No. 001 THE DRAMATURGICAL SOCIETY: MACRO-ANALYSIS With Garth Massey, University of Wyoming RED FEATHER INSTITUTE Distributed as part of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of The Red Feather Institute, 8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893. |
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ABSTRACT
While the writings of Erving Goffman have illuminated the dramaturgical components of face-to-face interaction, the task of developing a thoroughgoing substantive and theoretical explication of the dramaturgical society remains. This paper expands the dramaturgical analysis to the macro-societal. The character of a dramaturgical society is discussed in the first section. The origins of a critical dramaturgy are presented in the next section.
The conditions of social organization which give birth to a dramaturgical society are set forth in the next sections, and the potential of dramaturgy for a self-directed society are weighed in the final section.
Dramaturgy For purposes of this essay, a dramaturgical society is defined as one in which the combined technologies of social science, mass communication, theatre and the arts are used to manage attitudes, behaviors, and feelings of the population in modern mass society. These conjoined technologies are used in the marketplace, industry, political life and the university to provide images of service, images of quality, images of accountability, and other images which shape the needs and understandings of individuals while bolstering the self-images of the corporation, the politician, and the administrator.
In a dramaturgical society as we find it today, a range of technological and artistic devices are used in the process of mass communication to project manufactured images in commercial and public service advertisements, press releases and news items, political declarations and documentaries to audiences of millions.
We emphasize that there is no necessary connection between dramaturgy and the sociology of fraud produced in these times by the managers of social life...in better times, the magic of make believe, what if, suppose and never was could be put to enlarge and enhance the human project. We caution one to keep this analysis in perspective...most people, most of the time organize their behavior innocently and without guile. Most groups are transparent; they are pretty much what they claim to be. We limit this analysis to the more strategic efforts of large scale organizations to manage the social environment in which they operate to the private advantage of an economic or political elite.
Throughout the Western industrialized societies and especially in the United States, the services of expert technicians, research institutes doing surveys, polls and samples, theatrical people, and mass communications are disproportionately available to large-scale organizations. Huge corporations, major universities, the military services, government bureaus and agencies, labor unions, as well as the major political parties hire specialized sets of functionaries. Their task is to use the accouterments of theatre, the findings of social science, and the facilities of mass media to generate an "in.formed" public...formed in the image of the purchaser of such services.
These public relations, management science and communications professionals are the ". . . tribal magicians (who) have come to life in urban guise as publicists" (Duncan, 1965:xxii). As with all tribal magicians, these specialists come to control the process by which social reality is constructed however they are paid to apply their control in the service of a class/elite organized society.
In sum, the dramaturgical society is one in which the interaction between an atomized mass of people and the major institutions and largest organizations is deliberately managed, marked by the images of service, quality, or agency, and the projection of these upon the population for whose benefit these organizations and institutions are ostensibly acting.
This cultural hegemony of organizations can be understood in terms of a critical dramaturgical analysis, in so far as life in mass society is increasingly taking on the trappings of theatre. It is theatre of a most serious sort. Contained within the one- sided use of dramaturgical technology is the systematic evasion of reciprocity.
The most general consequences for a social order in which this technology is used in the evasion of reciprocity is the exacerbation of political and material inequality; inequality in social honor, in wealth and in the forms of power. Such cultural hegemony creates, in the long run, instability, resistance and revolution of a most serious sort.
Perhaps the most serious fault of the dramaturgical sciety is the attendant exacerbation of inequality which accrues with the unrestrained use of dramaturgy in business and political life. Use of dramaturgy to create markets for capital intensive, high-profit items in the marketplace or to create a market for secondary political issues (see Mauler, 1973:94) jeopardizes the political and material well-being of the society.
Large-scale organizations are capable of consolidating positions of privilege, while the general public increasingly experiences reduced participation in the creation of authentic culture. At the same time, material, ideological, and political cultural forms lose their function of constructing a situationally meaningful social-life world created by intending, reciprocating humans.
It is the position of the authors that there are specific conditions of social organization in Western industrial societies, and particularly in the United States, which converge to create a dramaturgy alienated from the human project.
The impoverishment of public opinion and the lack of understanding in formulating societal goals are products of the dramaturgical society. The lack of a coherent public discourse in the general population and between its experts and leaders, fostered by the strength and resources of organizations which prefer to foist deceptive and narrowly defined images of service, accountability, and quality on the public, provides a major obstacle to a free and rational society.
A major facet of the distorted communication that Jurgen Habermas (1970a) has so skillfully begun to examine lies in the production of images by organizations which legitimate the distorted reciprocity between these organizations and the public. In such a society, the assumptions of functional analysis and functional interchange become invalid.
A conflict model replaces the functional model as the appropriate intellectual tool with which to contribute to the self- knowledge of a society. A social order requiring individuals and organizations engaged in serious fundamental interaction to deal so heavily in images and stagings is also inimical to the conditions of human freedom.
By illuminating those conditions in modern society which enable organizations to create non-reciprocal, unchallengeable images of "reality" and which concomitantly require people to adopt temporary identities having little permanent relation to the self system, one may be able to see a prelude to the political task of changing those conditions, of turning them in the direction of a rationally creative, reciprocal dramaturgy in social life.
In the 1988 election, the Bush-Qualye team defined crime, abortion, a pledge of allegiance and military might as the central issues in the presidential campaign. A better set of issues upon which to spend public energy and public funds might be the continued bifurcation of the health care system; the continued deterioration of housing; the increase in poverty among women and dependant children; the national debt and its mortgaging of the future as well as the overspending on exotic weapons systems in a world too full of death and violence.
In the present fiscal crises, solutions to capital accumulation or political legitimacy call for more than the dramaturgical facsimile of value and accountability; they call for the most serious political and economic transformation yet considered by the general public in Western societies. The invasion of Grenada or the funereal spectacle of national mourning over the death of Astronauts does create a thin and short-term solidarity among the diverse, conflicting sectors of society...but when the troops come home or when the flag is lowered for the last time, the supply of solidarity runs low.
Drama and the technology of theatre might be useful to the human condition in a number of ways. In the celebration of human events, in separating the social world from the natural, in rites of transition, in making visible the flaws of life, dramaturgy is a powerful instrument and a valuable adjunct to the construction of a social reality imbued with vitality and wisdom. A critical dramaturgical analysis always combines these functions.
Toward a Critical Dramaturgy A dramaturgical analysis of society involves a recognition, not only of the nature of symbolic communication, but also of the class-based uses of dramaturgical devices that prevent reciprocal communication, which prevent the emergence of authentic self- structures and cultural forms, and which obstruct the collective establishment of societal goals which reflect the needs and interests of the entire population.
Many writers juxtapose the presentments and interpretations (e.g., Ichheiser's (1970) "expressions" and "impressions") of social reality to a "real" world. In doing so they do not necessarily derogate the as-if reality as an inferior facsimile, but generally attempt to make socially constructed reality as accurate a reflection of some objective reality as possible.
Marx and Freud explored the distance between things as they appear and things are they are. Both were concerned to make visible the mystifications of life and to help create a more authentic, a more innocent, a more human drama. Marx assumed that duality could be replaced by a unity of thought and being were social conditions right. Freud assumed that the duality between conscious and unconscious could be minimized were psychological traumas removed.
Also in opposition to the postulate of duality, the forerunners to and early exponents of symbolic interactionism-- Dewey, James, Mead, W. I. Thomas, and Cooley--made major contributions in bridging the "gap" between subjective social worlds and objective reality. They have pointed out and analyzed the fundamentally symbolic reality of human life, thus minimizing the duality of phenomenon on the one hand and ontologically (in- itself) reality forms on the other.
On Mystification For Symbolic Interactionists, reality is created through the subjective activity of the participants. Situations are defined as real by words, body talk, costumes and runs of behavior. The sharedness of symbols helps create the social occasion and the social actor in the same moment. Thus, mind in the form of expressed thoughts, self in the form of embodied social identities, and society in the form of social others and social occasions are produced in the same instant by the acting, sharing individuals in a social frame. When dramaturgy is in the service of the sociology of fraud, that unity of self and society is rent asunder.
If the symbolic interactional processes are undistorted by power, dramaturgical deceptions, or by secrecy, then the discrepancy between social reality and human understanding; between noumena and phenomena, is minimal.
An occasion defined as a family reunion becomes in the consequence a real family reunion as people are defined as and act as though they were cousins, brothers, grandparents and wives. This form of reality is as real as an atom, or a molecule, or a rock or a mountain. The difference is that the parts intend to be parts in social reality...and may cease to be such parts...remarkable but valid.
Dramaturgy has developed from this perspective, in both its depoliticized and in its critical approaches. Kenneth Burke's classic analyses of the dramaturgical nature of social life has been taken by many as an acceptance of the analogy of dramaturgy as an accurate portrayal of life: Life and politics, in this sense, is drama. People do not relate toward one another as if engaged in dramatic performances. They are caught up in a drama: they become the person whom they and others expect them to be.
But Burke intends no naive and unquestioned approach to the dramaturgical nature of social reality, as his analysis of "The dialectic Constitutions" in A Grammar of Motives makes apparent. Both Burke and Hugh Duncan have been well aware of the "mystifications" (cf. Duncan, 1962) that are created and sustained through the hierarchical control of mass communication.
Joseph Gusfield's (1963) analysis of the Temperance Movement exhibits both the managerial and the emancipatory uses of dramaturgy. His work provides much insight into the process by which the symbolic meaning of temperance took on a far broader meaning than mere abstinence from alcohol. It reveals how the resulting political action pushed a broad range of conservative and reactionary interests. However, a critical analysis must go beyond the general position that groups in a democracy sometimes use symbols that mean more than their exponents openly reveal.
Murray Edelman's (1964) analysis of the manipulation of symbolic events, encounters, and identities in politics falls more within the critical tradition. He notes that such uses, rather than stimulating political debate and reasoned consensus, divert attention, ". . . from cognitive and rational analysis." Thus, ". . . every individual (becomes) an instrument of the common interest rather than a cognitive and empirical manipulator of reality" (Combes and Mansfield, 1976:350).
Equally within the critical perspective is Mueller's (1973) analysis of the conditions promoting and facilitating constrained communication, where extraneous "noise" is systematically introduced and the audience ". . . has little control over the selection of information or the quality of interpretations transmitted" (Mueller, 1973:100).
This research and more adds to the theoretical point that reality and human understanding need not be alien to each other. It is possible for meaning to flow clearly and cleanly between two people; between two peoples; between generations. The symbolic interactional processes can be designed to mystify or to clarify human understanding. To help create the social conditions under which such meaning processes can develop is the task of the critical social psychologist and the clinical psychologist.
Dramaturgy and Society Under the conditions of social organization which constitute contemporary Western society, an analyst such as Goffman has special, but limited, relevance. His mode of social analysis presents a careful examination of the way individuals and organizations are trying not only to do but to be identified, in which identification is often a prerequisite to, and of equal or greater importance than, doing.
In Goffman's work the presentation of self identity must have adequate dramaturgical direction and expression in order to be credible. These dramaturgical techniques become part of the diet of socialization in the family, in peer groups, and in the schools, as well as what one sees and incorporates from the media. In analyzing the dramaturgical society one must ask: What are the reasons that a dramaturgy is suborned to the sociology of fraud; when is such an analysis appropriate for a given society?
In order to extend dramaturgical analysis to macro-societal levels, one must conceptually do two things. First, one must go beyond the boundaries of what Goffman calls the "situated activity system" in his micro-analytic focus (Goffman, 1961a). It is necessary to locate such micro-analyses within the larger economic framework in which it is found.
The situated activity system must also be given greater temporal boundaries than is the case in intimate interaction. It must be located in its historical setting. The dimensions of time are essential the analysis of events. A political campaign, an energy crisis, a campaign to sell a new product, the mobilization of support for war, or a public relations campaign may involve weeks or months of interaction between an organization or a group of organizations. The audience for such information sets may be subjected to the resulting symbol/product for seconds or for minutes. Macroanalysis requires that each dramaturgic event be placed in the larger social and historical context in which it is located.
A dramaturgical creation may be located in still longer runs of time. As an economic system rises or falls on a 30 or 50 year Kondratieff wave, the use of dramaturgy to protect profits and to generate markets replaces the impetus to use quality and price to share in market. The increase or decrease in the sociology of fraud follows such economic transformations.
Magnitudes of Dramaturgy In this historical epoch, the advent of the transnational corporation with multi-billion dollar budgets produces a cataclysmic change in the fraudulent use of dramaturgy. The relative equality that may exist among individuals has no parallel vis-a-vis the corporation or the state agency using dramaturgy to its own purpose.
Control over the knowledge process by the rich and powerful means increased power disparity as between organizations on the one hand and the isolated individuals of mass society. In the analysis of interaction between large scale, formal organizations and individuals this fact becomes more important, for it indicates the necessity to recognize that presentations will not be based on parity.
Assumptions of parity in the marketplace; of contracts freely made between equal parties are utterly false in a fully developed sociology of fraud. Access to dramaturgical resources by the private or public corporation; access to media; access to research findings in social science all give the Multinational corporation a position of power that even nation-states find daunting.
In societies which use dramaturgy as a marketing or managerial strategy, it is not the self-system that mediates behavior nor a set of significant others as most social psychologists teach their students. Experts from management science; from depth psychology, from public relations are employed to circumvent the self-system. Needs, urges, dispositions, fears and prejudices are generated by effective advertising. Bits of behavioral knowledge are used to link products directly to human anxieties about sex, status, identity quest and the like.
Such behavioral scientists and practitioners unscrupulously avoid generating specific social identities that can subject messages to personal scrutiny and group critique. When social identities (housewife, mother, doctor, male, or other) anchored in the self-system through the socialization process are the focus of advertising, it is to exploit or to mobilize such "selves" to serve the corporate goal.
Even religious identities can be used to expand markets. Xerox uses monks to tout its duplicating machines. The Encyclopedia Britannica uses the voice-over of God to encourage people to find Truth in its pages.
While a dramaturgical society is likely to arise in any society that contains ruling elites, dramaturgy finds its most favorable milieu in the capitalist societies. The existence of surplus production, together with an ever-increasing surplus population, serves as an impetus for corporate directors to use dramaturgy to generate mass markets for ever increasing productivity. If production were for use or followed social needs generated by a free, rather than manipulated, public discourse, there would be little need to generate a market for a commodity.
The United States has one special attribute which accounts for its being the leader in the fraudulent use of dramaturgy. Given the value it places on democratic forms as well as law and order, together with its tradition of an open society, the recourse to purely coercive technologies in public life is awkward and frequently counter-productive. Coercion has been used to generate markets, restrain workers, control minorities, and manage political unrest in this and other societies, but corporate liberalism in the United States has found dramaturgy more advantageous than coercion.
In America, the image industry is a trillion dollar enterprize; advertizing alone rakes in more than 100 billion dollars yearly from the sale of audiences to corporations in these days.
In Europe, especially in Great Britain, the crown sold franchises to companies for monopolies in a wide variety of products...and used the King's law and the King's men to enforce the monopoly. In Latin America, monopolies are maintained by death squads and political torture to this day. In Japan, the government coordinates the corporate world. But in the USA, the trust busting of T. R. Roosevelt, the New Deal of F. D. R., the labor unions struggles in Flint, Detroit, and elsewhere in the 30s, the consumer movement lead by the Nader Bunch, the Environmental Protection movement, the Civil Rights movements, and the United Farmworkers lead by Cesar Chavez...all converge to render direct physical and economic coercion outside the pale for most corporate strategies.
Dramaturgical society today is one in which large-scale organizations, employing scientific and artistic communities to create images and purchasing time on mass media with which to disseminate their images, generates power which far outweighs the ability of even moderately organized consumer organizations, public interest groups, and leftist political organizations to counter and to refute such images.
Whether there will be countervailing sources of information in the Dramaturgical Society of the 21st Century with which to control and constrain the mystifications of Public Relations, Scientific Management, Advertizing and other dramaturgical technologies is an open question. While critical social psychology can help demystify interactional processes, still meaningful emancipation requires a social base rather larger than the academic community.
Protective Structures While large-scale organizations, especially profit oriented ones, try to create a mass-consumption markets and to use theatre, social science, and sophisticated communication technologies to generate a receptive audience for their surplus production, there are still protective structures to counter that effort.
Societies in which social structures of tribe, kin, friends or community exist to mediate behavior quickly neutralize the information content of messages broadcast by large-scale organizations and greatly increase the "problem of order' for those organizations.
Wherever there is friendship, kinship, or other forms of solidarity, there are significant and sensible others available to warn off the innocent buyer of goods, services and politics.
Arnold Rose wrote of the importance of voluntary associations and other intervening structures to mediate between the managerial impulses of state and corporation. In a conflict ridden society, that is good advice indeed. Each oppressed interest group: women, minorities, workers, the elderly, patients, and customers need a watchdog team acting on its behalf. There are problems with a society organized around interest groups however.
1. There is no social agent acting on behalf of collective interests; of the common good. Each group is the enemy of all others and tries to advance special interest at the expense of those who have few or incompetent protective agencies.
2. In the competition for the services of the image specialists, the weak and the poor are left out of the game. The concept of community; the concept of brotherhood/sistership; the very web of social life is tattered and shredded.
3. The prepolitical activities of those who can't afford to purchase the services of dramaturgical specialist return to subvert the interests of all.
4. In a fully developed dramaturgical society...oriented to private profit or to political control, the substance of service; the substance of value; the substance of performance is replaced by the image of service, value and performance. Image is everything; content counts for little; there is always another customer, another group of voters, another disenchanted audience still looking, still hoping, still trusting in the spoken word.
5. The prophetic vision of William Butler Yeats joins the voices of the old testament prophets to warn:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Only in a society composed of atomized millions can such organizations succeed in generating markets with the techniques of theatre, television and social science. Only in a society with false economics and false politics can the major institutions: school, religion and play become so deformed and unequal. Only in a massified, depersonalized, soliptic society can the wedge between self and society grow to such proportions that individuals are led to seek and adopt privatized sources of self.
The Norm of Anonymity In the dramaturgical society role performances are often short, episodic, historical, and seldom bear a permanent relationship to one's own self-structure. This makes appropriate the term "short-take society" (Young, 1972) to describe a central aspect of the dramaturgical handling of one's self and of others (see also Helmer, 1970). Mall culture offers a vision of social relatedness for the 1990's. For those who want a short course in the social psychology of thoroughly dramatized society, one may observe the way in which people, businesses, schools, professionals, and politicians present themselves there.
Fairs, carnivals, holidays, and tourist spots also foretell of the structure of social relations. While these folk dramas could contribute to the logics of surprise, delight, and a sense of the holy, in their alienated form, they are uncertain interludes in a strange and anonymous world.
The norm of anonymity is a necessary adjunct to this short- take society wherein one goes from one short-take role to another. Between social takes, one must be accorded civil inattention and encouraged quickly to change roles unencumbered by the need to express or the desire to sustain social relationships (cf. Gouldner, 1970:378-380).
Since Weber's (1946) analysis of the characteristics of bureaucratic organization, it has been taken as a commonplace of such social forms that personal relations shall be essentially without serious emotional or intimate involvement. This is part of the demands of the formal rationality (Israel, 1971:100-101) that now pervades relations among those persons within bureaucracies and between those contacting such organizations. This style is now to be found throughout interactions inside and outside the structure of bureaucratic organization.
Anonymity takes the bumps and distractions out of contact with others. It relieves each from the burden of responsibility for others' feelings and problems. This norm of anonymity makes strangers of us all as it comes to pervade nearly all formal social relations. Its location is not, however, in human nature but rather in the structural features of mass, bureaucratic social formations.
Anonymity requires that there be an intricate and extensive set of visual and behavioral presentations which inform us of just who is accessible and to what degree, as well as to whom we must accord, and of whom we may demand, civil attention in the public sector of social discourse (cf., Perinbanayagam, 1975:7). Thompson (1966) has insightfully analyzed aspects of this dramaturgical process within formalized and hierarchical role systems of bureaucracies and between subordinates and authority figures.
This norm of anonymity applies at both the individual and the societal level, as groups and organizations hide behind a shield of anonymity. They express and elicit only those cues, those images, which serve their privately designed purposes and functions. The norm of anonymity affords even requires opportunity to manage impressions in that an intimate understanding of persons, products, and services varies from being merely difficult to being forbidden. When one is unknown, one must quickly make others know who one is...dramatics serve to cue us how to take and be taken in anonymous situations.
In the emptiness of social relations, the opportunities for the sociology of fraud abounds at all levels of society. The need for more and more regulatory; more and more compensatory; more and more therapeutic services press upon us. The resources of the state are strained to the breaking point in such a self-serving, soliptic society. The social sources of morality shrink to encompass only one's immediate family and very closest of friends. Even those are in jeopardy of stagings, theatrics, and professional managements.
Social workers, police, teachers, clerks, bosses and doctors are required to be impersonal instruments of bureaucratic rationality. When they do evil, they retreat behind the rule, the policy, the invisible arm of the boss...thus become anonymous even while looking at a hurting human being. In such societies, morality is programmed out of human interactions and preprogrammed by rules, policies, and programs. Morality loses its human face...and its social place.
Such a society is devoid of permanent, inclusive social relationships because anonymity norms, bureaucratic order, and power inequality all reduce reciprocity and accountability by reducing interaction. The social-life world produced in the polity, in the marketplace, and in the university has little more authenticity than the dramas produced on television or in the cinema. At least these latter are not presented as actual instances of social life.
Structural Bases for the Evasion of Reciprocity In complex societies marked by conflict relations in class, gender, race and ethnic 'purity,' the opportunities for exploitation and the evasion of reciprocity proliferate as complexity and anonymity increase, in spite of a real increase in the need for effective processes of communication and functional interdependence.
It is in a society where the only interest in the workplace is in the amount of surplus value which can be extracted from another person, that short, episodic roles replace community with its sustained, inclusive supportive social relations. And in the marketplace where the central interest is the realization of surplus value as profit, short-term social relations are preferable to life long social identities.
The corporation makes a sale, extracts surplus value, realizes profit and has no interest in any further social relatedness; there is a positive disinterest in further contact as long as new markets can be generated by depth psychology and a purchased media.
Guarantees and warranties are issued and then routinely circumvented. Insurance companies pay off small claims quickly and use statistics to create the dramaturgical appearance of honest actuarial accounting. Airlines change the definition of 'on time' to create the semblance of punctuality. Governments change the accounting categories to create the impression of frugality and fiscal probity. Mathematics and graphics become tools in the kit of profit seeking firms.
Surveys, polls and sampling services become ambushes behind which lurk the interests of managers, politicians, owners, and engineers of the mind. Measures of distribution and variations join the principles of psychology in the technologies of the theatre to circumvent the norm of reciprocity while staging a convincing image on the media that reciprocity is the object of interest. Where profits are counted; images are profitable.
Where there is extensive social differentiation, there is little opportunity for shared experiences to occur. Where there are large numbers of persons, the opportunity for contact between individuals as valued social others diminishes. Where there is no community, it becomes easy to advance one's own interests at the expense of another sector of society. Where exchange relations are complex and predicated on contrived rewards, the degree of reciprocity is difficult to assess.
Where important others in the exchange process are remote in time and place, the facts of exploitation are hard to establish. These features are common in class organized societies and they are also found in bureaucratically organized "socialist" societies.
All of these class based structural features, in addition to the racist, sexist and ageist structures, contribute to a form of social organization in which the interests of one segment of the population may be so inimical to the interests of other segments that it becomes necessary and possible to create deceptive images of social relationships. In such conditions, a common tactic is the presentation of an event, not as it actually occurs, but in terms of arranging the manifest signs ". . . at an inconspicuously gradual and piecemeal pace" (Boorstin, 1962:13).
In this way resistance is diffused and a predictable managed response is the outcome. Universities commonly raise tuition and fire popular faculty during the Summer and Christmas break. Politicians send out trial balloons. Price increases are hidden by reductions in weight of candy bars, corn flakes or by the addition of water to hams and vegetables.
In Western industrial societies the synergy of functional interchange is being subverted by the structure of corporate capitalism. Parameters of growth, profit, and control of the environment by corporations and public institutions conflict with the parameters of service, accountability, and quality of human life.
More and more resources go to banking, finance, luxury lodging and dining, high tech medical procedures while essential parts of the system; child care, public health, low cost housing, sewage and garbage treatment, bridges and roads, as well as teaching and healing are neglected. The flow of wealth is to the corporation with the best connections and the best dramatists; collective needs are set aside by soliptic market practices.
In the capitalist state, the policies and processes of the political apparatus provide disproportionate support for those corporations which sponsor the dramaturgical society. The dramaturgical arts and crafts readily lend themselves to masking these corporate interests in the political campaign and in the market, thereby consolidating the class structure. As the two- tiered class system is split further apart, the word, liberal, becomes a dirty word replacing communism, as the epithet of political scorn.
As the fiscal crisis of the state continues and as the surplus population grows, the problems of political legitimacy require more and more dramaturgy in the political sphere as a technique to manage dissent. Mass media have solved many of the technical problems of constructing images favorable to dominant class interests. They provide the means to project impressions throughout the society, and as need for a more up-to-date image arises, mass media make it possible in a very short time to replace an image that is no longer serviceable.
Reciprocity is subverted by the expertise of a vast cadre of skilled artists, musicians, photographers, writers, producers, poets, editors, engineers, and publicists who substitute a world of make believe for a world of serious social endeavor. They industriously engage in creating the dramaturgical impression of community, the image of friendship, the facsimile of democratic governance, and the illusion of academic excellence in concert with actors, musicians, cinematographers, stage managers, costumers, and make-up personnel.
In feudal society, kings and popes held a virtual monopoly on the services of the managers of illusion and pretense. In an capitalist society, every corporation can subscribe to the forms of art as well as theatre, and the monopoly of staging and drama maintained by church and state disappears.
In medieval Europe, artists and artisans were concerned with religious themes in paintings, tapestries, drama, and music. Artists and artisans created furnishings, fixtures, halls, palaces, cabinets, tables, silver, coin, and ceramics to serve, exalt, and comfort the elite of church, state, and commerce (cf. Burke, 1965: chapter five).
Today most of the best artists, photographers, musicians, directors, and actors ply their trade in the world of advertising and public relations. A full-blown industry in commercial image making is indispensable to a dramaturgical society whose institutions are finding themselves increasingly unwilling or unable to cope with the material, political, or ideological needs of the population (see also Young, 1978).
A market strategy with which to sell imaginary or trivial differences in a commodity is created. The advent of mass production, coupled with industrial espionage, has diminished the differences between products. In the political arena there is a "winning image" as well as a saleable political formula that, when shared by the directors of the major contributors, makes candidates as indistinguishable as their suits, socks, or shorts.
The artisans' task of imagery is to limit, then magnify acceptable differences between products and persons. As Gouldner sees it, "Dramaturgy makes the transition from an older economy centered on production to a new one centered on mass marketing and promotion, including the marketing of the self" (Gouldner, 1970:381). The dynamic of that transition is the profit motive. It is more profitable to create the dramaturgical semblance of quality than to support basic research by which to improve quality or to bear the real cost of improving quality in automobiles, medicines, appliances or service.
Dramaturgy and Modern Systems Theory When a society or firm makes claims of greatness, claims of service, or claims of quality, the images presented are not fraudulent in themselves. Images, visions, utopias, predictions, and wishes are necessary components of a self-fulfilling prophecy by which to embody cultural values.
Marked by the self-fulfilling prophecy, things defined and treated as real may come to be real. Desirable social events begin with an idea, a goal, a dream, a plan, a wish, a vision, an image.
All social realities contain ideas of social relationships, of social occasions, of social roles, and of community. In these respects, participation in the creation of ideological culture is necessary to the human condition. When ideological production is monopolized by a cadre of public relations experts serving the corporate interest of profit, control and growth, ideological production becomes a technology of oppression rather than an essential part of the construction of an authentic social-life world.
When images take the place of reality, when they distort and hide the recognition of things as they are, when effort, genius, and intention go no further than the construction of the image, then society becomes subject to the sociology of fraud, and the dramaturgical society becomes the society of ideological domination.
In his examination of the role of art, literature, music, and other forms of "high culture," Marcuse (964) expresses a position similar to the one taken here. The creative, artistic features of society have served traditionally to give societal direction by means of exposing the "negativity of society." They have indicated the truth of society as it is; its dark side and its light...not simply as it prefers to see itself.
In contemporary industrial society, this "artistic reality," this "other-dimension" is increasingly being ". . . absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs . . . to sell, comfort, or excite" (Marcuse, 1964:64), and the critical capacity of an art and culture is lost to their commercial capacities. The creative spheres no longer provide
"...images of another way of life but rather...types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order" (Marcuse, 1964:59).
In doing so they encourage the use of a language of "deception, ignorance and submission" which becomes effective solely for the established interests. Mass communications thus ". . . blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, sciences, religion, and philosophy with commercials. . . . (They) bring these realms of culture to their common denominator- -the commodity of form" (1964:57).
One-dimensionality becomes a pernicious outcome of the dramaturgical society which, in turn, makes one-dimensionality even more unchallengeable.
The central theoretical position of this paper is that fantasy, make-believe, theatre, game-playing, models, plans, and images are essential to self-directed social systems. These events from the world of make-believe constitute a major part of the variety, the options that make a social system active and adaptive to the needs of its populace. [See the Social Uses of Magic and Make-believe elsewhere in this volume].
Donald MacKay (1968:30-43) has provided an information-flow model of human behavior in which he represents the minimal requirements for goal-directed behavior. A modern systems theory approach postulates that a technology of information-flow which permits a social system to reduce mismatch between system goal- states and present states, or a means by which to change goals through use of stored information, is a self-controlled system (see also Buckley, 1968).
From this perspective, "make-believe" is essential to "reality" in any self-directed system. In the paradigm of the modern systems approach, in order for a person, society, or machine to be self- directed it is necessary:
a) to establish a goal or a set of equally desirable goals; Goals are found in the realm of the not-is and what-if.
b) to have a receptor/monitoring apparatus by which any mismatch between the goal and the present state is gauged in a continuous fashion.
c) to have a control apparatus with stored variety for every contingency that may occur between the present state and the goal(s). Variety...i.e., options are found in the realm of the possible but not-yet-is.
d) to have an effector apparatus organized to act on any option selected by the control apparatus.
Images, play, games, stories, myths, stagings, experiments and such may provide a social system with goals not yet realized in the social institutions of a society. Good health care systems; better ways of doing marriage; low crime relations; enlivening education all now dwell in the world of magic and make-believe. There are no societies in the world today organized to institute these goals. Many don't even try.
At the same time, whatever the goals of a social system, successful goal attainment requires a variety of means, options all, in its control ensemble by which to deal with contingencies encountered in moving from the present to the goal state. These images, ideas, utopias are the equivalent of stored data for society as a whole. Every society must have in its repertoire of "make believe" a possibility to transform itself into an entirely new social-life world.
Although the general point of his critique of systems theory is valid, we do have a profound point of disagreement with Jurgen Habermas (1974a:101). The point of disagreement lies in Habermas' assessment of general systems theory, condemned for its inspiration of "global interpretations" " which ". . . contest the possibility and substance of identity formation at the macro- societal level," whereby ". . . identity problems are eclipsed by steering problems and retain at best a parochial significance".
This is more appropriately a criticism of a managed society than systems theory per se. The modern systems perspective can readily lend itself to the understanding of distorted communication and its consequences, while in the same stroke, indicating the value of the pretend in organizing reality. Modern systems theory can be used to aid in the task of creating healthy self-systems as the central source of control for social behavior as readily as it lends itself to problems of social change and transformation (Young, 1977).
That a strong and stable self-system is not a major goal in capitalist societies is discussed earlier in this paper and in more detail later. We should like to add that the development of the self system is low profit, labor-intensive production ill-suited to capitalism on the one hand, while behavior mediated by a healthy self-system is inimical to an elitist society on the other.
A major contradiction developing in the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere is that a genuinely socialist self-system is hostile to both party and class hegemony over the production of political and ideological culture. It may not occur in this century, but one day the logics of socialism will produce a generation of young people who will cast off the bureaucratic forms of socialism now endemic in the Communist bloc. Whether they will move toward the soliptic consumerism of the West...or toward the modalities of praxis so essential to the marxian agenda depends, in large part, whether an emancipatory social psychology can be generated and communicated to the larger population of that world.
We agree with Habermas' position (1979b) that a normative structure established within the public sphere is the best solution to the problem of order. Our view is that a socially anchored self-system must be produced as a stable mediator of behavior and that a publicly constructed normative structure mediates behavior situationally. Alternative technologies of social control--coercion, dramaturgy, or pecuniary incentives--are poor seconds as solutions to the problems of order, inasmuch as they exclude praxis and community and, thus, authentic social-life worlds.
The need for alternative social goals...within a vision of wholeness...as well as the need for the capacity to change, inform us that dramaturgy can be put to better uses than those of profit, management of the political process or the false self presentments made by existentially isolated individuals in a mass society. A transparent society in which images presented are fair representations of things as they are...in the marketplace, in academia, in personal intercourse and in politics; this kind of a society is that in which the human spirit thrives.
We can call such a society a praxis society or we can call it the City of God...our rhetorics of motive are important but more important is that we get on with the job using the conceptual and emotional tools now available to educate, to politicize and to organize against the sociology of fraud in the Dramaturgical society we see developing in America today.
The alternative is one in which the sociology of fraud permeates and spreads. A society in which cynicism shrinks the human soul and one in which each person comes to look for private advantage from each other person. This is not the legacy we should leave to our children and the children of our children.
TIME TO THINK
I wonder sometimes if the soldiers lying under the soil, wrapped in their coats like beggars sleeping under an arch, their hands filled with leaves, would take vengeance on them who send them. Coming back like beggars, seeing the homes and fields that obedience lost them, whether they would have anything to say to sons or brothers or friends only this: Obedience is death.
I wonder if they, men of all nations, hands full of twigs, stones on their eyes, half afraid of what they done, but forgotten like a short wild dream, but now themselves again: tradesmen, farmers, students... would they tell us to die also, to be obedient?
Would they appeal to our better nature, our righteous indignation, our pity for men like themselves, and tell us quit? Would they call their cause a fraud, would they say our cause is just, would they help us discriminate between the aggressor and the regrettable necessity or would they turn away?
Not fools, but men who knew the price they paid. Would they melt like smoke or would they speak; meet our eyes and tell us what they think about this end?
Would they tell us each lesson is new; that they would make room for us in their dusty hall? Would they look in a frosty window and listen to us talk without saying what they thought?
Perhaps we might go to that frosty window and look out to speak to them and ask them what now they think about it now they have had time to think.
Padriac Colum