The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life summary

According to Goffman, successful performance requires concealment and control. To perform a convincing version of ourselves, it’s not enough to express certain ideals – we must also hide anything that contradicts them. Everyday performances are just as much about what is kept offstage as what is shown.

People routinely suppress actions, motives, or facts that clash with the image they want to project. Often, these hidden behaviors are personally satisfying, so they aren’t abandoned – just concealed. This allows performers to “have their cake and eat it too.” For example, we might display newspapers or other high-end reading material in our living rooms, while keeping guilty pleasure romance novels hidden in our bedrooms.

Goffman makes a distinction between frontstage and backstage behavior. If social life is a performance, then it must take place somewhere – and where we are matters deeply for how we act.

Performances usually occur within clearly bounded regions, both in space and time. When we enter these regions, the performance tends to saturate them. Everyone present is expected to accept the same definition of the situation. 

Goffman then turns to a central vulnerability of social performances: the problem of information. If social life depends on sustaining a shared definition of the situation, then performances must carefully manage what is known, by whom, and when. 

A “team” is a group of individuals working together to stage a social routine. Every team aims to protect its performance by controlling information that could undermine it. Some facts, if revealed at the wrong moment, would shatter the impression being fostered. Goffman calls this “destructive information,” and keeping it hidden is one of the basic tasks of social life.

Sometimes, performers momentarily step outside the roles they are officially playing. Even in highly disciplined performances, cracks appear. These are small moments in which individuals communicate things that contradict the impression they are meant to sustain. Goffman calls these moments “communication out of character,” and he treats them not as accidents, but as regular, revealing features of social life.

For instance, take sudden, spontaneous exclamations like “My God!” These expressions openly admit that the performer has momentarily lost control of the role. But because they’re so conventional, they function almost like a ritual apology, asking the audience for forgiveness on the grounds that everyone occasionally fails as a performer. Their very predictability shows how deeply embedded performance expectations are.