You drop your pizza on the sidewalk and then...
The hidden beauty of social interaction
Maybe it’s not your pizza that you drop. Maybe it’s a bagel in the coffee shop. Maybe it’s a drink you spill. The point is, something goes wrong. A cringe-worthy moment. What happens then?
Do you go full 30-second rule, pick up the pizza and eat it anyway? What if people saw you drop the pizza? Can you still eat it? And what if you’re really, really hungry and you can’t afford another slice of pizza? But also, why is doing something as simple as dropping food so potentially emotional and devastating? What exactly is going on here?
A couple weeks ago, I taught Erving Goffman in my sociological theory class and Goffman is all about questions like these. Goffman is one of my favorite sociologists for many reasons, including his insight into what’s so mortifying about dropping your pizza on the sidewalk. He wrote in an address to the American Sociology Association, the elite organization in sociology as a discipline, “Indeed I’ve heard it said that we [sociologists] should be glad to trade what we’ve produced so far for a few really good conceptual distinctions and a cold beer.” You have to love that level of self-deprecation about your life’s work, as well as the appropriate value placed on a good, cold beer.
I love Goffman’s insights into stigma and what happens in total institutions like mental asylums and prisons. I love that, though sociology is a social science, Goffman’s work is only science-ish. You won’t find any regressions or page-long tables full of numbers in Goffman’s work and that’s perfectly okay.
You will find concepts that make an intuitive sense in their ability to understand social interaction. You will find some very good stories and I do love a good story.
Like the pizza. What is that all about?
Goffman is probably most famous for his dramaturgical approach to understanding social life—using the metaphor of the theater to understand social interaction. When we drop our pizza, we’re failing at impression management—the way in which we manipulate cues and information in order to present a favorable image of ourselves. Clumsiness is not good impression management, unless there’s some benefit to being clumsy (like trying to get out of drying the dishes after Thanksgiving dinner or avoiding a game of Jenga).
Goffman also talked about front and back stage, which helps explain why having (or not having) an audience for your pizza failure is so important. In the front, we’re more intentionally performing our roles, usually for a larger audience. In the back stage, the audience is limited and we can be more “authentic” version of ourselves.
If you drop your pizza in restaurant full of strangers—horrifying! But dropping your pizza at home in your own kitchen—no big deal. That’s because the restaurant is front and your own kitchen is back stage. Unless you’re having a dinner party in your kitchen. Then it becomes front. When you Zoom with a shirt and tie while also wearing your pajama pats, you are embodying front and back stage. You get the idea.
But why does it feel so soul-crushing to drop your pizza in front of people in a restaurant or in the cafeteria or on the sidewalk as everyone’s going to class? The answer is one of my favorite parts of Goffman’s theory, as well as a deep insight into how modern life works.
Our social performances are geared to make people think well of us, but there’s more at stake than that alone. We’re also, in our social interactions, depending on other people to honor the sacredness of our selves as individuals. In Goffman’s language, our demeanors (conduct, dress, gestures, what we say) demand deference (honor, dignity, respect). This explains why dropping the pizza feels so…soul-crushing.
Most of our interaction is designed to demonstrate to others that we are worthy of respect and that others, too, are worthy of our respect. You can call all of this manners or etiquette, but it’s more complex than that. It calls not just for saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ but also for us to look away when someone drops their pizza rather than, say, laughing or pointing or calling them out. That’s us giving deference to their demeanor, in the hopes that someone will return the favor to us down the line.
You can try to tell someone when they drop their pizza that it’s not a big deal, but it is. For a moment, a big gaping hole opens up in the cooperative fabric of our social lives. Our precious, sacred sense of our selves are exposed and vulnerable. People could laugh at us or point at us or call us out. And even if they ignore us, they know. They saw. There’s no going back. We are exposed for the clumsy, incompetent creatures we all are.
There’s a beauty in seeing social life this way. Most of the time, we are propping each other up, depending on people to shelter and protect our fragile selves and sheltering and protecting theirs in turn. When we see someone drop their pizza, we’re more likely to commiserate than we are to laugh, because we feel that pain. We’ve been there and we hope when it happens to us, we’ll be met with the same amount of kindness.
Goffman argued that this exchange of deference and demeanor means that in the end, we’re more invested in people believing we’re good than we are in actually being good. Maybe that’s true, but it ignores the cooperative nature of interaction as a ritual, all the ways in which even when things go wrong, we help each other pick up the pieces and keep going. It ignores the small acts of goodness and mutual cooperation. It ignores the deep empathy that is essential to our everyday lives—the fact that you don’t really have to explain how traumatic it was to drop your slice of pizza. We’re already there with you.
This week I loved this post from
about research on the bent of human imagination.Also, as always, this from
on what we don't say in our stories and how important that can be.I got into the idea of contaminated leisure and gender in my gender textbook, but
has lots to say about it here this week.I read Geraldine Brooks’ novel, Horse, this week, all about the history of horse-racing and racism and I loved it (thanks for the rec, Sara), but also, there is absolutely no way you could ride a horse, even the fastest thoroughbred in history, from Midway, Kentucky, to the border with Illinois in one night. Geographical inconsistencies bother me, especially when they involve my home state.
I know it’s the Monday before Thanksgiving and we’re all about the gratitude, but I felt like maybe we’ve reached gratitude saturation so I decided to go with Goffman instead. I hope you enjoy and please feel free to share all your embarrassing pizza-dropping or pizza-dropping-adjacent stories in the comments.
I do want to say how grateful I am for all of you. I’m grateful for all the lovely folks around town who tell me in person how much they enjoy the newsletter. I’m grateful for people like Maliha, who are definitely not in town, but still commenting from afar. I’m grateful for the relationships with other Substack folks and all the interesting things I’ve learned here. I’m grateful to have found such a pleasant way to connect with people, near and far.
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That’s really interesting!
Goffman rules! But I wonder what he would say to the recent trend of actually picking the pizza up off the kitchen floor and eating it? When alone? It happens. More and more. Etiquette performance has broken down inside the American home while still maintained outside. Informal at home. Formal in public?