The inner stage: resituating Hochschild’s surface/deep binary from action to interaction

Abstract This article introduces the concept of the inner stage as an alternative to Arlie Hochschild’s influential surface–deep acting binary. Central to her theory of emotional labour, this binary constitutes her main contribution to extending Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology through Stanislavski’s system of acting and Freud’s notion of the signal function. Through a critical analysis of this conceptual architecture, I demonstrate that she draws on flawed readings of Goffman, Freud, and Stanislavski, and that her argument rests on an essentialist ontology of the self that aligns with romantic notions of authenticity and runs counter to the Durkheimian foundations of Goffman’s work. As an alternative, I extend Goffman’s theory of regional behaviour inward by developing the concept of the inner stage to describe a socially mediated region of reflexive performance, continuous with but bounded from outer regions. Re-examining Hochschild’s empirical examples, I reinterpret practices such as self-talk, bodily regulation, and imaginative framing – which she categorises as surface and deep acting – as inner-stage performances, and I relocate the surface–deep binary from the realm of authenticity and action to that of interactional levels and staging. The concept of the inner stage thus advances a Goffmanian framework for theorising interiority, redirecting the sociology of emotions from an exclusive concern with feeling to an analysis of the social organisation of inner life.