Teachers as interaction promoters

The notion of mask inevitably takes us to performance, and to a dramaturgical model, the perspective of theatrical performance, which has been widely used to analyse social life.

Erving Goffman (1969) identifies two forms of communication in face-to-face interactions. The first is what he calls ‘expressions given’, i.e. the process of transfer of information through verbal symbols or their substitutes, which is a narrow sense of communication. The second he terms ‘expressions given off, i.e. a wide range of actions performed for reasons other than direct transfer of information, so that others can think of it as symptomatic of the actor. In social interactions people will want to know the facts of the situation. But as these facts are rarely available in daily social interactions, they will rely on some ‘predictive devices’, such as cues, tests, hints, expressive gestures, status symbols, etc (p. 220). This is where Goffman concentrates: on the more theatrical and contextual, non-verbal and presumably unintentional (pp. 2–4). Goffman assumes that when an individual appears before others, s/he will try to control the definition of the situation by controlling the impression they receive from her/him, which is her/his claim as to what reality is (p. 74). To this end, s/he will use dramaturgical techniques of stage management to sustain such impressions (p. 13), wearing an expressive mask in face-to-face interactions (p. 105). The performer may be ‘sincere’ or ‘cynical’, depending whether or not s/he believes in her/his performance (p. 1 7), but s/he will incorporate in her/his performance the idealized, officially accredited values of the society (p. 31).

According to Goffman, ‘if the individual’s activity is to become significant to others, he must mobilize his activity, so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey’ (p. 27). The individual will rely on a ‘social front’, which is composed of setting, appearance and manner. A social front can be used for different routines (such as business clothes that can also be worn for going to a restaurant). It is only in highly ceremonial occasions that setting, manner and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for a particular type of routine (p. 26). To maintain the definition of a situation, the individual performer may have to rely on, and work with, others, i.e. a team of co-performers, such as the way members of a family or a group of office co-workers portray themselves in social situations (Figure 4.4). The members of the team have to co-operate to maintain a given impression, and as such may be considered the basic unit of performance (p. 74). The performances are often played in a front region, and performers are relaxed in backstage, where they can drop their masks (p. 92 ff). A disciplined performer is ‘someone with sufficient poise to move from private places of informality to public places of varying degrees of formality, without allowing such changes to confuse him’ (p. 191). He can manage his face and voice, so as to conceal actual affective responses and to display an appropriate affective response, e.g. be able to stop himself

4.4 On their own or as a team, individuals use performance to maintain the definition of a situation in social encounters (Bergen, Norway)

laughing about matters that are defined as serious. But even for less competent performers, there is usually a significant contribution by the audience, who exercise tact or protective practices on behalf of the performers, so as to maintain the show (p. 206).

When accidents cause a rupture in performance, the audience can see behind the scenes and take pleasure in learning an important lesson, that behind the mask, there is ‘a solitary player involved in a harried concern for his production’ (p. 207). What is revealed is that behind characters and masks, ‘each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task’ (p. 207). Disruption in performance can have consequences at three levels of social reality: personality, interaction and social structure.

These consequences can discredit the self-conceptions that build an individual’s personality, can bring a social interaction to an embarrassed and confused halt, and can have far-reaching consequences for others (pp. 213–14).

Richard Sennett (1976) used the dramaturgical model to investigate the historical changes in the public roles of individuals and the shifting relationship between public and private life. He argued that the modern period has witnessed a decline of public life, which is rooted in the formation of a new capitalist, secular urban culture. Rather than taking pleasure in the cosmopolitan city, which is the world of strangers, people today see public life as a matter of dry formal obligations. Rather than seeing this as a worthwhile

part of our life, the emphasis in modern life is on intimate relations, on private life of individuals and their relationships with family and intimate friends. This however, he argued, was not leading to a richer life, as ‘the more privatized the psyche, the less it is stimulated, and the more difficult it is for us to feel or to express feeling’ (p. 4).

Individuals are increasingly concerned with their ‘single life-histories and emotions as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation’ (p. 5).

In his later writing, Sennett (2000) distances himself from viewing public life as impersonal encounters. But in his seminal writing, The Fall of Public Man, he praises impersonality: ‘The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolours our rational understanding of society’ (1976:4).

Public life can only be understood through ‘codes of impersonal meaning’, rather than trying to work it out in terms of personal feelings and emotions (p. 5). Indeed, the private iife is in need of being restrained by a public world in which individuals make

‘alternative and countervailing investments of themselves’ (p. 6).

Like other theorists of public sphere, Sennett seems to idealize a golden age of public life. In his case, it is the early bourgeois attempts to establish a civilized society out of a rapidly changing environment. In the eighteenth-century capital cities, he maintains, a balance was struck between the public and private life. The line between them was drawn to balance the ‘claims of civility—epitomized by cosmopolitan, public behaviour’ against the ‘claims of nature—epitomized by the family’ (p. 18). A quality of the nineteenth-century bourgeois life was ‘its essential dignity’ and the family’s ‘attempt to preserve some distinction between the sense of private reality and the very different terms of the public world outside home’ (p. 11). During the nineteenth century, however, the rise of capitalism and secularism and of the notion of family as a refuge led to a decline of public life.

As the family became a refuge from the terrors of society, it gradually became also a moral yardstick with which to measure the public realm of the capital city. Using family relations as standard, people perceived the public domain not as a limited set of social relations, as in the Enlightenment, but instead saw public life as morally inferior. Privacy and stability appeared to be united in the family; against this ideal order the legitimacy of the public order was thrown into question. (Sennett, 1976:20)

This decline in public life has been expressed in the urban space of our time. The streets and squares as social centres have been replaced by suburban living rooms (p. 28) and the public spaces of the city are abandoned, to become only places ‘to move through, not to be in’ (p. 14). Everyone is under each other’s surveillance, leading to a decrease of sociability and withdrawing into silence as the only form of protection (p. 15).

By drawing on the tradition of theatrum mundi, an old Western tradition of seeing society as a theatre, Sennett related social theory and history to develop a theory of expression in public, using changes in public behaviour, speech, dress and belief as evidence. Sennett identifies three moral purposes in this tradition, which otherwise has no single meaning due to its longstanding use by a variety of people. It introduces illusion and delusion as fundamental questions of social life; it detaches human nature from social

action; and, most importantly, it recognizes that people are engaged in acting, playing roles in ordinary life (p. 35). Public life is made of play-acting, as expressed in manners, conventions and ritual gestures. By the erosion of the conditions in which play-acting becomes possible, people become members of an intimate society, where they are ‘artists deprived of an art’ (p. 29). His hypothesis is that theatricality has ‘a special, hostile relation to intimacy’ while it has ‘an equally special, friendly relation to a strong public life’ (p. 37). Where a strong public life exists, ‘there should be affinities between the domains of stage and street’ (p. 37). Particular emphasis is put on convention, as ‘the single most expressive tool of public life’, which is undermined in a society that prefers intimacy to public life (p. 37). As play-acting declines, self-disclosure becomes the measure of truth. But people obsessed with themselves cannot be expressive, as they are deprived of the skills only developed in the public domain. As de Tocqueville had argued, ‘any emotional relationship can be meaningful only when it is perceived as part of a web of social relations’ (Sennett, 1976:31).

Performance, and the presentation and exchange of symbols, therefore, lies at the heart of social life. We find this even in societies where industrial capitalism and its associated realm of strangers have not developed. In a celebrated essay, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1993) develops a multi-layered, ‘thick’ description of cockfight as an expressive form, a social ritual and its significance for the Balinese society. The fight, which until being banned was performed in public places, was ‘at once a convulsive surge of animal hatred, a mock war of symbolical selves, and a formal simulation of status tensions’ (p.

444). The aesthetic power of the fight resulted from its capacity of forcing together diverse realities of its immediate dramatic shape, its metaphorical content and its social context. For Geertz, culture is the webs of significance that human beings have spun around themselves (p. 5). By seeing behaviour as symbolic action, and that the meaning of these symbols can only be understood in public, in interaction with others, he develops an interpretive theory of culture. Following Wittgenstein, he thus insists that ‘Culture is public because meaning is’ (p. 12). The role of anthropologist, and the student of culture in general, is then to construct a reading, an interpretation of this public set of symbolic actions (Geertz, 1993; 1988). Using drama as a mode of interpretation of culture, it was thus possible for Geertz to conclude, in his analysis of the state ceremonies in Bali, that,

‘the pageants were not mere embellishments, celebrations of domination independently existing: they were the thing itself. In other words, the driving force of Balinese life was

‘an intricate and unending rivalry of prestige’ (quoted in Inglis, 2000:166).

For the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1998b), the social space, in which multifarious individuals who are enormous and complex worlds in themselves have to fit, is severely limited. The more this public space becomes crowded, the more pressure there is on trying to control it. Managing the appearances and of public space, therefore, becomes a crucial task, as it is here that all interpersonal contact takes place. Even if it goes fairly deep, the management of the surface is ‘the constant work of human life’ (Nagel, 1998b:5–6).

The development of a public self, a mask, through the use of conventions, is a tool that allows individuals ‘a sense of freedom to lead one’s inner life as if it were invisible, even though it is not’ (Nagel, 1998b:8). Creating a balance between the public and the private

would be then possible, where public is managed through conventions and private is the sphere of freedom.

The idea that everything should be out in the open is childish, and represents a misunderstanding of the mutually protective function of conventions of restraint, which avoid provoking unnecessary conflict Still more pernicious is the idea that socialization should penetrate to the innermost reaches of the soul, so that one should feel guilty or ashamed of any thoughts or feelings that one would be unwilling to express publicly. When a culture includes both of these elements to a significant degree, the results are very unharmonious…(Nagel, 1998b:9)

In this way, Nagel intends to show the limits to the public and the private spheres.

Displaying everything in the public sphere, through excessive frankness and increased exposure, is a serious mistake and inevitably the decline of privacy would coincide with the rise of hypocrisy (Nagel, 1998b:14). The balance between concealment and exposure is thus the key to a civilized social space.