The Comedy of Sincerity. Truth and Pretence at the Level of Interaction

Abstract

This paper presents some of the implications of the theatrical metaphor throughout which Erving Goffman analyses face-to-face social relations. This perspective considers the staging of the individual in each situation in which they take part as an ensemble of strategies set aside for controlling the self-image they are trying to project, in order to make their performance plausible. The article stresses that the goal of this dramatisation of the self is to restrain the inconsistencies, uncertainties and ambiguities that would cast doubts on the observance of the rules that make each one acceptable before others. The text aims to point out that, within this theoretical framework, sincerity, understood as a way of communication that guarantees the truthfulness of the information transmitted during a social encounter, is unfeasible, since what the interlocutors seek is never to express any hypothetical subjective truth but, above all, to continue to be foreseeable, to confirm a self-definition that the others will accept. Within this framework, in social life there are no actors but only characters.