The Drama of Social Life

A Dramaturgical Handbook

Charles Edgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367606206
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317035251
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Psicología social

Whatever else they may be doing, human beings are also and always expressing themselves whenever they are in the awareness of others. As such, the metaphor of life as theater - of people playing roles to audiences who review them and then coordinate further action - is an ancient idea that has been resurrected by social scientists as an organizing simile for the analysis and understanding of social life. The Drama of Social Life examines this dramaturgical approach to social life, bringing together the latest original work from leading contemporary dramaturgical thinkers across the social sciences. Thematically organized, it explores: ¢ the work of classical and contemporary thinkers who have contributed most to this theoretical framework ¢ the foundational concepts of the dramaturgical approach ¢ a rich array of substantive areas of empirical investigation to which dramaturgy continues to contribute ¢ directions for future dramaturgical thinking. An indispensable collection that updates and extends the dramaturgical framework, The Drama of Social Life will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social psychology, performance studies, cultural studies, communication, film studies, and anthropology - and all those interested in the work of Goffman and symbolic interactionist theory and practice.

PART I
Classical and Contemporary Thinkers and Perspectives in Dramaturgical Thought

Chapter 1
Drama as Life: The Seminal Contributions of Kenneth Burke

Ann Branaman

How has Kenneth Burke influenced the development of the dramaturgical perspective in sociology? What were his key contributions? To answer these questions, I realized, there were some other questions for which I would first need to find answers. The most fundamental is what is dramaturgy? Despite a history of serious engagement with the thought of both Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman, I realized I did not have a coherent idea of dramaturgy as a perspective. I approached the work of both authors, seeking to understand something about how people create meaningful lives and, in particular, how that is accomplished when doing so requires so much struggle. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I became interested in Burke and Goffman’s work when I saw how much both of them offered in the quest for thinking about the struggle to live meaningful lives.

Unconcerned upon initial engagement to draw sharp theoretical constructs or to trace the intellectual lineage of ideas and perspectives, I never bothered to find a coherent definition of the dramaturgical perspective or to ponder seriously the question of how much it owed, or did not owe, to the insights of Kenneth Burke. The differences in style and substance between Burke and Goffman were, naturally, obvious enough. Burke wrote firmly within the tradition of the literary essayist while Goffman wrote in a much more descriptive Hughesian ethnographic tradition, focusing his analysis on the minutiae of face-to-face interaction. Also clearly observable was a difference in political orientation. Burke’s leftist political orientation was evident in Burke’s comparatively greater emphasis on conflict, struggle, and challenge of dominant systems of meaning. Goffman’s political orientation, if he had one, did not appear in his work except insofar as readers interpreted it through the lens of a particular political orientation. The world he portrayed, although not necessarily the one he favored, seemed to be a much more conservative world in which conflict, struggle, and challenge were rare and order supreme. All of these differences aside, however, the key insights I drew from Burke and Goffman were very much the same. Both, in their very different ways, showed that meaningful lives and identities were dramatic productions, each precariously unfolding amidst a multitude of other (overlapping, competing, and/or complementary) dramatic productions.

Interestingly, it was only after I encountered and closely studied the work of Kenneth Burke that I developed a deep appreciation for the work of Erving Goffman that I had first encountered more coldly many years earlier. It is impossible to know with certainty, but in reflecting back to a couple of decades ago, I strongly suspect that my appreciation of Goffman would never have developed if not for my immediately prior engagement with Burke. Although differences of political orientation were, I came to realize, inessential to the force of the key principles of either, I believe Burke’s openly critical leftist orientation—and, particularly, his focus on meaning and identification as embattled—was essential for me to grasp the full weight of Burke’s and Goffman’s insights.

On first reading of Goffman, I was too blinded by the apparent conservatism, image-consciousness, and the extreme 1950s-style conformist other-directedness of actors in the world portrayed by Goffman to be able to realize the depth of insight in Goffman. Re-reading Goffman years later following an intensive reading of Kenneth Burke, I got Goffman. Or, more accurately, I gained from Burke a new “way of seeing” that turned an initially cold response to Goffman’s descriptions of impression management and interaction rituals into something quite different. Where I had once read Goffman as normalizing the dynamics he described, failing to see in them a potential prison-house they constructed, the lens offered to me by Burke allowed me to see the latter. Whereas Burke was compelling and inspiring intellectually, both as a consequence of his critical orientation as well as his provocative writing and intellect, it was Goffman’s work that generated the intensely hot response. Most likely this was a consequence of him describing in rich detail the face-to-face interactional processes in social situations those processes described more abstractly and formally, but also with more revolutionary and counter-hegemonic applications, in Burke. In this way, I grasped the powerful significance of both Burke’s and Goffman’s work, but without any concern with defining or naming their perspectives.

Lacking a coherent definition of the dramaturgical perspective without which I had concluded I would be unable to speak intelligibly of Burke’s contributions, I consulted Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley’s introductory essay to their edited volume Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook. The definition they provided, the delineation of the dramaturgical perspective, was very much consistent with the insights I had gleaned from Burke and Goffman in my study of them two decades ago. Dramaturgy, as they define it, is “the study of how human beings accomplish meaning in their lives” (Brissett and Edgley, 2006:2). “Not what people do, nor what they intend to do, nor even why they do it, but how they do it, is the dramaturgical curiosity” (p.3). Crediting Burke with some foundational insights upon which dramaturgy was developed Brissett and Edgley differentiate Burke from the dramaturgy that developed primarily on the basis of Goffman’s work. They characterize Burke’s dramatism as concerned with the formal properties of “who, what, where, when, and how” in contrast to dramaturgists focus on “the processual and transitory elements of human situations” (Brissett and Edgley 2006:13). Burke’s dramatism, in other words, is the formal framework he applies to the question, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? (Burke, 1969:xv)

Dramaturgical sociology, by contrast, could be said to be an analysis of people’s actual doings and sayings about their doings in relation to the sayings and doings of others.

Burke’s Influence on Sociologists in the Dramaturgical Tradition

Arguably, Burke has had a significant, although largely unacknowledged, impact on the development of the dramaturgical tradition in sociology. Although not himself a social scientist, Burke sought recognition of the value of his work by sociologists throughout his career, obtaining it to a degree through the positive reception he received from Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, C. Wright Mills, and others (Kenny 2008). As Goffman noted in his interview with Verhoeven (1993), Wirth and others at University of Chicago required reading of Burke by all of their graduate students. “We all read Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History,” Goffman comments. Burke’s A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives had also appeared in print and were widely read by Chicago sociologists. In another respect, arguably, Burke never received the recognition he deserved. Kenny, who provides a well-theorized and detailed account of Burke’s encounters, engagement with, and reception by leading figures in American sociology, offers a credible account of how and why Burke never arose to the prominence he arguably deserved. The issue, in his view, was essentially disciplinary boundaries and the need for a set of aspiring sociologists working on the development of a framework much like Burke’s to differentiate themselves, as social scientists, from literary criticism at the very same time that they depended so heavily on Burke due to the relative infancy of their sociology.

I will return to the issue of Burke’s relatively invisible and unacknowledged status within dramaturgical sociology despite his arguably enormous influence and will explain why I think that the concern over this may be overblown. But it is important first to discuss some of the (acknowledged) paths by which Burke did significantly influence sociology and, in particular, the development of the dramaturgical perspective.

In the 1950s and 60s, the sociologist H. D. Duncan wrote three books based centrally on the work of Burke: Language and Literature in Society (1953), Communication and Social Order (1962), and Symbols and Social Theory (1969). Two of these books contain a substantial amount of direct commentary on Burke’s work, and the third attempts to build a sociological model of action on the basis of Burke’s dramatistic pentad (Duncan 1969). With his untimely death, however, Duncan was largely forgotten and Burke’s opportunity for heightened visibility in sociology undermined. Robert Perinbayagam (1985) was an equally fervent devotee of the insights of Burke but never achieved recognition commensurate with the significance of his own work or of Burke’s. It is notable, however, that Duncan, Perinbayagam, and Burke himself—shared a common failure to attain a significant degree of visibility and recognition, while others who “used” Burke while working within more broadly recognized and credible research traditions in sociology (while crediting him minimally or not at all) gained far more. Goffman, of course, was chief among the latter group.

Many sociologists drew significantly from Burke. C. Wright Mills’ famous American Sociological Review article “Situated Actions and the Vocabulary of Motives” was among the most well-known treatments of Burke (Mills 1940). Burke was also central to Nelson Foote’s efforts to develop a dramatistic approach to the study of human development and motivation. Nelson Foote’s 1951 American Sociological Review article “Identification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation” drew from Burke’s theory of motivation and identity; his 1957 essay “Concept and Method in the Study of Human Development” directly credited Burke in arguing that the study of human development is much more appropriately pursued through a dramatistic vocabulary as developed by Burke (Foote 1957 in Brissett and Edgley 1990:63-72). Other scholars such as Gregory P. Stone, Murray Eldelman, Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scott were also influenced by the Burkean model.

Two sociologists, however, were most centrally important as conduits of Burke’s insights: Erving Goffman and Joseph R. Gusfield. Goffman was hugely influential in channeling Burke’s insights into the development of the dramaturgical perspective without giving Burke a great deal of credit or visibility; Gusfield, for his part, has contributed more than any other sociologist in conveying Burke’s ideas and importance to sociological audiences.

While Duncan had earlier, but ultimately unsuccessfully, worked to centralize Burke’s importance to sociology, it was not until Joseph Gusfield published in 1989 a collection of Burke’s work entitled, On Symbols and Society, that Burke was reintroduced to a broader sociological audience. In his introduction to the volume as well as in another essay on Burke published near the same time, Gusfield persuasively articulated Burke’s most important insights for sociology. A decade or so earlier, Overington (1977a, 1977b) had also delineated Burke’s contributions to sociology but in a less highly visible format relative to Gusfield’s edited collection of Burke’s writings. Although Gusfield succeeded in promoting a resurgence of interest in Burke among sociologists, the dramaturgical perspective had already been largely built by this time without acknowledgement of the depth of Burke’s centrality. Gusfield’s production of this collection of Burke’s work and delineation of his sociological insights, however, arguably increased the likelihood that scholars working anywhere in the vicinity of interpretive, interactionist, and dramaturgical traditions would at least read Burke just as Goffman and others were required to do at the University of Chicago over a half century ago. This is, I believe, a significant contribution in itself.

As the recognized foundational developer of dramaturgy, the full recognition of Burke’s significance probably could have come convincingly only through Goffman’s work. But, as Kenny argues, Burke’s influence on Goffman is barely acknowledged. Burke is casually cited several times in Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but is never referenced again in any of Goffman’s work. Similarly, Burke’s “dramatism” is referenced by many in the dramaturgical tradition, but it is usually presented as merely a precursor to the real influence—Goffman’s dramaturgy. Goffman is the most significant foundational figure in the development of the dramaturgical perspective, but this is not to deny the possibility that Burke may be the intellectual giant standing behind Goffman’s most important insights.

Although much has been made by some of the failure to give Burke the deserved credit for the enormous significance of his work as a source of Goffman’s greatest insights and, more generally, the dramaturgical tradition in sociology, I think this concern may be overstated. Burke and Burkeans might have wished to have more explicit recognition of the centrality of their ideas, but perhaps it is the nature of Burke’s theoretical perspective that it renders itself invisible at the point that dramaturgical sociologists move from the abstraction of formal principles to the analysis of the processes of face-to-face interaction. As Kenny (2008) suggests, Burke may well have been the intellectual giant standing quietly and invisibly behind Goffman and the dramaturgical perspective. But I do not think his quietness and invisibility lessen the weight of his ideas; perhaps he stands behind, but he is very much there.

As noted above, my intensive reading of Burke was essential to the development of my ability to appreciate Goffman; it is through the lens of Burke’s perspective, in all likelihood, that I continue to interpret Goffman and without which I undoubtedly would not get Goffman in the way that I do. But, interestingly, I too have left Burke behind. Until being asked to write this chapter, I had not read Burke even once since 1993 when I wrote a master’s thesis on Burke and Goffman, and I do not believe I have ever referenced Burke in anything other than one article I published on him in 1994, even as I have written quite a bit on Goffman and the traditions of research that have followed from him. Afforded this opportunity to reflect on Burke again in relationship to dramaturgy, however, has allowed me to realize that Burke remains powerfully alive in my way of reading Goffman and my way of thinking about life in general. That I have not returned to his writings or thought to cite him explicitly as the influence that he has had does not change this reality in the least.

If, however, it is in the nature of Burke’s ideas and presentation that he influences greatly while receding quickly into the background, it may be particularly important that we consciously remind ourselves to require our students to read Burke given that the reference lists of the articles they read may not often point them in this direction. Irrespective of the credit he is or is not given, I think it is crucially important that anybody working within the dramaturgical, interactionist, or any of the broadly interpretive traditions of sociology continue to read Burke for the enhanced understanding of dramaturgy that an engagement with Burke affords. And, hence, this is why I believe that Gusfield’s role as the prime conveyor of Burke’s ideas to sociology is so important and complementary to Goffman’s role in channeling Burke.

Burke’s Key Insights for Dramaturgical Sociology

Overington (1977a; 1977b) and Gusfield (1989a; 1989b) provide excellent delineations of Burke’s relevant insights for sociology. Overington (1977b) characterizes the basic insights of Burke’s early period—during which time he wrote Counterstatement, Permanence and Change, Attitudes towards history, and The Philosophy of Literary Form—with the following four propositions regarding human motives:

1. Human motives are socially derived terms which are internalized into the individual mind out of some particular cultural perspective.

2. Motives are interpretations of situations which are historically and culturally variable.

3. Motives are rhetorical appeals which seek to persuade either an internal or external audience.

4. Motives are explanations of situations which benefit the powerful; ultimately, they serve the interests of property (Overington 1977:137).

Overington distinguishes Burke’s early period from his later work by characterizing each as guided by two related, but different, questions. Burke’s early period deals with the question of what it means to understand and explain the world through one motivational terminology rather than another; the later period, in which he shifts to a more formal analysis of language, revolved around the complementary question: “What does it mean to be the kind of animal that uses language, that views reality through any kind of symbol system?” (Overington 1977:137). Dramatism is Burke’s answer to the latter question, defined by Overington as a “systematic approach to understanding human action through an analysis of the motives, the explanations, that people offer as accounting devices for such action” (Overington 1977:137). The worlds that humans know, the reality they experience, the motives they claim, according to the perspective of dramatism, are constituted by the terminologies humans apply. Languages or motivational terminologies are “terministic screens,” directing our attention one way while deflecting our attention away from other directions (Overington 1977:139).

Gusfield characterizes Burke’s main contribution to sociology in much the same way as Overington did the later ‘dramatist’ period of Burke’s work. Burke, he says, offers a “perspective about perspectives,” an analysis of the implications for human behavior of the fact that humans are “symbol-using animals” (Gusfield 1989:4). The essence of Burke’s dramatism, Gusfield argues, can be found within the set of terms Burke uses most frequently: symbolic action, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the words of Burke himself who defines these terns in his introduction to A Grammar of Motives (Burke 1969):

Grammar: a concern with the terms alone, without reference to the ways in which their potentialities have been or can be utilized in actual statements about motives (p. xvi).

Rhetoric: the basic stratagems which people employ, in endless variations, and consciously or unconsciously, for the outwitting or cajoling of one another; all these devices have a “you and me” quality about them, being “addressed” to some person or to some advantage (p. xvii).

Symbolic: concerned with modes of expression and appeal in the fine ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Classical and Contemporary Thinkers and Perspectives in Dramaturgical Thought
• Part II Foundational Concepts
• Part III Substantive Investigations and Empirical Elaborations
• Part IV The Future of Dramaturgical Thinking
• Index