đź•’ This essay is more than 10 years old (Published Apr 8, 2015).
Every day, each of us gives a live performance. That might seem like a presumptuous statement but I would argue that our everyday activities are indeed a form of subconscious performance art. This seemingly paradoxical concept can be demystified if we discuss such activities in terms of restored behavior.
According to Richard Schechner, a renowned performance theorist, restored behavior is any set of “marked, framed, or heightened” habits, rituals, and routines of life. In other words, restored behavior signifies those actions—from simple gestures to ritual performances—that have become a part of our lives, but have become independent of the source that brought them to existence.
What would be an example of that? In my life, and I think in the lives of many others, the act of smiling in day-to-day activities and encounters can be seen as an example of restored behavior. And that’s because, when we smile, we certainly can convey sincere and visceral feelings to others, but we also might smile to convey something that’s more calculated. What’s the difference?
As human beings, provided that we are not discussing cases of complete isolation, we are in constant communication with other people during our daily activities, habits, and rituals. Whether it’s simply the short-term process of making eye contact with a stranger on the street or sharing our intimate emotions with close friends or significant others, we regularly exchange both verbal and non-verbal means of communication.
It’s easy to assume that most of our physical reactions during communication are sincere and visceral, but the truth is that many of our gestures and expressions are programmed and dictated by external factors, such as cultural rules and societal pressure. Many, if not all, of these actions are restored behaviors—they exist as indispensable components of our personalities, yet they are completely detached from the inherent physical causes that would normally bring them to existence.
As Schechner describes in his essay on restoration of behavior, “even if I feel myself wholly to be myself, acting independently, only a little investigating reveals that the units of behavior that comprise me were not invented by me.” This does not mean that we are controlled or brainwashed by the society or other external factors; it simply means that we have subconsciously transformed our inherent gestures and reactions to channels of communication that convey our attitudes and establish our presence. Because of this, many of our everyday activities—such as smiling—can be understood as a restored behavior, and therefore as performance.
Smiling is a facial expression that is an innate feature of all human beings. While the associations linked to the act of smiling vary culturally, in most cultures, smiling is perceived as a physical reaction that signifies joy and happiness or a physical expression that shows person’s amiability and demeanor.
In many cases, it is a result of state of content and happiness, which can be caused by various factors, such as a humorous movie, positive memories, dancing, and attraction to another person. However, the act of smiling can also be employed in situations that are not necessarily associated with content and happiness.
For example, in Western cultures, people often smile when shaking hands or posing for a photograph. Politicians and public speakers are commonly seen smiling during speeches and presentations even though these events are often anxiety-inducing and not something that would naturally make a person smile. In the latter case, it can be tempting to think that the act of smiling is fake, but instead, it should be identified as restored behavior, which is a crucial component of person’s everyday subconscious performance.
In my own life, smiling has become such an important part of my everyday communication that I often forget when I am sincerely pleased or genuinely happy. If I am buying lunch or shopping for clothes, in most cases I will smile to the cashier or the person in the store as they are likely to greet me with a smile as well. If I have to communicate with workers in government offices, such as the Social Security Office, I always talk with a smile on my face.
Why? I most certainly am not happy or pleased when I am filing documents for a new ID card or when I am in a hurry to grab lunch and run back to class. Still, I—and many other people—approach these situations with a smile because it is established that “a smile can open many doors.”
What this truly means is that by employing a restored behavior and showcasing a unique, subtle type of performance, we are exercising amiability as means of facilitating communication, easing the tension, and ultimately—getting what we want.
For the beforehand mentioned cases, I am never particularly pleased or happy, but I always revert to the act of smiling because this framed and heightened behavior helps me reach the outcome of my desires.
In the case of buying lunch and clothes, smiling lets the other person know that I am an amiable person and that I am hoping for a good and helpful service. When I am smiling to the workers in government offices, I am hoping that my amiable demeanor will facilitate any required processes in these institutions and help me in case there is something wrong with my documentation. I am smiling not because I am content or happy, but because this restored behavior serves to showcase a delicate performance that conveys my attitude and personality traits to a person engaged with me in a two-way communication.
These examples support Schechner’s view of restored behavior: smiling in these situations has become completely independent of the original, physical source—happiness and sense of content—that would normally make a person smile. Instead, for the purpose of conveying a message and attaining a specific goal, smiling has become a framed and heightened behavior, employed in those situations that are not associated with the physical feeling of joy.
Interestingly, in his essay, Schechner notes that restored behaviors vary enormously from culture to culture, but he doesn’t elaborate on this statement. It’s nonetheless important to address this phenomenon because restored behaviors are in many cases dictated by cultural norms and societal conventions, so it is natural to pose question about the validity of restored behavior across different cultures. To be precise, while smiling and amiability can be seen as one type of performance in my own life—because I have always lived in similar cultural environments—one might think that this performance would not be valid or sustainable in other cultures.
For example, in some Asian countries, smiling is used to conceal embarrassment or emotional pain or to represent confusion and anger. In some Eastern European cultures, smiling at strangers can be perceived as odd, suspicious, or even frightening. In these cases, is smiling still a restored behavior and does it constitute a performance act?
Even though the act of smiling is associated with different interpretations in these particular cultures, it is still a restored behavior because it is independent of the inherent source that brings it to existence.
Members of specific Asian cultures will smile to detract attention from their actual feelings, so smiling is yet again used in instances where it wouldn’t be happening naturally. The example of Eastern European cultures might be trickier to understand, but the existence of restored behavior still applies. Here, we can view the lack of smiling as a restored behavior; that is, even if the sight of stranger on the street might evoke sincere physical feelings of happiness and joy, a person will purposefully avoid smiling to adapt to specific cultural norms.
Of course, these opinions and statements can be seen as unsupported because the distinction between genuine act of smiling and smiling as restored behavior can be subjective and unclear. Just because I’m using the act of smiling as a way of adapting to a specific culture, how can I know that every other person is following the same mindset when smiling? What if someone has a genuinely joyful demeanor and their amiable interactions with other people are not shaped by cultural traditions?
This is once again a question that Schechner answers concisely in his essay by denoting that restored behavior is sometimes esoteric, privy only to the initiated. This statement can be interpreted from different perspectives, and one of them implies that restored behavior is not temporally universal.
The act of smiling can be sincere and brought to existence by natural, physical feeling of happiness, but it can also be used as a restored behavior, one which has become completely independent of its natural source. People will adopt this restored behavior as necessary; when the act of smiling is used to explore or adjust to a specific context, then the behavior can be understood as restored.
In my own life, I also smile when I genuinely feel joyful. In this case, the act of smiling is not a restored behavior because it was brought naturally to existence, and then the actual physical process is understood as an innate, involuntary, muscle-flexing reaction to a state of happiness. On the other hand, when I am smiling to convey my amiable attitude or establish my courtesy to another person, the act of smiling becomes a restored behavior.
In that sense, for any person, the genuine process of smiling and the act of smiling as a restored behavior can be temporally distinguished from each other. Smiling is a genuine behavior when it’s an involuntary physical reaction, but it’s a restored behavior when it is a voluntary or subconscious way of conveying a symbolic message to a person or a group of people.
With that clear framework in mind, the seemingly presumptuous statement that we all perform becomes acceptable. Each and every one of us performs in front of various audiences, from family and friends to acquaintances and strangers, and we engage in this performance act to use a framed and heightened behavior as a way of conveying a specific, symbolic message.
It can certainly sound a bit sinister to think our lives and gestures are “taken over,” as Schechner describes it, but if we just for a moment let go of the notion that everything we do is conscious, the truth becomes obvious. The act of smiling and many other everyday behaviors are indeed restored behaviors, and consequently are also continuous performance acts.
Cover photo is of Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Linda Evangelista, courtesy of Roxanne Lowit.