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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
A. While post-structural critique was developing in France, there was an American sociologist who developed his own line of analysis about the ways in which images, stagings, performances, impressions, frauds, cons, and 'betrayals' were involved in the production of everyday life. Erving Goffman, in a wide ranging series of books laid out the techniques and tactics by which the people he observed used the accouterments from the world of theatre in order to construct the dramaturgical impressions they wanted 'to give off' and to have other persons take.
When Goffman's works first came out, the reviews were decidely unfriendly. There were two major lines of criticism which were leveled at the work in the reviews and in books about sociology itself. First there were criticisms from the more established sociologists who complained that the world Goffman described was far too cynical, far too conniving, and far too much a function of personal will and intent. People do not 'stage' their social life world, rather they live it in innocence and naivete according to those who liked structural analysis which reduce people to the mere embodiment of the social forms into which they had been born and socialized.
Then too, on the left, there was the criticism that Goffman had depoliticized social interaction by ignoring the structures of power, status and class inequality which greatly affected the ability of people to stage-manage the sociology of it all. In 1970, Gouldner wrote at length, in 'The Coming Crisis of American Sociology' that Goffman had trivialized the sociological project by his concentration on tactics while ignoring the reasons why people were reduced to such inauthentic presentations.
A year or two later, I wrote an article for The American Sociologist in which I said that Goffman, Gouldner and Garfinkel constituted, together, a rich underlife in American sociology which should be sustained and carefully considered...that, in my opinion, Goffman was talking about a social process coming to birth while Durkheim, Mead, Cooley were talking about the kinds of social forms in the past or found only in the safe and responsive world of the middle class academic. We now see these sociologists as pre-cursors and collateral embodiments of postmodern sensibility.
B. The work and world of Goffman.
There are five books by Goffman which are worth the time of the grad student. They are:
1. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Anchor Books] in which Goffman discusses the arts of impression management. His is a world in which theatre is not so much a metaphor for the analysis of social life but, rather, a model for how to do social life. All of the elements of theatre are found, variously, in his works: scripts, actors, directors, performances, audiences, editors, enactments, rehearsals, front and back stage regions as well as re-writes and critical comment.
2. His book on Encounters [Bobbs-Merrill] uses a game model to discuss everyday social activity. He also spends some time on the sociology of 'role distance' and role distancing activity...there is an implicit critique built into this work which is easy to miss...why should people make an effort to give off the impression of distance from any role if they have been well socialized to it and have had an associated social identity built deeply into the self system via socialization and rites of passage? The answer is that Goffman was describing a world coming to birth in which the sociology of it all was too frail and flimsey a base for the self system. Mass sports, mass entertainment, mass education, mass marketing, mass medicine and mass politics organized in bureucratic format were and are too thin and temporary an involvement for a whole person to use as anchor for the social self. Small wonder traditional symbolic interactionists viewed G. with suspicion...mind, self and society are not twin-born in his books...yet Mead had told us that they were and Mead was 'the' authority on social psychology.
3. I used his book on Behavior in Public Places [Free Press] for years in my courses on social psychology. It has a rich inventory of concepts to which student relate readily in doing field research and in development of their sociological imagination. A veritable treasure-trove of concepts with which to explicate the ways in which unknown others can approach another person and engage the symbolization process for weal or for woe. Most social psych deals with interaction between known and significant others...it is Goffman's particular genius that he greatly expands social psych to embrace a new realm of social behavior...one that did not exist in small towns, villages, and shops of a more innocent era.
4. Asylums is, arguably, Goffman's most consciously political work. Twice in its pages, he notes that he is not taking the point of view of the officially given social life world as normative...indeed, he speaks from the point of view of the prisoner, the inmate, the patient and the soldier. His sociology of total institutions is not as historical nor as pointedly propositional as the really excellent parallel work of Foucault. There is a theory of the underlife of institutions buried in this book which I extracted in a paper entitled, Underground Structures in the Democratic State.
5. Stigma is again a book which gives a marginal group a voice. G. looks at the process by which stigmatization occurs and how it 'spoils' the presentation of self in everyday life. After reading that one, I wrote a paper entitled, 'The Black Muslims: A strategy for the Management of a Spoiled Identity.' The identities available for Afro-American people to present in public places had been spoiled by racism...nigger, coon, jungle bunny, and such. In order to ground the social self on a much firmer, much more dignified social base, many Black Americans turned to Islam.
B. The Social Uses of Dramaturgy
Goffman's work stimulated me to think about the uses of dramaturgy in history...some place I have made the point that, for most of human history, dramaturgy was used either in the dramas of the Holy in order to sanctify social relationships and social groups or in politics to celebrate kings, princes, nations and states. There have been two major turning points in the social use of theatre...before Shakespeare, most plays were morality playsin which good and evil were made visible and in which good triumphed.
Shakespeare uses theatre in quite a different way...his plays show royalty as frail, vulnerable, indecisive, conniving, conspiring, murderous and venal. Hamlet knows his uncle murdered his father and does nothing about it...he dithers and whines the whole play through. In the Tempest, Shakespeare mocks both God and the believer...while he venerates Science and the man of Resaon. In the Merchant of Venice and in Lear, women are given a voice which speaks loudly and clearly. Here is no celebration of feudalism or even capitalism but rather a critique of both. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare has a wonderful poem about gold...yellow precious, glittering gold...which gives title, knee and honor to the scroundrel...which makes the wappened widow wed again...which plucks the pillow from beneath the head of stout fellows...which refreshes the hoar leper to the April Day...such an indictment of pecuniary values is matched only by, perhaps, Thorstein Veblen. Marx quoted S. often and read him assiduously [while Lenin read Balzac to get a fix on the middle classes].
Berthold Brecht offers another turning point in theatre; he tries to erase the midline between make-believe and just pretend, on the one side, and seriously intented social performances on the other...B.B. wants the audience to take outrage at the dynamics unfolding in the play and to take that rage into the street and do battle with it against oppression. In 'The Resistible Rise of Auturo Ui, Brecht has people seated in the audience in order to re-unite theatre and social life...the play itself is a thinly disguised attack on Hitler and the thugs in Nazi Germany. Three Penny Opera offers no character into whose persona the viewing audience can be innocently inserted.
It is Woody Allen's peculiar genius that he doesn't give the audience a hero from whose point of view action can be validated. One can identify with John Wayne, Jimmy Steward, Clark Gable or John Garfield...one cannot identify with the weak, frail, sneaky and cowardly characters found in Woody Allen's movies...indeed, the wise and wonderful Norm Denzin, U/Illinois, has called Woody Allen, a Prophet of Postmodern Cinema. After hearing Norm's lecture at TCU three years ago, I rented every Allen flick I could find and assured myself that Denzin knew whatof he spoke.
C. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DRAMATURGY It has been my central job to locate Goffman and Dramaturgical Analysis within the larger social and historical context in which they make sense. I made several points last Monday night in our seminar:
1. For most of human history swindles, cons, frauds, poseurs and dramaturgical impresssions of honest agency, of sincerity and of belief was a cottage industry in which one person or a small team of persons artfully connived the dramaturgical impression with which to fool and fleece the innocent. Now, the technology of artful impressions is a multi-billion dollar industry in which whole teams of skilled technicians are hired to create the dramaturgical impression of greatness, of agency, of sincerity, of authenticity.
2. I pointed to the development of five technologies with which such an industry produces dramaturgy as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.
a. Sociology and social research provides data on that which people think, want, desire, and despise.
b. Psychology offers information about those neuroses, values and beliefs, needs and anxieties which can serve as an envelope with which to create desire for commodities candidates alike.
c. Hollywood and cinematography offer the technical means for insertion of masses of people into a belief system, a value system, a hate system or a 'knowledge' system.
d. Electronics and the technology of radio and television offer the speed of electronic and the range of electro-magnetic transmissions of such dramaturgies.
e. Madison Avenue and the modern university provide the skill, knowledge, art, and craft with which to commodify drama.
3. Then I said that advanced monopoly capitalism has two serious problems both of which can be resolved, at least temporarily, by recourse to dramaturgy. a. 'Surplus production and the realization problem:' In order to get labor costs down and production up, there is a built-in drive in capitalism to improve the means of production: machinery, automation, mass production all drive down labor costs per unit item. Since workers do not earn 100% of the value of the wealth they produce, they cannot buy 100% back...hence surplus production.
In order to realize profit, the capitalist must create desire among those who do have discretionary income. Advertizing and the commodification of drama can solve this problem by creating 'demand'...that it, by treating desire as something that must be satisfied and can be satisfied by owning/using a product.
Actually, there are several solutions to the problem of demand:
War destroys and renews demand; property crime renews demand; Welfare redistributes and renews demand for some kinds of goods;
New inventions stimulate demand but it is the convincing image of utility in magazines, on radio, in television and bill boards which create mass demand via advertizing for those who neither need nor want most of the surplus goods produced by industrialized manufacturing.
B. The Legitimacy Problem.
In mass democracies in which candidates are sponsored by those who have wealth, and in which the promises of democracy are yet to be realized, political leaders can hire skilled dramatists from Madison Avenue to coach them on how to dramatize authentic agency.
In universities which are oriented to pecuniary values [Theresa Morris, a grad student, gave a fine paper last week on this point which I used in the lecture...don't know where she is], several things happen which undermine the knowledge process. Administrators uses sports and nobel laureates as a way to create the dramaturgical semblence of greatness.
When huge corporations commit huge crimes, they can use drama turgy to create an entirely respectable image.
When the sociology of it all becomes too fragile to bear the weight of an estimable self system, one can turn to professionals and purchase a new self...there are thousands of new firms which offer exercize machinery, cosmetics, clothing, slimming voice lessons and such with which to create one's own self.
It is in this socio-political context that both Goffman and postmodern society emerge...I want to conclude the lecture by making two points:
1. Most of the time in most societies, innocent and honest presentations are still the norm...it is a small layer in a few societies in which such cynical use of dramaturgy is appropriate...but as Stanford Lyman said in his keynote address to SSSA last week, it is another rough beast, it's time come round at last, marching toward Bethlehem to be born...so take care.
2. It is my firm and considered view that the human project can benefit greatly from all three knowledge processes:
a. Pre-modern thought with its emphasis upon belief, faith, trust, hope and prophecies remain the deep rich core of all social interactions; all distinctly social relationships; all the really rewarding forms of social life in which we are engaged...including education.
b. Modern thought and rational thinking has given us great treasures in agriculture, transportation, communication, health and the knowledge process itself...it is precious to the human condition
c. Postmodernity is the beginning of the end of innocence and also the beginning of responsibility for the good and evil we do...no longer can we blame God and/or Nature for the many forms of social life we erect and in which we must perforce live out our lives...most of the division of labor is a social division: race, gender, class and ethnicity...the technical division of labor is all too much praised...there are better ways to produce and better ways to consume all goods and services including dramaturgy; postmodernity insists we are responsible for the theories and the technologies we create. So be it.