Abstract
The sociology of emotions has become a vibrant and sprawling subfield in the discipline. Rather than focusing on individuals and their internal states, sociologists have identified emotion rules, emotion management, and the intersection of the social construction of understandable and legitimate emotionality with the constructions of other social meanings, particularly gender and legitimate agency, as their proper items of interest.
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I will use the term “things people do” instead of either “action” or “behavior,” as the common usage of both implies ascriptions of intention, or a lack thereof, which is precisely what cannot be abstractly decided.
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In Strategic Interaction, Goffman differentiates between the different kind of moves these players can engage in: “A subject’s observable behavior that is unoriented to the assessment an observer might be making of it can be called an unwitting move. Such activity is at once part of the expression game and not part of the game and requires a paradoxical title. […] The term naïve move can be used to refer to the assessment an observer makes of a subject when the observer believes that the subject can be taken as he appears, that is, that he is involved in an unwitting move.” (1969, p. 11).
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Psychiatry is, again, responsible for instances in which such negotiations fail, and actors dramatize emotions that are not understandable for others, emotion displays that are not acceptable as a presentation of self and must therefore be controlled; if need be, medically.
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For instance, consider this scene: a woman comes home and opens her door. A boyfriend is home already, sees her open the door, turns towards her, gets up, smiles broadly. He gives all the physical signs of wanting to come and hug her. She does not mirror any of his emotional displays, but leaves her face set in stone, keeps her body movement minimalistic: she is unmoved and unmovable in her presentation, but looks tender, though solemn. She is, we could say, engaged in presenting a “solemnity show.” As participants and as viewers (when they come up ion TV), we can read them to know that something bad has happened. The woman here engages in priming: She prepares her boyfriend for the expected emotionality by blocking his emotional display, from which the fall to the expected emotion would have been so much higher. In doing so, she not only serves prevalent emotional expectations and the structure of emotion work; she also helps him by preventing the awkward presentation of joy in the vicinity of bad news, and herself, because we know that as a participant in the encounter, she would suffer any awkwardness along with the other participants; their actions that spoil the interaction would soil her as well.
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Shows of nervousness and relaxedness can be conceived of as such instances of face-work as well: One of Goffman’s many memorable examples concerns “Charm and colorful little informalities,” which he notes are “usually the prerogative of those in higher office, leading us mistakenly to assume that an individual’s social graces helped bring him to his high position, instead of what is perhaps more likely, that the graces become possible for anyone who attains the office.” (1961b, p. 129) Rather than an expression of a personality, Goffman’s web of metaphors allows us to redescribe informality as a form of status presentation: They are neither characteristics of the person nor acquired traits that the person “gained” through socialization into the status role. Rather, they are a ritual resource available, in principle, to everyone, but successfully usable only by those who manage to have others ascribe “high status” to them, at least in the confines of the situation. Anyone could portray confident informality; but if that person also holds a lower status position, then the confident informality would appear to others as an usurpation of a role that the person is not credited with having: “[P]erfect poise […] may scandalize those present as to disrupt the interaction” (1967, p. 131). It is not availability that is the issue, it is the right to use what is available. This does not mean, however, that the availability of a “confident informality show” is structurally limited to those in higher status positions: Every presentation is a wager, a claim. Presenting perfect poise is a wager that the scene may play out as one in which a higher status position is ascribed to the person who shows this poise, an others may accept the presenter as one of a higher position because she presented this poise. Any presentation of status is a claim to that status, a claim that can succeed or fail: status is merely shorthand for a prediction of whether such a show might succeed or fail, and like all predictions, the outcome is finally open: those charming little informalities can successfully create or solidify a status role, but f they do not succeed, they can be creepy, and for the same reason that they would otherwise be charming. They assume the relationship between charmer and charmee that they reproduce, and if the other side of the interaction does not assume this relationship and cannot be swayed to play along with it, the informality becomes problematic and, ultimately, a quite unwelcome status and relationship aggression.
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For instance, informality pertains in close equal relationships, where flooding out is acceptable, versus status hierarchies, in which it is not. Therefore, actors already “take a line” toward what kind of situation, and what kind of relationship, they find themselves in through the emotion displays they present: “informality can be partly defined as a license to flood out on minor pretexts; […] small amounts of tension may be purposely engineered just for the fun of being capsized by them.” (1961b, p. 58).
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I am grateful to Morgan Erdman and Aaron Bielejewski for their comments and corrections.
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Dellwing, M. (2015). Watching the Body Idiom: Ethnography and the Emotional Dramaturgy of the Interaction Order. In: Kleres, J., Albrecht, Y. (eds) Die Ambivalenz der Gefühle. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01654-8_15
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