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The phenomenology of self-presentation: describing the structures of intercorporeality with Erving Goffman

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Abstract

Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through ‘behaviour’ and ‘expression.’ In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman’s account of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously—and constitutionally—engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman’s insights to extend Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions.

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Notes

  1. Gregory W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others: Specifying Goffman’s Phenomenological Omissions and Sociological Accomplishments,” Human Studies 28 (2005): 411.

  2. Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 2.

  3. The theme of intercorporeality as constitutive of subjectivity has been taken up by many contemporary phenomenologists. For instance, see: Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999).; Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012); Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).

  4. See: Mark R. Leary, Self-Presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behaviour (Madison: Brown & Benchmark, 1995), 2–3.

  5. Jean-Paul Sartre articulates this concern we have regarding how the body and behaviour appear to others in his account of ‘the look.’ See: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003).

  6. For example Jurgen Habermas accuses Husserl’s philosophy of being solipsistic in that it is only able to conceive of and theorise the singular subject. See: Jurgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 42.

  7. Joona Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 74.

  8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1977), 91, §43.

  9. See: Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 124.

  10. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 91, §43. Italics in original.

  11. Ibid. Italics in original.

  12. Ibid., 109. §50.

  13. Ibid., 110. §50. Italics in original.

  14. Ibid., 111. §50.

  15. Ibid., 113. §51.

  16. Ibid. Italics in original.

  17. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, 126. See also: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964a, b), 120.

  18. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 114. §52

  19. Ibid., 118. §54

  20. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, 124.

  21. A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge, 2003), 235.

  22. See: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 151–69.

  23. A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, 240.

  24. Ibid. Italics in original.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid., 241. Italics in original.

  27. See: A. Meltzoff and M. Moore, “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (1977).

  28. The terms ‘intercorporeality’ and ‘intercorporeity’ are used variously to translate Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeité. See for instance: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141.

  29. Ibid., 184.

  30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 363.

  31. Ibid., 364.

  32. Ibid.

  33. See, for example: ibid., 338–41.

  34. A.D. Smith, “The Flesh of Perception: Merleau-Ponty and Husserl,” in Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2007), 2–3.

  35. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 116–17. Emphasis added.

  36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 38.

  37. A.D. Smith, “The Flesh of Perception,” 3.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 368.

  40. Ibid. Gallagher and Meltzoff challenge Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions regarding this early capacity for imitation, arguing that infant imitation would not be possible without a functioning body schema and a primitive body image that entails a rudimentary level of self-awareness. See: Shaun Gallagher and Andrew N. Meltzoff, “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies,” Philosophical Psychology 9, no. 2 (1996). Merleau-Ponty argues that infant mimicry is not true imitation but rather arises because of an unconscious and primordial participation in intercorporeality, or a ‘postural impregnation’ of my own body with the behaviour and expression that I witness in others bodies. See: Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118. For further elaboration see: Jane Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” Parrhesia 13 (2011).

  41. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, 139.

  42. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 341.

  43. Ibid., 367.

  44. Landes, The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading (unpublished manuscript)

  45. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston Northwestern University Press, 1993), 103.

  46. Ibid., 103–04.

  47. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162.

  48. The Visible and the Invisible, 134–35.

  49. Ibid., 154.

  50. Ibid., 134.

  51. This line of argument is developed more fully in Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the relation with the other through ‘the look’ as constitutive of reflective self-consciousness. See: Sartre, Being and Nothingness. For commentary on ‘the look’ and its role in the constitution of subjectivity see: Luna Dolezal, “Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Sartre Studies International 18, no. 1 (2012).

  52. Quoted in: Landes, “The Weight of Others.”

  53. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 364.

  54. Ibid., 382.

  55. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 104.

  56. Donald A. Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.

  57. G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 402.

  58. See: Talcott Parsons, “Interaction,” in Encycolpaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. D.L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Also see: Richard L. Lanigan, “Is Erving Goffman a Phenomenologist?,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 4 (1988).

  59. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvii.

  60. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959), 15.

  61. G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 404–05. See: Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 86–87., n. 6.

  62. G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 405. See also: Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 74.

  63. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 1, 2.

  64. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

  65. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 2.

  66. Ibid., 5.

  67. Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 25. See also: Stephen Pattison, Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013).

  68. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 5.

  69. See: Luna Dolezal, The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 4.

  70. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 5.

  71. Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 35.

  72. Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992), 78.

  73. See, for example: Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, ed. Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

  74. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 244.

  75. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), 166.

  76. See: Mauss, “Techniques of the Body.”

  77. Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places, 35.

  78. G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 403.

  79. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 14.

  80. Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places, 33.

  81. Ibid., 83.

  82. Ibid., 84.

  83. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118.

  84. Ibid., 119.

  85. Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places, 35, 16.

  86. See, for example, Chapter 5 in. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  87. See, for example: Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162–63.

  88. Landes, “The Weight of Others.”

  89. See: ibid.

  90. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 11.

  91. Landes, “The Weight of Others.”

  92. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, 54, 55.

  93. There is research that demonstrates that seemingly ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ physiological movements and functions, such as heartbeat, breath and blinking, are part of the communicative social order. For example, on how breathing can be socially constituted, see: B. Lande, “Breathing Like a Soldier: Culture Incarnate,” Sociological Review 55 (2007).

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for funding my postdoctoral research. I’d also like to acknowledge the support of the Royal Irish Academy Mobility Grant which funded my research visit to the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University where the original research for this paper was carried out. Further thanks to Matthew Ratcliffe who read an early draft and gave me invaluable feedback.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham City, DH1 3HN, UK

    Luna Dolezal

  2. Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Luna Dolezal

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Dolezal, L. The phenomenology of self-presentation: describing the structures of intercorporeality with Erving Goffman. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 237–254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9447-6

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