Erving Goffman: Presentation of self in everyday life

In Erving Goffman’s Presentation of self in everyday life he states, ‘in Ichheiser’s terms, the individual will have to act so that he intentionally or unintentionally expresses himself and the others will in turn have to be impressed in some way by him’. He thinks that we perform everyday in our everyday lives and people put on a ‘performance’ particularly in different social situations. For example, you would ‘perform’ differently to a friend as you would to your boss at work. In site specific performance some performers find it strange as they are used to performing in a conventional performance space, usually a theatre. However if we think about performance being an everyday occurrence and something we do constantly it shouldn’t actually feel that strange performing in an unconventional space.

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