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THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE
Essays in CRITICAL DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER ONE
HARD TIMES AND HARD TOMATOES
The Plight of Symbolic Interactional theory in a Interactionally Deficient Society
Symbolic Interactional Theory has always been the heart and soul of American Sociology. Other theoretical approaches have focussed upon disembodied statistical aggregates, upon impersonal macro-processes, upon the raging, changing flow of class struggle and upon the surgical interplay of demographic categories. Most sociology is concerned with the correlation of variables, with measures of dispersion and measures of association of disembodied fragments of social activity. Symbolic Interactional theory has focussed upon real thinking, intending, trying, failing, loving, hurting human beings.
Symbolic interactionists have brought us understanding of how men change into gynecologists when examining women in order to strip the interactional matrix of its sexual potential and thus facilitate the diagnostic process. Symbolic interactionists have taught us how three year-old children come to be human beings, come to reflect upon and chastise their own behavior and that of others as the social self...the me, arises.
Interactionists have shown us how a young boy, within a process of symbolic activity, becomes a young woman. Interactionists have informed us of how police officers work their beat, how they count some things as crime and others not. We have been shown how cottagers hold outsiders at a distance and how, sometimes, they bring them into a closed world of meaning.
We have watched, through the analytic eyes of symbolic interactionists, how mental patients maintain the dignity of a whole person in the face of the degradation routines of the mental hospital, how prisoners maintain a rich underlife in the most lifeless prisons, and how adults distance themselves from the child's world of the merry-go-round. We have seen Purdy parade himself as a meteorologist before unknown and unknowing others. We have seen the secret places of trade and commerce in the asylum. We have observed the moral career of a whole person being turned and tossed by the official routines of hospital staff.
Symbolic Interactional research opened up the social organization of homosexual life, of barroom behavior, of the microdynamics of the classroom as well as the structure of action at funerals, weddings, courts martial and in the framing of the holy. The constitution of Halloween as well as the social nature of God has been made visible. We know that it is as possible to believe in the reality of God as to believe in Detroit, the NAACP, or the notion of a mother...all are, equally, human constructs and, as long as human beings organize their behavior as if there really is a God or a Detroit or an NAACP, there really are those things.
All in all, Symbolic Interactional Theory as a discipline has provided us with a conceptual scheme and a wide variety of methods by which we can unravel the most mysterious process of all...how human worlds of thought and action are created by distinctly human creatures. It is a wondrous accomplishment.
We learned that mind, self and society are trineborn...that there is no such thing, ontologically, as the separate individual in its social form. The notion of a mother is a nonsense notion without the child defined as such and the woman acting as such within a larger set of constructed human activity. We have been taught to explore the structure of self and the social identities which are inculcated into the self system and which, ceteris paribus, mediate human behavior in situationally appropriate ways within symbolically constituted worlds. We have learned that our very consciousness is shaped within the web of human affiliations.
Our perceptions of physical reality and our interpretations of social events are collective efforts. Language and symbols do not hang disembodied in time and space with predetermined meaning...despite what dictionaries tell us. Space, time, mass, volume, pressure, temperature, velocity, density, gravity and magnetism may, just may be human constructs as well...artifices of human interest and human imagination. People, together, create the meaning of a thing. People, together, construct and deconstruct the meaning of whole historical epochs.
Out of the 19th century had come the understanding that social reality was a human construct...that social forms and social processes were not ontologically prior to the actions and intentions of intending people. The belief that social forms were set eternally by the hand of a creator slowly was displaced by the belief that social forms were the product of countless trials and failures of countless tribes and families.
The idea that Western social forms were the highest point in an upwardly spiral of social evolution lingers, in most societies, to the present moment but now we know that to be part of the solidarity supplies which bond people to each other and to the 'people'. That, perhaps, there are thousands of equally adequate but differing ways to build social relations dawned slowly on a few scholars; mostly anthropologists. Still the innocent of the world believe that whatever social system into which they are born is the best of all those myriad forms.
Along with many other doubters, Marx set in motion a vigorous line of enquiry into the social sources of human alienation, into the processes of false consciousness, mystification and the ideological hegemony of ruling elites. It was a blasphemous thought that existing social forms were the source of much mischief and pain rather than the last final perfect child of the gods or of evolutionary processes.
In the famous Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the intimate relationship between human intention and social reality. One's relationship to the means of production tended to define and to limit one's ways of acting, thinking, and ways of feeling. For Marx, the structures of domination: race, class, gender and authority distorted the knowledge process. For Marx, the solution to human alienation was not an ever more perfect approximation to the Will of God.
For Marx, the solution to human alienation was collective human control over the social relationships which people built and experienced each other. But, in marxian terms, the relationships people created varied greatly in their capacity to promote human welfare. Under some conditions of social organization, the social life worlds created by humans turned back against them as alien forces. Feudalism, slavery, and capitalism were economic formations in which many people labored and a few benefitted. Primitive communism lay in the dim prehistory of human beings.
These social worlds were, mercifully for Marx, eradicated by capitalism and with them, the idiocy of rural life. Either the means of production were inadequate or the relations of production were oppressive in those four formations. Through revolution, people could build a just society...a praxis society.
In a praxis society, human beings...species beings...could create themselves, collectively, as full and competent agents of their own destiny. Not as rugged individuals, apart from the main, but rather as collaborators in that wondrous endeavor. Human beings would create law, religion, politics, and morality but, this time, human beings would benefit from those creations rather than made, each year, more miserable.
Marx became midwife to the dawn of post-history, an epoch in which humans beings would be creative, rational, self determining and sociable...in dialectic fashion. Today the vision of Marx inspires much of the movement toward a praxis society in the most oppressed parts of the globe. Joined with the ancient wisdom of Christ, Liberation Theology, marxism is a powerful catalyst for progressive change in the Christian part of the 3rd world.
The operative question became how to make the revolution toward a praxis society. For marx, good theory and good practice was the answer. Ideas and material resources joined together would help give humans ever more control over the social forms in which they need must live out their lives.
The revolutionaries taught us that social reality was not fixed for all time nor was it divinely established by the gods as the proper way for human beings to organize themselves into human groups. Social reality was a human creation...it was made by human and it could be changed by humans.
The quest for the laws of society became, for radical researchers, the quest for a liberating knowledge process in which human beings, could, in undistorted communication, create a public sphere in which dialogue and moral power replaces coercion and economic power in shaping the symbolic interactional process. And out of all this came an awful realization and an awful responsibility. Humans had lost their innocence and were now responsible for the good or the evil of their world. That was the political implication for all those who reflect upon the knowledge process. Such an understanding takes the locus of human morality out of the individual and places it in the complex interaction between mind, self and society where properly it belongs.
No longer may we speak of the moral development of the child in isolation from others but rather of the morality of symbolic social life worlds involving significant others, peers, orders, commands, role sets, social occasions, social institutions as well as social values.
The social location of morality is in the dialectic
relationship between individual and society...not in the
single individual, its psyche, its self structure or its
small, wee voice of conscience.
Some would say that, still, one is responsible and one acts in bad faith when one follows orders but such assertions ignores the brutal realities of power and wealth; ignores the need for trust, faith and belief; ignores the trineborn nature of mind, self and society.
Such a placement of credit or onus for the good and evil individuals indeed do, exculpates the good and evil of the larger symbolic environment shaped more by some than by others; more by bosses than employees; more by males than by females; more by bureaucratic elites than by the masses they manage and manipulate. In this world, physical power and economic power distorts the reciprocity of interaction, the mutuality of the knowledge process, the sharing of the symbol.
Out of the late 19th century social science, especially anthropology, came the growing realization that there were an infinite variety of ways to be human...and to be less than human. Out of the early 20th century came the archangels of symbolic interactional theory: Mead, Cooley, Thomas, Lewin, Blumer and dozens of others. They revealed to a generation of eager students the magical process by which people came to intersubjective understanding, defined a social occasion, reified it and, fulfilled the prophecy of its reality in their consequent activities.
But Symbolic Interactional Theory arose in simpler times...in more innocent times...in more congenial times. Today, Symbolic Interactional theory has fallen upon hard times. It developed in a world in which people tried with considerable success, to share in the creation of a cooperative symbolic environment with but little in the way of practiced deceit and scientifically informed fraud. With the growth of society psychology came the human power to polish or to obscure the looking glass process by which we, jointly, shape our own behavior.
In the mid-century, a Lucifer came bringing the reality- creating activity of human beings into a new and different light. Goffman, in a series of ground breaking studies showed us the dark underside of symbolic interaction. Mead and Cooley had stressed the cooperative, transparent, honest aspects of shared lifeworld creation but Goffman showed us the cynical, managed, fraudulent parts of it.
Many of us did not like the Goffmanian message. The early book reviews of Goffman were indignant that someone might disparage and discredit the wonderful reality-creating...the promethean part of every person. We wanted a world in which Mead was the apt theorist, not Goffman.
But as we looked more closely at more and more of politics, of sports, of religion, of the marketplace and its sales tactics, we began to take Goffman view more seriously. Even in the university we could see the stagings of greatness, pretensions of student service, of academic excellence, of public agency behind which lay much fraud.
The modern university remains a sexist, racist, elitist knowledge process shaped more by the interests of business and the job market than by the ideals of the humanities, arts and value full social sciences. Even today, football coaches are paid more than are people in the fine arts since they help create the dramaturgical semblance of greatness. Those in the fine arts only make the times great, not the image of the university.
When we looked at the use of social psychology in politics, in business and industry, and even in counselling, we found a discipline on the make selling its wares to whomever had the price to pay. Did you want to create false needs for overpriced goods? Simple...just call in the social psychologists...they could tell you of the vulnerabilities of the individual; of the mechanisms by which people came to trust and to believe and to act.
Did you want to garner votes without taking a stand on issues? Easy...just call in the pollsters, the demographers, the depth psychologists, and the dramaturgical experts from Hollywood. They would guarantee political office at a price. Did you want a new personal image that would inspire respect and trust apart from personal merit? No problem...just hire consultant. They will dress you, coach you, manage you and sell you to an innocent, believing, trusting public.
A whole new industry arose using the combined technologies of social science, of electronics data management and electronics communications media together with the art and craft of theatre, cinema, and song. The best writers, the best singers, the best actors, the best directors, the best artists, the best social scientists signed on to the sociology of fraud.
Out of the dynamics of privatized individualism, the
accumulation of wealth, the impetus of consumerism, the
rise of market science and the betrayal of social
psychology to these crude beasts marching to Bedlam,
arose the Dramaturgical Society informed more by the
forces of fraud than by joy, delight, surprise, and
invention.
Public Relations, advertizing, and industrial psychology became multi-billion dollar endeavors. Advertizing alone had revenues over 100 billion in 1989. We now know what rough beast, its time come round, was born at Bethlehem...it was the dramaturgical society and it was born on Madison avenue out of Hollywood.
Nowhere were the technologies of the dramaturgical society deployed more adroitly than in the elections of Richard Nixon who staged a convincing performance before a believing mass that he was indeed something called a president which matched in adequate ways, the prophecy in the American Constitution. Later, the revelations of Watergate made visible the backstage activities in which Nixon used scripts, assigned actors to read parts, edited out scenes which brought no applause, directed his bit players in the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Justice Department and used other stage props to bring forth the convincing impression of honest agency. Nixon tried to turn America into a political disneyland and, barely, failed. Now comes Reagan with more success.
For most people, most of the time, in their everyday life and between themselves, the assumptions of symbolic interaction about the shared meaning of a symbol, about the inclusive boundaries of a social occasion, about the rights of those present to share in the shaping of a symbolic universe...these and more assumptions are fully met.
People had lied before but lying then was a handicraft, a cottage industry. People had joined in teams to swindle before but that was petite bourgeois fraud compared to the fully automated, electronically based, expertly managed fraud of the large scale organization.
For most people today, most of the time, the innocence of trust, the readiness of belief, the transparency of action fully justifies the faith one has in friendships, family, classroom, church and sociability occasions. Most of the time for most people, Mead is the better theorist than either Marx or Goffman.
But in important ways...ways which affect the wages, the
welfare, and the fate of human beings, both Marx and Goffman were
right...dead right. The sociology of fraud trumps the sociology of
faith. Moral power and social power are betrayed to the economic
power of the rich and powerful by the mind managers, the
administrative scientists, the social psychologists of the
marketplace.
In a mass society; in a class-ridden society, in a racist society, in a sexist society, in a bureaucratically organized society, the structural conditions for fraud abound. The motives of profit, of privatized power, of racial preference, of gender privilege and of religious fervor all move us all toward a sociology of fraud.
The midline between reality and make-believe is deliberately
obscured by those engaged in the management of mass audiences for
the private profit of their clients. Even nation-states hire P.R.
people to polish up their image and to hide the ugliness of their
politics. The Union of South Africa, the military dictatorships in
Latin America, the authoritarian regimes in Asia all hire
professional dramatists to freshen their hoar leprosy to our April
day.
For most of history, most people created their social life
worlds using voice, body, clothing and behavioral sets. These
information flow media were inalienable. Under his breath, down on
his knees, Galileo would still mutter, the world turns...not the
sun. Workers on the dock in England could use a different voice to
express their contempt at their working conditions at the morning
lineup...they farted in the general direction of the boss. The
King of Denmark proudly wore the star of David on his arm as a
protest against the Nazi power to define the Jew as the source of
gentile misery...rather than the erratic dynamics of capitalism.
Today, the media are more readily wrested from the symbolic using creature we call human. The media are mass media. They are owned by unknown others serving unknown purpose. They need not be but they are.
In elitist societies, the public media are appropriated
by the rich or powerful to control the symbolic
interactional process, and thus controlling subvert it
from the human project.
We could use the vast trillions of dollars our labor creates to fashion interactively rich and informationally rich electronically based communication systems. We could fashion the strong democratic politics of which Bernard Barber so wisely urges. We could develop the environmentally sound economic system in which the authentic needs of human beings could join with the authentic needs for community. We could recapture the world of play and pretend to the antic joy of love and life. All these things we could do with an interactionally rich electronics.
These same technologies now underwrite the false needs of the compulsive consumer; they underwrite the ugly politics of the right wing; they underwrite the nasty military maneuvers in Central America. Human beings have lost their voice to the owners and operators of the mass media...and these entrepreneurs sell the media to the highest bidder. In these times, the highest bidder is the Multinational Corporation the goals of which are not participation but rather profit and management.
Given all these profound changes of technology and technique in the 20th century, symbolic Interactional theorists no longer have the luxury to work solely out of the consensus model of social interaction. As we go into the 21st Century, we must, increasingly be on the watch for conflict relations mediated and magnified by this new technology of electronic fraud. Today the data for interactional research come as much from the electronic ministries and from the electronically based right-wing political action groups as from the structure of action between friends and family.
The use of fraudulent reality processes in the Iran-Contra scandal are an especially rich vein to work for symbolic interactionists today. The Reagan administration uses the mass electronic media to label the thugs in Honduras as 'freedom fighters.' The Reagan team hide their ugly dealings in the dark, out of sight of the public whose trust they betray. They use the secret police to build whole social realms and to fund them outside the Constitution and outside the Congress. The self fulfilling prophecy of the American Constitution is subverted by the close and secret worlds created by the Poindexters, McFarlanes, Secords and North who wait upon their masters.
The old assumptions of symbolic interaction, emerging out of the well ordered life of middle class America no longer suffice for the discipline. We now find hard tomatoes in our Symbolic Supermarket...tasteless, artificially colored and designed to last until some innocence customer, still believing in the tomatoeness of life buys it and consumes it.
As we move into the 21st century, those who are part of the body of Symbolic Interaction Theory have a new task. Since Symbolic Interactional Theory is the heart and soul of American sociology, our task is to bring forth a new generation of SIT researchers, analysts, teachers, and activists.
We must join Marx, Marcuse, Habermas, Gramsci, and E. P. Thompson to the syllabi of Interactional Theory along with Mead, Cooley, Blumer, Stone and Goffman. We must integrate the vast research of the cultural marxists with the extensive research capacity of American social psychology. We must learn from the cultural marxists in England, Germany, France, Yugoslavia, Italy and Australia. We must master that literature and make it available to our students, to our colleagues, and to the more general public as warning and pathway to social justice.
We must focus upon the sociology of fraud which makes mock of the assumptions of the old symbolic interactional theorists. We must generate a new, subsidiary theory of human behavior setting forth the systematic distortions of the interactional process. We must produce a new, radical, generation of symbolic interactionists as we move into the 21st century. We must not allow the last half of the 20th century to be the precursor of the 21st. We need an epistemic break from our more innocent understandings of the symbolic world in which we must, each willy nilly, live out our days.
As we are human beings and honor that estate, we must act ethically to make visible the processes and practices of fraud in the creation of social life worlds which conserve and expand the ancient wrongs of race, class, bureaucracy and national pride. We must show that the politics of America in the world capitalist system do not serve the human interests in freedom, dignity, democracy, justice and cooperative exchange as the Reagan administration falsely prophesy but rather serves the interests of some 500 transnational corporations, 300 of which are based, for a while, in the United States. We must begin to speak of systematically distorted prophecies rather than self-fulfilling prophecies in our work.
As we are charged with the task of being impartial and truthful social scientists, we must make visible the vast fraud in the marketplace; in the electronic ministry; in the production of commodity sports; in the massification, technicization and depoliticization of the university as well as the creation of the living dead in the factories, schools, offices, mines and fields of America by the management scientists of modern corporate industry.
Let us help build a world in which the assumptions of symbolic interactional theory as we learned them in all our innocence might once again be valid...might once again be used to build a social life world by human beings in which trust, belief, faith and innocence are not betrayed to a class elite, a bureaucratic elite, a party elite or an intellectual elite.
Let us join American symbolic interactional theory with critical theory, phenomenology, semeiotics, socio-linguistics, and dramaturgical analysis to create an emancipatory social psychology which empowers rather than manages, which enlivens rather than objectifies, which transcends rather than freezes existing structures of power and privilege.
There is much to do. Let us set our hearts and souls to do it
as long as we shall live...and let us begin right after the picnic.
You can be Lenin and I will be Marx. It should be grand sport.
Origins of The Hard Times Paper In the last years of his life, Gregory Stone chaired a session at the MSS in which he called for a rapprochement between SIT and critical theory. I had not heard of critical theory so I hurried to the library upon my return from the MSS meetings that year. Over the next five years, I read Marcuse, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Wellmar, Habermas, and other Europeans in the sociology of knowledge; names I had not known in graduate school at Michigan or Colorado. On my next sabbatical, I spent a year in England getting to know the modern expressions of critical theory in London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Oxford. This paper is a product of those years and the hundreds of lectures I've prepared since...and a result of the inspiration from Stone. I wonder if he would appreciate the effort.
