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THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE
INTRODUCTION TO PART 2
THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
In this first section, there are three essays that contribute to the political struggle to reunite social science and morality. In a post-modern social psychology, the task is more than the simple discription and reporting of the processes by which a soul and a self emerge. It is also a task to map the context in which self and interaction succeeds or fails. It is a task to help clarify the conditions under a strong and competant self system arises and is sustained in an open and supportive society. To do social psychology in a post-modern mode is to be openly, frankly, passionately committed. Out of that passion comes not a search for the iron laws of society and self development but rather a quest for the myriad permutations of social organization which permit an infinite variety of self pattern to emerge within the simple structures of praxis: sociality, intentionality, creativity, and rationality. In the post-modern world, social psychology cannot be neutral or value-free; it must have a politics. The only interesting question becomes what shape that politics? One answer is offered here.
The first essay, Hard Times and Hard Tomatoes, was presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Norman Denzin, then President of SSSI, was kind enough to invite me to help the members of the Society understand why most of the major assumptions of Symbolic Interactional Theory could not be meet in mass society: school, marketplace, shop, factory, church or sports field. I was only too happy to oblige.
I suggested to the 40 or 50 interactionists assembled there that we must no longer assume undistorted processes of symbolic interaction, of self-hood, of communication, of the significant other or the looking glass process. Rather we must work assidously as praxical scientists to help create a world in which symbols elicit the same meaning in the self as in the other. We must work to reveal the structural obstacles to the self process. We must rewrite the textbooks which assume that interaction in mass society has the same result as interaction in a praxis society.
The second article, drafted first, but a special case in the larger study of the sociology of knowledge, follows with an appreciation and defense of Goffman from his many detractors. If Goffman describes a sociology of fraud, one need not subscribe to it. Even if Goffman is a partisan on behalf of dramaturgy used in the service of fraud, still less can be reject his observations. We can look and them and ask after their truth value; we can ask whether such a state of affairs is congenial to the human process. We can work to put dramaturgy to better uses in the creation of self and society. The second part of the article proposes that a more aggressive methodology is essential to meet the information needs of an authentically democratic and transparent society.
Under conditions of conflict, the polite and cooperative stance taken by social psychologists in a society marked by sincerity, honesty and mutuality does not answer to the research process nor does it answer to the trust accorded social science when we are given time, resources and social honor in return for our work.
The third article sets forth the theoretical and practical characteristics of an informationally rich and interactionally rich society...one at the opposite end of the sociology of fraud which now provides the raw data for an alienated dramaturgical society. These three articles, together, set the tone and the mood for a wide ranging critique and call for a radical, emancipatory, participatory social psychology in the post-modern mode.
