsistent or other than we’d like. The problem is that we do not integrate them with an ongoing awareness of the incredible complexity of ourselves and the social life in which we participate.
The Forest and the Trees Page 15