Performance Anxiety: Role-ing with Lacan

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I posited performance as a fundamental element of subject construction, and argued, through Goffman and Sartre, that role-play is not a kind of dissimulation nor a social con game, but rather the formation of the subject herself, which was otherwise a kind of Sartrean ‘no-thing’. I also noted that Goffman’s thought was most useful for the middle register of analysis: situational rather than psychological or conventionally sociological in any macroscopic sense. In this section, I want to enter into the former domain, that of the psychological, and bring the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition into dialogue with dramaturgical sociology, both as a supplement and a corrective. To do this, I will begin with a brief exploration of two points of contact, both interestingly indirect, between these two traditions.