He took the picture before he tasted the wine. An essay on performing happiness on social media, and what becomes of the performance of winning when the stage never goes dark.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

A week after the partnership goes to a colleague, imagine an architect booking a flight to Lisbon. On the second evening he sits on a terrace above the river with a glass of vinho verde. Before he tastes it, he lifts his phone and adjusts the angle until the bridge and the last of the light appear behind the glass. He considers sending the picture to a friend, then opens the account his colleagues follow. He knows the new partner will be at her desk when it appears. Let her see what winning looks like, he thinks, and begins composing the caption.

The wine is cold and good, and he registers this, though part of his attention remains with the colleague he hopes will see the photograph. His pleasure in the evening is real, and so is his intention to make that pleasure answer the disappointment he has left at home. Before the evening has finished, he gives it a second task: to establish that the person passed over has somehow come out ahead.

In an earlier essay, Still Taking Bows: Narcissism and the Performance of Winning, I described the performance of winning, in which victory becomes an identity requiring continuous confirmation. A lost contest can then remain active long after its outcome is settled, because the performer continues seeking an interpretation that restores his superiority. This essay concerns the space in which that effort might be set down. The architect has crossed an ocean and sits beyond the sight of everyone involved in the original disappointment, yet he continues arranging the evening around one of them. His physical departure has given him distance without securing an interval of release.

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) supplies a useful distinction. A front region sustains an impression before a particular audience; a back region permits conduct that would contradict it. A restaurant kitchen can serve as a back region relative to the dining room, allowing staff to prepare for service and relax the composed behavior expected among customers. Its status depends on the audience, and the same kitchen may require a different performance before a supervisor. Backstage therefore offers relief from particular demands while remaining part of social life, with expectations of its own.

Anyone who has worked in a theatre knows how much such relief depends on sightlines. Masking flats and black fabric conceal portions of the stage from the audience, and within those limits an actor can wait for an entrance or release the posture a scene requires. The protection is practical and imperfect: sound carries, and a careless movement can expose someone who believes herself hidden. Yet a well-masked stage provides a dependable distinction between being visible in the scene and waiting beyond it. An actor can use that distinction because she knows where the audience’s view ends.

Joshua Meyrowitz examined what happens when electronic media alter comparable boundaries in social life. In No Sense of Place (1985), he brought Goffman’s analysis into conversation with media theory, considering how access to social information helps constitute a situation. Physical separation offers less protection when conduct can reach people who would previously have been excluded from observing it. Television, in his account, changed what audiences could know about people whose authority had depended partly on maintaining that separation. His discussion of middle-region behavior considers the adjustments that follow when previously segregated situations merge, so that a performance must accommodate people who once encountered different versions of the performer.

Meyrowitz was writing before contemporary social platforms, and applying his argument to them requires attention to the particular conditions they introduce. Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2011) examine context collapse on Twitter, where users must negotiate audiences whose expectations differ and whose membership cannot be fully known. Their account of the imagined audience explains how users form a working conception of the people they address. A post may be available to a broad public while its writer composes it with a much smaller group in mind. For the architect on the terrace, that group has contracted almost to a single colleague.

Bernie Hogan’s distinction between performances and exhibitions adds a temporal dimension. In his account, online self-presentation often involves artifacts that remain available beyond the situation in which they were produced, with the platform acting as a curator of what others encounter (Hogan 2010). The architect can put down his phone while the photograph continues circulating, and he can sleep or enjoy the next day’s walk without attending to it. The artifact’s persistence creates an opportunity for continued presentation; his relationship to that opportunity determines how much attention it continues to claim.

The stage with no wings describes the condition that develops when such availability becomes a continuing obligation to appear victorious. At dinner the architect sets his phone face down beside the bread, and twice before the fish arrives he turns it over to see whether the photograph has been viewed. He posts nothing further, and he does not need to. The phone on the tablecloth has become a small window through which the colleague might be looking at any moment, and he eats with the posture of someone who could be seen. The restaurant remains private in an ordinary sense, but he has admitted an observer into his use of it.

The observer may have little interest in the role assigned to her. At home it is midafternoon, and the new partner is on a call with a client about a stalled permit. She thumbs past his photograph while on hold, registers a river and a glass of wine, and has forgotten both by the time the client returns. An imagined audience can nevertheless command attention independently of the actual audience’s response. In Marwick and boyd’s account, imagining an audience helps people address an uncertain public. Within the performance of winning, I am proposing a more specific development: the imagined observer becomes the person whose recognition would resolve the performer’s disappointment. The colleague he imagines studies the photograph and finds her promotion small beside his evening. The colleague who exists is worried about a permit. His evening takes its comparative meaning from the first of these women, who exists only in him.

Research on narcissistic self-regulation helps explain why recognition can acquire this importance. Morf and Rhodewalt (2001) describe a dynamic system in which a grandiose yet vulnerable self-conception is sustained through efforts to shape social feedback. Grapsas and colleagues (2020) organize narcissistic status pursuit around the selection and interpretation of situations that offer opportunities for higher standing, along with close attention to cues about one’s relative position. When the architect checks the view count a third time before dessert, he is reading such a cue, and he is recruiting an enjoyable experience into the work of repairing his position relative to the colleague.

Back and colleagues’ distinction between narcissistic admiration and rivalry clarifies the two purposes his image can serve. Admiration seeks recognition through self-promotion; rivalry defends superiority through antagonism and the devaluation of others (Back et al. 2013). The photograph presents a desirable life. His private comparison gives that presentation a further purpose, since he imagines the colleague confined to her desk while he enjoys a freedom her promotion cannot provide. The comparison belongs to the situation imagined here, and a photograph alone would leave those motives unknown. What connects his conduct to rivalry is the use he makes of her imagined inferiority to restore his own standing.

The difficulty extends beyond the production of flattering images. Consider a second imagined figure, a woman closing the restaurant she has run for eleven years after a lease dispute and a difficult season. She rents a cottage, begins taking long walks, and posts photographs of the garden. The quiet helps her. Then a mutual acquaintance mentions that the landlord believes she has been devastated by the closure. She revises the caption on a photograph she had intended to send to her sister, and it now announces how much lighter she feels. Over the following weeks she checks whether people connected to the landlord have viewed her posts, and news of the dispute prompts another declaration of peace.

Her relief and grief can coexist with these efforts. What draws the recovery back into the contest is her decision to make its appearance answer a particular account of her defeat. The garden begins supplying material for that reply. She chooses photographs partly according to what they might communicate to the landlord, and an afternoon that brings her little comfort can still seem useful if it produces an image of contentment. The experience must now satisfy two demands whose relationship grows increasingly strained: it must help her recover while demonstrating that there was little to recover from.

Withdrawal can become subject to the same pressure. An audience accustomed to regular updates may interpret a sudden absence, and someone concerned with appearing victorious may anticipate that interpretation before leaving. The restaurateur announces a break and explains how well it will serve her. During the break she drafts, in her head, the post she will make on returning, and she revises it on her walks. Her absence has become another part of the account she maintains for observers connected to the dispute. Goffman’s distinction helps us recognize the difficulty: she has gained a place beyond their direct observation, yet continues sustaining the impression she wishes them to receive.

Sam Vaknin’s account of narcissistic supply offers an interpretive language for this dependence. In Malignant Self-Love (1999), he describes a false self sustained through attention and external confirmation, including attention that takes a hostile form. His framework should be distinguished from the empirical models discussed above, and it gives particular emphasis to the dependence of self-experience on the responses of others. Applied here, it helps explain why even the imagined attention of an adversary can remain valuable. When the landlord’s sister likes one of the garden photographs, the restaurateur feels a jolt of satisfaction that outlasts anything the garden itself has given her that week. She wants the landlord to recognize her freedom, and the effort to obtain that recognition keeps him involved in the recovery she presents as evidence of her independence.

The platform makes such presentation convenient, but the demand can survive its absence. Long before social media, George Herbert Mead (1934) examined how people become objects to themselves by taking the attitudes of others. An internal social perspective is part of ordinary selfhood; most people carry some sense of how a friend or a parent might regard what they do. The difficulty considered here concerns the authority granted to a particular observer within it. Walking back to his hotel along the river, the architect finds himself narrating the city to the colleague, explaining the tiled facades and the yellow trams as though she were beside him and could be made to envy them. Her point of view now occupies a position that the actual colleague never sought and cannot reliably fill.

Once established, this relationship changes the sequence of attention. The architect experiences the terrace partly in the future perfect, as something that will have been seen. He considers how the evening will register elsewhere while it is still taking place. The light becomes useful as a setting for the impression he wants to produce, and the wine enters a composition before he tastes it. The habit of photographing an experience is familiar; the pressure here comes from the purpose the photograph must serve. He wants the evening to function as evidence in a continuing case, and evidence has a peculiar relationship to time. An experience lived for its own sake can be finished. Evidence remains open, since it must be kept available, presented again, and defended against rival interpretations for as long as the case continues.

An achievement enlisted for this purpose may offer less satisfaction than its substance warrants, because satisfaction depends partly on letting an achievement close. Months later, when one of his designs is shortlisted for a regional award, the architect reads the announcement twice and then checks whether the colleague has seen it. The project has brought him real pleasure and professional growth, yet its value now waits on a response beyond his control. If she remains silent, he must imagine that the news impressed her or look ahead to the ceremony, where he can at least be seen among the finalists. Actual success can accumulate while the original disappointment continues determining what success is for.

Recovery becomes similarly difficult when its public meaning requires continuous attention. On a gray morning the restaurateur sits at the cottage table with her coffee going cold and lets herself miss the kitchen at six o’clock, the first pans heating and the produce arriving at the back door. For a few minutes the loss is simply a loss. Then she thinks of how the morning would look to people who expect her to be broken, and she goes out to photograph the garden in better light. The cottage offers shelter and quiet, but she keeps measuring her use of them against the impression she hopes to establish, and the work of maintaining that impression occupies the very time she set aside for rest.

Privacy alone offers an incomplete answer. The architect could leave the photograph unposted and spend the evening imagining how impressed his colleague would be if she saw it, in which case the evening would remain evidence, merely unexhibited. He could also publish the photograph, answer a friend’s question about the wine, and return his attention to the river. A public artifact can coexist with private enjoyment when the person permits the artifact a limited claim on the experience. The consequential change concerns the authority of the observer whose recognition has become necessary.

This returns us to the wings. Their practical value lies in giving an actor a place where the demands of a particular scene can be suspended, and that suspension has always been partly a matter of time. An actor offstage stands in the dim blue of the running lights with a water bottle, listening for her cue, and for the length of that interval she can prepare for what comes next with some relief from the audience’s direct observation. Social media complicate this spatial guarantee by letting an impression circulate beyond its original moment, while the performance of winning gives a reason to keep attending to it. The interval itself was never purely architectural, however. It exists wherever an experience can happen before it is assigned meaning, in the brief span between the cold of the wine on the tongue and the thought of how the glass will look. For most people that span is wide enough to live in. For the performer of winning, it has narrowed nearly to nothing, because the meaning arrives first.

For the architect, release would become possible on an evening when the colleague stopped determining what the evening was for. He might still take a photograph. The wine would remain cold and good, and he could enjoy it without waiting for its pleasure to establish his superiority elsewhere. From the outside, the evening might resemble the first. The difference would lie in the attention he could give it, and in his willingness to let something good belong to the life he was living without asking it to settle the contest.

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Further Reading

Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013–1037. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034431

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor.

Grapsas, S., Brummelman, E., Back, M. D., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). The “why” and “how” of narcissism: A process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 150–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619873350

Hogan, B. (2010). The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(6), 377–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610385893

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior. Oxford University Press.

Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic self-regulatory processing model. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1204_1

Vaknin, S. (1999). Malignant self-love: Narcissism revisited. Narcissus Publications. (Subsequent revised editions.)

Related: This essay continues the inquiry begun in Still Taking Bows: Narcissism and the Performance of Winning.