WELCOME TO THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE: ESSAYS IN CRITICAL DRAMATURGY....TR Young

THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE

PART 3

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN A NEW AGE

Introduction   Traditional symbolic interactionist views of the            
social process maintained that the self was an ongoing product of
the reciprocal interaction of humans with significant symbols. 
According to the tradition of George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton
Cooley, W. I. Thomas and Herbert Blumer, the self results from and
exists within interactions where the social identities attributed
to an individual by others are internalized by that individual as
self.  

     In socially appropriate occasions, the social identity which
is part of the self system is called forth by definitions of a
situation; used to organized situationally appropriate behaviors;
and monitored by both individual and significant others.  When
behavior is inappropriate, inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfactory,
both the individual and others react to elicit more acceptable
behavior:  thus self and society are twinborn.

     Dramaturgical social psychology developed an important
challenge to traditional symbolic interactionism.  With the
appearance of Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(1959), social psychology in the U.S.A. became sensitized to the
difference between a public, performed self and a private
undisclosed self.  

     While traditional symbolic interactionism collapsed the two,
dramaturgical analysis maintained that there is no necessary
relationship between the two:  the publicly performed self is not
necessarily a reflection of the private self.  The real difference
between the two selves means that the public self can be falsified
or the public self can be separated from the private, adumbrating
the detachment of the individual self from the social order and the
subversion of the social process.  

     One can note, in Self and Social Organization in Capitalist
Society, that the individual self is not always anchored in the
social order.  While self and society are twin-born in most of
human history, a case is made that in capitalist society, self and
society are separated.  Communication is not jointly created; role
statuses belong to the corporation; many social occasions are too
brief and fleeting for a social self to be created; a great many
encounters are economic in nature rather than social.       

     All this militates against the traditional understandings of
symbolic interactional theory about the ways in which self is
constituted, presented, and adjusted continuously in some
negotiated order.  

     Then, too, people may not have access to the means of
production of the self or, if they do, others may own the means of
production and set the terms under which one may "be" an engineer,
clerk, soldier, student, customer or professor.  All this and more
is developed in the first essay.

     Given the opposition between the traditional symbolic
interactionist and the dramaturgical views of the self, a number of
important questions are raised:  

          Which depiction of the structure of self is the more
          adequate from an empirical point of view?  

          If individuals in everyday interactions falsify their
          public presentations of self, under what social and
          historical circumstances does this occur?  

          If individuals in everyday interactions falsify their
          public presentations of self, whose social interests does
          this serve?

          If individuals are caught up in a social matrix in which
          the sociology of fraud is engineered with the aid of the
          best in science and technology, what does this mean for
          morality and its location in the social order?

     The essays in this section address these kinds of questions. 
Much of the work here was done in close cooperation with John F.
Welsh whose contributions to the ideas and treatment of topics are
inextricably tied up with those of the present author.

   The Presentation of Self

The Brain that fills the skull with Schemes
must have its humming hive of dreams
The tongue that talks, the lungs that shout
the thighs that bustle them about,
These today are proud in power
and lord it in their little hour.

Before this fire of sense decay
The smoke of thought blown clean away
They leave to ancient night alone,
And to the world their harmless bone.

                    ....Housman

This is the land of lost Content
I see it shining plain
The Happy Highways were I went
and Cannot go again.

          ...A. E. Housman