This essay is dedicated to Kathy Charmaz, who as editor of the Journal of Symbolic Interaction, has encouraged scholars to expand and enliven the discipline of social psychology and enrich the profession of critical sociology.

Symbolic Interactional Theory is the beating heart of all social life and, along with other domains of social psychology, the foundation upon which all other sociologies is grounded. For this reason, it is particularly important that symbolic interaction, as a discipline, and symbolic interactionists as a profession, explore and illuminate the social forces which shape and pre-shape symbolic interaction in the daily lives of human beings.

There is much at stake in the doing the quality of life for generations of women, possibilities of emancipation for oppressed peoples, social power for lower-level workers in large scale organizations as well as the very dignity and esteem of social scientists--all are at risk from simplistic theory and encapsulated research protocols. The knowledge process itself is at risk. There is much to be done in this 21st century in pursuit of good theory and a well tempered discipline. I would like to suggest some of the ways in which the next generation of social psychologists and symbolic interactionists can build upon the work already done and, thereby, help create a knowledge process helpful to the human project.

I would like to begin with a critique of the assumptions of symbolic interaction; show their limitations and qualifications. Then I will go on to talk of some of the more promising yet neglected forms of social psychology pushed, at present, to the fringes of our discipline and our life's work.

A. Self and Society are Twin-born. For most of human life, this assumption has been well taken. Human beings are born into a social complex, are socialized, take part in rites of passage and live out their lives in a set of social roles well known, well developed and well integrated into the larger social structure. Family structures give life-long social identities to an individual as do work roles, gender roles, tribal roles and religious roles. For most of human history; for most human beings, self and society have been and remain, central to the structure of self.

Yet there are problems with this foundational assumption. In modern, massified, mobile societies, the structure of self become torn and tattered as family becomes torn and tattered; as kinship ties are torn asunder by migration, by war and by social mobility. Poverty and racism both tend to obstruct the development of self toward it fullest, most dignified potential. Sexist gender roles, especially, interfere with the development of self for both men and women.

In modern, bureaucratic society, work roles become the property of the large scale organization; rites of passage are 'rationalized' and role incumbency is dependent upon the whims of bosses and the vagaries of the economy. Gender roles are, rightly or wrongly, destroyed by market forces and the changing family structures in massified, impersonal, short-term work roles. If women work cheaper than do men, then job descriptions become de-gendered. There is much to gain from the liberation of women from sexist gender roles, restrictive and subservient as they are...but the fact remains, that self and society cannot be twin-born in a political economy where people are treated as interchangeable commodities and are discarded when profits fall or costs can be reduced.

The Bhagavad-gita teaches that faith, duty and belief are the core of one's self. But in mass, capitalist or bureaucratic socialist societies, religion itself becomes confined to the smallest corners, the least important runs of social life and, in the end, cannot serve as a strong and encompassing source of self. And, when moral agency is located in the upper echelons of corporation, of military, of university or of social class, the role of self becomes marginal in the lived experiences of those for whom moral agency is denied.

B. Symbols elicit the same Response in Self and Other. The corner-stone of symbolic interactional theory is that symbols are used, collectively, to create a social-life world, shared and understood by those defined as 'persons' in a social event. Again, the truth value of such a statement is, for most of us most of the time, high enough to give us confidence in the teaching of it and in the living with others whom we trust as friends, colleagues, family, lovers and public servants.

But, in weighing the truth value of such assumption, we need to look at the process in which symbols are created and employed. In the multi-trillion dollar endeavor of advertizing, we know that there is a large breech between subject and object of the communication process...deception and distortion in ads for automobiles, alcohols, tobaccos, pharmaceuticals, cereals and investments reduces the truth value of the assumption...and we ignore these communications in our lectures and in our theories of symbolic interaction. The fact is that those in 'scientific' management, operant conditioning, public relations as in outright fraud, do not want the subjects of a communication act to understand as they understand, to feel as they feel, to act as they act or to mis-trust as they mis-trust.

But we might well think about the enlarging methods of management of workers, students, voters, and believers in the media and as in the market place. Universities hire thousands of public relations persons to manage the image of the team, the program, of campus life and of its treatment of low-level workers. Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Ohio State, Arizona, Florida State and Texas Tech pay their workers sub-standard wages. Michigan State, Virginia Tech, Nebraska and Washington pay their athletes and suborn their mis-deeds. Major universities invest assets in the weapons of war, in firms which exploit workers in the poorest countries in the world. Major universities in major cities are slumlords and have to put the best face possible on their betrayal of the quest for social peace and social justice.

The sociology of fraud moves from a cottage industry to a major social institution in politics when the political process is purchased by elites in class, racist, religious and ethnic stratifications. Betrayals by husbands, confidence schemes by street hustlers, graft by local politicians are, one and all, small-time and amateur forms of the sociology of fraud. All major corporations have trained cadres of publicists who manage the image of the corporation while it despoils the earth, cheats its customers, exploits and discards its workers and buys the political process. The US Army has thousands of public relations officers attached to every program and every battalion whose only duty is to hide the problems of command from the tax-paying public. All these 'professional' services in the management of image and the manipulation of messages erode the sharedness of language and the mutuality of social life.

C. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Faith, hope, trust, and suspension of dis-belief are all essential to the process by which a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' takes on the kind of truth value with which it can fairly be called a social fact.

And for most people in church, home and sports field, the suspension of dis-belief, faith in the sincerity of others present and hope that the prophecy becomes social reality; all are honored in the consequent run of behavior of those present. Husbands and wives become so in the consequent fulfillment of the norms and values embodied in marriage vows. Students and teachers become such in the honest, open and sustained engagement with the knowledge process. Priests and parishioners create the drama of the holy when and only when they believe, trust and fulfill the duties incumbent on those roles. Cheating, lying, betrayal and falsification subvert the social process. Teachers betray the knowledge process when they exploit, harass or degrade the student. Students cannot believe, trust, and honor the knowledge process in mass, anonymous and impersonal university classes where knowledge is put second to credit production hours; to the comfort of teachers; to the economies of business.

But it is in mass politics, mass marketing, massified religion and mass sports where the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the private joke of mind managers, paid pollsters, crafty speech writers and well trained spokespersons for Presidents, CEO'S, Popes as for football players. In mass marketing, there is no authentic attempt to stand behind claims of efficacy, claims of economy, claims of safety or guarantees of quality...there is only the dramaturgical impression of honesty, agency, efficacy and sincerity in the arts and crafts of paid opinion makers, paid audience organizers and professional spin doctors.

In such a massified society, cynicism displaces faith; privatism displaces communalism; desire for personal gain displaces shared hope and mutuality of trust. The social process become victim to the privatized goals of corporation, of manager, of officer holder and of hired agents.

Cultural Marxism adds a deep, rich critical dimension to social psychology and a larger, politicized context to the symbolic interactional process. To begin with, a Marxist analysis of culture accepts that culture must be produced continuously; it is not inherited as is a house or a field. The essential fact is that there exists a wide range of socially organized institutions which produce culture. These are the means of cultural production. They together, in harmony and in conflict, produce forms of consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of defining and conceptualizing which, with more or less slippage, create the linkage between what-we-do and why-we-do it. The means of producing knowledge, understanding, common sense, science, wisdom and folly is central to the human process.

Gramsci, Lukacs, Horkheimer and others helped to found a new, more dialectical marxism in the critical school after the experience with fascism. Williams, Hoggart, Thompson, Habermas, Offe, and others help consolidate this revised marxism in the fifties and sixties with their work on cultural marxism in Europe and England.

The ways in which the means to produce meaning could be organized in ways central both to a full-bodied social psychology and an interactively rich and informationally honest social life world. In folk societies, the means to create meaning were vested, for the most part in the actions and capacities of individual persons; voice, body, costume and clothing as well as runs of behavior were and are used to create inter-subjective understanding. These are supplemented, in low-tech societies, by drumming, smoke signals, whistling and carvings. In the use of such means to create meaning between members of the same tribe, village or clan, there can be faith, hope, trust and belief in the social process under construction.

Creating Meaning in High-Tech Societies. Radio, television, movies, books, drama, art as well as universities, churches, politics and sports constitute the means to create meaning in modern, mass societies. The meaning created in these larger, less personal meaning institutions are often, most often oriented to a shared, transparent social process, itself oriented to the human project as mutually understood in that social group. High tech meaning processes however, provide the possibility for systematic subversions of symbolic interaction, the social process and thus, the structure of self. A competent and engaged social psychology must include the political and economic uses of high-tech meaning construction else the knowledge process remains forever infantile.

Cultural Marxists look at the ways in which movies reproduce alienating gender relations or the ways in which television programs promote violence and sexism in sports, war, children's cartoons or the ways in which news programs and stock market analyses treat class stratification as a given necessity. Cultural marxists have looked at the ways in which family literature and drama reproduce authoritarian politics and uncritical acceptance of hierarchy in the larger society. Cultural marxists trace the course of racism in books, movies, courts and schools. Marxists show the role of religion in affirming traditional inequalities in race, class, gender and status hierarchy. All these systems of measuring and interpretation of social life are the second and third-order contexts for everyday interaction among voters, workers, children, parents, priests and police officers.

We must teach our students in social psychology that societies marked by the great stratifications in class, race, gender, ethnicity and nationality, the means by which public meaning is produced are often, too often, owned and operated in the interests of class, racist, ethnic and/or religious elites. In such societies, the means to produce meaning become the means to produce ideological hegemony, false consciousness, alien understandings and crippling distortions of religion, politics and economy. As such they are the proper topic for all social scientists; not just those who are at the fringes of the discipline and department.

Critical Dramaturgy The Uses of Theory in Mass Societies. In the early 70's, Garth Massey and I began a long series of articles on the ways in which the insightful but dramaturgical analysis of Erving Goffman might be used in shaping an emancipatory symbolic interaction and more critical social psychology in massified, stratified societies. Scripts, rehearsals, presentations, performances, costumes and the run of accouterments from drama had been for most of human experience, deployed in the service of religion and everyday dramas of the holy. The special social magic of belief, faith, trust and hope for a better world remains vested in these dramas of the holy. Weddings, dedications, christenings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, anniversaries and holy days at Christmas and Easter remain dependent upon the pageantry of costume, script, performance and story. Parades, convocations, holidays and vacations create the drama of hope, faith, trust and belief among otherwise profane work and business. For most of human history faith, trust,hope and belief in social relationships were the product dramaturgical presentations. Community among clan, tribe and village emerged in the larger dramas of the holy. Wisdom, judgment and creative energy devoted to the solution of new problems and possibilities emerged from the inspirations of shaman, prophet, priest, imam, rabbi and boddhasattva. Peaceable and productive plans for communal life has been the enduring legacy of religious drama.

Sometime in the centuries before the birth of Christ, dramaturgy become the means by which political legitimacy and status stratifications are created and celebrated. The great empires of the Middle East in Persia, India, Turkey and Asia used dramaturgy for more than the worship of the gods...faith, hope, trust and belief were to be vested in King and Crown as well as Pope and Prelate. And now, in the last century or so, dramaturgy has been increasingly deployed as a tool of management in the workplace; of salesmen in the marketplace; of politicians in the public sphere. Roles, scripts, performances, rehearsals, actors and stage props are used to sanctify corporations; are used to create belief and trust in products or to invest desire in the policy of paid politicians.

Postmodern Phenomenology Slippery Facts and Vanishing Truths.

In the fifty years or so, a new understanding of the ways in which meaning emerges out of symbolic interaction has emerged. Hume, Hegel and Husserl laid down the foundation for a throughly modern phenomenology. Contrary to most pre-modern teachings which held that human beings lived in a world in which knowledge and understanding were the province of the gods, modernist phenomenologists held that the categories of perception and knowledge were distinctly human capacities.

G.W.F. Hegel, 1770-1831, posited in his Phenomenology of the Mind, some 272 natural categories of being and knowing. They cascaded from the abstract to the concrete and covered all that existed and all the disciplines of knowledge. The operative point in this phenomenology is that categories of being and knowing are natural, not super-natural.

Edmund Husserl 1859-1938 is given great credit as the founder of modern phenomenology. He gave it a name and an agenda. The agenda was to distill every concept until only the 'essence' was left...he called those essences, 'eidos' from the Greek, meaning form or shape. In Husserl's method, one 'brackets' all the un-essential parts of a thing until one has reached it's essence. This is called 'eidetic reduction.' It is important to note that this 'essence' is in the thing itself, not in the social psychology of a group or society.

Postmodern phenomenology holds that the very categories of thought in science, religion, politics, economics and social psychology itself are arbitrary constructs behind which lay the interests of human beings in given social life worlds. While the contributions of physicists, chemists, geneticists and astro-physicists have great utility in the everyday world of commerce, transportation, communication and agricultural, choices of what to study and choices of how to use the results of science are deeply cultural and deeply political. The same is true of economics, history, sociology, psychology and political science. Power, privilege and wealth shape and pre-shape the course of all science. Foucault has shown that medical clinics, prisons, and beliefs about human sexuality are product of human beings located in a political economy and a cultural complex...they are not the natural evolution toward civilized and enlightened social processes.

More than that, as we shall see below, all categories of knowing, believing, trusting, hoping and wanting are a poetics and a politics which change dramatically over time and over place...phenomenology itself, as a social 'science' is testimony to that transformation in belief and trust in human categories of understanding. In court cases as in college lectures, facts are just that, meaning systems constructed by those with vested interests in the deployment of belief, truth, trust and of course, consequent action.

Non-linear Social Dynamics and Fractal Truth Values. Chaos theory has many lessons to teach those of us who pursue the vagaries of symbolic interaction. Chaos theory teaches us that all complex systems move through a variety of dynamic regimes; some of these regimes are regular enough, stable enough, dependable enough upon which to ground predictive science. Modernist science, modelled on the linear assumptions of Bacon, Newton and all their heirs seek after certainty. Postmodern philosophy of science, grounded upon the work of Lorenz, Feigenbaum and Mandelbrot, look for the changing cascade of dynamical regimes which leap from regularity to uncertainty.

Symbolic interaction, as a process, embodies many of the characteristics of non-linearity. There is regularity, sameness and certainty at times and there is creativity, change and difference at other times in the spoken language and in the speaking of it in everyday life. In conversations, explanations, explications and applications of all symbols to the interaction process, there are skips, halts, reverses and creative uses of language and meaning. Surprize, delight, humor and tradegy all emerge out of the non-linearity of speech, song, prayer and play.

Given the slippery, changing shape of symbolic activity: meaning, understanding, belief and trust, all social facts based upon symbolic interaction take on the form of fractal truth-statements. Interactionists and indeed, all social scientists must learn to think in terms of the partial truth value of principles, theorems, correlations and significance of correlations.

It is, by far, too early to know if symbolic interaction in particular and social psychology in general exhibit the remarkable and elegantly choreographed transition from certainty to chaos that physical, chemical, biological and physiological systems do. The basic research is yet to be done. Yet uncertainty is not only present in symbolic interaction; uncertainty is essential. In every spoken word, in every gesture and in every run of behavior, there must be enough variety and enough flexibility to illuminate and communicate meaning in the ever changing context in which the spoken word occurs.

Without flexibility, some uncertainty and some variation in meaning of words, gestures, acts and silences, every word, every act, every gesture and every silence would mean exactly the same thing and in this certainty, be meaningless. No one word is adequate to describe the variety embodied in the living person referenced in the word, woman or the word, wonderful. And since we do use the one word to refer to a wide variety, an infinite variety of objects, symbol interaction must ground some meaning of a symbol upon the living context in which it occurs; this woman, this man, this bird and this flower as well as all similar but different women, men, birds and flowers.

I have tried, in a series of articles to explicate some of the applications of chaos theory to sociology in general and symbolic interaction in particular. The research tools and research design by which to do so in a much more trustworthy fashion are under development; my good friend Patty Hamilton at Texas Woman's University has successfully shown the hidden designs of non-linear dynamics in the birthing of teen age mothers over a ten year span in Texas. I commend her research as a place to start. And there are other emerging centers for the study of non-linear dynamics in psychology which offer a wealth of data and a model for those of us in sociology.