Social Control/Social Order/Social Art

Though the title of this essay speaks of art, it is concerned only with a certain species of art and only in special ways. Its focus is on folklore, that is, on the creation and performance of art in everyday life.1 In general the study of folklore is concerned with the ways in which ordinary people transform ordinary lives through the use of interpersonal art. It examines how normal worlds are made or destroyed, and it explains how self-conscious, selfreferencing fictions participate in the making and breaking of such worlds. Such fictions go by the very common names of tale, song, proverb, game, ritual and the like, but their place in the environment of human behavior is not common at all. This is so because folklore is art that exists only in performance. In a folkloric event, the creator/performer, the text, the stage, the audience, the response and the evaluation are all present at once. Their limits mark the limits of the world and what is not in the event does not exist at all. Accordingly, the artistic experience generated at all levels, textural, stylistic, critical, cultural, is for the duration of the performance the totality of the available social world and the only source of the social world to follow. Thus in folkloric performance, social experience and artistic experience are one; art is life and life is momentarily art, and reality hangs in the balance. The defining mark of a folkloric analysis, therefore, is a focus on the aesthetics of ordinary experience.2 Such a focus, however, is not an attempt to fix or enshrine social relations as literary texts outside of time. Folkloric performances are cultural situations. They are not things; they are messages that arise out of the tension inherent in the interplay of ourselves and the world around us. The artistry which develops in such a system of relationships cannot be separated from the general range of human behavior, and the participants, whether creator/performers or audiences, are not qualitatively different from other men. The voice that speaks in the creation or recreation of folklore is not that of an idealized disembodied artist outside of the living community, or that of a tradition speaking through the mouths of anonymous bearers, but that of a member of the community using art as a methodology for sustaining a real

Business · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Social control · Social order · Social science · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Music History and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

  Erving Goffman•The Presentation of Self in…•1990

  Add to list