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THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER TEN
MODES OF DRAMATURGICAL ANALYSES There are three general approaches one can take toward dramaturgy, dramaturgical analysis and the dramaturgical society. Each approach yields valid analyses but each one carries its own politics. It is the third mode of analysis which yields the most fruit for the emancipatory interest in change and renewal.
This essay presents the political, economic, and physical bases of an alienated dramaturgy at the macro-societal level to parallel and supplement the micro-analytic essay in the previous essay on the structure of self in mass society.
First, one can simply report the stagings, the adjustments, the editings and the performances of the "new bourgeoisie" with-out any great depth of moral concern or any great breadth of structural analysis. Goffman does this and does it excellently well (1959; 1961b).
Secondly, one can locate dramaturgy in the micro-politics of every day life. Here, Gouldner is much the better analyst in such a use of dramaturgy. Thirdly, one can locate dramaturgy in the macro-politics of the world economic system...this approach to dramaturgical analysis has yet to be done and done well. Some ideas on how to fit dramaturgical politics in this larger macro- sociology is offered in this and the following analysis on Nixon and on the Reagan years.
Dramaturgy Without Politics In a wide variety of analyses, Goffman dissects the stagings, posings, posturings, manipulations and charms of a new generation of salesmen. In these analyses, there is always a bit of calculation in which the actor gauges just how much is to be said, how and to what effect the various forms of language are to be deployed. One is not open, self-disclosing, authentic in joy, pleasure, anguish or pain; indeed anguish and pain have no place in the staging of friendship, concern, aid or honest agency. Moral outrage loses customers, clients, prospects, or audience. Self disclosure--except that of a false honesty--is closely curbed in the short and superficial encounters of market, office and lounge.
If one has social or economic power one can be mean spirited, sullen or contemptuous of those around one. Employees, wives, service persons or children can see the human side of the bourgeois personality in all its negativity as well as in its many appealing aspects. Goffman gives us the content and the language of dramaturgical analysis but he fails to give us its social logics.
He offers us the accouterments of stage and Hollywood with which to understand how social reality is created in a given social formation but he ignores the characteristics of that social formation which encourages, even requires, such a one-dimensional personality.
As sociology was getting more abstract, more structural, more mathematical and more remote from the day to day activities of real sweating human beings, the dramaturgical analysis of Goffman was a welcome counterpoint. Rehearsal, lines, roles, cues, props, managers, editions and editings, performances, impressions, audiences, effects, backstages, and other components of theatre are employed with telling effect in American sociology in the years following WWII.
This is the most depoliticized of the three approaches in that it ignores the social and economic context in which these micro- politics arise. It fails to lay out the political economy of a dramaturgical society.
There is another vital part to dramaturgical analysis which is only dimly visible in the writings of Goffman. If one looks one can see that the history and sociology of a dramaturgical society are missing. Without a sense of history, one has the impression that Goffman's people are forever. Goffman fails to tell us that his people are historical artifacts which came with capitalist economics and which will disappear when wealth and status no longer depend upon guiding others into profitable schemes, deals, contracts, risky or illegal scams.
In this first approach, it is as though Madison Avenue and mass advertising were part of nature, eternal and unchanging. And without a sociology, a macro structural analysis of the sort provided below, the reader has no sense of the life and logic of dramaturgy.
The Micro-politics of Dramaturgy Gouldner (1970) has provided some of that sociology. He regards the micro-politics of dramaturgy as a moral calamity. He sees this world inhabited by anxious, other directed, sweating and ingratiating but cynical souls. Gouldner lays the character structure of this generation of performers in the slightly larger structure of profit-seeking, exchange-oriented financial and mercantile bureaucracies and he does it superbly well. In the use of dramaturgy as seen by Gouldner, this second view is put forward with considerable passion and convincing indignation. He quotes Rousseau with telling effect:
The art of pleasing masks conflict and exploitation.
Perfidious politeness create unfounded esteem, insincere
friendship as well as ill-founded confidence in the
appearance of things.
Gouldner sees that the old tension between utility and morality has been displaced by a false reconciliation between a utility of appearance and a merchandized morality. In this system, rewards are not based upon merit of production of real value but in creating the impression of merit. Gouldner locates dramaturgical presentments and a critical dramaturgical analysis in the micro- politics of bureau, office and market, but Gouldner fails to anchor his analysis in those larger political and economic structures mentioned above, and thus, in the end, becomes a jeremiad screaming in anger at a grotesque world in which the sacred and the profane are juxtaposed without reason.
THE POLITIC ECONOMY OF DRAMATURGY But there is a third view which
adds marxian theory to both
Goffman, Gouldner (Marx 1964; 1972; 1978). As we see it, the
creation of surplus value which was the central concern of the old
capitalist class has been replaced by a concern on the part of the
new capitalist class for the extraction of surplus value.
Only in a mode of production in which automation and datamation provides huge surpluses in the private sector, can such a society develop. In such a political economy, the central question of distribution is not social justice but rather dramaturgical impressions of quality and service projected to a mass, individuated audience.
Capitalism has improved the means of production to the extent that the central problematic is how to realize profit from those with discretionary income. Those who have been disconnected from the means of production by this improvement in productivity do not have the resources with which to buy the mountains and mountains of goods in the stores, shops, and showrooms of America. Those with minimal wages do not have the resources to purchase much even on credit. Only those in the middle and upper echelons of firms in the monopoly sector...the Yuppies...have discretionary income in the amounts worth pursuing with the false dramas of Madison Avenue.
The star, the hero, the celebrity and the charming advertisement with charming actors help the corporation to extract part of the surplus value at the point of distribution. Whole layers of unproductive people can be supported in quite nice style on this surplus. Were social justice the operative principle for distribution, quite nice systems of health care, of child care, of education and recreation as well as quite nice social areas in urban areas could be supported.
Point of Production Today, it is difficult to extract surplus
value from workers at the point of
production. Unions and the power of collective bargaining can
destroy access to markets by strikes and boycotts. Corporations
cannot long survive a strike...not because the workers are so well
organized that they can live without wages but because foreign
competitors are so hungry that they will take markets away in a
moment if given the chance. At the same time, capitalists replace
workers with machines or with cheaper workers as a way to
depoliticize exploitation at the point of production.
The history of capitalism is a history of the transformation of exploitation centering first on both productive workers and upon unorganized consumers but now, with the aid of dramaturgy, focussed brightly on consumers.
A Brief History Capitalism, as a form of production, has gone
through three great epochs. First, from the
time of the Crusader to the exploration of de Gama, Columbus, and
Cortez, commodity capitalism thrived. Goods from all over the
world were funneled into Italy, Spain, France and England. Empire
was built on the trading adventures of people who were a bit less
than pirates; a bit more than brave. But dramaturgy served no
useful purpose to exploitation there...always excepting the drama
of the Holy used to pacify and to intimidate endogenous peoples.
Generally people in the far corners of the world were only too eager to get the wondrous things from the near corners. They were quick to rob each other, enslave each other, kill each other to acquire the gold and silver, spices and sugar, sex and drugs with which to pay for trader's goods.
The goods themselves were produced by peasants, serfs, women and slaves all of whom had little political power with which to negotiate wages or the labor process...most were happy to get the pennies, pfennigs, and stotinka paid for the goods by the trader. Most were paid nothing as husbands, slave-owners, and landed lords extracted surplus value through the micro-politics of home, plantation and manor.
The second great epoch started, I am told, in the 18th Century in a Yorkshire village called Huddersfield (Morris, 1963). There energy, mind and muscle were linked to machinery to turn out an endless stream of artifacts, textiles, tools and weapons. The Industrial phase of capitalism grew rapidly. Again, the utilitarian character of the manufactured good required little in the way of professional deception.
On the backs of the working class, at the expense of whole cohorts of children, without concern for the pinched efforts of women to raise those children, feed those workers, and care for the broken and discarded bodies of miners, iron mongers, wrights, smiths and carters--upon all this misery, tragedy, squalor and pious unconcern the great industrial empires were built.
The manufacturing company replaced the family and the manor as the unit of production and distribution. The corporation was developed to accumulate wealth while escaping what little legal culpability a thin democracy could assess.
By the end of the 19th century, monopolies, cartels, and multinational conglomerates had hurried everywhere, nestled everywhere, claimed ownership everywhere to the wealth...the legacy...of the ages. Mountains of ore, layers of coal, caves of phosphates, lakes of salt and wide reaching runs of forests were converted from communal use to private property of companies complete with deeds, letters of credit, securities, stocks and inventories. The earth was pillaged. The best land was set aside to grow tea, coffee, banana, cotton, sugar and other export crops. Staple crops vanished and hunger walked abroad.
Food was shipped from the colonies to feed and cloth the bourgeoisie and their workers. The colonies became poorer and hungrier with each passing century. Wealth became more concentrated at the world level while greatly expanded in some parts of the international capitalist system. Great wars were fought for colonies, markets and raw materials. The industrial revolution swept the world clean of tribal, feudal and community bonds. The ancient structures of gender and age were, in a historical moment dissolved. Marriage and friendship became obstacles to marketing and to private advantage.
I am told that the age of finance capitalism began in the warehouses of London as merchants divided up their share of the pepper trade from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). As the cargos varied in size and in grade of pepper corn, the problem of division of profits was a constant source of bickering and dispute. The solution was shares based upon stock ownership of the importing firm rather than upon the actual cargo itself. The idea of per capita share in all grades; in all ship cargoes; in all warehouse stock began the stock exchanges which now dominate the capitalist system. Industrialists and Merchants now take a back seat to the finance capitalist.
Today we see the ascendancy of finance capital. Great banking groups come together to entail the assets of industry, the wealth of nations, the heritage of whole peoples. Master Charge and Visa take their 20 percent tithe from every transaction in the free world and any in the socialist. Citicorp, First Chemical, Chase- Manhattan and The Bank of America skimmed the cream from the industry and entrepreneurial efforts of small and large business alike around the world.
Now Japanese banks displace American banks in gathering in the riches of the world with the aid of advertizing and an global electronics system for the transfer of Yen, dollars, Schillings, Drachma, Francs and Pounds. Joel Grey sang their theme song in Cabaret: Money, Money, Money. Not only does money make the world go around, it makes the world in its own image. International finance is the God of creation in these days.
The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and the U.S. State Department coerce whole countries to pay their loans upon pain of dis-credit. The I.M.R. estimates poor nations owe $1000 billion at the end of 1988 and interest rates at around 11%, with additional fees for rescheduling.
Progressive governments and repressive governments alike squeeze workers, consumers and taxpayers to pay the banks. National treasuries are depleted to satisfy the Annual Report of the financial giants. Military dictatorships hire Chicago economists to teach them the tricks of high finance. A new era is upon us.
In the third world, dramaturgy is partnered with death squads to control unrest. Advertising is used to generate more and more demand from poorer and poorer debtors. Coercion is used to contain dissent and to control default in the world capitalist system falsely labelled the free world. Mass media and control of radio frequencies become ideological battlegrounds upon which the rich and powerful continue to suck the wealth of the world into fewer and fewer banks.
Neither Goffman nor Gouldner give us an analysis of the political economy of the world in which dramaturgy arise and is deployed. The sweep of history is lost to social analysis. The political struggles are invisible to the theories and findings of most dramaturgical analysts. This is the lost economics...the lost history of social science. In the U.S., we can see part of this world drama played out in marketing, in real estate, in stock brokerage, in political campaigns and in credit cards. It is harder to see the same dynamics on a world stage.
In the U.S. as in most of the world, finance capital has elbowed out of center stage its earlier partners--mercantile and industrial capital. They are now surly and sullen members of the ruling classes. Extraction of value is more profitable than creation of it or the selling of it.
General Motors builds cars but the real profit is in G.M.A.C., its credit arm. Sears sells things but credit is more profitable than the tires, batteries or televisions it sells. Sears pays its employees to push credit while Wards' employees are required to push charge accounts upon pain of firing.
Given the productivity of the greatest economic machine in all history and given the appropriation of this great wealth by a relatively small portion of the American population, then there can be an unseemly and degrading scramble for the remaining share apart from merit and apart from need.
In the U.S., where less than one percentage of the population; i.e., fewer than two million persons "own" most of the stocks, bonds and other securities; where some eight to ten millions "own" more property than ever they could use personally; in which some thirty to forty millions have considerable discretionary income and where 30 to 70 millions are permanently excluded from adequate relationship to the means of distribution, in such an economy, there is a premium on dramaturgy as an essential tool with which corporations accumulate wealth.
Point of Distribution One cannot use force or monopoly on the
Yuppies of the world as a way of squeezing
profits from them...they are too important to the political
process. They are the social base of electoral politics...as long
as they vote, they must be managed carefully. Dramaturgy becomes
a useful tool in this, the latest and perhaps last phase of
capitalism.
The middle classes have access to the media. Indeed, they are the producers, the engineers, the cartoonists, the writers and the actors who run the media machine. They can use their access to radio, newspaper, video, journal and magazine to embarrass and to discredit corporations, nations, and policies which try to use force or direct economic coercion on them.
Middle class functionaries belong to voluntary organizations and can organize resistance and rebellions. In order to mine the discretionary income of the middle classes, it is necessary to slip into their psyche and motivate them. Madison Avenue can use their anxieties about identity and solidarity in a society where both are in short supply.
In such a setting, dramaturgy comes to be the
tool used to colonize desire; desire is neatly
shifted from humans and the human process to
the possession of whatever brings profit.
The traditional values which emphasized productivity of essential goods; of honest value, of guaranteed quality, of genuine competition, of truth in disclosure--those values are de-emphasized with the greater transformations in the means of production. These transformations produce transformations in relations of production.
All sorts of distortions accrue from alienated use of dramaturgy in the marketplace. Advertisements could, in principle, focus upon the technical merits of a product or the social utility but industrial espionage and retail piracy eliminates all but the most trivial differences in design or fashion. The need for interchangeable units in work and home reduces differences.
Federal laws mandate similarity. Mass production dictates common features of cars and appliances. At the same time social utility does not inform production and distribution except in so far as it is profitable. Children are taught early on to be profligate spenders enticed by charming puppets and appealing pets on Saturday morning television. Standardization, industrial espionage, and overseas branches all combine to eliminate variation in design. Everywhere MacDonald's and Colonel Saunders standardize food tastes. Everywhere General Motors and Nissan market the same car changing only color and trim.
The Micropolitics of Dramaturgy While it is the great transformations of capitalism which have changed the use and magnitude of dramaturgy in the political economy of the nation- state and the entire world economic system...not excluding the Socialist states, still there are good reasons to use dramaturgy in the sociology of fraud at the micro-levels. A full fledged critical dramaturgy must return to the micro-politics of advanced monopoly capitalism and make visible the dynamics which sustain a fraudulent dramaturgy today.
The changes in the means of production include a great increase in productivity which means that a goodly percentage of the population are disemployed and thus disconnected from productive labor. More than 70% have only their labor power to sell. Each day fewer still can sell it. But these disemployed, marginally employed and unproductive workers can use the techniques and technology of dramaturgy to wheedle, entice, cajole and deceive the affluent 30 percent to part with some of that surplus wealth.
A whole generation of street people are returning. They are relearning the lessons learned by the street people in London and Paris in the 19th Century. They beg, con, scam, hustle and otherwise help separate the innocent from their purse on the street.
The affluent either "own" enough claims on profit, rents or interest to secure their future and that of their children or they have sufficient job security with health insurance, retirement benefits, and supplemental incomes as to have a permanent claim on the economic system. These are, as O'Connor has said, mostly middle and upper functionaries in the monopoly sector or in the state sector. There are in addition some two or three millions of doctors and lawyers who have accumulated real estate, I.R.A.s, mutual stocks and profitable partnerships which pay off long after retirement.
These people do not have to scurry around and impress others. They do not have to sell themselves. They can be and are the moral minority who can show anger and indignation at a world from which they benefit but find repulsive in politics, market and the arts. But millions of people on welfare have to feign compliance and agreement with rules written by mean spirited and control oriented middle class males.
Still white collar crime continues to run strong and fast among this sector of the population...and dramaturgy is a full partner in most kinds of white collar crime from the dramaturgical enactments of the physician who wants to cut on patients in order to fill up an investment portfolio to the dramaturgy of advertizing commercial touting investments in Mutual Funds and Savings-Loan banks.
Millions of employees in the competitive sector daily face bosses, foremen, managers and customers in construction, shop, restaurant and store who demand the unauthentic but visible language of body, dress and voice which create the social relations of deference and degradation.
Millions of women learn, as second nature, to act the part of the dependent and feminine female. ' Millions of school children have to feign interest and enthusiasm for dull and lifeless topics under the twin tyranny of parental pressure and job insecurity.
More millions of minority people learn that they must dissemble, conceal, mask and suppress the inchoate anger they experience at the continuing insult to their persona in a society which continues to reproduce racial exploitation, racist conflict and racial animosity.
One must wonder at the kind of society in which the use of language skills develops. Words strain, crack and break under such a heavy burden of deception.
In order to survive, you have to lie a little,
cheat a little and hustle your ass a little.
Paris woman in 1789; Chicago woman in 1989.
The change in the character of work--increasing specialization and subdivisions of work--destroys the value of productive labor oriented to useful goods. Some call this the degradation of work. Whatever neutral or moral laden terms one uses, when one reflects upon it, one can see why a lively, creative and intelligent human being would rather partake of the demimonde of fraud and dramaturgy than work in such a degrading job. Good and lively young people understandably would rather resort to the skills and tactics of the stage in a wide variety of performances ranging from real estate, stock market and auto sales all the way to their illegal cousins involving scams, frauds, and hustle.
Hollywood has given us a series of films portraying the latter sort: Burt Reynolds, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford and Paul Newman all play the generic role of the enterprising hustler who cheats the cheater. As such they are variations on the Robin Hood theme in which the rich and powerful are done in by the smooth and clever. Why do they not play miners, factory hands, migrant farmers or working women should give one pause.
It is hard to dramatize the routine oppression of bureaucratic organized work. The Dolly Parton--Jane Fonda--Lily Tomlin movie, Nine to Five did manage to use the comedic form to satirize working conditions in a large corporation but such roles are seldom seen created by the box office stars above. Such work is boring.
Nonproductive Employees A major change in the structure of the productive process is the growth of layer after layer of nonproductive employees in factory, shop, and store. The need on the part of management to control the labor process--as degrading as it is--requires a whole cadre of middle management on the make. Assigned to the dirty work of spying, tattling and punishing workers, these middle management types must adopt the skills of dissembling, feigning and convincing.
Educated far beyond the purposes to which they are put, these white collar workers--majors in business administration, personnel, and office management, in law, accounting, production management and a whole panoply of even more exotic disciplines, these must create a convincing impression that they are doing useful and necessary work . . . that they are not spies, tattles and pushers.
Being surplus to the production process they are disemployed for hours, days and weeks on end until the workers grow sullen, devious and unruly. At that time they are called in to deploy whatever management skills they enjoy. Between times, they create the dramaturgical facsimile of useful labor.
Unable to find much satisfaction in the world of work, they seek status, identity, and meaning for life in compulsive consumption.
The huge surplus accruing to large corporations with product monopoly, regional marketing agreements, price fixing arrangements, efficient mass production and mass marketing systems enable owners and top management to insulate themselves from the dirty work of hiring, firing, transferring and intimidating employees--as in olden days.
They also hire useless ranks of middle management drones to protect themselves from the moral onus of price fixing, regional agreements, advertising deceptions, industrial espionage, factory relocations, while ripping markets, families and communities asunder in the process.
This diffusion of moral responsibility underwrites a good deal of the complexity and depth of tables of organizations in the modern industrial, financial, and commercial organization-- especially in the multinational corporation doing the nasty business of transferring wealth from the poorest countries in the world to the richest.
Corporate crime increases as market pressures increase in the world capitalist system. Advertizing specialists, market consultants, public relations people, private security forces, whole legions of lawyers, as well as eager politicians are added to the table of organization of multinational corporations as it becomes necessary to control more and more of its legal environment.
All of these sectors of the population are impelled to use dramaturgy in advancing their private, most personal interests in a larger social setting marked by conflict relations. At school, at work, in church, as in sociability occasions, symbolic interaction becomes symbolic counteraction...a war of each against all in the micro-politics of everyday life.
At the macro-political level of social organization, a parallel dramaturgy arises alienated from the human project and designed to use symbolic media for corporate profit or state purpose. At the second level, the media and the organization of dramaturgy is far different. At the micro-level, the media are voice, body, clothing, and behavior...and the cast of characters limited to the small group.
At the macro level of socio-drama, the media are the electronic, print, and cinema while the cast of characters assigned to the sociology of fraud run into the thousands...all orchestrated by professional managers in an emerging techno-fascism of social control.
The Technical Bases of Dramaturgy The change in information technology also has provided the material base for a dramaturgical society. Every major invention in communication since the arrival of photography in 1838 in France has been incorporated into the macro-structures of dramaturgy. The wireless, the telephone, cinematography, television, xerography, the microchip, machine languages and holography as well as satellite information flow systems provide a technology by which masses of unknown others can be turned into audiences for every sort of political or economic purpose under the sun.
Automatic dialing systems using computer based lists of persons with given economic, political, religious, familial or age characteristics can convert the telephone from an interactive medium involving known others into a mass marketing mechanism without the means to check the validity claims of the unknown actors reading carefully edited and preprogrammed scripts. Computer generated mail together with a subsidized postal system produces millions of tons of junk mail aimed at extracting surplus value from the innocent and the believer via any number of deceptive tactics.
The technical base for dramaturgy today is located in the 500 major corporations which dominate the world capitalist system. It is they which buy and use the best of these technologies. Only the US military and the US government agencies, NSA, NASA, IRS, C.I.A., and the Pentagon have better information flow systems than do the private multinational corporations. The 21st Century will see a sharp and bitter struggle over this physical equipment between the USA, its six partners in the West and the private multi-billion dollar transnational corporations.
The nation-state will, perforce lose that contest but out of the need to constrain multinational corporations, a new transnational political system will emerge encompassing both socialist and capitalist states...and we will enter an era of democratic socialism far stronger than now imagined. The physical bases of information will make possible politics and economics not now imaginable...
Theoretical Basis for Dramaturgy It is not that radio, telephony,
television and computer based
systems can not be put to useful, nonmystifying uses.
Make-believe, just-pretend, what-if and never-will-be are all essential to the social process...most of us in social psychology refer to these elements of dramaturgy as the 'self-fulfilling prophecy.' Such prophecies are, of course, never self-fulfilling...it always takes labor, trust, faith, response, and mutuality in order for any definition of a situation to be real-ized...i.e., made real from the raw materials of make-believe.
And dramaturgy is always and everywhere a group endeavor; dyads, triads, small groups, large groups and whole nations embark on the magic and mystery of make-believe in every social role, every social occasion, every social institution and every social whole; social reality is never just only a single, psychological activity...we call such individual play by other names; madness being the current name.
In mass, industrialized societies oriented to market dynamics in production and distribution wherein we find the metaphysics for an alienated dramaturgy these days. It is in the pressing need for profit or social control which weds dramaturgy, deception and persuasion to this technology. The great dysjuncture which grounds such a use of information technology, of dramaturgy and of language, is the separation of production and distribution. In order to reunite the two sides of the economy, dramaturgy is deployed.
The intrusion of alienated dramaturgy into the
marketplace is, then, best understood in terms of the
peculiar dysjunction between a prolific system of
production and a strangulated system of distribution.
In order to dispose of surplus production on profitable terms, it is helpful, maybe necessary, to use the technologies of theatre, cinema, psychology and television to create demand. Demand is artificially constrained by the central working features of capitalist modes of distribution.
Since workers don't make a hundred percent of the price of what they (collectively) produce, they can't buy it all back. The shortfall averages the 5-15 percentage of profit the capitalist class takes as a commission/royalty for the fact of ownership. Vast amounts of wealth pile up. Neither Goffman nor Gouldner nor many in their tradition adduce features of economics or politics in their analyses.
False Needs and Dramaturgy In the U.S., the solution to the separation of production and distribution for profit is to create layers of false needs within the population sector which does have discretionary income. Commercials on television using a skillful dramaturgy do create such needs to consume.
The best artists, actors, authors and editors deployed in a multibillion dollar industry preempt the media to this economic purpose. Unfortunately, those with marginal incomes also watch television and commercials and reach for things they don't need at the expense of things they do need. No amount of exhortation by home economists to be careful in buying neutralizes this compulsive buying.
People, conditioned to be fulsome consumers beg, borrow and steal what they can't buy. And, essential but low profit lines of production are deserted by the capitalist class. The state takes over the care of the poor, the healing of the sick, the incarceration of the hapless thief. The state loses legitimacy and fiscal deficits grow. These deficits contribute to the political and economic transformations on a global scale in the 21st Century.
Dramaturgy and Economic Distortions The two sides of economic
life could be unified by
producing for need rather than for profit but that is not the case.
The ever increasing flow of goods stored, stocked and piled must be
sold if profit is to be realized. Since the most profitable market
in the USA is the 30-40 millions with discretionary incomes--young,
professional couples detached from clan and soil--earning 40 to 70
thousand dollars between them, private capital orients the economic
system to serve their real and false needs...as a result, several
distortions enter into the economy.
First there is, of course, resort to image rather than substance in marketing practices. Secondly there is the emphasis upon capital intensive production rather than production with high labor costs (child care, education, health services, geriatric services, housing, mass transit, heavy industry as well as agriculture). Thirdly there is the flow of wealth to a favored few institutions while others starve for resources.
Family, church, community organizations, child care, apprenticeship and internship positions for teenagers, recreational and medical institutions are not adequately funded since investment is restrained by profit. Wages reduce profits. Some institutions have embarrassing riches; high profit firms in chemicals, finance, hotel lodging, air travel as well as the military absorb the wealth of nations. Essential infrastructure needs such as dams, bridges, mass transit, housing, child care and schools slowly atrophy.
Given such distortions in the economy, those charged with political agency must resort to rhetoric, image, and a false patriotism to gain election and to the crassest kind of pork barrel politics serving special (and affluent) interests in order to ensure reelection. Thus does dramaturgy and paid public relations become part of the democratic process--the point of which is to reduce democracy--to minimize it--to manage the dramaturgical impression of greatness in the political sphere and to subvert authentic representation of those who do bother to vote in such distorted politics.
The needs of family, community, nation and of the third world are held hostage to marketing efforts to produce and dispose of high-profit surplus production. Adolescents roam the streets unable to link their emerging enthusiasm and morality to socially useful labor. They learn to parasitize on friends, family, and merchants to acquire the clothes, records, drugs and cars they are taught to want. Community needs are left to a patchwork privatized voluntarism. Playgrounds, parks, utilities, services, pollution control, planning, recreational programs, renovation and reconstruction as well as care for the elderly and those with special needs are left to the private sectors oriented only to profit or to state welfare oriented to a mean-spirited frugality.
The politics required to contain the legitimate needs of people in cities, states and nation are ugly indeed. Dramaturgy and techno-fascism at home together with right-wing dictatorship in client countries, go together in incestuous embrace. How else can one understand a Reagan at home and U.S. funding to every murderous regime in the Third World. Such a politics is implicit in a profit oriented economy blind to human or social need and keyed only to private accumulation as the final test for production and distribution.
A productive system which creates more wealth than its employees can absorb must find some way to realize profit. If employees collectively are paid less than the totality of wealth produced, then markets must be found. And employees must be paid less or no profit can be realized. The special solutions to this dysjuncture include crime, war, and imperialism. Crime renews and satisfies demand. War destroys and renews demand. Foreign markets for luxury goods as well as repeated purchases in the affluent home market absorbs surplus production and thus realize profit. But only if other capitalist countries are excluded from home and foreign markets.
The history of warfare since 1873 is a history of capitalist countries trying to solve the need for markets and raw materials by dominating each other's markets at home and abroad while fighting to see which nation has exclusive rights to minerals and markets abroad.
Warfare, welfare, crime and now dramaturgy,
are economics by other means.
If the modern economy is to keep moving by these twin politics; dramaturgy at home and dictatorship abroad, there are other institutions which make recourse to dramaturgy as well. These include the educational institutions, religious institutions and medical institutions. Each has its own imperatives for employing a dramaturgy. Some reasons are socially valid; some are pure deceit. We can look at the university to see both kinds of dynamics embodied.
Dramaturgy in Other Institutions I have been speaking as if all
the alienated use of dramaturgy
were to be found in the political or economic life of a
society...the truth is that such dramaturgy intrudes into all
social institutions. Starting with the university and even into
the most Holy of human activity, a sociology of fraud is found.
The university resorts to an authentic dramaturgy in sports, in the pomp and circumstance of graduation, in the promotion of medical surgery or esoteric research. On its own merits this dramaturgy answers to the human interest in creating a sense of the sacred, a sense of awe and mystery, a sense of community and fellowship oriented to the general interest. But the delight, joy and surprise of dramaturgy in the university may serve to mask a more profound alienation.
In order to meet the demands of a capitalist mode of production for well trained docile workers geared to technical work, the central mission of education is subverted. A school, college or university, in varying degrees, could constitute a knowledge process undistorted by power, privilege or profit. In American colleges and universities, the process by which the critical and the transforming self knowledge of a society is put aside in favor of a mass produced system oriented to the creation of skills and techniques.
Such a educational system must betray its mission by the profligate discarding of all those students whose sense of life or moral certitude resists such indoctrination into a depoliticized, technicized and dehumanized educational system. Students from the impoverished schools of the American ghetto are discarded by the millions left to roam the streets; exploit a cheapjack welfare system and find refuge in the growing archipelago of prison gulags around the country.
Students are marched, en masse, through the four years of the university system in the cheapest, most mechanized way possible. Fitted into mass classes, lectured at, relentlessly tested in terms of a monolithic model of truth in marketing, politics, sociology, psychology and physics and ruthlessly discarded by these testing procedures, students reach for the thin and ephemeral solidarity of sports, alcohol, and commodity sex.
During the recent years of declining enrollment, nearly 1000 colleges use direct mail to stem further loss of students. Colleges scramble for students. Small liberal arts colleges; church related colleges; renamed teacher's colleges all hire 'public information officers' to beat the bushes for students whose parents can pay part of the costs of tuition.
Seeking the dramaturgical impression of greatness, universities invest in highly visible public relations gambits. Notre Dame, Alabama, Nebraska, Oklahoma and North Carolina use the beauty and grandeur of athletic ability from a few dozen young men to mask the degradation of the learning, knowing, and creating process so central to the authentic university.
Similar analyses can be made for religious, medical or communications industries. Such movies as "Elmer Gantry," "Hospital" and "Network" resonate the alienated use of dramaturgy in 'real' life. As fiction, these movies carry the larger truth made larger in order to be seen and heard. Such are the emancipatory uses of drama in the cinema.
The American church, sequestered in the corners of social time and social space; stripped of its concern for the spiritual in a land of materialism; larded with bland preachers who preach a careful sermon to their middle class parasites; indifferent to the fate of the poor and oriented to the mini-palaces of the suburbs...the churches fade and fail. In such a moral vacuum, the televangelists are an oasis for those who seek haven in a heartless world. Preaching a false justice and a false peace, the televangelists use the threat of Hell or the promise of a sweet Jesus to extort money from the 20 or so million who tune them in.
The electronic churches have grown to be a multi-billion dollar industry. They have computer based mailing lists together with sophisticated software which teases out those who are gullible enough to send for a free offer and honorable enough to want to pay for it. Using these computed compiled mailing lists, heart-rending appeals are made to save one's soul and the world by sending in an average of $17 per appeal to the Billies, Jimmies, and Johns of the mass, electronic church. Thus does fraud spread itself into the holy reaches of the ministry. Thus do ministers become hucksters and hucksters, ministers.
The American hospital system is also subject to monumental structural change by the forces of the market and the quest for profit. For-profit medical companies buy up failing hospitals, turn them into the counterpart of the Hyatt-Regency hotel; serve the medical and gourmet appetites of the insured middle class and desert the unprofitable health needs of the poor and hungry.
Great chains of hospital franchises are put together. Each chain uses the dramaturgy of heart or liver transplant to create for itself the dramaturgical facsimile of medical science. The great heart surgeons are recruited much as great basketball players are recruited or Olympic stars to the profit needs of such medical corporations. Humana and other such chains compete for the cream of the insurance crop. The motto of such medical corporations becomes; 'millions on advertizing but not one cent on charity.'
Summary We have seen that there is a political economy into which
to lay the dramaturgical analysis of a Goffman as well as
the critique of such analysis by a Gouldner. We can see the
historical picture which has developed over the past four centuries
in which dramaturgy has been preempted to meet the marketing needs
of an economy increasingly geared to capital accumulation.
We see the rise of the multinational corporation with a multi- billion dollar budget to buy and sell beliefs, natural resources, governments as well as the various media which comprise and create the knowledge process of a society.
The various technologies of information flow are developed and harnessed to the special interests of private property in profit, growth and control of class enemies rather than in the general interest of a well designed society oriented to community, to praxis and to the integrity of the physical environment.
Movable type, the rotating printing press, the wireless and telephony, radio, television, computers and holography could be assembled into a great national and international communication technology oriented to the collective discussion of pressing human concerns as well as the collective and undistorted creation of social policy with which to deal with these issues.
Instead we are treated to an alienating deployment of these technologies using a mystifying dramaturgy and oriented to the created of false needs in the marketplace, false politics in mass elections, as well as the creation of amoral technical abilities in the university.
It is against this use of technology; against this use of dramaturgy; against this use of the knowledge process that this work is set forth. We know from history, from the margins and interstices of society, from personal experiences that interactively rich and information-rich communications are possible.
We know from personal experience, from history and from odd moments in religion, politics and art that an authentic dramaturgy is possible. We know intuitively that a symbolic interactional format in family, friendship, recreation and work can be constituted in interactively rich as well as with open and sharing information processes. These are possible. These are central to uniquely human labor. These are necessary to undistorted politics.
Control over the knowledge process must be ripped from the hands of the private corporation; from the hands of the state apparatus; from the managers, administrators and superintendents of the shop and factory; from the burgeoning advertising firms, public relations firms and opinion sampling firms who sell this precious commodity to the highest bidder. The knowledge process in all its dimensions must be put to the collective; to the human; to the prosocial uses essential to a rational and decent society.
This is the political task of a critical dramaturgy; of a critical social psychology; of a critical philosophy of knowledge.
Some could gaze and not be sick But I could never learn the trick.
There's this to say for guile and guise They often bring their own surprise.
...adapted from Housman
