The Problems of Viewing Performance

7    Lingual problems

(Private and public) performances of the self: the performance of language (and the self) in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns

Performances of the self are not always a matter of choice, and even context (to refer to the previous chapter). Often, as demonstrated in Susan Jahoda’s performance art installation piece, Flight Patterns, one enters the crossroads of identity in the co-mingling of the private and public displays of self.

The presumption

Much like Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of how a waiter in the café demonstrates bad faith in their performance of being a waiter, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life also presumes something of a privately desired role that is publicly displayed for the sake ...