https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/1172/post_images/Slide345.JPG">

Meaning in this latter sense was a “dramaturgical problem,” a matter of “stage-craft and stage management.” In the performance, “interaction constraints … play upon the individual and transform his activities into performances.”³⁸²

In an architectonic sense, front spaces and back spaces might be the restaurant/kitchen, reception/office, shop/storeroom, living room/bedroom, or stage/backstage.³⁸³ In image, a rough parallel might be figure/ground; in speech, theme/rheme.^§MS2.1.1 Then, there is the outside, or that which is on the other side of a borderline, though juxtaposed meaningfully because it is a space of already-having-been performed or ready-to-be performed by way of anticipation or expectation.

Frames are distinctive patterns of spatialized social performance: seller/buyer (market frame); performer/audience (theatrical frame); teacher/student (educational frame); doctor/patient (medical frame).³⁸⁴ Frames, Goffman says, are “definitions of situation … built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events … and our subjective involvement in them.”³⁸⁵

Frames are repeated by design,^§MS0.4.1 but also by design they are never (quite) the same. Frames are designed into spaces in a premediated way by architects, town planners, and other social designers. They become a semi-conscious medium for our meaning in the habituated materiality of spaces. Frames can also be “keyed”³⁸⁶ – this is a function for space akin to quoting in text. Hence: dramatic scripts, rehearsals, simulations, or training practice. They can indicate a certain kind of meaningful absence of frame, for instance, the “civil inattention” that is anonymity in a crowd.

Nor are the meanings necessarily congruent. In the creation of impressions, they entail certain kinds of concealment, obfuscation or deception in selectivity: decorum, politeness, or social front; or fabrication and duping. If to tell a lie in speech is deceit, to feign is a spatial lie. Or hypocrisy: certain things being said, while other things are being “given off” by the situation. Or self-delusion: to believe the lie.

The “information game,” says Goffman, is “a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery.” Though the cycle does not necessarily reach rediscovery, for as he says wryly, “he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep.”³⁸⁷

If Wittgenstein’s focus was on “language games,”^§MS2.3.2a Goffman’s was not the script, but the stage setting and action for such games in the drama of everyday life. An inveterate gamer himself, in his spare time Goffman worked as blackjack dealer at the Station Plaza Casino in Las Vegas. There, this aficionado of everyday spatial configurations was promoted to a pit boss, dedicated to managing the relationship between front and back spaces of the gaming floor, where the name of the game was to align the hopes for good fortune of players with the guaranteed fortune of the casino proprietor, whose interest it is to have their patrons, on average, lose.³⁸⁸

---

³⁸¹ Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning, 2000, “Erving Goffman,” pp. 457–85 in The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists, edited by G. Ritzer, Oxford: Blackwell.

³⁸² Erving Goffman, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday Anchor, pp. 2, 15, 65; Dean MacCannell, 2000, “Erving Goffman (1922–1982),” pp. 8–36 in Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought: Erving Goffman, edited by G.A. Fine and G.W.H. Smith, London: Sage.

³⁸³ Erving Goffman, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday Anchor, pp. 106ff.

³⁸⁴ Daniel Miller, 2010, Stuff, Cambridge: Polity, p. 49.

³⁸⁵ Erving Goffman, 1974, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 10–11.

³⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 44, 58–62.

³⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 83, 70–71, 14; Erving Goffman, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday Anchor, pp. 107, 29, 43–46, 2, 8.

³⁸⁸ Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning, 2000, “Erving Goffman,” pp. 457–85 in The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists, edited by G. Ritzer, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 459.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 146–147. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Erving Goffman’s “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” §AS1.4.5a