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THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE
Essays in CRITICAL DRAMATURGY
INTRODUCTION: PART I
POSTMODERN UNDERSTANDING
and
DRAMATURGICAL ANALYSIS
Drama <to do; <IndoEuropean base: dra- = to work whence darit = to do.
Theatre <L. theatrum <Gr. Theatron <base of Theasthai, to see, whence <Gr thauma, a wonder.
...Webster's New World Dictionary
THE POST-MODERN IDEA There is little more mystifying and yet
so simple as the idea of the post-modern.
It is a great nuisance to the ordinary reader that such terms are
used since they are so far removed from ordinary language
conventions yet are important to an understanding of the era in
which we now live. Since all the essays in this book are oriented
to the post modern psychology and post=modern morality that
suffuses everyday behavior...thus it is that the informed lay
person must take a bit of time to learn what is at issue in the use
of the term.
In brief, the modern era began about 1500 with the beginnings of systematic thinking that we now call science. "Modern" thought assumed an interconnected set of universal laws governing the operations of Nature and society that could be discovered by the scientific method. Since the publication of Principia in 1687 by Issac Newton, it has been assumed, falsely, that there was perfect order in the universe and that men of genius could unscramble the complex codes of nature much as Crick and Watson unlocked the riddle of the genetic code with their work on the double helix. This era lasted until the 19th Century yielding to the ideas and assumptions of post modernity.
The task of the scientist in the 'modern' world was to use mathematics to make a model in which Nature could be simplified and mirrored. The quest of Einstein for a Unified Field Theory was thought to be the last task of the physicist; the writings of Talcott Parsons was thought to be a sociological version of a Unified Theory of social structure and function; mathematics, again was to be midwife to grand theory.
It did not last.
Chaos and change were revealed to be the central facts of the Cosmos (Gleick, 1987). Order and stability turned out to be local, temporary; pockets surrounded by a much larger ocean of Chaos and flux. It is important to note that Chaos provides for pattern and for a moving equilibrium but not for the fixed, mechanical, deterministic finality of the Newtonian world-view.
Post-Modern Science Just where the Post-modern analysis began is
hard to say. Out of the ferment of social
revolution; scientific discovery; political upheaval; critical
theory and social experiment came an awe-ful understanding. The
neat and closed world of Newton and Laplace did not exist. There
were no inviolable laws of nature and of society. There were no
pure forms, no ideal types, no final telos toward which to steer
with science and technology. There were only small windows of
order in a larger run of unpredictable patterns.
Post-modern knowledge processes destroyed that symmetry,
that perfection, that closed system of natural law.
Space for chaos; for disorder, for unpredictability,
hence uncontrollability opened up.
Mary Shelley, in her 1816 story of Victor Frankenstein, we could see if we would look, the dark shadows of the Enlightenment shed by modern science and technology. Shelley was the daughter of the celebrated feminist Mary Wollenscraft, who challenged the idea that God and Nature perfected the human race in the male image while her father, William Godwin, challenged the perfection of class privilege and aristocratic preference. In one 19th century English family was the seedlings of Post-modern critique.
In poetry, William Blake questioned the coherence of any God whose hand could fashion the tyger and the lamb and set them against each other in the jungles of the night. In the chartered streets of London, Blake found misery and injustice rather than perfection and harmony as the modernists would have it. In the same poetic tradition but with more cynicism than activism, A. E. Housman noted that malt does more than Milton can to justify the ways of God to man. And, if its dancing you would be, there's better pipes than poetry. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for those whom it hurts to think. In such a culture, the translation of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald was apt:
Why...all the Saints and Sages who discussed
of the two Worlds so wisely...they are thrust
like foolish Prophets forth; their words to
Scorn are scattered, and their mouths stopped up with dust.
But William Butler Yeats put it in its most poignant form:
Turning and turning in widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the Center does not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
We are all innocent in a fixed, God-hewn world; in a fixed, clock-work cosmos. In a chaotic world; in a world where patterns are possible but perfection not, we lose that innocence after which Yeats longs, but, in return, we gain the chance to change; the change to become responsible for our destiny if we are wise and good enough. To that possibility, a wise and decent social psychology might also strive.
After Darwin published the Origin of the Species in 1868, change lost its final, telological goal. There was only adaptation to an ever-changing environment. Many of Darwin's readers brought back into Darwin's theory of evolution, the telologics of racism, national chauvinism, patriarchy, and elitism but, for Darwin, it was the survival of the fittest; not movement toward the perfect that fueled biological evolution. What fit one environment might not fit another environment; hence the development of a variety of adapted life forms. The turtles and birds of the Gallapagos were variants of each other; not inferior or superior, not successive approximations to perfection, not stages of change, not primitive and modern...only different. They, too, could be but need not be, replaced by species more suited to the terrain, to the climate, to the ecology of the islands.
When Werner Heisenberg set forth the indeterminacy principle, we lost the possibility of an Einsteinian quest for order, harmony and prediction in the cosmos emerging out of the interactions of the four forces: the strong force of nuclear bonding; the weak force of atomic bonding; electro-magnetism and gravity. Grand theory with its clockwork connections is not possible in a chaotic cosmos. With quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920's, mathematical precision gave way to probabilistic statements. Probability statements in social psychology at least, still reflect an assumption that there is a precise relationship toward which better research and better theory could bring the knowledge process; quantum mechanics changed this view of probability to the view that all we could know, the best we could do was to give estimates...certainty did not exist.
For Social Psychology, the lesson has yet to be learned and applied. At some point soon, we must learn that there is no model of self that is forever fixed as normal. We must accept that there is no natural unfolding of self-development. We must be ready to live with an ever-changing set of normal personalities shaped by the times and troubles of the epoch in which we live.
If we can accept the fractal geometry of Mandelbrot as a model for variation of personality configurations within the context of prosocial labor, then we have much to gain from Post-modern social psychology. If we fail to develop a society in which pro-social work and compassion shape personality; if we turn to cynicism and to nihilism in the face of all this indeterminacy, then we fail the opportunity that such an open world offers us.
Most thinking people still live in the 'modern' epoch. They believe in the unchangeable regularities; eternal patterns of life that have been the product of three centuries of science. Some people...iconoclasts, rebels, philosophers of science or simply those who are hurt by existing social arrangements challenge this idea. They think that much if not all of Nature and society can be created anew...that there are no eternal, unchanging ways to be human or to do Nature. A most disconcerting thought yet having much support and much promise in its more positive modes. In its negative modes, post modern thought is bleak, cynical, nihilistic, and downright destructive of all that is valuable to the human project. It is important that the lay person who wants to be part of a post-modern knowledge process; a person who wants to help shape a post-modern morality, grasp the major arguments of both modernists and post modernist thought.
I should add that a great many people, probably most people in the world today, live in a pre-modern world; one in which there is mystery, magic, the inscrutable Will of God, or the whimsical caprice of gods. Preoccupied with the ordinary routines of physical survival or the extraordinary business of profit and loss, such persons make little effort to enter into the lively discourse of science and philosophy. Yet much is at stake for them and their children. One day they must take the time.
The Beginnings of Modern Thought For most of human history, the
knowledge process centered
around the effort to understand the Will of God. The idea was that
it was safer to find and to obey the Will of God than to act in
ignorance of it. The long centuries of human thinking came to be
vested in religious mystics and teachers who, somehow, came into
contact with the gods and could convey the Will of God to ordinary
people. Prayer, psychogenics, dance, danger, meditation, or
inspiration were pathways to that kind of knowledge. Most people
still center their quest for knowledge around priestly
persons...and around a quest for the Holy.
The very beginnings of modern science and logic came with Aristotle, Zeno, Plato, and Pythagoras. Rather than the majesty of the gods, the early philosophers saw majesty in the perfection of logic, mathematics, astronomy and, later physical science. A whole new knowledge industry opened up. By the turn of the 20th century, A. D. White would write a book about the history of the warfare between science and theology in Christendom...and declare science the winner.
The bounty of science was impressive...still is impressive. Predictions of the arrival of comets; knowledge of the tides, revelations of the inner workings of the atom, discovery of the four forces of nature, harnessing of nuclear power, development of electronics, biochemistry, genetic surgery and cloning seem to establish the triumph of the scientific revolution. Yet there was room for doubt.
Most of the doubt came in the realm of social science. The early founders of sociology, psychology, economics and political science were convinced that social relations had the same kind of Iron laws that physical reality revealed...and that the task of the enlightened social scientist was to reveal those laws of the psyche and of the social in order that the human project could be advanced. Auguste Comte thought that social engineers would replace priests as the arbitrators of behavior. Henry Ford hired social workers to help keep his workers and their families living up to middle class norms of behavior.
The first principle of social life to tumble was the idea of unilateral evolution toward higher, better forms of social life. Many sociologists and anthropologists thought, falsely, that each society went through stages of social evolution until they became modern societies. A lot of people still believe in the idea of progress. The problem was to identify the best social arrangements. No one could agree. The Germans tended to think aryan culture was superior; the Chinese tended to believe that Chinese culture was at the top of the evolutionary ladder as did the Japanese, while Americans were convinced that America was the best of all possible societies. Those who stepped back a bit saw that science was another name for ethnocentrism and personal advantage.
A second iron-bound law that was challenged was in gender roles and gender relations. Early feminists argued that the eternal, natural norms of patriarchy were neither eternal nor natural. Those norms were the result of some ugly gender politics which gave men the right to exploit women; to beat women; to rape and to discard them while men benefitted from their domestic services and sexual services. Social science became another word for alienated gender relations.
Minority groups learned that their ways of life were inferior in this scaling of social life. Many minority persons challenged the assumptions of the majority to their pain and injury. Vast wars of colonial imperialism were justified, in part, by the belief that modernization would benefit the 'savages' of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The iron bound dogmas of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian theodicies were challenged by atheists and by more thoughtful theologians alike. The teachings of the gentle Buddha found their way into American and European consciousness by those who brought back more than trophies and souvenirs from empire. The idea that Christ could speak to and could be heard in the voices of the poor infused liberation theology. The idea that women had something of value to offer Christianity other than cleaning and polishing or tending floral displays inspired another, feminist theology. The idea that human sexuality had more than one permitted form found a persistent voice in the Gay Liberation theology. All these are packed into a post-modern understanding of religion; an understanding that challenges the rigid logics of white anglo males with their linear, authoritarian views of God and justice.
Carol Gilligan challenged the assumptions of Kohlberg, Piaget and others who work the field of moral development. She thought there was a higher morality in human affairs than the simple application of universal principles of justice; that women and the way women thought was more congenial to the human project than the principled behavior of stage five or stage six moral character. For Gilligan, people were more important than principles. A simple but post modern view.
In the art world, the impressionists, the abstractionists, and the cubists offered a post modern form of art. Line, form and perspective were not the essentials of good art as the modern mentality would claim...it is the spirit of a scene or a subject which is captured by the artist; not the form. The camera and the printing press could produce exact copies of nature; the artist could do more...she could capture the essence of the subject.
In the meantime, James Joyce, e.e. cummings, John dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck and others were developing new literary styles. In the world of literary criticism, Raymond Williams at Cambridge was insisting that there was not an eternally valid set of principles by which good writing or good poetry could be judged.
The classic music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart might come close to mathematical precision in the beauty and elegance of their musical phrases but there was Jazz to challenge the perfection of that perfection. Gershwin, Ellington, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Teddy Wilson on the piano and Lady Day Holiday pushed modern musical theory aside. Out of the pain and anguish of everyday life in the modern world, they brought doubt and rebellion. Then came the Beatles.
The poetry of William Blake set forth a post-modern critique of religion with his famous essay on the oneness of religion; his essay on the origins of religions and his more famous poem:
ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONE The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness
The Argument: While the true method of knowledge is experience; the true method of understanding experience is poetic genius.
Principle 1: To be truly human, one must employ one's poetic genius. The forms of all things are derived from that poetic genius...which the Ancients called Spirit or Angel or Demon.
Principle 2: As all human beings are alike in outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in poetic genius.
Principle 3: No human can think, write, or speak from the heart, but that they intend truth. Thus all sects of religious philosophy derive from the infinite variety of the poetic genius of truthful but differing humans.
Principle 4: None, by travelling over known lands can find out the Unknown...therefore, no person could know more than that which the common experience of all; but having access to the common experience of all, a universal poetic genius emerges which is accessible to all.
Principle 5: The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation's different use of poetic genius...which is everywhere called the Spirit of Prophecy.
Principle 6: The Jewish and Christian Testaments are An original derivation from Poetic Genius. This is necessary from the limitations of perception...the limitations of bodily sensation.
Principle 7: As all humans are alike (tho' infinitely various), So all Religions, &, as all similars, have one source: the true source is the true Human, s/he being the Poetic Genius.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Ancient Poets animated all objects with their genius, Calling them by lovely names and adorning them with wondrous property; woods, rivers, streams, mountains, lakes, cities, nations...whatever their senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied each city and country giving each a deity appropriate to its nature; 'til a system was formed...which some took advantage and enslaved the common man by separating the deity from its object: thus began the priesthood.
Choosing the forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
...Wm. Blake
It was in his poem, Tyger, Tyger, that Blake set forth his earliest thoughts on postmodern theology and religious sensibility. In this poem, Blake casts doubt on the coherence of a worldvdesigned by a Rational Supreme Being. Thus Blake adopts and transcends the modern critique and presents himself as one of the first post-modern thinkers in Western thought while writing in the 18th century; thus he leaped over an entire age which still informs most work in the philosophy of knowledge and science.
THE TYGER
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
in the forests of the Night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
Where the Hammer, where the chain?
And what furnace forged thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
dare your deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
and water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger, tyger burning bright
in the forests of the night,
what immortal hand or eye
dare frame thy fearful majesty?
In the formal propositional form of his arguments, Blake uses the idea of deductive reasoning. In the content of those arguments, Blake goes far beyond post-modern critique which is based upon observation, rational thinking and systematic organization of principles....far beyond that to a trans-modern view that poetic genius and prophecy are sources of human understanding which surpass rational thinking. In the passage above, Blake links the source of God...and social order...in the human heart rather than in the reasoning mind.
Physical Science In the world of physical science as well, the
assumptions of a knowable, general theory of
physics was set askew by Heisenberg and his idea that not
everything is knowable; not everything is measurable. The new
physics turned certainty into probability while probability lost
its certainty at sub-atomic levels of physical reality; even
physical reality slipped away in the uncertain realm of
wave/particles which were neither matter nor merely energy.
In the world of biology, the curious case of the skunk cabbage served to undermine the principles of genetics and physiology. The plant had one shape in Alaska and another, quite different form in Ohio. It turned out that a rose is not a rose is not, after all a rose. Roseness (and skunk cabbageness) is a dialectically variable function of genetics and environment. There is no such thing as the ideal rose, the ideal oak tree or the ideal skunk cabbage. Our whole notion of what is normal and, therefore, abnormal is destroyed by such dialectics.
Above all, modernism requires the idea of the
ideal; the idea of the normal as well as an
explanation for the abnormal. The monumental
advantage of post modern ideas is that there is no
ideal in the abstract from which existing reality
is but a pale and imperfect shadow. There is only
infinite variety; each variation equally normal;
equally natural to every other variation.
In such an unstable, uncertain world there is much to trouble one; much to enliven one. There is the absence of all laws, rules, norms, principles, and coherent connections between the runs of human behavior as between the regularities in the physical world. This indeterminacy and openness of social reality has much promise and many problems. At its best, post-modern thought is enlivening and enabling. At its worst, it is ugly, vicious, soliptic, and self-serving. Its best is to be found in the poetry of Arnold:
Empedocles on Mt. Etna
Is it so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived light in the Spring
to have loved; to have thought,
to have done;
To have advanced true friends
and beat down baffling foes
That we must feign a bliss
of doubtful future date
and, while we dream on this,
lose all our present state
and relegate to worlds yet distant
our repose?
But thou, because thou hear'st
men scoff at heaven and fate,
because the gods thou fear'st
fail to make blest thy present state
Tremblest, and will not dare to trust
the joys that are!
I say, Fear not. Life still
leaves human effort scope.
Nurse no extravagant hope;
Because thou must not dream, thou
need'st not then despair!
...Mathew Arnold
The worst of the post-modern critique is to be found in a bourgeois liberalism that holds that any human good or service should be freely available as long as a market exists for it: drugs, child pornography, prostitution, agricultural chemicals as well as hand guns and elephant foot umbrella stands. We can find the post-modern spirit at its worst in Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols; in Abby Hoffman and his apology for theft; in William Buckley and his apology for predatory capitalism.
Yet one should not lightly discard the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten and the punk movement. They are trying to tell us something in a language made necessary by our preoccupation with pre-modern ideas of heaven and hell as with our 'modern' ideas of the natural and the normal. If painters, authors, singers, and poets scream at us, it is because we cannot hear, that we will not listen to more reasoned and reasonable critique. We create the Sid Vicious characters in the same instant we create and enforce our ideas of nature and normalcy. We could have listened to A. E. Housman, lonely and afraid in a world he never made, but failing that, we now hear Johnny Rotten...both are equally spokespersons for the post-modern spirit.
In the chapters in this book, I want to carry the post-modern critique in the realm of dramaturgy; into the social psychology of desire and being. I want to show all the negativity there is to be found in the sustained effort to colonize desire within the empire of market economics. I want to join with Blake and Arnold to advance a different fate for desire...and for poetic genius than in singing commercials for soap or beer or packaged political candidates.
At the same time, I want to amplify, in the mind of the reader, the vast potential of magic and make-believe for authentically human endeavor...endeavor in religion, sports, politics, and even in economics.
Central to this post-modern critique is the concept of dramaturgy and dramaturgical analysis, best set forth, perhaps, by Erving Goffman in his many essays on human behavior. Most informed lay persons have heard of Goffman, Burke, and Duncan if they have not heard of Ewen or Welch. For those who have not, what follows is a quick sketch of dramaturgical analysis and its problematics.
I intend to go beyond a description and a critique of dramaturgical analysis to show the reader its historical sources and structural effects on the human project. In our peculiar language system, this effort is called a structural analysis or macro-analysis as contrasted to a focus on real living striving crafting human behavior...or micro-analysis. Both are essential to the emancipatory impulse, to the post-modern spirit.
DRAMATURGICAL ANALYSIS In the attempt to understand the character
and processes of social life, social
psychologists necessarily utilize the conceptual framework to which
they are socialized. One of the more useful frameworks with which
to comprehend, describe, communicate and transform the character
and processes of social life is dramaturgy: the analytic
perspective that social life resembles theater or, more accurately,
drama.
Dramaturgy, as a perspective on social life, has existed for centuries. The well-known quote from the mournful character, Jacques, in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" presents the best known and least theoretical understanding of the dramaturgical perspective:
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
The literary critic, Kenneth Burke began to develop a "dramatistic" model of human behavior in his early writings in the 1930s. Burke maintained in his book Permanence and Change (1935), that human beings are active communicators who express themselves and relate to others much in the same way that actors do when playing roles in a play on a stage. In concert with the symbolic interactionist theories of George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley, Burke insisted that mechanistic models of human behavior were inadequate since they eschewed any notion that humans act with any purpose or attribute any subjective meaning to their objective behavior.
For two decades, Burke's insights from Permanence and Change and the later works, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), remained outside of mainstream social thought. But, with the writings of Hugh D. Duncan (1953; 1962; 1968; 1969) and, especially, Erving Goffman (1956/1959; 1961a) the notion that society could be studied as drama began to make inroads into sociology and social psychology. It was then that dramaturgical sociology was born and its imperative to study society as drama was taken seriously by students of the social world.
Goffman began his work on dramaturgy with The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) In this book he examined the ways in which a person gauged the responses of his/her behavior and altered it to create the kind of impression which s/he wanted an audience to take as an authentic representation of a mood, a social identity or a social occasion. With minimal props, the actor can produce these moods, social occasions or a characters in a performance sufficiently convincing to initiate a self-fulling prophecy of a given form of social reality.
The early works of Goffman were especially helpful in formalizing the dramaturgical model for American sociology, but they were critically important because they demonstrated that humans often separated their subjective intention from their objective behaviors...they gave off impressions of motives far different from those they had in mind. The Dale Carnegie school of acting friendly for non-friendly purpose received formal statement in the works of Goffman.
So, while dramaturgical sociology was born out of the intellectual milieu of Burke's dramatism and Mead's symbolic interactionism, it went beyond both in its basic understandings of human behavior to help the student of society to understand the dynamics of cynical, manipulative, insincere and fraudulent interaction. This was at a time when orthodox social psychological analysis; especially symbolic interactional theory, stressed consensus, mutuality and shared symbolic worlds.
There had always been fraud, deceit, duplicacy and dissembling in human behavior but it was in a particular kind of society that such behavior...dramaturgical behavior...became a way of life warranting its own special model of analysis. Dramaturgical analysis in the style of Erving Goffman arose in a mass, exploitative, conflict-ridden society; one in which each person was an unknown stranger to each other person, each pursuing separate goals to greater or lesser degree exclusive of each other.
The central assumption of symbolic interactional theory that communicating people attempt to create a shared symbolic world does not hold. Doctors, lawyers, furniture salespersons, politicians, clerks, bosses, employees, welfare applicants, police officers, auto repair mechanics all lived in their own private world of meaning while trying to give off the dramaturgical impression of mutuality in purpose.
For most people in the most important realms of life, a transparent world built of faith, belief and innocent trust can still be assumed without thought of betrayal. In family life, among friends, among those who helped each other, in the church and around the playground, shared meaning and mutuality of purpose could be assumed without jeopardy. There were, to be sure, the occasional husband or wife who did treason to the marriage vows, the unreliable cousin who had to be watched, the persistent liar who was known as such in the town but, as a way of life for millions of people through the long hours of the day, dramaturgical behavior...acting, staging the appearance of commitment to the social frame at hand...was inconceivable.
The ancient tactics of social control gave way to scientific tactics; workers, students, wives, minorities, political dissenters have been controlled throughout human history by overlapping structures of domination: the social power of significant others; the economic power of elites; the moral power of the church; and the physical power of the state converged to control and thus pattern human behavior in ways which reproduced the ancient structures of gender, racial, class, age, and authoritarian domination.
Such tactics do not work in a mass society. There are no significant others in the supermarkets of life. The use of moral power to persuade people to buy computers, cars, or pharmaceuticals is limited. The use of physical power to rid a factory of strikers ended in the Flint strike of 1937. The use of economic power to shape the behavior of unknown others is widely used still, however in a profit-oriented marketplace or in a cost-conscious bureaucracy, economic incentives are used to influence strategically placed union leaders rather than workers en masse; to influence selected government officials rather than citizens generally.
So, as you will see, a new technology of social control developed to replace the traditional forms of social power. Psychology in its perverted form joined with mass electronics as well as the tactics of theatre to manage the minds; to create the selves; to order the society where before mind, self and society had been the collective product of persons mutually open to each other.
For many orthodox social psychologists of the 50s and 60s, dramaturgical analysis was itself a fraud and a perverse distortion of social reality. In the well ordered world of the academic; living in a well ordered middle class family; dealing with motivated students and working among colleagues known too well for deception to last long, such an analysis was inappropriate. But that world changed in after WWII as psychology joined with marketing and management to create the post-modern world of mind, money and mass managers.
For many other, mostly young, sociologists during the 1950s and 1960s, the dramaturgical analysis of Goffman came as a breath of fresh air. Just as American sociology was becoming more abstract and mathematical, more depoliticized, more impersonal and more removed from the everyday forms of human behavior, dramaturgy spoke clearly about the everyday behaviors of humans in difficult situations.
While Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton and Wilbert Moore spoke in the dry, dusty, opaque language of formal theory, dramaturgy used a lively and comprehensible language. Lundberg, Dodd, and Blalock tried to convert the richness of social life to the bleakness of ration.al numbers. Then too, the rise of orthodox dramaturgical analysis must be understood in part in the political and social context of American society at the time. For American sociologists during the 1950s and 1960s it was risky to speak in a tone and with terms which exhibited a concern with oppression, conflict, social justice and social reform.
Only those theoretical models which were sufficiently depoliticized or remote from the context of the lived experiences of humans could be safely advanced within the universities. Dramaturgy was not remote from human experience but, with the exception of Goffman's Asylums, it was sufficiently depoliticized. Consequently, in addition to the model's intuitive validity, dramaturgy was appealing to those who were turned off by the irrelevance of structural-functionalism, who were suspicious of the sunshine and sweetness of traditional symbolic interactionism and, yet, were politically cautious.
Since the middle of the 1950s and the early 1960s dramaturgical analysts have produced an impressive stockpile of interesting and important studies of human behavior in a wide range of social locales. Certainly, by the middle of the 1980s, dramaturgy has been established as an important theoretical framework in mainstream social inquiry.
If the writings of Burke, Duncan and Goffman were emancipatory in that the use of the dramatic model meant that humans acted with purpose as against the idea that objective structures shaped human behavior, these writings also demonstrated that humans could and did hide their purposes from others as they acted and, in so doing, manage and manipulate the behavior of others. Not only did dramaturgy have humanistic and emancipatory dimensions, it had repressive dimensions as well.
As it became clear that dramaturgical analysis contained dehumanizing implications for humans and their social behaviors, many sociologists and social psychologists reacted with a knee-jerk negativism, rejecting dramaturgical analysis completely as a mere justification of con artistry.
This collection of essays, taken as a whole, appreciates the duality which exists in dramaturgical analysis but, rather than rejecting the model as devoid of empirical or political value, seeks to organize many of the questions that have been raised about dramaturgy with the goal of improving it as a perspective on society and human behavior and locating dramaturgy within the context of advanced monopoly capitalism.
The essays contained within are meant to help develop a critical dramaturgical analysis. The specific meaning of the term "critical dramaturgy" and how it is similar and dissimilar to orthodox dramaturgical analysis is developed in these essays but for the present it signifies (1) a concern with the changing social conditions under which dramaturgy arises as an adequate model of human behavior and (2) a concern for the ways in which human drama, very broadly defined, can be used to augment, rather than distort or destroy, human social existence.
Such are the concerns of this book. Their realization requires a rethinking of the old concepts, issues and topics previously identified as salient to dramaturgical analysis, an extension of dramaturgy to encompass new issues and topics which previously have been defined outside the scope or interest of dramaturgical analysis as well as an inclusion of the insights of classical and contemporary social theorists which orthodox dramaturgical analysis has excluded.
Similarly, the core theoretical problems of orthodox dramaturgical analysis, such as the problematic nature of meaning and communication, the estrangement between subjective meaning and overt act, the problems included in self-presentation and role performance, and the dehumanizing dimensions of dramatic actions, are rethought and transformed.
The essays here attempt to restore the sociology and the history to dramaturgical analysis ignored by Goffman and a second generation of those who work the field. These essays explore and include new topics which are salient to a critically transformed dramaturgical analysis but which have been excluded hitherto. They relate the dramaturgy of social life to the structural contradictions of advanced capitalism, to the problems of maintaining the legitimacy of the capitalist state, to the problems of political opposition and social revolution, to the problems of self-presentation and reality construction in family work, school and market relations as well as to the problems of massified forms of communication to mystify and distort knowledge of the social world.
It is imperative to add the insights of writers whose views have not yet been included if dramaturgical analysis is to deal with the issues surrounding its empirical adequacy and political meaning. Consequently, many of the concepts and insights of Goffman, Mead, Cooley and Duncan have been subjected to scrutiny with the insights of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. In fact, one of the major contributions of this work is the melding of dramaturgical analysis and critical social theory achieved by each of the essays included herein.
While it retains the traditional symbolic interactionist ideas that human action is bound to group interactions, that consciousness is shaped by symbolic activity, it rejects the mystifications, trivialities and political limitations of traditional social psychology. As a new dramaturgical analysis it accepts and retains the tragic chronicles of the world of spoiled identities, total institutions, cynical and alienated role performances, infinitely mutable self-presentations and fraudulently staged encounters.
I argue for the transformation of dramaturgical sociology and for the transformation of the society it describes. Thus, The Drama of Social Life says, yes, this is the way things are but they can be different. These fraudulent, alienated, distorted relationships can be changed and it is to the nature of the social formation where we must turn our attention if we want to change them. Drama can be put to better uses than those of the profit needs of capital, the legitimacy needs of the state or the private needs of the alienated individual.
The dramaturgical analysis developed within The Drama of Social Life is not safe, sanitary nor value-neutral. It speaks directly to the fear, anguish, blood and fire of the real social world. It speaks against social structures of domination which produce the cynicism, tragedy and violence which call forth the behaviors exhibited and endured by the actors in the Goffmanesque social world. It speaks against the collaboration of social science with this distorted social world. It speaks against careerist aims, opportunism and liberal reforms advanced by social psychologists. It speaks against a dramaturgical social psychology which survives and profits off the social anguish produced by capitalist and bureaucratic social forms and managed by psychiatrists, police and social workers.
Critical dramaturgy not only describes and analyzes the alienated relations which produce alienated social dramas, but also speaks to change them to forms more responsive to human rationality, human rights and human potential. The political task of critical dramaturgy is to expedite the replacement of the fraudulent, conniving, exploitative, privatized dramaturgy, which has been so ably described by Goffman by an enlivening, caring, entrancing and redeeming dramaturgy.
The knowledge content and models of sociology and of social psychology cannot be neutral; the only question is whose politics are to be served: those of privilege and power or those of emancipation and social justice. Certainly, dramaturgical analysis has contributed to the former but it has the potential to contribute to the latter in a systematic and effective way. consequently, within these pages the reader will find a general approach that contains not only intellect but passion, not only scholarship but political commitment.
I offer a preview of how a thoroughly radicalized, thoroughly politicized, emancipatory dramaturgical analysis can be made to enhance social relationships and the human project rather than betray them in politics, sports, religion, social science and in society generally. In so doing, I offer a vision of a post-modern philosophy of life which resonates with the poetic genius of Blake; the prosocial praxis of Marx, the strong democracy of Bernard Barber and the wholeness of the mind of the feminists.
For us, the individual on the stage serves a social function not his relationship to God But his relationship to society Stands center stage. Where he appears, he represents Class conflict and struggle.--Erich Maria Remarque
