#erving goffman

Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is sometimes misunderstood. He did not claim that we are all frauds constantly misrepresenting ourselves. Rather, his point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience.

Why is the image of the Asylum, with its multi-windowed blocks and the tall chimney of its furnace, so compelling? Not, as Goffman would have it, because it bespeaks an immutable social imperative, but because it symbolises an ancient, indefinitely renewed tradition of neglect whose liquidation, in the face of so many entrenched moral and material interests, will require a large and dedicated effort.

In his book on stigma, Erving Goffman explains that: ‘The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him.’ This means the stigmatized individual must feign acceptance of the situation, pretending everything is fine, providing a base for a phantom normalcy. The etymology of the word ‘stigma’ implies a mark on the outside of the body, the skin. Stigma, for Goffman, is spoiled identity.

“It is not unreasonable to argue that Americans are now being forced to live in a national mental asylum created for them courtesy of the madmen, madwomen, and variously gendered crazies now driving our country into economic, cultural, and military ruin for reasons that escape all rational explanation.”