The Drama of Social Life

Essays in Post-modern Social Psychology

T. R. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351483391
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

These essays explore the many ways theater and dramaturgy are used to shape the everyday experience of people in mass societies. Young argues that technologies combine with the world of art, music, and cinema to shape consciousness as a commodity and to fragment social relations in the market as well as in religion and politics. He sees the central problem of post-modern society as how to live in a world constructed by human beings without nihilism on the one hand or repressive dogmatism on the other.

Young argues that in advanced monopoly capitalism, dramaturgy has replaced coercion as the management tool of choice for the control of consumers, workers, voters and state functionaries. Young calls this process the "colonization of desire." Desire is colonized by the use of dramaturgy, mass media, and the various forms of art in order to generate consumers, vesting desire in ownership and display rather than in interpersonal relationships with profound consequence for marriage, kinship, friendship and community. While Young focuses his critique on capitalist societies undergoing great changes, he insists that the same developments are to be found in bureaucratically organized socialist societies.

The Drama of Social Life is of interest to those who study theories of moral development, cultural studies, the uses of leisure, politics, or simply the uses of "make believe." It is intended for the informed lay public as much as for social psychologists.

I The Politics of Social Psychology

T.R. Young

Introduction

T.R. Young

In this first section, there are three essays that contribute to the political struggle to reunite social science and morality. In a postmodern social psychology, the task is more than the simple description and reporting of the processes by which a soul and a self emerge. It is also a task to map the context in which self and interaction succeed or fail. It is a task to help clarify the conditions under which a strong and competent self system arises and is sustained in an open and supportive society. To do social psychology in a postmodern mode is to be openly, frankly, passionately committed. Out of that passion comes not a search for the iron laws of society and self-development but rather a quest for the myriad permutations of social organization that permit an infinite variety of self-patterns to emerge within the simple structures of praxis: sociality, intentionality, creativity, and rationality. In the postmodern world, social psychology cannot be neutral or value-free; it must have a politics. The only interesting question becomes what shape that politics? One answer is offered here.

The first essay, “Hard Times and Hard Tomatoes,” was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Norman Denzin, then president of SSSI, was kind enough to invite me to help the members of the society understand why most of the major assumptions of Symbolic Interactional Theory could not be met in mass society: school, marketplace, shop, factory, church, or sports field. I was only too happy to oblige.

I suggested to the forty or fifty interactionists assembled there that we must no longer assume undistorted processes of symbolic interaction, of selfhood, of communication, of the significant other or the looking-glass process. Rather we must work assiduously as praxical scientists to help create a world in which symbols elicit the same meaning in the self as in the other. We must work to reveal the structural obstacles to the self process. We must rewrite the textbooks that assume that interaction in mass society has the same result as interaction in a praxis society.

The second article, drafted first, but a special case in the larger study of the sociology of knowledge, follows with an appreciation and defense of Goffman from his many detractors. It Goffman describes a sociology of fraud, one need not subscribe to it. Even if Goffman is a partisan on behalf of dramaturgy used in the service of fraud, still less can we reject his observations. We can look at them and ask after their truth value; we can ask whether such a state of affairs is congenial to the human process. We can work to put dramaturgy to better uses in the creation of self and society. The second part of the article proposes that a more aggressive methodology is essential to meet the information needs of an authentically democratic and transparent society. Under conditions of conflict, the polite and cooperative stance taken by social psychologists in a society marked by sincerity, honesty, and mutuality does not answer the research process nor does it answer to the trust accorded social science when we are given time, resources, and social honor in return for our work.

The third article sets forth the theoretical and practical characteristics of an informationally rich and interactionally rich society—one at the opposite end of the sociology of fraud that now provides the raw data for an alienated dramaturgical society. These three articles, together, set the tone and the mood for a wide-ranging critique and call for a radical, emancipatory, participatory social psychology in the postmodern mode.

1 Hard Times and Hard Tomatoes

T.R. Young

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

—A. E. Housman

The Plight of Symbolic Interaction Theory in an Interactionally Deficient Society

Symbolic Interaction Theory has always been the heart and soul of American sociology. Other theoretical approaches have focused on disembodied statistical aggregates, impersonal macroprocesses, the raging, changing flow of class struggle, and on the surgical interplay of demographic categories. Most sociology is concerned with the correlation of variables, with measures of dispersion and of association of disembodied fragments of social activity. Symbolic interaction theory has focused on real thinking—intending, trying, failing, loving, hurting human beings.

Symbolic interactionists have brought us understanding of how men change into gynecologists when examining women in order to strip the interactional matrix of its sexual potential and thus facilitate the diagnostic process. Symbolic interactionists have taught us how three-year-old children come to be human beings, come to reflect on and chastise their own behavior and that of others as the social self— the me—arises.

Interactionists have shown us how a young boy, within a process of symbolic activity, becomes a young woman. Interactionists have informed us of how police officers work their beat, how they count some things as crime and others not. We have been shown how cottagers hold outsiders at a distance and how, sometimes, they bring them into a closed world of meaning.

We have watched, through the analytic eyes of symbolic interaction-ists, how mental patients maintain the dignity of a whole person in the face of the degradation routines of the mental hospital, how prisoners maintain a rich underlife in the most lifeless prisons, and how adults distance themselves from the child’s world of the merry-go-round. We have seen Purdy parade himself as a meteorologist before unknown and unknowing others. We have seen the secret places of trade and commerce in the asylum. We have observed the moral career of a whole person being turned and tossed by the official routines of hospital staff.

Symbolic interaction research opened up the social organization of homosexual life, of barroom behavior, of the microdynamics of the classroom as well as the structure of action at funerals, weddings, courts martial, and in the framing of the holy. The constitution of Halloween as well as the social nature of God has been made visible. We know that it is as possible to believe in the reality of God as to believe in Detroit, the NAACP, or the notion of a mother—all are, equally, human constructs and, as long as human beings organize their behavior as if there really is a God or a Detroit or an NAACP, there really are those things.

Symbolic Interaction Theory as a discipline has provided us with a conceptual scheme and a wide variety of methods by which we can unravel the most mysterious process of all—how human worlds of thought and action are created by distinctly human creatures. It is a wondrous accomplishment.

We learned that mind, self, and society are trine-born—that there is no such thing, ontologically, as the separate individual in its social form. The notion of a mother is nonsensical without the child defined as such and the woman acting as such within a larger set of constructed human activity. We have been taught to explore the structure of self and the social identities which are inculcated into the self system and which, ceteris paribus, mediate human behavior in situationally appropriate ways within symbolically constituted worlds. We have learned that our very consciousness is shaped within the web of human affiliations.

Our perceptions of physical reality and our interpretations of social events are collective efforts. Language and symbols do not hang disembodied in time and space with predetermined meaning—despite what dictionaries tell us. Space, time, mass, volume, pressure, temperature, velocity, density, gravity, and magnetism may, just may, be human constructs as well—artifices of human interest and imagination. People, together, create the meaning of a thing. People, together, construct and deconstruct the meaning of whole historical epochs.

Out of the nineteenth century had come the understanding that social reality was a human construct—that social forms and processes were not ontologically prior to the actions and intentions of intending people. The belief that social forms were set eternally by the hand of a creator slowly was displaced by the belief that social forms were the product of countless trials and failures of countless tribes and families.

The idea that Western social forms were the highest point in an upward spiral of social evolution lingers, in most societies, to the present moment, but now we know that there are thousands of equally adequate but differing ways to build social relations dawned slowly on a few scholars—mostly anthropologists. Still the innocent of the world believe that whatever social system into which they are born is the best of all those myriad forms.

Along with many other doubters, Marx set in motion a vigorous line of enquiry into the social sources of human alienation, into the processes of false consciousness, mystification, and the ideological hegemony of ruling elites. It was a blasphemous thought that existing social forms were the source of much mischief and pain rather than the last final perfect child of the gods or of evolutionary processes.

In the famous Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the intimate relationship between human intention and social reality. One’s relationship to the means of production tended to define and limit one’s ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. For Marx, the structures of domination—race, class, gender, and authority—distorted the knowledge process. The solution to human alienation was not an ever more perfect approximation to the will of a god.

For Marx, the solution to human alienation was collective human control over the social relationships which people built and experienced. But, in Marxian terms, the relationships people created varied greatly in their capacity to promote human welfare. Under some conditions of social organization, the social life worlds created by humans turned back against them as alien forces. Feudalism, slavery, and capitalism were economic formations in which many people labored and a few benefitted. Primitive communism lay in the dim prehistory of human beings.

These social worlds were, mercifully for Marx, eradicated by capitalism and with them, the idiocy of rural life. Either the means of production were inadequate or the relations of production were oppressive in those four formations. Through revolution, people could build a just society, a praxis society. In a praxis society, human beings—species beings—could create themselves collectively as full and competent agents of their own destiny. Not as rugged individuals, apart from the main, but rather as collaborators in that wondrous endeavor. Human beings would create law, religion, politics, and morality but, this time, they would benefit from those creations rather than be made each year more miserable.

Marx became midwife to the dawn of posthistory, an epoch in which human beings would be creative, rational, self-determining, and sociable—in dialectic fashion. Today the vision of Marx inspires much of the movement toward a praxis society in the most oppressed parts of the globe. Joined with the ancient wisdom of Christ’s liberation theology, Marxism is a powerful catalyst for progressive change in the Christian part of the Third World.

The operative question became how to make the revolution toward a praxis society. For Marx, good theory and good practice was the answer. Ideas and material resources joined together would help give humans ever more control over the social forms in which they must live out their lives.

The revolutionaries taught us that social reality was not fixed for all time nor was it divinely established by the gods as the proper way for human beings to organize themselves into human groups. Social reality was a human creation, it was made by humans and it could be changed by humans.

The quest for the laws of society became, for radical researchers, the quest for a liberating knowledge process in which human beings could, in undistorted communication, create a public sphere in which dialogue and moral power replaced coercion and economic power in shaping the symbolic interaction process. Out of all this came an awful realization and an awful responsibility. Humans had lost their innocence and were now responsible for the good and evil of their world. That was the political implication for all those who reflected on the knowledge process. Such an understanding takes the locus of human morality out of the individual and places it in the complex interaction between mind, self, and society where it properly belongs.

No longer may we speak of the moral development of the child in isolation from others but rather of the morality of symbolic social life worlds involving significant others, peers, orders, commands, role sets, social occasions, social institutions, as well as social values.

The social location of morality is in the dialectic relationship between individual and society—not in the single individual, its psyche, its self structure, or its small, wee voice of conscience.

Some would say that, still, one is responsible and one acts in bad faith when one follows orders, but such an assertion ignores the brutal realities of power and wealth; ignores the need for trust, faith, and belief; it ignores the trine-born nature of mind, self, and society.

Such a placement of credit or onus for the good and evil individuals do, exculpates the good and evil of the larger symbolic environment shaped more by some than by others: more by bosses than employees; more by males than by females; more by bureaucratic elites than by the masses they manage and manipulate. In this world, physical and economic power distort the reciprocity of interaction, the mutuality of the knowledge process, the sharing of the symbol.

Out of the late-nineteenth-century social science, especially anthropology, came the growing realization that there was an infinite variety of ways to be human—and less than human. Out of the early twentieth century came the archangels of symbolic interactional theory: Mead, Cooley, Thomas, Lewin, Blumer, and dozens of others. They revealed to a generation of eager students the magical process by which people came to inter-subjective understanding, defined a social occasion, reified it, and fulfilled the prophesy of its reality in their consequent activities.

But symbolic interaction theory arose in simpler times, more innocent times, more congenial times. Today Symbolic Interaction theory has fallen upon hard times. It developed in a world in which people tried with considerable success to share in the creation of a cooperative symbolic environment with but little in the way of practiced deceit and scientifically informed fraud. With the growth of social psychology came the human power to polish or to obscure the looking-glass process by which we, jointly, shape our own behavior.

In the mid-century, a Lucifer came bringing the reality-creating activity of human beings into a new and different light. Goffman, in a series of ground-breaking studies, showed us the dark ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Great University
• Introduction
• Part I. The Politics of Social Psychology
• Part II. Critical Approaches to Dramaturgy
• Part III. Social Psychology in a New Age
• Part IV. Politics in the Dramaturgical Society
• Part V. Emancipatory Uses of Dramaturgy
• References & Bibliography
• Index