… When an individual is in the open presence of others (and they are openly in his presence), he necessarily becomes vulnerable to them in certain standard ways in consequence of his character as a perishable organism and their character as an instrumentality.
This is from Relations in Public by Erving Goffman (2010: originally published in 1971):
… Individuals, whether in human or animal form, exhibit two basic modes of activity. They go about their business grazing, gazing, mothering, digesting, building, resting, playing, placidly attending to easily managed matters at hand. Or, fully mobilized, a fury of intent, alarmed, they get ready to attack or to stalk or to flee. Physiology itself is patterned to coincide with this duality.
… If individuals were not highly responsive to hints of danger or opportunity, they would not be responsive enough; if they carried this response [too] far on every occasion of its occurrence, they would spend all their time in a dither and have no time for all the other things required for survival.
… The role of adaptive competency can be seen nicely by looking at the situation of prey and predator. Between them there is what might be called a “critical distance.” It is that maximal distance across which a predator whose intent is known can still catch his prey, an “open strike distance,” as it were; or, more conventionally put, it is the minimal distance across which a prey under attack from a predator can easily escape his attentions. A predator that approaches closer than this critical distance to prey is likely to cause it to take defensive action, hence the phrase “flight distance.” Now the point is that it is common for prey to graze or play when a predator is well within their range of sight, providing only that orientation to him can be sustained free of intervening blocks to perception and that flight distance is not violated. Flight distance, then, is usually well within “orientation distance,” although admittedly some exceptions occur. [For example, at the extremity, the case of nuclear weapons which he discusses, though I am not going to quote.]
… To disappear from sight, to melt from view, is not, then, to hide or to sneak away; it is to be present but of no concern.
… The close involvement of the individual for personal as well as expediental reasons in how he must appear if others are to treat him with no special attention should not surprise us, provided only that we are willing to fall back upon basic principles. George Herbert Mead must be our guide. What the individual is for himself is not something that he invented. It is what his significant others have come to see he should be, what they have come to treat him as being, and what, in consequence, he must treat himself as being if he is to deal with their dealings with him. Mead was wrong only in thinking that the only relevant others are ones who are concerned to give sustained and pointed attention to the individual. There are other others, namely, those who are concerned to find in him someone unalarming whom they can disattend in order to be free to get on with other matters. So what the individual in part must come to be for himself is someone whose appearances are ones his others can see as normal. His show of being safely disattendable is deeply him; he has no self that is deeper, although he has some that are as deep.
… we deal with a normalcy show, with one individual seeking for warnings while concealing his suspicions and the others concealing the threat and opportunity they constitute for him while searching for signs that they are suspected. These two shows converge on what is seen as normal appearances, making of normal appearances a normalcy show, a show in which all participants have the task of acting unfurtively.
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It was suggested earlier that the life of many animals can be seen as oscillating between two radically different states, tranquility and mobilization, and that the capacity to be quietly on the lookout for signs for alarm is the mediating mechanism making it possible for these two states to approach each other closely in the same animal. Whenever, then, we find an animal idling his engine we can always ask what it will take to make him switch into high gear, and this we usually find is surprisingly small. That, after all, is the whole point of his alarm system. Behind this fact is something I think worth restating. In looking at the peace that usually obtains in public and semi-public places, in looking at persons quietly going about their business, we might find ourselves employing the standard imagery of a continuum that leads from these places and their people to places a little less secure and so on, until we are in the battlefield. Similarly, we could take the usual view that the greater the sense of security, the less the chance of sudden eventfulness. But this temperate view indeed might be fundamentally wrong. Full calm may in nature be a very few steps away from full agitation. This seems true with lower animals and is quite probably true with man. Instead of contrasting various situations according to their degree of uneasiness, we might better ask of the most peaceful and secure what steps would be necessary to transform it into something that is deeply unsettling.
This subject is related to the “prospect/refuge” theory that Felix Grant and, particularly Ray Girvan have posted about in landscape imagery.
-Julie
