ABSTRACT
The artist Daniel Buren (1969) once said “Every act is political and, whether one is conscious of it or not, the presentation of one’s work is no exception”. If this assertion is accepted then it merits generalisation beyond the presentation of works of art to the presentation of self. And, as has been emphasised from the very fi rst chapter of the present text, the presentation of self in human society is never an artless act but can be regarded as a deliberately framed and orchestrated piece of theatre in which people attempt to shape the impressions that they give and give off both in their actions and in their communications. This perspective immediately brings Erving Goffmann to mind and through his seminal text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), the use of dramaturgical analysis to understand what is going on in social interactions. However Goffmann’s main emphasis was upon the role of expressions in conveying impressions rather than upon the content of those expressions per se: it was about the subtext rather than the text. In drama theory by contrast the focus of interest is mainly in what is communicated (whether by word or deed) although the subtext is of course relevant to any shadow confrontations detected. This locates drama theory in a complementary role to that fulfi lled by academic sociology and at the heart of describing and interpreting the transactions that take place between people. And as politics can be thought of as being primarily concerned with how people infl uence each other, so drama theory can be seen to provide a distinctly ‘political’ mode of investigation very much in the spirit of Buren’s claim.
