Self-presentation is fragile and depends on spectators’ tactful cooperation

Evidence

People and social systems strive, in their self-presentation, as we have already shown, to draw a consistent picture of themselves and make it socially accepted. Since other people and social systems also have an interest in building up reliable expectations with regard to the people around them, in seeing them as enduring identities, there develops in social intercourse a type of expressive language which enables actions to be attributed to people or social systems, and not only causally but, indeed, also symbolically, as expressing their essence, their self. The systems concerned move about in this medium of symbolic representations with more or less great assurance, an assurance which is often misleadingly called ‘self-confidence’. For self-presentation is difficult, threatened by inner contradictions, mistakes, facts and information which cannot be presented. So, on the one hand, it requires considerable expressive prudence and, on the other hand, the tactful co-operation of spectators. There often arise delicate or indeed embarrassing situations where the fact that the presented self is not the true self threatens to become obvious. Someone who then loses his self-control is lost. His self-presentation collapses – at least in relation to the spectators then present. A person who, on the contrary, retains his composure can save himself in various ways, for example, by giving the situation a humorous twist, by open admission, reinterpreting retrospectively his past self-presentation, playing the matter down, ignoring it with the help of co-operating spectators who see through his self-presentation but refrain from acting on it, by explaining the incident as an event of no importance, for example as a ‘disturbance’ brought about by something external. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 292

Categorization

• XREF: This is Luhmann’s own account of what Giddens calls ‘facework’ — the maintenance of a presented self through social cooperation. Directly usable as the Luhmann-vs-Giddens comparison anchor for Stevens’s composure rituals. — connects to: The lover’s self-presentation demands the Other’s free recognition to succeed; Others’ actions constrain a person’s curated online self-presentation — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 638
• SEED: Stevens’s famous self-control — ‘dignity’ as his career’s whole point — is precisely this self-presentation maintenance under threat; an essay could read Ishiguro’s Stevens via Luhmann’s account of composure-saving tactics.