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THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY
CHAPTER NINE
THE SOCIAL MAGIC OF RELIGIOUS FAITH Conjunctions of Postmodern Science and Postmodern Theology
A little madness in the Spring is wholesome even for the King;
...Dickenson
INTRODUCTION The realm of magic and make believe is available to human beings as it is not for other creatures of the land. One supposes that pigs and dolphins, lemurs and gibbons, chimps and gorillas have some cognitive appreciation for states that do not now exist which, by virtue of their behavior, could exist. In hunting, courting, nesting, and fleeing, there are future states which, most likely, can be imagined in some vague and furry fashion.
But only humans have a rich and complex imagination in which all sorts of future states; all kinds of impossible states; all kinds of social relations might...just might...come to have some degree of facticity. Science fiction, cinema and theatre, role playing, games, and much in the way of folk lore about history and destiny dwell in the land of make-believe and never was. Yet there are social processes by which that which does not exist; that which has no precursors; that which is discontinuous for all previously existing states of a social group or society--can be called forth.
These social processes extend across the range of social activity and have the uncommon capacity to call into factual existence that which does have any ontological reality prior to the calling forth. This calling forth of social reality, I call social magic. It involves first of all the use of symbols by which to define futures states; by which to communicate and thus coordinate future behavior; by which to elicit the necessary belief, faith, trust and hope that makes the magic work.
Magic and Postmodern Science It is the special province of the Holy that claims for itself the power, the capacity to produce extraordinary changes in both human behavior (through conversion) and in social forms (through miracles). While I will speak to these extraordinary uses of social magic, I want to emphasize the natural, and thus scientific, character of social magic.
In particular, the dynamics revealed by studies of non- linear physical systems offer a most congenial theoretical framework with which to understand the most miraculous of human events. The full range of principles and postulates of postmodern science have yet to be spelled out. In other essays here and in the companion volumes to this work, I have set forth some of the basic elements of postmodern science. For purposes of understanding the magical nature of the Drama of the Holy, it is essential to grasp the wide differences between modern and postmodern science.
In brief, postmodern science offers a knowledge process that respects the variety of causalities that include social magic. Postmodern science respects the fractal nature of truth, its multi-faceted forms and its contradictions. Postmodern science does not privilege any one given social form as the apex of social evolution nor does it privilege a given theoretical paradigm. As I have said elsewhere, the knowledge paradigm within which one works is shaped both by ontology and by epistemology; hope, fact and conception and perception dwell in a fractal basin of truth none of which are completely false; all of which are driven by human desire.
A systematic study of social magic attests to the seamless web of qualitatively differing social and natural phenomena. In the same moment that one appreciates the nonlinear nature of these phenomena, one appreciates the remarkable capacity of human beings to create and transform the social and natural world within which they live and die. If we want to look at social forms clearly and honestly, we must begin to honor the many ways in which human beings can fashion, nonlinearily, the worlds in which they dwell.
The Other Side For the most part of human history, the midline between make believe on the one hand and seriously intended activity has been obscured by beliefs and practices which assume a second, invisible realm richly populated with beings that live forever, with the spirits of the dead, and with the souls of those yet unborn. In the teachings and practices of many, many societies, there existed a wide variety of pathways to the other side of reality.
In other essays, I have set forth some of the social practices by which spirits from the other world might help serve the human quest for knowledge and wisdom; the human plea for help and comfort; the human passion for power over nature and the many forces that assail them. Dance, drugs, chants, prayer, meditation, sex, violence, risk, purification and other sacred supplies have been used to generate the mind-body states that help transport one to and from the realm of the supernatural.
Sacred rituals in wide array are used by humans to celebrate that which exists...that is to say, myths and make-believe are used to sanctify and hallow that which is familiar and being familiar is treated as if it were an eternal part of nature and society. Sometimes, in the face of crises, magic and make- believe are placed in the service of quite new social forms. In a moment, the ways of our forebearers can be set aside and new, hitherto evil, foreign or corrupt ways can be adopted.
These social practices, along with the ordinary forms of discourse and of reality construction entail a nonlinear dynamics that bespeak and subvert the linear, closed, timeless forms of social action which modern science since the time of Newton and before has assumed and has set as the model and mission of the knowledge process.
In this essay, I would like to set forth a wider spectrum of the social uses of magic and make-believe and encourage the development of a comprehensive sociology of make-believe and just pretend. In particular, I want to show and to emphasize the great importance that social magic and make-believe have in the construction of social reality; in changing from one form of social reality to another existing form of social reality as well as contributing to the critical endeavor of human emancipation.
I'd like to present a more general, more historical approach to the uses of magic and make-believe and suggest how this domain of human activity is coopted to non-social purpose; to degradation of both nature and society. I should like to help the reader through a sociological (and a critical) analysis of this realm of play in which we spend so much time and in which we take such delight.
Social Magic I do not confine my construct of 'magic' to those special acts of healing, cursing, or conjuring which is the ordinary content of the concept. Such magical forms as Voodoo, Faith Healing, Spirit travel and claims for supernatural powers are not the subject matter of which I write, yet to the degree these do happen, I suggest that the human capacities which make them happen are quite natural.
The adjective, social, broadens and demystifies the construct such that 'magic' refers to all those activities which call into being that which did not exist in any tangible, physical way. I want to be very clear on this point, I am saying that a social fact does have material, objective, palpable existence...it exists in and of itself as long as people continue to organize their behavior in ways compatible with the prophecy...with the idea of a given social form.
A marriage or a religion has the same ontological facticity as does a forest or a molecule; social facts have objective existence in that they are greater than the sum of their parts and do things that the parts cannot do. The major difference between physical facticity and social facticity is that social facts are created by intending human beings while physical facts exist in and of themselves without human agency (but see below).
It is the human role in calling forth these social facts that I call social magic. I do this in order to account for the realm of the sacred and the drama of the Holy in ways that are not supernatural...even if a superorganic realm is, in fact, created. Again, I want to insist on the factual reality of God(s) and of realm of the sacred. I want to give an account of these in terms of Symbolic Interactional Theory. Such a magic is not the product of invisible spirits from another world...they are the product of human beings; this makes the Holy even more remarkable.
I have made case for the facticity of the god concept in some depth in a companion essay to this one; in brief, the case is made that the god concept is the first step in a series of social processes which real-ize, makes real, that concept. Just as a business firm or a sport team is made real by a series of processes including the pronouncement of the idea, the ritual of incorporation, the subsequent activities compatible with the prophecy as set forth, all social magic is, at once, natural and efficacious. Non-existent things defined as real; interpreted as real; responded as real, have a facticity that is nowise less than the reality of a wave-particle in physics.
For most skeptics and atheists, the variable facticity of
ordinary social forms; marriage, polity, economy, or communal are
not problematic. These are accepted as products of
informationally rich interaction of the sort sociologists speak.
It is the forms of religion which are the subject of doubt and
disbelief. Most people, imbued with modernists' understandings,
exclude religious forms from the self-fulfilling processes when
they do not hesitate to accept the non-religious forms.
I submit that such exclusion is not warranted; that such exclusion takes the assumptions of religious paradigms as given. Modern skeptics take the explanations and self-knowledge of the various religions at face value. Postmodern science does not. Postmodern science, as did modern science before it, offers different ways to understand the facts of nature and society. The case made here as elsewhere is that the drama of the Holy is a human drama and that the reality quotient of any form of social construction is a matter of empirical study.
I have said and say again that the attributes claimed as evidence of the facticity of the god concept exist and provide believers solid grounds for belief; omniscience, omnipotence or omnipresence have factual bases. The wisdom of the collective can be sensed, expressed by the poetic genius of men and women when in states of sensitive receptivity. This is the epistemic correlate of omniscience. The social power of the collective to bind even a child to the norms and values of a society exists and arises through the use of symbols which call forth the same feelings, beliefs, emotions and actions of each in each one which has begun to master the language. This is the epistemic correlate of the abstract notion of omnipotence. Socialization internalizes social norms and values into the personality system of even the youngest members of a society. They take these small wee voices of conscience with them wherever they go; this is the epistemic correlate of the concept of omnipresence.
Each attribute of each god claimed by each separate society has some, fractal, reality. The only remaining issue is one of interpretation. If one accepts the facticity of other social forms produced by social magic, it is fair to interpret these data (social power, social wisdom, social presence, and social conscience) as proof demonstrative of the existence of the Holy. Skeptics and atheists would say, No, one cannot interpret such evidence as proof of the existence of the Holy. I say, Yes. It would be equally as intrusive and as obnoxious to deny this one interpretation (as false) as it would be to deny the social interpretation of, say, Baltimore or General Motors as the forms of reality they claim to be. The truth value of a knowledge claim depends, centrally upon the honoring of such interpretations. Scientists have no license to judge as between interpretations; as scientists they may only report them. As human beings, they may dislike them or prefer to interpret them another way but such other ways are, themselves, creative acts.
Many peoples have claimed that property rights are a form of theft; that no-one can claim to own the sea, the sky, the snow or the animals. Yet American courts have ruled otherwise and a great many people agree. That the Navajo have no words for personal ownership of mountains or waters simply means that they do not interpret such to be forms of reality within that social life world. That the Eskimo have no native words for theft or the first person singular simply means that they interpret the reality which occurs in different ways: when a person takes and keeps something in an Eskimo society without permission or notice to the person who made or uses the item, it is defined as sharing or borrowing rather than crime or theft. When an Eskimo wants to make reference to the bio-physiological entity that is self, s/he says that 'a person thinks that we should do thus and thus;' not that I think thus and thus.
The legitimacy of interpretation is, in postmodern philosophy of knowledge, a matter of shared agreement not only of objective facticity. When we interpret coin or paper as money, it becomes money in the consequence. Any given coin or bill is not money ontologically, apart from the interpretation; it would be presumptuous of an economist to say that the pound, the crown or the shilling is not 'real' money; that only the $US dollar is real. The economist might prefer dollars; might refuse to accept pounds or pesos in payment for services but to deny its status as money is an affront to the reality process.
The interpretation of a child as one's son or daughter is valid apart from the biological heritage of the child. Once defined and presented as one's son, he becomes a son in the consequence. The opposite interpretation of the same child is valid; a child given up for adoption is no longer one' own son in law and in social discourse. When we interpret the relationship of two people as married, it is a marriage in the consequence. Long hours of legal argument are set forth to decide marginal cases but the point remains; all social reality is a matter of interpretation.
The god concept and the associated nonlinear effects of the god concept are, equally, legitimate interpretations. If we interpret social power and social conscience as proof demonstrative and proof presumptive of the god concept, it is as valid an interpretation as any other social endeavor. The confirmed skeptic will point to such claims as the existence of Angels, Devils, or Heavens as counterpoint to the validity of such interpretations. I refer such skeptics to other essays in which the facticity of such are treated; the issue here is the validity of interpretation. One may not go into a socio-cultural formation and tell the people who create and live their own special forms of social reality that they are sick, mad, erroneous or uncivilized. Such assertions bespeak their own cultural arrogance and overwhelming parochialism as well as a profound ignorance of the social construction of reality and the part that interpretation plays in such.
The essay is an easy read and falls readily into one's everyday categories of understanding and acting. Such a survey should help support such activity in a broader, historical and cultural perspective; it should help one understand the great importance of make-believe to the social process and finally it should help consolidate emancipatory opposition to degrading and subversive uses of magic and make-believe. The world of make- believe is too important to human life to be left to private interests for private advantage. It can serve a postmodern theology that enriches and expands the human project.
I will map out the world of make-believe and just-pretend; offer some clues about how to tell the difference between the two spheres...and then discuss the profound importance that make- believe and just pretend have as a social life-world for the human project. I offer a discussion and warning about the commodification of magic and make-believe. Finally, I will cast a spell on the reader that will take us into the realm of the make believe as we think about how postmodern theology might look.
All of the reflections I make upon magic and make-believe are founded upon the assumptions and processes of symbolic interactional theory. As above, I argue that the reality- creating process involves a certain social magic which, without linear physical causality, creates social facts out of physiological, psychological and biochemical facts. We will start with some discussion on the nature of social magic then go on to the role it has in the social enterprises mentioned above.
SOCIAL MAGIC I have used the concept, social magic, in several
papers which discuss the construction of social
reality. I want to emphasize that there is nothing supernatural
about social magic. It is proper to call the wondrous
transformations which take place, magical, since the ordinary
canons of linear causality simply do not hold. Physical reality
can neither be created nor dismantled in the same ways that
social reality can be...yet social reality is a subset of
physical reality.
In social magic, a group a people simply pronounce a form of reality to exist, and Lo!, it comes into being. That is true of all forms of social reality from simple parties and games to the most august of social forms: coronations, inaugurations, papal investitures, as well as the foundation of new nations, new religious organizations, new marriages and new businesses.
Interpretation Interpretation is a central social- psychological process in all forms of social magic including religious practice. When a set of behaviors are interpreted as comprising a particular social form, they are, ontologically, a valid instance of that form. Thus knowing and being are joined. Modern science tends to separate knowing and that which is known; postmodern science tends to unite them in varying dialectics.
The geography of Interpretation is normative. What set of activities is counted as a marriage or a vote or a husband varies widely as between cultures but tends to stabilize around the same set within a culture. The pattern, in the phase-space of a given person or group, takes the form of a torus; a doughnut shaped configuration which is recognized and interpreted as a legitimate instance of a given social form.
That pattern arises through symbolic interaction in much the same way that specific words are stabilized. One learns to use a word through many iterations of word use and through much feedback from others in the way of language or behavioral response. One learns the range of possible interpretations through negative and positive feedback loops which act as limiting events for the word or interpretation at hand. Others are always involved in the interpretation of a word or a whole epoch. Thinking, speaking, or interpreting is never a solitary endeavor.
The geometry of Interpretation is open. The boundaries of all social forms are, ontologically, fractal but interpretation casts them inside or outside a given normative pattern. Within a culture, many husbands do many of the same things but all husbands do things that are unique and 'strange.' Counting practices, based upon interpretive protocols yield a binary grouping--calling one set of marriages as 'real' while calling a few of the same pattern as 'false.'
The geography and geometry of Interpretation is variable. For some kinds of behavior, the distribution of events that constitute a legitimate instance of a specific social form is tight (the curve that describes its distribution is leptokurtotic) while some behaviors can have a very loose pattern of distribution within a population (its curve is platykurtotic). What counts as a vote in some elections is rigidly constructed in some situations; in others, a vote is very loose.
The dynamics of Interpretation are nonlinear. Many quite different unit acts are interpreted as instances of a given social fact. What is counted as a doctor in one society can be very different in another. What is counted as a family in one society can be very different in another. What is counted as a crime in one society can be counted as a lawful act in the same society.
Interpretation is fractal. The basin of all things interpreted as legitimate instances of a given social form has several regions; in one region, the acts that comprise the 'fact' is similar. In another region the acts are similar to each other but very different from those in another area of phase-space. Religion serves as a case in point. Among all religious services called Baptist services, there can be an astonishingly different series of activities yet one could recognize the Baptist pattern. However if one were to attend a Mormon or a Catholic service after being normalized to Baptist services, one would find it very strange. Jewish services are even more different yet we count all such sets of activities as legitimate instances of religion.
Given the dynamics of interpretation, one can begin to see the quite natural character of reality creating processes which, for many, are magical and outside the boundaries of normal science. Indeed, most modern scientists look upon these reality creating processes in society with little more than scorn; calling the study of such, 'soft science,' in comparison with the data they present and the generalizations they present which they interpret as 'hard' science, i.e., as real science. But what is at hand is neither hard nor soft science but difficult science. Where humans beings are concerned, the dynamics of their thought and behavior is such that it produces a great mysterious realm. Modern scientists feel frustration, contempt and anger at such untidy dynamics while postmodern scientists respond with more respect coupled with awe, delight and fascination that such a tremendous mystery could unfold.
Mysterium Tremendum Social magic is used in the Drama of the Holy; after the realm of the Holy is created as a social fact, then the special rituals and ceremonies within the realm of the sacred take on their own efficacy as magic. Healing, cursing, invocation of spirits as well as the experience of those spirits are facilitated as the realm of the Holy is constituted by intending, understanding, believing, trusting, desiring cooperative members of a religious solidarity.
The efficacy of social magic arises from what Rudolph Otto calls the numinous of religion. The numinous refers to the feeling of awe and power that arises from the transformations made in the Drama of the Holy. The numinous arises from the effects of psychogenic substances, discussed elsewhere, which produce extraordinary mind-body states which are then interpreted as proof presumptive of contact or connection with the realm of the Holy. Dancing, chanting, danger, risk or other activity can trigger the release of endorphins which alter body states and induce euphoria. Alcohol, hashish, cocaine, and other complex molecules provide their own intoxicants with which to suppress normal body-mind states and to induce new, extra-ordinary states.
Such numinous experiences include extra-ordinary mental feats such as visions, voices and motivations. The visions and voices may work in such a wondrous way as to mystify and enchant people who experience or observe them. When in such extra- ordinary state, insights, generalizations, solutions to intractable problems and inspirations come which are seldom seen when in ordinary body-states. People in such states report an overwhelming sense of clarity, of power, of capacity. People in such states can handle pain and shock beyond the ordinary limits of their endurance. They can perform physical feats that stretch the limits of their body mechanics. They are motivated to do that which seems impossible. Sometimes they succeed.
When they succeed, they are filled with awe and wonder that they, ordinarily quite simple and limited persons, could experience such extra-ordinary and limitless understandings. When they succeed, they provide direct evidence of the miraculous which can be and often is interpreted as divine intervention; divine inspiration; divine strength. Miracles happen often enough to warrant belief in their own cultural interpretations; their interpretations return to generate and shape the visions and voices as well as the strength and the courage to do that which seems impossible.
All of the effects of psychogens in the context of religion generate a feeling of wonder and fathomless mystery that Otto called the mysterium tremendum. Once people make the interpretation of that which they do indeed see, feel, hear and do as evidence of the Holy, the Holy becomes a social fact and a social institution nowise different from other organizing, motivating, inspiring social facts: family, polity, economy, recreation or communal. The sole difference between such social facts is that the one involves linear dynamics while the other involves dynamics which are nonlinear enough to call them, fairly, miraculous.
Social magic is, thus, the heart of the drama of the holy by which human beings create and invest desire in the social process. The drama of social magic involves many of the other dramatic activities I have discussed elsewhere among which are the various solidarity supplies used in the creation of the holy, the various equipment and instruments used, specific activities oriented to the drama of the Holy as well as the social practices a people use to protect pathways to the realm of the Holy.
Again, while social magic is mysterious in its discontinuities still it is quite natural in its workings and quite wonderful in its effects. Humans can do social magic because they can think, imagine, believe, and trust; not because there is an 'other' world peopled with gods, angels, devils, faeries, unquiet spirits or impersonal will. Social magic is quite a human capacity.
Elsewhere I have discussed Chaos theory and the nonlinear dynamics it surveys. I have made the point that Chaos findings support a postmodern science that permits changes in phase-state that are entirely foreign to modern science. Hence the kind of nonlinear dynamics used in calling forth social reality and in effecting the 'miracles' of healing and redemption of which premodern religion speaks are well within the logics of natural events. It is this openness and flexibility of Chaos theory along with other emerging perspectives in physics, astronomy, meteorology, human physiology, and economics that define a postmodern science most accommodating to theology in ways modern science could not.
Other aspects of social life, too, are infused with magic of this sort...things defined as real emerge in nonlinear fashion. These transformations, however nonlinear they may be, are not part of the mysterium tremendum nor do they invoke the luminous. They happen all the time. Once a woman has been converted, through social magic, into a wife; her transformations to and from the mind-body-behavioral state of wifeness is ordinary. At one time she is a clerk, professor, police-officer and at the next instant, she is wife and mother.
Once a person is transformed into a doctor through the social magic of graduation and confirmation by agents of the Holy and agents of the state, it is an everyday matter for that person to arise, go to a clinic, put on a jacket and embody the status- role of a physician. It is not unusual for patients to have faith and be respond to their belief in the physician and thus to increase their chances or improve their rates of healing. It is unremarkable that the same person, leave the clinic, travel home and embody the status-role of parent, spouse and friend without contamination by other status-roles.
When we define some as a priest or a physician and when the very belief in that person-as-healer works to heal the body and the spirit, then it is proper to speak of magic. The very same person doing the very same things with the very same tools...operating solely in the realm of physical reality could not heal. The healing takes place and it takes place by virtue of the fact that we have said some magical words conferring upon a person the power to heal.
Paradigms Switches In another place, I have set out the terms of paradigm formation using Ramsey theory, Gestalt theory and socio-cultural imperatives. Apart from physical feats and psychological states which exhibit nonlinear dynamics, there are paradigm switches which deserve the name of miracle.
When a whole people enter into such extra-ordinary mind-body states, profound social changes can occur in those areas of human endeavor which otherwise are predictable and traditional. Overnight political systems are undone; new marriage forms adopted; property relations reconstructed or religious conversions made. These switches in social paradigm are facilitated by recourse to the Drama of the Holy.
When a society is subjected to extraneous destabilizing factors; drought, war, famine, quake, tornado or flood, the ordinary uses of social magic are made more difficult. The transformations to social roles, to social occasions and to social institutions are rendered problematic. When societies are subject to internal destabilizers, everyday nonlinear transformation are, also, made more difficult. When such impediments to ordinary social magic present themselves, recourse is made to the drama of the Holy to help restore or to transcend such impediments. The history of social movements, of migrations, of underground structures bespeak recourse to the drama of the Holy. The history of science itself is part of the discontinuous paradigm transformations made to deal with both internal and external exigencies.
Among the internal destabilizing factors are bifurcations in health, status, income or security of members of a populations. When differences in health or income exceed critical limits, it becomes difficult for the limiting feedback processes to work and ensure near-to-stable dynamics. Income differences make it difficult for a market economy to work since some set of people cannot enter the market and get response to their demands. Status differences defeat that symbolic interaction which shapes and limits power differences; the stratification of power disenfranchises women, minorities, children and the aged. When they cannot register their needs in the political process of market economies, constraints on the powerful fail and as Lord Acton put it, absolute power corrupts.
Absolute powerlessness also corrupts; some of those who are excluded from feedback (and stabilizing) loops turn to pretheoretical (and destablizing) activities; suicide, crime, desertion, migration, opportunism and nihilism. All these parataxic activities are the epistemic correlates of that which chaos theorists call far-from-stable dynamics and what most people call chaos.
Bifurcations in social dynamics hurl the most ancient societies into unpredictable and unexpected states. But, for everyday purposes, pronouncements of a thing as real becomes real in the consequence if and only if they do, in fact, become embodied in stable and predictable ways; ways that are within the boundaries of shared meanings, interpretations and expectations.
At its heart, social magic requires that the central dimensions of human behavior: ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of acting...all these varied forms of human behavior converge to fulfill the incantation, the prediction, the intention, the dreadful majesty or the trivial point of a social prophecy. We combine our cognitive abilities to think of and to imagine with our emotional abilities to want and to desire with the physical abilities to orchestrate our movements and speech patterns within the logics of the prophecy and, wonder of wonders, it is fulfilled. Out of nothing, comes pattern and purpose.
The most powerful forms of social magic are, of course, those deeply embedded in the drama of the Holy. Each use of social magic discussed below is connected, sometimes more and often less, with the drama of the Holy. One cannot readily separate the secular and more sacred uses of social magic since they feed into and feed back to each other. A case of imaging in the remission of cancer is offered as evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit; the sudden awareness of danger to a loved one in distant city gives one pause; an unintended awakening to the power of spiritual healing during a casual visit to a religious service shakes open the human soul to belief and to commitment.
Over the past 400 years, secularization has pushed the more dramatic moments of social magic into smaller and smaller social niches. Yet for all it is touted, secularization is but a thin veneer on the social organum. Most of that which is important to the human project remains firmly connected to the drama of the Holy. Trivial uses of social magic by religious functionaries abound and tend to trivialize the drama of the Holy. Blessing of skis, toys, bombs or a prayer at a football game testifies to the diminishing importance of the drama of the Holy.
One would not put social magic to such trivial use in other centuries; it is seen as an awesome power not lightly to be invoked. It would be seen as blasphemy and condemned as heresy. Yet ordinary events are steeped in the magic of the Holy; indeed it is the mystery and majesty of such magic that gives the Holy its most dramatic moments. Weddings, christenings, funerals, as well as anniversaries, birthdays as well as the hundred natural ills to which all families are subject call forth the magic in the drama of the Holy. Everyday salutations such as Goodbye offer a blessing, a prophecy and an appeal to the Holy for safe travel.
All in all social magic is an integral part of human discourse and human creative action. I suspect that such social magic is the single most important ingredient of human being; that the capacity to produce nonlinear, acausal social facts is a better intellectual tool with which to separate humans from other species than are biological features such as the opposable thumb; such behavioral traits such as the use of tools; or such physiological feats such as communication. Let us then look at the social geography in which magic and make believe are deployed to undergird and underwrite the human project.
The Geography of Social Magic Social magic creates several realms in its social geography:
1) The realm of the Holy: all its words, costumes,
beverages, furnishings, cups, candles, crosses, stars,
and instruments are imbued with feelings of awe, wonder
and mystery. There are many places which are defined
separately as sacred social space.
2) Ordinary social life: a great variety of social forms:
roles, statuses, groups, occasions, institutions,
nations and transnational bodies are created by social
magic in which nonlinear transformations are viewed to
be normal and natural.
3) Make-believe and just-pretend. Social magic is used to
define many of the things we do, in fact do, as games,
rehearsals, practice, play or simply, not-there.
4) Ordinary non-social life. Prisons, orphanages, asylums
and schools are interpreted as less than 'reality.'
One is treated as a nonperson while inside such space;
one is thought to have entered the 'real' world when
one is rehabilitated, adopted, healed, or educated.
5) Underground structures. In alienated societies, many
forms of reality are said to be underground; many forms
of sexuality, religion, economics or political activity
are said to be illegitimate and thus, not of the same
facticity as 'straight' society.
Social magic is used to make several journeys and transportations between regions of its social geography:
6) social magic is used to make the shift between one
realm and the others.
7) social magic is used to redefine whether a given event
is in one realm or another.
8) social magic is used to terminate reality in all
realms.
9) social magic is used to make revolutionary social
change within 'seriously intended' realities.
In ordinary social life, social magic should be used primarily for creating and disassembling social occasions rather than changing the internal logics of those social occasions arbitrarily and capriciously. A Supreme Court should be supreme in its ability to rule on the logical coherence of the application of grounding principles but not on the content of the principles themselves...for that the people, collectively and historically, should be supreme since they are the ones who have to live out their lives within those logics.
Wherever social magic occurs, it is an incredibly wonderful capacity human beings have; no wonder they believe in gods...everywhere they look they see things not possible for other animals. Everywhere they turn, they see dynamics not accommodated by the logics of modern science. Every time there is great need, someone rises to the occasion, is inspired and speaks new truths. I have reviewed the Drama of the Holy elsewhere as it involves the god concept and the realm of the sacred. I want to focus on the ordinariness of social magic in everyday life now.
Creating 'Ordinary' Reality The creation of social reality is the subject matter of the founding texts of symbolic interactional theory: Mead, Cooley, Blumer, Goffman, and many other seminal thinkers have worked this territory excellently well. We all understand the general form by which social magic is used to call forth the ordinary forms of social reality in which we live out our lives as members of and creators/recreators of a given social life-world.
In the reality construction process, two or more persons come together, define a situation with one or more symbol systems: voice, clothing, body, or behavioral language...and then orchestrate their behavior in ways compatible with the socially defined structure of norms which are appropriate to a given kind of social reality.
In general, in the construction of ordinary social reality, we use a four-part social magical process in which we come together and:
1) define a social fact with various symbol systems;
2) validate that fact as a legitimate instance of a
category with belief and trust;
3) embody it in actions and interpret them as authentic;
4) interpret and thus reify it, that it to say, locate it
in the realm of that-which-is-real.
Then, using the same symbolic resources in reverse, we disengage from that social event...until the time comes to reconstitute it. Social magic is central to the defining part of the social process and the embodying part of the social process as well as the process of disengaging and dismantling social realities.
With this magic, we proclaim the right to be a social actor engaged in a social role within a social occasion. With this magic, we proceed to be...really be doctors, professors, waitresses, mothers, sons, priests, and presidents. With this magic, we create hospitals, schools, restaurants, homes, churches, and governments. With this magic, we recess and reconvene. It is magic but it is commonplace.
The forms of social reality we create using the social magic of symbolic interaction are real. That is, they have the same facticity, the same reality quotient as do other, non-magical forms of reality. A social event, produced by social magic has the same facticity as an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organism or a biome.
The major difference in the reality quotient of social facts and physical facts is that social reality is self-consciously created and may have degrees of facticity while physical reality exists apart from volition and activity of its constituent parts. Physical reality may be more a binary phenomena: at the scale of observation we make in everyday life, physical reality is either there or not there. The same cannot be said of all forms of social reality. A marriage or a church service or a class meeting may be partially realized.
the Realm of Make-believe. The same processes are used to create the realm of make-believe and never-will-be-real. The major difference is that we add a sub-routine to the prophecy saying that this is 'only' just pretend...and it does not have a reality quotient such that one could fairly call it real. In the four-part process above, only the fourth dimension; the reification process, is missing. Instead of reifying it as part of the natural world, we keep it dereified...we understand it to be 'only' make-believe.
When we play cards or volley-ball, we understand that it is just for fun and not a business nor an activity that counts. When we lie and fabricate inside the realm of make-believe, it does not discredit our moral worth as it would inside 'real' life. When we act foolish or take the role of a child, another gender or a long dead person, we are not defined as mad nor is our behavior interpreted as an 'illness'.
People who take games, sports, tom-foolery and whimsy too seriously are thought to be boors and poor sports. If one becomes compulsive about winning make-believe activities, one is defined as ill and is given psychiatric counseling. If one refuses to play or to engage in antic sport, one is said to be a boor; if one takes seriously intended reality too seriously, one is said to be a martinet and a very sick person.
Nonetheless it takes nonlinear dynamics to create and to depart from make-believe and just pretend. Such journeys to non- real time and non-real space are part of the ordinary social magic used to create more seriously understood lines of action.
NonSocial Life In contemporary American social geography, there are a great many institutions in which persons do not have social status; they are treated as less than whole persons with all the rights of adults to create the forms of social reality that are held to be sacred. Among these nonsocial forms one finds all the 'total' institutions surveyed so well by Goffman.
Prisons, asylums, armies, orphanages, hospitals, schools, and many workplaces are devoid of many social processes found in ordinary social life. Cadres in total institutions treat persons in their biological and physiological capacities. Persons are feed, housed, clothed. They are given orders and put through mechanized routines. They are forbidden marriage, political agency, religious agency, or economic agency. They are denied solidarity supplies and are forbidden the use of sacred words, instruments or activities so endemic to authentic social life.
Underground Structures Interpretation plays a large role in the creation and lived experience of underground structures. Elsewhere I have set forth many of the conditions under which underground structures arise. The most general point to be made is that, when those institutions defined as legitimate are harmful to the interests or well being of some part of the population and when that group are not allowed to create new forms and cannot easily migrate to legitimate their own forms of reality, they often live underground.
The reality of underground structures depends upon both those who are excluded and those doing the exclusion. If social power or physical power are not deployed against the 'illegitimate' forms, then they are very visible. When law and religion combine to force people into social forms alien to their values or views, then the underground structures become quite secret.
Nonsocial Institutions In some time-space realm between being born and dying, each of us are placed, by social magical processes, inside institutions which are less than social. Most societies define younger people as children until they are socialized and pass through a rite of passage. After such passages, the same people have social standing and are permitted to help create the more sacred forms of reality; marriage, church, science and medicine.
That holding time usually runs from eight to 12 years depending upon the society. The holding institutions are age graded and the incumbents are treated as less than whole persons. In 'modern' society, the age grade has greatly lengthened. Psychiatrists are not treated as 'really' psychiatrists until they are 35 or 40 years of chronological age. Twelve year old girls and 13 year old boys are interpreted as adults in other societies--and behave as adults in the consequence.
Those persons who fail to use social magic in socially appropriate ways are said to be sick or mad or evil and are sent to other, nonsocial institutions for magical healing. The procedures by which people are stripped of social identity and remanded to nonsocial institutions are themselves forms of social magic. An act is interpreted as a crime and a person is defined as a criminal and thus, magically, transformed into a prisoner.
Persons who are not claimed by kinship groups are defined as orphans and are sent to nonsocial institutions called orphanages. Children with mental or physical abilities that are markedly different from others are often, but not always, singled out to be defined as nonpersons. Those with Down's Syndrome, those with cerebral palsy or those with less ordinary mental capacities are defined, magically, as nonpersons and relegated to nonsocial institutions.
Transitions Social magic is used to make transitions from
one realm to the other. In rites of passage,
a young woman or a young man will be taken out of the realm of
make-believe, trial run, or getting ready and will be given
status in the world of seriously intended reality. Students will
graduate, i.e., move from one grade to another...the final grade
change being a qualitative leap from a non-person to a full
person in the eyes of society and the law.
People who have lived together as a couple will decide to get 'married.' The unit acts and the dimensions of behavior will be pretty much the same...at least for a while. The only difference is that, after the magic of a wedding, they will 'really' be married. Trial separations are the obverse process.
Articles of Incorporation mark a boundary change for a business. When a group of people incorporate a business in capitalism, the business 'becomes' a legal entity. When people organize their behavior as-if there were, in fact, a corporate entity in existence, then a social fact is created. In similar fashion, when a business closes at 5 p.m., it resides in the land of may-be until next morning, it reopens, reconstitutes itself.
Social magic is used to put persons in total institutions and to strip them of any previous social identities they may have once gained. It takes magic to award social standing and social honor; it takes magic to strip them away. In more communal societies the stripping process is given great dramatic moment. In mass societies the transitions between social and nonsocial life are much more pro forma; in some jurisdictions, court hearings and sentencing average less than five minutes per case. Still, most of the time, for most such divestments, there is the pomp and circumstance of weighty affairs.
Realms of Being Social magic is used to reconsider the social standing of a person, an act or an institution. When a given act is normative, it takes magical work to render it outside the boundaries of decent human endeavor. In many societies, ordinary body functions are treated as though they discredited one's social presence. Yet the bleeding of the hands of a Holy man or woman is recast into the realm of sacred events. For many years, smoking was deemed a mark of male status; over the years, women have desanctified that practice. If a person of 13 or 14 drives a car on public highways, it is said to be 'illegal' apart from the physical capacity of that person yet the same person can drive a tractor or a truck on a farm.
In more profound cases, one finds the 1954 US Supreme Court ruling which set aside racial privileges as normative. Abortion is a political football which is bounced back and forth between the realm of the Holy and the realm of the profane. The right to vote is always a matter of social magic; age, gender, religion and other sociological criteria are used to guide such magical proceedings.
Persons are pushed back and forth between realms of being by social magic as well. Migration officials declare one a citizen or a 'visitor.' Political functionaries turn 'freedom fighters' into 'terrorists' as coalitions change. Courts use their own social power to transform children into wards of the court or to return them to their 'natural' parents. In a medical hearing, a person might be defined as 'insane' or as 'criminal.' A given form of behavior might be interpreted as a clinical entity or as a criminal act. In a courtroom trial, a death might be interpreted as an 'accident' rather than a 'murder.' In a city assembly or election, an annexation might occur which makes a residential area 'really' part of Detroit.
In medical proceedings, in court hearings, in conventions, meetings, assemblies and in private discourse, that which occurs is moved from one status to another; from one realm to another.
When one people conquer another, the gods of the conquered people are converted into devils while the rituals of the earlier religion are redefined as blasphemy. Use of the sacred supplies is redefined as corruption. Old ways of organizing marriage, economy or politics are redefined as 'primitive,' 'barbarism,' or 'underdeveloped.' All these are recasting procedures which take a given event out of one realm and place it in another. The processes by which this is done are not mechanical processes following linear and unchanging laws of nature or society; it is a magic-al process following temporary and irregular principles of casting.
Whole organizations and whole institutions are moved around the checkerboard of social life. The Communist Party has been declared both legal and illegal. The KKK ran candidates for state and federal office and now dwells in a never-never land between legitimate and illegitimate being. Standard Oil, AT&T, and many other corporations have been praised and condemned. Prohibition was a form of political magic which held that the consumption of alcohol by working class persons was outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Plural marriage among Mormons was declared illegal.
Whole regions are annexed by cities. Whole nations are annexed to stronger nations. Plebiscites are used to determine forms of government. Court hearings are used to proclaim the metes and bounds of lots and fields. All of these are magical dispositions of social events whose facticity had been presumed and in that presumption, reified.
Terminations In academia, when a class is dismissed, it has no existence, ontologically, until the next time it meets, coalesces as an instance of that academic event and does, in fact, operate within the logics of a class in history, psychology or physics; whatever, the course might be. Thus social reality is episodic in ways the physical reality is not...thus bespeaking the magical quality of social reality not found in physical reality.
Going on vacation is a boundary transition. When we get on a plane and go to England, we are 'visiting,' we do not really live there even though, biologically and physiologically, we are living there. When we come back from vacation, we are, once again, living seriously. Neither the British nor the U.S. State Department regard American tourists as being there in sociological terms...to the same degree that British subjects exist as part of the social facticity of the nation.
Business firms are dissolved; empires are set aside; funerals mark the end of social roles. Doctors are de-certified; lawyers are disbarred; priests are defrocked; spouses are divorced. Ordinary citizens, not much different from others, are put through a criminal trial and if found 'guilty,' are stripped of most social rights and herded into warehouses where they are stored for some number of months or years. Ordinary citizens, marginally different from most others, are put through a medical hearing and if found mentally incompetent are warehoused in total institutions.
Transformations from make-believe and not-for-real happen all the time. This social movement provides the grounds for much in the way of fraud. We can pretend we are friends when we do not do friendly things. We can act as-if we were married when a marriage has ceased to exist in any behavioral sense. We can act as-if we were teachers and professors when, in point of social fact, we are not. The sociology of fraud emerges in the dynamics of transition from and to such worlds.
Terminating Social Reality The same magical activities that produce and reproduce social reality; that produce and reproduce make-believe, also are involved in terminating them. Sometimes there is a dereification ceremony that puts a permanent end to that social fact: disbarment, divorce, courts martial, and funerals all permanently dereify a social form/social process.
Every society has an inventory of permissible dereification routines. When these routines are not followed, serious consequences occur. To remarry without divorce is seen to be serious in some societies. To bury without a funeral creates great outrage in many societies. To practice medicine after decertification in one state raises questions of the reality quotient of something called a doctor in another state where that person might be licensed to practice medicine.
There are no legitimate processes for ending some forms of social reality. When religions are forbidden, we speak of repression. When nations are conquered, we speak of colonialism; when cultures are obliterated, we speak of assimilation; when socio-cultural groups are eliminated, we speak of genocide. There is the endemic assumption that some forms of social reality will always continue.
In similar fashion, we tend to get very upset when some forms of social reality are treated as if they were in the realm of make-believe rather than 'really' exist. To mock patriotism or to disbelieve in God or to pretend that one is not a parent is shocking to the sensibilities of many in most situations. One should not end those social facts nor should one move them to the realm of just-pretend. All this tends to reproduce existing forms of social reality.
Revolution A Revolution is a discontinuous change in the standing of some form of social reality. Social magic is used to proclaim a new state; to proclaim a new government; to proclaim qualitatively new ways of doing economics, politics, religion, marriage, or a new society. But more than social magic is needed for most social revolutions. Social magic depends upon social power for its efficacy; revolutions often need physical power or economic power to supplement social magic.
When Napoleon placed his brother on the throne of Mexico, he used force instead of magic. When the United States of America was established, physical force was used to enforce the social magic of the Constitutional Convention. When a socialist government of Cuba was announced, physical force was used to make the revolution and to preserve it. When Joseph Smith proclaimed the new Mormon religion, social magic worked to legitimate it while physical power was used, unsuccessfully, to repress it.
Social magic is a centrally important form of human behavior. It is central to the creation of the Holy and of its allied domains. Seriously intended social reality as well as most activity in the realm of make-believe are protected by sanctification routines which are part and parcel of social magic.
Just now, I would like to mention those activities which are clearly within the boundaries of make-believe and just-pretend in order to fill the concept up with everyday activity in which we all engage. Then I will go on to discuss how social magic is used to mediate both realms: that of 'real life,' and that of only 'make-believe.'
The Realm of Make-Believe and Not-For-Real Watching television,
reading books,
bowling, playing softball, fooling around, some parts of
religious activity, as well as going on vacations, all are very
different in meaning and in social consequences from that which
we call "reality." The realm of make-believe and seriously
intended social behavior have connections that must be explored
in the effort to sort out the relationship between magic, make-
believe and ontologically existing social reality.
Billions of dollars of resources are allocated to not-for- real activity. Play and game equipment, land for parks, recreation, wilderness areas, for cinema, drama, novels, for advertising, deception, and manipulation of whole populations of customers, citizens, employees, "enemy" nations as well as audiences.
Prisons, asylums, schools and other establishments are built and staffed to contain human beings whose sexual or economic or organizational activity is understood "not to count" in the same way as are "real" marriages, "real" business activity, and "real" politics. Disneyland, Las Vegas and Hollywood are different from Duluth, Peoria, and Austin, Texas.
In war-time governments-in-exile claim to be the "real" government of France, Greece or Poland. Children play school, play at killing Indians or enemies, play at building and at healing, at child-rearing and at selling things. Practices, rehearsals, trial runs, experiments as well as "mistakes," "errors," "failures," not-really-meant activity, and "I'm sorry" involve complicated lines of behavior using resources, energy, time and talent of varying numbers of persons whose activity is understood not to stand as a "real" instance of social behavior.
Football teams scrimmage but the results are not "counted" in the official records. People live together but are not "really" married. Airplanes are shot down by military actions but these are not counted as an act of war but as a "mistake." One hundred and sixty people die in a hotel in Omaha due to faulty construction but it doesn't really count as murder.
Orchestras spend hours and days rehearsing but the "real" performance doesn't happen until Saturday evening at 8:00 p.m. There are time-offs, time-outs, recesses, coffee breaks, out-of- bounds, over-time, half-time, weekends, and retirements. What happens in these time-space continua does not count as seriously intended, real, countable and accountable behavior.
The world of not-for-real is huge, complex, costly, and occupies the time, energy, genius, and resources of a large percent of those who live in a given geographical space. How that physical space is filled with social space is most interesting. The basic process involves a form of magic I shall call social magic.
The first task in exploring such social space is to learn how to distinguish seriously intended social reality from that which is not-to-be-taken-seriously. There are several differentiating characteristics by which one can tell in which space one finds oneself.
Differences If there is much human activity which passes by sociologists as well as by ordinary people who are involved, the salient question becomes how is one to tell the difference between "real" social activity and only just-pretend. There are several qualitative (and folk) methods by which the midline between reality and pretend may be found by the social scientist (or the innocent member of society).
Since exactly the same behavior may be involved in both spheres of human activity, it is important to have some clues by which one can know, unambiguously, when one is in the realm of the not-for-real and when one is in the 'real world.' There are several, varying characteristics of "real" life by which a socially adept person can know which is which.
1) Firstly, play and pretend do not have a history, a time
or a place.
One can start or stop at any point of time. One can
relive and repeat episodes. One can live outside of
socially constructed time. Vacations, time-outs,
recesses and breaks stop social time and initiate
hyper-time and hyper-space.
2) A second test of the fictive quality of social action
is whether a meta-discourse is necessary.
If we have to explain to people what is going on or
just who is playing which part, then it is most
probably just pretend. In 'real life,' we are doctors,
crooks, quarterbacks or professors by virtue of a
formal rite of passage and by specific role allocation
procedures. In make-believe, these have to be assigned
and enacted anew for each fictive social event.
3) Sanity rules do not apply in sorting out the 'reality
quotient' of a social event in the realm of make-
believe.
One can play at being Napoleon, the Virgin Mary or
"Mom," but should one assert a serious claim to be
Napoleon or Mom, that person would be judged insane.
4) Another test of "real" behavior is whether one must
accept the responsibility for what happens there.
If one is "on the job," one gets paid. But even if one
is physically, psychologically, and interactively
"there" but has "checked out," then one doesn't get
paid even though s/he may be doing exactly the same
things in both instances. A person who kills another
by "accident" is not held fully responsible for that
activity.
5) A fifth test of make-believe is whether it has
material consequences in the real world.
At a wedding rehearsal, people do much the same thing
as at the "real" ceremony, but they do not move in
together, file joint tax returns or celebrate
anniversaries until after the "real" wedding.
6) Finally, the whole retinue of judges, advocates,
historians, referees, juries, as well as rules, laws,
and hearings are deployed to make a determination
whether an act is a lawful instance of an abstract
social category. In make-believe, there is great
license to call an object something that it is not
usually called; paper can be called money, a book can
be called a ball. Interpretations are loosened up as
well. We can make believe we are giants or ghosts or
angels in the realm of make-believe but not in the
realm of seriously intended reality.
In the sections which follow, I would like to do two things: firstly, I shall explore how the world of make-believe is connected to the "real" world. Secondly, I shall try to show the second sphere of constructed reality is, increasingly, used against the human project.
Reality, Pretend and Play: Connections Human beings spend a
good deal of time in
play, recreation and other leisure time activities. The popular
understanding is that play, games and parties refresh one for
better, healthier involvement in the "real" world; that of
serious endeavor. In this understanding, work, school, family
life, war and commerce are the primary activities of human beings
while play and pretend are the secondary restorative, supportive
activities.
I would propose that, in well organized societies, there is a rich dialectic relationship between social reality and social play which creates and recreates both domains. It may be necessary to abort the dialectic in a marginal society in which physical survival is continuously in jeopardy. In such a society, make-believe, must be subsidiary to 'real life.' However, in a world with adequate production and distribution systems, the preference for "real" life over the realm of make- believe can transform into reality and non-reality in partnership with each other.
The question is not whether human beings are naturally serious, sober and industrious workers (Homo economicus) on the one hand or whether they are naturally players, gamesters and jokesters (Homo ludens) on the other; they can be neither or both. The better question is how to facilitate both within the larger logics of a praxis society. The better question is how to organize the resources essential to life as to permit both worlds to emerge dialectically in ways which are satisfying to human beings and non-exploitative of gender, racial, ethnic or other groups nor exploitative of the bio-sphere that supports all human life.
Non-real time, non-real roles, non-real definitions of an occasion, non-real norms and sanctions, make-believe roles and just-pretend institutions are related to serious, real social life in a number of ways:
1) First and foremost, play and pretend is used by all
societies to prepare children for "real" life.
Socialization dwells in the land of just pretend.
2) Secondly, play is used to rehearse and perfect ways of
embodying real life as institutionalized.
3) Make-believe is used to create social experiments which
offer close alternatives to institutional life and thus are
the repository of evolutionary social change.
4) Make-believe is used as a storehouse of folk wisdom in
the form of fables, myths, proverbs, epigrams, cliches, and
parables in the event the need for such kinds of activity
arises in real life.
5) Make-believe and just pretend are used as morality tales
to celebrate and venerate existing social forms.
6) Make-believe can be used as a refuge and as an escape
from alienating reality.
7) Play and not-for-real are also used for diversion and
distraction from real life. Olympic games as well as
television channels offer flight from seriously-intended
realities.
8) And, often pretend, what if, and just for fun are used as
underground structures in which critique of political
authority, distorted social morality, privilege and
oppression can be made without personal danger.
9) Healing. Faith healing, magical potions, religious
ecstasy and definitions of the supernatural affect body
states, healing rates, dying rates, as well as endurance,
strength and resistance.
10) Finally, the world of what if, and just pretend is a
realm of vast freedoms. The institutions of life which we
take seriously, in which we program human behavior in minute
detail, in which we give rewards and more significantly, in
which we punish nonconformity, all have degrees of necessity
together with an elaborate set of control institutions with
which to make them appear as natural and normal forms of
real life.
I would like to expand upon each way in which make-believe connects with the 'real world' just a bit in order to give the reader a good sense of the indispensability of magic and make- believe to everyday, ordinary, seriously intended social reality.
Socialization Societies everywhere permit and encourage children from the earliest age to use make-believe. Parents use word games with their children at a very early age to sensitize tongue and ear to those sounds used in the spoken language. Lines of speech directed at infants and children which, otherwise, would be construed to be nonsense or foolishness are taken-as-normal when adults are involved.
Play-time activities, whatever the substantive content, are exercises in forming and sustaining social relatedness. Children as young as two or three create new and unique lines of activity bearing no relationship whatsoever to "real life" other than the process of coming into relatedness with one or more others; other than using and practicing the language sounds, the speech forms, and control tactics common to that culture. This is the basic source of prosocial behavior.
It is in play that children take themselves as the object and agent of their own behavior; address themselves (or doll surrogate) with the forms of social control; and attribute their own desires and beliefs to generalized others.
Games and scheduled play carry forward the socializing activity found in free form play but add specific roles, occasions, and institutional rehearsals. Girls learn gender roles. Boys learn that boys learn war and work routines. Playing school, playing doctor, playing cops and robbers, playing "mommy and daddy" all help reproduce and legitimate the existing structure of institutional and gender practices as normal.
At each stage of life play, pretend and games have connections to seriously understood reality beyond the game or play itself. For adults, play and games are essentially solidarity mechanisms which call forth and celebrate friendship, kinship, and work-mate relations. One plays cards with people defined as friends. One plays games with people defined as one's children. One "fools around" with people understood to have a close relationship with one.
The joy and delight of play and pretend are bent to the solidarity needs of related persons especially when those relations are trying, antagonistic or require unpleasant behavior between people. Things are serious indeed when one cannot play or fool around with another human being. The human character of the relationship is missing.
Rehearsals Pretend forms of sexual play, of war play, of medical play, of governance and school permit people to embody a given socio-drama, to edit it, and to restage it as the 'real' thing later on.
When one is preparing to deal with an authoritarian boss, a disgruntled friend, or a public occasion, one moves into the realm of make believe to do so. One does not seriously believe the boss or the friend is before one; listening and reacting. One take the role of the other in imagination, considers how that person would react, and alters the line of discourse to fit that imagined response. One does not seriously believe one is really the other person when taking the status-role; one simply uses pretend to simulate response.
One rehearses a 'speech' before one's friend or family. Everyone knows that they are not to take the speech literally as a speech. One rehearses a wedding ceremony but everyone knows that the parties are not 'really' married even though exactly the same people spoke the same words in the same place as will they later at the 'real' wedding.
The Pentagon supports a whole industry of think tanks which spin out scenarios and mock-ups of just-pretend wars with make- believe results. The realm of just-pretend is a low-cost arena in which to try out the mass murder of war and the mass marketing of products. One can see some advantages.
There is a discipline called Futurology in which close approximations of future states are projected from what is known of the present and past. Every major business does simulations of investment strategies. Minerva, Plato IV, the Delphi technique and many other heuristics are used to mock up futures. John Sterman at Sloan School of business uses a 'beer' game with which to plot the nonlinear dynamics of decision making. Erik Mosekilde in Sweden also uses such games to model chaotic dynamics.
Experiments Two young persons living in a half-way marriage form called cohabitation do not have the same commitments as do persons who are "really" married. Two younger people "playing house" have no commitment at all, nor should they. And that is the blessing. One can learn and experiment with existing forms of social life with very little cost in human terms or in material terms.
A state can host an experiment in crime and corrections of young adults for the entire society. A university can arrange a whole host of experiments in medical, agriculture, educational, and political forms on behalf of the larger society. These are in real-time, real-space, real-resources, but they are not institutionalized...i.e., not approved for general consumption and thus occupy the intersections of that which is for real and that which is only make-believe.
Folk Wisdom From earliest times myths, anecdotes, parables, nursery rhymes, and tall tales have been used to carry and convey folk wisdom. In such stories and sagas, solutions to everyday problems are suggested; suggestions for extraordinary events are structured; suggestions for expansion and development of existing social forms mapped out.
'Old wives tales' on how to cook, heal, build, store, discipline children, ward off bad luck, and encourage good luck carry much wisdom. The reading of tea leaves, consultations with seers, casting of horoscopes, all comprise ways with which to tap into accumulated folk wisdom (of which the tea-reader, the seer and the astrologer are folk carriers).
Bibles with their cautionary stories; their prescriptive commandments, their proscriptive enjoinments, their mystical allusions, their prophetic utterances all guide and inspire the human project over centuries and millennia in a great variety of societies.
Fiction in all its forms; novels, theatre, poetry, cinema, and other art forms reside in the realm of make-believe...one must suspend disbelief while entering such a realm at the level of concourse, but at the level of discourse...meta-language...one retains an understanding that the play or story is fiction. Such plays endure and are treated as classics since they speak, fictively, to the problematics of real suffering, wondering human beings.
Newspapers, history and social science books occupy a sort of half-way house between reality and make-believe. Such books offer one of an infinite number of ways to read and interpret forms of social reality...and enter back into reality when they are used to legitimate or to change it.
Celebrations Much in the way of plays, songs, myths, folktales and other works of fiction are designed to elicit feelings of pride and patriotism. One's own society is said to be the final perfection of social wisdom while other societies are, in the same or other tales, presented and interpreted as inferior social life worlds peopled by inferior creatures.
In celebrating one's own culture, symbols with positive emotional content as well as symbols with luminous power are used. One's own society is given a fictive history in which great deeds are done for noble reason. The deeds of other nations are discredited while ignoble reasons are adduced to explain that behavior. News stories and history books about the Revolutionary War read very differently in England and in the USA. News reports and scholarly analyses are couched in very different ways during the Civil War. Southerners adduced noble and sacred reason for seceding while Northern politicians and writers gave equally noble and equally powerful reason for preventing secession. If one lives in Central America, one has a very different view of the USA; one much less celebratory.
Many societies have names for themselves which interpret members of the own society as 'the people,' while using pejorative words to categorize members of other tribes or nations. In North America, Niggers, Wops, Polacks, Sloops, Wetbacks, Chinks, Japs, Bohunks and Huns are labels in common use by dominant groups to de-center the positive claims of cultures different from their own and, thus, celebrate Anglo-saxon culture. Yankee Doodle Dandy began as a derisory label of the British but was adopted and given positive emotional content by Americans.
All societies have anthems which laud their special qualities; take totems from nature with which to emblazon their own might, their own high place in the animal hierarchy. The USA uses the imagery of war as its national anthem complete with waving flag and bright victories. It uses the image of the eagle as its totem. Other societies adopt other anthems and other images with which to celebrate itself.
Refuge from Alienating Life Non-real worlds offer a haven and a
refuge from the sufferings and
debasements of the real world. Given status degradations,
hopelessness and moral outrage in the various runs of serious,
real-time, material worlds, such a make-believe realm renews and
permits one to persevere.
The world of work, of school, of family life may be so dull, so defeating of the human spirit and so terrible a place to be that people together or alone move into the world of play and pretend. Common expressions embody this alienation. "Thank God it's Friday," "Sure Happy it's Thursday," and "Wednesday is hump day" all assume as normal the alienating character of work institutions and the refreshing, restorative character of a "week end."
The 'Hereafter,' as a refuge encompasses both the schizophrenic flight of the wounded to the false peace of death and resurrection in that 'hereafter.' One may argue that escapist literature, cinema, and vacations are useful where there are also political processes at work to eliminate the sources of alienation in the long term. A problem of some magnitude arises when such refuges are the only social space to which people can retreat for solace in a heartless world.
Goffman, in a wide ranging series, spoke of how the individual departs from the socially established boundaries of social space by brown studies, fugues, day-dreaming, toy involvement with hair, clothing or infants, boundary collusions and other situated devices by which one can depart in secret from the officially defined social life-world when it is alienating.
More permanent fugues produce autism of the sort enacted by Dustin Hoffman in Rainman. Amnesia can take a person out of a particularly painful situation, as can sleep and dreams.
The blues song "Stormy Monday" captures the character of alienated work. The eagle flies on Friday, on Saturday one goes out to play and on Sunday one gets down on one's knees to pray, but after payday, playday, and prayday, one must go back to a stormy life on Monday. The weekend becomes an institutional mechanism for departing alienated forms of seriously meant social reality. Drinking loses its solidarity function in such a society and becomes an escape ticket to oblivion in bad marriages, bad colleges, bad religions, and bad occupations.
The possibility that work might be delightful under more praxis conditions, that weekend life is destructive and pathetic in its false solutions to alienation is seldom a topic of collective discourse. On the contrary, in the U.S., countless commercials cash in on the make-believe and just pretend, games, sports and escapes on the weekend. One beer commercial proposes that every evening is best spent in escape with alcohol and friends in bars and taverns.
Young people often visit arcades and play computer-based games. Older people play dungeons and dragons at home. GURPs (Generic Universal Role Playing) is catching on fast. These games have 'magicians' who 'cast spells.' Within the logics of the games, those who play the game are under the spell of the magician just as basketball players are under the spell of the officials during a game. But most young people know the difference between reality and not-reality.
The problem comes for those whose parents do not use symbol sets in conventional ways and confuse them about the meaning of love, power, and deception. An entire society can have its symbolic creating definitional/linguistic systems confused by politicians, priests, teachers and, now, advertizing specialists. I will mention this again in the section on the sociology of fraud below.
And too, while such make-believe worlds endow one with only make-believe status honor and with only make-believe dignity, still there are serious possibilities which may grow out of such pretensions. The vision of peace, honor and justice in a make- believe world carries with it a vision of peace, honor and justice in those morally outrageous arenas of real life.
Diversion Many societies use forms of play and pretend as diversion as well as celebration. The soccer games in South America take precedence over revolution. East Germany has offered Olympic Gold medals to its citizens in lieu of the democracy promised in its self-celebratory statements. The circuses of USSR are reminiscent of the Roman circuses.
Many businesses use company parties and picnics with which to mask exploitation of its employees. Food, drink, and good humor are sacred supplies with which to put a thin veneer of solidarity on what is often very stratified and very privileged social relations. Universities use sports events to divert students from critical analyses of class room or funding practices as do the various departments in academia. Notre Dame, Alabama, and Nebraska offer excellence in football to redeem inferiority in academic pursuits. The University of Nevada Las Vegas, Oral Roberts University and Seton Hall have excellent basketball teams to offset deficiencies in academic disciplines.
Some energy and extractive corporations sponsor nature
programs to divert attention away from polluting practices. Some
companies hire famous persons to front for them to deflect
attention away from indictments or other scandal. Some hire
token minority employees to defend against a larger racism.
Individuals use promises, lies, deceptions and dissimulations with which to divert and to deflect criticism. Politicians, to minimize their own small vices, use make believe to create enemies and dangers against which all good citizens must unite. At times, members of minority groups claim discrimination and prejudice to mask their own limitations. Magicians use assistants to divert an audience from a crucial move.
The uses of play and pretend for diversion away from more serious moral enterprize are infinite in form and variety. Some of them are trivial and some are inimical to the human project. I will return to the more harmful in the section on the sociology of fraud.
Underground Political Uses of Unreality. Closely related to the use of make-believe as a haven and a refuge in an alienating world is the use of make-believe and just pretend as a safe place from which to mount an attack on seriously-taken social life.
One can write fiction in which the villains bear a close resemblance to actually existing oppressors. Children's stories can serve as non-dangerous media to make political and/or moral points. "Hansel and Gretel" tell of terrible family conditions. "Snow White" and "Cinderella" are critiques of life from the perspective of women especially young women. "Gulliver's Travels" makes mock of the British Crown.
"The Wizard of Oz" has a critique of the alienating conditions of workers (The Tin Man) and farmers (The Strawman). Dorothy represents all those who still believe that a good society is still possible. The four winds of the tornado represent the collective power of the people while the tornado itself symbolizes social revolution after which life takes on color and dimension. The story also sets as basic human needs love, courage, brains, and community. The Emerald City is Washington, D.C., while the Wizard is any humbug of a politician who can only give back to the people what was alienated from them in the first place...as the Good Witch from the North said to Dorothy, You always had the power to go home.
It is politically safe to satirize the powerful and the brutal in "children's" literature, rhymes and chants.
Every society must have the capacity to reflect upon its own organization and to critically evaluate its operation in terms of criteria linked to purely human values. While sociologists, economists and philosophers as well as historians sometimes claim a monopoly over the production of an authentic self-knowledge of a given society, they are not alone in this difficult but necessary activity.
Joining and often leading people to an evaluation of its own society are dramatists, novelists, artists, poets and comics. The role of the clown, the fool and the trickster in history has always been as a safe social position from which to mock, ridicule or embarrass the lord and the master. It is safe because it doesn't really "count" as real criticism since people are only 'fooling around.' But clowns have been known to die at the hand of a master when they came to close to the truth.
While a critical science seeks to offer a reasoned and formal analysis of the failings and flaws, radical art offers a more direct and humane view of a poorly designed social life world. A third partner in the critical enterprise is, of course, prophetic religion. If science embraces the reasoning capacity of a society and religion its spirit of community, radical art is the heart of a society expressing its joys, foolishness, its pretenses and its raw humanity. Radical art and prophetic religion do not pretend to the reason of science "for the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nought'
Therapeutic Uses of Make-believe and What If Before he came
to the United
States, Jacob Moreno was part of a circle in Vienna which was
interested in the therapeutic uses of drama and theatre. (Peter
Lorre was also part of that circle). Moreno focused his two
interests in psychiatry and in theatre to produce psychodrama and
socio-drama. Imaging is a form of therapy in which one creates
an image of a body part (or the whole individual) as healing and
healthy.
Socio-drama and psycho-drama are forms of theatre which permit real people to make-believe that they take roles of other real people. This make believe crossing to live in another's shoes enables each to gain insight on the distortions and pathologies of those important relationships. This role reversal serves the hermeneutical interest in undistorted understanding at the personal and interpersonal levels which parallels that of praxical social science in producing the authentic self knowledge of an entire society.
Such therapeutic uses of make-believe are widespread and form the basis for an entire industry in group therapy, encounter therapy, assertive training, and personal development. Of use primarily to middle class individuals who have some control over their life, socio-drama leaves the larger structure of class relations, poverty, crime, work and market untouched, just those conditions which distress lower class families so much.
In psychodrama, a husband and wife can pretend to change roles and thus experience life differently for a moment. The husband appreciates how alienating are his power advantages to the wife; the wife can sense the petty rewards of male dominance. Children can develop themes and topics in another, "non-real" role which expresses the anxieties and angers not permissible in the role of a real "son" or a "daughter." Employees can accept the responsibility for expressing resentment and hurt at the shabby treatment found in the daily routines of work if only in make-believe ways. Persons with serious emotional and cognitive disorders can begin to call forth the terrible experiences which haunt their dreams and cripple their lives. Thus visible to the person and the therapist, those experiences can be put into some perspective...and perhaps, transcended.
It is the special "non-real" character of these performances which opens up the possibilities of self-disclosure, self- understanding and well-placed anger. Perhaps more integrated and competent forms of self-directed action are then possible for the emotionally disturbed person. Again, this therapy is greatly limited by the conditions of "real" life to which one must return and must live out one's days but still such use of scripts, roles, dramas and pretenses are useful tools. One must remember both social change and personal change are necessary for full emancipation. One without the other has only limited and temporary benefit.
Freedom Much is made in American politics of freedom. The truth of the matter is that a society can allow very little scope for personal freedom if it is to function as a socio-culture complex. The rules of language; the norms of behavior; the dynamics of economic formations; the laws of the land all reduce the scope of freedom to a much smaller domain than most of us like to admit.
One should be very careful about the effects of freedom on other people, on the social process, on the welfare of people in other places and upon the future. However, freedom of thought is most important to the human interest in change and renewal of the Holy...of authentically social relationships. The realm of make- believe and just pretend is one arena in which the proportion between freedom and necessity reverses. If, in the realm of seriously intended reality, the proportion should be 99-1 in favor of conservation of existing social forms; then in the realm of make-believe, the ratio might well be reversed to favor new and 'unholy' ways of doing, ways of feeling, ways of thinking.
The spectacle of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to talk about racial superiority becomes less offensive to the holy notion of fellowship and solidarity when the KKK limits its activity to ideas, suggestions, possibilities. When the KKK begins to shape emotions and actions of others in seriously undertaken social activity, then there has been a boundary shift and one might well justify repression in the name of the Holy.
Non-real time, non-real space, non-real relationships, non- real social runs can provide insights and experiences which leave one breathless with surprise and delight without the disappointment and tragedy which follows when failure ensues as in real life. So, one can see that make-believe and just pretend are not to be taken lightly. They are central to the human labor of creating social life-worlds and in being human.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF FRAUD In all these social uses of make believe, the world of seriously intended social reality is, one way or another, preserved and reproduced. While there are many problems to some of the uses of make-believe, for the most part, there is little in the way of systemic fraud involved. What is important is that persons move easily into the realm of magic and make-believe, that they keep in mind the fictive character of that play and that they ponder, on occasion, the possibilities of such fantasies for the real world.
The traditional uses of make-believe and just for fun are increasingly preempted by a whole cadre of professional specialists who package make-believe and sell it as a commodity to whomever has the cash for whatever private purpose to which the buyer may put it. I have set forth in an earlier series of papers the ways in which these professionals create and sell dramaturgical facsimiles of political agency, of product excellence, of academic greatness and of economic coherence (Young and Massey, 1977).
The use of social magic, make-believe and just-pretend in service to the Sociology of Fraud has become a major industry in politics, marketplace and sadly enough, Religion.
American theatre and cinema, as well as its close cousin television, reduces art to a commodity and severs it from the critical enterprise. Even in the absence of political terror, theatre is made silent to the misery and fraud of everyday life. Social Science also is being transformed into a commodity and is sold to the state or any other customer and thus loses its power to critique an indecent society. Only religion in its prophetic mode is left alone to do the job of social revolution.
Contemporary American art forms give us little in the way of situated self-knowledge. The use of make-believe to celebrate and to mediate loyalty too often overwhelms the critical self knowledge essential to change and renewal. Ownership of the media by those who benefit from existing flows of wealth and power blind them to the disadvantages which accrue to those who do not own the media. Rental of the media by multinational corporations; their ads and the forms of pretend and not-for-real they sponsor, deflect and defeat critical self understanding. Thus, we are mystified at the problems we encounter and too often seek individual remedies in the way of self-development or self- hate or move toward fascism as a more general solution.
The larger history of theatre, of pageant, of ceremony and of magic and make-believe have all been pointed at the sacred tasks of creating distinctly human society and of constituting anthropoid creatures as human beings. However, from about the time of Shakespeare, theatre, drama and make-believe has progressively been converted into a commodity for sale to the private party. Prior to this time, theatre in Britain and Europe primarily was used to celebrate and exalt royalty; to celebrate and exhort a given religion; to celebrate and unite community.
Traveling troupes of actors, clowns and minstrels served such functions going from medieval town and market putting on morality plays, bawdy plays for court and clique; stealing, hustling, conning and enlivening life generally. Although money was collected, the purchase of a seat at a play as a commodity developed as an idea only slowly. The notion of producing plays as a mode of capital accumulation is a recent development. The costs of production were assumed to be borne by the nobility or by the rising bourgeoisie but commodity relations in magic and make believe, as such, are recent in historical terms.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare had Hamlet use a theatrical troupe for private intelligence: to verify Hamlet's suspicion of his uncle's crime. Since then theatre has been increasingly bent to private as distinct from social purpose. This commodity use of theatre and make-believe was greatly increased as technical developments become wedded to the fiscal needs of private capital.
By the 1930's, cinematography, radio, sociology, psychology and theatre all converged to create a new advertising and public relations industry. It is these industries which commodify the production of social reality in politics, religion, education and in economics. Reality is, for these industries, a commodity to be bought and sold to whomever has the cash. It thus joins with make-believe and just-pretend as a major industry.
Origins Cinematography grew out early attempts of artists to project images of nature or scenes from a town on a canvas in order to copy them. Sociology grew out of attempts by elites in England, France and Germany to more fully understand their subjects at home and abroad. Radio grew out of the efforts of money lenders and brokers to get rapid information about markets in other cities and towns. Computers were stimulated by military and corporate interests in managing large data sets quickly and accurately.
Both advertising and public relations grow out of the conflict and contradictions of capitalist production. Advertising helps dispose of the production that the employees of a capitalist firm could not absorb. Advertising was also used to create new markets out of mass audiences in a cash economy. Advertising created whole layers of false needs and created the dramaturgical impression of merit or of difference between goods not significantly different from each other.
Public relations as an industry grew out of the many antagonisms between workers and capitalists, capitalists and customers, capitalists and residents of polluted cities, capitalists and foreign industry, capitalists and foreign citizens. The manufacture of difference between products in the land of make-believe is cheaper than in real time. The dramaturgical impression of good citizenship is more profitable than quality, pollution control, or price reduction.
Public relations and advertising now use radio, psychology, social research, theatre, drama and television to create a make- believe world in which workers are happy, products are effective and safe, industry does not pollute, and fair value is given to the consumer. This industry is a giant enterprise employing hundreds of thousands of the best writers, best actors, best musicians, best directors, best cinematographers, best psychologists, best researchers and best artists to package make- believe as a market commodity and to sell it to any party wealthy enough to pay the price.
Dictators in Brazil, multinational corporations with no national base, politicians in California, religious zealots in South Carolina, small businesses in Iowa, antiwar protestors in New York, Mormon families in Utah as well as universities on the make all buy make-believe and just pretend from a growing industry.
Advertising as industry will sell any product, ennoble any idea, redeem any wrong, enrich any activity, or endow any person with honor. Thus it pre-empts the drama of the Holy with the drama of social fraud. Advertising will wed itself to any cause, will use any human anxiety, will exploit any conceivable human weakness, will appropriate every scientific fact to its private goals of deception, of motivation, and of management of hostility. Thus it pre-empts the therapeutic potential of magic and make-believe to the profits needs of stock holders and office incumbents.
Truth, fact, validity, science or social principles have only an incidental, instrumental place in the make-believe world thus created. Surveys, polls and samples are used when they are helpful; discarded when not. Make-believe and just-pretend are taken into the world of seriously meant social reality to be used falsely. As a commodity, pretend and not-for-real enter into "real" life and are sold to the highest bidder. Mystification and false consciousness are mass-produced along with beer, canned goods, soap, and automobiles, politicians and corporations.
The commodification of social reality processes deepens the sense of cynicism; aborts the mystery of social life; betrays the human capacity for trust, belief and innocence; turns the realm of make-believe into a hostile territory from which the traveler returns much shaken and much confused about the mid- line between that which is for-real and that which is just- pretend.
It is not that deception, disguise, fiction or falsehood have never been a social problem before the industry came along. It is that now there is a whole industry organized to plan and execute make-believe and just-pretend. It is not that falsehoods have never been a social problem before the industry came along. It is that now there is a multi-billion dollar industry and one very good at what it does.
It is not that people lie, pretend to be something other than what they are, that they dissemble or omit significant facts. What is of concern is that the capacity for make-believe, pretend, what-if, just-for-fun, never-was, and could be are put to private purpose hostile to the common interest, and that this takes place in a gigantic industry each year growing larger, each year absorbing onto itself more domains of life.
First the market place, then politics, now sports,
education, religion, medicine, and science are absorbed
in the fictive world of commercial advertising and
public relations.
To the extent that not-yet-true is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy and that which is defined as real becomes real; to the extent that the boundaries of social space are clearly visible and there are no hidden regions, agendas, or privatized benefits accruing at the expense of trusting others, then pretend and deception can translate into surprise and delight.
However, trust, naivete, innocence and belief itself are victim to the commodified world of make-believe oriented to profit and class privilege. Social life-worlds cannot exist without innocence, faith, and things-taken-for-granted. Such commodity production of make-believe subverts the social process itself.
The wondrous world of human being and the Drama of the Holy is systematically eroded in important areas of life when the new commodity dramaturgy abandons the theatre and is partnered with politics, religion, science and marketplace. When one goes to the cinema or theatre one knows that it is only make-believe one sees. When one does not know one lives in a make-believe politics, economics, or academia, the boundaries between reality and rehearsal, between time-out and time-in, between seriously intended action and just-fooling-around become blurred.
We all live in a world which has real consequences for real people some of which are very unpleasant. In such circumstances, it is the world that is insane and not people. The proper term is not schizophrenia but alienation--separation from the knowledge process.
The very structure of conceptual language is corrupted by such deliberate, non-substantive use of words. A chain store claims that, in the purchase of items there is a substantial expression of freedom, reduces freedom to triviality. When a feminine products corporation promises freedom to women, it conflates between physical comfort on the one side and political agency on the other. A university presents itself as a "great university" when its football team wins. The use of electronics media, Hollywood techniques, social surveys, and staged events much akin to legitimate theatre takes a particularly virulent turn in the political sphere.
A president stages a "news conference" and labels right-wing murderers who stage elections in El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras as "moderates" and "committed to freedom" while the murder and mayhem sponsored overseas is masked as "collateral damage." In the false dramaturgy of elitist politics, authoritarian states become "friendly states," while the interests of multinational corporations become "national interests." U.S. Marines in Lebanon fight on the side of Christian falangists and are called peace keepers. Feudal despots in the Middle East and tribal chiefs in Afghanistan are "freedom fighters" while progressive forces everywhere are recoded in this lexicon as "terrorists," "communists," and "extremists.' Words strain and break at the assaults. The very legitimacy of words is lost while symbolic interaction itself is lost to the Drama of the Holy.
SOCIAL CRITICISM The other half of make-believe and just pretend can be used for authentic self knowledge; for social criticism; for mutual understanding between those in hostile contrast each to the other. Jokes, tall stories, good humor, comedy, film, song, and nursery rhyme, what if and just suppose could be used to serve the human interest in change and renewal of existing social relations.
Every society must use magic and make-believe in the process of producing and reproducing itself...and every society, in a changing environment, must use magic and make-believe to critique, to demystify, to explore, to innovate, and to extrapolate to the future. Thus is the human capacity to anticipate and to adjust put in the service of ultra-stability without loss of continuity and the utility of those social practices which augment the human project.
The emancipatory use of magic and make-believe is subsumed by the generic label, Radical Art. In another place, I have discussed the dimensions of radical art. Here, I will just summarize: in order for stories, film, drama, and social research to serve the human interest in stable change and progressive renewal, radical art must, 1) dramatize the negativities of existing social relations; 2) offer visions of alternative ways of organizing social life and, 3) empower and encourage the transformations to that which-as-yet-does-not- exist.
In the history of human experience, there has been much radical art. The plays of Sophocles, the religious dramas of the middle ages, the works of Shakespeare, the poetry of Donne and Blake, the novels of Swift and Dumas, the nursery rhymes in England, the operas and ballet of the 19th Century, the film of social criticism in the 30's and the songs of social protest of the 60's are a treasure trove of radical critique.
Historical Fiction A particularly effective mode of social criticism is historical fiction...a literary and cinematic device in which the negativity of a social formation is dramatized in order to expand the imagination of a people and to politicize a social practice...to take it from the realm of the sacred and to move it into the realm of the political.
Women's Issues and Make-believe We can see the radical potential of cinema in the films of Sherry Lansing who uses it to make visible the generic negativities of gender politics in American life today. Lansing has taken a historical incident, dramatized it and put it into the consciousness of American masses in ways that straight- forward news reporting does not.
In Without a Trace, Ms. Lansing fictionalized a case in which a child disappeared. In Fatal Attraction, the sexual adventure of a married man was dramatized. In The Accused, a gang rape was reconstructed to expand our understanding of how gender politics works in barrooms, in the police station, in the court house and in the news media.
Lansing takes an episode from 'real life,' adds cinematic techniques which generate the same extraordinary body chemistry transformations used in the creation of the Holy and, thereby, sensitizes her audiences to situations which are problems for women.
Car chase scenes, acid thrown in one's face, brutal sexual action, rabbits boiled alive, buddies in danger, and children being subjected to threatening situations all change our body chemistry; all vivify the situation; all insert us into a drama from the perspective of the person being degraded by the existing structures of social power.
At one level, we know a car chase scene is carefully staged; that the actors are experienced stunt artists; that they are not really inside the exploding car; that the blood and twisted bones are stage props...at one level of cognitive functioning we know all this. But the human ability to make-believe, to suspend doubt, to accept the dynamics of an unreal situation, all converge in a darkened theatre to give such incidents a reality for us that mere broadcast news or articles in a newspaper cannot.
At the level of attention, understanding, and moral outrage, we believe that the incidents on the screen are real...we accept that there are women who get raped while decent people stand by and do nothing; we believe that some people steal children and use them for private purpose; we believe that some women are so hurt by gender politics that they engage in the pretheoretical politics of revenge and murder. We believe that.
The ordinary structure of gender politics is held up to us in vivid form and we are shown the negativities they have for the human potential of women and men. Lansing and other radical film makers bring into question that which we have held to be sacred. We are, to some small degree, moved within the logics of our morality to do something about it. We are politicized.
We can't become activated as moral agents by news stories. The structure of the news report is such that it tends to depoliticize us...the story comes from outside the structures of kin and friendship. The emotional dimensions of moral outrage are stripped away by the ethics and neutral language of news reportage. The excision of one such event from the larger data of social life makes such rapes and murders seem to be single, individual events. The knowledge process is distorted. The manner in which such cases are reported gives the impression that existing routines of police and courts are working to deal with that which occurs. News in its current format tends to depoliticize us; film tends to repoliticize us.
All three dimensions of human behavior: emotion,
understanding, and actual behavior must be
activated if existing social practices are to be
desanctified and reexamined as prelude to creative
and constructive change.
The content of radical art, then, helps us see the negativities of existing, cherished, sanctified ways of doing social life. But visions of what is possible in the way of postmodern religion are also necessary.
CONCLUSION If we are to take the fiction of George Orwell seriously, we must study the process by which human knowledge in public life is distorted. In ordinary discourse, meaning and intention grow out of commonly shared productive labor: planting, harvesting, weaving, mending, feeding, loving, correcting, planning and building. The interaction-rich and information rich matrix of interaction permitted little room for deception.
There remains, in all societies still, a large portion of face-to-face social life where this undistorted knowledge process is the dominant process. In advanced monopoly capitalist societies as in centrally controlled economies, the technical and social bases for quite new knowledge processes have arisen.
The knowledge process, centering around language and undistorted runs of symbolic interaction; depending upon trust and acceptance of that which is not yet but soon will-be, organized for intense and continuous interaction, open to all relevant facts and to visible purposes, is the central, uniquely human form of labor. All other labor; planting, growing, harvesting, storing, cooking, building, transporting, and healing is necessary, primary but still preliminary to the human project.
Food, shelter, drink and good health are equally necessary to the snail and the human; to the sea creature, the farm animal and the unreflective plant. The human animal is the only creature which can spin the lovely structures of kinship, friendship, religion and science that comprise the heart of human culture. Technologies, techniques, technicians, and industries which distort and expropriate the knowledge process to private profit or elite purpose are an assault on a fundamental human process. Belief and faith is the province of religion, broadly understood.
While there is much that is useful and much that is in service to the human project offered by market dynamics, still magic and make-believe belong to the drama of the Holy; the conversion of that which is Holy into a market commodity is a most serious subversion of the human project.
Such an industry, engaged in falsity and fraud, must be ruthlessly exposed. Such industries must be relentlessly studied and their partisan economies; their partisan politics made visible. Interaction-rich and information-rich knowledge processes oriented to prosocial activity must displace the privatized commodification of knowledge, else the human project is endangered. Make-believe and just-pretend are too important to the Drama of the Holy and to the human projects above to be left to the Hollywood entrepreneurs or Madison Avenue marketeers seeking customers for make-believe and social magic.
One should note and remember that the proper realm for revolutionary, transforming social magic is politics. The human interest in prediction and social control argues that institutional behavior should be principled...i.e., that court rulings, economic rewards, job allocations as well as social sanctions should be made in accord with visible rules; that rationality in its technical meaning should prevail in established social institutions.
But political life, informed by a parallel interest in change and renewal, should use social magic in order to say, let it be so that something that does not now exist; that can only come into existence by discontinuous, qualitative change...will be. Such emancipatory proclamations such as: let there be equal standing before the law; let it be so that there is equal pay for equal work; let it be so that technology should advance the human spirit rather than subvert it.
Discontinuous, acausal, parasodic, entirely new principles of human behavior should arise in the public sphere rather than in the private sector since there is so much opportunity for social fraud and private advantage when the principles of social life are set in secret...or when these principles are deemed to be outside the purview of public discourse.
The prosocial uses of make-believe should be fostered. Childhood socialization, social critique, surprise and delight, therapy, and the various social myths which ground and give purpose to a social life-world are legitimate uses of pretend and once upon a time. Management of hostility, increase in profit, growth of market share, usurpation of the political process and the false redemption of evil are not legitimate uses of this knowledge activity. The basic human right is participation in the knowledge process. The basic human wrong is to distort the reality process by distorting communication and, thus, knowledge of the social life-world in which we all must live out our days.
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