The word of this era is “performative.” A quick search of the word “performative” in Google trends leads you to search terms like “performative male,” “performative purity test,” “performative matcha,” “performative male starter pack,” etc. Does this say something deeper about how we act, especially as university students with complex social lives? Shakespeare has a saying that “all the world’s a stage.” When a person experiences dishonesty, they are said to have been “played” by the one who was dishonest to them. Confucianism has this idea that people are constituted by their social roles, and moral cultivation consists in performing those roles appropriately. This idea of play and performance is deeply rooted in our day to day vocabulary.

Academics have taken this far more seriously than we might initially think. Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that analyzes human interaction through the lens of theatre and drama, some even claiming that life [is] theatre. In such a view of the world, we act the way we want to be perceived by society. Just as actors perform for an audience in a theater, we perform every minute and every day for the world. Just like a theatre has a front stage and a backstage, we too separate our interactions with people from our individual activities without the audience.

Think of classrooms. Each professor exercises some authority, demands attention to the course content, dresses up in a certain way — all in an effort to sustain the front stage. Their backstage, in that case, might be their personal life away from students, where they are a completely different individual. Again, this backstage might even be a front stage for some different play, such as the role of a spouse or a parent.

When a professor acts in an unprofessional manner, it is usually frowned upon. “We did not expect this from someone like a professor,” we complain. This is similar to how mistakes are criticized when actors perform badly on stage. Breaking character is bad, and characters should be as flawless as possible in their roles.

In some sense, in a classroom we are both the audience and co-players in the theatre. The professor acts for us (and in relation, we are the audience), but so do we for the professor and fellow classmates (and we are fellow actors to everyone else in the same room). We raise hands and ask questions. I see several layers of performances and audiences in the smallest of actions. Sometimes, we ask questions because we are performing for ourselves, we want to show ourselves that we enjoy what we are doing. Sometimes, we perform for the professor; we raise our hands for participation grade. Sometimes, we perform for status amongst our peers; we raise our hands because we want to be seen as someone good enough to ask or answer these difficult questions. It is the same activity, and yet we have a completely different audience for each one of them.

This also explains our social interactions in groups and classrooms. One of my friends is extremely comfortable talking to his other friend in a group setting, you could say he even enjoys it. However, the moment he has to have a one-on-one conversation, the interaction turns extremely awkward. At first thought, it sounds odd. If you can talk to the same person in the group, why should you not be able to do the same in a direct conversation, especially if you have been around the person in the group setting for years and years?

The notion of performance might rescue us in this regard as well. In the group setting, we assume the role of a character that aligns most closely with our established identity. When one feels close in a group setting, the closeness comes in their capacity of the role they play in the group. In one-on-one with the members of the same group, you have to assume a completely different role (for the size and nature of the audience changes). The closeness does not necessarily translate from group settings to individual settings. I myself find interacting with some of my acquaintances much easier in a group, even with one more person in presence. First, performances in one-to-one conversations are too focused on the sole actor because the audience (the other person) has just one person in the play to attend to, which like for any actor, feels extremely nerve-wracking. Second, the roles are often distributed when it is in a group setting.

This neatly translates to how we act in social media. In our group chats, there are many people who chat extremely abundantly, and yet when we meet them in person, they are very economical with their words. The medium mediates how we perform our roles or even what our roles are. We curate our social media profiles to create a particular version of ourselves. Some of us even like certain reels to convey taste, and certain images of ourselves. But in reality, we perform completely differently. There are some us who perform to ourselves and others to the extreme by curating their Spotify the entire year for Spotify Wrapped. On the other hand, there are some of us who claim to not perform, and in doing so, perform as someone who does not want to be seen as a performer. And this also explains our distaste for pretension. In this worldview, what is wrong with pretentiousness is not so much that we think pretentious people are pretending; it is more that as an audience, we cannot believe the roles that they claim to be playing. Pretentiousness, in this view, is simply unconvincing acting.

Perhaps there is a value judgement to be made here, and questions to be asked. If everyone is performing, does the notion of authenticity not exist at all? This relates back to this columnwhere one of my friends, Sophiya, argued that authenticity is often performed too. Then, authenticity is a performance well done. Then, there are other important questions: if everything is performance, who decides what is a good performance and what is not? Is feeling inadequate, say, having imposter syndrome, — nothing more than having a sense that you are not fulfilling the expected role properly? Irrespective of questions and judgements, I think the mere recognition that we are all performing in our roles can help those struggling with failure and distress. It can help us feel closer to each other and build stronger sense of connection; we are all in the same boat, after all, performing for each other in the theater of the world.

As I write this column, I am performing. I have to write and sound a certain way. My sentences need a grammatical structure, they cannot offend anybody, I have to come off as slightly profound to be relevant and interesting. I am performing for the editors to avoid the wrath of their ruthless editing and I am performing for the readers, for there are few, and I want to be read and liked. Now, as in a theatre, acknowledging to the audience that this is all a play is akin to breaking the fourth wall. This article tries to do the same, and perhaps we should all break the fourth wall sometimes — at least for the intellectual pleasure, if not for a conclusive answer. The existential question still lingers: are we more than our roles? And if not, is it necessarily a bad thing?