Poltics Part 1/Performance and Truth

Politics is performance. We all know this, we all accept it. Despite the knowledge of the performance we still wish to see something else there. We want politicians to show us that they’re not just executing a song and dance in order to impress the public, we wish to see them actually being one of us. We want to see our identities reflected within them.

But is this really possible? Can we see politicians in a true light where they are revealing the groups that they themselves actually identify with rather than who they try to become associated with in order to achieve their certain goals?

It is interesting that if we look at this problem without the cynical light of Goffman telling us that everything is performance then we can never know what the true identity of politicians is. This gives us a cynical view of politicians and politics as merely means to an end without any true identities within themselves. However, if we instead take all (or most) of Goffman to be true then we can instead look at politicians as no more or less performance-oriented than the rest of us. I personally would like to look at politics in the latter view, because in my opinion it makes the whole process more palatable. Additionally I see nothing wrong with viewing all human interaction as performance.

As physical beings our primary(or only, depending on what you believe) way of expressing ourselves is through action. All of our thoughts and our identities that lie within ourselves are just that, within ourselves. There will always be something lost in the translation from mind to mouth and that translation is where our performance lies.

I take Goffman’s idea of performance and look at it as a way of viewing truth. If we are to say that all human interaction is performance then our truths are relative. If we are to say that some human interaction is not performance then there must be some absolute truth that lies behind the interaction that is making it something other than a performance. I don’t even know what we would call a non-performance interaction, perhaps a “true expression” or some such thing. I think what can be said about performance and interaction is that there are absolute truths. However those absolute truths can exist only within us. When we express them through speech, writing, or action we are applying truths to a situation, and in that application we must modify the truths to the scenario.

In short it appears to me that we can have absolute truths within ourselves but not between ourselves and others, much as we might like to believe we do.