THE DIVISION OF LABOR by T. R. Young RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
|
ARCHIVES
of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of the RED FEATHER INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGYAn earlier version of this paper appeared in
the journal of Urban Life 9(2):135162. |
THE
DIVISION OF LABOR
IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY
All Science is a Poetics and a Politics
ABSTRACT
This paper adds critical dimensions to dramaturgical analysis by locating the various uses of dramaturgy in the larger political economy in which it is found. The case is made that, in the last forty years or so, the use of the technology of theatre in concert with social science technology as well as mass electronics technology for the exploitative management of workers, customers, students, and voters has approached an art form. In market, politics, religion and other social realms, dramaturgy is used more to manage understanding rather than, as in most of history, to celebrate, to critique and to enliven social life. |
INTRODUCTION Dramaturgical
technology, sold as a commodity in the marketplace, effectively establishes a division of
labor in the construction of social reality. In modern market societies, there is a
professional cadre available to construct, dramaturgically, any form of social reality
ordered in the market. At a microlevel of analysis, catered weddings, parties, and dinners
are produced by paid specialists. Corporations, politicians, and religious functionaries
also use well trained specialists to construct dramaturgical facsimiles of social reality
which do not pretend to be make-believe in the marketplace, in election campaigns as in
the new emerging electronic ministries.
At a more macro-level of analysis; entire societies, political parties, governments,
universities, the military and transnational corporations hire producers, directors, stage
managers, actors, writers, and editors to fashion whatever image of social life and social
meaning serves the purposes of those who purchase the reality-construction process as
commodity. This contrasts to the assertions made by Cooley, Mead, Berger, Blumer and
others in an earlier, more innocent Symbolic Interactional tradition that social reality
is constructed by intending humans in the act of living everyday life.
Cultural marxists, critical theorists and postmodern critics, appreciating the oppressive
and exploitative character of modern forms of reality construction, censure symbolic
interactionists, dramaturgical analysts, ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists as the
new theorists of conservatism. The conservative bent in these most useful and otherwise
most valuable theories is that, rather than examining the full run of social life,
symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists as well as phenomenologists focus upon the
day to day life of privileged individuals who, in fact, do embody most of the propositions
and understandings of these depoliticized and miniaturized hermeneutical sciences.
Science as Politics In their critique of Ethnomethodology, Phenomenology, and
Symbolic Interaction, McNall and Johnson (1975) make the trenchant observation that it is
useful to realize that all social theories arise out of a specific economic and social
milieu. Dramaturgical analysis, in particular, arose just as the commodification of the
reality process in advertizing, public relations, community relations as well as career
advisers and agents appeared on the social landscape. In the 1930's, along with the advent
of depth psychology, mass marketing research, radio, and an ever accumulating 'surplus'
production, dramaturgy had both the means and the motive to attempt to bend human
consciousness to the 'scientific' solution to the problem of profits and market. The arts
of impression management were put to use to create, via the mass media, dramaturgical
images of quality and service.
A corollary to this position is that the dominant theories of an era are parsimonious
verbal accounts of the dominant economic and social relations in the social order in which
they appear. As a social order changes, a given theoretical paradigm loses its validities
and saliencies and new theories take center stage. Out of the sober and serious and quite
sincere milieu of primary group interaction, symbolic interactional theory was developed
along with its assumptions of shared meaning, collective creative of mind, self and
society; a 'self fulfilling prophecy,' a 'looking glass' process. The 'generalized other'
was taken to constitute the foundation stone of human social psychology embodying as it
did the expectations, obligations and internalized social control mechanisms which
saturate folk societies and socialization. There were and still are solid grounds for
making such assumptions and using such concepts; good for most people most of the time.
The Sociology of Fraud However the sociology of fraud: conning, manipulating
and giving off of images, which bore but slight resemblance to the prophecies embodied in
folk societies as a cottage art practiced by a few and known to be fraudulent by most.
Only in modern stratified society with its mass markets, massified medical system, mass
electronic ministries and mass education can the sociology of fraud succeed for so long
with so many people. Advertizing agencies can fool enough people long enough to elect
politicians, sell their products, repair damage to public opinion by corporations, and
refresh the hoar leper to the April Day.
In the past 100 years, that cottage craft has grown to a full blown
industry. Today, hundreds of thousands of skillful artists, musicians, cinematographers,
writers, directors, actors, and editors work assiduously to project convincing images of
service, quality, economy, and honest agency. Today, billions of dollars are spent to buy
the means to produce meaning in markets, in sports, in medicine, in politics and yes, even
in religion. 1 The best hours of the evening bring the highest
price in the marketplace of dreams, fancies, desires and fantasies. The best athletes, the
most esteemed actors, the best regarded public figures all sell that esteem and that honor
to the merchants of impression management.
There are good reasons why the sociology of fraud continues in the central institutions of
modern mass society. First is the character of interaction; short-term, narrowly focussed
and, in bureaucracies, mediated by layer after layer of clerks, foremen and women,
supervisors, agents, administrators, deans, chairs, secretaries and other functionaries.
Then too, the time lapse between the prophecy and the performance is long enough to be
complicated by intervening variables which exculpate the maker of prophecy; quality,
economy, value and honest agency. Even when the prophecy fails and is known to fail, still
there are enough innocent, believing, trusting and hoping souls in the mass market to make
the sociology of fraud a growth industry. Finally, in a semi-closed economy, there are few
good choices in the health care system, in the market place, in public education or in
religious sphere of social life to which the disenchanted might turn for better service,
care, goods or spiritual guidance.
In all this fraud, there are dimensions of power which serve the interests of the makers
of fraudulent prophecies about social life as well as essential social goods and services.
With the full force of the law behind them, with economic power to buy advertizing and
legal counsel, with private security personnel and sanctioned use of physical power, and
with the ideology of the free market on their side, those who engineer the sociology of
fraud are beyond the reach of justice. Those insiders who do blow the whistle are treated,
summarily, to these various forms of power. When outsiders blow the whistle, their fund of
knowledge is so small and fragmented that it can be easily 're-interpreted' by
professional managers and molders of public opinion. Every major agency from the Fortune
Five Hundred to incumbent and past presidents enjoy the services of P.R. people who can
put the best possible face on any given set of acts, words, or events.
Sociology as Emancipatory Science Given these propositions about the
socio-political character of social and psychological theories, the value-full scientist
does not search so much for the eternal verities of truth and fact but rather engages in
the more political task of sorting out the sociology of fraud from more solid
relationships. As such, the social scientist has joined in on the priestly function of
officiating over the transformation of epistemological categories into ontological
categories. Rather than seekers of objective truth and users of pre-existing natural
categories of social life and social behavior, the postmodern social psychologist is
burdened with the task of deconstructing the reality making process to reveal the human
hand and the human intelligence which said, let it be so.
Critical analyses such as McNall and Johnson (1975), Plotke (1975), Gouldner (1970),
Psathes (1975), the Schwendingers (1974), as well as many others properly voice their
indignation at the audacity of symbolic interactionists and others in offering their
theories as innocent of political meaning. McNall, Johnson and others have extracted the
conservative bias in ethnomethodology, phenomenology and symbolic interaction by showing
that these theories are astructural, ahistorical and falsely liberating.
However, it is not enough to "engage in the relentless
criticism" of all social theories--part of the critical enterprise is to transform
the conservative and/or alienating tendencies of a social theory into emancipatory
tendencies. While McNall and Johnson have provided us with excellent service in making
visible the political dimensions of the new genre of theories in sociology, in this paper
I would like to suggest that there are possibilities in ethnomethodology, phenomenology,
dramaturgical analysis and certainly symbolic interaction which, given visibility in the
knowledge process, fuel the emancipatory impulse in sociological theory. While the major
concern here is with dramaturgical analysis, the same task awaits those critical theorists
interested in ethnomethodology, symbolic interaction, and phenomenology. 2
Emancipatory Knowledge Critical theory instructs us that there are at least
three modes of sociological enterprise helpful to the construction of a rational and
decent society (Habermas, 1970). Positivism, invested as it is with a concern with general
truths, with prediction and control, is helpful to society by producing knowledge about
existing patterns, relationship, and problems. The emancipatory thrust of this central
part of the sociological enterprize consists of its abilities to illuminate the positive
as well as the negative trends in social data. A society without the capacity to gauge its
own behavior in critical areas of social life is ignorant of its past, oblivious to its
present and blind to its future.
Hermeneutics, a second mode of scientific enterprise is concerned with the aspects of
symbolic interaction by which situated social life worlds are framed by intending
subjects. The concern here is the character of intersubjective understanding; its origins
and its limitations. This scientific mode examines the phenomenological postulate that the
"objects" of social reality are created by knowing, meaning and believing
subjects. A growing number of social scientists is regaining interest in this mode of
sociology linked as it is to humanism and concerned as it is with alienation; alienation
from the reality creating process by women, workers, minorities as well as those whose
lives center around the various dramas of the Holy.
While positivism and hermeneutics have a rich theoretical inventory and an extensive
repertoire of research methods, the third mode of emancipatory science finds little or no
support in, especially North American, sociology. Informed by the human interest in change
and renewal, participation and responsibility, emancipatory science is made necessary by
the peculiar characteristics of human beings. As the direct agents in the process of
fulfilling prophecies of social life, human beings must participate every moment in
defining the meaning of interactional frames else these frames lose their social
character. The emancipatory capacity of science must be increased in those societies in
which structural barriers to that meaningful interaction are erected; racism, gender
privilege, class position and bureaucratic echelon all mediate the reality constituting
process and must be the object of transformation if the human project is to be expanded to
fill its human limits. Apart from marxism and critical theory, there is little in the way
of emancipatory science available to the student of sociology with which ground and to
guide a practical interest in emancipatory social science.
In its emancipatory modes science is, as Lukacs puts it, "the intellectual expression
of the revolution." In more concrete terms, the role of research and theory in
opposing and transforming commodity relationships into social relationships is the
political expression of science. Emancipatory theory and research acts to mediate human
behavior, but not to determine it. Critical research acts to augment reflexivity and human
intervention into social forms in its emancipatory mode; research is never used for the
private purposes of individuals nor for the managerial purposes of one social group toward
another. The general form of an emancipatory dialectic defines the relationships between
theory and research on the one hand and between the sociologist and the oppressed client
on the other.
SYMBOLIC INTERACTION AS THEORY AND MYSTIFICATION The
specific emancipatory interest in this paper is to facilitate an epistemological break
with the naive theoretical framework out of which symbolic interactionists work and, at
the same time, to preserve and improve the validities of that tradition. 3
Symbolic interactionists assume that the way to find out how social reality is constructed
is to watch people, in their everyday lives, constructing it. This seems reasonable enough
at first, but this assumption ignores the larger constraints in the political and economic
realm which pre-shape and set limits on behavior. It also ignores the cultural ethos which
marks the capitalist social paradigm. And, in advanced capitalist society, it fails to
deal with the fact that the means to produce social reality is converted into a commodity
and sold to whomever has the price. The dynamics of capitalism work such that, in the mass
society, only the wealthier national and multinational corporations can afford to purchase
the means of producing reality. It is these points which require an epistemological break.
If one wishes to know the sources of social reality: groups, occasions, self, roles,
meanings as well as these larger structures of power and privilege, ethnomethodologists,
phenomenologists, dramaturgical analysts and others, then one must examine all of the
means for producing meaning and the relation people bear to the means of that production.
The major obstacle to the a social life world in which the assumptions of symbolic
interactions about the shared character of mind, self and society resides in the alienated
use of dramaturgy in its 20th century form. Dramaturgy could be used, as has been the case
so often in fiction, poetry, theatre and religion, to celebrate the positivities of social
life and to sanctify deep and rich relationships between human beings. Stripped of its
ability to illuminate and inform, dramaturgy becomes an alien force about which to be
skeptical and cynical.
A Critique of dramaturgical Analysis Dramaturgical analysis, chiefly in the
writings of Erving Goffman, has responded to the hermeneutic interest by inquiring into
the everyday activities by which individuals, teams, and organizations bring social
reality into being by dramatic stagings, impressions, and playings. There are, however,
critical dimensions in dramaturgical analysis which have not been well developed. In a
mass society, the marketing of dramaturgical impressions has become big business. While
Goffman and his followers have concentrated on a micro-analytic dramaturgy, the larger
actors in the society have been embraced by the technology of theatre in concert with
social science technology, as well as electronics technology to stage impressions of
service, impressions of agency, impressions of quality in the marketplace, at work, in the
university and in the polity. The emancipatory point of this article is to investigate the
division of labor in the use of dramaturgical analysis as it has developed to date.
The critics of dramaturgical analysis properly focus upon the political sterility of most
of the early work in dramaturgical analysis. In addition to the more general critique made
earlier, the specific points of criticism are included: a) The absence of any great
outrage on the part of those who report on cynical managerial efforts to stage reality, b)
the systematic failure to include consideration of the larger social processes/structures
which produce the dramaturgy practiced in everyday life, c) failure to critique
constructed social reality from a perspective of the moral values claimed in given social
paradigms, d) an absence of any coherent theoretical context with which to give
dramaturgical analysis a meaning context, and e) unconcern with any systematic exploration
of how dramaturgy could amplify the human condition, and f) use of such exotic and
ponderous language that ordinary people are mystified and come to believe that the
construction of social reality is something so arcane and mysterious that only
"scientists" can understand it.
These criticisms are largely valid. The purpose here is to respond to these criticisms and
reflect on their meaning for human emancipation. Dramaturgical analysis has far too much
to offer as a mode of understanding social life to continue as a dilettantish excursion
into sociology and quite too important to be written off by serious radicals as
necessarily an exercise in counter-revolution.
Dramatizing Social reality Dramaturgical analysis is an analytic framework
dealing with the ways in which social reality is constructed. The major assumption of a
depoliticized dramaturgical analysis is that elements from the theatre may be used as metaphor
by which to understand the folk methods by which social reality is constructed in everyday
life. The approach used here rejects the notion of dramaturgy as metaphor and views
dramaturgy as ideology which gives shape and quality to human interaction while used, in
its repressive modes, to construct a fraudulent "social" life-world.
The utility of the elements of theatre as analytic categories by which to do qualitative
analysis is not in dispute as between conservative and critical/radical practitioners of
the art. Costumes, roles, actors, scripts, directors, cues, rehearsals, performances,
impressions given off, props, audiences, editors, re-writes, critics, and financial
speculation serve us well in trying to understand the funeral as theatre or the
marketplace as make-believe, just-pretend and never-was. Where radical and conservative
analysis part company is in the question of whether the world of theatre is a convenient
heuristic device or whether the art, craft, and skill of the artisans from the world of
"just pretend" are actively engaged in organizing human behavior in the
marketplace, polity, welfare and university systems.
The position advanced here is that "metaphor" transforms into
ideology the moment a dramatist hires out to a corporate manager to shape the
consciousness of human beings in the production of social meaning (Plotke, 1975). This is
compatible with the views of Robert Perinbanayagam who asserts that dramaturgy is the
"stuff and fiber" of social relations. I differ from Perinbanayagam in asserting
that the role of drama in society is to be understood historically. Sometimes it is part
of that social magic by which everyday runs of reality are created; sometimes it is
separated out to celebrate society itself; sometimes it comes under the control of an
elite to legitimate and consolidate its own power. 4 In this
epoch of corporate capitalism, it is merely a commodity to be bought and sold along with
0. J. Simpson or the Oakland "A"s. The point of real interest is how may
dramaturgy once again as in olden days be turned to the task of vivifying, illuminating
and enjoining people to the human endeavor.
Constructing Social Reality Those social scientists who engage in
dramaturgical analysis qua metaphor as McNall and Johnson (1975) charge, are the new
conservatives in social science and, as such, defeat the human interest which inform
science as an emancipatory practice. The particular human interest here is that each human
being, in order to be a competent and morally responsible human being, must engage in the
reality creating process with intention, insight, and efficacy. When social life worlds
are engineered by skilled practitioners apart from sentient and reciprocal symbolic
interaction, both knowledge and moral responsibility are casualty to this use of
dramaturgy.
Central to the practice of a critical dramaturgical analysis is the notion of the social
paradigm: an ensemble of social actors, cultural values, coherent sets of behavioral
events as well as a social prophecy bringing these components into a vibrant, meaningful
liminal whole. In the course of everyday life, an ordinary individual is involved in the
construction of many social paradigms; some of them of high resolution and carefully
bounded; some of low resolution and diffuse in time and space. To accomplish a given
social paradigm, a religious service, a family, a classroom, or a job of work, it is
necessary that four deeply connected sub-processes of the "self-fulfilling"
prophecy be embodied--failure in any one of these four subprocesses aborts the entire
procedure by which a social paradigm is constructed. If it is done deliberately with
benefits to the architect, then the sociology of fraud obtains.
First, there must be a shared idea of what social life world
is under construction. Robert Merton referred to this idea of what kind of reality was
being constructed as a 'self-fulfilling prophecy;' W.I. Thomas referred to it as a
'definition of the situation.' The means by which the idea comes to be shared is through a
process of symbolic interaction. Words, clothing, and architecture all can be used as
symbols to convey an idea of social-life world. Ordinarily, this part of the 'self'
fulfilling prophecy is scarcely visible. We go into a building commonly understood as a
church at a time when churches services are generally understood to occur; we see a person
dressed as priests and ministers often dress; we hear music ordinarily heard in religious
dramatizations; we see people dressed beyond the needs of work or climate; we observe
their muted comportment; we sense the special nature of the occasion and with, little
reflection, we understand that it is a religious rather than a commercial definition of
the situation. Indeed we would be most surprized if we were asked to buy a ticket of
admission, if there were a lecture on sub-atomic physics or on the theory of complex
numbers or a sales pitch from the pulpit. We expect a church service and almost without
fail, we get a reasonable facsimile of it in the consequence.
Secondly, the social life world must be defined as real by all of
its putative members. This is a reification phase in which that which is defined as real,
is accepted as real. 5 This is accomplished with surprisingly
little difficulty for many domains of social life. We would be very surprized, if while in
church, some people treated it as a rehearsal [and said, Let's start over again], as a
play [and applauded, as lecture [and held up a hand to ask a question, or as a non-event
[and turned to talk aloud with friends and neighbors. We understand such occasions to be
seriously intended versions of a given social form and we act as if that were true. We do
not act as if it were make-believe, just-pretend, not-for-real, or what-if. We have
crossed the mid-line between just-pretend and 'really there' and seldom question the truth
value of what is occurring.
Thirdly, there must be some performance which is taken to be the publicly known
embodiment of that prophecy. In a church service, the minister must offer a sermon which
speaks to questions of being and doing in the world. In a class-room, the professor must
lecture on a topic relevant to the course description. In a hospital, people must be
treated as patients rather than shoppers or communicants or friends. In a government
office, people must be treated as citizens rather than as spies, enemies or non-persons.
In all such occasions there must be a close and reasonable match between prophecy and
performance. Even in sports events, theatrical plays and other instances of make-believe,
there is a performance expected which must match the situation as defined. Football
players may not 'fool around' on the field; doctors or nurses may not treat the
therapeutic process as if it were a date or courting event; teachers may not treat the
class-room as if it were a sales office for real estate in Florida.
And, finally, all of this must be directed to serious human purposes...to the task
of creating social relations, community and the human individual as "species
being." Indeed, the difference between 'make-believe' and 'not for real' on the one
side and 'serious business' on the other is precisely that; some important consequence is
at stake. In most dramas of the Holy; marriage, baptism and funeral, there are serious
moral and legal consequences levied upon the practitioners. One cannot go through a
marriage ceremony and, immediately after, proceed as if one had no moral or legal
responsibility to others in the ceremony. One cannot proceed as if an election were 'just
pretend' and not leave office when a duly elected successor arrives. One cannot escape the
consequences of any seriously intended activity as may one for 'just-pretend,' 'just
fooling around,' 'not-for-real,' or 'what-if.'
The entire process is vulnerable to the sociology of fraud at each of the four phases
described above. Emancipatory knowledge is advanced by any analysis which permits the
individuals engaged in reality construction to estimate the degree to which fraud obtains.
Given an adequate dramaturgical analysis, those whose behavior is organized by the script
at hand or those whose interests are betrayed by the failures to perform have the
intellectual means to understand their distress and, thereby, the scientific basis to take
such political action as necessary to fulfill or to resist the prophecy of social life as
contained in the original idea. We will return to explicate the ways in which the
remarkable genius of human beings to construct social reality may be turned against them,
but first I would like to place this analysis in the larger socio-historical context.
Merchandizing Social Reality in Mass Society Most of us enter into the
construction of social paradigms with the same naivete and with the same easy confidence
as did our parents and their parents before that. However, some of us have become
professional practitioners in the dramaturgical construction of social reality. As we have
become specialists, we come to sell our skill, craft, knowledge, and art on the open
marketplace. This marketing of dramaturgical paradigms for managerial purposes has become
a big business and intrudes into the life of the individual in society in manifold ways.
"The Dramaturgical Society" (Young, Massey and Boland, 1977) attempts to
explicate that intrusion in a general way.
Division of Labor in Dramaturgy of Images and Simulacra
Some idea of the extent to which the division of labor in creating images of reality has
developed is to be found in the following data. In 1776, with a population of 2.4 million,
Advertising Age estimated that $200,000 was spent in advertizing. In 1976, with a
population of 210 million, expenditures were running at 34 billion. 6
The advertizing industry grew about 1500 times faster than the population in terms of
dollar volume. By 1973, Advertizing Age estimated that there were about 300,000
advertising jobs in agencies and company ad departments. 7 And by
1973 there were 369 ad agencies in the U.S. with billings from $390,000,000 (Young and
Rubican) to $304,000 (Contemporary Advertizing Agency). 8
Advertizing Age listed 743 International agencies in 1974. 9 While most effort is spent on image making in the marketplace in
order to 'realize' profit, other major institutions with other problems turn to this newly
emerging industry. Universities, politicians, churches, and federal agencies also develop
specialized cadre for creating dramaturgically persuasive images of excellence, fidelity,
states of grace, and authentic agency.
In the marketplace, the use of theatrical technology to create prophecies of quality,
images of social utility, impressions of efficacy, or idea of service abounds. Ads for
cigarettes create the impression of maturity, masculinity, individuality, competence, or
sensuality. Ads for soda pop put forward the prophecy of youth, of community, of peace,
fellowship or love. The university uses spectacles of football as well as scientific
"stars" to promote the image of excellence. Politicians hire scriptwriters,
pollsters, and stage managers to create a convincing impression of agency, concern and
competence.
In the marketplace the larger paradigm entails an idea of profit rather than social
utility. In the university, the idea which informs the actions of administrators is an
image of commercialized research and rationalized administration rather than educational
excellence. In the polity, the prophecy to be fulfilled is more often that of service to
commercial, financial and industrial interests rather than to women, Afro-Americans,
Latinos or of the general good. In each domain of American society, the larger social
paradigm under construction is rendered nonvisible by collusion with class, race and
gender interests and thereby partakes of the sociology of fraud.
Freedom Rings In a series of ads labeled "Free Enterprise
II, the Ad Council attempts to sell Capitalism itself to the American public. The Ad
Council will use about $30 million dollars in 'free' space and time on the media and will
distribute five to six million copies of a 24-page booklet on the joys of capitalism to
grade school and high schools." 10
In 1975, the National Auto Dealers Association proposed a foundation with a
three-million dollar annual budget to promote "freedom" of mobility. J. Walter
Thompson, an ad agency, created a "free enterprise" ad for Homelite chain saws
in 1976. A Florida bank spent $500,000 to stimulate the economy; a savings and loan
company in Baltimore uses funds to help "fight crime." The First Pennsylvania
Bank explains how America got "hooked" on inflation. The Pioneer Bank in
Tennessee spent $107,000 to get across the "real facts" about the private
enterprise system. These are but a few of the attempts to buy a dramaturgical image of
political events by corporate capitalism. The division of labor is such that the media is
used selectively by an expert cadre in advertising and public relations to create an image
for public consumption oriented to the needs of whoever can buy the product. The very
means to produce meaning thus is converted into a commodity.
Normalizing the Sociology of Fraud The consumer of the
commercial image not only receives a message about a particular product or corporation as
part of that 34 billion dollar effort but is also socialized to a social life world in
which such a use of dramaturgy is "natural" and ordinary. The industry thus
functions as a mechanism for institutionalizing an ideology which gives the legitimacy of
"normality" and "taken for granted" to the production and marketing of
images. 11
Young people everywhere watch hundreds of thousands of advertisements which do
more, much more than colonize and expand desire to fit the needs of corporate capital to
dispose of high profit goods in a saturated market; which do more than create a rage to
have and to own even when the means to shop and buy are inadequate. There are deep
structural effects beyond the purview of the viewer or critic. The division of labor in
constructing social reality represents a considerable danger in folk societies where the
construction of social reality is "ethnomethodology." By this is meant that the
methods and theories of reality construction were folk methods and folk theories; they
belonged to everyone on the one hand and were practiced by everyone on the other. This
people-oriented responsibility for the construction of everyday life stands in
contrast--marked contrast--to a division of labor format in which highly talented
specialists monopolize the task of constructing social reality in mass society.
The merchandizing of social reality by a cadre of skilled artists together with
psychologists and sociologists, in cooperation with technicians from the world of cinema
and television converts a human endeavor into a market commodity available to whomever has
the funds with which to purchase the dramaturgical impression of quality, service or
honest agency. In the first instance of hostile contrast, the gradual divorcement of the
masses from central involvement in the construction of social reality impairs the ability
of those concerned to have full awareness and full responsibility for that paradigm in
which they are expected to take a role. A purely positivistic epistemology would not be
able to discern the fact of loss of meaning by a straight-forward "objective"
analysis of social activity. Hermeneutical analysis repairs that oversight.
That loss of responsibility for the construction of a given social paradigm has the effect
of removing moral dimensions from the self structure of those who merely play a part
without effective power in developing the features of
the social paradigm under construction. Some insight into this implication may be
augmented by analogy to tract houses or mass recreation. Just as these goods, constructed
and sold without insightful participation of the user robs one of choice and lively
participation as well as direct involvement, moral choice and judgment in war, politics,
business, and praxical responsible participation in mass society.
Still another serious matter is that, from a symbolic interactionist view, the divorcement
of individuals from participation impairs the process by which self is constructed as a
directly and fully experienced activity. If society and self are in fact twinborn, they
are twinborn in the moment of intention by one party and of attribution by another party.
If there is a defect in either psychological process, the assumption about the unity
between self and society becomes invalid. In a concrete case, if one is taken to be a
social actor by attribution (a nigger, a chick, a soldier, or a massified worker,
consumer, student or parishioner) without intentionality on one's own part, then society
exists, after a fashion, without self. On the other hand if one only enacts a role without
the associated social identity integrated as a permanent feature of the self system, again
the linkage between self and society is weak.
The attribution of social identities via mass media proffer an inadequate structural basis
for self requiring, as they do, very few unit acts (intentional, meaningful acts). These
acts are embodied in very short social 'takes' and center upon shopping and displaying of
goods. The interactionally rich and informationally rich matrix of folk societies, kinship
and friendship groupings, or of work and church in small towns and large villages is not
found in the narrow, managed and impersonal role-takes available in mass politics, mass
sports, mass medicine, mass religion or mass education. Still less are they found in the
alienated dramaturgy of mass marketeering.
Reflecting upon a society composed of individuals with a flimsy structure of self, one
must be concerned. When a socializing process orients all young people to the acquisition
of goods and services far beyond their fiscal means, the bases for a great deal of petty
crime is laid. When self and mass society are no longer twin-born in that deep and
comprehensive way they are in folk societies, desire becomes unfettered by what social
psychologists are pleased to call the 'Generalized Other.' Absent the 'Generalized Other'
and given that well orchestrated desire to own cars, clothing, housing, and to use
services far beyond one's need or means, it seems an easy choice for young people on the
street to steal, to prostitute oneself, to join in the sale of illegal drugs and to drop
out of school to do so.
When one is middle class and well educated, desire can be pumped several more notches up
to and well past middle class income. Doctors, lawyers, stock-brokers are greatly tempted
to use their position of trust to gain the fiscal means to enjoy that good life advertized
on the various mass media. Those in politics find great temptations placed in their path
to sell their public trust to the higher bidder when commodification of services is seen
to be normal and when desire for the good life is seen to be the test of character and
success. Dramaturgy solves a great many problems for a few but creates a great many more
for a great many people.
From the perspective of political sociology, the failure of the self as a primary social
control unit is serious indeed. Moral agency becomes endangered as the self system is
given over to desire for goods and services rather than to norms, values, and morés of a
society. Both self structure as well as informal social control lose efficacy. External
control technologies; especially those supportive of a stratified society are a costly and
inhuman means of solving the problem of social order. A better and more effective means of
generating social order requires, on the one hand, a technology of participation and, at
the same time, radically reconstructed structures of self (Young, 1972).
The Market for Dramaturgy The price of images on radio and television is
great. The more expensive advertisements in prime time or during very popular programs can
now cost up to $250,000. In a highly stratified economy in which the wealthiest players
are managerial elites of huge corporations, dramaturgy is used to advance the interests of
corporate capitalism. In a globalized economy run by some 1000 multi-national
corporations, dramaturgy facilitates and celebrates the movement of food, resources and
the products of overseas labor to those half-dozen rich capitalist societies in which such
corporations are based. The net effect of this use of dramaturgy is to widen the gap
between rich and poor at home and among nation-states.
The use of dramaturgical technology to serve monopoly capital violates the substantive
rationality of economic life; the production of goods and services for human purposes
rather than for privatized profit. It colonizes human consciousness and turns it from
community interests to commodity desires. It adds to class inequality. It lays the
foundation for a great deal of street crime and white collar crime. The advertisements of
dramaturgy takes a valuable human invention and turns it against the human project.
Origins of Market Dramaturgy The underlying dynamic producing a
dramaturgical society can be understood best by the rise of the modern giant corporation
and its control of the various media, including the mass university. Accepting the Baran
and Sweezy (1966) analysis, we find an uneasy peace among the giants in a given commodity
sector. Increase of market share could come from either lower prices or better
quality...and often do. However both create problems for owners and managers. Normally,
price cuts are not used to increase market share since a price war would tend to weaken
the class unity needed to control labor struggles and the political process. Improvement
of quality requires a large outlay for new ideas and new machinery to produce the better
idea. The cost of a new auto plant can run up to $500 million dollars.
Rather than direct confrontation between corporations over price or quality, dramaturgy is
used to solve the problem of profits. In order to generate demand in a society with an
increasingly large portion of the population excluded from the market place by falling
wages and increasing prices, the surplus is disposed by dramaturgically enhancing the
merits of a given product. Dramaturgy is cheaper and effective as long as a population
continues to believe and act as if things defined as real are real in the consequence.
When the giant corporation can no longer depend upon the trust and
naivete of a population, recourse to dramaturgy will not succeed. Given such a solution to
the problem of surplus production and surplus population, the state becomes desperate for
political legitimacy. That legitimacy itself is a commodity for sale by Spencer-Roberts or
any number of ad agencies. 12 In a society with the democratic
proclivities of the U.S. and some European states, dramaturgy as a managerial technology
has greater utility than do the more oppressive technologies of coercion; police, domestic
espionage, terror, and bourgeois law. But the dynamics of elitist states; capitalist,
bureaucratic socialism, or politicized feudalities must, in the final analysis, replace
dramaturgy with fascism as the social paradigm under construction loses its social
character and, thereby, its political legitimacy.
Emancipatory Dramaturgy The central scientific task of critical
dramaturgical analysis is the investigation of social paradigms constructed by
professional social life world dramatists as instances of fraud or of authenticity. This
task is in contrast to mere description of folk methods by which social reality is
constructed as is now the case in the work of Mead, Cooley, Blumer and their followers.
The concepts and procedures of dramaturgical analysis point one in the direction of such
estimations.
The political task of dramaturgical analysts is to provide publics and
groups with those analyses of social fraud or authenticity in order that individuals and
groups can decide collectively whether to associate themselves with a given social
paradigm, to change that paradigm, or to oppose it. These two tasks, one political and one
scientific, underwrite dramaturgical analysis in an emancipatory mode. 13
It is important to remember that the point is not to oppose the use of dramaturgy
in social life, but to evaluate the degree to which dramaturgy is used to mystify and to
manage one class or group in the interest of another. Dramaturgy is essential to a world
of joy, delight, surprise, and enchantment. A world devoid of dramaturgy would be a
sterile, stale and dispirited world. More to the point, dramaturgy must be pointed to the
process by which human beings sanctify both nature and society. All that is sacred is
debased by just that much when dramaturgy is used for commercial or managerial purposes or
simply as another commodity.
Dramaturgy as Social Magic There is a qualitative difference between work
and praxis; between treatment and therapy; between a person and a nonperson. That
qualitative jump requires the mystery and magic of pretend and imagination. To cross the
threshold between nature and society or between fact and value requires a combination
dramaturgical elements by which to define a given experience as uniquely human. In
ceremonies, celebrations, festivals, holidays; in marriages, graduations, confirmations,
investitures and other rites of passage, the elements of dramaturgy may be used to define
and to bind off everyday experience from the ineffable, the unknowable, the inexpressible
and the mystical. By such social magic, we create social processes not found in the purely
physical world. The social process is contaminated when dramaturgy is produced as
commodity to solve technical problems of profit and control of masses.
DRAMATURGY AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF FRAUD Earlier, I spoke of the four-part
process by which social reality was created. I mentioned that, at each phase, the
possibility for fraud existed. In this section, I would like to expand and explain how
this happens as a guide to the emancipatory use of dramaturgical analysis. I take the
'self-fulfilling' prophecy first.
The Prophecy: The self-fulfilling prophecy does not "fulfill"
itself when the idea of a social paradigm is not publicly known. There are several ways in
which the paradigm is rendered nonvisible to those affected by it. In the first instance,
a prophecy may be falsely announced. A person could present herself as a 'friend' and yet,
later on, do quite unfriendly things. A corporation could announce a product as the best
buy, as a safe medicine, as a reliable machine, or as a new product. A politician could
announce herself as 'tough on crime' while she sold her vote to organized crime. A nation
could use dramaturgy to pronounce itself a democracy when secret police, black-lists, and
private under-ground organizations everywhere police and punish dissenters.
A second way in which a social prophecy can be turned into the sociology of fraud is by
what Goffman terms boundary collusion. A smaller, secret social reality may be constructed
within the boundaries of a larger, known social paradigm. Some of the participants may be
colluding to fulfill a privately known prophecy while proclaiming another prophecy in
public. A case in point is the attempt of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Halderman to use dramaturgy to
create the dramaturgical appearance of an investigation into the Watergate break-in.
In the Watergate tapes, there appears repeatedly the question by Mr. Nixon whether or not
it is possible to protect the persons who broke into Watergate as well as the public
officers who covered up the break-in. In public, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ehrlichman gave the
dramaturgical impression of accountability; they carefully studied their lines backstage
and gave creditable performance frontstage. The Watergate tapes revealed in clear detail
the existence of a different, nonvisible social paradigm out of which Mr. Nixon, Mr.
Ehrlichman, Mr. Dean and others were working. That paradigm bore little correspondence to
the publicly given prophecy of political agency. There were cues, lines, roles,
performances, impressions given off, props, actors, audiences, stage-managers, rehearsals
and other elements from the world of theatre. But dramaturgy in this case was more than
metaphor; it was an ideology which informed its producers as to the character and quality
of the social-life-world under construction. It had exactly the same standing as other
ideologies which shape other social paradigms; Catholicism, capitalism or feudalism.
George Wallace, Winthrop Rockefeller, William Scranton, Goodwin Knight are among those who
use P.R. firm of Hal Ervy in Los Angeles. But Ronald Reagan is the acknowledged genius of
packaged political culture. In a typical instance, a P. R. firm will design the
advertising theme of a campaign, arrange for the publicity, write, direct and produce
television commercials, and stage special events as well as special effects. The political
process is not a joint, interactive product of a candidate and an active public. There is
a division of labor in which P. R. firms control the production of meaning, candidates are
reduced to actors, and the public reduced to an audience. A reification process requires
that a wide range of social acts be defined as "really" of the kind predicted by
prophecy in question.
Reification: The second phase in the self-fulfilling prophecy is one of
reification: a process by which the prophecy of a social fact becomes real. All social
categories are in the first instance epistemological categories (ideas). Categories of
social "facts" are created by the act of intending, believing and
"knowing" persons. Epistemological categories become ontological categories
(real things) to the degree they are treated as real and only as long as they are so
treated. The major social device used in the reification process is authority: political,
religious, and more recently, scientific authority. Those with high status, formal
authority or social power certify that the occasion at hand is 'really' a legitimate
instance of its kind. Faith, hope, trust, belief, and innocence are necessary for
reification to occur.
The possibilities for fraud abound at the process of reification. Those in authority can
"count" what transpires as really "justice," as really "honest
service," as really "education" or whatever social fact is under
reification. If judges are corrupt, if politicians are venal, if teachers are incompetent,
if parents are indifferent, the social process fails. The social process also fails when
skilled dramatists, respected athletes, gifted musicians or ingenious technicians hire out
to create the image and the impression of reality.
Editing Out At the micro-level of face to face interaction, certain unit
acts are defined as "real" while some are not. The editing of certain acts:
belching, burping, yawning, and coughing as "not really there" requires little
effort after a bit of socialization to 'excuse' them. Such 'editing out' effectively
sustains a given social paradigm. The rewriting of the meaning of a given verbal or
physical act as "really" something else is commonplace in the history books;
after years and centuries, what 'really' happened becomes increasingly believed even if
fictive.
At the macro-level, an occasion can be artfully staged as being really there (The Tonkin
Bay attack) or not really there (the Cambodian "incursion"). Medicines can be
defined as "really" effective (and sometimes become so in the consequence).
However, the practice of defining soft drinks, beers, whiskeys, automobiles, or other
products as "really" status, love, masculinity, community mystifies those ideas
by linking them to a process which is a commercial process rather than a social process.
In this context, reification becomes a trap for the naive.
Transfer of Charisma In order to facilitate the reification process, the
esteem in which famous persons are held or the social honor accorded social positions is
purchased by an advertising firm and sold to a third party to endorse whatever image the
third party sells as true, correct, believable, valid, or warrantable. 0. J. Simpson, Alex
Karras, Pele, Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, and Bob Hope all cash in on the
personal esteem in which they are held in order to advance the process by which trust,
belief, and faith creates social "facts."
Muhammad Ali sold his prestige to Vitalis, Bill Russell to A.T.&T., Joe Frazier to
Personna, Alex Karras Sunbeam, Don Meredith to Lipton Tea, Yogi Berra to New Country
Yogurt, Oscar Robertson to Home Federal Savings and Loan, Artis Gilmore to GAF corporation
and Pele to Pepsi Cola.
Sometimes faith, hope, trust and belief are used directly to reify the truth value of a
social claim. Coca Cola sells the "real thing," one can "trust" Texaco
and United airlines uses the slogan "You Gotta Believe." Good Housekeeping, a
magazine regularly advertises its own "believability" in Advertising Age.
"Belief Dynamics" is a formal theoretical strategy developed by the PR firm of
D'Arcy, MacManus and Manus. It has a series of propositions which are applied and sold to
various customers. Belief itself is a commodity purchased by Budweiser, Southwestern Bell,
Michelob, the city of St. Louis and 81 other accounts.
Some advertising agencies use God and other elements from the world of religion to package
trust, faith, hope and belief. Playboy Magazine ran an ad which said, "I read Playboy
and found God." Machine Design magazine gives God credit for one of its products.
Life Magazine guaranteed to deliver Christmas, 1972 better than its competitors. One
religious college advertised, "Do a Wheelie for Jesus," and Fairchild
Corporation invoked the name of God in one of its ads. The Weller agency showed God as a
woman in order to sell sportswear. BASF ran an ad using nuns as endorsers for its computer
tapes. The Encyclopedia Britannica also used the structure of the religious experience in
its million dollar ad campaign in 1973 showing its books as if they were holy writ. And
Reverend Ike is one of the many who sell a blend of God and free enterprise for a fee. It
is very profitable to use the structure of religion to gain belief and trust while
appropriating the surplus value of labor.
The process of believing events to be real is, ultimately, indispensable to the
construction of society and should not be used for commercial purposes. The result of such
a fraudulent use of the reality process is the cynical distrust of any artfully staged
definition of a social paradigm as real. The loss of legitimacy accruing to the family,
the church, the school and the marketplace is serious indeed. The human response to a
fraudulently constructed social life world is not always syntaxic: employees steal,
students cheat, voters stay home, debtors skip, and children run away. And, sometimes,
people withdraw the legitimacy assigned to such fraudulent reifications. The role of the
critical dramaturgical analyst in investigating this subprocess in the major domains of
human life is to report on the degree to which such "definitions of reality" are
linked to distinctly human needs and purposes; to ascertain whether the practice of
treating social events as real is justified by the technical and social merits of the
event concerned; in a word, to provide the means by which the reification process creates
a social life world or tends to destroy one.
Force v. Fraud At the trial of the Chicago Seven, Judge Hoffman tried to
define what transpired as a "courtroom" definition of the situation while Abbie
Hoffman tried to define what happened as a dramaturgical facsimile of a
"courtroom." In the final analysis only the use of a technology of coercion: the
police, decided whether the reification process succeeded or not. Since
"authority" itself is an epistemological category temporarily reified in the
person of an office holder, without coercion as a back up, the legitimacy of authority is
at best tenuous unless the behavioral events counted as "really" of a sort
compatible to the prophecy are, in fact, compatible to publicly established standards.
While such artful reification, given life and credibility by skilled actors, by
professional writers, expert cinematography and by good musicians solves the problem of
generating a public for a product or a politician from mass society, the practice also
mystifies since the ideas and reality coefficients were constructed outside the public
sphere and broadcast via mass media without participation by individuals behaving as if
things pronounced as real, would in fact become real in the consequent. In the division of
labor of reality creation, the actors, musicians, writers and editors who reify have no
direct influence on the performance which might authenticate that reification. The test of
all reality creating processes is to be found in the deed.
Prophecy and Performance: Things prophesied and treated as
real do not automatically become real in the consequence. Performances must be embodied;
performances must match prophecy else the prophecy fails. 14 In
ordinary social paradigms, there are publicly known and objective standards of performance
by which to gauge mismatch. In some domains of social life, the standards are so esoteric
that the general public can be deceived. For new products, for complex organizations, as
with most "professions," the standards of competent performance are not easily
ascertained.
This circumstance permits the artful staging of the facsimile of excellence, of value, of
efficacy. Doctors, lawyers, and professors can evoke the impression of competence since
their work is not easily evaluated. Organizations can hire public relations persons,
economists, psychologists and sociologists to gauge the degree to which a public will
accept the illusion of performance in lieu of authentic performance. The profit motive is
satisfied as much by skillfully staged facsimiles of excellence using the structure of
friendship, or family or the structure of science to generate a market as by retooling
production routines or by supporting research and development--both very costly.
Some forms of social life and social endeavor have no objective, external, or publicly
known standards against which to measure fraud. It is in the act of believing and trusting
that a given social form is warranted. There are no external standards for religious
beliefs nor for the aesthetic experience generally. In the act of believing comes the joy,
the awe, the enlivening rush to join in community, in friendship, in love, or in worship
with others who also believe. Still this realm of human activity can be used in cynical
exploitation of the reification process. Community, friendship and love can be turned to
private, individual ends which drains the joy, the wonder, and the ineffable good spirits
from life itself. In this domain, only subjective tests are appropriate.
For the greater share of social life, there are intersubjective criteria which stand as
test against which fraud is measured. For a part of social life there are external,
nonsubjective and non-intersubjective criteria with which to gauge match. When two persons
reach understanding, only those two know whether a given act is warranted. In "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Wolff," Burton and Taylor had an intersubjective social life world
which Burton betrayed to their guests. There is only one judge of such reifications and
defections from them. If the intersubjective understanding is shared by a collective, it
is the collective which must judge default. If the social paradigm which underwrites that
intersubjective understanding is flawed, the public discourse must occur in order for
publicly understood transformations to occur.
In a society in which the dramatization of life is routinely produced as a commodity, a
Gestalt, a world view develops in which it seems reasonable to partake of private
enterprise in face to face presentments. It was this subjective domain which Goffman
explored and relentlessly exposed to critical analysis. What is of concern to the human
condition is that the full range of exploitative dramaturgy be explored and the immense
capacity of an advertising cadre to merchandize reality be subjected to critical scrutiny.
The relevant form of social research by which performance is evaluated is that of
jurisprudence. Critical departure from publicly known standards must be judged by
knowledgeable insiders provided with the social facts and must place around those involved
in a frame in which the meaning of their actions may be understood. That frame is
determined by the social paradigm at hand. More particularly, judgment must be made on the
basis of the prophecy explicitly or implicitly given.
Many persons caught up in such an evaluative process know, with some
warrant, that they have been "framed" in that the explicit prophecy varied from
the implicit prophecy such that they were held accountable to the former while others were
held accountable by the latter. 15 Any society in which there is
such contradiction in the prophecy phase invites problems of jurisprudence in the
performance phase. In a stratified society, law becomes a political tool for the powerful
to use against customers, competitors, the public interest.
We may see the play of power in the Watergate Affair. In that affair, Mr. Nixon used the
considerable social power of his office to help stage a convincing impression of honest
investigation of the Watergate burglary and the part the Committee to Re-elect the
President [CREEP] played in it. His used his authority to instruct others, especially Mr.
Dean, to take this or that role in the dramatization of honest agency. The F.B.I., the
C.I.A., and other public agencies, in turn, colluded with Mr. Dean and other White House
staff to distance the President from the scandal. Much was at stake in this drama; the
outcome of the election and the future of Mr. Nixon, who with Henry Kissinger, was putting
together a global policy to protect the interests of American corporations in an
increasingly competitive world. Part of that strategy entailed rapproachment with the USSR
and Communist China in order to open up markets for American business and to protect jobs
of American workers. Part of it was the quest for peace in the Mid-East where large oil
reserves were essential to an oil-based industry in Europe, Japan and the USA. Many who
colluded with the White House knew this and knew how other presidents had used power to
gain and keep office...they were thus acting out of a much larger sociology of fraud than
merely a cover-up of a burglary.
A critical dramaturgical analysis instructs us to examine the degree to which a given set
of units acts are, intersubjectively, compatible with a given social prophecy. Many acts
on the part of Mr. Nixon and his staff were not; such analysis enables us to make the
scientific judgment that Mr. Ehrlichman and Mr. Nixon were skilled practitioners of the
sociology of fraud. This statement is a scientific statement of fact that is at once
objective, unbiased and value full. It is objective in that another analyst, using the
same data and the same research approach would come up with the same conclusion. It is
unbiased in that the social paradigm against which the behavior of Mr. Nixon and Mr.
Halderman is tested is the same social paradigm pronounced by these two and
intersubjectively understood by their audience to be the relevant paradigm against which
their behavior is to be tested for congruence to the central prophecy of the paradigm. It
is value full in that such a scientific statement permits affirmation, modification, or
destruction of historically situated and socially relevant paradigms of social action in
the event they are fraudulent. This research capacity serves the emancipatory interest in
change and renewal.
Substantive Rationality of Dramaturgical Presentments: Understanding the
fourth aspect of the process of constructing social reality requires that the theorist
change levels of analysis. Since the point of human interaction is to generate a
distinctly emergent level of social reality; in the final analysis, one must reflect upon
the degree to which reality qua social reality, emerges. The test of the facticity
of a social life world is always, in positive terms, the solidarity of social
relationships. To the extent we accord social standing to each other as "really"
a brother, a friend, a fellow human being, to that extent is the social paradigm likely to
be substantively rational.
The point emphasized here is that the technology of theatre could be used to augment the
capacity of individuals to construct a social-life world anchored in human interests.
Elements from theatre could be used to advance prophecies of honorific social status, of
educational experience, of romance or of therapy. Music, actors, roles, rehearsals,
costumes, stagings, audiences, scripts, stage managers, and other elements from the world
of theatre need not be employed in the sociology of fraud. As long as dramaturgical
presentments are used to construct publicly established and publicly visible social
paradigms and, as long as the services and goods produced by these paradigms serve human
interests, the technology of theatre can add, rather than detract from, the fullness of
human life.
A social paradigm is substantively rational when it is oriented to the formation of
communities and implementation of shared cultural values. A surgical team, a work team, a
classroom, a couple on a date, a town meeting, or an entire society share value
orientations to a social paradigm. When one goes to a party or to church, or to a ball
game or to a union or political meeting, one expects that active participants give
implicit allegiance to the values at hand. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the impression
of authentic, naive participation is given off by one or more of the parties responsible
for the construction of a particular kind of social reality. When that occurs, a form of
conflict exists. At the microlevel, a union spy vigorously urging violence or easy terms
in collective bargaining; a seducer posing as a suitor, an insurance salesman insinuating
himself in the good graces of his fellow parishioners, or a careerist sacrificing his
public charge in a bureaucracy to cultivate the sponsorship of his superiors: these do not
begin to exhaust the list of those who employ dramaturgy for quite private purposes--the
very fact of such simulation of compliance, cooperation and accord on values permits the
analyst to infer conflict in a given social paradigm. Community does not emerge in such a
situation.
At the macro-level of sociological analysis, one can gauge the facticity of a society by
degree to which the capacity of individuals to participate in the construction of social
forms is augmented; when the capacity of individuals to create culture increases; or when
the basic social necessities are adequately distributed. This test is relevant whether one
is evaluating face-to-face relations, group to group relations or international relations.
For a given social paradigm as a whole, there are "objective" standards which
can be used to gauge its emergent facticity. Crime rates, desertion rates, drop-out rates,
child morbidity and mortality rates, suicide rates, absentee rates, and the incidence of
political dissent are fairly direct tests of the varying efficacy of the reality process.
Capitalist, socialist and communist societies can be compared by such transcendent
standards. Indirectly, the presence of underground structures, police force, and custodial
cadres attest to a poorly designed officially given social paradigm.
As the surplus population grows in capitalist societies, as the
indicators of a poorly organized society fall, as the political legitimacy of a society
fails, the capacity to control the means by which social reality is produced is put to the
task of legitimating capitalism itself. 16 Exxon, which spent
$32 million in 1976 for advertising "energy for a strong America." A.T.&T.
spent $112.8 million for advertising while it proclaimed that "the system is the
solution." Textron corporation which owns Homelite saws advertises that it helps
"build a better America." The U.S. Government is the 17th largest advertiser
spending 113 million in 1976 to celebrate itself. Coca Cola peddles reality itself in the
$91.3 million it spent on advertising in 1976.
Such a capacity to employ artisans from the world of make-believe and just-pretend; such
economic power to purchase 20% of commercial television time, to purchase 50% of newspaper
space, to purchase 60% of magazine space, to finance the political process through
political contributions; such a cadre of advertising and public relations specialists to
orchestrate the dramaturgical impression of a rational and decent society must give one
pause.
A political coup of an entirely new character is thus possible and, perhaps, in process.
For those of us who think of political change in terms of armies, control of the state
apparatus, and the proclamation of new directives we have not the concepts with which to
recognize the new, polite, delightful form of domination encompassed in the concept of a
dramaturgical society in which the division of labor in the construction of social reality
preempts that process to the goals of growth, profit and control of the masses. Thus,
social reality itself becomes make believe.
CONCLUSION The use of coercion, terror, or physical violence destroys the
social character of a social paradigm by a unilateral imposition of a given definition of
the situation. In the use of direct force, the prophecy of a social paradigm is not shared
in any human sense of the notion of sharing. Prisons, concentration camps, asylums, and
"schools" are defined as such and the definition unilaterally enforced by
technologies of coercion; police, occupation armies, chemotherapy, behavior modification,
and by courts. Yet the direct use of force is somehow less dishonest than is recourse to a
dramaturgically staged sociology of fraud.
The same is true of stage, cinema, games and sports. There is an open understanding that
these events are on the far side of the line between make-believe, just-pretend and
what-if and that seriously intended world of 'the real world.' The thing about plays and
games is that they have no consequence beyond the event. One does not take movie actresses
as if they were 'really' murderesses; one does not take money from friends outside a poker
game; one does not take a base-ball players strike as seriously as one takes a strike of
teachers, police or doctors. Those who dwell in the land of make believe do not reach over
into the land of reality; they do not step out of the screen and touch one. Electronic
ministers do not prayer for a given living viewer of a Sunday morning. This is
make-believe and known to be make believe.
When the artful contrivance of images become a major industry, then one has grounds to
question the placement of that mid-line and to enquire into its boundaries. That is the
task of the phenomenologist, ethnomethodologist, symbolic interactionist, or the
socio-linguist who wishes to contribute to emancipatory knowledge.
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Footnotes